the first place throughout a century; but for the task of colonization
the parts were to be differently cast. The century had witnessed many
profound changes in European politics. In the year 1519 Charles V., King
of Spain, Archduke of Austria, King of Naples and Sicily, heir of the
House of Burgundy, and therefore lord of the Netherlands, had become
also Emperor of Germany, and had begun to threaten all Europe with his
greatness. But the vast circle of his realm had not held together. It
was not a single power, but naturally diverse and disintegrate, and had
speedily fallen asunder. In 1568 began that determined revolt of the
Netherlands which was eventually to sap and destroy the Spanish power.
By scattering her force too ambitiously, and staking her supremacy on
too many issues, Spain began steadily to lose the great advantage she
had held upon the continent. For England the end of Spain’s power was
marked by the destruction of the Armada, and the consequent dashing of
all the ambitious schemes that had been put aboard the imposing fleet at
Lisbon. There had meanwhile been reckonings between England and France
also. Henry VIII. and Francis I. had kept restlessly at work to adjust
the balance of European power to their own liking and advantage. Wars,
brief and inconclusive, but ceaseless, swept Europe in every direction;
and then radical changes set in, both national and international. In
1562 the great Huguenot civil wars broke out, to rage for more than
twenty years; and France stained her annals with St. Bartholomew’s day,
1572. In driving the Huguenots forth to England and America, she lost
the flower of her industrial population. She thwarted her European
enemies, nevertheless, and solidly compacted her national power. The
German countries all the century through were torn and distracted by
the struggle of the Reformation, and remained self-absorbed, forming
the parties and defining the passions which were to bring upon them the
terrible Thirty Years’ War of the next century.
When the new century opened, France and England alone stood ready to
compete for North America. And, for all France was as keen to seek her
interest in the New World as in the Old, the signal advantage, as the
event abundantly proved, was to lie with England in this new rivalry in
the wilderness. The reason is now plain enough. England had obtained from
the sixteenth century just the training she needed for winning America
in the seventeenth, while France had unfitted herself for the race by
the new life she had learned. England had become a commercial nation,
quickened in every seaport by a bold spirit of individual enterprise
that would dare anything for a success. The Tudor monarchs had, it is
true, established a political absolutism; but they had, nevertheless,
somehow deeply stirred individual initiative in their subjects in the
process. In France, meanwhile, individual initiative had been stamped
out, and the authority of church and state consolidated, to command and
control every undertaking. France sent official fleets to America and
established government posts; while England licensed trading companies,
and left the colonists, who went to America in their own interest, to
serve that interest by succeeding in their own way. The French colonies
pined under careful official nursing; the English colonies throve under
“a wise and salutary neglect.” A churchly and official race could not
win America. The task called for hard-headed business sense, patient,
practical sagacity, and men free to follow their own interest by their
own means.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF HENRY VIII.]
The Reformation had performed a peculiar service for England. It had
filled her, not with intense religious feeling, but with intense national
feeling. It meant that England had thrown off all slavish political
connection with Rome, and was to be henceforth national in her church
as well as in her politics. It meant, too, that she was to have less
church than formerly. When Henry VIII. destroyed the monasteries and
appropriated their means and revenues, he secularized the government of
England, and in part English society too, almost at a stroke. The wealth
of the church went to make new men rich who had won the favor of the
crown, and a new nobility of wealth began to eclipse the old nobility of
blood. Such a change met the spirit of the age half-way. The quickened
curiosity and nimble thought of the Renaissance had no courteous care
as to what it exposed or upset. The discovery of new lands, moreover,
stimulated all sorts of trade and sea-traffic. A general movement to
learn and acquire new things had begun among masses of comfortable people
who had never cared to disturb their minds before. The literature of the
“spacious times of great Elizabeth” was the spontaneous speaking out,
with unexampled freedom of heart, with unmatched boldness of fancy and
amplitude of power, of the finer spirits of a nation excited by every new
prospect of thought and enterprise. Fortunately the Tudor monarchs were
stingy how they helped their subjects with money, even to defend their
wealth and commerce against the foreigner. Henry VIII. interested himself
in improved methods of ship-building; and when he had time to think of
it he encouraged instruction in seamanship and navigation; but he built
no navy. He even left the English coasts without adequate police, and
suffered his subjects to defend themselves as best they might against the
pirates who infested the seas not only, but came once and again to cut
vessels out of port in England’s own waters. Many public ships, it is
true, had been built before the Armada came, and fine craft they were;
but they were not enough. There was no real navy in the modern sense. The
fleet which chased the Spaniards up the Channel was a volunteer fleet.
