The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements ...

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Preface

In this work, brought to completion after many years of patient research, I have sought to trace from their source the various and often complex movements that resulted in the early English settlements in America, and in the evolution of a great nation with English speech and traditions. It has been my aim to make these pages reflect the character of the age in which the English colonies were begun, and the traits of the colonists, and to bring into relief the social, political, intellectual, and religious forces that promoted emigration. This does not pretend to be the usual account of all the events attending early colonization; it is rather a history in which the succession of cause and effect is the main topic — a history of the dynamics of colony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth century. Who were the beginners of English life in America ? What propulsions sent them for refuge to a wilderness? What visions beckoned them to undertake the founding of new states ? What manner of men were their leaders? And what is the story of their hopes, their experiments, and their disappointments? These are the questions I have tried to answer.

The founders of the little settlements that had the unexpected fortune to expand into an empire I have not been able to treat otherwise than unreverently. Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply English men and women of the seventeenth century, with the faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues of their age. I have disregarded that convention which

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Preface.

VUl

The Beginners of a Nation.

Prsface.

makes it obligatory for a writer of American history to explain that intolerance in the first settlers was not just like other intolerance, and that their cruelty and injustice were justifiable under the circumstances. This walking backward to throw a mantle over the nakedness of ancestors may be admirable as an example of diluvian piety, but it is none the less reprehensible in the writing of history.

While the present work is complete in itself, it is also part of a larger enterprise, as the half-title indicates. In January, 1880, I began to make studies for a History of Life in the United States. For the last sixteen or seventeen years by far the greater part of my time has been given to researches on the culture history of the United States in the period of English domination, that " good old colony time " about which we have had more sentiment than information. As year after year was consumed in this toilsome preparation, the magnitude of the task became apparent, and I began to feel the fear for my work so felicitously expressed by Ralegh, " that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me before the performance." It seemed better, therefore, to redeem from the chance of such mishap a portion of my work, by completing this most difficult part of the task, in order that when, early or late, the inevitable night shall fall, the results of my labor, such as they are, may not be wholly covered over by the darkness.

There is always difference of opinion in regard to the comparative fullness with which the several portions of a historical narrative should be treated, and I can not hope to escape criticism on this point. I have related some events with what will be considered disproportionate amplitude of detail. But the distinctive purpose of this work is to give an insight into the life and character of the people, and there are details that make the reader feel the very spirit and manner of the time. It is better to let the age disclose itself in action ; it

Preface.

IX is only by ingenious eavesdropping and peeps through keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge from the past. Literary considerations should have some weight in deciding how fully an episode shall be treated, unless the historian is content to perform the homely service of a purveyor of the crude ore of knowledge. I have sought to make this '' a work of art as well as of historical science/' to borrow a phrase from Augustin Thierry. Some omissions in this volume will be explained when its successors appear.

I find it an embarrassing task to make acknowledgment to those who have assisted me; the debts that have accumulated since I began are too many to be recorded. I must not neglect to express my grateful remembrance of the hospitality shown to my researches during my various sojourns in England. At the British Museum and at the Public Record Office every facility has been extended to me, and a similar attention was shown to my wants at other less public repositories of books, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. To Dr. Richard Garnett, the head of the printed book department of the Museum, I owe thanks for many personal attentions. I am also indebted to Mr. E. M. Thompson, keeper of the manuscripts in the museum. The late Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Public Record Office, was very obliging. I owe most of all to the unfailing kindness of the Right Honorable James Bryce, M. P., who found time, in the midst of his preoccupations as a member of Parliament and his duties in high office, to secure for me access to private stores of historical material. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice with generous kindness put himself to much trouble to facilitate my examination of the manuscripts at Landsdowne House. I am indebted to Lord Leconsfield for permission to visit Petworth House and read there Percy's Trewe Relacion in the original manuscript. I must ask others in England who befriended my researches to accept a general acknowledgment, but I can not forget

PREFACK.

The Beginners of a Nation.

