One strong motive which drew many of these gentlemen to the New World,

like the Castilian hidalgos of a century before, was doubtless the mere

love of wild adventure. Another motive was the quest of the pearls

and gold about gold that which the poet Drayton had written. In the

spring of 1608, while Newport was on the scene with his First Supply,

somebody discovered a bank of bright yellow dirt, and its colour was

thought to be due to particles of gold. Then there was clatter and

bustle; "there was no thought, no discourse, no hope, and no work but

to dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, and load gold." In the list of the

First Supply we find the names of two goldsmiths, two refiners, and

one jeweller;[67] but such skill as these artisans had was of little

avail, for Newport carried a shipload of the yellow stuff to London,

and found, to his chagrin, that all is not gold that glitters. On

that same voyage he carried home a coop of plump turkeys, the first

that ever graced an English bill of fare. Smith seems early to have

recovered from the gold fever, and to have tried his hand at various

industries. If precious metals could not be found, there was plenty

of excellent timber at hand. The production of tar and soap was also

attempted, as well as the manufacture of glass, to assist in which

eight Germans and Poles were brought over in the Second Supply. It was

hardly to be expected that such industries should attain remunerative

proportions in the hands of a little company of settlers who were

still confronted with the primitive difficulty of getting food enough

to keep themselves alive. The arrival of reinforcements was far from

being an unmixed benefit. Each new supply brought many new mouths to

be filled, while by the time the ship was ready to sail for England,

leaving all the provisions it could safely spare, the remnant was so

small that the gaunt spectre of threatening famine was never quite out

of sight. Moreover the new-comers from the civilized world arrived

with their heads full of such wild notions as the older settlers were

beginning to recover from under the sharp lessons of experience; thus

was confusion again and again renewed. While the bitter tale was being

enacted in the wilderness, people in London were wondering why the

symptoms of millennial happiness were so slow in coming from this

Virginian paradise. From the golden skewers and dripping-pans adorning

the kitchens of barbaric potentates,[68] or the priceless pearls that

children strolling on the beach could fill their aprons with, the

descent to a few shiploads of ignoble rough boards and sassafras was

truly humiliating. No wonder that the Company should have been loth

to allow tales of personal peril in Virginia to find their way into

print. No wonder that its directors should have looked with rueful

faces at the long columns of outgoes compared with the scant and petty

entries on the credit side of the ledger. No wonder if they should

have arrived at a state of impatience like that of the urchin who has

planted a bed full of seed and cannot be restrained from digging them

up to see what they are coming to. At such times there is sure to be

plenty of fault-finding; disappointment seeks a vent in scolding. We

have observed that Wingfield, the deposed president, had returned to

England early in 1608; with him went Captain Gabriel Archer, formerly

a student of law at Gray's Inn, and one of the earliest members of

the legal profession in English America. His name is commemorated in

the little promontory near Jamestown called Archer's Hope. He was

a mischief-maker of whom Wingfield in his "Discourse of Virginia"

speaks far more bitterly than of Smith. To the latter Archer was an

implacable enemy. On the return of Smith from his brief captivity

with the Indians, this crooked Archer exhibited his legal ingenuity

in seeking to revive a provision in the laws of Moses that a captain

who leads his men into a fatal situation is responsible for their

death. By such logic Smith would be responsible for the deaths of his

followers slain, by Opekankano's Indians; therefore, said Archer, he

ought to be executed for murder! President Ratcliffe, alias Sickelmore,

appears to have been a mere tool in Archer's hands, and Smith's life

may really have been in some danger when Newport's arrival discomfited

his adversaries. One can see what kind of tales such an unscrupulous

enemy would be likely to tell in London, and it was to be expected

that Newport, on arriving with his Second Supply, would bring some

message that Smith would regard as unjust. The nature of the message is

reflected in the reply which Smith sent home by Newport in November,

1608. The wrath of the much-enduring man was thoroughly aroused; in

his "Rude Answer," as he calls it, he strikes out from the shoulder,

and does not even spare his friend Newport for bringing such messages.

Thus does he address the Royal Council of Virginia, sitting in London:

"Right Honourable Lords and Gentlemen: I received your letter wherein

you write that our minds are so set upon faction and idle conceits,

... and that we feed you but with ifs and ands, hopes, and some few

proofes; as if we would keep the mystery of the businesse to ourselues;

and that we must expresly follow your instructions sent by Captain

Newport, the charge of whose voyage amounts to neare £2000 the which

if we cannot defray by the ship's returne, we are like to remain as

banished men. To these particulars I humbly intreat your pardons if I

offend you with my rude answer.

[Sidenote: I cannot prevent quarrels.]

"For our factions, vnlesse you would haue me run away and leaue the

country, I cannot prevent them: ... I do make many stay that would

els fly anywhither.... [As to feeding] you with hopes, etc., though I

be no scholar, I am past a school-boy; and I desire but to know what

either you [or] these here do know but I have learned to tell you by

the continual hazard of my life. I have not concealed from you anything

I know; but I feare some cause you to believe much more than is true.

[Sidenote: Your instructions were not wise.]

"Expressly to follow your directions by Captain Newport, though they be

performed, I was directly against it; but according to our Commission,

I was content to be ruled by the major part of the council, I fear to

the hazard of us all; which now is generally confessed when it is too

late.... I have crowned Powhatan according to your instructions. For

the charge of this voyage of £2000 we have not received the value of

£100.... For him at that time to find ... the South Sea, [or] a mine of

gold, or any of them sent by Sir Walter Raleigh: at our consultation I

told them was as likely as the rest. But during this great discovery of

thirty miles (which might as well have been done by one man, and much

more, for the value of a pound of copper at a seasonable time) they had

the pinnace and all the boats with them [save] one that remained with

me to serve the fort.

[Sidenote: From our infant industries you must not expect too much.]

"In their absence I followed the new begun works of pitch and tar,

glass, soap ashes, and clapboard; whereof some small quantities we

have sent you. But if you rightly consider what an infinite toil it is

in Russia and Swedeland, where the woods are proper for naught else,

and though there be the help both of man and beast in those ancient

commonweals which many an hundred years have [been] used [to] it; yet

thousands of those poor people can scarce get necessaries to live but

from hand to mouth. And though your factors there can buy as much in a

week as will fraught you a ship ...; you must not expect from us any

such matter, which are but a many of ignorant miserable souls, that

are scarce able to get wherewith to live and defend ourselves against

the inconstant salvages; finding but here and there a tree fit for the

purpose, and want[ing] all things else [which] the Russians have.

[Sidenote: While we suffer for want of food,]

"For the coronation of Powhatan, by whose advice you sent him such

presents I know not; but this give me leave to tell you, I fear they

will be the confusion of us all ere we hear from you again. At your

ship's arrival the salvages's harvest was newly gathered and we [were]

going to buy it; our own not being half sufficient for so great a

number. As for the two [shiploads] of corn [which] Newport promised to

provide us from Powhatan,[69] he brought us but 14 bushels ... [while

most of his men were] sick and near famished. From your ship we had

not provision in victuals worth £20, and we are more than 200 to live

upon this; the one half sick, the other little better.... Our diet is a

little meal and water, and not sufficient of that. Though there be fish

in the sea, fowls in the air, and beasts in the woods, their bounds are

so large, they so wild, and we so weak and ignorant that we cannot much

trouble them.

[Sidenote: peculation and intrigue are rife.]

"The soldiers say many of your officers maintain their families

out of that you send us; and that Newport hath £100 a year for

carrying news.... Captain Ratcliffe is now called Sickelmore, a poor

counterfeited imposture. I have sent you him home, lest the company

[here] should cut his throat. What he is now, every one can tell you.

If he and Archer return again, they are sufficient to keep us always in

factions.

[Sidenote: Send us next time some useful workmen.]

"When you send again I intreat you [to] send but 30 carpenters,

husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers

up of trees' roots, well provided, [rather] than 1000 of such as we

have; for except we be able both to lodge them and feed them, the most

will consume with want of necessaries before they can be made good for

anything.... And I humbly entreat you hereafter, let us know what we

[are to] receive, and not stand to the sailors's courtesy to leave us

what they please....

"These are the causes that have kept us in Virginia from laying such

a foundation [as] ere this might have given much better content and

satisfaction; but as yet you must not look for any profitable returns;

so I humbly rest."[70]

[Sidenote: A sensible letter.]

It is to be hoped that the insinuation that some of the Company's

officers were peculators was ill founded; as for the fling at Newport,

it was evidently made in a little fit of petulance and is inconsistent

with the esteem in which Smith really held that worthy mariner. These

are slight blemishes in a temperate, courageous, and manly letter.

It is full of hard common-sense and tells such plain truths as must

have set the Company thinking. It was becoming evident to many persons

in London that some new departure must be made. But before Newport's

home-bound ship could cross the ocean, and before the Company could

decide upon its new plan of operations, some months must needs elapse,

and in the interim we will continue to follow the fortunes of the

little colony, now left to itself in the wilderness for the third time.

[Sidenote: Richard Hakluyt on the Indian character.]

It is evident from Smith's letter that he anticipated trouble from the

Indians. In The Powhatan's promise to count him forever as his own son

he put little faith. His own view of the noble savage seems to have

been much the same as that expressed about this time by Rev. Richard

Hakluyt, in a letter of advice and warning to the London Company:

"But for all their fair and cunning speeches, [these natives] are not

overmuch to be trusted; for they be the greatest traitors of the world,

as their manifold most crafty contrived and bloody treasons ... do

evidently prove. They be also as unconstant as the weathercock, and

most ready to take all occasions of advantages to do mischief. They

are great liars and dissemblers; for which faults oftentimes they had

their deserved payments.... To handle them gently, while gentle courses

may be found to serve, ... will be without comparison the best; but

if gentle polishing will not serve, [we] shall not want hammerers

and rough masons enow--I mean our old soldiers trained up in the

Netherlands--to square and prepare them to our Preacher's hands."[71]

[Sidenote: What Smith dreaded.]

[Sidenote: How the red men's views of the situation were changed.]

There is something delicious in the naïve promptness with which this

worthy clergyman admits the probable need of prescribing military

measures as a preparation for the cure of souls. The London Company

may have stood in need of such advice; Smith did not. He looked

upon Indians already with the eyes of a frontiersman, and the rough

vicissitudes of his life had made him quick to interpret signs of

mischief. It was not so much a direct assault that he feared as a

contest arising from the Indians' refusal to sell their corn. During

the past winter Pocahontas had made frequent and regular visits to

Jamestown, bringing corn and occasionally venison, raccoons, and other

game; and this aid had been so effective as to ward off famine for that

season. But a change had come over her father and his councillors.

