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turned into pastures for sheep.
This
The change
from tillage process not only tended to raise the price
to pastur-
age. of food, but it deprived many people of employment, since sheep-farming requires fewer hands than tilling the soil. Since the accession of
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 47
Henry VIII. there had been many legislative attempts to check the conversion of ploughed land into grassy fields, but the change still con- tinued to go on.1. The enormous increase in the quantity of precious metals had still further raised the price of food, while as people were thrown out of employment the labour market tended to become overstocked so that wages did not rise. These changes bore with especial severity upon the class of peasants. The condition of the freeholding yeomanry was much improved during the sixteenth century. Stone houses with floors had taken the place of rude cabins with rushes carpeting the ground ; meat was oftener eaten, clothes were of
1 The case is put vigorously by Sir Thomas More in 1516: " Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame, are now become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swal- low down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy. and devour whole fields, houses, and cities ; for look in what part of the realm doth grow the finest, and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea. and certain abbots, holy men, God wot! not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predeces- sors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure - nothing profiting, yea. much annoying the weal pub- lick - leave no ground for tillage ; they enclose all into pas- tures, they throw down houses. they pluck down towns. and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep- house. And, as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands. and parks, those good holy men turn all dwelling places and all glebe lands into desolation and wilder- ness, enclosing many thousands acres of ground together within one pale or hedge." while those who formerly lived on the land. "poor, silly, wretched souls. men, women, husbands, wives. fatherless children, widows. and woeful mothers with young babag, were starving and homeless. And where many labourers had existed by field labour, only a single shepherd or herdsman was occupied." -- Utopia, book i.
48 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
better quality. But it was otherwise with the peasants who held by servile tenures. In the abolition of medieval serfdom which had been going on for two centuries and was completed in England so much earlier than in any other part of Europe, it was not all gain for the lowest grades of labourers. Some through energy and good for- tune rose to reeruit the ranks of freeholders, but many others became paupers and thieves. The change from tillage to pasturage affected this class more than any other, for it turned many out of house and home; so that. in the words of an old writer, they "prowled about as idle beggars or continued as stark thieves till the gallows did eat them." 1 The sudden destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII. deprived the pauper of such seanty support as he had been wont to get from the vast wealth of the Church, and besides it had let loose upon society a vast number of persons with their old occupations gone and set aside.2 In Elizabeth's reign, therefore, for the various reasons here mentioned, the growth of pauperism Growth of
pauperismi. began to attract especial attention as a lamentable if not formidable evil, and the famous "poor law" of 1601 marks a kind of era in the social history of England. Under such circum- stances, for men disheartened by poverty and demoralized by idleness, struggling for life in a
1 Doyle. Virginia, etc. p. 103.
2 In many cases the monasteries by injudicious relief had in- creased the number of paupers and beggars. The subject of this paragraph is admirably expounded in Ashley's Introduction to English Economic Ilistory, ii. 190-376.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 49
community that had ceased to need the kind of labour they could perform, the best chance of sal- vation seemed to lie in emigration to a new col- ony where the demand for labour was sure to be great, and life might be in a measure begun anew. So thought the good Hakluyt, and the history of the seventeenth century did much to justify his opinion. The prodigious development of the Eng- lish commercial and naval marine, to which the intercourse with the new and thriving American colonies greatly contributed, went far toward multiplying the opportunities for employment and diminishing the numbers of the needy and idle class. Many of the sons of the men who had been driven from their farms by sheep-raising landlords made their home upon the ocean, and helped to secure England's control of the watery pathways. Many of them found new homes in America, and as independent yeomen became more thrifty than their peasant fathers.
