University of Virginia Library

I

CLOSE to the northern bank of the winding
and placid James, some three score miles
above where it pours its waters through Hampton
Roads into that inland sea, the Chesapeake,
into which flow well-nigh a score of rivers,
some of them among the noblest on the globe,
lies a narrow island. Steeped in the sunshine,
or soaked by the rains, it has until but yesterday,
as it were, lain asleep for the last two centuries
and more, just as it had lain, with the
exception of about seventy years, since the
Powhatan at flood cut it from its neighboring
shore. At the upper end, on the river side,
in a clump of trees, and what was until lately
a tangle of shrubbery, on the edge of which are
piled the remains of an old redout, a relic of the

Civil War, stands a brick church-tower—a single
surviving fragment of the first Protestant church
built in America. About it lie the traces of a once
extensive graveyard, where of late the pious
zeal of loyal women of the Land has uncovered
and preserved a few broken tombs graved with
armorial escutcheons and bearing the names of
a very few among those whose ashes have lain
for nearly three hundred years embosomed in
Virginia's soil.

The foundation of a later State-House has
been exhumed near by; and the eye of the born
antiquary may detect out on the plateau in the
sun the faint traces of ancient streets and houses,
but to the ordinary passer-by, there has been
until just now nothing to distinguish it from the
ordinary Virginia river-plantation dozing in the
sunshine.

Yet, here on this very spot, at the head of this
little island was Jamestown, the Birthplace of
the American People: the first rude cradle in
which was swaddled the tiny infant that in time
has sprung up to be among the leaders of the
nations; the torch-bearer of civilization, and
the standard-bearer of popular government
throughout the world. Here was planted three
hundred years ago the first surviving colony
of the English-speaking Race which has since

occupied this continent and spread over the
globe. Here was established the first outpost
and earliest settlement of the American nation,
since then dedicated to the principle that "Government
of the People, by the People, and for
the People shall not perish from the earth."

And this in brief is the story of it, and the
manner in which it came about.

On the morning of the 13th day of May,
1607, James I. being then King of England,
Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and Philip III.
being King of Spain, the American Continent
when the sun rose belonged absolutely to Spain.
When the sun set, could the eyes of men have
read the future, they would have seen that it
belonged to England. This was accomplished
by a little band of six score men who "after long
toil and pain" landed that day about the hour
of four from three small ships: the Discovery,
the Good Speed, and the Sarah[1] Constant, and
planted the flag of the Anglo-Saxon on the point
which they promptly proceeded to fortify and
call "James Fort" or "James Town," after their
king.

The day that a besieged city capitulates is not
so truly the day of its capture as the day on

which the besiegers plant their standard upon
the walls never again to be taken down. So,
much more here. The approach had been long
and arduous. Effort after effort, attempt after
attempt, had been made to make a breach in
Spain's extensive defenses. As has been described
in the previous paper, a break had
actually been made under Sir Walter Raleigh's
inspiring direction twenty-odd years before by a
gallant and devoted band on Roanoke Island,
some score of leagues to the southward. But
the assault had finally failed; the little band on
Roanoke Island had disappeared into the mysterious
limbo of Croatan, that vague land of
Romance. It was this new band of settlers who
on this May day, 1607, finally seized and permanently
held the outpost, which was the key to
the continent, and led to the supremacy of the
Saxon Race, with its laws, its religion and its
civilization in North America.

As a matter of mere history, it ought to be
known that North America was firmly settled
by the English people, and the Anglo-Saxon
civilization was established in this country before
the Mayflower, under the encouragement
and charter of the Virginia Company, brought
her body of devoted Pilgrims to the shores of
North Virginia.

This happened at Jamestown. And unless
this had happened at Jamestown, it is far from
improbable, that the French colonies planted
under the charter of Louis XIII., on what is
now the coast of Maine, which were rooted out
in 1612-13, by the expeditions under Samuel
Argall, sent for that purpose by Sir Thomas
Dale, Governor of Virginia, might by 1620 have
extended so far to the southward as to seize
the coast and prevent any settlement of the
English between them and the Dutch colony
on Manhattan Island. Moreover, but for the
development of the Virginia colony, in which the
People and Church of England were so deeply
interested, the destinies of the nations might
have been changed, and under the pusillanimous
James, who even as late as 1618 sacrificed Sir
Walter Raleigh to the enmity of the Spaniard,
Spain, with her civilization, might have so firmly
established herself on the shores of Virginia that
no English settlement could have taken root.

