The Beginners of a Nation Part 4

By the time he was twenty-eight years old this knight-errant had pretty well exhausted Europe as a field for adventure. Soon after his return to his own land he found the navigator Gosnold agitating for a new colony in Virginia, the scene of Ralegh's failures. That being the most difficult and dangerous enterprise then in sight, nothing was more natural than that Smith should embark in it. From this time to the end of his life this really able man gave his best endeavors to the advancement of American colonization. In counsel he was accounted wise, and his advice was listened to with more than common deference in the a.s.semblies of the Virginia Company as long as the company lasted. In labor he was indefatigable, in emergencies he proved himself ready-witted and resourceful. His recorded geographical observations are remarkably accurate considering his circ.u.mstances, and his understanding of Indian life shows his intelligence. His writings on practical questions are terse, epigrammatic, and wise beyond the wisdom of his time. But where his own adventures or credit are involved he is hardly more trustworthy than Falstaff. His boasting is one of the many difficulties a historian has to encounter in seeking to discover the truth regarding the events of an age much given to lying.

VII.

[Sidenote: Smith's exploration and trading.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1607, 1608.]

[Sidenote: Oxford Tract, _pa.s.sim_.]

[Sidenote: Gen. Hist _pa.s.sim_.]

On Smith princ.i.p.ally devolved the explorations for a pa.s.sage to the Pacific and the conduct of the Indian trade. He was captured by the Indians in the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried from village to village in triumph. Contriving to secure his release from the head chief, Powhatan, he returned to Jamestown. Nothing could have suited better his bold genius and roving disposition than the life he thereafter led in Virginia. He sailed up and down the bays and estuaries, discovering and naming unknown islands, ascending great unknown rivers, cajoling or bullying the Indians, and returning to his hungry countrymen at Jamestown laden with maize from the granaries of the savages. Smith and his companions coasted in all seasons and all weather in an open boat, exercising themselves in morning psalm-singing and praying, in manoeuvring strange Indians by bl.u.s.tering or point-blank lying, and in trying to propagate the Christian religion among the heathen--all in turn as occasion offered, like true Englishmen of the Jacobean time.

[Sidenote: His narrative.]

Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achievements in Virginia seem to be nearer the truth than his later Generall Historie. As years rolled on his exploits gained in number and magnitude in his memory.

The apocryphal story of his expounding the solar system by means of a pocket compa.s.s to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity to learn is to be found only in his later writings. He is a prisoner but a month in the narrative of the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was written by his a.s.sociates and published with his authority, but his captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in the Generall Historie of 1624. His prosaic release by Powhatan had developed into a romantic rescue by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in the earlier account become four or five hundred in the later. Certain Poles a.s.sist him in the capture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative of Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our hero performs this feat single-handed. A mere cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure representing the number of his enemies, who by this simple feat of memory become ten times more redoubtable than before.

[Sidenote: His service to the colony.]

[Sidenote: Oxf. Tract, p. 32. Gen. Hist., bk. iii, ch. v.]

[Sidenote: Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 41.]

But it does not matter greatly whether the "strangely grimmed and disguised" Indians seen by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who, according to the story, were shouting and yelling horribly, though in ambuscade, numbered three or four hundred as in one account, or three or four thousand as in his later story. To Captain Smith remains the credit of having been the one energetic and capable man in those first years--the man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but won from the Indians what was of infinitely greater value--the corn needed to preserve the lives of the colonists. In an open boat, with no instrument but a compa.s.s, he explored and mapped Chesapeake Bay so well that his map was not wholly superseded for a hundred and forty years. Even Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recognizes the value of his services; and Strachey, who had every means of knowing, says that "there will not return from" Virginia "in hast any one who hath bene more industrious or who hath had (Captain Geo. Percie excepted) greater experience amongst them, however misconstruction maye traduce here at home."

[Sidenote: Smith overthrown.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1609.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

During the autumn of 1608 and the winter following Captain Smith was sole ruler of Jamestown, all the other councilors having gone; but the next spring there arrived five hundred new colonists inadequately provisioned, and under two of the old faction leaders who were Smith's mortal enemies. These were the visionary and turbulent Archer and his follower Ratcliffe. Smith got some of the newcomers to settle at Nansemond, and others took up their abode near the falls of the James River. After much turmoil Smith was disabled by an accident, and his enemies contrived to have him sent home charged, among other things, with having "incensed" the Indians to a.s.sault the insubordinate settlers under West near the falls, and with having designed to wed Pocahontas in order to secure royal rights in Virginia as son-in-law to Powhatan.

[Sidenote: His later years.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

He afterward explored the New England coast with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. What he published in his later years by way of advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of admirable good sense. With rare foresight he predicted the coming importance of the colonial trade and the part to be played by the American fisheries in promoting the greatness of England by "breeding mariners." He only of the men of his time suspected the imperial size and future greatness of North America. He urged that the colonies should not annoy "with large pilotage and such like dues" those who came to trade in their ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. This is a strange doctrine in an age when foreign trade seemed almost an evil, and false conceptions of economic principles were nearly universal.

Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a wit whose pungency is delightful. In mental and physical hardihood, and in what may be called s.h.i.+ftiness, as well as in p.r.o.neness to exaggeration and in boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical American pioneer--a forerunner of the daring and ready-witted men who have subdued a savage continent.

VIII.

[Sidenote: The famine of 1609-'10.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1609, 1610.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1610.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

[Sidenote: Tragicall Relation, 1623. Briefe Declaration, 1624, both in British Pub. Record Office. Percy's Trewe Relacyon, MS., Petworth House.]

Disaster of some sort could hardly have been avoided had Captain Smith been allowed to stay, but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and there was no hand strong enough to stay it. The unchecked hostility of the savages drove the outsettlers from Nansemond and the falls of the James. The Indians found exercise for their devilish ingenuity in torturing those who fell into their hands alive, and outraging the dead. The brave but unwise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury by visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs of their chiefs. There was now no one who could carry on the difficult Indian trade.

Ratcliffe, who had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell into an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's example in trading with Powhatan. He was tortured to death by the Indian women, and only fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. The brood hogs of the colony were all eaten, the dogs came next, and then the horses, which were to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their very hides.

Rats, mice, and adders were relished when they were to be had, and fungi of various sorts were eaten with whatever else "would fill either mouth or belly." An Indian slain in an a.s.sault on the stockade was dug up after he had been three days buried, and eaten "by the poorer sort," their consuming hunger not being embarra.s.sed by the restraints of gentility. From this horrible expedient it was but one step to the digging up of their own dead for food. Famine-crazed men even dogged the steps of those of their comrades who were not quite wasted, threatening to kill and devour them. Among these despairing and s.h.i.+ftless men there was but one man of resources. Daniel Tucker--let his later sins as tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven--bethought himself to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this small relief "did keep us from killing one another to eat," says Percy. He seems to have been the only man who bethought himself to do anything.

One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, slew his own wife and salted what he did not eat at once of her flesh, but he was put to death at the stake for this crime. Some, braving the savages, sought food in the woods and died while seeking it, and were eaten by those who found them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw themselves on the tender mercies of the Indians and were slain. To physical were added spiritual torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible into the fire, crying out in the market place that there was no G.o.d in heaven. Percy adds, with grim theological satisfaction characteristic of the time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very market place where he had blasphemed in his agony. The depopulated houses, and even the palisades so necessary for protection, were burned for firewood by the enfeebled people, and Jamestown came presently to look like the slumbering ruins of some ancient fortification. Fortunately, the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had help been delayed a few days longer.

IX.

[Sidenote: The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610.]

[Sidenote: A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, 1619, p.23.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same s.h.i.+p. This s.h.i.+p became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ash.o.r.e on the Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of swine." Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what the islands afforded--live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and waterfowl salted--the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction.

Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from fis.h.i.+ng vessels. The four little craft were turned back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pinnaces on a s.h.i.+pless sea with but a fortnight's provision to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown.

[Sidenote: De la Warr's arrival, 1610.]

[Sidenote: Smith's Oxford Tract, so called.]

With all the formalities thought necessary at that time, De la Warr took possession of Jamestown, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead men's bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock of cattle, while the brave old Sir George Somers once more embarked for the Bermudas in the Patience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built wholly of the wood of that island without a particle of iron except one bolt in the keel. In this boat he sailed up and down until he found again "the still vexed Bermoothes," where he hoped to secure provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was also sent to the Bermudas, but missed them, and went north to the fis.h.i.+ng banks in search of food.

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

[Sidenote: De la Warr's government, 1610.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: British Museum, MS. 21,993, ff. 174, 178. Instr. to Gates and De la Warr.]

[Sidenote: Gold-hunting.]

[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration, MS., Pub. Rec. Off.]

Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety characteristic of that age the deserted little church was enlarged and reoccupied and daily decorated with Virginia wild flowers. All the bitter experience of the first three years had not taught the true method of settling a new country. The colony was still but a camp of men without families, and the old common stock system was retained. To escape from the anarchy which resulted from a system that sank the interest of the individual in that of the community, it had been needful to arm De la Warr with the sharp sword of martial law. Some of the instructions given him were unwise, some impossible of execution. To convert the Indians out of hand, as he was told to do, by shutting up their medicine men or sending them to England to be Christianized by the methods then in use, did not seem a task easy of accomplishment, for Indian priests are not to be caught in time of war. But De la Warr undertook another part of his instructions. A hundred men under two captains were sent on a wild-goose chase up the James River to find gold or silver in the mountains, whither the phantom of mines had now betaken itself. This plan originated with the London managers of Virginia affairs, and men had been sent with De la Warr who were supposed to be skillful in "finding out mines." But being especially unskillful in dealing with the Indians, they were tempted ash.o.r.e by savages, who offered them food and slew them "while the meate was in theire mouthes." The expedition thereupon turned back at a point about forty miles above the present site of Richmond.

[Sidenote: Flight of De la Warr.]

A new town was begun at the falls, in the fond belief that two mines were near, and De la Warr took up his residence there. Jamestown, drawing its water from a shallow and probably polluted well, became the seat of a fresh epidemic. In the month of March following his arrival the governor fled from the colony to save his own life, leaving Virginia more than ever discredited.