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The Beginners of a Nation
The Beginners of a Nation A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
TO
THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE, M. P
My dear Mr. Bryce:
In giving an account of the origins of the United States, I have told a story of English achievement. It is fitting that I should inscribe it to you, who of all the Englishmen of this generation have rendered the most eminent service to the American Commonwealth. You have shown with admirable clearness and candor, and with marvelous breadth of thought and sympathy, what are the results in the present time of the English beginnings in America, and to you, therefore, I offer this volume. I need not assure you that it gives me great pleasure to write your name here as godfather to my book, and to subscribe myself, my dear Mr. Bryce,
Yours very sincerely,
Edward Eggleston.
PREFACE
In this work, brought to completion after many years of patient research, I have sought to trace from their source the various and often complex movements that resulted in the early English settlements in America, and in the evolution of a great nation with English speech and traditions. It has been my aim to make these pages reflect the character of the age in which the English colonies were begun, and the traits of the colonists, and to bring into relief the social, political, intellectual, and religious forces that promoted emigration. This does not pretend to be the usual account of all the events attending early colonization; it is rather a history in which the succession of cause and effect is the main topic – a history of the dynamics of colony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth century. Who were the beginners of English life in America? What propulsions sent them for refuge to a wilderness? What visions beckoned them to undertake the founding of new states? What manner of men were their leaders? And what is the story of their hopes, their experiments, and their disappointments? These are the questions I have tried to answer.
The founders of the little settlements that had the unexpected fortune to expand into an empire I have not been able to treat otherwise than unreverently. Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply English men and women of the seventeenth century, with the faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues of their age. I have disregarded that convention which makes it obligatory for a writer of American history to explain that intolerance in the first settlers was not just like other intolerance, and that their cruelty and injustice were justifiable under the circumstances. This walking backward to throw a mantle over the nakedness of ancestors may be admirable as an example of diluvian piety, but it is none the less reprehensible in the writing of history.
While the present work is complete in itself, it is also part of a larger enterprise, as the half-title indicates. In January, 1880, I began to make studies for a History of Life in the United States. For the last sixteen or seventeen years by far the greater part of my time has been given to researches on the culture history of the United States in the period of English domination, that "good old colony time" about which we have had more sentiment than information. As year after year was consumed in this toilsome preparation, the magnitude of the task became apparent, and I began to feel the fear for my work so felicitously expressed by Ralegh, "that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me before the performance." It seemed better, therefore, to redeem from the chance of such mishap a portion of my work, by completing this most difficult part of the task, in order that when, early or late, the inevitable night shall fall, the results of my labor, such as they are, may not be wholly covered over by the darkness.
There is always difference of opinion in regard to the comparative fullness with which the several portions of a historical narrative should be treated, and I can not hope to escape criticism on this point. I have related some events with what will be considered disproportionate amplitude of detail. But the distinctive purpose of this work is to give an insight into the life and character of the people, and there are details that make the reader feel the very spirit and manner of the time. It is better to let the age disclose itself in action; it is only by ingenious eavesdropping and peeps through keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge from the past. Literary considerations should have some weight in deciding how fully an episode shall be treated, unless the historian is content to perform the homely service of a purveyor of the crude ore of knowledge. I have sought to make this "a work of art as well as of historical science," to borrow a phrase from Augustin Thierry. Some omissions in this volume will be explained when its successors appear.
I find it an embarrassing task to make acknowledgment to those who have assisted me; the debts that have accumulated since I began are too many to be recorded. I must not neglect to express my grateful remembrance of the hospitality shown to my researches during my various sojourns in England. At the British Museum and at the Public Record Office every facility has been extended to me, and a similar attention was shown to my wants at other less public repositories of books, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. To Dr. Richard Garnett, the head of the printed book department of the Museum, I owe thanks for many personal attentions. I am also indebted to Mr. E. M. Thompson, keeper of the manuscripts in the museum. The late Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Public Record Office, was very obliging. I owe most of all to the unfailing kindness of the Right Honorable James Bryce, M. P., who found time, in the midst of his preoccupations as a member of Parliament and his duties in high office, to secure for me access to private stores of historical material. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice with generous kindness put himself to much trouble to facilitate my examination of the manuscripts at Landsdowne House. I am indebted to Lord Leconsfield for permission to visit Petworth House and read there Percy's Trewe Relacion in the original manuscript. I must ask others in England who befriended my researches to accept a general acknowledgment, but I can not forget their courtesy to a stranger. In common with other students I received polite attentions during my researches in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
In this country I owe much to the librarians of public libraries and their assistants – too much to allow me to specify my obligations to individuals. At the Astor, and at the Lenox, under its more recent management, my debt has been continual for many years. Acknowledgments are due to the officers of the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and the libraries of the New York, the Massachusetts, the Pennsylvania, the Maryland, and the Virginia Historical Societies. To Harvard College Library and to the New York State Library I am specially indebted; from them I have been able to supplement my own collection by borrowing. The Brooklyn Mercantile Library has granted me similar privileges. The New York Mercantile Library, on the other hand, I have not found hospitable to research.
To my generous friend Mr. Justin Winsor I owe thanks for many favors. Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet opened his valuable collection to me, and the late Mr. S. L. M. Barlow showed me similar kindness. My friend, Mr. Oscar S. Straus, permitted me to use at my own desk valuable works from his collection. There are others whose friendly attentions can be more fitly recognized in later volumes of this series, and yet others whom I must beg to accept this general but grateful acknowledgment.
Mr. W. W. Duffield, the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, supplied the artist with the coast charts from which the maps in this volume were drawn.
To avoid misapprehension, it is needful to say that this is not a re-issue of anything I have heretofore produced. The lectures on the culture history of the United States given at Columbia College and other institutions were never written or reported. The papers on colonial life contributed to the Century Magazine in 1882, and the years following, were on a different plan and scale; they have merely served the purpose of preliminary studies of the general subject. To the editor and publishers of the Century Magazine I am obliged for their courtesy in all affairs relating to my contract with them, and for an arrangement which enables me to have free use of my material.
Joshua's Rock, Lake George, October, 1896.
BOOK I.
RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE AND NOTIONS OF AMERICA AT THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT
I
The Elizabethan age. The age of Elizabeth and James – the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon – was a new point of departure in the history of the English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet a modern invention; the New World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern discovery; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit growing out of the recent reformation in religion. Imagination was powerfully stimulated by the progress of American exploration, by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards in the West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but the credulity and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama-loving age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste. He who could afford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples inhabiting them, or the "monstrous strange beasts" found in lands beyond the bounds of Christendom.
Credulity about America. America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the least known of all the "four parts" into which the globe was then divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to the pole. George Beste, First Voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents; they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites expectation of others like it. And in a time when vague report or well-worn tradition counted for more than observation or experimental knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure probabilities, and to those shut in by the narrow limits of mediæval knowledge the mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it afterward seemed incredible.
Illusions of discoverers. The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark. Zuan Caboto – in English, John Cabot – who is described by a contemporary as "a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he sailed down the coast again the next year, "ever with the intent to find said passage to India." 1 It was announced on his return from his first voyage that Henry VII had "won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword."
The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513, and the voyage of Magellan's ship across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth century; but to reach Asia was still the main purpose of western exploration, and America was for a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a passage to the Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it retarded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World. 2
II
Frobisher. Adventure by sea became a favorite road to renown for ambitious Englishmen in the time of Elizabeth, and the belief in a passage through or round North America grew into a superstition. The discovery of this strait seemed, in the phrase of George Beste, a writer of the time, "the onely thing of the world that was left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." Sir Martin Frobisher, who is reckoned by Camden "among the famousest men of our age for counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voyages in 1576 and the following years to that part of the American coast almost under the arctic circle. Frobisher's Voyages, Hakl. Soc., passim. He desisted from the attempt to get to China by an arctic channel only when he had involved the "venturers" or stockholders associated with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune of his wife and stepchildren, to whom "glory gotten at sea" must have been insufficient compensation. "Sir Martin Frobisher whome God forgive" is the phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife.
Gilbert. In the year of Frobisher's first voyage, Sir Humphrey Gilbert issued a treatise to prove that there was a way to the East Indies round North America. This he demonstrated by a hydra-headed argument constructed after the elaborate fashion of that unscientific age, proving the existence of a northwest passage, first by authority, secondly by reason, thirdly by experience of sundry men's travels, and fourthly by circumstance. Voy., 184-227. Not content with getting to China by logic, and nothing daunted by Frobisher's brilliant failure, Gilbert mortgaged his estate that he might engage in attempts yet more disastrous than Frobisher's, and lost his life during his second voyage, in 1584.
Hakluyt. About this time there appeared on the scene the famous geographer, Richard Hakluyt, one of those men that exert a marked influence in favor of a new movement mainly by ardor and industry. Hakluyt's fervor was akin to enthusiasm, his belief of every story favorable to projects for colonization, and his unwavering faith in the projects themselves bordered on flat credulity. To men of his own time his tireless advocacy of American exploration and colony-planting must have seemed irksome hobby-riding. But he was the indispensable forerunner of colonization. "Your Mr. Hakluyt hath served for a very good trumpet," says Sidney. Believing in everything American as unwaveringly as if his soul's salvation depended on his faith, he believed in nothing more sublimely than in a passage to the "South Sea" or Pacific Ocean. He seized on every vague intimation of ignorant map-makers, on every suspicion of an explorer, on every fond tale of an Indian that tended to lend support to the theory in hand. All evidence was of equal weight in his scales, provided it lay on the affirmative side of the balance. It mattered little to him where his witnesses placed this elusive passage. In Hakluyt's mind it was ubiquitous. The Pacific is now "on the backside" of Montreal Island, and the great Laurentian lakes suffer a sea change; now it is reached by a river flowing three months to the southward – that is, the Mississippi. Then the much-sought strait is carried northward on the authority of an old map – "a great old round carde" – shown him "by the King of Portingall." But he had also seen "a mightie large old mappe in parchment" which showed, as far south as latitude 40°, a little neck of land "much like the streyte neck or Isthmus of Darienna." Hakl. Disc. on Western Planting. He had seen the same isthmus on another old map "with the sea joynninge hard on both sides as it doth on Panama." In a paper meant for private use, he expresses solicitude that the nearness of the Pacific to Florida shall not become known too commonly. N. Y. Col. Docs. I, 16. Many years later an injunction was granted in Holland forbidding a publisher to insert in a map the newly discovered channel into the South Sea.
III
Ralegh. Both Frobisher and Gilbert made ineffectual attempts to plant colonies in the new lands, but colony-planting held a place in their minds quite secondary to the search for the South Sea in the north and the finding of gold. It was only when the large and lucid mind of Sir Walter Ralegh took up the subject seriously that the settlement of an agricultural colony became for a while the real object of American voyages. Ralegh sent no men to the arctic or to the wintry shores of Newfoundland, as Frobisher and Gilbert had done. He turned to milder latitudes, and dispatched his explorers in 1584, and his colonists in 1585, to the coast of what is now North Carolina.
But the ever-mischievous South Sea delusion did not vanish when the period of colonization was reached. Ralph Lane's quest. Ralph Lane, the governor of Ralegh's first colony on Roanoke Island, having inquired perhaps for that western sea which Hakluyt had seen "on the mightie old mappe in parchment," understood the inventive savages to say that the Roanoke River sprang from a rock so near to a sea that the waves in storm often dashed into this fountain, making the river brackish for some distance below. That the story might be more interesting, they added that there was gold there, and that the walls of a town in that land were made of pearls. This is what the white men fancied the Indians said; but whatever they said was spoken in a tongue of which Lane's men had but the most scanty knowledge, if indeed it were not given mainly by signs. 3 Nothing dispirited by the extravagance of these tales, Lane and some of his men set out to immortalize and enrich themselves – like a company of children running after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Lane's Account in Hakl. III. While the crafty Indians were plotting the destruction of the colonists left behind, the governor and his followers pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat their dogs, made palatable by seething with a dressing of sassafras leaves. They returned, half famished and wholly disappointed, just in time to rescue the colony from destruction. But faith is faith, and despite his severe experience Lane went back to England believing that the Roanoke rose near to the Bay of Mexico "that openeth out into the South Sea." The map which the colonists brought with them when they abandoned the country in 1586 handed down the delusion, in another form, by showing a strait leading from the neighborhood of Port Royal into a body of water to the westward. 4
IV
Seeking the Pacific on James River. Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first colonists the Jamestown company was sent to plant the germ of an English-speaking nation in North America. Beginning with the first voyage of Columbus, the search for a route through America had lasted a hundred and fourteen years. No passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found, yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way remained a part of the geographical creed of the time. The Jamestown emigrants were officially instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay toward the northwest, perhaps because the charmed latitude of 40° might thus be reached. It was in carrying out this instruction that Captain John Smith came to grief at the hands of the Indians while looking for the Pacific in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith rarely mixed his abounding romance with his geography; he is as sober and trustworthy in topographical description and in map-making as he is imaginative in narration. But Smith was at this time under the influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hoped that his second voyage up the Chesapeake would lead him into the Pacific. Hudson. His belief in a passage to the westward in latitude 40°, just beyond the northward limit of his own explorations, he communicated to his friend Henry Hudson, who was so moved by it that he sailed to America in 1609 in violation of his orders, and in seeking the strait to the South Sea penetrated the solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his name. Dermer. The explorer Dermer was intent on winning immortality by finding a passage to the Pacific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, he got information from the obliging Indians that made plain his way to the Orient. He was very secretive about this route, which, however, seems to have lain through Delaware Bay.
A false notion once generally accepted is able to live in some ghostly shape after the breath is out of its body. The hope of a passage to the Pacific by means of a strait and the belief in a narrow isthmus in latitude 40° could not long survive the increase of knowledge that followed the settlement of Virginia and Captain Smith's explorations. 5 But sixteen years after the landing at Jamestown, when these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased to flicker, the poet George Sandys, who was secretary of the colony, wrote that he was ready to venture his life in finding a way to the South Sea, but this way was now to be by an overland route. Sandys's plan. About the same time Henry Briggs, the famous Savile lecturer at Oxford, proved to the satisfaction of many that the rivers running westward from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific in about one hundred and fifty miles. 6 One Marmaduke Parkinson, an explorer sailing in the Potomac, confirmed the theory of the learned mathematician by discovering in the house of a chief a "China Boxe," whatever that may have been. Luke Fox. In 1631 Luke Fox set sail by the northwest, carrying a letter from Charles I addressed "to the Emperor of Japan," which he probably was not able to deliver. Northwest. Fox, p. 172. In 1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the falls of the Delaware in the endeavor to go through the continent in latitude 40°. The strait and isthmus and northwest passage having failed, Yong was content to go by fresh water till he should reach a Mediterranean Sea in the heart of America, which he believed to open into both the "North Ocean" and the South Sea. Weston Documents 45 and 47 and ff. As the century advanced the fresh-water route had in turn to be finally abandoned, and seekers after the Pacific were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, and even to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys had proposed. Catlet and Lederer. A Colonel Catlet is mentioned who reached the Alleghanies in the endeavor to find a river flowing westward, but he was daunted by what seemed to him almost impassable ranges of mountains that barred his way. Glover, in Phil. Trans., xi 626. Comp. Perfect Descr. of Va., 1649 and Lederer's Voyage. Over these "rocky hills and sandy desarts" scarce a bird was seen to fly. In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out from Virginia on a similar futile exploration. Lawson's Carolina, 47. As late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson speaks hopefully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Carolina. This fallacy had prompted many desperate adventures, and had been the cause of many important discoveries, in the two centuries that it held possession of men's minds. Scot's Magazine, 1765, page 161. It reached its last attenuation in 1765, when the public prints announced that large boats were fitting out at Quebec to try the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and that "they have hopes of finding a communication by water with the western ocean, founded on the favorable reports of some Indians, who inform that a river runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as the Mississippi."
