University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IX

ADMINISTRATION OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH—
Continued

While Captain Smith was stoutly and successfully endeavoring
to hold the colony at Jamestown together during the year
1608-09, events of great importance relating to the Company
were happening in London. Newport reached England during
the winter of 1609, and his report, coupled with the information
already in possession of the members of that body, decided
them to solicit a new charter of the King, which would do away
with the faults and defects of the old as brought to light in its
practical working. This new charter was drafted by Sir
Edwin Sandys, the leader of the independent party in Parliament,
which opposed the royal encroachments upon the rights
of freeborn Englishmen, and advocated a policy of resistance
to the crafty power of Spain. He had been educated in the
austere atmosphere of Geneva, with its republican leanings.
"If God from Heaven," he exclaimed, in a moment of profound
dissatisfaction with the drift of affairs in England, "did
constitute and direct a form of government on earth, it was
that of Geneva." He was the most famous spokesman in his
own country of liberal principles in national administration;
and it is quite possible that, holding such opinions, he hoped
almost from the beginning that the erection of a great colony
in Virginia would redress some of the evils of that arbitrary
spirit which even then was shaking the old political framework
of the English kingdom. "Monarchy," he did not hesitate to
say in the teeth of this spirit of the throne, "had its origin in
election. The duties of sovereign and people are reciprocal.
Neither side can violate the conditions of this relation with

Sir Edwin Sandys

impunity." This was a rebellious doctrine in the eye of James
the First, and it was natural enough that by it Sandys should
bring down on his own head the vials of the Sovereign's sour
dislike and suspicion.

Under the provisions of the first charter, as we have seen,
the community at Jamestown was a royal colony,—that is to
say, it was at all times subject to the direct control of the King
and his representatives. Under the clauses of the second charter,
the right of administration was assigned from top to
bottom to the London Company and its agents. The change
diminished the chance of complications between the Spanish
and English Governments, since the cautious, if not pusillanimous,
James could own or disown the actions of the Company
as expediency might suggest. If unsuccessful, the discredit
would not fall on him, as he could disclaim all responsibility
whatever. On the other hand, if these actions were successful,
the royal prestige would necessarily be enhanced. Should the
Spaniards plan to destroy the settlement by fire and sword,
England could not be dragged into war to prevent it; nor could
she be called upon to seek revenge, should that settlement be
ultimately rooted up by the same cruel hands.

By the terms of the second charter, as by the terms of the
first, the Colony was to be exempted from all external customs
for a period of twenty-one years; and the first inhabitants and
their descendants were again granted all the immunities,
privileges, and liberties, which had been possessed immemorially
by the natives of England.[1] Down to the end of the first
seven years following the grant of the charter, the profits to
be derived from Virginia were to be reserved to the joint stock
associations which were to be formed under the supervision of
the Company for the purpose of transporting people and supplies
to the Colony for the maintenance of the community and
the expansion of its trade. At the conclusion of this period,

the lands, now held by the Company alone, were to be subdivided
according to the amounts which should be paid for
them by individual patentees. A single subscription was
valued at twelve pounds and ten shillings; and this share
entitled the holder, when the subdivision should take place, to
a specific area of ground in fee-simple.

One of the first acts of the Company, after receiving the
second charter, was to petition the Mayor of London to assist
in the acquisition of funds for its treasury by reminding the
various guilds of the profit to be got by subscribing to its
shares. The appeal of that officer was successful, and the same
willingness to forward the Company's prosperity was exhibited
in many other urban communities of the kingdom. The
clergymen were especially assiduous in directing attention to
the religious aspects of the enterprise; and much publicity
was also given to its general aims by a series of pamphlets
which were issued about the same time.

Under the terms of the second charter, the governor of the
Colony was chosen, not by the majority of voices in the Council
resident in Virginia, but by the majority of voices at a meeting
of the Company's Council in London. To that extent, the
system adopted in 1609 was less democratic than the one
adopted in 1606, which was supposed to be so purely royal.[2]

The first governor elected under the new regulation was
Thomas West, Lord Delaware. He was known as the Captain-General
of Virginia; and associated with him in subordinate
offices were Sir Thomas Gates, lieutenant-general, Sir George
Somers, admiral, and Captain Christopher Newport, vice-admiral.
Sir Thomas Smythe was retained in the office of
treasurer in England. It was wisely planned under the new
administration to send out many settlers, to be accompanied

Sir George Somers

by their wives and children. Delaware did not embark with the
first fleet, but, in his place, Sir Thomas Gates went with all the
powers of sole governor; and he had the companionship of
Somers and Newport; who were expected, after their arrival
in Virginia, to pass backward and forward between England
and the Colony, carrying additional immigrants and supplies
one way, the commodities of the Colony the other.