Merchants had learned to defend their own cargoes. They built fighting
craft of their own to keep their coasts and harbors free of pirates,
and to carry their goods over sea. They sought their fortunes as they
pleased abroad, the crown annoying them with no inquiry to embarrass
their search for Spanish treasure ships, or their trade in pirated linens
and silks.
[Illustration: SPANISH GALLEON]
[Illustration: SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT]
[Illustration: GILBERT’S MAP]
It was this self-helping race of Englishmen that matched their wits
against French official schemes in America. We may see the stuff
they were made of in the Devonshire seamen who first attempted the
permanent settlement of the new continent. For a time all that was most
characteristic of adventurous and sea-loving England was centred in
Devonshire. Devonshire lies in the midst of that group of counties in
the southwest of England in which Saxon mastery did least to destroy
or drive out the old Celtic population. There is, accordingly, a strong
strain of Celtic blood among its people to this day; and the land suits
with the strain. Its abrupt and broken headlands, its free heaths and
ancient growths of forests, its pure and genial air, freshened on either
hand by the breath of the sea, its bold and sunny coasts, mark it a
place made by nature to indulge that sense of mystery and that ardor
of imagination with which the Celt has enriched the sober Saxon mind.
Next it lay Somersetshire, with its sea outlet at sturdy Bristol port,
where trade boasted itself free from feudal masters, pointing to the
ruined castle on the hill, and whence the Cabots had sailed, so close
upon the heels of Columbus. For itself Devonshire had the great harbor
and roads of Plymouth, and innumerable fishing ports, where a whole race
of venturesome and hardy fishermen were nurtured. All the great sea
names of the Elizabethan age belong to it. Drake, Hawkins, Ralegh, and
the Gilberts were all Devonshire men; and it was from Plymouth that the
fleet went out which beat the great Armada on its way to shipwreck in the
north. The men who first undertook to colonize the New World for England
were bred to adventure, both by books and by the sea air in which they
lived. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Walter Ralegh, were
gentlemen, trained to books at Oxford, and men of fortune besides, who
could put forth into the world to look into what they had read of. Their
books were full of travellers’ tales; their neighbors were seamen who had
met the Spaniard at close quarters on the high seas, and lightened him of
his treasure. Wealth and adventure alike seemed to call them abroad into
the new regions of the West. Ardently, and yet soberly too, with a steady
business sagacity as well as with high, imaginative hope, they obtained
license of the crown and led the way towards new ports and new homes in
America. They did all with unstinted energy and devotion, embarking
their fortunes in the venture. In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself
went out to Newfoundland, and lost his life seeking a harbor to the
southward where to plant a colony. He had made his own quarters in the
smallest vessel of his little fleet, and calmly “sat abaft with a book
in his hand,” even when the violent sea and the unknown coast threatened
most sharply, cheering his companions the while with the stout-hearted
assurance, “We are as near heaven by sea as by land.” On Monday night,
the 9th of September, about twelve o’clock, his lights went out and
he found a haven he had not sought. The next year, 1584, Ralegh sent
out two ships to take the southern course to America and find a coast
suitable for settlement. They hit upon Roanoke Island. It was, their
captains reported, an exceeding pleasant land, its people “most gentle,
loving, and faithful, and such as live after the manner of the golden
age.” Within the next three years, therefore, until the coming of the
Armada called his attention imperatively off from the business, Ralegh
made two distinct efforts to establish a permanent colony on the island.
But both attempts failed. The right temper and purpose had not come yet.
The first colony contained men only, and these devoted themselves to
exploration instead of to tillage and building. Ralegh and his agents
alike were still dreaming of El Dorado. The second colony contained women
and families; but they made small progress in learning to deal with the
Indians, now no longer gentle and faithful; and they continued to rely on
England for supplies, which did not come. When finally search was made
for them they were not to be found. Their fate has remained a mystery to
this day.