V
Gold-hunting. As the mistake made by Columbus had left for heritage an almost ineradicable passion for the discovery of a westward sea way to Japan and China, so the vast treasure of gold and silver drawn by the Spaniards from Mexico and Peru produced a belief in the English mind that a colony planted at any place on the American coast might find gold. Here, again, the undoubting Hakluyt and other writers after him were ready with learned conclusions balancing on the tight rope of very slender premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a piece of copper that "bowed easily," this flexibility proved it to be tarnished gold. If a savage seemed to say in his idiom, or by gestures and other signs, something which the puzzled newcomers took to signify that in a country farther on the copper was too soft for use, or that it was yellow, or that it had a good luster, what further evidence could an ingenious writer desire of the existence of the precious metal in that country? Hakluyt. Pref. to Va., magnified. Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt in geographical research, explains the divine purpose in thus endowing a heathen land with gold, which is that the Indian race "as a rich bride, though withered and deformed, … might find many suitors for love of her portion," and thus the pagans be converted. Pilgrimage, 795. But Purchas filches both the simile and the pious thought from Herrera, who in turn probably pilfered it with many better things from the good Las Casas. Purchas also speaks with more optimism than elegance of the "silver bowels and golden entrails of the hills," as though one had but to dig into the first mountain to be enriched.
Frobisher's gold. Frobisher brought home from sub-arctic islands what his clumsy assayers avouched to be "gold eure." Refining works were erected for this stuff at Deptford to no profit, and to this day the inquisitive student is not able to ascertain from the conflicting reports whether there was any gold in the ore or not. Early Virginia gold-hunting. The main causes of the suffering at Jamestown during the first winter were the waste of time and the consumption of supplies while lading the ships with the glittering "dust mica" which is so abundant in the Virginia sands. The worthlessness of this cargo could not weaken the hopes of those alchemists who were able to produce gold merely by the use of arguments. The mines in Virginia moved farther west. It wanted only that explorers should reach the mountains. In spite of the sickness that wasted the colony in 1610, Lord De la Warr sent an expedition to dig gold on the upper James, but the warlike up-river tribes soon drove the prospectors back. In 1634, Sir John Harvey sent another body of men on the same fool's errand, though there had not been found in all the years preceding a particle of tangible evidence that gold existed in Virginia. But on the James, as on the Hudson, the glistering pigment with which the Indians besmeared their faces on occasions of display was believed to contain gold, and the places of its procurement were sought with ludicrous secrecy. 7
Fact and fable about America. The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. Ingram's story. Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by relapse, it may be; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the account of what he had seen legends common in the folklore about America that had grown up in Europe; or perchance he only falls into an old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without provocation. The American women are described as "wearing great plates of gold covering their whole bodies like armor… In every cottage pearls are to be found, and in some houses a peck" – an assertion that had a grain of truth in it, since the sailor no doubt mistook wampum beads for pearls. Fireflies, in this old tar's exalted memory, are "fire dragons, which make the air very red as they fly," while the buffalo appears as an animal "as big as two of our oxen." The streets in one "city" are broader than London streets, which we may readily believe. The banqueting houses are built of crystal, "with pillars of massie silver, some of gold." This is a fine example of the manner of a mind afflicted with the vice of exaggeration; crystal becomes silver in the next breath, and silver is as instantly transmuted to gold. All that optimistic projectors sought in America – gold, silver, pearls by the peck, and great abundance of silkworms – are obligingly supplied in Ingram's narrative. Such tales impressed the imagination in a romantic and uncritical age. 8
VI
Indian devil-worship. The interest in America was heightened by popular curiosity regarding the Indians. The American savages were sometimes treated as sun-worshipers, but they were more commonly thought to be worshipers of devils. The prevailing belief in witchcraft, divination, and abounding evil spirits rendered it easy for Europeans to accept the Indian deities as supernatural beings, and to credit the pretensions of the powwows, or Indian priests, to give knowledge of distant or future events, to heal the sick, and even to bring rain in time of drought. But it was observed at Plymouth that when the Pilgrims prayed for rain it fell gently, and that the rain procured by the Indian conjurers was violent and destructive – a rain with something devilish about it. According to writers of the time, the demons worshiped by the savages were able to materialize themselves on great occasions, appearing to their votaries in some beastly form. This belief in Indian devil-worship fitted well with the religious faith of the period, which can hardly be described as anything but a sort of Manichæism dividing the government of the universe almost equally between good and evil powers. Religionists of all schools desired to convert these subjects of Satan, not from those philanthropic motives that are main considerations in modern propagandism, but because their conversion would glorify God, and yet more because it would despite the devil. Sometimes the religious motive was incongruously supported by hopes of commercial advantage. The navigator Davis wrote to Secretary Walsingham that if the Indians "were once brought over to the Christian faith they might soon be brought to relish a more civilized kind of life and be thereby induced to take off great quantities of our coarser woolen manufactures."
Indians exhibited. The early explorers made a practice of kidnapping Indians and transporting them to England, where the sight of barbarians without doublet or hose quickened the interest in projects for colonization and adventure. In our age of commercial activity and extended geographical knowledge one can form but a weak conception of the excitement produced by the sight of "the Indian man and woman," no doubt Esquimaux, brought by Frobisher. Portraits of these rarities were made for the king and queen and others. In 1605 Weymouth brought from the coast of Maine five kidnapped Indians, "with all their bows and arrows" and two beautiful birch-bark canoes. Rosier's True Relation. "This accident," exclaimed Sir Ferdinando Gorges, "hath been the means of putting life into all our plantations." Some of the savages captured at various times were exhibited for money, and one perhaps was shown after he was dead; at least we may venture to conjecture so much from Shakespeare's jeer in The Tempest at the idle curiosity of the crowd. In England, says Trinculo, "any strange beast makes a man. Tempest, ii, 2. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." This interest in outlandish savages no doubt suggested to the poet the creation of the monster Caliban, who probably seemed a realistic figure to the imagination of that age.
VII
Notions about animals. The animals of the new continent excited the wonder of the people of Europe and increased the interest in America. Regarding them, also, the most extravagant stories were easily credited. It was recorded in the sober Latin of Peter Martyr that the advance of Cabot's ships was retarded by the multitude of codfish on the Newfoundland coast, and that the bears were accustomed to catch these fish in their claws. Note 9. It is hard to recognize the familiar opossum in the description by Purchas: "A monstrous deformed beast, whose fore part resembleth a fox, the hinder part an ape, excepting the feet, which are like a man's; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, where she bestows her young until they can shift for themselves." The humming bird was believed to be a cross between a fly and a bird. The Hudson River Dutch settlers went further, and named it simply "the West Indian bee." These dainty creatures were prepared for exportation to Europe in New Amsterdam by drying them, in Barbadoes by filling them with sand. Evelyn's Diary, i, 277. They were accounted "pretty delicacies for ladies, who wore them at their breasts and girdles." Evelyn saw two preserved as great rarities at Oxford, in 1564. A New England versifier extols
The humbird for some queen's rich cage more fit
Than in the vacant wilderness to sit.
Wood's New Eng. Prospect, p. 23. Flying squirrels, when brought into English parks in 1608, were the occasion of much wondering excitement. King James begged for one of them, like a spoiled child. The skins of muskrats were esteemed for their odor and were brought to England "as rich presents." It was thought that musk might be extracted from this animal. Hariot, the learned man of Ralegh's first colony, fancied that the civet cat would prove profitable to settlers in America, but his words indicate that he had been misled by traces of the skunk, whose perfume has never yet come into request. De Bry's Hariot, p. 10. Speaking of the "civet catte," he says, "in our travails there was found one to have been killed by a salvage or inhabitant; and in many places the smell where one had lately beene before."
The raccoon, the "aroughcun" of the Virginia Indians, being a plantigrade, was esteemed a monkey; the peccaries were called the wild hogs of America, and were thought to have "their navels on the ridge of their backs." 9 Somewhere in the region of the Hudson River a beast is described as having a horn in the middle of his forehead, from which it would appear that the unicorn on the royal coat of arms may have been found running at large. It is not easy to account for the "camel mare," reported to have been seen about three hundred miles west from the coast of New Jersey, unless it belonged to the genus Incubus. The bewildering number of new creatures found in America troubled the European scholars of that day, who were ever theological. They were puzzled to get so many four-footed beasts and creeping things into the compass of Noah's ark. Mercator, the Flemish geographer, avoided this difficult embarkation by concluding that America had been excepted from the Deluge.
VIII
Thus grotesque and misleading were many of the glimpses that Europe got of the New World as the mists of ignorance slowly lifted from it. An age of romance and adventure. These erratic notions regarding America give one an insight into the character of the English people at the period of discovery and colony-planting. Credulity and the romantic spirit dwell together. The imagination in such an age usurped the place of discrimination, and the wonderful became the probable. The appetite for the marvelous fostered exaggeration; every man who had sailed in foreign seas thought it shame not to tell of wonders. The seventeenth century indeed betrayed a consciousness of its own weakness in a current proverb, "Travelers lie by license." History and fiction had not yet been separated. Like every other romantic age, the period of Elizabeth and James was prodigal of daring adventure; every notable man aspired to be the hero of a tale. English beginnings in America were thus made in a time abounding in bold enterprises – enterprises brilliant in conception, but in the execution of which there was often a lack of foresight and practical wisdom.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
JAMES RIVER EXPERIMENTS
I
Departure of the emigrants. In December, 1606, there lay at Blackwall, below London, the Susan Constant, of one hundred tons, the Godspeed, of forty tons, and the little pinnace Discovery, of but twenty tons – three puny ships to bear across the wintry Atlantic the beginners of a new nation. The setting forth of these argonauts produced much excitement in London. Patriotic feeling was deeply stirred, public prayers were offered for the success of the expedition, sermons appropriate to the occasion were preached, and the popular feeling was expressed in a poem by Michael Drayton. Even those who were too sober to indulge the vain expectations of gold mines and spice islands that filled the imaginations of most Englishmen on this occasion could say, as Lord Bacon did later: "It is with the kingdoms on earth as it is with the kingdom of heaven: sometimes a grain of mustard seed proves a great tree. Who can tell?" Ld. Chancellor's Speech in reply to the Speaker. On the 19th of that most tempestuous December the little fleet weighed anchor and ran down on an ebb tide, no doubt, as one may nowadays see ships rush past Blackwall toward the sea. Never were men engaged in a great enterprise doomed to greater sorrows. A. D. 1606. From the time they left the Thames the ships were tossed and delayed by tempests, while the company aboard was rent by factious dissensions.
II
The laws and orders. Those who shaped the destinies of the colony had left little undone that inventive stupidity could suggest to assure the failure of the enterprise. King James, who was frivolously fond of puttering in novel projects, had personally framed a code of unwise laws and orders. The supremacy of the sovereign and the interests of the Church were pedantically guarded, but the colony was left without any ruler with authority enough to maintain order. The private interest of the individual, the most available of all motives to industry, was merged in that of the commercial company to which Virginia had been granted. All the produce of the colony was to go into a common stock for five years, and the emigrants, men without families, were thrown into a semi-monastic trading community like the Hanseatic agencies of the time, with the saving element of a strong authority left out. Better devices for promoting indolence and aggravating the natural proneness to dissension of men in hard circumstances could scarcely have been hit upon. Anarchy and despotism are the inevitable alternatives under such a communistic arrangement, and each of these ensued in turn.
III
Character of the emigrants. The people sent over in the first years were for the most part utterly unfit. Smith's Gen. Hist., iii, c. i and c. xii. Of the first hundred, four were carpenters, there was a blacksmith, a tailor, a barber, a bricklayer, a mason, a drummer. There were fifty-five who ranked as gentlemen, and four were boys, while there were but twelve so-called laborers, including footmen, "that never did know what a day's work was." Advertisements for Planters of New Eng., p. 5. The company is described by one of its members as composed of poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, and such like. Comp. Briefe Declaration in Pub. Rec. Off., Sainsbury i, 66; and New Life of Va. "A hundred good workmen were better than a thousand such gallants," says Captain Smith. Of the moral character of the first emigrants no better account is given. Essay on Plantations. It was perhaps with these men in view that Bacon declared it "a shameful and unblessed thing" to settle a colony with "the scum of the people."
IV
The arrival. The ships sailed round by the Canaries, after the fashion of that time, doubling the distance to Virginia. They loitered in the West Indies to "refresh themselves" and quarrel, and they did not reach their destination until seedtime had well-nigh passed. They arrived on the 6th of May, according to our style. Driven into Hampton Roads by a storm, they sailed up the wide mouth of a river which they called the James, in honor of the king. A. D. 1607. At that season of the year the banks must have shown masses of the white flowers of the dogwood, mingled with the pink-purple blossoms of the redbud against the dark primeval forest. Percy, in Purchas, p. 1689. Wherever they went ashore the newcomers found "all the ground bespread with many sweet and delicate flowers of divers colors and kinds." The sea-weary voyagers concluded that "heaven and earth had never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation."
The first meetings with Indians. They were like people in an enchanted land – all was so new and strange. On the first landing of a small party they had a taste of savage warfare. "At night, when wee were going aboard, there came the savages creeping from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their Mouthes, charged us very desperately, hurt Captain Gabrill Archer in both hands, and a Sayler in two places of the body very dangerous. Percy, in Purchas iv, pp. 1685, 1686. After they had spent their arrowes, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise and so left us."
But the newly arrived did not find all the Indians hostile. The chief of the Rappahannocks came to welcome them, marching at the head of his train, piping on a reed flute, and clad in the fantastic dress of an Indian dandy. He wore a plate of copper on the shorn side of his head. The hair on the other side was wrapped about with deer's hair dyed red, "in the fashion of a rose." Two long feathers "like a pair of horns" were stuck in this rosy crown. His body was stained crimson, his face painted blue and besmeared with some glistering pigment which to the greedy eyes of the English seemed to be silver ore. A. D. 1607. He wore a chain of beads, or wampum, about his neck, and his ears were "all behung with bracelets of pearls." There also depended from each ear a bird's claw set with copper – or "gold," adds the narrator, indulging a delightful dubiety.
Purchas i, 686 and following. During the period of preliminary exploration every trait of savage life was eagerly observed by the English. The costume, the wigwams, and most of all the ingenious weapons of wood and stone, gave delight to the curiosity of the newcomers.
V
Founding of Jamestown. The colonists chose for the site of their town what was then a malarial peninsula; it has since become an island. The place was naturally defended by the river on all sides, except where a narrow stretch of sand made a bridge to the main. 10 Its chief advantage in the eyes of the newcomers was that the deep water near the shore made it possible to moor the ships by merely tying them up to trees on the river bank. Relatyon of the Discovery of our River, Am. Antiq. Soc., iv, 61. Here the settlers planted cotton and orange trees at once, and experimental potatoes, melons, and pumpkins, but they postponed sowing grain until about the first of June in our reckoning.
