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Title: Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8)

Editor: Justin Winsor

Release date: January 21, 2016 [eBook #50987]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Giovanni Fini, Dianna Adair, Bryan Ness, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (https://archive.org/details/americana)

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and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive/American Libraries
(https://archive.org/details/americana)

 

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English Explorations
AND
Settlements
IN
North America
1497-1689

NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL

HISTORY OF AMERICA

EDITED

By JUSTIN WINSOR

LIBRARIAN OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

VOL. III

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge


[vi]

Copyright, 1884,
By JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved.


[vii]

CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

[The English arms on the title are copied from the Molineaux map, dated 1600.]

PAGE
CHAPTER I.
The Voyages of the Cabots. Charles Deane 1
Illustration: Sebastian Cabot, 5.
Autographs: Henry VII., 1; Henry VIII., 4; Edward VI., 6; Queen Mary, 7.
Critical Essay 7
Illustrations: La Cosa map (1500), phototype, 8, 8; Ruysch’s map (1508), 9; Orontius Fine’s map (1531), 11; Stobnicza’s map (1512), 13; Page of Peter Martyr in fac-simile, 15; Thorne’s map (1527), 17; Sebastian Cabot’s map (1544), 22; Lok’s map (1582), 40; Hakluyt-Martyr map (1587), 42; Portuguese Portolano (1514-1520), 56.
CHAPTER II.
Hawkins and Drake. Edward E. Hale 59
Illustrations: John Hawkins, 61; Zaltieri’s map (1566), 67; Furlano’s map (1574), 68.
Autographs: John Hawkins, 61; Francis Drake, 65.
Critical Essay on Drake’s Bay 74
Illustrations: Modern map of California coast, 74; Viscaino’s map (1602), 75; Dudley’s map (1646), 76, 77; Jeffreys’ sketch-map (1753), 77.
Notes on the Sources of Information. The Editor 78
Illustrations: Hondius’s map, 79; Portus Novæ Albionis, 80; Molineaux’s map (1600), 80; Sir Francis Drake, 81, 84; Thomas Cavendish, 83.
CHAPTER III.[viii]
Explorations to the North-West. Charles C. Smith 85
Illustrations: Martin Frobisher, 87; Molineaux globe (1592), 90; Molineaux map (1600), 91; Sir Thomas Smith, 94; James’s map of Hudson Bay (1632), 96.
Autographs: Martin Frobisher, 87; John Davis, 89; George Waymouth, 91; William Baffin, 94.
Critical Essay 97
Illustration: Luke Fox’s map of Baffin’s Bay (1635), 98.
The Zeno Influence on Early Cartography; Frobisher’s and Hudson’s Voyages. The Editor 100
Illustrations: The Zeno map (circa 1400), 100; map in Wolfe’s Linschoten (1598), 101; Beste’s map (1578), 102; Frobisher’s Strait, 103.
CHAPTER IV.
Sir Walter Ralegh: Settlements at Roanoke and Voyages to Guiana. William Wirt Henry 105
Autographs: Walter Ralegh, 105; Queen Elizabeth, 106; Ralph Lane, 110.
Critical Essay 121
Illustrations: White’s map in Hariot (1587), 124; De Laet’s map (1630), 125.
Autograph: Francis Bacon, 121.
CHAPTER V.
Virginia, 1606-1689. Robert A. Brock 127
Illustrations: Jamestown, 130; George Percy, 134; Seal of the Virginia Company, 140; Lord Delaware, 142.
Autographs: King James, 127; Delaware, 133; Thomas Gates, 133; George Percy, 134; George Calvert, 146; William Berkeley, 147.
Critical Essay 153
Autographs: William Strachey, 156; Delaware, 156; John Harvey, 156; John West, 164.
Notes on the Maps of Virginia, etc. The Editor 167
Illustration: Smith’s map of Virginia or the Chesapeake, phototype, 167.
CHAPTER VI.
Norumbega and its English Explorers. Benjamin F. De Costa 169
Illustration: Map of Ancient Pemaquid, 177.
Autographs: J. Popham, 175; Ferd. Gorges, 175.
Critical Essay[ix] 184
Illustrations: Modern map of Coast of Maine, 190; Henri II. map (1543), 195; Hood’s map (1592), 197; Smith’s map of New England (1616), 198.
Autographs: J. Popham, 175; Ferd. Gorges, 175.
Earliest English Publications on America, and other Notes. The Editor 199
Illustrations: Title of Eden’s Münster, 200; Münster’s map (1532), 201, (1540), 201; Title of Stultifera Nauis (1570), 202; Gilbert’s map (1576), 203; Linschoten, 206; John G. Kohl, 209; Lenox globe (1510-1512), 212; Extract from Molineaux globe (1592), 213; Frankfort globe (1515), 215; Molineaux map (1600), 216.
Autographs: Humphrey Gilbert, 203; Richard Hakluyt, 204; Jul. Cæsar, 205; Ro. Cecyll, 206; John Smith, 211.
CHAPTER VII.
The Religious Element in the Settlement of New England.—Puritans and Separatists in England. George E. Ellis 219
Critical Essay 244
CHAPTER VIII.
The Pilgrim Church and Plymouth Colony. Franklin B. Dexter 257
Illustrations: Site of Scrooby Manor-House, 258; Map of Scrooby and Austerfield, 259; Austerfield church, 260; Record of William Bradford’s baptism, 260; Robinson’s House in Leyden, 262; Plan of Leyden, 263; Map of Cape Cod Harbor, 270; Map of Plymouth Harbor, 272; Historic Swords, 274; Governor Edward Winslow, 277; Pilgrim relics, 279; Governor Josiah Winslow, 282.
Autographs: John Smyth, 257; John Robinson, 259; Robert Browne, 261; Francis Johnson, 261; Signatures of Mayflower Pilgrims (William Bradford, Myles Standish, William Brewster, John Alden, John Howland, Edward Winslow, George Soule, Francis Eaton, Isaac Allerton, Samuel Fuller, Peregrine White, Resolved White, John Cooke), 268; Dorothy May, 268; William Bradford, 268; Thomas Cushman, 271; Alexander Standish, 273; James Cole, senior, 273; Signers of the Patent,1621 (Hamilton, Lenox, Warwick, Sheffield, Ferdinando Gorges), 275; Governors of Plymouth Colony (William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Thomas Prence, Thomas Hinckley, Josiah Winslow), 278.
Critical Essay 283
Illustrations: Extract from Bradford’s History, 289; First page, Plymouth Records, 292.
Autograph: Nathaniel Morton, 291.
CHAPTER IX.
New England. Charles Deane 295
Illustrations: Dudley’s map of New England (1646), 303; Alexander’s map (1624), 306; John Wilson, 313; Dr. John Clark, 315; John Endicott, 317; Hingham meeting-house, 319; Joseph Dudley, 320; John Winthrop of Connecticut, 331; John Davenport, 332; Map of Connecticut River (1666), 333.
Autographs[x]: William Blaxton, 311; Samuel Maverick, 311; Thomas Walford, 311; Mathew Cradock, 312; John Wilson, 313; Quaker autographs, 314; John Endicott, 317; Colonial ministers of 1690 (Charles Morton, James Allen, Michael Wigglesworth, Joshua Moody, Samuel Willard, Cotton Mather, Nehemiah Walter), 319; Joseph Dudley, 320; Abraham Shurt, 321; Thomas Danforth, 326; Thomas Hooker, 330; John Haynes, 331; John Winthrop, the younger, 331; John Allyn, 335; William Coddington, 336; Samuel Gorton, 336; Narragansett proprietors (Simon Bradstreet, Daniel Denison, Thomas Willett, Jno. Paine, Edward Hutchinson, Amos Richison, John Alcocke, George Denison, William Hudson), 338; Roger Williams, 339.
Critical Essay 340
Illustrations: Seal of the Council for New England, 342; Cotton Mather, 345; Ship of the seventeenth century, 347; Fac-simile of a page of Thomas Lechford’s Plaine Dealing, 352; James Savage’s manuscript note on Lechford, 353; Beginning of Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography, 355.
Autographs: Leaders in Pequot war (John Mason, Israel Stoughton, Lion Gardiner), 348; Jonathan Brewster, 349; Nathaniel Ward, 350; Signatures connected with the Indian Bible (Robert Boyle, Peter Bulkley, William Stoughton, Joseph Dudley, Thomas Hinckley, John Cotton, John Eliot, James Printer), 356; Edward Johnson, 358; John Norton, 358; Edward Burrough, 359; Robert Pike, 359; Benjamin Church, 361; Thomas Church, 361; William Hubbard, 362; Walter Neale, 363; Ferdinando Gorges, 364; John Mason, 364; Roger Goode, 364; Thomas Gorges, 364; Connecticut secretaries (John Steel, Edward Hopkins, Thomas Welles, John Cullick, Daniel Clark, John Allyn), 374.
Bibliographical Notes; Early Maps of New England. The Editor 380
Illustrations: Maps of New England (1650), 382, (1680), 383.
Autograph: John Carter Brown, 381.
CHAPTER X.
The English in New York. John Austin Stevens 385
Illustrations: Sir Edmund Andros, 402; Great Seal of Andros, 410.
Autographs: Commissioners (Richard Nicolls, Sir Robert Carr, George Cartwright, Samuel Maverick), 388; Francis Lovelace, 395; Thomas Dongan, 404; Jacob Leisler, 411.
Critical Essay 411
Notes. The Editor 414
Illustrations: View of New York (1673), 416; View of The Strand, 417; Plan of New York, 418; Stadthuys (1679), 419.
Autograph: Thomas Willett, 414.
CHAPTER XI.
The English in East and West Jersey, 1664-1689. William A. Whitehead 421
Autographs: King James, 421; Richard Nicoll, 421; Robert Carr, 422; John Berkeley, 422; G. Carteret, 423; Philip Carteret, 424; James Bollen, 428; Edward Byllynge, 430; Gawen Laurie, 430; Nicolas Lucas, 430; Edmond Warner, 430; R. Barclay, 436; Earl of Perth, 439.
Critical Essay[xi] 449
Note. The Editor 455
Illustration: Sanson’s map (1656), 456.
Note on New Albion. Gregory B. Keen 457
Illustrations: Insignia of the Albion knights, 462; Farrer map of Virginia (1651), 465.
Autograph: Robert Evelin, 458.
CHAPTER XII.
The Founding of Pennsylvania. Frederick D. Stone 469
Illustrations: George Fox, 470; William Penn, 474; Letitia Cottage, 483; Seal and Signatures to Frame of Government, 484; Slate-roof House, 492.
Autographs: William Penn, 474; Thomas Wynne, 486; Charles Mason, 489; Jeremiah Dixon, 489; Thomas Lloyd, 494.
Critical Essay 495
Illustrations: Title of Some Account, etc., 496; Title of Frame of Government, 497; Receipt and Seal of Free Society of Traders, 498; Gabriel Thomas’s map (1698), 501; Seal of Pennsylvania, 511; Section of Holme’s map of Pennsylvania, 516.
CHAPTER XIII.
The English in Maryland, 1632-1691. William T. Brantly 517
Illustrations: George, first Lord Baltimore, 518; Baltimore arms, 520; Map of Maryland (1635), 525; Endorsement of Toleration Act, 535; Baltimore coins, 543; Cecil, second Lord Baltimore, 546.
Autographs: George, first Lord Baltimore, 518; Leonard Calvert, 524; Thomas Cornwallis, 524; John Lewger, 528; Thomas Greene, 533; Margaret Brent, 533; William Stone, 534; Josias Fendall, 540; Charles Calvert, 542.
Critical Essay 553
Autograph: Thomas Yong, 558.

INDEX 563

[xii]
[1]

NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL

HISTORY OF AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

THE VOYAGES OF THE CABOTS.

BY CHARLES DEANE, LL. D.

Vice-President, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“WE derive our rights in America,” says Edmund Burke, in his Account of the European Settlements in America, “from the discovery of Sebastian Cabot, who first made the Northern Continent in 1497. The fact is sufficiently certain to establish a right to our settlements in North America.” If this distinguished writer and statesman had substituted the name of John Cabot for that of Sebastian, he would have stated the truth.

SIGN MANUAL OF HENRY VII.

John Cabot, as his name is known to English readers, or Zuan Caboto, as it is called in the Venetian dialect, the discoverer of North America, was born, probably, in Genoa or its neighborhood. His name first appears in the archives of Venice, where is a record, under the date of March 28, 1476, of his naturalization as a citizen of Venice, after the usual residence of fifteen years. He pursued successfully the study of cosmography and the practice of navigation, and at one time visited Arabia, where, at Mecca, he saw the caravans which came thither, and was told that the spices they brought were received from other hands, and that they came originally from the remotest countries of the east. Accepting the new views as to “the roundness of the earth,” as Columbus had done, he was quite disposed to put them to a practical test. With his wife, who was a Venetian woman, and his three sons, he removed to England, and took up his residence at the maritime city of Bristol. The time at which this removal took place is uncertain. In the year 1495 he laid his proposals before the king, Henry VII., who on the 5th of March, 1495/6, granted to him and his three sons, their heirs and[2] assigns a patent for the discovery of unknown lands in the eastern, western, or northern seas, with the right to occupy such territories, and to have exclusive commerce with them, paying to the King one fifth part of all the profits, and to return to the port of Bristol. The enterprise was to be “at their own proper cost and charge.” In the early part of May in the following year, 1497, Cabot set sail from Bristol with one small vessel and eighteen persons, principally of Bristol, accompanied, perhaps, by his son Sebastian; and, after sailing seven hundred leagues, discovered land on the 24th of June, which he supposed was “in the territory of the Grand Cham.” The legend, “prima tierra vista,” was inscribed on a map attributed to Sebastian Cabot, composed at a later period, at the head of the delineation of the island of Cape Breton. On the spot where he landed he planted a large cross, with the flags of England and of St. Mark, and took possession for the King of England. If the statement be true that he coasted three hundred leagues, he may have made a periplus of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, returning home through the Straits of Belle Isle. On his return he saw two islands on the starboard, but for want of provisions did not stop to examine them. He saw no human beings, but he brought home certain implements; and from these and other indications he believed that the country was inhabited. He returned in the early part of August, having been absent about three months. The discovery which he reported, and of which he made and exhibited a map and a solid globe, created a great sensation in England. The King gave him money, and also executed an agreement to pay him an annual pension, charged upon the revenues of the port of Bristol. He dressed in silk, and was called, or called himself, “the Great Admiral.” Preparations were made for another and a larger expedition, evidently for the purpose of colonization, and hopes were cherished of further important discoveries; for Cabot believed that by starting from the place already found, and coasting toward the equinoctial, he should discover the island of Cipango, the land of jewels and spices, by which they hoped to make in London a greater warehouse of spices than existed in Alexandria. His companions told marvellous stories about the abundance of fish in the waters of that coast, which might foster an enterprise that would wholly supersede the fisheries of Iceland. On the 3d of February 1497/8 the King granted to John Cabot (the sons are not named) a license to take up six ships, and to enlist as many men as should be willing to go on the new expedition. He set sail, says Hakluyt, quoting Fabian, in the beginning of May, with, it is supposed, three hundred men, and accompanied by his son Sebastian. One of the vessels put back to Ireland in distress, but the others continued on their voyage. This is the last we hear of John Cabot. His maps are lost. It is believed that Juan de la Cosa, the Spanish pilot, who in the year 1500 made a map of the Spanish and English discoveries in the New World, made use of maps of the Cabots now lost.

Sebastian Cabot, the second son of John Cabot, was born in Venice,[3] probably about the year 1473. He was early devoted to the study of cosmography, in which science his father had become a proficient, and Sebastian was largely imbued with the same spirit of enterprise; and on the removal of his father with his family to England, he lived with them at Bristol. His name first occurs in the letters patent of Henry VII., dated March 5, 1495/6, issued to John Cabot and his three sons, Lewis, Sebastian, and Sancius, and to their heirs and assigns, authorizing them to discover unknown lands. There is some reason to believe that he accompanied his father in the expedition, already mentioned, on which the first discovery of North America was made; but in none of the contemporary documents which have recently come to light respecting this voyage is Sebastian’s name mentioned as connected with it. A second expedition, as already stated, followed, and John Cabot is distinctly named as having sailed with it as its commander; but thenceforward he passes out of sight. Sebastian Cabot, without doubt, accompanied the expedition. No contemporary account of it was written, or at least published, and for the incidents of the voyage we are mainly indebted to the reports of others written at a later period, and derived originally from conversations with Sebastian Cabot himself; in all of which the father’s name, except incidentally, as having taken Sebastian to England when he was very young, is not mentioned. In these several reports but one voyage is spoken of, and that, apparently, the voyage on which the discovery of North America was made; but circumstances are narrated in them which could have taken place only on the second or a later voyage.

With a company of three hundred men, the little fleet steered its course in the direction of the northwest in search of the land of Cathay. They came to a coast running to the north, which they followed to a great distance, where they found, in the month of July, large bodies of ice floating in the water, and almost continual daylight. Failing to find the passage sought around this formidable headland, they turned their prows and, as one account says, sought refreshment at Baccalaos. Thence, coasting southwards, they ran down to about the latitude of Gibraltar, or 36° N., still in search of a passage to India, when, their provisions failing, they returned to England.

If the views expressed by John Cabot, on his return from his first voyage, had been seriously cherished, it seems strange that this expedition did not, at first, on arriving at the coast, pursue the more southerly direction, where he was confident lay the land of jewels and spices.

They landed in several places, saw the natives dressed in skins of beasts, and making use of copper. They found the fish in such great abundance that the progress of the ships was sometimes impeded. The bears, which were in great plenty, caught the fish for food,—plunging into the water, fastening their claws into them, and dragging them to the shore. The expedition was expected back by September, but it had not returned by the last of October.

[4]

There is some evidence that Sebastian Cabot, at a later period, sailed on a voyage of discovery from England in company with Sir Thomas Pert, or Spert, but which, on account of the cowardice of his companion, “took none effect.” But the enterprise is involved in doubt and obscurity.

AUTOGRAPH OF HENRY VIII.

In 1512, after the death of Henry VII., and when Henry VIII. had been three years on the throne, Sebastian Cabot entered into the service of Ferdinand, King of Spain, arriving at Seville in September of that year, where he took up his residence; and on the 20th of October was appointed “Capitan de Mar,” with an annual salary of fifty thousand maravedis.[1] Preparations for a voyage of discovery were now made, and Cabot was to depart in March, 1516, but the death of Ferdinand prevented his sailing. On the 5th of February, 1518, he was named, by Charles V., “Piloto Mayor y Exâminadór de Pilotos,” as successor of Juan de Solis, who was killed at La Plata in 1516. This office gave him an additional salary of fifty thousand maravedis; and it was soon afterwards decreed that no pilots should leave Spain for the Indies without being examined and approved by him. In 1524 he attended, not as a member but as an expert, the celebrated junta at Badajoz, which met to decide the important question of the longitude of the Moluccas,—whether they were on the Spanish or the Portuguese side of the line of demarcation which followed, by papal consent in 1494, a meridian of longitude, making a fixed division of the globe, so far as yet undefined, between Spain and Portugal. On the second day of the session, April 15, he and two others delivered an opinion on the questions involved.

In the following year an expedition to the Moluccas was projected, and under an agreement with the Emperor, executed at Madrid on the 4th of March, Sebastian Cabot was appointed its commander with the title of Captain-General. The sailing of the expedition was delayed by the intrigues of the Portuguese. In the mean time his wife, Catalina Medrano, who is again mentioned with her children a few years later, received by a royal order fifty thousand maravedis as a gratificacion. On April 3, 1526, the armada sailed from St. Lucar for the Spice Islands, intending to pass through the Straits of Magellan. It was delayed from point to point, and did not arrive on the coast until the following year, when Cabot entered the La Plata River. A feeling of disloyalty to their commander, the seeds of which had been sown from the beginning, broke out in open mutiny. He had, moreover, lost one of his vessels off the coast of Brazil. He therefore determined to proceed no farther at present, to send to the Emperor a report of the condition of affairs, and in the mean time to explore the La[5] Plata River, which had been penetrated by De Solis in 1515. He remained in that country for several years, and returned in July or August, 1530. The details of this expedition are described in another volume of this work and by another hand.

SEBASTIAN CABOT.

[This cut follows a photograph taken from the Chapman copy of the original. The original was engraved when owned by Charles J. Harford, Esq., for Seyer’s Memoirs of Bristol, 1824, vol. ii. p. 208, and a photo-reduction of that engraving appears in Nicholl’s Life of Sebastian Cabot. Other engravings have appeared in Sparks’s Amer. Biog., vol. ix. etc. See Critical Essay.—Ed.]

[6]

As might have been expected, this enterprise was regarded at home as a failure, and Cabot had made many enemies in the exercise of his legitimate authority in quelling the mutinies which had from time to time broken out among his men. Complaints were made against him on his return. Several families of those of his companions who were killed in the expedition brought suits against him, and he was arrested and imprisoned, but was liberated on bail. Public charges for misconduct in the affairs of La Plata were preferred against him; and the Council of the Indies, by an order dated from Medina del Campo, Feb. 1, 1532, condemned him to a banishment of two years to Oran, in Africa. I have seen no evidence to show that this sentence was carried into execution. Cabot, who on his return laid before the Emperor Charles V. his final report on the expedition, appears to have fully justified himself in that monarch’s esteem; for he soon resumed his duties as Pilot Major, an office which he retained till his final return to England.

Cabot made maps and globes during his residence in Spain; and a large mappe monde bearing date 1544, engraved on copper, and attributed to him, was found in Germany in 1843, and is now deposited in the National Library in Paris. This map has been the subject of much discussion. While in the employ of the Emperor, Cabot offered his services to his native country, Venice, but was unable to carry his purpose into effect. He was at last desirous of returning to England, and the Privy Council, on Oct. 9, 1547, issued a warrant for his transportation from Spain “to serve and inhabit in England.” He came over to England in that or the following year, and on Jan. 6, 1548/9, the King granted him a pension of £166 13s. 4d., to date from St. Michael’s Day preceding (September 29), “in consideration of the good and acceptable service done and to be done” by him. In 1550 the Emperor, through his ambassador in England, demanded his return to Spain, saying that Cabot was his Pilot Major under large pay, and was much needed by him,—that “he could not stand the king in any great stead, seeing he had but small practice in those seas;” but Cabot declined to return. In that same year, June 4, the King renewed to him the patent of 1495/6, and in March, 1551, gave him £200 as a special reward.

AUTOGRAPH OF EDWARD VI. OF ENGLAND.

The discovery of a passage to China by the northwest having been deemed impracticable, a company of merchants was formed in 1553 to prosecute a route by the northeast, and Cabot was made its governor. He drew up the instructions for its management, and the expedition under Willoughby was sent out, the results of which are well known. China was not reached, but a trade with Muscovy was opened through Archangel. After the accession of Mary to the Crown of England, the Emperor made another unsuccessful demand for Cabot’s return to Spain. On Feb. 6, 1555/6, what is known as the Muscovy Company was chartered, and Cabot became its[7] governor. Among the last notices preserved of this venerable man is an account, by a quaint old chronicler, of his presence at Gravesend, April 27, 1556, on board the pinnace, the “Serchthrift,” then destined for a voyage of discovery to the northeast. It is related that after Sebastian Cabot, “and divers gentlemen and gentlewomen” had “viewed our pinnace, and tasted of such cheer as we could make them aboard, they went on shore, giving to our mariners right liberal rewards; and the good old Gentleman, Master Cabota, gave to the poor most liberal alms, wishing them to pray for the good fortune and prosperous success of the ‘Serchthrift,’ our pinnace. And then at the sign of the ‘Christopher,’ he and his friends banqueted, and made me and them that were in the company great cheer; and for very joy that he had to see the towardness of our intended discovery he entered into the dance himself, amongst the rest of the young and lusty company,—which being ended, he and his friends departed most gently commending us to the governance of Almighty God.”

AUTOGRAPH OF QUEEN MARY.

Cabot’s pension, granted by the late King, was renewed to him by Queen Mary Nov. 27, 1555; but on May 27, 1557, he resigned it, and two days later a new grant was issued to him and William Worthington, jointly, of the same amount, by which he was deprived of one half his pay. This is the last official notice of Sebastian Cabot. He probably died soon afterwards, and in London. Richard Eden, the translator and compiler, attended him in his last moments, and “beckons us, with something of awe, to see him die.” He gives a touching account of the feeble and broken utterances of the dying man. Though no monument or gravestone marks his place of burial, which is unknown, his portrait is preserved, as shown on a preceding page.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

UNLIKE the enterprises of Columbus, Vespucius, and many other navigators who wrote accounts of their voyages and discoveries at the time of their occurrence, which by the aid of the press were published to the world, the exploits of the Cabots were unchronicled. Although the fact of their voyages had been reported by jealous and watchful liegers at the English Court to the principal cabinets of the Continent, and the map of their discoveries had been made known, and this had had its influence in leading other expeditions to the northern shores of North America, the historical literature relating to the discovery of America, as preserved in print, is, for nearly twenty years after the events took place, silent as to the enterprises and even the names of the Cabots. Scarcely anything has come down to us directly from these navigators themselves, and for what we know we have hitherto been chiefly indebted to the uncertain reports, in foreign languages, of conversations originally held with Sebastian Cabot many years afterwards, and sometimes related at second and third hand. Even the year in which[8] the voyage of discovery was made was usually wrongly stated, when stated at all, and for more than two hundred years succeeding these events there was no mention made of more than one voyage.[2]

La Cosa Map. 1500. - Left side

La Cosa Map. 1500. - Right side

RUYSCH’S MAP, 1508.

[9]

I now ask the reader to follow me down through the sixteenth century, if no further, and examine what notices of the Cabots and their voyages we can find in the historical literature of this period; and then to examine what has recently come to light.

[10]

John Cabot had died when his son Sebastian in 1512, three years after the death of Henry VII., left England and entered into the service of the King of Spain, who gave him the title of Captain, and a liberal allowance, directing that he should reside at Seville to await orders. He there became an intimate friend of the famous Peter Martyr, the author of the Decades of the New World, or De Orbe Novo, and a volume of letters entitled Opus Epistolarum, etc., a writer too well known to need further introduction here. Through Martyr, for the first time, there was printed in 1516 an account of the voyage of the Cabots.

[11]

PART OF ORONTIUS FINE’S GLOBE OF 1531, REDUCED TO MERCATOR’S PROJECTION.

[12]

He published in that year at Alcala (Complutum), in Spain, the first three of his Decades, addressed to Pope Leo X., the second and third of which Decades had been written in 1514 and 1515.[3] In the sixth chapter of the third Decade—of which we give later a page in slightly reduced fac-simile—is the following:—

“These northern shores have been searched by one Sebastian Cabot, a Venetian born, whom, being but in manner an infant, his parents carried with them into England, having occasion to resort thither for trade of merchandise, as is the manner of the Venetians to leave no part of the world unsearched to obtain riches. He therefore furnished two ships in England at his own charges, and first with three hundred men directed his course so far towards the North Pole that even in the month of July he found monstrous heaps of ice swimming on the sea, and in manner continual daylight; yet saw he the land in that tract free from ice, which had been molten. Wherefore he was enforced to turn his sails and follow the west; so coasting still by the shore that he was thereby brought so far into the south, by reason of the land bending so much southwards that it was there almost equal in latitude with the sea Fretum Herculeum. He sailed so far towards the west that he had the island of Cuba on his left hand in manner in the same degree of longitude. As he travelled by the coasts of this great land (which he named Baccalaos) he saith that he found the like course of the waters toward the great west, but the same to run more softly and gently than the swift waters which the Spaniards found in their navigation southward.... Sebastian Cabot himself named these lands Baccalaos, because that in the seas thereabout he found so great multitudes of certain big fishes much like unto tunnies (which the inhabitants call baccallaos)[4] that they sometimes staied his ships. He also found the people of those regions covered with beasts’ skins, yet not without the use of reason. He also saith there is great plenty of bears in those regions which use to eat fish; for plunging themselves into the water, where they perceive a[14] multitude of these fishes to lie, they fasten their claws in their scales, and so draw them to land and eat them, so (as he saith) they are not noisome to men. He declareth further, that in many places of those regions he saw great plenty of laton among the inhabitants. Cabot is my very friend, whom I use familiarly, and delight to have him sometimes keep me company in mine own house. For being called out of England by the commandment of the Catholic king of Castile, after the death of Henry VII. King of England, he is now present at Court with us, looking for ships to be furnished him for the Indies, to discover this hid secret of Nature. I think that he will depart in March in the year next following, 1516, to explore it. What shall succeed your Holiness shall learn through me, if God grant me life. Some of the Spaniards deny that Cabot was the first finder of the land of Baccalaos, and affirm that he went not so far westward.”[5]

[13]

STOBNICZA’S MAP, 1512, REDUCED.

[The legends on the map even on the large scale are not clear, and Brunet, Supplement, p. 697, gives a deceptive account of them. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 54, makes them thus: On North America, “Ortus de bona ventura,” and “Isabella.” Hispaniola is called “Spagnolla.” On the northern shore of South Ameica, “Arcay” and “Caput de Sta de.” On its eastern parts, “Gorffo Fremosa,” “Caput S. Crucis,” and “Monte Fregoso.” At the southern limit, “Alla pega.” The straight lines of the western coasts, as well as the words “Terra incognita,” are thought to represent an uncertainty of knowledge. The island at the west is “Zypangu insula,” or Japan. Mr. Bartlett, the editor of the Carter-Brown Catalogue, is of the opinion that the island at the north is Iceland; but it seems more in accordance with the prevailing notions of the time to call it Baccalaos. It appears in the same way on the Lenox globe, and in the circumpolar MS. map of Da Vinci (1513) in the Queen’s library at Windsor, where this island is marked “Bacalar.” The eastern coast outline of the Stobnicza map bears a certain resemblance to the Waldseemüller map which appeared in the Ptolemy of 1513, having been however engraved, but not published, in 1507, and Stobnicza may have seen it. If so, he might have intended the straight western line of North America to correspond to the marginal limit of the Ptolemy map; but he got no warrant in the latter for the happy conjecture of the western coast of the Southern Continent, nor could he find such anywhere else, so far as we know. The variations of the eastern coast do not indicate that he depended, solely at least, upon the Ptolemy map, which carries the northern cut-off of the northern continent five degrees higher. “Isabella” is transferred from Cuba to Florida, and the northeast coast of South America is very different. There are accurate fac-similes of this Ptolemy map in Varnhagen’s Premier Voyage de Vespucci, and in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, pl. ii. See the chapter on Norumbega, notes.—Ed.]

This account we may well suppose to have come primarily from Sebastian Cabot himself, and it will be noticed that his father is not mentioned as having accompanied him on the voyage. Indeed, no reference is made to the father except under the general statement that his parents took him to England while he was yet very young, pene infans. No date is given, and but one voyage is spoken of. It may be said that Peter Martyr is not here writing a history of the voyage or voyages of the Cabots; that the account is merely brought into his narrative incidentally, as it were, to illustrate a subject upon which he was then writing,—namely, on a “search” into “the secret causes of Nature,” or the reason “why the sea runneth with so swift course from the east into the west;” and that he cites the observations of Sebastian Cabot, in the region of the Baccalaos, for his immediate purpose. Richard Biddle, in his Life of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 81-90, supposes the voyage here described to be the second, that of 1498, undertaken after the death of the father, as the mention of the three hundred men taken out would imply a purpose of colonization, while the first voyage was one of discovery merely; and thinks that this view is confirmed by a subsequent reference of Martyr to Cabot’s discovery of the Baccalaos, in Decade seven, chapter two, written in 1524, where the discovery is said to have taken place “twenty-six years before,” that is, in 1498.[6]

[15]

PETER MARTYR, 1516.

[16]

A map of the world was composed in 1529 by Diego Ribero, a very able cosmographer and map-maker of Spain in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is a very interesting map, but is so well known to geographers that I need give no particular description of it here. The northern part of our coast, delineated upon it, is supposed to have been drawn from the explorations and reports of Gomez made in 1525. It was copied and printed, in its general features only, in 1534, at Venice. A superior copy in fac-simile of the original map was published by Dr. Kohl in 1860, at Weimar, in his Die beiden Æltesten General-Karten von Amerika.[7] On this map an inscription, of which the following is an English version, is placed over the territory inscribed Tierra del Labrador: “This country the English discovered, but there is nothing useful in it.” See an abridged section of the map and a description of it in Kohl’s Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 299-307.[8]

[17]

THORNE’S MAP, 1527.

[18]

In 1530, four years after Martyr’s death, there was published at Alcala (Complutum), in Spain, his eight Decades, De Orbe Novo, which included the three first published in 1516, in the last of which, the third, appeared the notice of Sebastian Cabot cited above. And it may be added here that the three Decades, including the De nuper ... repertis insulis, etc., or abridgment, so called, of the fourth Decade, printed at Basel in 1521, were reprinted together in that city in 1533. Of later editions there will be occasion to say something farther on. Martyr’s notice of Cabot was the earliest extant, and the republication of these Decades, at different places, served to keep alive the important fact of the discovery of North America under the English flag. In some of these later Decades, written in 1524 and 1525, references will be found to Sebastian Cabot and to his employment in Spain.

There was published in Latin at Argentoratum (Strasbourg), in 1532, by James Ziegler,—a Bavarian theologian, who cultivated mathematics and cosmography with success,—a book relating in part to the northern regions. Under the head of “Gronland” the author quotes Peter Martyr’s account of Sebastian Cabot’s voyage:—

“Peter Martyr of Angleria writeth in his Decades of the Spanish navigations, that Sebastian Cabot,[9] sailing from England continually towards the north, followed that course so far that he chanced upon great flakes of ice in the month of July; and diverting from thence he followed the coast by the shore, bending toward the south until he came to the clime of the island of Hispaniola above Cuba, an Island of the Cannibals. Which narration hath given me occasion to extend Gronland beyond the promontory or cape of Huitsarch to the continent or firm land of Lapponia above the castle of Wardhus; which thing I did the rather for that the reverend Archbishop of Nidrosia constantly affirmed that the sea bendeth there into the form of a crooked elbow.”

This writer evidently supposed that Cabot sailed along the east coast of Greenland, and the inference he drew from Cabot’s experience, as related by Martyr, confirmed his belief[19] that that country joined on to Lappona (Lapland),—an old notion which lasted down to the time of Willoughby,—making “one continent;” and so he represented it on his map no. 8, published in his book.[10] He places “Terra Bacallaos” on the east coast of “Gronland.” He believed that Cabot’s falling in with ice proved “that he sailed not by the main sea, but in places near unto the land, comprehending and embracing the sea in the form of a gulf.” I have copied this from Eden’s English version of Ziegler (Decades, fol. 268), in the margin of which at this place Eden says, “Cabot told me that this ice is of fresh water, and not of the sea.”[11]

There was published at Venice in 1534, in Italian, a volume in three parts; the first of which was entitled, Summario de la generale historia de l’indie occidentali cavato da libri scritti dal signor don Pietro Martyre del consiglio delle indie della maesta de l’imperadore, et da molte altre particulari relationi.[12]

This, as will be seen, purports to be a summary drawn from Peter Martyr and other sources,—“from many other private accounts.” The basis of the work is Martyr’s first three Decades, published together in Latin in 1516, the original arrangement of the author being entirely disregarded, many facts omitted, and new statements introduced for which no authority is given. By virtue of the concluding words of the quoted title, the translator or compiler appears to claim the privilege of taking the utmost liberty with the text of Martyr. For the well-known passage in the sixth chapter of the third Decade, where Martyr says that Sebastian Cabot “sed a parentibus in Britāniam insulam tendentibus, uti moris est Venetorum: qui commercii causa terrarum omnium sunt hospites transportatus pene infans” (“whom being yet but in manner an infant, his parents carried with them into England, having occasion to resort thither for trade of merchandise, as is the manner of the Venetians to leave no part of the world unsearched to obtain riches”), the Italian translator has substituted, “Costui essendo piccolo fu menato da suo padre in Inghilterra, da poi la morte del quale trouandosi ricchissimo, et di grande animo, delibero si come hauea fatto Christoforo Colombo voler anchor lui scoprire qualche nuoua parte del mōdo,” etc. (“He being a little boy was taken by his father into England, after whose death, finding himself very rich and of great ambition, he resolved to discover some new part of the world as Columbus had done”).

M. D’Avezac has given some facts which show that the editor of this Italian version of Peter Martyr, as he calls this work, was Ramusio, the celebrated editor of the Navigationi et Viaggi,[13] etc., and this work is introduced into the third volume of that publication, twenty-one years later. Mr. Brevoort has also called my attention to the fact that the woodcut of “Isola Spagnuola,” used in the early work, was introduced into the later one, which is confirmatory of the opinion that Ramusio was at least the editor of the Summario of 1534.[14]

Cabot we know was, during his residence in Spain, a correspondent of Ramusio,—at least, the latter speaks once of Cabot’s having written to him, and we shall see farther on that they were not strangers to each other,—and it is possible that this modification of Peter Martyr’s language was authorized by him. It is here stated, however, that Cabot reached only 55° north, while in the prefatory Discorso to his third volume the editor says that Cabot wrote to him many years before that he reached the latitude of 67 degrees and a half, and no explanation is given as to whether the reference is to the same voyage. A fair inference from the passage above cited from the Italian Summario would be that Sebastian Cabot planned the voyage of discovery after his father’s death, which we know[20] was not true; as it was equally untrue that the death of his father made him very rich, for the Italian envoy tells us that John Cabot was poor. Indeed, the whole language of the passage relating to Sebastian Cabot is mythical and untrustworthy, whoever may have inspired it.[15]

I now come to a map of Sebastian Cabot, bearing date 1544, as the year of its composition, a copy of which was discovered in Germany in 1843, by Von Martius, in the house of a Bavarian curate, and deposited in the following year in the National Library in Paris. It has been described at some length by M. D’Avezac, in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 4 ser. xiv. 268-270, 1857. It is a large elliptical mappe monde, engraved on metal, with geographical delineations drawn upon it down to the time it was made. I saw the map in Paris in 1866. On its sides are two tables: the first, on the left, inscribed at the head “Tabula Prima;” and that on the right, “Tabula Secunda.” On these tables are seventeen legends, or inscriptions, in duplicate; that is to say, in Spanish and in Latin, the latter supposed to be a translation of the former,—each Latin legend immediately following the Spanish original and bearing the same number.[16]

After the seventeen legends in Spanish and in Latin, we come to a title or heading: “Plinio en el secund libro capitulo lxxix., escriue” (“Pliny, in the second book, chapter 79, writes”). Then follows an inscription in Spanish, no. 18, from Pliny’s Natural History, cap. lxvii., the chapter given above being an error. Four brief inscriptions, also in Spanish, numbered 19 to 22, relating to the natural productions of islands in the eastern seas, taken from other authors, complete the list. So there are twenty-two Spanish inscriptions or legends on the map,—ten on the first table and twelve on the second,—the last five of which have no Latin exemplaires; and there are no Latin inscriptions without the same text in Spanish immediately preceding.

There are no headings prefixed to the inscriptions, except the 1st, the 17th, and 18th. The first inscription, relating to the discovery of the New World by Columbus, has this title, beneath Tabula Prima, “del almirante.” The 17th—a long inscription—has this title: Retulo, del auctor conçiertas razones de la variaçion que haze il aguia del marear con la estrella del Norte (“A discourse of the author of the map, giving certain reasons for the variation of the magnetic needle in reference to the North Star”). It is also repeated in Latin over the version of the inscription in that language. The title to the 18th inscription, if it may be called a title, has already been given.

The 17th inscription begins as follows: “Sebastian Caboto, capitan y piloto mayor de la S. c. c. m. del Imperador don Carlos quinto deste nombre, y Rey nuestro sennor [21]hizo este figura extenda en plano, anno del nascimo de nrō Salvador Iesu Christo de MDXLIIII. annos, tirada por grados de latitud y longitud con sus vientos como carta de marear, imitando en parte al Ptolomeo, y en parte alos modernos descobridores, asi Espanoles como Portugueses, y parte por su padre, y por el descubierto, por donde, podras navegar como por carta de marear, teniendo respecto a luariaçion que haze el aguia,” etc. (“Sebastian Cabot, captain and pilot-major of his sacred imperial majesty, the emperor Don Carlos, the fifth of this name, and the king our lord, made this figure extended on a plane surface, in the year of the birth of our Saviour Jesus Christ, 1544, having drawn it by degrees of latitude and longitude, with the winds, as a sailing chart, following partly Ptolemy and partly the modern discoveries, Spanish and Portuguese, and partly the discovery made by his father and himself: by it you may sail as by a sea-chart, having regard to the variation of the needle,” etc.). Then follows a discussion relating to the variation of the magnetic needle, which Cabot claims first to have noticed.[17]

In the inscription, No. 8, which treats of Newfoundland, it says: “This country was discovered by John Cabot, a Venetian, and Sebastian Cabot, his son, in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ, MCCCCXCIV. [1494] on the 24th of June, in the morning, which country they called ‘primum visam’; and a large island adjacent to it they named the island of St. John, because they discovered it on the same day.”[18]

A fac-simile of this map was published in Paris by M. Jomard, in Plate XX. of his Monuments de la Géographie (begun in 1842, and issued during several years following down to 1862), but without the legends on its sides, which unquestionably belong to the map itself; for those which, on account of their length, are not included within the interior of the map, are attached to it by proper references. M. Jomard promised a separate volume of “texte explicatif,” but death prevented the accomplishment of his purpose.[19]

[22]

PART OF THE SEBASTIAN CABOT MAPPE MONDE, 1544.

[23]

If this map, with the date of its composition, is authentic, it is the first time the name of John Cabot has been introduced to our notice in any printed document, in connection with the discovery of North America. Here the name is brought in jointly with that of Sebastian Cabot, on the authority apparently of Sebastian himself. He is said to be the maker of the map, and if he did not write the legends on its sides he may be supposed not to have been ignorant of their having been placed there. As to Legend No. 8, copied above, who but Sebastian Cabot would know the facts embodied in it,—namely, that the discovery was made by both the father and the son, on the 24th of June, about five o’clock in the morning; that the land was called prima vista, or its equivalent, and that the island near by was called St. John, as the discovery was made on St. John’s Day? Whether or not Sebastian Cabot’s statement is to be implicitly relied on, in associating his own name with his father’s in the voyage of discovery, in view of the evidence which has recently come to light, the legend itself must have proceeded from him. Some additional information in the latter part of the inscription, relating to the native inhabitants, and the productions of the country, may have been gathered in the voyage of the following year. Sebastian Cabot, without doubt, was in possession of his father’s maps, on which would be inscribed by John Cabot himself the day on which the discovery was made.

Whatever opinions, therefore, historical scholars may entertain as to Sebastian Cabot’s connection with this map in its present form, or with the inscriptions upon it as a whole, all must admit that the statements embodied in No. 8, and, it may be added, in No. 17, could have been communicated by no one but Sebastian Cabot himself. The only alternative is that they are a base fabrication by a stranger. Moreover, this very map itself, or a map with these legends upon it, as we shall see farther on, was in the possession of Richard Eden, or was accessible to him; and one of its long inscriptions was translated into English, and printed in his Decades, in 1555, as from “Cabot’s own card,”—and this at a time when Cabot was living in London, and apparently on terms of intimacy with Eden. Legend No. 8 contains an important statement which is confirmed by evidence recently come to light, namely, the fact of John Cabot’s agency in the discovery of North America; and, although the name of the son is here associated with the father, it is a positive relief to find an acknowledgment from Sebastian himself of a truth that was to receive, before the close of the century, important support from the publication of the Letters Patent from the archives of the State. And this should serve to modify our estimate of the authenticity of reports purporting to come from Sebastian, in which the father is wholly ignored, and the son alone is represented as the hero. The long inscription, No. 17, contains an honorable mention of his father, as we have already seen; and in the Latin duplicate, the language in the passage which I have given in English will be seen to be even more emphatic than is expressed in the Spanish text. Indeed, in several instances in the Latin, though generally following the Spanish, so far as I have had an opportunity of observing, there are some statements of fact not to be found in the Spanish.[20] The passage already cited concludes[24] thus in the Latin: “And also from the experience and practice of long sea-service of the most excellent John Cabot, a Venetian by nation, and of my author [the map is here made to speak for itself] Sebastian his son, the most learned of all men in knowledge of the stars and the art of navigation, who have discovered a certain part of the globe for a long time hidden from our people.”[21]

Though we are not quite willing to believe that Sebastian Cabot wrote the eulogy of himself contained in this passage, yet who but he could have known of those facts concerning his father, who, we suppose, had been dead some fifty years before this map was composed?

The map itself, as a work of Sebastian Cabot, is unsatisfactory, and many of the legends on its sides are also unworthy of its alleged author. It brought forward for the first time, in Legend 8, the year 1494 as the year of the discovery of North America, which the late M. D’Avezac accepted, but which I cannot but think from undoubted evidence, to be adduced farther on, is wrong. The “terram primum visam” of the legend is inscribed on the northern part of Cape Breton, and there would seem to be no good reason for not accepting this point on the coast as Cabot’s landfall. The “y de s. Juan,” the present Prince Edward Island, is laid down on the map; and although Dr. Kohl thinks that the name was given by the French, and that Cabot may have taken it, not from his own survey, but from the French maps, I have seen no evidence of the application of the name on any map before this of Cabot. Cartier gave the name “Sainct Jean” to a cape on the west coast of Newfoundland, in 1534, discovered also on St. John’s Day; but this fact was not known, in print at least, till 1556, when the account of his first voyage was published in the third volume of Ramusio.

We find no strictly contemporaneous reference to this map, or evidence that it exerted any influence on opinions respecting the first two voyages of the Cabots; and the name of John Cabot again sinks out of sight. Dr. Kohl has called attention to the fact that the author of this map has copied the coast line of the northern shore largely from Ribero.

It may be added that the inscription No. 8, on Cabot’s map, has since its republication by Hakluyt, with an English version by him, in 1589, been regarded as containing the most definite and satisfactory statement which had appeared as to the discovery of North America, the date as to the year having been subjected to some interesting criticisms, to be referred to farther on.

In the year 1550 Ramusio issued at Venice the first volume of his celebrated collection of voyages and travels in Italian, entitled, Delle Navigationi et Viaggi, etc. This contained, in a discourse on spices, etc., the well-known report of a conversation at the villa of Hieronymo Fracastor, at Caphi, near Verona, in which the principal speaker, a most profound philosopher and mathematician, incidentally relates an interview which he had, some years before, with Sebastian Cabot at Seville. Ramusio, who was present, and tells the story himself, says he does not pretend to give the conversation precisely as he heard it, for that would require a talent beyond his; but he would try and give briefly what he could recollect of it. The substance of Cabot’s story as related, much abridged by me, is this:—

[25]

Sebastian Cabot’s father took him from Venice to London when he was very young, yet having some knowledge of the humanities, and of the sphere. His father died at the time when the news was brought of the discovery of Columbus, which caused a great talk at the court of Henry VII., and which created a great desire in him (Cabot) to attempt some great thing; and understanding, by reason of the sphere, that if he should sail by the northwest he would come to India by a shorter route, he caused the king to be informed of his idea, and the king immediately furnished him with two small ships, and all things necessary for the voyage, which was in the year 1496, in the beginning of summer. He therefore began to sail to the northwest, expecting to go to Cathay, and from thence to turn towards India, but found after some days, to his displeasure, that the land ran towards the north. He still proceeded hoping to find the passage, but found the land still continent to the 56th degree; and seeing there that the coast turned toward the east, he, in despair of finding the passage, turned back and sailed down the coast toward the equinoctial, ever hoping to find the passage, and came as far south as Florida, when, his provisions failing, he returned to England, where he found great tumults among the people, and wars in Scotland.

The volumes of Ramusio became justly celebrated throughout the literary centres of Europe, and the publication of the account of Sebastian Cabot’s discovery in the first volume attracted the attention of scholars in England. It will be noticed that Sebastian Cabot here, as well as in the account in Peter Martyr, is said to have been born in Venice, and taken to England while yet very young; yet not so young but that he had acquired some knowledge of letters, and of the sphere. He speaks here of the death of his father as occurring before the voyage of discovery was entered upon, for which he had two small ships furnished him by the king. He says that this was in the year 1496; yet he speaks of events occurring in England on his return,—great tumults among the people, and wars in Scotland,—which point to the year 1497. The latitude he reached “under our pole” was 56 degrees; and, despairing to find the passage to India, he turned back again, sailed down the coast, “and came to that part of this firm land we now call Florida.”[22] Many incidents here described could not have occurred on the voyage of discovery, as we shall see farther on.

We do not know the precise year in which the interview at Seville between this learned man and Sebastian Cabot was held, but have given some reasons below for believing that it took place about ten years before it was printed by Ramusio.[23]

[26]

I might mention here another reference to Cabot, in Ramusio’s third volume, 1556, though of a little later date. In a prefatory dedication to his excellent friend Hieronimo Fracastor,[24] at whose house the conversation related in Ramusio’s first volume took place, Ramusio under date of June 20, 1553, says that “Sebastian Cabot our countryman, a Venetian,” wrote to him many years ago that he sailed along and beyond this land of New France, at the charges of Henry VII. King of England; that he sailed a long time west and by north into the latitude of 67½ degrees, and on the 11th of June, finding still the sea open, he expected to have gone on to Cathay, and would have gone, if the mutiny of the shipmaster and mariners had not hindered him and made him return homewards from that place.[25]

I have already briefly referred to this letter, in speaking of the alleged voyage of 1516-17, contended for by Biddle (pp. 117-19), on which occasion he thinks Cabot entered Hudson Bay. This passage in Ramusio is mentioned twenty years later by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in his tract, as we shall see farther on, principally on account of the high degree of northern latitude reached, 67½°, and where the sea was found still open.[26] As this is the only account of a voyage which describes so high an elevation reached, and an immediate return thence by reason of mutiny, some have supposed that the incidents described must have occurred on a third voyage, in company with Sir Thomas Pert. On Cabot’s map of 1544 there is inscribed a coast line trending westward, terminating at the degree of latitude named.

In 1552 Gomara’s Historia General de las Indias was published at Saragossa in Spain. In cap. xxxix., under the head of “Los Baccalaos,” he says:—

“Sebastian Cabot was the first that brought any knowledge of this land, for being in England in the days of King Henry VII. he furnished two ships at his own charges, or (as some say) at the King’s, whom he persuaded that a passage might be found to Cathay by the North Seas.... He went also to know what manner of lands those Indies were to inhabit. He had with him three[27] hundred men, and directed his course by the track of Iceland, upon the Cape of Labrador, at fifty-eight degrees (though he himself says much more), affirming that in the month of July there was such cold and heaps of ice that he durst pass no further; that the days were very long and in manner without night, and the nights very clear. Certain it is that at sixty degrees the longest day is of 18 hours. But considering the cold and the strangeness of the unknown land, he turned his course from thence to the west, refreshing themselves at Baccalaos; and following the coast of the land unto the 38th degree, he returned to England.”[27]

Francis Lopez Gomara was among the most distinguished of the historical writers of Spain. In his History of the Indies his purpose was to give a brief view of the whole range of Spanish conquest in the islands and on the American continent, as far down as about the middle of the sixteenth century. He must have known Cabot in Seville, and might have informed himself as to his early maritime enterprises, but he seems to have neglected his opportunity. His book was published after Cabot had returned to England. On one point in the above brief account, namely, as to whether the ships were furnished at the charge of Cabot, he speaks doubtfully. Peter Martyr had said that Cabot furnished two ships at his own charge, while Ramusio, in the celebrated Discorso, makes Cabot say that the king furnished them. As usual but one voyage is spoken of; and Sebastian Cabot is the only commander, and is called a Venetian. His statement contains little new, and is principally a repetition of Peter Martyr. There is added the statement that the expedition, on returning from the northern coasting, “refreshed at Baccalaos.” The degrees given, as to the latitude and longitude reached in sailing both north and south, appear to be an inference from Martyr and Ramusio. The incidents here related of course refer to the second voyage. Gomara, in his history, has other notices of Cabot during his residence in Spain at a later period, in connection with his account of the junta at Badajos, and the expedition to the La Plata.

In 1553 Richard Eden, the first English collector of voyages and travels, published in London a translation “out of Latin into English” of the fifth book of the Universal Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster, entitling it A Treatise of the Newe India,[28] etc. In the dedication of the book to the Duke of Northumberland, who had been Lord High Admiral of England under Henry VIII., Eden says, incidentally, that “King Henry VIII. about the same year of his reign [i. e. between April 1516 and April 1517], furnished and sent forth certain ships under the gouvernance of Sebastian Cabot yet living, and one Sir Thomas Pert, whose faint heart was the cause that the voyage took none effect;” and that if manly courage “had not at that time been wanting, it might happily have come to pass that that rich treasure called Perularia, which is now in Spain in the city of Sivil, and so named for that in it is kept the infinite riches brought hither from the new-found-land of Peru, might long since have been in the Tower of London, to the king’s great honor and wealth of this his realm.”

I find no notice taken of this statement of Eden, at the time, and it is only when we come down to the publication of Hakluyt’s folio, in 1589, that we see an attempt made to attach some importance to it. Although deviating a little from the chronological order of[28] this narrative, I propose here to bring together what I may have to say concerning this voyage.

Dr. Kohl[29] very properly says that this incidental remark of Eden is all the original evidence we have on this so-called expedition of Cabot in 1516, to which some modern writers attach great importance, and by which great discoveries are said to have been made under Henry VIII. Hakluyt, in his folio of 1589, p. 515, copies the language of Eden cited above, and also an abstract from a spurious Italian version of Oviedo, in Ramusio’s collections, in which that writer is made to say that a Spanish vessel in the year 1517 fell in with an English rover at the islands of St. Domingo and St. John’s in the West Indies, on their way from Brazil; and concludes that this English rover could be none other than the vessel of Cabot and Pert. But Richard Biddle,[30] nearly two hundred and fifty years after Hakluyt wrote this opinion, exploded this theory by showing that Oviedo, in his genuine work, really gave 1527 as the date of the meeting of the English vessel, as narrated. Biddle, however, still had faith in Eden’s statement that an expedition sailed from England in the year indicated, commanded by Cabot and Pert, but held that it took a northwesterly direction, and that it was on this expedition that Cabot entered Hudson Bay, and reached the high latitude of 67½ N. as mentioned by him in a letter to Ramusio;[31] in which letter Cabot says that “on the 11th of June, finding still the open sea without any manner of impediment, he thought verily by that way to have passed on still the way to Cathay, which is in the east, ... if the mutiny of the shipmaster and mariners had not hindered him, and made him to return homewards from that place.” Biddle saw a parallel in the language of Eden as to the “faint heart” of Pert, and in that of Cabot as to the “mutiny of the shipmaster and mariners;” not forgetting also similar language in a letter written by Robert Thorne to Doctor Ley, in 1527, relating to a voyage of discovery to the west, in which Thorne’s father and another merchant of Bristol, Hugh Eliot, were participants—which voyage, Mr. Biddle says, was in 1517—that, “if the mariners would then have been ruled and followed their pilots’ mind, the lands of the West Indies, from whence all the gold cometh, had been ours.”[32] Mr. Biddle forgets that in the letter of Cabot to Ramusio, cited above, the writer says that the voyage of which he is here speaking was made in the reign of Henry VII., who died in 1509, seven or eight years before the date which Biddle assigns to the alleged Cabot and Pert voyage.

Dr. Kohl, who has very learnedly and at great length examined the claims for this voyage of 1516-17,[33] has little confidence that any such expedition actually sailed. Eden says the voyage “took none effect,” which may mean that the expedition never sailed. It seems also very improbable that Cabot, so recently domiciled in Spain, where he was occupying an honorable position, should leave it all now and re-enter the service of England, by whose Government he had apparently for so many years been neglected. No English or Spanish writer mentions his leaving Spain at this time.[34]

[29]

In 1555 there appeared in London the first collection in English of the “results of that spirit of maritime enterprise which had been everywhere awakened by the discovery of America.” The book was edited by Richard Eden,—just mentioned as the translator of the fifth book of Munster, in 1553,—and consisted of translations from foreign writers, principally Latin, Spanish, and Italian, of travels by sea and land, largely relating to discoveries in the New World. The book was entitled, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, etc., inasmuch as one hundred and sixty-six folios out of three hundred and seventy-four, which the book contains, consist of the first three Decades of Peter Martyr, and an epitome of the fourth Decade first issued at Basle, in 1521. Then follow abstracts of Oviedo, Gomara, Ramusio, Ziegler, Pigafeta, Munster, Bastaldus, Vespucius, and several others. Some of the voyages are original and were drawn up by Eden’s own hand. It is a very desirable book to possess; and though Eden was a clumsy editor, not always correct in his translations, and did not always make it clear whether he or his author was speaking, we are grateful to him for the book. An enthusiastic tribute is paid to Eden and his book by Richard Biddle,[35] who sets him off by an invidious comparison with Richard Hakluyt, whom he studiously depreciates. Eden was apparently a devoted Catholic, and was a spectator of the public entry of Philip and Mary into London in 1554. He says that the splendid pageant as it passed before him inspired him to enter upon some work which he might in due season offer as the result of his loyalty, and “crave for it the royal blessing.”[36] In his preface to the reader Eden gives a brief review of ancient history, and coming down to the time of the conquest of the Indies by Spain he eulogizes the conduct of that nation towards the natives, particularly in having so effectually labored for their conversion. His language is one continued eulogy of the Spaniards. He urges England to submit to King Philip, of whom he says:—

“Of his behavior in England, his enemies (which canker virtue never lacked),—they, I say, if any such yet remain,—have greatest cause to report well, yea so well, that if his natural clemency were not greater than was their unnatural indignation, they know themselves what might have followed.... Being a lion he behaved himself as a lamb, and struck not his enemy having the sword in his hand. Stoop, England, stoop, and learn to know thy lord and master, as horses and other brute beasts are taught to do!”

He earnestly desires to see the Christian religion enlarged, and urges his countrymen to follow here the example of the Spaniards in the New World. He says:—

“I am not able, with tongue or pen, to express what I conceive hereof in my mind, yet one thing I see which enforseth me to speak, and lament that the harvest is so great and the workmen so few. The Spaniards have showed a good example to all Christian nations to follow. But as God is great and wonderful in all his works, so beside the portion of land pertaining to the Spaniards (being eight times bigger than Italy, as you may read in the last book of the second Decade), and beside that which pertaineth to the Portugals, there yet remaineth another portion of that main land reaching toward the northeast, thought to be as large as the other, and not yet known but only by the sea-coasts, neither inhabited by any Christian men; whereas, nevertheless, (as writeth Gemma Phrisius) in this land there are many fair and fruitful regions, high mountains, and fair rivers, with abundance of gold, and diverse kinds of beasts. Also cities and towers so well builded, and people of such civility, that this part of the world seemeth little inferior to our Europe, if the inhabitants had received our religion. They are witty people and refuse not bartering with strangers. These regions are called Terra Florida and Regio Baccalearum or Bacchallaos, of the which you may read somewhat in this book in the voyage of that worthy old man yet living,[30] Sebastian Cabot, in the vi. book of the third Decade. But Cabot touched only in the north corner, and most barbarous part thereof, from whence he was repulsed with ice in the month of July. Nevertheless, the west and south parts of these regions have since been better searched by other, and found to be as we have said before.... How much therefore is it to be lamented, and how greatly doth it sound to the reproach of all Christendom, and especially to such as dwell nearest to these lands (as we do), being much nearer unto the same than are the Spaniards (as within xxv days sailing and less),—how much, I say, shall this sound unto our reproach and inexcusable slothfulness and negligence, both before God and the world, that so large dominions of such tractable people and pure gentiles, not being hitherto corrupted with any other false religion (and therefore the easier to be allured to embrace ours), are now known unto us, and that we have no respect neither for God’s cause nor for our own commodity, to attempt some voyages into these coasts, to do for our parts as the Spaniards have done for theirs, and not ever like sheep to haunt one trade, and to do nothing worthy memory among men or thanks before God, who may herein worthily accuse us for the slackness of our duty toward him.”

The few voyages of discovery made by the English in the first part of the sixteenth century, either by the authority of the Government or on private account, were productive of little results; and when Sebastian Cabot finally returned to England from Spain, in 1547 or 1548, his influence was engaged by sundry merchants of London, who were seeking to devise some means to check the decay of trade in the realm, by the discovery of a new outlet for the manufactured products of the nation. The result was the sending off the three vessels under Willoughby, in May, 1553, to the northeast, and finally the incorporation of the merchant adventurers, with Cabot as governor.

In Richard Eden’s long address to the reader prefixed to his translation of the fifth Book of Sebastian Münster, written probably before the Willoughby expedition had been heard from, he speaks of “the attempt to pass to Cathay by the North East, which some men doubt, as the globes represent it all land north, even to the north pole.” In his preface to his Decades, cited above, written two years later, we have seen that he urges the people of England to turn their attention in the old direction, and to take possession of the waste places still unoccupied by any Christian people; which regions be says are called Terra Florida and Regio Baccalearum. These offer a large opportunity for traffic as a remedy for the stagnation of trade under which England is suffering, and a wide field for the Christian missionary.

The reader will have noticed, in the above extract, that Eden says that Sebastian Cabot “touched only in the north corner and most barbarous part” of the region which he is urging his countrymen to take possession of, “from whence he was repulsed with ice in the month of July.”

Eden’s Decades placed before the English reader for the first time the several notices of Sebastian Cabot, of which mention has been here made; namely, by Martyr, Ramusio, Gomara, and the brief Commentary by Ziegler. And the fact that this large unoccupied territory at the west, which Eden here urges the English Government and people to take possession of, was discovered by Cabot for the English nation, could not fail in time to produce its fruit upon the English mind.

Sebastian Cabot, as we have seen, was living in England at the time Richard Eden published his book, and a very old man. Eden appears to have been on terms of acquaintance with him, if not of intimacy; and unless the infirmities of years weighed too heavily upon his faculties, Cabot might have been able to impart much information to one so curious and eager as Eden was to gather up details. Eden more than once speaks of what Sebastian Cabot told him. In the margin of folio 255, where is a report of the famous conversation concerning Sebastian Cabot, extracted from Ramusio, in which Cabot is spoken of as “a Venetian born,” Eden says: “Sebastian Cabot told me that he was born in Brystowe, and that at iiii years old he was carried with his father to Venice, and so returned again into England with his father, after certain years, wherby he was thought to have been born in Venice.” This was a bad beginning on the part of Eden as an interviewer; that is to say, the truth was not reached.

[31]

Sebastian Cabot, if he had been asked, might have told Eden much more. Why did not Eden hand in a list of questions? Why did he not submit to him a proof-sheet of the story from Ramusio, which we know contains so many errors, and ask him to correct it, so that the world might have a true account of the discovery of North America? What an excellent opportunity was lost to Cabot for printing here under the auspices of Eden all those maps and discourses which Hakluyt, at a later period, tells us were in the custody of the worshipful Master William Worthington, who was very willing to have them overseen and published, but which have never yet seen the light![37]

I have already called attention to the fact that Eden had a copy of Cabot’s map, and translated one of the legends upon it,—that relating to the River La Plata, no. vii.[38]

About this time, or perhaps a few years earlier, there was painted in England a portrait of Sebastian Cabot, supposed for many years to have been done by Holbein, whose death has usually been referred to the year 1554, though recent investigations have rendered it probable that he died eleven years before. The first notice of this portrait which I have seen is in Purchas.[39] A minute description of it, with a notice of its disappearance from Whitehall, where it hung for many years, is given by Mr. Biddle,[40] who subsequently purchased the picture in England and brought it to this country, where in 1845 it was burned with his house and contents, in Pittsburg, Pa. Two excellent copies of it, however, had fortunately been taken, one of which, by the artist Chapman, is in the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society,[41] and the other in that of the New York Historical Society.[42] The portrait was painted after Cabot had returned to England; and it is said, I know not on what authority, to have been painted for King Edward VI., who died in 1553. Cabot lived some five years longer. The picture represents Cabot as a very old man. It has the following inscription upon it:[43]

Effigies· Sebastiani Caboti
Angli· Filii· Johãnis· Caboti· Vene
Ti· Militis· Avrati· Primi· Invēt
Oris· Terræ Noviæ Sub Herico Vii. Angl

Læ Rege.

A peculiar interest is attached to this inscription, from the circumstance that it must probably have proceeded from Sebastian Cabot himself; that is to say, the facts intended to be embodied in it by the artist or herald could best come from him. But being clumsily expressed, it is uncertain whether the son or the father was intended to be represented as the knight and discoverer. With the exception of the legend on the map already mentioned, it is the only direct testimony presumably from Sebastian himself as to the principal fact involved. That joins both the father and the son as discoverers. Here the honor is given to but one of them, but unhappily the only statement clearly expressed is that Sebastian Cabot is an Englishman and the son of John Cabot, a Venetian. Which was the knight and the discoverer no one can tell certainly from the legend itself. The inscription has been the subject of considerable discussion and even controversy.[44] Humboldt has a brief note on the subject,[45] in which he says: “Il importe de savoir si c’est le père Jean ou[32] le fils Sebastien qui est désigné comme celui auquel la décoverte est due. Si c’était le fils, Holbein aurait probablement placé le mot filii après Veneti. Il aurait écrit: Effigies Seb. Caboti Angli, Joannis Caboti Veneti filii....” We now know from other evidence that John Cabot was the discoverer of North America. He may have been accompanied by his son, Sebastian, but it would have been a pleasant fact to have the testimony of the son to his father’s honor clearly expressed, as may have been intended in this awkward composition. Sebastian Cabot has been the sphinx of American history for over three hundred years, and this inscription over his head in his picture does not tend to divest him of that character. There has as yet appeared no other evidence to show that either John Cabot or Sebastian was ever knighted. Purchas[46] insists on giving the title of “Sir” to the son. Laying aside the question as to the interpretation of the inscription on the portrait, there is sufficient evidence elsewhere to show that Sebastian Cabot was not a knight. In two documents to be more particularly noticed in another place,—one dated in May, 1555, and the other in May, 1557, the latter dated not long before Sebastian Cabot’s death,—relating to a pension granted to him by the Crown of England, he is styled “Armiger,” a dignity below that of knight and equivalent to that of esquire. See Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. xv. pp. 427 and 466.

In 1558 there was published in Paris a book entitled Les Singularitez de la France Antarcktique, etc., by F. André Thevet, the French Cosmographer.[47] This writer is held in little estimation, and deservedly so. In chapter lxxiv. fol. 145, verso, in speaking of the Baccalaos, is this passage:—

“It was first discovered by Sebastian Babate, an Englishman, who persuaded Henry VII., King of England, that he could go easily this way by the North to Cathay, and that he would thus obtain spices and other articles from the Indies equally as well as the King of Portugal; added to which he proposed to go to Peru and America, to people the country with new inhabitants, and to establish there a New England, which he did not accomplish. True it is he put three hundred men ashore, somewhere to the north of Ireland, where the cold destroyed nearly the whole company, though it was then the month of July. Afterwards Jaques Cartier (as he himself has told me) made two voyages to that country in 1534 and 1535.”

This passage it will be seen is a mere perversion of that in Gomara, changing the name of Cabot to Babate, and Iceland to Ireland, but adding the wholly unauthorized statement that the three hundred men were put ashore and perished in the cold. Mr. Biddle,[48] who calls attention to this writer’s recklessness, says that this is a “random addition suggested by the reference in Gomara to one of the objects of Cabot’s expedition, and the reasons which compelled him to turn back.” On the other hand, he thinks it possible that Thevet “derived his information from Cartier, who would be very likely to know of any such attempt at settlement.” It is not at all likely that Thevet had any authority whatever for his statement. His mention of Cartier is probably suggested by seeing in Gomara,[49] immediately following the extract from him above quoted, the mention of Cartier as being on that coast in 1534 and 1535. But Thevet’s statement has entered into sober history, and has been quoted and requoted.

Captain Antonio Galvano, the Portuguese, had died in 1557, leaving behind him a Trádado, a historical treatise, which was published at Lisbon in 1563. It gives an account “of all the discoveries, ancient and modern, which have been made up to the year one thousand five hundred and fifty.” This is a valuable chronological list of discoveries in which the[33] writer includes, in the latter part, his own experience. He spent the early part of his life in India, and the latter part, on being recalled home, in compiling an account of all known voyages. The Hakluyt Society have published Galvano’s book in the original, from a copy, believed to be unique, in the Carter-Brown Library, at Providence R. I. It is accompanied by an English version, by an unknown translator, long in the possession of Hakluyt, corrected and published by him, as the title says, in 1601.[50] Hakluyt never could get sight of a copy of the original edition. On comparing the texts, several omissions and additions are noticed by the modern editor. The former are supposed to be due to the inadvertence of the translator, the latter to Hakluyt, who supplied what he thought important from other sources; and to him are probably due the marginal references. The following is the English version of Galvano’s account[51] of Cabot’s discovery, some omissions having been supplied by the modern editor:—

“In the year 1496 there was a Venetian in England called John Cabota, who having knowledge of such a new discovery as this was [viz. the discovery by Columbus], and perceiving by the globe that the islands before spoken of stood almost in the same latitude with his country, and much nearer to England than to Portugal, or to Castile, he acquainted King Henry the Seventh, then King of England, with the same, wherewith the said king was greatly pleased, and furnished him out with two ships and three hundred men; which departed and set sail in the spring of the year, and they sailed westward till they came in sight of land in 45 degrees of latitude towards the north, and then went straight northwards till they came into 60 degrees of latitude, where the day is eighteen hours long, and the night is very clear and bright. There they found the air cold, and great islands of ice, but no ground in seventy, eighty, an hundred fathoms sounding, but found much ice, which alarmed them; and so from thence putting about, finding the land to turn eastwards, they trended along by it on the other tack, discovering all the bay and river[52] named Deseado, to see if it passed on the other side; then they sailed back again, diminishing the latitude, till they came to 38 degrees toward the equinoctial line, and from thence returned into England. There be others which say that he went as far as the Cape of Florida, which standeth in 25 degrees.”

It will be seen that the greater part of this is taken from Gomara, and the writer had also read Peter Martyr and Ramusio, and from the latter takes his year 1496. One statement,—namely, that Cabot came in sight of land in 45 degrees north,—is original here, which would almost lead one to suppose that Galvano had seen the prima vista of Cabot’s map.

It will be noticed, near the beginning of the extract from Galvano, that John Cabot is said to be the discoverer. Thus it stands in the old English version as published by Hakluyt, but in the original Portuguese it reads: “No anno de 1496 achandose hum Venezeano por nome Sebastiāo Gaboto em Inglaterra,” etc. The substitution of John for Sebastian was no doubt due to Hakluyt, who also made this marginal note: “The great discovery of John Cabota and the English.”[53]

In this same year (1563) there was published in London an English version from the French of Jean Ribault, entitled, The whole and True discoverie of Terra Florida (englished the Flourishing Lande), etc., giving an account of the attempt to found a colony at Port Royal in the preceding year. The translation was made by Thomas Hacket, and was reprinted by Richard Hakluyt in his Divers Voyages, in 1582.[54] In referring to the preceding attempts at discovery and settlement of those northern shores, he says:—

[34]

“Of the which there was one, a very famous stranger named Sebastian Cabota, an excellent pilot, sent thither by King Henry, the year 1498, and many others, who never could attain to any habitation, nor take possession thereof one only foot of ground, nor yet approach or enter into these parts and fair rivers into the which God hath brought us.”[55]

This passage from Ribault is cited principally for the date there given, 1498, as the year of Sebastian Cabot’s visit to the northern shores. It was not the year of the discovery, but was the year of the second voyage. Where did Ribault pick up this date? No one of the notices of Cabot’s voyage hitherto cited contains it. I have already called attention to Peter Martyr’s language, in 1524, that Sebastian Cabot discovered the Baccalaos twenty-six years before, from which by a calculation that date is arrived at.[56]

In 1570 Abraham Ortelius published at Antwerp the first edition of his celebrated Theatrum orbis terrarum, containing fifty-three copperplate maps, engraved by Hogenberg.[57] In the beginning of the book is a list of the maps which Ortelius had consulted, and he mentions among them one by “Sebastianus Cabotus Venetus, Universalem Tabulam: quam impressam æneis formis vidimus, sed sine nomine loci et impressoris.” This would seem to describe, so far as it goes, the Cabot map in the National Library, at Paris, which is a large engraved map of the world, “without the name of the place or the printer.”

Mr. Biddle was impressed with the belief that Ortelius was largely influenced in the composition of his map by the map of Cabot. He contended that Cabot’s landfall was the coast of Labrador, and he found near that coast, on the map of Ortelius, a small island named St. John, which he supposed was that discovered by Cabot on St. John’s day and so named, and was taken by Ortelius from Cabot’s map.[58] But an examination of the Paris map fails to confirm Biddle’s hypothesis. The “Y. de s. Juan,” is in the Gulf of St. Lawrence near where the prima vista is placed. A delineation of what might be called Hudson Bay appears on the map of Ortelius, and Biddle supposed that Cabot’s map furnished the authority for it. But no such representation of that bay appears on Cabot’s map.

[35]

In 1574 there appeared at Cologne another edition of Peter Martyr’s three Decades, published in connection with some writings of the distinguished Fleming, Damiani A. Goès.[59] The third Decade of Martyr, as I have already said, contained the earliest notice of Sebastian Cabot.

We have arrived at a period now when the public men of England began especially to interest themselves in voyages of discovery and colonization, and successfully to engage the good offices of the Queen in their behalf. “There hath been two special causes in former age,” says George Beste in “the Epistle Dedicatory” to his voyages of Frobisher, published in 1578, “that have greatly hindered the English nation in their attempts. The one hath been lack of liberality in the nobility; and the other, want of skill in the cosmography and the art of navigation,—which kind of knowledge is very necessary for all our noblemen, for that, we being islanders, our chiefest strength consisteth by sea. But these two causes are now in this present age (God be thanked!) very well reformed; for not only her Majesty now, but all the nobility also, having perfect knowledge in cosmography, do not only with good words countenance the forward minds of men, but also with their purses do liberally and bountifully contribute unto the same; whereby it cometh to pass that navigation, which in the time of King Henry VII. was very raw, and took (as it were) but beginning (and ever since hath had by little and little continual increase), is now in her Majesty’s reign grown to his highest perfection.”[60]

Frobisher sailed on his first voyage in June, 1576. The tract of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, entitled, A Discourse of Discovery for a new Passage to Cataia, principally written ten years before, was published before Frobisher left the Thames. The reference in this tract to Sebastian Cabot—who “by his personal experience and travel hath set forth and described this passage [that is, the Straits of Anian] in his charts, which are yet to be seen in the Queen’s Majesty’s Privy Gallery at Whitehall, who was sent to make this discovery by King Henry VII., and entered the same fret,” etc.—has led Mr. Biddle to suppose that Frobisher had the benefit of Cabot’s experience, and that his maps or charts hanging in the gallery at Whitehall had delineated on them the strait or passage through to the Pacific, which Cabot entered, and would have passed on to Cathay, if he had not been prevented by the mutiny of the master and mariners.[61]

One would naturally infer that Gilbert wrote this passage after inspecting the map in Whitehall, but the full passage of which we have here given an extract is taken from Cabot’s letter in Ramusio,[62] to which work Gilbert refers in the margin of his tract thus: “Written in the Discourses of Navigation.”[63] I may add that in the following year, 1577, Richard Willes published a new edition of Eden,[64] containing all the references to Cabot in the genuine edition, and also a paper on Frobisher’s first voyage, with some speculations, added to those of Gilbert, as to the northwest passage. In this paper, addressed to the Countess of Warwick, he makes frequent reference to Cabot’s card or table, in possession[36] of the countess’s father “at Cheynies,” as proving by Cabot’s experience the existence of such a strait as had been spoken of by Gilbert, and of which Frobisher in his first voyage was in search. He says: “Cabota was not only a skilful seaman but a long traveller, and such a one as entered personally that strait, sent by King Henry VII. to make this aforesaid discovery, as in his own discourse of navigation you may read in his card drawn with his own hand; the mouth of the northwest strait lieth near the 318 meridian, betwixt 61 and 64 degrees in elevation, continuing the same breadth about 10 degrees west, where it openeth southerly more and more.”[65]

If the Countess of Warwick’s father, the Earl of Bedford, had a map by Cabot, with a northwestern strait delineated on it in degrees of latitude and longitude as described by Willes, it could not be a copy of the recently recovered Paris map. In the latter the coast to the north of Labrador from latitude 58 to 65 runs in a northeasterly direction, when it suddenly trends in a northwesterly direction, its delineation ceasing at latitude 68, where is this inscription, “Costa del hues norueste” (coast west-northwest). Dr. Kohl is of opinion that Cabot is here delineating, from his own experience, Cumberland Island in Davis’s Strait; but Mr. Biddle thinks that Cabot’s highest northern latitude was reached in Fox’s Channel on the shores of Melville Peninsula. All these speculations seem to me to be based on very uncertain data.[66]

One is impressed with the ambiguous language of Willes when he speaks of Cabot’s “own discourse of navigation [which] you may read in his card drawn by his own hand.” The phrase “discourse of navigation” sounds so much like Gilbert’s reference in the margin of his tract to Ramusio, that I am disposed to refer it to that source.

Clement Adams, as we shall see farther on, made a copy of Cabot’s map or a copy of some reputed map of Cabot, in 1549 (if the supposition as to the date is correct), which in Hakluyt’s time hung in the gallery at Whitehall, and of which copies were also to be seen in many merchants’ houses; yet it is difficult to understand how different copies of a genuine map of Cabot could contain such variations. Certainly they are all unsatisfactory, and throw but little light on the voyage of the Cabots.

The indefatigable compiler and translator Belleforest issued in 1576,[67] in Paris, his Cosmographie Universelle, on the basis of the work of Sebastian Munster; and he says[68] that Sebastian Cabot attempted, at the expense of Henry VII. of England, to find the way to Cathay by the north; that he discovered the point of Baccalaos, which the Breton and Norman sailors now call the Coast of Codfish, and proceeding yet farther reached the latitude of 67 degrees towards the Arctic pole. Substantially the same passage may be found in Chauveton’s Histoire Nouvelle du Nouveau Monde, p. 141, published at Geneva, in 1579, being a translation of Benzoni, and of other writers.

In connection with Frobisher’s voyage there was published in London, in 1578, A Prayse and Report of Maister Martyne Frobisher’s Voyage to Meta Incognita, by Thomas Churchyard, a miscellaneous and voluminous writer, who says: “I find that Cabota was the first in King Henry VII.’s days that diserned this frozen land or seas from 67 towards the north, from thence toward the south along the coast to 36 degrees.”[69]

The work of George Beste, the writer of the account of Frobisher’s three voyages, before mentioned, published in London in 1578, speaks of Sebastian Cabot as having discovered sundry parts of new-found-land, and attempted the passage to Cathay, and as being an Englishman, born in Bristowe. And a yet further reference is made to him, with the singular additional statement that the date of his discovery was 1508. This date may be a clerical or typographical error.

These brief notices of Sebastian Cabot are cited as showing how a tradition is kept[37] alive by one author or compiler quoting another, neither of which is of the slightest authority in itself.

In 1582 there appeared at Paris a work entitled Les Trois Mondes, etc. by L. V. Popellinière. It is a mere compilation, and embraces translations from various authors relating to the discoveries of the different maritime nations of Europe in various parts of the world. His third world is Australia, called by the Spaniards, he says, Terra del Fuego, which is here represented on a map as a large continent.[70] On fol. 25 it is said that Cabot was the first to conduct the English to the Baccalaos, which was better known to him than to any other; that he armed two ships at the charge and with the consent of Henry VII. of England to go there, and took out with him three hundred Englishmen, and sailed along 48½ degrees in a strait, but was so baffled by the extremity of the cold which he found there in July, that, although the days were long, and the nights were clear, he did not dare to pass beyond with his men to the island to which he wished to conduct them.

This is substantially a resumé of the account in Gomara, with a discrepancy in stating the latitude reached.

Following a long resumé in French of the conversation in the first volume of Ramusio, this writer remarks: “This then was that Gabote which first discovered Florida for the King of England, so that the Englishmen have more right thereunto than the Spaniards; if to have right unto a country, it sufficeth to have first seen and discovered the same.”[71]

In 1580 was published the first edition of Stow’s Chronicle (or Annals) of England, etc., which contains, under the year 1498, the alleged passage from Fabian, which Mr. Biddle[72] charges Hakluyt with perverting, by prefixing in his larger work the name of John Cabot to the “Venitian” as it appeared in the Divers Voyages of 1582. The passage in Stow begins thus: “This year one Sebastian Gabato, a Genoa’s son, born in Bristow,” etc. Reference will be made to this document farther on.

In 1582 Richard Hakluyt published his Divers Voyages, his first book, which contains many curious and important documents. It is dedicated to Master Philip Sidney, Esquire, who, with other statesmen and public men of England, was then deeply interested in American Colonization, being largely inspired by political considerations. The dedication contains an interesting summary of what had been done by other nations, and the reasons why England should now enter upon this work. Reasons are also given for believing that “there is a strait and short way open into the west even unto Cathay,” which they had so long desired to find. And finally the claim of England to the large unsettled territory in America is set forth, “from Florida to sixty-seven degrees northward, by the letters patent granted to John Gabote and his three sons, Lewis, Sebastian, and Santius, with Sebastian’s own certificate to Baptista Ramusius of his discovery of America, and the testimony of Fabian our own chronicler.”

We begin now to approach for the first time a document which is of the highest authenticity and value. I mean the letters patent, which Hakluyt here prints,[73] under[38] which the discovery of North America was made by authority of England. John Cabot, the father, now emerges from obscurity, for we find the grant is to him and to his three sons, of whom Sebastian is the second. The patent gave them permission to sail with five ships, at their own costs and charges, under the royal banners and ensigns, to all countries and seas of the east, of the west, and of the north, and to seek out and discover whatsoever isles, countries, and provinces of the heathen and infidels, whatsoever they be, which before this time had been unknown to Christians. They also had license to set up the royal banners in the countries found by them, and to conquer and possess them as the king’s vassals and lieutenants. This document is dated 5 March, 1495 (that is 1496, new style). Hakluyt also prints an extract from Fabian’s chronicle, furnished him by John Stow, and supposed to have been in manuscript, as it is not contained in any printed edition of Fabian. In the heading which Hakluyt gives to the paper as printed, he says it is “a note of Sebastian Gabote’s voyage of discovery.” The document reads: “This year the King (by means of a Venetian which made himself very expert and cunning in knowledge of the circuit of the world and islands of the same, ...) caused to man and victual a ship at Bristowe to search for an island which, he said he knew well, was rich and replenished with rich commodities,—which ship thus manned and victualed at the King’s cost, divers merchants of London ventured in her small stocks, being in her as chief patron the said Venetian. And in the company of the said ship sailed also out of Bristowe three or four small ships fraught with slight and gross merchandizes; ... and so departed from Bristowe in the beginning of May, of whom in this Mayor’s time returned no tidings.” This of course refers to the voyage of 1498.

In the margin against this paper Hakluyt has this note: “In the 13 year of King Henry the VII., 1498,” and also “William Purchas, Mayor of London,” whose time expired the last of October, 1498. Stow, as has been seen, had already printed this paper, two years before, in his Annals; and it is reprinted in later editions of that work. What precise shape the original paper was in, which was used by Stow and Hakluyt, we do not know. If they had but one original it was not followed in all its details by both. Dr. E. E. Hale printed in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society for October, 1865, a paper from the Cotton manuscripts in the British Museum, Vitellius, A. xvi, which he thought was the original paper used by each, and to which Hakluyt’s copy conforms more nearly than does that of Stow. The Cotton manuscript gives no name to the navigator, but calls him a stranger “Venetian,” as does Hakluyt. Stow, who probably rarely heard of the name of John Cabot, and was very familiar with that of Sebastian, calls him “Sebastian Gaboto, a Genoa’s son.”[74]

[39]

Hakluyt also prints in this precious little volume the substance of Sebastian Cabot’s letter to Ramusio, printed in the beginning of his third volume, in which he mentions the degree of latitude, 67½° N., which Cabot reached in his voyage in search of a way to Cathay.

He also prints for the first time the two well-known letters of Robert Thorne, in the latter of which, addressed to Dr. Ley, the English ambassador to Spain, the writer says that his father and another merchant of Bristol, Hugh Eliot, were the discoverers of the new-found lands. Some have conjectured that these merchants went out with the Cabots, and others that they were in some later expedition not well defined. Hakluyt also prints here an English version of “Verarzanus,” and Hacket’s “Ribault.” The volume also contains two maps, one of which, prepared by Michael Locke, was made, he says, “according to Verarzanus’s plat,” an “old excellent map, which he gave to King Henry VIII., and is yet in the custody of Master Locke.” The map of Locke was probably made only in its general features according to the original model, and contained some more modern additions by its compiler. It has one interesting inscription upon it,—namely, on the delineation of C. Breton we read, “J. Gabot, 1497.” This is the first time I have seen this date assigned as the date of the discovery.[75]

Hakluyt’s little volume expressed the interest felt in England on the subject of North American colonization, and furnished the ground on which England based her title to the country. He also announced in this book that Sebastian Cabot’s maps and discourses were then in the custody of one of Cabot’s old associates, William Worthington, who was willing to have them seen and published.

The interest in the contemplated voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who made the first serious attempt in that century at colonization for England, culminated next year, when he sailed and never returned. Among the reports of that voyage was one written by Mr. Edward Haies in 1583, in which he says: “The first discovery of these coasts (never heard of before) was well begun by John Cabot the father, and Sebastian the son, an Englishman born, who were the first finders out of all that great tract of land stretching from the Cape of Florida unto those islands which we now call the Newfoundland; all which they brought and annexed unto the crown of England.”[76]

Sir George Peckham, a large adventurer with Gilbert, also wrote in 1583 on the same theme, and he makes mention of the title of England in the following language: “In the time of the Queen’s grandfather of worthy memory, King Henry VII., letters patent were by his Majesty granted to John Cabota, an Italian, to Lewis, Sebastian, and Sancius, his three sons, to discover remote, barbarous, and heathen countries, which discovery was afterwards executed to the use of the Crown of England in the said King’s time by Sebastian and Sancius, his sons, who were born here in England.”[77] It seems to have been thought that the title of England would be strengthened by the statement that the discoverers, or some of them, were native subjects of the Crown of England. This seems to[40] have been one reason why it has always been insisted on that Sebastian Cabot, so long supposed to be the discoverer, was born in England.[78]

LOK’S MAP, 1582.—REDUCED.

I have already spoken of an edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades in the original Latin,[41] De Orbe Novo, published at Paris in 1587, under the editorship of Richard Hakluyt, who was then residing in that city in connection with the British Embassy. It was dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh, for whom, three years before, Hakluyt had written the Discourse on Westerne Planting. It was the first time the Decades had been printed entire since the first edition of them appeared at Alcala in Spain in 1530. It has been suggested by Mr. Brevoort that the Spanish Government did not favor their circulation, or encourage their republication. In Hakluyt’s edition there was inserted an excellent map of North and South America, of small size, six and a half by seven and a half inches, and dedicated to him by the maker, “F. G.” On the delineation of the coast of Labrador, there is inscribed just north of the River St. Lawrence, “Baccalaos Ab Anglis, 1496.” This date was without doubt supplied by Hakluyt himself, who, in his Discourse on Westerne Planting, insisted on that erroneous date as the true year of discovery,—citing the conversation in the first volume of Ramusio for his authority, as we have seen.

In tracing down the notices in print of John or Sebastian Cabot, we come now to a book of considerable interest, published in Venice in 1588, some years after the death of its author, Livio Sanuto. It was entitled Geographica Distincta, etc., and related in part to matters connected with naval science. The author was deeply interested in the subject of the variation of the needle, and having heard that Sebastian Cabot had publicly explained this subject to the King of England (supposed to be Edward VI., on Cabot’s return to England), he applied to the Venetian ambassador there resident to ascertain from Cabot himself where he had fixed the point of no variation. The information was accordingly procured and published by Sanuto. In the course of his investigations the author made use of a map composed by Cabot himself, in which the position of this meridian was seen to be one hundred and ten miles to the west of the island of Flores, one of the Azores. Mr. Biddle,[79] who dwells at some length on this volume, calls attention to the fact “that the First Meridian on the maps of Mercator, running through the most western point of the Azores, was adopted with reference to the supposed coincidence in that quarter of the true and magnetic poles.” Sanuto makes frequent reference to the map of Cabot in his book, and also makes mention of Cabot’s observations relating to the variation of the compass at the equator. I have already called attention to one of the legends on Cabot’s map of 1544, no. 17, which relates in part to the variation of the needle. In Prima Parte, lib. ii. fol. 17, Sanuto gives a brief account of Cabot’s voyage, which Mr. Biddle[80] says corresponds minutely with that which Sir Humphrey Gilbert derived from the map hung up in Queen Elizabeth’s gallery. Sanuto, however, evidently copied from Cabot’s letter in the preface of the third volume of Ramusio, from which also the language in Gilbert is drawn.

In 1589 Hakluyt published his first folio of 825 pages entitled, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, a monument of his industry as a collector. In this first folio Hakluyt included several pieces from his little quarto tract of 1582, and he collected and put into English other most important evidence relating to the discovery of North America by the Cabots. He gave the passage in Peter Martyr, the conversation in Ramusio, the extract from Gomara, added to those documents reprinted from the quarto tract, all of which have been here noticed in the order in which they appeared in print. It may be added that in the passage from Fabian Hakluyt introduced the name of John Cabot as the Venetian, though he allowed the name of Sebastian[42] to stand in the heading, probably through inadvertence. He also brought the marginal date into the text.

A SKETCH OF THE HAKLUYT-MARTYR (1587) MAP.

[This sketch-map is taken from the fac-simile in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, and needs the following key:—

1. Groenlandia.
2. Islandia.
3. Frislandia.
4. Meta incognita ab Anglis inventa An. 1576.
5. Demonum ins.
6. S. Brandon.
7. Baccalaos ab Anglis, 1496.
8. Hochelaga.
9. Nova Albion inventa An. 1580, ab Anglis.
10. Nova Francia.
11. Virginia, 1584.
12. Bermuda.
13. Azores.
14. Florida.
15. Nueva Mexico.
16. Nova Hispania.
17. Caribana.
18. Brasilia.
19. Fretum Magellani.
20. Peru.

This map is so rare that the copies in some of the choicest collections lack it, such as the Huth (p. 920,) Brinley (no. 42), and Carter-Brown (no. 370). Rich priced a copy in 1832 with the map at £4 4s., which would to-day be a small sum for the book without the map; while a copy with the map is now worth £20. Quaritch, Cat. 331, no. 1. The Boston Athenæum copy has the map. See Norton’s Lit. Gazette, new series, i. 272. Bull. Soc. Géog., Oct. 1858, p. 271.—Ed.]

He also produced here from the Rolls Office a memorandum of a license granted by the[43] King to John Cabot alone, to take five English ships of two hundred tons or under, with necessary furniture, and mariners and subjects of the King as would willingly go with him,—dated the 3d day of February in the thirteenth year of his reign (1497/8).

The full copy of this license Hakluyt probably never saw, and the significance of this brief memorandum was never known until, two hundred and forty years afterwards, the entire document was found and published by Mr. Richard Biddle in his Memoir of Sebastian Cabot.[81] It was therefore often interpreted, in connection with the letters patent previously issued, as a grant to take up ships for the first voyage, which, as was supposed, did not take place till 1498.

The original grant of this license, of which Hakluyt publishes a brief memorandum, is found to be a permit to enlist ships and mariners, etc., “and them convey and lead to the land and isles of late found by the said John in our name and by our commandment. Paying for them and every of them as and if we should in or for our own cause pay, and none otherwise.”

The part I have italicized is most significant, and shows that a previous voyage had been made by John Cabot under the authority of the Crown.

