Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS.

A
POPULAR HISTORY
OF THE
UNITED STATES
OF
AMERICA:
FROM THE DISCOVERY OF THE AMERICAN CONTINENT TO THE PRESENT TIME.

BY MARY HOWITT.

Illustrated with Numerous Engravings.

VOL. I.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

FRANKLIN SQUARE.

1860.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine, by

Harper & Brothers,

in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

CONTENTS TO VOL. I.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I.

A POPULAR

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.
DISCOVERIES.

The mighty hemisphere of the West lay for countless ages shrouded from the knowledge of the rest of the world, as by the darkness of night, waiting for the appointed time of its revelation. That appointed time was the close of the fifteenth century, for although upwards of four hundred years earlier, after the reign of Alfred of England, and Charlemagne in France, America was discovered by some of those adventurous Scandinavian Vikings—the true ancestors of the so-called Anglo-Saxons, who, in their stout-built little ships, traversed all seas—still the knowledge of this discovery produced so little effect on the rest of the world, that afterwards, when America was rediscovered, the history of the Scandinavian colonisers was regarded as mythical. The antiquarian researches, however, of Rafn and others, leave no doubt of the fact. These bold adventurers, at home on the most perilous seas, having colonised Iceland, Greenland, and afterwards Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, came at length, in the year 1000, to the coast of America, where a colony was formed under the name of Vinland hin Goda, or Vineland the Good—so called from the abundance of wild grapes which grew there, and because the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the soil delighted the discoverers, accustomed as they were to the savage sterility and severe cold of Greenland and Iceland, and even of their native north.

The tract of country first explored by these earliest European discoverers is supposed to extend down the coast from about where Boston is now situated to New York. According also to the antiquarians, Rask and Finn Magnusen, boundary pillars were discovered by them, in the year 1824, on the eastern shore of Baffin’s Bay, exhibiting Runic inscriptions, and the date 1135. The generally uncivilised state of the rest of Europe prevented these early Scandinavian discoveries from producing any permanent or important effect. The time when this great discovery of a second world could be availing was not yet come. The precursors of knowledge had yet to be born; society lay under a night of barbarous ignorance, and glimpses of light, coming from whatever quarter they might, were lost in the density of its shadow.

The important thirteenth century arrived: Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, and Vicentius of Beauvais, lived. A breath of true life awakened the general mind, and geographical, as well as other knowledge began to be studied. In the meantime, Iceland, which must be regarded as the mother of colonisation, had lost her noble independent spirit with her republican form of government, and become a fief of the crown of Norway. In consequence, however, of her remote position, as well as her high reputation for learning, she was made the depository of the most ancient records of Europe, which was then agitated by internal convulsions, and here they were carefully preserved for ages. In this remote Ultima Thule lay sealed up, as it were, the keys of a mighty knowledge, which would unlock a second world. Here, accordingly, in the month of February, 1477, came Christopher Columbus, “the sea,” says he, “not being at that time covered with ice, and being resorted to by traders from Bristol.” This is singular. Some historians doubt whether Columbus heard any tidings here of the early discovery and colonisation of America. No doubt he did; no doubt, in his conversations with Bishop Skalholt and other learned men, he would hear the extraordinary fact of a great country having been discovered by their ancestors beyond the Western Ocean. They had found land where he had believed it to exist, whether a part of Asia or not was of no consequence, and this information would not be lost on a mind like his. No doubt, also, hither came the Cabots, merchants of Bristol, who, in their process of discovery, sailed northward, as if following the guidance of Icelandic tradition, and arrived on the dreary coasts of Labrador, before Columbus discovered the mainland of America.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

Columbus having, at the age of twenty-one, sailed, as we have said, to Iceland, “to see if it were inhabited,” returned to Spain resolved to navigate the great Western Sea, and discover the land which lay beyond. He was one of the elect of Providence, men of the time and the hour, whose work is appointed them to do, and spite of impediment, discouragement, and adversity, who must succeed in doing it. The history of his eventful life is well known; with inflexible resolution and deep religious ardour, he pursued his object, and finally won the ear of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. On August 3rd, 1492, he set sail as Admiral of the Seas and Lands which he expected to discover, and on October 11, after a tedious voyage and long anxiety, stepped on shore of one of the Bahama Islands with tears of joy and fervent thanksgiving; and after kissing the soil of the New World, he planted here the cross, in token of Christian possession.

Gold dust and Japan, or Cipango, as it was called, were the objects of search, and Columbus, after twelve days, again set sail in the hope of finding them. He found several other of the West India Islands, and finally the beautiful Cuba, the most beautiful island in the world. He believed that now indeed he had found the long-sought-for Cipango; and San Domingo, which he next discovered, he imagined to be the ancient Ophir, the source of all the riches of Solomon.

Columbus’s discoveries were confined principally to the West India Islands; nor was it till his third voyage that he touched the mainland, near the mouth of the river Oronoco.

The Cabots, as we have seen, enterprising merchants of Bristol, which was at that time the second port in England, and accustomed to the navigation of the northern seas, had discovered, in 1496, the coast of Labrador—a country which could neither be mistaken for Cipango nor for Ophir—a savage arctic region, abounding in white bears and deer of a gigantic size, and inhabited by men clad in skins and armed with bows and clubs.

About two years afterwards, Sebastian Cabot, the son, again sailed for Labrador, by way of Iceland, and thence proceeding southward along the shores of the new country advanced into a more hospitable climate, until want of provisions compelled him to return. On a subsequent voyage, steering still to his favourite north, in search of a north-west passage, he entered Hudson’s Bay, but was now compelled to return in consequence of insubordination among his crews. In 1526, having gone to Spain, he was nominated by Charles V. as pilot-major of the kingdom, and in the April of this year, proceeding across the Atlantic, explored the river La Plata and some of its tributaries, erecting forts, and endeavouring, but unsuccessfully, to plant colonies.

“The career of Sebastian Cabot,” says Bancroft, “was in the issue as honourable as the beginning was glorious. He conciliated universal esteem by the placid mildness of his character. Unlike the stern enthusiasm of Columbus, he was distinguished for serenity and contentment. For sixty years he was renowned for his achievements and skill.” It is, however, greatly to be regretted that, of all his voyages and discoveries, no detailed account has been preserved. In 1548 he was pensioned by Edward VI. as “The Great Seaman,” and through his advice and influence it was that an expedition to the North of Europe was undertaken, which opened to England the important trade with Russia. He lived to extreme old age, but the place of his death and burial is unknown.

The fame of Cabot rests less on any discovery of summer lands, affluent in natural beauty and precious commodities, than on his having made known rich fisheries, the wealth and value of which remain to the present day. The immense shoals of cod in the shallows of those new seas soon attracted the attention of other voyagers, and within seven years of Cabot’s discovery, the hardy fishermen of Brittany and Normandy frequented the abundant fisheries of Newfoundland; Cape Breton remaining as a memorial of them to this day. This fishery, on the coast and bank of Newfoundland, formed the first link between Europe and North America.

The Portuguese, excited by the success of England and Spain, entered eagerly into competition with them. Emanuel, king of Portugal, animated also by the great success of his expedition under Vasco de Gama, who, having for the first time doubled the Cape of Good Hope, had reached India, thus opening to Europe all the vast treasures of the Indian Ocean, now sent out Gaspar Cortereal with two vessels, to follow in the course of the Cabots, and explore the north-western seas. Accordingly, reaching the shores of North America, he coasted for about seven hundred miles, admiring as he went along the beauty and fertility of the country, and the grandeur of its forests, the pines of which appeared to him admirably suited for the masts and yards of shipping. The commerce, however, which occupied these Portuguese was of a much less innocent kind than that of timber, or than the cod-fishing of the French; Cortereal freighted his vessels with a number of inoffensive natives, whom he sold for slaves, intending to return for more. But he never returned; he lost his life, it is said, in a contest with the natives, whom he was endeavouring to kidnap.

The successful trade which the bold fishermen of France carried on, and some of the natives whom they had taken into their own country, turned the attention of Francis I. to the subject of discovery. He fitted out a fleet under the command of John Verrazzani, a Florentine, commissioned to explore for the French monarch these new realms of wonder and hope. Verrazzani sailed by way of Madeira, and after a most stormy voyage, had the satisfaction of discovering land in a latitude which was unknown to any European navigator. Sailing for a long time in search of harbourage, he at length cast anchor on the coast of North Carolina. The natives had as yet seen no white man; they were of a gentle and peaceful character, dressed in skins, and ornamented with garlands of feathers. Coasting northward, he relates, in his letter to Francis I., that nothing could equal the beauty of the country; the climate was soft and balmy, the groves full of beautiful trees and flowers which diffused a delicious odour. The red colour of the earth, and the fragrance of the groves, suggested at once the idea of gold dust and the spices of the East. Still advancing northward, they reached Nova Scotia, where natives of another character met them.

From this point he returned homeward; his narrative of this coasting voyage being the earliest record of that part of the new world now extant. Of Verrazzani’s further discoveries nothing is known, although it is said that he visited the coast of America three times. He is believed to have perished at sea.

Ten years afterwards, the Admiral Chabot, whose duties brought him into connexion with the Newfoundland fishermen, became interested in the subject of discovery. Jaques Cartier, a mariner of St. Malo, was despatched with two ships on the commission to explore those northern coasts of the new world already so familiar to the fishermen. Cartier made a wonderfully speedy voyage. In twenty days from leaving St. Malo, he was on the coast of Newfoundland, and after partly circumnavigating the island, he planted a cross bearing the arms of France, in token of having taken possession for that country.

Sailing within the magnificent bay on its west, he reached the estuary of a vast river, which he ascended, until he could see land on both sides; further he was unable to advance, being unprepared to winter there. He turned his face homeward, therefore, and in thirty days reached St. Malo, carrying two natives with him.

The success of this voyage caused a second expedition to be soon fitted out. Three well-furnished vessels were provided by government, and several of the young nobility joined in the enterprise. Solemn preparations were made for departure, the ships’ companies assembled in the cathedral to receive absolution and the blessing of the bishop; and thus they set sail, full of hope and schemes for the colonising of that splendid territory which was to be called New France. This voyage, however, unlike the former, was stormy, and passing the west of Newfoundland on the day of St. Lawrence, they gave the name of that saint to the noble bay which expanded before them, and which name not alone the gulf, but the magnificent river which falls into it, bear to this day. Cartier again sailed up the river, but in a boat, and as far as Hochelaga, where, ascending a hill, he was struck by the magnificent view of woods, mountain, and river, which lay behind him. Anticipating this as the site of the future metropolis of a splendid empire, he called the hill Mont-Real, and “time,” says the historian, “which has transferred the name to the island, is realising his visions.” He and his companions spent the winter in these seas, and in the spring departed, having basely kidnapped an Indian chief who had treated them with the utmost kindness.

The report which the adventurers carried home of the severity of the climate abated the ardour of colonisation for a few years. At length, in an interval of peace, the remembrance of that magnificent river, which exceeded in grandeur any river of Europe, awoke anew the spirit of adventure, and Francis de la Roque, lord of Robertval in Picardy, was appointed viceroy of the unknown regions of Norimbega, that is to say, all the vast territories around the gulf and river of St. Lawrence, with all its islands; and Cartier, on account of his knowledge and experience, was associated in the enterprise, as captain-general and chief pilot. Cartier was also commissioned to take with him artisans of all kinds, that useful colonies might be established. We must suppose that but little public enthusiasm existed on the subject; for Cartier had to ransack the jails to make up his complement of men. This was an ill-starred enterprise altogether; the two leaders did not even act in concert. Cartier set sail long before his superior, ascended the St. Lawrence, built a fort near the present site of Quebec, where he passed the winter in hostility with the natives, and in the spring set sail homeward, meeting Robertval on his way out, off Newfoundland. Robertval, though he remained a twelvemonth in his new territory of Norimbega, effected very little, and so returned home.

For the next fifty years nothing was done by France, which was absorbed by her own internal conflicts—feudalism against monarchical power, Calvinism against Catholicism. In the meantime, however, the value and importance of the northern fisheries increased, and in 1578 no less than one hundred and fifty French ships were employed in the Newfoundland trade.

While the French were thus vainly endeavouring to colonise the regions of Acadia and Canada lying around the bay and along the river of St. Lawrence, the Spaniards were occupied in the south. The brilliant discoveries of Spain had kindled the most extraordinary enthusiasm throughout the nation for adventure beyond the seas. Nothing was too extravagant for their imaginations to conceive of the new world, where it was believed “that the natives ignorantly wore the most precious ornaments, and the sands of every river sparkled with gold.” Spaniards, high and low, young and old, rich and poor, were all ready to rush to the conquest and the spoil. Among others, Juan Ponce de Leon, an aged veteran in the wars of Granada, a companion of Columbus in his second voyage, and some time governor of Porto Rico, fitted out three ships at his own expense, and resolved to go forth to seek his fortune, and more especially to seek for that which he had been told existed in those paradisiacal regions of the sun and the palm—a fountain whose waters possessed the extraordinary virtues of restoring or perpetuating youth. In search of this poetical fountain, Ponce de Leon set sail with his three ships, in March 1512. On Easter Sunday, which the Spaniards call Pascua Florida, the aged adventurer discovered a glorious land, covered with woods, which were brilliant with flowers. Spite of the marvellous beauty of the country, to which he gave the name of Florida, it was some time before he was able to land, in consequence of stormy weather. At length a landing was effected, and formal possession taken of the country; but though he remained exploring the coast for several weeks, the fountain of youth was nowhere to be found, the natives were hostile, and Ponce de Leon returned to Porto Rico still an old man. A new and splendid region had, however, been discovered, and thither Ponce de Leon returned a few years afterwards, intending to select a site for a colony, but in a contest with the natives was mortally wounded.

Ponce de Leon’s discovery had opened a new path for Spanish commerce through the Gulf of Florida, and in 1516 Diego Miruelo, a bold sea captain, trafficking with the natives, brought away gold which he had obtained in exchange for toys, and thus gave a yet more brilliant colouring to the reports current regarding the wealth of this new region.

In 1517, Francisco Fernandez de Cordova discovered the province of Yucatan and the Bay of Campeachy, but soon afterwards, like Ponce de Leon, was mortally wounded by the natives. The pilot of Fernandez in the following year conducted another squadron to the same shores, under the command of Grijalva. The amount of gold which was here collected, and the costly presents of the unsuspecting natives together with the rumours of the magnificent empire of Montezuma, excited the general imagination, and led to the enterprise of Cortes.

While events were thus opening the way for the conquest of Mexico, seven wealthy men of St. Domingo, at the head of whom was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, despatched two vessels as slavers to seek for labourers in their mines and plantations. These ships were driven northward from the Bahamas by adverse winds upon the coast of Carolina, which they called Chicora; they anchored at the Cambahee river, to which they gave the name of Jordan. The natives received them with great kindness, being new to the sight of Europeans, and visited their ships in crowds, both with curiosity and good faith, but when they were all below, the hatches were suddenly closed, and the perfidious Spaniards sailed away. One of these ships was lost, the captives in the other refused food, and died of starvation and distress of mind.

Again de Ayllon sailed with three ships to the newly-discovered Chicora, of which he was appointed governor, intending now to take formal possession. But the largest of his ships was stranded and lost at the mouth of the river Cambahee, and he himself, though received with apparent kindness by the natives, narrowly escaped with his life, many of his men having been killed, the friendly aspect being merely a feint on the part of the incensed natives to get them more completely into their power. This unsuccessful attempt preyed so severely upon de Ayllon’s heart as to cause his death.

But now let us return to the discoveries of Francisco Fernandez de Cordova and Grijalva on the northern coast of Yucatan. On approaching the shore, the Spaniards had been astonished to find no longer rude and half-clad savages, but people well dressed in cotton garments, and dwelling apparently in edifices of stone. They were of a bold and martial character, and received the strangers with demonstrations of hostility. Cordova being, as we have said, wounded, his expedition hastened back to Cuba, only however to be followed by a second, when the southern coast of Mexico was discovered, and Juan de Grijalva carried home with him a large amount of treasure obtained by traffic with the natives. Valesquez, the governor of Cuba, highly pleased with the result of this expedition, resolved on the conquest of this rich country, and hastily fitted out an armament of eleven vessels for this purpose, giving the command to Fernando Cortes.

In March, 1519, Cortes landed in Tabasco, a southern province of Mexico, where he defeated the natives with great slaughter. Advancing from this point westward, he reached San Juan de Ulloa, where he was kindly received by two officers of the monarch, Montezuma, who had been sent to inquire into the object of his visit, and to offer him any assistance which he might require. Cortes replied with great courtesy that his business was important, and could be confided to no less a person than Montezuma himself. The great monarch of Mexico, not being accustomed to such interviews, his officers made valuable presents to Cortes, and set before him the impossibility of his request. In vain; Cortes was determined; messengers were sent backwards and forwards, and magnificent presents still made to Cortes, with the request finally that he would depart. But no; Cortes destroyed his vessels, to prevent his soldiers escaping, and marched to the capital of Mexico. As he advanced, the disaffected in Montezuma’s kingdom joined him. Montezuma was overcome by alarm.

The Spaniards marched onward; and the vast plain of Mexico opened before them. It was covered with villages and cultivated fields, all wearing an aspect of prosperity. In the middle of the plain, partly encompassed by a lake, and partly built on the islands within it, towered aloft the city of Mexico, like some gorgeous fairyland city. The Spaniards could scarcely believe their senses; it seemed more like a splendid vision than reality. Montezuma received the strangers with great pomp and kindness; admitted them into the city; appropriated to their use splendid accommodations; supplied all their wants, and presented them with gifts.

Cortes, astonished at what had befallen him, and anxious for his own safety, thus shut up in the very heart of a city which might, after all, be hostile, resolved on a bold expedient, which he accomplished with wonderful success. He seized the person of Montezuma, whom he held as a hostage for the good faith of the nation. And thus, having the astonished monarch in his power, so wrought upon his mind, as to induce him to acknowledge himself a vassal of the crown of Spain, and subject his kingdom to an annual tribute.

Cortes, after this, was compelled to return to Cuba for a short time, and the Mexicans, incensed by the cruelties and wanton excesses of the Spaniards, who remained in charge of the monarch and his capital, rose in arms. Cortes returned, and at once threw aside the mask of moderation which he had hitherto worn. He compelled Montezuma, who was in his power, to interpose with his exasperated people; the captive monarch did so, and an aspect of submission was for the moment assumed. The Mexicans reverenced their monarch almost as a divinity, and bowed their heads and dropped their weapons at sight of him; but when, in obedience to the commands of Cortes, he endeavoured to awaken amicable sentiments in their breasts towards the Spaniards, their rage burst forth in fury, and snatching up their arms, they assailed their enemies with tenfold determination, and in this fresh onset the unfortunate Montezuma was himself mortally wounded. The Mexicans, seeing their king fall by their own hands, believed that the vengeance of heaven was pursuing them, and fled; and Montezuma, refusing all food, survived but a short time.

The position of Cortes, in the heart of an exasperated nation, was perilous in the extreme. He commenced his retreat from the capital, and fighting almost every yard of ground, found himself on the sixth day in a spacious valley, hemmed in by an innumerable army. Nothing was left but to conquer or die; and they were but a handful of men. Multitudes thronged in upon them, sufficient alone to trample them to dust. At that moment Cortes beheld the great Mexican banner advancing, and recollecting to have heard that upon its fate depended the fate of every Mexican battle, resolved, at the head of his bravest men, to hew his way to the standard, and gain possession of it. He did so. The Mexicans, panic-stricken, threw down their arms and fled to the mountains.

The determination of Cortes was undaunted; he resolved to accomplish the conquest of Mexico, and four months after his retreat, having received fresh supplies and reinforcements, he again departed for the interior, and after a siege of twenty-five days, the successor of Montezuma having fallen into his hands, the city yielded, and the wealthy Mexico became a province of Spain. This occurred in August, 1521.

While the conquest of Mexico was taking place, another important event occurred in the history of Spanish discoveries. Ferdinand Magellan, having spent several months in exploring the coast of South America, finally passed through the strait which bears his name, thus accomplishing the discovery so long-sought-for of a western passage to India.

CHAPTER II.
DISCOVERIES CONTINUED.

Florida had remained unoccupied, and almost disregarded, for several years, when Pamphilo de Narvaez obtained permission from the emperor Charles V. to effect its conquest; accordingly he landed on the coast in April, 1528, with three hundred men, and, erecting a standard, took possession for Spain. Fired by the successes of Cortes, they advanced up the country, hoping to find a second wealthy empire; but swamps and forests met them everywhere, and hosts of ambushed savages attacked them. Still intimations of a country northward abounding in gold, which they continued to receive from captives whom they had taken, and now employed as guides, lured them on. But they found nothing save a village of wigwams; though the guides still persisted that still farther north lay a region full of gold. Unwilling to adventure further to the north, they directed their course again southward, and reached the sea after a journey of probably 800 miles, their numbers being then greatly diminished. They constructed five boats, but of so frail a description that only desperate men would have ventured their lives in them; and Narvaez and most of his companions perished. Four of the survivors reached Mexico in the course of seven years, after a series of wonderful adventures and hardships, having travelled through Louisiana, Texas, and Northern Mexico, passing on from one tribe of Indians to another, and frequently as slaves. A marvellous story of wild adventure was theirs; and, like an earlier Robinson-Crusoe history, calculated to allure others into the same path.

The most remarkable of the followers of these men, and the believers of their story, was Ferdinand de Soto, a Spanish nobleman, and courtier of Charles V., by whom he was appointed governor of Cuba. De Soto had been a favourite companion of Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, and had distinguished himself in the storming of Cusco. Believing all the wonders which were related of the golden regions of Florida, he resolved to fit out an expedition at his own cost, and conquer these lands which were believed to be more beautiful and richer than those of Mexico and Peru. His own enthusiasm excited that of others; hundreds of young men of birth and fortune enlisted in this enterprise. Property of all kinds, vineyards, houses, valuables, were all sold to purchase arms, horses, and equipments for this undertaking. From the multitudes who offered themselves for this expedition of conquest and discovery, its leader selected six hundred young men, all adventurous and ambitious as himself.

