|
Sir WALTER RALEIGH spent a large
fortune in attempting to colonize Virginia. He succeeded in directing the
attention of his countrymen to the region which had kindled his own
enthusiasm. But his colonies never prospered. Sometimes the colonists
returned home disgusted by the hardships of the wilderness. Once they were
massacred by the Indians. When help came from England the infant settlement
was in ruins. The bones of unburied men lay about the fields; wild deer
strayed among the untenanted houses. Once a colony wholly disappeared. To
this day its fate is unknown.
1606 A.D.
Sir Walter was enduring his long captivity in the
Tower, writing his "History of the World," and moaning piteously over the
havoc which prison-damps wrought upon his handsome frame. The time had now
come, and his labours were about to bear fruit. The history of Virginia was
about to open. It opened with meagre promise. A charter from the King
established a Company whose function was to colonize—whose privilege was to
trade. The Company sent out an expedition which sailed in three small
vessels, it consisted of one hundred and five men. Of these one-half were
gentlemen of broken fortune. Some were tradesmen; others were footmen. Only
a very few were farmers, or mechanics, or persons in any way fitted for the
life they sought. Morally the aspect of the expedition was even more
discouraging. "An hundred dissolute persons" were on board the ships. The
respectable portions of the expedition must have gone into very little room.
But, happily for Virginia, there sailed with these
reprobate founders of a new empire a man whom Providence had highly gifted
with fitness to govern his fellow-men. his name was John Smith. No writer of
romance would have given his hero this name. But, in spite of his name, the
man was truly heroic. He was still under thirty, a strong-limbed, deep-chested,
massively-built man. From boyhood he had been a soldier—roaming over the
world in search of adventures, wherever hard blows were being exchanged. He
was mighty in single combat. Once, while opposing armies looked on, he
vanquished three Turks, and, like David, cut off their heads, and bore them
to his tent. Returning to England when the passion for colonizing was at its
height, he caught at once the prevailing impulse. He joined the Virginian
expedition. Ultimately he became its chief. His fitness was so manifest,
that no reluctance on his own part, no jealousies on that of his
companions, could bar him from the highest place. Men became Kings of old by
the same process which now made Smith a chief.
The "dissolute persons" sailed in their ships up the
James river. Landing there, they proceeded to construct a little town, which
they named Jamestown, in honour of the King. This was the first colony which
struck its roots in American soil. The colonists were charmed with the
climate and with the luxuriant beauty of the wilderness on whose confines
they had settled. But as yet it was only a wilderness. The forest had to be
cleared that food might be grown. The exiled gentlemen laboured manfully,
but under grievous discouragements. "The axes so oft blistered their tender
fingers, that many times every third blow had a loud oath to drown the
echo." Smith was a man upon whose soul there lay a becoming reverence for
sacred thugs, he devised how to have every man's oaths numbered; "and at
night, for every oath, to have a can of water poured down his sleeve." Under
this treatment the evil assuaged.
The emigrants had landed in early spring. Summer came
with its burning heat. Supplies of food were low. "Had we been as free from
all sins as from gluttony and drunkenness," Smith wrote, "we might have been
canonized as saints." The colonists sickened and died. From those poor
blistered fingers dropped for ever the unaccustomed axe. Before autumn every
second man had died. But the hot Virginian sun, which proved so deadly to
the settlers, ripened the wheat they had sowed in the spring, and freed the
survivors from the pressure of want. Winter brought them a healthier
temperature and abundant supplies of wild-fowl and game.
When the welfare of the colony was in some measure
secured, Smith set forth with a few companions to explore the interior of
the country. He and his followers were captured by the Indians. The
followers were summarily butchered. Smith's composure did not fail him in
the worst extremity. He produced his pocket-compass, and interested the
savages by explaining its properties. He wrote a letter in their sight—to
their infinite wonder. They spared him, and made a show of him in all the
settlements round about. He was to them an unfathomable mystery. He was
plainly superhuman. Whether his power would bring to them good or evil, they
were not able to determine. After much hesitation they chose the course
which prudence seem to counsel. They resolved to extinguish powers so
formidable, regarding whose use they could obtain no guarantee. Smith was
bound and stretched upon the earth, his head resting upon a great stone. The
mighty club was uplifted to dash out his brains. But Smith was a man who won
golden opinions of all. The Indian chief had a daughter, Pocahontas, a child
of ten or twelve years. She could not bear to see the pleasing Englishman
destroyed. As Smith lay waiting the fatal stroke, she caught him in her arms
and interposed herself between him and the club. Her intercession prevailed,
and Smith was set free.