Hakluyt also reprinted for the first time, in Latin, with an English version, an extract from Sebastian Cabot’s map, being no. 8 of the Legends inscribed upon it, relating to the discovery of North America, already recited on p. 21. And in saying that it was taken from Sebastian Cabot’s map, I should explain that Hakluyt says it was “an extract taken out of the map of Sebastian Cabot, cut by Clement Adams, ... which is to be seen in her Majesty’s Privy Gallery at Westminster, and in many other ancient merchants’ houses.” This language is a little equivocal, and some have supposed that Hakluyt intended to say that the extract simply was cut by Adams, and not that the whole map was copied by him. Clement Adams was a schoolmaster and a learned man, and probably[44] was not an engraver. But Hakluyt is elsewhere more explicit. In his Westerne Planting,[82] he says: “His [Cabot’s] own map is in the Queen’s Privy Gallery at Westminster, the copy whereof was set out by Mr. Clement Adams, and is in many merchants’ houses in London.” It was probably reproduced under the inspection of Adams. We do not know the year in which Adams’s copy was made, unless an equivocal date in the margin of Purchas[83] may be regarded as expressing the year, namely “1549.” Purchas has fallen into great confusion in attempting to describe Cabot’s map and his picture as they hung in Whitehall in his time.[84]

All these documents relative to the Cabot voyages were reprinted by Hakluyt in the third volume of his larger work—bearing a similar general title to that of 1589—published in 1600.[85] In the extract from Cabot’s map, cut by Clement Adams, there reproduced, he changed the date of the year of the discovery from 1494 to 1497. This latter is no doubt the true date, but on what authority did Hakluyt make the change? M. D’Avezac, who contended that 1494 was the true date of the discovery, that being the date on Cabot’s map, believed that the change was the result of a typographical error.[86] That it was deliberate and that the change was not made by an error of the printer, is shown by the fact that the altered date appears both in the Latin extract and the English version of it; and that the index or general catalogue at the beginning of the third volume, in noticing the authorities for Sebastian Cabot’s voyage, gives “1497” as the year. Again, a copy of Emeric Molyneaux’s map, prepared about this time, and inserted in some copies of this volume of Hakluyt, has on the delineation of Labrador, which some suppose to have been the prima vista of Cabot, the following inscription: “This land was discovered by John and Sebastian Cabot for King Henry VII., 1497.”[87] I have already referred to the earliest use of this date as the year of the discovery, inscribed on a map of Locke in Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages of 1582. But the true source of the date is not here revealed.[88]

Clement Adams’s map is yet a mystery. I have already called attention to two editions of Cabot’s map, one of which is in the National Library at Paris, and another from[45] which the legends in Chytræus were copied. The extract from Adams’s edition, first made by Hakluyt in 1589,[89] was in Latin, but from a text quite different from that of Chytræus, or from the Paris map. It is Legend No. 8 of the inscriptions, and was the “Chapiter of Gabot’s mapp De terra nova,” as set out by Adams, which Hakluyt tells us of in his Discourse.[90] This heading is the same as that in Chytræus. Here we have two different translations from a Spanish original. Did Adams transcribe from another copy of Cabot’s map yet to be discovered—for we can hardly suppose he would make a new Latin version of the legends, with one already before him—or did he translate from a map with the Spanish legends only?—neither of which precious documents is to be found in our bureaus of cartography, and they are yet to be added to Dr. Kohl’s list of lost maps!

Following Hakluyt’s extract from Adams’s map is an English version by him, beginning thus:—

“In the year of our Lord 1494, John Cabot, a Venetian, and his son Sebastian (with an English fleet set out from Bristol), discovered that land which no man before that time had attempted, on the 24th of June, about five of o’clock early in the morning. This land he called Prima vista, that is to say, First seen, because, as I suppose, it was that part whereof they had the first sight from sea. That island which lyeth out before the land he called the Island of S. John, upon this occasion, as I think, because it was discovered upon the day of St. John the Baptist.”

It is scarcely necessary to say that the passage in parenthesis is not in the original, but is introduced by Hakluyt. But the words which I have italicized are represented in the extract by “credo” and “opinor,” and are not authorized by the language of the Paris map, nor by the same legend in Chytræus. In the concluding part of this extract, not here quoted, Hakluyt speaks of a certain kind of fish seen by the Cabots, “which the Savages call Baccalaos.” The Latin of Adams’s map and of the Paris map is vulgus, which may mean the common people of Europe, or the fishermen. In the Spanish of the Paris map, it is said that the fish are called Baccalaos, but it does not say by whom. The “white bears” of the Spanish crept into the Latin of Adams, and of course into Hakluyt’s English, as “white lions.”

An interesting discussion as to the authenticity of this map of Cabot in the Paris Library, in connection with the genuineness of the date 1494, as expressing the true year of the discovery of North America, may be seen in the letter of M. D’Avezac to President Woods, already referred to. M. D’Avezac accepts the map and the date as genuine and authentic, while Dr. Kohl rejects both. Mr. Richard Henry Major, in his paper on “The True Date of the English Discovery,” etc., ably reviews the whole question discussed by those distinguished savans, and adopts a somewhat modified view. He believes that Sebastian Cabot originally drew a map with legends or inscriptions upon it in Spanish only, but that he had no hand in publishing it, or in correcting it for the press, and that the errors in the engraved map arose from the ignorance or inadvertence of transcribers; that the date of the discovery, 1497, was expressed in Roman numerals in the manuscript; that the letter V. in the numerals VII. was carelessly drawn, and not well joined at the base, so that a reader might well take it for a II.; and that such an error might more easily occur in a manuscript, especially on parchment, than on an engraved map on paper. As evidence that the Paris map, which Dr. Kohl thinks was made in Germany or Belgium, was copied from a Spanish manuscript, Mr. Major cites the instance of the name Laguna de Nicaragua being rendered into “Laguna de Nicaxagoe.” The Spanish manuscript r being in the form of our northern x, the transcriber showed his ignorance by substituting the one letter for the other. So also as regards the copy made by Clement Adams from the Spanish original. He made an independent translation of the inscriptions into Latin, which accounts for the two Latin versions, and also made the same error for the same reason, in giving the date 1494, instead of 1497.

Mr. Major believes that Hakluyt had good reason for making the change of date from[46] 1494 to 1497 as the true date of discovery, as in the same volume in which the change was made he introduced the remarkable map of Molyneaux, referred to above, on which that date was inscribed as the year of the discovery; and furthermore that he may have consulted the papers of Cabot in the possession of William Worthington.[91]

To return again from this long digression to the volumes of Hakluyt in which he has brought together his various authorities relating to the voyages of the Cabots, one is impressed with a feeling of disappointment that he makes no attempt to reconcile their apparent glaring discrepancies,—that is to say, as to the different dates given in them to the voyage of discovery, and the variation in the different degrees of latitude reached; while no opinion is expressed as to the comparative agency of John or Sebastian Cabot, or the question as to whether there was more than one voyage,—I mean a second immediately following the first which was of discovery. In the general catalogue prefixed in 1600 to the third volume of his larger work, he refers to these several “testimonies” as proving a voyage of discovery in 1497, while in reality no one of them proves that date, bearing in mind that the date in the extract from Adams’s map was in this later reprint inserted by him on some evidence not found in his volumes,—the truth being that all these testimonies, taken as a whole, refer probably to two if not three voyages, as we have already seen.[92]

I do not forget that these volumes of Hakluyt contain other interesting documents relating to Cabot,—namely, the record of the pension granted by Edward VI., dated Jan. 6, 1548-49, of £165 13s. 6d., to date from the preceding Michaelmas Day (September 29); the Ordinances and Instructions compiled by Cabot for the intended voyage for Cathay, May 9, 1553; his appointment in the charter of the Muscovy Company, Feb. 6, 1555-56, as its governor; the story of his presence on board the “Serchthrift” at Gravesend on the 13th of April, 1556, about to sail on a voyage of discovery to the northeast, where the venerable man “entered into the dance himself.”[93]

I have already referred to a volume of Chytræus, containing the Latin legends on Sebastian Cabot’s map, which was published about this time,—the first edition in 1594, a second in 1599, and a third edition in 1606. We can hardly suppose that Hakluyt ever saw this book, at least in the earlier editions, as he could hardly have failed to incorporate the inscriptions into his larger work. The date 1494 given in the 8th Legend as the year of the discovery of the new lands, and the same date incorporated in Hakluyt’s folio of 1589 from Adams’s map, gave currency to its use to a limited extent.[94] But Hakluyt’s larger work of 1598-1600 quite superseded in use his previous books, and Chytræus was probably rarely seen or consulted; yet Mr. Biddle, who never could have seen Chytræus or Hakluyt’s folio of 1589, could never understand why later writers, like Harris and Pinkerton, adopted that date.

I did not propose, in presenting this sketch of authorities relating to the Cabots, in chronological order, to pursue the inquiry much beyond the period to which I have arrived.[47] Neither do I flatter myself that I have, in the field already traversed, embraced everything in printed form that should have been noticed, and something of value may have escaped me. In proceeding, therefore, to notice two or three important works relating to my theme published about the period now reached, I shall conclude this chapter by introducing some important material which has come to light at a later time, from the slumbering archives of foreign States, and much of it within a few years.[95]

One of the most important books relating to the history of America was published at Madrid, 1601-15, by Herrera,—Historia General. It contains nothing relating to the first voyages of the Cabots, except the passage from Gomara already cited; but it gives other interesting facts respecting Sebastian Cabot’s residence in Spain, drawn from official documents. In citing passages from this work below, I have also made use of the more recently published works of Navarrete, and even of other writers, where they relate to the same subject. In the “deceptive conversation” given in the first volume of Ramusio, Cabot[48] is made to say that the troubles in England induced him, that is, on his return from his voyage of discovery, to seek employment in Spain. But Peter Martyr informs us that Cabot did not leave England until after the death of Henry VII., which took place in 1509.[96] Herrera[97] mentions the circumstances under which the invitation from Ferdinand was given and accepted, and Cabot arrived in Spain, Sep. 13, 1512.

He was taken into service as “capitan,” with pay of fifty thousand maravedis by a royal grant made at Lagroño, Oct. 20, 1512.[98] Eden,[99] in a translation of Peter Martyr, makes that author say that Cabot had been, at the time at which Martyr was writing, 1515, appointed a member of the Council of the Indies, but it is believed that the original language of Martyr, “concurialis noster,” will not bear that interpretation.[100] In 1515 he was appointed “Cosmographo de la Casa de la Contratacion,” an office which involved the care of revising maps and charts.[101] And in that same year, Peter Martyr tells us, there was projected a voyage under the command of Cabot, to search for that “hid secret of Nature” in the northwest, to sail in the following year, 1516. But the death of King Ferdinand, on the 23d of January of that year, put an end to the expedition. In November, 1515, Cabot and Juan Vespucius gave an opinion (parecer) concerning the demarcation line in Brazil.[102] I have already spoken of the alleged voyage of Cabot and Sir Thomas Pert from England, of 1516-17, concerning which serious doubts have been expressed. Herrera makes no mention of Cabot’s leaving Spain at this time; and De Barcia, not perhaps the highest authority, in the preface to his Ensayo Chronologico, etc., Madrid, 1723, says that Cabot was residing quietly in Spain from 1512 to 1526, and that “he never intended or proposed to prosecute the proposed discovery.” On Feb. 5, 1518, he was appointed “Piloto Mayor y Examinador de Pilotos,” succeeding Juan de Solis, who had been killed on the La Plata River in 1516, with the same pay in addition to that of capitano.[103] In 1520 this appointment is again confirmed, with orders that no pilot should pass to the Indies without being first examined and approved by him.[104] On April 14, 1524, the celebrated Congress at Badajos was held, which was attended by Cabot, not as a member but as an expert; and he and several others delivered an opinion on the questions submitted, April 15, the second day of the session.[105] Immediately after the decision of the Congress, which was pronounced practically in favor of the Spanish interest, a company was formed at Seville to prosecute the trade to the Moluccas, through the Straits of Magellan, and Cabot was invited to take the command; and in September of this year he received the sanction of the Council of the Indies to engage in the enterprise, and the agreement with the Emperor was executed at Madrid on March 4, 1525, and the title of Captain-General was conferred upon him. It was intended that the expedition should depart in August, but it was delayed by the intrigues of the Portuguese, and did not sail till April 3, 1526.[106] Cabot’s expedition to the La Plata, it having been diverted on the coast from its original destination, will be considered in another volume. On Oct. 25, 1525, his wife, Catalina Medrano, was directed by a royal order to receive fifty thousand maravedis as a “gratificacion.”[107]

Cabot returned from South America to Seville with two ships at the end of July or the beginning of August, 1530, and laid his final report before the Emperor, of which an[49] abstract may be found in Herrera. Private complaints were laid against him, and at the suit of the families of some of his companions who had perished in the expedition he was arrested and imprisoned, but liberated on bail. Public charges were preferred against him for misconduct in the affairs of the La Plata, and the Council of the Indies by an order dated from Medina del Campo, Feb. 1, 1532, condemned him to a banishment of two years to Oran, in Africa. But the sentence was not carried into execution. Under the date of 1531, Herrera speaks of his wife and children.[108]

During Cabot’s absence, that is to say, on April 4, 1528, Alonzo de Chaves was appointed “Piloto Mayor,” with Ribero;[109] but the office was resumed by him not long after his return. Navarrete quotes from the Archivo de Indias a declaration made in 1574, by Juan Fernandez de Ladrillos, of Moguer, a great pilot, over seventy years old, who had sailed to America for twenty-eight years, that he was examined by Sebastian Cabot in 1535.[110] This office Cabot retained till he left Spain and returned to England.

I may as well introduce here as elsewhere a few passages from that part of the history of Oviedo recently published at Madrid, for the first time, by the Academy of History. Oviedo is very severe on Cabot for his want of knowledge and skill in his operations on the La Plata. But my citations are for another purpose. “Another great pilot (piloto mayor), Sebastian Cabot, Venetian by origin, educated in England, who at present is Piloto Mayor and Cosmographer of their Royal Majesties, etc.... I will not defend from passions ... and negligence Sebastian Cabot in the affairs of this expedition, since he is a good person and skilful in his office of cosmography, and making a map of the whole world in plane or in a spherical form; but it is not the same thing to command and govern people as to point a quadrant or an astrolabe.”[111]

Several interesting episodes in the life of Cabot during his residence in Spain have been recently made public from the Venetian archives. They may be related here.

The story of Cabot’s intrigue with the authorities of Venice is told in a remarkable and interesting letter of Gasparin Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to Charles V., dated Valladolid, Dec. 31, 1522. Cabot was at this time holding a high office under the Emperor, and was drawing large pay. It appears that he had made secret proposals to the Council of Ten through a friend of his, a certain friar, named Hieronimo de Marin, a native of Ragusa, to enter into the service of Venice, and disclose the strait or passage which he claimed to have discovered, whereby she would derive a great commercial benefit. He proposed to visit Venice and lay the whole plan before the Council. The Council of Ten, though they had but little confidence in the scheme, made all this known to their ambassador by letter, in which they enclosed a letter also for Cabot, which they had instructed the friar to write to him. Contarini sent for Cabot, who happened then to be residing at the court, and gave him his letter, which he there read with manifest embarrassment. After his fears had been quieted he told Contarini that he had previously, in England, out of the love he bore his country, spoken to the ambassadors of Venice on the subject of the newly discovered countries, through which he had the means of benefiting Venice, and that the letter had reference to that subject; but he besought the ambassador to keep the thing a secret, as it would cost him his life. Contarini told him that he was thoroughly acquainted with the whole affair, but they would talk further on the subject in the evening. At the hour appointed, when they were closeted alone in the ambassador’s chamber, Cabot said:—

“My Lord Ambassador, to tell you the whole truth, I was born in Venice, but was brought up in England (Io naqui a Venetia, ma sum nutrito in Engelterra), and then entered the service of their Catholic Majesties of Spain, and King Ferdinand made me a captain, with a salary of 50,000 maravedis.[50] Subsequently his present Majesty gave me the office of Pilot Major, with an additional salary of 50,000 maravedis, and 25,000 maravedis besides, as a gratuity; forming a total of 125,000 maravedis, equal to about 300 ducats.”

He then proceeded to say that being in England some three years before, Cardinal Wolsey offered him high terms if he would sail with an armada of his on a voyage of discovery, for which preparations were making; but he declined unless the Emperor would give his consent, in which case he would accept the offer. But meeting with a Venetian who reproached him for not serving his own country instead of being engaged altogether for foreigners, his heart smote him, and he wrote the Emperor to recall him, which he did. And on his return to Seville, and contracting an intimate friendship with this Ragusan friar, he unbosomed himself to him; and, as the friar was going to Venice, charged him with the aforesaid message to the Council of the Ten, and to no one else; and the Ragusan “swore to me a sacred oath to this effect.” Cabot then said he would go to Venice, and lay the matter before the Council, after getting the Emperor’s consent to go, “on the plea of recovering his mother’s dowry.” The ambassador approved of this, but made some serious objections to the feasibility of the scheme which Cabot proposed for the benefit of Venice. Cabot answered his objections. In the course of the conversation he told Contarini that he had a method for ascertaining by the needle the distance between two places from east to west, which had never been previously discovered by any one. The interview was concluded by his promising to go to Venice at his own expense, and return in like manner if his plan was disapproved by the Council. He then urged Contarini to keep the matter secret.

On the following 7th of March the ambassador again wrote to the Chiefs of the Ten, saying that Cabot had been several times to see him, and that he was disposed to come to Venice to carry his purpose into effect, but that he did not then dare ask leave for fear he might be suspected of going to England, and he must wait three months longer; and that Cabot desired the Council to write him a letter urging him to come to Venice for the dispatch of his affairs (meaning his private business). On the 28th of April the Council, in the name of the Ragusan friar, wrote to Cabot what had been done to discover where his property was; that there was good hope of recovering the dower of his mother and aunt, and that had he been present no doubt the object would have been attained before. He is therefore urged to come at once, “for your aunt is very old.” The Council say they have caused this letter to be written “touching his private affairs, in order that it may appear necessary for him to quit Spain.” On the 26th of July, Contarini again writes that Cabot, who had been residing at Seville, had come to Valladolid on his way to Venice, and was endeavoring to get leave of the Imperial Councillors to go, and that the Signory would be informed of the result of the application. Probably he never went. The next mention of him in the Venetian correspondence, during his residence in Spain, is under the date of September 21, 1525,—that Sebastian Cabot is captain of the fleet preparing for the Indies.[112]

Cabot still kept up his intrigues with Venice, even after his return to England. On the 12th of September, 1551, the Council of Ten write to their ambassador in England, telling him to assure Cabot that they are gratified by his offer, and that they will do all they can about the recovery of his property there, but that it is necessary that he should come personally to Venice, as no one there knows him; that the matters concerned are over fifty years old, and by the death of men, decay of houses, and perishing of writings, as well as by his own absence, no assured knowledge can be arrived at. He should therefore come at once. Ramusio, the Secretary of the Council, had been put in trust by Cabot of all[51] such evidences as should come to hand regarding Cabot’s business, and he would use all diligence towards establishing his rights. In the mean time the ambassador is to learn from him all he can about this navigation.

Whether this talk about Cabot’s property in Venice, the dowry from his mother and his aged aunt, was all fictitious, perhaps never can be known. That these alleged facts were used as a pretext or “blind” in this correspondence, was on both sides avowed.[113]

It has been already mentioned, that, after Cabot’s return to England, and his entry into the service of Edward VI.,—a warrant for his transportation hither from Spain having passed the Privy Council on the 9th of Oct. 1547,—the King, on the 6th of January, 1548/9, granted him a pension for life of £166 13s. 4d., “in consideration of good and acceptable service done and to be done by him.” But in the following year a little contretemps occurred between Cabot and the Emperor Charles V. Through the Spanish ambassador, Jan. 19, 1549/50, Charles had demanded the return of Cabot to Spain, saying that he was the “Grand Pilot of the Emperor’s Indies, ... a very necessary man for the Emperor, whose servant he was, and had a pension of him.” The Council replied that Cabot was not detained by them, but that he had refused to go, saying that being the King’s subject there was no reason why he should be compelled to go. The ambassador insisted that Cabot should declare his mind to him personally; and an interview was held, at which Cabot made a declaration to the same import, but said he was willing to write to the Emperor, having good-will towards him, concerning some matters important for the Emperor to know. He was then asked if he would return to Spain if the King of England and the Council should demand of him to go; to which Cabot made an equivocal answer, but which the Council, to whom a report of the conversation was made by a third person present, interpreted to mean that he would not go, as he had divers times before declared to them.[114]

In March, 1551, Sebastian Cabot received from the King a special reward of £200. On the 9th of September, 1553, soon after the accession of Philip and Mary, the Emperor, Charles V., again made an earnest request that Cabot should return to Spain. But he declined to go. On the 27th of November, 1555, Cabot’s pension was renewed to him. Edward VI. having died two years previous, the former grant had probably expired with him. On the 27th of May, 1557, Cabot resigned his pension, and on the 29th a new grant was made to him and to William Worthington, jointly, of the same amount, so that Cabot was bereft of half his pay.[115] Cabot died not long afterwards, the precise date, however, not being known.

Mr. Biddle was strongly impressed with the belief that Cabot suffered great neglect and injustice in his last days from Philip, through the jealousy of Spain of the growing commerce and maritime enterprise of England, stimulated by one who had left his father’s service and refused to return, and “who was now imparting to others the benefit of his vast experience and accumulated stores of knowledge.” And he believed that William Worthington, who was associated with Cabot in the last grant to him of his pension, was a creature of Spain, who finally got possession of Cabot’s papers, and confiscated them beyond the reach of the students and statesmen of England.

I will now call attention to some documents recently made public, principally derived from the archives of Venice and of Spain, which reveal John Cabot again to our view and show him to have been the real discoverer of North America.[116]

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John Cabot, or in the Venetian dialect, Zuan Caboto, was probably born in Genoa or its neighborhood, and came to Venice as early as 1461. He there married a daughter of the country, by whom he had three sons. On the 28th of March, 1476, by the unanimous consent of the Senate, he obtained his naturalization as a citizen of Venice,[117] “within and without,” having resided there fifteen years.[118] He engaged in the study of cosmography and the practice of navigation, and at one time visited Mecca, where the caravans brought in the spices from distant lands. He subsequently left Venice with his family for England and took up his residence in Bristol, then one of the principal maritime cities of that country. Sebastian is reported as saying that his father went to England to follow the trade of merchandise. When this removal took place is uncertain. Peter Martyr says that Sebastian, the second son, at the time was a little child (pene infans), while Sebastian himself says, if correctly reported, that he was very young (che egli era assai giouare), yet that he had some knowledge of the humanities and of the sphere. He therefore must have arrived at some maturity of years.[119] Eden[120] says that Sebastian told him that he was born in Bristol, and was taken to Venice when he was four years old, and brought back again after certain years. He told Contarini, at a most solemn interview, that he was born in Venice and bred (nutrito) in England, which is probably true. It is reasonable to suppose that the three sons were of age when the letters patent were granted to them and their father in March, 1496, in which case Sebastian, being the second son, must have been born as early as 1473, or three years before his father took out his papers of naturalization in Venice.[121]

In a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella to Doctor de Puebla, in London, dated March 28, 1496, they say, after acknowledging his letter of the 21st of January: “You write that a person like Columbus has come to England for the purpose of persuading the King to enter into an undertaking similar to that of the Indies, without prejudice to Spain and Portugal. He is quite at liberty.” But Puebla is further charged to see that the King of England, who they think has had this temptation laid before him by the King of France, is not deceived in this matter, for that these undertakings cannot be executed without prejudice to Spain and Portugal.[122]

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A reasonable inference from this would be, that John Cabot had arrived in England not long before the date of Puebla’s letter to their Majesties, to lay his proposals before Henry VII., as Columbus had done some years before through his brother, and not that he had been a long resident in the country. The letters patent had already been issued, that is to say, on the 5th of March.[123] This letter from Spain may have caused some delay in the sailing of the expedition, which did not depart till the following year. But some time was necessary to beat up recruits for the voyage, and to enlist the aid of the substantial citizens of Bristol in the undertaking. John Cabot, accompanied perhaps by his son Sebastian, finally sailed in the early part of May, 1497, with one small vessel and eighteen persons, “almost all Englishmen and from Bristol,” says Raimondo; who adds, “The chief men of the enterprise are of Bristol, great sailors.” A few foreigners were included in the company, as we learn from the same authority that a Burgundian and a Genoese accompanied them. The name of the vessel is said to have been the “Matthew.” Mr. Barrett[124] says: “In the year 1497, June 24th, on St. John’s day, as it is in a manuscript in my possession, ‘was Newfoundland found by Bristol men in a ship called the Matthew.’” How much of this paragraph was in the manuscript is not clear. The first part of it was evidently taken from Hakluyt. And we are not told whether the manuscript was ancient or modern. It cannot now be found.[125]

John Cabot returned in the early part of August. The following well-known memorandum, from the Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII., “August 10, 1497: To him who found the New Isle, 10l.,” is supposed to refer to him.[126]

Additional evidence concerning the voyage will now be given. The following is a letter from Lorenzo Pasqualigo, a merchant residing in London, to his brothers in Venice, dated August 23d, 1497, which I have somewhat abridged:—

“The Venetian, our countryman, who went with a ship from Bristol, is returned, and says that 700 leagues hence he discovered land in the territory of the Grand Cham. He coasted 300 leagues and landed, saw no human beings, but brought to the king certain snares set to catch game, and a needle for making nets. Was three months on the voyage. The king has promised that in the spring our countryman shall have ten ships. The king has also given him money wherewith to amuse himself till then, and he is now in Bristol with his wife, who is also a Venetian, and with his sons. His name is Zuan Cabot, and he is styled the great Admiral. Vast honor is paid him. The discoverer planted on his new-found land a large cross, with one flag of England and one of St. Mark, by reason of his being a Venetian.... London, 23d of August, 1497.”[127]

On the following day, August 24, 1497, Raimondo de Soncino, envoy of the Duke of Milan to Henry VII., wrote the following passage in a long dispatch to his Government:

“Also, some months ago, his Majesty sent out a Venetian who is a very good mariner, and has good skill in discovering new islands, and he has returned safe, and has found two very large and[54] fertile new islands, having likewise discovered The Seven Cities, four hundred leagues from England in the western passage. This next spring his Majesty means to send him with fifteen or twenty ships.”[128]

In the following December, Raimondo de Soncino wrote another letter from London, making more particular mention of John Cabot’s discovery, and of the intention of the King to authorize another expedition. This letter, from the State Archives of Milan, was first published in the Annuario Scientifico, in 1865,[129] and is now published in English for the first time. There is some obscurity in the letter in a few places, in naming the direction in which the vessel sailed, as the east when the west was evidently intended. Whether this was a clerical error, or whether by the term “the east” was meant “the land of the spices” to which the expedition was bound, and which in the language of the day lay to the east, is uncertain. Neither is the geographical object named as “Tanais” recognized. This letter throws no light on the Landfall. I am indebted to Professor Bennet H. Nash, of Harvard College, for revising the translation of this letter.

Most Illustrious and Excellent My Lord:—

Perhaps among your Excellency’s many occupations, it may not displease you to learn how his Majesty here has won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword. There is in this kingdom a Venetian fellow, Master John Caboto by name, of a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation, who seeing that those most serene kings, first he of Portugal, and then the one of Spain, have occupied unknown islands, determined to make a like acquisition for his Majesty aforesaid. And having obtained royal grants that he should have the usufruct of all that he should discover, provided that the ownership of the same is reserved to the crown, with a small ship and eighteen persons he committed himself to fortune; and having set out from Bristol, a western port of this kingdom, and passed the western limits of Hibernia, and then standing to the northward he began to steer eastward, leaving (after a few days) the North Star on his right hand; and, having wandered about considerably, at last he fell in with terra firma, where, having planted the royal banner and taken possession on behalf of this King, and taken certain tokens, he has returned thence. The said Master John, as being foreign-born and poor, would not be believed if his comrades, who are almost all Englishmen and from Bristol, did not testify that what he says is true. This Master John has the description of the world in a chart, and also in a solid globe which he has made, and he [or the chart and the globe] shows where he landed, and that going toward the east he passed considerably beyond the country of the Tanais. And they say that it is a very good and temperate country, and they think that Brazil-wood and silks grow there; and they affirm that that sea is covered with fishes, which are caught not only with the net but with baskets, a stone being tied to them in order that the baskets may sink in the water. And this I heard the said Master John relate, and the aforesaid Englishmen, his comrades, say that they will bring so many fishes that this kingdom will no longer have need of Iceland, from which country there comes a very great store of fish which are called stock-fish. But Master John has set his mind on something greater; for he expects to go farther on toward the East (Levant,) from that place already occupied, constantly hugging the shore, until he shall be over against [or “on the other side of”] an island, by him called Cipango, situated in the equinoctial region, where he thinks all the spices of the world, and also the precious stones, originate; and he says that in former times he was at Mecca, whither spices are brought by caravans from distant countries, and that those who brought them, on being asked where the said spices grow, answered that they do not know, but that other caravans come to their homes with this merchandise from distant countries, and these [caravans] again say that they are brought to them from other remote regions. And he argues thus,—that if the Orientals[55] affirmed to the Southerners that these things come from a distance from them, and so from hand to hand, presupposing the rotundity of the earth, it must be that the last ones get them at the North toward the West; and he said it in such a way, that, having nothing to gain or lose by it, I too believe it: and what is more, the King here, who is wise and not lavish, likewise puts some faith in him; for (ever) since his return he has made good provision for him, as the same Master John tells me. And it is said that, in the spring, his Majesty afore-named will fit out some ships, and will besides give him all the convicts, and they will go to that country to make a colony, by means of which they hope to establish in London a greater storehouse of spices than there is in Alexandria; and the chief men of the enterprise are of Bristol, great sailors, who, now that they know where to go, say that it is not a voyage of more than fifteen days, nor do they ever have storms after they get away from Hibernia. I have also talked with a Burgundian, a comrade of Master John’s, who confirms everything, and wishes to return thither because the Admiral (for so Master John already entitles himself) has given him an island; and he has given another one to a barber of his from Castiglione-of-Genoa, and both of them regard themselves as Counts, nor does my Lord the Admiral esteem himself anything less than a Prince. I think that with this expedition there will go several poor Italian monks, who have all been promised bishoprics. And, as I have become a friend of the Admiral’s, if I wished to go thither I should get an archbishopric. But I have thought that the benefices which your Excellency has in store for me are a surer thing; and therefore I beg that if these should fall vacant in my absence, you will cause possession to be given to me, taking measures to do this rather [especially] where it is needed, in order that they be not taken from me by others, who because they are present can be more diligent than I, who in this country have been brought to the pass of eating ten or twelve dishes at every meal, and sitting at table three hours at a time twice a day, for the sake of your Excellency, to whom I humbly commend myself.

Your Excellency’s

Very humble servant,

Raimundus.

London, Dec. 18, 1497.

These letters are sufficient to show that North America was discovered by John Cabot, the name of Sebastian being nowhere mentioned in them, and that the discovery was made in 1497. The place which he first sighted is given on the map of 1544 as the north part of Cape Breton Island, on which is inscribed “prima tierra vista,” which was reached, according to the Legend, on the 24th of June. Pasqualigo, the only one who mentions it, says he coasted three hundred leagues. Mr. Brevoort, who accepts the statement, thinks he made the periplus of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, passing out at the straits of Belle Isle, and thence home.[130] He saw no human beings, so that the story of men dressed in bear-skins and otherwise described in the Legend must have been seen by Sebastian Cabot on a later voyage. The extensive sailing up and down the coast described by chroniclers from conversations with Sebastian Cabot many years afterwards, though apparently told as occurring on the voyage of discovery,—as only one voyage is ever mentioned,—must have taken place on a later voyage. There was no time between the 24th of June and[56] the 1st of August for any very extensive explorations. Indeed, John Cabot intimated to Raimondo that he intended on the next voyage to start from the place he had already found, and run down the coast towards the equinoctial regions, where he expected to find the island of Cipango and the country of jewels and spices. No doubt he was anxious to return and report his discovery thus far, and provide “for greater things.” The plea of a shortness of provisions may have covered another motive. The great abundance of fish reported might have supplied any immediate want.

PORTUGUESE PORTOLANO. 1514-1520.

[This map, at no. 5, places the Breton discovery at the Cabot landfall. The original is dated by Kohl (Discovery of Maine, 179) in 1520; and by Kunstmann in 1514. Stevens, Hist. and Geog. Notes, pl. v., copies Kunstmann. The points and inscriptions on it are as follows:—

1. Do Lavrador (Labrador). Terram istam portugalenses viderunt atamen non intraverunt. (The Portuguese saw this country, but did not enter it.)

2. Bacaluaos (east coast of Newfoundland).

3. (Straits of Belle Isle.)

4. (South entrance to Gulf of St. Lawrence.)

5. Tera que foij descuberta por bertomas. (Land discovered by the Bretons.)

6. Teram istam gaspar Corte Regalis portugalemsis primo invenit, etc. (Nova Scotia. Gaspar Cortereal first discovered this country, and he took away wild men and white bears; and many animals, birds and fish are in it. The next year he was shipwrecked and did not return, and so was his brother Michael the following year.) The voyages of the Cortereals will be described in Vol. IV.—Ed.]

John Cabot was now in high favor with the King, who supplied him with money, by which he was able to make a fine appearance. Indeed, the King granted him under the great seal, during the royal pleasure, a pension of twenty pounds sterling per annum, having the purchasing value of two hundred pounds at the present time; to date from the preceding 25th of March. The grant was a charge upon the customs of the port of Bristol. The document authorizing this grant we are able to present here for the first time in print. The order from the King is dated the 13th of December, 1497, and it passed the seals the 28th of January, 1498:[131]

“Memorandum quod xxviii. die Januarii anno subscripto istæ litteræ liberatæ fuerunt domino Cancellario Angliæ apud Westmonasterium exequendæ:—

“Henry, by the Grace of God King of England and of France and Lord of Ireland, to the most reverend father in God, John Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England and of the apostolic see legate, our Chancellor, greeting:—

“We let you wit that we for certain considerations, us specially moving, have given and granted unto our well-beloved John Calbot, of the parts of Venice, an annuity or annual rent of twenty pounds sterling to be had and yearly paid from the feast of the Annunciation of Our Lady last past, during our pleasure, of our customs and subsidies coming and growing in our port of Bristowe by the hands of our customs there for the time being at Michaelmas and Easter, by even portions. Wherefore we will and charge you that under our great seal ye do make hereupon our letters patents in good and effectual form. Given under our privy seal, at our palace of Westminster, the xiiith day of December, the xiiith year of our reign.”

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Preparations were now made for a second voyage, and a license to John Cabot alone, as we have already seen, was issued by the King, for leave to take up six ships and to enlist as many of the King’s subjects as were willing to go. This was evidently a scheme of colonization. Peter Martyr says, if this is the voyage which he is describing, that Sebastian Cabot—for he never speaks of John—furnished two ships at his own charge, and Sebastian Cabot, in Ramusio, says that the King furnished them, and the Bristol merchants are supposed to have furnished three others; and they took out three hundred men.[132] The Fabian manuscript quoted by Hakluyt says they sailed in the beginning of May; and De Ayala says they were expected back by September. There is no doubt that Sebastian Cabot accompanied his father on this voyage. From the documents already cited from Peter Martyr and Ramusio there is some reason to believe that the expedition coasted some distance to the north, and then returning ran down the coast as far as to the 36° N. without accomplishing the purpose for which they went. That this latter course was pursued receives some confirmation from the declarations of John Cabot on his return from the first voyage, that he believed it practicable to reach in that direction the Island of Cipango and the land of the spices. But the prospects were discouraging and their provisions failed. Gomara, in noticing this voyage, says that on their return from the north they stopped at Baccalaos for refreshment. But all the accounts relied on for this voyage are vague and, as we have already seen, unsatisfying.

The following letter from the Prothonotary, Don Pedro de Ayala, residing in London, to Ferdinand and Isabella, dated July 25, 1498, relates to the sailing of this expedition:

“I think your Majesties have already heard that the King of England has equipped a fleet in order to discover certain islands and continents which he was informed some people from Bristol, who manned a few ships for the same purpose last year, had found. I have seen the map which the discoverer has made, who is another Genoese like Columbus, and who has been in Seville and in Lisbon asking assistance for his discoveries. The people of Bristol have, for the last seven years, sent out every year two, three, or four light ships in search of the Island of Brazil and the Seven Cities, according to the fancy of this Genoese. The King determined to send out ships, because the year before they brought certain news that they had found land. His fleet consisted of five vessels, which carried provisions for one year. It is said that one of them, in which Friar Buel went, has returned to Ireland in great distress, the ship being much damaged. The Genoese has continued his voyage. I have seen on a chart the direction which they took and the distance they sailed; and I think that what they have found, or what they are in search of, is what your Highnesses already possess. It is expected that they will be back in the month of September.... I think it is not further distant than 400 leagues.... I do not now send the chart, or mapa mundi, which that man has made, and which, according to my opinion, is false, since it makes it appear as if the land in question was not the said islands.”[133]

We see by this letter that this “Genoese,” who had discovered land the year before, had again sailed on the expedition here described. If so important a person as John Cabot now was to the King had died before its departure, the fact would have been known at court, and De Ayala would surely have mentioned it, as the Spaniards were very jealous of all these proceedings. The statement that the King had equipped the fleet may only mean that the expedition was fitted and sent out under his countenance and protection. De Ayala says it was expected back in September, but it had not returned by the last of October. No one knows when the expedition returned, and no one knows what became[58] of John Cabot. When the domestic calendars of the reign of Henry VII. are published, some clew to him may turn up. In the mean time we must wait patiently.

The enterprise was regarded as a failure, and no doubt the Bristol and London adventurers suffered a pecuniary loss. All schemes of Western discovery and colonization were for years substantially abandoned by England. Some feeble attempts in this direction appear to have been made in 1501 and 1502, when patents for discovery were granted by Henry in favor of some merchants of Bristol, with whom were associated several Portuguese, but it is not certain that anything was done under their authority.[134]


NOTE.—Henri Harrisse’s Jean et Sébastien Cabot, leur origine et leurs voyages, has been published since this chapter was completed.


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CHAPTER II.

HAWKINS AND DRAKE.

BY THE REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D.,

Massachusetts Historical Society.

THE English voyagers had no mind to content themselves with adventure in those more rugged regions to which the Cabots had introduced them. Whether in peace or war, their relations with Spain were growing closer and closer all through the sixteenth century. Sebastian Cabot, in fact, soon passed into the service of the Spanish Crown. Indeed, if we had no other memorial of the intimacy between English and Spanish navigators, we could still trace it in our language, which has derived many of its maritime words from Spanish originals. The seamen of England found their way everywhere, and soon acquainted themselves with the coasts of the West India Islands and the Spanish main. There exists, indeed, in the English archives a letter written as early as 1518 by the Treasurer-General of the West Indies to Queen Katherine, the unhappy wife of Henry VIII., in which he describes to her the peculiarities of his island home. He sends to her a cloak of feathers such as were worn by native princesses. From that time forward, allusions to the new discoveries appear in English literature and in the history of English trade.[135] Still, it would be fair to say, that, for thirty years after the discovery of America, that continent attracted as little attention in England as the discovery of the Antarctic continent, forty years ago, has attracted in America up to this time.

It belongs to another chapter to trace the gradual steps by which the English fisheries developed England’s knowledge of America. The instincts of trade led men farther south, in a series of voyages which will be briefly traced in this chapter. One of the earliest of them, which may be taken as typical, is that of William Hawkins, of Plymouth. Not content with the short voyages commonly made to the known coasts of Europe, Hawkins “armed out a tall and goodly ship of his own,” in which he made three voyages to Brazil, and skirted, after the fashion of the time, the African coast. He carried thither negroes whom he had taken on the[60] coast of Guinea. He deserves the credit, therefore, such as it is, of beginning that African slave-trade in which England was engaged for nearly three centuries.

The second of these voyages seems to have been made as early as 1530. He brought to England, from the coast of Brazil, a savage king, whose ornaments, apparel, behavior, and gestures were very strange to the English king and his nobility. These three voyages were so successful, that a number of Southampton merchants followed them up, at least as late as 1540.

It was, however, William Hawkins’s son John who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his success in the slave-trade, and in acknowledgment of the wealth which his voyages brought into England. Engaging several of his friends, some of whom were noblemen, in the adventure, John Hawkins sailed with a fleet of three ships and one hundred men for the coast of Guinea, in October, 1562. He took—partly by the sword, and partly by other means—three hundred or more negroes, whom he carried to San Domingo, then called Hispaniola, and sold profitably. In his own ships he brought home hides, ginger, sugar, and some pearls. He sent two other ships with hides and other commodities to Spain. These were seized by the Spanish Government, and it is curious that Hawkins should not have known that they would be. His ignorance seems to show that his adventure was substantially a novelty in that time. He himself arrived in England again in September, 1563. Notwithstanding the loss of half his profits in Spain, the voyage brought much gain to himself and the other adventurers.

Thus encouraged, Hawkins sailed again, the next year, with four ships, of which the largest was the “Jesus,” of Lubec, of seven hundred tons; the smallest was the “Swallow,” of only thirty tons. He had a hundred and seventy men; and, as in all such voyages, the ships were armed. Passing down the coast of Guinea, they spent December and January in picking up their wretched freight, and lost by sickness and in fights with the negroes many of their men. On the 29th of January, 1565, they had taken in their living cargo, and then they crossed to the West Indies. On the voyage they were becalmed for twenty-one days. But they arrived at the Island of Dominica, then in possession of savages, on the 9th of March. From that period till the 31st of May, they were trading on the Spanish coasts, and then returned to England, touching at various points in the West Indies. They passed along the whole coast of Florida, and they are the first Englishmen who give us in detail any account of Florida.[136]

[61]

It was Hawkins’s great good fortune to come to the relief of the struggling colony of Laudonnière, then in the second year of its wretched history. From his narrative we learn that the settlers had made twenty hogsheads of wine in a single summer from the native grapes, which is perhaps more than has been done there since in the same period of time.[137] The wretched colonists owed everything to the kindness of Hawkins. He left them a vessel in which to return to France; and they had made all their preparations so to do, when they were relieved—for their ultimate destruction, as it proved—by the arrival of a squadron under Ribault.[138] Hawkins returned to England after a voyage sufficiently prosperous, which had lasted eleven months. He had lost twenty persons in all; but he had brought home gold, silver, pearls, and other jewels in great store.

[This cut follows a photograph of the bas-relief which is given in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of the Hawkins Voyages. Another engraving of it is given in Harper’s Magazine, January, 1883, p. 221.—Ed.]

His account of Florida is much more careful than what he gives of any of the West India Islands. From his own words it is clear that he[62] thought it might be of use to England, and that he wanted to draw attention to it as a place open to colonization. Like so many other explorers, from Ponce de Leon down to our own times, he was surprised that a country, which is so attractive to the eye, should be left so nearly without inhabitants. It seems to have been more densely peopled when Ponce de Leon landed there in 1513 than it was at the beginning of this century. To such interest or enthusiasm of Hawkins do we owe an account of Florida, in its native condition, more full than we have of any other of our States, excepting New Mexico, at a period so early in our history.

Besides tobacco, he specifies the abundance of sorrel,—which grew as abundantly as grass,—of maize, of mill, and of grapes, which “taste much like our English grapes.” He describes the community building of the southern tribes, as made “like a great barne, in strength not inferiour to ours,” with stanchions and rafters of whole trees, and covered with palmetto leaves. There was one small room for the king and queen, but no other subdivisions. In the midst of the great hall a fire was kept all night. The houses, indeed, were only used at night.

In a country of such a climate and soil, with “marvellous store of deer and divers other beasts, and fowl and fish sufficient,” Hawkins naturally thought that “a man might live,” as he says quaintly. Maize, he says, “maketh good savory bread, and cakes as fine as flower.” The first account to be found in English literature of the “hasty pudding” of the American larder, the “mush” of the Pennsylvanians,[139] is in Hawkins’s narrative. “It maketh good meal, beaten, and sodden with water, and eateth like pap wherewith we feed children.” The Frenchmen, fond by nature of soup, had made another use of it, not wholly forgotten at this day. “It maketh also good beverage, sodden in water and nourishable; which the Frenchmen did use to drink of in the morning, and it assuaged their thirst so that they had no need to drink all the day after.” It was, he says, because the French had been too lazy to plant maize for themselves that their colony came to such wretched destitution. To obtain maize, they had made war against the so-called savages who had raised it, and this aggression had naturally reacted against them.

It is interesting to observe that in all these early narratives of the slave-trade there is no intimation that it involved cruelty or any form of wrong. Hawkins sailed in the ship “Jesus,” with faith as sincere as if he had sailed on a crusade. His sailing orders to his four ships close with words which remind one of Cromwell: “Serve God daily; love one another; preserve your victuals; beware of fire; and keep good company.” By “serve God,” it is meant that the ship’s company shall join in religious services morning and evening; and this these slave-traders regularly did. In one of their incursions on the Guinea coast they were almost destroyed by the[63] native negroes, as they well deserved to be. Hawkins narrates the adventure with this comment: “God, who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by him we escaped without danger. His name be praised for it!” And again, when they were nearly starved, becalmed in mid-ocean: “Almighty God, who never suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the ordinary breeze.”[140]

The success of the second voyage was such that a coat-of-arms was granted to Hawkins. Translated from the jargon of heraldry, the grant means that he might bear on his black shield a golden lion walking over the waves. Above the lion were three golden coins. For a crest he was to have a figure of half a Moor, “bound, and a captive,” with golden amulets on his arms and ears. No disgrace attached to the capturing of Africans and selling them for money. That the Heralds’ Office might give to the transaction the sanctions of Christianity, it directed Hawkins, five years after, to add in one corner of the shield the pilgrim’s scallop-shell in gold, between two palmer’s staves, as if to intimate that the African slave-trade was the true crusade of the reign of Elizabeth.

So successful was this expedition, that Hawkins started on a third, with five ships, in October, 1567. He commanded his old ship, the “Jesus,” and Francis Drake, afterward so celebrated, commanded the “Judith,” a little vessel of fifty tons. They took four or five hundred negroes, and crossed to Dominica again, but were more than seven weeks on the passage. As before, they passed along the Spanish main, where they found the Spaniards had been cautioned against them. They absolutely stormed the town of Rio de la Hacha before they could obtain permission to trade. In all cases, although the Spanish officers had been instructed to oppose their trade, they found that negroes were so much in demand that the planters dealt with them eagerly. After a repulse at Cartagena, they crossed the Gulf of Mexico towards Florida, but were finally compelled, by two severe tempests, to run to San Juan d’ Ulua, the port of Mexico, for repairs and supplies. Here they claimed the privileges of allies of King Philip, and were at first well enough received. Hawkins takes to himself credit that he did not seize twelve ships which he found there, with, £200,000 of silver on board. The local officers sent to the City of Mexico, about two hundred miles inland, for instructions. The next day a fleet from Spain, of twelve ships, arrived in the offing. Hawkins, fearing the anger of his Queen, he says, let them come into harbor, having made a compact with the Government[64] that neither side should make war against the other. The fleet entered, and for three days all was amity and courtesy. But on the fourth day, from the shore and from the ships, the five English vessels were attacked furiously, and in that little harbor a naval action ensued, of which the result was the flight of the “Minion” and the “Judith” alone, and the capture or destruction of the other English vessels. So crowded was the “Minion,” that a hundred of the fugitives preferred to land, rather than to tempt the perils of the sea in her. They fell into the hands of the Inquisition, and their sufferings were horrible. The others, after a long and stormy passage, arrived in England on the 25th of January, 1568/69.

It is a real misfortune for our early history that no reliance can be placed on the fragmentary stories of the few survivors who were left by Hawkins on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. One or two there were who, after years of captivity, told their wretched story at home. But it is so disfigured by every form of lie, that the most ingenious reconstructer of history fails to distil from it even a drop of the truth. The routes which they pursued cannot be traced, the etymology of geography gains nothing from their nomenclature, and, in a word, the whole story has to be consigned to the realm of fable.[141] Such a narrative as these men might have told would be our best guide for what has been well called by Mr. Haven “the mythical century” of American history.

In this voyage of Hawkins the Earls of Pembroke and of Leicester were among the adventurers.

If Hawkins’s account of the perfidy of the Spaniards at San Juan d’Ulua be true,—and it has never been contradicted,—the Spanish Crown that day brought down a storm of misery and rapine from which it never fairly recovered. The accursed doctrine of the Inquisition, that no faith was to be kept with heretics, proved a dangerous doctrine for Spain when the heretics were such men as Hawkins, Cavendish, and Drake. On that day Francis Drake learned his lesson of Spanish treachery; and he learned it so well that he determined on his revenge. That revenge he took so thoroughly, that for more than a hundred years he is spoken of in all Spanish annals as “The Dragon.”[142]

Hawkins gives no account of Drake’s special service in the “Judith,”—the smallest vessel in the unfortunate squadron, and one of the two which returned to England; nor has Drake himself left any which has been discovered; nor have his biographers. Clearly his ill-fortune did not check his eagerness for attack; and from that time forward Spain had at least one determined enemy in England.

He had made two voyages to the West Indies in 1570 and in 1571, of which little is known. For a fifth voyage, which he calls the third of importance,[65] he fitted out a little squadron of only two vessels, the “Pasha” and the “Swan,” and sailed in 1572, with no pretence of trade, simply to attack and ravage the Spanish main. He specially assigns as his motive for this enterprise his desire to inflict vengeance for injuries done him at Rio de Hacha in 1565 and in 1566, and, in particular, that he might retaliate on Henriques, Viceroy of Mexico, for his treachery at San Juan d’ Ulua. It seems that he had vainly sought amends at the Court of Spain, and that the Queen’s diplomacy had been equally ineffective. The little squadron, enlarged by a third vessel which joined them after sailing, attacked Nombre de Dios, then the granary of the West Indies, but with small success. They then insulted the port of Cartagena, and afterward, having made an alliance with the Cimaronnes, since and now known as Maroons,—a tribe of savages and self-freed Africans,—they marched across the isthmus, and Drake obtained his first sight of that Pacific Ocean which he was afterward to explore. “Vehemently transported with desire to navigate that sea, he fell upon his knees and implored the divine assistance that he might at some time sail thither and make a perfect discovery of the same.” The place from which Drake saw it was probably near the spot where Balboa “thanked God for that great discovery,” and that he had been first of Christian men to behold that sea. His discovery was made in 1513, sixty years before Drake renewed it.[143]

The narrative which we cite is in the words of the historian Camden. Camden tells us also that Drake had “gotten together a pretty sum of money” in this expedition, and, satisfied for the moment, he remained in England. He engaged himself in assisting, at sea, in the reduction of Ireland. But he had by no means done with the Spaniards, and at the end of 1577, sailing on the 15th of November, he left Plymouth on the celebrated voyage in which he was to sail round the world. The squadron consisted of the “Pelican,” of one hundred tons, the “Elizabeth,” of eighty, the “Swan,” of fifty, and the “Marigold” and “Christopher,” of thirty and of fifteen tons. Of these vessels the “Pelican” was the only one which completed the great adventure. Her armament was twenty guns of brass and iron. She had others in her hold. So well had Drake profited by earlier expeditions, that his equipment was complete, and even luxurious. He carried pinnaces in parts, to be put together when needed. He had “expert musicians, rich furniture, all the vessels for the table, yea, many even of the cook-room, being of pure silver.” In every detail he was prepared to show the magnificence and the civilization of his own country.

The crew were shipped and the expedition sailed, with the pretence of a[66] voyage to Egypt. This was to blind the Spanish envoys, in concealment of the real object of the expedition, as similar expeditions since have been veiled. But it is clear enough that the partners in the enterprise and the men they shipped knew very well whither they were faring.

After one rebuff, the fleet finally left England on the 13th of December, 1577, and, with occasional pauses to refit at the Cape de Verde and at different points not frequented by the Portuguese or Spaniards on the Brazilian coast and the coast south of Brazil, they arrived at Port St. Julian on the 19th of June, in the beginning of the southern winter. Here they spent two months, not sailing again until the 17th of August, when they essayed the passage of the Straits of Magellan. While at Port St. Julian Drake found, or professed to find, evidences of the treachery of Doughty, one of the gentlemen in whom at first he had most confided. Doughty was tried before a jury of twelve, found guilty, and beheaded. They all remembered that Magellan had had a similar experience in the same harbor fifty-seven years before. Indeed they found the gibbet on which, as they supposed, John of Cartagena had been hanged by Magellan, with his mouldering bones below. The Spaniards said that Drake himself acted as Doughty’s executioner. Fletcher says, “he who acted in the room of provost marshal.” It is hard to see how the Spaniards should know.

After a series of stormy adventures, they found themselves safe in the Pacific on the 28th of October. After really passing the straits, they had been driven far south by tempests, and on the extreme point of Tierra del Fuego Drake had landed. On a grassy point he fell upon the ground at length, and extended his arms as widely as possible, as if to grasp the southern end of the hemisphere,—in memory, perhaps, of Cæsar’s taking possession of England. The “Pelican” was the only vessel now under his command. The others had either been lost or had deserted him; and though he sought for his consorts all the way on his voyage northward, he sought in vain.

From Drake’s own pen we have no narrative of this remarkable voyage. His chaplain, Fletcher,[144] gives a good account of Patagonia and of the natives, from the observations made in Port St. Julian and in their after experiences as they passed the straits. The Englishmen corrected at once the Spanish fable regarding the marvellous height of these men. They corrected errors which they supposed the Spaniards had intentionally published in the charts. It is supposed that Drake sighted the Falkland Islands, which had been discovered by Davis a few years before. Drake gave the name of Elizabeth Islands, or the Elizabethides, to the whole group of Tierra del Fuego and its neighbors.

In their voyage north they touched for supplies at a great island, which the Spaniards called Mucho; and afterward at Valparaiso, where they plundered a great ship called the “Captain of the South,” which they found at anchor there. Fletcher describes all such plunder with a clumsy raillery,[67] as if a Spaniard’s plunder were always fair game. To Drake it was indeed repayment for San Juan d’ Ulua. Farther north, they entered the bay of “Cyppo;” and in another bay, still farther north, they set up the pinnace which they had in parts on board their vessel. In this pinnace Drake sailed south a day to look for his consorts; but he was driven back by adverse winds. After a stay of a month here, which added nothing to our knowledge of the geography of the country, they sailed again. “Cyppo” is probably the Copiapo of to-day.

ZALTIERI’S MAP, 1566.

This sketch follows a drawing by Kohl in his manuscript in the American Antiquarian Society’s Library. This is the key:—

1. Mare Septentrionale.
2. Terra incognita.
3. Quivira prov.
4. C. Nevada.
5. Tigna fl.
6. R. Tontonteac.
7. Y. delle Perle.
8. Y. di Cedri.
9. Giapan.
10. Mare di Mangi.
11. Chinan Golfo.
12. Parte di Asia.

Pausing for plunder, or for water, or fresh provisions, from time to time, they ran in, on the 7th of February, to the port of Arica, where they spoiled the vessels they found, generally confining their plunder to silver, gold, and jewels, and such stores as they needed for immediate use. At Callao they found no news of their comrades; but they did find news from Europe,—the death of the kings of Portugal, of France, of Morocco, and of Fez, and of the Pope of Rome. From one vessel they took fifteen hundred bars of silver, and learning that a treasure-ship had sailed a fortnight before, went rapidly in pursuit of her.

They overtook her on the 1st of March, and captured her. As part of her cargo, she had on board “a certain quantity of jewels and precious stones,” thirteen chests of silver reals, eighty pounds weight of gold, twenty-six tons of uncoined silver, two very fair gilt silver drinking-bowls, “and the like trifles,—valued in all about three hundred and sixty thousand pezoes,”—as Fletcher says in his clumsy pleasantry. The ships lay together six days, then Drake “gave the master a little linen and the like for his commodities,” and let him and his ship go. Her name, long remembered, was the “Cacafuego.” The Spanish Government estimated the loss at a million and a half of ducats. A ducat was about two dollars.

Drake now determined to give up the risk of returning by the way he came, and to go home by the north or by crossing the Pacific. He abandoned[68] the hope of joining his consorts, who had, though he did not know it, no thought of joining him. On the 16th of March he touched at the Island of Caines, where he experienced a terrible earthquake; on the 15th of March at Guatulco, in Mexico, where he took some fresh provisions; and sailing the next day, struck northward on the voyage in which he discovered the coast of Oregon and of that part of California which now belongs to the United States.

MAP OF PAULO DE FURLANO, 1574.

Furlano is said to have received this map from a Spaniard, Don Diego Hermano de Toledo, in 1574. The sketch is made from the drawing in Kohl’s manuscript in the American Antiquarian Society’s Library. The key is as follows:—

1. Mare incognito.
2. Stretto di Anian.
3. Quivir.
4. Golfo di Anian.
5. Anian regnum.
6. Quisau.
7. Mangi Prov.
8. Mare de Mangi.
9. Isola di Giapan.
10. Y. di Cedri.

A certain doubt hangs over the original discovery of the eastern coast of this nation. There is no doubt that the coast of Oregon was discovered to Europe by the greatest seaman of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.[145]

Taking as plunder a potful of silver reals,—the pot, says Fletcher, “as big as a bushel,”—and some other booty, Drake sailed west, then northwest and north, “fourteen hundred leagues in all.” This, according to the account of Fletcher, his chaplain, brought them to the 3d of June,[146] when they were in north latitude 42°. On the night of that day, the weather (which had been very hot) became bitterly cold; the ropes of the ship were stiff with ice, and sleet fell instead of rain. This cold weather continued for days. On the fifth they ran in to a shore which they then first[69] descried, and anchored in a bad bay, which was the best roadstead they could find. But the moment the gale lulled, “thick stinking fogs” settled down on them; they could not abide there; and from this place[147] they turned south, and ran along the coast. They found it “low and reasonable plain.” Every hill was covered with snow, though it was in June.

In the latitude of 38° 30′, they came to a “convenient and fit harbour.” Another narrator says, “It pleased God to send us into a fair and good bay, with a good wind to enter the same.” They entered, and remained in it till the 23d of July. During all this time they were visited with the “like nipping colds.” They would have been glad to keep their beds, and if they were not at work, would have worn their winter clothes. For a fortnight together they could take no observations of sun or star. When they met the natives, they found them shivering even under their furs; and the “ground was without greenness” and the trees without leaves in June and July.

The day after they entered this harbor an Indian came out to them in a canoe. He made tokens of respect and submission. He threw into the ship a little basket made of rushes containing an herb called tobàh.[148] Drake wished to recompense him, but he would take nothing but a hat, which was thrown into the water. The company of the “Pelican” supposed then and always that the natives considered and reverenced them as gods. In preparation for repairing the ship, Drake landed his stores. A large company of Indians approached as he landed, and friendly relations were maintained between them and the Englishmen during the whole[70] of their stay. Drake received them cautiously but kindly. He set up tents, and built a fort for his defence. The natives, watching the English with amazement, still regarded them as gods. One is tempted to connect this superstition with the direct claim which Alarcon had made of a divine origin, in presence of these tribes, a generation before, though at a point five hundred miles away. Fletcher’s description of their houses is precisely like the Spaniard’s account of the winter houses of the tribes he met. “Those houses are digged round within the earth, and have from the uppermost brimmes of the circle clefts of wood set up, and joined close together at the top like our spires on the steeple of a church; which, being covered with earth, suffer no water to enter, and are very warm; the door in the most part of them performs the office also of a chimney to let out the smoke; it’s made in bigness and fashion like to an ordinary scuttle in a ship, and standing slopewise.”[149]

At the end of two days an immense assembly, called together from all parts of the country, gathered to see the strangers. They brought with them feathers and bags of tobàh for presents or for sacrifices. Arrived at the top of the hill, their chief made a long address, wearying his English hearers and himself. When he had concluded, the rest, bowing their bodies in a dreamy manner “and long producing of the same,” cried “Oh!” giving their consent to all that had been spoken. This reminds one of the “hu” of the Indians of the Tizon. The women, meanwhile, tore their cheeks with their nails, and flung themselves on the ground, as if for a personal bloody sacrifice. Drake met this worship, not as Alarcon had done, but by calling his company to prayer. The men lifted their eyes and hands to heaven to signify that God was above, and besought God “to open their blinded eyes to the knowledge of him and of Jesus Christ the salvation of the Gentiles.” Through these prayers, the singing of psalms, and reading certain chapters of the Bible, Fletcher, who was the chaplain, says they sat very attentively. They observed every pause, and cried “Oh!” with one voice, greatly enjoying our exercises. They thus showed a more catholic spirit than the whites had shown, who were wearied by the length of the address of the savages. Drake made them presents, which at the departure of the English they returned, saying that they were sufficiently rewarded by their visit.

The fame of this visit extended so far, that at the end of three days more, on the 26th of June, a larger company assembled. This time the king himself, with a body-guard of one hundred warriors, was with them. They called him their Hióh. He approached the English, preceded by a mace-bearer, who carried two feather crowns, with three chains of bone of marvellous length, often doubled. Such chains were of the highest estimation,[71] and only a few persons were permitted to wear them. The number of chains, indeed, marked the rank of the highest nobility, some of whom wore as many as twenty. Next to the mace-bearer came the king himself. On his head was a knit crown somewhat like those which were borne before him. He wore a coat of the skins of conies coming to his waist. His guards wore similar coats, and some of them wore cauls upon their heads, covered with a certain vegetable down, almost sacred, and used only by the highest ranks. The common people followed, naked, but with feathers,[150] every one pleasing himself with his own device. The last part of the company were women and children. Each woman brought a well-made basket of rushes. Some of these were so tight that they would hold water. They were adorned with pearl shells and with bits of the bone chains. In the baskets they had bags of tobàh and roots called petáh, which they ate cooked or raw. Drake meanwhile held his men in military array.

The mace-bearer then pronounced aloud a long speech, which was dictated to him in a low voice by another. All parties, except the children, approached the fort, and the mace-bearer began a song, with a dance to the time, in which all the men joined. The women danced without singing. Drake saw that they were peaceable, and permitted them to enter his palisade. The women showed signs of the wounds which they had made before coming, by way of preparing for the solemnity.

At the request of the chief, Drake then sat down. The king and others made to him several orations, or, “indeed, supplications, that he would take province and kingdom into his hand, and become their king and patron.” With one consent they sang a song, placed one of the crowns upon his head, hung their chains upon his neck, and honored him as their Hióh.

Drake did not think he should refuse this gift. “In the name and to the use of Queen Elizabeth, he took the sceptre, crown, and dignity of the country into his hand.” He only wished, says the historian, that he could as easily transport the riches and treasures wherewith in the upland it abounds, to the enriching of her kingdom at home. Had Drake had any real knowledge of the golden gravel over which the streams of the upland flowed, it may well be that the history of California would have been changed.

From this time, through several weeks while Drake remained there, the multitude also remained. At first they brought offerings every three days as sacrifices, until they learned that this displeased their English king. Like other sovereigns who have had much to do with this race, he found that he had to feed his red retainers. But he had mussels, seals, “and such like,” in quantity sufficient for their rations.

Drake made a journey into the country. He saw “infinite company” of fat deer, in a herd of thousands. He found a multitude of strange “conies”[72] in large numbers, with long tails, and with a bag under the chin in which to carry food either for future supply or for their children.

Drake erected on the shore a post, on which he placed a plate of brass. Here he engraved the Queen’s name, the date of his landing, the gift of the country by the people, and left her Majesty’s portrait and arms. The last were not designed by his artists, as some historians have carelessly supposed, but were on a silver piece, of sixpence, “showing through a hole made of purpose in the plate.”

When the people saw that Drake could not remain, they could not conceal their grief. At last they stole on the English unawares with a sacrifice which “they set on fire,” thus burning a chain and bunch of feathers. The English could not dissuade them till they fell to prayers and singing of psalms, when the sad natives let their fire go out, and left the sacrifice unconsumed. On the 23d of July the friends parted, the English for the shores of Asia, the savages to the hills, where they built fires as long as the “Pelican” was in sight. Thus did England take possession of the region which, after near three hundred years, proved to be the richest gold-bearing country in the world. Drake gave to the country the name of New Albion, and it bore that name on the maps for centuries. He called it so “for two causes: in respect of the white banks and cliffs which lie towards the sea; and the other because it might have some affinity with our country in name.” Curiously enough, the original narrative says, “There is no part of earth here to be taken up wherein there is not some speciall likelihood of gold or silver.”[151]

From the time when the Government’s ships crept along the coast to Cape Mendocino, and then turned, unwilling, to their long voyage to Asia, observations on that coast were doubtless repeated by navigators. The line of coast took different courses and different names accordingly. But it is well-nigh certain that from the time of Drake until 1770 the California now a part of the United States had no European inhabitants. The part of California which is in Mexico was first settled by Jesuit missions, whose first successes date from the year 1697.

Drake returned to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived at Plymouth in triumph on the 26th of September, 1580. He had given the name Nova Albion to the western coast of North America thus discovered; he had taken possession for his sovereign, Elizabeth, with better color of right than most discoverers could urge. But under this title the Queen never claimed, nor her successors indeed, until, after three centuries, Drake’s voyage may have been sometimes cited as a vague or shadowy introduction to any rights by which England claimed the mouth of the Columbia River and the region northward.[152]

[73]

The name Nova Albion was generally applied on the maps to the more northerly region, the Oregon of our geography. But the name California held its place for the whole region known to us as the State of California, as well as for the peninsula and the gulf. The distinction between Upper and Lower California is still observed.

Drake’s reception at home was an enthusiastic one, by a populace always anxious for a hero. It was tempered somewhat by the cautious feelings of some, who regarded with no favorable eye the policy of private reprisals upon another nation in time of peace. The Queen had no such compunctions. She received him with undisguised favor, dined with him on board his ship, and made him a knight. She directed that the vessel which had borne her authority about the world should be carefully preserved; and when the ship was finally broken up, John Davis, the Arctic navigator, caused a chair to be made of the timbers, which is now one of the relics of interest in the Bodleian Library, and within whose seat Abraham Cowley wrote one of his well-known poems.

At length, in 1585, Queen Elizabeth determined on open hostility, and giving Drake his first royal commission, and an ample fleet and land force, he started on his successful expedition to the Spanish main, when town after town fell into his hands, and the Spanish settlements experienced most poignantly ravages similar to those which they had so abundantly for nearly a century inflicted upon the natives of those regions. Of his subsequent exploits in European waters this is no place for the recital; but in 1595 he prevailed upon Elizabeth to put him, in connection with his old patron and companion, Sir John Hawkins, once more in command of another expedition to Spanish America. They sailed from Plymouth in August, with the purpose of seizing Nombre de Dios, and then of marching his twenty-five hundred troops to Panama to capture the treasure which took that route from Peru on its way to Spain. The expedition was a melancholy failure. The Spaniards were forewarned. Porto Rico successfully resisted the English in the first place, and the attack on Panama was abortive.

Hawkins died, overcome by the reverses; and Drake, struck with a fever of mortification, sank beneath the fatal influences of the climate, and died on board his ship early in the following year. His remains were placed in a leaden casket and sunk off Puerto Cabello, and there was no failure of suspicions that he had been the victim of foul play. There are those in the English nation who indulge the hope that the casket may yet be recovered, and that the remains of the great English “Dragon” may yet rest beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey.

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CRITICAL ESSAY ON DRAKE’S BAY.

THE question where was the “convenient and fit harbor,” the “fair and good bay,” which Drake entered on the Pacific coast, and where he careened and repaired the “Pelican,” is still undecided, after much discussion by the Californian geographers, who have now their capital in the city of San Francisco,—on that matchless land-locked harbor which is entered by the narrow passage known as the “Golden Gate.” The authorities are not many, and are not quite in accord.

The narrative of Fletcher, which has been followed in the text, gives the latitude of this bay as 38° 30′ north. But the briefer narrative in Hakluyt[153] says: “We came within thirty-eight degrees towardes the line; in which height it pleased God to send us into a faire and good bay, with a good wind to enter the same.” Here is a difference of half a degree. But the text in Hakluyt is supported by a manuscript marginal note on what seems to be the original drawing of Dudley’s map, and which is preserved in Munich, where the language (Italian) is: “This map begins with the port of New Albion, in longitude 237° and latitude 38°, discovered by the Englishman Drake in 1579 or thereabout, as above,—a convenient place to water and to collect other refreshment.” The manuscript has a note, which the engraving has not, “Porto bonissimo.” But on the coast farther north, where the same author speaks of the cold, he says: “Drake returned to 38½ degrees, and the weather was temperate, and he called it New Albion.” The Arcano del Mare, in which these maps are printed, was not published till 1646. But Dudley, the author, was active in maritime affairs in England in all the last ten years of the sixteenth century. He was the son of Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester; he was brother-in-law of Cavendish, administered on his estate, and must have seen his chart.[154] Hakluyt had wished to publish his narrative of Drake in his edition of 1589; but this account by Pretty was not regularly embodied by Hakluyt in his great work till 1600.[155] The World Encompassed was not printed until 1628, but is from Fletcher’s contemporary notes. Dudley himself prepared an expedition to the South Seas. He may be spoken of as a valuable contemporary authority. The English Government did not publish such discoveries. But Cavendish would have had Drake’s charts.

MODERN MAP.

This sketch will indicate the relative positions of the several bays.

Now the opening of the Golden Gate is in latitude 37° 46′: it exactly corresponds with “within 38° N.” of one account, but it lacks 44′ of the 38° 30′ of the other two. The discrepancy is not so important when we find that in 38° 30′ there is no harbor and no bay, good or bad. The voyager must come down the coast as far as 38° 15′ to find Bodega Bay, which has, accordingly, been assigned by some conjectures as Sir Francis’ resting-place. Just south of this, near the line of 38°, is an open roadstead which has some advocates in this discussion. Between this bay and the Golden[75] Gate, the point of Los Reyes runs out southwest. East of this, and northwest of the Golden Gate, is another open roadstead, facing the south, which for many years, long before the discovery of Californian gold, had been known as Jack’s Bay, or Sir Francis Drake’s Bay. One of these four bays is chosen by one or another geographer as the fair and good harbor into which a special providence drove Drake by a favorable wind.

VISCAINO’S MAP.

Sketch from Carta de los reconocimentos hechos en 1602 por el Capitan Sebastian Vizcaino formada por los Planos que hizo el misno durante su comision, in an atlas in the State Department at Washington.

In this discussion, the map of Dudley, whose information was nearly at first-hand, plays an important part. His representation of Drake’s bay—a sort of bottle-shaped harbor—so far resembles the double bay of San Francisco, that it would probably decide the question, but that, unfortunately, he gives two such bays. His two maps, also, do not very closely resemble each other. It becomes necessary to suppose that one of his bays was that which we know as Bodega Bay, or that both are drawn from the imagination. The map of Hondius gives a chart of Drake’s bay,[156] which has, unfortunately, no representation to any bay on the coast, and is purely imaginary.

The discussion is complicated from the fact, that, if Drake entered San Francisco Bay, the English Government kept its secret so well that they forgot it themselves. What is curious is, that for two centuries the Spaniards were seeking at intervals for “Port St. Francisco,” and did not find it. In 1603, Viscaino put into a bay which he called Port St. Francisco; but it is urged[157] that Viscaino really entered the Bay of Monterey. The Spaniards by this time were eagerly seeking a bay of refuge for their Asiatic squadrons.[158] They knew that Drake had repaired a vessel somewhere. Viscaino passed “Port St. Francisco” in a gale, and returned into it, according to the narrative. It was not until 1769 that a land party of Franciscan monks finally discovered to Spain the magnificent Bay of San Francisco. One theory is that no one ever discovered it before; but a contemporary manuscript account of the discovery, preserved in the British Museum, says distinctly that this famous port, according to the signs given by history, is called San Francisco. It is distant from St. Diego two hundred leagues, and is to be found in 38½°. “They say it is the best bay they have discovered; and while it might shelter all the navies in Europe, it is entered by a straight of three leagues, and surrounded with mountains which make the waters tranquil.”

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COAST OF NOVA ALBION, FROM DUDLEY’S ARCANO DEL MARE.

[77]

The reader must understand that all the maps had a port of Sir Francis, or a Puerto San Francisco, or some similar name. One English map bravely says,[159] “Port Sr. Francis Drake, not St. Francisco,” for the bay discovered in 1770.

JEFFERYS’ SKETCH.

So soon as this discovery was known in England, Captain Burney claimed it as Drake’s bay; in America, Davidson, in the Coast Pilot, and Mr. Greenhow give the same decision.

Probably the early maps must be taken as the best and decisive authorities.

The reader has before him Dudley’s two maps. Of these, Dudley says that California was drawn by an English pilot. In his text describing the shore, he goes no further than Cape St. Lucas, and then crosses to California, which suggests that he is following Cavendish, who took this course, and who was Dudley’s near kinsman. On the margin in the manuscript of Dudley’s map at Munich, he calls Drake’s bay “Porto bonissimo,” “the best of harbors,”—an expression which certainly does not belong to Jack’s Bay. In both maps, also, it is represented as the southern of the two deep bays, of which the northern appears to correspond to Bodega Bay, and the southern to San Francisco Bay. On the larger of the two maps Drake’s bay is placed in the same relation to Monterey as is held by San Francisco.

DUDLEY’S CARTA PRIMA.

[This is a section from a marginal map on the “Carta Prima” of Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, vol. i. lib. 2, p.19. Key:—

1. C. Arboledo.
2. Ensa Larga.
3. Po. di Don Gasper.
4. R. Salado.
5. Po. dell Nuovo Albion scoperto dal Drago Cno. Inglese.
6. Enseada
7. Po. di Anonaebo.
8. Po. di Moneerei.
9. C. S. Barbera.
10. C. S. Agostino.
11. Quivira Ro.
12. Nuova Albione.—Ed.]

In the curious “new map” mentioned by Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night,”[160] the spot where Drake landed is indicated. The names, as one reads southward from the parallel of 40°, are C. Roxo, Sierra de los Pescadores,—Tierra de Paxaros R. Grande, which seems to be Drake’s harbor,—Rio Hermoso, C. Frio, Sierra Nevada, C. Blanco, Cicuic, Playa, Tiguer. Cicuic and Tiguer are evidently borrowed from Ciceyé and Tiguex of Coronado’s narrative. The same position is given to Tiguex in Hondius’s map. Of this the scale is so small that Drake’s[78] Bay could not be determined from it, were it not for the issuing of the dotted line showing his homeward track.

The Spanish geographers are at work on this subject, with full understanding of the points involved in the problem. It will not be long, probably, before the question is decided. This writer does not hesitate to say that he believes it will prove that Drake repaired his ship in San Francisco Bay, and that this bay took its name not indirectly from Francis of Assisi, but from the bold English explorer who had struck terror to all the western coast of New Spain.[161]

EDITORIAL NOTES

ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

FOR the authoritative accounts of William Hawkins’s Brazilian voyages, we must go to Hakluyt’s third volume, as published in 1600. In it likewise we shall find the account of the West Indian voyages of Sir John Hawkins in 1562, 1564, and 1567-68. We may also read them in the usual compilations drawn from Hakluyt, among the latest of which is The Elizabethan Seamen of Payne, who remarks that “nothing which Englishmen had done in connection with America previous to those voyages had any result worth recording.” Lowndes, in his Bibliographer’s Manual, gives an edition, in 1569 (London), of John Hawkins’s True Declaration of the Troublesome Voyages to the Partes of Guynea and the West Indies; but Sabin (Dictionary, viii. 157) thinks it was only printed in Hakluyt.

A SKETCH OF HONDIUS’S MAP.

A sketch of a part of Hondius’s map of the world, on which Drake’s route is marked; it is taken from a fac-simile in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of The World Encompassed.

Key:—

1. Nova Albion, sic a Francisco Draco, 1579, dicta qui bis ab incolis eodem die diademate redimitus,
eandem Reginæ Angliæ consecravit.
2. Hic præ ingenti frigore in Austrum reverti coactus est lat. 42 die 5 Junii.
3. Cozones.
4. [Drake’s Bay].
5. Tigues.
6. I. de passao.
7. California.
8. San Miguel.
9. Damantes.
10. Mare Vermeo.
11. S. Thomas.

Fox Browne, in his English Merchants, chap. viii., shows the relations which Hawkins in his day established with British commerce.

The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knight, in his Vojage jnto the South Sea, Anno Domini 1593, was printed in London in 1622,[162] and was reprinted in 1847 by the Hakluyt Society, under the editing of Captain C. R. D. Bethune. The book gives us some useful notes upon the aborigines of Florida and the regions farther south.

The most convenient embodiment, however,[79] of the ancient records and of modern criticisms upon all the exploits of the Hawkinses is in the volume of the Hakluyt Society for 1878,—The Hawkins’ Voyages during the Reigns of Henry VIII., Queen Elizabeth, and James I., edited, with an Introduction, by the careful hand of Clements R. Markham. Here we have not only what Hakluyt has preserved for us, but the Observations of 1622, and other journals and narratives.

PORTUS NOVÆ ALBIONIS.

This is an outline sketch of the map of Drake’s Bay given in the margin of Hondius’s map, but which is omitted in the reproduction of that map in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of The World Encompassed. The map is rare, and our sketch follows another belonging to Mr. Charles Deane.

Key:—1. A group of Indian houses.
2. Place of the ship.
3. Portus Novæ Albionis.
4. A group of the English conferring with the natives.

A fac-simile of the original engraving is given in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 577. It has a Latin legend beneath it, which reads: “The inhabitants of Nova Albion lament the departure of Drake, now twice crowned, and by frequent sacrifices lacerate themselves.” A curious picture representing the crowning of Drake is in the 1671 edition of Montanus, p. 213.

A writer in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, Oct. 5, 1878, says that the island in the sketch is misplaced, if Bodega Bay is intended, being below the peninsula; but that, viewed from the position assigned to Drake’s ship, it seems to be outside, as drawn. He maintains that this bay answers all the other conditions of Fletcher’s description, and that Hondius’s sketch is confirmed by Dudley’s map.

For Drake the material is more abundant. Regarding his famous voyage round the world in 1577-80, the earliest statement in print is one said to be by Francis Pretty, and called The famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea ... begun in the yeare of our Lord 1577.[163] Hakluyt had this, and says in effect, in the Introduction of his 1589 edition, that the friends of Drake who did not wish their publications forestalled, had wished him to omit it. Hakluyt, however, seems to have privately printed it, in six pages, and these, without pagination, are found in some, if not all, copies of the 1589 volume, inserted after page 643.[164] It finally publicly appeared in his third volume of the 1598-1600 edition. A more authoritative publication, however, was The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, carefully Collected out of the notes of Master Francis Fletcher, Preacher in this imployment, and divers others his followers, London, 1628.[165] It was reprinted in 1635,[166] and made part of Sir Francis Drake revived in 1653.[167] It was again reprinted by the Hakluyt Society in 1855, with an Introduction by W. S. W. Vaux. This and other accounts of the voyage have also found a place in the general collections of Hakluyt, Harris, and the Oxford Voyages.[168]

[80]

The report of Da Silva mentions that Drake captured some sea-charts from the Spaniards during this voyage; and Kohl (Catalogue of Maps in Hakluyt, p. 82) supposes that Drake had with him the maps of Mercator and Ortelius. After Drake’s return, Hondius made a map of the world, in which he tracked both the routes of Drake and Cavendish; and of that portion showing New Albion, as well as of his little plan of Drake’s Bay, sketches are given herewith. Kohl thinks (page 84) that Hondius may have used Drake’s own charts in this little marginal sketch, while the main map has “little to do with Drake’s own charts.” Hondius, however, is thought to have been living in England at this time. Molineaux is known to have used Drake’s reports and perhaps his map, in making his mappemonde of 1600, of which an outline sketch of a part of the Pacific coast is annexed. This is the map mentioned by Mr. Hale as supposed to be referred to by Shakespeare.

FROM MOLINEAUX’S MAP, 1600.

The Key:—

1. Nova Albion.
2. Cabo Mendocino. “It appeareth by the discoverie of Francis Gaulle, a Spaniard, in the year 1584, that the sea betweene the west part of America and the east of Asia (which hath bene ordinarily set out as a straight, and named in most maps the Streight of Anian) is above 1,200 leagues wide at the latitude of 38°, and that the distance betweene Cape Mendocino and Cape California, which many maps and sea-charts make to be 1,200 or 1,300 leagues, is scarce so much as 600.” [This legend is in the right-hand upper corner of the map. Gali (or Gaulle), in returning from China in 1583, had struck the California coast at 37° 30´. His account appeared in Linschoten, and so was rendered in the English translation of Linschoten, 1598, and is given in Hakluyt, vol. iii. (1600) p. 442.]
3. R. Grande.
4. C. San Francisco.
5. Rio Grande.
6. C. Blanco.
7. C. Blanco.
8. B. Hermosa.
9. B. San Lorenzo.
10. California.
11. R. Grande.
12. S. Francisco.
13. New Mexico.
14. Cibola.

For Drake’s expedition of 1585-86, we have the original account in Latin, printed at Leyden in 1588,—Expeditio Francisci Draki,—which should be accompanied by four large folding maps; namely, of Cartagena, St. Augustine, San Domingo, and S. Jacques (Guinea).[169] An English translation by Thomas Cates appeared in London the next year (1589) as A Summarie and true Discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, wherein were taken the towns of St. Jago, Sancto Domingo, Cartagena, and Saint Augustine.[170] This first edition seems to have been without maps; but a second edition of the same year is sometimes found with copies of the Leyden maps, besides a fifth, a mappemonde, showing “The famous West Indian Voyadge,” which did not appear in the Leyden edition.[171] The Huth Catalogue, ii. 442, notes a third edition for the same year.[172]

[81]

[82]

In 1855, Louis Lacour edited at Paris a French manuscript upon this 1585-86 expedition, which is preserved in the National Library at Paris. [173]

The expedition in 1587, by Drake and Norris, against the Spaniards in Europe, does not fall within our present scheme.[174]

Of Drake’s last voyage in 1595-96 we have his log-book, printed for the first time in Kunstmann’s Entdeckung Amerikas in 1859. A manuscript account, by Thomas Maynarde, is preserved in the British Museum, which, with a Spanish account, “Francis Draque y Juan Acquines,”[175] was printed by the Hakluyt Society in 1849, under the editing of W. D. Cooley.

Henry Savile’s Libell of Spanish Lies, giving the earliest English account in print, was issued in London in 1596 (Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 508), and was also included in Hakluyt’s third volume in 1600.[176]

Tiele—Mémoire bibliographique (1867), p. 300—says that Hakluyt lent his account, two years before he published it, to the Dutch historian Van Meteren, who printed a Dutch version of it at Amsterdam in 1598.[177]

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.

A fac-simile of a copperplate engraving in H. Holland’s Heroologia, Arnheim, 1620, p. 105,—a book now rare. There is a copy in Harvard College Library. Cf. also Magazine of American History, March, 1883. There is another head by Houbraken in his series of heads, London, 1813, p. 47.

A library, which is said to have been begun by Drake and kept up by his descendants at Nutwell Court, Lympstone, Devon, was recently sold in London. Cf. London Times, March 16, 1883. There were books in the sale pertaining to America, which were published early enough to have been collected by Drake himself; but the rarest of the Americana, of interest to the students of this period, must rather have been the accumulation of the younger Francis Drake, the chronicler of his uncle’s exploits. Some of the rare books mentioned in other chapters of this history are noted as bringing the following prices: Rich’s Newes from Virginia, £93; Whitaker’s Good Newes from Virginia, £90, later priced by Quaritch at £105; Hariot’s New found land of Virginia, £300, later advertised by Quaritch for £335; Rosier’s True Relation, £301, later marked by Ouaritch at £335; Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affairs in Virginia, £46; De la Warre’s Relation, £26 11s.; Good Speed to Virginia, £30; Hamor’s True Discourse, £69; New Life of Virginia, £18 5s., later priced by Ouaritch at £25; True Declaration of the Estat of the Colonie of Virginia, £80, later priced by Quaritch at £96.

A kinsman of Drake published at London, in 1626, Sir Francis Drake revived: calling upon this dull or effeminate age to follow his noble steps for gold and silver, by this memorable relation of the rare occurrences (never yet declared to the world) in a third Voyage made by him to the West Indies in the yeares ‘72 and ‘73, faithfully taken out of the reporte of Christofer Ceely, Ellis Hixon, and others; reviewed by Sir Fr. Drake himself, and set forth by Sir Fr. Drake, his nephew.[178] This edition was reissued in 1628, with the errata corrected.[179] It was again reissued in 1653, in the first collected edition of Drake’s[83] voyages, under the title, Sir Francis Drake revived: four several voyages ... collected out of the notes of the said Sir Francis Drake, Master Philip Nichols, Master Francis Fletcher, ... carefully compared together.[180]

CAVENDISH.

Follows a copperplate engraving in H. Holland’s Heroologia, Arnheim, 1620, p. 89.

In 1595 a Life of Drake by C. FitzGeffrey was published in London.[181] Fuller, in his Holy and Prophane State (1642), gives a characteristic seventeenth-century estimate of Drake, and he knew some of Drake’s kin.

Samuel Clarke’s Life and Death of Drake was published in London in 1671.[182] Robert Burton’s English Hero, long a popular book, and passing through many editions, was first published in 1687 and 1695, and was translated into German and other foreign tongues.[84] Dr. Johnson’s Life of Drake has his peculiar flavor. Of the later biographies, Barrow’s seems to unite best the various details of Drake’s career.[183]

The voyages of Candish, or Cavendish, can be followed in the Latin and German of De Bry’s eighth part of his Great Voyages (1599), and in an abridged form in Hulsius’ part vi. There is no separate English edition of the account of the 1586-88 voyage, written by Francis Pretty, who took part in it; but besides the text in Hakluyt’s third volume (it had been briefly given in the 1589 edition), it can be found in the later collections of Callender (1766), Harris (vol. i.), and Kerr (vol. x.); cf. S. Colliber’s Columna Rostrata, or a Critical History of English Sea Affairs, London, 1727. It was later reprinted in Dutch, Amsterdam, 1598, and in 1617.[184]

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.

This portrait, said to follow the three-quarters likeness in Vaughan’s print (of which there is a copy in the Lenox Library), is a fac-simile of a cut in the title of Sir Francis Drake revived, issued in London in 1626, by his nephew, Sir Francis Drake, Baronet; cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 133. Another likeness of a little later date will be observed in the fac-simile of the Virginia Farrar map, given in connection with Professor Keen’s paper on “Plowden’s Grant,” in the present volume. There are other portraits on the title of De Bry, parts viii. (1599) and xi. (1619), and in Hulsius, part vi. (1603), and on the folding map in part xvi. (1619); cf. also Le Voyage Curieux, Paris, 1641.

Some new light has been thrown upon Drake by a namesake, Dr. Drake, in the Archæological Journal, 1873; and Mr. Walter Herries Pollock says the latest word in the National Review, May, 1883. Two other testimonies to the alleged change of the name of San Francisco Bay (see p. 77) may be found among the contributions of the middle of the last century to the history of the Pacific coast geography. The map published by the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg in 1754 and 1773 says, “Port de Francois Drake, fausement appellé de St. Francois.” J. Green, in his Remarks in support of the new Chart of North and South America, London, 1753, says, “The French geographers within this century have converted Port Sir Francois Drake into Port San Francisco.”


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CHAPTER III.

EXPLORATIONS TO THE NORTH-WEST.

BY CHARLES C. SMITH,

Treasurer of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

THE fresh spirit of maritime adventure which marked the last decade of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth century, owed its origin to mistaken theories as to the distance between the west of Europe and the east of Asia. Columbus believed that the land which he first discovered was an island on the coast of Japan; and he seems never to have relinquished this idea. The contemporary geographers all cherished the same mistake; and the early maps give a much better representation of the coast-line of Asia than they do of the shores of North America.[185] It is a curious fact that the true position and form of South America were familiar to cartographers long before there was any exact knowledge of the northern half of the continent. North America was regarded as an island or a collection of islands, through which it would not be difficult to find a short passage to Zipangu and Cathay,—the modern Japan and China.[186] Gradually these mistakes yielded to more correct views; but it was still believed that a feasible passage existed around the northern shore of the new continent. This belief was the inspiring motive of all the early northwestern explorations, and it lingered almost to our own time, long after every one knew that such a passage would be of no practical use. At length the problem has been solved; but the introduction of new methods of ocean and land trade and travel has deprived it of all but a purely scientific and geographical interest. Meanwhile the search for a northwest passage has developed an heroic endurance and a perseverance in surmounting obstacles scarcely paralleled anywhere else, and has added largely to the stores of human knowledge.

At the head of the long list of explorers for a northwest passage stand the names of the Cabots; but the intricate questions as to the measure of just fame to be assigned to father and son have been fully treated in another chapter of this work,[187] and neither John nor Sebastian penetrated the more[86] northern waters with which our inquiry is mainly concerned. It is enough now to recall their names as the leaders in an enterprise in which for nearly three centuries England took a foremost part, and that so early as 1497 John Cabot set sail in the hope of this great discovery. Within the next half century he was followed by his son Sebastian, the Cortereals, Cartier, and Hore, not one of whom sought to reach a high northern latitude. It was not until Frobisher sailed on his first voyage that the real northwest explorations can be said fairly to have begun. Since that time more than one hundred voyages and land journeys have been undertaken in this vain quest.

In two of the northwestern voyages of Martin Frobisher the discovery of a short way to the South Sea was only a secondary object. The adventurers at whose cost they were undertaken looked mainly to the profit from a successful search for gold, though they were not unmindful of the advantages to be gained by shortening the distance to the Spice Islands of the East. In the bitter quarrel between Frobisher and Michael Lok, after the third voyage, it was charged that Frobisher had neglected this part of the undertaking. But it was natural that Lok, who had no doubt lost heavily by the voyages, should be angry with Frobisher, and endeavor to make the most of any failure on his part to carry out the whole plan; and there is no reason to believe that Frobisher wilfully neglected the interests or the wishes of his employers, however much they may have been disappointed. The whole amount subscribed for the three voyages was upward of twenty thousand pounds, and of this sum Lok subscribed, for himself and his children, nearly one fourth. Among the subscribers were Queen Elizabeth, who invested four thousand pounds, Lord Burleigh, the Earl and Countess of Warwick, the Earl of Leicester, the Earl and Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir Francis Walsingham, and others scarcely less conspicuous in that generation.

Frobisher’s first expedition consisted of two small vessels, the “Gabriel” and the “Michael,” one of twenty-five tons and the other of twenty tons, and a pinnace of ten tons. They set sail from Blackwall on the 15th of June, 1576, but it was not until the 1st of July that they were clear of the coast of England. Not long after coming in sight of Friesland, Frobisher parted company with the pinnace, in which were four men, who were never seen again; and about the same time the “Michael” slipped away without any warning, and returned to England. Nevertheless, Frobisher pressed on, and on the 21st he entered the opening now known as Frobisher’s Strait or Bay, “having upon eyther hande a great mayne or continent; and that land uppon hys right hande as hee sayled westward, he judged to be the continente of Asia, and there to bee devided from the firme of America, which lyeth uppon the lefte hande over against the same.”[188] Into this bay, as it is now known to be, he sailed about sixty leagues, capturing one of the natives, whom he carried to England. The land, Meta Incognita,[87] he took possession of in the name of the Queen of England, commanding his company, “if by anye possible meanes they could get ashore, to bring him whatsoever thing they could first find, whether it were living or dead, stocke or stone, in token of Christian possession.”[189] Some of the men returned to him with flowers, some with green grass, “and one brought a peece of black stone, much lyke to a seacole in coloure, which by the waight seemed to be some kinde of mettall or mynerall.” Frobisher reached England on his return in the following October, and on his arrival presented the stone to one of his friends, an adventurer in the voyage. The wife of this gentleman accidentally threw it into the fire, where it remained for some time, when it was taken out and quenched in vinegar. It then appeared of a bright gold color, and on being submitted to a goldfinder in London, was said to be rich in gold; and large profits were promised if the ore was sufficiently abundant.

This cut follows the engraving in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Frobisher’s Voyages.

With this report, there was little difficulty in providing means for a second voyage. The new expedition consisted of a “tall ship of her Majesty’s,” named the “Ayde,” of two hundred tons, and of two smaller vessels, with the same names as those in the former voyage, but now said to be of thirty tons each. They were manned in all by one hundred and twenty men, to which number Frobisher was limited by his orders. After some delay, he sailed from Harwich on the 31st of May, 1577. By his orders he was directed to proceed at once to the place where the mineral[88] was found, and set the miners at work. There he was to leave the “Ayde,” and then to sail to another place visited on his first voyage, where a further attempt at mining was to be made, and where one of the small barks was to be left. With the remaining bark he was to sail fifty or a hundred leagues farther west, to make “certayne that you are entred into the South Sea; and in yor passage to learne all that you can, and not to tarye so longe from the ‘Ayde’ and worckmen but that you bee able to retorne homewards wth the shippes in due tyme.” If the mines should prove less productive than it was hoped they would be, he was to “proceade towards the discovering of Cathaya wth the two barcks, and returne the ‘Ayde’ for England agayne.”[190] Frobisher had his first sight of Friesland on the 4th of July; and he reached Milford Haven, in Wales, on his return voyage, about the 23d of September. During this period of a little more than two months, his energies were mainly devoted to procuring ore, of which, in twenty days, he obtained nearly two hundred tons; but he also made as careful an examination as was practicable of the region previously visited by him, and added something to the stock of geographical knowledge. Two of the natives were captured, and were carried to England to be educated as interpreters.