The landing of this proud and gallant company on the shores of the new world was a splendid spectacle. Their banners floated in the soft breezes of Florida; the golden sun of Florida reflected itself in their armour; and thus they galloped onward, “very gallant,” says the old chronicle, “silk upon silk,” along the sea-shore of that region which they believed to be full of gold and great cities, and the destined conquerors of which they esteemed themselves to be.

Ferdinand de Soto, who, like Cortes, wished to remove all possibility of a retreat, either for himself or his companions, sent back all his vessels to Cuba, where he had left his young wife as governor during his absence. It was in the month of May, 1539, when they set out; taking with them weapons of all kinds, work-tools and an iron-forge, as well as chains and bloodhounds for the subjection of their captives. They also took with them a singular accompaniment for so gallant an army, a drove of three hundred swine, which were intended to stock the country when the commander should have selected his seat of government; and these swine were driven with the expedition through nearly the whole of its route.

They advanced onward through a wilderness day after day, and week after week, amid continual skirmishes with the natives, and ever, as they went, mass was performed by priests with all the pomp of Catholic ceremonial; and cruelties were practised on their captives, whilst they amused themselves by gaming. Thus they wandered onward through uncultivated regions for upwards of five months, and then established themselves in winter-quarters. In twelve months they had advanced to the ocean—to the very spot whence Narvaez had embarked; they had found plenty of maize, but no gold, and no cities but only small Indian villages. Next spring they broke up their winter camp, and set out for a remote country, of which they had heard, lying to the north-east, abounding in gold and silver, and the ruler of which was a woman.

They now advanced to the north-east, made a long and arduous journey, and arrived indeed at the territory of the queen, of whose wealth they had conceived such extravagant hopes; but the gold proved to be copper, and the silver thin plates of mica. Still de Soto advancing with a perseverance worthy of a better cause, came to the spring-heads of vast rivers, and thus reached the Highlands of Georgia, where he fell in with the peaceable and gentle Cherokee Indians. This was the second year of his wanderings. Some of de Soto’s companions wished to settle down here in the midst of a beautiful region, and enjoy the riches of an abundant soil. But no,—de Soto would not listen to such a scheme: he had promised a second Peru and Mexico to Spain, and he would not desist from his wanderings till they were found. He was a resolute man, of few words, and his followers yielded themselves to his commands.

Again he heard of gold still further north, and despatched two horsemen, with Indian guides, to visit the country; and once more they returned with copper; gold there was none. They wandered still further, advancing into Alabama, where was a large Indian town, Mavilla, afterwards Mobile. The Indians rose in arms; a battle ensued; the Spanish cavalry were victors: it was the bloodiest battle ever known in Indian warfare. The Indians fought for nine hours, and several thousands were slaughtered; the town was burned to ashes, and numbers of Indians perished in the flames. The Spaniards also lost many of their number, together with horses and the whole of their baggage. Their situation was terrible in the extreme; food they had none, nor medicines for the wounded—all were lost. Fortunately for them, however, the spirit of the Indians was so completely broken, that they could no longer molest them. Spanish ships, from Cuba, now awaited them with supplies in Pensacola Bay, near Mavilla. But, fearing that his disheartened soldiers might leave him, and as he had no tidings of gold and great glory to send home, and was too proud to send any other, he turned away from the sea-coast, and again advanced inland.

Winter overtook them in the northern parts of Mississippi, with severe frost and snow, and they established themselves in an Indian village, which the inhabitants had deserted at their approach, and in the fields of which the maize still remained uncut. The Indians returned in the depth of winter and in the dead of night, and set fire to the village. All that had been saved from the fires of Mavilla was now destroyed; they lost all their beloved swine, many of their horses, and all their clothes. Their sufferings were intense. De Soto ordered the chains to be taken from the captives, and new weapons to be forged. Clothed in skins and mats of ivy-leaves, he still advanced further west in search of the land of gold. For seven days they wandered on through wildernesses of forest and morass, and reached the Indian settlements in the vicinity of the Mississippi. De Soto was the first European who beheld that mighty river. He saw it then as the familiar trader on its banks beholds it now, rolling its immense mass of waters through a rich alluvial soil, more than a mile broad, and carrying trees and timber down its turbid flood.

In May, 1541, the Spaniards, having constructed boats, crossed the river, and proceeded westward into Arkansas. The natives, regarding them with reverence, and believing them to be the children of the sun, brought their blind to them, that they might receive sight. “Pray only to God who dwells in heaven,” replied de Soto, “and He will give you what you need.”

De Soto proceeded onward in the direction of the north-west, and reached the mountains of the White River, two hundred miles from the Mississippi; but there were neither gold nor precious stones in these mountains. They took up their third winter-quarters among peaceful Indians, who pursued agriculture rather than war; and the young cavaliers found their pastime in practising cruelties on the natives. In the spring, de Soto descended the White River, and became entangled in the midst of dismal swamps; Indian settlements there were none; the whole country was apparently interminable morass, forest, and cane brake. De Soto received in gloomy silence this report from scouts whom he had sent forward. Horses and men lay dying around him; and, to add still more to his distress, hostile Indians were coming up on all sides. His ambitious pride was now changed into deep melancholy, and his health gave way under the pressure of disappointed hope. Of his gallant company, three hundred alone remained.

Feeling the approach of death, he summoned his people round him, and named his successor. The following day he died. “His soldiers,” says Bancroft, “pronounced his eulogy by sorrowing for his loss. The priests chanted over his body the first requiem that was ever heard by the waters of the Mississippi.” His body was wrapped in a mantle, and, in the dead of night, his soldiers bore him to the middle of the Mississippi, and silently sunk his body in the river.

Singular to say, this was once more the month of May, four years from the time of his setting forth; “the spring burst forth gloriously over the Mississippi,” says a writer on this subject, “but de Soto rose up no more to meet it.” “The discoverer of the Mississippi,” concludes Bancroft, “slept beneath its waters. For four years he had wandered to and fro over a great portion of the continent in search of gold, but he found nothing so remarkable as his place of burial.”

The successor whom de Soto had appointed now attempted to lead back the remnant of the party by the way of Mexico; but, after several months’ wanderings and adventures among the hostile tribes of the western prairies, they retraced their steps to the Mississippi, on the banks of which they passed the winter. Here they constructed boats, which were ready for their embarkation in the month of July, and on the 20th of September, 1543, they arrived, half naked and famished with hunger, at a Spanish settlement near the mouth of the river Panuco, in Mexico.

Such was the discovery of the Mississippi.

The next adventurer on this ill-fated field was Louis Cancello, a priest of the Dominican order, anxious to convert the nations: his scheme, however, fared no better than those of others; the missionary priests were looked upon with suspicion, and Cancello and two of his companions fell martyrs to their zeal.

A spell seemed to rest upon these shores; nevertheless the name of Florida, as if it were full of good omen, was conferred upon the whole extent of American territory, not only on the portion of Florida proper on the Mexican gulf, but northward to Canada itself, all of which vast territory was claimed by Spain; still not a fort was erected on its shores, not a single colony was established; and when at length a permanent settlement of the Spaniards was effected in Florida, it was only by means of jealous and bloody bigotry.

But this will lead us back to France and French affairs. The good Coligny, admiral of France, who had long been seeking an asylum for the persecuted Huguenots in America, and who indulged the hope of establishing a French protestant empire in that country, obtained, after long perseverance, a commission from the king to that purpose, and in 1562 a squadron sailed for Florida, under command of John Ribault, of Dieppe, a brave man and a true protestant, accompanied by some of the best young French nobility, together with experienced troops. Arriving on the coast in the month of May, 1562, he discovered St. John’s River, which he named the river of May; the shores were covered with groves of mulberries, and the whole scenery was of a pleasing character. He sailed northward, giving French names to the rivers and prominent points of the shore, until he reached Port Royal entrance, near the southern boundary of Carolina, and here he resolved to found the colony. A fort was erected, and called Fort Charles, or the Carolina, in honour of Charles IX. of France, and this name, given a century before the English took possession, became the adopted name of the country.

The site of the infant colony delighted its founders; its harbour was capable of containing a whole navy; immense oaks, the growth of centuries, groves of pine, abounding with game, and flowers whose perfume filled the air, rendered the country beautiful. Ribault left twenty-six men to keep possession, and returned to France for fresh emigrants and supplies; but in the meantime civil war had begun to rage in that country, and the reinforcements for which Ribault had come were not to be had. The condition of the colonists became desperate; dissensions broke out among them; and the following spring they embarked in a hastily-constructed brigantine for their native land. Their provisions, however, were insufficient for the voyage, and they must have perished of famine had they not fallen in with an English vessel, which received them on board.

Again, two years later, Coligny renewed his endeavours for the colonisation of Florida, and three ships were sent out under the command of Laudonniere. Emigrants offered abundantly, for the fame of the climate of Florida had awoke general enthusiasm; life there, it was said, was extended to twice its usual limits, besides which, it was still believed that a golden realm lay hidden in its interior, and Coligny, who wished to obtain accurate knowledge of the country, engaged a painter called De Morgues to accompany the expedition, that he might make coloured drawings of all scenes and objects which interested him.

The misfortunes of the late colonists of Port Royal deterred the present from going thither; and after a little search they discovered so beautiful a situation, that the most delightful anticipations were excited. The Huguenots thanked God in hymns of praise for a glorious home of peace, as they believed, in the wilderness. The natives received them with the utmost kindness, rival tribes vying which should show them most distinction. Again the new colony received the name of Carolina.

Many of the emigrants, however, who had come out in this expedition were dissolute adventurers; their excesses turned the hearts of the Indians against them: the supplies were wasted, and famine threatened them. Under pretence of desiring to escape from famine, some of their number were permitted to embark for New Spain, but no sooner was this liberty granted than they commenced a series of piracies against the Spaniards. Before long their vessel was taken. Theirs was the first aggression in the New World, and soon brought down its punishment. The pirate vessel being seized, most of its men were sold as slaves, and such as escaped to Carolina were condemned to death by Laudonniere. Meantime the famine had become extreme; for three months there seemed no prospect but death for the little colony, and they must have perished had not Sir John Hawkins, the famous slave-merchant, who was just returning from the West Indies, whither he had conveyed a cargo of unfortunate Africans, relieved their wants, and even furnished them with a vessel, in which they were about to return to France, when Ribault arrived with fresh emigrants, abundant supplies, implements of husbandry, and domestic animals of all kinds. New life was infused into the colony; God was thanked fervently, and protestantism, it was hoped, had now found a safe and fixed abode in the beautiful Florida.

In the meantime news reached Spain that a company of French protestants had established themselves in the Spanish territory. Spain at home was inveterate against France, Catholicism against protestantism; and Pedro Melendez de Avilès, a soldier long accustomed to scenes of blood, a bigoted catholic, a naval commander, who, having often been employed against pirates, was accustomed to acts of summary vengeance, and who had been appointed to the government of Florida on condition that he subdued it in three years, introduced at least four Jesuit priests, and imported five hundred negro slaves for the cultivation of the sugar-cane, which it was intended to introduce, was now hastily despatched to his office, with the strict injunction to extirpate all heretics. The fury in Spain against the heretic-settlers in Florida waxed hot; between two and three thousand persons, soldiers, sailors, priests, Jesuits, etc., engaged in the expedition. Melendez, who considered that “celerity was the secret of success,” lost no time in any of his movements. Early in September he came in sight of Florida, and discovering some French ships, gave them chase, but could not overtake them. A few days later he reached a beautiful bay and river, and as it happened to be the day of St. Augustine, he gave that name to both. Soon after which, sailing northward, he discovered the French ships at anchor.

The French demanded his name, and the purport of his voyage. “I am Melendez of Spain,” replied he, “sent with strict orders from my king to gibbet and behead all the protestants in these regions. The Frenchman, who is a catholic, will I spare; every heretic shall die!”

The French ships not being prepared to fight, cut their cables and fled, and the Spaniards, unable to overtake them, returned to the harbour of St. Augustine. Here they took solemn possession of the continent in the name of the bigoted Philip II., whom they proclaimed king of all North America, and having performed mass, laid the foundations of St. Augustine, the oldest town, by forty years, of any in America.

In a few days the French put out to sea, with the intention of attacking the Spaniards within the harbour; but a furious storm overtook them, which lasted for more than two weeks, and wrecked every vessel; the Spaniards in the meantime lying in harbour comparatively safe. Melendez now marched his troops across the country, and suddenly made an attack upon the defenceless French settlement, putting to death all whom he could seize, men, women, and children, the aged and the sick; some few escaping, fled to the woods and afterwards took shelter on board the only two ships which had been spared by the tempest. The Spaniards, enraged that even a remnant had escaped, insulted and mangled the corpses of the dead. After these scenes of horror were completed, mass was performed, and the site of a church was selected on the very ground yet crimson and sodden with the blood of the inoffensive inhabitants.

The few who had escaped to the ships were in the utmost want of every necessary of life, worn out by fatigue, and destitute both of food and water. Melendez, who was aware of their wretched condition, promised them mercy if they would surrender themselves into his hands. Being men of truth themselves, they believed his words and capitulated. As they stepped on shore, however, their hands were at once tied behind them, and they were marched as prisoners into St. Augustine. A signal was given; and to the sound of drums and trumpets they were all massacred, with the exception of a few catholics and a few mechanics, who were reserved for slaves; and over their mangled remains was placed the inscription, “This is done not as unto Frenchmen, but as unto heretics.” Nine hundred true men, worshippers of God according to their protestant faith, are supposed to have perished on those shores, victims of bigotry.

The French government did not trouble itself about these things; the Huguenots and the French nation, however, resented them keenly. A bold soldier of Gascony, Dominic de Gourgues, a man whose life had been a series of adventures and hardships, sold his property to acquire the means of avenging the wrongs of his fellow-countrymen and believers. With one hundred and fifty men and three ships he embarked for Florida; they were but a handful against the Spanish power, but their object was not conquest—it was retributive justice, if not revenge. Like Melendez he came suddenly; and surprising two Spanish forts on St. John’s river, took them at once, together with a still larger fort on the spot where the unfortunate French settlement had stood. He executed summary justice, hung his prisoners on the trees, with this inscription, “I do this not as unto Spaniards or mariners, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers.” And the Indians, who had been ill-used both by the French and the Spaniards, looked on well pleased to see their enemies preying one on another.

Dominic de Gourgues, having avenged his countrymen, again disappeared with his ships, and France disavowing all cognisance of the circumstance, relinquished any claim to Florida; and Spain remained in possession. The Spanish dominion in America was magnificent. Cuba was the centre of the West Indian possessions. “From the remotest south-eastern cape of the Carribean,” says the historian. “along the whole shore, to the Cape of Florida, and beyond it, all was hers. The Gulf of Mexico lay embosomed within her territories.”

About the time when the impetuous Dominic de Gourgues returned to France from his swoop of vengeance in Florida, Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the most gallant spirits of the age, suddenly left his studies at Oxford to take part with the Huguenots in their struggles against the catholics. From his protestant friends he heard of the massacre which De Gourgues had avenged, and from that brave man himself, and his associates, learnt much also of the country where these scenes had occurred. The imagination of Raleigh was inflamed; on his return to England he found the same spirit afloat; a few of the unfortunate Huguenots had escaped to England, and their tale of wrong had interested even Queen Elizabeth herself. Hawkins, too, the slaver, who had relieved the famishing settlement, had much to tell of the wonderful regions where these things had been done; so had De Morgues, the landscape painter, who had fortunately escaped with, many sketches of its scenery. The leading minds of England were turned to Florida.

From the time of Cabot, England had never wholly given up her intercourse with the New World. English mariners, as well as French, frequented the fisheries of Newfoundland. Henry VIII. declared that he considered the discovery of the North “to be his charge and duty;” and Hakluyt records a wild sea-voyage, conducted by a man named Hore, in which marvellous things are told far outdoing those of the Ancient Mariner. The search for the north-western passage still continued; the fleets of Willoughby and Chancellor set sail. In the north their ships parted company. The fate of Willoughby was an early tragedy in those mournful and fatal seas. After a winter of great hardship, the vessels which went in search of him the following spring found him dead in his cabin, his journal open before him, containing a record of the ship’s sufferings to the very day of his death, and with his faithful crew lying dead around him. Chancellor, on the contrary, was driven in a north-eastern direction, and reached the harbour of Archangel, and thus the Russian nation, like another New World, emerged, as it were, into being. Joint-stock companies, for the discovery of unknown lands, were first formed in 1555. The marriage of Mary with Philip of Spain brought the magnificent discoveries and productions of that country into a closer proximity with England, and a desire to emulate the successes of Spain in the New World was excited.

The spirit of Elizabeth seconded that of her people. The nation had now assumed a more determined and a prouder front in their resentment of the attempt of Spain to render them an appendage to the Spanish crown, and by the successful struggle of protestantism against catholicism. England strengthened her navy; frequented the bays and banks of Newfoundland; sent out adventurers to Russia and Africa; endeavoured to reach Persia by land, and enlarged her commerce with the East, whilst her privateers lay in wait at sea for the rich galleons of Spain. The study of geography was universally cultivated, and books of travels and adventures by land and sea were eagerly read. Frobisher, the boldest mariner who ever crossed the ocean, set forth to discover the long-sought-for north-western, passage, and Queen Elizabeth waved her hand to him in token of favour, as he sailed down the Thames. Frobisher, like all the rest of the world, hoped to find gold. If the Spaniards had found gold in the south, England was confident of finding gold in the north. Elizabeth entered enthusiastically into the scheme of planting a colony among the wealthy mines of the polar regions, where gold, it was said, lay on the surface of the ground. Frobisher was followed by a second fleet, But they found only frost and icebergs.

Whilst Frobisher and his ships were thus vainly endeavouring to discover an el Dorado in the north, Sir Francis Drake was acquiring immense wealth as a freebooter on the Spanish main, and winning great glory by circumnavigating the globe, after having explored the north-western coast of America, as far north as the forty-third degree. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, also, a man of sound judgment and deeply religious mind, obtained a charter from Queen Elizabeth, in 1578, for the more rational purposes of colonisation. He set sail with three vessels, accompanied by his step-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh; but a series of disasters befell them; the largest vessel was wrecked, and a hundred perished, among whom was Parmenius, a Hungarian scholar, who had gone out as historian of the expedition. On the homeward voyage they were overtaken by a great storm. “We are as near to heaven on sea as on land,” said Sir Humphrey Gilbert, sitting abaft with a book in his hand. And the same night his little vessel went down, and all on board perished.

The brave spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh was not discouraged, though he deeply deplored the loss of his noble step-brother. He resolved now to secure to England those glorious countries where the poor French protestants had suffered so deeply; and a patent was readily granted, constituting him Lord Proprietary, with almost unlimited powers, according to the Christian protestant faith, of all land which he might discover between the 33rd and 40th degrees of north latitude. Under this patent, Raleigh despatched, as avant-courier ships, two vessels under the command of Philip Armidas and Arthur Barlow. In the month of July they reached the coast of North America, having perceived while far out at sea the fragrance as of a delicious garden, from the odoriferous flowers of the shore. Finding, after some search, a convenient harbour, they landed, and offering thanks to God for their safe arrival, took formal possession in the name of the queen of England.

The spot on which they landed was the island of Wocoken. The shores of this part of America are peculiar, inasmuch as, during one portion of the year, they are exposed to furious tempests, against which the low flat shore affords no defence of harbourage; in the summer season, on the contrary, the sea and air are alike tranquil, the whole presenting the most paradisaical aspect, whilst the vegetation is calculated to strike the beholder with wonder and delight. The English strangers beheld the country under its most favourable circumstances; the grapes being so plentiful that the surge of the ocean, as it lazily rolled in upon the shore, dashed its spray upon the clusters. “The forests formed themselves into wonderfully beautiful bowers, frequented by multitudes of birds. It was like a garden of Eden, and the gentle, friendly inhabitants appeared in unison with the scene. On the island of Roanoke they were received by the wife of the king, and entertained with Arcadian hospitality.”

Charmed by all that they had seen, the English voyagers returned, after a very short stay, having laden their ships with cedar, to which were added skins and furs obtained from the Indians, and sassafras, which had been introduced from Florida by the Spaniards, and was in great repute as a panacea; besides all this they carried with them two natives of this western paradise, Manteo and Wanchese. So glowing were the descriptions which they gave of the country that Elizabeth, who regarded it as an honour to her reign that during it these glorious lands had been discovered, conferred upon them her favourite appellation of Virginia.

The report brought by these heralds of discovery excited the utmost enthusiasm, and Raleigh, who was now knighted, made active preparations for a second expedition, which should consist of seven vessels, and take out one hundred and fifty colonists. Sir Ralph Lane was appointed governor of the colony, and Sir Richard Grenville, one of the bravest men of the age, took the command of the fleet. They set sail on the 9th of April, 1585, reckoning among their company many distinguished men—Cavendish, afterwards the circumnavigator, and Hariot, the inventor of the system of notation in modern algebra, being of the number. After some few disasters and narrowly escaping shipwreck on the coast of Florida, they reached Roanoke, where it was intended to found the colony. Manteo, one of the Indians who had accompanied the former party to England, and had now returned, being first sent on shore to announce their intention to the natives. Immediately afterwards a circumstance occurred which is to be regretted. Grenville, Lane, and others of the principal adventurers, made an excursion up the country, being everywhere well received by the natives. At one Indian town, however, a silver cup was stolen, and not being immediately restored, Grenville ordered the village to be set fire to, and the standing corn destroyed. This naturally incensed the natives.