Preface.

their courtesy to a stranger. In common with other students I received polite attentions during my researches in Paris at the Biblioth^que Nationale.

In this country I owe much to the librarians of public libraries and their assistants— too much to allow me to specify my obligations to individuals. At the Astor, and at the Lenox, under its more recent management, my debt has been continual for many years. Acknowledgments are due to the officers of the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and the libraries of the New York, the Massachusetts, the Pennsylvania, the Maryland, and the Virginia Historical Societies. To Harvard College Library and to the New York State Library I am specially indebted ; from them I have been able to supplement my own collection by borrowing. The Brooklyn Mercantile Library has granted me similar privileges. The New York Mercantile Library, on the other hand, I have not found hospitable to research.

To my generous friend Mr. Justin Winsor I owe thanks for many favors. Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet opened his valuable collection to me, and the late Mr. S. L. M. Barlow showed me similar kindness. My friend, Mr. Oscar S. Straus, permitted me to use at my own desk valuable works from his collection. There are others whose friendly attentions can be more fitly recognized in later volumes of this series, and yet others whom I must beg to accept this general but grateful acknowledgment.

Mr. W. W. Duffield, the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, supplied the artist with the coast charts from which the maps in this volume were drawn.

To avoid misapprehension, it is needful to say that this is not a re-issue of anything I have heretofore produced. The lectures on the culture history of the United States given at Columbia College and other institutions were never written or reported. The papers on colonial life contributed to the Century Magazine in

Preface,

XI

1882, and the years following, were on a different plan and scale ; they have merely served the purpose of preliminary studies of the general subject. To the editor and publishers of the Century Magazine I am obliged for their courtesy in all affairs relating to my contract with them, and for an arrangement which enables me to have free use of my material

Joshua's Rock, Lake Geoage, October, t8g6.

Preface.

chapter the third. New England Dispersions

. 266

LIST OF MAPS.

(In the coast line the American maps follow the charts of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey ; the third map conforms to the British

Ordnance Survey.)

PAcmc

PACB

I.— Chesapeake Bay i

II.— James River 28

III.— The cradle of the Pilgrims 149

IV.— Coast explored by the Pilgrims I77

v.— The colony at St. Mary's 245

VI.— Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth . . . .275

VII.— The early settlements on Narragansett Bay . . 296

VIII.— New England after the dispersions . . . .343

^VvMIlt •ll«.

Chapter The First. English Knowledge And Notions Of America At The Period Of Settlement

L

The age of Elizabeth and James — the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon — was a new point of departure in the history of the English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet a modem invention ; the New World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern discovery ; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit growing out of the recent reformation in religfion. Imagination was powerfully ^stimulated by the progress of American explora- , by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards he West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but

Chap. I. The Elizabethan age

Rise of the First Colony.

Book I.

Credulity

about

America.

Geor]gc Beste, First Voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher.

the credulity and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that dramaloving age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste. He who could afiford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General.readers delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples inhabiting them, or the " monstrous strange beasts " found in lands beyond the bounds of Christendom.

America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the least known of all the " four parts " into which the globe was then divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to the pole. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents ; they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites ex- • pectation of others like it. And in a time wl vague report or well-worn tradition counted more than observation or experimental knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure prolTabilities, and to

14^

English Notions of America.

those shut in by the narrow limits of mediaeval knowledge the mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it afterward seemed incredible.

The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark. Zuan Caboto — in English, John Cabot — who is described by a contemporary as " a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he sailed down the coast again the next year, " ever with the intent to find said passage to India." It was announced on his return from his first voyage that Henry VII had " won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword."

The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 15 13, and the voyage of Magellan's ship across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth century ; but to re^ch Asia was still the main pur-

Chap. I.

Illusions of discoverers.

Note I.

Rise of the First Colony.

Book I.

Note a.

ProbUhcr.

Frobisher's Voyages, HakLSoc., passim.

pose of western exploration, and America was for a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a passage to the Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it retarded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World.