As the English kept strengthening their fortifications and building

houses, as the second and third shiploads of colonists arrived, the

Indians must have begun to realize that it was their intention to

stay in the country. On Smith's first visit to Werowocomoco, when The

Powhatan said that he should henceforth regard him as a son, he showed

himself extremely curious to know why the English had come to his part

of the world. Smith did not think it safe to confess that they had come

to stay; so he invented a story of their having been defeated by the

Spaniards and driven ashore; then, he added, the pinnace being leaky,

they were obliged to stay until their Father Newport should come back

and get them and take them away. Since that conversation Father Newport

had come twice, and each time he had brought many of his children and

taken away but few. Instead of 38 men at Jamestown there were now 200.

Every painted and feathered warrior knew that these pale children were

not good farmers, and that their lives depended upon a supply of corn.

By withholding this necessary of life, how easy it might be to rid the

land of their presence!

[Sidenote: A bold resolve.]

[Sidenote: Voyage to Werowocomoco.]

As the snows began to come, toward Christmas of 1608, Smith's fears

began to be realized. When the Indians were asked for corn they refused

with a doggedness that withstood even the potent fascination of blue

glass beads. Smith fully comprehended the seriousness of the situation.

"No persuasion," he says, "could persuade him to starve." If the

Indians would not trade of their own free will they must be made to

trade. The Powhatan asked for some men who could aid him in building a

house, and Smith sent to Werowocomoco fourteen men, including four of

the newly arrived Germans. Smith followed with twenty-seven men in the

pinnace and barge. In the party were George Percy and Francis West,

brother of the Lord Delaware of whom we shall have soon to speak. At

Warrasqueak Bay, where they stopped the first night, a chieftain told

them to beware of treachery at Werowocomoco; The Powhatan, he said, had

concocted a scheme for cutting their throats. Captain Smith thanked

the redskin for his good counsel, assured him of his undying affection,

and proceeded down the river to Hampton, where he was very hospitably

entertained by the Kecoughtans, a small tribe numbering about twenty

warriors. For about a week, from December 30, 1608, till January 6,

1609, a fierce blizzard of snow and sleet obliged the party to stay

in the dry and well-warmed wigwams of the Kecoughtans, who regaled

them with oysters, fish, venison, and wild fowl. As they passed around

to the northern side of the peninsula and approached the York River,

the Indians seemed less friendly. When they arrived at Werowocomoco

the river was frozen for nearly half a mile from the shore, but Smith

rammed and broke the ice with his barge until he had pushed up to a

place where it was thick enough to walk safely; then sending the barge

back to the pinnace the whole party were landed by instalments. They

quartered themselves in the first house they came to, and sent to The

Powhatan for food. He sent them venison, turkeys, and corn-bread.

[Sidenote: Smith's parley with The Powhatan.]

The next day, January 13, the wily barbarian came to see Smith and

asked him bluntly how soon he was going away. He had not asked the

English, he said, to come and visit him, and he was sure he had no

corn for them, nevertheless he thought he knew where he could get

forty baskets of it for one good English sword per basket. Hearing

this speech, Captain Smith pointed to the new house already begun, and

to the men whom he had sent to build it, and said, "Powhatan, I am

surprised to hear you say that you have not invited us hither; you must

have a short memory!" At this retort the old chieftain burst into fits

of laughter, but when he had recovered gravity it appeared that his

notions as to a bargain remained unchanged. He would sell his corn for

swords and guns, but not for copper; he could eat corn, he could not

eat copper. Then said Captain Smith, "Powhatan, ... to testify my love

[for you] I sent you my men for your building, neglecting mine own.

What your people had, you have engrossed, forbidding them our trade;

and now you think by consuming the time we shall consume for want, not

having [wherewith] to fulfill your strange demands. As for swords and

guns, I told you long ago I had none to spare.... You must know [that

the weapons] I have can keep me from want; yet steal or wrong you I

will not, nor dissolve that friendship we have mutually promised,

except you constrain me by ... bad usage." This covert threat was not

lost upon the keen barbarian. He quickly replied that within two days

the English should have all the corn he could spare, but said he, "I

have some doubt, Captain Smith, [about] your coming hither, [which]

makes me not so kindly seek to relieve you as I would. For many do

inform me [that] your coming hither is not for trade, but to invade my

people and possess my country. [They] dare not come to bring you corn,

seeing you thus armed with your men. To free us of this fear, leave

your weapons aboard [the ship], for here they are needless, we being

all friends, and forever _Powhatans_."

[Sidenote: A game of bluff.]

This last remark, that Smith's men were virtually or constructively

members of the Powhatan tribe is in harmony with my suggestion that the

rescue of their leader by Pocahontas a year before had directly led to

his adoption, according to the usual Indian custom in such cases of

rescue. With many such discourses, says our chronicle, did they spend

the day; and on the morrow the parley was renewed. Again and again the

old chief insisted that before the corn could be brought, the visitors

must leave their arms on shipboard; but Smith was not so blind as to

walk into such a trap. He said, "Powhatan, ... the vow I made you

of my love, both myself and my men have kept. As for your promise,

I find it every day violated by some of your subjects; yet ... for

your sake only we have curbed our thirsting desire of revenge; else

had they known as well the cruelty we use to our enemies as our true

love and courtesy to our friends. And I think your judgment sufficient

to conceive--as well by the adventures we have undertaken as by the

advantage we have [in] our arms [over] yours--that had we intended you

any hurt, we could long ere this have effected it. Your people coming

to Jamestown are entertained with their bows and arrows, without any

exceptions; we esteeming it with you as it is with us, to wear our arms

as our apparel." Having made this hit, the captain assumed a still

loftier tone. It would never do to admit that this blessed corn,

though the cause of so much parley, was an indispensable necessity for

the white men. "As for your hiding your provisions ... we shall not so

unadvisedly starve as you conclude; your friendly care in that behalf

is needless, for we have [ways of finding food that are quite] beyond

your knowledge."

The narrative which I am here following[72] is written by William

Phettiplace, captain of the pinnace, Jeffrey Abbot, described as

sergeant, and two of the original settlers, Anas Todkill and Richard

Wiffin. Abbot and Phettiplace were on the spot, and the narrative was

revised by Captain Smith himself, so that it has the highest kind

of authority. One need but examine the similar parleys described so

frequently by Francis Parkman, to realize the faithful accuracy with

which these Englishmen portrayed the Indian at that early period when

English experience of the red man's ways was only beginning.

[Sidenote: The corn is brought.]

The hint that perhaps white men could get along without his corn

after all seems to have wrought its effect upon the crafty Powhatan.

Baskets filled with the yellow grain were brought, and dickering as

distinguished from diplomacy began. Yet diplomacy had not quite given

up its game. With a sorrowful face and many sighs the chief exclaimed:

"Captain Smith, I never used any chief so kindly as yourself, yet

from you I receive the least kindness of any. Captain Newport gave

me swords, copper, clothes, a bed, towels, or what[ever] I desired;

ever taking what I offered him, and would send away his guns when I

entreated him. None doth ... refuse to do what I desire but only you;

of whom I can have nothing but what you regard not, and yet you will

have whatsoever you demand.... You call me father, but I see ... you

will do what you list.... But if you intend so friendly as you say,

send hence your arms that I may believe you."

[Sidenote: Suspicions of treachery.]

Smith felt sure that this whimpering speech was merely the cover for

a meditated attack. Of his thirty-eight Englishmen but eighteen were

with him at the moment. He sent a messenger to his vessels, ordering

all save a guard of three or four men to come ashore, and he set some

Indians to work breaking the ice, so that the barge could be forced up

near to the bank. For a little while Captain Smith and John Russell

were left alone in a house with The Powhatan and a few squaws, when

all at once the old chief slipped out and disappeared from view. While

Smith was talking with the women a crowd of armed warriors surrounded

the house, but instantly Smith and Russell sprang forth and with drawn

swords charged upon them so furiously that they all turned and fled,

tumbling over one another in their headlong terror.

[Sidenote: A wily speaker.]

This incident gave the Englishmen a moral advantage. The Indian plot,

if such it was, had failed, and now the red men "to the uttermost of

their skill sought excuses to dissemble the matter; and Powhatan, to

excuse his flight and the sudden coming of this multitude, sent our

Captain a great bracelet and a chain of pearl,[73] by an ancient

orator that bespoke us to this purpose; perceiving even then from our

pinnace, a barge and men departing and coming unto us:--Captain Smith,

our [chief] is fled; fearing your guns, and knowing when the ice was

broken there would come more men, sent these numbers but to guard his

corn from stealing, [which] might happen without your knowledge. Now,

though some be hurt by your misprision, yet [The] Powhatan is your

friend, and so will forever continue. Now since the ice is open he

would have you send away your corn, and if you would have his company

send away also your guns." It was ingeniously if not ingenuously said,

but the concluding request remained unheeded, and Smith never set eyes

on his Father Powhatan again. With faces frowning, guns loaded and

cocked, the Englishmen stood by while a file of Indians with baskets

on their backs carried down the corn and loaded it into the barge. The

Indians were glad to get safely done with such work; as the chronicle

observes, "we needed not importune them to make despatch."

[Sidenote: Pocahontas reveals the plot.]

[Sidenote: Smith's message to The Powhatan.]

The Englishmen would at once have embarked, but the retreating tide

had left the barge stranded, so that it was necessary to wait for

the next high water. Accordingly it was decided to pass the night

in the house where they were already quartered, which was a kind of

outpost at some distance from the main village, and they sent word to

The Powhatan to send them some supper. Then the Indians seem to have

debated the question whether it would be prudent to surprise and slay

them while at supper or afterward while asleep. But that "dearest

jewel," Pocahontas, says the narrative, "in that dark night came

through the irksome woods, and told our Captain great cheer should be

sent us by and by; but Powhatan and all the power he could make would

after[ward] come kill us all, if [indeed] they that brought it [did]

not kill us ... when we were at supper. Therefore if we would live she

wished us presently to be gone. Such things as she delighted in [we]

would have given her; but with the tears running down her cheeks she

said she durst not be seen to have any, for if Powhatan should know

it she were but dead; and so she ran away by herself as she came.

Within less than an hour eight or ten stalwart Indians appeared,

bringing venison and other dainties, and begged the English to put

out the matches of their matchlocks, for the smell of the smoke made

them sick. Our narrator tells us nothing of the sardonic smile which

we are sure that he and his comrades can hardly have suppressed. The

captain sent the messengers back to Father Powhatan, with a concise

but significant message: "If he is coming to visit me to-night let him

make haste, for I am ready to receive him." One can imagine how such an

announcement would chill the zeal of the Indians. A few of their scouts

prowled about, but the English kept vigilant guard till high tide and

then sailed away. A queer interview it had been. With some of hell's

fiercest passions smouldering beneath the surface, an explosion had

been prevented by watchful tact on the one side and vague dread on the

other. Peace had been preserved between the strange white chieftain and

his dusky father, and two Englishmen were left at Werowocomoco, with

the four Germans, to go on with the house-building. If our chronicle

is to be trusted, the Germans played a base part. Believing that the

English colony would surely perish of famine, they sought their own

profit in fraternizing with the Indians. So, no sooner had Smith's

vessels departed from Werowocomoco on their way up to Opekankano's

village, than two of these "damned Dutchmen," as the narrator calls

them, went overland to Jamestown and said that Captain Smith had

sent them for more weapons; in this way they got a number of swords,

pikes, muskets, and hatchets, and traded them off to the redskins at

Werowocomoco.

