The Beginners of a Nation Part 5

X.

[Sidenote: Sir Thomas Dale, 1611.]

[Sidenote: Docs. Rel. to Col. Hist. N. Y., i, pp. 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 16-21.]

As the hope of immediate profit from Virginia died away, the colony would have been abandoned if there had not arisen in its favor a patriotic enthusiasm which gave it a second lease of life. Many of the great n.o.blemen were deeply engaged in this new agitation in favor of the unlucky colony, and none more deeply, perhaps, than Prince Henry, the heir apparent. At Henry's request, Sir Thomas Dale, an officer who had been employed about the prince's person, and who with other English officers was now in the service of the Netherlands, was granted leave of absence to go to Virginia. Since the colony was a check to Spain, the Netherlands were supposed to have an indirect interest in the enterprise and were persuaded to continue Captain Dale's pay. De la Warr, who remained in England, was nominally governor; Gates, when present in Virginia, was the ranking officer; but for five years Dale appears to have been the ruling spirit in the colony.

[Sidenote: The heavy hand of Dale, 1611-1616.]

[Sidenote: A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia, 1624, MS., Pub. Rec. Off.]

To induce him to go, Dale had been deceived regarding the condition of the plantation, as had been everybody else that had gone to Jamestown after the first s.h.i.+ps sailed. The vice-admiral, Newport, was the princ.i.p.al reporter of Virginia affairs in England and the princ.i.p.al agent of the company in this deception. Dale's rough temper was already well known. It was for this, no doubt, that he had been chosen to do a rude piece of work. On his arrival he saw the desperate state of the undertaking. He pulled Vice-Admiral Newport's beard and threatened him with the gallows, demanding "whether it weare meant that people heere in Virginia shoulde feed uppon trees."

[Sidenote: Brit. Museum, MS., 21,993, f. 174.]

[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration.]

Under the inefficient government of George Percy, who had again been placed in charge, the seedtime of 1611 was allowed to pa.s.s without the planting of corn. The Jamestown people were found by Dale "at their daily and usual work bowling in the streets." But the days of unthrifty idleness were at an end. "The libertyes, ffranchises, and immunityes of free denizens and natural-born subjects of any our other dominions" promised to the colonists, were also at an end from the moment of the arrival of this sharp-set soldier and disciplinarian. Dale's pitiless use of martial law turned Virginia not exactly into a military camp, but rather into a penal settlement where men suffered for the crime of emigration. The men taken to Virginia in Dale's own company were hardly fit for anything else, and were so "diseased and crazed in their bodies" that at one time not more than sixty out of three hundred were capable of labor. The food sent with Sir Thomas Dale by the corrupt contractors was "of such qualitie as hoggs refused to eat." Sir Thomas Gates afterward made oath to its badness before the Chief Justice in London.

XI.

[Sidenote: The years of slavery.]

Dale regarded himself as an agent of the company. His aim was by hook or crook to make the hitherto unprofitable colony pay dividends to the shareholders, who were his employers. His relation to the emigrants was that of a taskmaster; one might, perhaps, more fitly call him a slave-driver. Instead of seeking to render the colony self-supporting by clearing corn ground, he gave his first attention to lading vessels with sa.s.safras root, then much prized as a medicine, and cedar timber, valued especially for its odor.

[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration. Percy to Northumberland, Hist. MS., Commission, Rept., iii, 53, 54.]

[Sidenote: Observations and Travel from London to Hamburgh, p. 13.]

During a part of Dale's time eight or nine ounces of meal and half a pint of peas was the daily ration. In their declaration, made some years afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both the meal and the peas were "moldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and unfit for beasts." Better men than these might have been driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and bad food. And mutiny and desertion were usually but other names for suicide under the rule of the pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the woods, hoping to reach a mythical Spanish settlement believed to be not very far away. Dale set the Indians on them, and they were brought back to be burned at the stake. Others, who in desperation or deadly homesickness resolved to venture their lives in a barge and a shallop "for their native country," suffered in various ways for their temerity. Death by shooting or hanging was clemency. One offender was put to death by the awful torture of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may have learned during his stay on the Continent. Taylor, the water poet, has left us the sickening details of such an execution in Germany in 1616.