Frobisher’s third voyage was planned on a much larger scale than any other which hitherto had been sent to the Arctic regions, and he was placed in command of fifteen vessels. They were all collected at Harwich by the 27th of May, 1578; and after receiving their instructions from Frobisher, they sailed together on the 31st. On the 2d of July they reached the mouth of Frobisher’s Bay; but after entering it a short distance, they found it so choked with ice that it was impossible to proceed. One of the vessels was soon sunk by the ice, and all suffered more or less. After beating about for several days, they entered a strait, supposed at first to lead to their desired goal, but which was, in fact, what is now known as Hudson’s Strait, the entrance to the great bay which bears his name, “havyng alwayes a fayre continente uppon their starreboorde syde, and a continuance still of an open sea before them.” According to Best, one of the captains, and an historian of the expedition, Frobisher was probably one of the first to discover the mistake, though he persuaded his followers that they were in the right course and the known straits. “Howbeit,” he adds, “I suppose he rather dissembled his opinion therein than otherwyse, meaning by that policie (being hymself ledde with an honorable desire of further discoverie) to enduce ye fleete to follow him, to see a further proofe of that place. And, as some of the company reported, he hath since confessed, that, if it had not bin for the charge and care he had of ye fleete and fraughted shippes, he both would and could have gone through to the South Sea, called Mare del Sur, and dissolved the long doubt of the passage which we seeke to find to the rich countrey of Cataya.”[191] Toward the latter part of July it was[89] determined not to proceed any farther, and after many difficulties and dangers they returned to Meta Incognita. It had been their intention to erect a house here, and to leave a considerable party to spend the winter. But after a full consideration it was decided that this plan was impracticable, and it was relinquished. A house of lime and stone was, however, built on the Countess of Warwick’s Island, in which numerous articles were deposited. On the last day of August the fleet, having completed their loading with more than thirteen hundred tons of ore, sailed for England, where they arrived at various times about the 1st of October, and with the loss of not more than forty men in all. The ore proved to be of very little value, and the adventurers lost a large part of what they had subscribed.[192]

Of the voyages of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who is often included among the northwest explorers, little need be said here; for though he wrote an elaborate Discourse of a Discovery for a new Passage to Cataia, to stimulate the search for a northwest passage, the voyage in which he lost his life was not extended beyond the coasts of Newfoundland.[193]

FROM MOLINEAUX GLOBE, 1592.

[This globe is now in the Middle Temple. (See Editorial Note E, at the end of Dr. De Costa’s chapter.) This is thought to have been made, in part at least, from Davis’s charts, which are now lost. Kohl’s Catalogue of Maps in Hakluyt, p. 23. The sketch is to be interpreted thus:—

1. Grocland.
2. Hope Sanderson.
3. London cost.
4. Marchant Yle.
5. Davies island.
6. Challer’s Cape.
7. Gilbert’s Sound.
8. Easter Point.
9. Regin. Eli. forland.
10. Fretum Davis.
11. Mare Conglelatum.
12. C. Bedford.
13. Sandrson’s tour.
14. Mont Ralegh.
15. E. Cumberland isles.
16. E. Warwicke’s forland.
17. L. Lumley’s inlet.
18. A furious overfall.
19. Terre de Labrador.
20. Dorgeo.
21. I. de Arel.(?)

—Ed.]

Next in importance to the three voyages of Frobisher are the three voyages of Captain John Davis, who has been immortalized by the magnificent strait which bears his name, and which was discovered on his first voyage. On this voyage he sailed from Dartmouth on the 7th of June, 1585, with two vessels,—the “Sunshine,” of fifty tons, manned by twenty-three persons, and the “Moonshine,” of thirty-five tons, with seventeen men. But it was not until three weeks later that he was able to take his final departure from the Scilly Islands; and he arrived at Dartmouth, on his return, on the 30th of September. In this brief period he made some important discoveries, and sailed as far north as 66° 66′, and westward farther than any one had yet penetrated, “finding no hindrance.” He naturally concluded that he had already discovered the desired passage, and that it was only necessary to press forward in order to insure entire success. But he was compelled by stress of weather to put back, and he reached England shortly afterward. On his second voyage his little fleet was increased by the addition of the “Mermaid,” of one hundred tons, and the[90] “North Star,” a pinnace of ten tons. He sailed from Dartmouth on the 7th of May, 1586, and for a time everything promised well; but at the end of July the crew of his largest vessel became discontented, and returned with her to England. Meanwhile, the “Sunshine” and the pinnace had been sent to make discoveries to the eastward of Greenland. But, in nowise disheartened by these circumstances, Davis determined to prosecute his enterprise in the “Moonshine.” He reached, however, not quite so far north as in his previous voyage, and apparently about as far west, and arrived home early in October,—“not having done so much as he did in his first voyage,” is the judgment of one of his successors in Arctic navigation.[194]

On his third voyage he sailed from Dartmouth, on the 19th of May, 1587, with three vessels,—the “Elizabeth,” the “Sunshine,” and a smaller vessel, the “Helen,”—and arrived at the same port, on his return, on the 15th of September. His course was in the track which he had previously followed; but he added little to the knowledge he had already gained, and having been inadequately provided for a long voyage, was obliged to sail for home when he thought “the passage is most probable, the execution easie.”[195]

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FROM MOLINEAUX’S MAP, 1600.

[It is claimed that Davis, who was in England, June, 1600, to February, 1601, probably furnished the plot, and there is manifest an endeavor in it to reconcile the old Zeno map. Davis’s discoveries are correctly placed, but Frobisher’s are on the wrong side of the Straits. It needs the following key:—

1. A furious overfall.
2. Warwick’s forelande.
3. E. Cumberland Inlet.
4. Estotiland.
5. M. Rawghley.
6. Saunderson’s towe.
7. C. Bedford.
8. Fretum Davis.
9. Desolation.
10. Warwick’s Forlande (repeated).
11. Meta incognita.
12. Mr. Forbusher’s straights.
13. Reg. E. Foreland.
14. Freyland.
15. Gronlande.

See Editorial Note F, at the end of Dr. De Costa’s chapter.—Ed.]

It is a matter for surprise, in view of the sanguine expectations of Davis, that an interval of nearly fifteen years elapsed between his return from his third voyage and the sailing of the next expedition. This was sent out at the cost of the East India Company, and consisted of two small vessels,—the “Discovery,” under the command of Captain George Waymouth, and the “Godspeed,” under John Drew. Waymouth sailed from the Thames on the 2d of May, 1602, under a contract which provided that he should sail directly toward the coast of Greenland and the sea described as Fretum Davis, and that thence he should proceed by those seas, “or as he shall find the passadge best to lye towards the parts or kingdom of Cataya or China, or the backe side of America, wthout geveng ouer the proceedinge on his course soe longe as he shall finde those seas or any ṗte thereof navigable, and any possibilitie to make way or passadge through them.”[196] In spite of these specific directions, the voyage was not productive of any important results, though it is probable that he sighted land to the north of Hudson’s Strait; and Luke Fox appears to have been right when he says that Waymouth “neither discovered nor named any thing more than Davis, nor had any sight of Groenland, nor was so farre north; nor can I conceive he hath added anything more to this designe. Yet these two, Davis and he, did (I conceive), light Hudson into his straights.”[197] Waymouth himself ascribed his failure[92] to a mutiny which occurred in the latter part of July, and which compelled him to return to Dartmouth, where he arrived on the 5th of August. An inquiry into the causes of the failure was begun shortly afterward, but no evidence has been found to show how it terminated.

Three voyages were undertaken not long afterward by the Danes, in which James Hall was the chief pilot; and one by the English, under the command of John Knight, in a pinnace of forty tons, sent out by the East India and Muscovy companies. But each of these voyages had for its chief object the discovery of gold and silver mines, and though they all seem to have followed in the track of Frobisher, they added little or nothing to the knowledge of Arctic geography, and contributed nothing toward the solution of the problem of a northwest passage. The first of these expeditions, in which both Hall and Knight were employed, consisted of two small ships and a pinnace, and sailed from Copenhagen on the 2d of May, 1605. After coasting along the western shore of Davis Strait as far north as 69°, the ships reached Elsinore on their return early in August. The next year a fleet of four ships and a pinnace was sent out, with Hall as pilot-major. They sailed from Elsinore on the 29th of May, but were prevented by the ice and stormy weather from reaching as far north as before, and after much delay they returned to Copenhagen on the 4th of October. In 1607 Hall accompanied a third expedition, consisting of two vessels, which was equally unproductive of results. When they had reached no farther than Cape Farewell, on the southern coast of Greenland, they were compelled to return, from causes which are variously stated, but which were probably complicated by a mutinous spirit in the crew.

In the same year with Hall’s second voyage, Knight sailed from Gravesend, on the 18th of April. Two months afterward he made land on the coast of Labrador; and the captain and five men went on shore to find a convenient place for repairing their vessel. Leaving two men with their boat, the captain and three men went to the highest part of the island. They did not return that day, and on the following day the state of the ice was such that it was impossible to reach them, and they were never heard from afterward. The pinnace then went to Newfoundland to repair; and after encountering many perils, reached Dartmouth on the 24th of December. Hall made a fourth voyage, in 1612, in two small vessels fitted out by some merchant-adventurers in London. In this voyage he was mortally wounded in an encounter with the Esquimaux on the coast of Labrador. His death destroyed all hope of a successful prosecution of the enterprise, and shortly afterward the vessels returned to England.

Henry Hudson had already acquired a considerable reputation as a bold and skilful navigator, and had made three noteworthy voyages of discovery when he embarked on his voyage for northwest exploration. On the 17th of April, 1610, he sailed from Gravesend in the “Discovery,” a vessel of only fifty-five tons, provisioned for six months; and on the 9th of June he arrived off Frobisher’s Strait. He then sailed southwesterly, and entering[93] the strait which bears his name, passed through its entire length, naming numerous islands and headlands, and finally, on the 3d of August, saw before him the open waters of Hudson’s Bay. Three months were spent in examining its shores, and on the 10th of November his vessel was frozen in. She was not released until the 18th of June in the following year, and six days afterward a mutiny occurred. Hudson and his son, with six of the crew who were either sick or unfit for work, were forced into a shallop, where they were voluntarily joined by the carpenter; and then the frail boat was cut loose, and the mutineers set sail for home, leaving their late master and his companions to the mercy of the waves or death by starvation. They were never seen or heard of again; but after encountering great perils and privations, the mutineers finally made land in Galway Bay, on the coast of Ireland. Hudson’s own account of the voyage terminates with his entrance into the bay discovered by him. For the later explorations and for the tragic end of the great navigator’s brilliant career, we are forced to trust to the narrative of one of his men, Abacuk Pricket. If we may believe the story told by him, he had no part in the mutiny; but no one can read his narrative without sharing the suspicion of Fox: “Well, Pricket, I am in great doubt of thy fidelity to Master Hudson.”[198]

Two years after Hudson sailed on his last voyage, a new expedition was sent to the northwest under the command of Sir Thomas Button. It consisted of two ships, the “Resolution” and the “Discovery,” and was provisioned for eighteen months. “Concerning this voyage,” says Luke Fox, “there cannot bee much expected from me, seing that I have met with none of the Journalls thereof. It appeareth that they have been concealed, for what reasons I know not.”[199] Button sailed from England in the beginning of May, and entering Hudson’s Strait, crossed the Bay to the southern point of Southampton Island, which he named Carey’s Swan’s Nest. He then kept on toward the western side of the Bay, to which he gave the significant name “Hope’s Check,” and coasting along the shore he discovered the important river which he called Port Nelson, and which is now known as Nelson’s River. Here he wintered, “and kept three fires all the Winter, but lost many men, and yet was supplied with great store of white Partridges and other Fowle,” says Fox.[200] On the breaking up of the ice he made a thorough exploration of the bay and of Southampton Island, and finally returned to England in the autumn, having accomplished enough to give him a foremost rank among Arctic navigators.

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A little less than a year and a half after Button’s return, Robert Bylot and William Baffin embarked on the first of the two voyages commonly associated with their names.

They sailed from the Scilly Islands on Good Friday, April 7, 1615, in the “Discovery,” a ship of about fifty-five tons, in which Bylot had already made three voyages to the northwest. Following a course already familiar to him, they passed through Hudson’s Strait, and ascended what is now known as Fox Channel. Here and at the western end of Hudson’s Strait they spent about three weeks, and then sailed for home, where they arrived in the early part of September.

SIR THOMAS SMITH.

Passe’s engraving is very rare. It is also reproduced by Markham, in whose Introduction are accounts of Smith, Sir Dudley Digges, Sir John Wolstenholme, and other eminent patrons of Arctic exploration in that day. See Belknap’s American Biography, ii. 9.

Their next voyage was one of far greater interest and importance, and ranks among the most famous of the Arctic voyages. They sailed again in the “Discovery,” leaving Gravesend on the 26th of March, 1616, with a company numbering in all seventeen persons; and coasting along the western shore of Greenland and through Davis Strait, they visited and explored[95] both shores of the great sea which has ever since borne the name of Baffin’s Bay. Here they discovered and named the important channels known as Lancaster Sound and Jones Sound, beside numerous smaller bodies of water and numerous islands since become familiar to Arctic voyagers. All this was accomplished in a short season, and on the 30th of August they cast anchor at Dover on their return.

Fifteen years elapsed, during which no important attempt was made toward the discovery of a northwest passage; but in 1631 two voyages were undertaken, to one of which we owe the quaint, gossippy narrative entitled Northwest Fox, or Fox from the Northwest Passage. Luke Fox, its author, was a Yorkshireman, of keen sense and great perseverance, as well as a skilful navigator. He had long been interested in northwest explorations; and, according to his own account, he wished to go as mate with Knight twenty-five years before. At length he succeeded in interesting a number of London merchants and other persons in the enterprise, and on the 5th of May, 1631, he set sail from Deptford in the “Charles,” a pinnace of seventy tons, victualled for eighteen months. He searched the western part of Hudson’s Bay, discovered the strait and shore known as Sir Thomas Roe’s Welcome, sailed up Fox Channel to a point within the Arctic Circle, and satisfied himself, by a careful observation of the tides, of the existence of the long-sought passage, but failed to discover it. On his return he cast anchor in the Downs on the 31st of October, “not having lost one Man, nor Boy, nor Soule, nor any manner of Tackling, having beene forth neere six moneths. All glory be to God!”[201]

On the same day on which Fox began his voyage, Captain Thomas James sailed from the Severn in a new vessel of seventy tons, named the “Maria,” manned by twenty-two persons, and, like Fox’s vessel, victualled for eighteen months. On his outward voyage he encountered many perils, and on more than one occasion his vessel barely escaped shipwreck. His explorations were confined to the waters of Hudson’s Bay, and more particularly to its southeastern part, where he wintered on Charlton Island. Here he built a house in which the ship’s company lived from December until June, enduring as best they might all the horrors of an Arctic winter on an island only a little north of the latitude of London. On the 2d of July they again set sail, but were so hampered by ice that their progress was very slow, and in the latter part of August James, with the unanimous concurrence of his officers, determined to return home. He arrived at Bristol on the 22d of October, 1632, having added almost nothing to the knowledge gained by Fox in a third of the time.

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A PART OF JAMES’S MAP.

[This is the southwest corner of a folding map, 16 × 12 inches, entitled “The Platt of Sayling for the discoverye of a passage into the South Sea, 1631,1632,” which belongs to James’s Strange and Dangerous Voyage, London, 1633. Mr. Charles Deane has two copies, both with photographic fac-similes of the map made from the copy now in the Barlow Library, New York. The Harvard College copy is defective. The map has a portrait of James, “ætatis suæ, 40.” (Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, ix. 35,711; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. no. 400. Quaritch priced it in 1872, £36.) The narrative was reprinted in 1740, and is in the Collections of Churchill and Harris.—Ed.]

Both voyages were substantially failures, and their want of success nearly put an end to northwestern explorations. It was more than a hundred years before the matter was again taken up in any deliberate and efficient manner. But in the long list of Arctic navigators there are no greater names than those of Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, and Baffin. With means utterly disproportioned, as it now seems, to the task which they undertook, these men accomplished results which have called forth the admiration of more than one of their successors. They did not find the new and more direct way to Cathay which they sought for; but they dispelled many geographical illusions, and every fresh advance in our knowledge of the[97] Arctic regions has only confirmed the accuracy of their statements. The story of these later explorations belongs to another part of this History; and we shall there see an energy and perseverance and an heroic endurance of hardship for the solution of great geographical problems not unworthy of the men whose voyages have been here narrated.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

A COMPLETE bibliography of the northwest explorations is apart from our present purpose.[202] The principal works used in the preparation of the preceding narrative were almost all of them written by the men who were the chief actors in the scenes and incidents described, or are based on the original journals of those men. Their general accuracy and trustworthiness have never been challenged, and with some unimportant exceptions the statements of the early navigators have been confirmed by their successors. The men who first encountered the perils of those unknown seas were men of plain, straightforward character, who told in simple and unpretentious words what they saw and did. Some rectifications of their opinions and descriptions have, it is true, become necessary; in part through the imperfections of the early astronomical instruments, and in part through the difficulty, often very great, of deciding what was land and what water, even from the most careful observation. As a general rule, the early latitudes are given too high from the first of these causes; but the longitudes are substantially correct.

Of the works which are mainly compilations, the undisputed pre-eminence belongs to Hakluyt’s Voyages and Purchas’s Pilgrimes. Hakluyt was an enthusiast with regard to western discoveries, and he spared neither time nor labor to obtain trustworthy information with regard to the voyages in which he took so deep an interest. His narratives of the early voyages, so far as we have the means of verifying them, follow with almost entire accuracy the original documents, though in a few instances he has abbreviated his originals, apparently from motives of economy and the want of space. In these instances, however, the republication of the narratives by the Hakluyt Society, with the learned annotations of their thoroughly competent editors, places before the reader an exact copy of the originals. Purchas is an authority of less importance than Hakluyt, but a similar remark will apply to his accounts of the early voyages, though they are more abridged than Hakluyt’s. Luke Fox prefixed to his quaint and fascinating narrative of his own voyage an account of what had been done by his predecessors, and this must be classed among the best authorities. Of the later compilations the Chronological History[203] of Sir John Barrow, so far as it[98] covers the earlier period, should not be overlooked by any one who wishes for a full summary of what was accomplished. He was scarcely less of an enthusiast than was Hakluyt; and his statements of fact are apparently indisputable. But he was a man of strong and often of unreasonable prejudices, and his opinions, particularly regarding events near his own time, cannot always be accepted without a careful investigation of their grounds. The Narratives,[204] edited by Mr. Rundall for the Hakluyt Society, must also be classed with the compilations useful in this study.

As an attempt to find a practicable passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, either through or around North America, every voyage early and late was a failure. The theories in accordance with which northwestern explorations were first undertaken were unsound, and the objects by which they were inspired found realization long ago in quite other ways. But not the less did those theories and those objects animate men with a zeal and self-sacrifice worthy of the Crusades, and produce results of great importance. No easier route to China and Japan was discovered to enrich the fortunate adventurers; no valuable territories were added to the realm of England; and it was an utterly barren sovereignty which Frobisher and his successors claimed. But for the disappointment of these expectations there was an ample compensation in the whaling grounds to which they pointed the way, and which have proved the fruitful source of large accessions to the wealth of nations;[205] and it was something to learn, almost from the first, that the gold mines from which so much was expected were only a delusion and a snare.

We subjoin a specific mention of some of the more important separate sources. For[99] Frobisher the student may refer to Admiral Collinson’s excellent gathering for the Hakluyt Society, as embodying the earliest monographic literature upon the Northwest search.[206] Of John Davis of Sandridge, whose exploits we are concerned with, there has sometimes been confusion with a namesake and contemporary, John Davis of Limehouse, and Mr. Froude has confounded them in his Forgotten Worthies; but a note in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Davis’s Voyages, p. lxxviii, makes clear the distinction, and is not the least of the excellences of that book, which contains the best grouping of all that is to be learned of Davis.[207]

Referring to the general collections, for the intervening voyages we come to Hudson’s explorations, and must still trust chiefly to the work of the Hakluyt Society,[208] to which must also be credited the best summary of the voyages conducted by Baffin.[209]

For Fox’s quaint and somewhat capriciously rambling narrative, the present reader may possibly chance upon an original copy,[210] but he can follow it at all events in modern collections. The author accompanied it with a circumpolar map, which is only to be found, according to Markham, in one or two copies; and a fac-simile of Markham’s excerpt of the parts interesting in our inquiry is herewith given.

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EDITORIAL NOTES.

A. The Zeno Influence on Early Cartography.—Frobisher’s reference to Friesland indicates the influence which the Zeno map, then for hardly a score of years before the geographers of Europe, was having upon their notions regarding the North Atlantic.

THE ZENO CHART, circa 1400.

Of this map and its curious history a full account is given in Vol. I. of the present History. It had been brought to light in Italy in 1558, and Frobisher is said to have taken it with him on his voyage. Its errors in latitude deceived that navigator. When he fell in with the Greenland shore, in 61°, he supposed himself to be at the southern limit of Friesland, that being Zeno’s latitude for that point (the southern point of his Greenland being in 66°); and thus that unaccountable insular region of the Zeno chart was put anew into the maps of the North Atlantic, and remained there for some time. Again, when Davis fell in with land in 61°, he thought it neither Friesland nor Zeno’s Greenland, but a new country, which he had found and which he named “Desolation;” and so it appears in Molineaux’s map and globe, and in Hudson’s map (given in fac-simile in Asher’s Henry Hudson), as an island south of Greenland, with a misplaced Frobisher’s Straits (still misplaced as late as the time of Hondius) separating it from[101] Greenland. Our Zeno chart must be interpreted by the following key:—

1. Engronelant (Greenland).
2. Grolandia.
3. Islanda (Iceland).
4. Norvegia (Norway).
5. Estland (Shetland Islands?).
6. Icaria.
7. Frisland (Faroe Islands?).
8. Estotiland (Labrador?).
9. Drogeo (Newfoundland or New England?).
10. Podalida.
11. Scocia (Scotland).
12. Mare et terre incognite.

Its influence can be further traced, twenty years later, in the map of the world which Wolfe, in 1598, added to his English translation of Linschoten. We annex a sketch-map of the Arctic portion, which needs to be interpreted by the key below the cut.

FROM WOLFE’S LINSCHOTEN, 1598.

1. Terra Septemtrionalis.
2. Grocland.
3. Groenland.
4. Island (Iceland).
5. Friesland.
6. Drogeo.
7. Estotiland.
8. R. Nevado.
9. C. Marco.
10. Gol di S. Lorenzo.
11. Saguenay flu.
12. Canada.
13. Nova Francia.
14. Norōbega.
15. Terra de Baccalaos.
16. Do Bretan.
17. Juan.
18. R. de Tomēta.
19. S. Brādam.
20. Brasil.

Considering the doubt attached to the Zeno chart, it would seem that the earliest undoubted delineation of American parts of the Arctic land is the representation of Greenland which appears in the Ptolemy of 1482. This position of Greenland was reproduced, about ten years before Frobisher’s voyage, in Olaus Magnus’s Latin Historia, Basil, 1567, who puts on the peninsula this legend: “Hic habitant Pygmei vulgo Screlinger dicti.” There had been an earlier Latin edition of the Historia at Rome in 1555, and one in Italian at Venice in 1565: there was no English edition till 1658. (Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 269.) Ziegler’s Schondia had in Frobisher’s time been for forty years or more a source of information regarding the most northern regions. (Carter-Brown Catalogue, pp. 103, 120, for editions of 1532 and 1536.)

The cartographical ideas of the North from the earliest conceptions may be traced in the following maps, which for this purpose may be deemed typical: In 1510-12, in the Lenox Globe, which is drawn in Dr. De Costa’s chapter; the map in Sylvanus’s Ptolemy, 1511, represents Greenland as protruding from the northwest of Europe; the globe of Orontius Fine, 1531, is resolvable into a similar condition, as shown on page 11 of the present volume; Mercator’s great map of 1569, blundering, mixes the Zeno geography with the later developments; Gilbert’s map, 1576, gives an insular Greenland of a reversed trend of coast; the Lok map of 1582 may be seen on page 40, and the Hakluyt-Martyr map on page 42. The map of America[102] showing the Arctic Sea which appears in Boterus’s Welt-beschreibung, 1596, and Acosta’s map (1598) of Greenland and adjacent parts, can be compared with Wolfe’s, in Linschoten, already given in this note. Finally, we may take the Hondius maps of 1611 and 1619, in which Hondius places at 80° north this legend: “Glacis ab Hudsono detecta.”

B. Frobisher’s Voyages.—George Beste’s True Discourse of Discoverie by the North Weast, 1578, covers the three voyages, and contains two maps,—one a mappemonde, the most significant since Mercator’s, and of which in part a fac-simile is here given. The other is of Frobisher’s Straits alone. Kohl, Catalogue of Maps mentioned in Hakluyt, p. 18, traces the authorship of these charts to James Beare, Frobisher’s principal surveyor. Compare it with Lok’s map, page 40, of the present volume.

PART OF MAP IN BESTE’S “FROBISHER,” 1578.

Beste’s book is very rare, and copies are in the Lenox and Carter-Brown libraries. It is reprinted by Hakluyt.

Beste’s general account may be supplemented by these special narratives:—

First Voyage. A State-paper given by Collinson, “apparently by M. Lok.” The narrative by Christopher Hall, the master, in Hakluyt. See an examination of its results in Contemporary Review (1873), xxi. 529, or Eclectic Review, iii. 243.

Second Voyage. Dionysius Settle’s account, published separately in 1577. Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 206, with fac-simile of title. It was reprinted by Mr. Carter-Brown (50 copies) in 1869. See notice by J. R. Bartlett in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1869, p. 363. This narrative is given in Hakluyt, vol. iii.; Pinkerton, vol. xii.; Brydge’s Restituta, 1814, vol. ii. Chippin’s French version of Settle, La Navigation du Cap. Martin Forbisher, was printed in 1578. It is in the Lenox and Carter-Brown libraries. It has reappeared at various dates, 1720, 1731, etc. From this French version of Settle was made the Latin, De Martini Forbisseri Angli navigatione in regiones occidentis et septentrionis, narratio historica ex Gallico sermone in Latinum translata per D. Joan Tho. Freigium, Norbergæ, 1580, 44 leaves. This is also in the Lenox, Carter-Brown, and Sparks (Cornell University) Collections. Cf. Sunderland Catalogue, ii. 4,650. Its value is from $10 to $30. It was reprinted with notes at Hamburg in 1675. Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 33. Brinley, no. 28. Sabin, Dictionary, vii. 25,994. This edition is usually priced at $12 or $15. There are also German (1580, 1679, etc.) and Dutch (1599, 1663, 1678; in Aa’s Collection, 1706) editions. In the 1580 German edition is a woodcut of the natives brought to England. Huth Catalogue, ii. 556.

Third Voyage. Thomas Ellis’s narrative, given by Hakluyt and Collinson. Edward Sellman’s account is also given by Collinson.

Collinson’s life of Frobisher, prefixed to his volume, is brief; his authorities, other than those in the body of his book, are Fuller’s Worthies of England, and such modern treatises as Campbell’s Lives of the Admirals, Barrow’s Naval Worthies, Muller’s History of Doncaster, etc. S. G. Drake furnished a memoir, with a good engraving of the usual portrait, in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., vol. iii.; and there is a Life by F. Jones, London, 1878. Biddle, in his Cabot, chap. 12, epitomizes the voyages, and they can be cursorily followed in Fox Bourne’s English Seamen, and Payne’s[103] Elizabethan Seamen. Commander Becher, in his paper in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xii. 1, gives a useful map of the Straits, a part of which is reproduced in the accompanying cut. In the same volume of the Journal its editor enumerates the various manuscript sources, most of which have been printed, and have been referred to above.

FROBISHER’S STRAIT.

C. Hudson’s Voyages.—The sources of our information on this navigator’s four voyages to the North are these:—

First voyage in 1607, under the auspices of the Muscovy Company, to the Northeast. A log-book, in which Hudson may have had a hand, or to which he may have supplied facts; and a few fragments of his own journal. Purchas’s Pilgrims, vol. iii.; Asher’s Henry Hudson, pp. i and 145.

Second voyage, 1608, under the auspices of the Muscovy Company, to the Northeast. A log-book by Hudson himself. Purchas’s Pilgrims, iii. 574; N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 81; Asher’s Hudson, p. 23.

A map by Hondius illustrating the first and second voyage, and given by Asher in fac-simile, was originally published in Pontanus’s History of Amsterdam, Latin ed. 1611, and Dutch ed. 1614.

Third voyage, 1609, under the auspices of the East India Company, to the Northeast, where, foiled by the ice, he turned and sailed to make explorations between the coast of Maine and Delaware Bay. The journal of Juet, his companion. Purchas’s Pilgrims, vol. iii.; Asher’s Hudson, p. 45. See further in Mr. Fernow’s chapter in Vol. IV. of this History.

Fourth voyage, 1610, to the Northwest, discovering Hudson’s Strait and Hudson’s Bay. Purchas, Pilgrims, vol. iii., got his account from Sir Dudley Digges. He also gives an abstract of Hudson’s journal (Asher, p. 93); a discourse by Pricket, one of the crew, whom Purchas discredits, which is largely an apology for the mutiny which set Hudson adrift in an open boat in the bay now bearing his name (Asher, p. 98); a letter from Iceland, May 30, 1610, perhaps by Hudson himself, and an account of Juet’s trial (Asher, p. 136). Purchas added some new facts in his Pilgrimage, reprinted in Asher, p. 139.

H. Gerritsz seized the opportunity, occasioned by the interest in Hudson’s voyage and his fate, to promulgate his views of the greater chance of finding a northwest passage to India, rather than a northeast one; and in the little collection of tracts edited by him, produced first in the Dutch edition of 1612, he gives but a very brief narrative of Hudson’s voyage, which is printed on the reverse of the map showing his discoveries,—the maps, which he gives, both of the world and of the north parts of America[104] being the chief arguments of his book, the latter map being also reproduced by Asher. The original Dutch edition is extremely scarce, but four or five copies being known. A reproduction of it in 1878 by Kroon, through the photo-lithographic process, consists of 200 copies, and contains also, under the general title of Detectio freti Hudsoni, a reproduction of the Latin edition of 1613, with an English version by F. J. Millard, and an Introductory Essay on the origin and design of this collection, which, besides Gerritsz’s tract, includes others by Massa and De Quir. Sabin’s Dictionary, viii. 33,489; Asher’s Hudson, p. 267.

In the enlarged Latin translation, ordinarily quoted as the Detectio freti Hudsoni of 1612, Gerritsz inverted the order of the several tracts, giving more prominence to Hudson, as May’s expedition to the northeast had in the mean time returned unsuccessful. Huth Catalogue, ii. 744, shows better than Brunet, iii. 358, the difference between this 1612 and the 1613 editions. H. C. Murphy’s Henry Hudson in Holland. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 131, gives this little quarto the following title: Descriptio ac delineatio Geographica detectionis freti sive, Transitus ad Occasum, suprà terras Americanas in Chinam atq: Iaponem ducturi, Recens investigati ab M. Henrico Hudsono Anglo, etc., and cites the world in two hemispheres as among the three maps which it contains. A copy in Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s collection has a second title, which shows that Vitellus and not Gerritsz made the Latin translation. This other title reads: Exemplar Libelli ... super Detectione quintæ Orbis terrarum partiscui Australiæ Incognitæ nomen est: item Relatio super Freto per M. Hudsonum Anglum quæsito, ac in parte dedecte supra Provincias Terræ Novæ, novæque Hispaniæ, Chinam, et Cathaiam versus ducturo ... Latine versa ab R. Vitellio, Amstelodami ex officina Hessilii Gerardi. Anno 1612. Speaking of this little tract and the share which Gerritsz had in it, Asher, in his Henry Hudson the Navigator, says, “Around it grew in a very remarkable manner the most interesting of the many collections of voyages and travels printed in the early part of the sixteenth century.”

In a second Latin edition, 1613, Gerritsz again remodelled his additions, and gave a further account of May’s voyage. Huth Catalogue, ii. 744; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 152; Tièle, Mémoire bibliographique, 1867, no. 153; Muller’s Essai d’une bibliographie néerlando-russe, 1859, p. 71.

To some copies of this second edition Gerritsz added a short appendix of two leaves, Sig. G, which is reprinted in the Kroon reproduction, and serves to make some bibliographers reckon a third Latin edition. There are in the Lenox Library six copies of the original, representing the different varieties of the Dutch and Latin texts. One of the copies in Harvard College Library has these two additional leaves, which are also in the copy in the Carter-Brown Library, whose Catalogue, ii. 152, says that the fac-simile reprint by Muller must have been made from a copy with different cuts and ornamental capitals and tail-pieces, as these are totally different from those of the Carter-Brown copy. The map of the world was repeated in this edition.

The original Dutch text has been reprinted in several later collections of voyages, published in Holland. The English translation in Purchas is incomplete and incorrect; and that of Millard, as well as the English generally in the Kroon reprint, could have been much bettered by a competent native proof-reader.

German versions appeared in De Bry and in Megiser’s Septentrio novantiquus, p. 438, both in 1613; and in 1614 in Hulsius, part xii.

There is a French translation in the Receuil d’Arrests of 1720.


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CHAPTER IV.

SIR WALTER RALEGH: THE SETTLEMENTS AT ROANOKE AND VOYAGES TO GUIANA.

BY WILLIAM WIRT HENRY,

Third Vice-President of the Virginia Historical Society.

HISTORY has recorded the lives of few men more renowned than Walter Ralegh,—the soldier, the sailor, the statesman, the courtier, the poet, the historian, and the philosopher. The age in which he lived, the versatility of his genius, his conspicuous services, and “the deep damnation of his taking off,” all conspired to exalt his memory among men, and to render it immortal. Success often crowned his efforts in the service of his country, and the impress of his genius is clearly traced upon her history; but his greatest service to England and to the world was his pioneer effort to colonize America, in which he experienced the most mortifying defeat. Baffled in his endeavor to plant the English race upon this continent, he yet called into existence a spirit of enterprise which first gave Virginia, and then North America, to that race, and which led Great Britain, from this beginning, to dot the map of the world with her colonies, and through them to become the greatest power of the earth.

Walter Ralegh[211] was born, in 1552, in the parish of Budleigh, in Devonshire. His father was Walter Ralegh, of Fardel, and his mother was Catherine, daughter of Sir Philip Champernown, of Modbury, and widow of Otho Gilbert, of Compton, in Devonshire. On his mother’s side he was brother to Sir John, Sir Humphrey, and Sir Adrian Gilbert,—all eminent men. He studied at Oxford with great success, but he left his books in 1569 to volunteer with his cousin, Henry Champernown, in aid of the French Protestants in their desperate struggle for religious liberty under the Prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny. He reached France in time to be present at the battle of Moncontour, and remained six years, during which time the massacre of St. Bartholomew occurred.[106] Afterward he served in the Netherlands with Sir John Norris under William of Orange in his struggle with the Spaniards.

In these wars he became not only an accomplished soldier, but a determined foe to Roman Catholicism and to the Spanish people. His contest with Spain, thus early begun, ended only with his life. It was indeed a war to the death on both sides. Elizabeth, his great sovereign, with all the courage of a hero in the bosom of a woman, sustained him in the conflict, and had the supreme satisfaction of seeing him administer a death-blow to Spanish power at Cadiz; while her pusillanimous successor rendered himself forever infamous by putting such a conqueror to death at the mandate of the Spanish King.

The claim of Spain to the New World, based upon its discovery by Columbus, fortified by a grant from Pope Alexander VI. and further strengthened by continued exploration and by settlements, was disputed, at least as regards the northern continent, by England on the strength of the Cabot voyages, of which an account has been given in the opening chapter of this volume. The English claimed that they were entitled to North America by the right of Cabot’s discovery of its mainland preceding that of Columbus, who had not then touched the mainland at the south. No serious effort was made, however, to follow up this claim by a settlement till 1578, when Elizabeth granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert a charter looking to a permanent occupation of the country. Sir Humphrey sailed in November, 1578, with seven ships and three hundred and fifty men. One of the fleet, the “Falcon,” was commanded by Ralegh, who had already learned to be a sailor as well as a soldier. His presence with the expedition was not alone due to his attachment to his distinguished brother. He had already discovered that the power of Spain was due to the wealth she derived from her American possessions, and he earnestly desired to secure for England the same source of power. His attention had been attracted to the coast of Florida by Coligny, whose colony of Huguenots there had been brutally murdered by the Spaniards under Menendez in 1565.

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The voyage of Gilbert met with disaster. In a short time all the ships except Ralegh’s were forced to return. Ralegh determined to sail for the West Indies, but when he had gone as far as the Islands of Cape de Verde, upon the coast of Africa, he was forced by a scarcity of provisions to return. He arrived at Plymouth in May, 1579, after having experienced many dangerous adventures in storms and sea-fights.

Sir Humphrey had returned before him, and was busy preparing for a renewal of the voyage; but an Order from the Privy Council, April 26, prohibited their departure. The conflicts at sea seem to have been with Spanish vessels, and complaints had been made to the Council concerning them.

Ralegh spent but little time in vain regrets, but at once took service in Ireland, where he commanded a company of English soldiers employed to suppress the insurrection headed by the Earl of Desmond, who led a mongrel force of Spaniards, Italians, and Irishmen. His service began under the Lord Justice Pelham, and was continued under his successor, Lord Grey. His genius and courage soon attracted public notice, and won for him the favor of the Queen. Upon his return in 1582 he made his appearance at court, and at once became that monarch’s favorite. No one could have been better fitted to play the rôle of courtier to this clever, passionate, and capricious woman. Ralegh is described by a contemporary as having “a good presence in a handsome and well-compacted person; a strong natural wit, and a better judgment; with a bold and plausible tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best advantage.” He had the culture of a scholar and the fancy of a poet, as well as the chivalry of a soldier; and he superadded to these that which was equally as attractive to his mistress,—unrivalled splendor in dress and equipage.

The Queen’s favor soon developed into magnificent gifts of riches and honor. He was given the monopolies of granting license for the export of broadcloths, and for the making of wines and regulating their prices. He was endowed with the fine estates in five counties forfeited to the Crown by the attainder of Anthony Babington, who plotted the murder of Elizabeth in the interest of Mary of Scotland; and with twelve thousand acres in Ireland, part of the land forfeited by the Earl of Desmond and his followers. He was made Lord Warden of the Stannaries, Lieutenant of the County of Cornwall, Vice-Admiral of Cornwall and Devon, and Captain of the Queen’s Guard.

One of his Irish estates was near the home of Edmund Spenser, secretary to Lord Grey during the Irish rebellion, and a visit which led to a renewal of their friendship led also to the publication, at the instance of Ralegh, of the Faerie Queene, in which Elizabeth is represented as Belphœbe.

No sooner did Ralegh find that his fortune was made, than he determined to accomplish the object of his passionate desire,—the English colonization of America. He furnished one of the little fleet of five ships with which Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed June 11, 1583, upon his last and most disastrous[108] voyage to America, and was only prevented from going with him by the peremptory order of the Queen, who was unwilling that her favorite should incur the risk of any “dangerous sea-fights.” The gallant Sir Humphrey, after taking formal possession of Newfoundland, sailed southward, but, experiencing a series of disasters, went down with his ship in a storm on his return homeward.[212]

Ralegh obtained a new charter, March 25, 1584, drawn more carefully with a design to foster colonization. Not only was he empowered to plant colonies upon “such remote heathen and barbarous lands, not actually possessed by any Christian prince nor inhabited by Christian people,” as he might discover, but the soil of such lands was to be enjoyed by the colonies forever, and the colonies planted were to “have all the privileges of free denizens and persons native of England, in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said realm of England, any law, etc., notwithstanding,” and they were to be governed “according to such statutes as shall be by him or them established; so that the said statutes or laws conform as near as conveniently may be with those of England, and do not oppugn the Christian faith, or any way withdraw the people of those lands from our allegiance.”[213]

These guarantees of political rights, which first appeared in the charter to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, were renewed in the subsequent charter of 1606, under which the English colonies were planted in America, and constituted one of the impregnable grounds upon which they afterwards maintained the struggle which ended in a complete separation from the mother country. It is doubtless to Ralegh that we are indebted for these provisions, which justified the Virginia burgesses in declaring in 1765,—

“That the first adventurers and settlers of this his Majesty’s colony and dominion brought with them, and transmitted to their posterity and all other his Majesty’s subjects since inhabiting in this his Majesty’s said colony, all the privileges, franchises, and immunities that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed by the people of Great Britain.”

Ralegh’s knowledge of the voyages of the Spaniards satisfied him that they had not explored the Atlantic coast north of what is now known as Florida, and he determined to plant a colony in this unexplored region.[214] Two ships were immediately made ready, and they sailed April 27, 1584, under the command of Captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, for the purpose of discovery, with a view to a permanent colony.

On the 10th of May they reached the Canaries, on the 10th of June the West Indies, and on the 4th of July the American coast. They sailed[109] northward one hundred and twenty miles before they found “any entrance or river issuing into the sea.” They entered the first which they discovered, probably that now known as New Inlet, and sailing a short distance into the haven they cast anchor, and returned thanks to God for their safe arrival. Manning their boats, they were soon on the nearest land, and took possession of it in the name “of the Queen’s most excellent Majestie, as rightful Queene and Princesse of the same,” and afterwards “delivered the same over to Sir Walter Ralegh’s use, according to her Majestie’s grant and letters patents under her Highnesse great seale.” They found the land to be about twenty miles long and six miles wide, and, in the language of the report to Sir Walter,—

“very sandie and low towards the water’s side, but so ful of grapes, as the very beating and surge of the sea overflowed them, of which we found such plentie, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the greene soile on the hils as in the plaines, as well on every little shrubbe, as also climing towards the tops of high cedars, that I thinke in all the world the like abundance is not to be found; and myselfe having seene those parts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as were incredible to be written.”

The report continues:—

“This Island had many goodly Woodes full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle, even in the middest of Summer, in incredible abondance. The Woodes are not such as you finde in Bohemia, Moscovia, Hercynia, barren and fruitles, but the highest and reddest Cedars of the world, farre bettering the Cedars of the Azores, of the Indies, or Lybanus; Pynes, Cypres, Sassaphras, the Lentisk, or the tree that beareth the Masticke, the tree that beareth the rind of blacke Sinamon.”

On the third day a boat with three natives approached the island, and friendly intercourse was at once established. On the next there came several boats, and in one of them Granganimeo, the king’s brother, “accompanied with fortie or fiftie men, very handsome and goodly people, and in their behavior as mannerly and civill as any of Europe.” When the English asked the name of the country, one of the savages, who did not understand the question, replied, “Win-gan-da-coa,” which meant, “You wear fine clothes.” The English on their part, mistaking his meaning, reported that to be the name of the country.

The King was named Wingina, and he was then suffering from a wound received in battle. After two or three days Granganimeo brought his wife and daughter and two or three children to the ships.

“His wife was very well favoured, of meane stature, and very bashfull; shee had on her backe a long cloake of leather, with the furre side next to her body, and before her a piece of the same; about her forehead shee hade a band of white corall, and so had her husband many times; in her eares shee had bracelets of pearles hanging doune to her middle, and these were of the bignes of good pease. The rest of her women of the better sort had pendants of copper hanging in either eare; he himself had upon his head a broad plate of golde or copper, for being unpolished we knew not[110] what mettal it should be, neither would he by any meanes suffer us to take it off his head, but feeling it, it would bow very easily. His apparell was as his wives, onely the women wear their haire long on both sides, and the men but on one. They are of colour yellowish, and their haire black for the most part, and yet we saw children that had very fine auburne and chesnut-colored haire.”

The phenomenon of auburn and chestnut-colored hair may be accounted for by the fact, related by the natives, that some years before a ship, manned by whites, had been wrecked on the coast; and that some of the people had been saved, and had lived with them for several weeks before leaving in their boats, in which, however, they were lost. It was the descendants of these men, doubtless, who were found by the English.

After the natives had visited the ships several times, Captain Barlowe with seven men went in a boat twenty miles to an island called Roanoke (probably a corruption of the Indian name Ohanoak), at the north end of which “was a village of nine houses built of cedar and fortified round about with sharp trees to keep out their enemies, and the entrance into it made like a turnpike, very artificially.” There they found the wife of Granganimeo, who, with her attendants, in the absence of her husband, entertained them “with all loue and kindness, and with as much bounty (after their manner) as they could possibly devise.”

They did not attempt to explore the mainland, but returned to England, arriving about the middle of September, and carrying with them two of the natives, Manteo and Manchese. They were enthusiastic concerning all they had seen, describing the soil as “the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful, and wholesome of all the world,” and “the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the Golden Age.”

The Queen, not less delighted than Ralegh, named the newly-discovered country Virginia, in commemoration of her maiden life, and conferred upon Ralegh the honor of knighthood. He now had a new seal of his arms cut, with the legend, Propria insignia Walteri Ralegh, militis, Domini et Gubernatoris Virginiæ. He was soon honored also with a seat in Parliament by his native shire of Devon, and rose to eminence in that body.

Upon the return of his expedition Ralegh began to fit out a colony to be planted in Virginia. Everything was made ready by the next spring, and on the 9th of April, 1585, he sent from Plymouth a fleet of seven ships in command of his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, “with one hundred householders, and many things necessary to begin a new state.” The colony itself was put in the immediate charge of Ralph Lane, who was afterwards knighted by the King. He had seen considerable service, and was on duty in Ireland when invited by Ralegh to take command of the colony. The Queen ordered a substitute to be appointed in his government of Kerry and Clanmorris, “in consideration[111] of his ready undertaking the voyage to Virginia for Sir Walter Ralegh at her Majesty’s command.” His residence in Ireland and Ralegh’s interest there account for a number of Irish names which appear among the colonists. Captain Philip Amadas was associated with Lane as his deputy, and among those who accompanied him were two who were men of distinction. One, Thomas Cavendish, afterwards became celebrated as a navigator by sailing round the world; and another, Thomas Hariot, was a mathematician of great distinction, who materially advanced the science of algebra, and was honored by Descartes, who imposed some of Hariot’s work upon the French as his own.

On the voyage the conduct of Sir Richard Grenville gave great offence to Lane and the leading men of the colony, and Lane became convinced that Grenville desired his death. On the 26th of June they came to anchor at Wocokon, now known as Ocracoke Inlet. On the 11th of July Grenville crossed the southern portion of Pamlico Sound, and discovered three Indian towns,—Pomeiok, Aquascogoc, and Secotan. At Aquascogoc a silver cup was stolen from one of his men, and failing to recover it, they “burned and spoiled their corn, all the people being fled.” This act of harsh retribution made enemies of the inhabitants of this part of the country, and was unfortunate in its consequences.

Grenville landed the colony at Roanoke Island, and leaving Lane in charge of one hundred and seven men, he sailed for England August 25, promising to return with supplies by the next Easter. Lane at once erected a fort on the island, and then began to explore the coast and rivers of the country. The exploration southward extended about eighty miles, to the present county of Carteret; northward, about one hundred and thirty miles, to the vicinity of Elizabeth River; northwest, about the same distance, to a point just below the junction of the Meherrin and Nottoway rivers; and westward, up the Roanoke River to the vicinity of Halifax.

Lane was a man of decided ability and executive capacity. He informed himself regarding the country and its inhabitants, and protected his men from the many dangers which surrounded them. He soon became convinced that a mistake had been made in attempting a settlement on Roanoke Island, because of the dangerous coast and wretched harbor. He learned on his voyage up the Chowan, from an Indian king named Monatonon, that on going three days’ journey in a canoe up the river and four days’ journey over land to the northeast, he would come to a king’s country which lay upon the sea, whose place of greatest strength was an island in a deep bay. This information evidently pointed to Craney Island in Chesapeake Bay. Lane thereupon resolved, as soon as the promised supply arrived from England, to send ships up the coast to discover the bay, and to send men overland to establish posts, and if he found the bay to be as described, to transfer the colony to its shore.

The two natives who had been carried to England had returned with Lane. Manteo was a firm friend to the English, while Manchese became their[112] implacable enemy. Granganimeo, the brother, and Ensenore, the father, of Wingina, were also friendly, but both died within a few months after the arrival of the colony, and the king, who had changed his name to Pemisapan, did all in his power to destroy it. When Lane ascended the Roanoke, he found that the tribes along its banks, with whom he had previously entered into terms of friendship, had been informed by Pemisapan that the English designed to kill them. They had retired into the interior with their families and provisions, and Lane, whose supplies were running short, found great difficulty in subsisting his men.

The exploration of this river, called by the Indians Moratoc, was deemed of the greatest importance, as the natives reported it as flowing with a bold stream out of a rock upon the coast of the Western Ocean, and running through a land rich in minerals. During the voyage they were reduced to great straits for subsistence, but the men insisted on going farther and feeding on the flesh of dogs, rather than to give up the search. Finally they were attacked by the natives, and being without food they returned from their search for the mines and the South-Sea passage. The scarcity of provisions at Roanoke Island had now become a matter of serious concern, as the time had passed for Sir Richard Grenville to return with supplies, and Pemisapan was endeavoring to starve them out. In order to get subsistence Lane was forced to divide his men into three parties. One of these he sent to the Island of Croatoan, and another to Hatorask. Learning from Skyco, a son of King Monatonon, held as a hostage, that Pemisapan had informed him of a plot to murder the English, Lane saved his men by striking the first blow, and putting to death Pemisapan and seven or eight of his chief men.

Within a few days afterwards Sir Francis Drake, with a fleet of twenty-three sail, returning from sacking St. Domingo, Carthagina, and St. Augustine, came in sight of the Island of Croatoan, and on the 10th of June came to anchor near Roanoke Island. Drake acted in the most generous manner towards the colonists. He proposed to carry them back to England if they desired it, or to leave them sufficient shipping and provisions to enable them to make further discovery. Lane and his men, being desirous to stay, accepted the last offer, promising when they had searched the coast for a better harbor to return to England in the coming August. They had despaired of the return of Sir Richard Grenville, and they believed that Ralegh had been prevented from looking after them by the condition of public affairs in England. Sir Francis at once placed one of his ships at the disposal of Lane, and began to put provisions aboard. Before this was accomplished a storm arose, which lasted three days and threatened to destroy the whole fleet. To save themselves several of the ships put to sea, and among them the “Francis,” selected for the use of the colony, with the provisions aboard. After the storm had abated Drake offered another ship of much greater burden, it being the only one he could then spare; but it being too heavy for the harbor and not suited for their purposes, Lane[113] with the chief men determined to ask for a passage to England for the colony, which was granted them by Drake, and they arrived at Plymouth on the 27th of July, 1586, having lost but four of their number. Thomas Hariot carried with him, on the return of the colony, a carefully prepared description of the country,—its inhabitants, productions, animals, birds, and fish,—and John White, the artist of the expedition, carried illustrations in water-colors. Specimens of the productions of the country were also carried by the colonists; and of these two, though not previously unknown in Europe, through the exertions of Ralegh were brought into general use, and have long been of the greatest importance. One was the plant called by the natives uppowoc, but named by the Spaniards tobacco; the other, the root known as the potato, which was introduced into Ireland by being planted on the estate of Ralegh. In Hariot’s description of the grain called by the Indians pagatour, we easily recognize our Indian corn.

Soon after the departure of the colony a ship arrived with supplies sent by Ralegh, with a direction to assure them of further aid. Finding no one on the island, this vessel returned to England. Fifteen days after its departure Sir Richard Grenville arrived with three ships well provisioned, but finding the island desolate, and searching in vain for the colony or any information concerning it, he also returned, leaving, however, fifteen men with provisions for two years. This was done to retain possession of the country, and in ignorance of the hostility of the natives and of the purpose of Lane to abandon that locality as a settlement. Though seemingly wise and proper, it proved to be the source of further misfortune.

Sir Walter Ralegh, upon receiving the report of Lane, determined to make no further effort to settle Roanoke Island, but at once began to prepare for a settlement upon Chesapeake Bay. He granted a charter of incorporation to thirty-two persons, nineteen of whom were merchants of London who contributed their money, and thirteen, styled “the Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia,” who adventured their persons in the enterprise. Of the nineteen styled merchants, ten were afterwards subscribers to the Virginia Company of London which settled Jamestown. Among them were Sir Thomas Smith, for years the chief officer of that company, and one of the two Richard Hakluyts. John White was selected as the governor, and with him were sent one hundred and fifty persons, including seventeen women. They were carried in three ships in charge of Simon Ferdinando, with directions to visit Roanoke Island and take away the men left there by Sir Richard Grenville, and then to steer for Chesapeake Bay. On July 22, 1587, they arrived at Hatorask, and White, taking with him forty of his best men, started in the pinnace to Roanoke Island.

Ferdinando, who was a Spaniard by birth, was either acting in the interest of Spain or was angered by his difficulties with White. He had purposely separated from one of the ships during the voyage, and instead[114] of carrying the colony to Chesapeake Bay, as he had agreed, he no sooner saw White and his men aboard the pinnace for Roanoke Island, than he directed the sailors to bring none of the men back, on the pretext that the summer was too far spent to be looking for another place. The colony was thus forced to remain upon the island. They found evidence of the massacre by the savages of the men left by Grenville, and they soon experienced the hostility of the Indians toward themselves.

Manteo, who had gone to England with Lane, returned with White, and was of the greatest service to the colony. By the direction of Ralegh he “was christened in Roanoke, and called lord thereof, and of Dasamonguepeuk, in reward of his faithful service.” On the 18th of August Eleanor, daughter of the governor and wife of Ananias Dare one of the assistants, gave birth to a daughter, “and because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia, she was named Virginia.”

The little vessel, from which Ferdinando had parted company, arrived safely with the rest of the colony aboard in a few days, and the men who landed on the island, all told, were one hundred and twenty souls.

When the time came for the ships to return to England it was determined by the unanimous voice of the colony to send White back to represent their condition and to obtain relief. He at first refused to go, but at last yielded to their solicitation, and on the 5th of November arrived in England.

When White landed he found the kingdom alarmed by the threatened Spanish invasion. Ralegh, Grenville, and Lane were all members of the council of war, and were bending every energy toward the protection of England from the Spanish Armada. Ralegh’s genius shone forth conspicuously in this crisis, and his policy of defending England on the water by a well-equipped fleet was not only adopted, but has been steadily pursued since, and has resulted in her becoming the great naval power of the world.

Ralegh did not forget his colony, however, and by the spring he had fitted out for its relief a small fleet, which he placed under the command of Sir Richard Grenville. Before it sailed every ship was impressed by the Government, and Sir Richard was required to attend Sir Walter, who was training troops in Cornwall. Governor White, with Ralegh’s aid, succeeded in sailing for Virginia with two vessels, April 22, 1588, but encountering some Spanish ships and being worsted in a sea-fight, he was forced to return to England, and the voyage was abandoned for the time. White was not able to renew his effort to relieve the colony during the year 1589, but during the next year, finding that three ships ready to sail for the West Indies at the charges of John Wattes, a London merchant, had been detained by the order prohibiting any vessel from leaving England, he applied to Ralegh to obtain permission for them to sail, on condition that they should take him and some others with supplies to Roanoke Island. After obtaining permission to sail on this condition, the owner and commanders[115] of the ships refused to take any one aboard except White; and as they were in the act of sailing, and White had no time to lodge complaint against them, he went aboard, determined alone to prosecute his search. On the 15th of August they came to anchor at Hatorask. When White left the colony they had determined to remove fifty miles into the interior, and it had been agreed that they should carve on the trees or posts of the doors the name of the place where they were seated, and if they were in distress a cross was to be carved above the name. White found no one on the island, but the houses he had left had been taken down and a fort erected, which had been so long deserted that grass was growing in it. The bark had been cut from one of the largest trees near the entrance, and five feet from the ground, in fair capital letters, was cut the word Croatoan, without any sign of distress. Further search developed the fact that five chests, buried near the fort, had been dug up and their contents destroyed. White recognized among the fragments of the articles some of his own books, maps, and pictures. He concluded that the colony had removed to Croatoan, the island from which Manteo came, whose inhabitants had been friendly to the English. White at once begged the captain of the ship to carry him to Croatoan, which the captain promised to do; but a violent storm preventing, he finally determined to sail for England, where they arrived on the 24th of October. This was White’s fifth and last voyage, as he states in his letter to Hakluyt in 1593. His disappointment produced despondency, and he abandoned all hope of relieving the colony, with whom he had left his daughter and grandchild.

Ralegh had already spent forty thousand pounds in his several efforts to colonize Virginia, and he found himself unable to follow up his design from his own purse alone. He thereupon leased his patent to a company of merchants, hoping thus to achieve his object. But in this he was disappointed. He did not abandon all hope of final success, however, but continued to send out ships to look for his lost colony. In 1602 he made his fifth effort to afford them help by sending Captain Samuel Mace, a mariner of experience, with instructions to search for them. Mace returned without executing his orders, and Ralegh wrote to Sir Robert Cecil on the 21st August that he would send Mace back, and expressed his faith in the colonization of Virginia in these words, “I shall yet live to see it an Englishe nation.” He lived, indeed, to see his prediction verified, but not until he was immured in the Tower of London. During the last years of Elizabeth’s reign he continually pressed the Secretary and Privy Council for facilities to resume his schemes, but without success; and he finally abandoned all hope of finding the colony left at Roanoke Island.

What became of this colony was long a question of anxious inquiry, only to be solved by the information obtained from the Indians after the English settled at Jamestown. It was then ascertained that they had intermixed with the natives, and, after living with them till about the time of the[116] arrival of the colony at Jamestown, had been cruelly massacred at the instigation of Powhatan, acting under the persuasions of his priests.[215] Only seven of them—four men, two boys, and a young maid—had been preserved from slaughter by a friendly chief. From these was descended a tribe of Indians found in the vicinity of Roanoke Island in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and known as the Hatteras Indians. They had gray eyes, which were found among no other tribes, and claimed to have white people as their ancestors.

The failure of Ralegh’s efforts to colonize Virginia may be ascribed to the inherent difficulties of the enterprise, increased by the inexperience of those sent out; to the unfortunate selection of the place of settlement; and, above all, to the war with Spain, which prevented Ralegh from taking proper care of the infant colony until it could become self-sustaining.

But although the colonies he sent to Virginia perished, to Ralegh must be awarded the honor of securing the possession of North America to the English. It was through his enterprise that the advantages of its soil and climate were made known in England, and that the Chesapeake Bay was fixed upon as the proper place of settlement; and it was his genius that created the spirit of colonization which led to the successful settlement upon that bay.

Ralegh incurred the displeasure of the Queen in 1592 by his marriage with Elizabeth Throgmorton, her beautiful maid of honor. He was more than compensated, however, by the acquisition of a faithful and loving wife, who was in every way worthy of him. The jealous Queen sent them both to the Tower. After a few months’ imprisonment Sir Walter was released, that he might superintend the division of the rich spoil taken in the Spanish ship “Madre de Dios,” on her return from the West Indies, by a privateering fleet which he had sent out. The Queen was personally interested in this enterprise, and got the lion’s share of the profits. Afterward he was permitted to retire with his wife to his estate, and there he matured his plans for a voyage to Guiana, which he had been long considering. His colony had found no mines in Virginia, and he longed to make England the rival of Spain in mineral wealth.

Spanish travellers had reported that the natives told of a city of gold called “El Dorado,” which was situated in the unexplored region of the northeastern portion of South America, known as the “Empire of Guiana.” Between the years 1530 and 1560 a number of expeditions had been sent by the Spaniards to this unknown land. They had proved unsuccessful, and been attended with great loss of life and money. Ralegh was seized with a desire to visit this region and secure its riches. In 1594 he sent out Jacob Whiddon, with instructions to examine the coast contiguous to the River Orinoco, and to explore that river and its tributaries. Whiddon met at the Island of Trinidad with Antonio de Berreo, the Spanish governor, who was himself planning an exploration of the region along the Orinoco,[117] and who opposed every obstacle to the success of Whiddon’s mission. Ralegh’s agent returned to England towards the close of the year with but little trustworthy information. Sir Walter continued his preparations, however, and on February 9, 1595, with a squadron of five ships, he sailed from Plymouth for Trinidad, having aboard one hundred officers, soldiers, and gentlemen adventurers. Before the end of March he arrived at Trinidad. He captured the town of St. Joseph, and took Berreo prisoner. Treating his captive with kindness, Ralegh soon learned from him what he knew of Guiana. He was informed by Berreo that the empire of Guiana had more gold than Peru; that the imperial city called by the Spaniards “El Dorado” was called by the Indians “Manoa,” and was situated on a lake of salt water two hundred leagues long, and that it was the largest and richest city in the world. Berreo showed Sir Walter a copy of a narrative by Juan Martinez of his journey to Manoa, which had induced Berreo to send a special messenger to Spain to get up an expedition for the conquest of El Dorado, or, as it was then called, “Laguna de la Gran Manoa.”

This narrative appeared to confirm the marvellous tales concerning El Dorado which had so long obtained credence. Ralegh did not rely on Berreo, however, but sought out the oldest among the Indians on the island, and inquired of them concerning the country, its streams and inhabitants. He then started upon his perilous voyage up the Orinoco, with four boats and provisions for a month. He entered by the most northern of the divisions through which that remarkable river flows into the sea, and after struggling against its rapid, various, and dangerous currents for more than a month, and reaching the mouth of the Caroni, and ascending that stream some forty miles to the vicinity of its falls, he was forced by the rising of the river to return,—finding that his farther progress was not only prevented thereby, but his return made dangerous. He supposed he had gone four hundred miles by the windings of the river, and he was still more than two hundred miles from the country of which Manoa was the capital, according to the reckoning of Berreo. Ralegh did not find the rich deposits of gold he had hoped for, but saw, as he supposed, many indications of that metal, and secured specimens of ores and precious stones. He found that the Spaniards had previously traversed the country contiguous to the river, and been cruel in their treatment of the natives. He informed them that his Queen, whose portrait he showed them, was the enemy of the Spaniards, and that he came to deliver them from their tyranny. He soon made them his fast friends by his kindness, and an old chief, Topiawari, promised to unite the several tribes along the river in a league against the Spaniards by the time Sir Walter should return. This chief gave his son to Ralegh as a pledge of his fidelity, and received in return two Englishmen, who were instructed to learn what they could of the country, and, if possible, to go to the city of Manoa.

Ralegh arrived in England in the latter part of the summer of 1595, after laying under contribution several Spanish settlements on the way. He[118] published a glowing account of his voyage, in which he related not only the wonderful things he had seen, but the more wonderful things which had been told him by the Spaniards and natives. He was firmly persuaded of the existence of El Dorado, and also that there lived in Guiana the Amazons, a race of women who allowed no man to remain among them; and the Ewaipanoma, a tribe who had their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts. The publication was eagerly read, and increased his already great reputation. But it was severely criticised at the time, as it has been since by Hume and other historians. During the present century two distinguished men—Humboldt and Schomburgk—have explored the Orinoco and the countries drained by it and its almost innumerable tributaries. They found that what Ralegh stated of the country, as coming under his own observation, was true, while many of the tales told him by others were the merest fiction.

In January, 1596, Ralegh sent Captain Laurence Keymis, a companion of his first voyage, with two ships, to renew the exploration of the Orinoco, with a view to planting a colony. He returned in June, and his report confirmed Ralegh in his belief in the mineral wealth of the country. He brought intelligence, however, of a Spanish settlement made by Berreo near the mouth of the Caroni, with the men sent out to him from Spain.

When Keymis landed in England he found that Ralegh had been partially restored to the favor of the Queen, and united with Essex and Howard in command of the force sent to attack Cadiz. The operations before that city were directed by Ralegh’s genius, and he led the van of the naval attack which resulted in the destruction of the Spanish fleet and the capture of the city. From the effects of this blow Spain never recovered, and the 21st of June, 1596, the day of the battle, marks the date of her decline as one of the great powers. During the next year he struck her another blow by the capture of Fayal.

In the year 1596 Ralegh despatched one of the smaller ships which had fought at Cadiz, to Guiana, under the command of Captain Leonard Berry, but with no important results. In 1598 he attempted to get together a fleet of thirteen ships, to be commanded by Sir John Gilbert, with which to convey a colony to the fertile valley of the Orinoco, but from some cause, not known, he failed.

His frequent failures did not dampen his ardor in the cause of colonization, but he found that it “required a prince’s purse to have it thoroughly followed out,” and he therefore endeavored to interest the Ministry in his schemes. But the end of the great Queen was approaching, and instead of aiming at the enlargement of her kingdom, her ministers were scheming for their own advancement with her successor.

The accession of James to the throne of England changed the fortunes of Ralegh. When he met the King he found the royal mind already prejudiced against him. He was displaced from the Captaincy of the Guard, and shortly afterwards was arrested on a charge of treason,[119] in plotting with the Count of Arenburg, an ambassador of the Archduke Albert, to place Lady Arabella Stuart upon the throne, and to obtain aid from the King of Spain for the purpose. The mockery of a trial which followed drew from one of his judges the statement, which succeeding ages have pronounced true, that “never before was English justice so injured or so degraded.” The brutal conduct of Sir Edward Coke who prosecuted, and of Chief-Justice Popham who presided, at the trial, and denied the request of Ralegh to be confronted with the witnesses against him, has consigned their memory to lasting infamy. That Ralegh, after spending his life in war with Spain, should plot with her to overthrow his King and put another in his place is not credible, and that the Government that prosecuted him did not believe the charge is conclusively shown by the fact, that the Count of Arenburg retained the favor of King James, and further, that some of the men prominent in the prosecution were at the time in the paid service of Spain.

James did not proceed to execute the sentence of death which his corrupt court had pronounced against Ralegh, but kept him a prisoner in the Tower for thirteen years. In prison he devoted himself to the study of chemistry and to literary composition; and the great wrong done in depriving him of his liberty resulted in that literary treasure, the History of the World.

As prison life became more and more irksome to Ralegh, he attempted to relieve himself from it by obtaining employment in Virginia or Guiana, promising the King rich returns if he would but permit him to visit either country. Finally, by bribing those who had the ear of the King, he was released January 30, 1616, to prepare for a voyage to Guiana. He had been assured by Keymis that a rich mine existed near the mouth of the Caroni, and he pledged himself to find it or else to bear all the expenses of the expedition. Keymis was to go along with him, and also a sufficient force “to defend him against the Spaniards inhabiting upon the Orenocke, if they offered to assaile him,—not that it is meant to offend the Spaniards there, or to beginne any quarrell with them, except themselves shall beginne the warre.” It was said in London at the time that Ralegh wanted to obtain a pardon under the Great Seal, but it required a further expenditure of money which he needed in his expedition, and he was advised by Bacon that the King’s commission under which he sailed was equivalent to a pardon. The release of Ralegh enabled him to see Pocahontas, who was in England in 1616, and we can well conceive with what interest he beheld her who had so much aided in realizing his hope of seeing Virginia an English nation.

King James had fallen under the influence of Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, to whom Ralegh was particularly obnoxious on account of his lifelong enmity to Spain. The Count attempted to prevent the sailing of the expedition, but failing in that, he obtained from the King Ralegh’s plans, and at once transmitted them to Madrid, where steps were immediately taken to thwart them. In June, 1617, Ralegh sailed with eleven[120] vessels from Plymouth, having with him his son, young Walter Ralegh, Captain Keymis, and four hundred and thirty-one men. He arrived at Trinidad in December, suffering from the effects of a violent fever. He was too feeble to attempt the ascent of the Orinoco, but sent forward his son and Keymis. When they approached St. Thomas, settled since his first voyage, they were attacked by the Spaniards. The conflict ended in the taking of the town, but at the cost of young Walter Ralegh’s life. Keymis continued the search for the mine, and with a part of his men reached the vicinity of the place at which he had located it on his previous voyage. The hostility of the Spaniards reduced his numbers so that he felt forced to return to St. Thomas for reinforcements. After returning to that point he became despondent, and finally burnt the town and returned to Trinidad, taking along with him documents found at St. Thomas, which showed that the plans of Ralegh, communicated to the King, had been betrayed to the Court of Madrid. When Keymis met Ralegh and saw how he was affected by the failure of the expedition and the loss of his son, and heard his reproaches, he was seized with remorse at the thought that upon him rested the responsibility for the failure, and committed suicide.

Ralegh, utterly dispirited and broken-hearted, now turned his face homeward, and arrived at Plymouth early in July, 1618. He was arrested upon his arrival, by order of the King, on the charge of breaking the peace with Spain. No trial was had upon this charge, which could not have been sustained; but as the King of Spain demanded that he should be put to death James sought for a legal cover for compliance, and upon the advice of Bacon determined to issue a warrant for his execution upon the conviction of 1603. Ralegh was brought before the Court of King’s Bench on the 28th of October, and asked what he had to allege in further stay of execution. He pleaded his commission from the King, giving him command of the expedition to Guiana, as working a pardon, but was told that “Treason must be pardoned by express words, not by implication.” Nothing remained but to execute the death-warrant, already drawn by Bacon and signed by the King. He was beheaded on the next day, meeting death with the greatest fortitude. His execution excited the horror and indignation of the Protestant world, and King James was at once arraigned at the bar of public opinion. He called to his defence the genius of his Lord Chancellor, and Bacon attempted to justify him by publishing a disgraceful attack upon Ralegh’s fame. But the effort was in vain. The world acquitted Ralegh of the charges which had been made the pretext of his judicial murder, and adjudged King James to be the real criminal.

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CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE life of Sir Walter Ralegh, reprehensible in some of its parts, but admirable in most and brilliant in all, has been variously portrayed. Lord Bacon in 1618 published in quarto A Declaration of the Demeanor and Carrige of Sir Walter Ralegh, as well in his Voyage as in and since his Return, etc., intending it as a justification of the conduct of King James in beheading him; but it grossly misrepresented him. He began with the statement that “Kings are not bound to give account of their actions to any but God alone;” but the whole apology is framed upon the theory that King James was forced by the popular voice to give an account of this base action. It appears from a letter of Bacon to the Marquis of Buckingham, dated Nov. 22, 1618,[216] that the King made very material additions to the manuscript after Bacon had prepared it.

The first Life of Ralegh was published with his works not long after his death. The name of the author is not given, and it is not a full narrative, but was written during his life or soon after his death.

The next publication was under the style of The Life of the Valiant and Learned Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight, with his Tryal at Winchester, London: printed by J. D. for Benj. Shirley and Richard Tonsin, 1677. This has sometimes been attributed to James Shirley, the dramatist, who was a contemporary of Ralegh. The narrative, however, was little more than what was already known from books familiar to the public.

In 1701 the Rev. John Prince, a fellow-Devonian, published in his Worthies of Devon a short memoir of Ralegh, which was the best account of its subject that had then appeared. He was able to throw light upon some of the obscurer portions of his life by his local knowledge, and his book is still worthy of perusal.

No other Life of Ralegh of value appeared until 1733, when William Oldys published his work, which showed great industry in collecting and judgment in arranging his material. For near a century it was the standard Life of Ralegh, and was the source from which writers derived their materials. Notwithstanding the criticism of Gibbon, that “it is a servile panegyric or flat apology,” this work is of great value. It contains all that was accessible, when it was published, from printed records, and much information derived from the descendants of Ralegh and from his contemporaries.[217]

Dr. Thomas Birch published three several Lives of Ralegh,[218]—the first in 1734, in the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical. This author corresponded with the descendants of Ralegh, and collected various anecdotes of him, but he made no additions of real value to the work of Oldys.

The next work worthy of mention was by Arthur Cayley in 1805, although a dozen Lives perhaps appeared between Birch’s and this. Cayley made valuable additions to the knowledge concerning Ralegh which Oldys had gathered. He brought to light several new and valuable documents, which threw additional light upon his subject.[219]

In 1830 Mrs. A. T. Thompson published a Life of Ralegh in London, which was republished in Philadelphia in 1846, containing fifteen original letters then first printed from the collection in the State-Paper Office, throwing light on the share he took in the political transactions of his times. It was of but little additional value so far as its other materials were concerned.

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In 1833 Patrick Fraser Tytler published a Life of Ralegh, “with a Vindication of his Character from the Attacks of Hume[220] and other writers.” This writer added several original documents to the material previously used, but his publication is more justly entitled to the criticism of Gibbon on the work of Oldys than was that book. He first carefully traced out the conspiracy which brought Ralegh to the scaffold.

In 1837 there appeared in Lardner’s Cabinet of Biography, among the Lives of the British Admirals, an excellent life of Ralegh by Robert Southey, the poet. The author’s only addition to the knowledge afforded by previous writers was in reference to the Guiana expeditions, the additional information being drawn from Spanish sources.

In 1847 the Hakluyt Society published Ralegh’s accounts of his voyages to Guiana, with notes and a biographical memoir by Sir Robert H. Schomburgk. This memoir is an admirable summary of what was then known of Ralegh, and the publication is a complete vindication of Ralegh’s statements and conduct in reference to Guiana. The notes of the author are of the greatest value. He was a British Commissioner to survey the boundaries of Guiana in 1841, and traversed the country visited by Ralegh and those sent out by him. He also had the benefit of Humboldt’s previous exploration of the country. This writer published for the first time two valuable manuscripts in the British Museum, both from the pen of Ralegh. One was written about the year 1596, and entitled “Of the Voyage for Guiana,” and the other was the journal of his last voyage to that country.

In 1868 there was published in London the most valuable of all the biographies of Ralegh. It was written by Edward Edwards, and is “based on contemporary documents preserved in the Rolls House, the Privy Council Office, Hatfield House, the British Museum, and other manuscript repositories, British and foreign, together with his letters now first collected.” The author also had the advantage of the correspondence of the French ambassador at London during the latter part of Ralegh’s life. He has cleared up some of the obscure parts of Ralegh’s career, and has, not only by the very full collection of his letters, but by the admirable treatment of his subject, rendered invaluable service to his memory.[221]

Another Life of Ralegh, published in the same year (1868) by St. John, is also the embodiment of the latest information, and is better adapted to the general reader than that of Edwards, and elucidates some points more fully.

The voyage of Amadas and Barlow to Roanoke Island in 1584 was related by the latter in a Report addressed to Sir Walter Ralegh. The voyage of Sir Richard Grenville in 1585, conveying Ralph Lane and the colony under his command, was related by one of the persons who accompanied Grenville, and the account of what happened after their arrival was written by one of the colonists, probably Lane himself.[222] An account of the country, its inhabitants[123] and productions, was written by Thomas Hariot (b. 1560; d. 1621), one of the colony.[223] There are also accounts of the voyages of John White to Virginia written by himself.

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These several publications are found together in Hakluyt, and are of the highest authority. They have been republished by Francis L. Hawks, D.D., LL.D., with valuable notes, in the first volume of his History of North Carolina, published in 1857. Dr. Hawks was a native of North Carolina, and personally familiar with its coast, and thus enabled to fix the localities mentioned in the early voyages. His book is accompanied with valuable maps. He defends Lane with much ability from the attacks of Bancroft and others.[224]

The letters of Ralph Lane constitute a very valuable addition to the history of Lane’s colony, and show that the disputes between Lane and Grenville had in all probability much to do with Lane’s abandonment of the enterprise.

WHITE’S OLD VIRGINIA (HARIOT).

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PART OF DE LAET’S MAP, 1630.

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The voyages to Guiana are related by Ralegh himself.[225] The journal of the second voyage is given by Schomburgk from the original manuscript in the British Museum. The collections of the works of Ralegh show his several other writings concerning Guiana, among which are an “Apology for the Voyage to Guiana,” written in 1618, on his way from Plymouth to London as a prisoner; to gain time for the preparation of which he feigned sickness at Salisbury. Expecting to be put to death, he was determined before he died fully and elaborately to justify to the world his last expedition, which had been grossly misrepresented. It was not published till 1650.

In Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. iii., there is published a letter, written Nov. 17, 1617, “from the River Aliana, on the coast of Guiana,” by a gentleman of the fleet, who signs his initials “R. M.” It is entitled Newes of Sir Walter Rawleigh, and gives the orders he issued to the commanders of his fleet, and some account of the incidents of the expedition.[226]

In Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World he often illustrates his subject by the incidents of his own life, and thus we have in the book much of an autobiography.


NOTE.—At the charge of an American subscription a Ralegh window has been placed in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, London; and a sermon, Sir Walter Raleigh and America, was preached by the Rev. Canon Farrar, at the unveiling, May 14, 1882.


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CHAPTER V.

VIRGINIA, 1606-1689.

BY ROBERT A. BROCK,

Corresponding Secretary of the Virginia Historical Society.

ON the petition of Hakluyt (then prebendary of Westminster), Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and other “firm and hearty lovers of colonization,” James I., by patent dated the 10th of April, 1606, chartered two companies (the London and the Plymouth), and bestowed on them in equal proportions the vast territory (then known as Virginia) lying between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of north latitude, together with the islands within one hundred miles of the coast stretching from Cape Fear to Halifax.

The code of laws provided for the government of the proposed colonies was complicated, inexpedient, and characteristic of the mind of the first Stuart. For each colony separate councils appointed by the King were instituted in England, and these were in turn to name resident councillors in the colonies, with power to choose their own president and to fill vacancies. Capital offences were to be tried by a jury, but all other cases were left to the decision of the council. This body was, however, to govern itself according to the prescribed mandates of the King. The religion of the Church of England was established, and the oath of obedience was a prerequisite to residence in the colony. Lands were to descend as at common law, and a community of labor and property was to continue for five years. The Adventurers, as the members of the Company were termed, were authorized to mine for gold, silver, and copper, to coin money, and to collect a revenue for twenty-one years from all vessels trading to their ports. Certain articles of necessity, imported for the use of the colonists, were exempted from duty for seven years. Sir Thomas Smith, an eminent merchant of London, who had been the chief of the assignees of Sir Walter Raleigh and ambassador to Russia, was appointed treasurer of the Company.

But the body of the men who composed the expedition had little care for forms of government. A wilder chimera than the impractical devices of[128] the selfish and pedantic monarch possessed them. “I tell thee,” says Seagull, in the play of Eastward Ho! which was popular for years, “golde is more plentifull there than copper is with us; and for as much redde copper as I can bring I’ll have thrise the weight in gold. Why, man, all their dripping-pans ... are pure gould; and all the chaines with which they chaine up their streets are massie gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they goe forth in Holydayes and gather ‘hem by the seashore, to hang on their children’s coates and sticke in their children’s caps, as commonly as our children weare saffron gilt brooches and groates with holes in ‘hem.” A life of ease and luxury is pictured by Seagull, and, as the climax of allurement, with “no more law than conscience, and not too much of eyther.”[227] The expedition left Blackwall on the 19th of December, but was detained by “unprosperous winds” in the Downs until the 1st of January, 1606-7. It consisted of three vessels,—the “Susan Constant,” of one hundred tons, with seventy-one persons, in charge of the experienced navigator Captain Christopher Newport (the commander of the fleet); the “God-Speed,” of forty tons, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, carrying fifty-two persons; and the “Discovery,” of twenty tons, Captain John Ratcliffe, carrying twenty persons. The crews of the ships must have constituted thirty-nine of the total of these, as the number of the first planters was one hundred and five. In the lists of their names, more than half are classed as “gentlemen,” and the remainder as laborers, tradesmen, and mechanics. Two “chirurgeons,” Thomas Wotton, or Wootton, and Wil. Wilkinson, are included; the service of the first of them in a professional capacity is afterwards noted. Sailing by the old route of the West Indies, the Virginia coast was reached on the 26th of April, and in Chesapeake Bay on that night the instructions from the King were examined. These, with a mystery well calculated to promote mischief, had been confided to Newport, in a sealed box, with the injunction that it should not be opened until he reached his destination. The councillors found to be designated were Edward Maria Wingfield, Bartholomew Gosnold, John Smith, Christopher Newport, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and John Kendall. Wingfield, a man of honorable birth and a strict disciplinarian, who had been a companion of Ferdinando Gorges in the European wars, was chosen president; and Thomas Studley, cape-merchant, or treasurer.

On the 29th of the month a cross was planted at Cape Henry, which was so named in honor of the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King James; the name of his second son, then Duke of York, afterwards Charles I., being perpetuated in the opposite cape. The point at which the ships anchored the next day was designated, in thankful spirit, Point Comfort. On the 13th of May, 1607, the colonists landed at a peninsula on the northern bank of the river known to the natives as Powhatan, after their king, but to which the English gave the name James River. Upon this spot, about fifty miles[129] from its mouth, they resolved to build their first town, to which they also gave the name of the English monarch. The selection of this site is said to have been urged by Smith and objected to by Gosnold. The better judgment of the latter was vindicated in the sequel. Smith—at this time not yet twenty-eight years of age, a man the most remarkably endowed among those nominated for the council, and whose administrative capacity was to be so prominently evidenced—was at first excluded from his seat because, says Purchas, he had been “suspected of a supposed mutinie” on the voyage over.[228] This proscription in all probability had no more warrant than in the jealousy which the recent adventurous career and the confident bearing of Smith may be supposed to have excited, since he was admitted to office on the 10th of June following. The colonists at once set about building fortifications and establishing the settlement. Newport, Smith, and twenty-three others in the mean time ascended the river in a shallop on a tour of exploration. At an Indian village below the falls was found a lad of about ten years of age with yellow hair and whitish skin, who, it has been assumed, was the offspring of some representative of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony left by White, of which it is narrated that seven persons were preserved from slaughter by an Indian chief.[229] On the 26th of May, the day before the return of the explorers to Jamestown, the unfinished fort (not completed until the 15th of June) was attacked by the savages, who were repulsed by the colonists under the command of Wingfield. The colonists had one boy killed and eleven men wounded, one of whom died. Communion was administered by the chaplain, the Rev. Robert Hunt, on Sunday, the 21st of June, and on the next day Newport sailed for England in the “Susan Constant,” laden with specimens of the forest and with mineral productions. A bark or pinnace, with provisions sufficient to sustain the colonists for three months, was left with them. The prospect of the men thus cast upon their own resources, was not promising. Disturbed by the fatuous hope of discovering gold, divided by faction, unused to the labor and hardships to which they were now subjected, and in daily peril from the hostility of the savages, the difficulties of success were enhanced by the insalubrity of their ill-chosen settlement. By September fifty of them, including the intrepid Gosnold, had died, and the store of damaged provisions upon which they mainly depended was nearly exhausted. Violent dissension ensued, which resulted, on the 10th of the month, in the displacement of Wingfield by Ratcliffe in the office of president, and the deposing, imprisonment, and finally the execution of Kendall; by which the Council, never more than seven in number (including Newport), and in which no vacancies had been filled, was reduced to three only,—Ratcliffe, Smith, and Martin. Reprehensible as the conduct of the colonists at this period may have been, they yet held religious observances in regard. Their piety and reverence are instanced both by Smith and Wingfield. In Bagnall’s narrative in the Historie of the first, it is noted that “order was daily to haue[130] Prayer, with a Psalme;”[230] and Wingfield states that when their store of liquors was reduced to two gallons each of “sack” and “aqua-vitæ,” the first was “reserued for the communion table.”[231]

JAMESTOWN.

This cut follows a sketch made about 1857 by a travelling Englishwoman, Miss Catherine C. Hopley, and shows the condition of the ruined church at that time.

Differences among the colonists being somewhat allayed, labor was resumed, habitations were provided, a church was built, and, through the courage and energy of Smith, supplies of corn were obtained from the Indians. Leaving the settlement on the 10th of December, Smith again ascended the Chickahominy to get provisions from the savages, but incurring their hostility, two of his companions, Emry and Robinson, were killed, and Smith himself was taken captive. Being released after a few weeks, on the promise of a ransom of “two great guns and a grindstone,” he returned to Jamestown. On his arrival there he found the number of the colonists reduced to forty, and that Captain Gabriel Archer had been admitted to the Council during his absence. Archer caused him to be arrested and indicted, under the Levitical law, for allowing the death of his two men; but in the evening of the same day, Jan. 8, 1607-8, Newport returned from England with additional settlers (a portion of the first supply), and at once released both Smith and Wingfield from custody. Within five or six days the fort and many of the houses at Jamestown were destroyed by an accidental fire. Newport, accompanied by Matthew Scrivener (newly arrived and admitted to the Council), with Smith as interpreter and thirty or forty others, now[131] visited Powhatan at his abode of Werowocomico. This was at Timberneck Bay, on the north side of York River. On the east bank of the bay still stands a quaint stone chimney,[232] subsequently built for Powhatan by German workmen among the colonists. Hostages were exchanged; Namontack, an Indian who was taken to England by Newport, being received from Powhatan for Thomas Savage, a youth aged thirteen, who for many years afterwards rendered important service to the colonists as interpreter. With supplies of food obtained from Powhatan and Opecancanough, the chief of the Pamunkey tribe, the party returned to Jamestown.

The ship being loaded with iron ore, sassafras, cedar posts, and walnut boards, Newport, with Archer[233] and Wingfield as passengers, sailed on the 10th of April from Jamestown, and on the 20th of May, 1608, arrived in England. The diet of the colonists was soon reduced to meal and water, and through hunger and exposure death diminished them one half. While they were engaged in re-building Jamestown and in planting, to their great joy Captain Nelson, who had left England with Newport, but from whom he had been separated by storm and detained in the West Indies, arrived in the ship “Phœnix,” with provisions and seventy settlers, being the remainder of the first supply of one hundred and twenty. He departed for England on the 2d of June with a cargo of cedar-wood, carrying Martin of the Council. Smith, in an open boat, with fourteen others,—seven gentlemen (including Dr. Walter Russell of the last arrival), and seven soldiers,—accompanied the “Phœnix” down the river, and parted from her at Cape Henry, with the bold purpose of exploring Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and establishing intercourse with the natives along their borders. To the islands lying off Cape Charles, Smith gave his own name. After a satisfactory cruise, having crossed the bay, visited its eastern shore, and explored the Potomac River some thirty miles, the party returned late in July to Jamestown for provisions. Smith again embarked on the 24th of July to complete his explorations, with a crew of twelve, similarly constituted as before, but with Anthony Bagnall as surgeon. At the head of Chesapeake Bay they were hospitably entertained by a tribe of Indians, supposed by Stith[234] to have been of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, and also by the Susquehannas, at a village on the Tockwogh (now Sassafras) River. The highest mountain to the northward observed by them was named Peregrine’s Mount, and Willoughby River was so called after the native town of Smith. The Indian tribes on the Patuxent, and the Moraughtacunds and the Wighcomoes on the Rappahannock, were visited. Richard Featherstone, a “gentleman” of the party, dying, was buried on the banks of the last-named river, which was explored[132] to the falls, near where Fredericksburg now is. Here a skirmish took place with the Rappahannock tribe. The Pianketank, Elizabeth, and Nansemond rivers were in turn examined for a few miles. From the results of these discoveries Smith composed his Map of Virginia, a work so singularly exact that it has formed the basis of all like delineations since, and was adduced as authority as late as 1873 towards the settlement of the boundary dispute between the States of Virginia and Maryland. The drawing was sent to England by Newport before the close of the year, and in 1612 was published in the Oxford Tract. Returning to Jamestown, Sept. 7, 1608, Smith was elected President of the Council over Ratcliffe (who suffered from a wounded hand and was enfeebled by sickness), and now, for the first time, he had the “letters patent” of office placed in his hands.[235] Ever firm, courageous, and persevering, he at once instituted vigorous and salutary measures adapted to the wants and conducive to the discipline of the colonists. The church was repaired, the storehouse covered, and magazines erected. Soon after, Newport arrived for the third time from England, with the second supply of settlers, seventy in number. Among them were Captains Peter Wynne and Richard Waldo, Francis West (the brother of Lord Delaware), Raleigh Crashaw, Daniel Tucker, some German and Polish artisans for the manufacture of glass and other articles, Mrs. Thomas Forest, and her maid, Ann Burras. The last named of these—the first Englishwomen in the colony—became, before the close of the year, the wife of John Laydon. This was the first marriage celebrated in Virginia. Newport had left England under the silly pledge not to return without a lump of gold, or without tidings of the discovery of a passage to the North Sea, or without the rescue of one of the settlers of the lost company of Sir Walter Raleigh. The Company added the equally impossible condition that he should bring a freight in his vessel of equal value to the cost of the expedition, which was £2,000. In case of failure in these respects, the colonists were to be abandoned to their own resources. Much valuable time was consumed by Newport in an idle coronation of Powhatan (for whose household he had brought costly presents), and in futile efforts for the accomplishment of the visionary expectations of the Company. At last there was provided by those of the colonists who remained at their labors a part of a cargo of pitch, tar, glass, and iron ore, and Newport set sail, leaving at Jamestown about two hundred settlers. The iron ore which he carried was smelted in England, and seventeen tons of metal sold to the East India Company at £4 per ton. In the preservation of the colony until the next arrival, the genius and energy of Smith were strongly but successfully taxed,—for Captain Wynne dying, and Scrivener and Anthony Gosnold, with eight others, having been drowned, he alone of the Council remained. His measures were sagacious. Corn was planted, and blockhouses were built and garrisoned at Jamestown for defence, and an outpost was established at Hog Island, to give signal of the approach of shipping.

[133]

At the last place the hogs, which increased rapidly, were kept. But being subject to the treachery of the natives, the colonists were in continual danger of attack, and were too slothful to make due provision for their wants, so that the tenure of the settlement became like a brittle thread. The store of provisions having been spoiled by damp or eaten by vermin, their subsistence now depended precariously on fish, game, and roots. The prospects of the colony were so discouraging at the beginning of the year 1609, that, in the hope of improving them, the Company applied for a new charter with enlarged privileges. This was granted to them, on the 23d of May, under the corporate name of “The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the first Colony in Virginia.” The new Association, which embraced representatives of every rank, trade, and profession, included twenty-one peers, and its list of names presents an imposing array of wealth and influence. By this charter Virginia was greatly enlarged, and made to comprise the coast-line and all islands within one hundred miles of it,—two hundred miles north and two hundred south of Point Comfort,—with all the territory within parallel lines thus distant and extending to the Pacific boundary; the Company was empowered to choose the Supreme Council in England, and, under the instructions and regulations of the last, the Governor was invested with absolute civil and military authority.

With the disastrous experience of the previous unstable system, a sterner discipline seems, under attending circumstances, to have been demanded to insure success. Thomas West (Lord Delaware), the descendant of a long line of noble ancestry, received the appointment of Governor and Captain-General of Virginia. The first expedition under the second charter, which was on a grander scale than any preceding it, and which consisted of nine vessels, sailed from Plymouth on the 1st of June, 1609.

Newport, the commander of the fleet, Sir Thomas Gates, Lieutenant-General, and Sir George Somers, Admiral of Virginia, were severally authorized, whichever of them might first arrive at Jamestown, to supersede the existing administration there until the arrival of Lord Delaware, who was to embark some months later; but not being able to settle the point of precedency among themselves, they embarked together in the same vessel, which carried also the wife and daughters of Gates. Among the five hundred colonists, were the returning Captains Ratcliffe, Archer, and Martin, divers other captains and gentlemen, and, by the suggestion of Hakluyt, a number of old soldiers[236] who had been trained in the Netherlands. On the 23d of July the fleet was caught in a hurricane; a[134] small vessel was lost, others damaged, and the “Sea Venture,” which carried Gates, Somers, and Newport, with about one hundred and fifty settlers, was cast ashore on the Bermudas. Captain Samuel Argall (a relative of Sir Thomas Smith) arrived at Jamestown in July, with a shipload of wine and provisions, to trade on private account, contrary to the regulations of the Company. As the settlers were suffering for food, they seized his supplies. Many of them at this time had gone to live among the Indians, and eighty had formed a settlement twenty miles distant from the fort. Early in August the “Blessing,” Captain Archer, and three other vessels of the delayed fleet sailed up James River, and soon after the “Diamond,” Captain Ratcliffe, appeared, without her mainmast, and she was followed in a few days by the “Swallow,” in like condition.

The Council being all dead save Smith, he, obtaining the sympathy of the sailors, refused to surrender the government of the colony; and the newly arrived settlers elected Francis West, the brother of Lord Delaware, as temporary president. The term of Smith expiring soon after, George Percy—one of the original settlers, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and a brave and honorable man—was elected president, and West, Ratcliffe, and Martin were made councillors.

Smith, about Michaelmas (September 29), departed for England or, as all contemporary accounts other than his own state, was sent thither “to answer some misdemeanors.”[237] These were doubtless of a venial character; but the important services of Smith in the sustenance of the colony appear not to have been as highly esteemed by the Company as by Smith himself. He complains that his several petitions for reward were disregarded, and he never returned to Virginia. Modern investigation has discredited many of the so-long-accepted narratives in which he records his own achievements and judges so harshly the motives[135] and conduct of all others of his companions; and the glamour of romance with which he invested his own exploits has been somewhat dissipated. But whatever may have been the fervor of his imagination as a historian, it was more than equalled by his fertility of resource in vital emergencies, and there is ample evidence that his services in the preservation of the infant colony were momentous. After his return to England but little is recorded of him until the year 1614, during which he made a successful voyage to New England, under the auspices of the Plymouth Company, which gained for him the title of Admiral of New England.[238] Whatever may have been the defects of Smith, the greatness of his deeds has impressed him enduringly on the pages of history as one of the most prominent figures of his period. At the time of his departure for England he left at Jamestown three ships, seven boats, a good stock of provisions, nearly five hundred settlers, twenty pieces of cannon, three hundred guns, with fishing-nets, working-tools, horses, cattle, swine, etc.