[Sidenote: How Opekankano was brought to terms.]

Meanwhile Smith's party arrived at Opekankano's village, near the place

where the Pamunkey and Mattapony rivers unite to form the York. The

chief of the Pamunkeys received them with smiles and smooth words,

but seems to have meditated treachery. At all events the Englishmen

so interpreted it when they found themselves unexpectedly surrounded

by a great crowd of armed warriors numbering several hundreds. It was

not prudent to fire on such a number if it could be avoided; actual

bloodshed might do more harm than good; a peaceable display of boldness

was better. It might have been and probably was remembered that the

Spaniards in the West Indies had often overawed all opposition by

seizing the person of the chief. After a brief consultation Smith,

accompanied by West and Percy and Russell, rushed into Opekankano's

house, seized him by the long scalp-lock, dragged him before the

astonished multitude, and held a pistol to his breast. Such prompt

audacity was its own safeguard. The corn was soon forthcoming, and the

little expedition made its way back to Jamestown, loaded with some 300

bushels of it, besides a couple of hundredweight of venison and deer

suet. In itself it was but a trifle of a pound of meat and a bushel and

a half of grain for each person in the colony. But the chief result

was the profound impression made upon the Indians. A few years later

such a bold treatment of them would have been attended with far more

difficulty and danger, would seldom indeed have been possible. But in

1609 the red man had not yet learned to gauge the killing capacity of

the white man; he was aware of terrible powers there which he could not

estimate, and was therefore inclined to err on the side of prudence.

This sudden irruption of about forty white men into the principal

Indian villages and their masterful demeanour there seemed to show that

after all it would be wiser to have them for friends than for enemies.

A couple of accidents confirmed this view of the case.

[Sidenote: Smith as a worker of miracles.]

One day as three of the Chickahominy tribe were loitering about

Jamestown, admiring the rude fortifications, one of them stole a

pistol and fled to the woods with it. His two comrades were arrested

and one was held in durance, while the other was sent out to recover

the pistol. He was made to understand that if he failed to bring it

back, the hostage would be put to death. As it was intensely cold,

some charcoal was charitably furnished for the prisoner's hut.

In the evening his friend returned with the pistol, and then the

prisoner was found apparently dead, suffocated with the fumes of the

charcoal, whereupon the friend broke forth into loud lamentations.

But the Englishmen soon perceived that some life was still left in

the unconscious and prostrate form, and Smith told the wailing Indian

that he could restore his friend to life, only there must be no more

stealing. Then with brandy and vinegar and friction the failing heart

and arteries were stimulated to their work, the dead savage came to

life, and the two comrades, each with a small present of copper, went

on their way rejoicing.

[Sidenote: A pretty accident.]

The other affair was more tragic. An Indian at Werowocomoco had got

possession of a bag of gunpowder, and was playing with it while his

comrades were pressing closely about him, when all at once it took fire

and exploded, killing three or four of the group and scorching the

rest. Whereupon our chronicler tells us, "These and other such pretty

accidents so amazed and affrighted Powhatan and all his people, that

from all parts with presents they desired peace, returning many stolen

things which we never demanded nor thought of; and after that ... all

the country became absolutely as free for us as for themselves."

[Sidenote: Communism.]

The good effects of this were soon apparent. With his mind relieved

from anxiety about the Indians, Smith had his hands free for work at

Jamestown. One of the most serious difficulties under which the colony

laboured was the communistic plan upon which it had been started. The

settlers had come without wives and children, and each man worked not

to acquire property for himself and his family but to further the

general purposes of the colony. In planting corn, in felling trees,

in repairing the fortifications, even in hunting or fishing, he was

working for the community; whatsoever he could get by his own toil or

by trade with the natives went straightway into the common stock, and

the skilful and industrious fared no better than the stupid and lazy.

The strongest kind of premium was thus at once put upon idleness, which

under circumstances of extreme anxiety and depression is apt enough

to flourish without any premium. Things had arrived at such a pass

that some thirty or forty men were supporting the whole company of two

hundred, when President Smith applied the strong hand. He gathered them

all together one day and plainly told them that he was their lawfully

chosen ruler and should promptly punish all infractions of discipline,

and they must all understand that hereafter he that will not work

shall not eat. His authority had come to be great, and the rule was

enforced. By the end of April some twenty houses had been built, a well

of pure sweet water had been dug in the fort, thirty acres or more of

ground had been broken up and planted, and nets and weirs arranged for

fishing. A few hogs and fowl had been left by Newport, and now could be

heard the squeals of sixty pigs and the peeping of five hundred spring

chickens. The manufacture of tar and soap-ashes went on, and a new

fortress was begun in an easily defensible position upon a commanding

hill.

[Sidenote: Unbidden messmates.]

[Sidenote: Arrival of Argall.]

This useful work was suddenly interrupted by an unforeseen calamity.

Rats brought from time to time by the ships had quickly multiplied,

and in April these unbidden guests were found to have made such havoc

in the granaries that but little corn was left. Harvest time was a

long way off, and it was necessary to pause for a while and collect

provisions. Several Indian villages were again visited and trading

went on amicably, but there was a limit to the aid the barbarians had

it in their power to give, and in the quest of sustenance the settlers

were scattered. By midsummer a few were picking berries in the woods,

others were quartered among the Indians, some were living on oysters

and caviar, some were down at Point Comfort catching fish, and it was

these that were the first to hail the bark of young Samuel Argall,

who was coming for sturgeon and whatever else he could find, and had

steered a straighter course from London than any mariner before him.

Argall brought letters from members of the Company complaining that the

goods sent home in the ships were not of greater value in the market,

and saying that Smith had been accused of dealing harshly with the

Indians. This must have referred to some skirmishes he had had with

the Rappahannocks and other tribes in the course of his exploration of

the Chesapeake waters during the previous summer. Another piece of news

was brought by Argall. The London Company had obtained a new charter,

and a great expedition, commanded by Lord Delaware, was about to sail

for Virginia.

[Sidenote: Second Charter of the London Company, 1609.]

This was true. The experience of two years had convinced the Company

that its methods needed mending. In the first place more money was

needed and the list of shareholders was greatly enlarged. By the

second charter, dated May 23, 1609, the Company was made a corporation

and all its members were mentioned by name. The list was headed by

Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and contained among other interesting

names those of the philosopher Bacon and of Sir Oliver Cromwell, from

whose nephew, then a lad at Huntingdon School, the world was by and

by to hear. On the list we find the names of 659 persons, of whom 21

were peers, 96 were knights, 11 were clergymen and physicians, 53

are described as captains, 28 as engineers, 58 as gentlemen, 110 as

merchants, while the remaining 282 are variously designated or only the

name is given. "Of these about 230 paid £37 10s., or more, about 229

paid less than £37 10s., and about 200 failed to pay anything."[74] It

should be borne in mind that £37 10s. at that time was equivalent to

at least $750 of to-day. Besides these individuals, the list contains

the companies of mercers, grocers, drapers, fishmongers, vintners,

brewers, masons, lawyers, fletchers, armourers, and others,--in all

fifty-six companies of the city of London. Such a list, as well as the

profusion of sermons and tracts on Virginia that were poured forth at

the time, bespeaks a general interest in the enterprise. The Company

was incorporated under the name of "The Treasurer and Company of

Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in

Virginia." Nothing was said about the Second Colony, so that by this

charter the London Company was unyoked from the Plymouth Company.

[Sidenote: The council in London.]

The jurisdiction of the reorganized London Company was to extend 200

miles south and 200 miles north of Old Point Comfort, which would not

quite contain all of North Carolina but would easily include Maryland

and Delaware. The government of this region was vested in a supreme

council sitting in London, the constitution of which was remarkable.

Its members were at the outset appointed by the king, but all vacancies

were thereafter to be filled by the vote of the whole body of 659

persons and 56 trade-guilds constituting the Company. The sole power

of legislation for Virginia, with the right to appoint all colonial

officers, was vested in the council. Besides thus exercising entire

sovereignty over Virginia, the Company was authorized to levy and

collect custom-house duties and even to wage war for purely defensive

purposes. Thus this great corporation was made virtually independent of

Parliament, with a representative government of its own.

[Sidenote: The local government.]

As for the local government in Virginia, it was entirely changed.

The working of the local council with its elected president had been

simply ludicrous. Two presidents had been deposed and sent home,

while the councillors had done nothing but quarrel and threaten each

other's lives, and one had been shot for mutiny. Order and quiet had

not been attained until President Smith became autocratic, after the

other members of the council had departed or died. Now the new charter

abolished the local council, and the direct rule was to be exercised by

a governor with autocratic power over the settlers, but responsible to

the supreme council in London, by which he was appointed.

[Sidenote: Thomas, Lord Delaware.]

For the Company as thus reorganized the two most important executive

offices were filled by admirable appointments. The treasurer was the

eminent merchant Sir Thomas Smith, of whom some account has already

been given. For governor of Virginia the council appointed Thomas

West, third Baron Delaware, whose younger brother, Francis West, we

have seen helping John Smith to browbeat the Indians at Werowocomoco

and Pamunkey. This Lord Delaware belonged to a family distinguished

for public service. On the mother's side he was nearly related to

Queen Elizabeth. In America he is forever identified with the history

of Virginia, and he has left a name to one of our great rivers, to a

very interesting group of Indians, and to one of the smallest states

in our Union. With New England, too, he has one link of association;

for his sister, Penelope West, married Herbert Pelham, and their son

was the first treasurer of Harvard College. Thomas West, born in 1577,

was educated at Oxford, served with distinction in the Netherlands,

and was knighted for bravery in 1599. He succeeded to the barony of

Delaware in 1602, and was a member of the Privy Council of Elizabeth

and James I. No one was more warmly enlisted than he in the project of

founding Protestant English colonies in the New World. To this cause

he devoted himself with ever growing enthusiasm, and when the London

Company was remodelled he was appointed governor of Virginia for

life. With him were associated the sturdy soldier, Sir Thomas Gates,

as lieutenant-governor, and the old sea rover, Sir George Somers, as

admiral.

[Sidenote: A communistic programme.]

The spring of 1609 was spent in organizing a new expedition, while

Smith and his weary followers were struggling with the damage wrought

by rats. People out of work were attracted by the communistic programme

laid down by the Company. The shares were rated at about $300 each,

to use our modern figures, and emigration to Virginia entitled the

emigrant to one share. So far as needful the proceeds of the enterprise

"were to be spent upon the settlement, and the surplus was either to

be divided or funded for seven years. During that period the settlers

were to be maintained at the expense of the Company, while all the

product of their labours was to be cast into the common stock. At

the end of that time every shareholder was to receive a grant of

land in proportion to his stock held."[75] Doubtless the prospects of

becoming a shareholder in a great speculative enterprise, and of being

supported by the Company, must have seemed alluring to many people in

difficult circumstances. At all events, some 500 people--men, women,

and children--were got together. A fleet of nine ships, with ample

supplies, was entrusted to Newport, and in his ship, the Sea Venture,

were Gates and Somers, who were to take the colony under their personal

supervision. Lord Delaware remained in London, planning further

developments of the enterprise. Three more trusty men he could hardly

have sent out. But a strange fate was knocking at the door.