One need not waste any sympathy on those who were hanged for stealing to satisfy hunger; death is more merciful than life to men in such a case. But one poor rogue, who thought to better his rations by filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had a bodkin run through his tongue and was chained to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though these things were twice attested by the best men in the colony, one prefers to make some allowance for their pa.s.sionate resentment, and to hope that some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is hard to believe, for example, that men unable to work were denied food, and left to creep away into the wretched burrows in the ground used for shelter, there to die unregarded in the general misery.

[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration.]

In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch fish braved the perils of the ocean in a little bark and got back to England. It was the only escape from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Abandon every hope who enter here" was almost as appropriate to the mouth of the James River as to the gate of Dante's h.e.l.l. All letters of complaint sent to England were intercepted, and all efforts of friends of the colonists in England to succor or rescue them were thwarted by the company in London. The king's pa.s.s to one of the colonists authorizing him to leave Virginia was sent to him by his friends closely made up in a garter, to avoid the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale.

[Sidenote: Dale's services.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Dale's administration was strongest on its military side. There was no danger that the Indians would reduce the colony to any straits while he was in charge. He gave his first attention to fortification, and he even begged for two thousand convicts out of English jails to form a line of posts from Hampton to a point a hundred miles above Jamestown.

He sent Argall all the way to Mount Desert to plunder a Jesuit settlement and make prize of a French s.h.i.+p--an undertaking congenial to Dale's military temper and the Viking tastes of Argall. As his experience increased, Dale came to understand that other than military measures were needed to found a colony, though he never more than half comprehended the elements of the problem. In his later time he cleared more corn ground, and he could boast at his departure that Virginia contained six horses, a hundred and forty-nine neat cattle, two hundred and sixteen goats, and hogs without number. Dale set off a private garden of three acres of land to each of the old planters, on the condition that they should provide food for themselves while still giving nearly all of their time to the service of the common stock.

Even this slave's-patch of private interest given to only a fraction of the colonists put some life into Virginia; but two thirds of the people were retained in the old intolerable bondage, and not even the most favored secured personal owners.h.i.+p of land. Dale's administration was remembered as "the five years of slavery."

XII.

[Sidenote: Dale's return.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

The rough-handed soldier from the Low Countries had indeed brought the Virginia chaos into order, but it was an order almost as deadly as the preceding anarchy. Dale confessed that the government of Virginia was "the hardest task he had ever undertaken," and he got himself out of it after five years by making a theatrical return to England in 1616 with a train of Indians, including the "Princess" Pocahontas, converted, baptized with a Christian name as Rebecca, and wedded to an Englishman. He added glowing reports of the country, and proved all by exhibiting "at least sixteen several sorts of staple commodities to be raised in this plantation." For greater effect, samples of twelve of these products of the colony were sold by public auction in the open court of the company. Though Dale could show many commodities, some of which have never flourished in Virginia since his time, he left behind him not an established community, but a mere camp of unhappy men retained in the country by the sheer impossibility of getting away.

After nine years of suffering, Virginia consisted of some three hundred and twenty-six men, twenty-five women and children, and graves outnumbering many times over all the living souls.

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

Three things had been discovered in Dale's time that were of importance to the colony. Dale had by personal experiment learned the two fis.h.i.+ng seasons in the James River. The colonists had begun the profitable cultivation of tobacco, and the economic success of the colony was thereby a.s.sured. Lastly, even Dale's small experiment with private interest rendered the apportionment of the land and the establishment of private owners.h.i.+p certain to come in time. As early as 1614 it was estimated that three men working for themselves raised more corn than ten times as many when the labor was for the public stock.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Argall's government.]

[Sidenote: Lord Rich's intrigue.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

[Sidenote: St.i.th, 142.]

[Sidenote: The Companie's root of difference. MS. Rec. Va. Co., May 7, 1623.]

[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co., _pa.s.sim_.]

