DISCOVERIES CONTINUED.
Raleigh, spite of the ill-success which had attended his efforts at
colonisation, was not discouraged; and the report which Hariot made of
the capabilities and resources of the country strengthened the public
faith. Profiting by adversity, Raleigh now resolved to attempt an
agricultural colony; to send out families, men with wives and children,
so that the emigrant should take his home, as it were, with him. He
granted a charter of incorporation for the settlement, and established,
before it left the country, a municipal government for his projected
city of Raleigh; Captain John White being appointed governor. The
emigrants were embarked at the expense of Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth
declining to afford any aid. Women were now among them, and a
sufficiency of implements of husbandry seemed to give promise of
successful industry. They arrived at Roanoke in July, expecting to find
the fifteen men whom Grenville had left there; but the fort which had
been built was in ruins, the houses were deserted; wild deer were
feeding amid the rank vegetation of the gardens, and human bones lay
scattered everywhere. Spite of all these melancholy tokens, the
new-comers resolved here to build their city of Raleigh; here to
establish the seat of their future government.
Raleigh was again unfortunate in his choice of governor; Captain John
White was no better fitted for his post than Sir Richard Lane had been.
Aggressions on the Indians were the first acts of the colonists. The
mother and relatives of Manteo welcomed the English with the utmost
cordiality, but spite of this, a party of English seeing a company of
natives sitting by their fires at night, and fearing lest they might be
enemies, fell upon them, and after killing a considerable number
discovered that they were their friends. Manteo, however, remained
faithful, and by command of Sir Walter Raleigh received Christian
baptism and the rank of a feudal baron, as the Lord of Roanoke.
It was soon found that many things were yet needful for the comfort of
the emigrants, and the governor sailed for England to obtain them. A
gloom overspread the little colony as the ship was ready to depart, and
women as well as men besought of him to return speedily with
reinforcements and supplies. At this moment he would have remained with
them, and shared their sufferings and privations, but they compelled him
to go. Previous to his departure, his daughter, Eleanor Dare, the wife
of one of the emigrants, gave birth to a female child, the first
offspring of English parents born in America; the child was called
Virginia Dare.
When White reached England he found the whole nation absorbed by the
threats of a Spanish invasion; Raleigh, Grenville, and Lane, Frobisher,
Drake, and Hawkins, all were employed in devising measures of
resistance. It was twelve months before Raleigh, who had to depend
almost entirely upon his own means, was able to despatch White with
supplies; this he did in two vessels. White, who wished to profit by his
voyage, instead of at once returning without loss of time to his colony,
went in chase of Spanish prizes, until at length one of his ships was
overpowered, boarded, and rifled, and both compelled to return to
England. This delay was fatal. The great events of the Spanish Armada
took place, after which Sir Walter Raleigh found himself embarrassed
with such a fearful amount of debt, that it was no longer in his power
to attempt the colonisation of Virginia; nor was it until the following
year that White was able to return, and then also through the noble
efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh, to the unhappy colony Roanoke. Again the
island was a desert. An inscription on the bark of a tree indicated
Croatan; but the season of the year, and the danger of storms, furnished
an excuse to White for not going thither. What was the fate of the
colony never was known. It has been conjectured that through the
friendship of Manteo they had probably escaped to Croatan; perhaps had
been, when thus cruelly neglected by their countrymen, received into a
friendly tribe of Indians, and become a portion of the children of the
forest. The Indians had, at a later day, a tradition of this kind, and
it has been thought that the physical character of the Hatteras Indians
bore out the tradition.
The kind-hearted and noble Raleigh did not soon give up all hopes of his
little colony. Five different times he sent out at his own expense to
seek for them, but in vain. The mystery which veils the fate of the
colonists of Roanoke will never be solved in this world. “Roanoke,” says
Bancroft, “is now almost uninhabited; the intrepid pilot and the hardy
wrecker, rendered bold by their familiarity with the dangers of the
ocean, and unconscious of the associations by which they are surrounded,
are the only tenants of the spot, where the inquisitive stranger may
still discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new
settlement were erected.”
Speaking of Raleigh and his many and rare virtues, Bancroft adds—“The
judgments of the tribunal of the Old World are often reversed at the bar
of public opinion in the New. The family of the chief author of early
colonisation in the United States was reduced to beggary by the
government of England, and he himself finally beheaded. After a lapse of
nearly two centuries the State of North Carolina, by a solemn act of
legislation, revived in its capital the CITY OF RALEIGH; and thus
expressed its confidence in the integrity, and a grateful respect for
the memory, of the extraordinary man, who united in himself as many
kinds of glory as were ever combined in one individual, and whose name
is indissolubly connected with the early period of American history.”