Five
years later, "an honest and discreet" young Englishman called John Rolfe
loved this young Indian girl. He had a sore mental struggle about uniting
himself with "one of barbarous breeding and of a cursed race." But love
triumphed. He laboured for her conversion, and had the happiness of
seeing her baptized in the little church of Jamestown. Then he married her.
After a time he took her home to England. Her appearance was pleasing; her
mind was acute; her piety was sincere; her manners bore picturesque evidence
of her forest upbringing. The English King and Court regarded her with
lively interest as the first-fruits of the wilderness. Great hopes were
founded on this union of the two races. She is the brightest picture— this
young Virginian wife and mother—which the history of the doomed native
races presents to us. But she did not live to revisit her native land. Death
parted her very early from her husband and her child.
When Smith returned from captivity the colony was on
the verge of extinction. Only thirty-eight persons were left, and they were
preparing to depart. With Smith, hope returned to the despairing settlers.
They resumed their work, confident in the resources of their chief. Fresh
arrivals from England cheered them. The character of these reinforcements
had not as yet improved. "Vagabond gentlemen" formed still a large majority
of the settlers—many of them, we are told, "packed off to escape worse
destinies at home." The colony, thus composed, had already gained a very bad
reputation: so bad that some, rather than be sent there, "chose to be
hanged, and were." Over these most undesirable subjects Smith ruled with an
authority which no man dared or desired to question. But he was severely
injured by an accidental explosion of gunpowder. Surgical aid was not in the
colony. Smith required to go to England, and once more hungry ruin settled
down upon Virginia.
1610 A.D.
In six months the five hundred men whom Smith had left
dwindled to sixty. These were already embarked and departing, when they were
met by Lord Delaware, the new governor. Once more the colony was saved.
Years of quiet growth succeeded. Emigrants—not wholly
now of the dissolute sort—flowed steadily in. Bad people bore rule in
England during most of the seventeenth century, and they sold the good
people to be slaves in Virginia. The victims of the brutal Judge Jeffreys—the
Scotch Covenanters taken at Bothwell Bridge—were shipped off to this
profitable market. In 1688 the population of Virginia had increased to
50,000. The little wooden capital swelled out. Other little wooden towns
established themselves. Deep in the unfathomed wilderness rose the huts of
adventurous settlers, in secluded nooks, by the banks of nameless Virginian
streams. A semblance of roads connected the youthful communities. The
Indians were relentlessly suppressed. The Virginians bought no land. They
took what they required—slaying or expelling the former occupants. Perhaps
there were faults on both sides. Once the Indians planned a massacre so
cunningly that over three hundred Englishmen perished before the bloody hand
of the savages could be stayed.
The early explorers of Virginia found tobacco in
extensive use among the Indians. It was the chief medicine of the savages.
Its virtues—otherwise unaccountable—were supposed to proceed from a
spiritual presence whose home was in the plant. Tobacco was quickly
introduced into England. It rose rapidly into favour. Men who had heretofore
smoked only hemp knew how to prize tobacco. King James wrote vehemently
against it. He issued a proclamation against trading in an article which was
corrupting to mind and body. He taxed it heavily when he could not exclude
it. The Pope excommunicated all who smoked in churches. But, in defiance of
law and reason, the demand for tobacco continued to increase.
The Virginians found their most profitable occupation
in supplying this demand. So eager were they, that tobacco was grown in the
squares and streets of Jamestown. in the absence of money tobacco became the
Virginian currency. Accounts were kept in tobacco. The salaries of members
of Assembly, the stipends of clergymen, were paid in tobacco. Offences were
punished by fines expressed in tobacco. Absence from church cost the
delinquent fifty pounds; refusing to have his child baptized, two thousand
pounds; entertaining a Quaker, five thousand pounds. When the stock of
tobacco was unduly large, the currency was debased, and much inconvenience
resulted. The Virginians corrected this evil in their monetary system by
compelling every planter to burn a certain proportion of his stock.
Within a few years of the settlement the Virginians had
a written Constitution, according to which they were ruled. They had a
Parliament chosen by the burghs, and a Governor sent them from England. The
Episcopal Church was established among them, and the colony divided into
parishes. A College was erected for the use not only of the English, but
also of the most promising young Indians. But they never became an educated
people. Time population was widely scattered, so that schools were almost
impossible. In respect of education, Virginia fell far behind her sisters in
the North. |
