Experience is a great teacher. That London Company with Virginia to colonize had now come to see how inadequate to the attempt were its means and strength. Evidently it might be long before either gold mines or the South Sea could be found. The company's ships were too slight and few; colonists were going by the single handful when they should go by the double. Something was at fault in the management of the enterprise. The quarrels in Virginia were too constant, the disasters too frequent. More money, more persons interested with purse and mind, a great company instead of a small, a national cast to the enterprise these were imperative needs. In the press of such demands the London Company passed away. In 1609 under new letters patent was born the Virginia Company.
The members and shareholders in this corporation touch through and through the body of England at that day. First names upon the roll come Robert Cecil, Thomas Howard, Henry Wriothesley, William Herbert, Henry Clinton, Richard Sackville, Thomas Cecil, Philip Herbert—Earls of Salisbury, Suffolk, Southampton, Pembroke, Lincoln, Dorset, Exeter, and Montgomery. Then follow a dozen peers, the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells, a hundred knights, many gentlemen, one hundred and ten merchants, certain physicians and clergymen, old soldiers of the Continental wars, sea-captains and mariners, and a small host of the unclassified. In addition shares were taken by fifty-six London guilds or industrial companies. Here are the Companies of the Tallow and Wax Chandlers, the Armorers and Girdlers, Cordwayners and Carpenters, Masons, Plumbers, Founders, Poulterers, Cooks, Coopers, Tylers and Brick Layers, Bowyers and Vinters, Merchant Taylors, Blacksmiths and Weavers, Mercers, Grocers, Turners, Gardeners, Dyers, Scriveners, Fruiterers, Plaisterers, Brown Bakers, Imbroiderers, Musicians, and many more.
The first Council appointed by the new charter had fifty-two members, fourteen of whom sat in the English House of Lords, and twice that number in the Commons. Thus was Virginia well linked to Crown and Parliament.
This great commercial company had sovereign powers within Virginia. The King should have his fifth part of all ore of gold and silver; the laws and religion of England should be upheld, and no man let go to Virginia who had not first taken the oath of supremacy. But in the wide field beside all this the President—called the Treasurer—and the Council, henceforth to be chosen out of and by the whole body of subscribers, had full sway. No longer should there be a second Council sitting in Virginia, but a Governor with power, answerable only to the Company at home. That Company might tax and legislate within the Virginian field, punish the ill-doer or "rebel," and wage war, if need be, against Indian or Spaniard:
One of the first actions of the newly constituted body was to seek remedy for the customary passage by way of the West Indies—so long and so beset by dangers. They sent forth a small ship under Captain Samuel Argall, with instructions "to attempt a direct and cleare passage, by leaving the Canaries to the East, and from thence to run a straight westerne course.... And so to make an experience of the Winds and Currents which have affrighted all undertakers by the North."
This Argall, a young man with a stirring and adventurous life behind him and before him, took his ship the indicated way. He made the voyage in nine weeks, of which two were spent becalmed, and upon his return reported that it might be made in seven, "and no apparent inconvenience in the way." He brought to the great Council of the Company a story of necessity and distress at Jamestown, and the Council lays much of the blame for that upon "the misgovernment of the Commanders, by dissention and ambition among themselves," and upon the idleness of the general run, "active in nothing but adhearing to factions and parts." The Council, sitting afar from a savage land, is probably much too severe. But the "factions and parts" cannot easily be denied.
Before Argall's return, the Company had commissioned as Governor of Virginia Sir Thomas Gates, and had gathered a fleet of seven ships and two pinnaces with Sir George Somers as Admiral, in the ship called the Sea Adventure, and Christopher Newport as Vice-Admiral. All weighed anchor from Falmouth early in June and sailed by the newly tried course, south to the Canaries and then across. These seven ships carried five hundred colonists, men, women, and children.
On St. James's day there rose and broke a fearsome storm. Two days and nights it raged, and it scattered that fleet of seven. Gates, Somers, and Newport with others of "rancke and quality" were upon the Sea Adventure. How fared this ship with one attendant pinnace we shall come to see presently. But the other ships, driven to and fro, at last found a favorable wind, and in August they sighted Virginia. On the eleventh of that month they came, storm-beaten and without Governor or Admiral or Sea Adventure, into "our Bay" and at last to "the King's River and Town." Here there swarmed from these ships nigh three hundred persons, meeting and met by the hundred dwelling at Jamestown. This was the third supply, but it lacked the hundred or so upon the Sea Adventure and the pinnace, and it lacked a head. "Being put ashore without their Governor or any order from him (all the Commissioners and principal persons being aboard him) no man would acknowledge a superior."
With this multitude appeared once more in Virginia the three ancient councilors—Ratcliffe, Archer, and Martin. Apparently here came fresh fuel for factions. Who should rule, and who should be ruled? Here is an extremely old and important question, settled in history only to be unsettled again. Everywhere it rises, dust on Time's road, and is laid only to rise again.