The fisheries of the north and the efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh at
colonisation had trained a race of men for discovery. One of these,
Bartholomew Gosnold, determined upon sailing direct from England to
America, without touching at the Canaries and the West Indies, as had
hitherto been the custom; and with the aid of Raleigh he “well nigh
secured to New England the honour of the first permanent English
colony.” He sailed in a small vessel directly across the ocean, and in
seven weeks reached the shore of Massachusetts, but not finding a good
harbour sailed southward, and discovered and landed on a promontory
which he called Cape Cod, which name it retains to this day. Sailing
thence, and still pursuing the coast, he discovered various islands, one
of which he called Elizabeth, after the Queen, and another Martha’s
Vineyard. The vegetation was rich; the land covered with magnificent
forests; and wild fruits and flowers burst from the earth in unimagined
luxuriance—the eglantine, the thorn, and the honeysuckle; the wild pea,
tansy, and young sassafras; strawberries, raspberries, and vines. In the
island was a little lake, and in the lake a rocky islet, and here the
colonists resolved to build their storehouse and fort, the nucleus of
the first New England colony. The natural features of the place, the
historian tells us, remain unchanged—the island, the little lake, and
the islet are all there; the forests are gone, while the flowers and
fruit are as abundant as ever. But no trace remains of the fort.
Friendly traffic with the natives of the mainland soon completed a
freight, which consisted of furs and sassafras, and Gosnold was about to
sail, when the hearts of the intending colonists failed them; they
dreaded the attack of Indians and the want of necessary supplies from
home. All, therefore, re-embarked, and in five weeks reached England.
Gosnold and his companions brought home such favourable reports of the
country and the shortness of the voyage, that the following year a
company of Bristol merchants despatched two small vessels, under the
command of Martin Pring, for the purpose of exploring the country and
commencing a trade with the natives. They carried out with them trinkets
and merchandise suited for such traffic, and their voyage was eminently
successful. They discovered some of the principal rivers of Maine, and
examined the coast of Massachusetts as far south as Martha’s Vineyard.
The whole voyage occupied but six months. Pring repeated his voyage in
1606, making still more accurate surveys of the country.
English enterprises for discovery were rapidly continued. An expedition,
promoted by the Earl of Southampton and Lord Arundel of Wardour, and
commanded by George Weymouth, having explored the coast of Labrador,
discovered the Penobscot River. It left England in March, and in six
weeks reached the American continent near Cape Cod.
We must, however, now return to the French and their colonies, of whom
we have lost sight for some time.
In 1598, the Marquis de la Roche received a commission from Henry IV. to
found a French empire in America. But his enterprise utterly failed. His
proposed colonists were the refuse of the jails; these he conveyed to
the desolate Sable Island, on the coast of Nova Scotia, where, after
languishing twelve years, they were allowed to return, and their
offences pardoned in consideration of their sufferings.
Five years later, in 1603, a company of merchants of Rouen resolved to
attempt a scheme of colonisation, and Samuel Champlain, a man
“marvellously delighting in such enterprises,” was placed at its head.
He proceeded to Canada, carefully studied the geography of the country
and the manners of the Indians, and selected Quebec as a commodious
situation for a settlement, near the place where, in 1541, Cartier had
passed the winter and erected a fort. Champlain returned to France, and
De Monts, an able patriot and an honest Calvinist, obtained a patent
from the French government, which conceded to him the sovereignty of
Acadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degree of latitude, that is,
from a degree south of New York city to one north of Montreal, with a
monopoly of the fur trade, control and government of the soil, and
freedom of religion for the Huguenots. Wealth and honour were expected
from the expedition. He set sail with two vessels in March 1604, reached
Nova Scotia in May, and spent the summer in trading with the natives and
examining the coasts preparatory to a settlement.
The early colonists seem to have had a remarkable preference for
islands; accordingly the company of De Monts selected an island near the
mouth of the river St. Croix, in New Brunswick; here they passed a
winter of intense suffering, and in the spring removed to a place in the
Bay of Fundy, where was formed the first permanent settlement of the
French in America, three years before a cabin had been erected in
Canada. The settlement was called Port Royal, and the whole country,
including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the neighbouring islands,
received the name of Acadia.
De Monts was superseded by Pourtrincourt, one of his company. The
undertaking now assumed a religious character. The pope gave his
benediction to all who went thither to evangelise the heathen; Marie de
Medici contributed money, and the Marchioness de Guercheville gave her
support. Jesuits were sent over, and the order itself enriched by
imposts on the fishery and fur trade.
