University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
Nest egg of the Old Dominion.

With joined hands, Smith and Pocahontas conduct you naturally
to Jamestown, that abandoned nest of the Sire of Eagles.
James river is one of the classic regions of the country. We
should all of us, once in a life, at least, make it the object of a
pilgrimage! It is full of associations, to say nothing of it as a
fine spacious stream, which, when a better spirit and knowledge
of farming shall prevail and a denser population shall inhabit its
borders, will become a channel of great wealth, and present a
throng of quiet beauties to the eye wherever its currents wander.

“But the imputation of a sickly climate rests upon James
river.”

“This is due wholly to the sparseness of the settlements, the
lack of drainage, the want of proper openings in the woods for
the progress of the winds, and to the presence of a cumbrous and
always rotting undergrowth. Population will cure all this. It
is doing it already. The farming settlements are improving, and
the health of the river is said to be improving along with them.
You will have pointed out to you, along the route, a number of
well-cultivated plantations, some containing four or five thousand
acres, which are represented as being among the best managed
and most profitable in the state. With the substitution of
farming for staple culture, this progress would be rapid.”

“But the genius of the Southron, particularly the Virginian,
has always inclined more to extensive than to careful cultivation.
His aims were always magnificent. He must have large estates.
He can not bear to be crowded. Like his cattle, he must get all
the range he can; and, in the extent of his territory, he neglects
its improvement. Indeed, his force — that is, his labor —
was never equal to his estates. The New York farmers have

been farming upon his waste domains. Their policy differs from
his in one essential particular. They concentrate the energies
which he diffuses. They require but small territory, and they
make the most of it. Lands which, in the hands of the Virginian,
were no longer profitable for tobacco, the New-Yorkers have
limed for wheat; and what he sold at a dollar per acre, in many
instances will now command seventy-five dollars. The character
of the Southorn is bold and adventurous. This leads him to
prefer the wandering to the stationary life. He needs excitement,
and prefers the varieties and the vicissitudes of the forest,
to the tame drudgery of the farmstead. His mission is that of
a pioneer. The same farmer who now makes his old fields flourish
in grain, thirty bushels to the acre, would never have set foot
in the country, until the brave Virginian had cleared it of its
savage inhabitants, the wild beast, and the red man.”

“James river conducts you to Jamestown. Jamestown and
St. Augustine are among the oldest landmarks of civilization in
Anglo-Norman America. You approach both, if properly minded,
with becoming veneration. The site of Jamestown is an island,
connected by a bridge with the main. The spot is rather a pleasing
than an imposing one. It was chosen evidently with regard
to two objects, security from invasion by the sea, and yet an
easy communication with it when desirable. Here, squat and
hidden like a sea-fowl about to lay her eggs, the colony escaped
the vigilant eyes and ferocious pursuit of the hungry Spaniard.”

“What a commentary upon the instability of national power
is the fact, that, at this day, this power has no longer the capacity
to harm. In the time of Elizabeth, the Spaniard was the
world's great Tiger Shark. Now, he is little better than a skipjack
in the maw of that Behemoth of the nations, whose seagrowth
he certainly did something to retard. In the time of
Roundhead authority, the Dutch were a sort of corpulent swordfish
of the sea; now you may better liken them to the great
lazy turtle, fat and feeble, whom more adroit adventurers turn
upon their backs to be gathered up at leisure. Both of these
nations may find their revenges, and recover position in other
days, when the powers by which they were overcome shall fall
into their errors, and contrive, through sheer blindness, their own
emasculation.”

“Did you ever read `Purchas, his Pilgrims?' He has a description
of Jamestown in 1610, written by William Strachey.
If you are curious to see it, I have it in my berth, and marked
the passage only this morning.”

Some curiosity being expressed, the book was brought, and
the extract read. It may possibly interest others, in this connection,
to see where the first tree was hewn in the New World
by the hands of the Anglo-Norman.