The winter of misery. They took up their abode in hastily built cabins roofed with sedge or bark, and in ragged tents. The poorer sort were even fain to shelter themselves in mere burrows in the ground. A. D. 1607. Ill provided at the start, the greater part of their food was consumed by the seamen, who lingered to gather comminuted mica for gold. In this hard environment, rent by faction, destitute of a competent leader and of any leader with competent authority, the wonder is that of this little company a single man survived the winter. Purchas, p. 1690. "There never were Englishmen left in any foreign country in such misery as we were in this new-discovered Virginia," says George Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland. A pint of worm-eaten barley or wheat was allowed for a day's ration. This was made into pottage and served out at the rate of one small ladleful at each meal. "Our drink was water, our lodgings castles in the air," says Smith. The misery was aggravated by a constant fear of attack from the Indians, who had been repulsed in an energetic assault made soon after the landing of the English. It was necessary for each man to watch every third night "lying on the cold, bare ground," and this exposure in a fever swamp, with the slender allowance of food of bad quality and the brackish river water, brought on swellings, dysenteries, and fevers. Sometimes there were not five men able to bear arms. "If there were any conscience in men," says Percy, "it would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men without relief every day and night for the space of about six weeks." The living were hardly able to bury the dead, whose bodies were "trailed out like dogs." Half of the hundred colonists died, and the survivors were saved by the Indians, who, having got a taste of muskets and cannon in their early attack on Jamestown, now brought in supplies of game, corn, persimmons, and other food, to trade for the novel trinkets of the white men.
VI
Emergence of Captain John Smith. Peril and adversity bring the capable man to the front. The colony proceeded, by means of the technicalities habitually used in those days, to rid itself of its president, Wingfield, a man of good intentions but with no talents suitable to a place of such difficulty. Slowly, by one change and then another, the leadership fell into the hands of Captain John Smith. During the voyage he had drawn upon himself the jealousy of the others, probably by his boastful and self-asserting habit of speech. When the list of councilors, till then kept secret, was opened at Jamestown and his name was found in it, he was promptly excluded by his associates. It was only on the intercession of the clergyman, Hunt, that he was at length admitted to the Council.
His paradoxical character has been much misunderstood. Those who discredit the historical accuracy of Captain Smith's narratives consider his deeds of no value. It is the natural result and retribution of boasting that the real merit of the boaster is cast into the rubbish heap of contempt along with his false pretensions. On the other hand, those who appreciate Smith's services to the colony in its dire extremities believe that the historical authority of such a man must be valid.
His romantic tendencies. His character, double and paradoxical as it is, presents no insoluble enigma if we consider the forces of nature and of habit underlying its manifestations. According to his own highly colored narrative, he had fed his fervid imagination on romances of chivalry. The first natural result in a youth so energetic as he, was that he should set out to emulate the imaginary heroes of whom he had read. It was equally a matter of course that a man of his vanity should exaggerate his own adventures to the size of those that had excited his admiration. The same romantic turn of the imagination that sent him a-wandering after exploits in Flanders and in the wars with the Turks, in Barbary, and in Ireland, made his every adventure seem an exploit of heroic size. Such a man is valuable when boldness and aggressive action are in request; to relate facts where autobiography is involved he is little fitted.
His story of his own life. According to Smith's own narrative, he was robbed and shipwrecked at sea; he slew three infidel champions in single combat and cut off their heads, just for the amusement of the ladies; he was made captive by the Turks and escaped by slaying his master with a flail; he encountered pirates; in the plunder of a ship he secured by the grace of God a box of jewels; and, to round off his story, he was beloved in romance fashion by a fair Turkish lady, one Tragabigzanda; befriended by a Russian lady, the good Calamata; and, later, was snatched from the open jaws of death by the devotion of the lovely Princess Pocahontas, daughter of King Powhatan, of Virginia. What more could one ask? Here are the elements of all the romances. But, to crown all, he emulated the misadventure of the prophet Jonah, and he even out-Jonahed Jonah. He got ashore by mere swimming without the aid of a whale, when cast overboard by Catholic pilgrims to appease a tempest. Never any other wanderer since the safe return of Ulysses passed through such a succession of marvelous escapes as this young John Smith. His accidents and achievements, even without exaggeration, were fairly notable, doubtless, but they are forever obscured by his vices of narration.
Interest in colonization. By the time he was twenty-eight years old this knight-errant had pretty well exhausted Europe as a field for adventure. Soon after his return to his own land he found the navigator Gosnold agitating for a new colony in Virginia, the scene of Ralegh's failures. That being the most difficult and dangerous enterprise then in sight, nothing was more natural than that Smith should embark in it. From this time to the end of his life this really able man gave his best endeavors to the advancement of American colonization. His character. In counsel he was accounted wise, and his advice was listened to with more than common deference in the assemblies of the Virginia Company as long as the company lasted. In labor he was indefatigable, in emergencies he proved himself ready-witted and resourceful. His recorded geographical observations are remarkably accurate considering his circumstances, and his understanding of Indian life shows his intelligence. His writings on practical questions are terse, epigrammatic, and wise beyond the wisdom of his time. But where his own adventures or credit are involved he is hardly more trustworthy than Falstaff. His boasting is one of the many difficulties a historian has to encounter in seeking to discover the truth regarding the events of an age much given to lying.
VII
Smith's exploration and trading. On Smith principally devolved the explorations for a passage to the Pacific and the conduct of the Indian trade. He was captured by the Indians in the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried from village to village in triumph. Contriving to secure his release from the head chief, Powhatan, he returned to Jamestown. Nothing could have suited better his bold genius and roving disposition than the life he thereafter led in Virginia. A. D. 1607, 1608. He sailed up and down the bays and estuaries, discovering and naming unknown islands, ascending great unknown rivers, cajoling or bullying the Indians, and returning to his hungry countrymen at Jamestown laden with maize from the granaries of the savages. Oxford Tract, passim. Smith and his companions coasted in all seasons and all weather in an open boat, exercising themselves in morning psalm-singing and praying, in manœuvring strange Indians by blustering or point-blank lying, and in trying to propagate the Christian religion among the heathen – all in turn as occasion offered, like true Englishmen of the Jacobean time. Gen. Hist passim.
His narrative. Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achievements in Virginia seem to be nearer the truth than his later Generall Historie. As years rolled on his exploits gained in number and magnitude in his memory. The apocryphal story of his expounding the solar system by means of a pocket compass to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity to learn is to be found only in his later writings. He is a prisoner but a month in the narrative of the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was written by his associates and published with his authority, but his captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in the Generall Historie of 1624. His prosaic release by Powhatan had developed into a romantic rescue by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in the earlier account become four or five hundred in the later. Certain Poles assist him in the capture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative of Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our hero performs this feat single-handed. A mere cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure representing the number of his enemies, who by this simple feat of memory become ten times more redoubtable than before.
His service to the colony. But it does not matter greatly whether the "strangely grimmed and disguised" Indians seen by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who, according to the story, were shouting and yelling horribly, though in ambuscade, numbered three or four hundred as in one account, or three or four thousand as in his later story. Oxf. Tract, p. 32. Gen. Hist., bk. iii, ch. v. To Captain Smith remains the credit of having been the one energetic and capable man in those first years – the man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but won from the Indians what was of infinitely greater value – the corn needed to preserve the lives of the colonists. In an open boat, with no instrument but a compass, he explored and mapped Chesapeake Bay so well that his map was not wholly superseded for a hundred and forty years. Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 41. Even Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recognizes the value of his services; and Strachey, who had every means of knowing, says that "there will not return from" Virginia "in hast any one who hath bene more industrious or who hath had (Captain Geo. Percie excepted) greater experience amongst them, however misconstruction maye traduce here at home."
Smith overthrown. During the autumn of 1608 and the winter following Captain Smith was sole ruler of Jamestown, all the other councilors having gone; but the next spring there arrived five hundred new colonists inadequately provisioned, and under two of the old faction leaders who were Smith's mortal enemies. These were the visionary and turbulent Archer and his follower Ratcliffe. A. D. 1609. Smith got some of the newcomers to settle at Nansemond, and others took up their abode near the falls of the James River. 11 After much turmoil Smith was disabled by an accident, and his enemies contrived to have him sent home charged, among other things, with having "incensed" the Indians to assault the insubordinate settlers under West near the falls, and with having designed to wed Pocahontas in order to secure royal rights in Virginia as son-in-law to Powhatan.
His later years. He afterward explored the New England coast with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. What he published in his later years by way of advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of admirable good sense. With rare foresight he predicted the coming importance of the colonial trade and the part to be played by the American fisheries in promoting the greatness of England by "breeding mariners." He only of the men of his time suspected the imperial size and future greatness of North America. He urged that the colonies should not annoy "with large pilotage and such like dues" those who came to trade in their ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. This is a strange doctrine in an age when foreign trade seemed almost an evil, and false conceptions of economic principles were nearly universal. Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a wit whose pungency is delightful. In mental and physical hardihood, and in what may be called shiftiness, as well as in proneness to exaggeration and in boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical American pioneer – a forerunner of the daring and ready-witted men who have subdued a savage continent. 12
VIII
The famine of 1609-'10. Disaster of some sort could hardly have been avoided had Captain Smith been allowed to stay, but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and there was no hand strong enough to stay it. The unchecked hostility of the savages drove the outsettlers from Nansemond and the falls of the James. 13 The Indians found exercise for their devilish ingenuity in torturing those who fell into their hands alive, and outraging the dead. A. D. 1609, 1610. The brave but unwise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury by visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs of their chiefs. There was now no one who could carry on the difficult Indian trade. Ratcliffe, who had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell into an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's example in trading with Powhatan. He was tortured to death by the Indian women, and only fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. The brood hogs of the colony were all eaten, the dogs came next, and then the horses, which were to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their very hides. Rats, mice, and adders were relished when they were to be had, and fungi of various sorts were eaten with whatever else "would fill either mouth or belly." A. D. 1610. An Indian slain in an assault on the stockade was dug up after he had been three days buried, and eaten "by the poorer sort," their consuming hunger not being embarrassed by the restraints of gentility. From this horrible expedient it was but one step to the digging up of their own dead for food. Famine-crazed men even dogged the steps of those of their comrades who were not quite wasted, threatening to kill and devour them. Among these despairing and shiftless men there was but one man of resources. Daniel Tucker – let his later sins as tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven – bethought himself to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this small relief "did keep us from killing one another to eat," says Percy. He seems to have been the only man who bethought himself to do anything. Note 5. One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, slew his own wife and salted what he did not eat at once of her flesh, but he was put to death at the stake for this crime. Some, braving the savages, sought food in the woods and died while seeking it, and were eaten by those who found them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw themselves on the tender mercies of the Indians and were slain. To physical were added spiritual torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible into the fire, crying out in the market place that there was no God in heaven. Percy adds, with grim theological satisfaction characteristic of the time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very market place where he had blasphemed in his agony. The depopulated houses, and even the palisades so necessary for protection, were burned for firewood by the enfeebled people, and Jamestown came presently to look like the slumbering ruins of some ancient fortification. Tragicall Relation, 1623. Briefe Declaration, 1624, both in British Pub. Record Office. Percy's Trewe Relacyon, MS., Petworth House. Fortunately, the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had help been delayed a few days longer.
IX
The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610. Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, 1619, p.23. This ship became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ashore on the Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of swine." 14 Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what the islands afforded – live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and waterfowl salted – the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction. Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pinnaces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's provision to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown.
De la Warr's arrival, 1610. With all the formalities thought necessary at that time, De la Warr took possession of Jamestown, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead men's bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock of cattle, while the brave old Sir George Somers once more embarked for the Bermudas in the Patience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built wholly of the wood of that island without a particle of iron except one bolt in the keel. Smith's Oxford Tract, so called. In this boat he sailed up and down until he found again "the still vexed Bermoothes," where he hoped to secure provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was also sent to the Bermudas, but missed them, and went north to the fishing banks in search of food.
15 Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety characteristic of that age the deserted little church was enlarged and reoccupied and daily decorated with Virginia wild flowers. De la Warr's government, 1610. All the bitter experience of the first three years had not taught the true method of settling a new country. 16 The colony was still but a camp of men without families, and the old common stock system was retained. To escape from the anarchy which resulted from a system that sank the interest of the individual in that of the community, it had been needful to arm De la Warr with the sharp sword of martial law. British Museum, MS. 21,993, ff. 174, 178. Instr. to Gates and De la Warr. Some of the instructions given him were unwise, some impossible of execution. To convert the Indians out of hand, as he was told to do, by shutting up their medicine men or sending them to England to be Christianized by the methods then in use, did not seem a task easy of accomplishment, for Indian priests are not to be caught in time of war. But De la Warr undertook another part of his instructions. Gold-hunting. A hundred men under two captains were sent on a wild-goose chase up the James River to find gold or silver in the mountains, whither the phantom of mines had now betaken itself. This plan originated with the London managers of Virginia affairs, and men had been sent with De la Warr who were supposed to be skillful in "finding out mines." But being especially unskillful in dealing with the Indians, they were tempted ashore by savages, who offered them food and slew them "while the meate was in theire mouthes." Briefe Declaration, MS., Pub. Rec. Off. The expedition thereupon turned back at a point about forty miles above the present site of Richmond.
Flight of De la Warr. A new town was begun at the falls, in the fond belief that two mines were near, and De la Warr took up his residence there. Jamestown, drawing its water from a shallow and probably polluted well, became the seat of a fresh epidemic. In the month of March following his arrival the governor fled from the colony to save his own life, leaving Virginia more than ever discredited.
X
Sir Thomas Dale, 1611. As the hope of immediate profit from Virginia died away, the colony would have been abandoned if there had not arisen in its favor a patriotic enthusiasm which gave it a second lease of life. Many of the great noblemen were deeply engaged in this new agitation in favor of the unlucky colony, and none more deeply, perhaps, than Prince Henry, the heir apparent. Docs. Rel. to Col. Hist. N. Y., i, pp. 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 16-21. At Henry's request, Sir Thomas Dale, an officer who had been employed about the prince's person, and who with other English officers was now in the service of the Netherlands, was granted leave of absence to go to Virginia. Since the colony was a check to Spain, the Netherlands were supposed to have an indirect interest in the enterprise and were persuaded to continue Captain Dale's pay. De la Warr, who remained in England, was nominally governor; Gates, when present in Virginia, was the ranking officer; but for five years Dale appears to have been the ruling spirit in the colony.
The heavy hand of Dale, 1611-1616. To induce him to go, Dale had been deceived regarding the condition of the plantation, as had been everybody else that had gone to Jamestown after the first ships sailed. The vice-admiral, Newport, was the principal reporter of Virginia affairs in England and the principal agent of the company in this deception. Dale's rough temper was already well known. It was for this, no doubt, that he had been chosen to do a rude piece of work. A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia, 1624, MS., Pub. Rec. Off. On his arrival he saw the desperate state of the undertaking. He pulled Vice-Admiral Newport's beard and threatened him with the gallows, demanding "whether it weare meant that people heere in Virginia shoulde feed uppon trees."
Under the inefficient government of George Percy, who had again been placed in charge, the seedtime of 1611 was allowed to pass without the planting of corn. The Jamestown people were found by Dale "at their daily and usual work bowling in the streets." Brit. Museum, MS., 21,993, f. 174. But the days of unthrifty idleness were at an end. "The libertyes, ffranchises, and immunityes of free denizens and natural-born subjects of any our other dominions" promised to the colonists, were also at an end from the moment of the arrival of this sharp-set soldier and disciplinarian. Dale's pitiless use of martial law turned Virginia not exactly into a military camp, but rather into a penal settlement where men suffered for the crime of emigration. The men taken to Virginia in Dale's own company were hardly fit for anything else, and were so "diseased and crazed in their bodies" that at one time not more than sixty out of three hundred were capable of labor. Briefe Declaration. The food sent with Sir Thomas Dale by the corrupt contractors was "of such qualitie as hoggs refused to eat." Sir Thomas Gates afterward made oath to its badness before the Chief Justice in London.