The colonists, however, landed, and soon afterwards the ships returned to England; Grenville taking a rich Spanish prize by the way. Lane and his colonists explored the country, and Lane wrote home: “It is the goodliest soil under the cope of heaven; the most pleasing territory in the world; the continent is of a huge and unknown greatness, and very well peopled and towned, though savagely. The climate is so wholesome that we have none sick. If Virginia had but horses and kine and were inhabited by English, no realm in Christendom were comparable to it.” Hariot’s observations were directed to “the natural inhabitants,” and to the productions of the colony with reference to commerce; he observed the culture of tabacco, used it himself, and had great faith in its salutary qualities; he paid great attention to the maize and the potatoe, “which when boiled he found to be good eating.” He carefully studied the manners, customs, and faith of the Indians; exhibited to them his mathematical instruments, guns, clocks, etc., exciting in their minds the utmost respect and reverence for the English, as pupils and favourites of heaven. He exhibited the Bible to them wherever he went, and explained its truths, which affected them with profound regard and awe. The fire-arms which killed at a distance filled them with superstitious terror. Their wise men prophesied that “more of the English generation would yet come, who would kill theirs and take their places.”

In the meantime, the mass of the colonists, who were rabid for gold, listened to wonderful tales invented by artful Indians, who wished to be rid of these awe-inspiring strangers. The river Roanoke, they said, gushed forth from a rock near the Pacific Ocean, that a nation dwelt on its remote banks, skilful in refining gold, and that they occupied a city the walls of which glittered with pearls. Even sir Richard Lane was credulous enough to believe these tales, and ascended the river with a party in order to reach this golden region. They advanced onward, finding nothing, till they were reduced to the utmost extremity of famine. The Indians, disappointed by their return, resolved to cultivate no more corn, so that they might be driven from the country by want, and the English, divining their views, having invited the chief to a conference, fell upon him and slew him, with many of his followers. Lane was unfit for his office. This act of treachery exasperated the Indians to such a degree that they would no longer give him supplies. The colony was about to perish by famine, as the Indians desired, when Sir Francis Drake appeared outside the harbour with a fleet of twenty-three ships. He was on his way from the West Indies, and was now come to visit his friends. No visit could have been more opportune nor more welcome.

He supplied their wants; appropriated to them a vessel of seventy tons with pinnaces and small boats. All that they could need for sustenance or for the pursuit of discovery, he appointed for them. Strange however to say, a sudden storm came on; there was no security for the fleet but to weigh anchor and go out to sea; when the tempest was over, and Drake returned to the shore, he found all his preparations for the colony scattered as wrecks on the waves. The colonists were completely disheartened; and at their entreaties Drake received them on board his ships, and conveyed them back to England, after an absence of about twelve months, during which time they had accustomed themselves to the use of tobacco, which they now carried home with them.

They were gone; but scarcely had they left the shore, when a ship despatched by Raleigh, who had not forgotten them, arrived with all possible supplies, but which, finding the colony had vanished, set sail again homeward; and scarcely had it left the shore, when Sir Richard Grenville arrived with three ships, and he, too, after vainly searching about for the missing colony, departed, leaving fifteen men on Roanoke to keep possession for the English.

CHAPTER III.
DISCOVERIES CONTINUED.

Raleigh, spite of the ill-success which had attended his efforts at colonisation, was not discouraged; and the report which Hariot made of the capabilities and resources of the country strengthened the public faith. Profiting by adversity, Raleigh now resolved to attempt an agricultural colony; to send out families, men with wives and children, so that the emigrant should take his home, as it were, with him. He granted a charter of incorporation for the settlement, and established, before it left the country, a municipal government for his projected city of Raleigh; Captain John White being appointed governor. The emigrants were embarked at the expense of Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth declining to afford any aid. Women were now among them, and a sufficiency of implements of husbandry seemed to give promise of successful industry. They arrived at Roanoke in July, expecting to find the fifteen men whom Grenville had left there; but the fort which had been built was in ruins, the houses were deserted; wild deer were feeding amid the rank vegetation of the gardens, and human bones lay scattered everywhere. Spite of all these melancholy tokens, the new-comers resolved here to build their city of Raleigh; here to establish the seat of their future government.

Raleigh was again unfortunate in his choice of governor; Captain John White was no better fitted for his post than Sir Richard Lane had been. Aggressions on the Indians were the first acts of the colonists. The mother and relatives of Manteo welcomed the English with the utmost cordiality, but spite of this, a party of English seeing a company of natives sitting by their fires at night, and fearing lest they might be enemies, fell upon them, and after killing a considerable number discovered that they were their friends. Manteo, however, remained faithful, and by command of Sir Walter Raleigh received Christian baptism and the rank of a feudal baron, as the Lord of Roanoke.

It was soon found that many things were yet needful for the comfort of the emigrants, and the governor sailed for England to obtain them. A gloom overspread the little colony as the ship was ready to depart, and women as well as men besought of him to return speedily with reinforcements and supplies. At this moment he would have remained with them, and shared their sufferings and privations, but they compelled him to go. Previous to his departure, his daughter, Eleanor Dare, the wife of one of the emigrants, gave birth to a female child, the first offspring of English parents born in America; the child was called Virginia Dare.

When White reached England he found the whole nation absorbed by the threats of a Spanish invasion; Raleigh, Grenville, and Lane, Frobisher, Drake, and Hawkins, all were employed in devising measures of resistance. It was twelve months before Raleigh, who had to depend almost entirely upon his own means, was able to despatch White with supplies; this he did in two vessels. White, who wished to profit by his voyage, instead of at once returning without loss of time to his colony, went in chase of Spanish prizes, until at length one of his ships was overpowered, boarded, and rifled, and both compelled to return to England. This delay was fatal. The great events of the Spanish Armada took place, after which Sir Walter Raleigh found himself embarrassed with such a fearful amount of debt, that it was no longer in his power to attempt the colonisation of Virginia; nor was it until the following year that White was able to return, and then also through the noble efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh, to the unhappy colony Roanoke. Again the island was a desert. An inscription on the bark of a tree indicated Croatan; but the season of the year, and the danger of storms, furnished an excuse to White for not going thither. What was the fate of the colony never was known. It has been conjectured that through the friendship of Manteo they had probably escaped to Croatan; perhaps had been, when thus cruelly neglected by their countrymen, received into a friendly tribe of Indians, and become a portion of the children of the forest. The Indians had, at a later day, a tradition of this kind, and it has been thought that the physical character of the Hatteras Indians bore out the tradition.

The kind-hearted and noble Raleigh did not soon give up all hopes of his little colony. Five different times he sent out at his own expense to seek for them, but in vain. The mystery which veils the fate of the colonists of Roanoke will never be solved in this world. “Roanoke,” says Bancroft, “is now almost uninhabited; the intrepid pilot and the hardy wrecker, rendered bold by their familiarity with the dangers of the ocean, and unconscious of the associations by which they are surrounded, are the only tenants of the spot, where the inquisitive stranger may still discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new settlement were erected.”

Speaking of Raleigh and his many and rare virtues, Bancroft adds—“The judgments of the tribunal of the Old World are often reversed at the bar of public opinion in the New. The family of the chief author of early colonisation in the United States was reduced to beggary by the government of England, and he himself finally beheaded. After a lapse of nearly two centuries the State of North Carolina, by a solemn act of legislation, revived in its capital the City of Raleigh; and thus expressed its confidence in the integrity, and a grateful respect for the memory, of the extraordinary man, who united in himself as many kinds of glory as were ever combined in one individual, and whose name is indissolubly connected with the early period of American history.”

The fisheries of the north and the efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh at colonisation had trained a race of men for discovery. One of these, Bartholomew Gosnold, determined upon sailing direct from England to America, without touching at the Canaries and the West Indies, as had hitherto been the custom; and with the aid of Raleigh he “well nigh secured to New England the honour of the first permanent English colony.” He sailed in a small vessel directly across the ocean, and in seven weeks reached the shore of Massachusetts, but not finding a good harbour sailed southward, and discovered and landed on a promontory which he called Cape Cod, which name it retains to this day. Sailing thence, and still pursuing the coast, he discovered various islands, one of which he called Elizabeth, after the Queen, and another Martha’s Vineyard. The vegetation was rich; the land covered with magnificent forests; and wild fruits and flowers burst from the earth in unimagined luxuriance—the eglantine, the thorn, and the honeysuckle; the wild pea, tansy, and young sassafras; strawberries, raspberries, and vines. In the island was a little lake, and in the lake a rocky islet, and here the colonists resolved to build their storehouse and fort, the nucleus of the first New England colony. The natural features of the place, the historian tells us, remain unchanged—the island, the little lake, and the islet are all there; the forests are gone, while the flowers and fruit are as abundant as ever. But no trace remains of the fort.

Friendly traffic with the natives of the mainland soon completed a freight, which consisted of furs and sassafras, and Gosnold was about to sail, when the hearts of the intending colonists failed them; they dreaded the attack of Indians and the want of necessary supplies from home. All, therefore, re-embarked, and in five weeks reached England.

Gosnold and his companions brought home such favourable reports of the country and the shortness of the voyage, that the following year a company of Bristol merchants despatched two small vessels, under the command of Martin Pring, for the purpose of exploring the country and commencing a trade with the natives. They carried out with them trinkets and merchandise suited for such traffic, and their voyage was eminently successful. They discovered some of the principal rivers of Maine, and examined the coast of Massachusetts as far south as Martha’s Vineyard. The whole voyage occupied but six months. Pring repeated his voyage in 1606, making still more accurate surveys of the country.

English enterprises for discovery were rapidly continued. An expedition, promoted by the Earl of Southampton and Lord Arundel of Wardour, and commanded by George Weymouth, having explored the coast of Labrador, discovered the Penobscot River. It left England in March, and in six weeks reached the American continent near Cape Cod.

We must, however, now return to the French and their colonies, of whom we have lost sight for some time.

In 1598, the Marquis de la Roche received a commission from Henry IV. to found a French empire in America. But his enterprise utterly failed. His proposed colonists were the refuse of the jails; these he conveyed to the desolate Sable Island, on the coast of Nova Scotia, where, after languishing twelve years, they were allowed to return, and their offences pardoned in consideration of their sufferings.

Five years later, in 1603, a company of merchants of Rouen resolved to attempt a scheme of colonisation, and Samuel Champlain, a man “marvellously delighting in such enterprises,” was placed at its head. He proceeded to Canada, carefully studied the geography of the country and the manners of the Indians, and selected Quebec as a commodious situation for a settlement, near the place where, in 1541, Cartier had passed the winter and erected a fort. Champlain returned to France, and De Monts, an able patriot and an honest Calvinist, obtained a patent from the French government, which conceded to him the sovereignty of Acadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degree of latitude, that is, from a degree south of New York city to one north of Montreal, with a monopoly of the fur trade, control and government of the soil, and freedom of religion for the Huguenots. Wealth and honour were expected from the expedition. He set sail with two vessels in March 1604, reached Nova Scotia in May, and spent the summer in trading with the natives and examining the coasts preparatory to a settlement.

The early colonists seem to have had a remarkable preference for islands; accordingly the company of De Monts selected an island near the mouth of the river St. Croix, in New Brunswick; here they passed a winter of intense suffering, and in the spring removed to a place in the Bay of Fundy, where was formed the first permanent settlement of the French in America, three years before a cabin had been erected in Canada. The settlement was called Port Royal, and the whole country, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the neighbouring islands, received the name of Acadia.

De Monts was superseded by Pourtrincourt, one of his company. The undertaking now assumed a religious character. The pope gave his benediction to all who went thither to evangelise the heathen; Marie de Medici contributed money, and the Marchioness de Guercheville gave her support. Jesuits were sent over, and the order itself enriched by imposts on the fishery and fur trade.

Jesuit priests commenced the conversion of the natives and the exploration of the country at the same time. The Indians of the Canadian territory, affected by the confiding humanity of the French priests, listened reverently to their teachings of salvation. A French colony within the United States was soon established, under the safeguard of religion. “The conversion of the heathen,” says Bancroft, “was the motive of the settlement; the natives venerated the Jesuit Biart as a messenger from heaven, and beneath the summer sky, round a cross in the centre of the hamlet, matins and vespers were regularly chanted. France and the Roman religion had appropriated the soil of Maine.”

In 1608, the company of merchants of Dieppe and St. Malo, who had been instrumental in depriving De Monts of his monopoly, founded Quebec, the whole undertaking, nevertheless, originating with Samuel Champlain, in concert with De Monts. Brick cottages were built, a few fields cleared, a few gardens laid out; the city of Quebec was begun. The following year, Champlain, attended by his two Europeans, joined an expedition of Indians against the Iroquois, and advanced as far into the interior as the lake which bears his name.

Seven years later, he once more advanced against his old enemies, the Iroquois. Wounded and alone, he spent a winter with the Hurons, and thus “a knight-errant in the forest, he carried his language, religion, and influence even to the hamlets of Algonquins near Lake Nipissing.”

The presence of Jesuits and Calvinists led to contentions; religious animosity and commercial jealousy checked for a time the progress of the colony; nevertheless, the wisdom and good conduct of Champlain established successfully the dominion of the French on the banks of the St. Lawrence. He lies buried in the land which he colonised.

About the same time that the French adventurer Champlain advanced inland to the lake which since then has borne his name, another discoverer, the celebrated Henry Hudson, was penetrating in the same direction from an opposite point. The great field for commercial enterprise which had been opened by traffic with the East, and the immense profits thence accruing, still kept alive the hope of a nearer passage than that by the Cape of Good Hope. Almost every maritime power of Europe had sent out ships in the vain hope of discovery, and so persevering was the quest, that no sooner was one failure recorded, than another expedition set forth.

It was on the failure of Denmark in this respect that a company of London merchants contributed a large sum of money for another attempt, under the command of Henry Hudson. Sailing to the north, with his only son as his companion, he deliberated, while coasting Greenland, as to whether he should circumnavigate that country or attempt to cross the pole; he discovered Spitzbergen, however, and was then compelled to return, from the immense icebergs which he encountered. The next year found him again amid the horrors of the polar seas, cherishing the vain hope of advancing across the pole into the warm, genial regions of southern Asia.

These two unsuccessful expeditions, though they could not daunt the courage of this bold navigator, quite discouraged the rich London merchants, and Hudson, who seems to have had a passion for the northern seas, hastened to Holland and offered his services to the Dutch East India Company, to explore for them this much-desired passage. Hudson had applied in the right quarter; the Dutch at that time took rank as one of the most maritime and commercial nations of Europe. Commerce was the breath of their lives, maritime adventure their occupation. The device on the first Dutch coin was a ship labouring on a stormy sea, without oar or sails. Speaking of the Republic of the United Netherlands, the historian Bancroft says, “the rendezvous of its martyrs had been the sea; the musters of its patriot emigrants had been on shipboard; they had hunted their enemy, as the whale-ships pursue their game, in every corner of the ocean.” Holland is but a peninsula, intersected by navigable rivers, protruding itself into the sea. And Zealand is composed of islands. Its inhabitants were nearly all fishermen; both provinces were by nature a nursery of sailors; the principles of navigation were imbibed from infancy; every house was a school for mariners. They became affluent through commerce. They were the connecting links between hemispheres. Their enterprising seamen displayed the flag of the republic from Southern Africa to the Arctic circle. The ships of the Dutch, said Raleigh, outnumber those of England and the other kingdoms. Amsterdam, the depôt of the merchandise of Europe and of the East, was esteemed, beyond dispute, the first commercial city of the world.

England and Holland had been allies in the contest with Spain; both had sent their ships to the Indian seas; they were both desirous of obtaining settlements in America. The Dutch, like all other nations connected either with the commerce of Asia or inquisitive with regard to America, turned their efforts to the discovery of a north-west passage. The unsuccessful attempts of the English mariners, Cabot, Frobisher, Willoughby, and others, mattered nothing to them; with that perseverance which, if it attain not to its object, generally wins some unlooked-for good, they, too, had sought repeatedly for the north-west passage, coasting for this purpose Nova Zembla and Muscovy. In 1596, one of their ships in this quest advanced within ten degrees of the pole; during the winter, when it was frozen in, on the shores of Nova Zembla, the sufferings of the unfortunate crew have hardly their parallel in any narrative of human endurance, misery, and terror at sea.

Hudson had, as we have said, offered his services in the right quarter. A vessel of discovery, called the Crescent, was soon equipped for him, and on the 4th of April, 1609, he set sail in search of the north-western passage, accompanied again by his son.

Masses of ice prevented his sailing toward Nova Zembla; turning to the south-west, therefore, and passing Greenland and Newfoundland, he ran along the coast of Acadia, and entered Penobscot Bay, on the southern coast of Maine, and so on southward to Cape Cod, which, supposing himself to have first discovered, he called New Holland, and still sailing southward, reached the entrance of Chesapeake Bay, where he remembered that his countrymen had a settlement. From this point he again turned northward, having discovered Delaware Bay; on the 3rd of September, about five months from the time of his setting sail, he anchored within Sandy Hook; the natives being attracted to the ship from the neighbouring shores, which he described as crowned with “goodly oaks.” After tarrying here a week, Hudson advanced up the Narrows, and anchored in a safe harbour at the mouth of the river. Every object around was worthy of admiration—the luxuriant grass, the trees, the flowers, and the fragrance which was diffused over all. For ten days the Crescent, the wonder of the Indians who congregated on the shore to witness the marvellous apparition and to welcome the strangers, ascended the river above the highlands, and some little distance beyond where the city of Hudson now stands, and whence he took a boat forward as far as the present city of Albany. He descended the stream rapidly, and on the 4th of October, set sail for Europe, “leaving,” says the eloquent historian, “once more to its solitude the land that his imagination, anticipating the future, described as the most beautiful in the world.”

A prosperous voyage returned Hudson to Europe. He landed at Dartmouth, and sent a splendid report of his discoveries to his Dutch employers; but he never revisited the country which he so much praised, nor the river to which time has now given his name. The Dutch East India Company declined, as he had failed to discover the north-western passage, to employ him further.

The following spring, however, an English company was formed, and Hudson was again abroad in search of a passage to the Pacific. He sailed directly north, passing Iceland, and Greenland, and Frobisher Straits, and advancing through the straits that now bear his name, and through which Cabot had entered a century before, emerged into an immense gulf, which he joyfully believed for some time to be the object of his search. He was naturally very unwilling to believe it a bay. Backwards and forwards he sailed; still hoping for success, and determining at all hazards to winter there, that he might be ready in the spring to pursue the important discovery. A horrible winter succeeded; the spring was late; famine stared him in the face; Hudson divided the last bread with his men, and wept as he gave it them, having consented to return. He believed that he was now on the point of success—of success, where all other nations had failed. With a heavy heart he commenced his homeward voyage, on June the 18th, yet still amid fields of ice. Two days afterwards the crew broke forth into mutiny; Hudson was seized, and, with his son, and seven others, four of whom were sick, was put in an open boat and turned adrift. Hudson, it is said by some, was a severe commander, and that his stern and pitiless temper provoked his crew to mutiny; one little circumstance, however, which is related of this tragical event, seems to contradict the assertions, and we are willing to believe its inference. The ship’s carpenter, Philip Staffe—his name deserves to be remembered—seeing his commander thus exposed, insisted upon sharing his fate. It was on Midsummer-day, and in a latitude where the sun at that season scarcely sets, and morning and night meet in the heavens, that this infamous deed was perpetrated. The fate of Hudson and his companions never was known. But his name and his memory are preserved in those dreary polar waters, which, seeming to have had a wonderful fascination for him in life, became in death his tomb.

“Such,” says Bancroft, “were the men and the voyages which led the way to the colonisation of the United States. The daring and skill of these earliest adventurers on the ocean deserve the highest admiration. The difficulties of crossing the Atlantic were new; the characters of the prevalent winds and currents were unknown. The possibility of making a direct passage was but gradually discovered. The ships at first employed for discovery were generally of less than one hundred tons burden. Frobisher sailed in a vessel of but twenty-five tons; two of those of Columbus were without decks; and so perilous were voyages considered, that the sailors were accustomed, before embarking, to perform acts of solemn devotion.”

CHAPTER IV.
COLONISATION OF VIRGINIA.

At the commencement of the seventeenth century a considerable revolution had taken place in the objects of American enterprise and discovery. As the greatness and the immense resources of the new world opened before the European mind, the grasp of mind itself and of human interests widened in proportion. The vain hope of the new passage to the East Indies, which prompted Columbus and others to sail first westward, was now becoming a secondary motive. To this had succeeded the desire for the acquisition of gold, a rabid appetite, whether a more bitter curse to the aborigines or the European it is hard to say; the islands and equatorial regions had also ministered to the luxury and indulgence of the conqueror by all their affluence of tropical productions. Selfishness and aggrandisement had prevailed; but gradually, as morning will succeed to night, a nobler and better purpose had begun to operate, and these new-found realms were regarded as a wide field on which to found states and establish Christian colonies; they had already become the refuge of the oppressed, they might be still more so: they had already given an impulse to commercial enterprise, they would do so still more.

England, of all European nations, was perhaps most fitted to profit by this enlarged sphere of operation. She had even then, apparently, an excess of population, and “the timid character of king James having thrown out of employment the gallant men who had served under Elizabeth, both by sea and land, no other choice was left to them but either to engage in the quarrels of other nations, or incur the hazards of seeking a new world.” The expeditions sent out by the intelligence of Sir Walter Raleigh, had turned the public mind to Virginia. Gosnold, a bold seaman, whose ship first sailed directly across the Atlantic, and who entertained the highest opinion of the capabilities of the New World for colonisation, had long endeavoured to persuade his friends to make trial of it for that purpose. Schemes of this kind were revolving in the minds of various people at the same time. Sir Ferdinand Gorges, who had learned much regarding America from George Weymouth, entertained the most favourable ideas on the subject; Sir John Popham, the lord chief justice of England; the assignees of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Richard Hakluyt, the historian of maritime adventure, all favoured the establishment of a colony in the New World.

