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
outlasted that generation, and was in full vigor in 1649, sixty-four
years after Hariot's mistake.
IV.
[Sidenote: Wine.]
[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co. i, 343.]
It was also proposed to produce wine in Virginia for English
consumption. No more gold and silver should go out of the realm to buy
port and canary to the profit of foreigners and the impoverishment of
the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty. The instructions on this
point were clear, and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread to
stay their hunger they had made wine of the sour wild grapes of the
country. French vine-dressers were sent over a little later and were
forbidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to employ themselves
about vines, with the care of silkworms for variety. In 1621 these
Frenchmen sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which was
duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of wine were afterward sent
to England from America at long intervals, but without decreasing the
profits of wine growers in the Old World.
[Sidenote: Other products sought.]
[Sidenote: Nova Brittania.]
All the commodities sought from Virginia were unsuited to conditions
in a new country. To the folly of making such experiments at all where
living itself was an experiment, the managers added the folly of
crowding a multiplicity of problematic enterprises on the colony at
the same time. With a virgin continent in which to produce novelties,
all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. Plants of every
clime grew rank in the imagination of projectors. Virginia was a
wonderland, and it was readily believed without evidence that the
"soyle and clymate" were "very apt and fit for sugar canes"; "also
linseed and rapeseeds to make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of
1609 expresses it. Along with "orenges, limons, and almonds," this
official writer proposes to plant "anniseeds, rice, cummin,
cottonwool, carroway seeds, ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke,"
and, as if this breathless list were not enough for one new land, he
adds, "and many such like that I can not now name." If we may trust
the publications of the company, various West India plants were tried
in the very first days of the colony, while the threefold peril of
death from famine, pestilence, and savage war was imminent.
[Sidenote: Timber and naval stores.]
[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co. 31 May and 23 June, 1620.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
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