[Illustration: SIR WALTER RALEGH]
[Illustration: MAP OF ROANOKE ISLAND AND VICINITY BROUGHT AWAY BY THE
RALEGH COLONISTS]
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF RALEGH’S “DISCOVERIE”]
And so the century ended, with only a promise of what might some day be
done. But, though the new continent still remained wild, strange, and
inhospitable, the approaches to it at least were at length known. The
Atlantic was cleared of its terrifying mystery, and the common sun shone
everywhere upon it. Both the northern and the southern routes across it
had become familiar to seafarers. The merchants of Southampton regularly
sent ships upon the “commodious and gainful voyage to Brazil” so early
as 1540; and Newfoundland had been a well-known fishing and trading post
ever since 1504. In 1570 at least forty ships went annually from English
ports to take part in the fisheries there; and in 1578 no fewer than a
hundred and fifty were sent from France alone. Hundreds of crews were
to be found in St. John’s Harbor in the season, drying their catch and
sunning their nets. Europe could not have been sure of fish on Fridays
otherwise. The ocean ways were well known; the coast of North America was
partly charted; its forests were no longer deemed the frontier barriers
of kingdoms; the romantic age of mere adventure was past; and the more
commonplace and sober age which succeeded was beginning to appreciate the
unideal economic uses to which North America was to be put, if Europe was
to use it at all. It only remained to find proper men and proper means
for the purpose.
_Note on the Authorities._—The general history of the
discovery, exploration, and early settlement of the coasts
of North America, before the English came, may best be read
in the various chapters of the first two volumes of Winsor’s
_Narrative and Critical History of America_ (where full lists
of authorities are given), in the two volumes of Mr. John
Fiske’s _Discovery of America_, in the first volume of Mr.
J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in America_, and in the
first volume of Bryant and Gay’s excellent _Popular History
of the United States_. Mr. Francis Parkman has given a
characteristically lucid, accurate, and engaging account of the
French settlements in Florida and at the north in his _Pioneers
of France in the New World_.
Those who wish to read of the early voyages and explorations at
first hand, in the _contemporary accounts_, will find almost
everything that they want in Richard Hakluyt’s _Principal
Navigations_ (edited by Edmund Goldsmid. Edinburgh, 16 vols.,
1885-1890), in the invaluable _Publications_ of the Hakluyt
Society, and in the _Collections_ of the Massachusetts
Historical Society.
CHAPTER II
THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH
I. THE VIRGINIA COMPANY
It was the end of the month of April, 1607, when three small vessels
entered the lonely capes of the Chesapeake, bringing the little company
who were to make the first permanent English settlement in America, at
Jamestown, in Virginia. Elizabeth was dead. The masterful Tudor monarchs
had passed from the stage, and James, the pedant king, was on the throne.
The “Age of the Stuarts” had come, with its sinister policies and sure
tokens of revolution. Men then living were to see Charles lie dead upon
the scaffold at Whitehall. After that would come Cromwell; and then the
second Charles, “restored,” would go his giddy way through a demoralizing
reign, and leave his sullen brother to face another revolution. It was
to be an age of profound constitutional change, deeply significant for
all the English world; and the colonies in America, notwithstanding their
separate life and the breadth of the sea, were to feel all the deep stir
of the fateful business. The revolution wrought at home might in crossing
to them suffer a certain sea-change, but it would not lose its use or its
strong flavor of principle.
[Illustration: KING JAMES I.]
The new settlers came in two small ships and a pinnace, the _Goodspeed_,
the _Sarah Constant_, and the _Discovery_, all of which belonged to the
Muscovy Company, which usually sent its ships for trade much farther
north, to Hudson’s Bay and Davis Strait, or to bring cargoes from
Greenland and the Cherry Islands. The little band of adventurers had gone
aboard their craft at Blackwall, on the Thames, and had begun to drop
down the river to put to sea on the next to the last day of December,
1606; but rough weather held them for weeks together in The Downs, and
it was past the middle of February, 1607, before they got finally away.
