University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XII

ADMINISTRATION OF SIR THOMAS DALE

The fleet carrying Dale to Virginia dropped anchor off
Point Comfort in May (1611). There were three hundred new
colonists aboard, besides numerous goats, horses, and kine.
The governor, who was a man of extraordinary energy and
decision of character, was unwilling to wait until he should
reach Jamestown before setting his hand vigorously to the
administrative plough. He started in at once to repair the
forts that had been previously erected at the mouth of the
Hampton River, built houses for the new settlers, and personally
directed the cultivation of the ground in maize. Accompanied
by Percy, he landed at Jamestown on the twenty-ninth
of May. He hardly stopped to look to right or left before
he continued the beneficent work which he had begun at
Kecoughtan. He undertook at once the digging of a new well
to obtain a purer supply of water, and he ordered the prompt
construction of a new block-house, a powder magazine, a warehouse
for the ammunition, and a shed for drying sturgeon. He
also had erected a smith's forge, a shed for the cattle, and a
wharf for the ships; and he fully repaired the existing church
edifice and storehouses. For some of these structures he
supplied the bricks by his own manufacture. He wrote to
the Company in England to send out to Virginia a number of
seamen and doctors—the seamen, to engage in constant trade
with the Indians; the physicians to combat the sickness of
the country.

Accompanied by soldiers in armor, Dale explored the
Nansemond River, and was so exposed to the assaults of the
savages at one stage of the voyage that he was only saved

from death by his headpiece when an arrow struck it with
full force and glanced away. He was already looking out
for a safer and more wholesome site than Jamestown for a
permanent place of settlement.

His determination to secure such a site was strengthened
by the capture of a Spanish spy. A Spanish sloop arrived
off Fort Algernon in June (1611), and its commander sent
three of his crew on shore, ostensibly to obtain a pilot to carry
him off the coast. The boat that brought the pilot to the sloop
did not bring back the three men, who, in consequence, were
put under arrest, and when the demand came for their surrender,
Captain Davis's only reply was "Go to the devil."
The Spaniard, no doubt, satisfied with his manoeuvre, sailed
away with his English pilot. It was feared in the fort that
he had consorts outside the capes, and that an attack in force
would soon follow, but none came. Diego de Molina was the
name of the chief spy, and the Spanish plan was to recover
him by diplomacy in time to receive a full description of the
Colony's defenses as they then stood; and this plan was afterwards
carried out, and Molina lived long enough to lead an
expedition by sea against Virginia, which was only halted by
the mutiny of his crews. One of the three spies died at
Jamestown, whilst the third, an Englishman by birth, was
hung as a traitor to his country.

Dale aroused by the dangerous suggestiveness of this
incident, was about to visit the upper sections of the Powhatan,
in order to select a new site for the Colony, when Gates
arrived. The latter's fleet of six vessels entering the Bay
was at first taken for the Spanish armada which was expected
to return for De Molina and overwhelm the community. Dale
informed of its appearance, rushed his whole force on board
of two ships and one pinnace, then anchored at Jamestown,
and despatched a shallop down the river to reconnoiter. "We
will fire the Spanish vessels with our own," he declared,
"rather than yield basely or be captured. Our lives could not
be sacrificed in a more acceptable service."

Gates was accompanied by numerous artisans and at least
twenty women—an addition to the population too long
deferred, and one, had it been made at an early date, would
by this time have assured the success of the Colony. Dale
was at once appointed marshal, and his plan to build a town
on the banks of the upper river was approved without reservation.
Very soon many workingmen were employed in splitting
rails and manufacturing palisades and bricks for the
projected settlement, and in September (1611), all this material,
along with three hundred men, was transported in a
mass to the modern Farrar's Island. Here Dale began the
erection of a town, which was protected on all sides but one
by the coil of the stream. A palisade quickly shut off the
danger of assault on the open neck. Watch-towers, storehouses,
dwelling-houses, and a church, laid off in three streets,
were completed by the fifteenth of January; and to these structures,
a hospital, with numerous beds and imported nurses
or keepers, was afterwards added.[1] A second palisade was
erected across the neck of a second coil of the river, which
closed to Indian depredation a large area of fertile land. A
third palisade on the south side of the stream created a safe
run for many hundreds of hogs.