Captain Argall, who succeeded Sir Thomas Dale, was a bold and notable mariner. He had built the first Virginia vessel; he had traded with the Indians for corn with as much enterprise and address as Captain Smith had shown; he had in a small s.h.i.+p called the Dainty made the first experimental voyage to James River by the westward route, avoiding the long circuit by the Canaries and West Indies. It had been his fortune to be the first Englishman to see the American bison, which he found near the Potomac. He it was who by a shrewd trick had captured Pocahontas and held her as hostage; and he drove the French out of Maine, despoiling their settlement at Mount Desert. To a mastery of all the arts that make the skillful navigator he added the courteous politeness of a man of the city and the unfaltering rapacity of a pirate. As governor, he robbed the company with one hand and the hapless colonists with the other. While using the s.h.i.+ps and men of the colony to carry on the Indian trade, he turned all the profits of it into his own wallet. The breeding animals of the colony acc.u.mulated by Dale he sold, and made no account of the proceeds. There was hardly anything portable or salable in Virginia that he did not purloin. He even plundered the property of Lady De la Warr, the widow of his predecessor. He boldly fitted out a s.h.i.+p belonging to Lord Rich, and sent an expedition of sheer piracy to the West Indies under an old letter of marque from the Duke of Savoy. When advices from England warned Argall that his downfall was imminent, he forthwith redoubled his felonious diligence. His chief partner in England was Lord Rich, who became the second Earl of Warwick in 1619, about the time of Argall's return, and who is known to history in his later character as a great Puritan n.o.bleman, who served G.o.d while he contrived to better his estate with both hands by such means as troublous times put within his reach. He was not content with small pickings. Rich appears to have aimed at nothing less than wrecking the company and securing the land and government of Virginia. The first step toward this was to get a charter for a private or proprietary plantation within Virginia which should be exempt from all authority of the company and the colony. This independent government was to serve as a refuge from prosecutions for Argall and other piratical agents, and at last to possess itself of the wreck and remainder of Virginia. The second step in this intrigue was one that could have availed nothing in any time less respectful to shadowy technicalities and less p.r.o.ne to legal chicanery than that of James I. As we have seen, jealousy was excited in Virginia by the possibility of Captain Smith's wedding Pocahontas and setting up a claim to authority based on her inheritance from Powhatan. A tradition lingered in Virginia a hundred years later that King James questioned Rolfe's right to intermarry with a foreign princess without the consent of his sovereign. If this had any foundation, it grew out of the value of a pretext in a time of technicality and intrigue. There may have been already a scheme to trade upon the hereditary right of Powhatan's daughter. Pocahontas died in England, leaving an infant son. Argall, on his arrival, hastened to notify the company that Opechankano, the brother and successor of Powhatan, had resolved not to sell any more land, but to reserve it for the son of Pocahontas when he should be grown. The company charged that this was a ruse to serve the ends which Argall, Rich, and others had in view. The larger plan miscarried, but Argall found his prey so tempting that he lingered longer than was safe, and got away in the nick of time by the aid of Lord Rich, who had stood guard like a burglar's pal, and who contrived to delay the s.h.i.+p carrying out the new governor until a small swift-sailing vessel could be sent to fetch away Argall and his varied booty of public and private plunder. In that day justice often went by favor, and Argall consigned his spoils to hands so powerful that the Virginia Company, stripped bare by his treacherous villainy, could never recover any of its lost property. The embittered colonists had the bootless satisfaction of sending over after the runaway governor twenty-four bundles of accusatory depositions.

XIV.

[Sidenote: Fall of the lottery.]

[Sidenote: Note 14.]

From the first n.o.body reaped any profit from investments made in the new colony except the clique of merchants who had been allowed to sell wretched supplies for the distant settlers at ruinous rates. Rich and those interested with him had abundantly reimbursed themselves for all outlays on their part. The Virginia Company, swindled by commercial peculators at home, robbed by a pirate governor in America, and embarra.s.sed by Spanish intrigues at the English court, had also been deprived of the lotteries, large and small, which had supplied money for sending eight hundred emigrants to Virginia. The lottery, which had fallen into great disrepute and had suffered "many foul aspersions," was abolished in compliance with a public sentiment. The company was tottering swiftly to a fall; vultures like Warwick were waiting longingly for its death.

[Sidenote: Revival of interest, 1618.]

But there set in once more a widespread patriotic movement in its behalf. Such movements were characteristic of that vital age when love of country was fast coming to count for more as a motive to action than loyalty to the person of a prince. "Divers lords, knights, gentlemen, and citizens, grieved to see this great action fall to nothing," came to its rescue with one final effort which resulted after some years in putting the enterprise well beyond the danger of failure. They formed auxiliary societies within the Virginia Company, after the custom of corporations in that day. Each of these undertook to plant a settlement or "hundred." In one year the population rose from less than four hundred to about a thousand. The newly active element infused a more liberal spirit into the company, and set about correcting the abuses in its management.

XV.

[Sidenote: The Great Charter, 1618.]

[Sidenote: Pub. Rec. Off. Col. Papers, iii, 40. Disc. of the Old Va.

Co.]