Penguin History of the United States of America Read Online Free PDF Page B

hold
    Virginia
,
    Earth’s only paradise.
    Where nature hath in store
    Fowl, venison, and fish,
    And the fruitfull’st soil
    Without your toil
    Three harvests more,
    All greater than your wish.
    And the ambitious vine
    Crowns with his purple mass
    The cedar reaching high
    To kiss the sky,
    The cypress, pine,
    And useful sassafras. 1
    Michael Drayton
    Disaster dogged the first Virginians, and disappointment their patrons, for nearly twenty years.
    The reasons were many and complicated.
    Nothing, on a long view, could be said against the region that they had chosen for their experiment. The James river winds, wide and deep, fifty miles into the interior and is only one of a score of navigable waterways. The coast, in fact, is extravagantly indented and proved ideal for thatseaborne traffic with the outer world without which the colony could not have lived. The land itself, sloping gently upwards towards the foothills of the Alleghenies, was extremely fertile, rich in game and timber. 2 The local Indians, though fully capable of resenting and punishing injuries, were less formidable and thinner on the ground (thanks to European diseases) than many tribes to be encountered elsewhere, by others, later on. The frightful American climate -jungle-hot in summer, tundra-cold in winter, unbearably humid whenever it isn’t freezing – is, as it happens, far more agreeable in Virginia 3 than in most of the rest of the Eastern seaboard. Captain John Smith summed it up accurately:
    The summer is hot as in Spain; the winter cold as in France or England. The heat of summer is in June, July, and August, but commonly the cold breezes assuage the vehemency of the heat. The chief of winter is half December, January, February, and half March. The cold is extreme sharp, but here the proverb is true, that no extreme long continueth.
    Certainly it is not the damp and mild climate of England; 4 but many could be found to say that this is no disadvantage. Thomas Jefferson, for example, at the end of the eighteenth century, exulted in the fact that whereas in Europe one never saw a wholly blue sky, quite innocent of cloud, in Virginia it was common.
    So much is true; but it is equally true that the new colony more than once came within a hair’s breadth of sharing the fate of Roanoke and Sagadahoc.
    In 1610 the settlers had actually abandoned the site and were sailing down-river when they met the new Governor, Lord De La Warr, sailing up it, with men and supplies sufficient to allow the enterprise to be renewed. At that time – only three years after its founding – Jamestown appeared
    rather as the ruins of some ancient fortification, than that any people living might now inhabit it. The pallisadoes… torn down, the ports open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty houses (whose owners’ untimely death had taken newly from them) rent up and burnt, the living not able, as they pretended, to step into the woods to gather other firewóod.
    And in 1617 a new Deputy-Governor found it much the same: ‘… but five or six houses, the church down, the palisadoes broken, the bridge in pieces, the well of fresh water spoiled…’ The more the early history of Virginiais studied, the more it must (and did) appear miraculous that the colony survived.
    Three things explain the miracle.
    First, in time, importance and honour, must be placed the spirit of some of the colonists, and some of their leaders. Captain John Smith may be taken as the type of both, partly because he has left remarkable accounts of himself and his experiences, partly because of his general importance, as propagandist, to the colonization movement as a whole, partly because without him the Virginian settlement must have foundered within two years of its birth.
    Captain Smith (1579–1631) was a soldier of fortune who sailed with the first settlers. A man with, as it proved, justified faith in his own abilities and no weak reluctance to make enemies, he