By this time the colony of Virginia, first
rooted at Jamestown, and fertilized with the
ashes of over three thousand English settlers,
had spread until it had become a Commonwealth,
with settlements extending almost unbrokenly
over a hundred miles into the interior;
with several towns, one of them with houses

partly of brick; with forts guarding the mouths
of the rivers; with a charter which secured forever
to all colonists in Virginia, and their
posterity from sea to sea, the rights, privileges
and immunities of native-born citizens of Great
Britain; with a Vice-Regal Court, a Legislative
Assembly composed of twenty-two burgesses
elected by the people, with an Established
Church, Monthly Courts, a University projected
and endowed with ten thousand acres of land,
and a College already begun for the education of
the Indian population, under a competent master,
endowed with a thousand acres of land, for
which over fifteen hundred pounds (equal to ten
times the amount now) had been subscribed;
with a hospital "containing fourscore lodgings
and beds sent to furnish it." In fine, with a
civilization which, though at the time it lacked
the comforts and the expansion which it later
attained, contained the substantial principles of
the later civilization which throughout her entire
Colonial period, and for over a half century
afterwards, made Virginia the first colony in
America in influence, as she was in time, and
more than any other contributed to the making
of this nation.

That this happened at Jamestown, and that
Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan

alike, owe the same debt to the Jamestown
colony, the historian can now show; not from
partisan histories, but from the facts taken from
the original records, many of which have only
of late become generally known.

In consequence of Columbus's discovery of
the New World and of the discoveries and explorations
of the southern parts of the new-found
hemisphere by Spanish navigators, Spain had
grown until, by the middle of the sixteenth century,
she was not only the richest kingdom of
the world, but the most arrogant, and the most
powerful. She promised to become greater than
Rome had been under the Cæsars. Her empire
covered twice as great an extent of land as that
over which Rome's eagles ever flew, and her sway
extended over many times as broad a main. She
made it death to fly any other flag than her own
in those seas which have retained almost to our
own days the name of the Spanish Main. Indeed,
she had it in her power to have been Mistress of
the World in a far larger sense than Rome ever
was. But she lacked the wisdom of Rome.
Not content with commanding the actions of her
teeming myriads of subjects stretching from the
Baltic to the Pacific, she undertook to assert
her imperial sovereignty over their minds as
well, and this sovereignty was already becoming

effete. Its insignia were the outworn robes of a
prelatical ecclesiasticism, bent on perpetuating
its power and prepared to put to the sword every
one who did not bow abjectly before its dogmatism
and arrogance.

Happily for the world, just at this time the
Crown of England fell on the brow of the able
and hard-headed daughter of Henry VIII. and
Anne Boleyn, the great Elizabeth, and yet more
happily, she found herself at the head of an
awakened and eager people alive in every fibre
of their being and most of all alive to the peril
of allowing Spain to go on unchecked in her
career of conquest over body and mind.

The rest of Europe was growing anxious under
Spain's advancing power, and Francis I. had
sent his powerful rival, Charles V., a message
asking by what right he claimed the earth.

There was some sort of claim to discovery
under the patronage of England by John Cabot
and his sons. This was the ostensible peg on
which was now hung the right of further exploration
and settlement. But it is probable
that even had the Cabots never sailed beyond
the Downs, the Sea Dogs of Devon and Cornwall,
of Bucks and Kent and Surrey with their
Norse blood, would have set their prows into
the west where El Dorado, the Fountain of

Gold, was flowing hard by the scarcely less
mythical Fountain of Youth. Within a few
years Fame was filling her trump with the names
of a score of these captains—of whom many
survive to-day: John Hawkins, Sir Francis
Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, Captain Christopher
Newport, Sir Richard Grenville and the
brave Gilberts, Sir Adrian, Sir Humphrey and
Sir John, half-brothers of Walter Raleigh, and
Sir Walter himself, bold adventurer; fine gentleman;
patron of explorers; favorite of Queen
Elizabeth; godfather and first president or governor
of Virginia.