Smith was still President. Who was in the right and who in the wrong in these ancient quarrels, the recital of which fills the pages of Smith and of other men, is hard now to be determined. But Jamestown became a place of turbulence. Francis West was sent with a considerable number to the Falls of the Far West to make there some kind of settlement. For a like purpose Martin and Percy were dispatched to the Nansemond River. All along the line there was bitter falling out. The Indians became markedly hostile. Smith was up the river, quarreling with West and his men. At last he called them "wrongheaded asses," flung himself into his boat, and made down the river to Jamestown. Yet even so he found no peace, for, while he was asleep in the boat, by some accident or other a spark found its way to his powder pouch. The powder exploded. Terribly hurt, he leaped overboard into the river, whence he was with difficulty rescued.
Smith was now deposed by Ratcliffe, Archer, and Martin, because, "being an ambityous, onworthy, and vayneglorious fellowe," say his detractors, "he wolde rule all and ingrose all authority into his own hands." Be this as it may, Smith was put on board one of the ships which were about to sail for England. Wounded, and with none at Jamestown able to heal his hurt, he was no unwilling passenger. Thus he departed, and Virginia knew Captain John Smith no more. Some liked him and his ways, some liked him not nor his ways either. He wrote of his own deeds and praised them highly, and saw little good in other mankind, though here and there he made an exception. Evident enough are faults of temper. But he had great courage and energy and at times a lofty disinterestedness.
Again winter drew on at Jamestown, and with it misery on misery. George Percy, now President, lay ill and unable to keep order. The multitude, "unbridled and heedless," pulled this way and that. Before the cold had well begun, what provision there was in the storehouse became exhausted. That stream of corn from the Indians in which the colonists had put dependence failed to flow. The Indians themselves began systematically to spoil and murder. Ratcliffe and fourteen with him met death while loading his barge with corn upon the Pamunkey. The cold grew worse. By midwinter there was famine. The four hundred—already noticeably dwindled—dwindled fast and faster. The cold was severe; the Indians were in the woods; the weakened bodies of the white men pined and shivered. They broke up the empty houses to make fires to warm themselves. They began to die of hunger as well as by Indian arrows. On went the winter, and every day some died. Tales of cannibalism are told....This was the Starving Time.
When the leaves were red and gold, England-in-America had a population of four hundred and more. When the dogwood and the strawberry bloomed, England-in-America had a population of but sixty.
Somewhat later than this time there came from the pen of Shakespeare a play dealing with a tempest and shipwreck and a magical isle and rescue thereon. The bright spirit Ariel speaks of "the still-vex'd Bermoothes." These were islands "two hundred leagues from any continent," named after a Spanish Captain Bermudez who had landed there. Once there had been Indians, but these the Spaniards had slain or taken as slaves. Now the islands were desolate, uninhabited, "forlorn and unfortunate." Chance vessels might touch, but the approach was dangerous. There grew rumors of pirates, and then of demons. "The Isles of Demons," was the name given to them. "The most forlorn and unfortunate place in the world" was the description that fitted them in those distant days:
All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us Out of this fearful country.
When Shakespeare so wrote, there was news in England and talk went to and fro of the shipwreck of the Sea Adventure upon the rocky teeth of the Bermoothes, "uninhabitable and almost inaccessible," and of the escape and dwelling there for months of Gates and Somers and the colonists in that ship. It is generally assumed that this incident furnished timber for the framework of The Tempest.
The storm that broke on St. James's Day, scattering the ships of the third supply, drove the Sea Adventure here and there at will. Upon her watched Gates and Somers and Newport, above a hundred men, and a few women and children. There sprang a leak; all thought of death. Then rose a cry "Land ho!" The storm abated, but the wind carried the Sea Adventure upon this shore and grounded her upon a reef. A certain R. Rich, gentleman, one of the voyagers, made and published a ballad upon the whole event. If it is hardly Shakespearean music, yet it is not devoid of interest.
... The Seas did rage, the windes did blowe,
Distressed were they then;
Their shippe did leake, her tacklings breake,
In daunger were her men;
But heaven was pylotte in this storme,
And to an Iland neare,
Bermoothawes called, conducted them,
Which did abate their feare.
Using the ship's boats they got to shore, though with toil and danger. Here they found no sprites nor demons, nor even men, but a fair, half-tropical verdure and, running wild, great numbers of swine.
And then on shoare the iland came
Inhabited by hogges,
Some Foule and tortoyses there were,
They only had one dogge,
To kill these swyne, to yield them foode,
That little had to eate.
Their store was spent and all things scant,
Alas! they wanted meate.
They did not, however, starve.
A thousand hogges that dogge did kill
Their hunger to sustaine.
