containing the orders from the King.

This box designated

as councillors the three sea - captains, with Edward Maria Wingfield (president), John Smith, John Martin, and John Kendall. Smith, however, because of some suspicion of mutinous bearing on the voyage, was excluded from office until June 10th.

It is possible that something of personal feeling may have entered into Smith's low opinion of these first colonists. He says of them, in his "Generall Historie:"

"Being for most part of such tender educations, and small experience in Martiall accidents, because they found not English Cities, nor such fair houses, downe pillowes, tavernes, and ale-houses in euery breathing place, neither such plentie of gold and silver and dissolute libertie as they expected, had little or no care of anything but to pamper their bellies, to fly away with our Pinnaces, or procure their meanes to returne for England. For the Country was to them a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell, and their reports here and their actions there according."

They planted a cross at Fort Henry, naming it for the Prince of Wales, and they named the opposite cape for his brother, the Duke of York, afterwards Charles I. The next day they named another spot Point Comfort. Ascending the Powhatan River, called by them the James, they landed at a peninsula about fifty miles from the mouth, and resolved to build their town there. They went to work, sending Smith and others farther up the river to explore, and repelling the first Indian attack during their absence. In June Newport sailed for England, leaving three months' provisions for the colonists. Again the experiment was to be tried; again Englishmen found themselves alone in the New World. Captain John Smith, always graphic, has left a vivid picture of the discomforts of that early time:

"When I first went to Virginia, I well remember, wee did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to three or foure trees to shadow us from the Sunne, our walls were rales of wood, our seats unhewed trees, till we cut plankes, our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighboring trees, in foule weather we shifted into an old rotten tent, for we had few better, and this came by the way of adventure for new; this was our Church, till wee built a homely thing like

a barne, set upon Cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge, and earth, so was also the walls the best of our houses of the like curiosity, but the most part farre much worse workmanship, that could neither well defend wind nor raine, yet wee had daily Common Prayer morning and evening, every Sunday two Sermons, and every three moneths the holy Communion, till our Minister died, but our Prayers daily, with an Homily on Sundaies we continued two or three yeares after till more Preachers came, and surely God did most mercifully heare us, till the continuall inundations of mistaking directions, factions, and numbers of unprovided Libertines neere consumed us all, as the Israelites in the wildernesse."

The place was unhealthy; they found no gold; the savages were hostile; by September one-half of their own number

had died, including Gosnold, and their provisions. were almost exhausted. The council was reduced to three-Ratcliffe, Smith, and Martin. Later still their settlement was burned, and their food reduced to meal and water; the intrepid leadership of Smith alone saved them; and for years the colony struggled, as did the Plymouth colony a dozen years later, for mere existence. Its materials from the beginning were strangely put together-one mason, one blacksmith, four carpenters, fifty-two gentlemen, and a barber! The "first supply" in 1608 brought one hundred and twenty

more, but not in much better combination-thirty-three gentle

men, twenty-one laborers, six tailors, with apothecaries, perfumers, and goldsmiths, but still only one mechanic of the right sort. The "second supply," in the same year, brought seventy persons, including "eight Dutchmen and Poles," and, best of all, two women- Mistress Forrest and Anne Burras her maid -joined the company; and soon after, the maid was married. to John Laydon, "which was the first marriage," Smith triumphantly says, "we had in Virginia." Smith had by this time become President of the Council, and was at last its only member. They had received supplies from England, but the continuance of these was very uncertain. Newport on his return trip had foolishly pledged himself not to return without a lump of gold, the discovery of a passage to the North Sea, some of the settlers of the lost colony, or a freight worth £2000. Unless this pledge was fulfilled, the colony was to be abandoned to its own resources; and fulfilled it never was.

Early in October, 1609, Smith sailed for England, leaving nearly five hundred settlers, with horses, cattle, cannon, fishing nets, and provisions. He never returned, though he made a successful voyage to New England. He apparently went away under a cloud, but with him went the fortunes of the colony. There followed a period known as "the starving time," which ended in the abandonment of the settlement, with its fifty or sixty houses and its defence of palisades. The colonists were met as they descended the river, in April, 1610, by Lord Delaware (or De la Warr) as he ascended with another party of settlers; and thenceforward the Virginia settlement was secure. Yet it did not grow strong; it was languishing in 1618, and it had an accession of doubtful benefit in 1619, when we read in Smith's "Generall Historie," as the statement of John Rolfe, "About the last of August came in a Dutch man-ofwarre, and sold us twenty Negars." In 1621 came a more desirable accession, through the shipment by the company of respectable young women" for wives of those colonists who

would pay the cost of transportation-at first one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, afterwards one hundred and fifty. In July, 1620, the colony was four thousand strong, and shipped to England forty thousand pounds of tobacco. This was raised with the aid of many bound apprentices-boys and girls picked up in the streets of London and sent out-and of many "disorderly persons" sent by order of the King. But in the year 1624 only 1275 colonists were left in Virginia.

The colony would have been more prosperous, Captain John Smith thought, without the tobacco. "Out of the relicks of our miseries," he says, "time and experience had brought that country to a great happinesse, had they not so

much doted on their tobacco, on whose firmest foundations there is small stability, there being so many good commodities beside." But their chief trouble, as he wrote from London in 1631-the last year of his life -was always in the uncertain sway of the Virginia Company in London: “Their purses and lives were subject to some few here in London, who were never there, that consumed all in Arguments, Projects, Conclusions, altering everything yearely, as they altered opinions, till they had consumed more than 200,000 and neere 8000 men's lives."

Another voyager, also English, but in Dutch employ, following Smith across the ocean, rivalled his fame. It was a wondrous period, certainly, when a continent lay unexplored before civilized men, and a daring navigator could at a single voyage add to the map a whole mighty river, whereas now it sometimes takes many lives to establish a few additional facts as to the minor sources of some well-known stream. The name of Henry Hudson is as indelibly associated with the river he discovered as is the Rhine with the feudal castles that make its summits picturesque. The difference is that after the last stone of the last ruin has crumbled, the name of the great navigator will be as permanent as now. While Hudson was exploring what he called The Great North River of New Netherlands," Champlain was within a few miles of him, on the lake that was to bear his name. Both he and Hudson were fortunate enough to have names sufficiently characteristic to keep their places on the map, while "Smith's Isles" soon yielded to the yet vaguer appellation of the "Isles of Shoals."

It has been well pointed out in the most recent sketch of the Dutch in America-that of Mr. Fernow, in the "Narrative and Critical History of America," edited by Justin Winsor that the early Dutch explorations did not proceed from the love of discovery or of gold-seeking, but were an