The Beginners of a Nation Part 1

The Beginners of a Nation.

by Edward Eggleston.

PREFACE.

In this work, brought to completion after many years of patient research, I have sought to trace from their source the various and often complex movements that resulted in the early English settlements in America, and in the evolution of a great nation with English speech and traditions. It has been my aim to make these pages reflect the character of the age in which the English colonies were begun, and the traits of the colonists, and to bring into relief the social, political, intellectual, and religious forces that promoted emigration. This does not pretend to be the usual account of all the events attending early colonization; it is rather a history in which the succession of cause and effect is the main topic--a history of the dynamics of colony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth century. Who were the beginners of English life in America? What propulsions sent them for refuge to a wilderness? What visions beckoned them to undertake the founding of new states? What manner of men were their leaders? And what is the story of their hopes, their experiments, and their disappointments? These are the questions I have tried to answer.

The founders of the little settlements that had the unexpected fortune to expand into an empire I have not been able to treat otherwise than unreverently. Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply English men and women of the seventeenth century, with the faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues of their age. I have disregarded that convention which makes it obligatory for a writer of American history to explain that intolerance in the first settlers was not just like other intolerance, and that their cruelty and injustice were justifiable under the circ.u.mstances. This walking backward to throw a mantle over the nakedness of ancestors may be admirable as an example of diluvian piety, but it is none the less reprehensible in the writing of history.

While the present work is complete in itself, it is also part of a larger enterprise, as the half-t.i.tle indicates. In January, 1880, I began to make studies for a History of Life in the United States. For the last sixteen or seventeen years by far the greater part of my time has been given to researches on the culture history of the United States in the period of English domination, that "good old colony time" about which we have had more sentiment than information. As year after year was consumed in this toilsome preparation, the magnitude of the task became apparent, and I began to feel the fear for my work so felicitously expressed by Ralegh, "that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me before the performance." It seemed better, therefore, to redeem from the chance of such mishap a portion of my work, by completing this most difficult part of the task, in order that when, early or late, the inevitable night shall fall, the results of my labor, such as they are, may not be wholly covered over by the darkness.

There is always difference of opinion in regard to the comparative fullness with which the several portions of a historical narrative should be treated, and I can not hope to escape criticism on this point. I have related some events with what will be considered disproportionate amplitude of detail. But the distinctive purpose of this work is to give an insight into the life and character of the people, and there are details that make the reader feel the very spirit and manner of the time. It is better to let the age disclose itself in action; it is only by ingenious eavesdropping and peeps through keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge from the past.

Literary considerations should have some weight in deciding how fully an episode shall be treated, unless the historian is content to perform the homely service of a purveyor of the crude ore of knowledge. I have sought to make this "a work of art as well as of historical science," to borrow a phrase from Augustin Thierry. Some omissions in this volume will be explained when its successors appear.

I find it an embarra.s.sing task to make acknowledgment to those who have a.s.sisted me; the debts that have acc.u.mulated since I began are too many to be recorded. I must not neglect to express my grateful remembrance of the hospitality shown to my researches during my various sojourns in England. At the British Museum and at the Public Record Office every facility has been extended to me, and a similar attention was shown to my wants at other less public repositories of books, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. To Dr.

Richard Garnett, the head of the printed book department of the Museum, I owe thanks for many personal attentions. I am also indebted to Mr. E. M. Thompson, keeper of the ma.n.u.scripts in the museum. The late Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Public Record Office, was very obliging. I owe most of all to the unfailing kindness of the Right Honorable James Bryce, M. P., who found time, in the midst of his preoccupations as a member of Parliament and his duties in high office, to secure for me access to private stores of historical material. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice with generous kindness put himself to much trouble to facilitate my examination of the ma.n.u.scripts at Landsdowne House. I am indebted to Lord Leconsfield for permission to visit Petworth House and read there Percy's Trewe Relacion in the original ma.n.u.script. I must ask others in England who befriended my researches to accept a general acknowledgment, but I can not forget their courtesy to a stranger. In common with other students I received polite attentions during my researches in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale.

In this country I owe much to the librarians of public libraries and their a.s.sistants--too much to allow me to specify my obligations to individuals. At the Astor, and at the Lenox, under its more recent management, my debt has been continual for many years. Acknowledgments are due to the officers of the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Peabody Inst.i.tute in Baltimore, and the libraries of the New York, the Ma.s.sachusetts, the Pennsylvania, the Maryland, and the Virginia Historical Societies. To Harvard College Library and to the New York State Library I am specially indebted; from them I have been able to supplement my own collection by borrowing. The Brooklyn Mercantile Library has granted me similar privileges. The New York Mercantile Library, on the other hand, I have not found hospitable to research.

To my generous friend Mr. Justin Winsor I owe thanks for many favors.

Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet opened his valuable collection to me, and the late Mr. S. L. M. Barlow showed me similar kindness. My friend, Mr.

Oscar S. Straus, permitted me to use at my own desk valuable works from his collection. There are others whose friendly attentions can be more fitly recognized in later volumes of this series, and yet others whom I must beg to accept this general but grateful acknowledgment.

Mr. W. W. Duffield, the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, supplied the artist with the coast charts from which the maps in this volume were drawn.