XI
The years of slavery. Dale regarded himself as an agent of the company. His aim was by hook or crook to make the hitherto unprofitable colony pay dividends to the shareholders, who were his employers. His relation to the emigrants was that of a taskmaster; one might, perhaps, more fitly call him a slave-driver. Instead of seeking to render the colony self-supporting by clearing corn ground, he gave his first attention to lading vessels with sassafras root, then much prized as a medicine, and cedar timber, valued especially for its odor.
During a part of Dale's time eight or nine ounces of meal and half a pint of peas was the daily ration. Briefe Declaration. Percy to Northumberland, Hist. MS., Commission, Rept., iii, 53, 54. In their declaration, made some years afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both the meal and the peas were "moldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and unfit for beasts." Better men than these might have been driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and bad food. And mutiny and desertion were usually but other names for suicide under the rule of the pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the woods, hoping to reach a mythical Spanish settlement believed to be not very far away. Dale set the Indians on them, and they were brought back to be burned at the stake. Others, who in desperation or deadly homesickness resolved to venture their lives in a barge and a shallop "for their native country," suffered in various ways for their temerity. Death by shooting or hanging was clemency. One offender was put to death by the awful torture of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may have learned during his stay on the Continent. Taylor, the water poet, has left us the sickening details of such an execution in Germany in 1616. Observations and Travel from London to Hamburgh, p. 13. One need not waste any sympathy on those who were hanged for stealing to satisfy hunger; death is more merciful than life to men in such a case. But one poor rogue, who thought to better his rations by filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had a bodkin run through his tongue and was chained to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though these things were twice attested by the best men in the colony, one prefers to make some allowance for their passionate resentment, and to hope that some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is hard to believe, for example, that men unable to work were denied food, and left to creep away into the wretched burrows in the ground used for shelter, there to die unregarded in the general misery.
In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch fish braved the perils of the ocean in a little bark and got back to England. It was the only escape from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Abandon every hope who enter here" was almost as appropriate to the mouth of the James River as to the gate of Dante's hell. All letters of complaint sent to England were intercepted, and all efforts of friends of the colonists in England to succor or rescue them were thwarted by the company in London. Briefe Declaration. The king's pass to one of the colonists authorizing him to leave Virginia was sent to him by his friends closely made up in a garter, to avoid the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale.
Dale's services. Dale's administration was strongest on its military side. There was no danger that the Indians would reduce the colony to any straits while he was in charge. He gave his first attention to fortification, and he even begged for two thousand convicts out of English jails to form a line of posts from Hampton to a point a hundred miles above Jamestown. He sent Argall all the way to Mount Desert to plunder a Jesuit settlement and make prize of a French ship – an undertaking congenial to Dale's military temper and the Viking tastes of Argall. As his experience increased, Dale came to understand that other than military measures were needed to found a colony, though he never more than half comprehended the elements of the problem. In his later time he cleared more corn ground, and he could boast at his departure that Virginia contained six horses, a hundred and forty-nine neat cattle, two hundred and sixteen goats, and hogs without number. Dale set off a private garden of three acres of land to each of the old planters, on the condition that they should provide food for themselves while still giving nearly all of their time to the service of the common stock. Even this slave's-patch of private interest given to only a fraction of the colonists put some life into Virginia; but two thirds of the people were retained in the old intolerable bondage, and not even the most favored secured personal ownership of land. Dale's administration was remembered as "the five years of slavery." 17
XII
Dale's return. The rough-handed soldier from the Low Countries had indeed brought the Virginia chaos into order, but it was an order almost as deadly as the preceding anarchy. Dale confessed that the government of Virginia was "the hardest task he had ever undertaken," and he got himself out of it after five years by making a theatrical return to England in 1616 with a train of Indians, including the "Princess" Pocahontas, converted, baptized with a Christian name as Rebecca, and wedded to an Englishman. Note 10. He added glowing reports of the country, and proved all by exhibiting "at least sixteen several sorts of staple commodities to be raised in this plantation." For greater effect, samples of twelve of these products of the colony were sold by public auction in the open court of the company. Though Dale could show many commodities, some of which have never flourished in Virginia since his time, he left behind him not an established community, but a mere camp of unhappy men retained in the country by the sheer impossibility of getting away. 18 After nine years of suffering, Virginia consisted of some three hundred and twenty-six men, twenty-five women and children, and graves outnumbering many times over all the living souls.
Three things had been discovered in Dale's time that were of importance to the colony. Dale had by personal experiment learned the two fishing seasons in the James River. The colonists had begun the profitable cultivation of tobacco, and the economic success of the colony was thereby assured. Lastly, even Dale's small experiment with private interest rendered the apportionment of the land and the establishment of private ownership certain to come in time. As early as 1614 it was estimated that three men working for themselves raised more corn than ten times as many when the labor was for the public stock. 19
XIII
Argall's government. Captain Argall, who succeeded Sir Thomas Dale, was a bold and notable mariner. He had built the first Virginia vessel; he had traded with the Indians for corn with as much enterprise and address as Captain Smith had shown; he had in a small ship called the Dainty made the first experimental voyage to James River by the westward route, avoiding the long circuit by the Canaries and West Indies. It had been his fortune to be the first Englishman to see the American bison, which he found near the Potomac. He it was who by a shrewd trick had captured Pocahontas and held her as hostage; and he drove the French out of Maine, despoiling their settlement at Mount Desert. To a mastery of all the arts that make the skillful navigator he added the courteous politeness of a man of the city and the unfaltering rapacity of a pirate. As governor, he robbed the company with one hand and the hapless colonists with the other. While using the ships and men of the colony to carry on the Indian trade, he turned all the profits of it into his own wallet. The breeding animals of the colony accumulated by Dale he sold, and made no account of the proceeds. There was hardly anything portable or salable in Virginia that he did not purloin. He even plundered the property of Lady De la Warr, the widow of his predecessor. He boldly fitted out a ship belonging to Lord Rich, and sent an expedition of sheer piracy to the West Indies under an old letter of marque from the Duke of Savoy. When advices from England warned Argall that his downfall was imminent, he forthwith redoubled his felonious diligence. Lord Rich's intrigue. His chief partner in England was Lord Rich, who became the second Earl of Warwick in 1619, about the time of Argall's return, and who is known to history in his later character as a great Puritan nobleman, who served God while he contrived to better his estate with both hands by such means as troublous times put within his reach. He was not content with small pickings. Rich appears to have aimed at nothing less than wrecking the company and securing the land and government of Virginia. 20 The first step toward this was to get a charter for a private or proprietary plantation within Virginia which should be exempt from all authority of the company and the colony. This independent government was to serve as a refuge from prosecutions for Argall and other piratical agents, and at last to possess itself of the wreck and remainder of Virginia. The second step in this intrigue was one that could have availed nothing in any time less respectful to shadowy technicalities and less prone to legal chicanery than that of James I. As we have seen, jealousy was excited in Virginia by the possibility of Captain Smith's wedding Pocahontas and setting up a claim to authority based on her inheritance from Powhatan. Stith, 142. A tradition lingered in Virginia a hundred years later that King James questioned Rolfe's right to intermarry with a foreign princess without the consent of his sovereign. If this had any foundation, it grew out of the value of a pretext in a time of technicality and intrigue. There may have been already a scheme to trade upon the hereditary right of Powhatan's daughter. Pocahontas died in England, leaving an infant son. Argall, on his arrival, hastened to notify the company that Opechankano, the brother and successor of Powhatan, had resolved not to sell any more land, but to reserve it for the son of Pocahontas when he should be grown. The company charged that this was a ruse to serve the ends which Argall, Rich, and others had in view. The larger plan miscarried, but Argall found his prey so tempting that he lingered longer than was safe, and got away in the nick of time by the aid of Lord Rich, who had stood guard like a burglar's pal, and who contrived to delay the ship carrying out the new governor until a small swift-sailing vessel could be sent to fetch away Argall and his varied booty of public and private plunder. The Companie's root of difference. MS. Rec. Va. Co., May 7, 1623. In that day justice often went by favor, and Argall consigned his spoils to hands so powerful that the Virginia Company, stripped bare by his treacherous villainy, could never recover any of its lost property. MS. Rec. Va. Co., passim. The embittered colonists had the bootless satisfaction of sending over after the runaway governor twenty-four bundles of accusatory depositions.
XIV
Fall of the lottery. From the first nobody reaped any profit from investments made in the new colony except the clique of merchants who had been allowed to sell wretched supplies for the distant settlers at ruinous rates. Rich and those interested with him had abundantly reimbursed themselves for all outlays on their part. The Virginia Company, swindled by commercial peculators at home, robbed by a pirate governor in America, and embarrassed by Spanish intrigues at the English court, had also been deprived of the lotteries, large and small, which had supplied money for sending eight hundred emigrants to Virginia. The lottery, which had fallen into great disrepute and had suffered "many foul aspersions," was abolished in compliance with a public sentiment. 21 The company was tottering swiftly to a fall; vultures like Warwick were waiting longingly for its death.
Revival of interest, 1618. But there set in once more a widespread patriotic movement in its behalf. Such movements were characteristic of that vital age when love of country was fast coming to count for more as a motive to action than loyalty to the person of a prince. "Divers lords, knights, gentlemen, and citizens, grieved to see this great action fall to nothing," came to its rescue with one final effort which resulted after some years in putting the enterprise well beyond the danger of failure. They formed auxiliary societies within the Virginia Company, after the custom of corporations in that day. Each of these undertook to plant a settlement or "hundred." In one year the population rose from less than four hundred to about a thousand. The newly active element infused a more liberal spirit into the company, and set about correcting the abuses in its management.
XV
The Great Charter, 1618. The movement of 1618 was retarded by the disgrace into which the colony had fallen. An unbroken series of misfortunes and disappointments, the bad conduct of the company's affairs, the ill fame of Dale's remorseless tyranny, and the fresh Argall scandal, had made Virginia odious. Pub. Rec. Off. Col. Papers, iii, 40. Disc. of the Old Va. Co. One convict to whom the alternative was proposed, chose hanging in preference to transportation to Virginia. It was needful that something should be done to restore credit. The men who took the lead in the patriotic movement of 1618 on behalf of Virginia were mainly liberal statesmen – that Earl of Southampton who is known as the friend of Shakespeare; Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the greatest men of a great age, whose brave support of popular liberty had lost him the favor of the king; Sir John Danvers, and others. The records before the election of Sandys in 1619 were probably destroyed to conceal the guilt of the managers. We can only conjecture that the rising influence of the men who were able a few months later to overthrow the ruling party had much to do with the most notable change that took place in the conduct of affairs in the Virginia Company at this time. On the 13th of November, 1618 – memorable but neglected and forgotten date – the Virginia Company, acting within the powers conferred on it by its charter, granted to the residents in Virginia a document styled a "Great Charter or Commissions of Priviledges, Orders, and Lawes." No copy of this instrument now exists, but some of its provisions have been preserved. It established a legislative body, to consist of councilors of estate and of representatives or burgesses chosen by the several "plantations" or hundreds, and it limited the power of the governor. This charter was the starting point of constitutional government in the New World. It contained in embryo the American system of an executive power lodged mainly in one person, and a Legislature of two houses. One might without much exaggeration call this paper a sort of Magna Charta of America, and it was a long and probably a deliberate step toward popular government. 22 If the results that have followed it be considered, it can hardly be accounted second in importance to any other state paper of the seventeenth century.
XVI
Division of land. Not only did this admirable charter establish a representative form of government and do away with martial law, but it fairly launched the Virginians on the current of freedom and advancement by authorizing a liberal division of land to all those who had arrived before the departure of Sir Thomas Dale. 23 The oldest land titles in Virginia are deduced from the authority of the Great Charter of 1618. Aspinwall Papers, p. 14, note. Communism, pernicious everywhere, is at its worst in an infant settlement. True Declaration, p. 25. "Every man sharked for his own bootie," says a writer on Virginia in 1609, "but was altogether careless of the succeeding penurie." The distribution of land abolished the common stock system of labor, and opened a pathway to the ambition of the diligent.
The good news in Virginia. Tidings of the great change wrought in their condition and prospects by the new charter reached the dwellers on the James River in the spring of 1619, and the colonists were "ravished with so much joy" that they felt themselves "now fully satisfied for their long labors and as happy men as there were in the world." Note 17. They valued their liberties as no man can who has not known the bitterness of bondage, and in 1623, when they had reason to fear the re-establishment of the old tyranny, the Virginia Assembly petitioned the king in these strong words: "Rather than be reduced to live under the like government, we desire his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over to hang us." Tragicall Relation, 1623. We have here, perhaps, the very first of the many protests of colonial Legislatures against oppression from England.
XVII
The sending of wives to Virginia. In 1618, before the adoption of the charter, it was concluded, in the quaint phrase of the time, "that a plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respects of Wives and Children fix the people on the soyle," or, in simpler words, that a colony of bachelors can hardly found a state. 24 The first ship laden with home-makers carried over ninety maids, and the company thought it necessary to promise special rewards to the men who should marry these young women. If the maids were as certified, "young, handsome, and well recommended," they needed no such dowry in a land that had hardly a woman in it. Young or old, handsome or homely, the maids did not prove a drug. Shipload after shipload of them were eagerly bought by the planters, who had to pay a round sum in the high-priced tobacco of that early time to defray the cost of transporting these wives. Besides having to pay for his wife, the planter could have her only on the condition of winning her consent; and the eager courtship that ensued on the arrival of a shipload of maids must have been one of the most amusing scenes in the settlement of America. Suitors far outnumbered the women, and the latter had things pretty much their own way. The first cargo of this interesting merchandise was landed in 1619, but as late as 1624 the women were probably in danger of setting the colonists by the ears, for the governor felt obliged to issue a proclamation threatening fine or whipping for the offense of betrothal to more than one person at a time. 25 In 1632, thirteen years after the first shipment, we find the colony still being replenished with women sent in the same fashion. In that year, two, whose behavior during the voyage had been disgraceful, were sent back as unfit to be mothers of Virginians. The precaution could not have been of much practical use, but it indicates the early growth of a wholesome local pride. When there were house mothers in the cabins, and children born in the country, the settlers no longer dreamed of returning to England; and there was soon a young generation that knew no other skies than those that spanned the rivers, fields, and vast primeval forests of their native Virginia, which now for the first time became a home.
XVIII
The struggle ended, 1624. It is not the Virginia colony alone that we have seen in the crucible. The fate of English colonization was no doubt settled by the experiments made during the first years on the James River, and the story told in this chapter is but the overture to the whole history of life in the United States. In our colonizing age a settlement might be made in the heart of Africa with a far smaller loss of life than was incurred in the first sixteen years in Virginia. From 1607 to 1623 there were landed in Virginia more than six thousand people. The number that returned to England was inconsiderable, but in the year 1624, when the colony passed under a royal government, there remained alive in the colony only twelve hundred and seventy-five. Of those who came in these early years four fifths perished. A part of this loss was due to radically wrong conceptions of the nature, end, and proper methods of colonization, a part to corrupt and incompetent management in the London Company. The bad character of many of the earliest emigrants was one cause of difficulty. The writers of the time probably exaggerated this evil in order to excuse the severity of the government and the miseries into which the settlers fell. But the loss of many of the early comers must be accounted a distinct gain to Virginia. Unfitted for their environment, they were doomed to extinction by that pitiless law which works ever to abolish from the earth the improvident, the idle, and the vicious.