Almost the whole of the sixteenth century
was spent in one long contest between the two
civilizations: the Latin and the Saxon. Into
the contest entered every principle that two
widely diverse civilizations represent, and every
feeling that can animate nations. Patriotic zeal;
religious fervor; bigotry; personal adherence,
or hostility; lust of power and lust of gold—
all united to make the contest one of continuous
war between the two peoples, if not the
governments of the two countries. The wealth,
the power and the arrogance of Spain, with her
bigotry, aroused the people of England to a
pitch which had possibly not been known since
the Norman Conquest.

Although England claimed the middle zone of
North America by virtue of the discovery made
in 1497 by John Cabot and his sons, under
patent of Henry VII., of which event the only
official record is the item noted in the "Privy
Purse" of Henry VII., "Ten pounds to hym
who found the New Land," the continent
was won a hundred years later in the war with
Spain, which lasted substantially through the
latter half of the sixteenth century.

For a generation the great sea captains of
England had been training in Western waters
and garnering up implacable hate against Spain.
Sir Philip Sidney had written vigorously of
England's opportunity and duty; Hawkins,
Drake, the Gilberts, Grenville, and others had
flouted Spain and fought her from Cadiz to
Peru. And now Sir Walter Raleigh and his half-brothers,
the Gilberts, gentlemen of Devon, bred
on traditions of sea-fighters, and hereditary haters
of Spain, had definitely set before themselves the
colonization of the region claimed by England.

It was a perilous business. Spain had declared
it piracy to sail the western seas under
any other flag than her own. Menendez, the
Spanish Governor, had ruthlessly butchered
Coligny's Huguenot colony started at St. Augustine
on the St. John's River.

The struggle was on between Spain and England—and
not only between the countries and
the governments, but between the two races and
the two schools of thought; the two forms of
religion. The Latin and the Saxon had locked
in a wrestle which was to end only with the
absolute supremacy of the one and the subjection
of the other. And Spain was now seeking
to destroy England's power forever.

Menendez's ferocity was destined to make
such a lodgment in the minds of Englishmen
as to be mentioned as a warning in the instructions
given to the first colonists of the race who
effected a permanent settlement.

The treachery of the Spaniards at St. Juan
d'Ulua arrayed against her two of the most
potent enemies she ever had to face: Among
John Hawkins's men was one, who from his fury
against Spain came to be known later as the
"Dragon of the Seas," young Francis Drake.
To the other, who later came to be known as
"The Shepherd of the Seas," more, possibly, than
to any other one man in England, Spain owed
the wresting of North America from her grasp.
For Sir Walter Raleigh inspired and equipped and
dispatched the fleets which opened the way to the
settlement of Virginia and of America. He gave
Virginia her name and was her first governor.

Previous to the final and successful effort there
had been several attempts to plant here colonies
fitted out by Sir Walter Raleigh, which failed.
That on Roanoke Island might have succeeded
had not the Spanish war and the peril of the
Spanish Armada kept supplies from being sent
over seas to their relief.

The destruction of the Spanish Armada left
the seas open for England's schemes for colonization
to go into effect.

The victory of England was complete; but it
had been at the cost of her utmost resources.
March 7, 1589, Raleigh signed an indenture
as Chief Governor of Virginia with Thomas
Smith and others, merchants of London, and
John White and others, gentlemen, transferring
the Colony in Virginia and the planting thereof
in his domain to this Company, and contributing
100 pounds towards the planting of the
Christian religion there, and reserving one-fifth
part of the gold and silver for his share.

When, on August 27, 1587, White, the governor
of Raleigh's new colony on Roanoke
Island, sailed for England for supplies he left
behind him eighty-nine men, seventeen women,
and eleven children, among them his daughter,
Eleanor, and her infant daughter, Virginia Dare,
the first English child born on this hemisphere.

