The Beginners of a Nation. Eggleston Edward

Чтение книги онлайн.

6

Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs: "The Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, which lyeth on the West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the other side of the mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] and openeth a free and faire passage, not only to China, Japan, and the Moluccas, but also to New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and those rich countries of Terra Australis not as yet discovered." It is one of many marks of practical sagacity in Captain John Smith that after his experience on the American coast he was able to form views of the geography of the continent almost a century in advance of the opinions held in his time. He speaks of "those large Dominions which doe stretch themselves into the main God knoweth how many thousand miles" (Generall Historie, book vi).

7

So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New Haven in 1645. The ship was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth or sky.

8

I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment in the British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by Ingram was inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It was omitted in the later edition as too incredible even for Hakluyt. See also a paper by Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883, on the copy of Ingram's Statement preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's story, and others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of Eastward, Ho! by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The assertion of Seagull, in the play, that "they have in their houses scowpes, buckets, and diverse other vessels of massie silver," would seem at first sight to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of Ingram's narrative. But in the second edition of Bullein's A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one Mendax, describing an unknown land, declares that "their pottes, panns, and all vessells are cleane gold garnished with diamondes." This shows that Ingram's story had probably absorbed certain traits from what I have ventured to call European folklore tales about America – folk tales originally applied to the Orient, no doubt; echoes of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but not probable, that Bullein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had returned three years or more before he printed his second edition. The authors of Eastward, Ho! probably enlarged on Bullein.

Note 9, page 18. "Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. These details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian Cabot, whose veracity is not above suspicion.

9

Some of the early writers speak of "apes." Strachey calls what appears to be a raccoon a monkey, and Brickell, as late as 1743, uses the same word. The peccaries are recorded as in the text by the marvel-loving Purchas, p. 805. One finds unicorns in Speed's Prospect, Description of New York. Speed also lets us know that the buffalo was accustomed to defend himself by vomiting "a hot scalding liquor" on the dogs that chased it. Argall was the first Englishman to see the bison, in 1613. Citing his letter, Purchas says, p. 943, "In one voyage … they found a slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine, which were good meate."

10

In 1889, when I visited Jamestown, there was no apparent trace of Sandy Beach which had connected the island with the mainland. This bit of sand, in the antique phrase of one of the early colonists, was "no broader than a man may well quaite a tileshard." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1752. Jamestown is now a farm; the ruins of the church and many of the tombs in the eighteenth-century churchyard remain; but the upper end of the island is wearing away, and I picked out of the crumbling sand, far from the later burying place, human bones of earlier burials, possibly of the victims of the famines and epidemics. The walls of the magazine had been exposed by erosion. I brought away wrought nails, bits of glass grown iridescent from long burial, and an exploded bombshell of so small a caliber as to mark its antiquity. By the aid of a negro youth living on the farm I found the hearth bricks turned up in various places by the plow, and the arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement, of the town could thus be made out. My guide volunteered the information that Jamestown was "the first place discovered after the Flood." Some drawings made at the time were reproduced with an article on Nathaniel Bacon in the Century Magazine for July, 1890.

11

Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treatment, as he asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been matter of dispute. Both accounts are correct, as is shown by the testimony of an important manuscript at Petworth House, in Surrey, which I was allowed to examine by the courtesy of Lord Leconsfield. It is from the pen of George Percy, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen to succeed Smith on his departure from the colony. It is not the narrative from which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The title is "A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of momente wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas Gates was shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my depture ovtt of the country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a quarto of forty-one pages. Percy was a man of courage, but his own narrative in this little book shows that he had no qualification for the office of governor except the rank of his family. His ill health is made an excuse for his inefficiency, but Dale's letter of May 25, 1611, shows that even the horrible events of Percy's first government had not taught him to plant corn when again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's boastfulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the unruly settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to attack them, is supported by Percy; and a very different charge, that he stirred up the Indians to assassinate West himself, appears at a later time in Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears abundant internal evidence of the writer's mental inability to speak the truth. Percy himself relates that the Indians were already hostile to West's party, and that they had wounded and killed some of West's men in resentment of their wanton outrages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with the signatures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the affair. "Bloody-mindedness" seems not to have been a trait of Smith. But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was already impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any cost could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. Such a course would not have done much violence to the notions of the time, and would have found precedents in the various plots against the lives of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. It is quite probable, however, that there is no truth in the story. The violent hatred of the factions will account for the suspicion.

12

Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and was printed in London in 1608. In 1612 he published what is commonly referred to as the Oxford Tract. Its proper title is very long. The first part of it is as follows: "Map of Virginia, with a description of the Covntry, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. Written by Captain Smyth, sometime Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the proceedings of those colonies since their first departure from England," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken from the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, and to have been edited by W. S. – that is, the Reverend Dr. Symonds. The Generall Historie was first proposed in a well-considered and rather elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meeting of the Virginia Company, April 12, 1621, while the СКАЧАТЬ