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
THE PROCESSION OF MOTIVES
I
The chief mistake. The cause of the sorrows of Virginia will be more plainly seen if we turn again to the motives that propelled Englishmen to plant a colony. The chief mistake lay in the main purpose. If the founding of a state had been other than a secondary and remote end, the managers might have sent at first families and not bachelors, farmers and not gentlemen, laborers and not riff-raff. But more visionary motives dominated the action. A state was planted, but something else was mainly intended by the first projectors. The work seemed continuous, but the end in view shifted and the actors gradually changed. The only motive that held from first to last, and ran through all the rest, was the rivalry with Spain.
The rivalry with Spain. The colonies attempted by Frobisher and Gilbert were to serve as relays in the work of exploration for a sea passage to the Pacific and the search for mines, but they mark strongly the influence of the Spanish example on English projects. Ralegh was a lifelong opponent in peace and war of Spanish intrigue and aggression, and his efforts to plant colonies in the virgin land were suggested by a knowledge of the almost exhaustless treasure that flowed into Spanish coffers from America. The opportune capture of a Spanish carack bound homeward from Mexico with letters describing the wealth of Mexican mines brought the support of English merchants to Ralegh's undertaking. Imbued with the same spirit, Ralegh's governor wrote from Roanoke Island in 1585 that his colony would be a means of deliverance from the domination of Spain, "whose strength doth altogether grow from the mines of her treasure." Lane to Sydney. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury. In the perilous isolation of the little company on Roanoke Island, Lane assures himself that God will feed his men by means of ravens rather than suffer their "enemies the papists" "to triumph at the overthrow of this most Christian action." Lane to Walsingham. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury. The home-staying English of that age were spurred to colony-planting by three main motives – cupidity, patriotic feeling, and religious zeal – and all of these were provoked by emulation and jealousy of Spain. 26
II
Delusions in colony-planting. The prolonged movement for a colonial establishment, which extended over the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and almost the whole of the reign of James I, was kept alive by delusions. The ultimate ends for which colonies were proposed and planted in the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth century were none of them attained. The movable passage through North America to the Pacific was still leading explorers a merry dance when the first Jamestown emigrants sailed in 1606, and gold mines of comminuted mica, of iron pyrites, of Indian mineral paints, and of pure fable were potent attractions for some time after. The gradual increase of geographical knowledge caused the "South Sea" to take shelter in the unknown region behind the mountains, and the gold mines reported by Indians and discovered by sanguine prospectors were somehow lost in the interminable forests. In this exigency the first colony must have perished for want of support if new hopes as illusive as the old had not moved the English people to avert such a calamity.
Commodities. The production of commodities which the ungenial climate of the British Islands refused to grow was thought of from the beginning, and they became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from Virginia. For example, Carlisle's treatise, Anderson's Commerce, year 1583. It seemed grievous that England should spend her money in buying wine and silk from southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. The only maxim of political economy generally accepted in that day was that a nation is enriched by getting money from abroad and keeping it at home. The precious metals constituted the only recognized riches. Laws were made to restrain the exportation of gold and silver, and sumptuary laws to discourage the consumption of those things that must be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to raise in Great Britain the products of the Mediterranean region would have proved successful if the climate had been half as favorable to such enterprises as the government. Wine. The arguments advanced in favor of the possibility of producing wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the sunshine of royal favor for experiments made to that end, but climatic conditions were inexorable. King James busied himself to no profit in raising mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silkworms, in imitation of Henry IV, the reigning King of France, who succeeded in producing cocoons in the Tuileries but not in making silk culture profitable in the north of France. Silk. Anderson on the year 1589. Mulberries were first planted in England in 1608, two years after the sailing of the Virginia argonauts. James sent circulars to persons of influence among his subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry trees, and, in the years immediately following, the silk fever ran its course alongside the excitement about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia colony. 1609. Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in every breeze, hastened to announce at the first mention of silk culture that mulberry trees, "apt to feed silke wormes to make silke," were a "chiefe commoditie" of Virginia.
The first principles that govern colony-planting were not yet understood. It was proposed to force everything from a forlorn camp of men dwelling under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treacherous foes and in constant peril of starvation. The raising of silkworms was begun in Virginia in 1613, and before the colony was nine years old it was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a hundred times its market value. The experiment came to nothing. It could not have happened otherwise amid the miseries of those early years. The rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk moth, were made to bear the responsibility for the failure.
A new silk fever. Silk was little known in England at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, but it came into great request a few years later. Cal. Dom. S. P. James I, p. 428. In 1617 Lord Carew declares that there is "a madness for silk instead of cloth." This rage for silk led to the establishment of silk manufacturing in England; throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought to England from abroad and settled in Spitalfields, "the cheap end of its metropolis," and in Moorfields. It seemed more than ever important to produce silk in the king's dominions, in order to supply these manufacturers with material without importation from alien lands. Accordingly, a new effort was made in 1620 to secure raw silk from Virginia. The Earl of Southampton, ever eager to promote the Virginia colony, "writt into Italy, France, and Spayne" for silkworm "seed"; the king gave some from his own stock, and the expert who had charge of the king's worms was sent over to look after the business. A French book on the subject was translated to instruct the colonists. Pory's Report, Pub. Rec. Off. The first Virginia Assembly in 1619 had passed a law to promote the raising of the mulberry. To save expense, the colonists at this time, or later, planted the trees in hedgerows and mowed them with a scythe. Phil. Trans. I, 201. In 1621 orders were sent from England that none but members of the Council and the heads of hundreds should wear silk, unless they had made it themselves. Hening i, 14. The prohibition shows how general was the craze for silk clothing. Original Records of Colony of Va. The climate of Virginia proved genial enough, but the massacre of 1622, the bitter Indian conflicts that ensued in 1623, and the epidemic of the same year, following one another swiftly, were enough to annihilate a hundred feeble projects. The real doom of silk-raising, however, came from the fact that the culture of tobacco in virgin soil was incalculably more profitable and vastly less troublesome to pioneers than hatching silkworms' eggs in one's pocket or bosom, or sleeping with them in a small box under one's bolster and covering them in the warm bed on rising. Note 2. The project was blighted in the bud by adverse economic conditions – a killing frost more deadly to such enterprises than an ungenial climate. But a lesson in economic principles is one of the hardest for men to learn. Long after the colony had become prosperous, English projectors and Virginia experimenters tried again and again to supplant tobacco with silk. If we may credit the report, Virginia furnished a coronation robe of silk for Charles I, and Charles II certainly wore silk from worms hatched and fed in his Virginia dominions. One Esquire Digges brought Armenians to Virginia to attend his worms. 1655. But in the Reformed Virginia Silkworm, by Hartlib, the friend of Milton, it is announced that a young lady had discovered that silkworms would care for themselves on the trees, "to the instant wonderful enrichment of all the planters there, requiring neither cost, labour, or hindrance in any of their other employments." It is also suggested on the eager title-page of the pamphlet that "the Indians, seeing and finding that there is neither Art, Pains, or Skill in the thing," will "incontinently fall to raising silk." Comp. Va. Richly Valued, 1650, and Leah and Rachel, 1636. Not only were the gentle savages, and especially their women and children, to devote themselves to silk, but the American caterpillar – "the natural silkworm" as it was called – was expected to spin for the market if his cocoon could be "refined." 27
Hening ii, 242. By 1666 the silk delusion had passed, and the Virginia Assembly repealed all acts for the encouragement of mulberry trees. Ten years later, Glover, the botanist, found many of these trees still standing as melancholy witnesses to the waste of energy by the earlier promoters and settlers of the colony. Phil. Trans. XI, 628. Almost every other American colony made the same experiment for itself, and Virginia renewed its endeavors from time to time, each generation forgetting what its fathers had learned.
III
Silk-grass. Along with the silk fever went the silk-grass craze. 1585. Ralegh's people had seen the Indians wearing garments woven of the fiber of the Yucca filamentosa, the "Adam's needle and thread" of our popular speech. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Hariot, in his account of it, declares that "the like grows in Persia," and that much of the "silk-works" coming thence to Europe was made of this fiber. He probably confounded the yucca with the ramie plant of the East, of which grass cloth is made. Of the yucca fiber taken to England in 1585, "a piece of silk grogram" was made, and of course pronounced "excellent good"; it was even presented to the queen. The coarse and rather brittle fiber of this plant was exalted by enthusiasts into something nearly equal to silk. Ordinances for planting it were sent from England; at least one legislative act in its favor was passed by the Virginia Assembly, and the most foolish hopes were entertained regarding the profit to be had from it. Proceedings of Va. Assembly, 1619. 2d N. Y. Hist. Society Coll. iii, 348. By 1619 it had come to be called "silk flax," and it was then advocated for homelier uses, such as cordage and linen, and every householder was compelled by law to set a hundred plants; the governor himself set five thousand. In 1624 it is spoken of as "a commoditie of speciall hope and much use." Purchas IV, p. 1777. There were by this time those who ventured to say that the silk-grass enterprise was "full of difficultie"; but the managers in England easily got rid of this objection by attributing the difficulty to "negligence and want of experience." Instr. of 24 July, 1624. MS. Bk. of Instr. Libr. of Cong. They were just then intent on finding some commodity that would take the place of tobacco, which was frowned upon by both court and Parliament. In spite of all discouragement, the hope of good results from the yucca fiber outlasted that generation, and was in full vigor in 1649, sixty-four years after Hariot's mistake.
IV
Wine. It was also proposed to produce wine in Virginia for English consumption. No more gold and silver should go out of the realm to buy port and canary to the profit of foreigners and the impoverishment of the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty. The instructions on this point were clear, and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread to stay their hunger they had made wine of the sour wild grapes of the country. French vine-dressers were sent over a little later and were forbidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to employ themselves about vines, with the care of silkworms for variety. MS. Rec. Va. Co. i, 343. In 1621 these Frenchmen sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which was duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of wine were afterward sent to England from America at long intervals, but without decreasing the profits of wine growers in the Old World.
All the commodities sought from Virginia were unsuited to conditions in a new country. Other products sought. To the folly of making such experiments at all where living itself was an experiment, the managers added the folly of crowding a multiplicity of problematic enterprises on the colony at the same time. With a virgin continent in which to produce novelties, all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. Plants of every clime grew rank in the imagination of projectors. Virginia was a wonderland, and it was readily believed without evidence that the "soyle and clymate" were "very apt and fit for sugar canes"; "also linseed and rapeseeds to make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of 1609 expresses it. Nova Brittania. Along with "orenges, limons, and almonds," this official writer proposes to plant "anniseeds, rice, cummin, cottonwool, carroway seeds, ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke," and, as if this breathless list were not enough for one new land, he adds, "and many such like that I can not now name." If we may trust the publications of the company, various West India plants were tried in the very first days of the colony, while the threefold peril of death from famine, pestilence, and savage war was imminent.
Timber and naval stores. But it was not enough to wring from an infant colony the products of the south; those derived from the north of Europe were straightway to be got there also. MS. Rec. Va. Co. 31 May and 23 June, 1620. German millwrights – "Dutch carpenters," in the phrase of the records – were brought from Hamburg by John Ferrar to build Virginia sawmills; timber was still sawed by hand in England. Pitch, tar, and potash were to be produced by Poles sent out for the purpose in the second year of the colony. Patriotism dictated that England should be relieved of her dependence on foreign countries for naval stores. Virginia had forests: why should she not produce these things? 28
It had been found that the savages eagerly received glass beads in exchange for corn and peltries. Glass-making. Nothing more was required to prove the profitableness of glass-making. Some Germans were sent to the colony in 1608, and glass works were established. 29 For some reason no proper materials were available at first, and it became necessary to request that sand might be sent from England to make Virginia glass of at the glass works in the woods near Jamestown. The German glass blowers were prone to run away to the Indians, among whom work was lighter and food more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these desertions by providing dusky wives for the men whose skill with tools and weapons they valued highly. In 1621 the glass business was revived, and this time it was intrusted to Italian workmen. Iron works. About the same time iron works were established at Falling Creek, with "forty skilled workmen from Sussex to carry them forward." 30 Twenty-five ship carpenters were sent to ply their trade on the James River, and it was also arranged that oil was to be distilled from walnuts by the "apothecaries." George Sandys was sent over in July, 1621, to have entire control of all schemes for staple commodities. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineapples, plantains, and other fruits were to be started forthwith. There was once again great hope from the "rich commodity of silk," an endowed school for Indians was founded, and the little Virginia pool became iridescent with many frail bubbles. Result of the massacre. The sudden and frightful massacre by the savages in March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and premature projects. This calamity did not cause the failure of these foredoomed schemes; it only saved them from a painful and lingering death, and provided their friends with a decent epitaph for them. The people who survived the massacre were decimated by an epidemic in the following year. What strength they could spare from frequent battles with the savages they spent in growing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable for export.
V
Tobacco. Against tobacco King James had written a book. A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 1604. It was denounced in Parliament and regarded by all public-spirited men as an evil. Nevertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. In colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an economic one, and economic problems are solved by coarse and homely means. 31 John Rolfe, the first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, planted the first tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, and by 1616 the better West India variety had perhaps been substituted for the harsh kind grown by the Virginia Indians, and by them called "uppowoc" or "apooke." Tobacco prospered and was profitable, to the disgust of the pedantic king and the sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful products from a colony upon which so much poetic sentiment had been lavished. Neither gold nor spices came as had been expected; the strings of pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to be found, or were perhaps transformed on investigation into wampum beads; the silver mine once discovered on the upper James had vanished forever; tropical fruits refused to grow; even madder and woad failed, and, though the indigo plant would readily mature, nobody knew how to manufacture the dye. Silk was troublesome and unprofitable, shipbuilding, and such coarse but patriotic products as naval stores had come to naught. But the detestable "weed," as King James had dubbed it, throve apace. As early as 1617 the waste margins of the broad streets of Jamestown were planted with it by the eager settlers. The English merchants grasped at the profits of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the heavy duties imposed on it, and a powerful mercenary interest in the prosperity of Virginia was established. 32 By 1624, when the Virginia Company was dissolved, the danger that the colony would be abandoned as a result of Spanish intrigues, Indian massacres, or prolonged discouragement had passed away. Public spirit, patriotism, and religious enthusiasm no longer guarded it as a feeble house plant. It had struck root in the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its life was assured. From that time the colony that had been for seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers in England and a perdition to its inhabitants, became a sober money-making enterprise, uninteresting to enthusiasts and philanthropists. 33
VI
Motives of sentiment. In the preceding sections of this chapter we have traced what may be called the series of commercial motives that, sometimes in succession, often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia movement. The agitation for a colony was primarily a commercial one. The London or Virginia Company by which it was carried forward had been organized in the form of the great trading corporations of the time, such as the Muscovy Company and the East India Company, and it was expected to yield large returns. But though commercial in form and purpose, the Virginia Company from the outset was able to appeal successfully in every emergency to motives that were far from mercenary. Into the chain-threads of commercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic feeling and religious sentiment.