II

Adventure by sea became a favorite road to renown for ambitious Englishmen in the time of Elizabeth, and the belief in a passage through or round North America grew into a superstition. The discovery of this strait seemed, in the phrase of George Beste, a writer of the time, " the onely thing of the world that was left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." Sir Martin Frobisher, who is reckoned by Camden " among the famousest men of our age for counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voyages in 1576 and the following years to that part of the American coast almost under the arctic circle. He desisted from the attempt to get to China by an arctic channel only when he had involved the " venturers " or stockholders associated with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune of I his wife and stepchildren, to wljpm " glory gotten

English Notions of America.

at sea " must have been insufficient compensation. " Sir Martin Frobisher whome God forgive " is the phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife.

In the year of Frobisher's first voyage, Sir Humphrey Gilbert issued a treatise to prove that there was a way to the East Indies round North America. This he demonstrated by a hydraheaded argument constructed after the elaborate fashion of that unscientific age, proving the existence of a northwest passage, first by authority, secondly by reason, thirdly by experience of sundry men's travels, and fourthly by circumstance. Not content with getting to China by logic, and nothing daunted by Frobisher's brilliant failure, Gilbert mortgaged his estate that he might engage in attempts yet more disastrous than Frobisher's, and lost his life during his second voyage, in 1584.

About this time there appeared on the scene the famous geographer, Richard Hakluyt, one of those men that exert a marked influence in favor of a new movement mainly by ardor and industry. Hakluyt's fervor was akin to enthusiasm, his belief of every story favorable to projects for colonization, and his unwavering faith in the projects themselves bordered on flat credulity. To men of his own time his tireless advocacy of American exploration and colony-planting must have seemed irksome hobby-riding. But he was the indispensable forerunner of colonization. " Your Mr. Hakluyt hath served for a very good trumpet," says Sidney. Believing in everything American as un-

Chap. I.

Gilbert.

Haies in

HakLVoy.,

184-227.

Hakluyt.

Book I.

HakLDisc on Western Planting.

N. Y. Col.

Docs. I, i6.

waveringly as if his soul's salvation depended on his faith, he believed in nothing more sublimely than in a passage to the "South Sea" or Pacific Ocean. He seized on every vague intimation of ignorant map-makers, on every suspicion of an explorer, on every fond tale of an Indian that tended to lend support to the theory in hand. All evidence was of equal weight in his scales, provided it lay on the affirmative side of the balance. It mattered little to him where his witnesses placed this elusive passage. In Hakluyt's mind it was ubiquitous. The Pacific is now " on the backside " of Montreal Island, and the great Laurentian lakes suffer a sea change ; now it is reached by a river flowing three months to the southward — that is, the Mississippi. Then the much-sought strait is carried northward on the authority of an old map — " a great old round carde ** — shown him " by the King of Portingall." But he had also seen " a mightie large old mappe in parchment" which showed, as far south as latitude 40°, a little neck of land " much like the streyte neck or Isthmus of Darienna." He had seen the same isthmus on another old map " with the sea joynninge hard on both sides as it doth on Panama." In a paper meant for private use, he expresses solicitude th^t the nearness of the Pacific to Florida shall not become known too commonly. Many years later an injunction was granted in Holland forbidding a publisher to insert in a map the newly discovered channel into the South Sea.

English Notions of America.

III

Both Frobisher and Gilbert made ineffectual attempts to plant colonies in the new .lands, but colony-planting held a place in their minds quite secondary to the search for the South Sea in the north and the finding of gold. It was only when the large and lucid mind of Sir Walter Ralegh took up the subject seriously that the settlement of an agricultural colony became for a while the real^ object of American voyages. Ralegh sent no men to the arctic or to the wintry shores of Newfoundland, 2is Frobisher and Gilbert had done. He turned to milder latitudes, and dispatched his explorers in 1584, and his colonists in 1585, to the coast of what is now North Carolina.

