CHAPTER THE SECOND. JAMES RIVer experiMENTS. I. Departure grants. IN December, 1606, there lay at Blackwall, CHAP. II. below London, the Susan Constant, of one hundred tons, the Godspeed, of forty tons, and the little pin- of the eminace Discovery, of but twenty tons-three puny ships to bear across the wintry Atlantic the beginners of a new nation. The setting forth of these argonauts produced much excitement in London. Patriotic feeling was deeply stirred, public prayers were offered for the success of the expedition, sermons appropriate to the occasion were preached, and the popular feeling was expressed in a poem by Michael Drayton. Even those who were too sober to indulge the vain expectations of gold mines and spice islands that filled the imaginations of most Englishmen on this occasion could say, as Lord Bacon did later: "It is with the kingdoms on Ld. Chanearth as it is with the kingdom of heaven: sometimes a grain of mustard seed proves a great tree. Who can tell?" On the 19th of that most tempestuous December the little fleet weighed anchor and ran down on an ebb tide, no doubt, as one may nowadays see ships rush past Blackwall toward the sea. Never were men engaged in a great enter cellor's Speech in reply to the Speaker. Book I. prise doomed to greater sorrows. From the time A. D. 1606. they left the Thames the ships were tossed and delayed by tempests, while the company aboard was rent by factious dissensions. The laws and orders. II. Those who shaped the destinies of the colony had left little undone that inventive stupidity could suggest to assure the failure of the enterprise. King James, who was frivolously fond of puttering in novel projects, had personally framed a code of unwise laws and orders. The supremacy of the sovereign and the interests of the Church were pedantically guarded, but the colony was left without any ruler with authority enough to maintain order. The private interest of the individual, the most available of all motives to industry, was merged in that of the commercial company to which Virginia had been granted. All the produce of the colony was to go into a common stock for five years, and the emigrants, men without families, were thrown into a semi-monastic trading community like the Hanseatic agencies of the time, with the saving element of a strong authority left out. Better devices for promoting indolence and aggravating the natural proneness to dissension of men in hard circumstances could scarcely have been hit upon. Anarchy and despotism are the inevitable alternatives under such a communistic arrangement, and each of these ensued in turn. CHAP. II. III. of the emi Gen. Hist., iii, c. i and ments for The people sent over in the first years were for Character the most part utterly unfit. Of the first hundred, grants. four were carpenters, there was a blacksmith, a Smith's tailor, a barber, a bricklayer, a mason, a drummer. There were fifty-five who ranked as gentlemen, c. xii. and four were boys, while there were but twelve Advertiseso-called laborers, including footmen, "that never Planters of New Eng., did know what a day's work was." The company p. 5. is described by one of its members as composed of Comp. poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, and such like. "A hundred good workmen were better than a thousand such gallants," says Captain Smith. Of the moral character of the first emigrants no better account is given. It was perhaps with these men in view that Bacon declared it "a shameful and unblessed thing" to settle a colony Plantawith "the scum of the people." Briefe De claration in Pub. Rec. bury i, 66; Off., Sains and New Life of Va. Essay on tions. IV. val. The ships sailed round by the Canaries, after The arrithe fashion of that time, doubling the distance to Virginia. They loitered in the West Indies to "refresh themselves" and quarrel, and they did not reach their destination until seedtime had well-nigh passed. They arrived on the 6th of May, according to our style. Driven into Hampton Roads by a storm, they sailed up the wide mouth of a river which they called the James, in honor of the king. At that season of the year the Book I. banks must have shown masses of the white flowA. D. 1607. ers of the dogwood, mingled with the pink-purple blossoms of the redbud against the dark primeval forest. Wherever they went ashore the newcomers found "all the ground bespread with many sweet and delicate flowers of divers colors and kinds." The sea-weary voyagers concluded that "heaven and earth had never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." Percy, in Purchas, p. 1689. The first meetings with Indians. Percy, in Purchas iv, pp. 1685, 1686. They were like people in an enchanted land— all was so new and strange. On the first landing of a small party they had a taste of savage warfare. "At night, when wee were going aboard, there came the savages creeping from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their Mouthes, charged us very desperately, hurt Captain Gabrill Archer in both hands, and a Sayler in two places of the body very dangerous. After they had spent their arrowes, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise and so left us." But the newly arrived did not find all the Indians hostile. The chief of the Rappahannocks came to welcome them, marching at the head of his train, piping on a reed flute, and clad in the fantastic dress of an Indian dandy. He wore a plate of copper on the shorn side of his head. The hair on the other side was wrapped about with deer's hair dyed red, “in the fashion of a rose." Two long feathers "like a pair of horns" were stuck in this rosy crown. His body was stained crimson, his |