The Beginners of a Nation Part 2

[Sidenote: Notions about animals.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

[Sidenote: Evelyn's Diary, i, 277.]

The animals of the new continent excited the wonder of the people of Europe and increased the interest in America. Regarding them, also, the most extravagant stories were easily credited. It was recorded in the sober Latin of Peter Martyr that the advance of Cabot's s.h.i.+ps was r.e.t.a.r.ded by the mult.i.tude of codfish on the Newfoundland coast, and that the bears were accustomed to catch these fish in their claws. It is hard to recognize the familiar opossum in the description by Purchas: "A monstrous deformed beast, whose fore part resembleth a fox, the hinder part an ape, excepting the feet, which are like a man's; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, where she bestows her young until they can s.h.i.+ft for themselves." The humming bird was believed to be a cross between a fly and a bird. The Hudson River Dutch settlers went further, and named it simply "the West Indian bee." These dainty creatures were prepared for exportation to Europe in New Amsterdam by drying them, in Barbadoes by filling them with sand. They were accounted "pretty delicacies for ladies, who wore them at their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and girdles." Evelyn saw two preserved as great rarities at Oxford, in 1564. A New England versifier extols

The humbird for some queen's rich cage more fit Than in the vacant wilderness to sit.

[Sidenote: Wood's New Eng. Prospect, p. 23.]

[Sidenote: De Bry's Hariot, p. 10.]

Flying squirrels, when brought into English parks in 1608, were the occasion of much wondering excitement. King James begged for one of them, like a spoiled child. The skins of muskrats were esteemed for their odor and were brought to England "as rich presents." It was thought that musk might be extracted from this animal. Hariot, the learned man of Ralegh's first colony, fancied that the civet cat would prove profitable to settlers in America, but his words indicate that he had been misled by traces of the skunk, whose perfume has never yet come into request. Speaking of the "civet catte," he says, "in our travails there was found one to have been killed by a salvage or inhabitant; and in many places the smell where one had lately beene before."

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

The racc.o.o.n, the "aroughcun" of the Virginia Indians, being a plantigrade, was esteemed a monkey; the peccaries were called the wild hogs of America, and were thought to have "their navels on the ridge of their backs." Somewhere in the region of the Hudson River a beast is described as having a horn in the middle of his forehead, from which it would appear that the unicorn on the royal coat of arms may have been found running at large. It is not easy to account for the "camel mare," reported to have been seen about three hundred miles west from the coast of New Jersey, unless it belonged to the genus _Incubus_. The bewildering number of new creatures found in America troubled the European scholars of that day, who were ever theological.

They were puzzled to get so many four-footed beasts and creeping things into the compa.s.s of Noah's ark. Mercator, the Flemish geographer, avoided this difficult embarkation by concluding that America had been excepted from the Deluge.

VIII.

[Sidenote: An age of romance and adventure.]

Thus grotesque and misleading were many of the glimpses that Europe got of the New World as the mists of ignorance slowly lifted from it.

These erratic notions regarding America give one an insight into the character of the English people at the period of discovery and colony-planting. Credulity and the romantic spirit dwell together. The imagination in such an age usurped the place of discrimination, and the wonderful became the probable. The appet.i.te for the marvelous fostered exaggeration; every man who had sailed in foreign seas thought it shame not to tell of wonders. The seventeenth century indeed betrayed a consciousness of its own weakness in a current proverb, "Travelers lie by license." History and fiction had not yet been separated. Like every other romantic age, the period of Elizabeth and James was prodigal of daring adventure; every notable man aspired to be the hero of a tale. English beginnings in America were thus made in a time abounding in bold enterprises--enterprises brilliant in conception, but in the execution of which there was often a lack of foresight and practical wisdom.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 3.]

See the careful and learned discussion of the Voyages of Cabot by the late Charles Deane, in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii. Mr. Deane effectually destroys the delusion which so long gave the credit of this discovery, or a part of it, to Sebastian Cabot, the son of the real discoverer. Mr. Henry Harrisse, in John Cabot, the Discoverer of America, and in an earlier work, Jean et Sebastien Cabot, etc., reaches the same conclusion. He even doubts Sebastian's presence in the expeditions of his father, John Cabot, etc., p. 48.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 4.]

Yet George Beste, who sailed with Frobisher, says: "Now men neede no more contentiously strive for roume to build an house on, or for a little turffe of ground, ... when great countreys and whole worldes offer and reache out themselves to them that will first voutsafe to possesse, inhabite, and till them." These countries, he says, "are fertile to bring forth all manner of corne and grayne, infinite sortes of land cattell, as horse, elephantes, kine, sheepe, great varietie of flying fowles of the ayre, as phesants, partridge, quayle, popingeys, ostridges, etc., infinite kinds of fruits, as almonds, dates, quinces, pomegranats, oringes, etc., holesome, medicinable, and delectable"

(Frobisher's Voyages, Hakluyt Society, p. 38).