When White reached England, November 2,
war had, as we have seen, become flagrant with
Spain, and he was unable to return until after
the destruction of the Spanish Armada left the
sea once more comparatively open and England
once more free to give her attention to the
work of expansion. Before leaving Roanoke
White had provided that in case the colonists
should have any reason to change their seat,
the place to which they should move should be
so posted that he might be able to follow them.
White was not able to get away finally to his
colony until 1590, when three ships, furnished
at the charge of Mr. John Watts, being ready
to sail for the Indies, "to make spoil of the
Spaniards," being detained under the orders
prohibiting ships from sailing, Raleigh obtained
permission for them to sail on condition that
they should take White back to Virginia. They
would, however, take no one but White himself,
and so he returned alone to Virginia. They
cast anchor off Hatorask on the 15th of August,
but there was no one there; the settlement had
been abandoned. The settlers had not been
murdered; for they had buried boxes containing
books, etc., which some one had found and dug
up afterwards. "Some tracks of feeting they
found upon a sandy bank," says old Strachey
("First Travails into Va.," Brita., p. 152) "and
on a tree curiously carved these Roman letters,
C. R. O., which gave them hope that they might
be removed to Croatan." This White interpreted
to mean that the colony had moved to the
Island of Croatan, from which they had previously
taken the friendly Indian, Manteo. White
begged the Captain to take him to Croatan,
which he agreed to do, but a violent storm prevented
him and he determined to sail straight
for England, where they arrived October 24,
1590. This was White's fifth and last voyage
(as he stated to Hackluyt in a letter in 1593).
He fell into a despondency after his disappointment.
There appears to have been a tribe of
Croatans in the interior, at some distance from
the coast, but diligent search failed to find trace
of the lost settlers at that time. And since that
day the researches of investigators have scarcely
been more successful. The little Virginia colony
with the babe, Virginia Dare, simply faded
away into the mystic Land of Romance. Some
effort has been made to prove that there exists
in the interior of North Carolina a body of
people who are rather assumed than shown to
have the mixed blood of the Indian and the
White, and have vague traditions of being thus
descended. Twenty years later when a permanent
settlement was effected on the banks of the
James, one hundred miles to the northward,
one boy was found with yellow hair and a lighter
skin than the Indians have, and it has been conjectured
that he might have been the offspring
of some one of the colonists, but his age did not
admit of this explanation, and no man knows
to this day what became of them.

The blotting out of this colony was a heavy
blow to English enterprise, and as one of the old
writers declared, "all hopes of Virginia thus abandoned,
it lay dead and obscured from 1590 to this
year, 1602." By this time, the end of the long war
with Spain was in sight, and the English public,
the English Church, and the English Government
once more turned their eyes to that far off,
but "sweet, wholesome and fruitful country."

Though the efforts made had all failed, the
spirit still remained. Even the death of the
great Queen in 1603 was not able to quench it.
National pride; religious zeal; the spirit of adventure
and of cupidity, all combined to make
the effort time after time to establish a foothold
where all previous efforts had failed.

Just as in our fathers' time, adventure and
the love of gold drew the Argonauts and their
followers around the Horn and across the arid
plains of the West to California, and in our own

time the same motives have sent thousands to
Alaska and South Africa; so then the trophies
of Spain's fortune-hunters would not let the
adventurers of Great Britain rest. Hatred of
Spain and envy of the plate-ships of Peru drew
them from the Devon coast. The tales of
Spain's El Dorado untied the purse-strings of
the London companies. But there was another
and loftier motive. The zeal of the children of
those who had suffered at Smithfield and Tower
Hill under the Queen of Philip II. could not
with languor see the church of Torquemada and
Alva bringing vast tribes within their fold.

The cities of England were full of soldiers returned
from the wars in the Low Countries; the
spirit of adventure was abroad, and much more
the hatred of Spain. The State reflected it;
the poet sang of it; the writers wrote of it.

About 1590 Elizabeth granted a commission
to Richmond Greynville of Stow and others,
for discovering lands in the Arctic Ocean to the
domains of Great Cam of Cathaia. August 26,
1591, Captain Thomas Cavendish sailed from
England on his last fatal voyage. In 1592
(January 25), Captain Christopher Newport
sailed from England with three ships and a pinnace
for the West Indies, where he took and
"spoiled" several Spanish towns. In this same

year an expedition was organized for an attack
on the Spanish settlements at Panama, the nearest
way to the South Sea, and the key to the possessions
of Spain and America. The adventurers
provided thirteen vessels and the Queen two
ships of war. Sir Walter Raleigh was to have had
command of the expedition as Admiral; but he was
again balked in his enterprise by the peremptory
order of the Queen to resign and return forthwith
to Court. He, however, laid off the plan of the
expedition, and Sir John Burrough, his vice-admiral,
and Captain Christopher Newport, with
other vessels, captured the great carrack, the
Madre de Dios, which Edwards in his "Life of
Raleigh" says "was in one sense the most brilliant
feat of privateering ever accomplished, even
in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and a piece of
mercantile enterprise pregnant with results."

