The Beginners of a Nation Part 9

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

[Sidenote: Iron works.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

[Sidenote: Result of the ma.s.sacre.]

It had been found that the savages eagerly received gla.s.s beads in exchange for corn and peltries. Nothing more was required to prove the profitableness of gla.s.s-making. Some Germans were sent to the colony in 1608, and gla.s.s works were established. For some reason no proper materials were available at first, and it became necessary to request that sand might be sent from England to make Virginia gla.s.s of at the gla.s.s works in the woods near Jamestown. The German gla.s.s blowers were p.r.o.ne to run away to the Indians, among whom work was lighter and food more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these desertions by providing dusky wives for the men whose skill with tools and weapons they valued highly. In 1621 the gla.s.s business was revived, and this time it was intrusted to Italian workmen. About the same time iron works were established at Falling Creek, with "forty skilled workmen from Suss.e.x to carry them forward." Twenty-five s.h.i.+p carpenters were sent to ply their trade on the James River, and it was also arranged that oil was to be distilled from walnuts by the "apothecaries." George Sandys was sent over in July, 1621, to have entire control of all schemes for staple commodities. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineapples, plantains, and other fruits were to be started forthwith. There was once again great hope from the "rich commodity of silk," an endowed school for Indians was founded, and the little Virginia pool became iridescent with many frail bubbles. The sudden and frightful ma.s.sacre by the savages in March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and premature projects.

This calamity did not cause the failure of these foredoomed schemes; it only saved them from a painful and lingering death, and provided their friends with a decent epitaph for them. The people who survived the ma.s.sacre were decimated by an epidemic in the following year. What strength they could spare from frequent battles with the savages they spent in growing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable for export.

V.

[Sidenote: Tobacco.]

[Sidenote: A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 1604.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Against tobacco King James had written a book. It was denounced in Parliament and regarded by all public-spirited men as an evil.

Nevertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. In colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an economic one, and economic problems are solved by coa.r.s.e and homely means. John Rolfe, the first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, planted the first tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, and by 1616 the better West India variety had perhaps been subst.i.tuted for the harsh kind grown by the Virginia Indians, and by them called "uppowoc" or "apooke." Tobacco prospered and was profitable, to the disgust of the pedantic king and the sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful products from a colony upon which so much poetic sentiment had been lavished.

Neither gold nor spices came as had been expected; the strings of pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to be found, or were perhaps transformed on investigation into wampum beads; the silver mine once discovered on the upper James had vanished forever; tropical fruits refused to grow; even madder and woad failed, and, though the indigo plant would readily mature, n.o.body knew how to manufacture the dye. Silk was troublesome and unprofitable, s.h.i.+pbuilding, and such coa.r.s.e but patriotic products as naval stores had come to naught. But the detestable "weed," as King James had dubbed it, throve apace. As early as 1617 the waste margins of the broad streets of Jamestown were planted with it by the eager settlers. The English merchants grasped at the profits of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the heavy duties imposed on it, and a powerful mercenary interest in the prosperity of Virginia was established. By 1624, when the Virginia Company was dissolved, the danger that the colony would be abandoned as a result of Spanish intrigues, Indian ma.s.sacres, or prolonged discouragement had pa.s.sed away. Public spirit, patriotism, and religious enthusiasm no longer guarded it as a feeble house plant. It had struck root in the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its life was a.s.sured. From that time the colony that had been for seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers in England and a perdition to its inhabitants, became a sober money-making enterprise, uninteresting to enthusiasts and philanthropists.

VI.

[Sidenote: Motives of sentiment.]

In the preceding sections of this chapter we have traced what may be called the series of commercial motives that, sometimes in succession, often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia movement. The agitation for a colony was primarily a commercial one. The London or Virginia Company by which it was carried forward had been organized in the form of the great trading corporations of the time, such as the Muscovy Company and the East India Company, and it was expected to yield large returns. But though commercial in form and purpose, the Virginia Company from the outset was able to appeal successfully in every emergency to motives that were far from mercenary. Into the chain-threads of commercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic feeling and religious sentiment.

VII.

[Sidenote: Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company.]

[Sidenote: Woodnoth's Short Collection, p. 6.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Ferrar, 113.]

Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a second place. The company began to pa.s.s more and more out of the control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach of voracious n.o.blemen like Warwick. More and more it pa.s.sed into the hands of the great liberal statesmen whose leader was the incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of rare gifts and knowledge and of great resoluteness. These men had suffered some disappointment, no doubt, in their struggle for parliamentary freedom in England. They might have succeeded better had their antagonist been a strong king, but against the pusillanimity, the vanity, the vacillation, and the pedantic dogmatism of James little permanent headway could be made.

Without relinquis.h.i.+ng the conflict in the House of Commons, they took it up in the Quarter Courts of the Virginia Company. In this new field they found themselves afresh confronted by the obstinacy of the king, who was stirred up to oppose them by the discarded governor, Sir Thomas Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all the partisans of high prerogative and all the advocates of the Spanish match.

"Bedchamber men" and others about the king's person were engaged to work upon the king to come to the rescue of Sir Thomas Smyth's "honor." The Spanish amba.s.sador Gondomar, who had spies in the Virginia Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. He told the king that it was time for him to look into the Virginia courts, which were held in the great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too many of the king's n.o.bility and gentry resorted thither, in order to be in company with the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous Sandys. They were deep politicians, and they entertained designs beyond a tobacco plantation. Their leaders, he said, were "subtle men of high courage who regarded neither his master nor their own."

[Sidenote: Sir Edwin Sandys.]

[Sidenote: Royal Hist. MS. Comm. viii, II, 45.]

[Sidenote: The king's interference.]

[Sidenote: 1620.]

[Sidenote: A land of freedom.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Sandys, as a.s.sistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and virtual governor, had already succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng in Virginia a const.i.tutional state with a representative government. He was furthering plans for the foundation of the little separatist state of New Plymouth, and his enemies set agoing tales that he had dark designs of removing with the Pilgrims to America, in order to found a democratic state there. In 1619 Sir Thomas Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, to his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and chose Sandys to his place. When, in 1620, his first year of government drew to a close, Sir Edwin Sandys erected an elegant ballot-box in the midst of the hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant a.s.semblage of n.o.blemen, knights, gentlemen, and merchants might by a secret vote exercise the right of choice without any constraint. Just as the a.s.semblage was about to begin voting, two clerks of the signet were announced with a message from the king forbidding the company to choose Sandys. "Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in which the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, braving the king's displeasure, allowed himself to be elected, with Sandys for deputy.

In June, 1621, both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. This attracted attention to Virginia as a "refuge from a more oppressive government in England." In three months' time twenty-five s.h.i.+ps set sail for the colony, which gained an impetus from the king's opposition that put it beyond the danger of destruction by the calamities of the next two years. Even before the ma.s.sacre and pestilence of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was a.s.sured by friends at court that it would come to "push of pike," and that the company would be overthrown. The charter of the company was vacated in 1624, but free government had so taken root in the colony that it could never afterward be quite extirpated. A new English state with a popular government had been founded of deliberate purpose by a group of English statesmen, at the head of which, and easily first, was Sir Edwin Sandys, whose great service to the people and nation that were to come has been almost forgotten.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Religious propagandism.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about American exploration and colonization the English church caught its first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of the savages from devil-wors.h.i.+p and semi-nudity, there was added the natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion in America. English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of infidels."

[Sidenote: Zeal of the clergy.]

Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the first minister in Virginia, a light s.h.i.+ning in a dark place indeed. He bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely equaled in the history of martyrdom the acc.u.mulating miseries of Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His n.o.bleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a nation of dissenters.

IX.

[Sidenote: The Ferrars.]

In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant, the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years.

The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel.

Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm, became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this, and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."

The horrible ma.s.sacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did not surpa.s.s, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the company by _quo warranto_ proceedings in 1624 the government of the colony pa.s.sed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with Virginia.

X.

[Sidenote: Later History of the Ferrars.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar.]

[Sidenote: Arminian Nunnery 1641.]

[Sidenote: Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix.]

The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his mother, now a widow, the manor lords.h.i.+p of Little Gidding, in Huntingdons.h.i.+re, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms to the poor, illuminated ma.n.u.scripts of the Bible, and wors.h.i.+ped in its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of the four gospels. By means of relays of wors.h.i.+pers the Ferrars kept their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The strength of this belated mediaeval saint gave way under a discipline so austere, and he died in 1637. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Behold an epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century--its idealism in affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!