Some Notes on Shipbuilding and Shipping in Colonial VirginiaEvans, Cerinda W.
History
Some Notes on Shipbuilding and Shipping in Colonial Virginia
Evans, Cerinda W.
Ferries -- Virginia; Shipbuilding -- Virginia; Shipping -- Virginia; Ships; Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Argall accompanied Lord De La Warr to Virginia in 1610, to point out
the northern route. While in Virginia, he was sent with Sir George
Somers to Bermuda with two pinnaces to get a supply of hogs and other
provisions for the colony. In a storm, Argall lost sight of Sir
George's pinnace and failed to locate Bermuda; so he changed his
course toward the north and went to Sagadahoc and Cape Cod where he
procured a large cargo of fish, which he brought to Jamestown. Sir
George Somers reached Bermuda, but died there on November 9, 1610.
Argall was then sent by Lord De La Warr to the river Patawomeke to
trade with the Indians for corn, where he rescued the English boy,
Henry Spelman, who had been living with the Indians. Through Spelman's
influence, the Indians "fraughted his ship with corn."
Soon after June 28, 1613, Argall sailed from Virginia on his "fishing
voyage" in a well-armoured English man-of-war. His object was the
French colony of Jesuits at Mt. Desert, now in Maine, but at that time
within the bounds of Virginia. He attacked the buildings and returned
with the priests late in July. He was sent back by Gates to destroy
the buildings and fortifications there and at St. Croix and Port
Royal. This was done and he arrived back at Jamestown, about the first
of December. On this voyage, he stopped at New Netherlands, on the
Hudson, and forced the colonists there to submit to the crown of
England.
SHIPBUILDING ON PLANTATIONS
The tracts of land or plantations occupied by individual settlers of
the colony were very few until after the "starving time" in 1610. When
the colony had been reorganized by Lord De La Warr and Sir Thomas
Gates, and something like peace existed with the Indians, more land
patents were issued year after year. A list of land owners, in 1625,
in the records of the Company, shows nearly two hundred persons owning
plots of land varying in size from forty acres to the thirty-seven
hundred acres of Sir George Yeardley's plantation at Hungar's river on
the Eastern Shore.
In _A Perfect Description of Virginia_ by an unnamed writer in 1648,
it is stated that there were in the colony "pinnaces, barks, great and
small boats many hundreds, for most of their plantations stand upon
the rivers' sides and up little creeks and but a small way into the
land." Every planter must have had a boat of some kind. Neighborly
communication had to be maintained, religious services attended,
fishing and oystering to be done, crops of tobacco transferred to the
ships anchored out in the channel, and cargoes of goods taken from the
ships to the warehouses. The planter navigated the boat himself unless
he could provide a slave or an indentured servant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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