The Beginners of a Nation. Eggleston Edward

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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