“A low levell of ground about halfe an acre, or (so much as
Queene Dido might buy of King Hyarbas, which she compassed
about with the thongs cut out of one bull's, and therein built her
castle of Byrsa) on the North side of the river is cast almost into
the forme of a triangle, and so pallazadoed. The South side
next the river (howbeit extended in a line, or curtaine six score
foote more in lengthe, than the other two by reason of the advantages
of the ground doth so require), contains one hundred
and forty yards: the West and East side a hundred only. At
every angle or corner, where the lines meet, a bulwarke or
watchtower is raised, and in each bulwarke a piece of ordnance
or two well mounted. To every side, a proportionate distance
from the pallisado, is a settled streete of houses, that runs along,
so as each line of the angle hath his streete. In the midst is a
market place, a storehouse and a corps du garde, as likewise a
pretty chappelle, though (at this time when we came in) as ruined
and unfrequented: but the Lord, Governor and Captaine
Generall, hath given order for the repairing of it, and at this instant
many hands are about it. It is in lengthe three-score
foote, in breadth twenty-four, and shall have a chancell in it of
cedar, and a communion table of the blacke walnut — and all the
pews of cedar, with fair broad windows, to shut and open, as the
weather shall occasion: a pulpit of the same wood, with a font
hewn hollow like a canoa; with two bells at the West end. It
is so cast as it be very light within, and the Lord Governor and
Captaine Generall doth cause it to be passing sweete and trimmed
up with divers flowers; — with a sexton belonging to it.”

“So much for the Church — the first English Church, be it
remembered, ever raised in America. This should render the
description an interesting one. And now something for the uses
to which it was put. We see that Strachey found it in a ruinous

condition. This was in 1610. You are not to suppose that the
ruin of the church arose from the neglect of the worshippers.
It was rather the result of the more pressing misfortunes of the
colonists. Smith was superseded by Lord Delaware in 1609, who
brought with him a host of profligate adventurers, some of whom
Smith had sent out of the colony, tied neck and heels, as criminals.
It was an evil augury to him and to the colony that they
were brought back. They brought with them faction, confusion,
and misery. Insurrection followed — the Indians revolted and
commenced the work of indiscriminate massacre, and the church
and religion necessarily suffered all the disasters which had befallen
society. But, with the restoration of the church under
Delaware, let us see what followed. Our Puritans make a great
outcry about their devotions. They are perpetually raising their
rams' horns, perhaps quite as much in the hope of bringing down
the walls of their neighbors, as with the passion of religion.
Our Virginia colonists boast very little of what they did in the
way of devotion. Let us hear Strachey still further on this
subject:—

“`Every Sunday we have sermons twice a day, and every
Thursday a sermon — having two preachers which take their
wekely turnes — and every morning at the ringing of a bell,
about ten of the clocke, each man addresseth himself to prayers,
and so, at four of the clocke before supper.'

“Verily, but few of the `guid folk' of Virginia or New England
are so frequent now-a-days at their religious exercises!
The authorities of Virginia set the example: —

“`Every Sunday, when the Lord Governor and Captain Generall
goeth to church, he is accompanied with all the Counsaillors,
Captains, other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a
guard of Halberdiers, in his lordship's livery, faire red cloaks, to
the number of fifty, both on each side and behind him: and
being in the church, his lordship hath his seate in the Quier
in a green velvet chair, with a cloath, with a velvet cushion
spread on a table before him on which he kneeleth, and on each
side sit the Counsell, Captains, and officers, each in their place;
and when he returneth home again, he is waited on to his house
in the same manner.'

“Something stately, these devotions, but they were those of

the times, and of — the politician. Religion has a twofold aspect,
and concerns society as well as the individual, though not
in the same degree. And this, would you believe it, was just
ten years before the Puritans landed at Plymouth. Our Virginians
were clearly not wholly regardless of those serious performances
which their more youthful neighbors, farther East,
claim pretty much to have monopolized. But to return. It
may interest many readers to see what Strachey further says of
the ancient city of Jamestown.

