The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
man that ruled in these early days, not even excepting his successor,
Argall. Dale's severity was serviceable in carrying the enterprise
through straits, but the reports of his harshness brought the colony
into disrepute and checked immigration. The detestation of Dale was
shared by the best men in Virginia, yet it is to be remembered that
the savagery of Dale's government was due not wholly to the brutal
temper of the man, but partly to the age and the school in which he
had been bred. Legal torture was in use long after this. The Clarendon
Papers, quoted by Southey, state that at Henley-on-Thames, as late as
1646, it was ordered that a woman's tongue should be nailed to a tree
for complaining of the tax levied by Parliament. The cruel practices
of the agents of the Virginia Company are paralleled by those of the
East India Company at the same time. "Before they were intrusted with
martial law they made it a rule to whip to death or starve to death
those of whom they wished to get rid." Mills, British India, i, 38.
Even that champion of popular liberty, Sir Edwin Sandys, found it in
his heart to approve of Dale's course while admitting its harshness.
He said to the court of the Virginia Company of the 17th of November,
1619, that "Sir Thomas Dale, building upon these foundations with
great and constant severity, reclaymed almost miraculously those idle
and disordered people, and reduced them to labor and an honest fashion
of life." MS. Records of the Virginia Company. Compare also Sir Thomas
Smythe's defense, note to Aspinwall Papers in IV Massachusetts
Historical Collections, ix, p. 1. My citations from the Tragicall
Relation and Briefe Declaration are partly from the originals in the
British Public Record Office, which I carefully examined in 1885, but
the first of these is printed in Neill's Virginia Company, and the
Briefe Declaration was published by the State of Virginia in 1874 in a
Senate document entitled Colonial Records of Virginia. Very good
abstracts of both papers appear in Sainsbury's Calendar. I cite the
Discourse of the Old Virginia Company from the MS. in the British
Public Record Office. I do not remember to have seen it in print.
[Sidenote: Note 10, page 49.]
Birch's Court of James I, i, 415. Chamberlain to Carleton, June 22,
1616: "Sir Thomas Dale is arrived from Virginia, and brought with him
some ten or twelve old and young of that country, among whom is
Pocahuntas, daughter of Powhatan, married to one Rolfe, an Englishman.
I hear not of any other riches or matter of worth, but only some
quantity of sassafras, tobacco, pitch, tar, and clapboard, things of
no great value unless there were plenty, and nearer hand. All I can
hear of it is, that the country is good to live in, if it were stored
with people, and might in time become commodious. But there is no
present profit to be expected."
[Sidenote: Note 11, page 49.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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