Gosnold at length induced three persons to engage with him in the enterprise, Edward Maria Wingfield, a merchant of the west of England, Robert Hunt, a clergyman, and the brave and energetic John Smith, a man of singular perseverance, indomitable courage, and possessed of every quality necessary for the successful adventurer. These, assisted by the influence of Popham and Gorges, succeeded, in 1606, in obtaining from James I. a patent for the establishment of a colony in Virginia.

The English monarch claimed the whole of that portion of North America lying between the 34th and 45th degrees of north latitude, from Cape Fear on the coast of North Carolina to Halifax in Nova Scotia. This territory was now divided into two portions, North Virginia, extending from the 41st to the 45th degree, and South Virginia, from the 34th to the 38th degree.

The first was granted to a company of “knights, gentlemen and merchants of the west of England, incorporated as the Plymouth Company;” the second to a company of “noblemen, gentlemen and merchants, mostly resident in London,” and which was called the London Company. The intermediate district, included in neither patent, was open to both companies, yet neither were permitted to extend their settlement within a hundred miles of the other.

The conditions of the charter were homage and rent, the rent being one-fifth of the net produce of gold and silver, and of copper one-fifteenth. The supreme government was vested in a council residing in England; local government alone was permitted to the colonists themselves. The members of the supreme council were nominated by the king, and even over the colonial councils the king preserved a control, being able to nominate and remove according to his royal pleasure. In all respects the king was the supreme head; the legislative and executive power lay in his hands; the colonists had no power of self-government. This first charter granted to an English-American colony was merely a simple charter for commercial purposes. The English government cherished through the whole scheme the hope of a considerable revenue from its colonies in Virginia; a duty to be levied on vessels trading to the harbours was to be applied to the use of the colony for one and twenty years, after which time it should lapse to the king. The code of laws also for the colony was drawn up by the king; religion was strictly enjoined to be according to the teachings of the English church; no emigrant might withdraw his allegiance from the king nor dissent from the royal creed. Dangerous tumults and seditions were punishable by death, as well as murder, manslaughter, and adultery. All civil causes involving corporal punishment, fine or imprisonment, were to be determined by the president and council, who were appointed by the king. There was not an element of popular liberty in the whole stipulated form of government. It was, however, worthy of the peddling, narrow policy and kingcraft of the British Solomon. The only element of enlightenment which it contained was the injunction of kindness to the savage, and the employment of all proper means for his conversion.

The Plymouth company, on receiving their grant, despatched a vessel of discovery, which, however, was taken by the Spaniards. A second went out, and returning, made the most favourable report of the country; the following year, therefore, 1607, a hundred colonists were despatched under the command of George Popham. They landed at the mouth of Kennebec River, west of the Penobscot, and about one hundred and thirty miles north-east of where Boston now stands. Here they erected a few rude huts, threw up slight fortifications, and built a storehouse. The settlement was called St. George. They had landed in the autumn, and the winter was intensely severe; their sufferings were extreme, not only from the severity of the climate and the season, but from want of provisions, their storehouse having been destroyed by fire. Their president also died; and in the following year, disheartened by so disastrous a beginning, they returned to England. This terminated the efforts of the Plymouth company.

The London company despatched a little squadron of three ships, on the 19th of December, 1606, one hundred and nine years after the discovery of this northern portion of the New World by Cabot. The largest vessel did not exceed one hundred tons burden; and the number of colonists was one hundred and five men. England was as yet new to the subject of colonisation, and the party sent out were injudiciously selected; out of the hundred and five persons emigrating to a wilderness where were no homes and no cultivated land, there were only twelve labourers, very few mechanics, and only four carpenters, the rest were gentlemen of fortune, persons with no occupation, many of them of dissolute habits, who had joined the expedition in the hope of gain. Neither were there any men with families. King James had also commanded the names and instructions of the future councillors of the government to be sealed up in a tin box, to be opened only on their arrival in Virginia; none, therefore, on the voyage were possessed of authority—envy and jealousy arose among them, which produced dissension. Besides this, the voyage was long and tedious, owing to Newport, the commander, adhering to the old route by the Canaries and West India islands. The voyage was as long as a slow voyage to Australia in these days. The intention of the colonists had been to establish themselves at the old settlement of Raleigh, but a severe storm fortunately prevented the execution of this design, and drove them into the magnificent Bay of Chesapeake. The headlands at the entrance of the bay were named Cape Henry and Cape Charles, after the sons of the king, which appellation they still retain; and the ships soon afterwards coming into deep water “put the emigrants,” says Smith’s narrative, “into good comfort,” and that name was bestowed on the northern point of a broad river near the estuary of which they lay. The emigrants were greatly pleased by the aspect of the country around them. “Heaven and earth,” says Smith, “seemed never to have agreed better to frame a place for man’s commodious and delightful habitation.” They entered the noble river, which they called after King James, and spent seventeen days in exploring the banks, during which time they encountered a company of hostile natives, and two of their number were wounded. With another tribe of Indians they smoked the calumet of peace. A fine situation, fifty miles above the mouth of the river, was selected for their settlement, the place receiving the name of Jamestown. Here was formed the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

The important sealed-box was opened, and the names of Wingfield, Newport, Gosnold, Smith, and three others, were found nominated to the council. But the dissensions and jealousies which had broken out on the voyage here assumed a more determined aspect. Smith, almost the only man amongst them of superior character and powers of mind, had become an object of jealousy to his fellows, and the council having elected Wingfield as their president, proceeded to exclude Smith from their council, under pretence of his harbouring a design to murder the council, and establish himself as king of Virginia. Smith, however, who had a sincere friend in Robert Hunt, the clergyman, insisted on trial by jury, which he had a right to demand, and was not only acquitted, but restored to his station.

Whilst timber was being felled, wherewith to freight the ships for their homeward voyage, Newport, Smith, and some others, ascended the river to the falls, and were well received by Powhatan, the great Indian chieftain, called “the emperor of the country,” whose residence, a village of twelve wigwams, was near the present city of Richmond, the capital of the present State of Virginia. Powhatan, “a tall, sour, and athletic man, about sixty years old,” was from the first disposed to favour the English. When his people murmured at the intrusion of the strangers, he replied, “they hurt you not; they take but a little waste land.” Powhatan evidently did not possess the prophetic gift of the wise Indians who, twenty years before, on the very same shores, foretold that “there were more of the English generation yet to come, to kill theirs and take their places!”

Newport set sail for England in June, carrying with him a favourable report; but scarcely was he gone, when a change came over the aspect of all things. Disease broke out among the settlers; their provisions were not abundant, the water was bad: the glorious country around them, in the beauty of which they had at first rejoiced, became an appalling wilderness; the rank luxuriance of the soil needed clearance before new harvests could be expected, but the colonists were unused to and disinclined for labour; discontent gave place to despair; distress of mind added to disease of body, and within a fortnight after the departure of the ships, it is related that scarcely ten men out of the whole number were able to stand; the fortifications could scarcely be completed, and no ground tilled. The fort by autumn was filled with the groans of the sick, whose outcries night and day for six weeks rent the hearts of those who could afford no relief. Frequently three or four died in a night. Fifty had perished before the close of the autumn, and among these the brave and excellent Bartholomew Gosnold, the projector of the enterprise, and one of the few whose influence had preserved some degree of concord in the council.

To add to the misery of the time, Wingfield, their president, a selfish, unprincipled man, was found to have appropriated the best stores to his own use, himself living luxuriously, whilst the others were starving. On his detection, he attempted to escape to the West Indies, in a bark which had been left for the use of the colonists, but was prevented and expelled from the council. A new president was appointed, but one wholly inadequate to the exigencies of the colony, and by a sort of law of necessity, rather than by general consent, the management of all fell into the hands of Smith, the only man whose wisdom and energy were sufficient to retrieve their desperate affairs.

Smith was possessed of a spirit of heroic daring. He had set out on brave adventures when a boy, and though not yet thirty, had been a champion in the service of humanity and Christianity. In his youth he had fought for the independence of the Batavian republic, in the wars of the Low Countries. He had travelled through France, had visited Egypt, and returned by Italy. Again, eager for action and glory, he had fought against the followers of Mahomet on the borders of Hungary, and during these combats had distinguished himself, both with the Christians and infidels, by his magnanimity and bravery. His extraordinary courage had attracted the notice and gained for him the favour of the unfortunate Sigismund Bathori, Prince of Transylvania. At length, being overcome in a sudden skirmish among the wild valleys of Wallachia, he was left on the field of battle severely wounded. Being now taken captive he was sold as a slave in Constantinople. But here his romantic fortune by no means deserted him. A Turkish lady had compassion on his youth and sufferings, and wishing to befriend him sent him to a fortress in the Crimea. The intentions of his protectress were, however, defeated for some time; he fell into the hands of a savage taskmaster, whom however he killed, and then seizing a horse, gallopped away to freedom on the confines of Russia. Here again, the kindness of woman aided him in his extreme need; and thence, travelling across the country to Transylvania, he bade farewell to his brothers in arms, resolving to return “to his own country.” On his way home, however, tidings of civil war in northern Africa drew his steps aside, and he had many a perilous adventure in the realms of Morocco.

Reaching England, he heard of the projected colonisation of North America, a scheme so entirely consonant with his nature, that he entered into it at once, with all the energy and enthusiasm of his character. And now here he was, as we have seen, in the autumn of 1607, the sole hope and support of the infant colony of Virginia, which, without his integrity and force of character, his cheerful temperament and sagacity, must have miserably perished.

Smith was equal to the difficulties of his position; his was a mind fruitful in resources, and his high principle rendered him not only strict in the fulfilment of his own arduous duties, but enabled him to enforce the fulfilment of duty in others. Under the former governors the natives had become unfriendly, he, on the contrary, conciliated them; “he was more anxious,” says the record of the colony, “to gather provisions than to find gold;” and before the winter commenced, the Indians brought in voluntary supplies. The colonists also, influenced by his spirit, now laboured earnestly to complete their fortifications and erect huts for the winter.

As soon as the new spirit of activity and hope had given a brighter aspect to the affairs of the colony, Smith set out to accomplish one of the strictly-enjoined purposes of the colonists; that, namely, of seeking for a communication with the South Sea, by ascending some river which flowed from the north-west. A little above Jamestown, a river called Chickahominy, and which flowed into the James river, seemed to answer this purpose, it being supposed that the continent of America was narrow, and that some river unquestionably would be found to serve as a connexion between the two seas. Smith, who was not as ignorant as his employers, and who entertained no expectation of reaching the Pacific Ocean by any such means, nevertheless was well pleased, having left the colony in a comparative state of comfort and prosperity, with abundant provisions for the winter, to diversify his life by new adventures. Advancing therefore up the river Chickahominy, accompanied by two Englishmen and two Indian guides, as far as was practicable by boat, he struck into the interior with a single Indian guide, leaving the boat under the guardianship of the two Englishmen. Scarcely, however, had he set forth when the English, disregarding some of his injunctions, were attacked and killed by the Indians, and he himself suddenly assailed by a large party. Binding his Indian guide to his arm as a buckler, he fought manfully, killing three of his assailants; unfortunately, however, in stepping backwards, he found himself on the edge of a morass; his feet sank, and he was taken prisoner. Accustomed to the views and sentiments of savage hordes in his captivity in southern Russia, he now availed himself of that knowledge, and acted in accordance with it. He neither begged for his life from the Indians, nor appeared cast down. They carried him away captive, but his self-possession never forsook him; marching through the forest he took out his pocket-compass and explained to them its use, and then from the globe-like figure of that instrument, as he himself relates, instructed them regarding the roundness of the earth, and how “the sun did chase the night about the earth continually.” His captivity among this tribe of Indians was a more wonderful and interesting event than any other preserved in their traditions. He wrote to the colony at Jamestown, and his letter increased the wonder of the savages at the miraculous power which existed within him; he seemed to them to convey a magical intelligence to the paper. His fame spread through all the kindred tribes, and he was conveyed as an object of curiosity from the Indian settlements on the Chickahominy, to those on the Rappahannock and the Potomac, and so on to the residence of Opechancanough at Pamunky. Here, for three days, the Indian priests or sorcerers practised incantations and mystical ceremonies to ascertain the designs and character of their extraordinary prisoner. He remained perfectly calm, as if regardless of his fate or assured of his safety. The Indians were amazed and confounded; they had never, unless among their bravest men, seen a courage and equanimity equal to this, they treated him with hospitality and reverence, as if to propitiate the superior powers that dwelt within him.

POCAHONTAS INTERCEDING FOR JOHN SMITH.

The decision of his fate was referred to Powhatan, then residing at some little distance, and thither he was removed. The grim warriors of the forest, arrayed in all the pomp of savage attire, received him in solemn council. They deliberated and consulted among themselves, and feeling him to be a superior, as well as overcome by their fears, doomed him to death. His execution, however, was not immediate, and in the meantime he employed himself in making hatchets and stringing beads, which he gave to Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan, a girl of ten or twelve years of age, who for beauty of countenance and spirit, combined with gentleness, so far excelled all the maidens of her people that she was called “the nonpareil of the country.” At length the day of his doom was fixed; he was to die by the blows of the hatchet; the hour was come; he knelt on the place of execution, and already the uplifted hatchet was raised, but at the same moment Pocahontas, obeying an impulse of mercy, sprang to his side, threw her arms round his neck, and laying her head upon his, interposed herself between him and death. Her devotion and entreaties spared his life. The Indians, whom his superiority had so long awed, now resolved to make of him a friend and adopt him into their nation. They offered him every temptation which lay in their power to induce him to join them in attacking the white men who had settled at Jamestown. His firmness in resisting their offers inspired them with still higher respect, and they dismissed him with promises of friendship. His captivity was of great advantage to the colony; he not only had become acquainted with the country considerably inland, but with the Indian language and character, and was the means of establishing a friendly intercourse between the English colony and the tribes of Powhatan.

Returned to the colony, he found its numbers reduced to forty, and all disheartened and disunited, and the ablest among them so wearied by the hardships of colonial life that they were about to desert in the pinnace. Smith, at the hazard of his life, prevented this; by reason and firmness he once more established order, and the wants of the colony were relieved by the generous Pocahontas, who not satisfied with having saved the great chief from death, came now every few days with her companions, to bring baskets of corn for him and his people.

Newport was re-despatched, almost immediately on his return to the colony, with supplies and one hundred and thirty fresh emigrants in two vessels. The hope of the old colonists, which had revived at the sight of their new associates, soon died away again; for this reinforcement was only a repetition of the old disastrous elements. The new-comers were vagabond gentlemen, refiners of gold, goldsmiths, and jewellers. Smith, for the first time, was almost disheartened himself. They would neither build nor cultivate, but fancying that they should discover grains of gold in the micacious sands of a stream near Jamestown, they set to work, and, as Smith himself records, “there was now no talk, no hope, no work, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold.” The whole colony was mad about gold; and Newport having remained fourteen weeks in harbour, idling away his time and consuming with his crew the provisions of the colony, which were already considerably diminished by the accidental burning of the storehouse, sailed away, having laden his ship with the glittering earth, and, contrary to the assertions of Smith, believing that he was conveying home vast treasures. Wingfield and some of his partisans sailed with him. The other ship was, by the strenuous advice of Smith, laden with cedar, skins and furs, and furnished the first valuable remittance from Virginia to the mother-country.

Disgusted at the folly of the colonists, upon whom his better reason had no influence, Smith left them for awhile to their own devices, and with a few companions made two voyages during the summer months in an open boat to explore the Bay of Chesapeake and its affluents: and in this manner he accomplished about three thousand miles. He surveyed the Bay of Chesapeake to the Susquehanna. He was the first to make known to the English the fame of the Mohawks, who dwelt upon the great water, and had many boats and many men, and who, according to the feebler Algonquin tribes, made war upon the whole world. He discovered and explored the Patapsco, and probably entered the harbour of Baltimore. He entered the mighty Potomac, which at its outlet is seven miles broad, which he ascended beyond the present Mount Vernon and Washington, as far as its falls above Georgetown. Nor did he content himself with merely exploring rivers; he penetrated into the country, and established friendly relationships with various tribes of powerful Indians, many of them in perpetual warfare one with another. On his second expedition he brought back with him to Jamestown a cargo of corn. He prepared an account of his voyage, with descriptions of the country and the natives, accompanied by a map, which remains extant to this time, and which is singularly correct.

Shortly after his return, Smith was made president of the colony. Subordination and industry now began to prevail. The first corn of their own planting was reaped. Again Newport arrived with fresh emigrants, two of whom were women. There came also a few Poles and Germans to teach the art of making pitch, tar, potash and glass. The company in London wrote by this vessel in a very angry strain. They were greatly dissatisfied that their heavy outlays produced no return, for, of course, the shining earth which Newport carried back with him on his voyage was found to be utterly worthless. They now required a lump of gold; the positive discovery of a direct passage to the South Sea, or some of the lost company planted on Roanoke! “If,” said they, “the colonists do not send back valuable commodities to defray the expenses of the voyage, amounting to £2,000, they shall henceforth be left to manage for themselves, as banished men.”

Smith very justly wrote back, “I entreat you send me but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of the roots of trees, well provided, rather than a thousand of such as we now have.”

But for the wisdom and efficiency of this brave man, the colony must have perished. Making the best of such as he had, the gentlemen, whom necessity had taught the use of the axe, were employed in cutting down timber to freight his ship. He obliged them to work six hours a day; “he who will not work, shall not eat” was his law. Jamestown, by the close of autumn, assumed a more habitable appearance, but as yet only between thirty and forty acres of land had been brought into cultivation. Food was still so scanty that they were obliged to seek for supplies from the Indians. Smith went himself to Powhatan for this purpose, but found the old chief unfriendly; nay, a scheme was even laid to take his life, and again he was saved by Pocahontas, who came through a midnight storm to warn him of his danger. Newport was despatched with a cargo of timber, and specimens of tar, pitch, and potash, prepared by the Germans.

The corporate company in London boasted of the success of the enterprise, spite of their angry letter and threats to the colony itself, and powerful men became its adherents; among these was Cecil, the inveterate enemy of Raleigh, who had first called public attention to the colonisation of these very shores, and who now, at this time, was a prisoner in the Tower of London. This body having thus become more important at home, without any knowledge or sanction of the colony itself, entirely changed its constitution. The territory was also extended by a grant of all lands on the sea-coast, within the limits of two hundred miles north, and two hundred miles south of old Point Comfort.

A new charter was obtained, which transferred the power formerly vested in the king to the company. The shareholders at home were now the legislators. A governor, in whom was vested uncontrolled power, was to be appointed by them. The lives, liberties, fortunes of the colonists were to be all placed in the hands of this one man; to the colonists themselves not a single privilege was conceded.

Lord De la Ware was appointed governor, with a lieutenant-governor, admiral, vice-admiral, high-marshal, and other officers, with high-sounding titles under him, all of whom were appointed for life. A general enthusiasm was awakened at home towards this Virginian colony, and 500 emigrants offered themselves and were accepted. Lord De la Ware, not being able immediately to take possession of his new government, Newport, now admiral, set sail in June, 1609, with a fleet of nine vessels, Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers being sent out to administer the government till Lord De la Ware’s arrival. The admiral and the two deputy-governors sailing in the same vessel, disagreed on the important subject of precedence, and in a violent storm off the Bermudas were stranded on the rocks, and one vessel being lost, seven only reached Virginia.

Smith found himself now in a difficult position. The old charter under which he held authority was at an end; there was now, in the absence of the stranded vessel, which had on board all the officials, no one in the colony who could legally assume the government. The new emigrants were, if possible, worse than any who had hitherto arrived. “Dissolute gallants,” says the chronicle, “packed off to escape worse destinies at home, broken tradesmen, rakes and libertines, men fitter to breed a riot than form a colony.” “It was not the will of God,” says Bancroft beautifully, “that the new state should be formed of these materials—that such men should be the fathers of a progeny born on the American soil, who were one day to assert American liberties by their eloquence, and defend it by their valour.”

Smith, however, with his incomparable power of organisation and rule, contrived for some little time to bring these turbulent elements under control, and by devising new expeditions and settlements to give them employment. At last the explosion of a bag of gunpowder in his boat deprived the colony of his valuable services. He was severely injured; and as the colony furnished no surgical aid, he was compelled to return to England to seek it in one of the latelyarrived vessels, after having delegated his authority to Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland. He left about 500 persons in Virginia, well supplied with arms, provisions, and goods for Indian traffic. There were about sixty dwelling-houses in the town, besides a fort, a church, and a storehouse; there was a good stock of goats, of hogs, sheep, and poultry, together with a few horses; with about forty acres of land brought into cultivation. He had weathered the storm of the early days of the colony; in all the difficulties of his situation he had exhibited a courage and perseverance, a coolness of judgment, a patience and wisdom, which have scarcely ever been equalled. “He was,” says the historian, “accustomed to lead, not to send his men into danger; he would suffer rather than borrow, starve rather than not pay. He had nothing counterfeit in his nature; but was open, honest, and sincere.” We have dwelt long on the deeds and character of this brave, true man, because it is ever a pleasure to find such an one.

No sooner was Smith gone than subordination, and industry were at an end. The colonists abandoned themselves to idleness and indulgence; the store of provisions was consumed. Percy, to whom Smith had delegated his authority, had not the power to enforce it; no one regarded him. The unoffending Indians being attacked and murdered by the settlers, now became hostile, and refused to contribute any further supplies. The horrors of absolute famine faced them; a company of thirty seized a small vessel belonging to the colony, and sailed away as pirates. In the traditions of Virginia this horrible season of winter, famine, and crime, is known as the starving time. By the spring of the following year, of the 490 persons whom Smith had left in health and comparative comfort, only sixty remained, and these so reduced and dispirited that a few days longer would have terminated their sufferings.

