The Beginners of a Nation. Eggleston Edward
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,
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