Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
The introduction of negro slavery into the colony is thus noted by
John Rolfe: “About the last of August [1619] came in a Dutch man of
warre, that sold us twenty Negars.”[254] During this year there were
sent to the colony more than twelve hundred settlers, and one hundred
“disorderly persons” or convicts, by order of the King, to be employed
as servants. Boys and girls picked up in the streets of London were
also sent, and were bound as apprentices[255] to the planters until
the age of majority. In June twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, the
crop of the preceding year, was shipped to England. In November the
London Company adopted a coat-of-arms, and ordered a seal to be
engraved.[256] The Company appears ever to have held in due regard the
importance of education as intimately connected with the preservation
and dissemination of Christianity in the colony. Under an order from
the King, nearly £1,500 were collected by the bishops of the realm to
build the college at Henrico, and fifteen thousand acres of land were
appropriated for its support.[257] To cultivate it during the years
1619 and 1620 one hundred laborers were sent over under the charge of
Mr. George Thorpe (a kinsman of Sir Thomas Dale) and Captain Thomas
Newce as agents. At a meeting of the Company held June 28, 1620,
the Earl of Southampton was elected to succeed Sir Edwin Sandys as
treasurer.
The population of the colony in July was estimated at four thousand,
and during the year forty thousand pounds of tobacco were shipped to
England. The freedom of trade which the Company had enjoyed for a brief
interval with the Low Countries, where they sold their tobacco, was in
October, 1621, prohibited in Council, and thenceforward England claimed
a monopoly of the trade of her plantations. The planters at length
were absolved from service to the Company, and enjoyed the blessings
of property in the soil and of domestic felicity. In the autumn of
1621 the practice was begun by the Company of shipping to the colony
young women of respectability as wives for the colonists, who were
chargeable with the cost of transportation. This charge was at first
one hundred and twenty, afterwards one hundred and fifty, pounds of
tobacco. A windmill, the first in America, was about this time erected
by Sir George Yeardley, and iron-works (the primal inauguration of this
essential manufacture in this country) were established at Falling
Creek on James River, under the management of Mr. John Berkeley.[258]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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