But the ever-mischievous South Sea delusion did not vanish when the period of colonization was reached. Ralph Lane, the governor of Ralegh's first colony on Roanoke Island, having inquired perhaps for that western sea which Hakluyt had seen "on the mightie old mappe in parchment," understood the inventive savages to say that the Roanoke River sprang from a rock so near to a sea that the waves in storm oftf n dashed into this fountain, making the river brackish for some distance below. That the story migh^ be more interesting, they added that there was gold there, and that the walls of a town in that land were made of pearls. This is what the white men fancied the Indians said ; but whatever they said was spoken in

Chap. I.

Ralegh.

Ralph

Lane's

quest.

Rise of the First Colony.

Book I.

Note 3.

Lane's Account in HakL III.

Note 4.

Seeking: the Pacific 00 James River.

a tongue of which Lane's men had but the most scanty knowledge, if indeed it were not given mainly by signs. Nothing dispirited by the extravagance of these tales, Lane and some of his men set out to immortalize and enrich themselves — like a company of children running after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. While the crafty Indians were plotting the destruction of the colonists left behind, the governor and his followers pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat their dogs, made palatable by seething with a dressing of sassafras leaves. They returned, half famished and wholly disappointed, just in time to rescue the colony from destruction. But faith is faith, and despite his severe experience Lane went back to England believing that the Roanoke rose near to the Bay of Mexico " that openeth out into the South Sea." The map which the colonists brought with them when they abandoned the country in 1586 handed down the delusion, in another form, by showing a strait leading from the neighborhood of* Port Royal into a body of water to the westward.

IV

Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first colonists the Jamestown company was sent to plant the germ of an English-speaking fwtion in North America, Beginning with the first voyage of Columbus, the search for a route through America had lasted a hundred and fourteen years. No

English Notions of America.

passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found, yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way remained a part of the geographical creed of the time. The Jamestown emigrants were officially instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay toward the northwest, perhaps because the charmed latitude of 40® might thus be reached. It was in carrying out this instruction that Captain John Smith came to grief at the hands of the Indians while looking for the Pacific in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith rarely mixed his abounding romance with his geography ; he is as sober and trustworthy in topographical description and in map-making as he is imaginative in

narration. But Smith was at this time under thfi

•

influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hope^ that his second voyage up the Chesapeake would lead him into the Pacific. His belief in a passage to the westward in latitude 40®, just beyond the northward limit of his own explorations, he communicated to his friend Henry Hudson, who was so moved by it that he sailed to America in 1609 in violation of his orders, and in seeking the strait to the South Sea penetrated the solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his name. The explorer Dermer was intent on winr ning immortality by finding a passage to the Pacific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, he got information from the obliging Indians that made plain his way to the Orient He was very

Chap. I.

Hudson.

Dermer.

lO

Rise of the First Colony.

Book I.

Note 5.

Sandya's plan.

Note6L

Luke Pox.

Northwest.

Fox, p. 17a.

secretive about this route, which, however, seems to have lain through Delaware Bay.

A false notion once generally accepted is able to live in some ghostly shape after the breath is out of its body. The hope of a passage to the Pacific by means of a strait and the belief in a narrow isthmus in latitude 40° could not long survive the increase of knowledge that followed the settlement of Virginia and Captain Smith's explorations. But sixteen years after the landing at Jamestown, when these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased to flicker, the poet George Sandys, who was secretary of the colony, wrote that he was ready to venture his life in finding a way to the South Sea, but this way was now to be by an overland route. About the same time Henry Briggs, the famous Savile lecturer at Oxford, proved to the satisfaction of many that the rivers running westward from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific in about one hundred and fifty miles. One AJarmaduke Parkinson, an explorer sailing in the Potomac, confirmed the theory of the Teamed mathematician by discovering in the house of a chief a " China Boxe," whatever that may have been. In 163 1 Luke Fox set sail by the northwest, carrying a letter from Charles I addressed " to the Emperor of Japan," which he probably was not able to deliver. In 1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the falls of the Delaware in the endeavor to go through the continent in latitude 40°. The strait and isthmus and northwest passage having failed, Yong

English Notions of America.

