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BOOK I.
RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
JAMES RIVER EXPERIMENTS
XI
ОглавлениеThe years of slavery. Dale regarded himself as an agent of the company. His aim was by hook or crook to make the hitherto unprofitable colony pay dividends to the shareholders, who were his employers. His relation to the emigrants was that of a taskmaster; one might, perhaps, more fitly call him a slave-driver. Instead of seeking to render the colony self-supporting by clearing corn ground, he gave his first attention to lading vessels with sassafras root, then much prized as a medicine, and cedar timber, valued especially for its odor.
During a part of Dale's time eight or nine ounces of meal and half a pint of peas was the daily ration. Briefe Declaration. Percy to Northumberland, Hist. MS., Commission, Rept., iii, 53, 54. In their declaration, made some years afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both the meal and the peas were "moldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and unfit for beasts." Better men than these might have been driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and bad food. And mutiny and desertion were usually but other names for suicide under the rule of the pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the woods, hoping to reach a mythical Spanish settlement believed to be not very far away. Dale set the Indians on them, and they were brought back to be burned at the stake. Others, who in desperation or deadly homesickness resolved to venture their lives in a barge and a shallop "for their native country," suffered in various ways for their temerity. Death by shooting or hanging was clemency. One offender was put to death by the awful torture of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may have learned during his stay on the Continent. Taylor, the water poet, has left us the sickening details of such an execution in Germany in 1616. Observations and Travel from London to Hamburgh, p. 13. One need not waste any sympathy on those who were hanged for stealing to satisfy hunger; death is more merciful than life to men in such a case. But one poor rogue, who thought to better his rations by filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had a bodkin run through his tongue and was chained to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though these things were twice attested by the best men in the colony, one prefers to make some allowance for their passionate resentment, and to hope that some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is hard to believe, for example, that men unable to work were denied food, and left to creep away into the wretched burrows in the ground used for shelter, there to die unregarded in the general misery.
In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch fish braved the perils of the ocean in a little bark and got back to England. It was the only escape from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Abandon every hope who enter here" was almost as appropriate to the mouth of the James River as to the gate of Dante's hell. All letters of complaint sent to England were intercepted, and all efforts of friends of the colonists in England to succor or rescue them were thwarted by the company in London. Briefe Declaration. The king's pass to one of the colonists authorizing him to leave Virginia was sent to him by his friends closely made up in a garter, to avoid the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale.
Dale's services. Dale's administration was strongest on its military side. There was no danger that the Indians would reduce the colony to any straits while he was in charge. He gave his first attention to fortification, and he even begged for two thousand convicts out of English jails to form a line of posts from Hampton to a point a hundred miles above Jamestown. He sent Argall all the way to Mount Desert to plunder a Jesuit settlement and make prize of a French ship – an undertaking congenial to Dale's military temper and the Viking tastes of Argall. As his experience increased, Dale came to understand that other than military measures were needed to found a colony, though he never more than half comprehended the elements of the problem. In his later time he cleared more corn ground, and he could boast at his departure that Virginia contained six horses, a hundred and forty-nine neat cattle, two hundred and sixteen goats, and hogs without number. Dale set off a private garden of three acres of land to each of the old planters, on the condition that they should provide food for themselves while still giving nearly all of their time to the service of the common stock. Even this slave's-patch of private interest given to only a fraction of the colonists put some life into Virginia; but two thirds of the people were retained in the old intolerable bondage, and not even the most favored secured personal ownership of land. Dale's administration was remembered as "the five years of slavery." 17
17