[Sidenote: Wreck of the Sea Venture.]

On the first of June, 1609, the fleet set sail and took the route

by the Azores. Toward the end of July, as they were getting within

a week's sail of the American coast, the ships were "caught in the

tail of a hurricane," one of them was sunk, and the Sea Venture was

separated from all the rest. That gallant ship was sorely shaken and

torn, so that for five days the crew toiled steadily in relays, pumping

and baling, while the water seemed to be gaining upon them. Many of

the passengers abandoned themselves to despair and to rum, or, as an

eye-witness tells us, "some of them, having good and comfortable waters

in the ship, fetched them and drank one to the other, taking their last

leave one of the other until their more joyful and happy meeting in a

more blessed world."[76] The company were saved by the skill and energy

of the veteran Somers, who for three days and nights never once left

the quarter-deck. At length land was sighted, and presently the Sea

Venture was driven violently aground and wedged immovable between two

rocks, a shattered wreck. But all her people, a hundred and fifty or

so, were saved, and most of their gear was brought away.

[Sidenote: The Bermudas.]

The island on which they were wrecked was one of a group the early

history of which is shrouded in strange mystery. If my own solution of

an obscure problem is to be trusted, these islands had once a fierce

cannibal population, whose first white visitors, Vincent Pinzon and

Americus Vespucius, landed among them on St. Bernard's day in August,

1498, and carried off more than 200 slaves.[77] Hence the place was

called St. Bernard's archipelago, but on crudely glimmering maps went

wide astray and soon lost its identity. In 1522 a Spanish captain, Juan

Bermudez, happened to land there and his name has remained. But in the

intervening years Spanish slave-hunters from San Domingo had infested

those islands and reaped and gleaned the harvest of heathen flesh till

no more was to be had. The ruthless cannibals were extirpated by the

more ruthless seekers for gold, and when Bermudez stopped there he

found no human inhabitants, but only swine running wild, a sure witness

to the recent presence of Europeans. Then for nearly a century the

unvisited spot was haunted by the echoes of a frightful past, wild

traditions of ghoulish orgies and infernal strife. But the kidnapper's

work in which these vague notions originated was so soon forgotten

that when the Sea Venture was wrecked those islands were believed to

have been from time immemorial uninhabited. Sailors shunned them as a

scene of abominable sorceries, and called them the Isles of Demons.

Otherwise they were known simply by the Spanish skipper's name as the

Bermoothes, afterward more completely anglicized into Bermudas. From

the soil of those foul goblin legends, that shuddering reminiscence of

inexpiable crime, the potent sorcery of genius has reared one of the

most exquisitely beautiful, ethereally delicate works of human fancy

that the world has ever seen. The wreck of the Sea Venture suggested to

Shakespeare many hints for the Tempest, which was written within the

next two years and performed before the king in 1611. It is not that

these islands were conceived as the scene of the comedy; the command

to Ariel to go and "fetch dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes" seems

enough to show that Prospero's enchanted isle was elsewhere, doubtless

in some fairy universe hard by the Mediterranean. But from the general

conception of monsters of the isle down to such incidents as the

flashing light on the shrouds of the ship, it is clear that Shakespeare

made use of Strachey's narrative of the wreck of the Sea Venture,

published in 1610.

[Sidenote: Arrival of the pinnaces at Jamestown, May, 1610.]

Gates and Somers found the Isles of Demons far pleasanter than their

reputation, and it was well for them that it was so, for they were

obliged to stay there nearly ten months, while with timber freshly cut

and with bolts and beams from the wreck the party built two pinnaces

which they named Patience and Deliverance. They laid in ample stores of

salted pork and fish, traversed the 700 miles of ocean in a fortnight,

and arrived at Jamestown on the 10th of May, 1610. The spectacle that

greeted them was enough to have appalled the stoutest heart. To explain

it in a few words, we must go back to August, 1609, when the seven

ships that had weathered the storm arrived in Virginia and landed their

300 or more passengers, known in history as the Third Supply.

[Sidenote: Arrival of the Third Supply, August, 1609.]

[Sidenote: Smith returns to England, October, 1609.]

Since the new dignitaries and all their official documents were in

the Bermuda wreck, there was no one among the new-comers in Virginia

competent to succeed Smith in the government, but the mischief-makers,

Ratcliffe and Archer, were unfortunately among them, and the former

instantly called upon Smith to abdicate in his favour. He had

persuaded many of the new-comers to support him, but the old settlers

were loyal to Smith, and there was much confusion until the latter

arrested Ratcliffe as a disturber of the peace. The quality of the

new emigration was far inferior to the older. The older settlers were

mostly gentlemen of character; of the new ones far too many were

shiftless vagabonds, or, as Smith says, "unruly gallants, packed

thither by their friends to escape ill destinies." They were sure to

make trouble, but for a while Smith held them in check. The end of his

stay in Virginia was, however, approaching. He was determined to find

some better site for a colony than the low marshy Jamestown; so in

September he sailed up to the Indian village called Powhatan and bought

of the natives a tract of land in that neighbourhood near to where

Richmond now stands,--a range of hills, salubrious and defensible, with

so fair a landscape that Smith called the place Nonesuch. On the way

back to Jamestown a bag of gunpowder in his boat exploded and wounded

him so badly that he was completely disabled. The case demanded such

surgery as Virginia could not furnish, and as the ships were sailing

for England early in October he went in one of them. He seems also to

have welcomed this opportunity of answering sundry charges brought

against him by the Ratcliffe faction. Some flying squirrels were sent

home to amuse King James.[78]

[Sidenote: Lord Delaware sails for Virginia, April, 1610.]

[Sidenote: Horrible sufferings.]

The arrival of the ships in England, with news of the disappearance of

the Sea Venture and the danger of anarchy in Virginia, alarmed Lord

Delaware, and he resolved to go as soon as possible and take command

of his colony. About the first of April he set sail with about 150

persons, mostly mechanics. He had need to make all haste. Jamestown

had become a pandemonium. Smith left George Percy in command, but

that excellent gentleman was in poor health and unable to exert much

authority. There were now 500 mouths to be filled, and the stores of

food diminished with portentous rapidity. The "unruly gallants" got

into trouble with the Indians, who soon responded after their manner.

They slaughtered the settlers' hogs for their own benefit, and they

murdered the settlers themselves when opportunity was offered. The

worthless Ratcliffe and thirty of his men were slain at one fell swoop

while they were at the Pamunkey village, trading with The Powhatan.[79]

As the frosts and snows came more shelter was needed than the cabins

already built could furnish. Many died of the cold. The approach of

spring saw the last supplies of food consumed, and famine began to

claim its victims. Soon there came to be more houses than occupants,

and as fast as one was emptied by death it was torn down for firewood.

Even palisades were stripped from their framework and thrown into the

blaze, for cold was a nearer foe than the red men. The latter watched

the course of events with savage glee, and now and then, lurking in

the neighbourhood, shot flights of arrows tipped with death. A gang of

men stole one of the pinnaces, armed her heavily, and ran out to sea,

to help themselves by piracy. After the last basket of corn had been

devoured, people lived for a while on roots and herbs, after which they

had recourse to cannibalism. The corpse of a slain Indian was boiled

and eaten. Then the starving company began cooking their own dead. One

man killed his wife and salted her, and had eaten a considerable part

of her body before he was found out. This was too much for people to

endure; the man was tied to a stake and burned alive. Such were the

goings on in that awful time, to which men long afterward alluded as

the Starving Time. No wonder that one poor wretch, crazed with agony,

cast his Bible into the fire, crying "Alas! there is no God."

[Sidenote: Virginia abandoned.]

[Sidenote: Arrival of Lord Delaware, June 8, 1610.]

When Smith left the colony in October, it numbered about 500 souls.

When Gates and Somers and Newport arrived from the Bermudas in May,

they found a haggard remnant of 60 all told, men, women, and children

scarcely able to totter about the ruined village, and with the gleam of

madness in their eyes. The pinnaces brought food for their relief, but

with things in such a state there was no use in trying to get through

the summer. The provisions in store would not last a month. The three

brave captains consulted together and decided, with tears in their

eyes, that Virginia must be abandoned. Since Raleigh first began, every

attempt had ended in miserable failure and this last calamity was the

most crushing of all. What hope could there be that North America would

ever be colonized? What men could endure more than had been endured

already? It was decided to go up to the Newfoundland fishing stations

and get fish there, and then cross to England. On Thursday the 7th of

June, 1610, to the funereal roll of drums, the cabins were stripped

of such things as could be carried away, and the doleful company went

aboard the pinnaces, weighed anchor, and started down the river. As

the arching trees at Jamestown receded from the view and the sombre

silence of the forest settled over the deserted spot, it seemed indeed

that "earth's paradise," Virginia, the object of so much longing, the

scene of so much fruitless striving, was at last abandoned to its

native Indians. But it had been otherwise decreed. That night a halt

was made at Mulberry Island, and next morning the voyage was resumed.

Toward noonday, as the little ships were speeding their way down the

ever widening river, a black speck was seen far below on the broad

waters of Hampton Roads, and every eye was strained. It was no red

man's canoe. It was a longboat. Yes, Heaven be praised! the governor's

own longboat with a message. His three well-stocked ships had passed

Point Comfort, and he himself was with them!

Despair gave place to exultant hope, words of gratitude and

congratulation were exchanged, and the prows were turned up-stream.

On Sunday the three staunch captains stood with their followers drawn

up in military array before the dismantled ruins of Jamestown, while

Lord Delaware stepped from his boat, and, falling upon his knees on the

shore, lifted his hands in prayer, thanking God that he had come in

time to save Virginia.

FOOTNOTES:

[66] Smith's _Works_, p. 439.

[67] Id. p. 108.

[68] See above, p. 58.

[69] Smith here means the village of that name, on the James River,

near the site of Richmond. See above, p. 94.

[70] Smith's _Works_, pp. 442-445.

[71] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 28.

[72] Smith's _Works_, pp. 448-465.

[73] Wampum is undoubtedly meant.

[74] Brown's _Genesis_, i. 228.

[75] Doyle's _Virginia_, p. 128.

[76] _Plain Description of the Bermudas_, p. 10; apud Force, vol. iii.

[77] See my _Discovery of America_, ii. 59.

[78] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 32.

[79] See Spelman's account of the affair, in Smith's _Works_, pp.

cii.-cv.

CHAPTER V.

BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH.