While there were many people who espoused Hakluyt's views, while preachers might be heard proclaiming from the pulpit that " Virginia was a door which God had opened for England," on the other hand, as in the case of all great en- Opposition terprises, loud voices were raised in oppo- to Hakluyt.
sition. To send parties of men and women to starve in the wilderness, or be murdered by savages or Spaniards, was a proceeding worthy of severe condemnation for its shocking cruelty, to say no- thing of its useless extravagance. Then, as usual, the nien who could see a few inches in front of their noses called themselves wise and practical,
50
OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
while they stigmatized as visionary theorizers the men whose imaginations could discern, albeit in dim outlines, the great future. As for the queen, who clearly approved in her innermost heart the schemes of Raleigh and Hakluyt, not much was to be expected from her when it came to a question of spending money. Elizabeth carried into the management of public affairs a miserly spirit in- herited, perhaps, from her grandfather, Henry VII. When the Armada was actually
The queen's penurious- entering the Channel she deemed it ness. sound economy to let her sailors get siek with sour ale rather than throw it away and buy fresh for them. Such a mind was not likely to appreciate the necessity for the enormous im- mediate outlay involved in planting a successful colony. That such a document as Hakluyt's should be laid away and forgotten was no more than natural. To blame Elizabeth unreservedly, however, without making some allowance for the circumstances in which she was placed, would be crude and unfair. It was the public money that she was called upon to spend, and the military pressure exerted by Spain made heavy demands upon it. In spite of her pennywise methods, which were often so provoking, they were proba- bly less ill suited to that pinching crisis than her father's ready lavishness would have been.
That Raleigh should appeal to the sovereign for aid in his enterprise was to have been expected. It was what all explorers and colonizers had been in the habit of doing. Since the days of Prince Henry the Navigator the arduous work of discov-
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 51
ering and subduing the heathen world outside of Europe had been conducted under government control and paid from the public purse whenever the plunder of the heathen did not suffice. In some cases the sovereign was unwilling to allow private capital to embark in such enterprises; as for example in the spring of 1491, when the Duke of Medina-Celi offered to fit out two or three caravels for Columbus and Queen Isabella refused to give him the requisite license, probably because she was " unwilling to have the duke come in for a large share of the profits in case the venture should prove successful." 1 Usually, however, such work was beyond the reach of private purses, and it was not until the middle of the six- The begin- nings of joint-stock companies.
teenth century, and in such commercial countries as the Netherlands and Eng-
land, with comparatively free governments, that joint-stock companies began to be formed for such purposes. I have already alluded to the famous Muscovy Company, first formed in the reign of Edward VI., and from that time forth the joint- stock principle went on rapidly gaining strength until its approach to maturity was announced by the creation of the English East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. The latter was " the first great joint-stock company whose shares were bought and sold from hand to hand," 2 and these events mark the begin- ning of a new era in European commerce.
This substitution of voluntary cooperation
1 See my Discovery of America, i. 400.
2 Payne, European Colonies, p. 55.
52 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
among interested individuals for compulsory ac- tion under government control was one of the most important steps taken toward bringing in the modern era. Americans have no reason to regret that the beginnings of English colonization in the New World were not made by an English sover- eign. There can be no doubt that the very slight connection between these colonies and the Crown was from the first extremely favourable to their free and untrammelled development. Far better that the worthy Hakluyt's essay should get tucked away in a pigeon-hole than that it should have fired Elizabeth to sueli zeal for Virginia as Louis XIV. a century afterward showed for New France !
By 1589 Raleigh seems to have despaired of finding the queen disposed to act as a fairy god- mother. He reckoned that he had already spent £40,000 on Virginia. although this sum may per- haps have included his contributions toward the Arctic voyages of John Davis. Such a sun would be equivalent to not less than $1.000,000 of our modern money, and no wonder if Raleigh began to feel more than ever that the undertaking was too great for his individual resources. In March,
Raleigh's 1589, we find him, as governor of Vir-
difficulties. ginia, assigning not his domain but the right to trade there to a company, of which John White, Thomas Smith, and Rev. Richard Hak- luyt were the most prominent members. He re- served for himself a royalty of one fifth of all the gold and silver that should be obtained. The Company did not show much activity. We may well believe that it was too soon after the Armada.