The Tragicall Relation of 1623, and the Briefe Declaration of 1624, manuscripts in the British Public Record Office, are the most important authorities for the facts given in the text. The Briefe Declaration is rather the fuller, but the earlier paper supplies some particulars. These two formal documents are not from the same hand, and the slight difference between them in details tends rather to confirm than to shake the reader's confidence in their testimony. The names of Sir Francis Wyatt, George Sandys, and other prominent colonists appended to the Tragicall Relation are a guarantee of its good faith. It is curious to note that Raphe Hamor, whose relation is so favorable to Dale, and who held the post of secretary under Dale and that of vice-admiral under Argall, signs this paper, which is a severe impeachment of Sir Thomas Smythe's administration of the affairs of the company before 1619. Hamor's True Discourse has heretofore usually been taken as an authority, but after reading the documents in the Public Record Office one is compelled to believe that Hamor, or perhaps one might say Dale, under cover of his secretary, misrepresents the state of the colony, and makes promises to those who may emigrate that it was hardly possible to carry out. The Discourse of the old Virginia Company (Colonial Papers, iii, 40), and other papers in the Public Record Office relating to the strife between the company and the Court, throw light on this period. The half-apologies for Dale's cruelties in Smith's Generall Historie, book iv, prove their existence. "For amongst them, so hardened in evil," says this writer, "the fear of a cruel, painful, and unusual death more restrains them than death itself." See also Hamor, p. 27. There is a letter from Whitaker appended to Hamor's Discourse. Though apparently an incidental letter, it bears marks of having been procured for purposes of vindication. Its defensive tone goes to show that the character of Dale's tyranny had transpired in England. Whitaker praises Sir Thomas Dale mainly for being religious and valiant, and says that he had "great knowledge in Divinity and good conscience in all his doings; both which bee rare in a martiall man." In Whitaker's Good Newes of Virginia, 1613, there is no praise of Sir Thomas Dale. That Dale was famous for his severity before he left Europe is manifest from the phrase used by the Jesuit Biard, "Le Mareschal Thomas Deel que vous auez ouy estre fort aspre en ses humeurs." Relation, chap. xxxiii. See in this and the preceding chapter the whole account of his savage temper toward his French prisoners, etc. It has been the custom of our older writers to speak of Dale's administration only in praise, but careful weighing of the original authorities shows that Dale was utterly pitiless in the cruelty of his discipline and unjust in his detention of the old planters, and that when he left the colony he was more generally execrated than any other man that ruled in these early days, not even excepting his successor, Argall. Dale's severity was serviceable in carrying the enterprise through straits, but the reports of his harshness brought the colony into disrepute and checked immigration. The detestation of Dale was shared by the best men in Virginia, yet it is to be remembered that the savagery of Dale's government was due not wholly to the brutal temper of the man, but partly to the age and the school in which he had been bred. Legal torture was in use long after this. The Clarendon Papers, quoted by Southey, state that at Henley-on-Thames, as late as 1646, it was ordered that a woman's tongue should be nailed to a tree for complaining of the tax levied by Parliament. The cruel practices of the agents of the Virginia Company are paralleled by those of the East India Company at the same time. "Before they were intrusted with martial law they made it a rule to whip to death or starve to death those of whom they wished to get rid." Mills, British India, i, 38. Even that champion of popular liberty, Sir Edwin Sandys, found it in his heart to approve of Dale's course while admitting its harshness. He said to the court of the Virginia Company of the 17th of November, 1619, that "Sir Thomas Dale, building upon these foundations with great and constant severity, reclaymed almost miraculously those idle and disordered people, and reduced them to labor and an honest fashion of life." MS. Records of the Virginia Company. Compare also Sir Thomas Smythe's defense, note to Aspinwall Papers in IV Massachusetts Historical Collections, ix, p. 1. My citations from the Tragicall Relation and Briefe Declaration are partly from the originals in the British Public Record Office, which I carefully examined in 1885, but the first of these is printed in Neill's Virginia Company, and the Briefe Declaration was published by the State of Virginia in 1874 in a Senate document entitled Colonial Records of Virginia. Very good abstracts of both papers appear in Sainsbury's Calendar. I cite the Discourse of the Old Virginia Company from the MS. in the British Public Record Office. I do not remember to have seen it in print.
Note 10, page 49. Birch's Court of James I, i, 415. Chamberlain to Carleton, June 22, 1616: "Sir Thomas Dale is arrived from Virginia, and brought with him some ten or twelve old and young of that country, among whom is Pocahuntas, daughter of Powhatan, married to one Rolfe, an Englishman. I hear not of any other riches or matter of worth, but only some quantity of sassafras, tobacco, pitch, tar, and clapboard, things of no great value unless there were plenty, and nearer hand. All I can hear of it is, that the country is good to live in, if it were stored with people, and might in time become commodious. But there is no present profit to be expected."