Captain Samuel Argall was dispatched ahead to find a new
route to Jamestown. On the fifteenth of May he embarked at
Plymouth, and sailed directly westward, instead of southward
by way of the Canary Islands. The main fleet, nine vessels in
all, bearing Gates, Somers, and Newport, departed from the
port of Falmouth a few weeks later. Captain Argall arrived
at Jamestown on the twenty-third of July, twenty-four hours
before Captain Fernandez de Eceza, the Spanish governor of
St. Augustine in Florida, appeared off the Capes in his search
for the exact site of the English colony. Argall boldly moved
out to attack the intruder, but the latter shifted his rudder and
discreetly sailed away towards the south.

Gates, who was accompanied by Ratcliffe, Martin, and
Archer, of the former council of Virginia, was harassed by
fever and plague among his crew all the way to the Canaries;
and on reaching the Bahamas, he suffered the chagrin of seeing
his fleet dispersed by a hurricane. One of the small vessels
foundered in the tempest; the rest, with one exception, succeeded
in reaching the Chesapeake. This exception was the
Sea Adventure, with Gates, Somers, and Newport on board. As
she was moving through the water one night, there became
visible on her main mast a little round light, like a faint star,
that trembled and sparkled, and at times passed quickly to
the end of a yard and then returned. On the following night,
the vessel was wrecked on the coral shoals of the Bermudas.
This episode is thought to have suggested to Shakespeare the
play of the Tempest. The officers and men were successful in
reaching the shore.

Whilst they, with undaunted spirit, were occupied in constructing

several small vessels of the tall cedars with which
the island was overgrown, the main fleet was moving up the
Powhatan to the anchorage at Jamestown. After the debarcation,
a dispute arose,—fanned, it may be presumed, chiefly by
Ratcliffe, Martin, and Archer, because they were his inveterate
enemies,—to displace Smith from the Presidency, on the
ground that his commission had been superseded by the one
granted to Gates. But he refused to vacate the position until
Gates's commission should be shown him by Gates himself.
In that age, when official rules were observed with rigid fidelity,
and any irregularity in official conduct was invariably
punished with severity, this action on his part was justified by
common prudence. Especially was he called upon to exhibit
wariness and caution when the demand to surrender his
authority came from men who were notoriously hostile to
himself.

It seems to have been ultimately decided that Smith should
continue to occupy the Presidency until the twentieth of September,
when it was agreed that Captain West should succeed
him. But Smith soon found himself in an atmosphere of
unscrupulous intrigue, in which he was the principal target of
the prevailing spirit of malevolence. For a time, he seems to
have grown discouraged, in spite of his characteristic stoutness
of heart, and expressed a desire to leave the Colony and
go back to England. He probably perceived that he was too
much hampered by the antagonistic influences surrounding
him to accomplish the purposes which he thought alone
assured both the safety and the prosperity of the Colony. But
he was not the man to throw up his hands in the face of opposition,
and his former determination to remain returned. In
order to break up the faction that was conspiring to destroy
his authority, he ordered West, with a company of over one
hundred men, to set out for the Falls, and Martin and Percy,
with an equal following, for Nansemond.

Before Martin left Jamestown, he was chosen President by
Smith, who was still the only member of the council. In three

hours, Martin resigned the office, and departed for the station
assigned him at Nansemond. Smith himself joined West at
the Falls. He found on his arrival there that this officer and
his men had so stirred up the hostility of the Indians inhabiting
the immediate region round about, by robbing their fields and
gardens, that they openly said that they preferred their old
enemies, the Monacans, to these pilfering neighbors. Smith's
power was now too much curtailed and damaged by the prospect
of Gates's early arrival at Jamestown for him to exercise
a continuous influence over the conduct of West and his company,
especially as West had been selected to succeed him in
the Presidency should the interregnum be prolonged beyond
September 20th. He, therefore, made up his mind to return
down the river, and hardly had he entered his boat when the
Indians, provoked to murderous retaliation by the aggression
of the Englishmen at the Falls, crept through the underbrush
with tomahawk and bow and arrow and killed and scalped
every soldier who had straggled from the camp.