This terrible time, like the flood in the days of Noah, was one of the wise judgments of God, sent to sweep away those who were unfit to live. It was not the will of God that the state should be formed of such base materials; we repeat the words, as true.

A few days would have ended the lives of the remnant that was left, but help came within the time. The ship that had been wrecked on the Bermudas arrived without loss of life. For nine months the shipwrecked men had remained on an uninhabited but fertile island, where they had been well sustained. From the wreck of their own ship and timber which they felled, they constructed two vessels, and in these safely reached their destination. They came expecting to be received by a prosperous and happy colony; far different was the scene which presented itself—the extremity of distress, death by starvation even for themselves if they remained, was that which they found. Gates resolved at once to sail for Newfoundland, and seek safety among the fishermen there. Four pinnaces lay in the river belonging to the colonists, and in these they all determined to embark; the colonists were anxious to leave for ever the scene of their misery, determining, as a last act, to burn the town in which they had suffered so much; this, however, Gates, who was the last to leave the shore, prevented. They fell down the stream with the tide, and “none,” says the chronicle, “dropped a tear, for none had enjoyed there one day of happiness.” As they approached the mouth of the stream, a boat was seen advancing towards them. It was the long-boat of Lord De la Ware, now put off to land from one of the three ships with which he had come from England, bringing new colonists and provisions! The hand of God surely was in this. The disheartened fugitives bore up the helm, and with a favouring wind entered once more the harbour of Jamestown. It was well for them now that there were houses left to receive them.

It was on the 11th of June, and with solemn services of thanksgiving to Heaven, the restored colonists took possession of their former place. A deep sense of the infinite mercies of God now, for the first time, impressed its character upon the colony. The remnant of the original colonists who had been saved from famine, the remnant of the former emigrants who had been saved from shipwreck, were now restored and provided for as by a miracle, whilst they, the new-comers, who had expected joy and prosperity, and found instead misery and want, were evidently the angels of God’s providence. This was an occasion which could not but deeply impress all. “It is,” said they, “the arm of the Lord of Hosts, who would have his people pass the Red Sea and the wilderness before they could possess the promised land.”

After solemn religious service, Lord De la Ware read his commission. A consultation was held for the good of the colony; government was organised with mildness but decision. The terrible crisis through which the colony had passed, like the effect of severe fever on the human frame, had left it at first weak perhaps, but renovated as by a new principle of life; the disease—the moral disease—was gone from the colony. The colonists now performed, with obedience and alacrity, their duties in truth and piety, assembling every morning before commencing the labours of the day in the little church, which was kept neatly trimmed with the wild flowers of the country, after which they returned home and received their allowance of food. Labour went on with cheerfulness; the houses were made warm and home-like. Comfort and prosperity returned to the colony.

In the dawn of this better day the health of the excellent Lord De la Ware declined. His mild virtues had been as efficient in the milder elements now composing the colony, as the higher character of Smith had been on its more turbulent elements; and his loss at this time was very great. He returned to England within less than a year of his arrival, leaving Percy, as Smith had done before him, as his deputy. The colony now consisted of 200 men, and the departure of their beloved governor cast a gloom on all hearts.

Fortunately Sir Thomas Dale, a worthy and experienced soldier in the Low Countries, had been already despatched from England with supplies; and he arriving in the colony very soon after Lord De la Ware’s departure, assumed the government, which he administered well, though with severity, and more according to martial than civil law. Dale, nevertheless, was a judicious governor; he saw the wants of the colony, and he strenuously endeavoured to remedy them. As regarded the small number and ill-provided condition of the colonists, he wrote home entreating that these things should be cared for, assuring the company that their purses and their endeavours would never open nor travel in a more meritorious enterprise. “Take four of the best kingdoms of Christendom,” says he, “and put all together, they may in no way compare with this country, either for commodities or goodness of soil.” And Lord De la Ware in England testified to the same effect. In consequence of these representations, really efficient aid came. Sir Thomas Gates, now appointed governor, conducted six ships to Virginia, with 300 emigrants, 100 head of cattle, and other liberal supplies. And as “to oblige quickly is to oblige twice,” this aid was doubly welcome, because it was promptly given. Dale wrote his letter in May, and on the last day of August Sir Thomas Gates and his ships were seen advancing towards Jamestown. The colonists, who least of all expected so ready a response to their wishes, seeing what appeared a large fleet advancing, dreaded that an enemy might be at hand. This was a new terror, a new misfortune. As the fleet approached, however, they perceived, with unspeakable joy, that they were friends.

Sir Thomas Gates assumed his government with an act of solemn thanksgiving; and so deep was the sentiment of gratitude in the hearts of the colonists for this real, and, as it seemed, generous aid, that for a long time the morning and evening prayer of the colonists was, “Lord, bless England, our sweet native country!”

The colony now numbered 700. New settlements were formed, one situated up the river, called Henrico, after Prince Henry; and here, on the frontiers of the Indians, Alexander Whitaker, the “Apostle of Virginia,” preached the word of God to the natives. But perhaps the most efficient change which occurred in the colony had reference to the now established law of private property. To each man was allotted a few acres of land for a garden and orchard. Hitherto the land had all been worked in common, and the produce deposited in public stores. The excellent results of the new arrangement were soon apparent in the increased industry of all. To this shortly followed larger assignments of land, and before long the mode of common labour in the common field, to fill the public stores, was wholly abandoned. From this time the sanctity of private property, at least as regarded the colonists, was recognised. The colonists themselves still made free with the possessions of the Indians; as regarded them, might, which was strong in their hands, was right, as is too often the case where the civilised man deals with the savage.

In March, 1612, a new charter was obtained by the London company for Virginia, which produced an important change in the constitution of the colony, and through which the first seed of democracy was introduced into the government of Anglo-America. Hitherto, as we have seen, all power had been vested in the council, which under the first charter was appointed by the king; now the control of the company’s affairs was removed from the council, and placed in the hands of the stockholders themselves, who were empowered to convene meetings for the transaction of the lesser business, whilst a great and general court was held once a quarter for important business. This charter also allowed the company to raise money by means of lotteries; but this liberty, after a few years, was withdrawn as a public evil.

The powers of the company were increased by the new charter, and the affairs of the colony assumed an aspect of stable prosperity. As in the days of Smith, the Indians entered into treaties of alliance, nay, even went beyond it, declaring themselves tributaries of the English.

A marriage now took place in the colony, which forms an important event in its annals, and the details of which we must give somewhat at length. Captain Argall, an adventurer, who had come to Virginia in a trading ship, being on one occasion sent up the Potomac to trade for corn, fell in with the young Indian girl, Pocahontas, who had at that time been absent from the colony of Jamestown for two years. Aided by a chief of the district, whom Argall had bribed with a brass kettle, Pocahontas was induced to go on board his ship, when he carried her off to Jamestown. Powhatan demanded the restoration of his daughter, which Argall refused without ransom. The naturally indignant chief prepared for war, when a deliverer appeared for the young Indian girl in the person of John Rolfe, an honest and discreet young Englishman. I will give the narrative in the words of Bancroft. “Rolfe was an amiable enthusiast, who had emigrated to the forests of Virginia, daily, hourly, and as it were in his very sleep, hearing a voice crying in his ears that he should strive to make Pocahontas a Christian. With the solicitude of a troubled soul, he reflected on the true end of his being. ‘The Holy Spirit,’ such are his own expressions, ‘demanded of me why I was created? and conscience whispered, that, rising above the censure of the low-minded, I should lead the blind in the right paths.’ After a great struggle of mind, and daily and believing prayers, he resolved to labour for the conversion of the unregenerated maiden, and winning the favour of Pocahontas herself, he desired her in marriage. Quick of comprehension, the Indian girl received instruction readily, and soon, in the little church of Jamestown, which rested on rough pine columns, fresh from the forest, and was in a style of rugged architecture as wild, if not as frail, as an Indian wigwam, she stood before the font which had been hollowed from the trunk of a tree, and, renouncing her country’s idolatry, professed the faith of Jesus Christ, and was baptized.” The gaining of this one soul, the first-fruits of Virginian conversion, was followed by her nuptials with Rolfe. In April, 1613, to the joy of Sir Thomas Dale, with the approbation of her father and her friends, Opachisco, her uncle, gave the bride away; and she stammered before the altar her marriage-vows according to the rites of the English church.

Every historian of Virginia commemorates the marriage of Rolfe to the Indian Pocahontas with approbation. In the year 1616, the Indian wife, instructed in the English language, and bearing the English name of Rebecca, the very first Christian of her nation, in company with Dale, who had resigned his office of governor, sailed with her husband for England. The daughter of the wilderness possessed the mild elements of female loveliness, rendered still more beautiful by the child-like simplicity with which her education in the savannahs of the New World had invested her. In London she had the pleasure of meeting with her old friend, John Smith, and by him she was recommended to the notice of the Queen. She was caressed at court, and admired in the city. Nevertheless, so absurd were the prevailing notions at that time regarding royalty in England, that Rolfe narrowly escaped being called to account, because he, a commoner, had married a princess!

“As a wife and a young mother, Pocahontas was exemplary; she had been able to contrast the magnificence of European life with the freedom of the western forest, and now, as she was preparing to return to America, at the age of twenty-two, she fell a victim to the English climate, saved, as by the hand of mercy, from beholding the extermination of the tribes whence she sprung; leaving a spotless name, and surviving in memory under the form of perpetual youth.” The Bollands and the Randolphs, two of the most distinguished families of Virginia, are proud to trace their descent from this marriage.

The portrait of Pocahontas, which is still preserved among her descendants, represents her in the costume which was worn by the higher class of English in the time of Elizabeth; but the stiff Indian plaits of hair which hang down her cheeks from beneath her head-dress betray her descent. The countenance has an affecting expression of child-like goodness and innocence, and the eyes have a melancholy charm. The portrait was taken in 1616, and bears the inscription, Matoakeals. Rebecca potentiss. Princ. Powhatan Imp. Virginæ.

The consequence of this alliance was peace with the Indians, not alone with the Powhatans, but with the powerful Chickahominies. The Indians wished the two nations to blend in one, and proposed more general intermarriage, but the English, who despised the Indians as savages, and abhorred them as heathens, would not promote such union, and by degrees the old animosities were revived.

The same year that Pocahontas was married, her bold abductor, Captain Samuel Argall, who had the spirit of a pirate, sailing up the eastern coast in an armed vessel, discovered that the French had established a little settlement called St. Savieur, near Penobscot, on Mount Desert Island. At once he cannonaded the intrenchments and speedily gained possession. The poor settlers clung to the cross in the middle of the village, while their houses, and their ship lying peacefully in harbour, were pillaged; some of the colonists he sent off to France, others he carried to Jamestown, and among these one of their Jesuit priests, the other being killed.

The colonists of Virginia, jealous of any French settlement on their coasts, despatched Argall again to the north, with the Jesuit prisoner as his pilot; and on this expedition he dispersed the settlement at Port Royal; the place itself, he burned, and the settlers took shelter in the woods. On his return, he entered the harbour now called New York, and compelled the Dutch settlement on the island of Manhattan to acknowledge the English supremacy, and this, although England was then at peace with France and Holland. No sooner, however, was Argall gone, than the French returned to Port Royal, and the Dutch hoisted again their flag on Manhattan.

The prosperity and the anticipated glories of Virginia were now themes of exultation in England; and the theatre, which had formerly made the colony a subject of derision, rang with its praises, and lauded King James as the patron of colonies.

In 1614, Sir Thomas Gates left the colony, appointing Sir Thomas Dale his successor. A few words must now be said regarding the land-law of Virginia. The original grant had allowed all persons coming to Virginia, or sending others, one hundred acres of land for each person so arriving in the colony. This allowance was now reduced to fifty, and so it remained as long as Virginia was a British colony; two shillings for each hundred acres being paid annually as quit-rent. Such emigrants as were sent out at the expense of the company were its servants, bound by indenture to labour for the company, receiving three acres of land each, and being allowed one month’s service for themselves, with a small allowance of two bushels of corn from the public store; the rest of their labour belonged to their employers. This class gradually wore out. Others were tenants of the company, and paid two barrels and a half of corn as an annual contribution to the public store, and gave one month’s labour in the twelve to the public service; but this, however, neither in seed time nor harvest. Other lands were granted as rewards of real or pretended merit, none, however, to exceed two thousand acres to one person. And here it may be mentioned, that to John Smith, the greatest benefactor of the infant colony, not a single acre of land was ever awarded, and he, whose unselfishness was only equal to his merit, never demanded it. To the governor was appointed a plantation to be cultivated for him by the company’s servants; and the other colonial officers were remunerated in the same manner. Twelve pounds ten shillings paid into the company’s treasury, gave a title also to one hundred acres, with a reserved claim for as much more.

Such were the earliest land-laws of Virginia; and imperfect and unequal as they were, they yet enabled the cultivator to become the proprietor of the soil. The cultivation of corn in a few years had become so great, that the colonists, from buyers of corn, had become sellers to the Indians. Tobacco also was cultivated with great success; potash, soap, glass, tar, all gave place now to tobacco. Seeking for gold was happily at an end; fields and gardens, nay, even the public squares and streets of Jamestown, grew tobacco. Tobacco, which was the life of Virginian industry, became its staple produce and finally its currency.

In the midst of all this growing prosperity, the discontents of the colony were justly raised by evils incident to their position under a corporate body, through whom interested parties obtained posts for which they were wholly unfitted, without the colony having a voice in the appointment. Hence, in 1616, Sir Thomas Dale, an able though stern governor, having returned to England, leaving George Yeardley deputy-governor, the notorious Captain Samuel Argall, through the influence of Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, was sent out, not only as deputy-governor, but admiral. A more unfit man could not have been selected. Martial law was again the law of the colony. The return of Lord De la Ware was petitioned for, and that excellent man embarked to resume his office, but died on the voyage. Unlimited power was in the rapacious hands of Argall; the labour of the colonists was enforced for his benefit; even life itself was insecure against his capricious passions. The colony appealed to the company on behalf of an innocent man, who for merely speaking freely against his tyranny, was condemned by him to death. Fortunately for the colony, Argall had also defrauded the company; he was therefore deposed, and George Yeardley, a mild and popular man, was appointed captain-general; Argall in the meantime, disappeared from the colony, having fled with the fruits of his peculation to the West Indies, and thence to England, where, strange to say, his partisans, of whom he had many in the company, prevented his being called to account.

Under the administration of Yeardley, who was now knighted, the colony prospered greatly; martial law was abolished; the planters were released from further service to the colony, and the first colonial assembly ever held in Virginia took place at Jamestown, in June, 1619. The exactions and abuses of Argall had led to the concession of law and justice by the company. A great step was gained. This was the dawn of legislative liberty in America. “The colonists, now become willing to regard Virginia as their future home,” says the old chronicler, “fell to building houses and planting corn.”

Fortunately, also, the treasurer of the company in London, Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of great judgment and firmness, investigated the affairs of the colony, and carried out the reform of many abuses. It was now twelve years since the foundation of Jamestown, yet the colony consisted but of six hundred persons, men, women, and children; and in this present year of 1620, Sir Edward Sandys sent out twelve hundred and sixty-one persons. The character of his emigration is also worthy of consideration. Hitherto but few persons going to the colony had done so with the intention of settling; their purpose had been to make money and then return home; few women, therefore, had ventured across the ocean;—now, however, everything was changed for the better; Virginia offered a desirable home for families, therefore “ninety agreeable young women, of incorrupt lives,” through the influence of Sandys, were sent out at the expense of the company, sure of a cordial welcome in the colony, but only to be married to men well able to support them, and who would willingly pay the cost of their passage. This adventure answered so well in every respect, that the next year sixty more “maids of virtuous education, young, handsome, and well recommended,” went out; and so great was the demand for them, that their price rose from one hundred and twenty pounds weight of tobacco, to one hundred and fifty each; and so much was the worth of a man increased by his being married, that the company gave employment by preference to men with wives. The result of this new element in the colony was great, but not more so than was natural. Now commenced the existence of domestic life, and with it virtuous sentiments and habits of thrift. Within three years, so greatly had emigration increased under these circumstances, that 3,500 persons landed in the colony, amongst whom were many Puritan refugees.

FIRST MEETING OF THE ASSEMBLY IN VIRGINIA.

In 1621, Sir George Yeardley was succeeded as governor by Sir Edward Wyatt, who carried out with him a written constitution, ratifying in the main the form of government established by Yeardley. The form of constitution prescribed was similar to that of England, and remained to be the model of all other Anglo-American governments. Its purport was declared to be “the greatest comfort and benefit to the people, and the prevention of injustice, grievances, and oppression.” A more sound basis than this for any government could not have been devised. A governor and permanent council were to be appointed by the company; a general assembly was to meet yearly, consisting of the members of the council, and delegates chosen by the people as their representatives, two for each borough, the colony being divided into eleven boroughs. All enactments of the General Assembly, however, required, to become valid, the ratification of the company in England. It was further ordained—and this gave the greatest satisfaction perhaps of all—that after the government of the colony had once become established, no orders of the company in London should be valid unless ratified by the General Assembly of the colony. The courts of justice were to be constituted according to the laws and mode of trial established in England.

Representative government and trial by jury were established in America; and the colonists, no longer depending on a commercial corporation, now became enfranchised citizens. “Henceforth,” says Bancroft, “the supreme power was held to reside in the hands of the colonial parliament, and of the king, as king of Virginia. This ordinance was the basis on which Virginia erected the superstructure of her liberties. Its influences were wide and enduring, and can be traced through all following years of the history of the colony. It constituted, in its infancy, a university of freemen; and succeeding generations learned to cherish institutions which were as old as the first period of the prosperity of their fathers. The privileges which were now conceded could never be wrested from the Virginians, and as new colonies arose at the south, their proprietaries could hope to win emigrants only by bestowing franchises as large as those enjoyed by their older rival.”

In the month of August, 1620, fourteen months before the sitting of the first representative assembly in Virginia, about four months before the landing of the pilgrim fathers in America, a century after the last hereditary serfdom had been abolished in England, and six years after the commons of France had petitioned for the emancipation of every serf in any fief, a Dutch man-of-war entered James River, bringing in twenty negroes for sale. The necessity for labourers seems to have been the first cause of the introduction of negro slaves into Virginia, and the Dutch were for many years the principal slave traders. The cultivation of silk and of the vine had been introduced, but scarcity of labourers caused these branches of cultivation to languish; cotton, on the other hand, soon engaged attention. In 1621, the first seeds were sown as an experiment, and their “plentiful coming up” promised the most successful results.

Wyatt found the colony in a high degree of prosperity. The English had extended their plantations considerably inland, along the banks of the James River and the Potomac; wherever rich ground invited, there they established themselves, no longer fearing the solitude of the forest, because they no longer dreaded the power of the Indians. The Indians were regarded with contempt or pity; a single mastiff would put many to flight; seven hundred armed savages had on one occasion been routed by fifteen armed men; no care was taken to conciliate their good will, although in many cases their condition was improved by the introduction of some of the arts of civilised life. Their simple, child-like state may be exhibited by one small circumstance. A house had been built for the great chief Opechancanough, successor of Powhatan, according to the English style, and so delighted was he with the lock on the door, that he locked and unlocked it a hundred times a day, and regarded it as a triumph of skill.

So peaceful were all things, and so amicable appeared the relationship with the natives, on the arrival of Wyatt, that the emigrants needed fire-arms apparently merely for the destruction of game; and the old law of the colony which had made it death to teach an Indian the use of fire-arms, was now so much disregarded, that the Indians were employed by the whites as their huntsmen. Enmity, however, was not extinct in the heart of the savage. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, the firm friend of the English, was dead, and his younger brother, his successor, entertained different sentiments towards the strangers, whose rapidly increasing numbers and widely extending settlements might justly awake the fear and the jealousy of the primeval possessors of the soil. A deep plan of extermination was laid. In open battle the Indian knew that he had no chance, but by cunning and guile he could accomplish much. A general attack was determined on by the Indians, but all preparations concealed by impenetrable secrecy. The Indians appeared as amicably disposed as heretofore. They visited the settlements of the English, borrowed their boats, sat at their tables, and made professions of friendship; “sooner,” said they, “shall the sky fall than our friendship be broken by us!” and this on the very morning of the day which was to destroy the whole race.

At mid-day on the 22nd of March, at one and the same moment, the Indians fell upon the whole white population scattered in distant villages, one hundred and forty miles along each side of the river! No suspicion of such an intention had been excited;—men, women, and children, the missionary who had taught them and laboured among them with unwearying kindness; those from whom the Indian never received anything but benefits, all were murdered, with every appalling circumstance of Indian barbarity, and so great was their fury, that they even attacked the dead, as if to murder them anew.

In one hour three hundred and forty-seven persons were destroyed. And the whole of Virginia might have slept in one bloody grave, had not a converted Indian, the night before the massacre, revealed the plot to an Englishman, to whom he was much attached, and whose life he wished to save. By this means Jamestown and the nearer settlements were fully prepared. The larger portion of the colony was saved, but so universal was the terror which this bloody massacre occasioned, that all public works were interrupted, and the more remote settlements abandoned. The cultivation of the land was almost at once given up, and of the eighty flourishing, happy settlements which had so lately existed, now there remained but eight. Some of the colonists fled in their terror to England, and sickness broke out amongst those who remained.

The colonists rose up for vengeance, and in England so great was the sympathy and compassion excited, that new supplies and arms were immediately sent out; King James, for his part, ordering a quantity of arms which had been thrown into the Tower as good for nothing to be sent over, as they might be useful against the Indians! The city of London and many private persons generously contributed aid; and the brave John Smith, then in London, volunteered his services to defend the colonists and chastise the Indians; but the company declared it had no funds, and he was not rich enough to go out at his own cost.