VII
Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company. Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a second place. The company began to pass more and more out of the control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach of voracious noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed into the hands of the great liberal statesmen whose leader was the incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of rare gifts and knowledge and of great resoluteness. These men had suffered some disappointment, no doubt, in their struggle for parliamentary freedom in England. They might have succeeded better had their antagonist been a strong king, but against the pusillanimity, the vanity, the vacillation, and the pedantic dogmatism of James little permanent headway could be made. Without relinquishing the conflict in the House of Commons, they took it up in the Quarter Courts of the Virginia Company. In this new field they found themselves afresh confronted by the obstinacy of the king, who was stirred up to oppose them by the discarded governor, Sir Thomas Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all the partisans of high prerogative and all the advocates of the Spanish match. Woodnoth's Short Collection, p. 6. "Bedchamber men" and others about the king's person were engaged to work upon the king to come to the rescue of Sir Thomas Smyth's "honor." Peckard's Ferrar, 113. The Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who had spies in the Virginia Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. He told the king that it was time for him to look into the Virginia courts, which were held in the great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too many of the king's nobility and gentry resorted thither, in order to be in company with the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous Sandys. They were deep politicians, and they entertained designs beyond a tobacco plantation. Their leaders, he said, were "subtle men of high courage who regarded neither his master nor their own."
Sir Edwin Sandys. Sandys, as assistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and virtual governor, had already succeeded in establishing in Virginia a constitutional state with a representative government. Royal Hist. MS. Comm. viii, II, 45. He was furthering plans for the foundation of the little separatist state of New Plymouth, and his enemies set agoing tales that he had dark designs of removing with the Pilgrims to America, in order to found a democratic state there. In 1619 Sir Thomas Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, to his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and chose Sandys to his place. When, in 1620, his first year of government drew to a close, Sir Edwin Sandys erected an elegant ballot-box in the midst of the hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant assemblage of noblemen, knights, gentlemen, and merchants might by a secret vote exercise the right of choice without any constraint. The king's interference. Just as the assemblage was about to begin voting, two clerks of the signet were announced with a message from the king forbidding the company to choose Sandys. 1620. "Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in which the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, braving the king's displeasure, allowed himself to be elected, with Sandys for deputy. In June, 1621, both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. A land of freedom. This attracted attention to Virginia as a "refuge from a more oppressive government in England." In three months' time twenty-five ships set sail for the colony, which gained an impetus from the king's opposition that put it beyond the danger of destruction by the calamities of the next two years. Even before the massacre and pestilence of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was assured by friends at court that it would come to "push of pike," and that the company would be overthrown. 34 The charter of the company was vacated in 1624, but free government had so taken root in the colony that it could never afterward be quite extirpated. A new English state with a popular government had been founded of deliberate purpose by a group of English statesmen, at the head of which, and easily first, was Sir Edwin Sandys, whose great service to the people and nation that were to come has been almost forgotten.
VIII
Religious propagandism. We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about American exploration and colonization the English church caught its first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of the savages from devil-worship and semi-nudity, there was added the natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion in America. 35 English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of infidels."
Zeal of the clergy. Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the first minister in Virginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely equaled in the history of martyrdom the accumulating miseries of Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a nation of dissenters.
IX
The Ferrars. In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant, the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years. The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel. Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm, became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this, and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."
The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the company by quo warranto proceedings in 1624 the government of the colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with Virginia.
X
Later History of the Ferrars. The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms to the poor, illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, and worshiped in its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of the four gospels. By means of relays of worshipers the Ferrars kept their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The strength of this belated mediæval saint gave way under a discipline so austere, and he died in 1637. Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar. Arminian Nunnery 1641. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix. Behold an epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century – its idealism in affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!
Advent of Puritanism. In the very years during which the Ferrars were most active on behalf of Virginia the earliest Puritan movement toward America set in. The attenuated mediævalism of the Ferrars did not lack a certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited to the rough work of hewing a road along which civilization might march into a savage wilderness. The Puritans, with their robust contempt for æsthetic considerations – making firewood of organs with delight, and feasting without scruple on the sheep of those whom they esteemed idolaters – were much the fitter to be champions against the American Canaanites.
BOOK II.
THE PURITAN MIGRATION
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM
I
Love of display in Elizabeth's time. Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses. Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. 36 High sheriffs and other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends to lend state to their office. Machyn's Diary, 324, note. Edward VI set out upon a progress in 1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
The age of the drama. A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.
Display in dress. Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. Peckard's Life of Ferrar. It was thus that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, passim. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display in people of lower rank. 37 Even the severe Puritan moralists did not object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty rank.
II
Observance of ceremonies. Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American history. Compare supra, p. 41. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of showy red cloaks. Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green velvet. De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again aboard the ship where he dwelt.
Formality at Plymouth. Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352. On the governor's left was Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus "they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."
Puritanism an outgrowth of the time. It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.
III
Origin of the Puritan movement. Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28. In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism – as a party protest against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship – had its origin in the persecution of Queen Mary's time. 1536. The English Protestants who fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.
A. D. 1553. In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English churches. The English exiles. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became centers of animated discussion and debate.
Outbreak of dissension. During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity; but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John Knox – the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish reformation.
Character of the debates at Frankfort. This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence – the little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude. Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the United States.
The rise of the two great parties. In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after another, there appeared at length the features of the two great parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand, in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local and independent church and to a democratic church government was already apparent. 38 Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.
A purified ritual. While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party came to be known by the name of Puritan – that is, a party not so much bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from mediæval forms. 39
Return of the exilies, 1558. After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize. Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of congregational independence in church government.
Results. The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England, grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill to its rise at the fountain head.
IV
The Puritan debate. The theological debates that fill so large a place in the history of the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe were mainly concerned with speculative dogmas. However futile controversies may seem that seek to reduce to formulas the relations between God and man, they have at least a topical dignity. But the debates about ceremonies and vestments which the exiles brought back to England from the Continent, and which held first place there during the reign of Elizabeth and James, were bitter without being serious. A life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of "white surplices" or the making of the sign of the cross in baptism can not but seem frivolous to the modern mind. Certayne Qvestions concerning silk or vvool in the high priest's ephod, 1605. Learned scholars like Broughton and Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to write tractates discussing the material of which the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was of silk, and there were sober essays on the linsey-woolsey side of that controversy. To the fine-spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish ephod was thought to settle the propriety of the Christian surplice. To the modern reader the whole debate about vestments and liturgies would be amusing if it were not so tedious. It is necessary to steady one's judgment of that age by remembering that deeper things sometimes lay concealed under these disputes regarding the contemptible mint and cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puritanism at its rise was an effort to escape from formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for greater spirituality in worship; but it gradually passed into an opposite formalism as rigid as that from which it had escaped.
Uniformity not possible. It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel uniformity. The difference between the radical and the conservative is constitutional, and is manifest in every period of agitation. Neither the mediation of moderate men nor the compulsion of authority can bring these two sempiternal divisions of the human race into agreement. The conservative English churchman limited his Protestantism to the rejection of the pope's authority, and to certain moderate reforms in church government and ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every proposal to reconstruct religious institutions which were moss-grown with ancient sentiment. The extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went about his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his reverence for the precepts of the Bible, now becoming common in the vulgar tongue. He applied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a way that would have been impossible had he possessed any sense of humor. He felt himself impelled by the call of God to carry out in England the changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, and to go even further. He would have no surplices, no sign of the cross, no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these rags of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back to the simplicity of the primitive ages. The Anglican, on the other hand, felt himself an Englishman above all, and without a stately liturgy, great bishops in square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas feasts, solemn Good Fridays, and joyous Easters, there would have remained for him no merry England.
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notes
1
See the careful and learned discussion of the Voyages of Cabot by the late Charles Deane, in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii. Mr. Deane effectually destroys the delusion which so long gave the credit of this discovery, or a part of it, to Sebastian Cabot, the son of the real discoverer. Mr. Henry Harrisse, in John Cabot, the Discoverer of America, and in an earlier work, Jean et Sebastien Cabot, etc., reaches the same conclusion. He even doubts Sebastian's presence in the expeditions of his father, John Cabot, etc., p. 48.
2
Yet George Beste, who sailed with Frobisher, says: "Now men neede no more contentiously strive for roume to build an house on, or for a little turffe of ground, … when great countreys and whole worldes offer and reache out themselves to them that will first voutsafe to possesse, inhabite, and till them." These countries, he says, "are fertile to bring forth all manner of corne and grayne, infinite sortes of land cattell, as horse, elephantes, kine, sheepe, great varietie of flying fowles of the ayre, as phesants, partridge, quayle, popingeys, ostridges, etc., infinite kinds of fruits, as almonds, dates, quinces, pomegranats, oringes, etc., holesome, medicinable, and delectable" (Frobisher's Voyages, Hakluyt Society, p. 38).
3
Ralegh, in his History of the World, book i, chap, viii, sec. xv, has an interesting digression on the danger of trusting such communications, and he relates an anecdote of misapprehension by this very party sent under Grenville and Lane: "The same happened among the English, which I sent under Sir Richard Greeneville to inhabit Virginia. For when some of my people asked the name of that country, one of the savages answered, 'Wingandacon,' which is as much as to say, as, 'You wear good cloaths,' or gay cloaths." From this answer it came that the coast of North Carolina was called "Wingandacon," or, in its Latinized form, Wingindacoa, while the chief, or "king," of the country appears in the narratives of the time as Wingina. Ralegh says that Yucatan means merely "What say you?" and that Peru got its name from a similar mistake.
4
I found the original of this map among the drawings made by John White in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum. It was reproduced to accompany a paper of mine on the Virginia Colony in the Century Magazine of November, 1882. It excited interest among scholars, as it was supposed to have been previously unknown. A copy was afterward found, however, in the collection made by Dr. Kohl for the State Department at Washington. The drawings in the Sloane MSS., British Museum, attributed to John White by Dr. E. E. Hale, in the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 21, are not White's originals. The latter are in the Grenville Collection. See my comparison of the two in The Nation of April 23, 1891.
5
As late as December 5, 1621, in a letter from the Virginia Company to Governor Wyatt, these words occur: "The Conjectures of the Southwest Passage and the piece of copper which you sent us gladly saw and heard." This long-surviving desire for a short passage to the East Indies is traceable to the passion that existed in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for spices, and this no doubt came from the gross forms of cookery in that time. Anderson's Commerce, sub anno 1504, cites Guicciardini on the great quantities of spices used, and adds: "For in those days the people of Europe were much fonder of spices in their cookery, etc., than they have been in later times." The rise in the price of commodities in Elizabeth's time may have been only apparent, but it promoted voyages looking to the extension of commerce. Compare Holinshed, i, 274.
6
Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs: "The Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, which lyeth on the West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the other side of the mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] and openeth a free and faire passage, not only to China, Japan, and the Moluccas, but also to New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and those rich countries of Terra Australis not as yet discovered." It is one of many marks of practical sagacity in Captain John Smith that after his experience on the American coast he was able to form views of the geography of the continent almost a century in advance of the opinions held in his time. He speaks of "those large Dominions which doe stretch themselves into the main God knoweth how many thousand miles" (Generall Historie, book vi).
7
So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New Haven in 1645. The ship was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth or sky.
8
I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment in the British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by Ingram was inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It was omitted in the later edition as too incredible even for Hakluyt. See also a paper by Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883, on the copy of Ingram's Statement preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's story, and others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of Eastward, Ho! by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The assertion of Seagull, in the play, that "they have in their houses scowpes, buckets, and diverse other vessels of massie silver," would seem at first sight to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of Ingram's narrative. But in the second edition of Bullein's A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one Mendax, describing an unknown land, declares that "their pottes, panns, and all vessells are cleane gold garnished with diamondes." This shows that Ingram's story had probably absorbed certain traits from what I have ventured to call European folklore tales about America – folk tales originally applied to the Orient, no doubt; echoes of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but not probable, that Bullein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had returned three years or more before he printed his second edition. The authors of Eastward, Ho! probably enlarged on Bullein.
Note 9, page 18. "Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. These details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian Cabot, whose veracity is not above suspicion.
9
Some of the early writers speak of "apes." Strachey calls what appears to be a raccoon a monkey, and Brickell, as late as 1743, uses the same word. The peccaries are recorded as in the text by the marvel-loving Purchas, p. 805. One finds unicorns in Speed's Prospect, Description of New York. Speed also lets us know that the buffalo was accustomed to defend himself by vomiting "a hot scalding liquor" on the dogs that chased it. Argall was the first Englishman to see the bison, in 1613. Citing his letter, Purchas says, p. 943, "In one voyage … they found a slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine, which were good meate."
10
In 1889, when I visited Jamestown, there was no apparent trace of Sandy Beach which had connected the island with the mainland. This bit of sand, in the antique phrase of one of the early colonists, was "no broader than a man may well quaite a tileshard." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1752. Jamestown is now a farm; the ruins of the church and many of the tombs in the eighteenth-century churchyard remain; but the upper end of the island is wearing away, and I picked out of the crumbling sand, far from the later burying place, human bones of earlier burials, possibly of the victims of the famines and epidemics. The walls of the magazine had been exposed by erosion. I brought away wrought nails, bits of glass grown iridescent from long burial, and an exploded bombshell of so small a caliber as to mark its antiquity. By the aid of a negro youth living on the farm I found the hearth bricks turned up in various places by the plow, and the arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement, of the town could thus be made out. My guide volunteered the information that Jamestown was "the first place discovered after the Flood." Some drawings made at the time were reproduced with an article on Nathaniel Bacon in the Century Magazine for July, 1890.
11
Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treatment, as he asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been matter of dispute. Both accounts are correct, as is shown by the testimony of an important manuscript at Petworth House, in Surrey, which I was allowed to examine by the courtesy of Lord Leconsfield. It is from the pen of George Percy, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen to succeed Smith on his departure from the colony. It is not the narrative from which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The title is "A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of momente wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas Gates was shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my depture ovtt of the country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a quarto of forty-one pages. Percy was a man of courage, but his own narrative in this little book shows that he had no qualification for the office of governor except the rank of his family. His ill health is made an excuse for his inefficiency, but Dale's letter of May 25, 1611, shows that even the horrible events of Percy's first government had not taught him to plant corn when again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's boastfulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the unruly settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to attack them, is supported by Percy; and a very different charge, that he stirred up the Indians to assassinate West himself, appears at a later time in Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears abundant internal evidence of the writer's mental inability to speak the truth. Percy himself relates that the Indians were already hostile to West's party, and that they had wounded and killed some of West's men in resentment of their wanton outrages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with the signatures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the affair. "Bloody-mindedness" seems not to have been a trait of Smith. But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was already impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any cost could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. Such a course would not have done much violence to the notions of the time, and would have found precedents in the various plots against the lives of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. It is quite probable, however, that there is no truth in the story. The violent hatred of the factions will account for the suspicion.