[Sidenote: Indian corn.]

[Sidenote: Importance of Smith's work.]

OF late years there has been some discussion as to which of the flowers

or plants indigenous to the New World might most properly be selected

as a national emblem for the United States of America, and many persons

have expressed a preference for that most beautiful of cereals,

Indian corn. Certainly it would be difficult to overrate the historic

importance of this plant. Of the part which it played in aboriginal

America I have elsewhere treated.[80] To the first English settlers it

was of vital consequence. But for Indian corn the company of Pilgrims

at Plymouth would have succumbed to famine, like so many other such

little colonies. The settlers at Jamestown depended upon corn from the

outset, and when the supply stopped the Starving Time came quickly.

We can thus appreciate the value to the Pilgrims of the alliance with

Massasoit, and to the Virginians of the amicable relations for some

time maintained with The Powhatan. We are also furnished with the

means of estimating the true importance of John Smith and his work

in the first struggle of English civilization with the wilderness.

Whether we suppose that Smith in his writings unduly exalts his own

work or not, one thing is clear. It is impossible to read his narrative

without recognizing the hand of a man supremely competent to deal

with barbarians. No such character as that which shines out through

his pages could ever have been invented. To create such a man by an

effort of imagination would have been far more difficult than to be

such a man. One of the first of Englishmen to deal with Indians, he had

no previous experience to aid him; yet nowhere have the red men been

more faithfully portrayed than in his pages, and one cannot fail to

note this unrivalled keenness of observation, which combined with rare

sagacity and coolness to make him always say and do the right things at

the right times. These qualities kept the Indians from hostility and

made them purveyors to the needs of the little struggling colony.

[Sidenote: Nobility of his nature.]

Besides these qualities Smith had others which marked him out as a

natural leader of men. His impulsiveness and plain speaking, as well

as his rigid enforcement of discipline, made him some bitter enemies,

but his comrades in general spoke of him in terms of strong admiration

and devotion. His nature was essentially noble, and his own words bear

witness to it, as in the following exhortation: "Seeing we are not

born for ourselves, but each to help other, and our abilities are much

alike at the hour of our birth and the minute of our death; seeing our

good deeds and our bad, by faith in Christ's merits, is all we have

to carry our souls to heaven or to hell; seeing honour is our lives'

ambition, and our ambition after death to have an honourable memory of

our life; and seeing by no means we would be abated of the dignities

and glories of our predecessors, let us imitate their virtues to be

worthily their successors." So wrote the man of whom Thomas Fuller

quaintly said that he had "a prince's heart in a beggar's purse,"

and to whom one of his comrades, a survivor of the Starving Time,

afterward paid this touching tribute: "Thus we lost him that in all our

proceedings made justice his first guide, ... ever hating baseness,

sloth, pride, and indignity more than any dangers; that never allowed

more for himself than his soldiers with him; that upon no danger would

send them where he would not lead them himself; that would never see us

want what he either had or could by any means get us; that would rather

want than borrow, or starve than not pay; that loved action more than

words, and hated falsehood and covetousness worse than death; whose

adventures were our lives and whose loss our deaths."[81]

[Sidenote: But for Smith the colony would probably have perished.]

It is, indeed, in all probability true that losing Smith was the

chief cause of the horrors of the Starving Time. The colony was not

ill supplied when he left it, in October, 1609, for the stock of hogs

had increased to about 600, and the Third Supply had brought sheep

and goats as well as horses. All this advantage had been destroyed by

the active hostility of the Indians, which was due to the outrageous

conduct of white ruffians whom Smith would have restrained or

punished. But for this man's superb courage and resourcefulness, one

can hardly believe that the colony would have lasted until 1609. More

likely it would have perished in one of the earlier seasons of sore

trial. It would have succumbed like Lane's colony, and White's, and

Popham's; one more would have been added to the sickening list of

failures, and the hopes built upon Virginia in England would have been

sadly dashed. The utmost ingenuity on the part of Smith's detractors

can never do away with the fact that his personal qualities did more

than anything else to prevent such a direful calamity; and for this

reason he will always remain a great and commanding figure in American

history.

[Sidenote: Three sources of weakness.]

[Sidenote: Lord Delaware's administration.]

The arrival of Lord Delaware in June, 1610, was the prelude to a new

state of things. The pathetic scene in which that high-minded nobleman

knelt in prayer upon the shore at Jamestown heralded the end of the

chaos through which Smith had steered the colony. But the change was

not effected all in a moment. The evils were too deep-seated for that.

There had been three principal sources of weakness: first, the lack

of a strong government with unquestioned authority; secondly, the

system of communism in labour and property; thirdly, the low character

of the emigrants. This last statement does not apply to the earlier

settlers so much as to those who began to come in 1609. The earliest

companies were mainly composed of respectable persons, but as the need

for greater numbers grew imperative, inducements were held out which

attracted a much lower grade of people. Neither this evil nor the evils

flowing from communism were remedied during Lord Delaware's brief rule,

but the first evil was entirely removed. In such a rude settlement a

system by which a council elected its president annually, and could

depose him at any time, was sure to breed faction and strife; strong

government had been attained only when the strong man Smith was left

virtually alone by the death or departure of the other councillors.

Now there was no council, but instead of it a governor appointed in

London and clothed with despotic power. Lord Delaware was a man of

strict integrity, kind and humane, with a talent for command, and he

was obeyed. His first act on that memorable June Sunday, after a sermon

had been preached and his commission read, was to make a speech to the

settlers, in which, to cite his own words, "I did lay some blames on

them for many vanities and their idleness, earnestly wishing that I

might no more find it so, lest I should be compelled to draw the sword

of justice to cut off such delinquents, which I had much rather draw in

their defence to protect from enemies."[82] Happily he was not called

upon to draw it except against the Indians, to whom he administered

some wholesome doses of chastisement. The colonists were kept at work,

new fortifications were erected and dismantled houses put in repair.

The little church assumed a comfortable and dignified appearance, with

its cedar pews and walnut altar, its tall pulpit and baptismal font.

The governor was extremely fond of flowers and at all services would

have the church decorated with the bright and fragrant wild growth of

the neighbourhood. At such times he always appeared in the full dignity

of velvet and lace, attended by a body-guard of spearmen in scarlet

cloaks. A full-toned bell was hung in its place, and daily it notified

the little industrial army when to begin and when to leave off the work

of the day.

[Sidenote: Death of Somers, and cruise of Argall, 1610.]

Discipline was rigidly maintained, but the old danger of famine was

not yet fully overcome. The difficulty was foreseen immediately after

Delaware's arrival, and the veteran Somers at once sailed with the

two pinnaces for the Bermudas, intending to bring back a cargo of

salted pork and live hogs for breeding. His consort was commanded by

Samuel Argall, a young kinsman of Sir Thomas Smith, the treasurer of

the London Company. The two ships were parted by bad weather, and

Somers, soon after landing at Bermuda, fell sick and died, with his

last breath commanding his men to fulfil their errand and go back to

Virginia. But they, disgusted with the wilderness and thinking only of

themselves, went straight to England, taking with them the old knight's

body embalmed. As for young Argall, the stress of weather drove him

to Cape Cod, where he caught many fish; then cruising along the coast

he reached Chesapeake Bay and went up the Potomac River, where he

found a friend in the head sachem of the Potomac tribe and bought as

much corn as his ship could carry. With these welcome supplies Argall

reached Jamestown in September, and then Newport took the ships back

to England, carrying with him Sir Thomas Gates to make a report of

all that had happened and to urge the Company to fresh exertions. The

winter of 1610-11 was a hard one, though not to be compared with the

Starving Time of the year before. There were about 150 deaths, and Lord

Delaware, becoming too ill to discharge his duties, sailed for England

in March, 1611, intending to send Gates immediately back to Virginia.

George Percy, who had commanded the colony through the Starving Time,

was again left in charge.

[Sidenote: Sir Thomas Dale.]

Meanwhile the Company had been bestirring itself. A survey of the

subscription list for that winter shows that English pluck was getting

aroused; the colony must be set upon its feet. The list of craftsmen

desired for Virginia is curious and interesting: millwrights, iron

founders, makers of edge tools, colliers, woodcutters, ship-wrights,

fishermen, husbandmen, gardeners, bricklayers, lime-burners,

blacksmiths, shoemakers, coopers, turners, gunmakers, wheelwrights,

masons, millers, bakers, and brewers figure on the list with many

others. But there must have been difficulty in getting enough of such

respectable workmen together in due season for Newport's return trip;

for when that mariner started in March, 1611, with three ships and 300

passengers, it was a more shiftless and graceless set of ne'er-do-weels

than had ever been sent out before. One lesson, however, had been

learned; and victuals enough were taken to last the whole colony for a

year. Gates, the deputy-governor, was not ready to go, and his place

was supplied by Sir Thomas Dale, who for the purpose was appointed

High Marshal of Virginia. Under that designation this remarkable man

ruled the colony for the next five years, though his superior, Gates,

was there with him for a small part of the time. Lord Delaware, whose

tenure of office as governor was for life, remained during those five

years in England. If the Company erred in sending out scapegraces for

settlers, it did its best to repair the error in sending such a man as

Dale to govern them. Hard-headed, indomitable, bristling with energy,

full of shrewd common-sense, Sir Thomas Dale was always equal to the

occasion, and under his masterful guidance Virginia came out from the

valley of the shadow of death. He was a soldier who had seen some

of the hardest fighting in the Netherlands, and had afterward been

attached to the suite of Henry, Prince of Wales. He was connected by

marriage with Sir Walter Raleigh and with the Berkeleys.

Dale was a true English mastiff, faithful and kind but formidable when

aroused, and capable of showing at times some traits of the old wolf.

The modern excess of pity misdirected, which tries to save the vilest

murderers from the gallows, would have been to him incomprehensible. To

the upright he was a friend and helper; toward depraved offenders he

was merciless, and among those over whom he was called to rule there

were many such. John Smith judiciously criticised the policy of the

Company in sending out such people; for, he says, "when neither the

fear of God, nor shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule

them [in England], there is small hope ever to bring one in twenty of

them ever to be good [in Virginia], Notwithstanding I confess divers

amongst them had better minds and grew much more industrious than was

expected; yet ten good workmen would have done more substantial work

in a day than ten of them in a week."[83] It was not against those who

had better minds that Dale's heavy hand was directed; it was reserved

for the incorrigible and crushed them. When he reached Jamestown, in

May, 1611, he found that the two brief months of Percy's mild rule had

already begun to bear ill fruit; men were playing at bowls in working

hours, quite oblivious of planting and hoeing.

[Sidenote: A Draconian code.]

[Sidenote: Cruel punishments.]

