escape, and it was from him that the islands took the name of Somers or Summer Islands. For want of pitch, the seams of the vessels were paid with "a kind of hard lime" and some "wax cast up by the sea." Strachey's A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, etc., Purchas, iv, p. 1734, is also by one of the shipwrecked party. The Rev. Joseph Hunter has written with much learning, patient research, and fatiguing prolixity to disprove the theory that Shakespeare's Tempest was suggested by the wreck of Gates and Somers. He succeeds in showing its relation to another occurrence, but works of imagination do not usually have their origin in a single fact, and it is hard to resist the conviction that the Tempest, as we have it, contains more than one allusion to the wreck upon "the still vexed Bermoothes."
15
The beauty of the wood of certain American trees had already been noted. The communion table in Jamestown in De la Warr's time was made of black walnut. The pews were of cedar, and there were "fair, broad windows," with shutters of cedar, "to shut and open as the weather shall occasion," but there appears to have been no glass. Window glass was little used at that time, and there probably was not a glazed window in the colony. The pulpit was of cedar, and the font was "hewen hollow like a canoa." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1755.
16
Some families appear to have gone to Virginia with De la Warr. The purpose to send families of wives and children and servants is expressed in A True Declaration, which was dated 1610, but, as Mr. Alexander Brown points out, issued in December, 1609.
17
The Tragicall Relation of 1623, and the Briefe Declaration of 1624, manuscripts in the British Public Record Office, are the most important authorities for the facts given in the text. The Briefe Declaration is rather the fuller, but the earlier paper supplies some particulars. These two formal documents are not from the same hand, and the slight difference between them in details tends rather to confirm than to shake the reader's confidence in their testimony. The names of Sir Francis Wyatt, George Sandys, and other prominent colonists appended to the Tragicall Relation are a guarantee of its good faith. It is curious to note that Raphe Hamor, whose relation is so favorable to Dale, and who held the post of secretary under Dale and that of vice-admiral under Argall, signs this paper, which is a severe impeachment of Sir Thomas Smythe's administration of the affairs of the company before 1619. Hamor's True Discourse has heretofore usually been taken as an authority, but after reading the documents in the Public Record Office one is compelled to believe that Hamor, or perhaps one might say Dale, under cover of his secretary, misrepresents the state of the colony, and makes promises to those who may emigrate that it was hardly possible to carry out. The Discourse of the old Virginia Company (Colonial Papers, iii, 40), and other papers in the Public Record Office relating to the strife between the company and the Court, throw light on this period. The half-apologies for Dale's cruelties in Smith's Generall Historie, book iv, prove their existence. "For amongst them, so hardened in evil," says this writer, "the fear of a cruel, painful, and unusual death more restrains them than death itself." See also Hamor, p. 27. There is a letter from Whitaker appended to Hamor's Discourse. Though apparently an incidental letter, it bears marks of having been procured for purposes of vindication. Its defensive tone goes to show that the character of Dale's tyranny had transpired in England. Whitaker praises Sir Thomas Dale mainly for being religious and valiant, and says that he had "great knowledge in Divinity and good conscience in all his doings; both which bee rare in a martiall man." In Whitaker's Good Newes of Virginia, 1613, there is no praise of Sir Thomas Dale. That Dale was famous for his severity before he left Europe is manifest from the phrase used by the Jesuit Biard, "Le Mareschal Thomas Deel que vous auez ouy estre fort aspre en ses humeurs." Relation, chap. xxxiii. See in this and the preceding chapter the whole account of his savage temper toward his French prisoners, etc. It has been the custom of our older writers to speak of Dale's administration only in praise, but careful weighing of the original authorities shows that Dale was utterly pitiless in the cruelty of his discipline and unjust in his detention of the old planters, and that when he left the colony he was more generally execrated than any other 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.
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."
18
The Discourse of the Old Virginia Company, an exceedingly interesting manuscript in the British Record Office, makes it appear that as late as 1618 the colonists had no thought of staying in Virginia, and even the directors at home were interested only in making money out of tobacco and sassafras, with little or no care to plant a permanent colony. Some allowance must be made, perhaps, for the
19
We may trust Hamor's True Discourse, p. 17, for some of these details, though the book generally is discredited by the account given in the Tragicall Relation, which Hamor himself signed with others in 1623. A comparison of all these authorities makes it evident that only eighty-one who were ranked as "farmers" derived any benefit from Dale's three-acre division, while about two hundred others were probably left in unmitigated bondage.
20
"And to protect Captain Argall from being called to an account for his government under shew of a new plantation to be set up in Virginia by Captain Argall and his partners, whereof the said earl (Warwick) hath since appeared to be one (which yet to this day hath had no beginning), there was procured a patent to the said captain and his associates for the said new plantation; whereby he and his Company, their heirs and assigns (save only in time of defence by war), were exempted from all power, authority, and jurisdiction to be from hence derived or there established, that so he might reign there as great and absolute master, without law or controulment, and without the fear of ever being called to any future reckoning… Whatsoever was remaining at that time in the colony belonging to the public … he converted it in a manner wholly to his own private use and possession, the very public lands cultivated, the Company's tenants and servants, their rents, corn and tributes of corn, their kine and other cattle, their stores