Dale seized an extensive region of fertile country lying
about five miles south from the site of his town, which he
divided into hundreds and named the New Bermudas. Each
hundred had a separate designation. Nether Hundred seems
to have been the first to be cultivated, as it contained much
open corn land. Many houses were soon constructed there,
the inhabitants of which were to be granted all the privileges
of freeholders after the lapse of two years. Rochdale Hundred
was largely used as pasture for hogs and cattle.

While Dale was busy with all these projects on the banks
of the upper Powhatan, Gates was engaged in building and
planting at Jamestown, and in loading his vessels for the

return voyage to England. A part of his cargoes consisted
of enormous masts, which had to be reduced in length before
they could be taken on board. The martial laws were in force
as long as Gates remained in Virginia; and were continued

Jamestown Church Tower, 1890

after his departure, at which time Dale resumed the sole
administration. The Indians had not been prevented by the
formidable palisades from attacking Henricopolis, and yet, in
spite of this hostility, a number of the English settlers ran
away to their towns. Several were recaptured and subjected
to the severe punishments of the Draconian Code, such as
being bound to trees and suffered to starve to death, or being
broken on the wheel. As a rule, however, the martial laws
were held up in terrorem rather than pitilessly enforced, unless
the safety of all the settlers had been endangered by the acts
of the criminals.

In March, 1613, Argall, who had arrived in Virginia on
the ship Treasurer, in June, 1612, made a voyage to the Rappahannock,
and in the course of it, he was able, by bribing
her guardian, Japasaws, a chief, with a copper kettle, to
carry off the Princess Pocahontas, who had been sent to that
distant country by her father to escape seizure by the English.
She had not visited Jamestown since the deposition of
Captain Smith. When brought there by Argall, Dale endeavored
to exchange her for all the English prisoners and guns
then in her father's possession. With a band of one hundred
and fifty men, and accompanied also by Pocahontas, he went
over to York River and sent word to Powhatan, that, unless
he paid the ransom of his daughter—these prisoners and
guns—they would be taken from him by force. The Indians
fled, and their village was destroyed and their fields despoiled.
Dale then sailed further up the river, and at Matchet, went
ashore with Pocahontas. Here two of her brothers came to
see her, and through them, she sent word to her father, that,
if he were really devoted to her, he would not value her less
than he did the old axes and saws which the English were
demanding. The English, she said, loved her, and with them
she would remain.

Dale returned to Jamestown unsuccessful in his expedition.
While sojourning as a prisoner there, Pocahontas had
been converted to Christianity and taught to speak the language
of her captors. John Rolfe, one of the colonists, of
excellent birth and character, had become enamored of her,
and with the consent of Dale and Powhatan, he ended in
marrying her. Two of her brothers and an uncle were present
at the ceremony, which was performed by the Rev. Richard
Burke, who had baptized her. Apart from the romance of her

conversion and marriage, there was much to invest her youthful
figure with a kindly glamour in the minds of all the colonists.
"Notwithstanding the constant wars with the Indians," says
Captain Smith, writing his own recollections of her, "this
tender virgin would not spare to dare to visit us, and our wants
still supplied, when her father sought to surprise us. The dark
night could not affright her from coming through the irksome
woods and with watered eyes give the intelligence, with the
best advice to escape her father's fury—which, had he
known, he would suredly have slain her. Jamestown, with her
wild train, she as freely frequented as her father's habitation;
and during the time of two or three years, she, next under
God, was still the instrument to preserve the Colony from
death and confusion, which, if, in these times, had once been
dissolved, Virginia might have lain as it was at our first
arrival, to this day."

The subsequent history of Pocahontas may be appropriately
told here. When she was in England with her husband,
in the summer of 1613, Smith called at her lodging to converse
with her again. "After a modest salutation," he has
recorded of the interview, "without any word, she turned
about and obscured her face, as not seeing with content, and
in that humor, her husband, with divers others, we all[2] left
her two or three hours. But not long after, she began to
talk. `You did promise Powhatan,' she said, `what was yours
shall be his, and he the like to you. You called him father,
being in his land a stranger, and by the same reason, soe must
I doe you.' " Smith deprecated this because she was a king's
daughter. "Fear you here that I should call you father?"
she exclaimed. "I tell you then I will, and you shall call me
child."

With Lady Delaware as her sponsor, Pocahontas was
received at court as a princess, was entertained by the Bishop
of London with great pomp, was present at many masked

balls, and sat for her portrait. People familiar with courts
were struck with the ease, modesty, and propriety of her
bearing and commented on it in words of surprised admiration.
She died of small-pox at Gravesend as she was about
to return to her native Virginia. Her only son, the ancestor
of so many distinguished families, was left with relatives in
England, but he finally made his home in the land of his
mother's ancestors.