All through '93 and '94 the adventures to the
American shores went on under the influence of
Raleigh's enterprising genius. In '94 he sent a
small expedition to Guiana, in South America,
and in '95 (February 6) he sailed himself on
his famous voyage to that coast. The interest
in America increased throughout '96, '97, '98
and '99, and many new adventurers were enlisted,
some to invest their property, and others
to adventure their persons in the work of making

America English. Raleigh himself never relinquished
his interest in the work, and vessel
after vessel sailed to Guiana, or to some other
point on the coast in his interest. In 1602
he sent Samuel Mace of Weymouth on a vessel
to Virginia, and in that same year Captain
Bartholomew Gosnold and others voyaged
to our New England coast. On the 24th of
March, 1603, Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond,
and on the same day James VI. of Scotland
was proclaimed King of England as James
I. That day Raleigh fell. He made the mistake
of opposing James and espousing the cause
of Arabella Stuart, and James never forgave
him. "I have heard of you but rawly, Sir Walter,"
he said to him acridly when later on Raleigh
went to him to offer him his submission. In time
he pretended to receive his submission, but it
was Raleigh's first offense, coupled with James's
cowardly fear of Spain, which afterwards sacrificed
the greatest colonizer whom England has
ever known, to the hatred of Spain. Raleigh,
however, had set on foot too great a work for even
James to undo, and on the 10th of May Captain
Bartholomew Gilbert set sail for the Chesepian
Bay in the country of Virginia. Gilbert, his surgeon,
and several officers and men went on shore
on their arrival, and were all killed by the Indians.

In 1605 Captain George Weymouth and
others, some of whom had been with Raleigh in
Guiana, visited again the North Virginia, later
the New England coast, and that same year
Champlain entered the present harbor of Plymouth
on that coast.

Peace was signed by Philip III. and Lord
Howard at Valadolid in 1605 (June 25).

This Treaty of Peace opened the way to
the immediate colonization of America by the
English.

Indeed, peace had already become assured
for England, and, under the conviction that
Spain must make peace, steps were already
being taken to recover the lost land.

A month later Captain George Weymouth,
who had been cruising along the coast of North
Virginia, returned to England taking with him
five Indians; "which accident," says Sir Ferdinando
Gorges, later President of the Plymouth
Company, "must be acknowledged as the means,
under God, of putting on foot, and giving life to
our Plantations." Weymouth was arrested afterwards
under suspicion of setting forth to betray
the Virginia Colony to Spain, but at this time he
was engaged in trying to enlist others in American
colonization. So great was the interest in
Virginia that two companies were formed and two

settlements were planned: one on the southerly
shores of Virginia, the other on the northerly.

Thus, in 1606, despite the failure of all earlier
attempts, an expedition was ready to set forth to
try to seize once more the American continent
for England, her King and People.

A great obstacle had been the difficulty of
securing the active co-operation of the Government
in the work. Experiment had abundantly
proved that such aid was necessary for final
success. This was now partly secured.

On April 10/20, 1606, the warrant for the proposed
Virginia charter was prepared by the
Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, and was
passed under the great seal of the Lord Chancellor,
Sir Thomas Egerton. It was stated to
be "for the furtherance of so noble a work as
the planting of Christianity among the Heathens,"
and claimed for the Crown of England
the whole of North America between 34 and
45 degrees north latitude, "commonly called
Virginia."

All England was now astir, and on the 10th
day of April, 1606, letters patent were granted
Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, Richard
Hakluit, Edward Maria Wingfield, Raleigh
Gilbert and others, for two separate colonies
and plantations to be made in Virginia, and

other parts and territories of America. Both
companies were incorporated by this one charter.
The first colony was authorized to seat their
plantation in some convenient place between 31
(about Brunswick, Ga.) and 41 degrees North
latitude (about New York City), and when
so located they were to have fifty miles north
and fifty miles south of said location, as well as
one hundred miles to sea, and one hundred
miles within the land. The second colony
was authorized to seat their plantation between
38 (about the southern point of Maryland)
and 45 degrees north latitude (about
Halifax, N. S.), and were granted the same extent
of territory with the first, provided, however,
that they should not plant within one
hundred miles of each other. This charter set
forth, among other things, the privileges and
franchises which Raleigh had obtained before
for his first colony, and on which our liberties
are based to-day.

