xt7g1j976z80 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7g1j976z80/data/mets.xml Page, Thomas Nelson, 1853-1922. 1919  books b92-246-31689293 English Whittet & Shepperson, printers, : Richmond, Va. : Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Jamestown (Va.) Address at the three hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown  / by Hon. Thomas Nelson Page. text Address at the three hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown  / by Hon. Thomas Nelson Page. 1919 2002 true xt7g1j976z80 section xt7g1j976z80 


            A ddress

                AT THE

Three Hundredth Anniversary

           OF THE SETTLEMENT OF


       JAMESTOW-N







                  By
         HON. THOMAS NELSON PAGE












               RICHMOND, VA.
           WHITTET & SHEPPERSON, PRINTERS
                 1919

 This page in the original text is blank.

 


                  ADDRESS



    It seems to me that what is said on this spot on this occa-
sion should relate to the spiritual side of the work and the
fruits of the Jamestown settlement, whose Three Hundredth
Anniversary we are here today to celebrate, rather than to the
material or physical side. And it is ina this spirit that I wish
to deal with it in this peseat1.e.
    And first on this spAt on this omasiorl I wish to mention
with reverence the name of Sir Walter Raleigh: "Lord, and
Chief Governor of Virginia," to whom, -lnder God's Provi-
dence, more than any other hilman being is due the fact that
this Country belongs to the English Speaking Race, and the
Civilization which it represents.
    Three hundred years ago, on this Island-which until then,
through all the ages, since the birth of things, had lain desert
and untrodden by any feet save those of the wild beast and the
yet wilder savage,-to which Spain had simply asserted a
traditionary right as a part of the vast unknown region of
the American Continent-landed a little band of sea-worn
Englishmen and took posession in the name of God and of the
Crown of England. Since the 20th day of December preceding,
when they weighed anchor in the River Thames and dropped
down the stream with the receding tide, they had in their three
little ships been making their way slowly and painfully across
the wintry Atlantic. These small vessels: "The Sarah Con-
stant," (of one hundred tons) with Captain Christopher New-
port, the Admiral, in command, "The Goodspeed," (of forty
tons), with Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, the Vice-Admiral,
and "The Discovery," a pinnace, (of twenty tons), with Cap-
tain John Ratcliffe, had, reckoning all the time since they
weighed anchor in the Thames until they dropped anchor in



3

 

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



4

 

so ill that his bodily sickness is noted in the report, stood forth
at need the first of that courageous band of Soldiers of Christ,
whose highest ambition has ever been to serve their Master
faithfully by sea or land; reckoning, like the great Apostle to
the Gentiles, that "the sufferings of this present time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed"
hereafter.
    It was not until the 18th day of February. two months
after starting, that they lost sight of the English coast and
found themselves upon the shoreless sea, with naught visible
but the heaving waste of waters and the heavens above.
    We know from the reports that they touched and rested
a few days at the Azores, and found for a brief period a sum-
mer land in the Islands of Dominica and of Nevis, where the
wonders of the Tropics first dawned on their astonished vision.
    At Nevis some trouble occurred, taking shape, as is known,
in something like mutiny, and because thereof, one of the chief
of the voyagers fell under such suspicion that he was put under
arrest, or, to use his own term, "was unjustly restrained of
his liberty;" in which condition he remained until the 26th
day of June following, when he was sworn of the Council of
Virginia, and emerges from obscurity into the romance which
has for three hundred years enveloped the fame of "Captain
John Smith": Sometime, "Governor of Virginia, and Admiral
of New England."
    It was the 26th of April when, "about four o'clock in the
morning," storm-tost and travel-worn, they entered the Capes
of the Chesapeake, and dropped anchor for the first time in
the waters of Virginia.
    They anchored England to America.
    The day that a beseiged city capitulates is not so truly
the day of its capture as the day on which the beseigers plant
their standard upon the walls never again to be taken down.
So, much more here. The approach had been long and ardu-
ous. Effort after effort, attempt after attempt had been made