Jamestown was strongly fortified with palisades, and contained between fifty and sixty houses. The favorable prospects of the colony were soon threatened by the renewal of Indian hostilities. Provisions becoming scarce, West and Ratcliffe embarked in small vessels to procure corn. The latter, deceived by the treachery of Powhatan, was slain with thirty of his companions, two only escaping,—one of whom, Henry Spelman, a young gentleman well descended, was rescued by Pocahontas, and lived for many years among the Patowomekes. He acquired their language, and was afterwards highly serviceable to his countrymen as an interpreter. He was slain by the savages in 1622. No effort by tillage being made to replenish their provisions, the stock was soon consumed, and the horrors of famine were added to other calamities. The intense sufferings of the colonists were long remembered, and this period is referred to as “the starving time.” In six months their number was reduced to sixty, and such was the extremity of these that they must soon have perished but for speedy succor. The passengers of the wrecked “Sea Venture,” though mourned for as lost, had effected a safe landing at the Bermudas, where, favored by the tropical productions of the islands, they, under the direction of Gates and Somers, constructed for their deliverance two vessels from the materials of the wreck and cedar-wood, the largest of the vessels being of eighty tons burden. The Sabbath was duly observed by them under the faithful ministry of Mr. Bucke. Among the passengers was John Rolfe and wife,[239] to whom a male child was born on the island, who was christened Bermuda; a girl also born there was named Bermudas. Six of the company, including the wife of Sir Thomas Gates, died on the island. The company of one hundred and forty men and women embarked on the completed[136] vessels—which were appropriately named the “Patience” and the “Deliverance”—on the 10th of May, 1610, and on the 23d they landed at Jamestown. Here the church bell was immediately rung, and such of the famished colonists as were physically able repaired to the sanctuary, where “a zealous and sorrowful prayer” was offered by Mr. Bucke. The new commission being read, Percy, the acting president, surrendered the former charter and his credentials of office. The fort was in a dismantled condition, and most of the habitations had been consumed for fire-wood. So forlorn was the condition of the settlement that Gates reluctantly resolved to abandon it and to return to England by way of Newfoundland, where he expected to receive succor from trading-vessels. Some of the colonists were with difficulty restrained from setting fire to the town, Gates, with a guard to prevent it, remaining on shore until all others had embarked. A farewell volley was fired; but the leave-taking of a spot associated with so much suffering was tearless.

In the mean time, the repeated ill tidings brought by returning ships to England, and the supposed loss of the “Sea Venture” had so dismayed the members of the Company in London that many of them withdrew their subscriptions. Lord Delaware—who is characterized in the “Declaration” of the Council, in 1610, as “one of approved courage, temper, and experience”—determined to go in person as Governor and Captain-General of Virginia (the first of such title and authority), and, disregarding the comforts of home and noble station, “did bare a grate part upon his owne charge.” By his example, constancy, and resolution, “that which was almost lifeless” was revived in the Company. On Feb. 21, 1609-10, William Crashaw, a preacher at the Temple (the father of the poet eulogized by Cowley), in view of the departure of Lord Delaware, delivered before the Council and Adventurers in London a stirring sermon, which was the first preached in England to any embarking for Virginia in a missionary cause.[240] Distinct and unequivocal testimony is given by the Company, in the “Declaration” already cited, as to the reputation of settlers for the colony, none being desired but those of blameless character. Five weeks later Lord Delaware sailed with three vessels and one hundred and fifty settlers, and arrived in Virginia providentially to intercept, off Mulberry Island, Gates and his disheartened companions as they were descending the river, who returned at once to Jamestown. The fleet, following, arrived there on Sunday, the 10th of June. The first act of Lord Delaware upon landing was to fall devoutly upon his knees and offer up a prayer, after which he repaired with the company to the church, to listen to a sermon by Mr. Bucke. Two days later a council was organized, consisting of Sir Thomas Gates, lieutenant-general, Sir Thomas Somers, admiral, Sir Ferdinando Wenman, master of ordnance (who soon died), Captain Newport, vice-admiral, Captain George Percy[137] and William Strachey, secretary and recorder. Captain John Martin was made master of the steel and iron works. The restoration of the settlement was prosecuted with vigor, and the church, a building sixty feet in length by twenty-four in breadth, was repaired, and services were held regularly twice on Sunday, and again on Thursday. Two forts were also built on Southampton River, and called after the King’s sons, Henry and Charles, respectively.

The administration of Delaware, though ludicrously ostentatious for so insignificant a dominion, was yet highly wholesome, and under his judicious discipline the settlement was restored to order and contentment. On the 19th of June Sir George Somers, in his cedar pinnace, accompanied by Argall in another vessel, re-embarked to seek for provisions. The vessels separating, Argall on the 27th of August “came to anchor in nine fathoms, in a very great bay,” called by him Delaware,[241] and on the ninth of the month reached Cape Charles. Somers, soon after parting from Argall, reached the Bermudas, where, dying from the effects of the hardships he had undergone, his body was embalmed and conveyed to England by his nephew, Captain Matthew Somers. About Christmas, Captain Argall sailed in the “Discovery” up the Potomac for supplies of corn, and rescued the captive English boy Henry Spelman from Jopassus, the brother of Powhatan. In the month of February following, Argall, aided by a small land force under Captain Edward Brewster, attacked the chief of the Warraskoyacks for a breach of contract and burned two of his towns. Sir Thomas Gates, being despatched to England to report to the Company the condition of the colony, succeeded by strenuous appeals in inducing it to send a fresh supply of settlers and provisions. During his absence, the health of Lord Delaware failing, on the 28th of March, 1611, accompanied by Dr. Bohune and Captain Argall, he sailed for England by way of the Isle of Mevis, leaving Percy in authority. On the 17th of March Sir Thomas Dale, with the appointment of “high marshall,” had sailed with three vessels for the colony, with settlers (among whom was the Rev. Alexander Whitaker) and cattle. He reached Point Comfort May the 12th, and spent several days in provisioning and disciplining that station and the forts Henry and Charles on the Southampton River, and in planting corn.

Sir Thomas landed at Jamestown on Sunday the 19th, where, first repairing to the church, he listened to a sermon from the Rev. Mr. Poole, after which, his commission being read by Secretary Strachey, Percy surrendered the government to him. Under an extraordinary code of “Lawes, Divine, Morall, and Martiall,” compiled by William Strachey for Sir Thomas Smith, and based upon those observed in the wars in the Low Countries, Dale inaugurated vigorous measures for the government and advancement of the colony. The church was repaired, and store, powder, and block houses[138] severally were built, while pales and posts were prepared for a new settlement. The site selected for the last was a peninsula in Varina Neck on James River, known as Farrar’s Island, which is formed by an extraordinary curve resembling that of a horseshoe, where the river, after a sweep of seven miles, returns to a point within a hundred and twenty yards from that of its deviation. The name of the bend, Dutch Gap,[242] by the events of the late civil war attained a historic notoriety. The building of the new town was delayed by insubordination among the colonists, which however, under the rigors of the martial code in force, was promptly quelled, eight of the ringleaders being executed. The pernicious system of a community of property was now to some extent remedied by Dale, in the allotment to each settler of three acres of land to be worked for his individual benefit. “Comon gardens for hemp and flaxe, and such other seedes,” were also laid out.[243]

In June, 1611, Sir Thomas Gates, accompanied by his wife (who died on the passage) and daughters and the Rev. Mr. Glover (who lived but a short time after his arrival in the colony), followed Dale with six ships, three hundred settlers, and one hundred cows, besides other cattle and an abundant supply of provisions. He arrived at Jamestown early in August, and thus increased the number of the colonists to seven hundred persons. Gates established himself at Hampton, deputed the command of Jamestown to Percy, and sent Dale, early in September, with three hundred and fifty men, to found the projected town of Henrico, at which, among the “three streets” of buildings erected, was a handsome church. The foundation of another, to be of brick, was laid.[244] In December, the Appomattox Indians having committed some depredations, Dale captured their town on the south side of the James, near the mouth of Appomattox River (and about five miles distant from Henrico), and upon its site established a third town, which he called Bermuda. Here the pious apostle Alexander Whitaker fixed his residence, serving as the minister both of Bermuda and Henrico.[245] Several plantations were laid out near Bermuda,—Upper and Lower Rochdale, West Shirley, and Digges’ Hundred. In conformity with the code of martial law, each hundred was subjected to the control of a captain. In December, also, Newport arrived at London from Jamestown, in the ship “Star,” with a cargo of “forty fine and large pines for masts,” and with the daughters of Sir Thomas Gates as passengers. Newport’s name does not[139] again appear in connection with Virginia.[246] The reinforcements for the colony for some months were insignificant, the only ships sent over being the “John and Francis” and the “Sarah,” with few settlers and less provisions, and the “Treasurer” with fifty persons, under the bold and unscrupulous Captain Samuel Argall, who, sailing from England in July, 1612, arrived at Point Comfort, September 17.[247] This year was a marked one in the inauguration by John Rolfe of the systematic culture of tobacco,—a staple destined to exert a controlling influence in the future welfare and progress of the colony, and soon, by the paramount profit yielded by its culture, to subordinate all other interests, agricultural as well as manufacturing. This influence permeated the entire social fabric of the colony, directed its laws, was an element in all its political and religious disturbances, and became the direct instigation of its curse of African slavery. It may be added, however, as an indisputable fact, that the culture of tobacco constituted the basis of the present unrivalled prosperity of the United States, and that this staple is still one of the most prolific factors in the revenue of the General Government.

Early in the spring of 1613, the colonists needing food, Argall determined on a bold stroke, and with the bribe of a copper kettle induced Jopassus, the king of Potomac, in whose domain Pocahontas was sojourning, to betray her into his hands. Having sent a messenger to Powhatan, demanding as a ransom the restoration of all English captives held by him, and of all arms and tools stolen from the settlement, Argall returned with his captive to Jamestown. There was a protracted struggle in the breast of the savage chieftain between avarice and parental affection.

Some months later Dale, with a command of one hundred and fifty men, sailed up York River to Werowocomico, the seat of Powhatan, carrying Pocahontas with him. Meeting with defiance, he landed and destroyed the settlement, and then returned to Jamestown. The ship “Elizabeth” arriving in March with thirteen settlers, Sir Thomas Gates departed in her for England finally, leaving the government to Dale. An event most auspicious for the future welfare of the colony soon occurred. A mutual attachment springing up between John Rolfe and Pocahontas, with the consent of Sir Thomas Dale they were united in marriage by the Rev. Alexander Whitaker, about the 5th of April, 1614. This was a politic example, which Dale himself unsuccessfully attempted to follow, although he had then a wife in England. Sending Ralph Hamor (who had been secretary of the Council under Lord Delaware) to Powhatan, with a request for the younger sister of Pocahontas, a girl scarce twelve years of age, his overtures were disdainfully rejected. The results of the union of Rolfe and Pocahontas were the good-will of Powhatan during the remainder of his life, and a treaty of peace with the formidable Chickahominy tribe, by which[140] the natives agreed ever to be called Englishmen, and to be true subjects to the British crown. With the immunity of peace, and under the wholesome discipline of Dale, industry was stimulated, property accumulated, and famine was no longer feared. Prosperity being now seemingly assured to the colony, the martial spirit of Dale sought other modes of manifesting itself. As early as 1605 the French had sent settlers to Acadia, and planted a colony at Port Royal, which had now attained some prominence.

SEAL OF THE VIRGINIA COMPANY.

This is a fac-simile of the engraving used in the publications of the Company. Cf. Calendar of Virginia State Papers, i. p. xxxix; Neill’s Virginia Company, p. 156. An example of this seal with the same dimensions and devices, but with the differing legend on the reverse of “Colonia Virginæ—Consilio Prima,” is in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society. It is of red wax between the leaves of a foolscap sheet of paper, and is affixed to a patent for land issued by Sir John Harvey, governor, dated March 4, 1638.

This being deemed by Dale an invasion of the territory of Virginia, which by charter extended to the forty-fifth degree of latitude, he sent Argall to dislodge the settlers, which was summarily accomplished.[248] Stimulated to new conquests, Argall on his return visited the Dutch settlement near the site of Albany, on the Hudson, and compelled its governor to capitulate.[249] It was however soon after reclaimed by the Dutch. Argall now sailed for England, where he and Gates both arrived in June, 1614. In March, 1612, a third charter had been granted to the Virginia Company, extending the boundaries of the colony so as to include all islands lying within three hundred leagues of the continent,—one object of which was to embrace the Bermuda or Summer Islands, of the fertility of which extravagant accounts had been given; but these last were soon after sold by the Company to one hundred and twenty of its members, who became a distinct corporation.[250][141] The privilege of holding lotteries for the benefit of the Company was also secured. Gates reporting that the colony in Virginia would perish unless better provided, the Company held for its relief a grand lottery, by which the sum of £29,000 was secured. The year 1615 is remarkable in the history of Virginia for the first establishment of a fixed property in the soil, in the granting by the Company of fifty acres to every freeman in absolute right.

Good order being established, and the colony prosperous, in April, 1616, Sir Thomas Dale, leaving the government to Captain George Yeardley as his deputy, accompanied by Rolfe, Pocahontas, and several Indians of both sexes, sailed for England, where he arrived on the 12th of June. The settlements in Virginia at this time were Henrico, the seat of the college for the education of the natives (of whom children of both sexes were already being taught), and of which the Rev. William Wickham was the minister,—its limits being Bermuda, Nether Hundred, or Presquile, the residence of the Deputy-Governor Yeardley and of the Rev. Alexander Whitaker; West and Shirley Hundred, Captain Isaac Madison, commander; Jamestown, Captain Francis West, Mr. Mease, minister; Kiquotan; and Dale’s Gift, on the sea-coast near Cape Charles, Lieutenant Cradock, commander. The total population of the colony was three hundred and fifty-one.

Pocahontas was the object of much kindly attention in London, where she was presented at court by Lady Delaware, attended by Lord Delaware, her husband, and other persons of quality. In March, 1617, John Rolfe prepared to return to Virginia with Pocahontas and their infant child Thomas,[251] but on the eve of embarkation Pocahontas was stricken with the small-pox, of which she died on the 21st instant, aged twenty-two years, and was buried at Gravesend, in the county of Kent.[252] Tobacco proving the most salable commodity of the colony, in 1616 Yeardley directed general attention to its culture, the profit of which speedily became so alluring that all other occupations were forsaken for it.

Through the influence of the court faction of the Company, in 1617, Captain Samuel Argall was elected Deputy-Governor of Virginia. He arrived in the colony on the 15th of May, with one hundred settlers, accompanied by Ralph Hamor as Vice-Admiral, and John Rolfe as “Secretary and Recorder-General.” They found “the market-place, streets, and all other[142] spare places” in Jamestown planted with tobacco.[253] In a few days thereafter Captain Martin also arrived in a pinnace, after a passage of five weeks. The whole number of the colonists was now about four hundred. To reinforce the languishing colony, the Company, in April, 1618, sent thither Lord Delaware, the Governor-General, in the ship “Neptune,” with two hundred men, and supplies. After his departure the ship “George” arrived from Virginia with such complaints of the malfeasance of Argall, who under martial law had loaded the colonists with oppressive exactions and robbed them of their property, that letters were despatched to Lord Delaware to seize upon all goods and property in Argall’s possession. Lord Delaware dying on the passage, these letters fell into the hands of Argall, who, to make the most of his remaining time, grew yet more tyrannical. For seizing one of the servants of the estate of Lord Delaware, on the complaint of Edward Brewster, the son of its manager, Argall was arrested, and on the 15th of October, 1618, tried and sentenced to death; but the penalty was commuted to perpetual banishment. He secretly stole away from the colony April the 9th, 1619, leaving Captain Nathaniel Powell in authority. Upon the intelligence of the death of Lord Delaware, Captain George Yeardley, who was knighted on the occasion, was appointed to succeed him. Sir Edwin Sandys also displaced Sir Thomas Smith as treasurer of the Company.

LORD DELAWARE.

His portrait is preserved at Bourne, the seat of his descendant the present Earl de la Warr, in Cambridgeshire, England. There is a copy of it in the Library of the State of Virginia at Richmond, which was made by William L. Sheppard, an artist of that city in July, 1877. He is represented as a stout, ruddy-visaged Saxon, with a most benevolent expression of countenance. King James granted a pension to the widow of Lord Delaware, who was alive in 1644, and is called Dame Cecily Dowager de la Warre in the sixth Report of the Historical Commission to Parliament, in a paper in which the continuance of her pension is asked for.

Yeardley arrived in the colony April the 19th with a new authority under the charter, by which the authority of the governor was limited by a council and an annual general assembly, to be composed of the Governor and Council, and two burgesses from each plantation, to be freely elected by the inhabitants[143] thereof. John Rolfe, who was succeeded in the office of Secretary of the Colony by John Pory, a graduate of Cambridge, a great traveller and a writer, was, with Captain Francis West, Captain Nathaniel Powell, William Wickham, and Samuel Macock, added to the Council. On Friday, July 30, 1619, in accordance with the summons of Governor Yeardley in June, the first representative legislative assembly ever held in America was convened in the chancel of the church at James City or Jamestown, and was composed of twenty-two burgesses from the eleven several towns, plantations, and hundreds, styled boroughs. The proceedings were opened with prayer by the Rev. Mr. Bucke, and each burgess took the oath of supremacy. John Pory was elected speaker, and sat in front of Governor Yeardley, and next was John Twine, the clerk, and at the bar stood Thomas Pierse, sergeant-at-arms. The delegates from Captain John Martin’s plantation were excluded, because by his patent, granted according to the unequal privilege of the manors of England, he was released from obeying any order of the colony except in time of war and the Company was prayed that the clause in the charter guaranteeing equal immunities and liberties might not be violated, so as to “divert out of the true course the free and public current of justice.” The education and religious instruction of the children of the natives was enjoined upon each settlement. Among the enactments, tobacco was authorized as a currency, and the treasurer of the colony (Abraham Percy) was directed to receive it at the valuation of three shillings per pound for the best, and eighteen-pence for the second quality. The government of ministers was prescribed according to the Church of England, and a tax of tobacco laid for their support. It was also enacted that “all persons whatsoever upon the Sabbath days shall frequent divine service and sermons, both forenoon and afternoon.” To compensate the officers of the Assembly, a tax of a pound of tobacco was laid upon every male above sixteen years of age.

The introduction of negro slavery into the colony is thus noted by John Rolfe: “About the last of August [1619] came in a Dutch man of warre, that sold us twenty Negars.”[254] During this year there were sent to the colony more than twelve hundred settlers, and one hundred “disorderly persons” or convicts, by order of the King, to be employed as servants. Boys and girls picked up in the streets of London were also sent, and were bound as apprentices[255] to the planters until the age of majority. In June twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, the crop of the preceding year, was shipped to England. In November the London Company adopted a coat-of-arms, and ordered a seal to be engraved.[256] The Company appears ever to have held[144] in due regard the importance of education as intimately connected with the preservation and dissemination of Christianity in the colony. Under an order from the King, nearly £1,500 were collected by the bishops of the realm to build the college at Henrico, and fifteen thousand acres of land were appropriated for its support.[257] To cultivate it during the years 1619 and 1620 one hundred laborers were sent over under the charge of Mr. George Thorpe (a kinsman of Sir Thomas Dale) and Captain Thomas Newce as agents. At a meeting of the Company held June 28, 1620, the Earl of Southampton was elected to succeed Sir Edwin Sandys as treasurer.

The population of the colony in July was estimated at four thousand, and during the year forty thousand pounds of tobacco were shipped to England. The freedom of trade which the Company had enjoyed for a brief interval with the Low Countries, where they sold their tobacco, was in October, 1621, prohibited in Council, and thenceforward England claimed a monopoly of the trade of her plantations. The planters at length were absolved from service to the Company, and enjoyed the blessings of property in the soil and of domestic felicity. In the autumn of 1621 the practice was begun by the Company of shipping to the colony young women of respectability as wives for the colonists, who were chargeable with the cost of transportation. This charge was at first one hundred and twenty, afterwards one hundred and fifty, pounds of tobacco. A windmill, the first in America, was about this time erected by Sir George Yeardley, and iron-works (the primal inauguration of this essential manufacture in this country) were established at Falling Creek on James River, under the management of Mr. John Berkeley.[258]

Upon the request of Sir George Yeardley to be relieved of the cares of office, Sir Francis Wyatt was appointed to succeed him upon the expiration of his term of government on the 18th of November, 1621. Sir Francis, with a fleet of nine sail, arrived in October, accompanied by his brother, the Rev. Haut Wyatt, Dr John Pott as physician, William Claiborne (destined to later prominence in the colony) as surveyor of the Company’s[145] lands, and George Sandys[259] as treasurer, who during his stay translated the Metamorphoses of Ovid and the First Book of Virgil’s Æneid. This first Anglo-American poetical production was published in 1626. Sir Francis Wyatt brought with him a new constitution for the colony, granted July 24, by which all former immunities and franchises were confirmed, trial by jury was secured, and the Assembly was to meet annually upon the call of the Governor, who was vested with the right of veto. No act of this body was to be valid unless ratified by the Company; but, on the other hand, no order of the Company was to be obligatory without the concurrence of the Assembly. This famous ordinance furnished the model of every subsequent provincial form of government in the Anglo-American colonies.[260] In November Daniel Gookin arrived from Ireland with fifty settlers under his control and thirty-six passengers, and planted himself in Elizabeth City County, at Mary’s Mount, just above Newport News.[261] There arrived during the year twenty-one vessels, bringing over thirteen hundred men, women, and children. The aggregate number of settlers arriving during the years 1619, 1620, and 1621 was thirty-five hundred and seventy.

Deluded by long peace, on the 22d of March, 1622, the unsuspecting colonists fell easy victims to a frightful Indian massacre of men, women, and children, to the number of three hundred and forty-seven. Among the slain were Mr. George Thorpe, the agent for the college at Henrico, and Mr. John Berkeley, master of the iron-works at Falling Creek.[262] Their death and the destruction of their charges terminated the prosecution of these material measures for the good of the colony. The future policy with the savages was aggressive until the peace of 1632. At an Assembly held in March, 1623, monthly courts to be appointed by the Governor were authorized. The Virginia Company, in their opposition to the King in the nomination of their officers, had already incurred his ill-will, which was increased by the freedom with which they discussed public measures[146] so as to invoke his denunciation of them as “but a seminary to a seditious parliament.” Violent factions divided them, and the massacre came at a juncture to fan discontent. Commissioners were sent to Virginia by the King to gather materials for the ruin of the Company. The result was the annulling of its charter by the King’s Bench on the 16th of June, 1624. Sir Francis Wyatt was continued as governor by commission from King James, dated Aug. 26, 1624, and again in May, 1625, by the young monarch, Charles I., who appointed as councillors for the colony, during his pleasure, Francis West, Sir George Yeardley, George Sandys, Roger Smith, Ralph Hamor, John Martin, John Harvey, Samuel Matthews, Abraham Percy, Isaac Madison, and William Claiborne. He omitted all mention of an assembly, and there is no preserved record of the meeting of this body again until 1629. The administration of Wyatt was wise and pacific. The death of his father, Sir George Wyatt, calling him to Ireland, he was succeeded, in May, 1626, by Sir George Yeardley, who dying Nov. 14, 1627, the Council elected as his successor, on the following day, Francis West, a younger brother of Lord Delaware. West, departing for England on the 5th of March, 1628, was succeeded by Dr. John Pott. The export of tobacco in 1628 was five hundred thousand pounds. Charles, desiring a monopoly of the trade, directed an assembly to be called to grant it. That body, replying the 26th of March, demanded a higher price and more favorable terms than his Majesty was disposed to yield. The colony rapidly increased in strength and prosperity, the population in 1629 being five thousand. Pott was superseded as governor in March, 1630, by Sir John Harvey, who had been one of the commissioners sent in 1623 to procure evidence to be used against the Virginia Company. Between him and the colonists there was but little good-will, and his arbitrary rule soon rendered him odious.

In July, by a strange mutation of fortune, Pott, the late governor, was tried for cattle-stealing, and convicted. This was the first trial by jury in the colony. It was in 1630 that George Calvert, with his followers, arrived in the colonies; but the details of his experience here and of the disputes about jurisdiction arising out of the grant of the present territory of Maryland, made to him and confirmed to his son in 1632, are given in another chapter.[263] It was under successive grants from the governors in 1627, 1628, and 1629, and from Charles I. in 1631, that William Claiborne had established his trading-posts in the disputed territory, from which he was driven with bloodshed, and by the final decree of the King in 1639 despoiled of £6,000 of property. Harvey—actuated, it has been charged, by motives of private interest—sided with Maryland in the disputes, and rendered[147] himself so obnoxious that an assembly was called for the 7th of May, 1635, to hear complaints against him. Before it met, however, he consented to go to England to answer the charges, and was “thrust out of his government” by the Council on the 28th of April, and Captain John West, a brother of Lord Delaware, was authorized to act as his successor until the King’s pleasure might be known. In 1634 the colony was divided into eight shires,[264] subject, as in England, to the government of a lieutenant.[265] The election of sheriffs, sergeants, and bailiffs was similarly provided for. The King, intolerant of opposition, reinstated the hated Harvey as governor, by commission dated April 2, 1636.[266] During his rule of three years thereafter, no assembly was held. Charles gradually relaxed his policy, and in November, 1639, displaced Harvey with Sir Francis Wyatt, who in turn was succeeded by Sir William Berkeley as governor in February, 1642. During the year three Congregational ministers came from Boston to Virginia to disseminate their doctrines.

Their stay, however, was but short; for by an enactment of the Assembly all ministers other than those of the Church of England were compelled to leave the colony. It will be shown that their success was limited. On the 18th of April, 1644, a second Indian massacre occurred. The number of victims has been differently stated as three and five hundred. During a visit by Berkeley to England, from June, 1644, to June, 1645, his place was filled by Richard Kemp. In 1642 the ship of Richard Ingle, from London, had been seized by Governor Brent, of Maryland, acting under a commission from Charles I., and an oath against Parliament tendered the crew. Ingle escaped, and, securing a commission from Parliament to cruise in the waters of the Chesapeake against Malignants, as the friends of the King were called, reappeared in February, 1645, in the ship “Reformation,” near St. Inigo Creek, where there was a popular uprising, and with the aid of the insurgents and forces from Virginia expelled Leonard Calvert and installed Colonel Edward Hill as governor. Calvert regained authority in August, 1646. The colony of Virginia continued to prosper. In 1648 the population consisted of fifteen thousand whites and three hundred negro slaves. Domestic animals were abundant; corn, wheat, rice, hemp, flax, and many vegetables were cultivated; there were fifteen varieties of fruit, and excellent wine was made. The average export of tobacco for several years had been 1,500,000 pounds. Besides the “old field schools,” there was a free school endowed by Benjamin Symmes with two hundred acres of land, a good house, forty milch cows, and other appurtenances.

[148]

The Dissenters, who had increased in number to one hundred and eighteen, now encountered the rigors of colonial authority in imprisonment and banishment, and all opposition to the Established Church was decisively quelled.[267]

With the beheading of Charles I. on the 30th of January, 1649, the Commonwealth of England was inaugurated; but Virginia still continued its allegiance to his son, the exiled prince, and offered an asylum to his fugitive adherents. Three hundred and thirty of these, including Colonel Henry Norwood and Majors Francis Morrison and Richard Fox, arrived near the close of 1649 in the “Virginia Merchant.”

Norwood was sent the following year by Berkeley to Holland to invite the fugitive King to Virginia as its ruler, and returned from Breda with a new commission for Berkeley as governor, dated June 3, and another for himself as treasurer of the colony, in approbation of the loyalty manifested. Charles II. was crowned by the Scotch at Scone in 1651, and, invading England with his followers, was utterly overthrown and defeated at Worcester, September 3. In the same month the Council of State issued instructions to Captain Robert Dennis, Richard Bennet, Thomas Steg,[268] and William Claiborne, as commissioners for the reduction of Virginia to the authority of the Commonwealth. Captain Dennis arrived at Jamestown in March, 1652, and the capitulation of the colony was ratified on the 12th instant upon liberal terms, which confirmed the existing privileges of the colonists and granted indemnity for all offences against Parliament. The commissioners Bennet and Claiborne soon after effected the reduction of Maryland, but with singular moderation allowed its Governor and Council to retain their offices upon the simple condition of issuing all writs in the name of the Commonwealth. A provisional government was organized in Virginia, on the 30th of April, by the election by the House of Burgesses of Richard Bennet as governor and William Claiborne as secretary of state, and a council of twelve, whose powers were to be defined by the Grand Assembly, of which they were ex-officio members.

A remarkable instance of individual enterprise was given in the early[149] part of 1654 by Francis Yeardley,[269] who effected discoveries in North Carolina, and at the cost of £300 purchased from the natives “three great rivers and all such others as they should like southerly,” and took possession of the country in the name of the Commonwealth.[270] In March, 1655, Richard Bennet was appointed the agent of the colony at London, and was succeeded as governor by Edward Digges. In 1656 Colonel Edward Hill the elder, in endeavoring with one hundred men to dislodge seven hundred Ricahecrian Indians who had seated themselves at the Falls of James River, was utterly routed. Bloody Run, near Richmond, significantly derives its name from this encounter. On the 13th of March, 1657, Edward Digges was sent to London as the agent of the colony, and was succeeded as governor by Samuel Matthews. The government of the colony under the Commonwealth was beneficent, and the people were prosperous.

Upon the reception of the intelligence of the death of Oliver and of the accession of Richard Cromwell as Protector, obedience was acknowledged by the Assembly on the 9th of March, 1658. Richard Cromwell resigned on the 22d of April, 1659, and Matthews had died in January previously. England was for a time without a monarch, and Virginia without a governor. The Virginia Assembly, convening on the 23d of March, 1660, elected Sir William Berkeley as governor, and declared that all writs should be issued in the name of the Grand Assembly. On the 8th of May Charles II. was proclaimed as King in England, and on the 31st of July following he transmitted a new commission to his faithful adherent, Sir William Berkeley. In March, 1661, 44,000 pounds of tobacco were appropriated by the Assembly to defray the cost of an address to the King, praying him to pardon the inhabitants of Virginia for having yielded during the Commonwealth to a force they could not resist. And in contrition for their tacit submission to the “execrable power that so bloodily massacred the late King Charles the First of blessed and glorious memory,” it was enacted that “the 30th of January, the day the said King was beheaded, be annually solemnized with fasting and prayer, that our sorrows may expiate our crime, and our tears wash away our guilt.”[271] A little later, the 29th of May, the date of the restoration of Charles II., was decreed to be celebrated annually as a “holy day.”[272]

Berkeley being sent on the 30th of April, 1661, by the colony to England to protest against the enforcement of the Navigation Act, Colonel Francis Morrison was elected in his stead. Berkeley returned in the fall of 1662 with advantageous patents for himself, but without relief for the colony. Colonel William Claiborne, secretary of state, was displaced by Thomas Ludwell, commissioned by the King. Colonel Francis Morrison[150] and Henry Randolph, clerk of the Assembly, were appointed to revise the laws, and it was ordered that all acts which “might keep in memory our forced deviation from his Majesty’s obedience” should be “expunged.” A satisfactory account of the condition of the colony in 1670 is afforded in a report made by Governor Berkeley to the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations. The executive consisted of the Governor and sixteen councillors commissioned by the King, who determined all causes above £15; causes of less amount were tried by the county courts, of which there were twenty. The Assembly, composed of two burgesses from each county, met annually; it levied the taxes, and appeals lay to it. The legislative and executive powers rested in the Governor, Council, Assembly, and subordinate officers. The Acts of the Assembly were sent by the secretary of the colony to the Lord Chancellor. All freemen were bound to muster monthly in their own counties. The force of the colony numbered upwards of eight thousand horsemen. There were five forts, mounted with thirty cannon.

The whole population was forty thousand, of which two thousand were negro slaves, and six thousand white servants. Eighty vessels arrived yearly from England and Ireland for tobacco; a few small coasters came from New England. The annual exportation of tobacco was 15,000 hogsheads (about 12,000,000 pounds), upon which a duty of two shillings a hogshead was levied. Out of this revenue the Governor received as salary £1,200. The King had no revenue from the colony except the quit-rents.[273] There were forty-eight parishes, the ministers of which were well paid. Under the monopoly of the Navigation Act the price of tobacco was greatly depressed, the cost of imported goods enhanced, and the trade of the colony almost extinguished; yet the profligate King oppressed the colonists still further, and by a grant of the whole territory of Virginia to Lords Arlington and Culpeper they found themselves deprived of the very titles to the lands they owned. The privilege of franchise was even virtually withheld, for there had been no election of burgesses since the Restoration in 1660, the same legislature having continued to hold its sessions by prorogation. The colonists grew so impatient under their accumulated grievances that a revolt was near bursting forth in 1674. It was quieted for a time by some pacific concessions; but the fires only slumbered, and an immediate grievance and a popular leader were alone required to produce revolutionary measures. The severity of the policy against the Indians incensed them to hostility, and the lives of the colonists were in constant jeopardy. They petitioned the Governor for protection, and on the meeting of the[151] Assembly in March, 1676, war was declared against the Indians, and a force of five hundred men raised and put under the command of Sir Henry Chicheley to subdue them; but when he was about to march he was suddenly and without apparent cause ordered by Berkeley to disband his forces. The Indians continued their murders until sixty lives had been sacrificed. The alarmed colonists, having in vain petitioned the Governor for protection, rose tumultuously in self-defence, including quite all the civil and military officers of the colony, and chose Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., as their leader. Bacon, who was of the distinguished English family of that name, had been but a short time in the colony; but he was a member of the Council, brave, rich, eloquent, and popular. He had an immediate stimulant, too, in the murder at his plantation, near the site of Richmond, of his overseer and a favorite servant.[274] Bacon, fruitlessly applying for a commission, marched at the head of five hundred men against the savages; and in the mean time Berkeley proclaimed them as traitors and ineffectually pursued them with an armed force. Bacon replied in a declaration denouncing the Governor as a tyrant and traitor to his King and the country. During Berkeley’s absence the planters in the lower counties rose, and, the revolt becoming general, he was forced to return, when he endeavored to quiet the storm. Writs for a new Assembly were issued, to which Bacon was elected. He, having punished the savages, while on his way to the Assembly was arrested in James River by an armed vessel, but was soon released on parole. When the Assembly met on the 5th of June, he read at the bar a written confession and apology for his conduct, and was thereupon pardoned and readmitted to his seat in the Council. He was also promised a commission to proceed against the Indians; but, being secretly informed of a plot by the Governor against his life, he fled, returning however to Jamestown in a few days with a large force, when, appealing to the Assembly, they declared him their general, vindicated his course, and sent a letter to England approving it. They also passed salutary laws of reform. Berkeley resisted, dissolved them, and in turn addressed the King. Bacon, all-powerful, having extorted a commission from the Governor, marched against the Indians. Berkeley once more proclaimed him as a traitor. Bacon, on hearing it, in the midst of a successful campaign returned; and Berkeley, deserted by his troops, fled to Accomac. Bacon, now supreme, called together, by an invitation signed by himself and four of the Council, a convention of the principal gentlemen of the colony, at the Middle Plantation, to consult for defence against the savages and protection against the tyranny of Berkeley. He also issued a reply to the proclamation of Berkeley, in which he vindicates himself in lofty strains.[275] He now again[152] marched against the Indians; but in his absence a fleet which he had sent to capture Berkeley was betrayed, and the Governor returned to Jamestown at the head of the forces sent to capture him. Bacon now returned, and Berkeley, deserted by his men, fleeing again to Accomac, Bacon triumphantly entered Jamestown and burned the State House. He died shortly afterwards from disease contracted by exposure, and his followers, left without a leader, dispersed, and Berkeley was finally dominant. On the 29th of February, 1677, a fleet with a regiment of soldiers, commanded by Colonels Herbert Jeffreys and Francis Morrison, arrived in the colony to quell the rebellion. Jeffreys, Morrison, and Berkeley sat as a commission to try the insurgents. They were vindictively punished: the jails were filled, estates confiscated, and twenty-three persons executed. At length the Assembly, in an address to the Governor, deprecated any further sanguinary punishments, and he was prevailed upon, reluctantly, to desist. All the acts of the Assembly of June, 1676, called Bacon’s Laws, were repealed, though many of them were afterwards re-enacted. Berkeley, being recalled by the King, sailed for England on the 27th of April, 1677, and was succeeded by Sir Herbert Jeffreys as governor. Jeffreys effected a treaty with the Indians, but dying in December, 1678, was succeeded by Sir Henry Chicheley, who in turn gave place, on the 10th of May, 1680, to Lord Culpeper, who had been appointed in July, 1675, governor of Virginia for life. Virginia was now tranquil. The resources of the country continued to be developed. The production and export of tobacco—the chief staple—steadily increased, and with it the prosperity of the colony. The ease with which wealth was acquired fostered the habits of personal indulgence and ostentatious expenditure into which the Virginia planter was led by hereditary characteristics.

Undue stress has been laid by many historians upon the transportation of “convicts” to the colony. Such formed but a small proportion of the population, and it is believed that the offence of a majority of them was of a political nature. Be it as it may, all dangerous or debasing effect of their presence was effectually guarded against by rigorous enactments. The vile among them met the fate of the vicious, while the simply unfortunate who[153] were industrious throve and became good citizens. It is clearly indicated that the aristocratic element of the colony preponderated.

The under stratum of society, formed by the “survival of the fittest” of the “indentured servant” and the “convict” classes, as they improved in worldly circumstances, rose to the surface and took their places socially and politically among the more favored class. The Virginia planter was essentially a transplanted Englishman in tastes and convictions, and emulated the social amenities and the culture of the mother country.[276] Thus in time was formed a society distinguished for its refinement, executive ability, and a generous hospitality, for which the Ancient Dominion is proverbial.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THERE is abundant evidence, as instanced by Mr. Deane in a paper in the Boston Daily Advertiser, July 31, 1877, that the name of Virginia commemorates Elizabeth, the virgin queen of England. Mr. Deane’s paper was in answer to a fanciful belief, expressed by Mr. C. W. Tuttle in Notes and Queries, 1877, that the Indian name Wingina, mentioned by Hakluyt, may have suggested the appellation.[277] The early patents are given in Purchas (abstract of the first), iv. 1683-84; Stith; Hazard’s Historical Collections, i. 50, 58, 72; Popham Memorial (the first), App. A; and Poor’s Gorges, App.

See a paper by L. W. Tazewell, on the “Limits of Virginia under the Charters,” in Maxwell’s Virginia Historical Register, i. 12. These bounds were relied on for Virginia’s claims at a later day to the Northwest Territory. Cf. H. B. Adams’s Maryland’s Influence in Founding a National Commonwealth, or Maryland Historical Society Publication Fund, no. 11. See also Lucas’s Charters of the Old English Colonies, London, 1850. Ridpath’s United States, p. 86, gives a convenient map of the grants by the English crown from 1606 to 1732. Mr. Deane has discussed the matter of forms used in issuing letters patent in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xi. 166.

The earliest printed account of the settlement at Jamestown, covering the interval April 26, 1607-June 2, 1608, is entitled: A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony which is now resident in the South part thereof, till the last returne from thence. Written by Captaine Smith, Coronell of the said Collony, to a worshipfull friend of his in England. Small quarto, black letter, London, 1608.[278]

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The second contemporary account appears in Purchas His Pilgrimes, iv. 1685-1690, published in 1625, and is entitled, “Obseruations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantations of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606, written by that Honorable Gentleman Master George Percy.”[279] The narrative gives in minute detail the incidents of the first voyage and of the movements of the colonists after their arrival at Cape Henry until their landing, on the 14th of May, at Jamestown. It is to be regretted that a meagre abridgment only of so valuable a narrative should have been preserved by Purchas, who assigns as a reason for the omissions he made in it, that “the rest is more fully set down in Cap. Smith’s Relations.”

The third account of the period, “Newport’s Discoveries in Virginia,” was published for the first time in 1860 in Archæologia Americana, iv. 40-65. It consists of three papers, the most extended of which is entitled: “A Relatyon of the Discovery of our river from James Forte into the Maine; made by Captain Christopher Newport, and sincerely written and observed by a Gentleman of the Colony.” This “Relatyon” is principally confined to an account of the voyage from Jamestown up the river to the “Falls,” at which Richmond is now situated, and back again to Jamestown, beginning May 21 and ending June 21, the day before Newport sailed for England. The second paper, of four pages, is entitled: “The Description of the new-discovered river and country of Virginia, with the liklyhood of ensuing riches, by England’s ayd and industry.” The remaining paper, of only a little more than two pages, is: “A brief description of the People.” These papers were printed from copies made under the direction of the Hon. George Bancroft, LL.D., from the originals in the English State Paper Office, and were edited by the Rev. Edward Everett Hale.[280]

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The next account to be noted, “A Discourse of Virginia,” by Edward Maria Wingfield, the first President of the colony, was also printed for the first time in Archæologia Americana, iv. 67-163, from a copy of the original manuscript in the Lambeth Library, edited by Charles Deane, LL.D., who also printed it separately. The narrative begins with the sailing of Newport for England, June 22, 1607, and ends May 21, 1608, on the author’s arrival in England. The final six pages are devoted by Wingfield to a defence of himself from charges of unfaithfulness in duty, on which he had been deposed from the Presidency and excluded from the Council. The narrative was cited for the first time by Purchas in the margin of the second edition of his Pilgrimage, 1614, pp. 757-768. He also refers to what is probably another writing, “M. Wingfield’s notes,” in the margin of p. 1706, of vol. iv. of his Pilgrimes. Mr. Deane reasonably conjectures that the narrative of Wingfield as originally written was more comprehensive, and that a portion of it has been lost.[281] Chapter I. of Neill’s English Colonization in America is devoted to Wingfield.

Another narrative of the period:—

A Relation of Virginia, written by Henry Spelman, “the third son of the Antiquary,” who came to the colony in 1609, was privately printed in 1872 at London for James Frothingham Hunnewell, Esq., of Charlestown, Mass., from the original manuscript.[282] Spelman, who was a boy when he first came to Virginia, lived for some time with the Indians, became afterwards an interpreter for the Colony, and was killed by the savages in 1622 or 1623.

In 1609 there were four tracts printed in London, illustrative of the progress of the new colony:—

1. Saules Prohibition staid, a reproof to those that traduce Virginia.

2. William Symondes’ Sermon before the London Company, April 25, 1609.[283]

3. Nova Britannia: offeringe most excellent Fruites by Planting in Virginia.[284]

4. A Good Speed to Virginia. The dedicator is R. G., who “neither in person nor purse” is able to be a “partaker in the business.”[285]

In 1610, appeared the following:—

1. W. Crashaw’s Sermon before Lord Delaware on his leaving for Virginia, Feb. 21, 1609.

2. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia.[286]

3. A true declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia.[287]

4. The mishaps of the first voyage and the wreck at Bermuda were celebrated in a little poem by R. Rich, one of the Company, called Newes from Virginia, which was printed in London in 1610.[288]

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William Strachey was not an actual observer of events in the colony earlier than May 23, 1610, when he first reached Jamestown. The incidents of his letter, July 15, 1610, giving an account of the wreck at Bermuda and subsequent events (Purchas, iv. 1734), must, so far as antecedent Virginia events go, have been derived from others.[289]

In 1612 Strachey edited a collection of Lawes Divine of the colony.[290]

There are two MS. copies of his Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of the Country, together with the Manners and Customes of the People,—one preserved in the British Museum among the Sloane Collection, and the other is among the Ashmolean MSS. at Oxford. They vary in no important respect. The former was the copy used by R. H. Major in editing it for the Hakluyt Society in 1849. This copy was dedicated to Sir Francis Bacon.

In 1611 Lord Delaware’s little Relation appeared in London.[291] In 1612 the Virginia Company, to thwart the evil intentions of the enemies of the colony, printed by authority a second part of Nova Britannia, called The New Life of Virginia. Its authorship is assigned to Robert Johnson.[292]

In 1612 the little quarto volume commonly referred to as the Oxford Tract was printed, with the following title: A Map of Virginia. With a Description of the Country, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion, Written by Captaine Smith, sometimes Governour of the Country. Whereunto is annexed the proceedings of those Colonies since their first departure from England, with the discoveries, Orations, and relations of the Salvages, and the accidents that befell them in all their Iournies and discoveries. Taken faithfully as they were written out of the writings of Doctor Rvssell, Tho. Stvdley, Anas Todkill, Ieffra Abot, Richard Wiffin, Will. Phettiplace, Nathaniel Powell, Richard Potts. And the relations of divers other intelligent observers there present then, and now many of them in England, by W. S. At Oxford, Printed by Joseph Barnes, 1612. As the title indicates, the tract consists of two parts. The first, written as Smith says, in the Generall Historie, “with his owne hand,” is a topographical description of the country, embracing climate, soil, and productions, with a full account of the native inhabitants, and has only occasional reference to the proceedings of the[157] colony at Jamestown. The second part of the Oxford Tract has a separate titlepage as follows: “The proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia since their first beginning from England in the year 1606, till this present 1612, with all their accidents that befell them in their iournies and Discoveries. Also the Salvages’ discourses, orations, and relations of the Bordering Neighbours, and how they became subject to the English. Vnfolding even the fundamentall causes from whence haue sprang so many miseries to the vndertakers, and scandals to the businesse; taken faithfully as they were written out of the writings of Thomas Studley, the first provant maister, Anas Todkill, Walter Russell, Doctor of Phisicke, Nathaniel Powell, William Phettiface, Richard Wyffin, Thomas Abbay, Tho. Hops, Rich. Potts, and the labours of divers other diligent observers, that were residents in Virginia. And pervsed and confirmed by diverse now resident in England that were actors in this busines. By W. S. At Oxford, Printed by Joseph Barnes. 1612.”[293]

Alexander Whitaker’s Good Newes from Virginia was printed in 1613. He was minister of Henrico Parish, and had been in the country two years. The preface is by W. Crawshawe, the divine.[294] Ralph Hamor the younger, “late secretary of that colony,” printed in London in 1615 his True Discourse of the present state of Virginia, bringing the story down to June 18, 1614. It contains an account of the christening of Pocahontas and her marriage to Rolfe. It was reprinted in 1860 at Albany (200 copies) for Charles Gorham Barney, of Richmond.[295] Rolfe’s Relation of Virginia, a MS. now in the British Museum, was abbreviated in the 1617 edition of Purchas’s Pilgrimage, and printed at length in the Southern Literary Messenger, 1839, and in the Virginia Historical Register, i. 102. (See also Neill’s Virginia Company, ch. vi.) There are various other early printed tracts, besides those already mentioned, reprinted by Force, which are necessary to a careful study of Virginian history.[296]

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Fortunately a copy of the records of the Company[297] from April 28, 1619, to June 7, 1624, is preserved. This copy was made from the originals, which are not now known to exist, at a time when the King gave sign of annulling their charter. Nicholas Ferrar (see the Memoir of Nicholas Ferrar by Peter Peckard, London, 1790, a volume throwing much light on early Virginian history, and compare Palfrey’s New England, i. 192), with the aid of Collingwood the secretary, seems to have procured the transcription at the house of Sir John Danvers, in Chelsea, an old mansion associated with Sir Thomas More’s memory. Collingwood compared each folio, signed it,—the work being completed only three days before judgment was pronounced against the Company,—and gave the whole into the hands of the Earl of Southampton for safe keeping, from whom the records passed to his son Thomas, Lord High Treasurer, after whose death, in 1667, William Byrd, of Virginia, bought them for sixty guineas, and it was from the Byrd family, at Westover, that Stith obtained them, to make use of in his History. By some means Stith’s brother-in-law, Peyton Randolph, got them, and at his death in 1775 his library was sold, when Jefferson bought it, and found these records among the books. Jefferson’s library afterwards becoming the property of the United States, these records in two volumes (pp. 354 and 387 respectively) passed into the Library of Congress, where they now are.

In May, 1868, Mr. Neill, who had used these records while working on his Terra Mariæ, memorialized Congress, explaining their value, and offering, without compensation, to edit the MS., under the direction of the Librarian of Congress.[298] The question of their publication had already been raised by Mr. J. Wingate Thornton ten years earlier, in a paper in the Historical Magazine, February, 1858, p. 33, and in a pamphlet, The First Records of Anglo-American Colonization, Boston, 1859. In these the history of their transmission varies a little from the one given above, which follows Neill’s statements.[299] Being thwarted in his original purpose, Mr. Neill made the records the basis of a History of the Virginia Company of London, Albany, 1869, which, somewhat changed, appeared in an English edition as English Colonization in America in the Seventeenth Century.[300][159] Of considerable importance among the papers transmitted to our time is the collection which had in large part belonged to Chalmers, and been used by him in his Political Annals; when passing to Colonel William Aspinwall,[301] they were by him printed in the Mass. Hist. Coll. 4th series, vols. ix. and x., with numerous notes, particularly concerning the earlier ones, beginning in 1617, in which the careers of Gates, Pory,[302] and Argall are followed.

Mr. Deane, True Relation, p. 14, quotes as in Mr. Bancroft’s hands a copy from a paper in the English State-Paper Office entitled “A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia during the first twelve years when Sr Thomas Smyth was Governer of the Companie [1606-1619], and downe to the present tyme [1624], by the Ancient Planters now remaining alive in Virginia.” Mr. Noël Sainsbury, in his Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, London, 1860, etc., has opened new stores of early Virginian as well as of general Anglo-American history, between 1574 and 1660. The work of the Public Record Office has been well supplemented by the Reports of the Historical Commission, which has examined the stores of historical documents contained in private depositaries in Great Britain. Their third Report of 1872 and the appendix of their eighth Report are particularly rich in Virginian early history, covering documents belonging to the Duke of Manchester. The Index to the Catalogue of MSS. in the British Museum discloses others.

In 1860 the State of Virginia sent Colonel Angus W. McDonald to London to search for papers and maps elucidating the question of the Virginia bounds with Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina, which resulted in the accumulation of much documentary material, and a report to the Governor in March, 1861, Document 39 (1861), which was printed. See Hist. Mag. ix. 13.

Matter of historical interest will be found in other of the documents of this boundary contest: Document 40, Jan. 9, 1860; Senate Document, Report of Commissioners, Jan. 17, 1872, with eleven maps, including Smith’s; Final Report, 1874; Senate Document No. 21, being reprints in 1874 of Reports of Jan. 9, 1860, and March 9, 1861; House Document No. 6, Communication of the Governor, Jan. 9, 1877. There were also publications by the State of Maryland relating to the contest.[303]

In 1874 there was published, as a State Senate Document, Colonial Records of Virginia, quarto, which contains the proceedings of the first Assembly, convened in 1619 at Jamestown,[304] with other early papers, and an Introduction and Notes by the late Hon. Thomas H. Wynne. Attention was first called in America to these proceedings by Conway Robinson, Esq. (who had inspected the original manuscript in the State-Paper Office, London), in a Report made as chairman of its Executive Committee, at an annual meeting of the Virginia Historical Society, held at Richmond, Dec. 15, 1853, and published[160] in the Virginia Historical Reporter, i. 7. They were first published in the Collections of the New York Historical Society, 1857, with an Introduction by George Bancroft.[305]

Abstracts from the English State-Paper Office have been furnished the State Library of Virginia by W. Noël Sainsbury, to Dec. 30, 1730.

There are various papers on the personnel of the colony in the lists of passengers for Virginia of 1635, which Mr. H. G. Somerby printed in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. ii. 111, 211, 268; iii. 184, 388; iv. 61, 189, 261; v. 61, 343; and xv. 142; and in the collection of such documents, mostly before published, which are conveniently grouped in Hotten’s Original Lists (1600-1700), London, 1874 and 1881; and in S. G. Drake’s Researches among the British Archives, 1860.

The Virginia Company published three lists of the venturers and emigrants in 1619, and in 1620 a similar enumeration in a Declaration of the State of the Colonie.[306] This was dated June 24; another brief Declaration bears date Sept. 20, 1620. A list of ships arriving in Jamestown 1607-1624 is given by Neill in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1876, p. 415.

Neill has published various studies of the census of 1624 in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. for 1877, pp. 147, 265, 393.[307]

The most trustworthy source of information as to those who became permanent planters and founders of families is afforded by the Virginia records of land patents, which are continuous from 1620, and are no less valuable for topographical than for genealogical reference.[308]

The manuscript materials of the history of Virginia have been ever subject to casualty in the varied dangerous and destructive forms of removal, fire, and war. The first capital, Jamestown, was several times the scene of violence and conflagration. The colonial archives were exposed to accident when the seat of government was removed to Williamsburg; and finally when, in 1779, the latter was abandoned for the growing town of Richmond, and when, upon the apprehended advance of the British forces during the Revolution, they were again disturbed and removed hastily to the last place. It is probable that at the destruction by fire of the buildings of William and Mary College, in 1705, many valuable manuscripts were lost which had been left in them when the royal governors ceased to hold sessions of the Council within her walls, and when other government functionaries no longer performed their duties there. Many doubtless suffered the consequences of Arnold’s invasion in 1781, upon whose approach the contents of the public offices at Richmond were hastily tumbled into wagons and hurried off to distant counties. The crowning and fell period of universal destruction to archives and private papers was, however, that of our late unhappy war, when seats of justice, sanctuaries, and private dwellings alike were subjected to fire and pillage. The most serious loss sustained was at the burning of the State Court House at Richmond, incidental on the[161] evacuation fire of April 3, 1865, when were consumed almost the entire records of the old General Court from the year 1619 or thereabout, together with those of many of the county courts (which had been brought thither to guard against the accidents of the war) and the greater part of the records of the State Court of Appeals.

Of the records of the General Court, a fragment of a volume covering the period April 4, 1670-March 16, 1676, is in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, and another fragment—Feb. 21, 1678-October, 1692—is in the archives of Henrico County Court at Richmond. In the State Library are preserved the journals of the General Assembly from 1697 to 1744, with occasional interruptions.

Of the records of the several counties, the great majority of those of an early period, it is certain, have been destroyed. Information as to the preservation of the following has been received by the writer: Northampton (old Accomac), continuous from 1634; Northumberland, from 1652; Lancaster, from 1652; Surrey, a volume beginning in 1652; Rappahannock, from 1656; Essex, from 1692; Charles City, a single volume, from Jan. 4, 1650, to Feb. 3, 1655, inclusive; Henrico, a deed book, 1697-1704, and, with interruptions, the same records to 1774,—all classes of records, unbroken, from October, 1781.

In elucidation of the social life and commerce of the period,—the three decades of the seventeenth century,—the following may be named: Letters of Colonel William Fitzhugh, of Stafford County, a lawyer and planter, May 15, 1679-April 29, 1699; Letters of Colonel William Byrd, of the “Falls,” James River, planter and Receiver-General of the colony, January, 1683-Aug. 3, 1691,—in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society.

The following parish records preserved in the library of the Theological Seminary near Alexandria, Va., are valuable sources of early genealogical information; Registers of Charles River Parish, York County,—births 1648-1800, deaths 1665-1787;[309] Vestry Books (some with partial registers) of Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, 1663-1767; Petsoe Parish, Gloucester County, from June 14, 1677; Kingston Parish, Matthews County, from 1679; St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, from 1686.

Of such of the early papers in the State archives at Richmond as escaped the casualties of the war, the Commonwealth intrusted the editing to William P. Palmer; and vol. i., covering 1652-1781 (with a very few, however, before 1689), was published in 1875 as Calendar of State Papers and other Manuscripts preserved in the Capitol at Richmond.[310]

On the life of Captain John Smith in general, some notes are made in another chapter of this volume.[311] It will be remembered that Fuller—in the earliest printed biography of Smith, contained in his Worthies of England—says of him, “It soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.”

Mr. Deane first pointed out (1860), in a note to his edition of Wingfield’s Discourse, that the story of Pocahontas’s saving Smith’s life from the infuriated Powhatan, which Smith interpolates in his Generall Historie, was at variance with Smith’s earlier recitals in the tracts of which that book was composed when they had been issued contemporaneous with the events of which he was treating some years earlier, and that the inference was that Smith’s natural propensity for embellishment, as well as a desire to feed the interest which had been incited in Pocahontas when she visited England, was the real source of the story. Mr. Deane still farther enlarged upon this view in a note to his edition (p. 38) of Smith’s Relation in 1866.[312] It has an important bearing on the question that[162] Hamor, who says so much of Pocahontas, makes no allusion to such a striking service. The substantial correctness of Smith’s later story is contended for by W. Robertson in the Hist. Mag., October, 1860; by William Wirt Henry, in Potter’s American Monthly, 1875; and a general protest is vaguely rendered by Stevens in his Historical Collections, p. 102.

The file of the Richmond Dispatch for 1877 contains various contributions on the early governors of the colony of Virginia by E. D. Neill, William Wirt Henry, and R. A. Brock, in which the claims of Smith’s narrative to consideration are discussed. Charles Dudley Warner, in A Study of the Life and Writings of John Smith, 1881, treats the subject humorously and with sceptical levity. Smith finds his latest champion, a second time, in William Wirt Henry, in an address, The Early Settlement at Jamestown, with Particular Reference to the late Attacks upon Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and John Rolfe, delivered before the annual meeting of the Virginia Historical Society, held Feb. 24, 1882, and published with the Proceedings of the Society. Mr. Deane’s views are, however, supported by Henry Adams (North American Review, January, 1867, and Chapter of Erie, and other Essays, p. 192) and by Henry Cabot Lodge (English Colonies in America, p. 6). Mr. Bancroft allowed for a while the original story to stand, with a bare reference to Mr. Deane’s note (History of the United States, 1864, i. 132); but in his Centenary Edition (1879, vol. i. p. 102) he abandoned the former assertion, without expressing judgment. The most recent recitals of the story of Pocahontas under the color of these later investigations have been by Gay, in the Popular History of the United States, i. 283, and by Charles D. Warner in his Captain John Smith, before named,—the latter carefully going over all the evidence.

Alexander Brown has contributed several articles, published in the Richmond Dispatch in April and May, 1882, in which he controverts the views of Mr. Henry, not only as to the truth of the story of the rescue, but as to the general veracity of Smith as a historian, taking a more absolute position in this respect than any previous writer has done.

Pocahontas is thought to have died at Gravesend just as she was about re-embarking for America, March 21, 1617; and the entry on the records of St. George’s Church in that place—which speaks of a “lady Virginia born,” and has been supposed to refer to her—puts her burial March 21. 1617.[313]

For the tracing of Pocahontas’s descendants through the Bollings,—Robert Bolling having married Jane Rolfe, the daughter of Thomas Rolfe, the son of Powhatan’s daughter,—see The Descendants of Pocahontas, by Wyndham Robertson, 1855, and Wynne’s Historical Documents, vol. iv., entitled A Memoir of a Portion of the Bolling Family, Richmond, 1868 (fifty copies printed), which contains photographs of portraits of the Bollings.[314]

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There is an engraving of Pocahontas by Simon Pass, which perhaps belongs to, but is seldom found in, Smith’s Generall Historie.[315] The original painting is said to have belonged to Henry Rolfe, of Narford,—a brother of John, the husband of Pocahontas,—and from him passed to Anthony Rolfe, of Tuttington, and from him again, probably by a marriage, to the Elwes of Tuttington, and it is mentioned in a catalogue of a sale of their effects in the last century. It has not since been traced.[316]

Richard Randolph, of Virginia, is said to have procured from England two portraits,—one of Rolfe, and the other of Pocahontas,—and they were hung in his house at Turkey Island. After his death, in 1784, they are said to have been bought by Thomas Bolling, of Cobbs, Va., and the inventory showing them is, or was, in the County Court of Henrico. In 1830 they were in the possession of Dr. Thomas Robinson, of Petersburg, when he wrote of the portrait of Pocahontas that “it is crumbling so rapidly that it may be considered as having already passed out of existence.” A letter of the late H. B. Grigsby to Mr. Charles Deane states that he had heard it was on panel let into the wainscot. In 1843, while still owned by Mr. Robinson, R. M. Sully made a copy of it, which seems to have proved acceptable, as appears from the attestations printed in M’Kinney and Hall’s Indian Tribes of North America, 1844, vol. iii., where at p. 64 is a reproduction in colors of Sully’s painting. Mr. Grigsby says that the original was finally destroyed in a contest which grew out of a dispute when the house was sold, whether the panel went with it or could be reserved.[317]

Of the massacre at Falling Creek, March 22, 1621-22, the Virginia Company printed, in Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia, a contemporary account.[318] Mr. Neill has made the transaction the subject of special consideration in the Magazine of American History, i. 222, and in his Letter to N. G. Taylor in 1868, and has printed a considerable part of Waterhouse’s account in his Virginia Company, p. 317 et seq.

The massacre is also incidentally mentioned by the present writer in a paper, “Early Iron Manufacture in Virginia, 1619-1776,” in the Richmond Standard, Feb. 8, 1879, and by James M. Swank, in “Statistics of the Iron and Steel Production of the United States,” compiled for the Tenth Census, which may also be referred to for information as to that industry in the Colony of Virginia.

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An examination of the story of Claiborne’s rebellion is made in the Maryland chapter in the present volume.

Respecting Bacon’s rebellion, the fullest of the contemporary accounts is that of T. M. on “The beginning, progress, and conclusion of Bacon’s Rebellion,” which is printed in Force’s Tracts, vol. i. no. 8.[319] Equally important is a MS. “Narrative of the Indian and Civil Wars in Virginia,” now somewhat defective, which was found among the papers of Captain Nathaniel Burwell, and lent to the Massachusetts Historical Society and printed carelessly in their Collections in 1814, vol. xi., and copied thence by Force in his Tracts, vol. i. no. 11, in 1836. The MS. was again collated in 1866, and reprinted accurately in the Society’s Proceedings, ix. 299, when the original was surrendered to the Virginia Historical Society (Proceedings, ix. 244, 298; x. 135). Tyler, American Literature, i. 80, assigns its authorship to one Cotton, of Aquia Creek, whose wife is said to be the writer of “An Account of our late troubles in Virginia,” which was first printed in the Richmond Enquirer, Sept. 12, 1804, and again in Force’s Tracts, vol. i. no. 9. The popular spreading of the news in England of the downfall of the rebellion was helped by a little tract, Strange news from Virginia, of which there is a copy in Harvard College Library. There is in the British Museum Sir William Berkeley’s list of those executed under that governor’s retaliatory measures, which has been printed in Force’s Tracts, vol. i. no. 10.

Other original documents may be found in Hening’s Statutes at Large, vol. ii.; in the appendix of Burk’s Virginia; and in the Aspinwall Papers, i. 162, 189, published in the Mass. Hist. Coll. An Historical Account of some Memorable Actions, particularly in Virginia, etc., by “Sir Thomas Grantham, Knight” (London, 1716), was reprinted in fac-simile with an Introduction by the present writer (Carlton McCarthy & Co., Richmond, 1882).[320] The fragment of the records of the General Court of Virginia, cited as being in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, contains details of the trial of the participants in the “rebellion” not included in Hening, and the abstracts from the English State-Paper Office, furnished by Mr. Sainsbury to the State Library of Virginia, give unpublished details. Extracts from the same source are in the library of the present writer. There are various papers in the early volumes of the Hist. Mag.; see April, 1867, for a contemporary letter. Massachusetts Bay proclaimed the insurgents rebels.[321]

The earliest History of Virginia after John Smith’s was an anonymous one published in London in 1705, with De Bry’s pictures reduced by Gribelin. When it was translated into French, and published two years later (1707) both at Amsterdam and Orleans (Paris), the former issue assigned the authorship to D. S., which has been interpreted D. Stevens, and so it remained in other editions, some only title editions, printed at Amsterdam in 1712, 1716, and 1718, though the later date may be doubtful. (Sabin, ii. 5112.) The true author, a native of Virginia and a Colonial official, had meanwhile died there in 1716.[165] This was Robert Beverley.[322] The book is concisely written, and is not without raciness and crispness; but its merits are perhaps a little overestimated in Tyler’s American Literature, ii. 264. His considerate judgment of the Indians is not, however, less striking than praiseworthy. For the period following the Restoration he may be considered the most useful, though he is not independent of a partisan sympathy.

Sir William Keith’s History of Virginia was undertaken, at the instance of the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, as the beginning of a series of books on the English plantations; but no others followed. It was published in 1738 with two maps,—one of America, the other of Virginia,—and he depended almost entirely on Beverley, and brings the story down to 1723.[323] Forty years after Beverley the early history of the colony was again told, but only down to 1624, by the Rev. William Stith, then rector of Henrico Parish; being, however, at the time of his death (1755), the president of William and Mary College. He seems to have been discouraged from continuing his narrative because the “generous and public-spirited” gentlemen of Virginia were unwilling to pay the increased cost of putting into his Appendix the early documents which give a chief value to his book to-day. He had the use of the Collingwood transcript of the records of the Virginia Company. His book, History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia, was published at Williamsburg in 1747, and there are variations in copies to puzzle the bibliographer.[324] Stith’s diffuseness and lack of literary skill have not prevented his becoming a high authority with later writers, notwithstanding that he implicitly trusts and even praises the honesty of Smith.[325]

The somewhat inexact History of Virginia by John Burk has some of the traits of expansive utterance which might be expected of an expatriated Irishman who had been implicated in political hazards, and who was yet to fall in a duel in 1808.[326] This book, which was published in three volumes at Petersburg (1804-5), was dedicated to Jefferson. A fourth volume, by Skelton Jones and Louis Hue Girardin, was added in 1816; but as the edition was in large part destroyed by a fire, it is rarely found with the other three.[327] Burk used the copy of the Virginia Company records which had belonged to John Randolph, as well as some collections made by Hickman (which Randolph had had made when it was his intention to write on Virginian history), and Colonel Byrd’s Journal.

The name of Campbell is twice associated with the history of Virginia. J. W. Campbell published in 1813 at Petersburg a meagre and unimportant History of Virginia, coming down to 1781. The best known, however, is the work of Charles Campbell, his son, who in 1847, at Richmond, published a well-written Introduction to the History of Virginia, and in 1860, at Philadelphia, a completed History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia, coming down to 1783,—a book written before John Smith was called a[166] romancer. The book, however defective in arrangement and execution, is thought to be the best general authority.[328]

The most comprehensive History of Virginia is that of Robert R. Howison, vol. i. coming down to 1763, being published at Philadelphia in 1846, and vol. ii., ending in 1847, being published at Richmond the next year. He is a pleasing writer, but sacrifices fact to rhetoric, though he makes an imposing display of references.

To these may be added, in passing, William H. Brockenbrough’s Outline of History of Virginia to 1754; Martin’s Gazetteer, 1835, and Howe’s Historical Collections of Virginia, printed in Charleston, 1856.

Respecting the religious history of the colony, besides the general historians, there have been several special treatments. Mr. Neill has written upon the Puritan affinities in Hours at Home, November, 1867, and on Thomas Harrison and the Virginia Puritans in his English Colonization, where is also a chapter on the planting of the Church of England.

Patrick Copland’s sermon, Virginia’s God be thanked, was preached before the Company in London, April 18, 1622; a copy of which is in Harvard College Library. Cf. Mr. Neill’s Memoir of Rev. Patrick Copland, New York, 1871, p. 52, and his English Colonization, p. 104.

Further, see Hawkes’s Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of the United States, “Virginia,” 1836; Hening’s Statutes; Papers relating to the History of the Church in Virginia, 1650-1770, by W. S. Perry, 1870; Hammond’s Leah and Rachel, 1656; Bishop Meade’s Old Churches, etc., 1855; “Notes on the Virginia Colonial Clergy” in the Episcopal Recorder, and reprinted separately by E. D. Neill, 1877; Savage’s Winthrop’s History of New England, and Anderson’s Church of England in the Colonies, 1856.

The writer has also in his possession the Records of the Monthly Meeting of Henrico County, June 10, 1699-1797, which he designs to use in a history of the Society of Friends in Virginia. He has also earlier isolated records, and a partial registry of births, marriages, and deaths of those of the faith of the Society in Henrico and Hanover counties in the eighteenth century.

For an account of early manufactures in Virginia, see Bishop’s History of American Manufactures, 1866. For a view of the early agriculture, see a paper by the present writer on the History of Tobacco in Virginia from its Settlement to 1790; Statistics, Agriculture, and Commerce, prepared for the Tenth Census; History of Agriculture in Virginia, by N. F. Cabell, 1857; the Farmers’ Register, 1833-42; Transactions of the State Agricultural Society of Virginia, 1855; and “Virginia Colonial Money and Tobacco’s Part therein,” by W. L. Royall, in Virginia Law Journal, August, 1877.

For a view of slavery in the colony, see Bancroft, ch. v.; O’Callaghan’s Voyages of the Slavers; Wilson’s Rise and Fall of the Slave Power; Cobb’s Inquiry; and the works of Cabell, Fitzhugh, Fletcher, Hammond, Ross, Stringfellow, and general histories.

It is evident that no single author has yet given an adequate history of Virginia; and while it is true that much precious material therefor has perished, it is believed that the original record is yet not wanting for such a representation of the past of the State as would be at once more intelligible as to the motives which occasioned events, and more convincingly just in the recital of them.

[167]

EDITORIAL NOTES.

A. Maps of Virginia or the Chesapeake.—There seem to have been visits of the Spaniards to the Chesapeake at an early day (1566-1573), and they may have made a temporary settlement (1570) on the Rappahannock. (Robert Greenhow in C. Robinson’s Discoveries in the West, p. 487, basing on Barcia’s Ensayo Chronologico; Historical Magazine, iii. 268, 318; J. G. Shea in Beach’s Indian Miscellany.) In the map which De Bry gave with the several editions of Hariot in 1590, the bay appears as “Chesepiooc Sinus;” but in the more general maps, shortly after, the name Chesipooc, or some form of it, is applied rather wildly to some bay on the coast, as by Wytfliet’s in 1597, or earlier still by Thomas Hood, 1592, where the “B. de S. Maria” of the Spaniards, if intended for the Chesapeake, is given an outline as vague as the rest of the neighboring coast, where it appears as shown in the sketch in chapter vi. between the Figs. 1 and 2. It may be, as Stevens contends (Historical and Geographical Notes), that not before Smith were the entangling Asian coast-lines thoroughly eliminated from this region; but certainly there was no wholly recognizable delineation of the bay till Smith recorded the results of the explorations which he describes in his Generall Historie, chs. v. and vi. Smith indicates by crosses on the affluents of the bay the limits of his own observations. Strachey’s Historie of Travaile, p. 42.

In Smith’s Map of Virginia, with a Description of the Country, etc., Oxford, 1612, W. S., or William Strachey, eked out the little tract with an appendix of others’ contributions. Strachey afterwards adopted a considerable part in his Historie of Travaile. Mr. Deane, in his edition of the True Relation, p. xxi, has given a full account of this tract. Smith reprinted it in his Generall Historie with some changes and additions and small omissions. Purchas reprinted it in his Pilgrimes, but not without changes and omissions of small extent, and with some additions, which he credits on the margin to Smith; and he had earlier given an abstract of it in his Pilgrimage. There is a copy of the original in the Lenox Library. Tyler, American Literature, i. 30, notices it.

The map accompanying this tract, engraved by W. Hole, appeared in three impressions (Stevens’s Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, no. 1,903). It was altered somewhat, and the words, “Page 41, Smith,” were put in the lower right-hand corner, when it was next used in the Generall Historie, 1624 and later; and in 1625 it was again inserted at pp. 1836-37 of Purchas’s Pilgrimes, vol. iv. De Bry next re-engraved it in part xiii. of his Great Voyages, printed in German, 1627, and in Latin 1634; and in part xiv. in German in 1630 (Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 370-71). It was also re-engraved for Gottfriedt’s Newe Welt, published at Frankfort, and marked “Erforshet und beschriben durch Capitain Iohan Schmidt.” The compiler of this last book was J. Ph. Abelin, who had been one of De Bry’s co-workers, and he made this work in some sort an abridgment of De Bry’s, use being made of his plates, often inserting them in the text, the book being first issued in 1631, and again in 1655. (Muller’s Books on America, 1872, no. 636, and (1877) no. 1,269.)

The map was next used in two English editions of Hondy’s Mercator, “Englished by W. S.” 1635, etc., but with some fanciful additions, as Mr. Deane says (Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 1103). The map of the coast in De Laet, 1633 and 1640, was, it would seem, founded upon it for the Chesapeake region; cf. also the map of Virginia and Florida called “par Mercator,” of date 1633, and the maps by Blaeu, of 1655 and 1696.

Once more Smith’s plot adorned, in 1671, Ogilby’s large folio on America, p. 193, as it had also found place in the prototype of Ogilby, the Amsterdam Montanus of 1671 and 1673. In these two books (1671-73) also appeared the map “Virginiæ, partis australis et Floridæ, partis orientalis, nova descriptio,” which shows the coast from the Chesapeake down to the 30th degree of north latitude.

Smith’s was finally substantially copied as late as 1735, as the best available source, in A Short Account of the First Settlement of the Provinces, etc., London, 1735,—a contribution to the literature of the boundary dispute, and was doubtless the basis of the map in Keith’s Virginia in 1738; but it finally gave place to Fry and Jefferson’s map of the region in 1750.

A phototype fac-simile, reduced about one quarter, of the earliest state of the original map in the Harvard College copy of the Oxford tract of 1612 is given herewith. A similar fac-simile, full size, is given in Mr. Deane’s reprint of the True Relation, though it was not published in that tract. A lithographic fac-simile, full size, but without the pictures in the upper corners, is given in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Strachey, p. 23. Other reproductions will be found in Scharf’s Maryland, i. 6, Scharf’s Baltimore City and County, 1881, p. 38, and in Cassell’s[168] United States, p. 27. That in the Richmond (1819) reprint of the Generall Historie is well done, full size, on copper. This copperplate was rescued in 1867 from the brazier’s pot by the late Thomas H. Wynne, and at the sale of his library in 1875 was purchased for the State Library of Virginia.

Neill, in his Virginia Company, p. 191, mentions “A mapp of Virginia, discovered to ye Hills and its latt. from 35 deg. and ½ neer Florida to 41 deg. bounds of New England. Domina Virginia Ferrar collegit, 1651,” and identifies this compiler of the map as a daughter of John Ferrar. The map we suppose to be the one engraved by Goddard. This map is associated with a London publication of 1650, called Virgo triumphans, or Virginia richly and truly valued, which is usually ascribed to Edward Williams, but is held nevertheless to be in substance the work of John Ferrar of Geding. There were two editions of this year (1650): Brinley Catalogue no. 3,816; Quaritch, General Catalogue, no. 12,535, held at £36 John Ferrar’s copy of the first edition, with his notes, and the original drawing of the map, inserted by Ferrar to make up a deficiency in the first edition, of which he complains. Quaritch prices a good copy without such annotations at £25. The second edition (1650) had additions, as shown in the title, Virginia, more especially the South part thereof, second edition, with addition of the discovery of silkworms, etc. In this the same map appeared engraved as above, and the Huth copy of it has it in two states, one without, and the other with an oval portrait of Sir Francis Drake. (Huth Catalogue, v. 1594.) The Harvard College copy lacks the map, which is described by Quaritch (no. 12,536, who prices this edition at £32) in a copy from the Bathurst Library, as a folding sheet exhibiting New Albion as well as Virginia, with the purpose of showing an easy northern passage to the Pacific, the text representing the Mississippi as dividing the two countries, and flowing into the South Sea; see also Menzies’ Catalogue, no. 2,143, and the note in Major’s edition of Strachey, p. 34, on a map published in 1651 in London. This second edition was the one which Force followed in reprinting it in his Tracts, vol. iii. no. 11. The Huth Catalogue notes a third edition, Virginia in America richly valued, 1651. The map is given on a later page.

B. The Virginia Historical Society.—From 1818 to 1828 the eleven volumes of the Evangelical and Literary Magazine, edited at Richmond by John Holt Rice, D.D., had contained some papers on the early history of the State, but no organized effort was made to work in this direction before the Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society was formed, in December, 1831, with Chief Justice Marshall as president, and under its auspices a small volume of Collections was issued in 1833; but from February, 1838, to 1847 the Society failed to be of any influence. Meanwhile, from 1834 to 1864 the Southern Literary Messenger afforded some means for the local antiquaries and historical students to communicate with one another and the public.

In December, 1847, a revival of interest resulted in a reorganization of the old Association as the Virginia Historical Society, with the Hon. William C. Rives as president. Promptly ensuing, Maxwell’s Virginia Historical Register was started as an organ of the Society, and was published from 1848 to 1853,—six volumes. The Society laid a plan of publishing the annals of the State, and, as preliminary, intrusted to Conway Robinson, Esq., the preparation of a volume which was published in 1848 as An Account of the Discoveries in the West until 1529, and of Voyages to and along the Atlantic Coast of North America from 1520 to 1573. This was an admirable summary, and deserves wider recognition than it has had. It subsequently published, besides various addresses, The Virginia Historical Reporter, 1854-1860, which contained accounts of the Society’s meetings. The Civil War interrupted its work, but in 1867 the Society was again resuscitated, and it has been under active management since. There is a bibliography of its publications in the Historical Magazine, xvii. 340. Its historical students have contributed to the files of the Richmond Standard since Sept. 7, 1878, much early reprinted and later original matter relating to Virginia.


NOTE.—Since this chapter was completed has appeared Mr. George W. Williams’s Negro Race in America, which has a chapter on the history of Slavery in the colony of Virginia; and also Mr. J. A. Doyle’s The English in America, Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, London, 1882.


[169]

CHAPTER VI.

NORUMBEGA AND ITS ENGLISH EXPLORERS.

BY THE REV. BENJAMIN F. DE COSTA, D.D.

Formerly Editor of the Magazine of American History.

THE story of Norumbega is invested with the charms of fable and romance. The name is found in the map of Hieronimus da Verrazano of 1529, as “Aranbega,” being restricted to a definite and apparently unimportant locality. Suddenly, in 1539, Norumbega appears in the narrative of the Dieppe Captain as a vast and opulent region, extending from Cape Breton to the Cape of Florida. About three years later Allefonsce described the “River of Norumbega,” now identified with the Penobscot, and treated the capital of the country as an important market for the trade in fur. Various maps of the period of Allefonsce confine the name of Norumbega to a distinct spot; but Gastaldi’s map, published by Ramusio in 1556,—though modelled after Verrazano’s, of which indeed it is substantially an extract,—applies the name to the region lying between Cape Breton and the Jersey coast. From this time until the seventeenth century Norumbega was generally regarded as embracing all New England, and sometimes portions of Canada, though occasionally the country was known by other names. Still, in 1582, Lok seems to have thought that the Penobscot formed the southern boundary of Norumbega, which he shows on his map[329] as an island; while John Smith, in 1620, speaks of Norumbega as including New England and the region as far south as Virginia. On the other hand Champlain, in 1605, treated Norumbega as lying within the present territory of Maine. He searched for its capital on the banks of the Penobscot, and as late as 1669 Heylin was dreaming of the fair city of Norumbega.

Grotius, for a time at least, regarded the name as of Old Northern origin, and connected with “Norbergia.” It was also fancied that a people resembling the Mexicans once lived upon the banks of the Penobscot. Those who have labored to find an Indian derivation for the name say that it means “the place of a fine city.” At one time the houses of the city were supposed to be very splendid, and to be supported upon pillars of crystal and silver. Pearls were also reported as abundant, which at that[170] early period was no doubt the case. Charlevoix offers the unsupported statement that Francis I. made Roberval “Lord of Norumbega.” Roberval was certainly the patentee of the whole territory of Norumbega, though Mark Lescarbot made merry over the matter, as he could find nothing to indicate any town except a few miserable huts. It is reasonable to infer, however, that at an early period an Indian town of some celebrity existed. Like the ancient Hochelaga, which stood on the present site of Montreal and was visited and described by Cartier, it eventually passed away. To-day, but for Cartier, Hochelaga would have had quite as mythical a reputation as Norumbega, which, however, still forms an appropriate theme for critical inquiry.[330]

The first Englishman whose name has been associated with any portion of the region known as Norumbega was John Rut. This adventurer reached Newfoundland during August, 1527, and afterwards, according to Hakluyt’s report, sailed “towards Cape Breton and the coastes of Arembec;” but Purchas, who was better informed, says nothing about any southward voyage. One of the ships, the “Sampson,” was reported as lost, while the other, the “Mary of Guilford,” returned to England. There is nothing to prove that Rut even reached Cape Breton; much less is it probable that he explored the coast southward, along Nova Scotia, which was called “Arembec.”

The first Englishman certainly known to have reached any portion of the region here treated as Norumbega was David Ingram, a wandering sailor. During October, 1568, with about one hundred companions, he was landed on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico by Captain John Hawkins, who, on account of the scarcity of provisions, sailed away and left these messmates behind. With two of his companions Ingram travelled afoot along the Indian trails, passing through the territory of Massachusetts and Maine to the St. John’s River, where he embarked in a French ship, the “Gargarine,” commanded by Captain Champagne, and sailed for France. The narrative of his journey is profusely embellished by his imagination, it may be,—as is generally held; but that he accomplished the long march has never been doubted. At that period the minds of explorers were dazzled by dreams of rich and splendid cities in America, and Ingram simply sought to meet the popular taste by his reference to houses with pillars of crystal and silver.[331] He also says that he saw the city of Norumbega, called Bega, which was three fourths of a mile long and abounded with peltry. There is no doubt of his having passed through some large Indian village, and possibly his Bega may have been the Aranbega of Verrazano.

At the close of 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert made a voyage to North America, but may not have visited Norumbega. The earliest mention[171] of his expedition is that found in Dee’s Diary, under date of Aug. 5, 1578, where he says: “Mr. Raynolds, of Bridewell, tok his leave of me as he passed towards Dartmouth to go with Sir Umfry Gilbert towards Hochelaga.”[332]

The first known English expedition to Norumbega was made in a “little ffrigate” by Simon Ferdinando, who was in the service of Walsingham. Ferdinando sailed from Dartmouth in 1579, and was absent only three months. The brief account does not state what part of Norumbega was visited; but the circumstances point to the northern part, and presumably to the Penobscot region of Maine. It would also appear that the voyage was more or less of the nature of a reconnoissance.

The first Englishman known to have conducted an expedition to Norumbega was John Walker, who, the year following the voyage of Ferdinando, sailed to the river of Norumbega, in the service of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He reached the Penobscot, of which he gave a rough description, finding the region rich in furs, as described by Allefonsce and Ingram. He discovered a silver mine where modern enterprise is now every year opening new veins of silver and gold. This voyage, like that of his predecessor, proved a short one,—the return trip being made direct to France, where the “hides” which he had secured were sold for forty shillings apiece.

In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland; and afterwards sailed for Norumbega, whither his “man” Walker had gone three years before. In latitude 44° north, near Sable Island, he lost his great ship, the “Admiral,” with most of his supplies; when, under stress of the autumnal gales, the brave knight reluctantly abandoned the expedition and shaped his course for home, sailing in a “little ffrigate,”—possibly the “barck” of Ferdinando. Off the Azores, in the midst of a furious storm, the frigate went down, carrying Sir Humphrey with her; just as, shortly before, Parmenius—a learned Hungarian who had joined the enterprise expressly to sing the praise of fair Norumbega in Latin verse—had gone down in the “Admiral.”

In 1584, while Sir Humphrey Gilbert lay sleeping in his ocean grave, Raleigh was active in Virginia, where the work of colonization was pushed forward during a period of six years.[333] Meanwhile the services of Simon Ferdinando as pilot were employed in this direction in the pay of Granville, and Norumbega for a space was unsearched, so far as we know, by the exploring English. There seems, however, ground for supposing that the fisheries or trade in peltries may have allured an occasional trafficking vessel, and contraband voyages may have been carried on without the knowledge of the patentee, the furs being sold in France. The elder Hakluyt appears to have had a very fair idea of the region, and he knew of the copper mines off the eastern coast of Maine, at the Bay of Menan, which was laid down on the map of Molyneux. Nevertheless, the only voyager that we can now[172] point to is Richard Strong, of Apsham, who, in 1593, sailed to Cape Breton, and afterwards cruised some time “up and down the coast of Arembec to the west and southwest of Cape Breton.” He doubtless searched for seal in the waters of Maine, and made himself familiar with its shores. It is said that he saw men, whom he “judged to be Christians,” sailing in boats to the southwest of Cape Breton.

The opening of the seventeenth century witnessed a revival of English colonial enterprise; and Sir Walter Raleigh, though busy with schemes for privateering, nevertheless found time to think of Virginia, of which, both north and south, he was now the patentee. Accordingly he sent out a vessel to Virginia under Mace, evidently with reference to the lost colonists.[334] Upon the return of Mace, Sir Walter went to Weymouth to confer with him, when, to his surprise, he learned that, without authority, another expedition had visited that portion of his grant which was still often called Norumbega. This was the expedition of Gosnold, who sailed from Falmouth, March 26, 1602, in a small bark belonging to Dartmouth, and called the “Concord.” The company numbered thirty-two persons, eleven of whom intended to remain and plant a colony, apparently quite forgetful of the fact that they were intruders and liable to be proceeded against by the patentee. In this voyage Gosnold took the direct route, sailing between the high and low latitudes, and making a saving of nearly a thousand miles. In this respect he has been regarded as an innovator, though probably Walker pursued the same course. If there is no earlier instance, Verrazano, as we now know, in 1524 set navigators the example of the direct course, thereby avoiding the West Indies and the Spaniards. It is reasonable to suppose that Gosnold took the idea direct from Verrazano, as he left Falmouth with the Florentine’s letter in his hand, referring directly to it in his own letter to his father; while Brereton and Archer made abundant use of it in their accounts of the voyage. On May 14 Gosnold sighted the coast of Maine near Casco Bay, calling the place Northland; twelve leagues southwest of which he visited Savage Rock, or Cape Neddock, where the Indians came out in a Basque shallop, and with a piece of chalk drew for him sketches of the coast. Next Gosnold sailed southward sixteen leagues to Boon Island, and thence, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he steered out “into the sea,” holding his course still southward until morning, when the “Concord” was embayed by a “mighty headland.” Their last point of departure could not have been nearer the “mighty headland,” which was Cape Cod, than indicated by the sailing time. If the starting-point had been Cape Ann, they would have sighted Cape Cod before sunset. Archer says, when at Savage Rock, that they were short of their “purposed voyage.” They had, then, a definite plan. Evidently they were sailing to the place, south of Cape Cod, described in the letter of Verrazano. Gosnold may have seen this island in the great Verrazano map described by Hakluyt. At all events[173] Cape Cod was rounded, and the expedition reached that island of the Elizabeth group now known as Cuttyhunk, where, upon an islet in a small lake, they spent three weeks in building a fortified house, which they roofed with rushes. All this work they kept a secret from the Indians, while they intended, according to the narrative, to establish a permanent abode. Indeed, this appears to have been the particular region for which Sir Humphrey was sailing in 1583, as we know by Hakluyt’s annotation on the margin of his translation of Verrazano which Gosnold used.

From Cuttyhunk the members of the expedition made excursions to the mainland, and they also loaded their vessel with sassafras and cedar. When, however, the time fixed for the ship’s departure came, those who were to remain as colonists fell to wrangling about the division of the supplies; and, as signs of a “revolt” appeared, the prospects of a settlement began to fade, if indeed the idea of permanence had ever been seriously entertained. Soon “all was given over;” and June 17 the whole company abandoned their beautiful isle, with the “house and little fort,” and set sail, desiring nothing so much as the sight of their native land. Gliding past the gorgeous cliffs of Gay Head, the demoralized company had no relish for the scene, but sailed moodily on to No-Man’s Land, where they caught some wild fowl and anchored for the night. The next day the “Concord,” freighted we fear with discord, resumed the voyage, and took her tedious course over the solitary sea.

Gosnold reached South Hampton on the 23d of July, having “not one cake of bread” and only a “little vinegar left;” yet even here his troubles did not end, for in the streets of Weymouth he soon encountered Sir Walter Raleigh, who confiscated his cargo of sassafras and cedar boards, on the ground that the voyage was made without his consent, and therefore contraband. Gosnold nevertheless protected his own interests by ingratiating himself with Raleigh, leaving the loss to fall the more heavily on his associates. Thus was Raleigh made, upon the whole, well pleased with the results of the voyage, and he resolved to send out both ships again. Speaking with reference to the unsettled region covered by his patent, he says, “I shall yet live to see it an Englishe nation.”

The year 1603 was signalized by the death of Elizabeth and the accession of James, while at nearly the same time Raleigh’s public career came to an end. Before the cloud settled upon his life, two expeditions were sent out. The “Elizabeth” went to Virginia, under the command of Gilbert, who lost his life there; while Martin Pring sailed with two small vessels for New England. Pring commanded the “Speedwell,” and Edmund Jones, his subordinate, was master of the “Discoverer.” This expedition had express authority from Raleigh “to entermeddle and deale in that action.” It was set on foot by Hakluyt and the chief merchants of Bristol. Leaving England April 10, Pring sighted the islands of Maine on the 2d of June, and, coasting southward, entered one of the rivers. He finally reached Savage Rock, where he failed to find sassafras, the chief object of his voyage,[174] and accordingly “bore into that great Gulfe which Captaine Gosnold overshot.” This gulf was Massachusetts Bay, the northern side of which did not answer his expectations; whereupon he crossed to the southern side, and entered the harbor now called Plymouth, finding as much sassafras as he desired, and he remained there for about six weeks. The harbor was named Whitson, in honor of the Mayor of Bristol; and a neighboring hill, probably Captain’s Hill, was called Mount Aldworth, after another prominent Bristol merchant. On the shore the adventurers built a “small baricado to keepe diligent watch and warde in” while the sassafras was being gathered in the woods. They also planted seed to test the soil. Hither the Indians came in great numbers, and “did eat Pease and Beans with our men,” dancing also with great delight to the “homely musicke” of a “Zitterne,” which a young man in the company could play. This fellow was rewarded by the savages with tobacco and pipes, together with “snake skinnes of sixe foote long.” These were used as belts, and formed a large part of the savage attire, though upon their breasts they wore plates of “brasse.”

By the end of July Pring had loaded the “Discoverer” with sassafras, when Jones sailed in her for England, leaving Pring to complete the cargo of the other ship. Soon the Indians became troublesome, and, armed with their bows and arrows, surrounded the “baricado,” evidently intending to make an attack; but when Pring’s mastiff, “greate Foole,” appeared, holding a half-pike between his jaws, they were alarmed, and tried to turn their action into a jest. Nevertheless, the day before Pring sailed for England, they set the forest on fire “for a mile space.” On August 9 the “Elizabeth” departed from Whitson Bay, and reached Kingsroad October 2. Thus two years before Champlain explored Plymouth Harbor, naming it Port of Cape St. Louis, ten years before the Dutch visited the place, calling it Crane Bay, and seventeen years before the arrival of the Leyden Pilgrims, Englishmen became familiar with the whole region, and loaded their ships with fragrant products of the neighboring woods.

We next approach the period when the French came to seek homes on the coasts of the ancient Norumbega, as, in 1604, De Monts and Champlain established themselves at St. Croix,—the latter making a voyage to Mount Desert, where he met the savages, who agreed to guide him to the Penobscot, or Peimtegoüet, believed to be the river “which many pilots and historians call Norembegue.” He ascended the stream to the vicinity of the present Bangor, and met the “Lord” of Norumbega; but the silver-pillared mansions and towers had disappeared. The next year he coasted New England to Cape Malabar, but a full account of the French expeditions is assigned to another volume of the present work.

The voyage of Waymouth, destined to have such an important bearing upon the future of New England colonization, was begun and ended before Champlain embarked upon his second expedition from St. Croix, and the[175] English captain thus avoided a collision with the French. Waymouth sailed from Dartmouth on Easter Sunday, May 15, 1605 evidently intending to visit the regions south of Cape Cod described by Brereton and Verrazano. Upon meeting contrary winds at his landfall in 41° 2´ north, being of an irresolute temper, he bore away for the coast farther east; and on June 18 he anchored on the north side of the island of Monhegan. He was highly pleased with the prospect, and hoped that it would prove the “most fortunate ever discovered.” The next day was Whitsunday, when he entered the present Booth’s Bay, which he named Pentecost Harbor. He afterwards explored the Kennebec, planting a cross at one of its upper reaches; and, sailing for England June 16, he carried with him five of the Kennebec natives, whom he had taken by stratagem and force.