12
Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and was printed in London in 1608. In 1612 he published what is commonly referred to as the Oxford Tract. Its proper title is very long. The first part of it is as follows: "Map of Virginia, with a description of the Covntry, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. Written by Captain Smyth, sometime Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the proceedings of those colonies since their first departure from England," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken from the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, and to have been edited by W. S. – that is, the Reverend Dr. Symonds. The Generall Historie was first proposed in a well-considered and rather elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meeting of the Virginia Company, April 12, 1621, while the new patent which was to be submitted to Parliament was under discussion. He suggested the writing of a history to preserve the memory of the worthies of Virginia, dead and living, and gave it as his opinion that no Spanish settlement of the same age afforded matter more interesting. "Which worthy speech," says the record, "had of the whole court a very great applause as spoken freely to a speciall purpose, and therefore thought fitt to be considered and put in practice in his due time. And for which also Mr. Smyth as preferring allwaies mocions of speciall consequence was exceedingly commended." MS. Records of the Virginia Company, i, 197-200. A first edition of the Generall Historie appeared in 1624, the last two editions in 1632. The book is a compilation of Smith's earlier works, somewhat expanded, not to say inflated. The later portions are mostly made up from the official and quasi-official pamphlets. Just what was Dr. Symonds's part in the preparation of the Oxford Tract and the Generall Historie it would be interesting to know. The latter work was in some sense by authority of the company, and liable to the peculiar suspicion that hangs about writings designed to advance the colony and not primarily to record history. Its descriptive portions are of high value, and we are now able to control its historical errors to a certain extent. Besides these three works on Virginia, Smith published a Description of New England, 1616, New England's Trials, 1620, and Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England or Elsewhere, in 1631, the year of his death. These all contain valuable matter relating to Virginia. He also published in 1627 two works on seamanship, a Sea Grammar, and the Accidence or Pathway to Experience necessary for a Young Seaman. In 1630 he published his True Travels, a book which contains an account of his own adventures previous to his going to Virginia. More than a quarter of a century had elapsed between the occurrence of these adventures and their publication. Smith's vivid imagination had meantime no doubt greatly magnified his own exploits. It is quite impossible at this day to sift what truth there is in the True Travels from the exaggerations. Travelers in that time were not held to a very rigid account, and their first obligation seems to have been to amuse their readers. No distinct line had yet been drawn in literature between fact and fiction.
Many years ago, before I had had an opportunity to examine and compare all his writings, I rashly printed a brief argument in favor of the trustworthiness of Captain John Smith and the credibility of the Pocahontas story. I believe no person of critical judgment can make a thorough comparison of Smith's successive books without being convinced of the ineradicable tendency of his mind to romance in narrating adventure, especially his own adventure. Even his style where his vanity speaks loses something of its native directness and force. His practical writings on navigation and on the proper conduct of colonization, and his descriptions of the country and the savages, are plain, direct, and lucid. His speeches in the Virginia Company appear to have been exceedingly wise, and to have impressed his hearers. Note, for example, his proposals (Records, i, 197) that colonial governors should be liable to trial in England; his proposal to reduce the fee for sending a child to Virginia from five pounds to five marks, the cost of apprenticing to a trade (i, 174); and his preference for a governor well paid to one working "for love" (February 4, 1623). His personal morals were probably unexceptionable. One of his associates certifies to his freedom from tobacco, wines, dice, debts, and oaths. But a comparison between the statements made in the Oxford Tract and those in the Generall Historie leaves upon the mind of the critic a distinct impression of the very processes by which his adventures were exaggerated in his own memory as time elapsed. The three or four hundred savages on the Potomac (Oxford Tract, p. 32, a sufficiently marvelous story) rise to three or four thousand in the Generall Historie. Pocahontas becomes the central figure in incidents as told in 1624 in which she had no place in 1612. There is but one allusion to Pocahontas in the entire Oxford Tract (p. 103), and that has to do with the charge that Smith intended to marry her. A just and witty judgment of Captain Smith was made almost in his own time by Thomas Fuller. He says: "Such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men beyond belief, to some beyond truth. Yet we have two witnesses to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them… However, moderate men must allow Captain Smith to have been very instrumental in settling the plantation in Virginia, whereof he was Governor, as also admiral of New England." Fuller's Worthies, edition of 1840, i, 276. Those who desire to see an ingenious and learned defense of Captain Smith, particularly in the matter of the Pocahontas story, will find it in an address by Mr. William Wirt Henry, published by the Virginia Historical Society. Prof. Arber's discussion of the subject in his edition of Smith's Works is sentimental rather than critical. Compare Deane's Wingfield for the other side. Unnecessary heat has characterized some of the debates about John Smith. History pitched in a shrill polemical key is not instructive and is something less than amusing. These debates center themselves on the Pocahontas story, which is of little historical importance except as it involves the trustworthiness of Smith's narrative.
The conduct of Captain Smith in the Virginia colony will be better understood if we appreciate the character of his principal opponent, Gabriel Archer. Archer's return to Virginia in 1609 and his agency in overthrowing Captain Smith are alluded to apparently in a passage in the New Life of Virginea, 1612, "In which distemper that envious man stept in, sowing plentifull tares in the hearts of all," etc. One of Archer's schemes seems to have been to establish a parliament and a complicated government at the beginning. Purchas and Strachey both take sides against Archer in his controversy with Smith. Purchas, iv, p. 1749, Oxford Tract, 22. Wingfield warned Newport of the danger of disturbance from Archer, who was "troubled with an ambitious spirit." Wingfield's Discourse, 77, 94, 95. Wingfield also says, "In all their disorders was Mr. Archer a ringleader." He adds that Ratcliffe "did wear no other eies or eares than grew on Mr. Archer's head." For a bibliographical account of Smith's works the reader is referred to the valuable notes in Mr. Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii, passim.
13
A Trewe Relacyon, etc., at Petworth House, as above. The Indians in sheer wantonness scraped out the brains of their dead victims with mussel shells. Percy seems to have retaliated in a way to exasperate without disabling the savages. He "burned their hawses, Ransacked their Temples, tooke downe the corpses off their deade Kings from off their Toambes [that is, the scaffold on which their well-dried remains were deposited], and caryed away their pearles, caps, and bracelets wherewith they doe decore their Kings fvneralls." (For this sacred house thus desecrated by Percy the Indians had such reverence that none but priests and chiefs were allowed to enter, and the Indians never ventured to pass it without casting some offering of tobacco, wampum, copper, or puccoon root into the water. – Strachey, 90.) When Percy had captured a chief's wife and children, the soldiers in revengeful wantonness, according to Percy's account, threw the children out of the boat and shot them in the water. The inefficient Percy was able to save the life of the "queen" or chief's wife with difficulty. West and Ratcliffe, who had overthrown Smith, are accused by Percy of unnecessary cruelty to the savages. West sailed away in the ship, leaving Jamestown to its fate. Ratcliffe was put to death with exquisite tortures. There is no doubt some truth, as there is certainly jealousy, in Percy's charge that Captain Smith was "an ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow, attempting to take all men's authorities from them," but he was neither weak, like Percy and Ratcliffe, nor visionary, like the gold-hunting Martin and the doctrinary and demagogical Archer, nor treacherous and cruel, like West. With all his faults he only was master of the situation in these early years. Percy admits that the lawful authority was that of Smith. The history of the government of Percy and his supporters seems to justify Smith's refusal to share his lawful power with incompetent factionaries.
So far the State Papers, but Percy, in his A Trewe Relacyon, adds that he caused the man to be tortured till he confessed, and he relates repulsive details of the crime. The effrontery of an official publication went so far as to deny (True Declaration, 1610), on the authority of Sir Thomas Gates, this fact so circumstantially and abundantly attested. In Peckard's Life of Ferrar, p. 158, a petition from the Virginia colony to the king is preserved in which occur these words: "To tell how great things many of us have suffered through hunger alone would be as incredible as horrible for us to repeat to your sacred ears."
14
See, among other authorities, A Plaine Declaration of Barmudas, in black letter, 1613, written by one of the party. Myriads of birds nested on the island. How the hogs came to be there is matter of conjecture. The writer of the Plaine Declaration makes old Sir George Somers the resourceful hero of their marvelous escape, and it was from him that the islands took the name of Somers or Summer Islands. For want of pitch, the seams of the vessels were paid with "a kind of hard lime" and some "wax cast up by the sea." Strachey's A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, etc., Purchas, iv, p. 1734, is also by one of the shipwrecked party. The Rev. Joseph Hunter has written with much learning, patient research, and fatiguing prolixity to disprove the theory that Shakespeare's Tempest was suggested by the wreck of Gates and Somers. He succeeds in showing its relation to another occurrence, but works of imagination do not usually have their origin in a single fact, and it is hard to resist the conviction that the Tempest, as we have it, contains more than one allusion to the wreck upon "the still vexed Bermoothes."
15
The beauty of the wood of certain American trees had already been noted. The communion table in Jamestown in De la Warr's time was made of black walnut. The pews were of cedar, and there were "fair, broad windows," with shutters of cedar, "to shut and open as the weather shall occasion," but there appears to have been no glass. Window glass was little used at that time, and there probably was not a glazed window in the colony. The pulpit was of cedar, and the font was "hewen hollow like a canoa." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1755.
16
Some families appear to have gone to Virginia with De la Warr. The purpose to send families of wives and children and servants is expressed in A True Declaration, which was dated 1610, but, as Mr. Alexander Brown points out, issued in December, 1609.
17
The Tragicall Relation of 1623, and the Briefe Declaration of 1624, manuscripts in the British Public Record Office, are the most important authorities for the facts given in the text. The Briefe Declaration is rather the fuller, but the earlier paper supplies some particulars. These two formal documents are not from the same hand, and the slight difference between them in details tends rather to confirm than to shake the reader's confidence in their testimony. The names of Sir Francis Wyatt, George Sandys, and other prominent colonists appended to the Tragicall Relation are a guarantee of its good faith. It is curious to note that Raphe Hamor, whose relation is so favorable to Dale, and who held the post of secretary under Dale and that of vice-admiral under Argall, signs this paper, which is a severe impeachment of Sir Thomas Smythe's administration of the affairs of the company before 1619. Hamor's True Discourse has heretofore usually been taken as an authority, but after reading the documents in the Public Record Office one is compelled to believe that Hamor, or perhaps one might say Dale, under cover of his secretary, misrepresents the state of the colony, and makes promises to those who may emigrate that it was hardly possible to carry out. The Discourse of the old Virginia Company (Colonial Papers, iii, 40), and other papers in the Public Record Office relating to the strife between the company and the Court, throw light on this period. The half-apologies for Dale's cruelties in Smith's Generall Historie, book iv, prove their existence. "For amongst them, so hardened in evil," says this writer, "the fear of a cruel, painful, and unusual death more restrains them than death itself." See also Hamor, p. 27. There is a letter from Whitaker appended to Hamor's Discourse. Though apparently an incidental letter, it bears marks of having been procured for purposes of vindication. Its defensive tone goes to show that the character of Dale's tyranny had transpired in England. Whitaker praises Sir Thomas Dale mainly for being religious and valiant, and says that he had "great knowledge in Divinity and good conscience in all his doings; both which bee rare in a martiall man." In Whitaker's Good Newes of Virginia, 1613, there is no praise of Sir Thomas Dale. That Dale was famous for his severity before he left Europe is manifest from the phrase used by the Jesuit Biard, "Le Mareschal Thomas Deel que vous auez ouy estre fort aspre en ses humeurs." Relation, chap. xxxiii. See in this and the preceding chapter the whole account of his savage temper toward his French prisoners, etc. It has been the custom of our older writers to speak of Dale's administration only in praise, but careful weighing of the original authorities shows that Dale was utterly pitiless in the cruelty of his discipline and unjust in his detention of the old planters, and that when he left the colony he was more generally execrated than any other man that ruled in these early days, not even excepting his successor, Argall. Dale's severity was serviceable in carrying the enterprise through straits, but the reports of his harshness brought the colony into disrepute and checked immigration. The detestation of Dale was shared by the best men in Virginia, yet it is to be remembered that the savagery of Dale's government was due not wholly to the brutal temper of the man, but partly to the age and the school in which he had been bred. Legal torture was in use long after this. The Clarendon Papers, quoted by Southey, state that at Henley-on-Thames, as late as 1646, it was ordered that a woman's tongue should be nailed to a tree for complaining of the tax levied by Parliament. The cruel practices of the agents of the Virginia Company are paralleled by those of the East India Company at the same time. "Before they were intrusted with martial law they made it a rule to whip to death or starve to death those of whom they wished to get rid." Mills, British India, i, 38. Even that champion of popular liberty, Sir Edwin Sandys, found it in his heart to approve of Dale's course while admitting its harshness. He said to the court of the Virginia Company of the 17th of November, 1619, that "Sir Thomas Dale, building upon these foundations with great and constant severity, reclaymed almost miraculously those idle and disordered people, and reduced them to labor and an honest fashion of life." MS. Records of the Virginia Company. Compare also Sir Thomas Smythe's defense, note to Aspinwall Papers in IV Massachusetts Historical Collections, ix, p. 1. My citations from the Tragicall Relation and Briefe Declaration are partly from the originals in the British Public Record Office, which I carefully examined in 1885, but the first of these is printed in Neill's Virginia Company, and the Briefe Declaration was published by the State of Virginia in 1874 in a Senate document entitled Colonial Records of Virginia. Very good abstracts of both papers appear in Sainsbury's Calendar. I cite the Discourse of the Old Virginia Company from the MS. in the British Public Record Office. I do not remember to have seen it in print.
Note 10, page 49. Birch's Court of James I, i, 415. Chamberlain to Carleton, June 22, 1616: "Sir Thomas Dale is arrived from Virginia, and brought with him some ten or twelve old and young of that country, among whom is Pocahuntas, daughter of Powhatan, married to one Rolfe, an Englishman. I hear not of any other riches or matter of worth, but only some quantity of sassafras, tobacco, pitch, tar, and clapboard, things of no great value unless there were plenty, and nearer hand. All I can hear of it is, that the country is good to live in, if it were stored with people, and might in time become commodious. But there is no present profit to be expected."
18
The Discourse of the Old Virginia Company, an exceedingly interesting manuscript in the British Record Office, makes it appear that as late as 1618 the colonists had no thought of staying in Virginia, and even the directors at home were interested only in making money out of tobacco and sassafras, with little or no care to plant a permanent colony. Some allowance must be made, perhaps, for the ex-parte nature of this paper, but its tone and the high character of those who offered it give reason to trust it. Colonial Papers, iii, 40. Answer of the Virginia Company to Queries of the Privy Council in 1625.
19
We may trust Hamor's True Discourse, p. 17, for some of these details, though the book generally is discredited by the account given in the Tragicall Relation, which Hamor himself signed with others in 1623. A comparison of all these authorities makes it evident that only eighty-one who were ranked as "farmers" derived any benefit from Dale's three-acre division, while about two hundred others were probably left in unmitigated bondage.
20
"And to protect Captain Argall from being called to an account for his government under shew of a new plantation to be set up in Virginia by Captain Argall and his partners, whereof the said earl (Warwick) hath since appeared to be one (which yet to this day hath had no beginning), there was procured a patent to the said captain and his associates for the said new plantation; whereby he and his Company, their heirs and assigns (save only in time of defence by war), were exempted from all power, authority, and jurisdiction to be from hence derived or there established, that so he might reign there as great and absolute master, without law or controulment, and without the fear of ever being called to any future reckoning… Whatsoever was remaining at that time in the colony belonging to the public … he converted it in a manner wholly to his own private use and possession, the very public lands cultivated, the Company's tenants and servants, their rents, corn and tributes of corn, their kine and other cattle, their stores and other provisions; whereby the company, being disabled in all appearance of ever setting up the same again or to bear the great burden of public charge both at home and abroad, being thus stripped of all revenue, the said Company must have failed and decayed and the whole colony have fallen in time into the hands of the said captain and his association to be there established, which seemeth to have been his prime and original desire… This course of depredation and roving not sufficing as likely to receive encounter and check from hence, new engines were used, some to dishearten and some to disgrace the Company, that so as it seemeth they might in time obtain the plantation and leave it as a prey to the said captain, his friends and followers, etc." Burk's History of Virginia, Appendix, vol. i. The extract is from the document known as The Company's Chief Root of Differences, etc. I have compared this copy with that in the MS. Records of the Virginia Company, Library of Congress, and find only slight verbal differences. At the instance of Warwick the authors of this paper – Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and John and Nicholas Ferrar – were put under arrest in their own houses for this "impertinent declaration." The Warwick party had made "threats of blood" to deter Southampton from complaining to the king.