5

 

through more than half a century to make a breach in Spain's
extensive defenses. A break had actually been made twenty-
odd years before by a gallant and devoted band on Roanoke
Island, some scores of leagues to the southward. But the as-
sault had finally failed: the little band on Roanoke Island had
disappeared into the mysterious limbo of Croatan, the vague
land of Romance. It was this new band of settlers who on
this May day, 1607, finally seized and permanently held the
outpost, which was the key to the Continent, and led to the
supremacy of the Saxon Race, with its Laws, its Religion, and
its Civilization in North America.
    The account of the landing given at the time tells how,
"After much and weary search with their barge coasting still
before, (as Virgil writeth Aeneas did, arriving in the region
of Italy called Latium, upon the bankes of the River Tyber) in
the country of a Warrowance called Wowinchapuncha, (a
ditionary to Powhatan) within this faire River of Paspiheigh,
which we have called the King's River, they selected and ex-
tended plaine and spot of earth which thrust out into the depth
and middest of the channel, making a kinde of Chesonesus or
Peninsula. The Trumpets sounding, the Admirall strooke saile
and before the same the rest of the Fleete came to an ancor,
and here to loose no further time the Colony disimbarked, and
every man brought his particular store and furniture together
with the general provision ashore."      And there-
upon, "a certain canton and quantity of that little half Island
of ground was measured which they began to fortifie, and
thereon in the name of God to raise a Fortresse with the ablest
and speediest meanes they could."
    Except the historical student, no one knows what the
earliest settlers and their immediate successors had to face.
Death was nothing to those men. It was a mere incident of
the life, as it is today of the soldier's in the field. It was the
torture of the savage; the stake and the rack of the Spaniard;
"the arrow that flyeth by day and the pestilence that walketh
in darkness"-all these they found. Of the one hundred and



6

 

four men left by Newport when he sailed from Virginia in
June, 1607, he found on his return in January with the first
supply, but thirty-four alive: Of the four hundred or there-
abouts left in 1609, Lord Delaware found but sixty-two or
sixty-three surviving in 1610. In the next twenty years, of
the seven or eight thousand who came to Virginia to seize and
settle her for England, over six thousand died on the way or
in the first year of their "seasoning."
    As we stand here today, it is almost impossible for the
mind to conceive what these men underwent. The whole world
has been not only explored, but become well-nigh as familiar
to us as our own home county or town. We read in the morn-
ing press accounts of the ordinary happenings in every quarter
of the globe. Every sea has been charted and almost every
land has become the playground of the tourist. The fabled
iabors of Hercules, and the far-famed travels of Ulysses are
surpassed by a thousand captains who sail the Arctic and the
Tropic Seas. But in those days those men faced every danger
which the human imagination could conjure up and faced it
with a constant mind. If they turned back to England months
and months away, of toilsome, tedious and perilous travel, they
found the Spaniard with sword and rack and stake on the
horizon. If they faced the new Continent, they looked into
the vast, impenetrable and illimitable forest, behind every tree
of which and in every patch of weeds in which there lurked a
murderous foe. They had reached a charmed but an unknown
land with a changeable and untried climate; their provisions
originally intended to last only until they could seed and har-
vest a new crop, had been wasted during their long voyage,
and would not last them out. Their form of government was
one ill calculated as it proved, to meet the needs of their situ-
ation. But their direst enemy was one more lurking than the
savage Indian and more fell than the cruel Spaniard. They
had pitched upon a landing-place simply because of the security
which it offered against their enemies, without knowing aught
of the climate and its perils, and it proved to be a spot so
malarial that before the first slimmer was out, sixty men of
                             7

 

the one hundred and twenty were dead of wounds and disease.
The sounds of their sufferings so impressed itself on that
scholarly historian, George Percy, third President of the
Colony, that he pictured it in one of his reports, whose virility
is today, the wonder of the English writers.
    "Burning fevers destroyed them, some departed suddenly,
but for the most part they died of mere famine. There were
never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as
we were in this new discovered Virginia.     There
was groaning in every corner of the Fort most pitiful to hear.
If there was any conscience in men," says the historian, "it
would make their hearts to bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings
and outcries    some departing out of the world, some-
times three and four in a night; in the morning their bodies
trailed out of the cabins like dogs to be buried.-'
    It came to the point, "when ten men could neither go nor
stand."
    This was the sickly season when, without knowledge of
malarial disease, they were in their half-starved condition at
the mercy of the agues and fevers. But happily, the change
of the season came at last; the winter, a bitter one on both
shores of the Atlantic, drove away the pestilence.
    Then came the picturesque incident over which historians
of late have quarreled so much, when according to Smith's
account, his life was saved by the young Indian Princess,
Pocahontas. Time fails to repeat the arguments in this place.
To me they appear to establish the fact beyond reasonable
question. However, that may be, that winter the small rem-
nant of men explored and charted the waters of the Chesapeake
with its noble tributaries to the Falls of the Potomac, where the
Capital of the Nation now stands, as within a short period
afterwards they explored the northern Chesapeake and the
Susquehanna, mapping their discoveries with an accuracy which
is the wonder of the present time.
    A conspiracy plotted by Kendall, in the absence of the
exploration party, to seize the pinnace and sail northward to

