Volume I Part 9 (2/2)
The small English house of lime and stone on this island was still standing in good condition, and there was also a trench where they had built their ill-fated boat.
[Ill.u.s.tration: An Indian Village at the Roanoke Settlement.]
A contemporary of Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake, also entertained the idea of making the northwest pa.s.sage. While engaged in privateering or piratical expeditions against the Spanish, Drake landed on the Isthmus of Panama, saw the Pacific for the first time, and determined to enter it by the Straits of Magellan. In 1577 he made his way through the straits, plundered the Spanish along the coast of Chili and Peru, and sailed as far north as the 48th parallel, or Oregon, calling the country New Albion. Steering homeward by the Cape of Good Hope, he arrived at Plymouth, his starting-point, in 1580, having been absent about two years and ten months.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir Humphrey Gilbert.]
Thomas Cavendish had been with Grenville in the voyage of 1585 to Virginia. Frobisher's attempts inspired him with the ambition of the age. In 1586 he, too, sailed through the Straits of Magellan, burning and plundering Spanish s.h.i.+ps, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached Plymouth in 1588, having been gone about two years and fifty days.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir Walter Raleigh. From a portrait attributed to Zuccaro in the National Portrait Gallery, London.]
[1584]
These half-piratical attempts against Spain led continually into American waters, till the notion of forming a permanent outpost here as base for such adventures suggested to Sir Humphrey Gilbert the plan, which he failed to realize, of founding an American settlement. Gilbert visited our sh.o.r.es in 1579, and again in 1583, but was lost on his return from the latter voyage.
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh sent two captains, Amidas and Barlow, to inspect the coast off what is now North Carolina. They reported so favorably that he began, next year, a colony on Roanoke Island. England was now a Protestant land, and no longer heeded Spanish claims to the transatlantic continent, save so far as actual settlements had been made.
[1586]
Sir Richard Grenville commanded this expedition, but was to return on seeing the one hundred and eight colonists who accompanied him well established. Queen Elizabeth gave the name VIRGINIA to the new country.
Drake, tending homeward from one of his raids on the Spanish coast, in 1586, offered the settlers supplies, but finding them wholly discouraged, he carried them back to England.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Queen Elizabeth.]
[1587]
Determined to plant an agricultural community, Raleigh next time, l587, sent men with their families. A daughter to one of these, named Dare, was the first child of English parents born in America. Becoming dest.i.tute, the colony despatched its governor home for supplies. He returned to find the settlement deserted, and no tidings as to the fate of the poor colonists have ever been heard from that day to our own. The Jamestown settlers mentioned in the next chapter found among their Indian neighbors a boy whose whitish complexion and wavy hair induced the interesting suspicion that he was descended from some one of these lost colonists of Roanoke.
Thus Sir Walter's enterprise had to be abandoned. In the 40,000 pounds spent upon it his means were exhausted. Besides, England was now at war with Spain, and the entire energies of the nation were in requisition for the overthrow of the Spanish Armada.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PLANTING OF VIRGINIA
[1606]
We have now arrived at the seventeenth century. In 1606 King James I.
issued the first English colonial charter. It created a first and a second Virginia Company, the one having its centre in London, and coming to be known as the London Company; the other made up of Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth men, and gradually taking the t.i.tle of the Plymouth Company. This latter company, the second, or Plymouth Company, authorized to plant between 38 degrees and 45 degrees north, effected a settlement in 1607 at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Little came of it but suffering, the colonists, after a severe winter, returning to England.
[Ill.u.s.tration: King James I. Mr. Henry Irving's Collection.]
[1607]
A colony of one hundred and five planters sent out by the first or London Company, proceeded, also in 1607, to Chesapeake Bay, entering James River, to which they indeed gave this name, and planted upon its banks Jamestown, the first permanent English colony on the continent.
This London Company consisted of a council in England, appointed by the king, having the power to name the members of a local council which was to govern the colony, the colonists themselves having no voice.
It is well known that the very earliest population of the Old Dominion was not of the highest, but predominantly idle and thriftless. Vagabonds and homeless children picked up in the streets of London, as well as some convicts, were sent to the colony from England to be indented as servants, permanently, or for a term of years. Persons of the better cla.s.s, to be sure, came as well, and the quality of the population, on the whole, improved year by year. Settlement here followed a centrifugal tendency, except as this was repressed by fear of the Indians. In 1616 the departments of Virginia were Henrico, up the James above the Appomattox mouth, West and s.h.i.+rley Hundreds, Jamestown, Kiquoton, and King's Gift on the coast near Cape Charles--a wide reach of territory to be covered by a total population of only three hundred and fifty.
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