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 8.]

Ralegh, in his History of the World, book i, chap, viii, sec. xv, has an interesting digression on the danger of trusting such communications, and he relates an anecdote of misapprehension by this very party sent under Grenville and Lane: "The same happened among the English, which I sent under Sir Richard Greeneville to inhabit Virginia. For when some of my people asked the name of that country, one of the savages answered, '_Wingandacon_,' which is as much as to say, as, _'You wear good cloaths,' or gay cloaths_." From this answer it came that the coast of North Carolina was called "Wingandacon," or, in its Latinized form, Wingindacoa, while the chief, or "king," of the country appears in the narratives of the time as Wingina. Ralegh says that Yucatan means merely "What say you?" and that Peru got its name from a similar mistake.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 8.]

I found the original of this map among the drawings made by John White in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum. It was reproduced to accompany a paper of mine on the Virginia Colony in the Century Magazine of November, 1882. It excited interest among scholars, as it was supposed to have been previously unknown. A copy was afterward found, however, in the collection made by Dr. Kohl for the State Department at Was.h.i.+ngton. The drawings in the Sloane MSS., British Museum, attributed to John White by Dr. E. E. Hale, in the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 21, are not White's originals. The latter are in the Grenville Collection. See my comparison of the two in The Nation of April 23, 1891.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 10.]

As late as December 5, 1621, in a letter from the Virginia Company to Governor Wyatt, these words occur: "The Conjectures of the Southwest Pa.s.sage and the piece of copper which you sent us gladly saw and heard." This long-surviving desire for a short pa.s.sage to the East Indies is traceable to the pa.s.sion that existed in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for spices, and this no doubt came from the gross forms of cookery in that time. Anderson's Commerce, sub anno 1504, cites Guicciardini on the great quant.i.ties of spices used, and adds: "For in those days the people of Europe were much fonder of spices in their cookery, etc., than they have been in later times."

The rise in the price of commodities in Elizabeth's time may have been only apparent, but it promoted voyages looking to the extension of commerce. Compare Holinshed, i, 274.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 10.]

Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs: "The Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, which lyeth on the West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the other side of the mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] and openeth a free and faire pa.s.sage, not only to China, j.a.pan, and the Moluccas, but also to New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and those rich countries of Terra Australis not as yet discovered." It is one of many marks of practical sagacity in Captain John Smith that after his experience on the American coast he was able to form views of the geography of the continent almost a century in advance of the opinions held in his time. He speaks of "those large Dominions which doe stretch themselves into the main G.o.d knoweth how many thousand miles" (Generall Historie, book vi).

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 14.]

So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the ma.s.sacre of Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was sent to Holland by the ill-fated s.h.i.+p that sailed out of New Haven in 1645. The s.h.i.+p was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth or sky.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 15.]

I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment in the British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by Ingram was inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It was omitted in the later edition as too incredible even for Hakluyt. See also a paper by Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883, on the copy of Ingram's Statement preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's story, and others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of Eastward, Ho! by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The a.s.sertion of Seagull, in the play, that "they have in their houses scowpes, buckets, and diverse other vessels of ma.s.sie silver," would seem at first sight to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of Ingram's narrative. But in the second edition of Bullein's A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one Mendax, describing an unknown land, declares that "their pottes, panns, and all vessells are cleane gold garnished with diamondes." This shows that Ingram's story had probably absorbed certain traits from what I have ventured to call European folklore tales about America--folk tales originally applied to the Orient, no doubt; echoes of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but not probable, that Bullein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had returned three years or more before he printed his second edition. The authors of Eastward, Ho! probably enlarged on Bullein.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 18.]

"Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. These details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian Cabot, whose veracity is not above suspicion.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 19.]

Some of the early writers speak of "apes." Strachey calls what appears to be a racc.o.o.n a monkey, and Brickell, as late as 1743, uses the same word. The peccaries are recorded as in the text by the marvel-loving Purchas, p. 805. One finds unicorns in Speed's Prospect, Description of New York. Speed also lets us know that the buffalo was accustomed to defend himself by vomiting "a hot scalding liquor" on the dogs that chased it. Argall was the first Englishman to see the bison, in 1613.

Citing his letter, Purchas says, p. 943, "In one voyage ... they found a slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine, which were good meate."

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

_JAMES RIVER EXPERIMENTS._

I.

[Sidenote: Departure of the emigrants.]

[Sidenote: Ld. Chancellor's Speech in reply to the Speaker.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1606.]