2
1
3
3
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 53
Business affairs had not had time to recover from that severe strain. But Raleigh never lost sight of Virginia. Southey's accusation that he sent out colonists and then abandoned thiem was ill- considered. We have already seen why it proved impossible to send help to John White's colony.
In the pursuit of his various interests the all - accomplished knight sometimes encountered strange vicissitudes. With all his flattery of the crowned coquette. Elizabeth Tudor, the true sover -. eign of his heart was one of the ladies of the court, the young and beautiful Elizabeth Throckmorton. To our prosaic modern minds the attitude of the great queen toward the favourite courtiers whom she could by no possibility dream of raising to the dignity of prince-consort seems incomprehensible. But after a due perusal of the English dramatists of the time, the romance of Sidney, the extrava- gances of Lyly, the poetry of Spenser and Ron- sard, or some of those tales of chivalry that turned good Don Quixote's brain, we are beguiled into the right sort of atmosphere for understanding it. For any of Elizabeth's counsellors or favourites to make love to any other lady was apt to call down some manifestation of displeasure, and in 1592 some circumstances connected with Raleigh's mar- riage 1 led to his imprisonment in the Tower. But his evil star was not yet in the ascendant. Within a few weeks one of his captains, Christopher New- port, whom we shall meet again, brought into Dart- mouth harbour the great Spanish carrack Madre
1 Circumstances not wholly creditable to him; see Stebbing's Ralegh, pp. 89-04.
54 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
de Dios, with treasure from the Indies worth
The great nearly four millions of modern dollars. Spanish car- A large part of Raleigh's own share in rack.
the booty was turned over to his sover- eign with that blithesome grace in which none could rival him, and it served as a ransom. In 1594 we find him commanding an expedition to Guiana and exploring the vast solitudes of the Orinoco in search of El Dorado. On his return to England he found a brief interval of leisure in which to write that fascinating book on Guiana which David Hume declared to be full of lies, a gross calumny which subsequent knowledge, gathered by Hum- boldt and sinee his time, has entirely refuted. Then came the great battle at Cadiz in 1596, already mentioned, and the capture of Fayal in 1597, when Raleigh's fame reached its zenith. About this time, or soon after, began those am-
The Mer- brosial nights, those feasts of the gods, at
maid Tav- ern.
the Mermaid Tavern, where Selden and
Camden, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and Dr. Donne, sat around the table with Raleigh and Shakespeare. In that happy time the opportunity for colonizing Virginia seemed once more to have come, and in 1602 Raleigh sent out Samuel Mace on an expedition of which less is known than one could wish, save that renewed search was made for White's lost colony. Other- wise, says the historian Stith, this Mace "per- formed nothing, but returned with idle stories and frivolous allegations." 1 When he arrived in Eng- land in 1603, sad changes had occurred. The
1 Stith's Virginia, Sabin's reprint, New York, 1865, p. 30.
.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 55
great queen - great and admirable with all her faults - had passed away, and a quaint pedantic little Scotehman, with uncouth figure and King James I.
shambling gait and a thickness of utter- ance due partly to an ill-formed tongue and partly to excessive indulgence in mountain dew, had stepped into her place. A web of intrigue, basely woven by Robert Cecil and Henry Howard, had caught Raleigh in its meshes. He was hurried off to the Tower, while an attainder bereft him of his demesne of Virginia and handed it over to the crown.