In connection with Waymouth’s voyage we have the earliest indications of English public worship, which evidently was conducted according to the forms of the Church, in the cabin of the “Archangel,” the savages being much impressed thereby.[335] The historian of Waymouth’s voyage declares “a public good, and true zeal of promulgating God’s holy Church by planting Christianity, to be the sole intent of the honorable setter forth of this discovery.”

The narrative of Waymouth’s voyage was at once published, and attracted the attention of Sir John Popham, chief-justice. It also greatly encouraged Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who, in connection with Sir John, obtained from King James two patents,—one for the London and the other for the Plymouth company; the latter including that portion of ancient Norumbega extending from 38° north to 45° north, thus completely ignoring the claims of the French. The patentees were entitled to exercise all those powers which belong to settled and well-ordered society, being authorized to coin money, impose taxes and duties, and maintain a general government for twenty-one years.

This was accomplished in 1606, when Sir Ferdinando Gorges sent out a ship under Captain Challons, which was captured by the Spaniards and never reached her destination. Before hearing of the loss of this ship, another was despatched under Thomas Hanam, with Martin Pring as master. Failing to find Challons, they made a very careful exploration of the region, which Sir Ferdinando says was the best that ever came into his hands. In the mean time the five Indians brought home by[176] Waymouth had been in training for use in connection with colonization under the supervision of Gorges. Indeed he expressly says that these Indians were the means, “under God, of putting on foot and giving life to all our plantations.” Accordingly the plans of a permanent colony were projected, and on the last day of May, 1607, two ships—the “Gift of God” and the “Mary and John”—were despatched under the command of Captain George Popham, brother of the chief-justice, and Captain Raleigh Gilbert. At the end of twenty-one days the expedition reached the Azores, where the “Mary and John,” having been left behind by her consort, barely escaped from the Netherlanders. Finally, leaving the Azores, Gilbert stood to sea, crossing the ocean alone, and sighted the hills of Le Have, Nova Scotia, July 30. After visiting the harbor of Le Have, Gilbert sailed southward, rounding Cape Sable, and entered the “great deep Bay” of Fundy. Then he passed the Seal Islands, evidently being well acquainted with the ground, and next shaped his course for the region of the Penobscot, looking in the mean time for the Camden Hills, which, on the afternoon of August 5, lifted their three double peaks above the bright summer sea. As he confidently stood in towards the land, the Matinicus Islands soon shone white “like unto Dover clifts;” and afterward the “Mary and John” found good anchorage close under Monhegan, Waymouth’s fortunate island, named in honor of England’s patron saint, St. George. Landing upon the island Gilbert found a sightly cross, which had been set up by Waymouth or some other navigator. The next morning, as the “Mary and John” was leaving Monhegan, a sail appeared. It proved to be the “Gift of God,” of whose voyage no account is now known. In company with his consort Gilbert returned to the anchorage ground. At midnight he made a visit to Pemaquid, on the mainland, accompanied by Skidwarres, one of Waymouth’s Indians, rowing over the placid waters with measured stroke among many “gallant islands.” They found the village sought for, and then returned. The next day was Sunday, when the two ships’ companies landed upon Monhegan,—then crowned with primeval forests and festooned with luxuriant vines,—where their preacher, the Rev. Richard Seymour, delivered a discourse and offered prayers of thanksgiving. The following is the entry of the pilot:—

“Sondaye beinge the 9th of August, in the morninge the most part of our holl company of both our shipes landed on this Illand, the wch we call St. George’s Illand, whear the crosse standeth; and thear we heard a sermon delyvred unto us by our preacher, gguinge God thanks for our happy metinge and saffe aryvall into the contry; and so retorned abord aggain.”

This, so far as our present information extends, is the first recorded religious service by any English or Protestant clergyman within the bounds of New England, which was then consecrated to Christian civilization.

On Sunday, August 19, after encountering much danger, both ships were safely moored in the harbor of Sagadahoc at the mouth of the Kennebec. The adventurers then proceeded to build a pinnace called the “Virginia,” the first vessel built in New England. She crossed the Atlantic several times.

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ANCIENT PEMAQUID.

This sketch-map follows one given with Sewall’s paper on “Popham’s town,” in Maine Hist. Coll., vii. See a more extended sketch of the coast in the Critical Essay.

The Kennebec was explored by Gilbert, while a fort, a church, a storehouse, and some dwellings were built upon the peninsula of Sabino, selected as the site of the colony. The two ships returned to England, the “Mary and John” bearing a Latin epistle from Captain Popham to King James. It gave a glowing description of the country, which was even supposed to produce nutmegs. During the winter Popham died; and in the spring, when a ship came out with supplies, the colonists were found to be greatly discouraged, their storehouse having been destroyed by fire, and the winter having proved extremely cold. Besides, no indications of precious metals were found, and they now learned that the chief-justice, like his brother, had passed away. Accordingly the fort, “mounting twelve guns,” was abandoned, and Strachey says “this was the end of that northern colony upon the river Sagadehoc.”

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After the abandonment of Sabino the English were actively engaged in traffic upon the coast; as appears from the testimony of Captain John Smith, who, in describing his visit to Monhegan in 1614, says that opposite “in the Maine,” called Pemaquid, was a ship of Sir Francis Popham, whose people had used the port for “many yeares” and had succeeded in monopolizing the fur-trade. The particulars concerning these voyages, and the scattered settlers around the famous peninsula of Pemaquid, are not now accessible.

The next Englishman to be referred to is Henry Hudson, who, with a crew composed of English and Dutch, visited Maine in 1609,—probably finding a harbor at Mt. Desert, where he treated the Indians with cruelty and fired upon them with cannon. Sailing thence he touched at Cape Cod, and went to seek a passage to the Indies by the way of Hudson River, which had been visited by Verrazano in 1524, and named by Gomez the following year in honor of St. Anthony. The voyage of Hudson is not of necessity connected with English enterprise.[336] The next year Captain Argall, from Virginia, visited the Penobscot region for supplies, but he does not appear to have communicated with any of his countrymen.

In 1611 the English showed themselves on the coast with a strong hand. This fact is learned from a letter of the Jesuit Biard, who, in writing to his superior at Rome, gives the history of an encounter between the English and French. From his narrative it appears that early in 1611 a French captain, named Plastrier, undertook to go to the Kennebec, and was made a prisoner by two ships “that were in an isle called Emmetenic, eight leagues from the said Kennebec.” He escaped by paying a ransom and agreeing not to intrude any more. This fact coming to the knowledge of Biencourt, the commander at Port Royal, the irate Frenchman proceeded to the Kennebec to find the English and to obtain satisfaction from them. Upon reaching the site of the Popham colony at Sabino, Biencourt found the place deserted. On his return he visited Matinicus (Emmetenic), where he saw the shallops of the English on the beach, but did not burn them, for the reason that they belonged to peaceful civilians and not to soldiers. Who then were the English for whom Biencourt was so considerate? Evidently they were those led by Captains Harlow and Hobson, who, as stated by Smith, sailed from Southampton for the purpose of discovering an isle “supposed to be about Cape Cod.” They visited that cape and Martha’s Vineyard, and, it would appear, sailed along the coast of Maine, where they showed Plastrier their papers, indicating that they acted by authority. Possibly, however, Sir Francis Popham’s agent, Captain Williams, may have been the commander who expelled the French. At all events there was no lack of English representation on the coast of New England in 1611. Smith, speaking in a fit of discouragement, says that “for any plantation there was no more speeches;” but the fact that Sir Francis annually for many years sent ships to the coast indicates brisk enterprise, though there[179] may have been no movement in favor of such a venture as that of the colony of 1607. Many scattered settlers, no doubt, were living around Pemaquid. Smith may be quoted again as saying that no Englishman was then living on the coast; but this is something that he could not know. It is also opposed to recognized facts, and to the declaration of Biard that the English in Maine desired “to be masters.” Still we do not at present know the name of a single Englishman living in New England during the winter of 1611. In 1612 Captain Williams was opposite Monhegan, at Pemaquid, where, no doubt, his agents lived all the year round, collecting furs. In 1613 the scene became more animated. At this period the French were boldly inclined, and Madame de Guercheville had determined to found a Jesuit mission in what was called Acadia. In 1613, therefore, the Jesuits Biard and Masse left Port Royal and proceeded to establish themselves on the border of Somes’s Sound in Mount Desert, where they began to land their goods and build a fortification, the ship in which they came being anchored near the shore. Argall, who was fishing in the neighborhood, learned of their arrival from the Indians, and by a sharp and sudden attack captured the French ship. He sent a part of the company to Nova Scotia, and carried others to Virginia. This action was not justified by the English Government, and some time afterward the French ship was surrendered.[337]

In the year 1614 Captain John Smith, the hero of Virginia, enters upon the New England scene; yet his coming would appear, in some respects, to have been without any very careful prevision, since he begins his narrative by saying, “I chanced to arive in New England, a parte of Ameryca, at the Ile of Monahiggan.” The object of his expedition was either to take whales or to try for mines of gold; and, failing in these, “Fish and Furres was our refuge.” In most respects the voyage was a failure, yet it nevertheless afforded him the opportunity of writing his Description of New England, whose coast he ranged in an open boat, from the Penobscot to Cape Cod. His brief description, so fresh and unconventional, will never lose its value and charm; and, because so unique, it will maintain a place in the historical literature of its time. Smith knew that his impressions were more or less crude, yet the salient features of the coast are well presented. At the Penobscot he saw none of the people, as they had gone inland for the summer to fish; and at Massachusetts, by which he meant the territory around Boston, “the Paradise of all those parts,” he found the French six weeks in advance of him, they being the first Europeans known to have visited the place. The River of Massachusetts was reported by the natives as extending “many daies Iourney into the entralles of that countrey.” At Cohasset he was attacked by the natives, and was glad to escape; while at Accomacke, which he named Plymouth, he found nothing lacking but “an industrious people.” He was the third explorer to proclaim[180] in print the value of the situation.[338] One result of his examination was his Map of New England, which he presented to Prince Charles.[339]

During the year 1614 another expedition was sent out. Gorges says that while he was considering the best means of reviving his “languishing hopes” of colonization, Captain Harlow brought to him one of the Indians whom he had captured in 1611. This savage, named Epenow, had been exhibited in London as a curiosity, being “a goodly man of brave aspect.” Epenow was well acquainted with the New England tribes. At the same time Sir Ferdinando had recovered Assacumet, one of Waymouth’s Indians, who had been carried to Spain, in 1606, when Challons was captured by the Spaniards. The possession of these two Indians inspired the knight with hope, since he was firmly persuaded that in order to succeed in colonization it would be necessary to have the good-will of the natives, whose co-operation he hoped to secure through the good offices of those whom he had taught to appreciate, in some measure, the advantages of English civilization. In this respect he was wise. In connection therefore with the Earl of Southampton he fitted out a ship, which was put in command of Captain Hobson, whom he describes as “a grave gentleman.” Hobson himself invested a hundred pounds in the enterprise, one of the main objects of which was to discover mines of gold. This metal, Epenow said, would be found at Capawicke, or Martha’s Vineyard. Hobson sailed in June, 1614, and finally reached the place where Epenow was “to make good his undertaking,” and where the savages came on board and were entertained in a friendly and hospitable way. Among the guests were Epenow’s brothers and cousins, who improved the occasion to arrange for his escape,—it being decided, as it appears from what followed, that upon their return he should jump overboard and swim away, while the tribe menaced the English with arrows. They accordingly appeared in full strength at the appointed time, when Epenow, though closely watched, and clothed in flowing garments to render his retention the more certain, succeeded in evading his keepers and jumped overboard. Hobson’s musketeers immediately opened fire, foolishly endeavoring to shoot the swimming savage, while Epenow’s friends bravely shot their arrows and wounded the master of the ship and many of the crew. In the end Epenow escaped; and Sir Ferdinando says: “Thus were my hopes of that particular mode void and frustrate;” adding, that such are “the fruits to be looked for by employing men more zealous of gain than fraught with experience how to make it.” Hobson however did not lose so much as was supposed; for, though no doubt Epenow believed that gold existed at Capawicke, and that if it should prove necessary he could bring the English to the mine, it is clear that no precious metal existed. The supposed gold was simply a[181] sulphate of iron, which the mineralogist finds to-day in the aluminous clays of Gay Head.

Though both Smith and Hobson had failed essentially in the objects of their voyage, the former was not in the slightest degree disheartened, but spoke in such glowing terms of the country and its resources that the Plymouth Company resolved to take vigorous action, and offered Smith “the managing of their authority in those parts” for life. The London Company was also stirred up, and sent out four ships before the people of Plymouth acted. The Londoners offered Smith the command of their ships, which he declined, having already made a life-engagement. Nevertheless the London ships sailed in January, led by Captain Michael Cooper, and reached Monhegan in March, where they fished until June, and then sent a ship of three hundred tons to Spain loaded with fish. This ship was taken by the Turks, while another sailed to Virginia, leaving the third to return to England with fish and oil. Smith’s Plymouth friends, however, furnished only two ships. Nevertheless he sailed with these, Captain Dermer being second in command. His customary ill fortune still attended him, and not far from port he lost both his masts, while his consort went on to New England. Sailing a second time in a small vessel of sixty tons, Smith was next captured by French pirates; and, while tossing at sea in captivity, wrote his Description of New England. His language has been regarded as very significant where he speaks of “the dead patent of this unregarded country;” but this is the language of a depressed prisoner. The patent was not dead; while, if it had been dead, English enterprise was alive, of which his own voyage, though cut short by pirates, was a convincing proof. To show that the patent was not dead, the Plymouth Company, in 1615, sent out Sir Richard Hawkins, who was acting “as President for that year.” Hawkins sailed October 15. Gorges says that he spent his time while in New England very usefully in studying the products of the country; but unfortunately he arrived at the period when the Indian war was at its height, and many of the principal natives were killed. From New England he coasted to Virginia, and thence he sailed to Spain, “to make the best of such commodities as he had got together,” which Sir Ferdinando loosely says “was all that was done by any of us that year.” Nevertheless, Smith tells us that Plymouth in 1616 sent out four ships, and London two; while Purchas states that “eight voluntarie ships” went to New England to make “further tryall.” Another of two hundred tons, the “Nachen,” commanded by Edwarde Brawnde, who addressed an account of the voyage to “his worthye good frend Captayne John Smith, admirall of New England,” also went out. In his letter reference is made to other vessels on the coast. The “Nachen,” of London, sailed from Dartmouth March 8, and reached Monhegan April 20. Afterwards Brawnde went to Cape Cod in his pinnace to search for pearls, which were also the first things sought for by the Leyden emigrants, in 1620, when they reached the harbor of Provincetown. Brawnde also mentions that he had his boats detained by Sir[182] Richard Hawkins, who thus appears to have wintered upon the coast and to have sailed to Virginia in the spring. Notwithstanding various mishaps, Brawnde entertained a favorable impression of New England, where profitable voyages were to be made in fish and furs, if not spoiled by too many factors, while he found the climate good, and the savages “a gentell-natured people,” altogether friendly to the English.

In 1617 Smith himself made the discovery that the patent of New England was not dead. At that time he had secured three ships, while his life-appointment for the new country was reaffirmed. Still misfortune continued to pursue him, and he did not even succeed in leaving port. Together with a hundred sail he was wind-bound at Plymouth for three months. By the terms of the contract he says that he was to be admiral for life, and “in the renewing of their Letters pattents so to be nominated.” But for the unfortunate head-winds he would have gone to New England in 1617 and undertaken a permanent work, as the times were ripe. He might have begun either at Plymouth or Massachusetts, “the paradise of all those parts,” and thus have made Boston anything but a Nonconformist town.

In 1618 the English were still active, and Captain Rocroft went to Monhegan to meet Captain Dermer, who was expected from Newfoundland. Dermer, however, failed to appear, while Rocroft improved the occasion to seize “a small barque of Dieppe,” which he carried to Virginia. This Frenchman was engaged in the fur-trade at Saco, in disregard of the claims of the English; but Gorges, with his customary humanity, condoned the offence, the man “being of our religion,” and kindly made good his loss. Soon after capturing the French trader, Rocroft came near being the victim of a conspiracy on the part of certain of his own men. When the plot was discovered he spared their lives, but set them ashore at Saco, whence they went to Monhegan and passed the winter, but succeeded in escaping to England in the spring. About this time that poorly known character, Sir Richard Vines, passed a winter on the coast, probably at Saco, sleeping in the cabins of the Indians, and escaping the great plague, which swept away so many of the Sagamores. The winter fisheries were commonly pursued, and the presence of Englishmen on the coast all the year round was no doubt a common thing, while a trading-post must have been maintained at Pemaquid. Rocroft finally sailed to Virginia, where he wrecked his vessel, and then lost his life in a brawl. Thus suddenly this “gallant soldier” dropped out of New England history.

With the summer of 1619 Dermer finally reached Monhegan, the rendezvous of English ships, and found that Rocroft had sailed for Virginia. While his people engaged in fishing, he explored the coast in a pinnace as far as Plymouth, having Squanto for his guide, and then travelled afoot westward to Nummastuquyt, or Middleboro’. From this place he sent a messenger to the border of Narragansett Bay, who brought “two kings” to confer with him. Here also he redeemed a Frenchman who had been wrecked at Cape Cod. Dermer adds immediately, that he obtained another[183] at Mastachusit, or the region about Boston, which he must have visited on his way back to Monhegan. The account of his exploration is meagre; and he hints vaguely at a very important island found June 12, which may have been thought gold-bearing, as he says that he sent home “some of the earth.” Near by were two other islands, named “King James’s Isles,” because from thence he had “the first motives to search for that now probable passage which hereafter may be both honorable and profitable to his Majesty.” Clearly he refers to a supposed passage leading through the continent to the Pacific and the Indies. In a letter to Purchas, not now known, he mentioned the important island first referred to, and probably described its locality, though its identity is now left to conjecture. It may have been situated near Boston Harbor, while the “probable passage” may have been suggested by the mouths of the Mystic and the Charles, which, according to the report given by the natives to Smith, penetrated many days’ journey into the country.

Dermer finally reached Monhegan, and sent his ship home to England. He afterwards put his surplus supplies on board the “Sampson,” and despatched her for Virginia. He then embarked once more in his pinnace to range along the coast. Near Nahant, during a storm, his pinnace was beached; but getting off with the loss of many stores, and leaving behind his Indian guide, he sailed around Cape Cod. At a place south of the cape he was taken prisoner by the natives, but he escaped covered with wounds. Subsequently he sailed through Long Island Sound, and, passing through Hell Gate, he found it a “dangerous cataract.” While here the savages on the shore saluted him with a volley of arrows. In New York Harbor the natives proved peaceable, and undertook to show him a strait leading to the west; but, baffled by the wind, he sailed southward to Virginia, where he made a map of the coast, which he would not “part with for fear of danger.” This map probably exhibited his ideas respecting the “westward passage,” which was to be concealed from the French and Dutch.[340] In Virginia this late but hopeful explorer of Norumbega died.

Dermer was emphatically an explorer, and even in 1619 was dreaming of a route through New England to China; but his most important work was the peace made with the Indians at Plymouth. It is mentioned in his report to Gorges. This report was quoted in the Relation of the president and council, and was used by Morton and Bradford. The latter quotes him as saying, with reference to Plymouth, “I would that the first plantation might here be seated, if there come to the number of fifty persons or upward.” This was but the echo of Captain John Smith. Morton endeavors, in an ungenerous spirit, to cheapen the services of Dermer, but it would be as just to underrate the work of the English on the Maine[184] coast; and we should remember that it was their faithful friend the Pemaquid Chief Samoset who hailed the Leyden colonists, upon their arrival at Plymouth, with the greeting, “Welcome, Englishmen!”[341] This was simply the natural result of the policy of peace and good-will which imparted a gracious charm to the life of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who may be well styled the Father of New England Colonization. Here we leave the English explorers of Norumbega.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

DOCUMENTS, whether in our own tongue or in others, which throw light upon the explorations of the English in Norumbega are by no means wanting. They embrace formal report and epistolary chronicle in great variety and of considerable extent. In some cases they are full and rich in details, but in others they disappoint us from their meagreness. Such deficiency particularly confronts us when we are searching for the tracks of their progress in maps or charts of these early dates.

The English, in reality, were behind the age in maritime enterprise,[342] and this forms one reason for the delay in colonizing ancient Norumbega.[343]

The present writer has never found an Indian on the coast of Maine who could recall the word Norumbega, or any similar word. M. Beauvois shows, among other facts, that the Icelandic vaga is the genitive plural of vagr, signifying “a bay.” Possibly, however, the word is Spanish. In this language b and v are interchangeable; and vagas often occurs on the maps, signifying “fields;” while norum may be simply a corruption of some familiar compound. Perhaps the explanation of the word does not lie so far away as some suppose, though the study of the subject must be attended with great care. In this connection may be consulted such works as Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi, etc., Venice, 1556, iii. 359; the Ptolemy of Pativino, Venice, 1596, p. 281; Wytfliet’s Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum, etc., Douay, 1603, p. 99; Magin’s Histoire Universelle, Douay, 1611, p. 96; Introductio in Universam Geographicam, by Cluverius, Amsterdam, 1729, p. 673; De Laet’s Nieuwe Wereldt, etc.; Leyden, 1625, p. 64, and his Histoire du nouveau Monde, etc., Leyden, 1640, p. 58; Ogilby’s America, 1671, p. 138; Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Wereldt, Amsterdam, 1671, p. 29; Dapper’s Die unbekante Neue Welt, etc., Amsterdam, 1673, p. 30. The subject of the varying bounds and the name is also discussed by Dr. Woods in his introduction to Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, p. lii, and by the following: Sewall, Ancient Dominions of Maine, p. 31; De Costa, Northmen in Maine, p. 44; Murphy, Verrazano, p. 37; Historical Magazine, ii. 187; Magazine of American History, May, 1881, p. 392.

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The voyage of John Rut has been pointed out as the earliest voyage having a possible connection with any portion of the territory of Norumbega, which never included Bacalaos, though Bacalaos, an old name of Newfoundland, sometimes included New England. The extreme northeastern extension of Norumbega was Cape Breton. It was towards Cape Breton and the coasts of Arembec, that Rut is said to have sailed when he left St. John. Hakluyt is the first authority summoned in connection with a subject which has elicited much curious discussion; but Hakluyt was poorly informed.[344] He refers to the chronicles of Hall and Grafton, who said that Henry VIII. sent out two ships, May 20, 1527; yet he did not know either the name of the commander or of the ships, one of which was given as the “Dominus vobiscum.” Purchas, however, gives the names of both ships, and the letter of Captain Rut to Henry VIII., together with a letter in Latin, written by Albert de Prato, a canon of St. Paul’s, London, which is addressed to Cardinal Wolsey.[345] Hakluyt, in his edition of 1589, reads, “towards the coasts of Norombega,” instead of Arembec, as in the edition of 1600. The latter appears to be a correction intended to limit the meaning. Arembec may have been a name given to Nova Scotia. A similar name was certainly given to one or more islands near the site of Louisburg.[346] According to Hakluyt, Rut often landed his men “to search the state of those unknown regions,” after he left the northerly part of Newfoundland; but the confused account does not prove that it was on Cape Breton or Arembec that they landed. Rut says nothing about any such excursion, but simply says that he should go north in search of his consort, the “Samson,” and then sail with all diligence “to that island we are commanded;” and Hakluyt says that it was an expedition intended to sail toward the North Pole. Nevertheless, it has been fancied that Rut, in the “Mary of Guilford,” explored all Norumbega, and then went to the West Indies. This notion is based upon the statement of Herrera, who tells of an English ship which lost her consort in a storm, and in 1519 came to Porto Rico from Newfoundland,[347] the pilot, who was a native of Piedmont, having been killed by the Indians on the Atlantic coast.[348] Herrera’s date has been regarded as wrong; and it has been corrected, on the authority of Oviedo, and put at 1527. There is no proof that Rut lost his pilot; but as he had with him a learned mathematician, Albert de Prato, a priest, it has been assumed that the priest was both a pilot and an Italian, and consequently that the vessel seen at Porto Rico was Rut’s. It would be more reasonable[186] to suppose that this was the missing “Samson,” or else one of the English traders sent to the West Indies in 1526/7.[349] The ship described by Herrera was a “great ship,” heavily armed and full of stores. On the other hand, the “Mary of Guilford” was a small vessel of one hundred and sixty tons only, prepared for fishing.[350] Finally, Rut was still at St. John August 10, while Hakluyt states that the “Mary of Guilford” reached England by the beginning of October. This, if correct, renders the exploration of Norumbega and the cruise in the West Indies an impossibility. Nevertheless Rut must have accomplished something, while it is significant that when Cartier explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in 1534, he found a cape called Cape Prato, apparently a reminiscence of the canon of St. Paul’s.[351]

David Ingram’s narrative, referred to in the text, was printed by Hakluyt in 1589,[352] who, however, omitted it in 1600. Ingram suffered much, and saw many things, no doubt, with a diseased brain. He listened also to the stories of others, repeating them with additions in sailor fashion; and, besides, may have been moved by vanity. Purchas, referring to Hakluyt, says, “It seemeth some incredibilities of his report caused him to leave him out in the next Impression, the reward of lying being not to be believed in truths.”[353]

The larger portion however, of the statements in his narrative appears to be true. He seems to have occupied about eleven months in reaching a river which he calls Gugida,[354] this being simply the Indian Ouigoudi of Lescarbot,[355] and the Ouygoudy of Champlain,[356] who, June 24, 1604, explored the river, and named it the St. John.

Concerning Simon Ferdinando there has been much misapprehension. He was connected with the Virginia voyages in 1584-86. In the latter year his ship was grounded. This led to his being loaded with abuse by White.[357] It was re-echoed by Williamson[358] and Hawks.[359] The latter declared that he was a Spaniard, hired by his nation to frustrate the English colony, calling him a “treacherous villain” and a “contemptible mariner;” yet Hawks did not understand the subject. Subsequently, Ferdinando’s real character[187] came to light; and, in one of the oldest pieces of English composition produced on the continent of North America, his skill and faithfulness were applauded by Ralph Lane.[360] He was one of the numerous Portuguese domiciled in England; but he had powerful friends like Walsingham, and thus became the leader of the first-known English expedition to Norumbega. His life was somewhat eventful, and like most men of his class he occasionally tried his hand at privateering. At one time he was in prison on a charge of heresy, and was bailed out by William Herbert, the vice-admiral. His voyage of 1579 seems hitherto to have escaped notice; but this, together with his personal history, would form the subject of an interesting monograph.

It was through the calendars of the state-paper office that the fact of John Walker’s voyage became known some time since, but not as yet with detail; and it is only by means of a marginal note, which makes Walker “Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s man,” that we get any clew to its purpose, and from which we are led to infer its tentative character, and its influence upon Gilbert’s subsequent career.[361]

Upon reaching Sir Humphrey Gilbert we discover a man rich in his intentions respecting Norumbega. He was the patentee,[362] and he possessed power and resources which would have insured success but for the untimely termination of his career. The true story of his life yet remains to be written, and in competent hands it would prove a noble theme.[363] The State Papers afford many documents throwing light upon his history, while the pages of Hakluyt supply many facts.[364]

The work of Barlow and others, from 1584 to 1590, does not properly belong to the story of Norumbega; yet the attempts in Virginia may be studied for the side-lights which they afford, the narratives being given by Hakluyt,[365]—who also gives the voyage of the “Marigold” under Strong, fixing the site of Arembec on the coast southwest of Cape Breton.[366]

With the opening of the seventeenth century the literature of our subject becomes richer. Gosnold’s voyage, now shorn of much of its former prestige, has only recently come to be understood. It was somewhat fully chronicled by Brereton and Archer, each of whom wrote accounts. The original volume of Brereton forms a rare bibliographical treasure.[367] It has been reprinted by the Massachusetts Historical[188] Society,[368] but an edition properly edited is much needed. In 1625 Purchas gave Archer’s account, with a letter by Brereton to Raleigh, and Gosnold’s letter to his father.[369] The voyage is also treated in the Dutch collection of Van der Aa,[370] which gives an engraving at variance with the text, in that it represents the savages assisting Gosnold in building his island fortification, the construction of which was in fact kept a secret. The voyage of Gosnold has been accepted as an authorized attempt at colonization, and used to offset the Popham expedition of 1607; but that part of the titlepage of Brereton which says that the voyage was made by the permission of Raleigh is now known to be untrue, and the contraband character of the enterprise stands confessed.[371]

It has been said more than once that Drake visited New England, and gave Gosnold some account thereof; but while he brought home the Virginia adventurers in 1587, and may then have touched on the coast of North Virginia, no early account of any such visit is found. It has also been said that Gosnold went so far in the work of fortification as to build a platform for six guns. The authority for the statement does not appear.[372]

The voyage of Martin Pring, as already pointed out, was a legitimate enterprise, having the sanction of Sir Walter Raleigh, the patentee.[373] This voyage is also the more noticeable as having had the active support of Hakluyt. Harris says that a thousand pounds were raised for the enterprise, and that Raleigh “made over to them all the Profits which should[189] arise from the Voyage.”[374] Here, therefore, it may be proper to delay long enough to indicate something of Hakluyt’s great work in connection with colonization.

Richard Hakluyt was born about the year 1553, and was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church College, Oxford. At an early age he acquired a taste for history and cosmography. In the preface to his work of 1589, dedicated to Walsingham, he says:—

“I do remember that being a youth, and one of her Maiestie’s scholars at Westminster, that fruitfull nurserie, it was my happe to visit the chamber of Mr. Richard Hakluyt my cosin, a Gentleman of the Middle Temple, well known unto you, at a time when I found lying vpen his boord certeine bookes of Cosmosgraphie with a vniversal Mappe: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof, began to instruct my ignorance by showeing me the divisions thereof.”

His cousin also turned to the 107th Psalm, relating to those who go down into the sea in ships and occupy themselves on the great waters. Upon which Hakluyt continues:—

“The words of the Prophet, together with my cousin’s discourse (things of high and rare delight to my young nature), tooke so deepe an impression that I constantly resolved, if euer I were preferred to the Vniversity, where better time and more convenient place might be ministered for these studies, I would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature, the doores whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me.”

This interview decided Hakluyt for life, and one of the first fruits of his zeal was his Divers Voyages, published in 1582.[375] In 1589 appeared his Principal Navigations.[376] In the year 1600 he enlarged his work, bringing it out in three volumes. In 1605 Hakluyt was made a prebend of Westminster; and in 1609 he published Virginia Richly Valued, being the translation of a Portuguese work.[377] Hakluyt also published other pieces. He died in Herefordshire, in 1616, finding a burial-place in Westminster Abbey. Still curiously enough, notwithstanding his great services to American colonization, his name has never been applied to any portion of our country; though Hudson, in 1608, named a headland on the coast of Greenland in his honor. He left behind, among other manuscripts, one entitled A Discourse of Planting, recently published, though much of the essence of the volume had been produced before in various forms.[378] Among the tracts appended to Brereton are the Inducements of Hakluyt the Elder, who appears to have known all about the Discourse.[379]

In connection with the voyage of Waymouth, 1605, one topic of discussion relates to the particular river which he explored. This, indeed, is a subject in connection with which a divergence of opinion may be pardonable. Did he explore the St. George’s River, or the Kennebec? Belknap, however, in 1796, in a crude fashion and with poor data, held that the Penobscot was the river visited.[380] In 1857 a Maine writer took the ground that Waymouth explored the Kennebec.[381] Other writers followed with pleas for the St.[190] George’s.[382]

SKETCH-MAP OF THE MODERN COAST OF MAINE.

1. Portsmouth.
2. York [Gorgiana, 1641].
3. Agamenticus.
4. Saco.
5. Richmond Island.
6. Casco.
7. Sabino [Popham’s Colony].
8. Sagadahoc River.
9. Damariscotta River.
10. Sheepscott River.
11. Pemaquid.
12. Monhegan Island.
13. Fox Islands.
14. Isle au haut.
15. Castine [Pentagöet, Bagaduce].
16. Mount Desert.
17. Kennebec River.
18. Penobscot River.
19. George’s River.
20. St. George’s Islands [? Pentecost harbor].
21. Boothbay [? Pentecost].
22. Camden Hills.
23. Damariscove Islands.
A. Lygonia, 1630; subsequently part of Gorges and Mason’s grant, 1622, and Somersetshire, 1635.
B. Plymouth grant.
C. Muscongus, 1630.
D. Waldo patent.

See for the region about Pemaquid the map in the narrative part of this chapter.

Ballard wrote what was, in most respects, a convincing argument in support of the Kennebec River.[383] In opposition to the advocate of the Kennebec, it has been said that[191] the high mountains seen by Waymouth were not the White Mountains,—for the reason that the White Mountains could not be seen,—but were the Camden hills, towards which he went from Monhegan; and consequently that he reached the St. George’s River, which lies in that direction. It has been said, also, that the White Mountains cannot be seen from that vicinity. This is simply an assumption. The White Mountains are distinctly visible in fair weather from the deck of a ship lying inside of Monhegan.[384] Yet the mountains in question have less to do with the subject than generally supposed, since a careful examination of the obscure text shows that it is not necessary to understand Rosier as saying that in going to the river they sailed directly towards the mountains. His language shows that they “came along to the other islands more adjoining the main, and in the road directly with the mountains.”[385] Here it is not necessary to suppose that it was the course sailed that was direct, but rather that it was the road that was direct with the mountains,—the term road signifying a roadstead, or anchorage place at a distance from the shore, like that of Monhegan. Beyond question Waymouth saw both the White and the Camden mountains; but they do not form such an essential element in the discussion as both sides have fancied. Strachey really settles the question where he says that Waymouth discovered two rivers,—“that little one of Pamaquid,” and “the most excellent and beneficyall river of Sachadehoc.”[386] This river at once became famous, and thither the Popham colonists sailed in 1607. In fact, the St. George’s River was never talked about at that period, being even at the present time hardly known in geography, while the importance of the Kennebec is very generally understood.

The testimony of another early writer would alone prove sufficient to settle the question. In fact, no question would ever have been raised if New England writers had been acquainted with the works of Champlain at an earlier period. In July, 1605, Champlain visited the Kennebec, where the natives informed him that an English ship had been on the coast, and was then lying at Monhegan; and that the captain had killed five Indians belonging to their river.[387] These were the five Indians taken by Waymouth at Pentecost Harbor—the modern Booth’s Bay—who were supposed to have been killed, though at that time sailing on the voyage to England unharmed.

The narrative of the expedition of Waymouth was written by James Rosier, and published in 1605.[388] It was printed by Purchas, with a few changes, in 1625;[389] and reprinted[192] by the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1843.[390] This narrative forms the source of almost everything that is known about the voyage. It contains some perplexing passages; but when properly interpreted, it is found that they are all consistent with other statements, and prove that the river explored was the Kennebec.

The story of the Popham Colony, of 1607-8, at one time occasioned much acrimonious discussion, for which there was no real occasion; but of late the better the subject has been understood, the less reason has been found for any disagreement between the friends of the Church of England and the apologists of New England nonconformity.

Prior to the year 1849 the Popham Colony was known only through notices found in Purchas,[391] the Brief Relation,[392] Smith,[393] Sir William Alexander, Gorges,[394] and others. In the year 1849, however, the Hakluyt Society published Strachey’s work, entitled The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, edited by R. H. Major; chapters viii., ix., and x. of which contained an account of the Popham Colony found to be much fuller than any that had appeared previously. In 1852 these chapters were reprinted with notes in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society;[395] and the next year four chapters of the work were reprinted by the Maine Historical Society.[396] In 1863 the same society published a Memorial Volume, which was followed by heated discussions, some of which, with a bibliography of the subject, were published in 1866. Articles of a fugitive character continued to appear; and, finally, in 1880, there came from the press the journal of the voyage to the Kennebec in 1607, by one of the adventurers,[397] which was reprinted in advance from the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society.[398] It would seem from the internal evidence furnished by the journal and the express testimony of Purchas,[399] that this composition was by James Davies, who, in the organization at the Sagadahoc, held the office of Captain of the Fort. This journal was found to be the source whence Strachey drew his account of the colony, large portions of which he copied verbatim, giving no credit. Since the publication of this journal no new material has been brought to light.[400]

The Popham Colony formed a part of the work undertaken by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his colaborers, who sought so long and so earnestly to accomplish the colonization of New England.[401] Many experiments were required to insure final success, and the attempt at Sagadahoc proved eminently useful, contributing largely to that disciplinary experience essential under such circumstances. Viewed in its necessary and logical connection,[193] it need not be regarded as a useless failure, since it opened the eyes of adventurers more fully, bringing a clearer apprehension of the general situation and the special requirements of the work which the North Virginia Company had in hand.

A paragraph that may have some bearing on the condition of things in Maine after the year 1608 appeared in 1609, and runs as follows: “Two goodly Rivers are discovered winding farre into the Maine, the one in the North part of the Land by our Westerne Colonie, Knights and Gentlemen of Excester, Plymouth, and others. The other in the South part thereof by our Colonie of London.”[402] Again a letter by Mason to Coke, assigned to the year 1632, teaches that the work of colonization was considered as having been continued from 1607.[403] This would seem to indicate, that, in the opinion of the writer, the work was not wholly abandoned; yet, concerning the actual condition of affairs on the Maine coast for several years after the colonists left Fort Popham, much remains to be learned. From neglected repositories in the seaport towns of the south of England, material may yet be gleaned to show a continuous line of scattered residents living around Pemaquid during all the years that followed the departure of the Popham colonists from Sabino[404] in 1608.

The visit of Henry Hudson to New England in 1609 is described in Juet’s Journal.[405]

Argall’s visit to New England in 1610 is treated by Purchas, though it has made no figure in current histories.[406] What appears to be the most correct account of the voyage of Hobson and Harlow, in 1611, is found in Smith. The student may also consult the Briefe Relation,[407] which, however, appears to confuse the account by introducing an event of 1614, the capture of Indians by Hunt. Gorges is also confused here, as in many other places.[408] We are indebted to the French for the account of the capture and ransom of Plastrier.[409]

In connection with Argall’s descent upon the French at Mount Desert, it will be necessary to consult the Jesuit Relations,[410] which throw considerable light upon the transactions of the English at this period; also the State Papers. These show that Argall’s ship was named the “Treasurer.”[411] Champlain says that this ship mounted fourteen guns, while ten more English vessels were at hand.[412] If his statement is correct, there must have been a large number of Englishmen on the coast at this period.

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Smith, in 1614, as at other times, is his own historian, and his writings show the growth of the feeling that existed with respect to colonization, and they at the same time illustrate his adverse fortune.[413]

Gorges gives an account of Hobson’s and Harlow’s voyage for 1614.[414] Hunt’s cruelty, in connection with the Indians whom he enslaved and sold in Spain, is made known by Smith.[415] Some of these Indians recovered their liberty, and Bradford speaks of Squanto, the interpreter to the Plymouth Colony.[416]

Gorges makes us acquainted with Sir Richard Hawkins, who was on the New England coast at the close of the year 1615. Sir Richard was the son of the famous John Hawkins, who set David Ingram and his companions ashore in the Bay of Mexico. Hawkins was born in 1555, and in 1582 he conducted an expedition to the West Indies. In 1588 he is found in command of the “Swallow,” and he distinguished himself in the defeat of the Armada. He next sailed upon an expedition to the Pacific, where he was captured and carried to Spain.[417] In 1620 he was named in connection with the Algerine expedition, dying at the end of 1621 or the beginning of 1622. A full account of his transactions in New England would be very interesting; but the account of Gorges, in connection with Brawnde’s Letter to Smith, must suffice.[418]

The story of Rocroft is told by Gorges, and Dermer writes of his own voyage at full length.[419]

It remains now to speak of the old cartology, so far as it may afford any traces of the English explorers of Norumbega. At the outset the interesting fact may be indicated that the earliest reference to Norumbega upon any map is that of the Italian Verrazano, 1529; while the most pronounced, if not the latest, mention during the seventeenth century is that of the Italian Lucini, who engraved over his “Nova Anglia” the word “Norambega,” which is executed with many flourishes.[420]

Passing over the first cartographical indication of English exploration on the coast of North America, in the map of Juan de la Cosa, which is figured and described in the chapter on the Cabots; and passing over the French and the Italians,[421]—adverting but[195] for a moment to the Dauphin map of 1543, with its novel transformation of the name Norumbega into Anorobagea,—the next map that needs mention is that of John Rotz, of 1542. It is of interest, for the reason that the “booke of Idrography,”[422] of which it forms a part, was dedicated by its author to Henry VIII. Rotz subscribes himself “sarvant to the King’s mooste excellente Majeste.” The English royal arms are placed at the beginning, though originally Rotz intended to present the book to Francis I. Indeed, the outline of the coast is drawn according to the French idea. Nevertheless, the names on the map are chiefly Spanish. It shows no English exploration; and, in a general way, indicates an absence of geographical knowledge on the part of that nation, which, however, is recognized by the legend placed in the sea opposite the coast between Newfoundland and the Penobscot. The legend is as follows: “The new fonde lande quhaz men goeth a-fishing.” The main features of the coast are delineated. Cape Breton and the Strait of Canseau, with the Penobscot and Sandy Hook, are defined; but Cape Cod, the “Arecifes” of Rotz, appears only in name, though in its proper relation to the Bay of St. John the Baptist, a name given to the mouth of Long Island Sound, in connection with the Narragansett Waters. The word Norumbega does not occur, and the nomenclature is hardly satisfactory. It contains no reference either to Verrazano or Cartier. The so-called map of Cabot, 1544, does not touch the particular subject under notice.[423]

HENRI II. (DAUPHIN) MAP, 1546.

The legends are as follows:—

2. C. des Illes.
3. Anorobagea.
4. Arcipel de Estienne Gomez. [This voyage of Gomez will be described in Vol. IV.]
5. Baye de St. Jhon Baptiste.
6. R. de bona mere.
7. B. de St. Anthoine.
8. R. de St. Anthoine.
9. C. de St. Xρofle.
10. R. de la tournee.
11. C. de Sablons.—Ed.

Frobisher’s map of 1578 shows a strait at the north leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and bearing his name, but the map throws no light upon Norumbega.[424]

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Dr. John Dee was much interested in American enterprise, and made a particular study of the northern regions, as well as of the fisheries. Under date of July 6, 1578, he speaks of “Mr. Hitchcok, who had travayled in the plat for fishing.”[425] A map bearing the inscription, “Ioannes Dee, Anno, 1580,” is preserved in the British Museum.[426] It reminds one of Mercator’s map of 1569, but is not so full. Dee was frequently invited to the Court of Elizabeth to make known her title to lands in the New World that had been visited by the English; and he was deferred to by Hakluyt, Gilbert, Walsingham, and others.

He writes in his diary, under date of July 3, 1582, “A meridie hor 3½ cam Sir George Peckham to me to know the tytle of Norombega, in respect of Spayn and Portugall parting the whole world’s distilleryes; he promised me of his gift and of his patient ... of the new conquest.”[427] Gilbert’s voyage was then being projected, but Dee’s map has no reference to him or the English adventurers.[428] It shows the main divisions of the coast of Norumbega, except Cape Cod, from Sandy Hook to Cape Breton. The Penobscot is well defined, and Norombega lies around its headwaters.

The map in Hakluyt’s Edition of Peter Martyr, published 1587, shows the English nomenclature around and north of the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but it gives away the territory of Norumbega to the French as Nova Francia. On the west coast of North America is Nova Albion. In Nova Francia there is a river apparently bearing the name of Arambe, which, it has been suggested, was used later in a restricted sense. Not far from this river, at the south, is the legend, “Virginia, 1580.”[429]

A map made in 1592, by Thomas Hood, does not show any English influence on the coast, but Norombega is represented north of the Penobscot, which is called R. des Guamas, intended for “Gamas,” the Stag River.[430]

The globe of Molyneux[431] shows the explorations of Davis in the north, and its author calls the northern continent, north of Sandy Hook, “Carenas.” Confusion reigns to a considerable extent. Norumbega is confined to the Penobscot, and nothing is indicated with respect to the English in that quarter.

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The map of Molyneux, 1600, is extremely interesting, but it does not show the operations of the English in New England, though the Bay of Menan is recognized, this being the place so well known to Hakluyt the Elder for its deposits of copper.[432] New England, as on Lok’s map, is shown as an island.[433]

The cartology at this period is very disappointing though the maps pointed out the main features of the coast. In many respects they were inferior to some of the earlier maps, and were occupied with a vain iteration. A little later the map of Lescarbot, of 1609, as might be supposed, is poor in its outlines and devoted rather to the French occupation.[434]

HOOD’S MAP, 1592.

The Legends are as follows:—

1. Rio de S. Spo.
2. Rio Salado.
3. C. de S. Joan.
4. C. de las arenas.
5. C. de Pero (arenas).
6. Santiago.
7. B. de S. Christoforo.
8. Monte Viride.
9. R. de buena madre.
10. St. John Baptista.
11. Terrallana.
12. C. de las Saxas.
13. Archipelago.
14. C. S. Maria.
15. C. de mucas yas.
16. R. das Guamas.
17. Aracifes.
18. R. de Mōtanas.
19. R. de la Plaia.—Ed.

Smith’s well-known map, issued with his Description of New England in 1616, was the[198] earliest to give a configuration of the coast, approaching accuracy; and he could have found little in Lescarbot’s and Champlain’s maps to assimilate, even if he had known them. Cape Cod now for the first time was drawn with its characteristic bend. Smith says that he had brought with him five or six maps, neither true to each other nor to the coast.

Smith’s map did not originally contain a single English name,[435] but the young Prince Charles, to whom it was submitted in accordance with Smith’s request, changed about thirty “barbarous” Indian names for others, in order that “posterity” might be able to say that that royal personage was their “godfather.” A number of Scotch names were selected, among others, by the grandson of the Queen of Scots. Smith gave the name of Nusket to Mount Desert, confusing it, perhaps, with the aboriginal Pemetic, which was changed to Lomond, given as “Lowmonds” on the map. The prince very naturally desired to give names recalling the country of his birth; and while Ben Lomond, one of the noblest Caledonian hills, bears a certain grand resemblance to its namesake, the breezes of the lake of Mount Desert, like “answering Lomond’s,”

“Soothe many a chieftain’s sleep.”

In a similar spirit he named the Blue Hills of Milton the “Cheuyot hills;” the ancient river of Sagadahoc being the Forth, with what was intended for “Edenborough” standing near its headwaters. There is nothing on the map to recall the nonconformists of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, who afterwards came upon the coast, except Boston and Hull which stand near the Isles of Shoals, being, in fancy, close together on the map, as afterwards they were reproduced farther south, in fact.

The young prince, then a lad of about fifteen, no doubt had suggestions made to him respecting the names to be selected, as he favored the southern and southwestern communities like Bristol and Plymouth, which furnished those expeditions encouraged by churchmen like Popham and Gilbert. Poynt Suttliff forms a distinct recognition of Dr. Sutliffe, the Dean of Exeter, who took so much interest in New England.[436]

On this map we find the ancient Norumbega called New England. Rich says that Smith was the first to apply this name. In reply, Mr. Henry C. Murphy has referred to its alleged use by a Dutchman in 1612.[437] Special reference is made to a statement printed upon the back of a map contained in a book brought out by Hessell Gerritsz at Amsterdam, giving a description of the country of the Samoieds in Tartary. The phrase used, however, is not “New England,” nor “Nova Anglia,” but “Nova Albion,”[438] which was applied to the whole region by Sir Francis Drake, in his explorations on the Pacific coast.

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At that time the continent lying between the Atlantic and the Pacific was regarded as a narrow strip of land; and as late as 1651 it was estimated that it was only ten days’ journey on foot from the headwaters of the James to the Pacific.[439] In 1609 the country was called Nova Britannia. It would seem, therefore, according to present indications, that Smith was entitled to the credit given him by Rich. At all events the importance of Smith’s work in New England cannot be questioned. Smith himself was not backward in asserting the value of his services, declaring in one place that he “brought New England to the Subjection of the Kingdom of Great Britain.”[440] After the publication of his map, Norumbega well-nigh disappeared from the pages of travellers,[441] and a new series of observation of the territory was begun by the authors of works like those which chronicled the doings of the Leyden Adventurers in New England.

EDITORIAL NOTES.

A. Earliest English publications on America.—The backwardness of the English in all that related to the extension of American discovery is distinctly apparent in the comparatively few publications from the London press in the sixteenth century which conduced to spread intelligence of the New World on the land and incite rivalry on the ocean. The following list will show this:—

1509. When Alexander Barclay put Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools into English verse and published it in folio in London, he disclosed one of the earliest references to the Spanish discoveries which the English people could have read. This book is very rare; a copy brought £120 at the Perkins sale in London in 1873,—Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 245. This edition has of late been reprinted in England, edited by Jamieson.

1511.(?) A book Of the newe Lādes, printed about this time at Antwerp, but in English, is thought to have been the earliest original treatise in the English tongue which makes any mention of America. The New World is supposed to be meant by “Armenica.” Harrisse, however, assigns 1522 as its date,—Bibl. Amer. Vet. p. 196. There is a copy in the British Museum.

1519, though put by some as early as 1510. A new Interlude of the iiij. Elements. This has been already described in Mr. Deane’s chapter.

1517. Wynkyn de Worde printed Watson’s English prose translation of Brant’s Ship of Fools.

A half century and more slipped away without the English press taking heed, except in such chance notices as these, of what was so closely engaging the attention of the rest of Europe. But in

1553 appeared the earliest book produced in England chiefly devoted to the American discoveries, and this was Richard Eden’s Treatyse of the newe India, which he had translated from the Latin of the fifth book of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia, pp. 1099 to 1113. See Carter-Brown Cat. p. 171, and further in the chapter on the Cabots.

Munster was one of the most popular cosmographers of his day. He had begun his work in 1532 by supplying a map by Apianus to Gyrnæus’s Novus Orbis of that date, which was not very creditable, being much behind the times; and he made amends by trying to give the latest information in an issue of Ptolemy, which he edited in 1540, to which he supplied a woodcut map that did service in a variety of publications for nearly all the rest of the century. It was one of the earliest maps, in which interstices were left in the block for the insertion of type for the names, and in this way it was made to accompany both German and Latin texts. It was also used in Sylvanus’s Ptolemy, the names being in red. Kohl, Disc. of Maine, p. 296; Harvard Coll. Lib. Bull. i. 270.

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Munster’s Cosmographia, to which he transferred this map, was first published in German, according to Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 258, quoting the Labanoff Catalogue, in 1541, and again in 1544, with a new map. After this there were two German (1545 and 1550) and one Latin (1550) edition, each published at Basle, and a French edition (1552), all of which are generally noted, besides Eden’s version of 1552 (owned by Mr. Brevoort); cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, 1865, p. 27, and an earlier one (1543), cited in Poggendorff’s Biog.-lit. Handwörterbuch, ii. 234, which is not so generally recognized, if indeed it exists at all. The statement is, however, enough to indicate that Eden thus made a popular book the medium of his first presentation to the English public.

TITLE OF EDEN’S MUNSTER.

The cut is taken from the Carter-Brown Catalogue. The Colophon reads: “Thus endeth this fyfth boke of Sebastian Munster, of the lādes of Asia the greater, and of the newefounde landes, and Ilandes. 1553.”

1555. Richard Eden, who to his book-learning added the results of converse with sailors, next published his Decades of the Newe Worlde, or West India, derived in large part, as shown in Mr. Deane’s chapter, from the Latin of Peter Martyr. This made to the English public the first really collective presentation of the results of the maritime enterprise of that time. (H. Stevens, Bibl. Hist. 1870, no. 632; Field, Indian Bibliog. no. 484; Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 184, with fac-simile of title.) Among the supplemental matters was a “Description of the two Viages made out of England into Guinea,” in 1553-54, which were the earliest English voyages ever printed. This 1555 edition, which fifty years ago was worth in good copies six guineas (Rich’s Catalogue, 1832, no. 30), will now bring about £25. The Editor has used the Harvard College and Mr. Charles Deane’s copies. There was sold in the Brinley sale, no. 40, the 1533 edition of Peter Martyr, which was the copy used by Eden in making this translation, and it is enriched with his little marginal maps and annotations. See Sabin’s Dictionary, i. 201, where it is said Bellero’s map, measuring 5 × 6½ inches, is found in some copies. The Lenox copy has a larger map, 10½ × 7 inches, with a similar title.

1559. “A perticular Description of suche partes of America as are by travaile founde out,” made the last chapter of a heavy folio, The Cosmographicalle Glasse, which appeared in London, the work of a young man, William Cunningham, twenty-eight years old, a doctor in physics and astronomy. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 214, where a fac-simile of the author’s portrait as it appeared in the book is given.

1563. The whole and true discouerie of Terra Florida, as set forth in English, following Ribault’s narrative, was published in London on the 30th of May. The book is so scarce that the Lenox and Carter-Brown Libraries have been content with manuscript copies from the volume in the British Museum. This may possibly indicate that the destruction of the edition followed upon much reading and thumbing.

1568. The New found Worlde, or Antarctike
... travailed and written in the French tong.
by that excellent learned man, Master Andrewe Thevet, and now newly translated into English. Imprinted at London for Thomas Hacket.
This

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is a translation of Thevet’s well-known but untrustworthy book. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 241; there is also a copy in H. C. Murphy’s collection.

MUNSTER, 1540.

This sketch-map needs the following key:—

1. India Superior.
2. Archipelagus 7448 Insularum.
3. Francisca.
4. C. Britonum.
5. Terra Florida.
6. Cortereali.
7. Hispaniola.
8. Cuba.
9. Iucatan.
10. Jamica.
11. Antillæ.
12. Dominica.
13. Zipangri.
14. Paria.
15. Regio Gigantum.
16. Fretum Magalini.
17. Insulæ Inforunatæ.
18. Oceanus Occidentalis.
19. Insulæ Hesperidum.
20. Insula Atlantica quam vocant Basilij et Americam.

1570. Another English edition of Barclay’s version of the Ship of Fools. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 243, gives the title and portrait of Brant in fac-simile.

1572. Eden’s version of Munster again appeared under the title of A briefe Collection and Compendious Extract of Straunge and Memorable Thinges, gathered out of the Cosmographeye of Sebastian Munster. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 172.

1574. Eden’s Briefe Collection was reissued. There was a copy in the Heber sale, and one is now in the British Museum, according to Sabin.

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[203]

AUTOGRAPH OF SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT.

1576. In April appeared Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Discourse of a Discoverie for a new passage to Cataia, a Gothic-letter tract of great rarity in these days. It is credited with giving a new impulse to English explorations; and had exerted some influence in manuscript copies before being printed. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 258; Brinley Catalogue, no. 31, Heber’s copy, which brought $255. It is also in the Lenox Library; and this and the Carter-Brown copy have the rare map which in the Catalogue of the latter collection is given slightly reduced, and it is in part reproduced herewith. See Fox Bourne’s English Seamen, chs. 5 and 7. Gilbert in this had undertaken to prove, both from reasoning and report, that there was a northwest passage, and that America was an island, and he recounts traditions of its being sailed through. See Mr. Deane’s chapter on “The Cabots.”

PART OF GILBERT’S MAP, 1576.

1577. Settle published in London his True Reporte of the laste Voyage into the west and northwest regions, the author having accompanied Frobisher on his voyage in 1577. Its rarity—for besides the Grenville copy in the British Museum, that in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 266, where its title is given in fac-simile, is the only one we have noted—may signify the eagerness there was to read it, with a consequent use great enough to destroy the edition, though there[204] are said to have been two issues the same year. A fac-simile reprint (fifty copies) has been privately made from the Carter-Brown copy; and it is also reprinted in Brydges’s Restituta, 1814, vol. ii. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1869, p. 363,—a notice by John Russell Bartlett.

1577. Richard Willes brought out in London, with some augmentation, an edition of Eden’s Peter Martyr, under the new title of The History of Trauvayle, a stout volume, which in the known copies has stood wear better. Willes’s preface tells the story of Eden’s labors, and adds, “Many of his Englysche woordes cannot be excused in my opinion for smellyng to much of the Latine.”

It would seem that the arrangement was still mostly the labor of Eden, who did not die till 1576. Willes, however, suppressed Eden’s preface of 1555.

This edition has likewise much appreciated in value. Rich, in his 1832 Catalogue, no. 57, priced a fine copy at £4 4s.; now one is worth £20 or more. There are copies in Harvard College, Carter-Brown (no. 312), Charles Deane’s and Boston Athenæum Libraries. See also Brinley Catalogue, no. 41; Sunderland Catalogue, no. 4180; Field, Ind. Bibl., no. 485; Huth Catalogue, p. 922.

1577. John Frampton translated and published, under the title of Joyfull Newes out of the New founde Worlde, a book of the Seville Physician, Nicholas de Monardes. See Brinley Catalogue, no. 46; Stevens’s Nuggets, 1924; Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 313.

1578. Thomas Churchyard’s Prayse and Report of Maister Martyne Forboisher’s Voyage to Meta Incognita, London. Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 450, reports a copy in the British Museum.

1578. George Best published his True Discourse of the late voyage of discoverie for the finding of a passage to Cathaya by the North-weast, under the Conduct of Martin Frobisher, generall. This is also very rare. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 319, which shows the two rare maps, a portion of one of which is given in fac-simile in ch. iii. from that in Collinson’s Martin Frobisher.

1578. Thomas Nicholas printed, under his initials only, an English version of Gomara’s account of Cortes’ conquest of New Spain, called The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast Indies. Fine copies are worth about £10. There are copies in the Boston Athenæum, Lenox Library, etc. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 275, for fac-simile of title; Sabin’s Dictionary, vii. 311; W. C. Hazlitt’s Bibliog. Coll. and notes, 2d ser. p. 265.

1580. A new edition of Frampton’s Joyfull Newes. This edition is worth about £4. There is a copy in Harvard College Library. Rich, Catalogue, 1832, no. 64.

1580. John Florio published a retranslation into English from Ramusio’s Italian version of Cartier’s Voyage to New France (1534), which had appeared originally in French, but was not now apparently accessible to Florio. Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 331.

1581. T. Nicholas published an English translation, now very rare, of Zarate’s account of the Conquest of Peru.

1582. Hakluyt began his active participation in furthering English maritime exploration by his first publication, the little Divers Voyages, dedicating it to Sir Philip Sidney; and in this he says: “I marvaile not a little ... that we of England could never have the grace to set fast footing in such fertill and temperate places as are left as yet unpossessed.” Again he says: “In my public lectures I was the first that produced and showed both the olde imperfectly composed and the new lately reformed mappes, globes, and spheares, to the generall contentment of my auditory.” See further in Mr. Deane’s chapter on “The Cabots.” Cf. W. C. Hazlitt’s Bibliog. Coll. and notes, 1st ser. p. 101.

There is, unfortunately, no sufficiently extended account of Hakluyt, and the most we know of him must be derived from his own publications. The brief account in Anthony Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses is the source of most of the notices. Mr. J. Payne Collier has added something in a paper on “Richard Hakluyt and American Discovery” in the Archæologia, xxxiii. 383; and Mr. Winter Jones in his Introduction to the reprint of the Divers Voyages has told about all that can be gleaned, and in his Appendix he gives some papers before unprinted, including Hakluyt’s will. The subject has had later treatment, with the advantage of some recent information, in the Introduction to the Westerne Planting, by Dr. Woods and Mr. Deane.

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With the exception of the criticism of John Locke,—if he be the editor of Churchill’s Collection,—who wished Hakluyt had condensed more, and of Biddle, who accuses him of perversions in his account of the Cabots (see Mr. Deane’s chapter), the general opinion of Hakluyt’s labor has been very high. Locke’s explanatory catalogue of voyages, which appeared in Churchill, is reprinted in Clarke’s Maritime Discovery. Oldys in the British Librarian, p. 136, analyzes Hakluyt’s books, and there is a list of them in Sabin’s Dictionary and in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 448. An account of the set in the Lenox Library is printed in Norton’s Literary Gazette, i. 384.

Of the Divers Voyages, perfect copies are excessively rare, and the two maps are almost always wanting. The two British Museum copies have them, but the Bodleian has only the Lok map, and the same is true of the Carter-Brown copy (Catalogue, p. 290). The other copies in America belong to Harvard College (imperfect), Charles Deane, and Henry C. Murphy. Of the maps, that by Lok is given in reduced fac-simile in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (as also in chapter i. of the present volume), and both are given full size in the reprint of the Hakluyt Society.

1583. Captain J. Carleill’s little Discourse upon the entended Voyage to the hethermoste Partes of America, a tract of a few leaves only, in Gothic letter, was probably printed about this time with the aim to induce emigration and the fixing of commercial advantages. Hakluyt thought it of enough importance to include it in his third volume seventeen years later. Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 292.

1583. Sir George Peckham’s True Report of the late Discoveries, etc. See further on this tract on a preceding page.

1583. M. M. S. published at London a small tract giving a translation of Las Casas’ story of the Spanish deeds in the New World. Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 293.

1588. What is called the second original work published in England on the New World is Hariot’s New Foundland of Virginia, a small quarto of twenty-three leaves, imprinted at London. Heber had a copy; and Brunet, the first to describe it, took the title from Heber’s Catalogue. There are copies in the Lenox, Huth (Catalogue, ii. 652), Grenville (British Museum) and the Bodleian libraries. Sabin, Dictionary, viii. 30377, who says this, adds that there was a copy sold surprisingly low at Dublin in 1873, escaping the attention of collectors. It was reprinted at Frankfort in 1590. See chapter iv.

1588. Appeared an English version of the Latin account of Drake’s voyage.

1589. Hakluyt gave out the first edition of his Principall Navigations. Copies are at present worth from £5 to £10, according to condition; and we have noted the following: Harvard College, Brinley (no. 33), Carter-Brown (no. 384), Charles Deane, Long Island Historical Society, Field (Ind. Bibliog. no. 631), Crowninshield (Catalogue, no. 487), etc. The catalogues usually note the six suppressed leaves of Drake’s voyage when present.

Hakluyt, at the end of his preface, speaks of “The comming out of a very large and most exact terestriall Globe, collected and reformed according to the newest, secretest, and latest discoveries, ... composed by Mr. Emmerie Mollineaux, of Lambeth, a rare gentleman in his profession.”

In place of this Molineaux map, there sometimes appears, at p. 597, what Hakluyt calls “One of the best general mappes of the world,” which is a recut plate of one in Ortelius’s Atlas; and in other copies instead we find another edition of the same, which is also found in the English translation of Linschoten. Sabin says he has sometimes found a woodcut of Gilbert’s map substituted. The Ortelius map is reproduced in chapter i. of the present volume.

1591. Job Hortop’s Rare Travales of an Englishman, published in London. Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 1124. There is a copy in the British Museum. Hortop was one of Ingram’s companions, and after being captured and confined in Mexico, reached England after very many years’ absence.

1595. John Davis published his Worlde’s Hydrographical Descriptions, which in parts reiterates the views of Gilbert’s Discourse. The only copies known are in the Grenville Library (British Museum) and Lenox Library, New York. It is reprinted in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Davis’s Voyages, p. 191, and in the 1812 edition of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations.

1596. A third edition of Frampton’s Joyfull Newes. A fine copy is worth about three guineas. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 497.

1596. Second edition of Nicholas’s translation of Gomara. Brinley Catalogue, nos. 32 and 5309; Sabin, Dictionary, 27752; Field, Ind. Bibl. no. 611; Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 499.

1598. Wolfe, of London, published an English translation, by William Philip, of Linschoten’s Discours of Voyages into ye Easte and West Indies, in foure Bookes, with a dedication to Sir Julius Cæsar, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty. The preface adds: “Which Booke being commended by Maister Richard Hackluyt, a man that laboureth greatly to advance our English Name and Nativity, the Printer thought good to cause the same to[206] bee translated into the English Tongue.” The original became a very popular book on the Continent. The maps of American interest are those of the World, of the Antilles, and of South America. The description of America begins on p. 216. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. no. 527; Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 625; Rich (1832), no. 84, prices a copy at £8 8s.

These are all, or nearly all, the publications brought out in English and relating to America prior to the enlarged edition of Hakluyt’s Collection, which was dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, and of which the third volume, bearing date 1600, was devoted to America. Compared with the publications of the Continent for the same century, they are strikingly fewer in number; and such as they are, it will be seen that of the thirty-four separate issues enumerated above only fourteen are of English origin, and of the whole number only twelve belong to the first three quarters of the century.

During this same century the literature of navigation took its origin. The Continental nations had already preceded. It was not till 1528 that the first sea-manual appeared in England, and no copy of it is now known. This[207] was a translation of the French Le Routier de la Mer, the antetype of the later rutters. The English edition was called The Rutter of the Sea, and other editions appeared in 1536, 1541, and 1560 (?); the second of these adding, “A rutter of the northe, compyled by Rychard Proude.” None of these, however, recognized the American discoveries.

In 1561, Eden, at the suggestion of the Arctic navigator, Stephen Burrough (b. 1525, d. 1586), again tried to give some impulse to English interest by his translation of Martin Cortes’ Art of Navigation, which had appeared at Seville ten years before. (Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 151.) Cortes was the first to suggest a magnetic pole. Frobisher, when he made his first voyage, fifteen years later (1576), perhaps because Eden’s translation was out of print, took with him a Spanish edition of Medina’s Arte de Navegar,—a work which preceded Cortes’, but never became so popular in England.

In 1565 came a fifth edition of the Rutter of the Sea, and in 1573 William Bourne first issued his Regiment of the Sea, which long remained the chief English book on navigation.[442]

Eden put forth, at what precise date is not known, but not later than 1576, A very necessarie and profitable book concerning Navigation, compiled in Latin by Joannes Taisnierus, in which the translator intimates that Cabot knew more of the ways of discovering longitude than he had disclosed. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 262. Davis’s Voyages (Hakluyt Society) gives the date 1579.

Such books, as the interest in America became more general, increased rapidly, and I note them in chronological order.

1577. Second edition, Regiments of the Sea.

1578. Edward Hellowes published in London, in a small tract, a translation, A booke of the Invention of Navigation of Antonio de Gaevara, Bishop of Mondonedo, originally printed at Valladolid in 1539.

1578. Second edition, Eden’s Cortes.

1580. Sixth edition of The Rutter of the Sea.

1580. Third edition, Eden’s Cortes.

1581. The Arte of Navigation. By Pedro de Medina. Translated out of the Spanish by John Frampton. Medina’s Arte de Navegar originally appeared at Valladolid in 1545.

1584. Fourth edition, Eden’s Cortes. See Brinley Catalogue, no. 19, for a copy which has a folding woodcut map of the New World, which is usually wanting in later editions.

1585. Robert Norman, hydrographer, published his Newe Attractive, with rules for the art of navigation annexed.

1587. Robert Tanner’s Mirror for Mathematiques, ... a sure safety for Saylers, etc.

1587. Seventh edition of The Rutter of the Sea.

1588. The first marine atlas ever made appeared at Leyden in 1583-84, and this year in London as The Mariner’s Mirrour, ... first made by Luke Wagenaer, of Enchuisen, and now fitted with necessarie additions by Anthony Ashley.

1588. Fifth edition, Eden’s Cortes.

1589. Thomas Blundeville’s Brief Description of Universal Mappes and Cardes, and of their Use, and also the Use of Ptolemy his tables.

1589. A sixth edition of Eden’s version of Martin Cortes’ Arte of Navigation appeared. Good copies of this small black-letter quarto are worth about seven guineas. It is known that Hakluyt about this time was endeavoring with the aid of Drake to found in London a public lecture for the purpose of advancing the art of navigation.

1590. Robert Norman translated from the Dutch The Safeguard of Saylers, or Great Rutter. Edward Wright corrected and enlarged this in 1612. Norman was the inventor of the dipping-needle, in 1576.

1590. Thomas Hood’s Use of the Jacob’s Staffe; also a dialogue touching the use of the Crosse Staffe. These were instruments for the taking of latitude. The astrolabe, an instrument of remote antiquity, had been adapted to sea-use by Martin Behaim; but it was soon found that it did not adapt itself to the automatic movement of the observer’s body in a rolling sea, and in 1514 the cross-staff was invented, or at least was first described.

1592. A third edition of Bourne’s Regiment of the Sea, corrected by Thomas Hood.

1592. Thomas Hood’s Use of both the Globes, celestiall and terrestriall, written to accompany the Molineaux globes.

1592. Thomas Hood’s Marriner’s Guide.

1594. John Davis published his Seaman’s Secrets, wherein is taught the three kindes of Sayling,—Horizontall, Paradoxall, and Sayling upon a great Circle. He held up the example of the Spaniards: “For what hath made the Spaniard to be so great a Monarch, the Commander of both Indies, to abound in wealth and all Nature’s benefites, but only the painefull industrie of his Subjects by Navigation.” No copy of this first edition is known. The second edition, 1607, is in the British Museum, and from this copy the tract is reprinted in Davis’s Voyages (Hakluyt Society ed.).

1594. M. Blundevile, his Exercises, with instruction[208] in the art of navigation. This proved a popular instruction book.

1594. Robert Hues printed in London a Latin treatise on the Molineaux globes, Tractatus de Globis, et eorum usu. This includes a chapter by Thomas Hariot on the rhumbs, or the lines which so perplexingly cover the old maps.

1596. Another edition of Hood’s corrected issue of Bourne’s Regiment of the Sea.

1596. Second edition of Norman’s Newe Attractive, etc.

1596. John Blagrave’s Necessary and Pleasaunt Solace and recreation for Navigators.... Whereunto ... he has anexed another invention expressing on one face the whole globe terrestrial, with the two great English voyages lately performed round the world. This last is a map by Hondius, reproduced in Drake’s World Encompassed (Hakluyt Soc. ed.).

1596. Thomas Hood’s Use of the mathematicall Instruments, the Crosse Staffe differing from that in common use, and the Jacob’s Staffe.

1596. Seventh edition of Eden’s version of Cortes.

1597. Second edition of Blundevile, his Exercises.

1597. William Barlow’s Navigator’s Supply, containing many things of principal importance belonging to navigation. Largely on compasses.

1598. John Wolfe translated and printed A treatyse ... for all seafaringe men, by Mathias Sijverts Lakeman, alias Sofridus.

1599. Simon Stevin’s De Haven-vinding appeared at Leyden, and Edward Wright brought it out at once in English, as The Haven-Finding Art.

1599. Edward Wright published his Certain Errors in Navigation, detected and corrected. Wright was born in 1560, was lecturer on navigation for the East India Company, was the verifier and improver of Mercator’s projection, and is thought to have been the author of the Molineaux map.

It will be observed that of this list of thirty-three publications for twenty-five years about one half is of foreign origin.

B. Hakluyt’s “Westerne Planting” and the Maine Historical Society.—The history of this manuscript, so far as known, is as follows:—

The family of Sir Peter Thomson (who died in 1770) possessed it, from whom Lord Valentia secured it, and this collector indorsed upon it “unpublished” and “extremely curious.” It subsequently is found in the hands of Mr. Henry Stevens, who put it into a public sale in London, May, 1854; and in the Catalogue (lot 474) it is called “a most important unpublished manuscript, 63 pages, closely and neatly written, in the original calf binding.” It brought £44, and passed into the Collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps. (Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, 1869, p. 20.) This gentleman began in 1837 to print privately a catalogue of his library, then kept at Middle Hill, Worcestershire, and continued the printing, sheet by sheet, and under no. 14097 this manuscript appears as “A Hakluyt Discourse.” In 1859 Sir Thomas bought Thirlestane House, Cheltenham, the seat of Lord Northwick, and hither he removed his vast collections of manuscripts and books, where they now are, in the possession of his heirs, Sir Thomas having died in 1872. They are open to inquirers under restrictions. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 429.

The manuscript of the Westerne Planting is not thought to be in Hakluyt’s hand, though in a contemporary script; and the writing of it by Hakluyt seems to have been in progress during the summer of 1584, while its author was thirty-two years old. There is evidence that it existed in four or five copies,—of which the only one known at this day is the Phillipps copy,—one of which was for the queen, and all were made with the view of recommending the planting of Norumbega.

In 1867 Dr. Woods was commissioned by the Governor of Maine to procure in Europe material for the early history of the State, and the first fruit was the engaging of Dr. Kohl in the work, which subsequently assumed shape in his Discovery of Maine, and the second the procurement of this Hakluyt manuscript. Dr. Woods was engaged in preparing it for the press, when his health declined, and the labor was completed by Mr. Charles Deane, the book being published by the Maine Historical Society in 1877.

Under the auspices of this Society some important historical work has been done. Dr. Kohl’s book is the most elaborate summary yet made of the early explorations on our New England coast. The labors of Dr. Woods have been the subject of consideration in Dr. E. A. Park’s Life and Character of Leonard Woods, Andover, 1880, 52 pp., and in Dr. C. C. Everett’s notice in Me. Hist. Coll., viii. 481, and in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 15. The late George Folsom opened an important field of investigation in his Catalogue of Original Documents in the English Archives relating to the Early History of Maine, privately printed, New York, 1858, which covers the years 1601-1700, and is said to have been compiled for him by Mr. H. G. Somerby. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg.,1859, p. 262, and 1869, p. 481. Of the labors of William D. Williamson, the principal historian of the State, there is due record in the Historical Magazine, xiii. 265, May, 1868, and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 90. The[209] Hon. William Willis, of whom there are accounts in the Maine Hist. Coll., vii. 473, and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 1, was for many years the president of the Society, and besides furnishing many communications, he issued a bibliography of Maine in Norton’s Literary Letter, no. 4, 1859, which was much enlarged in the Historical Magazine, xvii. 145, March, 1870. In connection with this subject the bibliography in Griffin’s History of the Press in Maine, 1872, deserves notice. There is in the Hist. Mag., Jan. 1868, an account of the Maine Historical Society and the historical investigations it has patronized.

A list of the charters and grants on the Maine coast is given in the Hist. Mag., March, 1870, p. 154. See in this connection S. F. Haven’s lecture in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Lowell Lectures.

DR. JOHN G. KOHL.

We are indebted for the photograph used by the engraver to Dr. Kohl’s successor in the librarianship of the Public Library at Bremen, Dr. Heinrich Bulthaupt. No name ranks higher than Kohl’s in the investigations of our early North American geography. “From my childhood,” he says, “I was highly interested in geographical researches in connection with history.” Having gathered much material on the early cartographical history of America in the archives and libraries of Europe, he came to this country, and receiving an appropriation from Congress to enable him to make copies of his maps for the Government, he undertook that work, the results of which are now in the State Department at Washington. All that he desired to do was not provided for by the order of Congress, and he returned to Europe disappointed in his hopes, but leaving behind him, besides the collections in Washington, a memoir with maps on the discovery of the western coast of America, which is now in the library of the American Antiquarian Society. In Europe he annotated and published at Munich in fac-simile the two oldest general maps of America, those known as Ribero’s and Ferdinando Columbus’s, and a treatise on the history of the Gulf Stream, as well as a condensed popular history of the discovery of America. In 1868 he undertook, what proved to be his chief contribution to American historical geography, his Discovery of Maine. He did not feel that he had accomplished all in this that he would; but it still remains the most important essay since Humboldt in that peculiar field. See Charles Deane’s notice of Kohl in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Dec. 1878, and the memoir in the Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Augsburg, July 9, 1879.

C. The Popham Colony.—It was unfortunate, as it was unnecessary, that any theological color should have been given to the discussion arising out of the claims made for this colony, since the merits of the case concerned solely the historical significance of secular events, upon which all were agreed in the main. The claim asserted by the Maine Historical Society, or by those representing it, was this: That the temporary settlement at Sabino, being made under the charter of 1606, was the first event to secure New England for the English crown, and should therefore be deemed the beginning of the existence of its colonies. The claim of those historical students who took issue was this: That the granting in 1606 of a patent by the king to his subjects concerned no further the question than that it simply formulated a pre-existing claim, while the actual attempts at colonization by Gosnold in 1602, whether authorized or not,—the latter[210] alternative having of late years been brought forward by Dr. De Costa,—were more practically demonstrative of that claim, in accordance with the English interpretation of rights in new countries, namely, actual possession. Further, that the true historic beginning of New England was not in the abortive attempts of Gosnold and Popham to effect a settlement, however much, in connection with many other events, they helped in preparing a way, but in the permanent colonization which was made at Plymouth in 1620, which was the first founded upon family life, and which under greater distress than befell either of the others, was rendered permanent more by the spirit of religious independency, as evinced by their Holland exile, than by the mercenary longing, which was professedly the chief motive of the others. Strachey distinctly says of the Popham Colony, that mining was “the main intended benefit expected.”

It is susceptible of proof that the blood of the Pilgrims and of their congeners runs through the veins of a large part of the population of New England to-day. No genealogical tree has been produced which connects our present life with a single one of the Sabino party. How, then, was New England saved for the English race? The decisive historical event is never those scattering forerunners which always harbinger an epoch, but the fulfilment of the idea which comes in the ripeness of time.

The controversy as it was waged was a reaction from the views with which the Pilgrims had long been regarded for their devotion under trial and for the pluck of their constancy in first making English homes on this part of the continent. Maine writers like George Folsom and William Willis had never questioned such established claims, but had reasserted them. The leading spirit in this revocation of judgment was Mr. John A. Poor, of Portland. This gentleman, having done much to increase the material interests of his native State, entered with pertinacity into a process of rendering, as he claimed, the position of Maine in history more conspicuous. This required the aggrandizement of the fame of Sir Ferdinando Gorges; and he began his missionary work with a vindication of Gorges’ claims to be considered the father of English colonization in America. It was no new idea, for George Folsom had done Gorges justice in his Discourse in 1846. Mr. Poor’s lecture was printed, and was subsequently appended to the Popham Memorial. To emphasize this claim, he secured the naming of a new fort in Portland Harbor after Sir Ferdinando in 1860; and in 1862, when the General Government built a fortification on the old peninsula of Sabino, his efforts caused it to be named Fort Popham, and his zeal planned and directed a commemorative service in August of that year on the spot, when a tablet recounting the claims of which he was the champion was placed near its walls. The address which he then delivered, which showed the intemperance, if not the perversity, of an iconoclast, and which appeared with other papers and addresses more or less pronounced in the same way in a Popham Memorial, opened the controversy. See also Historical Magazine, Jan. 1863, and Sept. 1866, and Mr. C. W. Tuttle’s account of Mr. Poor’s agency in a “Memorial of J. A. Poor,” in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Oct. 1872. The committee charged with the preparation of the Memorial unwisely omitted a counter speech of the late J. Wingate Thornton, on “The Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges,” which was accordingly printed in the Congregational Quarterly, April, 1863, and separately, and is examined favorably by Abner C. Goodell in the Essex Institute Collections, Aug. 1863, p. 175. A similar unfavorable estimate of Popham’s colonists had been taken by R. H. Gardiner in the Maine Historical Collections, ii. 269; v. 226.

For some years the spirit was kept alive by recurrent commemorations. Mr. Edward E. Bourne (see memoir of him in N. E. Hist and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 9, and Me. Hist. Coll., viii. 386) answered the detractors in an address, “The Character of the Colony founded by George Popham,” Portland, 1864. The statements of Poor and Bourne led to a review by S. F. Haven in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April 26, 1865, and in the Hist. Mag. (Dec. 1865, p. 358; March, July, Sept., Nov., 1867; Feb. and May, 1869). There was a dropping fire on both sides for some time. Meanwhile the address in 1865 by James W. Patterson, on The Responsibilities of the Founders of Republics, led to a controversy between William F. Poole attacking, and Rev. Edward Ballard and Frederick Kidder defending, the colonists; and their papers were printed together as The Popham Colony: a Discussion of its Historic Claims, to which Mr. Poole appended a bibliography of the subject up to 1866. Poole also gave his view of Gorges and the colony in his edition of Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence, and in the North American Review, Oct. 1868. At the celebration in 1871 Mr. Charles Deane reviewed the erroneous conclusions presented at earlier anniversaries, in a paper on “Early Voyages to New England, and their Influence on Colonization,” which was printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Sept. 2, 1871. A paper by R. K. Sewall on “Popham’s Town of Fort St. George,” which contains a summary of the arguments and events on the side of its historic importance, is given in the Me. Hist. Coll., vii., accompanied by a map of the region. The latest statement of the claim, apart from the review in the Preface to The Voyage to Sagadahoc, referred to on an earlier page, is in General Chamberlain’s Maine:[211] her Place in History, which is too moderate to provoke any criticism. Thus a reaction that at one time claimed the necessity of rewriting history, has in the end engaged few advocates, and is almost lost sight of.

D. Captain John Smith’s Publications.—The Description is now a rare book, worth with the genuine map, should one be offered, fifty pounds or upwards. There is some bibliographical detail regarding it in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 50, 52, 53. Latin and German versions of it were included in De Bry, part x. Michael Sparke, the London printer, issuing Higginson’s New England’s Plantation in 1630, appended this recommendation:—

“But whosoever desireth to know as much as yet can be discovered, I advise them to buy Captaine John Smith’s booke of the description of New England in folio, and reade from fol. 203 to the end; and there let the reader expect to have full content.”

Smith’s letter (1618) to Bacon, upon New England, is in the Hist. Mag., July, 1861, and the annexed autograph is taken from the original in the Public Record office. See Sainsbury’s Calendar of Colonial Papers, no. 42, p. 21; Popham Memorial, App. p. 104; Palfrey, New England, i. 97.

A little tract of Smith’s, New England’s Trials [i. e. Attempts at Settlements], needs to be taken in connection with the Description. Of this tract, of eight pages, published in 1620, there is no copy known in America, and Mr. Deane describes it and reprints it in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xii. 428, 449, from the Bodleian copy, which differs in the names of the dedication from the British Museum copy. In 1622 it was issued in a second edition, enlarged to fourteen pages, which is also very rare, though copies are in the Deane Collection and in that of John Carter-Brown, from the last of which a privately printed reprint has been made. It was this text which Force used in his Tracts, ii. See Brinley Catalogue, no. 363.

Smith had moved, April 12, 1621, in a meeting of the Virginia Company, that its official sanction should be given to a compiled history of “that country, from her first discovery to this day,” showing that the purpose of his Generall Historie was then in his mind. (Neill’s Virginia Company, p. 210.) The first edition of it was issued in 1624, and in it he included, besides abstracts of various other writings, substantially all his previous publications on America (see the chapter on Virginia in the present volume), except his True Relation, in the place of which he had put the Map of Virginia, a tract covering the same transactions. When reissued in 1626 it was from the same type, and again in 1627, and twice in 1632. An account of the various editions in the Lenox Library, which differ only in the front matter and plates, can be found in Norton’s Literary Gazette, new ser. i. pp. 134 a, 218 c. Mr. Deane has printed a part of the original prospectus. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ix. 454.

The best opportunity for studying the slight diversities of the different issues of this book may be found in the Lenox Library, which has ten copies, showing all the varieties. Among other copies, the following are noted:—

1624., Charles Deane. A large paper dedication copy of this edition, bound for Smith’s patron, the Duchess of Richmond and Lenox, was bought, at the Brinley Sale in 1879, no. 364, for the Lenox Library, $1,800. The Menzies and Barlow copies are also called large paper ones. See Griswold Catalogue, no. 778; Field’s Ind. Bibliog. no. 1435. The Huth Catalogue, p. 1367, gives a copy of this edition in the original rich binding, showing the arms of the Duke of Norfolk quartered with those of his wife, the daughter of the Duchess of Richmond and Lenox.

1626., Harvard College Library. Sparks’s Collection, now at Cornell University, no. 2424.

1627., Prince Library in Boston Public Library. Massachusetts Historical Society. See the Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 992.

1631., The Huth Catalogue, p. 1367, gives, perhaps by error, an edition of this date. I have noted no other copy.

1632., Harvard College Library.

The two portraits of the Duchess of Richmond and of Matoaka are usually wanting. See the note to chapter v. Average copies without the genuine portraits, which in Rich’s day (1832) were worth five guineas, are now valued at more than three times that sum. The portrait of Smith, which is shown reduced on the map of New England already given, has been similarly reproduced full size in the Memorial History of Boston, i., and is engraved in the Richmond edition of the Generall Historie, in Bancroft, Drake’s Boston, Hillard’s Life of Smith, N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Jan. 1858, etc.

The Generall Historie, in conjunction with the True Travels, was carelessly reprinted at Richmond, in 1819, at the cost of the Rev. John Holt Rice, D.D., who lost by the speculation. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1877, p. 114.) A large part appeared in Purchas’s Pilgrims, iv. 1838. It is given entire in Pinkerton’s Collections of Voyages, xiii.

It is the sixth book of this Generall Historie which relates to New England, and in this Smith supplements his own experience, and brings the details down beyond the limits of this present chapter, by borrowing from Mourt’s Relation and reporting upon other accounts, as he did in his[212] still later publication, the tract called Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, which brings the story down to 1630.

Dr. Palfrey has a note on the confidence to be reposed in Smith’s books, in his History of New England, i. 89.

Smith was born in 1579 at Willoughby, as the parish records show. (Hist. Mag., i. 313; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ix. 451.) He died June 21, 1631, signing his will the same day (Ibid. ix. 452), and was buried in St. Sepulchre’s, London, where the inscription above his grave is said to be now illegible. A committee of the American Antiquarian Society was appointed in 1874 to see to its restoration, but were prevented from acting by the demand of a fee for the privilege from the vestry of the church. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 222.) In Sparks’s American Biography is a memoir of him by George S. Hillard; another, by W. Gilmore Simms, was printed in 1846; and a recent study of his life and writings has been made by C. D. Warner, who says that the inscription, with the three (Turks’?) heads in St. Sepulchre’s, long supposed to mark the grave of Smith, is proved to commemorate some one who died in September, aged 66, while Smith died June, 1631, aged 51. Stow’s Survey of London, 1633, gives the long epitaph which could be read on the walls of the church previous to its destruction in the great London fire in 1666. Cf. Deane in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan. 1867, p. 454.

NEW WORLD FROM THE LENOX GLOBE.

Simon Passe, whose Latinized name we see on the engraving of Smith’s map, was ten years in England, and engraved many of the chief people of the time; and as he was his own draughtsman, it is probable the portrait of Smith was drawn by Passe from life, though Robert Clerke is credited with draughting the map.

E. Early Globes.—The Molineaux globe referred to in the text was constructed at the instance of that great patron of navigation, William Sanderson. (Davis’s Voyages, Introduction by Markham, pp. xii. 211.) It is said to be the earliest ever made in England. (Ibid. p. lix.) It is two feet in diameter, and was completed in 1592. (Asher’s Henry Hudson, p. 274.) The oldest globe known antedates it more than a century, and of those intervening which are known, the following, with the prototype, deserve mention:—

1. Martin Behaim’s, 1492, preserved in the library at Nuremberg. It presents an open ocean between Europe and Asia. The first meridian runs through Madeira. There is a copy in fac-simile in the Bibliothèque Nationale, at Paris. There have been engraved delineations of it by Doppelmayr at Nuremberg in 1730; by Dr. Ghillany, in connection with his Geschichte des Seefahrers Ritter Martin Behaim, 1853; by Jomard in his Monuments de la Géographie, 1854-56, pl. 15. There are sections and reductions in Cladera’s Investigaciones Historicas, Madrid, 1794; in Lelewel’s Moyen Age; in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xviii.; in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine; in some of the editions of Irving’s Columbus; in Bryant and Gay’s United States, i. 103; and in Maury’s paper in Harper’s Monthly, xlii. (February, 1871).

2. Acquired from a friend in Laon in 1860 by M. Leroux, of the Administration de la Marine at Paris, and represents the geographical knowledge current at Lisbon, 1486-87, according to D’Avezac, who gives a projection of it in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, 4th series, viii. (1860). It is dated 1493. The first meridian runs through Madeira.

3. A small copper globe in the Lenox Library, in New York, which is said to be the earliest globe to show the American coast, and its date is fixed at about 1510-12, but by some as early as 1506-7.

[213]

FROM THE MOLINEAUX GLOBE.

This extract is from a tracing by Dr. De Costa. The legends on it are marked as follows: A, Nova Francia; B, Canada; C, Norumbega; D, India; E, Virginia, primum lustrata et Culta ab Anglis inpensis D. Gualteri de Ralegh Equitis Aurati, etc., annuente Elizabetha sev. Angliæ Regina.

1. Hochelaga. 18. S. Cruz. 34. Claudia.
2. Mont Royal. 19. De Breton. 35. Rio Grande.
3. Estade. 20. Aredona. 36. De Lagus.
4. Stadin flu. 21. C. de Breton. 37. Montagna.
5. Saguinay. 22. S. Miguel. 38. B. S. Johan.
6. I. de Orleans. 23. C. Real. 39. Buena Vista.
7. R. Dulce. 24. C. S. Joan. 40. S. Samson.
8. R. S. Laurens. 25. Sinus Laureti. 41. Chesapicke.
9. S. Nicolas. 26. C. d’Esperance. 42. R. de Buelta.
10. C. Tienot. 27. G. de Chalue. 43. C. de Arenas.
11. Chasteaux. 28. Hunedo. 44. S. Christovall.
12. Belle Ysle. 29. I. S. Joan. 45. Chiapanak.
13. C. Blanco. 30. R. de la Pelaijo. 46. Trinitie Harbour.
14. Isle des Oiseaux. 31. R. Vista. 47. P. Hatorack.
15. C. de Bona Vista. 32. R. de Montagnas. 48. C. Hatoras.
16. The Bacailo. 33. Rio Honda. 49. Ye C. of Fear.
17. C. de Razo.

[214]

It was bought in Paris about twenty-five years ago by R. M. Hunt, the architect, and was given by him to Mr. Lenox. It is about five inches in diameter. Dr. De Costa has described it and given a draught of its geography in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., Sept. 1879. This paper, translated by M. Gravier, appeared in the Bulletin de la Société normande de Géographie, 1880. A projection of it is said to have been made in the Coast Survey Bureau in 1869, at the instance of Mr. Henry Stevens, and a reduction of this is given in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, x. 681, of which the Western Hemisphere is herewith reproduced. The globe opens on the line of the equator, and was probably used as a pyx. It may be said to be the oldest globe showing any part of the New World.

4. Brought to light in a Catalogue de Livres rares appartenant à M. H. Tross, année 1881, no. xiv. 4924, where a fac-simile by S. Pilinski is given. The gores composing it are found in a copy of the Cosmographiæ Introductio, supposed to have been printed at Lugduni, 1514. This is the claim of the Catalogue; but if it belonged to the tract it could hardly have been earlier than 1518. It is understood that the book has been added to an American collection. The plate is styled Universalis Cosmographie Descriptio tam in solido quem [sic] plano, and is given in twelve sections. The delineation of South America is marked “America noviter reperta.” It is claimed that this gives this copperplate, “essentiellement française,” the honor of being the earliest to bear the name of America,—that credit having been claimed for the woodcut map in Camer’s edition of Solinus, 1520. The manuscript delineation by Leonardo da Vinci, also giving the name, and preserved at Windsor in the Queen’s collection, probably antedates it.

5. Made by Johann Schoner at Bamberg in 1520, preserved in the library at Nuremberg, and thought, until the discovery of the Lenox globe, to be the earliest showing the discoveries in America. The northern section is still broken up into islands large and small; but South America is delineated with approximate correctness. Dr. Ghillany gave a representation of the American hemisphere in the Jahresbericht der technischen Anstalten in Nürnberg für 1842; also see his Erdglobus von Behaim vom Jahre 1492, und der des Joh. Schoner von 1520, Nürnberg, 1842, p. 18, two plates. Humboldt examines this Schoner globe in his Examen critique, and in his Appendix to Ghillany’s Ritter Behaim, where a reproduction is given. There are also delineations or sections in Lelewel’s Moyen Age; in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine; in Santarem’s Atlas; and in Maury’s paper in Harper’s Monthly, February, 1871. Schoner published, in 1515, a Terræ totius descriptio, without a map, of which there are copies in Harvard College Library and the Carter-Brown Collection at Providence.

6. Preserved at Frankfort-on-the-Main; of unknown origin. It is figured in Jomard’s Monuments de la Géographie. See also the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xviii. 45. It resembles Schoner’s, and Wieser ascribes it to that maker, and dates it 1515. It is 10½ inches in diameter, and by some the date is fixed at 1520.

7. Given by Duke Charles V. of Lorraine to the church at Nancy, and opening in the middle, long used there as a pyx, is now preserved in the Public Library in that town, and was described (with an engraving) by M. Blau in the Mémoires de la Société royale de Nancy, in 1836, and again in the Compte-Rendu, Congrès des Américanistes, 1877, p. 359, and from a photograph by Dr. DeCosta, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1881. It makes North America the eastern part of Asia, and transforms Norumbega into Anorombega. It is made of silver, gilt, and is six inches in diameter.