                             8

 

the shores of New Foundland, where the fishing fleet from
Europe might always be found, was defeated, possibly by the
return of Captain Smith;-at least, he has the credit of it.
The guns of the Fort were trained on the mutineers, and Ken-
dall, the ring-leader, was promptly tried and shot. Curiously,
the discovery of the plot was due to a private who was under
sentence of death for having struck the President when the
latter was beating him, and who, when he was mounting the
gallows, divulged the conspiracy.
    Smith himself came near falling the victim to a partisan
faction, he was tried for having lost his men during his explora-
tion, but his life was saved by the unexpected return of Newport
with provisions and reinforcements for the Colony. Among
these was an element which possibly did more to establish the
new plantation than even the provisions, for among the new
immigrants were a number of women.
    Once more came the starving time; but young Pocahontas
appears to have been the guardian angel of her new-found
friends.
    The time is filled with exploration, with attacks on their
Indian enemies, and counter attacks, with charges and counter
charges; but all the time the little Colony was establishing
itself for England and for her Faith, at the cost of as brave
and devoted lives as were ever laid down for the cause of
Religion and of Freedom.
    In the Nova Britannia, dated February, 1609, are given the
plans, objects and hopes of the Virginia Company. The chief
objects are stated, "First to advance the Kingdom of God.
Second, to advance the Kingdom of England. And third, to
relieve and preserve those already of the Colony, and lay a
solid foundation for the future good of this Commonwealth."
    Time fails on this occasion to mention the names of even
the leaders of those wonderful men, and yet more wonderful
women, who laid the foundation for the future good not only
of this Commonwealth of Virginia but of this great Common-
wealth of the United States. Unnamed as they are, and un-



9

 

honored as they have long been, they saved this Continent for
Protestantism and the English Civilization.
    We have not time here to do honor even to that "valiant
gentleman," Edward Maria Wingfield, first successor to Sir
Walter Raleigh as Governor of Virginia; or to those brave
members of the "First Counsell, who were in front in mayn-
tayning the Forte," on that fierce attack by the Indians, while
Newport was exploring the King's River, and planting a
"crosse' on Whit Sunday, 1607, at the Falls where now stands
the Capital of Virginia.
    I can only take time to mention an episode which must
have brought happiness into at least two hearts, and more
cheer possibly into the little fever-stricken settlement which
rose where we stand today.
    Soon after Newport's departure for England in December,
1608, there was a marriage betwixt John Ladron, carpenter,
and Anne Burrus, the maid of Mrs. Forrest; he aged 26, she
but fourteen. Mrs. Forrest was the first gentlewoman, and
her maid the first woman servant "that arrived in our Colony,"
"which was the first marriage we had in Virginia," and was
the first marriage according to the Protestant rite of matri-
mony which occurred on this Continent.
    Time fails me to go into the story of the sufferings and
struggles, the heroic deeds, and yet more heroic sacrifices that
these settlers endured. Of all that brave and gallant company
not one found that for which he set forth, save haply, "Worthy
Master Hunt," who counted nought so that he might wvin souls
to Christ, and Captain John Smith, who owes his abiding fame
even more to his pen than to his sword.
    Christopher Newport, who was the Guardian Angel of the
Colony, and preserved it from extirpation on more than one
occasion, has no monument in all this State of Virginia. It is
questionable if even the name with which he is supposed to be
associated, actually was derived from him. He explored the
Seas of both the East and West; and having had sole command
of the first five voyages which brought the first Colonists here