But other strong hands were taking up the work. That Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare ten years before had dedicated his " Ve- nus and Adonis " had been implicated in Henry, Earl of South- ampton. Essex's rebellion and narrowly escaped with his life. The accession of James I., which was fraught with such ill for Raleigh, set South- ampton free. But already in 1602, while he was still a prisoner in the Tower, an expedition organ- ized under his auspices set sail for Virginia. It was commanded by one of Raleigh's old captains, Bartholomew Gosnold, and has especial interest as an event in the beginnings alike of Virginia and of New England. Gosnold came to a region which some persons called Norumbega, but was soon to be known for a few years as Gosnold. Pring, and Weymouth. North Virginia, and always thereafter as New England. It was he who first wrote upon the map the names Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands in what we call Buzzard's Bay. His return to England was
-
56 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
the occasion of a fresh and strong renewal of inter- est in the business of what Hakluyt called " west- ern planting." The voyage of Martin Pring to North Virginia, at the expense of sundry Bristol merchants, followed in 1603, and at the same time Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey, coasted the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and was slain by the Indians with several of his men. Early in 1605 Captain George Weymouth set out in a vessel equipped by the Earl of Southampton, Lord Arundel of Wardour, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the garrison at Plymouth. After spending a month in North Virginia, Wey- mouth returned to England with five captive In- dians, and the popular interest aroused by his arrival surpassed that which had been felt upon former occasions.
The exeitement over Virginia was promptly re- flected upon the stage. The comedy of " East- ward Ho," written by Chapman and Marston, with contributions front Ben Jonson, was acted in 1605 and published in the autumn of that year. The title is a survival of forms of speech current when America was believed to be a part of the oriental world. Some extracts from this play will serve to illustrate the popular feeling. In the second " Eastward Ho!" act old Security, the money lender, is talking with young Frank Quicksilver about the schemes of Sir Petronel Flash. Quick- silver says, " Well, dad, let him have money ; all he could anyway get is bestowed on a ship, rowe bound for Virginia." Security replies, "Now & frank gale of wind go with him, Master Frank !
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 57
We have too few such knight adventurers. Who would not sell away competent certainties to pur- chase (with any danger) excellent uncertainties ? Your true knight venturer ever does it." In the next act a messenger enters.
Messenger. Sir Petronel, here are three or four gen- tleinen desire to speak with you.
Petronel. What are they ?
Quicksilver. They are your followers in this voyage, knight captain Seagull and his associates ; I met them this morning and told them you would be here.
Petronel. Let them enter, I pray you. . . .
Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift.
Seagull. God save my honourable colonel !
Petronel. Welcome. good Captain Seagull and wor- thy gentlemen ; if you will meet my friend Frank here and me at the Blue Anchor tavern, by Billingsgate, this evening, we will there drink to our happy voyage, be merry, and take boat to our ship with all expedition. . . . ACT III., SCENE 2. Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift in the Blue Anchor tavern, with a Drawer.
Seagull. Come, drawer, pierce your neatest hogs- heads, and let's have cheer, - not fit for your Billings- gate tavern, but for our Virginian colonel; he will be here instantly.
Drawer. You shall have all things fit, sir ; please you have any more wine ?
Spendall. More wine, slave! whether we drink it or no. spill it, and draw more.
Scapethrift. Fill all the pots in your house with all sorts of liquor, and let 'em wait on us here like soldiers in their pewter coats; and though we do not employ them now, yet we will maintain 'em till we do.
58 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
Drawer. Said like an honourable captain ; you shall have all you can command, sir. [Exit Drawer.
Seagull. Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her. . . .
Spendall. Why, is she inhabited already with any English ?
Seagull. A whole country of English is there, bred of those that were left there in '79 [Here our drama- tist's date is wrong; White's colony, left there in 1587, is meant]; they have married [continues Seagull] with the Indians . . . [who] are so in love with them that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet.
Scapethrift. But is there such treasure there, Cap- tain, as I have heard ?
Seagull. I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us ; and for as much red copper as I can bring I'll have thrice the weight in gold. Why, man. all their dripping-pans . . . are pure gold ; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold ; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold ; and for rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and gather 'em by the seashore to hang on their chil- dren's coats, and stick in their children's caps, as com- monly as our children wear saffron-gilt brooches and groats with holes in 'em.
Scapethrift. And is it a pleasant country withal ?
