Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
They passed various laws, chiefly
about tobacco and taxes, and sent them to England, where the Company
confirmed them, and afterwards, in 1621, granted the "Great Charter,"
which was the first Constitution of Virginia.
The colonists got into trouble with the Indians in 1622, and having
killed an Indian who murdered a white man, Jamestown was attacked and
the inhabitants massacred, three hundred and forty-five being killed.
Governor Butler, who visited the place not long after the massacre,
wrote that the houses were the "worst in the world," and that the
most wretched cottages in England were equal, if not superior, in
appearance and comfort to the finest dwellings in the colony. The
first houses were mostly of bark, imitating those of the Indian; and,
there being neither sawmills to prepare planks nor nails to fasten
them, the later constructions were usually of logs plastered with mud,
with thatched roofs. The more pretentious of these were built
double--"two pens and a passage," as they have been described. As late
as 1675 Jamestown had only a few families, with not more than
seventy-five population. Labor was always in demand there, and at
first the laborers were brought out from England. There was no money,
and having early learnt to raise tobacco from the Indians, this became
the chief crop, and, being sure of sale in England, became the
standard of value. Tobacco was the great export, twenty thousand
pounds being exported in 1619, forty thousand in 1620 and sixty
thousand in 1622. Everything was valued in tobacco, and this continued
the practical currency for the first century. They imported a lot of
copper, however, with which to make small coins for circulation. As
the tobacco fluctuated in price in England, it made a very unstable
standard of value. Gradually, afterwards, large amounts of gold and
silver coin came into Virginia in payment for produce, thus
supplanting the tobacco as a standard.
THE VIRGINIAN PLANTERS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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