History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of VirginiaCampbell, Charles
History
History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia
Campbell, Charles
Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Virginia -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783
Newport arrived with a second supply, and brought out also presents for
Powhatan, a basin and ewer, bedstead and suit of scarlet clothes.
Newport, upon this voyage, had procured a private commission in which he
stood pledged to perform one of three impossibilities; for he engaged
not to return to England without either a lump of gold, a certainty of
the South Sea, or one of Sir Walter Raleigh's lost colonists. Newport
brought also orders to discover the Manakin (originally Monacan)
country, and a barge constructed so as to be taken to pieces, which they
were to carry beyond the falls, so as to convey them down by some river
running westward to the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Vasco Nunez, in
1513, crossing the Isthmus of Darien, from the summit of a mountain
discovered, beyond the other side of the continent, an ocean, which,
from the direction in which he saw it, took the name of the "South Sea."
The cost of this last supply brought out by Newport was two thousand
pounds, and the company ordered that the vessels should be sent back
freighted with cargoes of corresponding value, and threatened, in case
of a failure, that the colonists should be left in Virginia as banished
men. It appears that the Virginia Company had been deeply incensed by a
letter received by Lord Salisbury, (Sir Robert Cecil,) Secretary of
State, reporting that the planters intended to divide the country among
themselves. It is altogether improbable that they had conceived any
design of appropriating a country which so few of them were willing to
cultivate, and from which so many of them were anxious to escape. The
folly of the instructions was only surpassed by the inhumanity of the
threat, and this folly and inhumanity were justly exposed by Smith's
letter in reply.[61:A]
Newport brought over with him Captains Peter Wynne and Richard Waldo,
two veteran soldiers and valiant gentlemen; Francis West, brother of
Lord Delaware; Raleigh Crashaw; Thomas Forest with Mrs. Forest, and Anne
Burras, her maid; the first Englishwomen that landed at Jamestown.[62:A]
Some Poles and Germans were sent out to make pitch, tar, glass, soap,
ashes, and erect mills. Waldo and Wynne were admitted into the council;
and Ratcliffe was restored to his seat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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