Jesuit priests commenced the conversion of the natives and the
exploration of the country at the same time. The Indians of the Canadian
territory, affected by the confiding humanity of the French priests,
listened reverently to their teachings of salvation. A French colony
within the United States was soon established, under the safeguard of
religion. “The conversion of the heathen,” says Bancroft, “was the
motive of the settlement; the natives venerated the Jesuit Biart as a
messenger from heaven, and beneath the summer sky, round a cross in the
centre of the hamlet, matins and vespers were regularly chanted. France
and the Roman religion had appropriated the soil of Maine.”
In 1608, the company of merchants of Dieppe and St. Malo, who had been
instrumental in depriving De Monts of his monopoly, founded Quebec, the
whole undertaking, nevertheless, originating with Samuel Champlain, in
concert with De Monts. Brick cottages were built, a few fields cleared,
a few gardens laid out; the city of Quebec was begun. The following
year, Champlain, attended by his two Europeans, joined an expedition of
Indians against the Iroquois, and advanced as far into the interior as
the lake which bears his name.
Seven years later, he once more advanced against his old enemies, the
Iroquois. Wounded and alone, he spent a winter with the Hurons, and thus
“a knight-errant in the forest, he carried his language, religion, and
influence even to the hamlets of Algonquins near Lake Nipissing.”
The presence of Jesuits and Calvinists led to contentions; religious
animosity and commercial jealousy checked for a time the progress of the
colony; nevertheless, the wisdom and good conduct of Champlain
established successfully the dominion of the French on the banks of the
St. Lawrence. He lies buried in the land which he colonised.
About the same time that the French adventurer Champlain advanced inland
to the lake which since then has borne his name, another discoverer, the
celebrated Henry Hudson, was penetrating in the same direction from an
opposite point. The great field for commercial enterprise which had been
opened by traffic with the East, and the immense profits thence
accruing, still kept alive the hope of a nearer passage than that by the
Cape of Good Hope. Almost every maritime power of Europe had sent out
ships in the vain hope of discovery, and so persevering was the quest,
that no sooner was one failure recorded, than another expedition set
forth.
It was on the failure of Denmark in this respect that a company of
London merchants contributed a large sum of money for another attempt,
under the command of Henry Hudson. Sailing to the north, with his only
son as his companion, he deliberated, while coasting Greenland, as to
whether he should circumnavigate that country or attempt to cross the
pole; he discovered Spitzbergen, however, and was then compelled to
return, from the immense icebergs which he encountered. The next year
found him again amid the horrors of the polar seas, cherishing the vain
hope of advancing across the pole into the warm, genial regions of
southern Asia.
These two unsuccessful expeditions, though they could not daunt the
courage of this bold navigator, quite discouraged the rich London
merchants, and Hudson, who seems to have had a passion for the northern
seas, hastened to Holland and offered his services to the Dutch East
India Company, to explore for them this much-desired passage. Hudson had
applied in the right quarter; the Dutch at that time took rank as one of
the most maritime and commercial nations of Europe. Commerce was the
breath of their lives, maritime adventure their occupation. The device
on the first Dutch coin was a ship labouring on a stormy sea, without
oar or sails. Speaking of the Republic of the United Netherlands, the
historian Bancroft says, “the rendezvous of its martyrs had been the
sea; the musters of its patriot emigrants had been on shipboard; they
had hunted their enemy, as the whale-ships pursue their game, in every
corner of the ocean.” Holland is but a peninsula, intersected by
navigable rivers, protruding itself into the sea. And Zealand is
composed of islands. Its inhabitants were nearly all fishermen; both
provinces were by nature a nursery of sailors; the principles of
navigation were imbibed from infancy; every house was a school for
mariners. They became affluent through commerce. They were the
connecting links between hemispheres. Their enterprising seamen
displayed the flag of the republic from Southern Africa to the Arctic
circle. The ships of the Dutch, said Raleigh, outnumber those of England
and the other kingdoms. Amsterdam, the depôt of the merchandise of
Europe and of the East, was esteemed, beyond dispute, the first
commercial city of the world.
England and Holland had been allies in the contest with Spain; both had
sent their ships to the Indian seas; they were both desirous of
obtaining settlements in America. The Dutch, like all other nations
connected either with the commerce of Asia or inquisitive with regard to
America, turned their efforts to the discovery of a north-west passage.