A feeling of discouragement swept over the minds of the
members of the London Company about 1613. A million
dollars in our modern values had been spent, and there had
been, as yet, no commercial return. Several thousand lives
also had been destroyed, and the Indians were still unfriendly
when not actively hostile. It began to be debated whether
it would not be wisest to abandon the Colony and remove all
the settlers to the Somers Isles. Dale stoutly protested when
told of this depression. To give up Virginia, he vehemently
asserted in a letter to Sir Thomas Good in June, 1613, would
be a loss only comparable to the loss, in the previous century,
of the kingdom of France. "The more I range this country,"
he added, "the more I admire it. I have seen the best countries
in Europe. Before the living God, put them all together,
this country will be equal to them if inhabited by good
people."

The vessel that carried this letter over to England carried
over also the small crop of tobacco which John Rolfe had
harvested, the first of that staple to be exported—an event
not second in importance to the introduction of African
slaves a few years later. Rolfe was in the habit of smoking
a pipe, and his earliest cultivation of the weed was probably
to gratify his own personal wants. He was aware of the fact
that tobacco was imported into England from the Spanish
colonies. Why not import it also from Virginia? This was
a reasonable question, and Rolfe's experiment was in a few
seasons pushed so far by others that Dale, to assure more
attention to maize, was forced to limit the amount of tobacco

to be planted. In 1616, however, at least two of the settlements
cultivated this crop only, and, by this time, the leaf of
the Colony had come to be held in almost as much esteem by
English smokers as the Spanish leaf.

Dale was not content with the importance given to tobacco
and endeavored to encourage the production of cotton, wine,
and silk also. He purchased too a large supply of grain from
the Indians, who were now in a state of peace. His agent was
Argall, who not only explored the Virginian waters, but also
went off to Mount Desert to capture a colony of Frenchmen
now seated there, although that region was claimed by England;
and he led a second and an equally successful expedition
against other French settlements in the north. Dale entered
into a treaty with the Chickahominy tribe, who, by its terms,
agreed to furnish several hundred bowmen in case of a Spanish
attack on Jamestown; and this they consented the more
readily to do as Powhatan and Opechancanough had originally
been driven away from the vicinity of the Gulf by Spanish
invaders.

Under Dale's wise supervision, the Colony was soon in a
sanguine and thrifty state.[3] He laid off a common garden
to be cultivated for the benefit of the public store by indentured
laborers; and to numerous tenants he assigned three
acres respectively, in return for an annual rent in corn. The
population was now divided into three classes: (1) the officers;
(2) the laborers, just mentioned, who worked in the ground
for the common store, or as mechanics, with a limited right to
their own time and profits; (3) the tenants of the public lands,
also just mentioned, who tilled the ground only thirty-one
days for the public wealth. The remaining months were
given up to them to be devoted to the production of their
own crops. This division extended to all the settlements in
the Colony, which now embraced Jamestown, Henricopolis,

Bermuda Lower Hundred, West and Shirley Hundred,
Kecoughtan, and Dale's Gift across the Bay. At the latter
place, seventeen men were occupied in manufacturing salt and
catching fish. A guard was maintained permanently at Point
Comfort. Jamestown consisted of three rows of framed
houses—two stories and a garret in height—three large
storage buildings, and a fortification with bastions. The
town was surrounded by a new palisade.

There was a complaint that there were not sufficient clergymen
for the pulpits, but, in reality, few of the settlements
were unprovided with an ordained spiritual adviser; and the
type was so faithful and so unselfish at this time that it was
justly said of the entire body then living in Virginia that all
were of such noble temper that they were "prepared to forsake
every wordly consideration in their loyalty to Christ."

In the spring of 1614, the Privy Council in England
directed the attention of the city companies of London to the
lottery which the London Company, by the terms of its charter
of 1612, was permitted to hold, and many of these associations,
as well as private individuals throughout the kingdom, purchased
tickets for the benefit of the Colony. In the course of
1616 the joint stock terminated, and dividends of land were
granted to every one who had subscribed to a share of the
Company or had gone out to Virginia to become an actual
planter there; and this was now established as the permanent
rule. The first patent issued was to Simon Codrington. This
was issued in March, 1616.