8. Supposed to be of Spanish origin; preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, at Paris, and formerly belonged to the brothers De Bure. It bears a close resemblance to the Frankfort globe.

9. In the custody of the successors of Canon L’Ecuy of Prémontré. It is without date, and D’Avezac fixed it before 1524; others put it about 1540. It is the first globe to show North America disconnected from Asia. It is said to be now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, at Paris. Cf. Raemdonck, Les Sphères de Mercator, p. 28.

10. What was thought to be the only copy known of one of Gerard Mercator’s engraved globes was bought at the sale of M. Benoni-Verelst, at Ghent, in May, 1868, by the Royal Library at Brussels. In 1875 it was reproduced in twelve plane gores at Brussels, in folio, as a part of Sphère terrestre et sphère céleste de Gerard Mercator, éditées à Louvain en 1541 et 1551, and one of the sections is inscribed, “Edebat Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus cum privilegio ces: Maiestatis ad an sex Lovanii an 1541.” Only two hundred copies of the fac-simile were printed. There are copies in the Library of the State Department at Washington, of Harvard College, and of the American Geographical Society, New York. The outline of the eastern coast of America is shown with tolerable accuracy, though there is no indication of the discoveries of Cartier in the St. Lawrence Gulf and River, made a few years earlier. In 1875 a second original was discovered in the Imperial Court Library at Vienna; and a third is said to exist at Weimar.

11. Of copper, made apparently in Italy,—at Rome, or Venice,—by Euphrosynus Ulpius in 1542, is fifteen and one half inches in diameter,[215] was bought in 1859 out of a collection of a dealer in Spain by Buckingham Smith, and is now in the Cabinet of the New York Historical Society. The first meridian runs through the Canaries, and it shows the demarcation line of Pope Alexander VI. It is described in the Historical Magazine, 1862, p. 302, and the American parts are engraved in B. Smith’s Inquiry into the Authenticity of Verrazano’s Claims, and Henry C. Murphy’s Verrazzano, p. 114. See Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, no. 291. The fullest description, accompanied by engravings of it, is given by B. F. De Costa in the Magazine of American History, January, 1879; and in his Verrazano the Explorer, New York, 1881, p. 64.

SKETCH FROM THE FRANKFORT GLOBE.

The Legends of this Globe are these: 1. Parias. 2. C. San til. 3. Isabelle. 4. Jamaica. 5. Spagnolla. 6. Lit. incognita [The Baccalaos region]. The passage to the west by the Central America isthmus will be observed.

Mr. C. H. Coote, in his paper on “Globes” in the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, x. 680, mentions two other globes of the[216] sixteenth century, which may antedate that of Molineaux, both by A. F. van Langren,—one in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and the other, discovered in 1855, in the Bibliothèque de Grenoble.

The globe-makers immediately succeeding Molineaux were W. J. Blaeu (1571-1638) and his son John Blaeu, and their work is rare at this day. Mr. P. J. H. Baudet, in his Leven en werken van W. J. Blaeu, Utrecht, 1871, reports finding but two pair of his (Blaeu’s) globes (terrestrial and celestial) in Holland. His first editions bore date 1599, but he constantly corrected the copper plates, from which he struck the gores. Muller, of Amsterdam, offered a pair, in 1877, for five hundred Dutch florins, and in his Books on America, iii. 164, another at seven hundred and fifty florins. (Catalogue, 1877, no. 329.) A pair, dated 1606, was in the Stevens sale, 1881. Hist. Coll., i., no. 1335.

I find no trace of the globe of Hondius, 1597, which gives the American discoveries up to that date. See Davis’s Voyages (Hakluyt Society), p. 351. Hondius and Langeren were rivals.

SKETCH FROM THE MOLINEAUX MAP.

The Legends are as follows:—

1. This land was discovered by John and Sebastian Cabot for Kinge Henry ye 7, 1497.
2.  Bacalaos.
3. C. Bonavista.
4. C. Raso.
5. C. Britton.
6. I. Sables.
7. I. S. John.
8. Claudia.
9. Comokee.
10. C. Chesepick.
11. Hotorast.
12. La Bermudas.
13. Bahama.
14. La Florida.
15. The Gulfe of Mexico.
16. Virginia.
17. The lacke of Tadenac, the bounds whereof are unknowne.
18. Canada.
19. Hochelague.

F. Molineaux Map, 1600.—Emeric Molineaux, the alleged maker of this map, belonged to Lambeth, “a rare gentleman in his profession, being therein for divers years greatly supported by the purse and liberality of the worshipful merchant, Mr. William Sanderson.” Captain Markham (Davis’s Voyages, Hakluyt Society, London, 1880, pp. xxxiii, lxi, also p. lxxxviii) is of the opinion that the true author is Edward Wright, the mathematician, who perfected and rendered practicable what we know to-day as Mercator’s projection,—first demonstrating it in his Certain Errors in Navigation Detected, 1599, and first introducing its formulæ accurately in the 1600 map. Hakluyt had spoken of the globe by Molineaux in his 1589 edition, but it was not got ready in time[217] for his use. The map followed the globe, but was not issued till about 1600, the discoveries of Barentz in 1596 being the last indicated on it. It measures 16½ × 25 inches. Quaritch in 1875 advanced the theory that the globe of Molineaux was referred to in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (act iii. sc. 2), as the “new map.” (Quaritch’s 1879 Catalogue, no. 321, book no. 11919),—a theory made applicable to the map and sustained by C. H. Coote in 1878, in Shakespeare’s “new map” in Twelfth Night (also in Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1877-79, i. 88-100), and reasserted in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Davis’s Voyages, p. lxxxv. Henry Stevens (Hist. Coll. i. 200), however, is inclined to refer Shakespeare’s reference (“the new map with the augmentation of the Indies”) to the “curious little round-face shaped map” in Wytfliet’s Ptolemæum Augmentum, 1597.

The Molineaux-Wright map has gained reputation from Hallam’s reference to it in his Literature of Europe as “the best map of the sixteenth century.” It is now accessible in the autotype reproduction which was made by Mr. Quaritch from the Grenville copy of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations in the British Museum, and which accompanies the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Davis’s Voyages. There are nine copies of the map known, as follows: 1. King’s Library. 2. Grenville Library. 3. Cracherode Copy. (These three are in the British Museum.) 4. Admiralty Office. 5. Lenox Library, New York. 6. University of Cambridge. 7. Christie Miller’s Collection. 8. Middle Temple. 9. A copy in Quaritch’s Catalogue, 1881, no. 340, title-number, 6235, which had previously appeared in the Stevens sale, Hist. Collections, i. 199. Quaritch held the Hakluyt (3 vols.) with this genuine map at £156, and it is said no other copy had been sold since the Bright sale.

It may be noted that Blundeville, who in his Exercises, pp. 204-42, describes the Mercator and Molineaux globes, also, pp. 245-78, gives a long account of a mappamundi by Peter Plancius, dated 1592, of which Linschoten, in 1594, gives a reduction.

G. Modern Collections of Early Maps.—The collections of reproductions of the older maps, showing portions of the American coast, and representing what may be termed the beginnings of modern cartography, are the following:—

Jomard, E. F. Les Monuments de la Géographie. Paris, 1866. The death of Jomard in 1862 (see Memoir by M. de la Roquette, in Bulletin de la Soc. Géog. February, 1863, or 5th ser. v. 81, with a portrait; Cortambert’s Vie et Œuvres de Jomard, Paris, 1868, 20 pages; and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., iv. 232, vi. 334) prevented the completion by him of the text which he intended should accompany the plates. M. D’Avezac’s intention to supply it was likewise stayed by his death, in 1875. It proved, however, that Jomard had left behind what he had meant for an introduction to the text; and this was printed in a pamphlet at Paris in 1879, as Introduction à l’Atlas des Monuments de la Géographie, edited by E. Cortambert. It is a succinct account of the progress of cartography before the times of Mercator and Ortelius. The atlas contains five maps, of great interest in connection with American discovery:—

The Frankfort Globe, circa 1520.
Juan de la Cosa’s map, 1500.
The Cabot map of 1544.
A French map, made for Henri II.
Behaim’s Globe, 1492.

These reproductions are of the size of the original. Good copies are worth £10 10s.

Santarem, Visconde de. Atlas Composé de Cartes des XIVe XVe XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris. 1841-53. This was published at the charge of the Portuguese Government, and is the most extensive of modern fac-similes. Copies, which are rarely found complete, owing to its irregular publication over a long period, are worth from $175 to $200. A list of the maps in it is given in Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, 1878, no. 529; and of them the following are of interest to students of American history:—

51. Mappemonde de Ruysch. This appeared in the Ptolemy of 1508 at Rome, the earliest engraved map of America.

52. Globe of Schoner, and the map in Camer’s edition of Solinus, each of 1520.

53. Mappemonde par F. Roselli, Florence, 1532, and the maps of Sebastian Munster, 1544, and Vadianus, 1546.

The atlas should be accompanied by Essai sur l’histoire de la Cosmographie et de la Cartographie pendant le Moyen Age, et sur les progrès de la Géographie après les grandes découvertes du XVe siècle. 3 vols. Paris. 1849-52.

Kunstmann, F. Entdeckung Amerikas nach den ältesten Quellen geschichtlich dargestellt. Munich, 1859. This was published under the auspices of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and is accompanied by a large atlas, giving fac-similes of the principal Spanish and Portuguese maps of the sixteenth century, including one of the California coast, and that of the east coast of North America, by Thomas Hood, 1592. Copies are worth from $15 to $20.

Lelewel, J. Géographie du Moyen Age étudiée. Bruxelles. 1852. 3 vols. 8º. With a small folio atlas, of thirty-five plates, containing fifty-two maps. The text is useful; but, as a rule, the maps are on too small a scale for easy study.

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A series of photographic reproductions of early maps is now appearing at Venice, under the title of Raccolta di Mappamondi e Carte nautiche del XIII al XVI secolo. There are two which have a particular interest in connection with the earliest explorations in America; namely,—

16. Carta da navigare. Attributed to Alberto Cantino, supposed to be A.D. 1501-03, and to illustrate the third voyage of Columbus. The original is in the Bibl. Estense at Modena. [Not yet published.]

17. Agnese, Battista. Fac-simile delle Carte nautiche dell’ anno 1554, illustrate da Teobaldo Fischer. Venezia. 1881.

The editor, Fischer, is Professor of Geography at Kiel. The original is in the Bibliotheca Marciana, at Venice. The sheets which throw light upon the historical geography of America are these:—

XVII. 4. North America northward to the Penobscot and the Gulf of California; and the west coast of South America to 15° south; then blank, till the region of Magellan’s Straits is reached.

XVII. 5. North America, east coast from Labrador south; Central America; South America, all of east coast, and west coast, as in XVII. 4.

XVII. 33. The World,—the American continent much as in XVII. 4 and 5.

We note the following other maps of Agnese:—

a. Portolano in the British Museum, bearing date 1536. Index to MSS. in British Museum, 19,927. If this is the one Kohl (Discovery of Maine, p. 293) refers to as no. 5,463, MS. Department British Museum, it is signed and dated by the author.

b. Portolano, dated 1536, in the royal library at Dresden, of ten plates,—one being the World, the western half of which, showing America, is given reduced by Kohl, p. 292. It resembles XVII. 33, above, but is not so well advanced, and retains a trace of Verrazano’s Sea, which makes New England an isthmus. It wants the California peninsula, a knowledge of whose discovery had hardly yet reached Venice.

c. Portolano, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; thought by Kohl, who gives a sketch (pl. xv. c), to be the work of Agnese, since it closely resembles, in its delineations of the American continent, that Venetian’s notions. This, perhaps, is earlier than the previous map; for it puts a strait leading to the Western sea, where Cartier had just before supposed he had found such in the St. Lawrence.

d. Map in the archives of the Duke of Coburg-Gotha, marked “Baptista Agnes fecit, Venetiis, 1543, die 18 Febr.” Kohl (pl. xvii. 3) gives from it a draft of the eastern coast of the United States.

e. Map, like d, in the Huth Library at London.

f. Portolano in the Royal Library, Dresden. It shows California. Kohl, p. 294.

g. Portolano in the British Museum, dated 1564. Index to MSS. 25,442.

Kohl says (p. 293) there are other MS. maps of Agnese in London, Paris, Gotha, and Dresden, not here enumerated.

A few other books, less extensive and more accessible, deserve attention in connection with the study of comparative early American cartography.

Henry Stevens. History and Geographical Notes of the Early Discoveries in America, 1453-1530, New Haven, 1869, with five folding plates of photographic fac-similes of sixteen of the most important maps.

Dr. J. G. Kohl. Discovery of Maine (Documentary History of Maine, 1), with reduced sketches, not in fac-simile, of many early charts of our eastern seaboard.

Charles P. Daly. Early History of Cartography, or what we know of Maps and Map-making before the time of Mercator,—being his annual address, 1879, before the American Geographical Society. The maps are unfortunately on a very much reduced scale.


NOTE.—Since this chapter was completed Henry Harrisse’s Jean et Sébastien Cabot, Paris, 1882, has given us the fullest account of Agnese’s cartographical labors, with much other useful information about the maps from 1497 to 1550; and George Bancroft (Magazine of American History, 1883, pp. 459, 460), in defence of his latest revision, has controverted Dr. De Costa’s statement (Ibid., 1883, p. 300), that Gosnold had no permission from Ralegh, and has set forth his reasons for believing that Waymouth ascended the George’s River. De Costa replied to Bancroft in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., Aug., 1883, p. 143.


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CHAPTER VII.

THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND.—PURITANS AND SEPARATISTS IN ENGLAND.

BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS,

Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

THERE is no occasion to offer any elaborate plea for making this theme the subject of a chapter of American history, however extended into detail or compressed in its dealing with general themes that history might be. In the origin and development, the strengthening and the triumph, of those agencies which transferred from the Old World to the New the trial of fresh ideas and the experiment with free institutions, the colonists of New England had the leading part. The influence and the institutions which have gone forth from them have had a prevailing sway on the northern half of this continent. Their enterprise—in its seemingly feeble, but from the first earnest and resolute, purpose—took its spring from religious dissension following upon the earlier stages of the Protestant Reformation in England. The grounds, occasions, and results of that dissension thus become the proper subject of a chapter in American history. It is certain that in tracing the early assertion in England of what may be called the principles of dissent from ecclesiastical authority, we are dealing with forces which have wrought effectively on this continent.

The well-established and familiar fact, that the first successful and effective colonial enterprises of Englishmen in New England found their motive and purpose in religious variances within the English communion, is illustrated by an incident anticipatory by several years of the period which realized that result. A scheme was devised and entered upon in England in the interest of substantially the same class of men known as Separatists and Nonconformists, who twenty-three years afterward established themselves at Plymouth, and ten years later in Massachusetts Bay. In the year 1597, there were confined in London prisons a considerable number of men known confusedly as Barrowists or Brownists, who had been seized in the conventicles of the Separatists, or had made themselves obnoxious by disaffection with the government, the forms, or the discipline of the English hierarchy. In that year a scheme was proposed, apparently by the Government,[220] for planting some permanent colonists somewhere in the northern parts of North America. Some of these Separatists petitioned the Council for leave to transport themselves for this purpose, promising fidelity to the Queen and her realm. Three merchants at the time were planning a voyage for fishing and discovery, with a view to a settlement on an island variously called Rainea, Rainée, and Ramees, in a group of the Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and they were to furnish two ships for the enterprise. Reinforcing the petition of the Separatists, they asked permission to transport with them “divers artificers and other persons that are noted to be Sectaries, whose minds are continually in an ecclesiastical ferment.” Permission was granted for the removal of two such persons in each of the two ships, the merchants giving bonds that the exiles should not return unless willing to obey the ecclesiastical laws. The four prisoners who embarked for the voyage, April 8, 1597, were Francis and George Johnson, brothers, who had been educated at Cambridge, and Daniel Studley and John Clarke, who shared with them their Separatist principles. One of the vessels was wrecked when near its destination, and the company took refuge on the other, which, proving unseaworthy and scantily provisioned, returned to England, arriving in the Channel, September 1. The four exiles found their way stealthily to a hiding-place in London, and by the middle of the month were in Amsterdam. Their history there connects with the subsequent fortunes of the Separatists in England, and with those of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.[443]

The facts, persons, and incidents with which we have to deal in treating of this special matter of religious contention within the English Church, give us simply the opening in series and course of what under various modifications is known as the history of Dissent. The strife then engendered has continued essentially the same down to our own times, turning upon the same points of controversy and upon contested principles, rights, and methods. The present relations of the parties to this entailed dissension may throw some light back upon the working of the elements in it when it was first opened. The result which has been reached, after the processes engaged in it for nearly four centuries, shows itself to us in a still existing National Church establishment in England, with authority and vested rights, privileges, and prerogatives, yet nevertheless repudiated by nearly, if not quite, half of the subjects of the realm. The reason or the right, the grounds or the justification, of the original workings of Dissent have certainly been suspended long enough for discussion and judgment upon their merits to help us to reach a fair decision upon them.

The indifference, even the strong distaste, which writers and readers alike feel to a rehearsal in our days of the embittered and aggravated strife,—often concerned too, with what seem to us petty, trivial, and perverse elements of scruple, temper, and passion,—in the early Puritan controversy in the Church[221] of England, may be sensibly relieved by the spirit of fairness and consideration in which the subject is treated in the most recent dealing with it by able and judicious writers. There are even now in the utterances of pulpit and platform, and in the voluminous pages of pamphlet, essay, and so-called history, survivals and renewals of all the sharpness and acrimoniousness of the original passions of the controversy. And where this spirit has license, the lengthening lapse of time will more or less falsify the truth of the relation of either side of the strife. One whose sympathies are with either party may rightly claim that it be fairly presented, its limitations, excesses, and even its perversities being excused or palliated, where reasons can be shown. Nor is one who for any fair purpose undertakes a statement or exposition of the views and course of either of those parties to be regarded as also its champion and vindicator. But no rehearsal of the controversy will have much value or interest for readers of our day which does assume such championship of one party. As the Puritans, Nonconformists, or Dissenters, from the beginning up to this day, were substantially defeated, disabled, and made the losers of the object for which they contended, they may fairly claim the allowance of making the best possible statement of their cause.

Those who at this distance of time accede in their lineage and principles to the heritage of the first Dissenters from the English Church system, might naturally eulogize them for their noble service in laying the foundations of religious and civil liberty in the realm. But there are not lacking in these days Royalists and Churchmen alike who in the pages of history and in essays equally extol the English Nonconformists as the foremost champions, the most effective agents, in bringing to trial and triumph the free institutions of the realm. Making the fullest allowances for all the perversities and fanaticisms wrought in with the separating tenets and principles of individuals and sects, their protests and assertions, their sufferings and constancy under disabilities, all wrought together at last to insure a grand result. Boldly is the assertion now maintained, that the Church of England at several critical periods would have been unable to withstand the recuperative forces of the Roman Church, had it not been for the persistent action of the Nonconformists in holding the ground won by the Reformation, and in demanding advance in the same line. The partial schemes of toleration and comprehension which were hopefully or mockingly entertained by parties in the Government down to the period of the Revolution, were avowedly designed “to strengthen the Protestant interest.” The strength of Dissent, in all its forms and stages, lay in its demanding for the laity voice and influence in all ecclesiastical affairs. It was this that restrained the dominance of priestly power.

There is a very important consideration to be had in view when we aim to form a fair and impartial judgment of the spirit and course of those earnest, if contentious, men, scholars, divines, heads and fellows of universities, who in their Nonconforming or Separatist principles originated dissensions[222] in the English Church, and withdrew from it, bearing various pains and penalties. Even in the calmer dealing with them in the religious literature of our own times coming from Episcopal writers, we find traces of the irritation, reproach, and contempt felt and expressed for these original Dissenters when they first came into notice, to be dealt with as mischief-makers and culprits. They were then generally regarded as unreasonable, perverse, and contentious spirits, exaggerating trifling matters, obtruding morbid scruples, and keeping the realm in a ferment of petty squabbles on subjects in themselves utterly indifferent. They withstood the hearty, harmonious engagement of the rulers and the mass of the people of the realm in the difficult task of securing the general principles and interests of the Reformation, when perils and treacheries of a most formidable character from the Papacy and from internal and external enemies threatened every form of disaster. To this charge it might be replied, that the Puritans believed that a thorough and consistent work of reformation within the realm would be the best security for loyalty, internal harmony, and protection from the plottings of all outside enemies.

The most interesting and significant fact underlying the origin and the principles alike of Nonconformity and of Separatism in England at the period of the Reformation, is this: the facility and acquiescence with which changes were made in the English ecclesiastical system up to a certain point, while further modifications in the same direction were so stiffly resisted. It would seem as if it had been assumed at once that there was a well-defined line of division which should sharply distinguish between what must necessarily or might reasonably be made a part of the new order of things when the Papacy was renounced, and what must be conserved against all further innovation. The pivot of all subsequent controversy, dissension, and alienation turned upon the question whether this sharply drawn line was not wholly an arbitrary one, not adjusted by a principle of consistency, but of the nature of a compromise. This question was followed by another: Why should the process of reformation in the Church, so resolute and revolutionary in changing its institution and discipline and ritual, stop at the stage which it has already reached? Could any other answer be given than that the majority, or those who in office or prerogative had the power to enforce a decision, had decided that the right point had been reached, and that an arrest must be made there?

We must indicate in a summary way the stage which the Reformation had reached in England when Puritanism, in its various forms, made itself intrusive and obnoxious in demanding further changes. We need not open and deal with the controverted point, about which English Churchmen are by no means in accord, as to whether their Church had or did not have an origin and jurisdiction independently of all agency, intrusion, or intervention of the Bishop of Rome, or the Pope. It is enough to start with the fact, that up to the reign of Henry VIII. the Pope asserted and exercised a supremacy both in civil and in ecclesiastical affairs in the realm. If there[223] was a Church in England, it was allowed that that Church must have a head. The Pope was acknowledged to be that head. Henry VIII., with the support of his Parliament, renounced the Papal supremacy, and himself acceded to that august dignity. The year 600 is assigned as the date when Pope Gregory I. put Augustin, or Austin, over the British Church. The headship of the Pope was acknowledged in the line of monarchs till Henry VIII. became the substitute of Clement VII. In the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign his Parliament enacted that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” Some of the clergy, being startled at this exaltation of a layman to the highest ecclesiastical office, demanded the insertion of the qualifying words “as far as is agreeable to the laws of Christ.” The King for a time accepted this qualification, but afterward obtained the consent of Parliament for its omission. Whatever may be granted or denied to the well-worn plea that the King’s reformatory zeal was inspired by his feud with the Pope about his matrimonial infelicities, it is evident that, notwithstanding the unrestrained royal prerogative, the monarch could not have struck at the very basis of all ecclesiastical rule and order in his kingdom, had there not been not only in his Council and Parliament, but also working among all orders of the people, a spirit and resolve against the Papal rule and discipline, ready to enter upon the unsounded and perilous ventures of radical reformation. None as yet knew where the opened way would lead them. The initiatory and each onward step might yet have to be retraced. Not for many years afterward did the threat and dread of the full restoration of the Papal power cease to appal the people of the realm. The final and the impotent blow which severed the Papacy from the realm came in the Bull of Pope Pius V. in 1571, which denounced Elizabeth as a heretic, and, under pain of curse, forbade her subjects to obey her laws. The measures of reform under Henry were tentative and arbitrary on his part. They made no recognition of any defined aim and stage to be reached. We must keep this fact in view as showing that while the realm was ready for change, it was as yet a process, not a mark.

It is necessary to start with a definition of terms which are often confounded in their use. “Puritans,” “Separatists,” and “Nonconformists” might in fact be terms equally applicable to many individuals, but none the less they were distinctive, and in many cases indicated very broad divergencies and characteristics in opinion, belief, and conduct. Nonconformists and Separatists were alike Puritans,—the latter intensively such. Puritanism developed alike into Nonconformity and Separatism. The earliest Puritans came to be Nonconformists, after trying in vain to retain a ministry and communion in the English Church as established by royal and civil authority, and after being driven from it because of their persistent demands for further reform in it. As heartily as did those who remained in its communion, they believed in the fitness of an established nationalized Church. They wished to be members of such a Church[224] themselves; and not only so, but also to force upon others such membership. It was not to destroy, but to purify; not to deny to the civil authority a legislative and disciplinary power in religious matters, but to limit the exercise of that right within Scriptural rules and methods. They had sympathized in the processes of reform so far as these had advanced, but complained that the work had been arbitrarily arrested, was incomplete, was inconsistently pursued, was insecure in the stage which it had reached, and so left without the warrant which Scripture alone could furnish as a substitute for repudiated Rome.

Who were the Separatists, whose utterances, scruples, and conduct seemed so whimsical, pertinacious, disloyal, and refractory in Old England, and whose enterprise has been so successful and honorable in its development in New England? When the unity of the Roman Church was sundered at the Reformation, all those once in its communion who parted from it were Separatists. It is an intricate but interesting story, which has been often told, wearisomely and indeed exhaustively, in explanation of the fact that this epithet came to designate a comparatively small number of individuals in a nation to the mass of whose population it equally belonged. The term “separatist” or “sectary” carries with it a changing significance and association, according to the circumstances of its application. It was first used to designate the Christians. The Apostle Paul was called “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts xxiv. 5). The Roman Jews described the Christians as a “sect” that was “everywhere spoken against” (Acts xxviii. 22). The civil power gave a distinctive limitation to the epithet. It is always to be remembered that every national-church establishment existing among Protestants is the creation of the civil authority. Its inclusion and its exclusion, the privileges and disabilities which it gives or imposes, its titles of honor or reproach, are the awards of secular magistrates. All ecclesiastical polity, outside of Scriptural rule and sanction, receives its authority, for those who accept and for those who reject it, from the extension of the temporal power into the province of religion. When King Henry VIII. and the English Parliament assumed the ecclesiastical headship and prerogative previously exercised by Pope Clement VII., all the loyal people of the realm became Separatists. All the Reformed bodies of the Continent substantially regarded themselves as coming under that designation, which might have been applied and assumed with equal propriety as the epithet “protestants.” The Curia of the hierarchy at Rome from the first until now regards English and all other Protestants as Separatists. An archbishop or bishop of the English Church is ranked by the Church of Rome in the same category of unauthorized intruders upon sacred functions with the second-advent exhorter and the field-preacher. The pages of English history, so diligently wrought, and the developments of ecclesiastical polity in the realm must be studied and traced by one who would fully understand the occasion, the grounds, and the justice of the restriction which confined the title of “separatists” to the outlawed and persecuted[225] and exiled class of persons, many of them graduates of English universities, ordained and serving in the pulpits of the Church, who were represented in and out of English jails by the four men whose abortive scheme of planting a colony in North America has just been referred to. However, justly or unjustly, the epithet “separatists” came to be applied and accepted as designating those who would not only not conform to the discipline of the Church, as still members of it, but who utterly renounced all connection with it, kept away from it, and organized assemblies, conventicles, or fellowships, subject only to such discipline as they might agree upon among themselves.

A suggestion presents itself here, to which a candid view of facts must attach much weight. Nonconformity, Separatism, Dissent, are not to be regarded as factiously obtruding themselves upon a peaceful, orderly, and well-established system, already tried and approved in its general workings. The Reformation in England was then but in progress, in its early stages; everything had been shaken, all was still unsettled, unadjusted, not reduced to permanence and order. There was an experiment to be tried, an institution to be recreated and remodelled, a substitute Church to be provided for a repudiated Church. The early Dissenters regarded themselves as simply taking part in an unfinished reform. The Church in England, under entanglements of civil policy and complications of State, gave tokens of stopping at a stage in reform quite different from that reached, and allowed progressive advance and unfettered conditions among Protestants on the Continent. There the course was free. The French, Dutch, and Italian systems, though not accordant, were all unlike the English ecclesiastical system. In England it was impeded, leading to a kind of establishment and institution in hierarchical and ritual administration which had more regard for the old Church, and looked to more compromise with it. It was not as if yielding to their own crotchets, self-willed idiosyncrasies, and petty fancies that those who opened the line of the Dissenters obtruded their variances, scruples, and contentions in assailing what was already established and perfected. They meant to come in at the beginning, at the first stage, the initiation of what was to be the new order of things in the Church, which was then, as they viewed it, in a state of formation and organization for time to come. They took alarm at the simulation of the system and ritual of the Roman Church, which the English, alone of all the Reformed Churches, in their view evidently favored. They wished to have hand and voice in initiating and planning the ecclesiastical institutions under which they were to live as Christians. Individual conscience, too, which heretofore had been a nullity, was thenceforward to stand for something. It remained to be proved how much and what was to be allowed to it, but it was not to be scornfully slighted. Then, also, with the first manifestations of a Nonconforming and Separatist spirit, we note the agitation of the question, which steadily strengthened in its persistency and emphasis of treatment, as to what were to be the rights and functions of[226] lay people in the administration of a Christian Church. Were they to continue, as under the Roman system, simply to be led, governed, and disciplined, as sheep in a fold, by a clerical order? Hallam gives it as his conclusion, that the party in the realm during Elizabeth’s reign “adverse to any species of ecclesiastical change,” was less numerous than either of the other parties, Catholic or Puritan. According to this view, if one third of the people of the realm would have consented to the restoration of the Roman system, and less than one third were in accord with the Protestant prelatical establishment, certainly the other third, the Puritanical party, might assert their right to a hearing.

While claiming and pleading that the strict rule and example of Scripture precedent and model should alone be followed in the institution and discipline of the Christian Church, there was a second very comprehensive and positive demand made by the Puritans, which,—as we shall calmly view it in the retrospect, as taking its impulse and purpose either from substantial and valid reasons of good sense, discretion, and practical wisdom, or as starting from narrow conceits, perversity, and eccentric judgments leading it on into fanaticism,—put the Puritans into antagonism with the Church party. From the first token of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII. through the reigns of his three children and the four Stuarts, the Reformation was neither accomplished in its process, nor secure of abiding in the stage which it had reached. More than once during that period of one and a half centuries there were not only reasonable fears, but actual evidences, that a renewed subjection to the perfectly restored thraldom of Rome might, in what seemed to be merely the cast of a die, befall the distracted realm of England. The Court, Council, and Parliament pulsated in regular or irregular beats between Romanism and Protestantism. Henry VIII. left the work of reform embittered in its spirit for both parties, unaccomplished, insecure, and with no settlement by fixed principles. His three children, coming successively to the crown, pursued each a policy which had all the elements of confusion, antagonism, inconsistency, and extreme methods.

The spirit which vivified Puritanism had been working in England, and had been defining and certifying its animating and leading principles, before any formal measures of King and Parliament had opened the breach with Rome. The elemental ferment began with the circulation and reading of parts or the whole of the Scriptures in the English tongue. The surprises and perils which accompanied the enjoyment of this fearful privilege by private persons of acute intelligence and hearts sensitive to the deepest religious emotions, were followed by profound effects. The book was to them a direct, intelligible, and most authoritative communication from God. To its first readers it did not seem to need any help from an interpreter or commentator. It is a suggestive fact, that for English readers the now mountainous heaps of literature devoted to the exposition, illustration, and extended and comparative elucidation of Scripture were produced only at[227] a later period. The first Scripture readers, antedating the actual era of the English Reformation and the formal national rupture with the Roman Church, were content with the simple text. They were impatient with any glosses or criticisms. When afterward, in the interests of psalmody in worship, the first attempts were made in constructing metrical versions of the Psalms, the intensest opposition was raised against the introduction of a single expletive word for which there was no answering original in the text.

We must assign to this early engagedness of love and devoted regard and fond estimate of the Bible the mainspring and the whole guiding inspiration of all the protests and demands which animated the Puritan movements. The degree in which afterward any individual within the communion of the English Church was prompted to pursue what he regarded as the work of reformation, whether he were prelate, noble, gentleman, scholar, husbandman, or artisan, and whether it drove him to conformity or to any phase of Puritanism, or even Separatism, depended mainly upon the estimate which he assigned to the Scriptures, whether as the sole or only the co-ordinate authority for the institution and discipline of the Christian Church. The free and devout reading of the Scriptures, when engaging the fresh curiosity and zeal of thoroughly earnest men and women, roused them to an amazed surprise at the enormous discordance between the matter and spirit of the sacred book and the ecclesiastical institutions and discipline under which they had been living,—“the simplicity that was in Christ,” constrasted with the towering corruptions and the monstrous tyranny and thraldom of the Papacy! This first surprise developed into all shades and degrees of protest, resentment, indignation, and almost blinding passion. Those who are conversant with the writings of either class of the Puritans know well with what paramount distinctness and emphasis they use the term, “the Word.” The significance attached to the expression gives us the key to Puritanism. For its most forcible use was when, in a representative championship, it was made to stand in bold antagonism with the term “the Church,” as inclusive of what it carried with it alike under the Roman or the English prelatical system. “The Church,” “the Scriptures,” are the word-symbols of the issue between Conformity and Puritanism. Christ did not leave Scriptures behind him, said one party, but he did leave a Church. Yes, replied the other party; he left apostles who both wrote the Scriptures and planted and administered the Church. The extreme to which the famous “Se-Baptist,” John Smyth, carried this insistency upon the sole authority of the Scriptures, led him to repudiate the use of the English Bible in worship, and to require that the originals in Greek and Hebrew should be substituted.[444] The fundamental distinguishing principle which is common to all the phases of Puritanism, Dissent, and Separatism in the English Church is this,—of giving to the Scriptures sole authority, especially over matters in[228] which the Church claimed control and jurisdiction. There was in the earlier stage of the struggle little, if any, discordance as to doctrine. Discipline and ritual were the matters in controversy. The rule and text of Scripture were to displace canon law and the Church courts. The first representatives of the sect of Baptists resolved, “by the grace of God, not to receive or practise any piece of positive worship which had not precept or example in the Word.”[445] Nor were the Baptists in this respect singular or emphatic beyond any others of the Dissenting company. None of them had any misgiving as to the resources and sole authority of Scripture to furnish them with model, guide, and rule. It is remarkable that in view of the positive and reiterated avowal of this principle by all the Puritans, there should have been in recent times, as there was not in the first era of the controversy, any misapprehension of their frank adoption of it, their resolute standing by it. Archbishop Whately repeatedly marked it as evidence of the inspired wisdom of the New Testament writers, that they do not define the form or pattern of a church institution for government, worship, or discipline. The Puritans, however, believed that those writers did this very thing, and had a purpose in doing it. It was to strike at the very roots of this exclusive Scriptural theory of the Puritans that Hooker wrought out his famous and noble classical production, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. He admitted in this elegant and elaborate work that Scripture furnished the sole rule for doctrine, but argued with consummate ability that it was not such an exclusive and sufficient guide for government or discipline. The apostles did not, he said, fix a rule for their successors. The Church was a divinely instituted society; and, like every society, it had a full prerogative to make laws for its government, ceremonial, and discipline. He argued that a true Church polity must be taken not only from what the Scriptures affirm distinctly, but also “from what the general rules and principles of Scripture potentially contain.” Starting with his grand basis of the sanctity and majesty of Law, as founded in natural order, he insisted that the Church should establish such order in laws, rites, and ceremonies within its fold, and that all who have been baptized into it are bound to conform to its ecclesiastical laws. He would not concede to the Puritans their position of denial, but he insisted that Episcopacy was of apostolic institution. He was, however, at fault in affirming that the Puritans admitted that they could not find all the parts of the discipline which they stood for in the Scriptures. Dean Stanley comes nearer to the truth, in what is for him a sharp judgment, when he writes: “The Puritan idea that there was a Biblical counterpart to every—the most trivial—incident or institution of modern ecclesiastical life, has met with an unsparing criticism from the hand of Hooker.”[446] Indeed, it was keenly argued as against these Puritan sticklers for adhesion to Scripture rule and model, that they by no means conformed rigidly to the pattern, as they dropped from observance[229] such matters as a community of goods, the love feast, the kiss of peace, the Lord’s Supper in upper chambers, and baptism by immersion.

It is, in fact, to this attempt of all Nonconformists to make the Scriptures the sole and rigid guide alike in Church discipline as in doctrine, that we are to trace their divergencies and dissensions among themselves, their heated controversies, their discordant factions, their constant parting up of their small conventicles into smaller ones, even of only two or three members, and the real origin of all modern sects. This was the common experience of such Dissenters from the Church, alike in England before their exile and then in all the places of their exile,—Holland, Frankfort, Geneva, and elsewhere. It could not but follow on their keen, acute, and concentrated searching and scanning of every sentence and word of Scripture as bearing upon their contest with prelacy, that they should be led beyond matters of mere discipline into those of doctrine. A very small point was enough to open a new issue. It is vexing to the spirit, while winning sometimes our admiration for the intense and awful sincerity of the self-inflicting victims of their own scruples, magnified into compunctions of conscience, to trace the quarrels and leave-takings of those poor exiles on the Continent, struggling in toil and sacrifice for a bare subsistence, but finding compensation if not solace in their endless and ever-sharpening altercations. But while all this saddens and oppresses us, we have to allow that it was natural and inevitable. The Bible, the Holy Scriptures, will never henceforward to any generation, in any part of the globe, be, or stand for, to individuals or groups of men and women, what it was to the early English Puritans. To it was intrusted all the honor, reverence, obedience, and transcendent responsibility in the life, the hope, and the salvation of men, which had but recently been given, in awe and dread, to a now dishonored and repudiated Church, against which scorn and contempt and hate could hardly enough embitter reproach and invective. With that Book in hand, men and women, than whom there have never lived those more earnest and sincere, sat down in absorbed soul-devotion, to exercise their own thinking on the highest subjects, to decide each for himself what he could make of it. Those who have lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency, the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest. How much more then will all exorbitant and eccentric, as well as all ingenious and rational, manifestations of like sort present themselves, when, instead of dealing with ballots, fashions, and social issues, men and women take in hand a book which, so to speak, they have just seized out of a descending cloud, as from the very hand of God. It was easy to claim the right of private judgment; but to learn how wisely to use it was quite a different matter. It was, however, in those earnest, keen studies, those brooding musings, those searching and subtle processes of speculation and dialectic argument engaged upon the Bible and upon institutional religion, that the wit, the wisdom, the logic,[230] and the vigor of the understanding powers of people of the English race were sharpened to an edge and a toughness known elsewhere in no other. The aim of Prelatists, Conformists, and clerical and civil magistrates in religion, to bring all into a common belief and ritual, was hopeless from the start. It made no allowance for the rooted varieties and divergencies in nature, taste, sensibility, judgment, and conscience in individuals who were anything more than animated clods. How was it possible for one born and furnished in the inner man to be a Quaker, to be manufactured into a Churchman? It soon became very evident that bringing such a people as the English into accord in belief and observance under a hierarchical and parochial system would be no work of dictation or persuasion, but would require authority, force, penalties touching spiritual, mental, and bodily freedom, and resorting to fines, violence, and prisons.

The consumptive boy-king, Edward VI., dying when sixteen years of age, through his advisers, advanced the Reformation in some of its details beyond the stage at which it was left by his father, and put the work in the direction of further progress. But “Bloody Mary,” with her spectral Spanish consort, Philip II., overset what had by no means become a Protestant realm, and made it over to cardinal and pope. Nearly three hundred martyrs, including an archbishop and four bishops, perished at the stake, besides the uncounted victims in the dungeons. No one had suffered to the death for religion in the preceding reign. After her accession, Elizabeth stiffly held back from accepting even that stage of reform reached by Edward. In the Convocation of 1562, only a single vote, on a division, withstood the proposal to clear the ritual of nearly every ceremony objectionable to the Puritans. The two statutes of supremacy and uniformity, passed in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth, brought the English Church under that subjection to the temporal or civil jurisdiction which has continued to this day. The firmness, not to say the obstinacy, with which the Queen stood for her prerogative in this matter has been entailed upon Parliament; and the ecclesiastical Convocation has in vain struggled to assert independency of it. Elizabeth exhibited about an equal measure of zeal against Catholics and Puritans. She frankly gave out her resolution that if she should marry a Catholic prince, she should not allow him a private chapel in her palace. About two hundred Catholics suffered death in her reign.

An important episode in the development of Puritanism and Separatism in the English Church brings to our notice the share which different parties came to have in both those forms of dissent during a period of temporary exile on the Continent in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Mary, and afterward of Elizabeth. The results reached by the two classes of those exiles were manifested respectively in the colonization, first by Separatists, at Plymouth, and next by Nonconformists in the Massachusetts Bay, and by other New England colonists.

In the thirty-first year of Henry’s reign, 1539, while the monarch was[231] vacillating between the old religion and the new, was enacted what was called “The Bloody Statute.” This was of “six articles.” These articles enforced the dogmas of Transubstantiation, of Communion in One Element, of the Celibacy of the Clergy, of the Vows of Chastity, of Private Masses, and of Auricular Confession. An infraction of these articles in act or speech or writing was to be punished either by burning, as heresy, or by execution, as felony. The articles were to be publicly read by all the clergy quarterly. To escape the operation of this statute, many of the clergy went to Geneva. Returning on the accession of Edward, they had to exile themselves again when Mary came to the throne, to venture home once more under Elizabeth, in 1559. As early as 1528, there had been a small but earnest religious fellowship of devout scholars in Cambridge, meeting for exercises of prayer and reading. Three of its members—Bilney, Latimer, and Bradford—were burned under Mary. Afterward Travers and Cartwright, both of them men of eminent ability and religious fervor, had found refuge in Geneva; and to them, on their return, is to be ascribed the strength and prevalence of the spirit of Puritanism in Cambridge. The fact that so many men of parts and scholarship and distinguished position were thus principal agents in the first working of Puritanism, should qualify the common notion that Nonconformity in England had its rise through obscure and ordinary men. Some of the most eminent Puritans, and even Separatists, were noted university men and scholars,—like Cartwright, Perkins, Ames, Bradshaw, and Jacob, the last being of Oxford. Robinson, the pastor at Leyden, has been pronounced to have been among the first men of his time in learning and comprehensiveness of mind.[447] It was really in the churches of the English exiles in Holland that the ultimate principles of Independency and Congregationalism were wrought out, to be asserted and so manfully stood for both in Old and in New England. Indeed, the essential principles of largest toleration and of equality, save in civil functions, had been established in Holland in 1572, before the coming of the English exiles. Almost as real as ideal was the recognition there of the one all-comprehensive church represented by a multitude of independent elements. Greenwood and his fellow-student at Cambridge,—Barrow, a layman,—joined the Separatists in 1586. The Separatists in England might well, as they did, complain to King James that he did not allow the same liberty to them, his own subjects, as was enjoyed by the French and Walloon churches in London and elsewhere in England.

On the accession of Queen Mary, who was crowned in 1553, more than eight hundred of the English Reformers took refuge on the Continent. Among them were five bishops, five deans, four archdeacons, fifty doctors of divinity and famous preachers, with nobles, merchants, traders, mechanics, etc. Among the “sundrie godly men” who went to Frankfort, the Lutheran system gained much influence. Those who found a refuge[232] in Zurich and Geneva were more affected towards the Calvinistic. Soon after a flourishing and harmonious church, with the favor of the magistrates, had been established at Frankfort, dissension about matters of discipline and the use of the Prayer-book of King Edward VI., with or without a revision, was opened by some new-comers. The advice of Knox, Calvin, and others, which was asked, did not prevent an acrimonious strife, which ended in division.[448] Carrying back their differences to England, we find them contributing to deepen the alienation and the variances between Conformists, Nonconformists, and Separatists. The intimacy and sympathy with Reformers on the Continent naturally induced the exiles, even the English bishops who had been among them, to lay but little stress on the exclusive prerogatives of Episcopacy, including the theory of Apostolic Succession.

The English bishops who were most earnest in the early measures of reform,—such as Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer,—realizing that in the minds of the common people the strong ties of association connected with the emblems, forms, and vestments of the repudiated Church of Rome would encourage lingering superstitions in their continued use, would have had them wholly set aside. Especially would they have had substituted in the chancels of churches tables instead of altars, as the latter would always be identified with the Mass. The people also associated the validity of clerical administrations with priestly garments. The starting point of the Puritan agitation and protest as to these matters may well be found, therefore, in the refusal of Dr. Hooper to wear the clerical vestments for his consecration as Bishop of Gloucester in 1550. Having exiled himself at Zurich during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., Hooper had become more thoroughly imbued with Reforming principles, and withstood the compromising compliances which some of the Continental Reformers yielded. Even Ridley insisted upon his putting on the vestments for his consecration; and after being imprisoned for his recusancy, he was forced to a partial concession. This matter of habits, tippets, caps, etc., may be viewed either as a bugbear, or as representative of a very serious principle.

In an early stage of the Puritan movement as working in the progress of the Reformation in England, it thus appeared that what, as represented in men and principles, might be called a third party, was to assert itself. As the event proved, in the struggle for the years following, and in the accomplished result still triumphant, this third party was to hold the balance of power. There was a general accord in dispensing with the Pope, renouncing his sway, and retaining within the realm the exercise of all ecclesiastical[233] jurisdiction. A Romanizing party was still in strength, with its hopes temporarily reviving, its agencies, open and secret, on the alert, and its threats bold, if opportunity should favor the execution of them. This Romanizing faction may represent one extreme; the Puritans may represent another. A third, and for a considerable space of time weaker, as already stated, than either of them, intervened, to win at last the victory. In ridding themselves of Rome, the Puritans aimed to rid the Church of everything that had come into it from that source,—hierarchy, ceremonial, superstition, discipline, and assumption of ecclesiastical prerogative,—reducing the whole Church fabric to what they called gospel simplicity in rule and order; the apostolic model. This, as we have noticed, was to be sought full, sufficient, and authoritative in the Scriptures. But neither of the Reforming monarchs, nor the majority of the prelates successively exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, were prepared for this reversion to so-called first principles. They would not allow the sufficiency nor the sole authority of the Scriptural model; nor would they admit that all that was wrought into the hierarchy, the ceremonial, the institution, and the discipline of the English Church came into it through Popery, and had the taint or blemish of Popery. The English Church now represents the principles then argued out, maintained, and adopted. It followed a principle of selection, sometimes called compromise, to some seeming arbitrary, to others reasonable and right. It proceeded upon the recognition of an interval between the close of the ministry of the apostles and the rise of the Papacy, with its superstitious innovations and impositions, during which certain principles and usages in the government and ceremonial of the Church came into observance. Though these might not have the express warrant of Scripture, they were in nowise inconsistent with Scripture. They might claim to have the real warrant and approval of the apostles, because they were “primitive,” and might even be regarded as essential, as Hooker so earnestly tried to show, to the good order, dignity, and efficiency of the Church of Christ. With exceeding ability did the Puritan and the Church parties deal with this vital issue. The Puritans brought to it no less of keen acumen, learning, and logic than did their opponents. They thoroughly comprehended what the controversy involved. When, fifty years ago, substantially the same issue was under vigorous discussion in the Oxford or Tractarian agitation, so far were the “Puseyites,” so-called, from bringing into it any new matter, that the old arsenal was drawn upon largely for fresh use.

The Puritans held loyally to the fundamental position asserted by their sturdy champion. Cartwright, in his Admonition, etc.,—“The discipline of Christ’s Church that is necessary for all time is delivered by Christ, and set down in the Holy Scripture.” The objection, fatal in the eyes of the Puritans, to receiving, as authoritative, customs and vouchers of the so-called “Primitive” Church and of the Fathers, was that it compelled to the practice[234] of a sort of eclecticism in choosing or rejecting, by individual preference or judgment, out of that mass of heterogeneous gathering which Milton scornfully described as “the drag-net of antiquity.” Though the pleaders on both sides of the controversy succeeded in showing that “patristic” authority, and the usages and institutions which might be traced out and verified in the dim past, were by no means in accord or harmony as to what was “primitive,” both parties seem to have consented to hide, gloss over, or palliate very much of the crudity, folly, superstition, conceit, and discordancy so abounding in the writings of the Fathers. Nothing could be more positive than the teaching of St. Augustine,—not drawn from the New Testament, in which the rite was for adults, but from the then universal practice of the Church,—that baptism was to be for infants, and by immersion. That Father taught that an unbaptized infant is forever lost; and that, besides baptism, the infant’s salvation depends upon its receiving the Eucharist. Yet this has not hindered but that the vast majority of Christians, Roman Catholic and Protestant, save a single sect, administer the rite by sprinkling infants. How, too, could the Prelatists approve a quotation from Tertullian:[449] “Where there are only three, and they laics, there is a church”?

In consistency with this their vital principle of the sole sufficiency of the Scripture institution and pattern for a church, the work of purification led its resolute asserters to press their protests and demands against not only such superstitions and innovations as could be traced directly to the Roman corruption and innovation, but to a more thorough expurgation. Incident to the rupture with the Papacy, and in the purpose to repel what seemed to be its vengeful and spiteful devices for recovering its sway, there was developed among the most impassioned of the Reformers an intense and scornful hate, a bitter heaping of invectives, objurgations, and all-wrathful epithets against the old Church as simply blasphemous,—the personification of Antichrist. So they were resolute to rid themselves of all “the marks of the Beast.” The scrapings, rags, tatters of Popery, and everything left of such remnants, especially provoked their contempt. Having adopted the conviction that the “Mass” was an idolatrous performance, all its paraphernalia, associated in the minds of the common people with it as a magical rite, the priestly and altar habits, the cap, the tippet, the rochet, etc., were denounced and condemned. The very word “priest,” with all the functionary and mediatorial offices going with it, was repudiated. The New Testament knew only of ministers, pastors, teachers. While, of course, recognizing that the apostles exercised special and peculiar prerogatives in planting the Church, the Puritans maintained that they had no successors in their full authority. The Christian Church assembly they found to be based upon and started from the Synagogue, with its free, popular methods, and not upon the Temple, with its altar, priests, and ritual. It is an interesting and significant fact, that while[235] the Reformation in its ferment was working as if all the elements of Church institution were perfectly free for new combinations, the edition of the English Bible called Cranmer’s, in 1539, translated the word ecclesia by “congregation,” not “church,”—thus providing for that Puritan principle of the province of the laity. Doctrine, discipline, and ritual, or ceremony, being the natural order in which ecclesiastical affairs should receive regard, there being at first an accord among the Reformers as to doctrine, the other essentials engrossed all minds. The equality of the ministers of religion, all of whom were brethren, with no longer a master upon earth, struck at the very roots of all hierarchical order. What would have been simply natural in the objections of the Puritans when they saw that Rome was to leave the prelatical element of its system fastened upon the realm, was intensified by the assumption of dangerous and, as they believed, unchristian and unscriptural power and sway by a class of the clergy of lordly rank exercising functions in Church and State, and taking titles from their baronial tenure of land. These lordly prelates had recently been filling some of the highest administrative and executive offices under the Crown, and holding places in diplomacy. In an early stage of the Reformation, the mitred abbots had been dropped out of the upper house of Parliament. While they were in it, they, with the twenty-one “Lord Bishops,” preponderated over the temporal peers. As their exclusion weakened the ecclesiastical power in the government, the prelates who remained seemed to believe and to act as if it fell to them to represent and exercise the full prerogative of sway which had belonged to the old hierarchy. Very marked is the new phase assumed by the spirit and course of the Nonconformists under this changed aspect of the controversy. The Puritans had begun by objecting and protesting against certain usages; they now set themselves resolutely against the authority of those who enforced such usages. To a great extent, the Roman Catholic prelates on those parts of the Continent where the Reformation established itself, deserted their sees. This left the way clear in those places for a church polity independent of prelacy. The retention of their sees and functions by the English bishops, and the addition to their number by the consecration of others as selected by the Crown, thus made the struggle which the Puritans maintained in England quite unlike that of their sympathizers on the Continent. The issue thus raised on the single question of the Divine right and the apostolic authority and succession of bishops was continuously in agitation through the whole contention maintained by Dissenters. In other elements of it, the controversy exhibited changing phases, as the process of the reform seemed at intervals to be advanced or impeded, while the kingdom, as we have noted, was pulsating between the old and the new régime,—as Henry VIII. and his three children, in their succession to his throne, sought to modify, to arrest, or to limit it. The distribution among the people of the Scriptures in the English tongue was favored and brought about by[236] Thomas Cromwell and Cranmer. The privilege, however, was soon revoked, as the people were thus helped to take the matter of religion into their own hands. The mother tongue was first used in worship with the translated litany in 1542, which was revised in 1549. The new prayer-book, canons, and homilies were brought into use. It was by royal authority, and not either by Convocation or Parliament, that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were imposed. On Elizabeth’s accession there were nine thousand four hundred priests in England. About two hundred of these abandoned their posts rather than comply with the conditions exacted by the stage in innovation already reached. The more pronounced champions of the Church of England are earnest in pleading that the rupture with Rome was not the act of the King, but of what might be called the Church itself. The as yet unreformed bishops, we are told, had in Convocation, in 1531, denied the Papal supremacy; then Parliament, the universities, the cathedral bodies, and the monastic societies had confirmed the denial. But on all these points there are still open and contested questions of fact and argument not requiring discussion here.

Another radical question concerned the rights and province of the laity in all that entered into the institutional part of religion, and the oversight and administration of discipline in religious assemblies. There certainly could be no complaint that lay or civil power as represented by the monarch had not exhibited sufficient potency in fettering the ecclesiastical or clerical usurpation. An already quoted Act in the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign affirmed that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in the first year of Elizabeth made the Church subordinate to, and dependent upon, the civil power. Thus ecclesiastical authority was restrained by the prerogative of the Crown, while ceremonial and discipline, as approved by the monarch, were left at the dictation of Parliament.

But this substitution of the lay power as represented by King or Queen and the Houses of Parliament for the Papal sway, by no means satisfied the Puritan idea and conviction as to the rightful claims of the laity in their membership of the reconstructed Church. Barrow described in the following sharp sentence the summary way of proceeding so far as the laity were concerned: “All these people, with all their manners, were in one day, with the blast of Queen Elizabeth’s trumpet, of ignorant Papists and gross idolaters, made faithful Christians and true professors.” It was said that the people, divided and classed in local territorial parishes, were there treated like sheep in folds. Illiterate, debauched, incompetent, “dumb” ministers or priests assumed the pastorate in a most promiscuous way over these flocks. Membership in the Church came through infancy in baptism. The Puritans wished to sort out the draught of the Gospel net, which gathered of every kind. They claimed that the laity should themselves be parties[237] in the administration of religion, in testing and approving discipline. They believed, too, that ministers should be supported by their congregations, and that the tithes and the landed privileges of the clergy were bribes and lures to them, making them independent and autocratical. Church lands and endowments, they insisted, should be sequestered, as had been the abbeys, nunneries, and monasteries. As soon as Separatist assemblies were associated in England or among the exiles on the Continent, altercations and divisions occurred among them as to the functions and the powers of the eldership, the responsibility and the authority of pastor and covenanted members in discipline.

Our space will admit here of only a brief recognition, conformed however to its slight intrinsic importance, of an element entering into the Puritan agitation, which at the time introduced into it a glow of excitement and a marvellously effective engagement of popular sympathy. The controversy between the Puritans and the Prelatists had in the main been pursued, however passionately, yet in a most grave and serious spirit, with a profound sense of the dignity and solemnity of its themes and interests. But from the time and occasion when Aristophanes tossed the grotesque trifling of his Clouds around the sage and lofty Socrates, down to this day, when Mr. Punch finds a weekly condiment of mischief and fun for the people of England in their own doings and in their treatment by their governors, it would seem as if no subject of human interest, however exalted its moment, could escape the test of satire, sarcasm, and caricature. Experimental ventures of this sort are naturally ephemeral, but they concentrate their venom or their disdain upon their shrinking victims. Some of Ben Jonson’s plays and Butler’s Hudibras have now alone a currency, and that a by no means extended one, out of a vast mass of the printed ridicule which was turned upon the Puritans. But the matter now in hand is the skill and jollity with which one or more Puritans, with the gift of the comic in his stern make-up, plied that keen blade in his own cause. Erasmus, though he never broke from the communion of the Papal Church, engaged the most stinging power of satire and sarcasm, not only against mean and humble monks, but against all the ranks of the hierarchy, not sparing the loftiest. Helped out with Holbein’s cuts, Erasmus’s Encomium of Folly drew roars of mirth and glee from those who winced under its mocking exposures. Even the grave Beza, in Geneva, tried his hand in this trifling. But the venture of this sort which cunningly and adroitly intruded itself at a peculiarly critical phase of the Puritan agitation, was of the most daring and rasping character. Under the happily chosen pseudonym of “Martin Mar-Prelate,” there appeared in rapid succession, during seven months of the years 1588 and 1589, the same number of little, rudely printed tracts, the products of ambulatory presses, which engaged the full power of satire, caricature, and sarcasm, with fun and rollicking, invective and bitter reproach and exposure against the hierarchy, especially against four of the most odious of the bishops. The daring spirit of these productions was[238] well matched by the devices of caution and secrecy under which they were put in print, and in the sly methods by which they were circulated, to be caught up, concealed, and revelled over by thousands who would find keen enjoyment in them, as in the partaking of the sweets of stolen food and waters. They may be said to have stopped only at the very edge of ribaldry, indecency, and even blasphemy. But they were free and trenchant, coarse and virulent. As such, they testify to the smart under the provocation of which they were written, and to the scorn and contempt entertained for the men and measures to which were committed for the time the transcendent interests of religion and piety. The more dignified and serious of the Puritans, like Greenham and Cartwright, frowned upon and repudiated these weapons of bitter gibe and contumely. But there was a constituency from which they received the heartiest welcome, and, as is usual in such cases, their circulation and efficiency were vastly multiplied by equally bitter and malignant replies to them from the pens or from the instigation of bishops. The whole detective force of the kingdom was put on the search for the writers and the printers. So adroit and cunning was the secret of their authorship and production at the time, that up to this day it has not been positively disclosed. Never has the investigation been so keenly or intelligently pressed for clearing the mystery investing the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts as by the indefatigable researches and the sharpened inquisition of Dr. Dexter. In his Congregationalism he gives his readers an exhaustive sketch and summary, in detail and analysis, of all the facts and documents. His conclusion, which cannot be hopefully contested or invalidated, is that they were written by Barrow, a prisoner in the Fleet, and carried through the press by the agency of Penry. There is abundant evidence in the appearance, publication, and circulation of tracts known to have come from the hands of imprisoned Puritans, that the bars of jails and dungeons offered no sufficient barriers to prevent the secret intercourse and interchange of intelligence between those whom they enclosed and friends outside, who dared all risks in their zeal and fidelity.

We must now close this narration of the issues raised in the Puritan controversy, whether by Nonconformists in the Church or by Separatists withdrawing from it, that we may note the concentration of forces and witnesses which were drawn together in assemblies or fellowships prepared in Old England to transfer and establish their principles in New England. Many of the clergy whose views and sympathies were warmly engaged in the further work of reform and purification within the Church, and who at the same time were moderate and conciliatory in their spirit, contrived to remain in their parochial fields, perhaps in this way accomplishing the most for all that was reasonable and good in the cause which they had at heart. When occasionally molested or challenged, they might contrive to make their peace. But the crisis and its demands called—as has always been the[239] case in such intense agitations of religious passions—for patient, steadfast, and resolute witnesses in suffering, for those who should be hounded and tracked by judicial processes, who should be deprived of subsistence and liberty, and be ready not only for being hidden away in prisons or exiled beyond the seas, but for public execution as martyrs. The emergency of time and occasion found such as these; and it was of such as these that there were men and women in training for wilderness work on this soil. And the combination of materials and persons was precisely such as would meet the exactions of such an enterprise. There were university men, scholars, doctors in divinity, practised disputants in their cherished lore, and with gifts of zeal, fervor, and tender eloquence in discourse and prayer. There were gentry likewise,—men and women lifted in the social scale, with furnishings of mind and worldly goods. To these were joined, in a fellowship which equalized many distinctions, yeomen, small traders, artisans, and some of every place and grade, save the low or mean or reckless, in the make-up of the population of the realm. Governor Bradford says that the first Separatist or Independent Church in England was that of which John Rough, the minister, and Cuthbert Symson, the deacon, were burned alive by Bonner, in the reign of Queen Mary. The laborious and faithful pages of Dr. Dexter, in his Congregationalism, must be closely studied for the results of the marvellous diligence and keen research by which he has traced every vestige, memorial, and testimony that can throw light on the little assemblies of those outlawed Puritans. It is a curious and engaging occupation in our peaceful and lethargic times of religious ease, to scan the make-up, the spirit, and methods of those humble assemblies in their lurking-places, private houses, barns, or the open fields, frequently changing their appointments under risks from spies and tipstaves, with their secret code of signals for communicating intelligence. Their religious exercises were of the intensest earnestness, and above all things stimulating. Their conferences about order and discipline bristled with individualisms and scruples. Many of these assemblies might soon resolve themselves into constituencies of single members. There was scarce one of those assemblies, either in England or in exile on the Continent, that did not part into two or three. There was a stern necessity which compelled variance and dissension among the members. They had in hand the Bible, and each was trying what he could draw out of it, as an oracle and a rule. They had to devise, discuss, and if possible agree upon and enforce ways of church order and discipline, a form of worship, rules of initiation into church membership, of suspension, expulsion, and restoration. It was brain work, heart work, and soul work with them. It would be difficult to reduce to any exact statements the numbers of persons, or even of what may in a loose sense be called assemblies, of Nonconformists or Separatists who remained in England, or who were in refuge on the Continent at the period just preceding the colonization of New England. What was called the Millenary Petition, which was presented to James I.,[240] as he came in from Scotland, was claimed to represent at least eight hundred Nonconforming ministers.

The way is now open for connecting the principles and fortunes of the earnest and proscribed class of religious men, whose course has been thus traced in England and Holland, with the enterprise of colonization in New England. It is but reasonable to suppose that, dating from the time and the incident referred to in the opening of this chapter, such an enterprise was latent in conception or desire in the thoughts of many as a possible alternative for the near future. A resolve or purpose or effort of such a nature as this involves much brooding over by individuals, much private communing, balancing of circumstances, conditions, gains, and losses, and an estimate of means and resources, with an eye towards allowance by a governmental or noble patronage, or at least to security in the venture. We have but fragmentary and scattered information as to all these preliminaries to the emigration. We must trace them backward from the completion to the initiation of the enterprise.

And here is the point at which we should define to ourselves, as intelligently and fairly as we can from our abounding authentic sources of information, precisely what was the influence or agency of religion in the first emigration to New England. We are familiar with the oft-reiterated and positive statement, that the enterprise would neither have been undertaken, nor persisted in, nor led on to success, had not religion furnished its mainspring, its guiding motive, and the end aimed at, to be in degree realized.

We may safely commit ourselves to these assertions, that religion was the master-motive and object of the most earnest and ablest leaders of the emigration; that they felt this motive more deeply and with more of singleness of purpose than they always avowed, as their circumstances compelled them to take into view sublunary objects of trade and subsistence which would engage to them needful help and resources; and that some of these secondary objects very soon qualified and impaired the paramount importance of the primary one. I am led to make this allowance of exception as to the occasional reserve in the avowal of an exclusively religious motive, because of a fact which must impress the careful student of their history and fortunes for the first hundred years. That fact is, that in multitudes of occasional utterances, sermons, journals, and historical sketches, many of the descendants of the first comers laid more exclusive and emphatic stress upon the prime agency of religion in the enterprise than did the first movers in it. When ministers and magistrates in after years uttered their frequent and sombre laments over the degeneracy of the times, the decay of zeal and godliness, and the falling from the first love, the refrain always was found in extolling the one, single, supreme aim of the fathers as that of pure piety. The pages of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia and of his tracts of memorial, rebuke, and exhortation, and the Century Sermon of Foxcroft, minister of the First Church, are specimens of masses of such matter in our[241] old cabinets pitched in that tone. Nor need we conclude that, as a general rule, the most fervent of those laments or the most positive of those statements were exaggerated. Only what such writers and speakers recognized as the degeneracy of their own later times, must be traced to seeds and agencies which came in with the most select fellowship of the fathers themselves. We cannot go so far as to claim that the whole aim, the all-including purpose of every member, or of even of a majority of the colonists, was religion, after the pattern of that of the leaders, or of any style of religion. But we have to conclude that the smaller the number of those among whom we concentrate the religious fervor in its supreme sway, the more intensified must have been its power to have enabled them, as it did, to give direction to the whole enterprise. And this was not only true at the first, but proportionately so as the original centre of that enterprise for a long period sent off its radii successively to new settlements in the woods. There were always found men and women enough to copy the original pattern and to keep the motive force in action. Sir Henry Maine does not state the whole of the truth when he writes thus: “The earliest English emigrants to North America, who belonged principally to the class of yeomanry, organized themselves in village communities for purposes of cultivation.”[450]

The stream of exile to New England in the interest of religion was first parted into one small and one large rill, which, however, soon flowed together and assimilated, as it appeared that they started substantially from the same source, with similar elements, and found more that was congenial than discordant in their qualities. The company of exiles whom residence in Holland, with its attendant influences and results, had confirmed and stiffened in their original principles of rigid Separatism, had the start by nearly a decade of years in transferring themselves to Plymouth. Their fortunes are traced in the next chapter.

The colonists in Massachusetts Bay, and those who, in substantial accord with them, struck into several other settlements in the wilderness of New England, were mainly those who in the land of their birth had remained steadfast to their principles of Nonconformity, and who had borne the penalties of them when avowed and put in practice. They had not turned in disdain and temper from the institution which they called their “mother church.” Their divided relation to it they regarded as rather caused by such harsh conditions as excluded them from its privileges than by any wilfulness or hostility of their own. They professed that they still clung to its breast, and wished to be nourished from it. It was not strange, however, that partial alienation should, under favoring opportunities, widen and stiffen into seeming antagonism to it. They regarded themselves as having been subjected to pains and penalties because of their protest against objectionable and harmful, as well as unscriptural, exactions in its discipline and ceremonial. So they were[242] content to be known as Nonconformists, but repelled the charge of being Separatists. They kept alive a lingering tenderness, in a reminder of their early membership and later disturbed affiliation with it. Some few of the sterner spirits among them—and Roger Williams was such, as he appeared here in his youth—demanded a penitential avowal of sin from Winthrop’s company, on account of their having once been in fellowship with the English Church. An agitation also arose upon the question whether the members of the Boston Church, who on visits to the old home occasionally conformed, should not be put under discipline on their return here. Happily the dispute was disposed of by forbearance and charity.

Still, while there was a slight manifestation at first of an antipathy or a jealousy on the part of the Nonconformists at the Bay of being in any way confounded with the Separatists at Plymouth, there never was a breach or even a controversy, beyond that of a friendly discussion, between them; and there is something well-nigh amusing, as well as interesting, in following the quaint narration[451] of the establishment of immediate harmony and accord between their respective church ways. Endicott’s little company at Salem, heralding the great emigration to the Bay, “entered into church estate” in August, 1629, having sought what we should now call the advice, help, and sympathy of their Plymouth brethren. This fellowship was extended through Governor Bradford and other delegates, and the example was afterward followed in like recognition of other churches. The covenanted members of the Salem Church ordained their pastor and teacher, notwithstanding that they had previously been under the hands of a bishop. It soon appeared, however, that the church was to be emphatically Nonconformist. Two brothers Brown, at Salem, set up separate worship by the Common Prayer. On being “convented” before the Governor, his Council and the ministers, and accusing the church of Separatism, they were told that the members did not wish to be Separatists, but were simply Nonconformists with the corruptions of the Church; and that having suffered much for their principles, and being now in a free place, they were determined to be rid of Common Prayer and ceremonial.[452]

The First Boston Church, in 1630, was organized under its covenant, with its appointed and ordained teacher, ruling elder, and deacons. In ten years after the landing at Plymouth there were five churches after this pattern, and in twenty years thirty-five, in New England.

This instantaneous abandonment, as it may be called, of everything in the institution of a church, followed by an immediate disuse of everything in ceremonial and worship in the English usage which the Nonconformists had scrupled at home, is of itself very suggestive, even in the first aspect of it. Followed into detail, it presents some surprises and very rich instruction. In full result, it exhibits to us principles and institutions in the highest interests of religion, in civil, social, and domestic life, which had been repudiated[243] and put under severe penalties in England, crossing the ocean to plant themselves in a wilderness for the training and guidance of successive generations of men and women in freedom, virtue, piety, worldly thrift, and every form of prosperity. There must have been nobleness in those principles, as well as in the men and women who suffered for them, put them on trial, and led them to triumph.

The work of preference, of conviction and conscience, had been wrought in behalf of those principles, in old English homes and byways, in humble conventicles, in fireside and wayside musings and conferences. Enough persons had been brought to be of one mind, purpose, and resolve, in the spirit of a determined heroism, to make a beginning of such a sort that it would be more than half of the accomplished work. There may have been debates, warm variances, hesitations, and conciliatory methods used among those who entered into covenant as the First Church of Boston. If there were such, we know nothing of them. There is no surviving record or intimation of them. The pattern and model which the exiled colonists followed, needed no study or shaping on the wilderness soil. It was an old-home product. What might seem to be extemporized work was prepared work. It was as if they had brought over timbers cut in their native woods all framed and matched for setting up in their transferred home. Their initiated teachers had been ordained by Episcopal hands. But this was neither help nor hindrance. When they needed more and new ones, they had a method of qualifying them. Surplice, tippet, cap, rochet, and prayer-book are not missed or mourned over. Simply not a word is said about them. The fabric which they set up was of a new and peculiar style. No! They would not have owned it to be new; they regarded it as the oldest, because the original,—that which was established by the first generation of the disciples of Jesus Christ.

One hundred university men from the grand old nooks and shrines of consecrated learning in Old England were the medium for the “Gospel work” in New England, till it could supply its needs from its own well-provided resources. But there was not a prelate among them. English magistrates of various grades and authority, governors, judges, spies, collectors, and commissionaries were here to represent the mother country, till she became so stingy that we were forced to wean ourselves from her; but never did an English bishop as a functionary set foot on the soil of what is now the territory of the United States. And when after our Revolution the virtue which comes from episcopal hands was communicated to the possessors of it here, it had parted with what was most offensive or objectionable in its claim or efficacy to the Old and the New English Puritans. Town and rural parishes, colleges and schools, had the faithful services of that hundred of university men. For a long time, the books that were imported here were almost exclusively the Puritan literature of the old home, and had a perceptible influence in stiffening, rather than relaxing, the stern spirit of Dissent, and throwing new vitality into the hard work which it had to do in[244] the wilderness. One consideration of the highest practical weight is presented to us in the fact that the Puritanism of New England originated and fostered the free and radically working instrumentalities and forces which neutralized its own errors, restrained its own bigotry and severity, and compelled it to develop from its own best elements something better than itself. There were other plantations on this virgin soil, of which religion was in no sense the master-impulse, and others still in which the mother church sought to direct the movement. New England was never affected for evil or for good by them. But if over the whole land, in radiations or percolations of influence, the leaven of any one section of the country has wrought in the whole of it, it is that of the New England Puritanism.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE original authorities and sources of information, in manuscript and print, relating to the agitations and controversies arising within the real or assumed membership of the Church of England after the Reformation, are to be distinguished into two great classes,—those of a public character, as records of the proceedings of government, of the courts, and of all bodies or individuals in office charged with authority; and those of a private nature, coming from voluntary bodies, or from single members of them, or from writers and authors whose works were published after the usual method, or sent forth and circulated surreptitiously. Both these classes of original authorities, constituting together an enormous mass of an infinitely varied elementary composition, are alike widely scattered, and, so far as they have not been gathered into local repositories, could be directly consulted only by one whose travel, investigation, and research were of the most extended comprehensiveness. England, Holland, and Switzerland have in keeping contemporary records and documents relating to minute and trivial, or to most important and vital, points in one or another stage, or concerning one or another prime party in the controversy. Perhaps, even after all the keen investigation and diligent toil of the most recent inquisitors, such original papers have not been exhaustively detected and examined. But one who is familiar with the stores already reported to us, unless his taste and interest in them run to morbidness, will hardly desire more of them. It is certain that whatever obscurity may still invest any incidental point in the controversy, the matter is of such comparatively slight importance, that the substance and details of any information as to persons or events which may be lacking to us would hardly qualify the general narratives of history.

The expense, diligence, and intelligent illustration which within the last thirty or forty years have been devoted to the collection and arrangement and calendaring of such masses of the State and other public papers of Great Britain, have aided as well as prompted the researches of those who have been zealous to trace out with fidelity and accuracy every stage, and the character and course of each one, lofty or obscure, as an actor in the larger and the lesser bearings of the struggle of Nonconformity and Dissent. As a general statement, it may be affirmed that the developments and the more full and minute information concerning the substance and phases of early Puritanism, as they have been studied in the mass of accumulated documents, have set forth the controversy in a dignity of interest and in a disclosure of its vital relations to all theories of civil government, church establishments,[245] and the institutional administration of religion, far more fully and in a much more comprehensive view than was recognized by contemporary actors.

There are two extensive and exceedingly rich collections of tracts, books, and manuscript documents of a most varied character well-preserved and easily accessible in London, which furnish well-nigh inexhaustible materials for the study of the Puritan, the Nonconformist, and the Separatist movements in all their phases. One of these is in the British Museum, the other in Dr. Williams’s Library. In the times with which we are now concerned, the motive, perhaps but vaguely comprehended by himself, which led George Thomason to gather his marvellous collection, now in the British Museum, would have been called a providential prompting. He was a modest man in private life, and, so far as we know, took no part in public agitations. As a Royalist bookseller, at “The Rose and Crown, in St. Paul’s Churchyard,” he had opportunities favoring him in the scheme which he undertook. It was in 1641 that he began a laborious enterprise, and one not without very serious risks to himself, which he continued to pursue till just before his death in 1666. This was to gather up, preserve, and bind in volumes,—though without any system or order of arrangement except chronological,—a copy of each of the publications in tract, or pamphlet, or fly-leaf form which appeared from the press, licensed or surreptitiously printed, during a period teeming with the issue, like the dropping of forest leaves, of a most extraordinary series of ephemeral works, quickened with all the vitality of those times. Though he began his collection in 1641, he anticipated that date by gathering similar publications previous to it. He copied during Cromwell’s time nearly a hundred manuscripts, mainly “on the King’s side, which no man durst venture to publish here without the danger of his ruin.” He took pains to write upon most of the publications the date of its appearance, and when anonymous, the name of its author if he could ascertain it. Besides the risks of fire and the burden of such a mass of materials filling his house from cellar to garret, this zealous collector exposed himself to severe penalties from the authorities on either side of the great civil and religious conflict. He was compelled once at least to remove his collection to a safe hiding-place. It fills now 2,220 volumes, and counts to 34,000 separate publications, from folio downward. It is difficult to say what may not be found there, and nearly as difficult to find exactly what one wishes. After various exposures through which the collection passed safely, it now rests in the British Museum, under the general title of the “King’s Pamphlets,” having been purchased and presented by King George III. in 1762, at a cost of £300. A mine of most curious matter is there ready for search on every subject, serious or comic, sacred or secular, illustrative of high and low life during the period. Probably the two most zealous delvers in that mine for its best uses have been Professor Masson, for the purpose of The Life of John Milton: narrated in connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time, in six volumes; and Dr. H. M. Dexter, in his Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, etc. Both authors have turned these pamphlets to the best account in clearing obscurities or filling gaps in the history or writings of men prominent in the cause of Nonconformity.

The other comprehensive and extensive collection of pamphlets, volumes, and original papers for illustrating the whole history of Puritanism and Dissent, is in what is known as Dr. Williams’s Library, in London. Dr. Daniel Williams, an eminent Presbyterian divine, possessed of means, had purchased the library of the famous Dr. William Bates. Adding to it from his own resources, he founded in 1716 the library which bears his name, committing it, with a sum of money for a building (to which additions were made by a subscription), to the hands of trustees in succession. The library edifice—long standing in Red-Cross Street, now removed to Grafton Street—has been ever since a favorite place for the assembling of meetings and committees in the Dissenting interest (of late years Presbyterians and Unitarians acceding to their trust), for the transaction of business, for preparing addresses to successive sovereigns, and managing their cause in Parliament. Those who in former years have sat in one of the ancient chairs of the library in Red-Cross[246] Street have hardly escaped feeling profoundly the influence of the place and of its associations,—the walls hung with the portraits of venerable divines and scholars learned in all ancient lore; the cabinets filled with laboriously wrought manuscripts, histories, diaries, and letters, some of them dating in the first half of the sixteenth century; the crowded shelves of folios and smaller tractates composed of brain-work and patient toil, without the facilities of modern research and study, and the many relics and memorials connected with the daily ministerial and domestic life of men of self-denying and honorable service. Harvard College holds and administers a fund of over sixteen thousand dollars, left by Dr. Williams in 1711, as a trust for the benefit of the aborigines.

Here is the fitting place for appropriate and most grateful mention of the results of a labor of devoted zeal and love given by the Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D., to the historic memorial of a cause of which he inherits the full spirit, and in the service of which he has spent his mature life. It may safely be said that not a single person, at least of those born on the soil of New England, of the lineage of the Fathers has so “magnified” their cause and work as he has done. Holding with such a rooted conviction, as is his, that the Congregational polity of the Christian Church has the warrant of Scripture and of the Primitive Church, and that it best serves the sacred interests of soul-freedom and of associated religion in its institutions, works, and influence, the earliest witnesses, confessors, and martyrs in its behalf have seemed to him worthy of the most lavish labor for their commemoration. Repeatedly has he crossed the seas and plied his most diligent scrutiny of tracing and searching, as he got the scent of some tract or record in its hiding-place of private cabinet or dim old parchment. With hardly eye or thought for the usual attractions of foreign travel, his valuable leisure has been spent in following any clew which promised him even the slightest aid to clearing an obscure point, or setting right a disputed fact, or completing our information on any serious matter relating to the early history of what is now represented by Congregationalism. The Introduction to his volume, The Congregationalism of the last Three Hundred Years, as seen in its Literature, with Special Reference to Certain Recondite, Neglected, or Disputed Passages,[453] tells in a vigorous and hearty tone what was his aim, his course, and its method.

The principal text of his volume disposes the treatment of his subject under twelve lectures, delivered by the author in the Theological Seminary at Andover, in 1876-1879. This text is elaborately illustrated by notes, with references and extracts, largely drawn from the recondite sources and the depositories already referred to. The author is careful to authenticate all his statements from prime authorities; and where obscurity or conflict of views or of evidence adduced makes it necessary, his patience and candor give weight to his judgment or decision. The extraordinary and unique element of his work is presented in his Collections towards a Bibliography of Congregationalism, which with the Index to its titles covers more than three hundred royal octavo pages, in close type. This contains an enumeration of 7,250 titles of publications, from folios down to a few leaves, dating between the years 1546 and 1879, which have even the slightest relation in contents, authorship, or purpose with the most comprehensive bearings of his subject in its historical development.

I have mentioned this elaborate work among the primary, instead of classing it with the secondary, sources of information on the history of Nonconformity, because it is something more than a link between the two. It takes its flavor from the past. Its abounding extracts from the quaint writings, and its portraitures and relations of the experiences, of the old-time worthies transfer us to their presence, make us sharers of their buffeted fortunes and listeners to their living speech. The work may be regarded as a summary of monumental memorials, more frank and true than are such generally on stone or brass of those who fought a good fight and trusted in promises.

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The natural desire of a dispassionate reader of the original documents dealing with the heats of the Puritan controversy, or pursuing it in the pages of historians who may relate it either with a partisan or an impartial spirit, is that he might have before him the words and impressions of some contemporary or observer of profound wisdom and of well-balanced judgment, as he viewed this turmoil of affairs. The nearest approach made to the gratification of this wish is found in two brief but very comprehensive essays from the pen of the great Lord Bacon, as with an evident serenity and poise of spirit he studied the scenes before him, and the characters, aims, excesses, and shortcomings of the various actors, monarchs, prelates, zealots, enthusiasts, and earnest, however ill-judging, extremists on either side. The first of these essays in publication, whenever it may have been written, is entitled Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England. The date of its imprint is 1640. But in this reference is made, in the address to King James, to an earlier essay, which appeared anonymously with the imprint of 1641, under the title of An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England. This was evidently written in the time of Elizabeth. In it, Bacon sagaciously traces the origin of the controversy to four main springs,—namely, the offering and the accepting occasions for variance; the extending and multiplying them; passionate and unbrotherly proceedings on both parts, and the recourse on either side to a stiffer union among its members, heightening the distraction. His most severe stricture is upon the Church, for its harsh measures, as the strife advanced, in enforcing with penalties what had previously been allowed to be matters of indifference, thus driving some discontents into a banded sect. He regards it as a grave error that some of the English Church zealots had spoken contemptuously of foreign Protestant Churches. Though Bacon affirms that he is himself no party to the strife, and aims only for an impartial arbitration in it, his judgment and sympathy evidently incline him to the Puritan side as against the bishops. A fair-minded Puritan of the time might well have contented himself with this wise man’s statement of his side and cause. Of the second of these essays, it being addressed to King James on his accession, it may be said that it would be difficult to find any piece of writing of equal compass, on the themes with which it deals, more crowded with sound, solid good sense, better balanced in its allowances and limitations, more moderate, judicious, and practical in its principles, or more likely to harmonize all reasonable differences, and to repress and discountenance extreme and perverse individualisms. Bacon justifies innovations and reconstructions. He tells the King that the opening of his reign is the opportune time for making them. He protests against modelling all reformation after one pattern. Then he utters words of eminent wisdom about the government of bishops, about the liturgy, ceremonies, and subscription, about a preaching ministry, the abuse of excommunication, and about non-residence, pluralities, and the maintenance of the ministry. Here, again, moderate men of both parties might well have been content with the great philosopher’s judgment.

Documents in Foreign Repositories.—In connection with the exile of so many prelates, clergy, and other members of the English Church on the accession of Queen Mary in 1553, the relations established between them and many eminent Reformers on the Continent resulted in the production of a large number of documents of the highest historical authenticity and value, as throwing light upon the aims and methods of the Puritans in England during the whole period from 1553 to 1602. Several of these exiles settled at Zurich, and there formed intimate friendships with many magistrates and ministers of the Reformed religion. On the return of the exiles, on the accession of Elizabeth, many of them kept up a constant correspondence with their friends. The letters have been preserved in the archives of Zurich, and it has been only within the last forty years that the wealth of information in them has been revealed in England. There are nearly two hundred folio volumes of these letters. Strype and Burnet had obtained copies of some[248] of them, which they put to use in their histories.[454] A descendant of one of the Swiss correspondents had before 1788 copied eighteen thousand of the letters with his own hand, arranged chronologically. In 1845 and 1846, “The Parker Society” in England published,[455] in four octavo volumes, a large number of these “Zurich Letters,” translated and carefully edited, with annotations. The general titles are The Zurich Letters, comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops, and Others, with Some of the Helvetian Reformers, during the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queens Mary and Elizabeth. In the collection are several letters to royal personages. One of these, by Rodolph Gualter, who in his youth had resided at Oxford, to Queen Elizabeth, dated Zurich, Jan. 16, 1559, is a long epistle, written in a dignified, courteous and earnest strain, counselling the Queen to have two things in her supreme regard: “First, that every reformation of the Church and of religion be conducted agreeably to the Word of God;” and second, that she restrain her counsellors from hindering or reversing the good work. Better than from the best-digested pages of history, one may learn from these fresh and admirable letters, down to the most minute detail and incident, the cross-workings, the entanglements, the progressive advance, the obstructions, the retrograde and opposing forces and influences connected with the oscillations of the reform in England. Nowhere else in our abounding literature on the subject are the Puritans and Nonconformists presented more faithfully and intelligently in their conscientious, scrupulous, and certainly well-meant efforts, within the Church itself, to have its institutions, ceremonial, and discipline disposed after a pattern which should have regard equally to discountenance the impositions and superstitions of the Papal system, which had been nominally renounced, and to make the purified Church a power to advance the best interests of true religion. The intelligent American visitor to Zurich, if his attention is drawn to this highly valued and admirably arranged collection in its library, can hardly fail of the impression that he has before him most sincere evidences of the depth of thought and the nobleness of spirit of men who were working out the principles of wisdom and righteousness.

Considering the influence exerted upon some of the English Puritans by their residence on the Continent, and their frequent reference afterward to the different ecclesiastical system and discipline adopted there, an interesting phase of the controversy is presented in the two following works. At the opening of the eighteenth century, Dr. William Nichols,—as he says, at the prompting of others, though, it was intimated, of his own motion,—wrote a Defence of the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, addressed especially to foreign divines and churches. This was replied to by James Peirce in his Vindication of the Dissenters; or, an Appeal to Foreign Divines, Professors, and all other Learned Men of the Reformed Religion. In this volume, originally written and published in Latin, afterward translated by the author and published in English, there is in the main a thorough and candid review of the rise and the conduct of the cause of Nonconformity, and a searching examination of the principles of the Church of England. Peirce quotes with care the original authorities, and puts them to a good use. He follows the history into the fortunes of those who had taken refuge and established their religion in New England, and while he says he differs with Mr. Cotton, of Boston, “in many of his opinions,” defends him and all the “Independents” from the charge of being “Brownists.”

The historians Bancroft and Motley and Dr. H. M. Dexter have, after diligent research in Holland, discovered many little scraps of curious information relating to the[249] residence, mode of life, social and domestic experiences, and way of conducting their religious affairs, of the earliest English exiles there associated in churches and assemblies. These slight memorials indicate that the Puritans and Separatists in refuge there, though their circumstances were modest, if not obscure, were respected for their characters and for the sincerity of their purposes. They found conveniences from the presses in Holland for putting into print their own fertile productions in the setting forth of their principles, while the busy commerce between the ports of Holland and those of England and Scotland furnished ready means for conveying these publications, as well as private letters, secretly and surreptitiously if it were necessary, to the safe hands of friends. Nor, if the occasion was urgent, would one of these refugees hesitate, taking in his hands the risk of his liberty or life, to pass the seas on some secret errand in his own behalf or in the interest of his fellows. Such scraps of information from Dutch repositories as the explorers above named have gathered have all been duly valued as filling gaps in our previous knowledge, or clearing up some obscure passages. The results have been so gratefully recognized and at once incorporated in the many modern rehearsals of the old history, that they need not be referred to more specifically here.[456]

English Authorities.—All such periods of intense controversy and struggle upon themes of the highest concern to man, as that of the internal commotions in England immediately following and consequent upon the Reformation, leave behind them some memorial in literature of so conspicuous and rare an excellence as to insure perpetual freshness, and to acquire interest and attractions even beyond that of the particular subject with which it deals. When the Press in such periods is pouring its outflow of ephemeral tracts and books, vigorous, intense, effective, as they may be for a temporary end or for the circle of a sect or party, genius or scholarly culture, or a philosophical and comprehensive spirit, penetrating below the surface and rising above the details of a controversy, will engage itself upon the product of what we call an immortal work. Such a work[457] is that which came from the pen of “the judicious Hooker,”—Richard by baptismal name. His eight books constitute one of the richest classics of the English tongue. It finds delighted readers among those who care little, if at all, for the mere issues of the questions under controversy. Its generally rich and stately style, its logic and rhetoric, its wealth of learning, and its occasional play of satire or contempt, engage the interest of many a reader who would turn listlessly from most pages of polemics. There is so much in it of a manly, free courage and self-asserting spirit, that at times it is difficult to believe that it was written by one who, according to the quaint biography of him by Isaack Walton, was so cowed and subjugated by his domestic partner, the mother of his children. English Churchmen may well boast themselves on this majestic work, dealing with the nucleus of the whole Puritan controversy, the question of Church authority. Of course, its argument in its whole sum and detail, in its array and estimate of original vouchers, has been traversed and brought under dispute by champions on the other side. But it will always hold its supreme place while the cause which it upholds shall need a classic.

Hallam[458] says that, “though the reasonings of Hooker won for him the surname of ‘the Judicious,’ they are not always safe or satisfactory, nor, perhaps, can they be reckoned wholly clear or consistent. His learning, though beyond that of most English writers in that age, is necessarily uncritical; and his fundamental theory, the mutability of ecclesiastical government, has as little pleased those for whom he wrote, as those whom he repelled by its means.” The same writer, in another work,[459] passes a high encomium upon Hooker’s Polity, as finding a basis for its argument in natural law.

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The first four of the books of Hooker’s work were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597. As the other three had been left in manuscript, and did not appear in print till many years after his death in 1600, suspicions were raised that they might have been interpolated. As the Narrative of this chapter has given place to an exposition of Hooker’s fundamental position against the Nonconformists, it need not be repeated here.

For a long period, the well-known work[460] of Daniel Neal, in its successive editions, was the only one written from an historical point of view by an author not contemporary with its whole subject, which had appeared from the press, was widely circulated and generally accredited for its fidelity, its ability, and its trustworthiness. Mr. Neal, born in London in 1678, was a Dissenting minister in that city, and died in 1743. His history was published in portions between 1731 and 1738. The editions of it now in general circulation are those edited with valuable notes by Dr. Toulmin, the first of which appeared in London in 1793, and the last in 1837. The editor continued the history after the English Revolution. Mr. Neal made diligent research, in order to verify his statements from all the original sources which were open to him. He relied largely on the laborious Memorials gathered by the painstaking Strype, while owing much to Fuller and Burnet. Mosheim accepted Neal’s work as of the highest authority. Dr. Kippis commends it highly in the Biographia Britannica. After the publication of his first volume, Neal made public his answer to an anonymous work by Dr. Maddox, Bishop of St. Asaph, vindicating the Church of England “from the injurious reflections cast upon it in that volume.” Similar animadversions were cast upon the later volumes by Dr. Zachary Grey. Bishop Warburton, in some Notes to Mr. Neal’s history which he published in 1788, even brings in question the author’s veracity. Dr. Toulmin meets and answers such charges. Mr. Neal sought to give his pages authenticity by full quotations, citations, and references to his original authorities. In a few instances in which Burnet or others denied his fairness or accuracy, Dr. Toulmin has vindicated him against all aspersions, if not from all charges of error. The author wrote when the Dissenters were relieved by legislation of the severe impositions, fines, and inflictions of an earlier period, but were by no means brought into an equality in social and civil rights and privileges with the favored and patronized members of the Church Establishment. So Mr. Neal’s pages are free from the asperity and bitterness provoked into indulgence by his predecessors under the smart of humiliating wrongs. Still, he is loyal to the memory and steadfastness of those earlier sufferers. There was much on which the Dissenters of his time might pride themselves as won by the constancy of those who had fought for them the battles with lordly arrogance and hierarchical assumptions and prerogatives. There was a palmy age for Dissent in England which Lord Macaulay describes very felicitously, when, as he says, there were Dissenting ministers whose standing and condition in life compared favorably with those of all the clergy of the Establishment below those of the bishops. Among the Dissenting laity were men of wealth and of commercial consequence, as a high and honored social class, whose munificent endowments were bestowed on some of the noblest institutions of the realm.

Mr. Hallam devotes the second, third, and fourth chapters of his Constitutional History of England to the development of the history of Nonconformity, both among Roman Catholics and Protestants, during the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. Among the many reviews and critical estimates of this history, that in the Edinburgh Review, vol. xlviii., is especially able and satisfactory. Mr. Hallam brought to the presentation of this part of his whole subject, not only his habitually thorough and conscientious fulness of research among authorities and documents, public and private, but also that spirit of candor, moderation, and equitable impartiality which, if not already[251] cherished in the purposes and motives of one intending the task of an historian, may or may not be acquired and exercised in dealing with themes engaging so much of temper, strife, and intenseness of polemical animosity. From his point of view, reading backwards along the line of historical development, he recognized that the early Nonconformists were dealing with fundamental principles in religious affairs which, though not at the time fully apprehended, would necessarily involve immunities and rights of a political character. It is because of this, now clearly exposed and certified to us, that such lofty tributes are rendered to the Puritans as the exponents and champions of English liberty.

The Inner Life[461] of Robert Barclay, not completely, though substantially, finished and supervised by its author, is an admirable example of the more wise, just, and considerate tone and method adopted in quite recent years for dealing with times and subjects of once embittered religious agitation and controversy. It is calm and judicial in its temper, inclusive and well-digested in its materials and contents. The author’s research was most wide and comprehensive. He spared no labor in the quest of original documents, in manuscript or print, all over England and on the Continent, of prime use and authority for his purpose, whether in public repositories or in private cabinets. For some very important matters which entered into the full treatment of his theme he has used for the first time many records that had been lying in undisturbed repose, and he has enlisted the valuable aid of many friends.

