chief mistake. The cause of the sorrows of Virginia will be more plainly seen if we turn again to the motives that propelled Englishmen to plant a colony. The chief mistake lay in the main purpose. If the founding of a state had been other than a secondary and remote end, the managers might have sent at first families and not bachelors, farmers and not gentlemen, laborers and not riff-raff. But more visionary motives dominated the action. A state was planted, but something else was mainly intended by the first projectors. The work seemed continuous, but the end in view shifted and the actors gradually changed. The only motive that held from first to last, and ran through all the rest, was the rivalry with Spain.
The rivalry with Spain. The colonies attempted by Frobisher and Gilbert were to serve as relays in the work of exploration for a sea passage to the Pacific and the search for mines, but they mark strongly the influence of the Spanish example on English projects. Ralegh was a lifelong opponent in peace and war of Spanish intrigue and aggression, and his efforts to plant colonies in the virgin land were suggested by a knowledge of the almost exhaustless treasure that flowed into Spanish coffers from America. The opportune capture of a Spanish carack bound homeward from Mexico with letters describing the wealth of Mexican mines brought the support of English merchants to Ralegh's undertaking. Imbued with the same spirit, Ralegh's governor wrote from Roanoke Island in 1585 that his colony would be a means of deliverance from the domination of Spain, "whose strength doth altogether grow from the mines of her treasure." Lane to Sydney. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury. In the perilous isolation of the little company on Roanoke Island, Lane assures himself that God will feed his men by means of ravens rather than suffer their "enemies the papists" "to triumph at the overthrow of this most Christian action." Lane to Walsingham. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury. The home-staying English of that age were spurred to colony-planting by three main motives – cupidity, patriotic feeling, and religious zeal – and all of these were provoked by emulation and jealousy of Spain. 26
II
Delusions in colony-planting. The prolonged movement for a colonial establishment, which extended over the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and almost the whole of the reign of James I, was kept alive by delusions. The ultimate ends for which colonies were proposed and planted in the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth century were none of them attained. The movable passage through North America to the Pacific was still leading explorers a merry dance when the first Jamestown emigrants sailed in 1606, and gold mines of comminuted mica, of iron pyrites, of Indian mineral paints, and of pure fable were potent attractions for some time after. The gradual increase of geographical knowledge caused the "South Sea" to take shelter in the unknown region behind the mountains, and the gold mines reported by Indians and discovered by sanguine prospectors were somehow lost in the interminable forests. In this exigency the first colony must have perished for want of support if new hopes as illusive as the old had not moved the English people to avert such a calamity.
Commodities. The production of commodities which the ungenial climate of the British Islands refused to grow was thought of from the beginning, and they became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from Virginia. For example, Carlisle's treatise, Anderson's Commerce, year 1583. It seemed grievous that England should spend her money in buying wine and silk from southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. The only maxim of political economy generally accepted in that day was that a nation is enriched by getting money from abroad and keeping it at home. The precious metals constituted the only recognized riches. Laws were made to restrain the exportation of gold and silver, and sumptuary laws to discourage the consumption of those things that must be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to raise in Great Britain the products of the Mediterranean region would have proved successful if the climate had been half as favorable to such enterprises as the government. Wine. The arguments advanced in favor of the possibility of producing wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the sunshine of royal favor for experiments made to that end, but climatic conditions were inexorable. King James busied himself to no profit in raising mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silkworms, in imitation of Henry IV, the reigning King of France, who succeeded in producing cocoons in the Tuileries but not in making silk culture profitable in the north of France. Silk. Anderson on the year 1589. Mulberries were first planted in England in 1608, two years after the sailing of the Virginia argonauts. James sent circulars to persons of influence among his subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry trees, and, in the years immediately following, the silk fever ran its course alongside the excitement about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia colony. 1609. Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in every breeze, hastened to announce at the first mention of silk culture that mulberry trees, "apt to feed silke wormes to make silke," were a "chiefe commoditie" of Virginia.
The first principles that govern colony-planting were not yet understood. It was proposed to force everything from a forlorn camp of men dwelling under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treacherous foes and in constant peril of starvation. The raising of silkworms was begun in Virginia in 1613, and before the colony was nine years old it was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a hundred times its market value. The experiment came to nothing. It could not have happened otherwise amid the miseries of those early years. The rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk moth, were made to bear the responsibility for the failure.