IO

 

and subsequently relieved their necessities when they were
about to perish; his shotted hammock was swung at the last in
the long surges of the Indian Seas.
    Bartholomew Gosnold, that "worthy and religious gentle-
man, "bold discoverer and explorer of both coasts of Virginia,
was laid in an unmarked grave somewhere there where the
waters have cut into the shore, and his heroic dust has long
since been swept away by the waters of the James, like that
of so many another brave and devoted soldier and mariner.
Years afterwards, Captain John Smith declared that he had
not one foot of ground in Virginia, "not the very house he had
builded; nor the land he had digged with his own hands."
    But though these men and their followers are not known
save to a few historical students, their work is written large
upon the History of the World. They laid the foundation for
what we call North America. To use their own term, "they
broke the ice and beat the paths," and the rest was compara-
tively easy.
    From their work, and out of their contentions, for there
was contention enough, came the enlarged Charters of 1609,
1612 and 1618, which gave and guaranteed to all Virginians and
their posterity the rights, privileges and immunities of English-
born citizens forever.
    Previous to this time Colonists who left their country did
not take with them across seas even those rights and privileges
that they had at home; the new country was under Martial
Law, with all who were therein. But when these English
settlers came they insisted on bringing with them, and they
brought with them, the rights of free-born Englishmen. And
this was the first great service which this first Colony of
England rendered to mankind.
    If one were summoned to make good the claim that God
had set His stamp here, he might point to the course of history
which in its wonderful development led up through the strange
chances and changes of the Sixteenth Century to the final and
abiding settlement of the Continent by the Saxon Race with its



I I

 

Civilization. He might show how Spain grew so great and
powerful that she surpassed Rome in the days of her greatest
might and extended her rule over many times the territory
Rome ruled. He might show how, ignoring the example of
Ancient Rome she endeavored to rule the minds as well as the
actions of men; how a bigoted and mind-cramping ecclesiasti-
cism fastened its tyrannical shackles on the aspiring thought
of the time and threatened to destroy Civilization in its strong-
holds.
    Then he might picture the great awakening throughout
Europe; the apparent workings of Providence through the gen-
erations-which produced the Mariner's Compass; Gunpowder
-and noblest of all inventions: the Art of Printing. You
should see the light of the New Dawn extend as far as England,
and there through the pious zeal of the Scholar Priest, John
Wyckliffe, suddenly reach the people and as with the en-
chanter's wand, quicken them to life. Then you should see
this awakened and quickened people declare against Foreign
Ecclesiasticism, and, for England-and, from this time you
should see the fierce struggle between England and Spain; the
Saxon and the Latin-the New and the Old-the rights of the
Englishmen and the pretensions of Prerogative: Civil, Mili-
tary and Ecclesiastical.
    All the middle of the Sixteenth Century was a long strug-
gle between Spain and England-or, more rightly, between the
Old and the New. And Spain had allied herself with the
former and England with the latter.
    Happily for the world, then came in the Providence of
God to the throne of England a woman with the brain not only
of a man, but of a man far beyond those who usually wear
crowns. And yet more happily, she found herself at the head
of an aroused and quickened people at the flood-tide of their
force and genius-most of all aroused to the perils of Spanish
domination; from which England had escaped by a hair's
breadth. She had the blood of the English Gentry as well as
of Royalty in her veins and she hated Spain with all her soul,
and had good right to hate her!
                             12

 

    Burleigh and Walsingham and Essex were her Counsellors;
Drake and Hawkins; the Gilberts and Howards were among
her seamen; Sidney and Raleigh were among her courtiers; and
Raleigh, greatest of all her Statesmen, was but a Knight,
knighted for Virginia.
    While the statesmen helped her to play her great game in
Europe; her sea captains helped her to bring it to success in
those seas where Spain's overreaching power had decreed it to
be death to fly any flag but her own.
    The wealth, the power and the arrogance of Spain, with
her bigotry, aroused the people of England to a pitch which
had, possibly, not been known since the Norman conquest.
    Although England claimed the middle part of North
America by virtue of the discovery made in 1496, by John
Cabot, under Patent of Henry VII., the Continent was won a
hundred years later in the War with Spain, which lasted sub-
stantially through the last half of the Sixteenth Century.
    For a generation the great sea captains of England had
been training in western waters, and garnering up implacable
hate against Spain. Sir Philip Sidney had written vigorously
of England's opportunity and duty; Hawkins, Drake, the Gil-
berts, Grenville, and others had flouted Spain and fought her
from Cadiz to Peru. And then in God's Providence came
Walter Raleigh. Of all the great men of the time, as has been
said, to him more than to any other was due the capture of
this New World for England and her People. It was his far-
reaching prevision that foresaw her worth-his lofty ambition
that desired and his all-mastering genius that conceived and
carried through the mighty plans which made her an English
possession. He was the first and "Chief Governor of Virginia."
To him more than to any other one man this Nation owes a
monument; and stands as one.
    We -may not go into the long struggle he made to plant
here the Banner of England and of Protestantism. He died
after long imprisonment, a victim to the hate of the nation he
had so long and implacably fought-the most foolish and