The author, after defining the idea and object of a visible church, makes an elaborate effort to trace to its sources and in its course the development of religious opinion in England previous to 1640. He marks the rise of Barrowism, Brownism, of the Johnsonists, the Separatists, the Presbyterians, the early Independents, the two parties of Baptists, and the Friends, or Quakers. Some of the views, habits, and principles adopted by these parties he traces in their connection with the Mennonites on the Continent. He distinguishes, as far as possible, the various shades of opinion, the introduction of new points of controversy or discussion, the individualisms, extravagancies, eccentricities, and erratic excesses of individuals or parties, and he keeps distinct the two main currents of the development, as they favored or rejected the connection of civil and ecclesiastical authority. He draws the line distinctly between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, on the one side, as according in favoring a state church and a national establishment, and the original ideas gradually developed into positive principles of individuals and societies among the Separatists, which involved the complete separation of the administration of religion from the civil power.

The central subject of Mr. Barclay’s volume is the early history of the Friends, or Quakers. Two chief points are specially dealt with: First, many of the distinctive principles in their teaching and conduct which have been generally regarded as original with them are traced as in full recognition by other parties previous to the preaching of George Fox. Second, the author presents many facts, new, or in a new light, which disclose how earnest were the efforts of the early Friends for a very careful and even elaborate inner organization and discipline of their membership, after the manner of a visible Church,—the appointment and oversight of a qualified ministry, the sending out of authorized missionaries, and the inquisition into the private affairs, the home life, habits, and business of members, carried out into very minute and annoying details. He reveals to us the embarrassments met by them in deciding upon the question of “birthright membership.” Manuscript documents, records, minute-books, etc., preserved in many places where the early Friends had their meetings, are found very communicative.[462]

Mr. Skeats, in his Free Churches[463] has in view as his general purpose, to trace “the[252] part which English Dissent has played in the history of England.” Following this comprehensive design, he presents the various phases of Nonconformity and Separatism through denominational organizations among Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Independents, and Congregationalists, noting the attitude of opposition assumed towards them by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. He regards the Toleration Act, passed in 1689,—which even then excluded the Unitarians from its terms,—as drawing the line between the efforts which had been made up to that time to extinguish Dissent, and the leaving it simply under a stigma, as lacking social standing and Government recognition. Only the first chapter, covering a hundred of the six hundred pages of the volume, is concerned with the subject directly in our hands. The author is in full sympathy with the principles and the cause, the attitude and the persistency, of the resolute and buffeted men whose views he sets forth, as developed from the earliest stage of the Reformation in England. He cites and quotes original authorities to authenticate his statements and his judgments. In some instances, where they bear hard upon the conduct of the archbishops of Canterbury under Queen Elizabeth, Curteis, in his Bampton Lectures, challenges their fairness. More than four hundred Dissenting societies, Congregationalist and Baptist, are now existing in England, which date their origin before the passage of the Toleration Act under William.[464] To these are to be added many societies of Presbyterians and Quakers.

The Congregational Union of England and Wales is an organized body devoted to the interests of the fellowship to which it succeeds as representing the original single and associated Nonconformists from the date of the English Reformation. Its magazines, its annual reports, and various publications issued under its patronage, keep in living interest and advocacy the principles first stood for by faithful witnesses, sufferers, and martyrs. One of these publications, of especial importance, bears the following title: Historical Memorials relating to the Independents, or Congregationalists, from their Rise to the Restoration of the Monarchy, 1660, London, 1839. The distinctive value and authority of this work, which is in four octavo volumes, attach to its being almost exclusively composed of the original writings, of various kinds, from the pens of the first Nonconformists, and the answers or arguments brought against them. These have been gathered by keen and extended investigation, carefully authenticated, and, where it is necessary, annotated. The motive which inspired this undertaking was to remove the obscurity and contumely which had been threatening to settle over the memory and principles of men whose own writings prove them to have been equal in learning, acumen, argumentative power, and heroic constancy of purpose to defend a cause by them thought worthy of their devotion. Many important papers which elsewhere are found only in quotations, extracts, or fragments, are here given in full.

The Bi-Centennial commemoration of the ejectment of all Nonconforming ministers from the parish churches of England, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1662, was made the occasion, after modern usage for such observances, of the delivery of a multitude of addresses, and the preparation and publication of numerous pamphlets and volumes, of local or general interest, with historical retrospect and review of the origin and development of English Nonconformity. Curteis[465] has a very pregnant note on the “bicentenary rhetoric” connected with this occasion. He alleges that “incredible exaggerations” were exposed, as founded upon the lists given in Calamy’s famous Nonconformist Memorial (edited by Palmer) of the ejected ministers, as being in number two thousand. Curteis says it was proved that instead of there being 293 such in London parishes, there were by count only 127, and that from the whole alleged number of two thousand, there should be struck off no less than twelve hundred.[466]

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There are three very admirable works[467] covering much of the matter of this chapter, from the pen of John Tulloch, D.D., Principal of St. Mary’s College in the University of St. Andrew’s.

Though these three works are from the pen of a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, they are written in a spirit of the most broad and comprehensive catholicity. They set forth with keen discernment and with generous appreciation the advances made by highly gifted individual minds in the several stages and phases of the development of a protracted controversy upon the principles involved in an attempted adjustment of the rights of conscience and free thought, in asserting themselves against traditional and ecclesiastical proscriptions. It required the contributions from many such minds and spirits, with their fragments of certified truth, to insure the substitution of reason for authority.

Church of England Authorities.—Among the recently published works, the authors of which have aimed with moderation and impartiality to treat a theme of embittered relations and rehearsals so as to present readers with information of facts and the means of judging fairly between violent contestants in their once angry issues, is one already referred to as Curteis’s Bampton Lectures.[468] Assuming that the English Church had an origin and existence independent of the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope, the author relates the process by which it reformed itself, by renouncing his interference and impositions, and establishing its own discipline and ritual. After this he regards and treats the Romanists as but one class of Dissenters, taking their place as such with the Independents, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Unitarians, and the Wesleyans. Of these divided elements of the common Christian fold, the author traces the rise, the leading principles, and the distinct institutions and methods which they adopted. His treatment of his large and tangled subject is as fair, considerate, and judicious as could be expected from an earnest and heartily loyal minister of the English Church. He makes many strong statements to commend and urge a national establishment of religion as far more dignified, consistent, and desirable than the scattering and fragmentary multiplication, indefinitely increasing under petty variances, of independent religious organizations. But he does not work out a practicable method for his suggested scheme when those concerned in it prefer their own ways. Mr. Curteis is very severe (p. 62) in his rebuke upon the harshness of terms in which Mr. Skeats[469] deals with Archbishop Parker, in the course pursued by him towards the Puritans. But the view presented by Mr. Skeats is more than justified by Hallam,[470] in his calm dealing with the original documents.

In the same connection may be mentioned The Church and Puritans,[471] a small and compact volume, written in the best spirit of moderation and candor. In but little more than two hundred open pages, the author traces the whole course of Dissent,—its rise, aims, principles, and methods, and its struggles, buffetings, and discomfitures, from its manifestations under Elizabeth to the failure of “a glorious opportunity of reconciling all moderate Dissenters to the communion of the Church of England, under William and Mary.” By the judicious restraint upon what might naturally be his promptings, as a clergyman of the Church of England, to criticise with some sharpness what has so generally been represented as the perversity and weak scrupulosity of the Puritans, he is eminently fair and considerate in presenting their side of the controversy, and in dealing[254] with their more conspicuous men. The abounding citation of original authorities on both sides in his notes authenticates, for nearly every sentence of the work, the statement made in it.

Two works of a remarkably liberal and scholarly character which have quite recently appeared from the pens of eminent divines of the English Church, would have been gratefully welcomed by the Nonconformists in the period of their sharpest conflict, on account of their generous spirit and their contents. They would have been especially noteworthy in the liberal concessions which they make upon all the points involved in the controversy, as to the simple authority and pattern of Scripture in the constitution and discipline of the Christian Church, as against the hierarchical claims based upon traditions and usages subsequent to the age of the apostles, and traceable in the so-called Primitive Church. These books are Mr. Edwin Hatch’s Organization of the Early Christian Churches,[472] and Dean Stanley’s Christian Institutions.[473]

Mr. Hatch has also published articles of a similar tenor to the contents of his Bampton Lectures, in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. In these lectures, the author aims to trace the facts of ecclesiastical history in the same way as those of civil history are usually dealt with. His aim is to investigate the framework of the earliest Christian societies. He says these societies in their formation adjusted themselves to previously existing methods of association. The philanthropic element in them suggested the sort of officers needed, their provinces and functions. A president of the society and one or more distributors of alms were the requisite officers. Then as increasing numbers in a society, and of societies, made necessary a distribution of functions, with centralization and subordination of duty and authority, an ecclesiastical system was developed by like methods to those of a civil or political system. Convenience and adaptation thus originated the elements of a hierarchy, the regulation of which was watched over and disposed by a system of councils.

Dean Stanley’s volume is a collection of essays, previously published separately. They are liberal in tone and tenor, and by no means in harmony with, or even quite respectful toward, any high-church principles, or any demands of “divine right” for ecclesiastical authority. He adopts a rational point of view for marking the accumulation of sentiments and usages around the original substance of Christianity. He exhibits the entire unlikeness of conditions and needs between the early days of the religion and our own. He recognizes the vast superstructure of fable reared upon original simple verities, and, like Mr. Hatch, identifies the development of ecclesiastical with that of civil forms and usages.

An Essay on the Christian Ministry, by Bishop Lightfoot, treats after a like unconventional method, the themes which in the days of early Nonconformity were dealt with in so different a tone and method.

New England Authorities.[474]—The authorities concerning every detail in the institution and disposing of church affairs in New England are abundant and well-nigh exhaustive. They may be consulted as digested and set in order in the more recently published works to be here named by title, or they may be traced fragmentarily in chronological order in the writings of the Fathers themselves. The organization of the New England churches came to be best described under the term “Congregational.” It was in substance a modification of Barrowism. While there seems to have been but little discordancy here among those who followed the pattern, they were soon challenged by some of their brethren in England most nearly in sympathy with them, as to doubtful or debated principles and methods in their institution and discipline of churches. There were two chief points which came under discussion: first, the respective rights of all the[255] brethren composing a church fellowship in administering discipline, and those of the pastor, teacher, and elders. Should the whole church, or only its officers, be primarily and ultimately invested with executive and administrative power? The second point covered all the considerations which would come into prominence in deciding upon the relations of churches to each other,—whether each should maintain an absolute independency, or qualify it in any way by seeking sympathy, fellowship, and advice, and heeding remonstrances or interference from “sister churches,” through their teachers and elders.

Contemporary references to these matters as they presented themselves to the attention of those who here first entered into a “church estate,” are scattered over Governor Winthrop’s journal. John Cotton, minister of the First Church of Boston, diligently and earnestly, in successive writings and publications, set himself to answering all questioning and challenging friends abroad. He evidently had to work out clear and consistent views of his own on a subject which, besides being novel in many of its relations, was embarrassed by local difficulties, and by some conscientious or practical diversities of judgment among his associates. Richard Mather, of Dorchester, also contributed his help in the exposition of the Congregational polity, which was to be defended alike from extreme Barrowism and from Presbyterianism, which was soon found to have some sympathizers in the colony. By a sort of general consent, recourse was had to a succession of “synods,” or councils of the representatives of the churches, first those of the Bay Colony alone, then with some of the other New England colonies. These synods resulted in the formation of a “Platform,” which laid out in form and detail the system of the Congregational polity.

It is not necessary here to indicate the titles, contents, and authors of the several publications, preserved in our cabinets of relics, which contributed either to the dissension or to the pacification of the sometimes eccentric and heated, and of the always scrupulous, earnest, and independent parties in this work of ecclesiastical reconstruction. They have been so faithfully, admirably, and impartially digested by Dr. Dexter in the eighth of the lectures in his Congregationalism, as to present to the reader a full and intelligent view of the whole subject in its development and its results, while relieving him of what save to the fewest possible of historical students would be a repelling task. If, however, zeal or curiosity should dispose any one to peer through those dried and withered relics of the old polemics of a generation that drew its honey from the rocks, he will find much occasion to respect the acuteness and the persistency of men who, having taken the interests of their creed and piety into their own hands, determined to build on what was to them the only sure foundation. That foundation was “the Word.” If the Scriptures, as their prelatical foes insisted, were not intended to afford, and would not afford, a complete pattern of a method of institution and government of a Christian Church, the reader of those patiently wrought tractates will often be amazed as he notes how rich and fertile, how apt and facile, the contents of the sacred books were found to be, in furnishing the requisite material for argument and authority.

A controversial discussion was opened in 1861 by Hon. D. A. White, of Salem, by the publication of his New England Congregationalism in its Origin and Purity, illustrated by the Foundation and Early Records of the First Church in Salem, and Various Discussions pertaining to the Subject. To this work Rev. J. B. Felt, in the same year, made an answer: Reply to the New England Congregationalism of Hon. D. A. White. The principal interest of the matter of these two publications consists in their arguments upon the question whether Congregationalism as a system of polity in the constitution and government of churches carries with it, as an essential organic part, the doctrinal creed held by those who first adopted it. Dr. Dexter offers some suggestions on this point, arguing that the creed of the first Congregationalists belongs continuously to their system of polity. Of course, only constructive and inferential arguments can be brought to bear on this point. As we have seen, from the first manifestations of Nonconformity and Dissent in England, doctrinal themes did not at all enter into the controversy, it being taken[256] for granted that there was accord upon them. But there certainly is no absolute, vital connection between a form of polity and a doctrinal system. There have come to be very many organizations and fellowships among Protestants which are substantially Congregational in their order, while widely diverse in their creeds.

In 1862, Mr. Felt published The Ecclesiastical History of New England.

Very full and curiously interesting information about the principles, persons, and events connecting the Puritan controversy in the Old World with the settlement of New England, may be found in the now well-nigh innumerable volumes containing the history of our oldest towns and churches. In their earlier pages or chapters these histories find the town and the church a common theme. Grateful occasions have been found in commemorations of bi-centennial or longer periods, from the settlement of municipalities or the foundation of parishes, to review the past, and to trace in the old land the men who brought here in their exile, for free and successful enjoyment, principles for which they had there suffered. The history of the Reformation and of Nonconformity might indeed be largely written from the pamphlets and the volumes called out by these local commemorations, so numerous during the last decade of years. Traces of matter of a similar character may also be found in the personal and historical references, in text or note, of the first volume of the Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Harvard University, by John Langdon Sibley. In connection with the public and formal observance of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the First Church of Boston,—in the fifth in order of the edifices in which it had worshipped,—a son of the present pastor (the seventeenth in the line of succession) prepared and published a work with the following title: History of the First Church in Boston. 1630-1880. By Arthur B. Ellis. With an Introduction by George E. Ellis. Illustrated. Boston, 1881. Pages lxxxviii + 356.


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CHAPTER VIII.

THE PILGRIM CHURCH AND PLYMOUTH COLONY.

BY FRANKLIN B. DEXTER,

Professor of American History in Yale College.

THE preceding chapter has outlined the growth of Separatism in England, and prepared the way for the story of the fortunes of that remarkable congregation which has given a new significance to the name “Pilgrim.”

Elizabeth’s policy of Uniformity, so sternly pursued by her last Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift (1583-1604), was ostentatiously adopted by her successor, James I., at the Hampton Court Conference held in his presence by learned men of the Puritan and High Church parties in the first year of his reign; and when this conference was quickly followed by the elevation of Bancroft, a more arbitrary Whitgift, to Whitgift’s vacant place, those who were earnest in the opposite opinions were forced to choose between persecution and exile.

SITE OF THE MANOR-HOUSE.

[This cut follows an engraving in Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 40, representing the scene about thirty years ago. Raine, Parish of Blyth, p. 129, referring to the time of Edwin Sandys, raised to the archiepiscopal throne of York in 1576, says: “Under him a family of the name of Brewster occupied the manor-house, which had gradually and insensibly dwindled down from a large mansion to a moderately sized farmhouse;” and Raine gives for a frontispiece a view of the remaining fragment, which is copied by Dr. Dexter in Sabbath at Home, 1867, p. 135. Mr. Deane says of it, “It may have been originally connected with the manor-house, which has long since passed away.” (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xi. 404.) Dr. Dexter gives a plan of the neighborhood.—Ed.]

SCROOBY AND AUSTERFIELD.

There were doubtless other neighborhoods where the Separatists maintained thriving congregations for a longer or shorter time after the King’s policy became known; but by far the most zealous company of which accounts remain was one formed by residents “of sundry towns and villages, some in Nottinghamshire, some of Lincolnshire, and some of Yorkshire, where they border nearest together.” In 1602, or thereabout, these people, from places at least eight or ten miles apart, gathered themselves into a church,—probably at Gainsborough, a market-town in Lincolnshire, on the Trent; at least we know that when the original congregation divided, in 1605 or 1606, into two,—perhaps for greater security, as well as for local convenience,—it was at Gainsborough that one branch remained, which soon chose John Smyth, a Cambridge graduate, who had been some time with them, to be its pastor, and that with him many of this portion of the parent stock migrated in 1606 to Amsterdam.

The western division of the original company appears to have been formed into a distinct church in the summer of 1606, and, according to the testimony of Governor Bradford, in his notice of Elder Brewster, “they[258] ordinarily met at his [Brewster’s] house on the Lord’s day (which was a manor [i. e. manor-house] of the Bishop’s), and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”

AUTOGRAPHS OF JOHN ROBINSON.

[No wholly authenticated signature of Robinson is known. Dr. Dexter, in his Congregationalism as seen in its Literature, pp. xx, 359, gives the upper of these two, as from a book in the British Museum, “believed by the experts of that institution to have belonged to him.” It is evidently by the same hand as the lower of the two, which, with another very like it, is upon the title of Sir Edwin Sandys’s Relation of the State of Religion, London, 1605, belonging to Charles Deane, Esq., of Cambridge. Hunter, Founders of New Plymouth, p. 155, has pointed out how parts of this book show its author to have been “much in advance of his time,” and that there is “a correspondency in some parts with the celebrated Farewell Address of Robinson.” It is easy to suppose, therefore, that Robinson once owned the little treatise. Hunter errs in assigning 1687 as the date of its first edition. That of 1605 is called in the 1629 edition a surreptitious one, and there is a copy in the Boston Athenæum, with MS. annotations said to be by the author. Dr. Dexter points out 1629 as the year of the first authorized edition, and there were others in 1632, 1633, 1638, and 1673. (Congregationalism, App. nos. 299, 568; Palfrey, New England, i. 191.)—Ed.]

William Brewster, the chief layman of this congregation, was postmaster, or “post,” as the usual term was, at Scrooby, a small village in the northern part of Nottinghamshire, ten miles west of Gainsborough. Though Scrooby was a mere hamlet, its station on the London and Edinburgh post-road gave Brewster full occupation, especially after the two capitals were united under one king, as it was his duty to provide food and lodging for all travellers by post on Government business, as well as relays of horses for them and for the conveyance of Government despatches. He was a native of the village, and had matriculated in 1580 at the University of Cambridge, where he came under Puritan influence; he soon, however, quitted his books to enter the service of William Davison, Elizabeth’s upright and Puritan Secretary of State, whose promising career was sacrificed to her duplicity in the matter of the execution of Mary Stuart. Under Davison, Brewster had experience both at court and in foreign embassies; he remained with his[259] master for a year or two after the fall of the latter in 1587, and then retired to his native village. There he assisted his father, who was then postmaster, until the latter’s death in 1590; and after a brief interval the son, then about twenty-three years of age,[475] succeeded to the father’s place through the intercession of his old patron, Davison.[476]

In 1603 his annual stipend from the Government was raised from £30 to £36, the two sums corresponding in present values to perhaps six and seven hundred dollars respectively. The manor-house of Scrooby, built originally as a hunting-seat for the Archbishops of York, though in Brewster’s time “much decayed,”[477] had been occupied for many years by his father as bailiff for the archbishops, and as representative of their vested interests in the surrounding property, which was leased to Sir Samuel Sandys, of London.

The clerical leaders of the church, meeting in the great hall or chapel under Brewster’s roof, were Richard Clyfton and John Robinson. The former had been instituted in 1586, at the age of thirty-three, rector of Babworth, a village six or seven miles southeast of Scrooby, and had continued there until the undisguised Puritanism of his teachings caused his removal, probably in connection with Archbishop Bancroft’s summary proceedings against Nonconformist ministers at the end of 1604. His associate, Robinson, apparently a native of the neighborhood, had entered Cambridge University in 1592, and after gaining a Fellowship had spent some years in the ministry in or near Norwich; but about 1604 he threw up his cure on conscientious[260] grounds, and returning to the North, allied himself with Separatists in Gainsborough. He was, by the testimony of an opponent (Robert Baillie), “the most learned, polished, and modest spirit among the Brownists.”

AUSTERFIELD CHURCH.

[This cut follows a photograph owned by Mr. Charles Deane, who also furnished a photograph, after which the accompanying fac-simile of the registry of the baptism of Bradford, preserved in this church, is made; see Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. x. 39. The view of the church given in the title of Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers is the one followed by Dexter in Sabbath at Home, 1867, p. 131, and in Harper’s Magazine, 1877, p. 183. Raine, in his Parish of Blyth, Westminster, 1860, gives a larger view; and Bartlett, p. 36, gives the old Norman door within the porch.—Ed.]

The other members of the Scrooby congregation were of humble station, and have left little trace even of their names; most notable to us is young William Bradford, born in 1590 in Austerfield, a hamlet two and a half miles to the northward, within the limits of Yorkshire.

After they had covenanted together in church relations, “they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side.... For some were taken and clapped up in prison; others[261] had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations. ... Seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of their continuance there, by a joint consent they resolved to go into the Low Countries, where they heard was freedom of religion for all men.”

The remedy of exile was not new to a generation that could remember the emigration of Robert Browne’s followers from Norwich to Zealand in 1581, and had witnessed the transfer of their Gainsborough neighbors to Holland shortly after their own organization. “So, after they had continued together about a year, and kept their meetings every Sabbath in one place or other, ... seeing they could no longer continue in that condition, they resolved to get over into Holland as they could.” A large number attempted, in the latter part of the year 1607, to embark at Boston in Lincolnshire, the most convenient seaport for them, though fifty miles distant from Scrooby. But emigration, except with a license, was in general prohibited by an early statute (A. D. 1389), and the ship’s captain, who had engaged to take them, found it to his interest to betray them in the act of embarking; so that the only result for most of them was a month’s detention in Boston jail, and the confiscation of their goods, while seven of the leaders, including Brewster, were kept in prison still longer. In a new attempt the following spring, an unfrequented strip of sea-coast in northeastern Lincolnshire, above Great Grimsby, was selected, and a bargain made with a Dutch captain to convey the party thence to Holland; then, perhaps, taking advantage of the Idle, a sluggish stream flowing near their doors, tributary to the Trent, and so to the Humber, the women and children, with all the household goods, were in that case despatched by water, while the men marched some forty miles across country to the rendezvous. But after a part of the men (who arrived first) had embarked, on the appearance of armed representatives of the law the captain took alarm and departed; some of those left on shore fled, and reached their destination by other means; but the women and children, with a few of the men and all their valuables, were captured. Another season of suspense followed; but at length the absurdity of detaining such a helpless group began to be felt, the magistrates were glad to be rid of them, and by August, 1608, the last of the straggling unfortunates got safely over to Amsterdam.

They found there the church of English Separatists transplanted under Francis Johnson upwards of twenty years before, as well as that of John Smyth and his Gainsborough people; but the church from Scrooby appears to have kept its separate organization, and their experience is calmly recounted by their historian, Bradford, as follows: “When they had lived at Amsterdam about a year, Mr. Robinson, their pastor, and some others of best discerning, seeing how Mr. John Smyth and his company was already fallen into contention with the church that was[262] there before them, and no means they could use would do any good to cure the same; and also that the flames of contention were like to break out in the ancient church itself (as afterwards lamentably came to pass),—which things they prudently foreseeing, thought it was best to remove, before they were anyway engaged with the same; though they well knew it would be much to the prejudice of their outward estates, both at present and in likelihood in the future,—as, indeed, it proved to be.”

For these, with other reasons, in the winter after their arrival they asked the authorities of Leyden, an inland city, twenty miles or more southwest from Amsterdam, and the next in size to it in the province, to allow their congregation, of about one hundred English men and women, to remove thither by May 1, 1609.[478] The application was granted, and the removal to that beautiful city was accomplished, probably in May; but their senior pastor, Clyfton, being oppressed with premature infirmity, preferred to remain in Amsterdam.

LEYDEN.

[This little cut is a fac-simile of one given by Mr. Murphy in the Historical Magazine, iii. 332, following a bird’s-eye map of the city, dated 1670, when this part of the town was unchanged from its condition in the Pilgrims’ time. More of the same plan is given by Dr. Dexter in Hours at Home, i. 198. No. 1 is the bell turret, no longer standing, of the cathedral which stood at 2, and beneath which Robinson was buried. No. 10 is the house in which Robinson lived, with a garden on the hither side, the front being at the other end of the building, on the Klog-steeg, or Clock-alley, marked 5; a building now on the spot, bearing the date 1683 as that of its erection, has also borne since 1866 another tablet, placed there by the care of Dr. Dexter, which reads: “On this spot lived, taught, and died John Robinson, 1611-1625.” See Dexter in Hours at Home i. 201-2, and in Congregationalism as seen in its Literature, p. 387.—Ed.]

In Leyden they were forced to adapt themselves, as they had begun to do hitherto, to conditions of life very unlike those to which they had been trained in their own country; and so far as we can trace them, a majority of the flock seem to have found employment in the manufacture of the woollen goods for which the city was famous. Upon the public records the church appears as an organized body early in 1611, when Robinson with three others purchased for 8,000 guilders (corresponding in our currency to perhaps $10,000 or $12,000) a valuable estate in the centre of the city, including a spacious house for the pastor, used also for Sunday worship, and at the back of the garden an area large enough for the subsequent erection of twenty-one small residences for church members.

Among additional reasons which had led the studious Robinson to favor the removal to Leyden, may be counted the fact that it was the site of a university already famous, and so furnished ample opportunities of intercourse with learned men and of access to valuable libraries. The sharp[263] controversy between the occupants of the chair of theology, Gomarus and Arminius, involving no personal risk to the English spectators, was an added attraction; and before long Robinson himself appeared as a disputant on the Calvinist side in the public discussions, and so successfully that by Bradford’s testimony “the Arminians stood more in fear of him than [of] any of the University.” This perhaps opened the way for his admission to membership of the University, which took place in September, 1615, and secured him valuable civil as well as literary privileges. Such an honor was justified also by the activity of his pen while in exile. Between 1610 and 1615 he published four controversial pieces, of nearly seven hundred quarto pages, the most important being a popularly written Justification of Separation from the Church of England. In the same field of argument were the other treatises; while in 1619, when public attention was absorbed with the Synod of Dort, he brought out in Latin a brief but telling Apologia, or Defence of the views of the Separatists, in distinction from those of the Dutch churches.

PLAN OF LEYDEN.

[This follows a plan given by Bartlett in his Pilgrim Fathers, p. 79. No. 1 is Saint Peter’s Church, where Robinson was buried in 1625. Bartlett also gives, p. 88, a view of the interior. No. 2 is Saint Pancras church. No. 3 is the Town Hall. Bartlett also gives a view, p. 83. from the tower of this building.—Ed.]

These outside discussions, in which their pastor took such interest, left undisturbed the steady growth of the Pilgrim church, in the government of which Brewster, as ruling elder, was associated with Robinson, after the removal to Leyden. In these years “many came unto them from divers parts of England, so as they grew a great congregation,” numbering at times nearly three hundred communicants. Among these new-comers were some who ranked thenceforth among their principal men: John Carver, an early deacon of the church, and leader of the first migrating colony; Robert Cushman, Carver’s adjutant in effecting that migration; Miles Standish, the soldier of the company; and Edward Winslow, a young man probably of higher social position than the rest, who shared with Bradford, after Carver’s death, the main burden of sustaining the infant colony.

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But though some recruits were attracted by Robinson’s gifts and by a prospect of freedom from prelatical oppression, yet the condition of the Leyden people was in general one of struggling poverty, with little hope of amendment. It were vain to expect that their language or their peculiarities of religious order could gain a secure foothold on Dutch soil, or that a Government on friendly terms with England could show active good-will to a nest of outcasts which England was anxious to break up. The increase of numbers had come in spite of the hardships attending the struggle for a livelihood in a foreign city; but as the conditions of the struggle were better understood, the numbers fell off. Time was also bringing a new danger with the approaching expiration of the twelve years’ truce (April, 1609-April, 1621) between Spain and the Netherlands.

As years passed, the older generation among the exiles who clung loyally to the English name and tongue began to realize that a great part of their aims would be frustrated if their children should, by intermarriage with the Dutch and other outside influences, wander from their fathers’ principles, and be absorbed in the Dutch people. These dangers being recognized, and the major part of the company being agreed that it was best to avoid them by a removal, it became necessary to select a new asylum, where Englishmen might preserve their nationality undisturbed. To the new continent of America, which best satisfied the conditions, all thoughts turned as early as the summer of 1617; and the respective claims were weighed of tropical Guiana on the one hand, which Raleigh had described in 1595 as the true Eldorado, and Virginia on the other, conspicuous as the seat of the first successful English colony. A little consideration excluded Guiana, with its supposed wealth of gold tempting the jealousy of the Spaniard; and so the choice was limited to the territory somewhat vaguely known as Virginia, within the bounds assigned to the two companies chartered by King James in 1606. The objection was duly weighed “that if they lived among the English which were there planted [i.e. on the James River], or so near them as to be under their government, they should be in as great danger to be troubled or persecuted for the cause of religion as if they lived in England; and it might be worse. And if they lived too far off, they should neither have succor nor defence from them.”

There were risks either way; but they decided, under the advice of some persons of rank and quality at home,—friends, perhaps, of Brewster’s when at court, or of Winslow’s,—to dare the dangers from wild beasts and savages in the unsettled parts of Virginia, rather than the dangers from their own bigoted countrymen, and to ask the King boldly for leave to continue as they were in church matters.

Their first care was for the regular sanction of the Virginia Company in London to the settlement of the proposed colony on their territory; and with this object Carver and Cushman were despatched to England as agents, apparently in September, 1617. They took with them, for use in conciliating the sentiments which any petition from a community with their[265] history would awaken at court, a memorable declaration in seven articles, signed by the pastor and elder, which professed their full assent to the doctrines of the Church of England, as well as their acknowledgment of the King’s supremacy and of the obedience due to him, “either active, if the thing commanded be not against God’s Word, or passive [i.e. undergoing the appointed penalties], if it be.” The same articles, in carefully guarded language, recognized as lawful the existing relations of Church and State in England, and disavowed the notion of authority inhering in any assembly of ecclesiastical officers, except as conferred by the civil magistrate. In any estimate of the Pilgrims, it is necessary to give full weight to this deliberate record of their readiness to tolerate other opinions.

The two messengers found the Virginia Company in general well disposed, and gained an active friend in Sir Edwin Sandys (a prominent member of the Company and brother of Sir Samuel Sandys, the lessee of Scrooby Manor), who, though no Puritan, was a firm advocate of toleration; but as he was also a leader of the Parliamentary Opposition, his friendship was a doubtful recommendation to royal favor. Their report, on their return in November, was so encouraging that Carver and another were sent over the next month for further negotiations with the Virginia Company and with the King. But the former business still halted, because of the prejudice in official minds against their independent practices in church government. Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Robert Naunton (one of the Secretaries of State), and other friends labored early in 1618 with the King for a guarantee of liberty of religion; but the ecclesiastical authorities were strong in their opposition, there was a suspicion abroad that the design was “to make a free popular State there,”[479] and the delegates returned to Leyden to propose that a patent be taken on the indirect assurance of the King “that he would connive at them and not molest them, provided they carried themselves peaceably.” It seemed wisest to proceed, and Brewster (now fifty-two years of age, one of the oldest and most experienced of the congregation) and Cushman were commissioned in the spring of 1619 to procure a patent from the Virginia Company, and to complete an arrangement with some London merchants who had partially agreed to advance funds for the undertaking. The business was delayed by a crisis in the Virginia Company’s affairs, connected with the excited canvass attending the election (April 28 [May 8], 1619) of Sir Edwin Sandys as Governor; but at length the patent was granted (June 9/19, 1619), being taken by the advice of friends, not in their own names, but in that of Mr. John Wincob (or Whincop), described by Bradford as “a religious gentleman then belonging to the Countess of Lincoln, who intended to go with them.”[480]

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When the patent was secured, Brewster appears to have returned to Leyden at once, leaving Cushman for a time to negotiate with the merchants; but so little was done or perhaps hoped for in this direction, that an entirely new project was started the next winter under Robinson’s auspices. Certain Amsterdam merchants, already interested in the rich fur-trade on and near the Hudson River, presented a memorial to the States-General, Feb. 2/12, 1620, from which it appears that Robinson had signified his readiness to lead a colony of over four hundred English families to settle under the Dutch in New Netherland, if assured of protection. The memorial asked for assurances on this last head, and for the immediate despatch of two ships of war to take formal possession of the lands to be reserved for such a colony.

While this memorial was awaiting its (unfavorable) answer, Thomas Weston, one of those London merchants with whom there had already been consultations, came to Leyden as their agent, to propose a new arrangement for a settlement in North Virginia. For some reason, not now clear, the Pilgrims showed peculiar deference to his advice; and accordingly the negotiations with the Dutch were broken off and articles of agreement with the London merchants drawn up, embodying the conditions propounded by Weston. By these conditions a common stock was formed, with shares of ten pounds each, which might be taken up either by a deposit of money or of goods necessary for the undertaking; and Carver and Cushman were sent to England to collect subscriptions and to make purchases and preparations for the voyage. In this service, while Carver was busy with the ship in Southampton, Cushman took the responsibility of conceding certain alterations in the agreement, to please the “merchant adventurers,” as they were styled, whose part in the scheme was indispensable. The original plan was for a seven years’ partnership, during which all the colonists’ labor—except for two days a week—was to be for the common benefit; and at the end of the time, when the resulting profits were divided, the houses and improved lands in the colony were to go to the planters: but the changes sanctioned by Cushman did away with the reservation of two days in the week for each man’s private use, and arranged for an equal division, after seven years, of houses, lands, and goods between the “merchant adventurers” and the planters. Dr. Palfrey has well observed that “the hardship of the terms to which the Pilgrims were reduced shows at once the slenderness of their means and the constancy of their purpose.” About seventy merchants joined in the enterprise, of whom only three—William Collier, Timothy Hatherly, and William Thomas—became sufficiently interested to settle in the colony.

Notwithstanding discouragements, the removal was pressed forward, but the means at command provided only for sending a portion of the company; and “those that stayed, being the greater number, required the pastor to stay with them,” while Elder Brewster accompanied, in the pastor’s stead, the almost as numerous minority who were to constitute[267] a church by themselves; and in every church, by Robinson’s theories, the “governing elder,” next in rank to the pastor and the teacher, must be “apt to teach.”

A small ship,—the “Speedwell,”—of some sixty tons burden, was bought and fitted out in Holland, and early in July those who were ready for the formidable voyage, being “the youngest and strongest part,” left Leyden for embarkation at Delft-Haven, nearly twenty miles to the southward,—sad at the parting, “but,” says Bradford, “they knew that they were pilgrims.” About the middle of the second week of the month the vessel sailed for Southampton, England. On the arrival there, they found the “Mayflower,” a ship of about one hundred and eighty tons burden, which had been hired in London, awaiting them with their fellow-passengers,—partly laborers employed by the merchants, partly Englishmen like-minded with themselves, who were disposed to join the colony. Mr. Weston, also, was there, to represent the merchants; but when discussion arose about the terms of the contract, he went off in anger, leaving the contract unsigned and the arrangements so incomplete that the Pilgrims were forced to dispose of sixty pounds’ worth of their not abundant stock of provisions to meet absolutely necessary charges.

The ships, with perhaps one hundred and twenty passengers, put to sea about August 5/15, with hopes of the colony being well settled before winter; but the “Speedwell” was soon pronounced too leaky to proceed without being overhauled, and so both ships put in at Dartmouth, after eight days’ sail. Repairs were made, and before the end of another week they started again; but when above a hundred leagues beyond Land’s End, Reynolds, the master of the “Speedwell,” declared her in imminent danger of sinking, so that both ships again put about. On reaching Plymouth Harbor it was decided to abandon the smaller vessel, and thus to send back those of the company whom such a succession of mishaps had disheartened. Those who withdrew were chiefly such as from their own weakness or from the weakness of their families were likely to be least useful in the hard labor of colonization; the most conspicuous desertion was that of Cushman, smarting under criticism and despairing of success. The unexpected parting between those who disembarked and those who crowded into the “Mayflower” was sad enough. It was not known till later that the alarm over the “Speedwell’s” condition was owing to deception practised by the master and crew, who repented of their bargain to remain a year with the colony, and took this means of dissolving it.

At length, on Wednesday, September 6/16, the “Mayflower” left Plymouth, and nine weeks from the following day, on November 9/19, sighted the eastern coast of the flat, but at that time well-wooded, shores of Cape Cod. She took from Plymouth one hundred and two passengers, besides the master and crew; on the voyage one man-servant died and one child was born making 102 (73 males and 29 females) who reached their destination. Of these, the colony proper consisted of 34 adult males, 18 of them accompanied by their wives and 14 by minor children (20 boys and 8 girls); besides these, there were 3 maid-servants and 19 men-servants, sailors, and craftsmen,—5 of them only half-grown boys,—who were hired for temporary service.

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AUTOGRAPHS OF THE “MAYFLOWER” PILGRIMS.

It is thought that the autographs of all who came in the “Mayflower,” whose signatures are known, are included in this group, except that of Dorothy May, who at this time was the wife of William Bradford, and whose maiden signature Dr. Dexter found in Holland, as well as the earliest one known of Bradford, attached to his marriage application at Amsterdam, in 1613, when he was twenty-four years old.

(See Dexter’s Congregationalism, p. 381.) Resolved White was then but a child, and his brother Peregrine was not born till the ship had reached Cape Cod Harbor.

John Cooke, son of Francis Cooke, was the last male survivor of the “Mayflower” passengers.—Ed.]

Of the thirty-four men who were the nucleus of the colony, more than half are known to have come from Leyden; in fact, but four of the thirty-four are certainly known to be of the Southampton accessions. The ruling motive of the majority was, therefore, that which had impelled the church in Leyden to this step, modified, perhaps, to some small extent by their knowledge of the chief reason, as Bradford alleges, in the minds of Weston and the others who had advanced them money, “for[269] the hope of present profit to be made by the fishing that was found in that country” whither they were bound.

And whither were they bound? As we have seen, a patent was secured in 1619 in Mr. Wincob’s name; but “God so disposed as he never went nor they ever made use of this patent,” says Bradford,—not however making it clear when the intention of colonizing under this instrument was abandoned. The “merchant adventurers” while negotiating at Leyden seem to have taken out another patent from the Virginia Company, in February, 1620, in the names of John Peirce and of his associates; and this was more probably the authority under which the “Mayflower” voyage was undertaken. As the Pilgrims had known before leaving Holland of an intended grant of the northern parts of Virginia to a new company,—the Council for New England,—when they found themselves off Cape Cod, “the patent they had being for Virginia and not for New England, which belonged to another Government, with which the Virginia Company had nothing to do,” they changed the ship’s course, with intent, says Bradford, “to find some place about Hudson’s River for their habitation,” and so fulfil the conditions of their patent; but difficulties of navigation and opposition from the master and crew caused the exiles, after half a day’s voyage, to retrace their course and seek a resting-place on the nearest shore. Near half a century after, a charge of treachery was brought against Mr. Jones, the master of the “Mayflower,” for bringing the vessel so far out of her course; but the alleged cause, collusion with the Dutch, who desired to keep the English away from the neighborhood of New Netherland, is incredible.

But their radical change of destination exposed the colonists to a new danger. As soon as it was known, some of the hired laborers threatened to break loose (upon landing) from their engagements, and to enjoy full license, as a result of the loss of the authority delegated in the Virginia Company’s patent.

The necessity of some mode of civil government had been enjoined on the Pilgrims in the farewell letter from their pastor, and was now availed of to restrain these insurgents and to unite visibly the well-affected. A compact, which has often been eulogized as the first written constitution in the world, was drawn up, as follows:—

“In the name of God, amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord King James, by the grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc., having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and[270] obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.”

CAPE COD HARBOR.

[This is a reduction of part of a map, which is given by Dr. H. M. Dexter in his edition of Mourt’s Relation. He has carefully studied the topography of the region in connection with the record, and he possessed certain advantages in such study over Dr. Young, who has similarly investigated the matter in his Chronicles of the Pilgrims. There were three expeditions from the ship, and Dr. Dexter’s interpretation is followed. The women were set ashore to wash at a, and while the carpenter was repairing their shallop, Standish and sixteen men started on the 15th November (O. S.) on the first expedition. At b they saw some Indians and a dog, who disappeared in the woods at c, and later ran up the hill at d. The explorers encamped for the night at e, and the next day, where they turned the head of the creek, they drank their first New England water. Then at g they built a fire as a signal to those on the ship. At h they spent their second night; at j they found plain ground fit to plough; at k they opened a grave; at l dug up some corn; at Pamet River they found an old palisade and saw two canoes. They then retraced their steps, and at i Bradford was caught in a deer-trap. They reached the ship on the 17th. When the shallop was ready, ten days later, a party of thirty-four started in her with Jones, the captain of the “Mayflower,” as leader, and the expedition, called the second on the map, lasted from the 27th to the 30th November. The third expedition, likewise in the shallop, started on the 6th of December. Farther south than the map carries the dotted line, they landed at the modern Eastham, and had their first encounter with the natives on the 8th, and the same day reached Plymouth Harbor in the evening, as narrated in the text. On the 12th the shallop, sailing directly east across the bay, returned to the “Mayflower,” which on Saturday, the 16th, reached the anchorage depicted on the map on the following page.—Ed.]

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Of the forty-one signers to this compact, thirty-four were the adults called above the nucleus of the colony, and seven were servants or hired workmen; the seven remaining adult males of the latter sort were perhaps too ill to sign with the rest (all of them soon died), or the list of signers may be imperfect.[481]

This needful preliminary step was taken on Saturday, November 11/21, by which time the “Mayflower” had rounded the Cape and found shelter in the quiet harbor on which now lies the village of Provincetown; and probably on the same day they “chose, or rather confirmed,” as Bradford has it (as though the choice were the foregone conclusion of long previous deliberation), Mr. John Carver governor for the ensuing year. On the same day an armed delegation visited the neighboring shore, finding no inhabitants. There were no attractions, however, for a permanent settlement, nor even accommodations for a comfortable encampment while such a place was being sought. After briefer explorations, an expedition started on Wednesday, December 6/16, to circumnavigate Cape Cod Bay in search of a good harbor, and by Friday night was safely landed on Clark’s Island (so called from the ship’s mate, who was of the party), just within what is since known as Plymouth Bay. On Saturday they explored the island, on the Sabbath day they rested, and on Monday, the 11th,[482] they sounded the harbor and “marched also into the land, and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place very good for situation.”[483]

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PLYMOUTH HARBOR.

[This is reduced from a map given in Dr. Dexter’s edition of Mourt’s Relation. The Common House of the first comers was situated on Leyden Street, which left the shore just south of the rock and ran to the top of Burial Hill, and it is the lots on the south side of this street that Bradford marked out in the fac-simile of the first page of the record given on another page. The “highway” as marked on that plan led to the south to the Town Brook. The Common House, if it had been designated on that draft, would have been put next “Peter Brown;” on the plan here given it would be on the north side of the brook, about where the meridian crosses it, though the engraver has put the designation on the opposite side of the water. It was not till about 1630, or ten years after their landing, that the Plymouth settlers began to spread around the bay, beyond the circuit of mutual protection. Still for a year or two they scattered merely for summer sojourns, to work lands which had been granted them. About 1632 Duxbury began to receive as permanent residents several of the “Mayflower” people. Standish settled on the shore southeast of Captain’s Hill, thus attaching his military title to the neighboring eminence, and though his grave is not known, it is probable that he was buried, in 1656, on his farm. His house stood, it is supposed, nearly ten years longer, and was probably enlarged by his son, Alexander Standish, who was, there is some reason to believe, a trader, and he may have been the town clerk of Duxbury. Its records begin in 1666, and the tradition that connects the destruction of the earlier records with that of this house derives some color from the traces of fire which have been discovered about its site. (Sabbath at Home, May, 1867.) The house now known as the Standish house was built afterwards by Alexander, the son. Elder Brewster became Standish’s neighbor a little later, and lived east of the hill.

Alden settled near the arm of the sea just west of Powder Point, and George Soule on the Point itself; Peter Brown also settled in Duxbury. Still farther to the north, beyond the scope of the map, Edward Winslow established his estate of Careswell, where in our day Daniel Webster lived and died, in Marshfield. John Howland found a home at Rocky Nook. Isaac Allerton removed to New Haven, and Governor Bradford during his last years was almost the only one of those who came in the first ship who still lived in the village about the rock. (Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xi. 478.)—Ed.]

Prepared to report favorably, the explorers returned to the ship, which by the end of the week was safely anchored in the chosen haven. The selection of a site and the preparation of materials, in uncertain weather, delayed till Monday, the[273] 25th, the beginning of “the first house, for common use, to receive them and their goods.” Before the new year, house-lots were assigned to families, and by the middle of January most of the company had left the ship for a home on land. But the exposures incident to founding a colony in the dead of a New England winter (though later experience showed that this was a comparatively mild one) told severely on all; and before summer came one half of the number, most of them adult males, had fallen by the way.[484] Yet when the “Mayflower” sailed homewards in April, not one of the colonists went in her, so sweet was the taste of freedom, even under the shadow of death.

An avowed motive of the emigration was the hope of converting the natives; but more than three months elapsed before any intercourse with the Indians began. Traces of their propinquity had been numerous, and at length, on March 16/26, a savage visited the settlement, announcing himself in broken English as Samoset, a native of “the eastern parts,” or the coast of Maine, where contact with English fishermen had led to some knowledge of their language. From Samoset the colonists learned that the Indian name of their settlement was Patuxet, and that about four years before a kind of plague had destroyed most of the inhabitants of that region, so that there were now none to hinder their taking possession or to assert a claim to the territory. They learned also that their nearest neighbors[274] were the Wampanoags, the headquarters of whose chief sachem, Massasoit, were some thirty miles to the southwestward, near the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. The next week Samoset brought in Squanto, formerly of Patuxet, who had been taken to England in 1614 by Hunt, and who was now willing to act as interpreter in a visit from Massasoit; the latter followed an hour later and contracted unhesitatingly a treaty of peace and alliance, which was observed for fifty-four years.

THE SWORDS.

[This group is preserved in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and all but two of the swords are associated with Plymouth history. The middle sword is that of Governor Carver. On the left, descending, are those of General John Winslow, Captain Miles Standish, and Governor Brooks of Massachusetts. On the right are those, in a like descending order, of Sir William Pepperrell, Elder Brewster, and Colonel Benjamin Church, the Plymouth hero of Philip’s War. Another Standish sword is preserved in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, and is figured in the group of Pilgrim relics on another page, as well as in Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 177. Concerning those above represented, see Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. 88, 114.—Ed.]

With the beginning of a new civil year (March 25) Carver was re-elected governor, and some simple necessary laws were established; on Carver’s sudden death the following month, Bradford was chosen his successor, under whose mild and wise direction the colony went on as before. As Bradford[275] was then enfeebled by illness, Isaac Allerton was at the same time appointed Assistant to the Governor.

After a summer and autumn of prosperous labor and harvest, they were cheered, November 11/21, by the arrival of the “Fortune” from London, bringing as a visitor Robert Cushman, their former associate, and thirty-five additions to their feeble number, twenty-five of them adult males,—the majority, however, not from Leyden. The ship brought also a patent, granted June 1/11,[485] by the President and Council of New England—within whose territory the new settlement lay—to the same John Peirce and his associates in whose names the merchants fathering this venture had secured a patent the year before from the Virginia Company for the use of the “Mayflower” colonists. Without fixing territorial limits, the new grant allowed a hundred acres to be taken up for every emigrant, with fifteen hundred acres for public buildings, and empowered the grantees to make laws and set up a government.

SIGNERS OF THE PATENT, 1621.

By the delivery of this patent a sufficient show of authority was conferred for immediate need and for eight and a half years to come. It is true that in April, 1622, Peirce obtained surreptitiously for his private use a new grant with additional privileges, to be valid in place of the grant just described; but the trick was soon discovered, and the associates were reinstated by the Plymouth Company in their rights.

Taking these eight and a half years under the first patent as a separate period, the progress made in them may be briefly stated.

[276]

The settlement is first called “New Plymouth” in a letter sent back to England by the “Fortune” in December, 1621, and printed in the second edition of Captain John Smith’s New England’s Trials, in 1622. That it was so called may have been suggested as much by the name Plymouth on Smith’s map of this region (1614) as by the departure of the “Mayflower” from Plymouth, England, or by the knowledge that the colony was the first within the limits of the newly incorporated Plymouth Company. Later, the town was called simply Plymouth, while the colony retained the name New Plymouth.

In numbers they increased from less than fifty at the arrival of the “Fortune,” to near three hundred on the reception of the second charter in May, 1630. The most important accessions were in July, 1623,—about sixty persons, a few of them from Leyden; and about as many more—all from Leyden—in 1629-30.

In the second year at New Plymouth, because of threats from the Narragansett tribe of Indians about Narragansett Bay, the town was enclosed with a strong palisade, and a substantial fort (used also on Sundays as a meeting-house) was erected on the hill which formed so conspicuous a feature of the enclosure. The mode of life which John Smith described in his Generall Historie in 1624,—that “the most of them live together as one family or household, yet every man followeth his trade and profession both by sea and land, and all for a general stock, out of which they have all their maintenance,”—was modified the same year, to the great advantage of all, by the assignment to each head of a family of an acre of ground for planting, to be held as his own till the division of profits with the London merchants. While this taste of proprietorship tended to increase the restlessness of the planters, the vanishing prospect of large returns was simultaneously disheartening the “merchant adventurers,” so that many withdrew, and the remainder agreed to a termination of the partnership, in consideration of the payment of £1,800, in nine equal annual instalments, beginning in 1628. This arrangement was effected in London in November, 1626, through Isaac Allerton, one of the younger of the original Leyden emigrants, who had been commissioned for the purpose; and to meet the new financial situation, the resident adult males (except a few thought unworthy of confidence) were constituted stockholders, each one being allowed shares up to the number of his family. Then followed an allotment of land to each shareholder, the settlement of the title of each to the house he occupied, and a distribution of the few cattle on hand among groups of families,—all these possessions having hitherto been the joint, undivided stock of the “merchant adventurers” and the planters. At the same time eight leading planters (Bradford, Standish, Allerton, Winslow, Brewster, Howland, Alden, and Prince), with the help of four London friends, undertook to meet the outstanding obligations of the colony and the first six annual payments on the new basis, obtaining in return a monopoly of the foreign trade.

[277]

GOVERNOR EDWARD WINSLOW.

[This is the only authentic likeness of any of the “Mayflower” Pilgrims. It was painted in England in 1651, when Winslow was fifty-six. It has been several times engraved before, as may be seen in the Winslow Memorial, in Young’s Chronicles, in Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, and in Morton’s Memorial, Boston edition, 1855. The original, once the property of Isaac Winslow, Esq., is now deposited in the gallery of the Pilgrim Society at Plymouth. (Cf. 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii. 286, and Proc., x. 36.) Various relics of the Governor are also preserved in Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth. There are biographies of him in Belknap’s American Biography, and in J. B. Moore’s American Governors. A record of Governor Winslow’s descendants will be found in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1850, 297 (by Lemuel Shattuck); 1863, p. 159 (by J. H. Sheppard). Of the descendants of his brother Kenelm, see L. R. Paige’s account in the Register, 1871, p. 355, and 1872, p. 69. An extensive Winslow Memorial has been begun by David P. Holton, 1877, the first volume of which is given to all descendants (of all names) of Kenelm. See Register, 1877, p. 454; 1878, p. 94, by W. S. Appleton, who in the Register, 1867, p. 209, has a note on the English ancestry; and Colonel Chester has a similar note in 1870, p. 329. There is in Harvard College Library a manuscript on Careswell and the Winslows by the late Dr. James Thacher.—Ed.]

In these arrangements, which proved eminently wise for the public interests, one object was to facilitate further emigration from Leyden. The management of the London merchants had been unfavorable to this end, and it was a special grief that during this period of delay the beloved pastor, Robinson, had ended his life in Leyden,—Feb. 19 (March 1), 1625. The heavy expenses of transporting and providing for such as came over in 1629-30 were cheerfully borne by the new management.

The same temper in the London merchants which had hindered Robinson’s coming,—a conviction that the religious peculiarities of the Pilgrims interfered with the attractiveness and financial success of the colony,—led them to send over in 1624 a minister of their own choosing (John Lyford), who was not merely not in sympathy with the wants of the Plymouth men, but even tried to serve his patrons by false accusations and by attempting to set up the Church of England form of worship. He was expelled from the colony within a year from his arrival, and the church continued under Elder Brewster’s teaching. In 1628 Mr. Allerton on a voyage from England,[278] without direction from the church, brought over another minister, but mental derangement quickly ended his career.

The colony began within these first years to enlarge its outlook. In 1627, to further their maritime interests, an outpost was established on Buzzard’s Bay, twenty miles to the southward; in the same year relations of friendly commerce were entered into with the Dutch of New Amsterdam, and as soon as the nearer plantations of the Massachusetts Company were begun, Plymouth was prompt to aid and counsel as occasion offered. In 1628 the attempt was made to establish more firmly the existing trade with the Eastern Indians, by obtaining a patent for a parcel of land on the River Kennebec.

GOVERNORS OF PLYMOUTH COLONY.

[Of John Carver, the first governor, no signature is known. This group shows the autographs of all his successors, who held the office for the years annexed to their names:—

William Bradford, 1621-32, 1635, 1637, 1639-43, 1645-56.
Edward Winslow, 1633, 1636, 1644.
Thomas Prince, 1634, 1638, 1657-72.
Josiah Winslow, 1673-80.
Thomas Hinckley, 1681 to the union, except during the Andros interregnum.—Ed.]

These outside experiences were all in the way of encouragements: the most serious annoyances came, not directly from the savages, but from neighbors of their own blood. Thus in 1623 the wretched colonists sent out the year before by Thomas Weston to Weymouth, twenty miles northwest from Plymouth, had to be protected from their own mismanagement and the hostility of the natives, by which means came about the first shedding of Indian blood by the Pilgrims; and thus again, five years later, the unruly nest of Morton’s followers at Merry Mount, just beyond Weymouth, had to be broken up by force.

Of the progress of civil government in this first period we have scanty memorials. Few laws and few officials answered the simple needs of the colony. Bradford was annually elected governor, and in 1624, at his desire, a board of five Assistants was substituted for the single Assistant who had hitherto shared the executive responsibility. The people met from time to time in General Court for the transaction of public business, and in 1623 a book of laws was begun; but three pages sufficed to contain the half-dozen simple enactments of the next half-dozen years.

[279]

The next period of the colony history extends from Jan. 13/23, 1629-30, when the Council for New England granted to Bradford, his heirs, associates, and assigns, a useful enlargement of the patent for Plymouth and Kennebec, to March 2/12, 1640-41, when Bradford in the name of the grantees conveyed the rights thus bestowed to the freemen of New Plymouth in their corporate capacity.

PILGRIM RELICS.

[The chest of drawers is an ancient one, which there is some reason to believe belonged to Peregrine White. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. 1873, p. 398.) The sword and vessels belonged to Standish. The cradle belonged to Dr. Samuel Fuller, the physician of the Pilgrims. (Russell’s Pilgrim Memorials, p. 55; Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 201.) Chair No. 1 belonged to Governor Carver; No. 2 was Elder Brewster’s; No. 3 is said to have been Governor Edward Winslow’s; and this with a table, which was until recently in the hall of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has lately been reclaimed by its owner, Mr. Isaac Winslow. (See 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. v. 293.; Proceedings, ii. 1, 284; iv. 142; xix. 124; Young’s Chronicles, p. 238; Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 197.) There are other groupings of Pilgrim relics in Dr. Dexter’s papers; C. W. Elliott’s “Good Old Times at Plymouth” in Harper’s Monthly, 1877, p. 180; Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers.—Ed.]

The most striking feature of this period was the growth from a single plantation to a province of eight towns, seven of them stretching for fifty miles along the shore of Cape Cod Bay, from Scituate to Yarmouth, and Taunton lying twenty-five miles inland,—in all containing about twenty-five hundred souls. With this growth there was also some extension of trade on the Kennebec and Penobscot, and in 1632 a beginning[280] of exploration, and in 1633 of settlement, in the Connecticut Valley; but the appearance of numerous emigrants from Massachusetts Bay defeated the contemplated removal of the entire colony to the last-named location.

The establishment of towns led necessarily to a more elaborate system of civil government, and in 1636 it was found expedient to revise and codify the previous enactments of the General Court, and to prescribe the duties of the various public officers. In 1638 the inconveniences of governing by mass-meeting led to the introduction of the representative system already familiar to Massachusetts Bay. The number of Assistants had been increased in 1633 from five to seven.

In 1629 an acceptable minister of the gospel—Ralph Smith, a Cambridge graduate—for the first time took charge of the church in Plymouth; and by 1641 the eight towns of the colony were all (except Marshfield, which was but just settled) supplied with educated clergy, of whom perhaps the most influential was Ralph Partridge, of Duxbury.

The half-century (1641-91) which completed the separate existence of Plymouth Colony, witnessed no radical changes, but a steady development under the existing patent, though repeated but unsuccessful attempts were made to obtain a charter direct from the English Government. At the outset (in 1641), by a purchase of the remaining interests of the English partners of 1627, the last trace of dependence on foreign capital was wiped out.

Notwithstanding the discontinuance of English emigration after 1640, and the enormous devastation of Philip’s war in 1675-76, the population of the colony increased to about eight thousand in these fifty years, being distributed through twenty towns, of which Scituate had probably the largest numbers and certainly the most wealth, the town of Plymouth having lost, even as early as 1643, its former prominence. That this growth was no greater, and that expansion beyond the strict colony limits was completely checked, resulted inevitably from the more favorable situation of the neighboring colony of the Bay.

The civil administration continued as before, the Governor’s Assistants and the Deputies sitting in General Court as one body. Deputies were elected in each town by the resident freemen, the freemen being the original signers of the compact on board the “Mayflower,” with such persons as had been added to their number by a majority vote of the general court. Public sentiment was so trustworthy that no qualifications were named for the estate of freemen until 1656, when it was merely provided that a candidate must have been approved by the freemen of his own town. Two years later, when the colony was overrun by Quaker propagandists, persons of that faith, as well as all others who similarly opposed the laws and the established worship, were distinctly excluded from the privileges of freemen, and in the new revision of the laws in 1671 freemen were obliged to be at least twenty-one years of age, “of sober and peaceable conversation,[281] orthodox in the fundamentals of religion,” and possessed of at least £20 worth of ratable estate in the colony. By the Code of 1671 a Court of Assistants was created to exercise the judicial functions hitherto retained by the General Court; but in 1685, with the constitution of three counties, most of these duties were transferred to county courts.

Two interdependent circumstances conspired with the poverty of the settlers and the unattractiveness of the soil,—even as compared with Massachusetts Bay,—to retard seriously the progress of the colony; and these were, their inability to keep up a learned ministry, and the enforced delay in providing for public education. The first of these facts was so patent as to call forth public rebukes from Massachusetts, and it may be enough to recall that in 1641 seven of the eight townships constituting the colony were served by ministers of English education; but in the next half-century these same pulpits stood vacant on the average upwards of ten years each, and the new towns which were formed in the colony had no larger amount of ministerial service. As to the other point, it is sufficient to note that neither from tradition nor from public records is there evidence of any opportunity or provision for education before 1670,—except, of course, in the private family. Their poverty no doubt chiefly occasioned this.

Yet while the resources of Plymouth and the education of her public men were distinctly inferior to those of the Bay, she bore herself in her relations with the other colonies with a certain simple dignity and straightforward reasonableness which won respect; and in matters of general interest she was content to share the sentiments of her comrades without controlling them. She joined in the New England Confederation of 1643; and though the idea sprang from another quarter, it is probable that the form was influenced by suggestions from the Plymouth men, derived from their experience in the United Netherlands.

Plymouth’s treatment of the Quakers, in 1656 and the following years, illustrated in part the contrast with Massachusetts Bay. At the outset public sentiment was much the same in the two colonies, in view of the extravagances and indecencies of these intruders; but the greater mildness of administration in Plymouth bore its appropriate fruit in lessening the evil characteristics which developed by opposition, and gradually the dreaded sectaries gained a foothold, until finally their principles were widely adopted in certain localities with only good results.

Plymouth’s treatment of the Royal Commissioners in 1665 indicated fairly her consistent attitude towards the mother country; in receiving the King’s mandates with respect, and in promising conformity, she held the course which had produced the seven articles at Leyden in 1617.

The most serious misfortune to visit the colony was the Indian war which broke out early in 1675. Up to that time the Plymouth men had been careful to acquire by bonâ fide purchase a title to all new lands as they were occupied; they had endeavored also (with fair success, as compared with like efforts in Massachusetts Bay) to spread the knowledge of Christianity; and in 1675 there were perhaps six or seven hundred “praying Indians” within the colony bounds.

[282]

GOVERNOR JOSIAH WINSLOW.

[This canvas is likewise the property of Isaac Winslow, Esq., and is now in the Pilgrim Hall, at Plymouth. This portrait, and that of the father, the elder Governor Winslow, are the only likenesses of the Plymouth governors extant; and Josiah Winslow was the first governor of native birth, having been born in Marshfield in 1629; dying there in 1680.—Ed.]

But Wamsutta and Metacomet (otherwise Alexander and Philip), the sons and successors of the sachem Massasoit, were hostile to the whites and unaffected by Christian influences; and after Alexander’s death, in 1662, the colonists found that only by constant watchfulness could they prevent a breach with the savages. Finally under Philip’s lead they rose and began a war of extermination. The exciting cause and the earliest operations were within the territory claimed by Plymouth; on her fell successively the heaviest blows (in proportion to her population) and the most pressing responsibilities for defence. When the war ended with Philip’s death, in August, 1676, more than half her towns had been partially or wholly destroyed, and the colony’s share (about £15,000) of the expense incurred by the New England Confederacy in suppressing the Indians was a very serious burden on a feeble agricultural community. Before the slow process of recovery from these desolations could be accomplished, the ancient customs of self-government were invaded by James II.; and when the arbitrary exactions under Andros, as Governor of all New England, were ended in the Revolution of 1689, the return to the old conditions of freedom was but temporary; the new monarchs followed James’s policy of consolidation, and Plymouth found herself fated to be included either in the charter of New York or in that of Massachusetts. Better a known than an unknown evil; and accordingly the London agent of Plymouth was authorized to express a preference for union with Boston, and the provincial charter of Massachusetts in October, 1691, put an end to the separate existence of the colony of New Plymouth. Of the original “Mayflower” company but two[283] members survived,—John Cooke, of Dartmouth, who died in 1695, and Mary (Allerton) Cushman, of Plymouth, who died in 1699. The younger generation were accustomed to the leadership of Massachusetts Bay, and accepted the union as a natural and fitting step.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE earliest printed volume treating of the origin of Plymouth Colony was New England’s Memorial; ... with special Reference to the first Colony thereof, published by Nathaniel Morton in 1669. As he states in his “Epistle Dedicatory,” the most of his intelligence concerning the beginnings of the settlement came from manuscripts left by his “much-honored uncle, Mr. William Bradford.” Morton’s parents had emigrated in 1623, when he was a boy of ten, from Leyden to Plymouth, with a younger sister of Mrs. Morton, who had been sent for to become the wife of Governor Bradford. This connection and his own position as secretary of the General Court of the Colony from 1645, gave peculiar opportunities for gathering information; but his book preserves nothing on the earliest portion of the Pilgrim history, beyond the date (1602) and the place (“the North of England”) of their entering into a church covenant together.

The manuscripts of Governor Bradford passed at his death (1657) to his eldest son, Major William Bradford, of Plymouth, and while in his possession a few particulars were extracted for Cotton Mather’s use in his Magnalia (1702), especially in the “Life of Bradford” (book ii. chap. i.). A minute, but very efficient typographical error, however (Ansterfield for Austerfield), kept students for the next century and a half out of the knowledge of Governor Bradford’s birthplace, and of the exact neighborhood whence came the Leyden migration. From Major William Bradford, who died in 1704, the manuscripts descended to his son, Major John, of Kingston (originally a part of Plymouth), by whom the most precious were lent or given, in 1728, to the Rev. Thomas Prince, of Boston.[486] Prince made a careful use of this material in the first volume of his Annals (1736), fixing the locality whence the Pilgrims came as “near the joining borders of Nottinghamshire, Linconshire, and Yorkshire,” and lodged the originals in the library which he bequeathed, in 1758, to the Old South Church in Boston. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, while writing his History of Massachusetts Bay, found these manuscripts in the Prince Library, and printed in the Appendix to his second volume (1767) a valuable extract describing the exodus to Holland. In the troublous times which followed, the Bradford papers disappeared.

Another extract from Bradford, however, soon after came to light in the records of the First Church in Plymouth, where Secretary Morton had transcribed, in 1680, most of his uncle’s account of the transatlantic history of the Pilgrims. This was printed, in part and somewhat inaccurately, by Ebenezer Hazard, in vol. i. of his Historical Collections (1792), and in full by the Rev. Alexander Young, in his Chronicles of the Pilgrims (1841).

The clews furnished by Mather and Prince to the Pilgrim cradle-land attracted no special attention until 1842, when the Hon. James Savage, during a visit to England,[487] submitted the problem to the Rev. Joseph Hunter, author of a history of South Yorkshire,[284] of which region he was also a native. Mr. Hunter, though the evidence was incomplete, suggested that Austerfield was the place wanted; and the attention of this accomplished antiquary being thus enlisted, the result appeared in a tract, published by him in 1849, entitled Collections concerning the Founders of New Plymouth, which identified the meeting-place of the Separatist Church before their removal to Holland. This tract was reissued, in 1852, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. xxxi., and again in London, in an enlarged form, in 1854.[488] The author’s careful examination of local records made plain the position of the Brewsters in Scrooby, and of the Bradfords in Austerfield (with the entry of Governor Bradford’s baptism), and traced their families, as well as the families of other early members of the Scrooby flock, in the neighboring parishes. The importance of Mr. Hunter’s labors may be seen in the fact, that, besides Brewster and Bradford, none of the “Mayflower” passengers (except the two Winslows) have even yet been surely traced to an English birthplace.[489]

Mr. Hunter’s success soon attracted the attention of other investigators. The earliest visit to Scrooby which has received notice in print was one made in July, 1851, by the Rev. Henry M. Dexter, of Boston, described by him in The Congregationalist of Aug. 8, 1851. Mr. W. H. Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 35, published in 1853, added nothing to Hunter’s researches, except some interesting engravings of the church in which Bradford was baptized, and of Scrooby village. In his enlarged edition of 1854, Hunter gave a better view of the remains of the palace inhabited by Brewster. Mr. Palfrey visited the neighborhood in 1856, and records his impressions in a note on p. 134 of vol. i. (1858) of his History of New England. In 1860 the Rev. John Raine, vicar of the parish of Blyth, in[285] which these hamlets were formerly included, printed a valuable account of that parish’s history and antiquities.[490]

In January, 1862, the Rev. H. M. Dexter published, in the Congregational Quarterly, an article on “Recent Discoveries concerning the Plymouth Pilgrims,” summarizing conveniently what had been learned regarding the place where, and the time when, the church was gathered. In March, 1867, he contributed to the Sabbath at Home magazine an illustrated article on the “Footprints of the Pilgrims in England,” which is still the most vivid and the fullest description extant of the Scrooby neighborhood. With this should be compared, for additional facts, a letter from Dr. Dexter in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. (xii. 129) for July, 1871; the early pages of the chapter on Robinson, in the same author’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature (1880); and the record of a visit in 1860, in Professor James M. Hoppin’s Old England. The Scrooby episode is also told, more or less fully, in the Rev. Ashbel Steele’s Life of Elder Brewster (1857), in Dr. John Waddington’s Track of the Hidden Church (1863), and in chap. vi. of the second volume of his Congregational History (1874), in the Rev. George Punchard’s History of Congregationalism, vol. iii. chap. xi. (1867), in chap. vii. of vol. ii. of S. R. Gardiner’s Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage (1869), and in chap. x. of Dr. Leonard Bacon’s Genesis of the New England Churches (1874).[491]

Scrooby village is about one hundred and forty miles N.N.W. from London, and eighty miles due east from Liverpool. It lies on the Great Northern Railway; but as its population numbers only some two hundred, it is practically a mere suburb of Bawtry, a small market-town a mile and a quarter to the north, of perhaps a thousand inhabitants. Austerfield, a little larger than Scrooby, and at about the same distance from Bawtry in a northeasterly direction, is included, as well as much of the other two localities, in the patrimony of Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes), whose family have held it since 1779.

Of the life in Holland and the preparations for removal to America, the first connected account in print was that appended by Edward Winslow (who had joined the company at Leyden in 1617, at the age of twenty-two) to his Hypocrisy Unmasked, in 1646, which was reprinted in 1841, in Dr. Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims. Winslow’s object in this brief appendix was to refute an unjust charge of schism in the Leyden church, and to explain the reasons for the removal and the course of the accompanying negotiations; he also reviewed Robinson’s doctrinal position, and incidentally preserved the substance of the pastor’s farewell address to the departing portion of his flock.[492] Morton’s Memorial, in 1669, gave from Bradford’s manuscripts a fuller account of the events in question; and Mather’s Magnalia (1702), and Prince’s Annals (1736), added a few touches to the picture. Prince has also the distinction of being the first of those who have retraced the steps of the Pilgrims on Dutch soil, his Annals (vol. i. p. 160) recording his visit to[286] Leyden in 1714, and his supposed identification of the church which Robinson’s congregation used, and in which he was buried.[493]

The extracts from Bradford published by Hazard in 1792, with those included in the notes to Judge John Davis’s edition of Morton’s Memorial in 1826, all of which were reprinted by Dr. Young in 1841, set forth in a more orderly way the story of the removal. But there was no inquiry in Holland until Leyden was visited by Mr. George Sumner, a younger brother of Senator Sumner, who communicated the results of his researches to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1843, in a paper which was published separately at Cambridge in 1845, and in the Society’s Collections, vol. xxix. (1846). Mr. Sumner threw much light on the actual condition of the Pilgrims in Holland, while investigating Prince’s report of a church lent them by the city, and Winslow’s account of the respect paid Robinson at his funeral. He showed that Prince had confused this congregation with one founded contemporaneously by English Presbyterians in Leyden, for whose use a chapel was granted, while Robinson’s company received no such favor. He also printed the record of Robinson’s admission to the University,—a fact not before recovered,—and the entry of his burial in St. Peter’s cathedral, just across the way from his house.[494]

In 1848 another item of interest,—the application of Robinson and his people for leave to come to Leyden,—was printed for the first time in a Memoir of Robinson, by Professor Kist, in vol. viii. of the Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkelijke Geschiedenis.[495] A fuller memoir, prefixed to a collected edition of his writings, was published in London three years later (1851), by the Rev. Robert Ashton, and reprinted in the Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. xli. (1852).

Next in chronological order comes the publication of the most important of all known sources of information respecting the Pilgrims from 1608 to 1646,—the History of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, second governor of the colony. We have seen that this history was used, in manuscript, by various writers, but disappeared after 1767. In 1844 a History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, by the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Samuel Wilberforce), was published in London, in which quotations embodying new information were made from an otherwise unknown “Manuscript History of the Plantation of Plymouth, etc., in the Fulham Library.” The Bishop’s volume passed to a second edition in 1846, and was reprinted in New York in 1849; while in 1848 there appeared in London the Rev. J. S. M. Anderson’s History of the Colonial Church, in which reference was distinctly made to “Bradford’s MS. History of Plymouth Colony ... now in the possession of the Bishop of London.” But the significance of these allusions was ignored by American students, until February, 1855, when Mr. John Wingate Thornton, of Boston, called the attention of the Rev. John S. Barry, who was then engaged on the first volume of his History of Massachusetts, to the Bishop of Oxford’s book. Taking up the clew thus given, Mr. Barry conferred with Mr. Charles Deane, who sent at once to London for information, and by the replies received, was enabled to announce at the meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, April 12, 1855, that the complete manuscript of Governor Bradford’s history had been found in the Library of the Bishop of London’s Palace at Fulham, and that an accurate copy had been ordered for the Society’s use. This transcript reached Boston in August, and was issued, under Mr. Deane’s able editorship,[287] in the spring of 1856, both as a separate publication and as volume xxxiii. of the Society’s Collections.[496]

How the manuscript came to be in the Fulham Library is uncertain; most probably it was taken from the Prince Library, upon the evacuation of Boston by the British in March, 1776, and was preserved and finally deposited in a public collection by those who perceived it to be of value. The desirability of its return to America has been repeatedly suggested; but as an individual bishop has no power to alienate the property of his See, nothing has yet been accomplished.

The next special contribution to the history of the Pilgrims in Holland was the publication of the “Seven Articles which the church of Leyden sent [in September, 1617] to the Council of England, to be considered of in respect of their judgments occasioned about their going to Virginia, anno 1618.” A contemporary transcript of this paper was found in the British State-Paper Office by the Hon. George Bancroft, and communicated by him, with an introductory letter, to the New York Historical Society, in October, 1856. It was included, in 1857, in vol. iii. of the second series of their Collections.[497]

In 1859-60 the Hon. Henry C. Murphy, of Brooklyn, N. Y., United States Minister at the Hague from 1857 to 1861, published in the Hist. Mag. (iii. 261, 335, 357; iv. 4) a series of four “Contributions to the History of the Pilgrim Fathers, from the Records at Leyden.” These valuable papers presented much new information (derived especially from the marriage records) as to the full names, ages, occupations, and English homes of Robinson’s congregation; they determined also the site and dimensions of his house, and the details of its purchase. Another fact, which was already known, that Elder Brewster during the last three years of his stay in Leyden was a printer and publisher, especially of books on ecclesiastical matters, both in Latin and English,[498] which it would not have been safe to print at home, received new illustration from Mr. Murphy.

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The labors of Sumner and Murphy in Holland have been supplemented by the diligent researches of Dr. H. M. Dexter, whose work at Scrooby was mentioned above. In the Congregational Quarterly for January, 1862 (vol. iv.), he gave an account of the recent additions to our knowledge; and in the notes to his invaluable addition of Mourt’s Relation, in 1865, he traced the personal history of the Pilgrims, so far as an exhaustive examination of the Leyden records made that possible. In 1866, in company with Professor George E. Day, of Yale College, who had shared in the previous investigations, Dr. Dexter superintended the erection of a marble tablet, with appropriate inscription, on the front of the Home for Aged Walloons, which now occupies the site of Robinson’s house. In the Sabbath at Home for April, 1867, he published a graphic account of the “Footprints of the Pilgrims in Holland,” and in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. for January, 1872 (xii. 184), suggested some valuable corrections of Mr. Sumner’s Memoirs, respecting Robinson’s death and burial. The Leyden pastor’s influence and doctrinal position may be best studied in Dr. Dexter’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature (1880), and in vol. iii. of the Rev. George Punchard’s History of Congregationalism (2d ed. 1867).[499]

For various contributions to fuller knowledge than Bradford affords of the negotiations in London, after removal to America had been decided on, great credit is due to the researches of the Rev. Edward D. Neill, especially in his History of the Virginia Company (1869) and his English Colonization of America (1871). Cf. Hist. Mag., xiii. 278. The same writer has investigated the personal history of Captain Thomas Jones, master of the “Mayflower,” in the Historical Magazine (January, 1869), xv. 31-33, and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. (1874), xxviii. 314-17. The charge that Jones was bribed by the Dutch in 1620, is considered by Mr. William Brigham in the volume of lectures published by the Massachusetts Historical Society on the Early History of Massachusetts, and in the Society’s Proceedings for December, 1868.[500]

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For the colony’s affairs from the sailing of the “Mayflower” to 1646, the prime source of knowledge is Bradford’s History. At the time of emigrating, the author was in his thirty-first year, and his book was written at various dates, from 1630 to 1650, when he was from forty to sixty years of age. Less than four months after landing he became Governor, and for the remaining quarter-century covered by his History he held the same office, except during five years, when excused at his own urgent request. The foremost man in the colony for this long period, nature and opportunity equally fitted him to be its chronicler from the beginning. No one could speak with more authority than he of the inner motives and guiding policy of the original colonists,—fortunately, also, no one could exemplify more clearly in written words the ideal Pilgrim than does Bradford, with his grave, homely, earnest style, not unsuggestive of the English of the Bible. Between his style and that of Winthrop, the contemporary historian of the Bay, there is something of the same difference that existed between the two emigrations; and yet Bradford’s simple story, standing as it does as the earliest piece of American historical composition, possesses a peculiar charm which the broader, more philosophic page of Winthrop cannot rival.[501]

BRADFORD’S WRITING,—FROM HIS “HISTORY.”

The special contributions by others to the history of Bradford’s period began in 1622 with the publication of Mourt’s Relation, a[290] daily journal of the first twelve months (Sept. 1620, to Dec. 11, 1621), so called from the name, “G. Mourt,” subscribed to the preface, but doubtless written by Bradford and Winslow. The standard edition is that of 1865, with notes by Dr. H. M. Dexter.[502] A few facts may also be gleaned from a Sermon (by Robert Cushman) preached at Plymouth, Dec. 9, 1621,[503] and from the second edition of Captain John Smith’s New England’s[291] Trials,—both published in London in 1622. Winslow’s Good News from New England appeared in 1624, continuing the narrative of events from November, 1621, to September 10, 1623.[504] Next came, after a long interval, New England’s Memorial, by Nathaniel Morton, printed at Cambridge in 1669, which professed to give the annals of New England to 1668; beyond the part supplied from Bradford and Winslow, however, there was little of value. Judge John Davis’s[505] edition of 1826 is still the best.[506]

To these materials the next sensible addition was in the “Summary of the Affairs of the Colony of New-Plimouth,” appended, in 1767, to vol. ii. of Governor Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay, and containing some personal items not before collected. In 1794 a fragment of a letter-book, preserving copies of important letters written and received by Governor Bradford from 1624 to 1630, having lately been found in Nova Scotia, was printed in the Massachusetts Historical Collections, vol. iii.[507] In 1798 Dr. Jeremy Belknap included in vol. ii. of his American Biography sketches of the leading Pilgrims (Robinson, Carver, Bradford, Brewster, Cushman, Winslow, and Standish), which put in admirable form all then known of early Plymouth history.

The next quarter of a century added nothing to the existing stock of knowledge, unless by the publication in 1815 of the General History of New England to 1680, by the Rev. William Hubbard (born 1621, died 1704), which, so far as Plymouth was concerned, was little more than a compilation from sources already named. But with the issue, in 1826, of a new edition of Morton, and in 1830 of An Historical Memoir of the Colony of New Plymouth, by the Hon. Francis Baylies,[508] and in 1832 of a History of the Town of Plymouth, by Dr. James Thacher, was introduced the new era of modern research.[509]

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FIRST PAGE, PLYMOUTH RECORDS.

[This is in the handwriting of Governor Bradford; it is also in Hazard, i. 100, and in the State edition, xii. 2. It is not clear when the entry was made. Pulsifer, Records, xii. p. iv., holds it was written in 1620; Shurtleff, Ibid., i. Introd., says that all entries dated before 1627 were made in this last year. Beside the account of the records in this introduction, there is another in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., ii. Also see N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1858, p. 358. The State edition is in twelve volumes, usually bound in ten; and was originally sold for $75, but is now obtainable at a much less price.

The patents under which the colony governed itself have been defined in the preceding narrative, and in a note the first one is traced. (Cf. also Neill’s notes on it in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1876, p. 413, and Poor’s Vindication of Gorges.) The second patent, of April 20, 1622, is not extant. The third, of Jan. 13, 1629-30, is at Plymouth in the Registry of Deeds, and is printed in Brigham’s edition of the Laws, Hazard’s Collections, etc. Cf. Mass. Archives, Miscellanies, i. 123.—Ed.]

The Legislature of Massachusetts gave fresh impulse to this spirit of investigation by publishing in 1836, under the editorship of Mr. William Brigham, the Laws passed in Plymouth Colony from 1623 to 1691, with a selection of other permanent documents. In 1841 the Rev. Alexander Young[510] collected, under the title of Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers from 1602 to 1625, the principal writings of that period, and, enriching them with a body of useful notes, made a volume which still retains a distinct value. In 1846 and 1851 a local antiquary, Mr. William S. Russell,[511] brought out two small volumes,—A Guide to Plymouth and Pilgrim Memorials,—which are not yet superseded; Mr. William H. Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers[512] (1853) added something to these local touches. Between 1855 and 1861 the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth were printed in extenso, by order[293] of the State Legislature, under the editorship of Dr. N. B. Shurtleff[513] and Mr. David Pulsifer.

The year 1856 was made memorable by the printing of Bradford’s manuscript, and two years later appeared the initial volume of Dr. John G. Palfrey’s History of New England, which comprehends by far the best of modern narratives of the complete career of Plymouth Colony. Only in subsidiary literature have the more recent years added anything. Valuable bibliographical notes on Pilgrim history, by the editor of the present volume, were printed in the Harvard College Library Bulletin for 1878, nos. 7 and 8; and the “Collections toward a Bibliography of Congregationalism,” appended to Dr. H. M. Dexter’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature (1880), are indispensable to future students. In 1881 General E. W. Peirce published a useful volume of Civil, Military, and Professional Lists of Plymouth and Rhode Island Colonies to 1700.

Apart from strictly historical composition, the theme has inspired some of the greatest oratorical efforts of the sons of New England in the present century,—especially in connection with the stated annual celebrations of the Pilgrim Society,[514] formed at Plymouth in 1820 (a successor of the earlier Old Colony Club,[515] founded in 1769). Most deservedly conspicuous in this series are the orations delivered in 1820 by Daniel Webster, in 1824 by Edward Everett, and in 1870 by Robert C. Winthrop; of similar note are several of the orations before the New England Society of New York, founded in 1805. The Pilgrim Society has also fostered local sentiment by erecting (in 1824) Pilgrim Hall in the town of Plymouth, and by gathering within it a valuable collection of memorials of the early settlers and of portraits of historical interest.[516]

A portrait of Edward Winslow (engraved on a previous page) is in Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth, and is the only undoubted portrait of any of the Pilgrims now existing.[517] Of the many attempts to depict on canvas signal events of Pilgrim history, the most important is a painting by Robert W. Weir of the embarkation at Delft Haven, executed in 1846, and occupying one of the panels in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington.[518] The most imposing works of architecture and sculpture in commemoration of the same events are the canopy recently erected over the rock in Plymouth on which the Pilgrims are believed to have landed, and the monument on a neighboring hill-top.[519]

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In poetical literature the most serious and sustained effort to represent the Pilgrim spirit is in Longfellow’s “Courtship of Miles Standish” (1859);[520] while in briefer compass Old England, through Lord Houghton (Prefatory Stanzas to Hunter’s Founders of New Plymouth) and Mrs. Hemans (“Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers”), and New England through Pierpont (“The Pilgrim Fathers”) and Lowell (“Interview with Miles Standish”), have vied in celebrating the character and deeds of the exiles of 1620.[521]


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CHAPTER IX.

NEW ENGLAND.

BY CHARLES DEANE, LL. D.,

Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The Council for New England.—This body was incorporated in the eighteenth year of the reign of James I., on the 3d of November, 1620, under the name of the “Council established at Plymouth, in the County of Devon, for the planting, ruling, ordering, and governing of New England, in America.” The corporation consisted of forty patentees, the most of whom were persons of distinction: thirteen were peers, some of the highest rank. The patentees were empowered to hold territory in America extending from the fortieth to the forty-eighth degree of north latitude, and westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and they were authorized to settle and govern the same. This charter is the foundation of most of the grants which were afterward made of the territory of New England.

This Company was substantially a reincorporation of the adventurers or associates of the Northern Colony of Virginia, with additional privileges, placing them on a footing with their rivals of the Southern Colony, whose franchise had been twice enlarged since the issuing of the original charter of April 10, 1606, which incorporated both companies. A notice of this earlier enterprise will but briefly detain us.

While the Southern Colony had attracted the wealth and influence of leading adventurers who represented the more liberal party in the government, and were enabled to prosecute their plans of colonization with vigor to a good degree of success, the Northern Colony had signally failed from the beginning. The former had established at Jamestown, in 1607, the first permanent English Colony in America. The latter produced no greater results than the abortive settlement at Sabino, known as the Popham Colony.[522] The discouragement following upon its abandonment prompted the withdrawal of many of the adventurers, though the organization of the patentees still survived; but of their meetings and records we have no trace. Sir Ferdinando Gorges himself would not despair, but engaged his[296] private fortune in fishing, trading, and exploring expeditions, and in making attempts at settlement. Many of these enterprises he speaks of as private ventures, while the Council for New England, in their Briefe Relation, of 1622, which I have sometimes thought was written by Gorges himself, speaks of them in the name of the Company. The probability is that Gorges was the principal person who kept alive the cherished scheme of settling the country, and by his influence a few other persons were engaged, and the name of the Council covered many of these enterprises.

Gorges now conceived the scheme of a great monopoly. King James had reigned since 1614 without a parliament, and during the following years down to the meeting of the next parliament, in January, 1620/21, a large part of the business of the country had been monopolized by individuals or by associations that had secured special privileges from the Crown. Gorges was a friend of the King and of the “prerogative.” Under the plea of desiring a new incorporation of the adventurers of the Northern Colony, in order to place them on an equality of privileges with the Southern Colony, Gorges had devised the plan of securing a monoply of the fishing in the waters of New England for the patentees of the new corporation, and for those who held or purchased license from them. He had the adroitness to enlist in his favor a large number of the principal noblemen and gentlemen. Relative to his proceedings, Gorges himself says: “Of this, my resolution, I was bold to offer the sounder considerations to divers of his Majesty’s honorable Privy Council, who had so good liking thereunto as they willingly became interested themselves therein as patentees and councillors for the managing of the business, by whose favors I had the easier passage in the obtaining his Majesty’s royal charter to be granted us according to his warrant to the then solicitor-general,” etc. The petition for the new charter was dated March 3, 1619/20; the warrant for its preparation, July 23; and it passed the seals Nov. 3, 1620.

An inspection of the several patents granted by King James will show that, in those of 1606 and 1609, among the privileges conferred is that of “fishings.” But the word is there used in connection with other privileges appertaining to and within the precincts conveyed, such as “mines, minerals, marshes,” etc., and probably meant “fishings” in rivers and ponds, and not in the seas. In the patent of Nov. 3, 1620, a similar clause ends, “and seas adjoining,” which may be intended to cover the alleged privilege. In this patent, as in the others, there is no clause forbidding free fishing within the seas of New England; but all persons without license first obtained from the Council are, in the patent of Nov. 3, 1620, forbidden to visit the coast, and the clause of forfeiture of vessel and cargo is inserted. This prevented fishermen from landing and procuring wood for constructing stages to dry their fish.

A few days after the petition of Gorges and his associates had been presented to the King for a new charter, with minutes indicating the nature of[297] the privileges asked for, the Southern Colony took the alarm, and the subject was brought before its members by the treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys, at a meeting on the 15th of March, 1619/20, at which a committee was appointed to appear before the Privy Council the next day, to protest against the fishing monopoly asked for by the Northern Colony. The result of the conference, at which Gorges was present, was a reference to two members of the Council,—the Duke of Lenox and the Earl of Arundell, both patentees in the new patent; and they decided or recommended that each colony should fish within the bounds of the other, with this limitation,—“that it be only for the sustentation of the people of the colonies there, and for the transportation of people into either colony.” This order gave satisfaction to neither party. The Southern Colony protested against being deprived of privileges which they had always enjoyed. Gorges contended that the Northern Colony had been excluded from the limits of the rival company, and he only desired the same privilege of excluding them in turn. The matter came again before the Privy Council on the 21st of July following, and that board confirmed the recommendation of the 16th of March. Two days later, on the 23d of July, the warrant to the solicitor-general for the preparation of the patent was issued, and it passed the seals, as already stated, on the 3d of November.

On the following day, November 4, Sir Edwin Sandys announced at a meeting of the Southern Colony, or what was now known as the Virginia Company, that the patent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, containing certain words which contradicted a former order of the Lords of the Council, had passed the seals, and that the adventurers of the Northern Colony by this grant had utterly excluded the Southern Colony from fishing on that coast without their leave and license first sought and obtained. By a general consent it was resolved to supplicate his Majesty for redress, and Sir Thomas Roe was desired to present the petition which had been drawn.

On the 13th Sir Thomas Roe reported that he had attended to that duty, and that the King had said that if anything was passed in the New England patent prejudicial to the Southern Colony, it was surreptitiously done, and without his knowledge, and that he had been abused thereby by those who pretended otherwise unto him. This was confirmed by the Earl of Southampton, who further said that the King gave command to the Lord Chamberlain, then present, that if this new patent were not sealed, to forbear the seal; and if it were sealed and not delivered, to keep it in hand till they were better informed. His Lordship further signified that on Saturday last they had been with the Lord Chancellor about it, when were present the Duke of Lenox, the Earl of Arundell, and others, who, after hearing the allegations on both sides, ordered that the patent should be delivered to be perused by some of the Southern Colony, who were to report what exceptions they found thereunto against the next meeting. Two days later it was announced through the Earl of Southampton that, at a recent[298] conference with Gorges, it was agreed that for the present “the patent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges should be sequestered and deposited in my Lord Chancellor’s hands according to his Majesty’s express command.”

The Council for New England, in their Briefe Relation (1622) of these proceedings, recounting the opposition of the Virginia Company, say that “lastly, the patent being passed the seal, it was stopped, upon new suggestions to the King, and by his Majesty referred to the Council to be settled, by whom the former orders were confirmed, the difference cleared, and we ordered to have our patent delivered us.”

The modifications suggested or directed by the Privy Council appear not to have been embodied in the instrument itself as it passed the seals. Gorges’ friends were very strong in the council board, some of the members being patentees in the grant, and they carried matters with a high hand. But before the order came for the final delivery of the patent, Gorges and his patentees were called to encounter a still more formidable opposition. Gorges himself tells us that his rivals had plainly told him that “howsoever I had sped before the Lords, I should hear more of it the next Parliament;” and that this body was no sooner assembled than he found it too true wherewith he had been formerly threatened.

The Parliament met Jan. 16, 1620/21, it being the first time for more than seven years, and at once adjourned to the 30th of that month. On its assembling, the House of Commons immediately proceeded to present the public grievances of the kingdom, prominent among which were the monopolies that had sprung up like hydras during the last few years under the royal prerogative. On the 17th of April “An Act for the freer liberty of fishing voyages, to be made and performed on the sea-coast and places of Newfoundland, Virginia, New England, and other the sea-coasts and parts of America,” was introduced. On the 25th this was repeated, and a debate followed, opened by Sir Edwin Sandys, who called attention to the new grant obtained for what had now come to be called New England, with a sole privilege of fishing; also to the fact that the King, who had been made acquainted with it, had stayed the patent; that the Virginia Company desired no appropriation of this fishing to them; that it was worth one hundred thousand pounds per annum in coin; that the English “little frequent this, in respect of this prohibition, but the Dutch and French.” He therefore moved for “a free liberty for all the King’s subjects for fishing there,” saying it was pitiful that any of the King’s subjects should be prohibited, since the French and Dutch were at liberty to come and fish there notwithstanding the colony.

The debate was continued. Secretary Calvert “doubteth the fishermen the hinderers of the plantation; that they burn great store of woods, and choke the havens;” that he “never will strain the King’s prerogative against the good of the commonwealth;” and that it was “not fit to make any laws here for those countries which not as yet annexed to the Crown.”

The bill was committed to Sir Edwin Sandys, and a full hearing advertized[299] to all burgesses of London, York, and the port towns, who might wish to testify, that day seven-night, in the Exchequer Chamber.

On the 4th of June Parliament adjourned to the 14th of November, and in the intermission Sir Edwin Sandys was arrested and thrown into prison. It is significant that, notwithstanding this opposition in the House of Commons, the Privy Council, on the 18th, ordered that the sequestered patent be delivered to Gorges, in terms which provided that each colony (the Northern and the Southern) should have the additional freedom of the shore for the drying of their nets and the taking and saving of their fish, and to have wood for their necessary uses, etc.; also that the patent of the Northern plantation be renewed according to the premises, while those of the Southern plantation were to have a sight thereof before it be engrossed, and that the former patent be delivered to the patentees.

