The Beginners of a Nation

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.