Their course fetched a wide compass round about by the Great Canaries and
the West Indies in the south, and it was the end of April before they saw
at last the strange coasts for which they were bound.
[Illustration: THE GOODSPEED, SARAH CONSTANT, AND DISCOVERY AT THE CAPES
OF THE DELAWARE]
It was a lonely age in which to be four months upon the great sea, for
“ships were rare,” only “from time to time, like pilgrims, here and there
crossing the waters.” You were sure to see no sail anywhere as you went.
And the land to which they came was as lonely as the sea, except for the
savages who lurked within its forests. The three little merchantmen came
none the less boldly in at the capes, however; and the tired men on board
thought the shores of the vast bay within very beautiful, with their
“fair meadows and goodly tall trees,” and their “fresh waters running
through the woods,” better than any wine to men who for four months had
drunk from the stale casks on the ships. And yet the loneliness of those
spreading coasts, forested to the very water, was enough to daunt even
brave men.
[Illustration: “SHIPS WERE RARE”]
They presently found a great “river on the south side, running into the
main,” and they chose a place on its banks for their settlement which
was quite forty miles above the mouth of its stately stream; for they
wished to be away from the open bay, where adventurous seamen of other
nations, none too sure to be their friends, might at any time look in
and find them. They named their river the James, and their settlement
Jamestown, in honor of the king at home. Eighty years before there had
been Spaniards upon that very spot. They had built houses there, and had
planned to keep a lasting colony. There had been Spaniards in the West
Indies these hundred years and more,—ever since the days of Columbus
himself; and in 1526 Vásquez de Ayllon had led a great colony out of
Santo Domingo to this very place, no fewer than five hundred persons, men
and women, with priests to care for their souls and to preach the gospel
to the savages. But discord, fever, and death had speedily put an end to
the venture. The place had soon been abandoned. Scarcely one hundred and
fifty of the luckless settlers survived to reach Santo Domingo again;
and when the English put ashore there, where a tongue of low and fertile
land was thrust invitingly into the stream, no trace remained to tell the
tragic story. It was as still and bare and lonely a place as if no man
else had ever looked upon it.
There were but a few more than a hundred men put ashore now from the
English ships to try their hands at making a colony, and not a woman
among them to make a home. They had been sent out by a mercantile
company in London, as if to start a trading post, and not a community
set up for its own sake, though there could be little trade for many a
long day in that wilderness. Certain London merchants had united with
certain west-country gentlemen and traders of Bristol, Exeter, and
Plymouth in the formation of a joint-stock company for the purpose of
setting up colonies in both “the north and south parts of Virginia”;
and to this company royal letters patent had been issued on the 10th of
April, 1606. The name “Virginia” had been given, in honor of Elizabeth,
the Virgin Queen, to the mainland which Ralegh’s first explorers found
beyond Roanoke. So far as Englishmen were concerned, the name covered
the greater part of the Atlantic coast of the continent. The patentees
of the new company were to attempt both a northern and a southern
settlement, and, to serve their double purpose the better, were divided
into two bodies. The London stockholders were to undertake the first
colony, in some southern part of “Virginia,” between the thirty-fourth
and the forty-first degrees of north latitude; while the incorporators
who were of Somerset and Devon were to undertake a second colony, to be
conducted to some point farther north,—though all were to remain under
the government of a single general council.
[Illustration: “LIKE PILGRIMS, HERE AND THERE CROSSING THE WATERS”]
[Illustration: BOTH SIDES OF THE SEAL OF HIS MAJESTY’S COUNCIL OF
VIRGINIA]
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF HAKLUYT’S DIVERS VOYAGES]
There were men of capital importance and quick energy among the London
incorporators; and the enterprise they had taken in hand was not all
novel. Several of them were members also of the East India Company,
which had been formed seven years before, and of the “Russia or Muscovy
Company,” whose trade in far-away seas was a thing established and
familiar. They were most of them men who had heard all there was to
be told or read of the voyages and adventures by which America had
become known in England; and some notable sailors were also of their
number who had themselves seen the strange seas and unfamiliar coasts
which others only read of. Richard Hakluyt, the genial and learned
churchman, who loved every tale of daring and who knew more of the New
World than any other man in the kingdom, was their associate in the
new company. Captain Newport, to whom they intrusted the command of
their little fleet, borrowed from the Muscovy Company, had already been
twice to America: a clear-eyed man hardly turned of forty, and likely
to understand what he saw. Bartholomew Gosnold, whom they commissioned
captain of the _Goodspeed_, had himself discovered the short route to
America by way of the Azores, and went now permanently to cast in his lot
with the colonists. There were capacity and experience and audacity and
steadfastness enough embarked in the service of the Virginia Company, it
must have seemed, to make it sure of its success.