Seagull. As ever the sun shined on : temperate, and full of all sorts of excellent viands ; wild boar is as com- mon there as our tamest bacon is here ; venison as mut- ton. And then you shall live freely there, without ser- geants, or courtiers, or lawyers. . . . Then for your means to advancement, there it is simple and not pre- posterously mixed. You may be an alderman there, and never be scavenger ; you may be any other officer. and never be a slave. You may come to preferment
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 59
enough, . . . to riches and fortune enough. and have never the more villainy nor the less wit. Besides, there we shall have no more law than conscience, and not too much of either ; serve God enough, eat and drink enough, and enough is as good as a feast.
Spendall. Gods me ! and how far is it thither ?
Seagull. Some six weeks sail, no more, with any in- different good wind. And if I get to any part of the coast of Africa, I'll sail thither with any wind ; or when I come to Cape Finisterre, there's a fore-right wind con- tinual wafts us till we come to Virginia. See, our col- onel 's come.
Enter Sir Petronel Flash with his followers.
Sir Petronel. We'll have our provided supper brought aboard Sir Francis Drake's ship that hath compassed the world, where with full eups and banquets we will do sacrifice for a prosperous voyage.1
The great popularity of this play, both on the stage and in print, - for it went through four editions between September and Christmas, -is an indication of the general curiosity felt about Virginia. The long war with Spain had lately been brought to an end by the treaty of 1604. It had left Spain so grievonsly weakened that the work of eneroaching upon her American demesnes was immeasurably easier than in the days when Hawkins began it and Elizabeth connived at it. In a cipher despatch from the Spanish am- Zuñiga's bassador Zuñiga to his sovereign, Philip report to Philip III.
III., dated London, March 16, 1606,
N. S., mention is made of an unpalatable scheme of the English : " They also propose to do another
I The Ancient British Drama. London, 1810, vol. ii.
60 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
thing, which is to send five or six hundred men, private individuals of this kingdom, to people Vir- ginia in the Indies, close to Florida. They sent to that country some small number of men in years gone by, and having afterwards sent again, they found a part of them alive." 1 In this refer- ence to White's colony the Spaniard is of course mistaken ; no living remnant was ever found. He goes on to say that the principal leader in this business is Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, who is a terrible Puritan ; and when reminded that this enterprise is an encroachment upon Spanish territory and a violation of the treaty, this astute judge says that he is only un- dertaking it in order to clear England of thieves and get them drowned in the sea. I have not yet complained of this to the king, says Zuñiga, but I shall do so.
It was very soon after this despatch, on April 10, O. S., that James I. issued the charter under which England's first permanent colony First charter
of Virginia, was established. This memorable docu- 1606. ment begins by defining the territorial limits of Virginia, which is declared to extend from the 34th to the 45th parallel of latitude, and from the seashore one hundred miles inland. In a second charter, issued three years later, Vir- ginia is described as extending from sea to sea, that is, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. It is not likely that the king and his advisers under- stood the westward extension of the grant, as here specified, to be materially different from that men-
1 Brown's Genesis, i. 46.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 61
tioned in the first charter. The width of the con- tinent between Chesapeake Bay and the valley of the St. Lawrence was supposed to be no greater than from one to two hundred miles. It is true that before the middle of the sixteenth century the expeditions of Soto and Coronado had proved the existence of a continnous mass of land from Flor- ida to California, but many geographers believed that this continental mass terminated at the 40th parallel or even some degrees lower, and that its northern coast was washed by an enormous bay of the Pacific Ocean, called on old maps The " Sea of
the Sea of Verrazano. The coast land Verrazano." from Virginia to Labrador was regarded as a thin strip separating the two oceans after somewhat the same fashion as Central America, and hence the mouths and lower reaches of such broad rivers as the Hudson and the Delaware were mistaken for straits. After one has traced the slow develop- ment of knowledge through the curious mingling of fact with fancy in the maps of Baptista Agnese published in 1536, and that of Sebastian Münster in 1540, down to the map which Michael Lok made for Sir Philip Sidney in 1582, he will have no difficulty in understanding either the language of the early charters or the fact that such a navi- gator as Henry Hudson should about this time have entered New York harbour in the hope of coming out upon the Pacific Ocean within a few days. Without such study of the old maps the story often becomes incomprehensible.
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