Nor was the composition of the colony such as to beget high hopes of it.
There was but one carpenter, and three others that desired to learn, two
blacksmiths, ten sailors; those called laborers were for the most part
footmen, brought over to wait upon the adventurers, who did not know
what a day's work was--all the real laborers were the Dutchmen and Poles
and some dozen others. “For all the rest were poor gentlemen, tradesmen,
serving men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a
commonwealth than either begin one or help to maintain one. For when
neither the fear of God, nor the law, nor shame, nor displeasure of
their friends could rule them here, there is small hope ever to bring
one in twenty of them to be good there.” Some of them proved more
industrious than was expected; “but ten good workmen would have done
more substantial work in a day than ten of them in a week.”
The disreputable character of the majority of these colonists is
abundantly proved by other contemporary testimony. In the letter of the
Governor and Council of Virginia to the London Company, dated Jamestown,
July 7, 1610, signed by Lord De La Ware, Thomas Gates, George Percy,
Ferd. Wenman, and William Strachey, and probably composed by Strachey,
after speaking of the bountiful capacity of the country, the writer
exclaims: “Only let me truly acknowledge there are not one hundred or
two of deboisht hands, dropt forth by year after year, with penury and
leysure, ill provided for before they come, and worse governed when they
are here, men of such distempered bodies and infected minds, whom no
examples daily before their eyes, either of goodness or punishment,
can deterr from their habituall impieties, or terrifie from a shameful
death, that must be the carpenters and workmen in this so glorious a
building.”
The chapter in the “General Historie” relating to Smith's last days in
Virginia was transferred from the narrative in the appendix to Smith's
“Map of Virginia,” Oxford, 1612, but much changed in the transfer. In
the “General Historie” Smith says very little about the nature of the
charges against him. In the original narrative signed by Richard Pots
and edited by Smith, there are more details of the charges. One omitted
passage is this: “Now all those Smith had either whipped or punished,
or in any way disgraced, had free power and liberty to say or sweare
anything, and from a whole armful of their examinations this was
concluded.”
Another omitted passage relates to the charge, to which reference is
made in the “General Historie,” that Smith proposed to marry Pocahontas:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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