Pioneers of the Old South | Page 5

being Christmas-tide of the year 1606--to go to
Virginia. Riding on the Thames, before Blackwall, are three ships,
small enough in all conscience' sake, the Susan Constant, the
Goodspeed, and the Discovery. The Admiral of this fleet is Christopher
Newport, an old seaman of Raleigh's. Bartholomew Gosnold captains
the Goodspeed, and John Ratcliffe the Discovery. The three ships have
aboard their crews and one hundred and twenty colonists, all men. The
Council in Virginia is on board, but it does not yet know itself as such,
for the names of its members have been deposited by the superior home
council in a sealed box, to be opened only on Virginia soil.
The colonists have their paper of instructions. They shall find out a safe
port in the entrance of a navigable river. They shall be prepared against
surprise and attack. They shall observe "whether the river on which you
plant doth spring out of mountains or out of lakes. If it be out of any
lake the passage to the other sea will be the more easy, and like
enough . . . you shall find some spring which runs the contrary way
toward the East India sea." They must avoid giving offense to the
"naturals" -- must choose a healthful place for their houses -- must
guard their shipping. They are to set down in black and white for the
information of the Council at home all such matters as directions and
distances, the nature of soils and forests and the various commodities
that they may find. And no man is to return from Virginia without leave
from the Council, and none is to write home any discouraging letter.
The instructions end, "Lastly and chiefly, the way to prosper and to
achieve good success is to make yourselves all of one mind for the
good of your country and your own, and to serve and fear God, the
Giver of all Goodness, for every plantation which our Heavenly Father
hath not planted shall be rooted out."
Nor did they lack verses to go by, as their enterprise itself did not lack
poetry. Michael Drayton wrote for them:--
Britons, you stay too long, Quickly aboard bestow you, And with a
merry gale, Swell your stretched sail, With vows as strong As the
winds that blow you.
Your course securely steer, West and by South forth keep; Rocks, lee

shores nor shoals, Where Eolus scowls, You need not fear,
So absolute the deep. And cheerfully at sea Success you still entice, To
get the pearl and gold, And ours to hold VIRGINIA, Earth's only
paradise! . . .
And in regions far Such heroes bring ye forth As those from whom we
came; And plant our name Under that star Not known unto our north.
See the parting upon Thames's side, Englishmen going, English kindred,
friends, and neighbors calling farewell, waving hat and scarf, standing
bare-headed in the gray winter weather! To Virginia--they are going to
Virginia! The sails are made upon the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed,
and the Discovery. The last wherry carries aboard the last adventurer.
The anchors are weighed. Down the river the wind bears the ships
toward the sea. Weather turning against them, they taste long delay in
the Downs, but at last are forth upon the Atlantic. Hourly the distance
grows between London town and the outgoing folk, between English
shores. and where the surf breaks on the pale Virginian beaches. Far
away--far away and long ago--yet the unseen, actual cables hold, and
yesterday and today stand embraced, the lips of the Thames meet the
lips of the James, and the breath of England mingles with the breath of
America.

CHAPTER II.
THE ADVENTURERS
What was this Virginia to which they were bound? In the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries the name stood for a huge stretch of littoral,
running southward from lands of long winters and fur-bearing animals
to lands of the canebrake, the fig, the magnolia, the chameleon, and the
mockingbird. The world had been circumnavigated; Drake had passed
up the western coast--and yet cartographers, the learned, and those who
took the word from the learned, strangely visualized the North
American mainland as narrow indeed. Apparently, they conceived it as
a kind of extended Central America. The huge rivers puzzled them.
There existed a notion that these might be estuaries, curling and
curving through the land from sea to sea. India--Cathay--spices and
wonders and Orient wealth--lay beyond the South Sea, and the South
Sea was but a few days' march from Hatteras or Chesapeake. The

Virginia familiar to the mind of the time lay extended, and she was
very slender. Her right hand touched the eastern ocean, and her left
hand touched the western.
Contact and experience soon modified this general notion. Wider
knowledge, political