“`The houses first raised were all burnt, by a casualty of fire,
the beginning of the second year of their siat [settlement] and in
the second voyage of Captain Newport; which have been better
rebuilted, though as yet in no great uniformity, either for the
fashion or the beauty of the streete. A delicate wrought fine
kind of mat the Indians make, with which (as they can be
trucked for, or snatched up[1] ) our people so dress their chambers
and inward rooms, which make their homes so much the more
handsome. The houses have large and wide country chimnies
in the which is to be supposed (in such plenty of wood) what
fires are maintained; and they have found the way to cover
their houses, now (as the Indians), with barkes of trees, as durable
and good proofs against stormes and winter weather as the
best tyle, defending likewise the piercing sunbeams of summer
and keeping the inner lodgings coole enough which before
would be in sultry weather like stoves, whilst they were, as at
first, pargetted and plaistered with bitumen or tough clay; and
thus armed for the injury of changing times, and seasons of the
the year, we hold ourselves well apaid, though wanting array

hangings, tapestry, and guilded Venetian cordovan, or more
spruce household garniture, and wanton city ornaments, remembering
the old Epigraph —

“The Puritans could not have expressed themselves more devoutly.
Here are texts to stimulate into eloquence a thousand
annual self-applausive orators, for a thousand years to come.
That this was the prevailing spirit of those who gave tone to the
colony, and not the sentiments of a single individual, hear further
of the manner in which that most excellent ruler, the Lord
Delaware, first made his approaches to the colony. This, be it
remembered, was in 1610, ten years before the Plymouth pilgrims
brought religion to the benighted West: —

“`Upon his lordship's landing, at the south gate of the Pallesado
(which looks into the river) our governor caused his company
to stand in order and make a guard. It pleased him that
I (William Strachey) should bear his colours for that time: —
His lordship landing, fell upon his knees, and before us all
made a long and silent prayer to himself, and after marching up
into the town: when at the gate, I bowed with the colours and
let them fall at his Lordship's feet, who passed into the chapelle,
where he heard a sermon by Master Bucke, our Governor's
preacher,' &c.

“To pray to himself, perhaps, was not altogether in the
spirit of that very intense religion which some portions of our
country so love to eulogize; but methinks it was not bad for our
Virginia Governor, whom their better neighbours were wont to
suppose never prayed at all. But they worked, too, as well as
prayed, these rollicking Virginians: and their works survive
them. The conversion of Pocahontas — the possession of that
bright creature of a wild humanity — has been long since envied
to Virginia by all the other colonies. Take the account of her
conversion from a letter of Sir Thomas Dale:—

“`Powhatan's daughter I caused to be carefully instructed in
the Christian religion, who, after she had made some good
progresse therein, renounced publickly her Country's Idolatry,

openly confessed her Christian Faith, was, as she desired, baptized,
and is since married to an English Gentleman of good understanding
— as by his letter unto me, containing the reasons
of his marriage unto her, you may perceive. Another knot to
bind the knot the stronger. Her father and friends gave approbation
of it, and her uncle gave her to him in the Church: she
lives civilly and lovingly with him, and I trust will increase in
goodnesse as the knowledge of God increaseth in her. She will
goe into England with mee, and were it but the gaining of this
one such, I will think my time, toile, and present stay, well
spent.'

“Enough of our old chronicler for a single sitting. I trust
the taste will lead to further readings: too little is really known
of our early histories. We gather the leading facts, perhaps,
from the miserable abridgments that flood the country, and too
frequently pervert the truth; but, at best, the tone, the spirit
of the history is sadly lacking. We want books which shall not
only see the doings of our fathers, but trace and appreciate
their sympathies and feelings also. But the bell rings for supper,
and the captain signalizes us with an especial leer and
wave of the hand. With you in a moment, Señor, as soon as I
have laid old Purchas on his pillow.”