Preparations which were, no doubt, already
on foot were pressed forward rapidly to send out
the colony immediately to take possession and
occupy the goodly land which Raleigh had so
long been trying to reach, and to secure the land
of the Thespians or Chesepians. It was a
dangerous adventure, for the Spaniards were

ever present in their minds, and the mysterious
fate of the last colony at Roanoke must have
been still a matter of constant discussion and
conjecture, which kept very fresh in the minds
of men the perils of adventure in those distant
shores. Cupidity, ambition, the chance of
sudden wealth and power, and fame, like those
which had come to Frobisher and Drake, to
Hawkins and the Gilberts; religious zeal, patriotism,
all combined to turn men's minds to the
new, and, as yet, unknown land.

The Stage is ever apt to reflect the current
feeling of the time, and Virginia became the
theme of the Stage. The play, "Eastward
Hoe," written by George Chapman, Ben Jonson,
and John Marston, was entered for publication
at "Stationers Hall," on the 4th of September,
1605, and gives, though in the form of comedy
and of exaggeration, what was no doubt in the
minds of many men at that time. "Quicksilver,"
"Sea-Gull," "Spendall," "Scape-Thrift,"
were among the characters. "Sir Petronel
Flash" was the first of a long and illustrious
line of Virginian colonels, and their talk was
so racy that the authors presently got themselves
into prison, not indeed for lampooning
Virginia or Virginia colonels, but for their gibes
at the Scots, which was a matter which lay much

nearer the hearts of Sir James Murray and the
King. I venture to quote from the second scene
of the third act.

Enter Sea Gull, Spendall and Scape-Thrift in the
Blewe Anchor Tavern with a Drawer:

Sea Gull.

Come, Drawer, pierce your neatest
Hogshead and let's have cheer not fit for your Billingsgate
Tavern, but for our Virginian Colonel who will
be here instantly.

Drawer.

You shall have all things fit, sir; please
you have any more wine?

Spendall.

More wine, slave, whether you drink
it or spill it; drawe more.

Sea Gull.

Come, boys, Virginia longs 'till we
share the rest of her maidenhead.

Spendall.

Why, is she inhabited already with any
English?

Sea Gull.

A whole country of English is there,
man, bread of those that were left there in '79, they
have married with the Indians, and make 'em to bring
forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England,
and, therefore, the Indians are so in love with them
that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet.

Scape-Thrift.

But is there such treasure there
as I have heard?

Sea Gull.

I tell thee that gold is more plentiful
there than copper is with us, and for as much red
copper as I can bring, I will have thrice the weight
in gold. Why, man, all their dripping pans are pure

gold, and all the chains with which they chain up
their streets are massie gold; all the prisoners they
take are fettered in gold, and for rubies and diamonds
they go forth on holy days and gather them up by the
sea-shore to hang on their children's coats, and stick
in their children's caps, as commonly as our children
wear saffron gilt groates with holes in them.

Scape-Thrift.

And is it a pleasant country with all?

Sea Gull.

As ever the sun shined on. Full of all
kinds of excellent viands, wild boar is as common
there as our tamest bacon is here; venison as mutton,
and then you shall live freely there without sergeants
or courtiers or lawyers, and intelligenceers; (only a
few industrious Scots, perhaps, who are, indeed, dispersed
over the face of the whole earth, but as for them,
there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England
when they are out on 't in the world, and, for my part,
I would a hundred thousand of them were there; for
we are all one-countrymen now you know, and we
should find ten times more comfort of them there than
here. Then for your means to advancement; there
it is simple and not preposterously mixed. You may
be an alderman there, and never be a scavenger; you
may be any other officer there and never be a slave;
you may come to preferment and never be a pandar;
to riches and fortune, and have never the more villany
nor the less wit. Besides, there we shall have no more
law than conscience, and not too much of either; serve
God enough; eat enough; drink enough, and "enough
is as good as a feast."

It was this last speech of Captain Sea Gull
which got Ben Jonson and his friends in jail.