II was content to go by fresh water till he should reach a Mediterranean Sea in the heart of America, which he believed to open into both the " North Ocean " and the South Sea. As the century advanced the fresh-water route had in turn to be finally abandoned, and seekers after the Pacific were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, and even to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys had proposed. A Colonel Catlet is mentioned who niched the AUeghanies in the endeavor to find a river flowing westward, but he was daunted by what seemed to him almost impassable ranges of mountains that barred his way. Over these " rocky hills and sandy desarts " scarce a bird was seen to fly. In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out from Virginia on a similar futile exploration. As late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson speaks hopefully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Carolina. This fallacy had prompted many desperate adventures, and had been the cause of many important discoveries, in the two centuries that it held possession of men's minds. It reached its last attenuation in 1765, when the public prints announced that large boats were fitting out at Quebec to try the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and that " they have hopes of finding a communication by water with the western ocean, founded on the favorable reports of some Indians, who inform that a river runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as the Mississippi."

Chap. I.

Weston Documents 45 and 47 andff.

Catlet and Lederer.

Glover, in Phit Trans., zj, 696. Comp.

Perfect Descr. of Va., 1649, and Lederer's Voyage.

Lawson*s Carolina,

Scot's Maganne, i765» page x6i.

Rise of the First Colony.

Book I.

Gold-hunting.

Hakluyt.

Pref. to Va., magnified.

Pflgrimage, 795.

V

As the mistake made by Columbus had left for heritage an almost ineradicable passion for the discovery of a westward sea way to Japan and China, so the vast treasure of gold and silver drawn by the Spaniards from Mexico and Peru produced a belief in the English mind that a colony planted at any place on the American coast might find gold. Here, again, the undoubting Hakluyt and otiR* writers after him were ready with learned conclusions balancing on the tight rope of ver)- slender premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a piece of copper that " bowed easily,** this flexibility proved it to be tarnished gold. If a savage seemed to say in his idiom, or by gestures and other signs, something which the puzzled newcomers took to signify that in a country farther on the copper was too soft for use, or that it was yellow, or that it had a good luster, what further evidence could an ingenious writer desire of the existence of the precious metal in that country ? Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt in geographical research, explains the divine purpose in thus endowing a heathen land with gold, which is that the Indian race " as a rich bride, though withered and deformed, . . . might find many suitors for love of her portion," and thus the pagans be converted. But Purchas filches both the simile and the pious thought from Herrera, who in turn probably pilfered it with many better things from the good

English Notions of America.

n

Las Casas. Purchas also speaks with more optimism than elegance of the •* silver bowels and golden entrails of the hills," as though one had but to dig into the first mountain to be enriched.

Frobisher brought home from sub-arctic islands what his clumsy assayers avouched to be "gold eure." Refining works were erected for this stufiF at Deptford to no profit, and to this day the inquisitive student is not able to ascertain from the conflicting reports whether there was any gold in the ore or not. The main causes of the sufiFering at Jamestown during the first winter were the waste of time and the consumption of supplies while lading the ships with the glittering " dust mica " which is so abundant in the Virginia sands. The worthlessness of this cargo could not weaken the hopes of those alchemists who were able to produce gold merely by the use of arguments. The mines in Virginia moved farther west. It wanted only that explorers should reach the mountains. In spite of the sickness that wasted the colony in 1610, Lord De la Warr sent an expedition to dig gold on the upper James, but the warlike up-river tribes soon drove the prospectors back. In 1634, Sir John Harvey sent another body of men on the same fool's errand, though there had not been found in all the years preceding a particle of tangible evidence that gold existed in Virginia. But on the James, as on the Hudson, the glistering pigment with which the Indians besmeared their faces on occasions of display was believed to contain gold,

Chap. I.

Probiiher's gold.

Early Virginia gold-hunting.

Rise of the First Colony.

Book I.

Note 7.

Pact and fable about America.

Ingram** •tory.

and the places of its procurement were sought with ludicrous secrecy.

The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in a year. In 1 569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by relapse, it may be ; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the account of what he had seen legends common