The Beginners of a Nation. Eggleston Edward
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
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.