the Powhatan, made only about one knot per hour. Time
moves slowly when weighted with the burden of Fate. Those
frail boats in which men might hesitate now to cruise along the
margin of the coast, bore in their wombs the destinies of
Nations. When on May 13, 1607, they moored to the trees of
this Island in six fathom water, they moored Europe to Amer-
ica. They moored the Old to the New. They moored the
English Civilization with all its possibilities to the New World
with all its possibilities. There were times when it appeared
that their cables were in danger of parting. But though frayed
to the slenderest, they never wholly gave way.
    Let us pause for a moment to get a view, if we can, of the
conditions environing and enveloping their great enterprise.
    When that band of "four-score souls" boarded those little
ships in the River Thames and weighed anchor, England was
just preparing to celebrate the great annual holiday of the
English People: Christmas. It was the England of the
"spacious times of Great Elizabeth;" for the after-glow of her
mighty reign had not yet faded out. Raleigh and Bacon and
Coke and Southampton and Burleigh and Walsingham, were
among the statesmen of England, and Ben Johnston and
Michael Drayton, were among her poets.
    Christopher Alarlowe and Edmund Spenser had but now
laid by their lyres; and in London, Marlowe's fellow-county-
man, who gave a new realm to England-a realm out of the
imagination, as Raleigh gave a new physical realm, was writing
those immortal dramas which are today the heritage of America
no less than of England. With the bells of London almost
beginning to peal out their Christmas chimes, these men bound
for the Virgin land after many prayers and sermons in sundry
churches, boarded their little vessels and dropped down the
river, headed for Virginia.
    For six long weeks they lay anchored in the Downs, thump-
ing up and down, within but a few miles of the English shore;
where their courage was sustained, says the chronicle, by
"Worthy Master Hunt," the simple parish priest, who though



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