The unsuccessful attempts of the English mariners, Cabot, Frobisher,
Willoughby, and others, mattered nothing to them; with that perseverance
which, if it attain not to its object, generally wins some unlooked-for
good, they, too, had sought repeatedly for the north-west passage,
coasting for this purpose Nova Zembla and Muscovy. In 1596, one of their
ships in this quest advanced within ten degrees of the pole; during the
winter, when it was frozen in, on the shores of Nova Zembla, the
sufferings of the unfortunate crew have hardly their parallel in any
narrative of human endurance, misery, and terror at sea.
Hudson had, as we have said, offered his services in the right quarter.
A vessel of discovery, called the Crescent, was soon equipped for him,
and on the 4th of April, 1609, he set sail in search of the
north-western passage, accompanied again by his son.
Masses of ice prevented his sailing toward Nova Zembla; turning to the
south-west, therefore, and passing Greenland and Newfoundland, he ran
along the coast of Acadia, and entered Penobscot Bay, on the southern
coast of Maine, and so on southward to Cape Cod, which, supposing
himself to have first discovered, he called New Holland, and still
sailing southward, reached the entrance of Chesapeake Bay, where he
remembered that his countrymen had a settlement. From this point he
again turned northward, having discovered Delaware Bay; on the 3rd of
September, about five months from the time of his setting sail, he
anchored within Sandy Hook; the natives being attracted to the ship from
the neighbouring shores, which he described as crowned with “goodly
oaks.” After tarrying here a week, Hudson advanced up the Narrows, and
anchored in a safe harbour at the mouth of the river. Every object
around was worthy of admiration—the luxuriant grass, the trees, the
flowers, and the fragrance which was diffused over all. For ten days the
Crescent, the wonder of the Indians who congregated on the shore to
witness the marvellous apparition and to welcome the strangers, ascended
the river above the highlands, and some little distance beyond where the
city of Hudson now stands, and whence he took a boat forward as far as
the present city of Albany. He descended the stream rapidly, and on the
4th of October, set sail for Europe, “leaving,” says the eloquent
historian, “once more to its solitude the land that his imagination,
anticipating the future, described as the most beautiful in the world.”
A prosperous voyage returned Hudson to Europe. He landed at Dartmouth,
and sent a splendid report of his discoveries to his Dutch employers;
but he never revisited the country which he so much praised, nor the
river to which time has now given his name. The Dutch East India Company
declined, as he had failed to discover the north-western passage, to
employ him further.
The following spring, however, an English company was formed, and Hudson
was again abroad in search of a passage to the Pacific. He sailed
directly north, passing Iceland, and Greenland, and Frobisher Straits,
and advancing through the straits that now bear his name, and through
which Cabot had entered a century before, emerged into an immense gulf,
which he joyfully believed for some time to be the object of his search.
He was naturally very unwilling to believe it a bay. Backwards and
forwards he sailed; still hoping for success, and determining at all
hazards to winter there, that he might be ready in the spring to pursue
the important discovery. A horrible winter succeeded; the spring was
late; famine stared him in the face; Hudson divided the last bread with
his men, and wept as he gave it them, having consented to return. He
believed that he was now on the point of success—of success, where all
other nations had failed. With a heavy heart he commenced his homeward
voyage, on June the 18th, yet still amid fields of ice. Two days
afterwards the crew broke forth into mutiny; Hudson was seized, and,
with his son, and seven others, four of whom were sick, was put in an
open boat and turned adrift. Hudson, it is said by some, was a severe
commander, and that his stern and pitiless temper provoked his crew to
mutiny; one little circumstance, however, which is related of this
tragical event, seems to contradict the assertions, and we are willing
to believe its inference. The ship’s carpenter, Philip Staffe—his name
deserves to be remembered—seeing his commander thus exposed, insisted
upon sharing his fate. It was on Midsummer-day, and in a latitude where
the sun at that season scarcely sets, and morning and night meet in the
heavens, that this infamous deed was perpetrated. The fate of Hudson and
his companions never was known. But his name and his memory are
preserved in those dreary polar waters, which, seeming to have had a
wonderful fascination for him in life, became in death his tomb.
“Such,” says Bancroft, “were the men and the voyages which led the way
to the colonisation of the United States. The daring and skill of these
earliest adventurers on the ocean deserve the highest admiration. The
difficulties of crossing the Atlantic were new; the characters of the
prevalent winds and currents were unknown. The possibility of making a
direct passage was but gradually discovered. The ships at first employed
for discovery were generally of less than one hundred tons burden.
Frobisher sailed in a vessel of but twenty-five tons; two of those of
Columbus were without decks; and so perilous were voyages considered,
that the sailors were accustomed, before embarking, to perform acts of
solemn devotion.”