A deep cloud rested on Virginia, which nothing but vengeance on the Indians would dispel. The Indians, not having fully accomplished their scheme, and now justly dreading a tenfold retaliation, fled far into the forest. But their land was seized upon, their open fields and villages, all planted on the pleasantest and most fertile sites, were soon in secure possession of the English. To pursue the natives to the fastnesses of the wilderness was impossible, therefore the English in their turn practised guile. They assumed an aspect of forgiveness; the savages, by degrees losing their fear, ventured forth again, and even approaching their old haunts, resettled themselves in the neighbourhood of their enemies. The aspect of peace and forbearance was, however, only vengeance deferred.

In July of the following year, the Indians were attacked by an army under commissioned officers; a similar attack was repeated the next year, and for several years, it being now a colonial principle that no peace should be concluded with the Indians.

Meantime great changes as regarded the relationships of the colony to the mother-country were taking place. The colony of Virginia had not been a lucrative enterprise for the London company; the shares at the present time were as unproductive stock of little value; the holders were numerous, and the meetings of the company in London had, instead of being mere meetings of business, become scenes of political debate, in which the supporters of liberty were arrayed against the supporters of royal prerogative. Liberal opinions here found free play. The king was displeased by this freedom of debate. Gondemar, the Spanish envoy, warned James that “these Virginian courts were only a seminary to a seditious parliament.” James, who abhorred freedom of opinion, determined to nip it in the bud, by putting an end to the hot-bed which fostered it. His first endeavour was to control the election of officers by overawing their assemblies; and failing of that, he determined to sequestrate their patent, and recover to himself the authority which he had conceded to the company. Commissioners in the interest of the king were appointed to examine into the affairs of the corporation, although former charges against them had been satisfactorily answered, the records were seized; the deputy-treasurer imprisoned, and private letters from Virginia intercepted and examined. Smith was examined, and his straightforward, honest answers exposed the bad management of the company, and showed that the withdrawal of the charter would be a boon to the colony. This surprised all; commissioners, who had been appointed to examine the affairs of the corporation and the colony itself, reported in favour of a change. The king did not hesitate; the London company was dissolved, and Virginia once more became a royal government, as under its first charter.

Whilst these things were going on in England, the Virginians were not indifferent. When the commissioners arrived in the colony, the prayer of the colonists was that the governors might not have absolute power; that the liberty of popular assemblies might not be retrenched, “for nothing,” said they, “can conduce more to public satisfaction and public utility, than the free discussion of our own affairs.” That this subject might be efficiently urged, an agent was sent for that purpose to England, a tax of four pounds weight of the best tobacco being levied on each male above the age of sixteen, and who had been a twelvemonth in the colony, to defray the expenses. But this agent unfortunately died on his voyage.

The spirit of liberty, however, had taken deep root on the Virginian soil. Intimidation and promised advantage could not induce the colony to pray for a repeal of the charter under which their first constitutional liberty had been granted. On the contrary, the assembly met, and laid down laws for itself. The governor said, “they shall not lay any taxes or impositions on the colony, its lands or commodities, other way than by the authority of the General Assembly, to be levied and employed as the said assembly shall appoint.” Virginia, the Old Dominion, as it is called, was the first to set an example of just and wise legislation as regarded the use of the public money. Others imitated the example in due time. Various governors had endeavoured by penal enactments to compel the culture of corn; now it was said, “for the encouragement of men to plant store of corn, the price shall not be stinted, but it shall be free for any man to sell it as dear as he can.” Through the whole of this disturbed period the Virginians showed themselves admirably capable of popular government, proving how truly, with the aid of free discussion, men become good legislators in their own concerns; wise legislation being the enacting of proper laws at proper times, and no criterion being so nearly infallible as the fair representation of the interests to be affected. Among the laws which were at this time framed, and which reflect the manners and spirit of the age, we may mention the following. It was enacted “that there should be a room or house set apart in every plantation for the worship of God, sequestered and set apart for that purpose only;” also a place of burial “sequestered and paled in.” Absence from public worship without allowable excuse, was punished by the fine of a pound weight of tobacco, or fifty pounds weight, if absence continued a month. Divine service was according to the canons of the English church. The 22nd of March was added to the church festivals, in commemoration of the escape from the Indian massacre. Any minister absent from his parish above two months annually forfeited half his salary. The falsely disparaging of a minister rendered the offender liable to a fine of five hundred pounds weight of tobacco, and publicly to ask pardon of the minister. Ministers’ salaries were to be paid out of the first-gathered and best tobacco and corn. Drunkenness and swearing were punishable offences. Three sufficient men were to be sworn in each parish to see that every man cultivated corn sufficient for his family. Every settler was to fence in a garden for himself of one acre, for the planting of vines, roots, herbs, and mulberry trees. Weights and measures were to be sealed. Every house was to be palisadoed for defence, and people were not to go out in such numbers as might leave their houses undefended and liable to attack. Delinquent persons of quality, not fit to undergo corporal punishment, might be imprisoned at discretion, or fined by the monthly courts. “At the beginning of July, the inhabitants of every plantation were to fall upon their neighbouring savages, as they did last year.” Every person wounded in this service was to be cured at the public expense, and if permanently lamed would have maintenance for life suitable to his quality.

The London company was at an end. “It had,” says Bancroft, “fulfilled its high destinies; it had confirmed the colonisation of Virginia, and had conceded a liberal form of government to Englishmen in America. It could accomplish no more.”

The term of five years was fixed as that of the period of representative government. Sir Thomas Wyatt was confirmed in office for that term; and the king himself was about to frame a code of fundamental laws for the colony, when death fortunately put an end to his attempt.

Charles I. succeeded his father, March 27, 1625. As regarded Virginia, he had no more interest in it than as the country producing tobacco, and from which he hoped to derive a large revenue. His first act with reference to the colony was an endeavour to obtain for himself the sole monopoly of this trade. As to its constitutions and political rights, he did not trouble himself about them, and they became established by his very indifference.

In 1626, Wyatt having returned to Europe, Sir George Yeardley was appointed his successor. The colony prospered; in 1627, one thousand emigrants arrived in the country. The following year Yeardley died, leaving behind him a memory cherished by the colony as the first governor who had convened a representative assembly.

Again, the king offered to contract for the whole crop of tobacco, desiring that an assembly might be called to consider his proposal. The assembly returned a firm negative to the royal monopolist.

On the death of Yeardley, John Harvey, who had been for several years a member of the council, and an extremely unpopular man, was nominated governor by the king; but as he was not then in the colony, some time elapsed before he appeared to assume his authority.

It was at this period that Lord Baltimore visited Virginia. He fled hither as a persecuted man, and was hospitably received; nor must it be forgotten that, as regarded the pilgrims of Plymouth rock, they were invited to leave that sterile and inhospitable region, and plant themselves in the milder regions of Delaware Bay. Puritanism was evidently at that time not persecuted in Virginia, though “needless novelties” in worship had been prohibited by law for some years.

In the autumn of 1629, Harvey, the new governor, arrived. He was unwelcome from various causes; he belonged to the faction to which Virginia ascribed her earliest sorrows; he had rendered himself extremely unpopular as a member of the council; besides which, it had been well pleasing to the colony that King James, on assuming supreme authority, had entrusted the government to impartial agents; but now the appointment of Harvey indicated a change of policy. His arrival among them was naturally cause neither of satisfaction nor of rejoicing, nor does he appear to have conciliated their favour. The older historians charge him with arbitrary and tyrannical conduct; yet it may be questionable whether he was quite deserving of the ill-will with which he was regarded, as the revised code of laws, which was published with consent of the governor and the council, neither abrogated nor abridged any of the civil rights of the colonists.

His administration, however, was disturbed by disputes respecting land-titles under the royal grants, and principally in consequence of the grant of Maryland to Lord Baltimore, which caused the first European blood to be shed by Europeans on the banks of the Chesapeake. Harvey not seconding the claims of Virginia against the royal grant, was considered by the colonists to have betrayed their interests; and full of indignation against him, they “thrust him out of his government,” says the old chronicle, and “appointed Captain John West governor in his stead till the king’s pleasure should be known.” Harvey consented to go to England to meet his accusers there, but, as might have been expected, no accusations would be received there against the man who had been merely acting according to royal instructions. The commission of accusation could not even obtain a hearing. Harvey returned to occupy his former post, and remained in office till 1639, when Sir Francis Wyatt succeeded him. Two years afterwards, Sir William Berkeley was appointed governor. The civil condition of Virginia was greatly improved; the laws and customs of England still further introduced; cruel punishments were abolished; old controversies adjusted; a more equitable system of taxation was introduced; taxes being assessed not in proportion to numbers, but “to men’s abilities and estates;” the rights of property and the freedom of industry were secured, so that Virginia enjoyed all the civil liberties which a more free form of government could have conferred. The Virginians seem early to have understood the true elements of political economy. In a petition addressed to England, in 1642, they asserted the necessity of the freedom of trade, “for freedom of trade,” say they, “is the blood and life of a commonwealth.” And as regarded self-government, they argued with the force of truth, “there is more likelihood that such as are acquainted with the clime and its accidents may, upon better grounds, prescribe our advantages, than such as sit at the helm in England.”

Spite of the liberality which had been exhibited in the colony towards diversities of religious opinion, which had led the excellent Whitaker to say, “let neither surplice nor subscription be spoken of here;” which had caused an invitation to the pilgrims of New Hampshire to remove within the precincts of Virginia; a spirit of intolerance was now manifested by the legislative assembly, and it was ordained that “no minister preach or teach except in conformity to the Church of England.” Whilst puritanism and republicanism were working together for the downfall of monarchy in England, Virginia showed the strongest attachment to the cause of episcopacy and royalty.

The hostility of the settlers against the natives remained year by year unabated. Twenty-one years after the massacre, it was enacted in the assembly that no terms of peace should be entertained with the Indians. Now, therefore, the Indians, hearing that troubles and dissensions were arising in England, resolved once more on a general massacre, hoping, that by destroying the corn-fields and cattle, they might cause any remnant who remained to perish by famine. The eighteenth of April was fixed upon as the fatal day; the attack commenced on the border frontiers; but the Indians themselves, filled as it were by a consciousness of their own weakness and dread of the consequences, had scarcely begun to shed blood when they fled. The number of victims was again about three hundred. The colonists roused themselves at once, and war commenced again vigorously against the Indians. The aged Opechancanough, the successor of Powhatan, was soon taken prisoner, and with his death peace was secured to the English.

This fierce warrior, and implacable enemy of the whites, was now nearly one hundred years of age, and his once stately form was wasted with the fatigues of war and bent with the weight of years. Unable to walk, says the historian of Virginia, he was carried from place to place by his followers. His flesh was almost wasted away from his bones, and his eyelids were so powerless, that he could only see when they were lifted by his followers.

After a long and rapid march, Sir William Berkeley, with a party of horse, surprised the aged warrior at some distance from his residence, and took him prisoner to Jamestown, where he was exhibited as an object of curiosity and of triumph to the victor. The old monarch of the forest, retaining a spirit unbroken by the decrepitude of the body, bore his calamities of fortune with a proud though melancholy mien. Hearing footsteps in the room where he lay, he requested his eyelids to be raised, when perceiving a crowd of spectators, he called for the governor, and upon his appearance said with calm dignity, “Had it been my fortune to have taken Sir William Berkeley prisoner, I would have scorned to have made a show of him.”

About a fortnight after the noble old chiefs capture, one of his guards, from private revenge, shot him in the back, and after languishing for some time of his wound, the old man died.

The Indians were completely subdued, and a cession of land was the terms on which peace was granted to the original possessors of the soil. The red man began to pass away from the precincts of the white. Within a short period, comparatively speaking, but few memorials of their former existence remained, saving the euphonious or sonorous names of rivers and mountains, the great imperishable features of nature, which thus became their monuments.

Whilst civil war and political convulsions were agitating England to the very centre of her being, peace and prosperity, security and quiet, equal laws and general contentment, were at home in Virginia. The population of the colony amounted to twenty thousand, and was still increasing; the houses were filled with children, as the ports were with ships and emigrants. At Christmas, 1648, two ships from London traded with Virginia, two from Bristol, twelve from Holland, and seven from New England.

The Virginians adhered faithfully to the royal cause, nor would they, after the execution of the monarch, recognise the Commonwealth, but still acknowledged Charles II. to be monarch, while yet a fugitive. Virginia soon became filled with cavaliers, fugitives like their sovereign. “Men of consideration among the nobility, gentry, and clergy, struck with horror and despair at the execution of the king, and desiring no reconciliation with the unrelenting rebels, made their way to the shores of the Chesapeake, where every house was for them a hostelry, and every planter a friend.” In the hospitable homes of Virginia they often met to talk over their own and their country’s sorrows, and to nourish loyalty and hope.

The Parliament, extremely displeased that this colony should thus become the asylum and nursery of monarchical principles, sent, in 1652, a naval force to reduce them to submission. Already, in 1650, foreign ships had been forbidden to trade with the contumacious colony, and in 1651 the celebrated Navigation Act was passed, which, having for its object the protection of British shipping, and the acquisition to England of the trade of the world, greatly shackled and restricted the commercial prosperity of her colonies.

In March, 1652, the republican party in the mother-country determined on obtaining the concession of obedience from Virginia. Commissioners chosen from among the planters themselves were empowered to act as pacificators with their country, the submission of which, if their efforts failed, would be enforced by the severities of war. It was the reconciliation of parent and child; the offended parent assumed an attitude of displeasure and resentment; obedient submission was that which was demanded, and which, if needful, would be enforced by violence; yet, would but the child submit, the parent would concede much; and the child, seeing the parent in earnest, yielded at once, and obtained the offered concession. No sooner, therefore, had the war-frigate of the Commonwealth anchored in the Chesapeake, than all thoughts of resistance were laid aside. The colonists, however loyal might be their inclinations, were more disposed to establish the freedom of their own institutions than to assume a hostile attitude against the mother-country, even on behalf of an exiled monarch.

There is something noble in the position which Virginia now assumed. It was not to force that she surrendered, but by “a voluntary deed and mutual compact; and in return she obtained, that her people should possess all the liberties of free-born people of England; should manage their business as formerly in their own assembly, and should have as free-trade as the people of England. No taxes nor customs were to be levied except by her own representatives, no forts erected nor garrisons maintained but by her consent.”

These conditions, so favourable to liberty, worthy to be granted by the champions of political and civil liberty in England, were a cause of great satisfaction to Virginia; and so earnest was the spirit of her submission and her desire to establish an amicable understanding with the mother-country, that Richard Bennett, one of the commissioners of the Parliament, a merchant and a Roundhead, was unanimously elected governor in the place of Sir William Berkeley.

The spirit of democratic liberty, like a strong young tree, grew with every change of season. Hitherto the governor and the council had sat in the General Assembly; the propriety of this was now questioned, and only retained by a concession which made the house of burgesses, a convention of the people, virtually possessed of supreme authority. Nor were these privileges at all interfered with by Cromwell. When Bennett two years afterwards retired from office, Edward Diggs, a steadfast Commonwealth’s man, was elected his successor, and after him the “worthy old Samuel Matthews, a planter of forty years, a most deserving republican, who kept a good house, lived bravely, and was a true lover of Virginia.” Under his governorship a single instance of the determined spirit of democracy occurred which still more strengthened and established it. The governor and his council having come to issue with the burgesses on a question of prerogative, the governor yielded, reserving a right of appeal to Cromwell. The members of the Assembly, fearing through this an infringement of their liberty, asserted their own sovereign authority, and deposed the governor and council; re-electing Matthews, however, and investing him “with all the just rights and privileges as governor and captain-general of Virginia,” and Matthews submitted, as Virginia herself had done in her quarrel with England, that by submission he might conquer. He acknowledged the right of the burgesses to depose and re-elect; took the oath; and thus was popular liberty still further strengthened in the Old Dominion—an example to all other newer states.

In March, 1660, the very time when the resignation of Richard Cromwell left England without a ruler, good old Samuel Matthews died, and Virginia was in the same predicament. But the burgesses of Virginia, unlike the people of England, stood fast by democratic principles, and, enacting that the supreme power should still reside in the General Assembly until there should arrive from England a commission, which the Assembly itself should adjudge to be lawful, proceeded to elect Sir William Berkeley as their governor; and he in his turn acknowledged the validity of this act of the Assembly by assuming office, “for I am,” said he, “but a servant of the Assembly.”

Virginia, in this case, however, it must be observed, recognised covertly another authority higher than that of her own Assembly, retaining, amid her spirit of democracy, a firm sentiment of loyalty. She hoped at this time for the restoration of the Stuarts.

Virginia was composed of separate boroughs, and the government organised on the basis of universal suffrage. Every freeman was possessed of a vote. On an attempt to limit the right of voting to householders, it was declared to be “hard and unagreeable to reason that every person shall pay equal taxes and yet have no vote in the elections.”

During the Commonwealth, Virginia not only enjoyed the utmost political liberty, but unlimited freedom of commerce also, while her own internal state was that of peace and prosperity. “Tobacco, the great staple product of the country, was the medium of exchange. Theft was hardly known, and the spirit and administration of the criminal law was mild and merciful; the cultivation of land was carried on very successfully; and as regarded commerce, the navigation laws were a mere dead letter. Virginia even traded with the Dutch during the period when the Protector and Holland were desperately contesting the sovereignty of the seas. The Virginians were the early advocates of free trade, and invited the Dutch and all foreigners to trade with them on the payment of no higher duty than that which was levied on such English vessels as were bound for a foreign port.” Proposals of peace were discussed between New Netherlands, the Dutch colony on the North American shore, and Virginia. During this period, also, considerable advance was made in religious liberty, although the Quakers were banished from the colony.

At the period of the Restoration, Virginia possessed, among the privileges which she had won for herself, freedom of commerce with the whole world, and the universal elective franchise. The population amounted now to 30,000, and it was esteemed an honour to be a born Virginian. Numbers of the emigrants of late years had been, as we have seen, royalist officers, men of family and education, and these, though they still retained their loyalty, offered no impediment to the free exercise of independent principles in Virginia, and finally the newly-adopted country superseded the old, and the interests and liberties of Virginia became to them dearer even than the monarchical principles of which they had been the supporters in England, and for their adherence to which they had been exiles.

“God Almighty,” says their statute-book of this time, “hath vouchsafed myriads of children to this colony.” Young Virginians were growing up throughout the length and breadth of the land. Virginia was becoming the home of patriots.

“Labour,” adds Bancroft, summing up the advantages and prosperity of the colony, “was valuable; land was cheap; competence promptly followed industry. There was no need of a scramble; abundance gushed from the earth for all. It was the best poor man’s country in the world. Yet, as the shadow-side of this bright picture, it must be conceded that plenty encouraged indolence; everything was imported from England. The chief branch of industry, for the purpose of exchanges, was tobacco planting, and the spirit of invention was enfeebled by the uniformity of pursuit.”

CHAPTER V.
COLONISATION OF MARYLAND.

The second charter granted to the London company embraced an extent of country 200 miles north of old Point Comfort, thus including the whole of the present state of Maryland. The country round the head of the Chesapeake was early explored, and a commercial relationship established with the natives whom Smith had been the first to visit. The hope of a good trade in furs continued to animate adventurers into these remote parts, and in 1631, William Clayborne, a man of a resolute and enterprising spirit, who was destined to exercise a long-continued and disturbing influence on the colony, obtained a royal license to trade with the Indians, and to form a settlement on Kent Island.

Clayborne had been in the first instance sent out by the London company as a surveyor to make a map of the country, and afterwards was appointed by King James a member of the council, which appointment was confirmed by Charles I. From 1627 to 1629 he was employed by the governor of Virginia to explore the source of the Bay of Chesapeake with the adjacent country, from the 34th to the 41st degree of latitude. By this means he became familiar with the resources of the country and the opportunities which it afforded for traffic; and in consequence of these representations a company was formed in England for trading with the natives, the royal license being granted in Clayborne’s name.

By virtue of this royal license, which was confirmed by the colonial commission, Clayborne established a trading settlement on the island of Kent, in the very heart of Maryland, and another near the mouth of Susquehannah. Virginia anticipated that, as commander of the Bay of Chesapeake and possessor of the soil on both banks of the Potomac, she should secure immense commercial prosperity without the interference of a rival. But while she was thus anticipating a brilliant future, the territory on which her hopes were founded was snatched from her, and a new government erected on her very threshold.

It has been the happy fortune of North America, that her states, severally founded by men of various religious opinions, origin, and purposes, have ever been the asylums of the persecuted. Men of truth and high principle, suffering at home from the narrowness of state policy and the bigotry of creeds, fled hither, and here, according as their views approximated more nearly or more remotely with the broad spirit of Christianity, succeeded in establishing that freedom of action and opinion after which they had vainly sighed in the old countries.

Among the enlightened men of the age who suffered from the spirit of religious animosity at that time prevailing in England, was Sir George Calvert, a graduate of Oxford, a man whose mind had been enlarged by travel, a member of Parliament for York, his native county, and who was even advanced by his sovereign to the honour of secretary-of-state. All historians are agreed in commending his knowledge of business, his industry, and his uprightness of character. Disgusted and distressed by the divisions and contentions of the protestant church, he conscientiously adopted the catholic faith, and on the open avowal of his conversion resigned the emoluments of office. King James, who was at that time on the throne, and who was never bitter against Catholics, retained him, however, in the Privy Council, and advanced him to the dignity of the Irish peerage under the title of Lord Baltimore.

Lord Baltimore, who even while secretary-of-state was a member of the Virginia company and a powerful advocate of American colonisation, had obtained in his own name a patent for colonising the southern promontory of Newfoundland, hoping there to establish a refuge for the persecuted Catholics of his native country. This settlement, which was called Avalon, on which he expended a large amount of his own private property, and which he visited twice in person, was finally abandoned, owing to the many difficulties against which it had to contend, partly from the severity of the climate and the sterility of the soil, and partly from the hostile attacks of the French, who were possessed of the surrounding country.