To avoid misapprehension, it is needful to say that this is not a re-issue of anything I have heretofore produced. The lectures on the culture history of the United States given at Columbia College and other inst.i.tutions were never written or reported. The papers on colonial life contributed to the Century Magazine in 1882, and the years following, were on a different plan and scale; they have merely served the purpose of preliminary studies of the general subject. To the editor and publishers of the Century Magazine I am obliged for their courtesy in all affairs relating to my contract with them, and for an arrangement which enables me to have free use of my material.

JOSHUA'S ROCK, LAKE GEORGE, _October, 1896_.

BOOK I.

RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

_ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE AND NOTIONS OF AMERICA AT THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT._

I.

[Sidenote: The Elizabethan age.]

The age of Elizabeth and James--the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon--was a new point of departure in the history of the English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet a modern invention; the New World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern discovery; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit growing out of the recent reformation in religion. Imagination was powerfully stimulated by the progress of American exploration, by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards in the West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but the credulity and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama-loving age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste.

He who could afford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples inhabiting them, or the "monstrous strange beasts" found in lands beyond the bounds of Christendom.

[Sidenote: Credulity about America.]

[Sidenote: George Beste, First Voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher.]

America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the least known of all the "four parts" into which the globe was then divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to the pole. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents; they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites expectation of others like it. And in a time when vague report or well-worn tradition counted for more than observation or experimental knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure probabilities, and to those shut in by the narrow limits of mediaeval knowledge the mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it afterward seemed incredible.

[Sidenote: Illusions of discoverers.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark.

Zuan Caboto--in English, John Cabot--who is described by a contemporary as "a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he sailed down the coast again the next year, "ever with the intent to find said pa.s.sage to India." It was announced on his return from his first voyage that Henry VII had "won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword."

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513, and the voyage of Magellan's s.h.i.+p across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth century; but to reach Asia was still the main purpose of western exploration, and America was for a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a pa.s.sage to the Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it r.e.t.a.r.ded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World.

II.

[Sidenote: Frobisher.]

[Sidenote: Frobisher's Voyages, Hakl. Soc., _pa.s.sim_.]

Adventure by sea became a favorite road to renown for ambitious Englishmen in the time of Elizabeth, and the belief in a pa.s.sage through or round North America grew into a superst.i.tion. The discovery of this strait seemed, in the phrase of George Beste, a writer of the time, "the onely thing of the world that was left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." Sir Martin Frobisher, who is reckoned by Camden "among the famousest men of our age for counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voyages in 1576 and the following years to that part of the American coast almost under the arctic circle. He desisted from the attempt to get to China by an arctic channel only when he had involved the "venturers" or stockholders a.s.sociated with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune of his wife and stepchildren, to whom "glory gotten at sea" must have been insufficient compensation. "Sir Martin Frobisher whome G.o.d forgive" is the phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife.

[Sidenote: Gilbert.]

[Sidenote: Haies in Hakl. Voy., 184-227.]

In the year of Frobisher's first voyage, Sir Humphrey Gilbert issued a treatise to prove that there was a way to the East Indies round North America. This he demonstrated by a hydra-headed argument constructed after the elaborate fas.h.i.+on of that unscientific age, proving the existence of a northwest pa.s.sage, first by authority, secondly by reason, thirdly by experience of sundry men's travels, and fourthly by circ.u.mstance. Not content with getting to China by logic, and nothing daunted by Frobisher's brilliant failure, Gilbert mortgaged his estate that he might engage in attempts yet more disastrous than Frobisher's, and lost his life during his second voyage, in 1584.

[Sidenote: Hakluyt.]

[Sidenote: Hakl. Disc. on Western Planting.]

[Sidenote: N. Y. Col. Docs. I, 16.]

About this time there appeared on the scene the famous geographer, Richard Hakluyt, one of those men that exert a marked influence in favor of a new movement mainly by ardor and industry. Hakluyt's fervor was akin to enthusiasm, his belief of every story favorable to projects for colonization, and his unwavering faith in the projects themselves bordered on flat credulity. To men of his own time his tireless advocacy of American exploration and colony-planting must have seemed irksome hobby-riding. But he was the indispensable forerunner of colonization. "Your Mr. Hakluyt hath served for a very good trumpet," says Sidney. Believing in everything American as unwaveringly as if his soul's salvation depended on his faith, he believed in nothing more sublimely than in a pa.s.sage to the "South Sea" or Pacific Ocean. He seized on every vague intimation of ignorant map-makers, on every suspicion of an explorer, on every fond tale of an Indian that tended to lend support to the theory in hand. All evidence was of equal weight in his scales, provided it lay on the affirmative side of the balance. It mattered little to him where his witnesses placed this elusive pa.s.sage. In Hakluyt's mind it was ubiquitous. The Pacific is now "on the backside" of Montreal Island, and the great Laurentian lakes suffer a sea change; now it is reached by a river flowing three months to the southward--that is, the Mississippi. Then the much-sought strait is carried northward on the authority of an old map--"a great old round carde"--shown him "by the King of Portingall." But he had also seen "a mightie large old mappe in parchment" which showed, as far south as lat.i.tude 40, a little neck of land "much like the streyte neck or Isthmus of Darienna." He had seen the same isthmus on another old map "with the sea joynninge hard on both sides as it doth on Panama." In a paper meant for private use, he expresses solicitude that the nearness of the Pacific to Florida shall not become known too commonly. Many years later an injunction was granted in Holland forbidding a publisher to insert in a map the newly discovered channel into the South Sea.

III.