[Illustration: RICHARD HAKLUYT]
And yet nobody very well understood what this new business of
establishing colonies was to be like, for all that; and the colonists
whom these capable London gentlemen sent over with Captain Newport were a
sorry lot, it turned out, with whom to attempt an enterprise which should
need for its execution every manly quality of courage and steadfastness
and industry. Prosperous and steady men who were succeeding at home were
not likely to be willing to go to America, of which they knew nothing
except that it was full of savages, and that Ralegh’s colonists had been
lost there, never to be found again. Only men hopelessly out of work or
out of sorts, and reckless men, young and fond of adventure, were likely
to think the prospect inviting, or the novel risk worth taking, to
better their fortunes, or to get the monotony out of their lives.
[Illustration: INDIAN VILLAGE OF SECOTAN]
It happened that England was full of idle men, because her life was
changing. The very quickening and expansion of commerce and of adventure
in trade and conquest which had changed all the age and the aspect of
the world itself since the first crossing of the Atlantic had given
England a new place in the geography of the planet, and was radically
altering men’s lives and occupations and ambitions there. New trades and
industries were springing up, and the towns were reaping the benefits
of a diversified commerce. But the people of the rural districts had
fallen upon evil days. Land, like everything else, had become a sort
of commodity as trade gained its mastery. The old tenures, under which
small holders had so long lived unmolested, were breaking up. The city
merchants bought estates for their pleasure, and wanted no tenants.
The older land-owners got rid of small farmers as fast as they could,
in order to turn their lands into pasture for the sheep whose wool was
so much in demand by the merchants and the manufacturers. They even
enclosed and appropriated for the same purpose commons which had time
out of mind been free to all, and swept hamlets away to make the more
room for their flocks. The demand for agricultural labor sadly slackened.
“Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame,” cried Sir Thomas
More, in his anger and pity to see such things done, “are now become so
great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very
men themselves. They consume, devour, and destroy whole fields, houses,
and cities.” Town and country-side alike filled with men out of work,
who “prowled about as idle beggars or continued as stark thieves till
the gallows did eat them”; and unguarded wayfarers were robbed upon
the highways by desperate men who could find no other way to obtain
subsistence. James’s craven eagerness for peace had put an end to the
wars with which Elizabeth’s day had resounded, and London was full of
idle soldiers, mustered out of service. Younger sons and decayed and
ruined gentlemen seemed to abound more than ever.
It was men out of work or unfit for it who chose to go to America; and
not men of the country-sides so much as discredited idlers and would-be
adventurers of the towns. More than one-half of the company Captain
Newport conducted to James River called themselves “gentlemen,”—were men,
that is, of good blood enough, but no patrimony, no occupation, no steady
habit, who were looking for adventure or some happy change of fortune
in a new land, of which they knew nothing at all. Very few, indeed, of
the rest were husbandmen or carpenters or trained laborers of any sort.
There was only one mason, only one blacksmith, in all the hundred and
twenty. Only two were bricklayers, only six carpenters; while thirty-five
were gentlemen, and most knew not what to call themselves. The things
it was most necessary to do when at last the landing had been made at
Jamestown,—the planting of crops, the building of houses, the dull labor
of felling trees and making a beginning in a wilderness,—were the very
things which the men the Virginia Company had sent over knew least about,
and had the least inclination to learn. They expected the company to send
them supplies out of England, and gave little thought to what they were
to do for themselves. When Captain Newport’s ships put to sea again
and left them, they were at their wits’ ends to know how to maintain
themselves.