Lord Baltimore now turned his thoughts to Virginia, where the climate was mild, the land fertile, and the country beyond the Potomac as yet unoccupied. In 1632, therefore, on the dissolution of the London company, and the royal resumption of prerogative, it was not difficult for him, a favourite with the monarch, to obtain a charter for domains in that colony, which was no doubt all the more readily granted, as the Dutch, the Swedes, and the French were prepared to occupy the country.

This charter, according to internal evidence and concurrent opinion, was drawn up by Lord Baltimore himself, but owing to his death before it received the royal assent, was ultimately made out in the name of his son Cecil. The territory thus granted was comprised between the ocean and the 40th degree of latitude. The meridian of the western fountains of the Potomac, the river itself from its source to its mouth, and a line drawn due east from Watkin’s Point to the ocean, were the boundaries of this grant, which was erected into a separate province, under the name of Maryland, from Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. The country thus bestowed on Lord Baltimore, his heirs and assigns, as absolute lord and proprietary, was to be held by the tenure of fealty only, paying a yearly rent of two Indian arrows and a fifth of all gold and silver which it might yield; and the charter, unlike any which had hitherto obtained the royal assent, secured to the colonists equality in religious and civil rights, and an independent share in the legislation of the province. The laws of the colony were to be established with the advice and approval of a majority of the freemen or their deputies; nor could the authority of the absolute proprietary extend to the life, freehold, or estate of any emigrant. “These,” says Bancroft, “were the features which endeared the proprietary government to the people of Maryland;” and he adds, “it is a singular fact, that the only proprietary charters productive of considerable emolument to their owners were those which conceded popular liberty. Lord Baltimore was a Roman Catholic; yet, far from guarding his territory against any but those of his own persuasion, as he had taken from himself and his successors all arbitrary power by establishing the legislative franchises of the people, so he took from them the means of being intolerant in religion, inasmuch as, while Christianity was made the law of the land, no preference whatever should be given to sect or party.”

To avoid dispute on the subject of the fisheries, all claim to these was expressly renounced by the charter; Maryland was also carefully separated from Virginia, the necessity of which Lord Baltimore had clearly foreseen from his former visit to Virginia, when the oaths of supremacy and allegiance were tendered to him in a form which he, as a Catholic, could not subscribe; now, therefore, when about to establish his colony within the jurisdiction of Virginia, he provided against every possible cause of contention with the neighbour state. He also provided, as far as was in his power, against any future aggressions of the English monarch, who covenanted in the charter, by an express stipulation, “that neither he, nor his heirs, nor successors, should ever set any imposition, custom, or tax whatever, upon the inhabitants of the province.” Maryland was by this means exempted from English taxation for ever.

“Calvert, Lord Baltimore,” says the historian, “deserves to be ranked among the most wise and benevolent lawgivers of all ages. He was the first in the history of the Christian world to seek for religious security and peace by the practice of justice and not by the exercise of power; to plan the establishment of popular institutions with the enjoyment of liberty of conscience; to advance the career of civilisation by recognising the rightful equality of all Christian sects. The asylum of Papists was the spot where, in a remote quarter of the world, on the banks of rivers which as yet had hardly been explored, the mild forbearance of a proprietary adopted religious freedom as the basis of the state.”

Lord Baltimore having died, as we have said, before the charter had passed the royal seal, his son Cecil Calvert, who succeeded not only to his father’s title and honours, but to his liberal views and enlightened opinions, soon succeeded in enlisting a sufficient number of emigrants for the commencement of the colony, and these were soon joined by gentlemen of fortune and enterprise. The second Lord Baltimore, however, having, for reasons which are now unknown, abandoned his original intention of going out in person with the emigrants, appointed his brother, Leonard Calvert, as his lieutenant.

On Friday, the 22nd of November, in the year 1633, Leonard Calvert set sail with about 200 persons, mostly Roman Catholic gentlemen and their servants, in a ship of large burden called the Ark and the Dove, together with a pinnace. They sailed by way of the West Indies, and in the early spring arrived at Point Comfort in Virginia, where, by the express orders of King Charles, they were courteously received by Harvey, the governor. There also they were met by Clayborne, who had already done all in his power, through persons of influence in England, to prevent the granting of the charter, foreseeing that it might interfere with his settlements on Kent Island and elsewhere. He now presented himself as a prophet of evil, foretelling the hostility of the natives, which he had already secretly fomented.

Disregarding all evil augury, the Ark and Dove, attended by the pinnace, ascended the Potomac. Landing on an island, Calvert planted a cross, claiming the country for Christ and England, and having proceeded about 150 miles, arrived at an Indian village on the eastern bank of the river, called Piscataqua, the chief of which would neither bid him go nor stay, but told him he might do as he liked. Calvert, however, decided to establish his first settlement lower down the Potomac, which he descended, and entering a river now called St. Mary’s, above ten miles from its junction with the Potomac, purchased the little Indian town of Yoacomoco from the natives, who having suffered from the superior tribe of Susquehannahs were now about to desert it. Calvert considered this a good situation for a settlement, and by presents of cloth, axes, hose, and knives, secured the confidence and friendship of the natives, with whom a treaty was entered into, by which the English immediately obtained possession of one-half of the town, the whole of which was surrendered to them after the getting in of harvest. Good faith was maintained on both sides. On the 27th of March, the Catholics came into peaceful possession; and now, at the humble village of St. Mary, religious liberty found its first real home, its only safe home in the whole world.

The Ark and Dove, fit emblems of their mission, anchored in the harbour. The native chiefs came down to see the new emigrants and to establish leagues of amity with them; all was peace and security. The Indian women taught the wives of the English strangers to make bread of maize corn, and the warriors of the tribes instructed the men in the mysteries of the chase. Corn-fields and gardens were ready for cultivation; no sufferings had to be endured, no want was apprehended; it seemed as if the colony of Maryland was founded on a blessing. Within six months it had increased greatly both in wealth and population.

Memorable as was the commencement of Maryland, still more so was the spirit of her institutions. She was the first asserter of religious toleration in the New World, and whilst religious persecution had even been carried across the seas to their places of refuge by the Puritans, the very men who had fled thither to escape from it in their native country, Maryland bound her governor, by his oath of office, “neither by himself nor by any other, directly or indirectly, to molest any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ for or in respect of religion.” Under these mild institutions and the liberal expenditure of Lord Baltimore, who in the first two years of the settlement expended no less a sum than £40,000 in advancing its interests, the colony prospered wonderfully. Roman Catholics, oppressed by the laws of England, fled hither as to their natural asylum, and hither also came suffering Protestants, fleeing from the intolerance of their Protestant brethren.

For some time harmony, peace, and prosperity prevailed. The mild and wise institutions of the proprietary were conducive to the interests of the colonists, and won in return their attachment and gratitude. Every heart, excepting Clayborne’s, was satisfied, and desired that things should remain as they were. Clayborne from the first had rejected the claim of Lord Baltimore, and refused to submit to it. Accordingly, in the sitting of the first Legislative Assembly of Maryland, in February, 1635, at St. Mary’s, the jurisdiction of the state was vindicated, in opposition to the claims of Clayborne. Nothing, however, daunted by this measure, he determined to make good his claims by force of arms. A bloody skirmish took place on one of the rivers of Maryland; several lives were lost; Clayborne’s men were defeated and taken prisoners, and he himself fled to Virginia, whence, to escape being given up to the governor of Maryland, he was sent by Harvey, the governor of Virginia, to England for trial.

The colony was well rid of this troublesome member, at least for a while; he was declared by the Assembly guilty of treason, not only by endeavouring to overthrow the government of the proprietary, but by exciting the jealousies of the Indians against the settlers; and his property on Kent Island was confiscated. In England he won at first a favourable hearing from the king, Charles I.; but on the merits of the case being more thoroughly investigated, it was decided that the charter of Lord Baltimore superseded all earlier licences of traffic. Clayborne was again defeated, and the claims of Lord Baltimore fully confirmed.

Men of strong intellect, ardent champions of popular liberty, were, as we have seen, the founders of the early American states, hence we universally find them not more jealous for the possession and maintenance of territory, than for the establishment of principles of democratic liberty. In 1639, therefore, the third annual General Assembly was convened for the purpose of establishing “a more convenient form of representative government,” and the people were allowed to send as many delegates to the General Assembly as they should deem proper. A declaration of rights was also drawn up; allegiance was declared to the English sovereign, Lord Baltimore’s prerogatives as proprietary were defined, and the liberties of Englishmen confirmed to the inhabitants of Maryland. “There was as yet,” says our historian, “no jealousy of power, no strife for place. Yet,” adds he, “while these laws prepared a frame of government for future generations, we are reminded of the feebleness and poverty of the state, when the whole people were at that very period obliged to contribute to the setting up of a water-mill.”

In the year 1642, the inhabitants of Maryland, from a grateful sense of Lord Baltimore’s “great charge and solicitude in maintaining the government, and protecting them in their persons, rights, and liberties, freely granted such a subsidy as the young and poor estate could bear.” This was a subsidy of fifteen pounds weight of tobacco for every person above twelve years of age.

In the same year the peace and prosperity of the colony was again interrupted; firstly, by the bordering Indian tribes, who, alarmed at the rapid spread of the colonists, and embittered towards them by the suspicions with which the artful Clayborne had poisoned their minds, made divers warlike incursions, causing the death of some and the alarm of all. A fort was built on the Patuxent as a defence against the Susquehannahs, and peace at length re-established on the usual terms of Indian submission. A more formidable and annoying enemy in the meantime made his appearance, this being no other than the contumacious Clayborne. Clayborne, on the breaking out of civil war in England, had allied himself with the popular party, and now, in the absence of Calvert, the governor, who was then in England, and in connexion with one Ingle, already convicted of treason in the colony, took the opportunity of re-asserting his claims and exciting insubordination among the disaffected. It may appear strange, that, under a form of government so wise and liberal as that of Lord Baltimore, disaffection should exist; but it must be borne in mind that the religious contentions of England had been transported to America, and not even in the Old World did papacy and puritanism come to closer quarters than on the soil of Maryland. Whilst England herself was convulsed with the birth of liberty, and whilst the popular will was standing in stout array against the power of the monarch, it was not to be expected that the men of America, who had fled from their native land in the very spirit of this conflict, would abate one jot of it here. Besides this, the demand of puritanism was fierce dogmatism, which not even the noble toleration of Lord Baltimore’s government could appease, nay, which it was even a virtue to oppose.

England had too much to do at home to care at this time about its colonies beyond the Atlantic, and New England and Virginia legislated for themselves almost without reference to the mother-country; and with the Puritans the same independent spirit had entered Maryland. Whilst England defied her king, Maryland began to question what were the rights of any human proprietary, who was in fact but a sort of petty sovereign; and this question once admitted into the heart of the colony, served as the leaven of disaffection.

Not even the virtues of Lord Baltimore could insure his authority and his rights against Puritanism and the spirit of democratic liberty. Clayborne and Ingle appeared in arms, and gained possession of the Isle of Kent, which was then held by Giles Brent, in whose hands the administration had been placed by Calvert on his departure. For twelve months anarchy prevailed throughout the colony, and the records, being seized by Clayborne and Ingle, were destroyed. At length Calvert returned, and by means of an armed force from Virginia subdued the insurgents, though not without considerable loss. Peace and order were re-established, and by a wise clemency of the government, an act of amnesty was passed, which, by cancelling offences, allayed the irritation of rebellion.

The power of the proprietary was once more confirmed, whilst in the mother-country monarchy was overthrown and Puritanism was predominant. At this crisis the Roman Catholic government of Maryland, with that sagacious spirit of Christian moderation which marked all its proceedings, resolved to meet any approaching danger by still further strengthening the law of toleration. A second act for religious freedom was placed on their statute-books in the following words: “And whereas the enforcing of the conscience in matters of religion hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequences in those commonwealths where it has been practised, and for the more quiet and peaceable government of this province, and the better to preserve mutual love and amity among the inhabitants, no person within this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall be in any way troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof.” Noble words, noble spirit of religious liberty, worthy to be spoken by the genius of the New World!

Years afterwards, when on some occasion it was necessary to defend the measures of Lord Baltimore, it was declared that no person in Maryland had ever been persecuted for religion, and that the colonists ever enjoyed freedom of conscience no less than freedom of person and estate. The persecuted both of Massachusetts and Virginia were welcomed to equal liberty of conscience and equal political rights in the Catholic province of Maryland.

In 1650 the legislative body was divided into an upper and lower house, the former consisting of the governor and council, the latter of representatives chosen by the people. The strength of the proprietary, it was declared in the General Assembly, reposed “in the affections of his people,” and all taxes were forbidden, unless granted by vote of the deputies of the freemen of the province.

In the meantime Virginia, as we have already said in the account of that state, having asserted its adherence to Charles II. on the execution of his father, parliament sent out commissioners to enforce the obedience of the colonies bordering on the Chesapeake to the commonwealth, the troublesome Clayborne being one of these very commissioners. Maryland, which had, though Catholic, already given in her allegiance to the commonwealth, of course was not included among the disaffected, and Virginia, as we already know, yielded without a blow being struck. The opportunity, however, was too good to be lost. Clayborne, glad of any plea to carry arms into Maryland, again put forth his claims to Kent Island, and Virginia, which had never relished so fine a portion of her territory being taken from her, revived also her claims to jurisdiction beyond the Potomac; whilst Charles II., angry with Lord Baltimore for his adhesion to the party of the commonwealth and for his religious toleration, appointed Sir William Davenant, the dramatist, governor in place of Stone, the deputy of Lord Baltimore. Again anarchy prevailed; Clayborne and his commissioners assumed authority; the governor Stone and his officers were deposed, and only reinstated on their submission. As to Sir William Davenant, he set sail with a body of refugee loyalists from France, but being met shortly after by the parliamentary fleet, was taken prisoner and earned to London, where he owed his liberation to the friendly mediation of Milton, then in high favour with the republican party. On the dissolution of the Long Parliament, from which Clayborne and the commissioners had derived their power, Stone reasserted the full authority of the proprietary, which alarming the commission then in Virginia, Clayborne appeared once more in Maryland, and by the help of the Puritans of Ann Arundel county again compelled Stone to resign. One William Fuller was appointed governor, and a new council and assembly convened. The spirit of religious asperity and bigotry prevailed; and imitating Cromwell’s measures in England, all were disfranchised by the assembly who differed from them in religious opinion; Catholics were excluded not only from participation in government, but were declared not entitled to the protection of the laws of Maryland.

In January of the following year, Stone, receiving a reprimand from Lord Baltimore for so easily yielding to Clayborne and his party, appeared in arms with, a considerable force, and marched to “Mr. Preston’s house on the Patuxent,” where the records of the colony were kept, which he seized, and so proceeded on to Providence, as Ann Arundel was now called, where he found the Puritan party fully prepared for their reception. On March 25th a battle was fought, the Catholics advancing with the cry of “Hey for St. Mary’s!” which was the seat of the Catholic government, and the Puritans, whose numbers were inferior to those of their enemies, shouting, “In the name of God, fall on! God is our strength!”

The Catholics were completely defeated, about fifty were killed or wounded, and the rest taken prisoners; of the Puritans but very few fell. “God did appear wonderful in the field and in the hearts of his people; all confessing him to be the only worker of this victory and deliverance,” wrote the Puritan Leonard Strong.

Stone and his officers were tried by court-martial, and he and ten others condemned to death. His life, however, was spared by the prayers of the enemies’ own soldiers and by the petitions of the women, says Mrs. Stone, in her letter to Lord Baltimore on this sad occasion; four, however, were shot in cold blood, “which, by all relations that ever I did hear of,” says she, “the like barbarous act was never done among Christians.” The Puritan party was now dominant throughout the province. In this miserable state of affairs, Cromwell was appealed to, that he “would condescend to settle the country by declaring his determinate will.” But Cromwell, though still acknowledging Lord Baltimore’s claim, was unwilling to dispute the act of his own political party. Josiah Fendall, who, with the approbation of Cromwell, was appointed governor by Lord Baltimore, was immediately arrested by the Puritan party, and thus Maryland lay for nearly two years the prey of two contending factions.

On the death of Cromwell, in 1658, the republican party, uncertain of the turn which affairs might take in England, agreed to a compromise, and the government of the province was surrendered to Fendall. The terms, however, of their resignation show their power in the colony. These were, the possession of their arms, an indemnity for arrears, confirmation of the acts and orders of the late Puritan assemblies, and, strange enough, they especially demanded that the proprietary should maintain the act of toleration by which they had gained a settlement in the colony, but which they had so signally disregarded while themselves in power.

The dissensions in the colony being thus adjusted by compromise, a circumstance occurred which proved that the democratic leaven had leavened the whole lump. On the 12th of March, 1660, the very day before the burgesses of Virginia asserted their right to independent legislation, the representatives of Maryland met in the house of one Robert Slye, and declared themselves a lawful assembly independent of any other power, refusing even to acknowledge the rights of the upper house; and Fendall, on this occasion acting in the spirit of Berkeley in Virginia, bowed to the supremacy of the people; and the supreme people, hoping thus to secure a long tranquillity, passed an act making it felony to disturb the order which they had established. Nor was the order disturbed. On the Restoration, Lord Baltimore’s claims were fully confirmed, and Philip Calvert was appointed governor. Fendall was tried for treason, and found guilty, but with that clemency which had on former occasions been evinced by Lord Baltimore, a general pardon was proclaimed to him and all other political offenders, and mercy and peace once more restored to Maryland their wonted blessings.

Spite of all her internal sorrows and dissensions, Maryland had grown and prospered. In 1660 her population amounted to about 10,000; a strong patriotic sentiment was alive in the hearts of all—Maryland was their country, the country and the home of their children.

CHAPTER VI.
COLONISATION OF MASSACHUSETTS.

The early unsuccessful attempts of the Plymouth company to obtain a settlement in what was then called North Virginia, have already been related. In the first instance, in 1606, the Spaniards captured the vessel which they had sent out; in the second, the hardships of a severe winter, with a few trying though by no means extraordinary casualties, discouraged the colonists so far that Popham, their president, being dead, and Gilbert having by the decease of his brother become heir to his property, they determined to return to England with what speed they could, and accordingly the ships, which the following year visited the infant colony with supplies, carried them back. Returned thus to England, they reported very unfavourably of the country, and exaggerated their own sufferings to furnish an excuse for their want of courage and perseverance. The Plymouth company, though much dissatisfied, especially as the American fisheries and fur trade were now carried on with great success, many ships annually visiting those northern coasts, and occasionally even wintering there, were unable, after these failures, to excite any further public interest in their schemes.

In 1614 Captain John Smith, whom we have known already so favourably in Virginia, and who had long asserted, with a sagacity unusual in that age, that colonisation was the true policy of England, entered this abandoned field of enterprise, and with two ships, the private venture of himself and four merchants of London, set sail for the northern coast of the lands included in the Virginia patent. “Captain John Smith,” says the early chronicle of Charlestown, in Massachusetts, “having made a discovery of some parts of America, lighted, amongst other places, upon the opening betwixt Cape Cod and Cape Ann, situate in 71° of west longitude and 42° 20′ of north latitude; where by sounding and making up he fell in amongst the islands, and advanced up into the Massachusetts Bay, till he came up into the river between Mishawum, afterwards called Charlestown, and Shawmutt, afterwards called Boston, and having made discovery of the land, rivers, coves, and creeks in the said bay, and also taken some observations of the manners, dispositions, and sundry customs of the numerous Indians, or nations inhabiting the same, he returned to England, where on his arrival he presented a map of the Massachusetts Bay to the king; and the prince, afterwards King Charles I., called the river Charles River.” The name of New England, which Smith gave to the country, was also confirmed by the monarch, but the northern promontory of Massachusetts Bay, which he had called Tragabigzanda, in remembrance of the Turkish lady whose slave he had been at Constantinople, was changed by Prince Charles into Cape Ann, from regard to his mother, and by this appellation it is still known; the name of the Three Turks’ Heads which he gave to three islands at the entrance of the Bay, has also been changed, and a cluster of islands which he had called after himself is now known as the Isle of Shoals.

Smith having successfully accomplished the purposes of his voyage, set sail homeward, leaving the second ship, commanded by one Thomas Hunt, to complete its lading and follow; but, as had been so often the case before, no sooner was Smith gone than mischief befell. Hunt, under pretence of trade, decoyed four-and-twenty Indians on board, and carried them away to Malaga, where he sold most of them for £20 a man as slaves, and would have sold them all, had not, says Cotton Mather, “the friars in those parts, learning whence they came, took away the rest of them, that so they might nurture them in the Christian religion.” This base action so incensed the natives, that for some time it was dangerous to the English to touch upon the shore; nevertheless, God, who frequently allows good to be produced from evil, overruled this outrage to the subsequent benefit of his people. Squanto, one of the poor Indians, escaping from bondage, fled to London; and after five years being restored to his country, became useful to the colonists as an interpreter.

Encouraged by the commercial success of his voyage, Smith was sent out in the following year, still in the employment of the Plymouth company, to establish a colony in New England; but through the violence of tempests he was compelled to give up the endeavour. Again he went out, but his crew mutinied, and he was finally captured by French pirates and carried into France. But the spirit of this brave man never forsook him; he escaped alone from Rochelle in an open boat, and arrived in England, where he devoted himself with all that ardour which was natural to his character to excite an enthusiasm towards his favourite scheme of the colonisation of New England. He published a map and description of the country, and visited in person the gentry and merchants of the West of England, suiting his promises of success to the character of the classes whom he addressed; to the merchant he proposed commercial enterprise and the establishment of cities, to the nobleman vast and wealthy dominion, and to the lover of leisure and indulgence presented pictures of an Arcadian life, with the pleasures of “angling and crossing the sweet air,” as he himself words it, “from isle to isle, over the silent streams of a calm sea;” but from all, with a blameable want of candour, he concealed dangers and difficulties.