21
Birch's Court and Times of James the First, i, 311. Chamberlain to Carleton, May 16, 1614: "Sir Thomas Gates is come from Virginia, and brings word that plantation will fall to the ground if it be not presently supplied. He speaks of wonderful commodities that are to be had there if we could but have patience and would be at the cost to bring them to perfection." Out of this necessity for some present support came the great lottery. It was recommended by the Privy Council to the Mayor of Canterbury, February 22, 1615. There was a "running lottery" of smaller adventures in Paul's Churchyard before the "great standing lottery" was instituted, and then there were other "running lotteries" "in many other places after." Purchas, p. 1773. No doubt there were corruptions and abuses in these lotteries. The merchants prospered while Virginia languished. Its unpopularity is attributed to "malignant tongues," in the MS. Records of the Virginia Company, i, 158, and the overthrow of the lottery may have been part of the plot of those who sought soon after to wreck the company itself.
22
My attention was first attracted to the date of the Great Charter of November 13, 1618, by a minute in the handwriting of Secretary Williamson in the Public Record Office, as follows: "Those Adventurers & Planters by Vertue of ye sd Lettrs Patent of Incorporačon &c. made a Great charter of Lawes & Ordrs for ye govermnt of the Country. It bore date at London, Nov. 13th 1618." Col. Pprs, i, 11. The proceedings of the first Assembly in Virginia are preserved in the Public Record Office in Pory's Report. This report gives the only information we have regarding the provisions of this long-lost charter. An abstract of these proceedings is printed in the Calendar of Colonial Documents, and the whole document was reprinted in the New York Historical Society Collections, second series, vol. iii, and yet more carefully in the Colonial Records of Virginia, 1874. There is an allusion to this charter in the Briefe Relation, 1624. Various Virginia land grants deduce their authority from the Great Charter of Laws and Orders of November 13, 1618, as we learn from a note in the Aspinwall Papers, p. 14. There are many allusions to the charter of 1618 in the Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company in the Library of Congress.
23
The Code of Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martiall, by which Dale reigned was edited and published by Strachey in 1612, and reprinted in Force's Tracts, vol. iii. This code appears to have had no other sanction than the approval of Sir Thomas Smythe, the governor of the company. The beneficial effect of these laws is maintained in Hamor's Discourse, in Rolfe's Relation, and in certain letters of Dale in the Record Office. It was not, indeed, the government by martial law, but Dale's abuse of his power, that wrought the mischief. After the emancipation the old settlers lived in perpetual terror lest some turn of the wheel should put them once more in the power of Sir Thomas Smythe and his divine and martial laws. See especially the Additional Statement appended to the Discourse of the Old Virginia Company. On the long and bitter dissension that resulted in the overthrow of the company, see Arthur Woodnoth's Short Collection of the most remarkable Passages from the Original to the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, a rare work of great value to the historian of this period.
Note 17, page 56. Rolfe's Relation has it that the ship which brought Yeardley brought also the news of the election of Sandys and John Ferrar. But Yeardley arrived in Virginia on the 18th of April (O.S.), and Sir Thomas Smythe's resignation did not take place until ten days later. Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company. The news that Sir George Yeardley did bring was no doubt that the power of Sir Thomas Smythe and his party was broken, and that the actual control of affairs was in the hands of such men as Sandys, Southampton, Cavendish, Danvers, and the two Ferrars. The whole policy of the company indicates that the new party was really in power, and the appointment of such a man as Yeardley was probably the work of the rising party. The records before the resignation of Sir Thomas Smythe were probably destroyed for purposes of concealment.
24
Manuscript Book of Instructions, etc., Library of Congress. Letter to the Governor and Council by the ship Marmaduke, August 12, 1621. A proposal to send women had been made seven years earlier. Commons Journal, 1, 487, May 17, 1614. Extract from Martyn's Speech (for which he was reprimanded): "That they require but a few honest Labourers burthened with Children. – Moveth, a committee may consider of the means for this, for Seven Years; at which some of the Company may be present." On November 17, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys pointed out in the court of the company that the people of Virginia "were not settled in their mindes to make it their place of rest and continuance." "For the remedying of the Mischiefe and for establishing a perpetuitie of the Plantation," he proposed the sending of "one hundred young maides to become wives." Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company, i, 44, 45. Two women, the first in the colony, had arrived in September, 1608. Oxford Tract, 47. There were women in Gates's party in 1610. It was even reported that some English women had intermingled with the natives. Calendar Colonial Papers, i, 13. An allowance of food to women in De la Warr's time is proof that women were there. In 1629 there was living Mistress Pearce, "an honest, industrious woman," who had been in Virginia "near twenty years." Rolfe (a copy of whose Relation is among the Duke of Manchester's MSS. now in the British Public Record Office) sets down a remainder of seventy-five of the three hundred and fifty-one persons in the colony at Dale's departure, as women and children. It is worth recalling here that D'Ogeron, who governed Santo Domingo in 1663 and after, supplied the buccaneers with wives brought from France; and the plan was also put into practice in Louisiana about a century later than the Virginia experiment, and the same expedient, as is well known, was resorted to in Canada. In Virginia more pains were taken to have all the women thus imported of a good character than in some of the French colonies.
25
The belief that these maids were "pressed" or coerced into going is probably erroneous (see the speech of Sandys, July 7, 1620, Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company). He says, "These people (including the maids) are to be provided as they have formerly beene, partlie by printed publication of the supplies indicated, together with the conditions offered to these publique tennants, partlie by help of such noble friends and others in remote parts as have formerlie given great assistance." The notion that some of the maidens were pressed seems to have had its rise in the counterfeiting of the great seal and the issuing of forged commissions to press maidens for "breeders for the King" in the Bermudas and Virginia in order to extort money. One Owen Evans was accused of such practices in October, 1618 (Sainsbury, p. 19), and one Robinson was hanged, drawn, and quartered for this or similar offences in November of the same year (Birch's Court of James I, 108). In order to encourage the adventurers or shareholders to subscribe to the sending of maids, a town was laid off in Virginia to be called Maydstown. The subscribers were to be allowed shares in this town. Manuscript Records, May 20, 1622, on the general subject; also Records under date of November 3, 1621, and the 17th of the same month, June 11, and November 21, 1621, and the manuscript book in the Library of Congress, which I refer to in these notes as Manuscript Book of Instructions, pp. 76 and 89. I may remark here that this book has not been in use in recent times for reference. Its origin is uncertain, nor can the authorities of the library tell where it came from. It was compiled in the latter part of the seventeenth century, judging from internal evidence, and was perhaps kept among the records of the colony for reference on what we should call constitutional questions. I found a loose memorandum laid in its pages in the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, to whom the book probably once belonged.
26
Two of the chapter heads to Hakluyt's Westerne Planting, printed in 2d Maine Historical Collections, ii, sufficiently indicate the views prevailing at the time:
"V. That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our pleasure for the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or two hundred saile of his subjectes Shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande.
"VI. That the mischefe that the Indian threasure wroughte in time of Charles the late Emperor, father to the Spanishe Kinge, is to be had in consideration of the Queens moste excellent Majestie, least the contynuall comynge of the like threasure from thence to his sonne worke the unrecoverable annoye of this realme, wherof already wee have had very dangerous experience."
The heading of the first chapter should be added: "I. That this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell of Christe whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde, amongst whome her Majestie ys principall."
It would be foreign to the purpose of the present work to tell the story of Spanish jealousy of Virginia, and of the diplomatic intrigues for the overthrow of the colony. See documents in Mr. Alexander Brown's Genesis of the United States. One can not but regret that Mr. Brown did not give also the original of his Spanish papers; no translation is adequate to the use of the historian.
Note 2, page 78. This method was recommended to the colonists as late as 1753 in Pullein's Culture of Silk for the Use of the American Colonies, and it had probably long prevailed on the continent of Europe.
27
The authorities on the early efforts to raise silk, in addition to those cited in the text and the margin, are too numerous to find place here. The most valuable of all is, of course, the copy of the Records of the Virginia Company after April, 1619, in the Library of Congress, passim. See, for example, under date of December 13, 1620, and June 11, 1621. See also A Declaration of Virginia, 1620, and Purchas, pp. 1777-1787, Hamor's True Discourse, Smith's General History, Book II, Anderson's Commerce under 1620, and various state papers abstracted by Sainsbury, with Sainsbury's preface to the first volume of his Calendar, and Hening, passim. The reader is also referred to Mr. Bruce's Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, issued as these pages are passing into the hands of the printer. The wildness of some of the proposals for the production of Virginia silk in the Commonwealth period is almost surpassed by other projects of the time. In Virginia Richly Valued, 1650, perfume was to be extracted from the muskrat, and the James River sturgeon were to be domesticated. Fishes may be "unwilded," says the author. Besides feeding silkworms, the Indians were to be used in pearl fisheries in Virginia waters. Wyckoff on Silk Manufacture, Tenth Census, says that experimental silkworms had been taken to Mexico by the Spaniards in 1531, without any permanent results.
28
Even in Elizabeth's time efforts had been made to procure naval stores without the intervention of foreign merchants. As early as 1583, Carlisle, who was son-in-law to Secretary Walsingham, had subscribed a thousand pounds toward an American colony, which it was urged would buy English woolens, take off idle and burdensome people, and, among other things, produce naval stores. In 1601 Ralegh had protested eloquently against the act to compel Englishmen to sow hemp. "Rather let every man use his ground to that which it is most fit for," he said. Edwards, Life of Ralegh, p. 272.
29
Why Germans were sent it is hard to say, as glass was made in England as early as 1557. Glass was produced in Virginia, according to Strachey, who says: "Although the country wants not Salsodiack enough to make glasse of, and of which we have made some stoore in a goodly howse sett up for the same purpose, with all offices and furnases thereto belonging, a little without the island, where Jamestown now stands." History of Travaile into Virginnia Brittannia, p. 71. The house appears to have been standing and in operation in 1624. Calendar of Colonial Documents, January 30, February 16, and number 20, pp. 38, 39.
30
Purchas, p. 1777, says that one hundred and fifty persons were sent over two years earlier to set up three iron works, but the statement seems hardly credible. In the midst of the misery following the massacre of 1622, and notwithstanding the imminent probability of the overthrow of the company, which was already impoverished, some of the adventurers or shareholders sent nine men to Virginia to try a different method of making iron from the one that had previously been used. Letter of August 6, 1623, in Manuscript Book of Instructions in Library of Congress, fol. 120. Having "failed to effect" the making of iron "by those great wayes which we have formerly attempted," the undiscouraged visionaries "most gladly embraced this more facile project" of making iron "by bloom," but with a like result, of course.
31
The raising of tobacco in Virginia was one of the earliest projects entertained. "We can send … tobacco after a yeare or two, five thousand pounds a yeare." Description of the Now-discovered river and Country of Virginia, with the Liklyhood of ensuing Ritches by England's Ayd and Industry, May 21, 1607. Public Record Office, printed in Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 59, 62. The paper is supposed to be from the pen of Captain Gabriel Archer.
32
In 1604 the king had, by a royal commission addressed to "our treasurer of England," arbitrarily raised the duty on tobacco from twopence a pound to six shillings tenpence. He was probably moved to make this surprising change by his antipathy to tobacco; but by increasing the profits of the farmers of customs and monopolists of tobacco, he no doubt contributed to that abandonment of Virginia to tobacco raising which seemed to him so lamentable. The use of Spanish tobacco in England was general before that from Virginia began to take its place. Barnabee Rich says, in 1614: "I have heard it tolde that now very lately there hath bin a cathologue taken of all those new erected houses that have set vppe that trade of selling tobacco in London, ande neare about London, and if a man may beleeue what is confidently reported, there are found to be vpward of 7000 houses that doth liue by that trade." He says such shops were "almost in euery lane and in euery by-corner round about London." The Honestie of this Age, p. 30.
33
The MS. records of the Virginia Company and the State papers relating to Virginia in the Public Record Office, London, are the most important authorities on the subjects treated in the text. On the commodities attempted at the outset, Manuscript Book of Instructions, Library of Congress, the first volume of Hening's Statutes, passim, and Purchas, pp. 1777-1786, passim. On the inferiority of the Indian tobacco, see Strachey, p. 121.
34
Peckard's Life of Ferrar supplies many of the particulars in this section. The Records of the Virginia Company and other original authorities do not sustain all of Peckard's statements. The author's view is evidently distorted by biographer's myopia. He often seems to depend on tradition, but in some passages his touch is more sure, and he writes like a man who has documents before him. Arthur Woodnoth's Short Collection of the Most Remarkable Passages from the Originall to the Dissolution of the Virginia Company is of great value. It is a scarce tract, which I met first in the White-Kennett Library, in the rooms of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. It is also in the British Museum, Harvard College, and the Library of Congress. It is to be taken with discrimination, but the view of the inner workings of court intrigue as it affected Virginia is so fresh and detailed that it would be a pity to miss its information. It was printed in 1651. There is a brief sketch of the life of Sandys in Brown's Genesis of the United States, ii, 993.
35
Hakluyt's Discourse concerneing Westerne Planting, printed first in the Maine Historical Collections, second series, vol. ii, page 11. "And this enterprise the princes of religion (amonge whome her Majestie ys principall) oughte the rather to take in hande because papists confirme themselves and drawe other to theire side shewinge that they are the true Catholicke churche because they have bene the onely converters of many millions of infidells. Yea, I myself have bene demanded of them how many infidells have bene by us converted."
36
Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter… He could not refuse the civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves, or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia, "which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110, Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any of his master's quarrels; but his principal use was to lend dignity to the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.
37
The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1583, Pickering's reprint, pages 16, 17: "It is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie and magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their callyng. The nobility and gentrie to innoble, garnish, and set forth birthes, dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their callynges… But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle of apparell, and suche preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he lusteth himself, or can get by any kinde of meanes. So that it is very hard to know who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shal haue those which are neither of the nobilitie, gentilitie nor yeomanrie … go daiely in silkes, veluettes, satens, damaskes, taffaties and suche like; notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birthe, meane by estate, and seruile by callyng. And this I compte a greate confusion, and a generall disorder in a Christian common wealth."
38
A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1564, is the primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whittingham, Dean of Durham, a participant in the troubles, wrote the book. The Frankfort struggles have been discussed recently in Mr. Hinds's The Making of the England of Elizabeth, but, like all writers on the subject, Hinds is obliged to depend almost solely on Whittingham's account. The several volumes of letters from the archives of Zurich, published by the Parker Society, give a good insight into the forces at work in the English Reformation. See, for example, in the volume entitled Original Letters, 1537-1558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated Strasburgh, February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is invoked. "The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence amongst us English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while some desire the book of reformation of the Church of England to be set aside altogether, others only deem some things in it objectionable, such as kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen surplice, and other matters of this kind; but the rest of it, namely, the prayers, scripture lessons and the form of the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper they wish to be retained."
39
There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the name. In the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there is an interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cotton's Answer to Roger Williams, in a note.