13

 

cowardly of all the sacrifices that unbridled power has ever
made. But he had planted here a colony which contained the
seed of a mighty nation which has made good his wildest imag-
ining, and thank God, that he lived, as he wrote Sidney, he
hoped to live, "to see it a Mighty Nation."
    The crucial battle was fought in the English Channel in
those summer days when the Spanish Armada succumbed to the
aroused Saxon Spirit, when sufficiently aroused has always
swept everything before it. Had the Spanish Armada been
victorious the settlement of America by the Anglo-Saxon would
have ended there forever, and with it, doubtless would have
gone to decline the Anglo-Saxon civilization.
    The victory which England won that day and in the suc-
ceeding days when the Sea Dogs of Devon hunted down the
broken sections of the fleet which attempted to sail around the
British Isles, but to strew their wrecks to the Hebrides to the
South and of Ireland, was the inspiration to the English people
to seize the American Continent for the Kingdom of God ac-
cording to the Protestant Religion and for the Kingdom of
England. And the victory which Raleigh and others won in
Cadiz in 1696, completed the overthrow of the Spanish sea
power, and justified Raleigh's title of "Shepherd of the Seas."
    It has been charged by those ignorant of the facts or in-
capable of comprehending them, that Virginia was planted only
for gain. The fact is far otherwise.
    The planting of Virginia had its origin in the religious zeal
of the people of England; the prime objects of the movement
were ever expressed to be the "welfare of the Kingdom of God
and the Kingdom of England," and the final instructions to
the first Colony that settled at Jamestown were closed with an
exhortation "to serve and fear God, the Giver of all Goodness,
for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath not
planted shall be rooted out.'" This exhortation the new settlers
ever observed, and though the forms of worship differed on
their part, and on the part of the Puritans, no Puritans were
ever more zealous than those Church of England colonists of



'4

 
Virginia. Religious fervor was the characteristic of the time.
The annals and records show that religion was a prominent
part of their life, and from that day to this the people of Vir-
ginia have been among the most religious people in the world.
    On that first Sunday when the Indians attacked the Fort,
as soon as the attack had been repulsed, "Worthy Master
Hunt" asked the President if it were his pleasure to have a
sermon, and Wingfield replied, that the "men were weary and
hungry, and if it pleased him we would wait until some other
time." And even this failure was made the subject of a charge
against him by his enemies.
    The records are full of the piety of the time, and the
ministrations of those faithful Soldiers of Christ, who came in
the true missionary spirit, prepared to lay down their lives
even with joy in their Master's service.
    The first structure erected on this Island was a sail spread
between the trees under which to conduct the service of God.
    Possibly, the first edifice erected after the construction of
the fortifications, was however rude, built for a Church, and
on its site four sacred edifices arose before Jamestown ceased
to be the Capital of Virginia. And now the fifth has arisen
through the pious zeal of those worthy women, successors or
the pious women who first contributed to make that spot holy.
    The first act of Lord Baltimore on his arrival, when he had
met and turned back the famishing remnant of the Colony, was
to fall on his knees before he entered the South Gate of the
Fort where Sir Thomas Gates was drawn up with his fifty sol-
diers to receive him.
    The first laws posted in Virginia contained the laws pro-
mulgated by Argall and his Council enjoining attendance on
Divine Worship under penalty of "lying neck and heels on the
corps du guarde for a day and night for the first offense, and
slaverie to the Colony for a week; for the second, and slaverie
for a month, for the third, slaverie to the Colony for a year."