A new silk fever. Silk was little known in England at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, but it came into great request a few years later. Cal. Dom. S. P. James I, p. 428. In 1617 Lord Carew declares that there is "a madness for silk instead of cloth." This rage for silk led to the establishment of silk manufacturing in England; throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought to England from abroad and settled in Spitalfields, "the cheap end of its metropolis," and in Moorfields. It seemed more than ever important to produce silk in the king's dominions, in order to supply these manufacturers with material without importation from alien lands. Accordingly, a new effort was made in 1620 to secure raw silk from Virginia. The Earl of Southampton, ever eager to promote the Virginia colony, "writt into Italy, France, and Spayne" for silkworm "seed"; the king gave some from his own stock, and the expert who had charge of the king's worms was sent over to look after the business. A French book on the subject was translated to instruct the colonists. Pory's Report, Pub. Rec. Off. The first Virginia Assembly in 1619 had passed a law to promote the raising of the mulberry. To save expense, the colonists at this time, or later, planted the trees in hedgerows and mowed them with a scythe. Phil. Trans. I, 201. In 1621 orders were sent from England that none but members of the Council and the heads of hundreds should wear silk, unless they had made it themselves. Hening i, 14. The prohibition shows how general was the craze for silk clothing. Original Records of Colony of Va. The climate of Virginia proved genial enough, but the massacre of 1622, the bitter Indian conflicts that ensued in 1623, and the epidemic of the same year, following one another swiftly, were enough to annihilate a hundred feeble projects. The real doom of silk-raising, however, came from the fact that the culture of tobacco in virgin soil was incalculably more profitable and vastly less troublesome to pioneers than hatching silkworms' eggs in one's pocket or bosom, or sleeping with them in a small box under one's bolster and covering them in the warm bed on rising. Note 2. The project was blighted in the bud by adverse economic conditions – a killing frost more deadly to such enterprises than an ungenial climate. But a lesson in economic principles is one of the hardest for men to learn. Long after the colony had become prosperous, English projectors and Virginia experimenters tried again and again to supplant tobacco with silk. If we may credit the report, Virginia furnished a coronation robe of silk for Charles I, and Charles II certainly wore silk from worms hatched and fed in his Virginia dominions. One Esquire Digges brought Armenians to Virginia to attend his worms. 1655. But in the Reformed Virginia Silkworm, by Hartlib, the friend of Milton, it is announced that a young lady had discovered that silkworms would care for themselves on the trees, "to the instant wonderful enrichment of all the planters there, requiring neither cost, labour, or hindrance in any of their other employments." It is also suggested on the eager title-page of the pamphlet that "the Indians, seeing and finding that there is neither Art, Pains, or Skill in the thing," will "incontinently fall to raising silk." Comp. Va. Richly Valued, 1650, and Leah and Rachel, 1636. Not only
Two of the chapter heads to Hakluyt's Westerne Planting, printed in 2d Maine Historical Collections, ii, sufficiently indicate the views prevailing at the time:
"V. That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our pleasure for the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or two hundred saile of his subjectes Shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande.
"VI. That the mischefe that the Indian threasure wroughte in time of Charles the late Emperor, father to the Spanishe Kinge, is to be had in consideration of the Queens moste excellent Majestie, least the contynuall comynge of the like threasure from thence to his sonne worke the unrecoverable annoye of this realme, wherof already wee have had very dangerous experience."
The heading of the first chapter should be added: "I. That this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell of Christe whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde, amongst whome her Majestie ys principall."
It would be foreign to the purpose of the present work to tell the story of Spanish jealousy of Virginia, and of the diplomatic intrigues for the overthrow of the colony. See documents in Mr. Alexander Brown's Genesis of the United States. One can not but regret that Mr. Brown did not give also the original of his Spanish papers; no translation is adequate to the use of the historian.
Note 2, page 78. This method was recommended to the colonists as late as 1753 in Pullein's Culture of Silk for the Use of the American Colonies, and it had probably long prevailed on the continent of Europe.