Smith's vessel, having run fast upon a shoal of sand, he
went back to the Falls, and resuming his old habit of command,
with characteristic vigor and sternness, he put six or seven of
the men in shackles, and ordered all the others to repair the old
Indian fort that was standing not far off. He then set out for
Jamestown again. On the way down the stream he inadvertently
fired the contents of his powder bag. In his violent pain,
he leaped into the water and was only rescued from drowning
by his companions; and in this condition of extreme agony, he
was compelled to continue his voyage, with over one hundred
miles to traverse.

After his safe arrival at Jamestown, there was a reasonable
basis for suspecting that his enemies, Martin, Ratcliffe, and
Archer, were plotting to remove him by the hands of assassins,
and would have succeeded had not the would-be murderers faltered
at the crucial moment. He was now in too low a state of
physical infirmity to suppress the factions or to search the outlying
regions for provisions even if his authority as President

had not come to be despised. It is true that his old soldiers were
so much incensed by the open or covert attacks upon him, that
they could, with difficulty, be restrained from putting his principal
opponents to the sword; but he himself was too wise, in
spite of his impatient spirit, to think that he could serve the
interest of the Colony at an hour when his commission was
in dispute and his health shattered. He was not permitted to
occupy his office up to the close of the term agreed upon, but
was roughly deposed by Martin, Ratcliffe, and Archer, on the
ground that he had gathered into his own hands, and insisted
upon retaining, all the reins of government. Ratcliffe, whom
Ralph Hamor asserts "was not worth remembering, but to his
own dishonor," recorded it as a fact that Smith was sent back
to England by force "to answer some misdemeanors;" but as
no charges were lodged against him on his arrival in London,
the supposed "misdemeanors" were not sufficient in the view
of the council in England to justify even his indictment.

Smith was a man of such aggressive and impatient temper,
such firmness and decisiveness of mind, such supreme confidence
in his own judgment, that, like all persons of this spirit
who have played a part in history, he made bitter enemies and
ardent friends with equal facility. It has been charged against
him that he had few kindly words to say in favor of those
who were associated with him in the first colonization of Virginia;
but being blunt and honest even in the expression of his
self-esteem, it was natural enough that he should have had
small toleration for the feeble or designing persons whose duty
it was to cooperate with him as his official equals. It is a man's
subordinate comrades who are in the best position to form a
correct impression of his real greatness, for their vision is
unclouded by big or petty jealousies and rivalries. What did
his old soldiers, who had followed him cheerfully and faithfully
through a thousand perils by land and water, and had never
known him to flinch or pause,—what did they say of their
departed leader? "Thus he left us," exclaimed one of these
soldiers, who had accompanied him to the ship and saw him

shake the dust of Jamestown from his feet for the last time,
"him, who, in all his proceedings, made justice his first guide
and experience his second; that hated baseness, sloth, and
pride, more than any dangers; that never allowed more for
himself than for his soldiers with him; that, upon no danger,
would send them where he would not lead them himself; that
would never see us want what he either had or could, by any
means, get us; that would rather want than borrow, or starve
than not pay; and that loved actions more than words and
hated falsehood."

What were the services to the Colony of this great man,—
this only great man in the first three or four years of its history,
the years that were to decide whether Virginia could be
permanently settled by persons of the English race? First,
he explored the virgin country far and wide, and mapped, with
astonishing accuracy, all its salient features; second, he made
a fruitful study of the qualities of the Indian character and a
complete record of Indian resources, which were to prove of
extraordinary value in the later relations of the English with
the savage tribes; third, he rescued the community from a
destructive famine on more than one occasion by his energetic
commerce with the Indians; fourth, he prevented the return of
all the settlers to England at least thrice; fifth, he demonstrated
that it was feasible to establish branch colonies at
different places in regions many miles apart from each other;
sixth, he compelled the Indians at times to cooperate in support
of the whites; and seventh, and finally, he took steps to
have the aboriginal methods of cultivating maize and vegetables
adopted in the fields around Jamestown. It was the
departing ship of this practical benefactor of the Colony which
was held back from sailing for a period of three weeks for the
single purpose that charges might be trumped up against him
and formulated in writing. "All whom I had either whipped,
punished, or disgraced," he himself afterwards justly complained,
"now had the free power to say or swear anything
against me."