'5

 

    A law was soon passed enjoining upon every plantation
to have a room set apart for the service of God, which should
be used for no secular purpose. Indeed, whatever the short-
comings of the Virginians were, the lack of piety was not among
them. I venture to make the assertion that their attendance
upon Divine Worship from the time of Argall's Laws, down
to the last ringing of the Church bells has not been exceeded by
the people of any other Colony or State in this Country. It
gave the complexion to their life, and with chivalry and love
of the rights of freemen gave its fibre.
    It is true, that the seeking of wealth bore its part in the
enterprise, as it has ever borne its part as one of the objects of
human endeavor. Sir Walter Raleigh sought El Dorado; but
who will be so stupid as to charge that this was his chief aim
So, none can read the true story of the founding of Virginia
without discovering on how much broader a foundation it was
laid. The aspiration was for the establishment of a great
Protestant State: a bulwark for England across seas. The
foundation was cemented by the dust of thousands of bold
Soldiers of Christ, who left comfort and ease behind them to
face death here in its most terrible form.
    But there is not time even so much as to mention today the
history of their self-sacrifice and lofty endeavor. All that may
be done here is to point to their true story and give assurance
that you will be well repaid for whatever trouble you may take
to burrow out from the musty records of the time, their history;
for you will find it the story of as high and as noble fortitude as
ever illumined the pages of human endeavor. No embellish-
ment is required. Truly it may be said, as was said at the
time, "That nothing can purge that famous action from the
infamous scandal some ignorantly have conceded, as the plaine,
simple and naked truth."
    We may not here even so much as touch on actions which
were epoch-making in their results; for there is scarcely time
to mention the names of Sir Thomas Gates, Sir Thomas Dale,
Sir Samuel Argall, Sir George Yeardley, Sir Francis Wyatt,
                             i6

 

William Claiborne and the long following of brave men who
spent their lives for the First English Colony in America and
her successors.
    At the Michaelmas Quarter Court of the Virginia Company,
1619, Sir Edwin Sandys, a name ever memorable in the annals
of America's founding, as that of the man possibly second only
to Sir Walter Raleigh in his work for Virginia, recalled, "How
by the admirable care and diligence of two worthy Knights,
Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, the Colony was set
forward in a way to great perfection; whereof the former, Sir
Thomas Gates, had the honour to all posterity to be the first
named in His Majesty's Patent of grant to Virginia, and was
the first who, by his wisdom, valour and industry, accompanied
with exceeding pains and patience in the midst of so many
difficulties, laid a foundation of that prosperous estate of the
Colony, which afterward in the virtue of those beginnings did
proceed.
    "The latter, Sir Thomas Dale, building upon those founda-
tions with great and constant severity) had reclaimed almost
miraculously those idle and disordered people, and reduced
them to labour and an honest fashion of life; and proceeding
with great zeal to the good of this Company."
    It is sufficient to say of Dale, that he abolished communism,
under which the Colony had languished, and gave men their
holdings in severalty; that he built the new town of Henrico
in the loop of the James, which in 1612 had six rows of houses
with the first stories of brick; had a hospital with four-score
lodgings and beds sent over to furnish it; and that he sent an
expedition under Samuel Argall to clear the Virginia coast as
far as Nova Scotia of intruders who had settled thereon. That
he quelled faction; dominated the Indians, and made a peace
with them which substantially lasted until 1622.
    It may be said of Argall, that "pleasant, ingenious and
forward young gentleman," that he first crossed the Atlantic
directly from England to the Chesapeake, and made the dis-
covery that no counter winds or currents existed to prevent
                             17

 
such passage. That he carried out with supreme success Dale's
plan of driving the French settlers from the coast of North
Virginia, and made that coast secure for those Englishmen who
came seven years later to found thereon the Plymouth and
Massachusetts Bay Colonies; thereby insuring forever the
Anglo-Saxon civilization on that shore.
    Incidentally it may be said, that Samuel Argall also first
brought Negro slaves to Virginia, in his ship, "The Treasure,"
sometimes called "A Dutch Man-of-War," that being the tech-
nical title for a Privateer. So his name is written large on the
History of both Virginia and New England.
    Of Sir George Yeardley, "The M\ild Yeardley," it must be
said that under him representative Government which was a
growth of the Virginia Col