To meet the occasion, a searching code of laws had already been

sanctioned by the Company. In this code several capital crimes were

specified. Among them were failure to attend the church services, or

blaspheming God's name, or speaking "against the known articles of

the Christian faith." Any man who should "unworthily demean himself

"toward a clergyman, or fail to "hold him in all reverent regard," was

to be thrice publicly whipped, and after each whipping was to make

public acknowledgment of the heinousness of his crime and the justice

of the punishment. Not only to speak evil of the king, but even to

vilify the London Company, was a treasonable offence, to be punished

with death. Other capital offences were unlicensed trading with the

Indians, the malicious uprooting of a crop, or the slaughter of cattle

or poultry without the High Marshal's permission. For remissness in

the daily work various penalties were assigned, and could be inflicted

at the discretion of a court-martial. One of the first results of this

strict discipline was a conspiracy to overthrow and perhaps murder

Dale. The principal leader was that Jeffrey Abbot whom we have seen

accompanying Smith on his last journey to Werowocomoco. The plot was

detected, and Abbot and five other ringleaders were put to death

in what the narrator calls a "cruel and unusual" manner, using the

same adjectives which happen to occur in our Federal Constitution

in its prohibition of barbarous punishments. It seems clear that at

least one of the offenders was broken on the wheel, after the French

fashion; and on some other occasion a lawbreaker "had a bodkin thrust

through his tongue and was chained to a tree till he perished." But

these were rare and extreme cases; the ordinary capital punishments

were simply hanging and shooting, and they were summarily employed.

Ralph Hamor, however, one of the most intelligent and fair-minded of

contemporary chroniclers, declares that Dale's severity was less than

the occasion demanded, and that he could not have been more lenient

without imperilling the existence of the colony.[84] So the "Apostle of

Virginia," the noble Alexander Whitaker, seems to have thought, for he

held the High Marshal in great esteem. "Sir Thomas Dale," said he, "is

a man of great knowledge in divinity, and of a good conscience in all

things, both which be rare in a martial man." In his leisure moments

the stern soldier liked nothing so well as to sit and discuss abstruse

points of theology with this excellent clergyman.

[Sidenote: Communism in practice.]

[Sidenote: Effects of abolishing communism.]

But Dale was something more than a strong ruler and merciless judge.

With statesmanlike insight he struck at one of the deepest roots of

the evils which had afflicted the colony. Nothing had done so much

to discourage steady labour and to foster idleness and mischief as

the communism which had prevailed from the beginning. This compulsory

system of throwing all the earnings into a common stock had just suited

the lazy ones. Your true communist is the man who likes to live on the

fruits of other people's labour. If you look for him in these days

you are pretty sure to find him in a lager beer saloon, talking over

schemes for rebuilding the universe. In the early days of Virginia the

creature's nature was the same, and about one fifth of the population

was thus called upon to support the whole. Under such circumstances it

is wonderful that the colony survived until Dale could come and put

an end to the system. It would not have done so, had not Smith and

Delaware been able more or less to compel the laggards to work under

penalties. Dale's strong common-sense taught him that to put men under

the influence of the natural incentives to labour was better than to

drive them to it by whipping them and slitting their ears. Only thus

could the character of the colonists be permanently improved and the

need for harsh punishments relaxed. So the worthy Dale took it upon

himself to reform the whole system. The colonist, from being a member

of an industrial army, was at once transformed into a small landed

proprietor, with three acres to cultivate for his own use and behoof,

on condition of paying a tax of six bushels of corn into the public

treasury, which in that primitive time was the public granary. Though

the change was but partially accomplished in Dale's time, the effect

was magical. Industry and thrift soon began to prevail, crimes and

disorders diminished, gallows and whipping-post found less to do, and

the gaunt wolf of famine never again thrust his head within the door.

[Sidenote: The "City of Henricus."]

Six months after Dale's administration had begun, a fresh supply of

settlers raised the whole number to nearly 800, and a good stock of

cows, oxen, and goats was added to their resources. The colony now

began to expand itself beyond the immediate neighbourhood of Jamestown.

Already there was a small settlement at the river's mouth, near the

site of Hampton. The want of a better site than Jamestown was freely

admitted, and Dale selected the Dutch Gap peninsula. He built a

palisade across the neck and blockhouses in suitable positions. The

population of about 300 souls were accommodated with houses arranged

in three streets, and there was a church and a storehouse. This new

creation Dale called the City of Henricus, after his patron Prince

Henry. A city, in any admissible sense of the word, it never became,

but it left its name upon Henrico County. Afterward Dale founded other

communities at Bermuda and Shirley Hundreds, and left his name upon

the settlement known as Dale's Gift on the eastern peninsula near Cape

Charles.

[Sidenote: Pocahontas seized by Argall, 1612.]

[Sidenote: Marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe, April, 1614.]

This expansion of the colony made it more than ever desirable to

pacify the Indians, whose attitude had been hostile ever since Smith's

departure. During all this time nothing had been seen of Pocahontas,

whose visits to Jamestown had been so frequent, but that can hardly

be called strange, since her tribe was on the war-path against the

English. The chronicler Strachey says that in 1610, being about

fifteen years old, she was married to a chieftain named Kocoum. Be

that as it may, it is certain that in 1612 young Captain Argall found

her staying with the Potomac tribe, whose chief he bribed with a

copper kettle to connive at her abduction. She was inveigled on board

Argall's ship and taken to Jamestown, to be held as a hostage for her

father's good behaviour.[85] It is not clear what might have come of

this, for The Powhatan's conduct was so unsatisfactory that Dale had

about made up his mind to use fire and sword against him, when all

at once the affair took an unexpected turn. Among the passengers on

the ill-fated Sea Venture were John Rolfe and his wife, of Heacham,

in Norfolk. During their stay on the Bermuda Islands, a daughter was

born to them and christened Bermuda. Shortly after their arrival in

Virginia, Mrs. Rolfe died, and now an affection sprang up between the

widower and the captive Pocahontas. Whether the Indian husband of

the latter (if Strachey is to be believed) was living or dead, would

make little difference according to Indian notions; for among all the

Indian tribes, when first studied by white men, marriage was a contract

terminable at pleasure by either party. Scruples of a different sort

troubled Rolfe, who hesitated about marrying a heathen unless he could

make it the occasion of saving her soul from the Devil. This was easily

achieved by converting her to Christianity and baptizing her with the

Bible name Rebekah. Sir Thomas Dale improved the occasion to renew the

old alliance with The Powhatan, who may have welcomed such an escape

from a doubtful trial of arms; and the marriage was solemnized in

April, 1614, in the church at Jamestown, in the presence of an amicable

company of Indians and Englishmen. One could wish that more of the

details connected with this affair had been observed and recorded for

us, so that modern studies of Indian law and custom might be brought

to bear upon them. How much weight this alliance may have had with the

Indians, one can hardly say; but at all events they made little or no

trouble for the next eight years.

[Sidenote: Argall attacks the French]

[Sidenote: and warns the Dutch.]

Other foes than red men called for Dale's attention. In the

neighbourhood of the Gulf of St. Lawrence the French were as busily

at work as the English in Virginia. The 45th parallel, the northern

limit of oldest Virginia, runs through the country now called Nova

Scotia. At Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, a small French colony

had been struggling against dire adversity ever since 1604, and more

lately a party of French Jesuits had begun to make a settlement on

Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. In one of his fishing

excursions Captain Argall discovered this Jesuit settlement and

promptly extinguished it, carrying his prisoners to Jamestown. Then

Dale sent him back to patrol that northern coast, and presently Argall

swooped upon Port Royal and burned it to the ground, carrying off

the live-stock as booty and the inhabitants as prisoners. The French

ambassador in London protested and received evasive answers until the

affair was allowed to drop and Port Royal was rebuilt without further

molestation by the English. These events were the first premonition

of a mighty conflict, not to be fully entered upon till the days of

Argall's grandchildren, and not to be finally decided until the days

of their grandchildren, when Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham. We

are told that on his way back to Jamestown the unceremonious Argall

looked in at the Hudson River, and finding Hendrick Christiansen

there with his colony of Dutch traders, ordered him under penalty of

a broadside to haul down the flag of the Netherlands and run up the

English ensign. The philosophic Dutchman quietly obeyed, but as soon as

the ship was out of sight he replaced his own flag, consigning Captain

Argall _sotto voce_ to a much warmer place than the Hudson River.

[Sidenote: Visit of Pocahontas to London, 1616.]

[Sidenote: Her interview with Smith.]

In 1616 George Yeardley, who was already in Virginia, succeeded Sir

Thomas Gates as deputy-governor, and Dale, who had affairs in Europe

that needed attention, sailed for England. He had much reason to feel

proud of what had been accomplished during his five years' rule. Strict

order had been maintained and the Indians had been pacified, while

the colony had trebled in numbers, and symptoms of prosperity were

everywhere visible. In the ship which carried Dale to England went John

Rolfe and his wife Pocahontas. Much ado was made over the Indian woman,

who was presented at court by Lady Delaware and everywhere treated as a

princess. There is a trustworthy tradition that King James was inclined

to censure Rolfe for marrying into a royal family without consulting

his own sovereign. In the English imagination The Powhatan figured as

a sovereign; and when European feudal ideas were applied to the case

it seemed as if in certain contingencies the infant son of Rolfe

and Pocahontas might become "King of Virginia." The dusky princess

was entertained with banquets and receptions, she was often seen at

the theatre, and was watched with great curiosity by the people. It

was then that "La Belle Sauvage" became a favourite name for London

taverns. Her portrait, engraved by the celebrated artist, Simon Van

Pass,[86] shows us a rather handsome and dignified young woman, with

her neck encircled by the broad serrated collar or ruff characteristic

of that period, an embroidered and jewelled cap on her head, and a

fan in her hand. The inscription on the portrait gives her age as

one-and-twenty, which would make her thirteen at the time when she

rescued Captain Smith. While she was in England, she had an interview

with Smith. He had made his exploring voyage on the New England coast

two years before, when he changed the name of the country from North

Virginia to New England. In 1615 he had started in the service of the

Plymouth Company with an expedition for colonizing New England, but

had been captured by French cruisers and carried to Rochelle. After

his return from France he was making preparations for another voyage

to New England, when he heard of Pocahontas and called on her. When he

addressed her, as all did in England, as Lady Rebekah, she seemed hurt

and turned away, covering her face with her hands. She insisted upon

calling him Father and having him call her his child, as formerly in

the wilderness. Then she added, "They did always tell us you were dead,

and I knew not otherwise till I came to Plymouth."[87]

[Sidenote: Death of Pocahontas, 1617.]

[Sidenote: A baffled census-taker.]

Early in 1617 Argall was appointed deputy-governor of Virginia and

sailed in March to supersede Yeardley. Rolfe was made secretary of the

colony and went in the same ship; but Pocahontas fell suddenly ill,

and died before leaving Gravesend. She was buried in the parish church

there. Her son, Thomas Rolfe, was left with an uncle in England, where

he grew to manhood. Then he went to Virginia, to become the ancestor,

not of a line of kings, but of the families of Murray, Fleming, Gay,

Whittle, Robertson, Bolling, and Eldredge, as well as of the branch of

Randolphs to which the famous John Randolph of Roanoke belonged.[88]

One cannot leave the story of Pocahontas without recalling the curious

experiences of a feathered chieftain in her party named Tomocomo, whom

The Powhatan had instructed to make a report on the population of

England. For this purpose he was equipped with a sheaf of sticks on

which he was to make a notch for every white person he should meet.