He succeeded in arousing a spirit of enterprise. New plans of colonisation were formed, and Smith was appointed admiral of the country for life. So far was comparatively easy; great difficulties, however, arose in the obtaining a charter for the new undertaking. The London company, jealous of a rival, threw difficulties and impediments in the way. It was not till two years had passed that a charter could be obtained. In November, 1620, King James granted what is distinguished among the New England historians as the “Great Patent,” by which the whole of North America, from the 40th to the 48th degree of north latitude, “excepting such places as were already possessed by any other Christian prince or people,” was granted wholly and entirely, with full rights of jurisdiction, traffic and settlement, to forty noblemen and merchants, incorporated as “The Council established at Plymouth, in the county of Devon, for the planting, ruling, ordering and governing of New England, in America.” Such a grant, which was intended to comprise everything, and secure and hasten colonisation, defeated its own object, and led to nothing but disputes. The English nation itself remonstrated, through its members in the House of Commons, on such an exercise of royal prerogative for the benefit of private individuals; and the French, who had already for seventeen years had possession of various trading stations on the coast, ridiculed and defied this wholesale appropriation.

God, however, in his marvellous providence, had other purposes in view for New England than the profit of the merchant or the aggrandisement of the nobleman. As he had sifted out the baser elements by suffering, death and much sorrow before the colonisation of Virginia was permitted to take deep root and flourish, so now, more memorably in the case of New England, was his arm stretched forth to prevent and counteract its appropriation by any but those for whom it was intended, and who there might remain for ages to become a purer and better people;—for those who, though they had not yet attained to the glorious accomplishment of Christianity in its perfect law of love, were yet the great and shining lights of God’s truth at that time. Whilst therefore the national and the private companies were disputing about the objects and spirit of the new charter, the people of God, persecuted and trodden down as they had been for ages, were following the guidance of a new voice sounding from the wilderness, and, without charter or royal licence, were taking permanent possession of the soil. The Puritans were the true colonisers of New England.

But before the Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock we must take a summary view of the growth of puritanism in England.

Henry VIII., when resolved to obtain his divorce from Catharine of Arragon, denied the supremacy of the Pope, and insisted on his clergy doing the same, and in this measure puritanism had its rise. A door was opened by the king for the admission of the principles of the Reformation; and though he himself was never anything but a Catholic in spirit, yet his marriage with Anne Boleyn and his quarrel with the Pope gave the more intelligent portion of the English people liberty to think and judge for themselves. The Bible was no longer a sealed book constituting merely a portion of the church ceremonial; Henry VIII. had caused it to circulate in its English translation among the people. It was read by all classes with eagerness, and the more it was read the more was undermined the mere traditional teaching of religion. The human mind began to think and to ask important questions, and amid this questioning, the rottenness and insufficiency of old systems became more and more apparent. With a new heart and a new life, a new and simpler mode of religious instruction was requisite; this was what the Bible taught them to seek for, and bold in the spirit of the Bible, it was not long before it was demanded. But it was not in Henry’s spirit to grant what the Bible dictated; the reformed English Church retained a hierarchical constitution and nearly the whole Romish ceremonial. Henry in his latter years forbade the general reading of the Scriptures, limiting the privilege to noblemen and merchants, and died a Catholic in heart. But light had been let in—the light of divine truth and knowledge—and no human power could henceforth wholly obscure it.

The accession of Edward VI. favoured the establishment of protestantism in England. He died. With Mary papacy was restored, and all the more virulently in consequence of the hold which protestantism had taken in the nation. John Rogers and Bishop Hooper, both Puritans, and many other pious and enlightened men, suffered martyrdom. Burleigh asserts that nearly 400 persons perished by imprisonment and at the stake. The earnest, steadfast, uncompromising spirit of puritanism showed itself early. Whilst Cranmer and others sought by recantations and prayers to escape the pangs of martyrdom, the Puritan made no concession, asked no favour, but died rejoicing to be accounted worthy to suffer for Christ’s sake. Multitudes of the married clergy and others fled, during this terrible storm of persecution, to the continent of Europe, as many others had already done in the previous reigns; and carrying abroad with them their spirit of inquiry and controversy, they differed in some points, and became split into the two sects of Lutherans and Calvinists. At Frankfort the two parties had a public quarrel; and when the death of Mary allowed the protestant exiles—most of whom during her reign had taken up their abode among the Calvinists of Geneva—to return to their native land, they brought home the bitterness of their contention.

With Elizabeth, the Reformation, which had commenced in the reign of Edward VI., was in some measure re-established. Many exiled Puritans returned full of hope, and with yet more inveterate abhorrence of papacy and papistical vestures and ceremonial, to discover, however, that the great queen, the champion of protestantism, was herself only half reformed, and that every bias of her character and inclination was in favour of royal prerogative and established authority. A true daughter of Henry VIII., Elizabeth regarded herself as head of the church, and ruled it with a despotic will.

In January, 1563, a convocation of the clergy drew up the Thirty-nine Articles; which, however, were not confirmed by act of parliament till nine years later. But the measure for the continuance of the ceremonies, and of the square cap and the surplice, of which the queen was a resolute supporter, was carried by one vote. The bishops urged the clergy to subscribe the liturgy and the ceremonies as well as the articles; Coverdale, Fox, Gilpin, and others refused, and this was the commencement of Nonconformity.

A great number of conscientious and excellent ministers were thus excluded from their pulpits. To them these requirements of the law were rank papacy, and they would not conform. Some in consequence became physicians; some were received into private families, holding views similar to their own, as chaplains; many fled to Scotland or the continent, and many others with their families were reduced to beggary. “The churches,” says an historian, “were shut; the public mind was inflamed; 600 persons repaired to a church in London to receive the sacrament; the doors were closed, no minister would officiate. The cries of the people reached the throne; but the throne was inexorable, and the archbishop preferred that his flock should perish rather than dispense with the clerical robes of the Church of Rome.”

The violence of persecution aroused the spirit of the persecuted tenfold; the press was resorted to as a means of defence, as well as for the propagation of opinion, but to little purpose. Any book or pamphlet reflecting on the present state of affairs was seized and burnt, and the author subjected to a fine and imprisonment. On this the suspended ministers and their party resolved on openly seceding from the church, believing that as they were not permitted to preach nor to officiate “without idolatrous geare, it was their duty to break off from the public church and to assemble in private houses and elsewhere.” They did so; they held their meetings in private houses and in fields and woods. One congregation was broken up in London, and as many as could be seized were hurried to prison. In 1575, ten men and one woman were condemned to the stake; the woman recanted; eight of the ten were banished, and two were burnt; and two others were put to death, after long and severe imprisonment, for circulating the tracts of the Brownists.

The prisons were full of Nonconformists; “died,” says their historian, “in their dungeons, like rotten sheep,” from hunger, cold and the noisome state of the prisons; and three of their ministers, Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry, were executed at Tyburn with peculiar circumstances of cruelty. Nothing but the preserving power of God could have left a remnant alive.

Still, though silenced by law and forbidden to preach or circulate their opinions, their views operated as leaven through the whole mass of society. Prohibitions, fines, imprisonments, ignominy, loss of property, nay, even of life, could not extinguish their zeal. Their works, produced at secret printing-presses, were diffused through the whole of the land as by invisible agency. The human mind had now risen up to do battle manfully for truth for conscience-sake, with the weapons of powerful argument and the keen arrows of sarcasm and wit, and no might of human oppression could overcome it.

In 1583, Grindall was succeeded by Whitgift, and with such prelates as Whitgift and Bancroft, Elizabeth, as she grew old, grew more and more intolerant. Whitgift, one of the fiercest of persecutors, used to go down on his knees before the queen to implore her not to show the slightest favour to the Nonconformists, lest it should invalidate her own infallibility. Under his guidance she refused to listen to the milder councils of her ministers; and the terrible Star Chamber and High Commission Court exercised a power almost equal to the Inquisition in Spain. Every one was compelled to answer on oath any question proposed either against others or themselves. The whole country groaned together; and Burleigh, remonstrating but in vain, declared that not even the Inquisition of Spain used so many questions to entrap their victims. Finally a law was enacted, that whoever above the age of sixteen refused to go to church, attended a conventicle, or denied the queen’s supremacy, should be imprisoned without trial till they conformed and signed an article of recantation. Refusing to sign this, they should be banished for life, or if refusing to quit the nation, or returning without royal licence, should be put to death without benefit of clergy.

But not even this terrible law could wholly effect its purpose, whatever ruin and misery it might occasion. There were already, in the counties round London alone, 20,000 stiff-necked frequenters of conventicles, who would not bow down to the Baal of conformity. Great numbers again fled to Holland.

The persecutions of the Puritans, however, somewhat abated before the death of Elizabeth, as a change of policy towards them was looked for on the accession of James, from whom the puritan party might even expect favour. But a very short time sufficed to prove how mistaken were these hopes. James, though brought up in the strictest accordance with the Calvinistic doctrines of the Scottish kirk, and though he had thanked God, while in Scotland, that he was at the head of the best and purest church in the world, by which he would stand to the death, and who abused the English establishment, “with its ill-sung mass,” as “wanting nothing of popery but the liftings;” yet no sooner had he arrived in England, and was met by the servile obeisance of bishops, who knelt before him and offered the most abject flattery, than he thanked God that he was now the head of a church where the bishops knew how to reverence a king. The bishops rejoiced; they had dreaded that in James, England would have had a presbyterian monarch; they found him a shallow boaster, whom their flatteries could make the tool of their will. Within nine months of his accession his key-note was “No bishop, no king;” and at the desire of his favourite bishops, he called a conference between them and the Puritans, when on the Puritans requesting permission to hold their assemblies for worship, the king interrupted them: “You are aiming,” said he, “at a Scotch presbytery; there Jack, and Tom, and Will, and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council, and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say ‘it must be;’ then Dick shall reply, ‘nay, marry, but we will have it thus.’ And therefore I repeat my former speech, and say, the king alone shall decide.” “I will have one doctrine,” said he, “and one discipline; one religion in substance and in ceremony;” adding, “that he had lived among such sort of men as the Puritans were since he was ten years old, but might say of himself as Christ said, ‘though I lived among them, I was none of them;’ nor did anything make me more detest their courses than that they disallowed of all things which had been used in popery.” Then, turning to his bishops, he declared that, “by his soul he believed Ecclesiasticus was a bishop, and that a Scottish presbytery agreed as well with monarchy as God and the devil.” And of the Puritans he said, “I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land, or else worse—only hang them, that’s all!”

Bishop Bancroft fell on his knees, and exclaimed, “I protest my heart melteth for joy, that Almighty God, of his singular mercy, has given such a king as has not been since the time of Christ!”

The king closed the conference by declaring “that if any would not be quiet and show their obedience, they were worthy to be hanged.” Bancroft was made archbishop of Canterbury. The canons of the church now in force were revised and enlarged, and it was enacted that whoever should speak against the Thirty-nine Articles, or the established church, should be excommunicated, put beyond the benefit of law, and subjected to all kinds of injury and injustice. This law was enforced with bitter cruelty; 300 nonconformist ministers, many of whom had been pastors of their congregations for twenty or thirty years, were very soon silenced, while hundreds of brave and conscientious men were imprisoned, fined, and driven into exile. Among those who sought refuge in Holland was the well-known John Robinson, who is generally considered to be the father of the Puritans in New England, and thus the royal bigot and persecutor James became, through the overruling of God’s providence, the means of establishing puritanism on the broad, free soil of America.

Through all the oppression and bigotry of this and the preceding reigns, the general intelligence had, however, greatly increased; the struggle between established authority and the growing spirit of popular liberty was becoming more and more determined. “The Bible,” says the author of the “History of Priestcraft,” “had been secretly making a mighty revolution in the popular mind. In the troubles and sufferings which kings and priests had inflicted, it had been the secret and precious companion; its poetry the most magnificent, its maxims the most profound, its promises the most momentous in the world, were not lost on the human heart; its doctrines became more clearly understood, and the spirit of man rose with its dignifying knowledge.” Enlightened, enfranchised, ennobled by the glorious teachings of this divine book, the victims of persecution became the unflinching promulgators of the truth and the liberty for which they suffered. Oppression, imprisonment, fines, spoiling of goods, and death, all were made the means of still further creating in the human soul a necessity for the liberty which was born through the Gospel.

CHAPTER VII.
THE PILGRIM FATHERS.

Holland, which had exhibited a republican character in its conflict with catholic Spain, and the reformed church of which inclined to the opinions of Calvin, offered a desirable retreat for the persecuted Puritans of England; “and hither, in the fall of the year 1608,” says Thomas Prince, the worthy chronicler of New England, “fled divers of Mr. Robinson’s church from the north of England, which had been extremely harassed; some cast into prison, some burnt in their houses, some forced to leave their farms and families;” thither they fled accordingly, for the purity of worship and liberty of conscience.

And now leaving England, we must attach ourselves to the history of our puritan exiles, thus commencing their momentous pilgrimage; and wherever it is possible so to do, we will take the worthy old Thomas Prince as our guide, who, like the chronicler of a second Acts of the Apostles, puts down all in good faith, even to the contentions in the church itself. “This spring” (1608), says he, “more of Mr. Robinson’s church, through great difficulties from their pursuers, got over to Holland; and afterwards the rest, with Mr. Robinson and Mr. Brewster, who are of the last, having tarried to help the weakest over before them. They first settle at Amsterdam, and stay there a year, where Mr. Smith (another minister from England) and his church had gotten before them.

“1609. Mr. Robinson’s church having staid at Amsterdam about a year, and seeing that Mr. Smith and his church was fallen into contention, and that the flames there were likely to break out in that ancient church itself, they think it best to remove in time, before they were any way engaged with the same; and valuing peace and spiritual comfort above other riches, they, with Mr. Robinson, remove to Leyden, choose Mr. Brewster assistant to him, and live in great love and harmony both among themselves and their neighbours for above eleven years.”

In 1617 the church in Leyden began to think of removing to America, for several weighty reasons; the principal of which were “the licentiousness and temptations of the place; many of their children having left their parents to become soldiers, others taking to foreign voyages, and others to courses leading to the danger of their souls, to the great grief of their parents, and the fear that religion might die among them; and also from an inward zeal and great hope of laying some foundation for the kingdom of Christ in the remote ends of the earth, though they should be but as stepping-stones to others.” The Dutch, hearing of their intention, made them large offers to emigrate to their colonies; but they, preferring to go under the English government, after humble prayers to God, decided on so doing, and to settle in a distinct body under the general government in Virginia.

Robinson, in the name of the congregation, stated to the Virginia company the wishes and feelings of the proposed emigrants, to which they all subscribed their names. This letter comprised the whole spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers. “1st (said they), We verily believe and trust the Lord is with us; to whom, and to whose service, we have given ourselves in many trials, and that he will graciously prosper our endeavours, according to the simplicity of our hearts. 2nd, We are weaned from the delicate milk of our mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land. 3rd, The people are, for the body of them, as industrious and frugal, we think we may say, as any company of people in the world. 4th, We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves straitly tied to all care of each other’s good, and of the whole. 5th and lastly, It is not with us, as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish ourselves at home again.”

The Virginia company saw, as well it might, that these were men in whom was the bone and sinew of steadfast enterprise, and they replied that “their desire should be forwarded in the best sort, that might be for their own and the public good.”

Another letter was also written, stating faithfully their religious views, which was intended to be laid before the king and privy council, praying for the royal consent to their liberty of conscience beyond the seas. Sir John Worstenholme, to whom the letter was sent, reported “very good news; for the king’s majesty and the bishops have consented; but,” says he, “for your letter I would not show it at any hand, lest it should spoil all.” Still, spite of Sir John Worstenholme’s very good news, the chronicler records that they found it a harder piece of work than they expected, to obtain their writ of the king for liberty in religion; he would only consent “to connive at them, and not molest them, provided they would carry themselves peaceably; but to tolerate them by the public authority of his seal, that he would not do.”

Nearly a year after this it is recorded that, “notwithstanding the great discouragement they met with from the king and bishops, yet casting themselves on the care of Providence, they resolve to venture,” and accordingly two agents were sent to London, to arrange all things for their departure.

Many difficulties still remained to be overcome, factions and disturbances having in the meantime occurred in the Virginia company. At length, after long attendance, a patent was granted and confirmed under the Virginia company’s seal, being made out to Mr. John Wincob, “a religious gentleman, belonging to the Countess of Lincoln, who intended at that time to go out; but Providence ordained it otherwise.” The patent was sent over to Holland, together with proposals for their transmigration from friends and merchants in London, who were willing either to go or to adventure with them. “On receiving these,” says the chronicler, “they first kept a day of solemn prayer, Mr. Robinson preaching a very suitable sermon, strengthening them against their fears, and encouraging them in their resolutions; and then they decided how many, and who should go first, for all who were willing could not be got ready quickly. The greater number remaining required their beloved pastor to remain with them; their elder, Mr. Brewster, accompanying those who should depart.”

And now, on June 10th, 1620, a ship of nine score tons being hired in London, and the ship in Holland being ready, they spent a day in solemn prayer, for with the Pilgrim every important act of life was an act of religion, and their beloved pastor, anticipating their high destiny, and the sublime doctrines of liberty that would grow out of the principles on which their religious tenets were established, gave them a farewell address, breathing a freedom of opinion and an independence of authority, such as then was hardly known in the world.[^[1]]

“I charge you,” said he, “before God and his blessed angels, that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord has yet more truths to break forth out of his holy word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go no further than the instruments of their reformation. Luther and Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated not into the whole council of God. I beseech you, remember it; ’tis an article of your church covenant—that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you, from the written word of God.”

On the 21st of July, the Pilgrims left Leyden, being accompanied by their brethren as far as Delft harbour, where many met them from Amsterdam, to take leave and see them depart; and early the next morning, “after a night spent in friendly and pleasant Christian converse, the wind being fair, they went on board, their friends accompanying them, and Robinson and they who were with him falling down on their knees, he commended them with watery cheeks and most fervent prayer to God; then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leave, and with a prosperous wind arrived at Southampton, where they found the larger ship from London, with the rest of their company, waiting for them.”

On the 5th of August, the two ships, the Speedwell and Mayflower, set sail from Southampton, but had not proceeded far before the smaller vessel, belying her name, proved leaky, and both returned to Dartmouth for her repair. Again they weighed anchor, and having advanced about one hundred leagues beyond the Land’s-End, the captain of the Speedwell, either having lost courage or the ship being really unseaworthy, declared that they must return or sink. They returned to Plymouth, and however grievous and discouraging it was, determined to part with the ship and all those whose hearts failed them, and taking in the rest, with such provisions as they could well stow in the larger vessel, resolved to proceed on the voyage alone.

After another sad parting the Mayflower again set sail, having on board 101 souls, not alone resolute men, but brave-hearted women, their wives, some far advanced in pregnancy, children and infants. A richer freight, fraught with more momentous consequences to humanity, never crossed the ocean.

Midway on the Atlantic they encountered fierce storms, which so much damaged the ship, that their arrival on the other side seemed hardly possible. “But a passenger having brought a great iron screw from Holland, they with it raised the beam into its place, and then, committing themselves to the Divine will, proceeded.”

On the 10th of November, after a voyage of sixty-three days, they entered the harbour of Cape Cod, when, falling on their knees they blessed God for having brought them safely across the great waters. Far-seeing and prudent as well as religious in all their actions, and in order to avoid any after dissatisfaction, they did not leave the ship until they had formed themselves into a body-politic, by a solemn contract, to which they set their hands. “In the name of God, amen,” says this remarkable document, the register of the birth of popular, constitutional liberty in the New World, “we, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign King James, having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our king and country, a voyage, to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do, by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body-politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furthering of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof, to enact, constitute and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony. Unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”

This instrument being signed by forty-one persons as representatives of their families and descendants, John Carver, “a pious and well-approved gentleman,” was chosen their governor for the first year.

It was the original intention of the emigrants to establish themselves in the district of Virginia, but stress of weather, or the ignorance of the pilot, or as some say the treachery of the captain of the Mayflower, who was bribed by the Dutch to take the vessel north of their plantation, or more probably the overruling hand of Providence, they now found themselves, at the commencement of winter, on a bleak, barren and unknown coast, which the inclement season forbade them to leave.

On Saturday, the 13th of November, the “people went ashore to refresh themselves, the whales playing round about them; and they being obliged to wade a bowshot or two to get to land, which was covered with snow, and the weather being freezing, many took grievous colds and coughs which ere long caused their death. Death was their welcome to this dreary coast, which thus was early hallowed by the graves of their friends. After resting on the sabbath-day, sixteen of their company again went on shore, well armed, to search for a convenient place of settlement. Many days were thus spent to no purpose, during which they suffered greatly, lodging in the woods and travelling over dreary country among Indian graves, into which they dug, and finding several baskets full of Indian corn, carried them away with them, and this served as seed-corn for the next harvest.”

On the 27th they proceeded into Cape Cod Bay; again landed, but it blew, snowed and froze all day and night; the ground was hard frozen and covered many inches deep with snow; they were tired with travelling up and down the steep hills and valleys; they dug in divers places, “but found no more corn, nor any thing else but graves.” What an omen this for the superstitious, if there were any such among them! Two Indian wigwams they saw, but no natives; and thus, with nothing comfortable to relate, they returned on the 1st of December to their ship. In the midst of these dreary prospects it is recorded that Mrs. Susanna White was delivered of a son, the first-born of European parentage in New England. He was called Peregrine, and lived to be eighty-four. In the meantime death was busy in the little company, and the next entry after this birth records four deaths.