The close of the wars had left London full
of soldiers out of employment, who had returned
and were ready for anything which promised
them the bettering of their fortunes. To these
men Virginia must have commended herself,
and one of them was to become in the first colony
the most able and noted soldier and administrator.
He had returned from a youth of adventure
in the south-eastern part of Europe,
and had influence enough to have himself appointed
one of the first Council of the colony
about to set forth.

It was with reference to this expedition, perhaps,
that Michael Drayton's "Ode to the Virginia
Voyage" was written. It begins:

The Northern Virginia Company had trouble
from the first, according to Sir Ferdinando
Gorges; because so many merchants were of the
Council that the gentlemen and great adventurers
withdrew from it. The Southern Virginia
Company was more fortunate. It escaped, at
least, this difficulty; for the great majority of
its members were men of the upper class and
almost without exception members of Parliament.

The expedition designed to settle North Virginia
got off first.

August 22, 1606, a ship, the Richard (fiftyfive
tons), was dispatched by Chief Justice
Popham, under Mr. Henry Challons, with
twenty-nine Englishmen and two of Weymouth's
Indians, to settle a colony in North Virginia,
and two months later another ship was dispatched
by him under Captain Thomas Hanham,
and Martin Prinne, "for the seconding of
Captain Challans and his people." Captain
Challans, however, and his people had been
captured by the Spaniards in the West Indies,
and were taken over to Bordeaux, where some
escaped and others became the subject of diplomatic
correspondence, and by Lord Bacon's
Report, were left in prison because, for England
to request their release might be considered a

recognition of Spain's rights. But for this untoward
accident, it is possible that the first colony
in America might have settled in North Virginia.
As it was, the first colony that made good their
footing, settled in Southern Virginia and established,
on the banks of the noble James, the
"Mother Christian town," of the English-speaking
race in America: Jamestown.

On the 20th day of December, 1606, after
many prayers, and sermons in various churches,
three small vessels, the Sarah Constant (of one
hundred tons), Captain Christopher Newport,
Admiral; the Goodspeed (forty tons), Captain
Bartholomew Gosnold, Vice-Admiral; and a
pinnace, the Discovery (twenty tons), Captain
Ratcliffe, all under command of Captain Christopher
Newport as Admiral, dropped down
the river from London, with six score souls
on board besides some fifty-odd mariners, on
their way to Southern Virginia. They carried
with them the destinies of nations.

Three weeks later, on January 16, 1607,
the ships anchored in the Downs, where "the
winds continued contrary so long that they
were forced to stay some time, where they suffered
great storms." The record of the voyage
shows that there was a strong inclination to turn
back then, but they were held to their duty

largely by the heroic devotion of "Worthy
Master Hunt"; the simple parson, the first
apostle of the Anglo-Saxon race to the Americas,
whose name never appears in the sombre, and
often squalid, records of that time that it does
not illuminate it with the light of a heroic spirit,
wholly devoted to the service alike of his fellowman
and the Most High God. For many weeks
the little ships tossed at anchor within twenty
miles of the coast where lay his home; and many
a heart failed; but not his, this faithful soldier
of Christ whose heart was stayed on Him.
Whether it was in encouraging his fellow-voyagers
in the midst of great storms in which
his own bodily sickness was so severe as to be
deemed worthy of mention, or whether it was in
the even darker hour at Jamestown, when factions
and contentions threatened the destruction
of the colony, he is always mentioned with that
appellation: "Worthy Master Hunt," who endeavored
to calm the troubled spirits of his cosufferers
amid the turbulence alike of the
Atlantic and of the new plantation.

The storms having abated, the ships lost the
coast of England about the 18th of February,
and after a sorry passage reached by the end of
February the southwest part of the great
Canaries. There they stayed several days, taking

on wood and water, when they again sailed
for Virginia, taking the old route by the West
Indies. They reached Dominica by the 24th
of March, where they did some little exploration,
and where one of the leading adventurers
appears to have fallen under some suspicion of
stirring up a mutiny, for he was arrested, and
because of it, to quote his own account, was "unjustly
restrained as a prisoner" until June 20,
when he suddenly emerges from his obscurity
into the fame which has for three hundred
years surrounded the name of "Captain John
Smith: President of Virginia, and Admiral of
New England."