Plymouth must have kept poor Tomocomo busy enough, but on arriving in

London he uttered an amazed grunt and threw his sticks away. He had

also been instructed to observe carefully the king and queen and God,

and report on their personal appearance. Tomocomo found it hard to

believe that so puny a creature as James Stuart could be the chief of

the white men, and he could not understand why he was not told where

God lived and taken to see him.

[Sidenote: Tobacco.]

[Sidenote: The Mask of Flowers.]

When Argall arrived in Virginia, he found that a new industry, at

which sundry experiments had been made under Dale, was acquiring

large dimensions and fast becoming established. Of all the gifts that

America has vouchsafed to the Old World, the most widely acceptable has

been that which a Greek punster might have called "the Bacchic gift,"

τὸ βακχικὸν δώρημα, tobacco. No other visible and tangible

product of Columbus's discovery has been so universally diffused among

all kinds and conditions of men, even to the remotest nooks and corners

of the habitable earth. Its serene and placid charm has everywhere

proved irresistible, although from the outset its use has been frowned

upon with an acerbity such as no other affair of hygiene has ever

called forth. The first recorded mention of tobacco is in Columbus's

diary for November 20, 1492. The use of it was soon introduced into

the Spanish peninsula, and about 1560 the French ambassador at Lisbon,

Jean Nicot, sent some of the fragrant herb into France, where it was

named in honour of him Nicotiana. It seems to have been first brought

to England by Lane's returning colonists in 1586, and early in the

seventeenth century it was becoming fashionable to smoke, in spite

of the bull of Pope Urban VIII. and King James's "Counterblast to

Tobacco." Every one will remember how that royal author characterized

smoking as "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful

to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume

thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that

is bottomless." On Twelfth Night, 1614, a dramatic entertainment, got

up by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn and called the Mask of Flowers, was

performed before the king and queen at Whitehall. In it the old classic

Silenus appears, jovial and corpulent, holding his goatskin wine-bag,

and with him a novel companion, an American chieftain named Kawasha,

dressed in an embroidered mantle cut like tobacco leaves, with a red

cap trimmed with gold on his head, rings in his ears, a chain of glass

beads around his neck, and a bow and arrows in his hand. These two

strange worthies discuss the merits of wine and tobacco:--

_Silenus._ Kawasha comes in majesty;

Was never such a god as he.

He's come from a far country

To make our nose a chimney.

_Kawasha._ The wine takes the contrary way

To get into the hood;

But good tobacco makes no stay,

But seizeth where it should.

More incense hath burned at

Great Kawasha's foot

Than to Silen and Bacchus both,

And take in Jove to boot.

_Silenus._ The worthies they were nine, 'tis true.

And lately Arthur's knights I knew,

But now are come up worthies new,

The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew.

_Kawasha._ Silenus tops[89] the barrel, but

Tobacco tops the brain

And makes the vapours fine and soote,[90]

That man revives again,

Nothing but fumigation

Doth charm away ill sprites.

Kawasha and his nation

Found out these holy rites.[91]

[Sidenote: Effects of tobacco culture.]

In Virginia the first settlers found the Indians cultivating tobacco in

small gardens. The first Englishman to make experiments with it is said

to have been John Rolfe in 1612. Under Yeardley's first administration,

in 1616, the cultivation of tobacco became fairly established, and

from that time forth it was a recognized staple of the colony. The

effects of this were very notable. As the great purchasing power of

a tobacco crop came to be generally known, the people of Virginia

devoted themselves more and more to its cultivation, until nearly all

other crops and most other forms of industry were neglected. Thus the

type of society, as we shall hereafter see, was largely determined by

the cultivation of tobacco. Moreover a clear and positive inducement

was now offered for emigration such as had not existed before since

the first dreams of gold and silver were dispelled. After the first

disappointments it became difficult to persuade men of hard sense to

go to Virginia, and we have seen what a wretched set of people were

drawn together by the Company's communistic schemes. But those who

came to acquire wealth by raising tobacco were of a better sort, men

of business-like ideas who knew what they wanted and how to devote

themselves to the task of getting it. With the establishment of tobacco

culture there began a steady improvement in the characters and fortunes

of the colonists, and the demand for their staple in Europe soon became

so great as forever to end the possibility of perishing from want.

Henceforth whatever a Virginian needed he could buy with tobacco.

[Sidenote: The London Company's third charter, 1612.]

[Sidenote: Lotteries.]

We have now to see how Virginia, which was fast becoming able

to support itself, became also a self-governing community. The

administrations of Lord Delaware, of Dale, of Yeardley, and of Argall,

were all despotisms, whether mild or harsh. To trace the evolution of

free government, we must take our start in the year 1612, when the

London Company obtained its third charter. The immediate occasion

for taking out this charter was the desire of the Company to include

among its possessions the Bermuda Islands, and they were now added

to Virginia. At the same time it was felt that the government of the

Company needed some further emendation in order to give the members

more direct and continuous control over its proceedings. It was thus

provided that there should be weekly meetings, at which not less

than five members of the council and fifteen of the Company must be

present. Besides this there were to be held four general courts or

quarter sessions in the course of each year, for electing the treasurer

and council and passing laws for the government of the colony. At

these quarter sessions charges could be brought against delinquent

servants of the Company, which was clothed with full judicial powers of

hearing and deciding such cases and inflicting punishments. A good many

subscribers had been alarmed by evil tidings from Virginia so that they

would refuse or more often would simply neglect to pay in the amount of

their subscriptions. To remedy these evils the Company was empowered to

expel delinquent members or to bring suits in law and equity against

them to recover damages or compel performance. Furthermore, it was

allowed to replenish its treasury by setting up lotteries, a practice

in which few people at that time saw anything objectionable. Such a

lottery was held at a house in St. Paul's Churchyard, in July, 1612,

of which the continuator of Stow's Chronicle tells us: "This lottery

was so plainly carried and honestly performed that it gave full

satisfaction to all persons. Thomas Sharplisse, a tailor of London, had

the chief prize, viz., 4,000 crowns in fair plate, which was sent to

his house in very stately manner. During the whole time of the drawing

of this lottery, there were always present divers worshipful knights

and esquires, accompanied with sundry grave discreet citizens." In

September the Spanish ambassador, Zuñiga, wrote home that "there was a

lottery on foot to raise 20,000 ducats [equivalent to about $40,000].

In this all the livery companies adventured. The grocers ventured £62

15s., and won a silver [dish] and cover valued at £13 10s."[92]

[Sidenote: The Company becomes an important force in politics.]

[Sidenote: Opposition to the charter: Middleton's speech.]

This remodelling of the Company's charter was an event of political

importance. Formerly the meetings of the Company had been few and

far between, and its affairs had been practically controlled by

the council, and in many cases by its chief executive officer, the

treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith. Now the weekly meetings of the Company,

and its courts of quarter sessions, armed with such legislative and

judicial powers, put a new face upon things. It made the Company a

democratic self-governing body, and when we recall the membership of

the Company we can see what this meant. There were fifty-six of the

craft-guilds or liveried companies of the city of London, whose lord

mayor was also a prominent member, and the political spirit of London

was aggressively liberal and opposed to high prerogative. There were

also more than a hundred London merchants and more than two hundred

persons belonging to the nobility and gentry, including some of the

foremost peers and knights in the party hostile to the Stuart king's

pretensions. The meetings of the Company were full of discussions which

could not help taking a political turn, since some of the most burning

political questions of the day--as, for example, the great dispute over

monopolies and other disputes--were commercial in character. Men's eyes

were soon opened to the existence of a great deliberative body outside

of Parliament and expressing itself with much freedom on exciting

topics. The social position and weighty character of the members drew

general attention to their proceedings, especially as many of them were

also members of either the House of Lords or the House of Commons. We

can easily believe the statement that the discussions of the Company

were followed with even deeper interest than the debates in Parliament.

It took a few years for this aspect of the situation to become fully

developed, but opposition to the new charter was soon manifested, even

by sundry members of the Company itself. Some of them agreed with

Sergeant Montague that to confer such vast and vague powers upon a

mercantile corporation was unconstitutional. In a debate in Parliament

in 1614 a member of the Company named Middleton attacked the charter on

the ground that trade with Virginia and agriculture there needed more

strict regulation than it was getting. "The shopkeepers of London," he

said, "sent over all kinds of goods, for which they received tobacco

instead of coin, infinitely to the prejudice of the Commonwealth.

Many of the divines now smell of tobacco, and poor men spend 4d. of

their day's wages at night in smoke. [He] wished that this patent may

be damned, and an act of Parliament passed for the government of the

colony by a company."[93]

[Sidenote: Mr. Martin forgets himself,]

[Sidenote: and has to apologize.]

So much effect was produced by speeches of this sort that the council

of the Company as a counterstroke presented a petition for aid, and

had it defended before the House of Commons by the eminent lawyer,

Richard Martin, one of the most brilliant speakers of the day. Martin

gave a fine historical description of English colonizing enterprise

since Raleigh's first attempts, then he dwelt upon the immediate and

pressing needs of Virginia, especially the need for securing an ample

reinforcement of honest workmen with their wives and children, and he

urged the propriety of a liberal parliamentary grant in aid of the

Company and its operations. Then at the close of an able and effective

speech his eloquence carried him away, and he so far forgot himself

as to remind the House that it had been but a thriftless penury which

had led King Henry VII. to turn the cold shoulder upon Columbus,

and to predict for them similar chagrin if they should neglect the

interests of Virginia. This affair, as he truly said, was of far

greater importance than many of the trifles on which the House was in

the habit of wasting its time. Poor Martin should have stopped a minute

sooner. His last remark was heard with indignation. One member asked

if he supposed the House was a school and he the schoolmaster; another

moved that he should be committed for contempt; finally it was decided

that he should make a public apology. So the next day, after a mild and

courteous rebuke from the Speaker, Mr. Martin apologized as follows,

according to the brief memorandum entered upon the journal of the House

of Commons for that day: "All men liable to err, and he particularly

so, but he was not in love with error, and as willing as any man to be

divorced therefrom. Admits that he digressed from the subject; that he

was like a ship that cutteth the cable and putteth to sea, for he cut

his memory and trusted to his invention. Was glad to be an example to

others, and submitted to the censure not with a dejected countenance,

for there is comfort in acknowledging an error."[94]

[Sidenote: Factions within the Company.]

[Sidenote: Death of Lord Delaware, 1618.]

While such incidents, trifling in themselves, tended to create

prejudice against the Company on the part of many members of

Parliament, factions were soon developed within the Company itself.