Ten months the Virginia colonists lived among the "still-vex'd Bermoothes." The Sea Adventure was but a wreck pinned between the reefs. No sail was seen upon the blue water. Where they were thrown, there Gates and Somers and Newport and all must stay for a time and make the best of it. They builded huts and thatched them, and they brought from the wrecked ship, pinned but half a mile from land, stores of many kinds. The clime proved of the blandest, fairest; with fishing and hunting they maintained themselves. Days, weeks, and months went by. They had a minister, Master Buck. They brought from the ship a bell and raised it for a church-bell. A marriage, a few deaths, the birth of two children these were events on the island. One of these children, the daughter of John Rolfe, gentleman, and his wife, was christened Bermuda. Gates and Somers held kindly sway. The colonists lived in plenty, peace, and ease. But for all that, they were shipwrecked folk, and far, far out of the world, and they longed for the old ways and their own kin. Day followed day, but no sail would show to bear them thence; and so at last, taking what they could from the forests of the island, and from the Sea Adventure, they set about to become shipwrights.
And there two gallant pynases,
Did build of Seader-tree,
The brave Deliverance one was call'd,
Of seaventy tonne was shee,
The other Patience had to name,
Her burthen thirty tonne....
... The two and forty weekes being past
They hoyst sayle and away;
Their shippes with hogges well freighted were,
Their harts with mickle joy.
And so to Virginia came...
What they found when they came to Virginia was dolor enough. On Jamestown strand they beheld sixty skeletons "who had eaten all the quick things that weare there, and some of them had eaten snakes and adders." Somers, Gates, and Newport, on entering the town, found it "rather as the ruins of some auntient fortification than that any people living might now inhabit it."
A pitiable outcome, this, of all the hopes of fair "harbours and habitations," of golden dreams, and farflung dominion. All those whom Raleigh had sent to Roanoke were lost or had perished. Those who had named and had first dwelled in Jamestown were in number about a hundred. To these had been added, during the first year or so, perhaps two hundred more. And the ships that had parted from the Sea Adventure had brought in three hundred. First and last, not far from seven hundred English folk had come to live in Virginia. And these skeletons eating snakes and adders were all that remained of that company; all those others had died miserably and their hopes were ashes with them.
What might Sir Thomas Gates, the Governor, do? "That which added most to his sorowe, and not a little startled him, was the impossibilitie.. how to amend one whitt of this. His forces were not of habilitie to revenge upon the Indian, nor his owne supply (now brought from the Bermudas) sufficient to relieve his people." So he called a Council and listened in turn to Sir George Somers, to Christopher Newport, and to "the gentlemen and Counsaile of the former Government." The end and upshot was that none could see other course than to abandon the country. England-in-America had tried and failed, and had tried again and failed. God, or the course of Nature, or the current of History was against her. Perhaps in time stronger forces and other attempts might yet issue from England. But now the hour had come to say farewell!
Upon the bosom of the river swung two pinnaces, the Discovery and the Virginia, left by the departing ships months before, and the Deliverance and the Patience, the Bermuda pinnaces. Thus the English abandoned the little town that was but three years old. Aboard the four small ships they went, and down the broad river, between the flowery shores, they sailed away. Doubtless under the trees on either hand were Indians watching this retreat of the invaders of their forests. The plan of the departing colonists was to turn north, when they had reached the sea, and make for Newfoundland, where they might perhaps meet with English fishing ships. So they sailed down the river, and doubtless many hearts were heavy and sad, but others doubtless were full of joy and thankfulness to be going back to an older home than Virginia.
The river broadened toward Chesapeake—and then, before them, what did they see? What deliverance for those who had held on to the uttermost? They saw the long boat of an English ship coming toward them with flashing oars, bringing news of comfort and relief. There, indeed, off Point Comfort lay three ships, the De La Warr, the Blessing, and the Hercules, and they brought, with a good company and good stores, Sir Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, appointed, over Gates, Lord Governor and Captain General, by land and sea, of the Colony of Virginia.
The Discovery, the Virginia, the Patience, and the Deliverance thereupon put back to that shore they thought to have left forever. Two days later, on Sunday the 10th of June, 1610, there anchored before Jamestown the De La Warr, the Blessing, and the Hercules; and it was thus that the new Lord Governor wrote home: "I... in the afternoon went ashore, where after a sermon made by Mr. Buck... I caused my commission to be read, upon which Sir Thomas Gates delivered up...unto me his owne commission, both patents, and the counsell seale; and then I delivered some few wordes unto the Company.... and after... did constitute and give place of office and chardge to divers Captaines and gentlemen and elected unto me a counsaile."
The dead was alive again. Saith Rich's ballad:
And to the adventurers* thus he writes,
"Be not dismayed at all,
For scandall cannot doe us wrong,
God will not let us fall.
Let England knowe our willingnesse,
For that our worke is good,
WE HOPE TO PLANT A NATION
WHERE NONE BEFORE HATH STOOD."
* The Virginia Company.
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