There was, first, the division between the court party, or supporters

of the king, and the country party, opposed to his overweening

pretensions. The difference between court and country parties was

analogous to the difference between Tories and Whigs that began in the

reign of Charles II. A second division, crossing the first one, was

that between the defenders and opponents of the monopolies. A third

division grew out of a personal quarrel between the treasurer, Sir

Thomas Smith, and a prominent shareholder, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl

of Warwick. This man's title remains to-day in the name of Warwick

County near the mouth of James River. At first he and Sir Thomas Smith

were on very friendly terms. Samuel Argall was closely connected by

marriage with Smith's family, and it was Lord Rich and his friends who

in 1617 secured Argall's appointment as deputy-governor of Virginia.

The appointment turned out to be far from creditable. Argall's rule was

as stern as Dale's, but it was not public-spirited. From the upright

and spotless Dale severity could be endured; with the self-seeking and

unscrupulous Argall it was quite otherwise. He was so loudly accused

of peculation and extortion that after one year the Company sent out

Lord Delaware to take personal charge of the colony once more. That

nobleman sailed in the spring of 1618, with 200 emigrants. They went

by way of the Azores, and while touching at the island of St. Michael,

Lord Delaware and thirty of his companions suddenly fell sick and died

in such manner as to raise a strong suspicion that their Spanish hosts

had poisoned them. Among the governor's private papers was one that

instructed him to arrest Argall and send him to England for trial. When

the ship arrived in Virginia this document fell into Argall's hands.

Its first effect was to make him behave worse than ever, until renewed

complaints of him reached England at the moment of a great change in

the governorship of the Company.

[Sidenote: Quarrel between Lord Rich and Sir Thomas Smith.]

[Sidenote: Election of Sir Edwin Sandys.]

The chief executive officer of the Company was the treasurer. Since

1609 Sir Thomas Smith had held that office, and it had naturally

enough become fashionable to charge all the ills of the colony to his

mismanagement. There may have been some ground for this. Sir Thomas

was a merchant of great public spirit and talent for business, but

he was apt to keep too many irons in the fire, and the East India

Company, of which he was governor, absorbed his attention much more

than the affairs of Virginia. The country party, led by such men as

the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar, were

opposed to Smith and twitted him with the misconduct of Argall. At

this moment broke out the quarrel between Smith and Lord Rich. One

of the merchant's sons aged only eighteen fell madly in love with

the nobleman's young sister, Lady Isabella Rich, and his passion

was reciprocated. There was fierce opposition to their marriage on

the part of the old merchant; and this led to an elopement and a

private wedding, at which the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke and

the Countess of Bedford assisted.[95] These leaders of the country

party thus mortally offended Sir Thomas Smith, while between him and

the young lady's brother, Lord Rich, there was a furious explosion.

Lord Rich, who in the midst of these scenes became Earl of Warwick,

by which title posterity remembers him, was a prominent leader of the

court party, but this family quarrel led him to a temporary alliance

with the opposition, with the result that in the annual election for

the treasurership of the Company, in April, 1619, Sir Thomas Smith

was defeated, and Sir Edwin Sandys chosen in his place. This victory

of the king's opponents called forth much excitement in England; for

the remaining five years of its existence the Company was controlled

by Sandys and his friends, and its affairs were "administered with

a degree of energy, unselfishness, and statesmanlike wisdom, perhaps

unparalleled in the history of corporations."[96]

[Sidenote: Sir George Yeardley appointed governor of Virginia.]

This victory in the spring election consummated the ascendency of

Sandys and his party, but that ascendency had been already shown in the

appointment of George Yeardley to succeed Lord Delaware as governor of

Virginia. The king can hardly have relished this appointment, but as

Yeardley was of rather humble birth, being the son of a poor merchant

tailor, he gave him a certain sanction by making him a knight. High

official position seemed in those days more than now to need some such

social decoration. Yeardley was ordered to send Argall home; but that

independent personage being privately notified, it is said by the

Earl of Warwick, loaded his ship and sailed for England before the

governor's arrival. He was evidently a man who could carry things with

a bold face. His defence of himself satisfied the court party but not

the country party; the evidence against him seems to have reached the

point of moral conviction, but not of legal certainty; he was put in

command of a warship for the Mediterranean service, and presently the

king, perhaps to relieve his own qualms for knighting Yeardley, slapped

him on the back and made him Sir Samuel Argall.

[Sidenote: The first American legislature, 1619.]

On many occasions the development of popular liberty in England

has gone hand in hand with its development in America. The growing

strength of the popular antagonism to Stuart methods of government was

first conspicuously marked by the ascendency of Sir Edwin Sandys and

his party in Parliament and in the management of affairs in Virginia.

Its first fruit was the introduction of parliamentary institutions

into America. Despotic government in Virginia had been thoroughly

discredited by the conduct of Argall. More than 1,000 persons were now

living in the colony, and the year 1619 saw the number doubled.[97]

The people called for self-government, and Sandys believed that only

through self-government could a colony really prosper. Governor

Yeardley was accordingly instructed to issue writs for the election

of a General Assembly in Virginia, and on the 30th of July, 1619, the

first legislative body of Englishmen in America was called together

in the wooden church at Jamestown. Eleven local constituencies were

represented under the various designations of _city_, _plantation_,

and _hundred_; and each constituency sent two representatives, called

_burgesses_, so that the assembly was called from 1619 until 1776

the House of Burgesses. The eleven boroughs were James City, Charles

City, the City of Henricus, Martin Brandon, Martin's Hundred, Lawne's

Plantation, Ward's Plantation, Argall's Gift, Flowerdieu Hundred,

Smith's Hundred, and Kecoughtan. The last two names were soon changed.

Smith's Hundred, at first named after the treasurer, took for its

sponsor one of the opposite party and became Southampton Hundred.

The name of this friend of Shakespeare, somewhat curtailed, was also

given to Kecoughtan, which became Hampton, and so remains to this day.

These eleven names indicate the extent of the colony up the James River

about to seventy miles from its mouth as the crow flies, and laterally

five or six miles inland from either bank, with a population rather

less sparse than that of Idaho at the present day. Such was the first

American self-governing state at its beginning,--a small beginning,

but what a change from the summer day that witnessed Lord Delaware's

arrival nine years before!

[Sidenote: Nature of the General Assembly.]

Concerning this House of Burgesses I shall have something to say

hereafter. Let it suffice for the present to observe that along with

the governor and deputy-governor there was an appointed upper house

called the council; and that the governor, with the assistant council,

and the House of Burgesses, altogether constituted a General Assembly

essentially similar to the General Court of Massachusetts, to their

common prototype, the old English county court, and to their numerous

posterity, the bicameral legislatures of nearly all the world in modern

times. The functions of this General Assembly were both legislative and

to some extent judicial. It was endowed with full powers of legislation

for the colony. Its acts did not acquire validity until approved by the

General Court of the London Company, but on the other hand no enactment

which the Company might make for the colony was to be valid until

approved by its General Assembly. These provisions were confirmed by a

charter issued in 1621.

[Sidenote: The first negro slaves, 1619.]

This gift of free government to England's first colony was the work

of the London Company--or, as it was now in London much more often

called, the Virginia Company--under the noble management of Sir Edwin

Sandys and his friends. That great corporation was soon to perish,

but its boon to Virginia and to American liberty was to be abiding.

The story of the Company's downfall, in its broad outlines, can be

briefly told, but first I may mention a few incidents that occurred

before the crisis. One was the first introduction of negro slaves into

Virginia, which, by a rather curious freak of dates, came in 1619, just

after the sitting of the first free legislature, and thus furnished

posterity with a theme for moralizing. "About the last of August," says

Secretary Rolfe, "[there] came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us

twenty negars." A census taken five years later, however, shows only

twenty-two negroes in the colony. The increase in their numbers was for

some time very slow, and the establishment of slave labour will best be

treated in a future chapter.

[Sidenote: A cargo of maidens, 1619.]

The same year, 1619, which witnessed the introduction of slaves and

a House of Burgesses, saw also the arrival of a shipload of young

women--spinsters carefully selected and matronized--sent out by the

Company in quest of husbands. In Virginia, as in most new colonies,

women were greatly in the minority, and the wise Sir Edwin Sandys

understood that without homes and family ties a civilized community

must quickly retrograde into barbarism. On arriving in Virginia these

girls found plenty of suitors and were entirely free to exercise their

own choice. No accepted suitor, however, could claim his bride until

he should pay the Company 120 pounds of tobacco to defray the expense

of her voyage. This practice of sending wives continued for some time,

and as homes with pleasant society grew up in Virginia, life began to

be made attractive there and the immigration rapidly increased. By

1622 the population of Virginia was at least 4,000, the tobacco fields

were flourishing and lucrative, durable houses had been built and made

comfortable with furniture brought from England, and the old squalor

was everywhere giving way to thrift. The area of colonization was

pushed up the James River as far as the site of Richmond.

[Sidenote: The great Indian massacre, 1622.]

This long narrow colony was dangerously exposed to attack from the

Indian tribes along the York and Pamunkey rivers and their confederates

to the west and north. But an Indian attack was something that people

had ceased to expect. For eight years the Indians had been to all

appearance friendly, and it was not uncommon to see them moving

freely about the villages and plantations. There had been a change of

leadership among them. Wahunsunakok, the old Powhatan whom Smith called

"Father," was dead; his brother Opekankano was now The Powhatan. It

is a traditional belief that Opekankano had always favoured hostile

measures toward the white men, and that for some years he awaited an

opportunity for attacking them. How much truth there may be in this

view of the case it would be hard to say; there is very little evidence

to guide us, but we may well believe that Opekankano and his people

watched with grave concern the sudden and rapid increase of the white

strangers. That they were ready to seize upon an occasion for war is

by no means unlikely, and the nature of the event indicates careful

preparation. Early in 1622 an Indian chief whom the English called Jack

of the Feather killed a white man and was killed in requital. Shortly

afterward a concerted attack was made upon the colony along the entire

line from Chesapeake Bay up to the Berkeley Plantation, near the site

of Richmond, and 347 persons were butchered. Such a destruction of

nearly nine per cent. of the white population was a terrible blow,

but the quickness with which the colony recovered from it shows what

vigorous vitality it had been gaining under the administration of Sir

Edwin Sandys. So lately as 1618 such a blow would have been almost

prostrating, but in 1622 the settlers turned out with grim fury and

hunted the red men like wild beasts till the blood debt was repaid with

compound interest, and peace was restored in the land for more than

twenty years.

While these fiendish scenes were being enacted in Virginia a memorable

drama was moving toward its final catastrophe in London. In the next

chapter we shall witness the overthrow of the great Virginia Company.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] See my _Discovery of America_, i. 27, 28, and _passim._ For a

national floral emblem, however, the columbine (_aquilegia_) has

probably more points in its favour than any other.

[81] Smith's _Works_, p. 486.

[82] Brown's _Genesis_, i. 407.

[83] Smith's _Works_, p. 487.

[84] Smith's _Works_, p. 508.