I have already remarked that the orders of the Privy Council early directed certain modifications to be made in the proposed patent which were not embodied in it when first drawn; nor were they ultimately included, although Gorges himself admitted, when afterward summoned before the Committee of the House of Commons, that the patent yet remained in the Crown office, “where it was left since the last Parliament” (he meant, since the last session of Parliament), “for that it was resolved to be renewed for the amendment of some faults contained therein.”

No doubt the intention was that a new patent should be drawn, and that the delivery of the existing parchment was provisional only.[523] The patent, however, never was renewed, though a scheme for a renewal of a most radical character was seriously contemplated all through the year following the dissolution of the Parliament in 1622; and Sir Henry Spelman and John Selden were consulted in regard to land tenures, the rights of the Crown, and the like, in reference thereto.

On the reassembling of Parliament in November, the subject was once again approached in the Commons. It was charged that since the recess Gorges had executed a patent. One had been issued, dated June 1, 1621, to John Peirce for the Plymouth people. He had also, by patent or by verbal agreement, by the King’s request, released to Sir William Alexander all the land east of St. Croix, known as Nova Scotia, confirmed to him by a royal charter September 10 of this year.[524] It was also charged that Gorges was threatening to use force in restricting the right to fish; and accordingly on the 20th an order was passed directing his patent to be brought in to the Committee on Grievances.[525]

[300]

The result was that on the 21st of December an Act for freer liberty of fishing passed the Commons, while previously, on the 18th, “Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Sir Jo. Bowcer, the patentees for fishing in and about New England, to be warned to appear here the first day of next Access, and to bring their patent, or a copy thereof.” Parliament then adjourned to the 8th of February; but it was subsequently prorogued and dissolved. Before the adjournment, in the afternoon, the Commons, foreseeing their dissolution, entered on their records a protestation in vindication of their rights and privileges; but the record is here mutilated by having the obnoxious passage torn out by the hands of the King, who sent for the Journal of the House and placed this mark of his tyranny upon it. Gorges himself, at this session of the Parliament, twice appeared before the Committee of the House, and had a preliminary examination without his counsel. He was questioned by Sir Edward Coke about his patent, which Coke called a grievance of the commonwealth, and complained of as “a monopoly, and the color of planting a colony put upon it for particular ends and private gain.” Gorges says he was treated with great courtesy, but was told that “the Public was to be respected before all particulars,” and that the patent must be brought into the House. Gorges replied by defending the plan of the adventurers, which he said was undertaken for the advancement of religion, the enlargement of the bounds of the nation, the increase of trade, and the employment of many thousands of people. He rehearsed what had already been done in the discovery and seizure of the coast, told of the failures and discouragements encountered, and explained the present scheme of regulating the affairs of the intended plantation for the public good. As for the delivery of the patent, he had not the power to do it himself, as he was but a particular person, and inferior to many. Besides, the patent still remained, for aught he knew, in the Crown Office, where it was left for amendment. He was then told to be prepared to attend further at a future day, and with counsel. In the end, also, the breaking up of Parliament prevented the bill for free fishing, which had passed the Commons, from becoming a law.

Of course, the opposition encountered—first from the Virginia Company and then from the House of Commons, the latter representing largely the popular sentiment—was a serious hindrance to the operations of the Council[301] for New England. The disputes with the former, the Council themselves say, “held them almost two years, so as all men were afraid to join with them.”

The records of the Council, so far as they are extant, begin on “Saturday, the last of May, 1622,” at “Whitehall,” at which there were seven persons present, “the Lord Duke of Lenox” heading the list. Some business was transacted before this date, as the first day’s record here refers to it. The record of the organization of the Council is wanting; and two persons named as present at this meeting—Captain Samuel Argall and Dr. Barnabe Goche—were not included in the list of the forty patentees. They must have been elected since, in the place of others who had resigned. Goche was now elected treasurer in the place of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. I think that the Duke of Lenox was the first president of the Council. In the patent granted to John Peirce, mentioned above as taken out on behalf of the Pilgrims, dated June 1, 1621,—which, I may add, was nearly a year before the date of any known record of the Council,—purporting to be signed by “the President and Counsell,” who have “set their seals” to the same, were the names of Lenox, Hamilton, Ro. Warwick, Sheffield, Ferd. Gorges, in the order here given, and one other name indistinct, with their separate seals.[526]

It is not improbable, therefore, that the business transactions of the Council, in this inchoate and uncertain period of its existence, were so few that they were preserved only in loose minutes, or files of papers, which were never recorded, and are now lost.

After they had freed their patent, they first considered how they should raise the means to advance the plantation, and two methods were suggested. One contemplated a voluntary contribution by the patentees; and the other, the ransoming the freedoms of those who were willing to partake of present profits arising by the trade or fishing on the coast. The patentees, in the one case, agreed to pay one hundred pounds apiece (the records say £110); in the other, inducements were offered to the western cities and towns to form joint-stock associations for trade and fishing, from which a revenue in the shape of royalty might be derived to the Council: and, in order to further this latter project, letters were to be issued to those cities, by the Privy Council, prohibiting any not free of that business from visiting the coast, upon pain of confiscation of ship and goods. This last scheme was not favorably received. The letters produced an effect contrary to what was expected, since the restraining of the liberty of free fishing gave alarm; and, as the Parliament of 1621 was about to meet, every possible influence was brought to bear against this great monopoly, with what effect we have already seen.

While the plan of voluntary associations failed, the business of exacting a tax from individual fishermen was prosecuted with vigor, and probably; in some instances with success. A proclamation against disorderly trading,[302] or visiting the coasts of New England without a license from the Council, was issued. A grand scheme for settling the coast of New England by a local government was marked out, and the Platform of the Government was put into print.[527]

The project of laying out a county on the Kennebec River; forty miles square, for general purposes, and building a great city at the junction of the Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers, was part of the great plan. A ship and pinnace had been built at Whitby, a seaport in Yorkshire, at large expense, for use in the colony; and others were contemplated. They were to lie on the coast for the defence of the merchants and fishermen, and to convoy the fleets as they went to and from their markets. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had been treasurer of the Council, was now chosen governor, and was destined for New England; but the Company were seriously embarrassed for funds, and finally were obliged to mortgage the ship to some of their individual members. The assessments of £110 each were not all paid in, and patentees who did not intend to pay were asked to resign, so that others might take their places. Constant complaints were made of merchants who were violating the privileges of the Company by sending out vessels for fishing and trading on the coast; and orders were passed for applying remedies. The plan for the new patent is constantly referred to in the records, and the present patentees are to be warned that they will have no place in it, unless they pay up their past dues. The inducement to be held out is, that all who actually pay £110 may have a place in the new grant, provided they “be persons of honor or gentlemen of blood, except only six merchants to be admitted by us for the service, and especial employments of the said Council in the course of trade and commerce,” etc. But their schemes were not realized.

In the Council’s prospectus already cited, issued in the summer of 1622, they say, “We have settled, at this present, several plantations along the coast, and have granted patents to many more that are in preparation to be gone with all conveniency.” The bare fact, however, is that the Pilgrims at Plymouth were the only actual settlers, and they had landed within the[303] patent limits by the merest chance. There may have been some other bodies of men, in small numbers, living on the coast, such as Gorges used to hire, at large expense, to spend the winter there. His servant, Richard Vines, a highly respectable man, was sent out to the coast for trade and discovery, and spent some time in the country; and he is supposed to have passed one winter during a great plague among the Indians,—perhaps that of 1616-17,—at the mouth of the Saco River.[528] Vines and John Oldham afterward had a patent of Biddeford, on that river. Several scattering plantations were begun in the following year.

FROM DUDLEY’S ARCANO DEL MARE.

The complaints to the Council of abuses committed by fishermen and other interlopers, who without license visited the coast, and by their conduct caused the overthrow of the trade and the dishonor of the government, led to the selection of Robert Gorges, the younger son of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and who was recently returned from the Venetian wars, to be sent to New England for the correction of these abuses. He was commissioned as lieutenant-general, and there were appointed for his council and assistants Captain Francis West as admiral, Christopher Levett, and the governor of Plymouth for the time being. Robert Gorges had but recently become[304] a shareholder in the grand patent, and he had also a personal grant of a tract of land on the northeast side of Massachusetts Bay, ten miles along the coast, and extending thirty miles into the interior. This was made to him partly in consideration of his father’s services to the Company.

West was commissioned in November, 1622; and his arrival at Plymouth, in New England, is noticed by Bradford “as about the latter end of June.” He had probably been for some time on the Eastern coast as he related his experiences to Bradford, who says he “had a commission to be admiral of New England, to restrain interlopers and such fishing ships as came to fish and trade without a license from the Council of New England, for which they should pay a round sum of money. But he could do no good of them, for they were too strong for him, and he found the fishermen to be stubborn fellows.... So they went from hence to Virginia.” West returned from Virginia in August, and probably joined Captain Gorges, who made his appearance in the Bay of Massachusetts in August or September of this year, having “sundry passengers and families, intending there to begin a plantation, and pitched upon the place Mr. Weston’s people had forsaken,” at Wessagusset. By his commission he and his council had full power “to do and execute what to them should seem good, in all cases, capital, criminal, and civil.”

This sending out of young Gorges with authority was probably a temporary expedient for the present emergency, preparatory to the great scheme of government set forth, a few months before he sailed, in the Council’s Briefe Relation. Captain Gorges had a private enterprise to look after while charged with these public duties. The patent which he brought over, issued to himself personally, provided for a government to be administered “acording to the great charter of England, and such Lawes as shall be hereafter established by public authority of the State assembled in Parliament in New England,” all decisions being subject to appeal to the Council for New England, “and to the court of Parliament hereafter to be in New England aforesaid.”

Gorges remained here but a short time,—probably not quite a year,—having during his stay a sharp conflict with the notorious Thomas Weston, whom Governor Bradford, in pity to the man, attempted to shield from punishment. In speaking of Gorges’ return to England, Bradford says that he “scarcely saluted the country in his government, not finding the state of things here to answer his quality and condition.” His people dispersed: some went to England, and some to Virginia. Sir Ferdinando Gorges himself assigns another reason for his son’s speedy abandoning the country. He says that Robert was sent out by Lord Gorges and himself,—meaning, I suppose, that he came at their personal charge,—and that he was disappointed in not receiving supplies from “divers his familiar friends who had promised as much; but they, hearing how I sped in the House of Parliament, withdrew themselves, and myself and friends were wholly disabled to do anything to purpose.” The report of these[305] proceedings coming to his son’s ears, he was advised to return home till better occasion should serve.

The records of the Council show that for the space of one year their business was pursued with considerable vigor by the few members who were interested.[529] Sir Ferdinando Gorges, of course, was the mainstay of the enterprise. The principal business was to prepare to put their plans into operation. The money did not come in, and a large number of the patentees fell off. Much time was spent in inducing new members to engage, and pay in their money; and the efforts to bring the merchant fishermen to acknowledge the claims of the Council, and to take out licenses for traffic and fishing, were untiring.

Finally, in the summer of 1623, the Council resolved to divide the whole territory of New England among the patentees, “in the plot remaining with Dr. Goche,” the treasurer. The reasons given for this step are, “For that some of the adventurers excuse their non-payment in of their adventures because they know not their shares for which they are to pay, which much prejudiceth the proceedings, it is thought fit that the land of New England be divided in this manner; viz., by 20 lots, and each lot to contain 2 shares. And for that there are not full 40 and above 20 adventurers, that only 20 shall draw those lots.” Provision was accordingly made that each person drawing two shares should part with one share to some member who might not have drawn, or some one else who shall thereafter become an adventurer, to the end that the full “number of forty may be complete.” The meeting for the drawing was held on Sunday, June 29, 1623, at Greenwich, at which the King was present.[530]

The “plot” of New England, on which this division is shown, with the names set down according as the lots were drawn, was published the next year in Sir William Alexander’s Encouragement to Colonies; and on page 31 of his book the writer speaks of hearing that “out of a generous desire by his example to encourage others for the advancement of so brave an enterprise he [Sir Ferdinando Gorges] is resolved shortly to go himself in person, and to carry with him a great number well fitted for such a purpose; and many noblemen in England (whose names and proportions as they were marshalled by lot may appear upon the map), having interested themselves in that bounds, are to send several colonies, who may quickly make this to exceed all other plantations.”

Alexander must have been well informed of the intentions of the Company,[306] certainly familiar with those of Gorges himself; and it must have been with their knowledge and approbation that the act above recorded was thus published.

ALEXANDER’S MAP, 1624.

[This is a fac-simile of a part of the map, as reproduced in Purchas’s Pilgrims.—Ed.]

The meeting at which the division was made is the[307] last of which we have any record for a number of years, and the history of the Company during these years must be gathered from other sources. The grand colonial scheme intended to be put in operation never went into effect; and at a late period the Council say, concerning this division, that hitherto they have never been confirmed in the lands so allotted.

A new Parliament was summoned to meet February 12, 1623/24, and on the 24th we find this minute: “Mr. Neale delivereth in the bill for free liberty of fishing upon the coasts of America.” “Five ships of Plymouth under arrest, and two of Dartmouth, because they went to fish in New England. This done by warrant from the Admiralty. To have these suits staid till this bill have had its passage. This done by Sir Ferdinando Gorges his Patent. Ordered, that this patent be brought into the Committee of Grievances upon Friday next.” March 15, 1623/24, an Act for freer liberty of fishing, as previously introduced, was committed to a large committee, of which Sir Edward Coke was chairman. On the 17th, Sir Edward reported from this committee that they had condemned one grievance, namely, “Sir Ferdinand Gorges his patent for a plantation in New England. Their council heard, the exceptions being first delivered them. Resolved by consent, that, notwithstanding the clause in the patent dated 3d November, 18th Jac., that no subject of England shall visit the coast upon pain of forfeiture of ship and goods, the patentees have yielded that the Englishmen shall visit, and that they will not interrupt any fisherman to fish there.” Finally it was enacted by the House that the clause of forfeiture, being only by patent and not by act of Parliament, was void.

Gorges himself gives a graphic picture of the scene when he, with his counsel, was before the Committee of the House, and he spoke so unavailingly in defence of his patent. This patent was the first presented from the Committee of Grievances. “This their public declaration of the Houses ... shook off all my adventurers for plantation, and made many of the patentees to quit their interest;” so that in all likelihood he would have fallen under the weight of so heavy a burden, had he not been supported by the King, who would not be drawn to overthrow the corporation he so much approved of, and Gorges was advised to persevere. Still he thought it better to forbear for the present, though the bill did not become a law of the realm. Soon afterward the French ambassador made a challenge of all those territories as belonging of right to the King of France, and Gorges was called to make answer to him; and his reply was so full that “no more was heard of that their claim.”

Being unable to enforce the claim whence was to come the principal source of its income, and the larger part of the patentees having abandoned the enterprise, the Great Council for New England, whose patent had been denounced by the House of Commons as a monopoly and opposed to the public policy and the general good, became a dead body. In the following year, 1625, we hear of Gorges as commander of one of the vessels in the squadron ordered by Buckingham to Dieppe for the service of the[308] King of France. Finding on his arrival that the vessels were destined to serve against Rochelle, which was then sustaining a siege, Gorges broke through the squadron, and returned to England with his ship.

In the summer of 1625 the Plymouth people were in great trouble by reason of their unhappy relations to the Adventurers in London, and Captain Standish was sent over to seek some accommodation with them. At the same time he bore a letter from Governor Bradford to the Council of New England, urging their intervention in behalf of the colony “under your government.” But Bradford says that, by reason of the plague which that year raged in London, Standish could do nothing with the Council for New England, for there were no courts kept or scarce any commerce held.

Two years later, in the summer of 1627, Governor Bradford again wrote to the Council for New England, under whose government he acknowledged themselves to be, and also to Sir Ferdinando Gorges himself, advising them of the encroachments of the Dutch, and also making complaints of the disorderly fishermen and interlopers, who, with no intent to plant, and with no license, foraged the country and were off again, to the great annoyance of the Plymouth settlers.

After a patent to Christopher Levett, of May 5, 1623, the Council appear to have made no grants of land till, in 1628, two patents were issued,—one to the Plymouth people of land on the Kennebec River, and one to Rosewell, Young, Endicott, and others, patentees of Massachusetts. These were followed by a grant to John Mason, of Nov. 7, 1629, the Laconia grant of Nov. 17, 1629, that to Plymouth Colony of Jan. 13, 1629/30, and sundry grants of territory in the present States of Maine and New Hampshire.

The records of the Council, of which there is a hiatus of over eight years in the parts now extant (and the latter portion is a transcript with probably many omissions), begin on the 4th of November, 1631, with the Earl of Warwick as president, and contain entries of sundry patents granted, and of the final transactions of the Company during its existence. Precisely when the Earl of Warwick was chosen president we do not know. His name appears in the Plymouth patent of Jan. 13, 1629/30, as holding that office, and it is quite likely that he was president when the Massachusetts patent was issued, he being chiefly instrumental in passing that grant. The Council seem now to have revived their hopes as they did their activity. As late as Nov. 6, 1634, divers matters of moment were propounded: “First, that the number of the Council be with all convenient speed filled. [It appears by a previous meeting that there were now but twenty-one members in all, whereas the patent called for no less than forty.] Second, that a new patent from his Majesty be obtained.” Also, that no ships, passengers, nor goods be permitted to go to New England without license from the President and Council; and that fishermen should not be allowed to trade with savages, nor with the servants of planters, nor to cut timber for stages, without license. This, surely, is a revival of[309] the old odious policy. We do not know if any of these orders were adopted.

There seems at this time to have arisen a serious misunderstanding or quarrel between the Council and their President, the Earl of Warwick. It first appears at a meeting held June 29, 1632. The President was not present at this meeting, though it was held, as the meetings had been held for some years past, at “Warwick House.” An order was adopted “that the Earl of Warwick should be entreated to direct a course for finding out what patents have been granted for New England.” At the same meeting the clerk was sent to the Earl for the Council’s great seal, which was in his lordship’s keeping; and word came back that he would send it when his man came in. It was also ordered that the future meetings of the Council be held at the house of Captain Mason, in Fenchurch Street. But the seal was not sent, and two more formal requests were made for it during the next six months. Captain John Mason was chosen vice-president Nov. 26, 1632. The records for 1633 and 1634 are wanting. Early in 1635 the Council resolved to resign their patent into the hands of the King; preparatory to which they made a new partition of the territory of New England, dividing it among themselves, or, according to the records, among eight of their number. Of what precise number the Council consisted at this time we have no means of knowing. The division was made at a meeting held Feb. 3, 1634/35, and to the description of each particular grant the members on the 14th of April affixed their signatures, each person withholding his signature to his own share. In making this division it was ordered that every one who had lawful grants of land, or lawfully settled plantations, should enjoy the same, laying down his jura regalia to the proprietor of this division, and paying him some small acknowledgment. A memorandum is also made that “the 22d day of April several deeds of feoffment were made unto the several proprietors.”

The act of surrender passed June 7, 1635. Lord Gorges had been chosen president April 18. The Company seem to have been kept alive till some years later, as there is an entry as late as Nov. 1, 1638, at which it was agreed to augment the grants of the Earl of Sterling and Lord Gorges and Sir F. Gorges, the two latter to have “sixty miles more added to their proportions further up into the main land.” Of course, in making this division the whole patent of Nov. 3, 1620, was not divided, for that ran from sea to sea. It was a division on the New England coast, running back generally sixty miles inland. It was part of the plan to procure from the King, under the great seal of England, a confirmation of these several grants. Lord Sterling’s grant included also Long Island, near Hudson’s River.

The intention in this division was to ride over the Massachusetts patent of 1628, which had been confirmed the following year by a charter of incorporation from the King, and legal proceedings were soon afterward instituted by a writ of quo warranto for vacating their franchises. The notorious Thomas Morton was retained as a solicitor to prosecute this suit.[310] The grants issued in this division to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and to John Mason are the only ones with which subsequent history largely deals.[531]

The King, in accepting the resignation of the Grand Patent, resolved to take the management of the affairs of New England into his own hands, and to appoint as his general governor Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who himself, or by deputy, was to reside in the country. But “the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.” The attempt to vacate the charter of Massachusetts Bay, a fundamental thing to be done, was not accomplished. The patentees to whom several of the divisions of the territory of New England were assigned appear to have wholly neglected their interest, and, except in the case of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, before referred to, royal charters were granted to none.

Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut were settled under grants, or alleged grants, from the Council for New England. The grant of the territory of Massachusetts Bay of March 19, 1627/28, was in the following year confirmed by the Crown, with powers of government. The grant to Sir Ferdinando Gorges in the general division of February, 1634/35, with an additional sixty miles into the interior subsequently added, was confirmed by the Crown April 3, 1639, with a charter constituting him Lord Proprietor of the Province of Maine, and giving him extraordinary powers of government. The territory issued to John Mason at the general division, which was to be called New Hampshire, the parchment bearing date April 22, 1635, was never confirmed by the King, nor were any powers of government granted. The first settlements in Connecticut,—namely, those of the three towns on the river of that name, in 1635 and 1636,—were made under the protection of Massachusetts, as though the territory had been part of that colony. But the inhabitants subsequently acquired a quasi claim to this territory, under what is known as the “old patent of Connecticut,” impliedly proceeding from the Council for New England, through the Earl of Warwick, to Lord Say and Sele and his associates. The settlers of Quinnipiack, afterward called New Haven, in 1638 and 1639, had no patent for lands, but made a number of purchases from the Indians. Plymouth Colony, of which an account is given here by another hand, received a roving patent from the Council, dated June 1, 1621, with no boundaries; and another patent, dated Jan. 13, 1629/30, defining their limits, but with no powers of government. The territory of Rhode Island was not a grant from the Council to the settlers.

Massachusetts.—There were scattered settlements in Massachusetts Bay prior to the emigration under the patent of 1627/28. Thomas Weston[311] began a settlement at what is now Weymouth Fore-River, in the summer of 1622, which lasted scarcely one year. Robert Gorges, as we have seen, took possession of the same place, in September, 1623, for his experimental government, but the colony broke up the next spring, leaving, it is thought, a few remnants behind, which proved a seed for a continuous settlement. Persons are found temporarily at Nantasket in 1625, and perhaps earlier; at Mount Wollaston the same year, and at Thompson’s Island in 1626. The solitary William Blaxton, clerk, is traced to Shawmut, (Boston) in 1625 or 1626, and the equally solitary Samuel Maverick, at Noddles’ Island, about the same time; while Walford, the blacksmith, is found at Charlestown in 1629. The last three named are reasonably conjectured to have formed part of Robert Gorges’ company at Weymouth, in 1623/24.

The Dorchester Fishing Company, in England, of which the Rev. John White, a zealous Puritan minister of that town, was a member, resolved to make the experiment of planting a small colony somewhere upon the coast, so that the fishing vessels might leave behind in the country all the spare men not required to navigate their vessels home, who might in the mean time employ themselves in planting, building, etc., and be ready to join the ships again on their return to the coast at the next fishing season. Cape Ann was selected as the site of this experiment, and in the autumn of 1623 fourteen men were left there to pass the winter. In the latter part of the year 1625 Roger Conant, who had been living at Plymouth and at Nantasket, was invited to join this community as its superintendent, and he remained there one year. The scheme proving a financial failure, the settlement broke up in the autumn of 1626, most of the men returning home; but Conant and a few others removed to Naumkeag (Salem), where they were found by Endicott, who, under the authority of the Massachusetts patentees, arrived there Sept. 6, 1628. These old settlers joined the new community.

Endicott was sent out as agent or superintendent of a large land company, of which he was one of the proprietors, colonization being, of course, a prominent feature in their plans. In the following year, March 4, 1628-29, the patentees and their associates received a charter of incorporation, with powers of government, and with authority to establish a subordinate government on the soil, and appoint officers of the same. This local government, entitled “London’s Plantation in Massachusetts Bay in New England,” was accordingly established, and Endicott was appointed the first resident governor. The charter evidently contemplated that the government of the Company should be administered in England. In a few[312] months, however, the Company resolved to transfer the charter and government from London to Massachusetts Bay; and Matthew Cradock, who had been the first charter governor, resigned his place, and John Winthrop, who had resolved to emigrate to the colony, was chosen governor of the Company in his stead. On the transfer of the Company to Massachusetts by the arrival of Winthrop, the subordinate government, of which Endicott was the head, was silently abolished, and its duties were assumed by its principal, the corporation itself, which took immediate direction of affairs. As the successor of Cradock, Winthrop was the second governor of the Massachusetts Company, yet he was the first who exercised his functions in New England.

The Massachusetts charter was not adapted for the constitution of a commonwealth; therefore, as the colony grew in numbers it became necessary for it to assume powers not granted in that instrument. Between the years 1630 and 1640 about twenty thousand persons arrived in the colony, after which, for many years, it is supposed that more went back to England than came thence hither. Previous to the year last named the colony had furnished emigrants to settle the colonies of Connecticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island.

The charter gave power to the freemen to elect annually a governor, deputy-governor, and eighteen assistants, who should make laws for their own benefit and for the government of the colony; and provision was made for general courts and courts of assistants, which exercised judicial as well as legislative powers. But at the first meeting of the general court in Boston, in October, 1630, it was ordered that the governor and deputy-governor should be chosen by the assistants out of their own number. This rule was of short duration, as in May, 1632, the freemen resumed the right of election, and the basis of a second house of legislature was laid.

The colonists, though Puritans, were Church of England men, and were fearful of rigid separation; but Winthrop and his party,—among whom was John Wilson, a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, and destined to become their first minister,—found on their arrival a church already established at Salem on the basis of separation. Thenceforward, following that example, the Massachusetts colony became a colony of congregational churches. It has been a favorite saying with eulogists of Massachusetts, that the pious founders of the colony came over to this wilderness to establish here the principle of civil and religious liberty, and to transmit the same inviolate to their remotest posterity. Probably nothing was further from their purpose, which was simply to find a place where they themselves, and all who agreed with them, could enjoy such liberty. This was a desirable object to attain, and they made many sacrifices for it, and felt that they had a right to enjoy it.

The banishment of Roger Williams, and of Mrs. Hutchinson and her[313] sympathizers, was no doubt largely due to the feeling that the peace of the community was endangered by their presence. In the unhappy episode of the Quakers, at a later period, the colonial authorities were wrought into a frenzy by these “persistent intruders.” It seemed to be a struggle on both sides for victory; but though four Quakers were hanged on Boston Common, the Quakers finally conquered. In the second year of the settlement, in order to keep the government in their own hands, or, in the language of the Act, “to the end the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men,” the Court ordered that thenceforward no one should be elected a freeman unless he was a member of one of the churches of the colony. Probably there were as good men outside the churches as there were inside, and by and by a clamor was raised by those who felt aggrieved at being denied the rights of freemen; but the rule was not modified till after the Restoration.

[This portrait of the first minister of Boston hangs in the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Its authenticity has been in turn questioned and maintained. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. September, 1867, and December, 1880.—Ed.]

A few unsavory persons whom Winthrop and his company found here and speedily sent away, on their arrival home failed not to make representations injurious to the Puritan settlement, and they were seconded by the influence of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason. Attempts were made in 1632 to vacate the colony’s charter; but these attempts proved unsuccessful. A more serious effort was made a few years later, when the Council for New England resigned its franchises into the hands of the King; but owing to the trouble which environed the government in England, and to other causes not fully explained, the colony then escaped, as it also escaped at the same time the impending infliction of a general governor for New England.

[314]

In 1640 some of the colony’s friends in England wrote to the authorities here advising them to send some one to England to solicit favors of the Parliament. “But, consulting about it,” says Winthrop, “we declined the motion, for this consideration,—that if we should put ourselves under the protection of Parliament, we must then be subject to all such laws as they should make, or at least such as they might impose upon us; in which course, though they should intend our good, yet it might prove very prejudicial to us.” From 1640 to 1660 the colony was substantially an independent commonwealth, and during this period they completed a system of laws and government which, taken as a whole, was well adapted to their wants. Their “Body of Liberties” was established in 1641, and three editions of Laws were published by authority, and put in print in 1649, in 1660, and in 1672. The first law establishing public schools was passed in October, 1647. Harvard College had already, in 1637, been established at Cambridge.

QUAKER AUTOGRAPHS.

[This group gives the names of some of the victims of the judicial extremities practised in Boston. See Bowden’s Friends in America, and the Memorial History of Boston. Cf. the note on the treatment of the early Quakers in New England, in chapter xii.—Ed.]

The ecclesiastical polity of the churches, embodied in the “Cambridge Platform,” was drawn up in 1648, and printed in the following year, and was finally approved by the General Court in 1651.

The community was obliged to feel its way, and adapt its legislation rather to its exigencies than to its charter. The aristocratical element in the society early cropped out in the institution of a Council for life, which[315] may have had its origin in suggestions from England; but it met with little favor.

The confederation of the United Colonies, first proposed by Connecticut, was an act of great wisdom, foreshadowing the more celebrated political unions of the English race on this continent, for they all have recognized the common maxim, that “Union is strength.” The colonists were surrounded by “people of several nations and strange language,” and the existence of the Indian tribes within the boundaries of the New England settlements was the source of ceaseless anxiety and alarm. The Pequot War had but recently ended, and it had left its warning. It would have been an act of grace to admit the Maine and Narragansett settlements to this union, but it was probably impracticable.

DR. JOHN CLARK.

[This portrait of a leading physician of the colony hangs in the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and is inscribed “Ætatis suæ 66 ann. suo,” and purports to be a Dr. John Clark, and is probably the physician of that name of Newbury and Boston, who died in 1664. His son John, likewise a physician, was also a prominent public man in Boston, and died in 1690. That it is the former is believed by Dr. Thacher in his American Medical Biography, and by Coffin in his History of Newbury, both of whom give lithographs of the picture. Dr. Appleton, who printed an account of the Society’s portrait in its Proceedings, September, 1867, also took this view; while the Rev. Dr. Harris, in the Society’s Collections, third series, vii. 287, finds the year 1675 in the inscription, which is not there, and identifies the subject of the picture with another Dr. John Clark, who was prominent in Rhode Island history. There was still a third Dr. John Clark, son of John, and of Boston, who died in 1728. It is not probably determinable beyond doubt which of the earlier two this is; and Savage, in his Genealogical Dictionary, gives twenty-five John Clarks as belonging to New England before the end of the first century; but of these only four are physicians, as above named. Cf. Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings, July, 1844, p. 287.—Ed.]

The conversion of the Indian tribes to Christianity was a subject which the colony had much at heart, and a number of its ministers had fitted themselves for the work: the special labors of the Apostle Eliot need only be mentioned. Through the instrumentality of Edward Winslow, a society for propagating the gospel[316] among the Indians was incorporated in England in 1649, and the Commissioners of the United Colonies were made the agents of its corporation as long as the union of the colonies lasted.

The Massachusetts colonists were at first seriously tasked for the means of subsistence; but these anxieties soon passed away. Industry took the most natural forms. Agriculture gave back good returns. To the invaluable Indian maize were added all kinds of English grain, as well as vegetables and fruits. Some were indigenous to the soil. English seeds of hay and of grain returned bountiful crops. All animals with which New England farms are now stocked then well repaid in increase the care bestowed upon them. The manufacture of clothing was of slower growth. Thread and yarn were spun and knit by the women at home; but in a few years weaving and fulling mills were set up, and became remunerative. The manufacture of salt, saltpetre, gunpowder, and glassware gave employment to many, while the brickmaker, the mason, the carpenter, and indeed all kindred trades found occupation. The forests were a source of income. Boards, clapboards, shingles, staves, and, at a later period, masts had a ready sale. Furs and peltry, received in barter from the Indians, became features of an export trade. The fisheries should be specially enumerated as a source of wealth, and this industry led to the building of ships, which were the medium of commerce with the neighboring colonies, the West Indies, and even with Spain.[532]

After the coin brought over by the settlers had gone back to England to pay for supplies, the colony was greatly embarrassed for a circulating medium, and Indian corn and beaver-skins were early used as currency, while wampum was employed in trade with the Indians. The colony, however, in 1652 established a mint, where was coined, from the Spanish silver which had been introduced from the West Indies, and from whatever bullion and plate might be sent in from any quarter, the New England money so well known in our histories of American coinage.[533] The relation of the colony to the surrounding New England plantations is noticed further on in the brief accounts given of those settlements.

Events in England moved rapidly onward. The execution of King Charles occurred about two months before the death of Winthrop, which happened on the 26th of March, 1648/49, and it is certain that the latter never heard of the tragic end of his old master. The colonists prudently acknowledged their subjection to the Parliament, and afterward to Cromwell, so far as was necessary to keep upon terms with both. Hutchinson says that he had nowhere met with any marks of disrespect to the memory of the late king, and that there was no room to suppose they bore any disaffection to his son; and if they feared his restoration, it was because they expected a change in religion, and that a persecution of all Nonconformists would follow. Charles II. was tardily proclaimed in the colony, owing, perhaps, to a lack of definite information as to the state of politics in England, and to rumors that the people there were in an unsettled condition.

[317]

[See note on this portrait in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 309.—Ed.]

A loyal address was finally agreed upon and sent; but he was not proclaimed till August of the following year, 1661. The Restoration brought trouble to the colony. Among those who laid their grievances before the King in Council were Mason and Gorges, each a grandson and heir of a more distinguished proprietor of lands in New England. They alleged that the colony had, in violation of the rights of the petitioners, extended its jurisdiction over the provinces of New Hampshire and Maine. The Quakers[318] and some of the Eastern people also had their complaints to make against the colony.

To the humble address made to the King a benignant answer was received; but an order soon afterward came that persons be sent over authorized to make answer for the colony to all complaints alleged against it. These agents on their return brought a letter from the King to the colony, in which he promised to preserve its patent and privileges; but he also required of the colony that its laws should be reviewed, and such as were against the King’s authority repealed; that the oath of allegiance and the forms of justice be administered in the King’s name; that no one who desired to use the book of Common Prayer should be prejudiced thereby as to the baptism of his children or admission to the sacrament or to civil privilege.

These requirements were grievous to the people of Massachusetts; but worse was to come. In the spring of 1664 intelligence was brought that several men-of-war were coming from England with some gentlemen of distinction on board, and preparations were made to receive them. At the next meeting of the General Court a day of fasting and prayer was appointed, and their patent and its duplicate were brought into Court and committed to the charge of four trusty men for safe-keeping. The ships arrived in July, with four commissioners having authority for reducing the Dutch at Manhados, and for visiting the several New England colonies, and hearing and determining all matters of complaint, and settling the peace and security of the country. Proceeding on their errand to the Manhados, the Dutch surrendered on articles.[534] In the mean time an address was agreed upon by the Court to be sent to the King, in which was recounted the sacrifices and early struggles of the colonists, while they prayed for the preservation of their liberties. Colonel Nichols remaining in New York, the other commissioners returned to New England, and, having despatched their business elswhere, came to Boston in May, 1665, after they had been joined by Colonel Nichols. Governor Endicott had died the preceding March, and Mr. Bellingham, the deputy-governor, stood in his place. The commissioners laid their claim before the Court, and demanded an answer. There was skirmishing on both sides. It is a long story, filling many pages of the colony records. The envoys asked to have their commission acknowledged by the government; but this would have overridden the charter of the colony, and placed the inhabitants at the mercy of their enemies. In short, the authorities refused to yield, and the commissioners, after being defeated in other attempts to effect their purpose, were called home. Several letters and addresses followed. Thus ended for a time the contest with the Crown. For nearly ten years there was an almost entire suspension of political relations between New England and the mother country. But the projects of the Home Government were not given over. Gorges and Mason persisted in their claims. In the mean time New England was ravaged by an Indian war, known as Philip’s War. The distress was great, and the loss of life fearful. During its progress Edward Randolph, the evil genius of New England, appeared on the scene, prepared for mischief.

[319]

MEETING-HOUSE AT HINGHAM.

[This is considered the oldest meeting-house in present use in New England. It was erected in 1681. Cf. The Commemorative Services of the First Parish in Hingham on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Building of its Meeting-House, Aug. 8, 1881 (Hingham, 1882), with another view of the building,—a photograph; also E. A. Horton’s Discourse, Jan. 8, 1882. A meeting-house of similar type, erected in Lynn in 1682, is represented in Lynn, Her First Two Hundred and Fifty Years, p. 117.

The annexed autographs, taken from a document in the Trumbull Manuscripts, in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Cabinet, and dated 1690, represent some of the leading ministers of the colony at the close of the colonial period. Morton was of Charlestown; Allen of Boston; Wigglesworth, the author of the Day of Doom, a sulphurous poem greatly famous in its day, was of Malden; Moodey was of Portsmouth; Willard and Mather of Boston; and Walter of Roxbury.—Ed.]

He arrived in July, 1676, with a letter from the King and with complaints from Mason and Gorges, and armed with a royal order for agents to be sent to England to[320] make answer. This was but the beginning of the end. The legal authorities in England, before whom the case was brought, decided that neither Maine nor New Hampshire was within the chartered limits of Massachusetts, and that the title of the former was in the grandson of the original proprietor. Whereupon the agent of Massachusetts bought the patent of Maine from its proprietor for £1,250, and stood in his shoes as lord paramount.

This greatly displeased the King, and the hostility to the colony continued. Additional charges, such as illegal coining of money, violations of the laws of trade and navigation, and legislative provisions repugnant to the laws of England and contrary to the power of the charter, were now alleged against the colony. The agents of the colony and the emissaries of the Crown crossed and recrossed the ocean with apologies on the one hand and requisitions[321] on the other; but nothing would satisfy the Crown but the subjugation of the colony. A quo warranto against the Governor and Company was issued in 1683; and finally, by a new suit of scire facias brought in the Court of Chancery, judgment against the Company was entered up Oct. 23, 1684. Intelligence of this was not officially received till the following summer. Meantime the new king, James II., was proclaimed, April 20, 1685. The government of the colony was expiring. The “Rose” frigate arrived in Boston May 14, 1686, bringing a commission for Joseph Dudley as President of the Council for Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, and Maine, and the Narraganset country, or King’s Province. There was no House of Deputies to oppose him. Dudley was succeeded by Sir Edmund Andros on the 19th of December, who had arrived in the frigate “Kingfisher,” with a commission for the government of New England. He was detested by the colony, and the people only needed a rumor of the revolution in England, which reached Boston in the spring of 1689, to provoke a rising, and he was thrown into prison.[535] A provisional government, with the old charter-officers, was instituted, and continued till the new charter of 1691 was inaugurated.

Maine.—There were many settlements on the coast of Maine prior to the grant to Gorges from the Council in 1635, and consequently before his subsequent charter from the King. Indeed, very little was done by Gorges as Lord Proprietor of Maine. The patents from the Council to the year 1633 had embraced the whole territory from Piscataqua to Penobscot, thus including the territory on both sides the Kennebec, which was claimed by the Pilgrims of Plymouth under their patent of Jan. 13, 1629/30. In various places settlements had already been begun. In the royal charter to Gorges, whose grant extended from Piscataqua to Sagadahoc, the rights of previous grantees were reserved to them, they relinquishing or laying down their jura regalia.

The earliest permanent settlement in this State, on the mainland, would seem to have been made at Pemaquid. One John Brown, of New Harbor, bought land in that quarter of the Indians as early as July 15, 1625, the acknowledgment of the deed being taken by Abraham Shurt, of Pemaquid, in the same month in the following year, if there is no error in Shurt’s deposition. Shurt says that he came over as the agent of the subsequent proprietors, Aldsworth and Elbridge, who had a grant of Pemaquid from the Council, issued Feb. 29, 1631/32, and that he bought for them the Island of Monhegan, on which a fishing settlement, temporarily broken up in 1626, was made three years before.

The settlement at the mouth of the Saco River must have begun soon[322] after Richard Vines took possession of his grant there in 1630. During the same year Cleeves and Tucker settled near the mouth of the Spurwink; but in two years they removed to the neck of land on which Portland now stands, and laid the foundation of that city. In applications to the Council for grants of land made respectively to Walter Bagnall and John Stratton, Dec. 2, 1631, the former represents himself to have lived in New England “for the space of seven years,” and the latter “three years last past.” Bagnall’s patent included Richmond Island, where he had lived some three years at least. He was killed by the Indians two months before the Council acted upon his application. Stratton’s grant was located at Cape Porpoise. Bagnall probably had been one of Thomas Morton’s unruly crew at Mt. Wollaston, in Boston Harbor.

In 1630 what is known as the “Plough Patent” was issued by the Council. The original parchment is lost, and it is nowhere recorded. The grant was bounded on the east by Cape Elizabeth, and on the west by Cape Porpoise, a distance of some thirty miles on the sea-coast. This included the patents on the Saco River previously granted, against which Vines protested. There was early a dispute as to its extent. The holders of it came over in the ship “Plough,” in 1631. They went to the eastward; but not liking the place, came to Boston. They subsequently fell out among themselves, and, as Winthrop says, “vanished away.” Afterward the patent fell into the hands of others, and played an important part for a number of years in the history of Maine, of which notice will be taken further on.

On Dec. 2, 1631, a grant of land of twenty-four thousand acres in extent was made to a number of persons, including Ferdinando Gorges, a grandson of Sir Ferdinando, then some three years of age. This territory was on both sides of the Acomenticus River. Some settlements were made here about this time, and April 10, 1641, after the Gorges government was established, the borough of Acomenticus was incorporated, and in the following March the place was chartered as the city of “Gorgeana.”

There were other early settlements on the coast of Maine, but we have no space for their enumeration. The inhabitants, really or nominally, for the most part sympathized with the Loyalist party as well in politics as in religion, and it was the policy of the proprietor of Maine to foster no opposing views. They were subjected to no external government until the arrival of Captain William Gorges, in 1636, as deputy-governor, with commissions to Richard Vines and others as councillors of the province, to which the name of “New Somersetshire” was given. The first meeting of the commissioners was held at Saco, March 25, 1636, where the first provincial jurisdiction in this section of New England was exercised. The records of this province do not extend beyond 1637, and it is uncertain whether the courts continued to be held until the new organization of the government of Maine in 1640. In 1636 George Cleeves, a disaffected person who lived at Casco, went to England, and next year returned with a commission from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, authorizing several persons in Massachusetts[323] Bay to govern his province of New Somersetshire, and to oversee his servants, etc. The authorities of the Bay declined the service, and the matter “passed in silence.” Winthrop says they did not see what authority Gorges had to grant such commissions.

The charter of Maine, which covered the same territory as New Somersetshire, having been granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, he issued a commission for its government. This included a number of his kinsmen, with Thomas Gorges as deputy-governor. The first General Court under this government was held at Saco, June 25, 1640, under an earlier commission and before the arrival of the deputy-governor. This Court exercised the powers of an executive and legislative, as well as of a judicial, body, in the name of “Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Knight, Lord Proprietor of the Province of Maine.” The second term of the Court was held in September, when the Deputy-Governor was present. He made his headquarters at Gorgeana. The records of the courts between 1641 and 1644, inclusive, are not preserved. Deputy-Governor Gorges sailed for England in 1643, leaving Richard Vines at the head of the government. At a meeting held at Saco in 1645, the Court, not having heard from the proprietor, appointed Richard Vines deputy-governor for one year, and if he departed within the year, Henry Josselyn was to take his place. The civil war was raging in England at this time, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges was active for the King, and was in Prince Rupert’s army at the siege of Bristol. When that city was retaken by the Parliamentary forces, in 1645, he was plundered and imprisoned. Under these circumstances he had no time to give to his distant province. In 1645 the Court ordered that Richard Vines shall have power to take possession of all goods and chattels of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and to pay such debts as Gorges may owe.

But Gorges’ authority was not, meanwhile, without its rival. Not long after the government under the charter of 1639 had been organized, George Cleeves, of Casco, again went to England, and induced Alexander Rigby, “a lawyer and Parliament-man,” from Wigan, Lancashire, to purchase the abandoned Plough patent before mentioned, which he did, April 7, 1643; and Cleeves received a commission from him, as deputy, to administer its affairs. By the following January he had returned, and, landing at Boston, he solicited the aid of the Massachusetts Government against the authority of Gorges; but that Government declined to interfere. Cleeves claimed that Casco was within the bounds of his patent, and he immediately set up his authority as “Deputy-President of the Province of Lygonia,” extending his jurisdiction over a large part of the Province of Maine, which was then under the administration of Richard Vines, as deputy for Gorges. This produced a collision, and both parties appealed to Massachusetts, which declined, as before, to act; but finally, in 1646, after Vines had left the country, the Bay Government consented to serve as umpire; but no conclusion was reached. Winthrop says that both parties failed of proof; and as a joint appeal had been made to the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations[324] in England, they were advised in the mean time to live peaceably together. Rigby’s position and influence in Parliament secured a decision in his favor, while Gorges at that time was in no position to protect his interests. The decision of the Commissioners, which was given in 1646, terminated Gorges’ jurisdiction over that part of Maine included in the Province of Lygonia, embracing the settlements from Casco to Cape Porpoise, and including both. The last General Court under the authority of Gorges, of which any record exists, was held at Wells, in July of this year.

At length, in 1649, the inhabitants of the western part of this province, between Cape Porpoise and Piscataqua River,—including Wells, Gorgeana, and Piscataqua,—having had intelligence in 1647 of the death of the proprietor (Gorges died in May of that year, and was buried on the fourteenth of the month), and finding no one in authority there, and having in vain written to his heirs to ascertain their wishes, formed a combination among themselves. Mr. Edward Godfrey was chosen governor, the style of the “Province of Maine” being still retained. This state of things continued till 1652/53, when the towns were annexed to Massachusetts. The inhabitants then living between Casco and the Kennebec were few in number. Thomas Purchase, one of the proprietors of the Pejepscot patent, had, in 1639, conveyed a large tract to Massachusetts with alleged powers of government over it. The people living within the Kennebec patent were regarded as belonging to the jurisdiction of New Plymouth.

In the mean time the inhabitants under the Lygonia government quietly submitted to its authority. Alexander Rigby died in August, 1650, and the proprietorship of Lygonia fell to his son Edward. In brief, the government was soon at an end. The inhabitants of Cape Porpoise and Saco submitted to Massachusetts in 1652, and the remaining settlements in 1658. Thus was accomplished what the Bay Colony had for some time been aiming to effect,—the bringing of these eastern settlements under her jurisdiction. Having decided that the northern boundary of her patent extended three miles above the northernmost head of the Merrimac River, the commissioners appointed on a recent survey showed that the northern line, as run by them, terminated at Clapboard Island (about three miles eastward of Casco peninsula); and this brought the Maine settlements within the bounds of the Massachusetts charter. This state of things continued till after the restoration of Charles II., when the hopes of those favorable to the Gorges interest began to revive. Young Ferdinando Gorges, the grandson and heir of the old proprietor, petitioned the Crown to be restored to his inheritance. His agent, Mr. Archdale, came into the province, and appointed magistrates to act under his authority, but the Government of Massachusetts speedily repressed all such movements. Charles II., however, soon directed his attention to New England. He appointed four commissioners to proceed thither, charged with important duties and clothed with large powers. They, or three of them, visited the province in the summer of 1665, and at York issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Maine, requiring them to submit[325] to the immediate protection and government of the King; and in his Majesty’s name forbidding the magistrates either of Massachusetts or of the claimant to exercise jurisdiction there, until his Majesty’s pleasure should be further known. A provisional government was therefore established, and the revival of the Church of England was encouraged.

In the previous year the Duke of York received a charter of the Province of New York, and, embraced within the same document, was a grant of the territories between the St. Croix and Pemaquid, which was interpreted to include Pemaquid and its dependencies; and a government was subsequently erected there under the name of Cornwall County. After the Duke became King it was a royal province. This was beyond the eastern bounds of the Province of Maine. There had scarcely been even a pretence of a civil government here under the old patents. The Royal Commissioners speak of the low moral condition of the people of this region. “For the most part,” they say, “they are fishermen, and share in their wives as they do in their boats.” The government under the Duke of York was of an uncertain character, and was subject to the contingencies of political changes; and in 1674 the Government of Massachusetts, on the petition of the inhabitants, took them for a time under its protection. During the Indian wars which scourged the eastern settlements, in the latter part of that century, the Pemaquid country was wholly depopulated.

The Government established by the Royal Commissioners in the Province of Maine never possessed any permanent principle or power to give sanction to its authority, and in 1668 it had nearly died out; at this time the inhabitants there looked to the wise and stable Government of Massachusetts for relief, and so petitioned to be again taken under its jurisdiction. Four commissioners, therefore, accompanied by a military escort were sent from the Bay, and reaching York in July, 1668, assumed jurisdiction “by virtue of their charter.” There were a few prominent individuals who did not quietly submit, but they were summarily dealt with. Renewed exertions were now made by the proprietor and his friends for a recognition of his title, and at length they so far prevailed as to obtain letters from the King, dated March 10, 1675/76, requiring the Massachusetts Colony to send over agents with full instructions to answer all complaints. The agents appeared within the time specified, and after a full hearing the authorities decided that neither Maine nor New Hampshire was within the chartered limits of Massachusetts, and that the government of Maine belonged to the heir of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Soon after this decision an agent of Massachusetts made a proposition for the purchase of the province, which was accepted; and in March, 1677/78, Ferdinando Gorges transferred his title for £1,250, and Massachusetts became lord-paramount of Maine. This proceeding was a surprise to the inhabitants of the province, and, as might have been expected, gave offence to the King, who ineffectually demanded that the bargain should be cancelled. Massachusetts, as the lawful assign of Ferdinando Gorges, now took possession of the province. A[326] proclamation to that effect was issued March 17, 1679/80; and a government was set up at York, of which Thomas Danforth was deputed to be president for one year. This state of things continued till the accession of James II., when the events in Maine were shaped by the revolution which took place in Massachusetts, and Danforth was in the end provisionally restored, as Bradstreet had been in the Bay.

New Hampshire.—The first settlement in New Hampshire was made by David Thomson, a Scotchman, in the spring of 1623, at Little Harbor, on the south side of the mouth of Piscataqua River. He had received a patent from the Council of New England the year before, and came over in the ship “Jonathan,” of Plymouth, under an indentured agreement with three merchants of Plymouth in England. He lived at Little Harbor till 1626, when he removed to an island in Boston Harbor, which now bears his name. By 1628 he had died, leaving a wife and child. There is reason to believe that the settlement at Little Harbor was continued after Thomson left the place.

Following Thomson,—perhaps about 1627,—came Edward Hilton, a fishmonger of London, who settled six miles up the river, on a place afterward called Hilton’s Point, or Dover Neck. Here he was joined by a few others, including his brother William and his family, who had been at New Plymouth. In 1630 Hilton and his associates received from the Council a patent of the place on which he was settled. This was dated March 12, 1629 (O. S.), and the whole or part of it they soon sold to some merchants of Bristol in England. Two years later the patent, or a large interest in it, was purchased by Lord Say, Lord Brook, and other gentlemen friendly to Massachusetts. This latter agreement was effected through the agency of Thomas Wiggin, who had gone over to England in 1632, and who in the following year returned, bringing with him a large accession to the settlement, which included a “worthy Puritan divine,” who soon left for want of adequate support. Other ministers came, and some laymen, all of whom had been in bad repute in Massachusetts. Although the inhabitants went through the form of electing magistrates, there was no authorized government. The original proprietor of the patent had left the place, and scenes of confusion, both civil and ecclesiastical, sometimes highly amusing, characterized the settlement for a number of years. In 1637 the people combined into a body politic, which seems not to have received general sanction, and the notorious George Burdett supplanted Wiggin, the former governor; but the troubles which subsequently ensued led to a new combination, Oct. 22, 1640, signed by forty-two persons, or nearly every resident. Massachusetts had for some years desired to bring the several governments on the Piscataqua and its branches under her jurisdiction, and had, by an early revision of the northern boundary of her patent, decided[327] that it included them. The inhabitants here desired to be under a stable government, and on June 14, 1641, they submitted to the Massachusetts authorities, and the Act of Union was passed by that Government, Oct. 9 following.[536]

The next independent settlement was made by the Laconia Company in 1630. This company was formed soon after the Laconia patent of Nov. 17, 1629, was granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason. It was an unincorporated association of nine persons, most of whose names appear in a subsequent grant of land, to be presently mentioned. Some of these associates had been members of the Canada Company, of which Sir William Alexander was the head, who had undertaken the conquest of Canada as a private enterprise, under the command of Sir David Kirke. The fur-trade of that province was the tempting prize. The sudden peace which followed the conquest, with the stipulation that all articles captured should be restored, brought the Canada Company to grief. Ten days after the return of the expedition, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason took out the patent above mentioned. The purpose of the Company was to engage in the fur-trade; to send cargoes of Indian truck-goods to the Piscataqua and unlade them at their factories near the mouth of the river, and thence to transport them in boats or canoes up the river to Lake Champlain, to be bartered there for peltries for the European market. Their patent was a grant of a vaguely bounded territory on the lakes of the Iroquois, which they named Laconia. The first vessel despatched to Piscataqua was the barque “Warwick,” which sailed from London the last of March, 1630, and which by the first of June had arrived, with Walter Neal, governor, and Ambrose Gibbons, factor, and some others. They took possession of the house and land at Odiorne’s Point, Little Harbor, which Thomson had left in 1626,—perhaps by an agreement with his associates. In the following year others were sent. Stations for the Company’s operations were also established at Strawberry Bank (Portsmouth), and at Newichwaneck (South Berwick), on the eastern side of the river. Captain Neal was charged with the duty of penetrating into the interior of the country in search of the lakes of Laconia. This he finally attempted, but without success. Hubbard says that “after three years spent in labor and travel for that end, or other fruitless endeavors, and expense of too much estate, they returned back to England with a non est inventa Provincia.” The Company also attempted to carry on, in connection with the peltry business, the manufacture of clapboards and pipe-staves, and the making of salt from sea-water. A fishing station was also set up at the Isles of Shoals. Large quantities of truck-goods were sent over, which were put off to advantage for furs brought to the factories by the Indians. In order to afford the Company greater facilities, and to secure to themselves what they had already gained, they had, on Nov. 3,[328] 1631, procured a grant from the Council of a tract of land on each side of the Piscataqua River, in which the Isles of Shoals were included.

But success did not attend their operations. The returns were inadequate to the outlay, and there was bad management and alleged bad faith on the part of the employés; the larger part of the associates became discouraged, and at the end of the third year they decided to proceed no further till Captain Neal should return and report upon the condition of affairs. Neal left Piscataqua July 15, 1633, and sailed from Boston in August. His report was probably not encouraging, for the Company proceeded later to wind up its affairs, and in December following they divided their lands on the east side of the river. In May, 1634, a further division was made, by which it appears that Gorges and Mason, by purchase from their partners, had acquired one half of the shares; and of this part Mason owned three fourths. Gibbons, their factor, was now directed to discharge all the servants and pay them off in beaver. Mason next sent over a new supply of men, and set up two saw-mills on his own portion of the lands; but after this we have no account of anything being done by him or by any other of the adventurers on the west side. Neither have we seen evidence of any division of lands having been made on the west side. Hubbard says that in some “after division” Little Harbor fell to Mason, who mentions it in his will. But Mason in that instrument claims and bequeaths his whole grant of New Hampshire of April 22, 1635, which included the part mentioned by Hubbard. Mason died before the close of the year 1635. What course was taken by his late partners or by the heirs of Mason during the two following years, there are but few contemporary documents to tell us. In 1638 Mrs. Mason, the executrix of John Mason’s estate, appointed Francis Norton her general attorney to look after her interests in those parts. But the expenses were found to be so great and the income so small, and the servants were so clamorous for their arrears of pay, that she was obliged to relinquish the care of the plantation, and tell the servants to shift for themselves. Upon this they shared the goods and cattle, while some kept possession of the buildings and improvements, claiming them as their own. Charges were afterward brought against her agents and servants for embezzling the estate. Some years later suits were brought in her name and in that of the other proprietors in the courts of Massachusetts against the inhabitants of Strawberry Bank and of Newichwaneck, for encroaching upon the lands in the Laconia patent. As a conclusion of this summary sketch of the Laconia Company, it may be added that the records of the old Court of Requests of London show that, on the dissolution of the Company, suits sprang up among the adventurers themselves, which were for a long time in litigation.

After Captain Neal went to England the Company appointed Francis Williams to be governor in his place. As Strawberry Bank (the place was not called Portsmouth till 1653) had no efficient government during all this time, the inhabitants now by a written instrument, signed by forty-one persons,[329] formed a combination among themselves, as Dover had done, and Francis Williams was continued governor. The people belonged principally to the Church of England, and during this combination they set apart fifty acres of land for a glebe, committing it in trust to two church wardens.[537] Reference has already been made to the successful attempts of the Massachusetts Government to bring all the Piscataqua settlements under her jurisdiction. The people of Strawberry Bank were as successfully wrought upon as those of Dover were, and the same agreement of June 14, 1641, included the submission of both, and certain proprietors named, in behalf of themselves and of the other partners of the two patents, subscribed to the paper.

Of no one of the grants issued to John Mason, or in which he had a joint interest, covering the territory of New Hampshire (except those connected with the Laconia Company) did he make any improvement,—and these grants were that of Aug. 10, 1622, with Gorges, between the Merrimac and Sagadahoc; that of Nov. 7, 1629, between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua; and that of April 22, 1635, between Naumkeag and the Piscataqua. The territory now known as New Hampshire was never called by that name, except by Mason in his last will, till 1661, when, through the discussions consequent upon the claims of the heir of Mason, this designation was introduced for the first time.

The independent settlement at Exeter was made in 1638 by John Wheelwright and others; and of these pioneers Wheelwright himself with some companions had been banished from Massachusetts in the previous year. They bought their lands in April of that year from the Indians. On the 5th of June, 1639, they formed a combination as a church and as subjects of King Charles, promising to submit to all laws to be made. It was signed by thirty-one persons, of whom fourteen made their marks. In 1643 they came under Massachusetts. The order of the General Court of that colony recites, under date of September 7, that, finding themselves within the bounds of Massachusetts, the inhabitants petitioned to be taken under her jurisdiction. Wheelwright then removed to Wells, in the Province of Maine.

Hampton, where the “bound-house” was built by Massachusetts in 1636, was considered from the first as belonging to the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. A union having been thus formed between the settlements on the Piscataqua River and its branches and the colony of Massachusetts, their history for the next forty years is substantially the same. These plantations were governed by the general laws of Massachusetts, and the terms of union were strictly observed.[538]

But Massachusetts was destined to be arraigned by the heir of the old patentee of New Hampshire, Robert Tufton Mason, who at the Restoration[330] pressed his claim on the attention of the Crown. Finally, after a long struggle, the judges in 1677 advised that Mason had no right to the government of New Hampshire, but that the four towns of Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter, and Hampton were beyond the bounds of Massachusetts, whose northern boundary was thereby driven back to its old limits, while its charter of 1629 was held to be valid. In 1679 a revised opinion was given by the attorney, Jones, to the effect that Mason’s title to the soil must be tried on the spot, where the ter-tenants could be summoned. A new government was now instituted by the Crown for New Hampshire, and a commission was issued to John Cutt as president for one year.

This form of government, the administration of which was arbitrary and very unpopular throughout the province, continued till the time of Dudley and Andros, whose commissions rode over all others preceding. On the downfall of Andros New Hampshire was for a short time again united to Massachusetts.

Connecticut.—Connecticut was settled in 1635 and 1636 by emigrants from three towns in Massachusetts,—namely, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (Cambridge); those from Newtown arriving in 1636. Their places of settlement on the Connecticut River bore for a while the names of the towns in Massachusetts whence the emigrants came; but in February, 1637, the names of Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford were substituted.

The Rev. Thomas Hooker and the Rev. Samuel Stone accompanied the people from Newtown. The Rev. John Warham joined his people at Windsor, and the Rev. Henry Smith was chosen pastor of the church at Wethersfield. These several communities, though beyond the borders of Massachusetts, were instituted under her protection, and for one year they were governed by a commission issuing from the General Court of that colony. Springfield, settled in 1636, was in this commission united with the lower plantations. This provisional arrangement was found to be inconvenient, and at the end of the year the several towns took the government into their own hands, and a General Court was held at Hartford, May 1, 1637. Preparations were now made for the impending Pequot war, which called out all the strength of the feeble settlements. On its conclusion, after arrangements had been made for future security from savage foes, and for the purchase of food till the new fields should become productive, the inhabitants of these towns—Springfield, now suspected, and soon afterward declared, to be within the bounds of Massachusetts, excepted—formed a constitution among themselves, bearing date Jan. 14, 1638/39. This instrument has been called “the first example in history of a written constitution,—a distinct organic law constituting a government and defining its powers.”[539] It contained no recognition of any external authority, and provided that all persons should be freemen, who should be admitted as such by the freemen of[331] the towns, and should take the oath of allegiance. It continued in force, with little alteration, for one hundred and eighty years.

John Haynes[540] was the first governor; and he and Edward Hopkins held the office during most of the time for the next fifteen years. In 1657 John Winthrop, son of the Massachusetts governor, was chosen, and continued to serve till the acceptance of the new charter by New Haven, when he was continued in that office.

[This portrait hangs in the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society. A heliotype of it will be found in the Winthrop Papers, Part iv., and in Bowen’s Boundary Disputes of Connecticut.—Ed.]

Meanwhile, in October, 1635, this same John Winthrop, Jr., had returned from England with a commission from Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brook, and others, their associates, patentees of Connecticut, constituting him “governor of the River Connecticut, with the places adjoining,” for the space of one whole year. He was instructed to build a fort near the mouth of the river, and to erect habitations; and he was supplied with means to carry out this purpose. He brought over with him one Lion Gardiner, an expert engineer, who planned the fortifications, and was[332] appointed lieutenant-governor of the fort. It was expected that a number of “gentlemen of quality” would come over to the colony, and some disposition was at first shown to remove the settlers of the towns on the river who had “squatted” on the lands of the Connecticut patentees.

In the summer of 1639 George Fenwick, who was interested in the patent, and his family came over in behalf of the patentees, and took possession of the place, intending to build a town near the mouth of the river. A settlement was made, and named Saybrook, in honor of the two principal patentees. The government of the town was entirely independent of Connecticut till 1644/45, when Fenwick, as agent of the proprietors, transferred by contract to that government the fort at Saybrook and its appurtenances, and the land upon the river, with a pledge to convey all the land thence to Narragansett River, if it came into his power to convey it.

[The editor is indebted to Professor F. B. Dexter, of Yale College, for a photograph of the original picture, which is in New Haven, painted on panel, and bears the inscription, “J. D. obiit, 1670.” Davenport left Connecticut in 1668 to become the successor of John Wilson in Boston, and died as the pastor of the First Church in Boston, March 11, 1670. Cf. Memorial History of Boston, i. 193, and the important paper on Davenport by Professor Dexter, printed in the New Haven Historical Society’s Papers, vol. ii.—Ed.]

In 1638 a settlement was made at Quinnipiack, afterward called New Haven, under the lead of John Davenport. The emigrants, principally from Massachusetts,—like those of the river towns,—had no patent or title to the land on which they planted, but made a number of purchases from the Indians. Here, in April, under the shelter of an oak, they listened to a sermon by Davenport, and a few days afterward formed a “plantation covenant,” as preliminary to a more formal engagement,—all agreeing to be ordered by the rule of Scripture. This colony, as well as that just described, sympathized substantially in religious views with Massachusetts.

On the 4th of June, 1639, all the free planters met in a barn “to consult[333] about settling civil government according to God.” Mr. Davenport prayed and preached, and they then proceeded, by his advice, to form a government. They first decided that none but church members should be free burgesses. Twelve men were then chosen, who out of their own number chose seven to constitute a church and on the “seven pillars” thus chosen rested also the responsibility of forming the civil government. On October 29 these seven persons met, and, after a solemn address to the Supreme Being, proceeded to form the body of freemen, and to elect their civil officers. Theophilus Eaton was chosen to be governor for that year; indeed, he continued to be rechosen to the office for nearly twenty years, till his death. This was the original, fundamental constitution of New Haven. A few general rules were adopted, but no code of laws established. The Word of God was to be taken as the rule in all things.

CONNECTICUT RIVER, 1661.

[This is taken from a Dutch map which appeared at Middleburgh and the Hague in 1666, in a tract belonging to the controversy between Sir George Downing and the States General. It follows the fac-simile given in the Lenox edition of Mr. H. C. Murphy’s translation of the Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland. It also is found as a marginal map in the Pas Kaart van de Zee Kusten van Nieu Nederland, published at Amsterdam by Van Keulen, which shows the coast from Narragansett Bay to Sandy Hook, where is also a portion of the map of the Hudson given in the notes following Mr. Fernow’s chapter in Vol. IV. The Pas Kaart is in Harvard College Library (Atlas 700, No. 9). No. 10 of the same atlas is Pas Kaart van de Zee Kusten inde Boght van Nieu Engeland, which shows the coast from Nantucket to Nova Scotia.—Ed.]

This year settlements were made at Milford and at Guilford, each for a time being independent of any other plantation. Connecticut had also interposed two new settlements between New Haven and the Dutch, at Fairfield and at Stratford.

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In 1642 the capital laws of Connecticut were completed and put upon record; and in May, 1650, a code of laws known as “Mr. Ludlow’s Code” was adopted. In 1643 Connecticut and New Haven were both included in the New England Confederation, as mentioned on an earlier page, and the articles of union were printed in 1656, with the code of laws which was adopted by New Haven, as drawn up by Governor Eaton, the manuscript having been sent to England to be printed.

The old patent of Connecticut mentioned in the agreement with Fenwick seems never to have been made over to the colony; and they were very anxious, on the restoration of Charles II. in 1660, for a royal charter, which would secure to them a continuance and confirmation of their rights and privileges. Governor John Winthrop was appointed as agent to represent the colony in England, for this purpose; and in April, 1662, he succeeded in procuring a charter, which included the colony of New Haven. The charter conveyed most ample powers and privileges for colonial government, and confirmed or conveyed the whole tract of country which had been granted to Lord Say and Sele and others. Mr. Davenport and other leading men of that colony were entirely opposed to a union with Connecticut; and the acceptance of the new charter was resisted till 1665, when the opposition was overcome, and the colonies became united, and at the general election in May of that year John Winthrop was elected to be governor.

It is needless to say that the church polity of Connecticut and New Haven, from the beginning, was substantially that of Massachusetts. Their clergymen assisted in framing the Cambridge Platform in 1648, which was the guide of the churches for many years. Hooker’s Survey and Cotton’s Way of the Churches Cleared (London, 1648) were published under one general titlepage covering both works. After a few years the harmony of the churches was seriously disturbed by a set of new opinions which sprang up in the church at Hartford, and which finally culminated in the adoption by a general council of Connecticut and Massachusetts churches, held in Boston in 1657, of the “Half-Way Covenant.” New Haven held aloof. Political motives lent their influence in the spread of the new views; and while the government of Connecticut attempted to enforce the resolutions of the synod, the churches long refused to comply.[541]

The union of the two communities under one charter gave strength to both, and the colony prospered, while Winthrop felt the strong control of a robust spirit in John Allyn, the secretary of the colony.[542] There were[335] of course constant occasions of annoyance and dissension, both civil and religious. Their wily foe, the Indian, did not cease wholly to disturb their repose. But during Philip’s War, which was so disastrous to Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island, there was less suffering in Connecticut. Conflicts of jurisdiction, both east and west, growing out of the uncertain boundaries of its grant, though it ran west to the South Sea, were of long duration. No sooner had the commissioners, appointed by the King in 1683, made a favorable decision for Connecticut in her controversy with Rhode Island in regard to the Narragansett country, than a new claimant arose. At the division of the grand patent in 1635, James, Marquis of Hamilton, had assigned to him the country between the Connecticut and the Narragansett rivers; but his claim slumbered only to be revived by his heirs at the Restoration,—and now a second time, through Edward Randolph, the watchful and untiring enemy of New England. The prior grant to Lord Say and Sele, confirmed by the charter of April 23, 1662, and the settlement of the country under it, was cited by Connecticut in their answer; and, in an opinion on the case a few years later, Sir Francis Pemberton said that the answer was a good one.

When James II. continued the attacks on the New England charters begun by the late king, with a view to bring all the colonies under the crown, Connecticut did not escape. A quo warranto was issued against the Governor and Company in July, 1685, and this was followed by notices to appear and defend; but the colony resisted, and petitioned, and final judgment was never entered. The colony’s language to the King in one of its addresses to him was, however, construed as a surrender. Andros went from Boston to Hartford in October, 1687, and at a meeting of the Assembly, which was prolonged till midnight, demanded its charter. The story goes, that, by a bold legerdemain, the parchment, after the lights were blown out, was spirited away and hidden in the hollow of an oak-tree; nevertheless Andros assumed the government of the colony, under his commission. Thus matters continued till the Revolution of 1689, when the colony resumed its charter.

Rhode Island.—Rhode Island was settled by Roger Williams in 1636, he having been banished from Massachusetts the year before. Professor George Washington Greene, in his Short History of Rhode Island, remarks, that in the settlement of the New England colonies the religious idea lay at the root of their foundation and development; that in Plymouth it took the form of separation, or a simple severance from the Church of England; in Massachusetts Bay it aimed at the establishment of a theocracy and the enforcement of a vigorous uniformity of creed and discipline;[336] and that from the resistance to this uniformity came Rhode Island and the doctrine of soul-liberty.

Williams was banished from Massachusetts principally for political reasons. His peculiar opinions relating to soul-liberty were not fully developed until after he had taken up his residence in Rhode Island. Five persons accompanied him to the banks of the Mooshausic, and there they planted the town of Providence. Williams here purchased, or received by gift, a tract of land from the Indians, and he had no patent or other title to the soil. Additions were soon made to the little settlement, and he divided the land with twelve of his companions, reserving for them and himself the right of extending the grant to others who might be admitted to fellowship. An association of civil government was formed among the householders or masters of families, who agreed to be governed by the orders of the greater number. This was followed by another agreement of non-householders or single persons, who agreed to subject themselves to such orders as should be made by the householders, but “only in civil things.” This latter is the earliest agreement on the records of the colony. In 1639, to meet the wants of an increasing community, five disposers or selectmen were chosen, charged with political duties,—their actions being subject to revision by the superior authority of the town meetings.

Meanwhile two other colonies had been planted on the shores of Narragansett Bay. The first, partly from the ranks of the Antinomians of Massachusetts, led by William Coddington and John Clarke, who settled at Pocasset (Portsmouth), in the northern part of the Island of Aquedneck in March, 1637/38; and their number so increased that in the following year, 1639, a portion of them moved to the south part of the island, and settled the town of Newport. Like Roger Williams, the settlers had no other title to the land than what was obtained from the natives. Another colony was planted at Shawomet (Warwick), in January, 1642/43, by Samuel Gorton,—a notorious disturber of the peace,—with about a dozen followers, who also secured an Indian title to their lands. Gorton had been in Boston, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and in Providence, and was an unwelcome resident in all, and at Portsmouth he had been whipped.

About 1640, with some followers, he came to Pawtuxet, in the south part of Providence, and, taking sides in some previous land quarrel there, prevailed. The weaker party appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and finally subjected themselves and their lands to that government; upon which Gorton and his followers fled south to Shawomet. Soon afterward, by the surrender to Massachusetts of a subordinate Indian chief, who claimed the territory there, purchased by Gorton of Miantonomi, that Government made a demand of jurisdiction there also; and as Gorton[337] refused their summons to appear at Boston, Massachusetts sent soldiers, and captured the inhabitants in their homes, took them to Boston, tried them, and sentenced the greater part of them to imprisonment for blasphemous language to the Massachusetts authorities. They were finally liberated, and banished; and as Warwick was included in the forbidden territory, they went to Rhode Island. Gorton and two of his friends soon afterward went to England.

The inhabitants on the island formed themselves into a voluntary association of government, as they had done at Providence. The community at Warwick was at first without any form of government.

Feeling a sense of a common danger, the little settlements of Providence and Rhode Island sent Roger Williams to England, in 1643, to apply for a charter. He found the King at open war with the Parliament; but from the Parliamentary commissioners, with the Earl of Warwick at their head, he procured a charter of “Incorporation of Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay in New England,” dated March 14, 1643; that is, 1644 (N. S.). Three years were allowed to pass before the charter was formally accepted by the plantations; but in May, 1647, the corporators met at Portsmouth, and organized a government; and Warwick, whither Gorton and his followers had now returned, though not named in the charter, was admitted to its privileges. This franchise was a charter of incorporation, as its title indicates; but it contained no grant of land. It recites the purchase of lands from the natives; and the Government under it claimed the exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title to lands still owned by the tribes within its boundaries. The code of laws adopted when the charter was accepted is an attempt to codify the common and statute laws of England, or such parts as were thought binding or would suit their condition.

Williams’s principle of liberty of conscience was sometimes interpreted in the community to mean freedom from civil restraint, and harmony did not always prevail. This gave cause to his enemies to exult, while his friends feared lest their hope of reconciling liberty and law should fail.

The attempt of Massachusetts to bring the territory of the colony under her jurisdiction was a source of great annoyance. During this contest an appeal to the authorities in England resulted in the triumph of the weaker colony. Then came the “Coddington usurpation,”—an unexplained episode in the history of Rhode Island, by which the island towns in 1651 were severed from the government of the colony; and Coddington, by a commission from the Council of State in England, was made governor for life. This revolution seemed for a time successful; but the friends of the colony did not despair. Williams and John Clarke were sent to England as agents,—the one in behalf of the former charter, and the other to ask for a revocation of Coddington’s commission. They were both successful; and in the following year the old civil status was fully restored.

As civil dissensions ceased, there was danger of another Indian war,[338] which for the time was arrested by the sagacity of Williams. The refusal of the United Colonies to admit Rhode Island to their confederacy placed her at great disadvantage. Yet though causes of dissension remained, the colony grew in industry and strength. Newport especially increased in population and in wealth. Not every inhabitant, however, was a freeman. The suffrage was restricted to ownership in land, and there was a long process of initiation to be passed through before a candidate could be admitted to full citizenship.

Changes were taking place in England. Cromwell died, and his son Richard soon afterward resigned the Protectorship. The restoration of Charles II. followed by acclamation. The colony hastened to acknowledge the new King; the acts of the Long Parliament were abrogated, and a new charter was applied for through John Clarke, who still remained in England. This instrument, dated Nov. 24, 1663, was evidently drawn up by Clarke, or was prepared under his supervision. It confirmed to the inhabitants freedom of conscience in matters of religion. It recounted the purchase of the land from the natives, but it equally asserted the royal prerogative and the ultimate dominion of the lands in the Crown,—a provision which Williams had strenuously objected to and preached against in the Massachusetts charter. The holding was from the King, as of the manner of East Greenwich. This gave the colony, in English law, an absolute title to the soil as against any foreign State or its subjects. It operated practically as a pre-emptive right to extinguish the Indian title. The charter created a corporation by the name of “The Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England in America.”

THE MASSACHUSETTS PROPRIETORS OF THE NARRAGANSETT COUNTRY.

This charter gave the whole of the Narragansett country to the colony, which the year before had been given to Connecticut; but it did not bring peace. That colony still clamored for her charter boundary; while a body of land speculators from Massachusetts, known as the Atherton Company, who had, in violation of Rhode Island law, bought lands at Quidnesett[339] and Namcook, now insisted upon being placed under Connecticut jurisdiction. The King’s commissioners, who arrived in the country in 1664, charged with the duty of settling all disputes, came into Rhode Island. They received the submission of the Narragansett chiefs to the King, confirmatory of the same act performed in 1644, and they set apart the Narragansett country, extending from the bay to the Pawcatuck River, and named it King’s Province, and established a royal government over it. Some other matters in dispute were happily settled. The royal commissioners were well satisfied with the conduct of Rhode Island.

The colony still grew, but it continued poor. About the year 1663 schools were established in Providence,—a tardy following of Newport, which had employed a teacher in 1640. The colony was kept poor by the great expense incurred in employing agents to defend itself from the surrounding colonies, that wished to crush it. But another trouble arose. A fearful war was impending, the bloodiest which the colony had yet waged with the Indians. We have no space for the story; but Philip’s War fell most heavily on Rhode Island, which furnished troops, but was not consulted as to its management. Peace was at length restored, and the Indians subdued; though they were still turbulent.

Connecticut had not yet renounced her claims on the Narragansett country. Rhode Island set up her authority in the province, and appointed officers for its government. Both colonies appealed to the King. Within the colony itself now arose a most bitter controversy respecting the limits and extent of the original Providence and Pawtuxet purchase, which was not finally settled till the next century. It grew out of the careless manner in which Roger Williams worded the deeds to himself from the Indians, and also those which he himself gave to the colony.

The appeal of Connecticut and Rhode Island to the King resulted in a commission, in 1683, headed by the notorious Cranfield, Governor of New Hampshire, and including the no less notorious Edward Randolph. They quarrelled with the authorities of Rhode Island, and decided in favor of Connecticut.

In due time Rhode Island was a common sufferer with the rest of New England, under the imposition of Andros and his commission. He came into Rhode Island, and was kindly received. He broke the colony seal, but the parchment charter was put beyond his reach. The colony surrendered, and petitioned the King to preserve her charter, and then fell back upon a provisional government of the towns. At the revolution she resumed her charter, and later it was decided in England that it had never been revoked and remained in full force.

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CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE Council for New England.—Chalmers, Annals, 1780, p. 99, says concerning the great patent of Nov. 3, 1620, “This patent which has never been printed because so early surrendered, is in the old entries of New England in the Plant. off.” I saw the parchment enrolment of this charter in her Majesty’s Public Record Office, in Fetter Lane, London, and described it in full in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., for April, 1867, p. 54. It was first printed by Hazard, Historical Collections, vol. i. 1792, pp. 103-118, probably from a manuscript copy in the Superior Court files, N. H.[543]

The petition of the Northern Colony for a new charter, dated March 3, 1619/20, and the warrant to his Majesty’s Solicitor-General to prepare such a patent, dated July 23, 1620, may be seen in Brodhead’s Documents, etc., iii. 2-4. The warrant is also in Gorges’ Briefe Narration, p. 21.

The opposition of the Virginia Company to the granting of this patent may be seen in their records as published by Neill., History of the Virginia Company of London, 1869, passim; also in Gorges’ Briefe Narration, pp. 22-31; in the Council’s Briefe Relation,[544] pp. 18-22; and in Brodhead’s Documents, iii. 4. The opposition of the House of Commons to the patent, after it had passed the seals, may be best seen in the printed Journals of the House for the sessions of 1621 and 1624. Chalmers’ extracts are to the point, but are not full. See also Gorges, and the Briefe Relation, as above. For the answer to the French ambassador, see also Sainsbury’s Calendar, Colonial, p. 61. The history of the transactions of the Council may be largely gathered from their extant records as published in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., for April, 1867, and for October, 1875; from Gorges, and from the Briefe Relation. Cf. Palfrey, i. 193.

Probably no complete record exists of all the patents issued by the Council; and of those known to have been granted, the originals, or even copies of all of them, are not known to be extant. As full a list of these as has been collected may be seen in a Lecture read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jan. 15, 1869, by Samuel F. Haven, LL. D., entitled History of Grants under the Great Council for New England, etc.,—a valuable paper with comments and explanations, with which compare Dr. Palfrey’s list in his History of New England, i. 397-99.[545] Since Dr. Palfrey wrote, new material has come to light respecting some of these grants. The patent of Aug. 10, 1622, which Dr. Belknap supposed was the Laconia patent, and which he erroneously made the basis of the settlements of Thomson and of the Hiltons, and of later operations on the Piscataqua, is found not to be the Laconia patent, which was issued seven years later, namely, Nov. 17, 1629.[546] Later writers have copied him. Again, Dr. Palfrey refers the early division of the territory by the Council, from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Cod, among twenty associates, to May 31, 1622. By the recovery of another fragment of the records of the Council in 1875, we are able to correct all previous errors respecting that division, which really took place on Sunday, July 29, 1623. This fact has appeared since Dr. Haven wrote.[547]

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An object of interest would be the map of the country on which the different patents granted were marked off. Some idea from it might be formed of the geographical mistakes by which one grant overlapped another, or swallowed it up entirely. I know of no published map existing at that time that would have served the purpose. The names of the places on the coast from Penobscot to Cape Cod, mentioned by Captain Smith in his tract issued in 1616, were rarely indicated on his map which accompanied the tract. They had been laid down on the manuscript draft of the map, but were changed for English names by Prince Charles.[548] Quite likely the Council had manuscript maps of the coast. Of the division of 1623, the records say it was resolved that the land “be divided according as the division is made in the plot remaining with Dr. Goche.” Smith, speaking of this division, says that the country was at last “engrossed by twenty patentees, that divided my map into twenty parts, and cast lots for their shares,” etc. Smith’s map was probably the best published map of the coast which existed at that time; but the map on which the names were subsequently engrossed and published was Alexander’s map of New England, New France, and New Scotland, published in 1624, in his Encouragement to Colonies, and also issued in the following year in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1872. This record, as the fac-simile shows,[549] is a mere huddling together of names, with no indication as to a division of the country, as it was not possible there should be on such a map as this, where the whole New England coast, as laid down, is limited to three inches in extent, with few natural features delineated upon it.

The greatest trouble existed among the smaller patents. A large patent, like that to Gorges, for instance, at the grand division, with well-defined natural boundaries on the coast, between the Piscataqua and the Sagadahoc, or the Penobscot, would not be likely to be contested for lack of description; but there had been many smaller patents issued within these limits, which ran into and overlapped each other, and some were so completely annihilated as to cause great confusion.

Some of these smaller patents had alleged powers of government granted to the settlers,—powers probably rarely exercised by virtue of such a grant, and which the Council undoubtedly had no authority to confer.[550] The people of Plymouth, for instance, in their patent of 1630, were authorized, in the language of the grant, to incorporate themselves by some usual or fit name and title, with liberty to make laws and ordinances for their government. They never had a royal charter of incorporation during their separate existence, though they strove hard to obtain one. The Council for New England might from the first have taken the Pilgrims under their own government and protection; and Governor Bradford, in letters to the Council and to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, written in 1627 and 1628, acknowledges that relation, and asks for their aid.[551]

SEAL OF THE COUNCIL FOR NEW ENGLAND.

The records of the Council, so far as they are extant, contain no notice of the adoption of a common seal, and we are ignorant as to the time of its adoption. In the earliest patent known to have been issued by the Council, which was an indenture between them and John Peirce and his associates, dated June 1, 1621, the language is, “In witness whereof the said President and Council have to the one part of this present Indenture set their seals.” This is signed first by the Duke of Lenox, who I think was the first President[342] of the Council, and by five other members of the Council, with the private seal of each appended to his signature. But in a grant to Gorges and Mason, of Aug. 10, 1622, which is also an indenture, the language is, that to one part “the said President and Council have caused their common seal to be affixed.” Here we have a “common seal” used by the Council in issuing their subsequent grants. But it is very singular, that of the many original grants of the Council extant no one of them has the wax impression of the seal intact or unbroken; usually it is wholly wanting. It is believed, however, that the design of the seal has been discovered in the engraving on the titlepage of Smith’s Generall Historie; and the reasons for this opinion may be seen in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., March, 1867, pp. 469-472.[552] A delineation of it is given herewith.

In the absence of any record of the organization of the Council, or of any rules or by-laws for the transaction of its business, we do not know what officers, or what number of the Council, were required for the issuing of patents, or for authorizing the use of the Company’s seal. The only name signed to the Plymouth Patent of Jan. 13, 1629/30 is that of the Earl of Warwick, who was then the President of the Council.

Massachusetts.[553]—The Massachusetts Colony had its origin in a grant of land from the Council of New England, dated March 19, 1627, in old style reckoning.[554] So far as is known, it is the first grant of any moment made after the general division in 1623, but probably it was preceded by the license to the Plymouth people of privileges on the Kennebec. This patent to the Massachusetts Colony is not extant, but it is recited in the subsequent charter. There is some mystery attending the manner of its procurement, as well as about its extent. The business was managed, in the absence of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, by the Earl of Warwick, who was friendly to the patentees.[555] The royal charter of Massachusetts was dated March 4, 1628 (O.S.). For the forms used in issuing it, see Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., December, 1869, pp. 167-196. A discussion of the charter itself as a frame of government for a commonwealth is found in Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts, i. 414, 415; Judge Parker’s Lecture before the Massachusetts Historical Society,[343] Feb. 9, 1869, entitled The First Charter, etc.; and Memorial History of Boston, i. 329-382, and the authorities there cited. As to the right of the Company to transfer the government and charter to the soil, see Judge Parker, as above; Dr. Palfrey, New England, i. 301-308; Barry, History of Massachusetts, i. 174-186, and the authorities cited by them. The original charter, on parchment, is in the State House in Boston. A heliotype of a section of it is given in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 329.[556] The duplicate or exemplification of the charter, which was originally sent over to Endicott in 1629, is now in the Library of the Salem Athenæeum. The charter was first printed, and from the “dupl.” parchment, “by S. Green, for Benj. Harris, at the London Coffee-House, near the Town-House, in Boston, 1689.” It is entitled A Copy of the Massachusetts Charter.[557]

The archives of the State are rich in the materials of its history. The records of the government from its first institution in England down to the overthrow of the charter are almost a history in themselves. The student is no longer required to decipher the ancient writing, for in 1853-54 the Records were copied and printed under the editorial care of Dr. N. B. Shurtleff.[558] A large mass of manuscripts remains at the State House, and is known as the Massachusetts Archives. The papers were classified by the late Joseph B. Felt.[559] They are the constant resource of antiquaries and historians, few of whom, however, but regret the too arbitrary arrangement given to them by that painstaking scholar.[560] The City of Boston, by its Record Commission, is making accessible in print most valuable material which has long slumbered in manuscript. The Archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society are specially rich in early manuscripts, a catalogue of which is now preparing, and its publishing committees are constantly at work converting their manuscripts into print, while the sixty-seven volumes of its publications, as materials of history, are without a rival.[561]

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The first general History of Massachusetts Bay was written by Thomas Hutchinson, afterward governor of the province, in two volumes, the first of which, covering the period ending with the downfall of Andros, was published in Boston in 1764. The second volume, bringing the history down to 1750, was published in 1767. Each volume was issued in London in the year following its publication here. The author had rich materials for his work, and was judicious in the use of them. He had a genius for history, and his book will always stand as of the highest authority. A volume of Original Papers, which illustrate the first volume of the history, was published in 1769.[562] Hutchinson died in England in 1780. Among his manuscripts was found a continuation of his history, vol. iii., bringing the events down to 1774, in which year he left the country. This was printed in London in 1828.[563] Some copies of vol. i., London ed., were wrongly dated MDCCLX.

In 1798 was published, in two volumes, a continuation of Hutchinson’s second volume, by George Richards Minot,[564] bringing the history down to 1764. The work was left unfinished, and Alden Bradford, in 1822-1829, published, in three volumes, a continuation of that to the year 1820.

The next most considerable attempt at a general History of Massachusetts was by John Stetson Barry, who published three volumes in 1855-1857. It is a valuable work, written from the best authorities, and comes down to 1820.

Palfrey’s History of New England, the first three volumes of which were published in 1858-1864, and cover the period ending with the downfall of Andros, must be regarded altogether as the best history of this section of our country yet written, as well for its luminous text as for the authorities in its notes.[565]

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I will now go back and mention a few other general histories of New England, including those works in which the history of Massachusetts is a prominent feature.

Cotton Mather’s Ecclesiastical History of New England, better known as his Magnalia, from the head-line of the titlepage, Magnalia Christi Americana, was published in London in 1702, in folio. Although relating generally to New England, it principally concerns Massachusetts. While the book is filled with the author’s conceits and puns, and gives abundant evidence of his credulity, it contains a vast amount of valuable historical material, and is indispensable in any New England library. It is badly arranged for consultation, for it is largely a compilation from the author’s previous publications, and it lacks an index. It has been twice reprinted,—in 1820 and 1853.[566]

John Oldmixon, Collector of Customs at Bridgewater, England, compiled and published at London, in 1708, his British Empire in America, in two volumes. About one hundred pages of the first volume relate to New England, and while admitting that he drew on Cotton Mather’s Magnalia for most of his material, omitting the puns, anagrams, etc., the author nevertheless vents his spleen on this book of the Boston divine. Mather was deeply hurt by this indignity, and he devoted the principal part of the Introduction to his Parentator, 1724, to this ill-natured writer. He says he found in eighty-six pages of Oldmixon’s book eighty-seven falsehoods. A second edition of The British Empire in America was published in 1741, with considerable additions and alterations. In the mean time the Rev. Daniel Neal had published in London his History of New England, which led Oldmixon to rewrite, for this new edition, his chapters relating to New England. Oldmixon’s work is of little value. He was careless and unscrupulous.[567]

Mr. Neal’s History of New England, already mentioned, first appeared in 1720, in two volumes, but was republished with additions in 1747.[568] It contains a map “according to the latest observations,” or, as he elsewhere observes, “done from the latest surveys,” in one corner of which is an interesting miniature map of “The Harbour of Boston.” This book must have supplied a great want at the time of its appearance, and though Hutchinson says it is little more than an abridgment of Dr. Mather’s history,—which is not quite true, as see his authorities in the Preface,—it gave in an accessible form many of the principal facts concerning the beginning of New England. It of course relates principally to Plymouth and Massachusetts. Neal was an independent thinker, and differed essentially from Cotton Mather on many subjects.

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The Rev. Thomas Prince published in Boston in 1736 A Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals, in one volume, 12º, of about four hundred pages. The author begins with the creation of the world, and devotes the last two hundred and fifty pages to New England, coming down only to September, 1630, or to the settlement of Boston. After an interval of about twenty years the work was resumed, and three numbers, of thirty-two pages each, of vol. ii. were issued in 1755, bringing the chronology down to August, 1633, when for want of sufficient encouragement the work ceased. Prince was very particular in giving his authorities for every statement, and he professed to quote the very language of his author.[569]

In 1749 was published the first volume of a Summary, Historical and Political, ... of the British Settlements in North America, by William Douglass, M.D. The book had been issued in numbers, beginning in January, 1747. The titlepage of the second volume bears date 1751. The author died suddenly Oct. 21, 1752, before his work was finished. A large part of the book relates to New England. It contains a good deal of valuable information from original sources, but it is put together without system or order, and the whole work appears more like a mass of notes hastily written than like a history. Dr. Douglass was a Scotchman by birth, and coming to Boston while a young man, he attained a reputable standing as a physician. In the small-pox episode in 1721 he took an active part as an opposer of inoculation. He was fond of controversy, was thoroughly honest and fearless, and gave offence in his Summary by his freedom of speech. The Summary was republished in London in 1755 and in 1760, each edition with a large map.[570] The Boston edition was reissued with a new title, dated 1753.

For the origin of the brief settlement at Cape Ann, which drew after it the planting at Salem and the final organization of the Massachusetts Company, and for the narrative of those several events,—namely, the formation in London of the subordinate government for the colony, “London’s Plantation in Massachusetts Bay,” with Endicott as its first governor, and his instructions; the emigration under Higginson in 1629; the establishment of the church in Salem, and the difficulty with the Browns; and the emigration under Winthrop in 1630,—see John White’s Planter’s Plea,[571] Hubbard’s New England, chap. xviii.; the Colony Records; Morton’s Memorial, under the year 1629; Higginson’s Journal, and his New England Plantation;[572] Dudley’s Letter to the Countess of Lincoln;[573] and Winthrop’s own Journal. For the principal part of these documents and[347] others of great value the reader is referred to Dr. Alexander Young’s Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay,—a convenient manual for reference, of the highest authority, containing ample bibliographical notes and illustrations, which need not be repeated here. This book, which was published in 1846, was unfortunately thrown into chapters as of one narrative, as had been that relating to the Plymouth Colony, published in 1841, whereby the original authorities, which should be the prominent feature of the book, are subordinated to an editorial plan.

For the original authorities of the history of the scattered settlements in Massachusetts Bay, prior to the Winthrop emigration, I cannot do better than refer to a paper on the “Old Planters,” so called, about Boston Harbor, by Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., June, 1878, p. 194; and to Mr. Adams’s chapter in Memorial History of Boston, i. 63.

SHIP OF XVIITH CENTURY.

[This fac-simile is from a map in Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, 1647.—Ed.]

In Captain John Smith’s Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New England, or anywhere, London, 1631, he has two chapters (xi. and xii.) on the settlement of Salem and Charlton (Charlestown), and an account of the sad condition of the colony for months after the Winthrop emigration. This is Smith’s last book, and his best in a literary point of view, and was published the year of his death.[574]

The New England’s Prospect, by William Wood, London, 1634, is the earliest topographical account of the Massachusetts Colony, so far as the settlements then extended. It also has a full description of its fauna and flora, and of the natives. It is a valuable book, and is written in vigorous and idiomatic English. The writer lived here four years, returning to England Aug. 15, 1633. His book is entered in the Stationers’ Register, “7 Julii, 1634.” Alonzo Lewis, author of the History of Lynn, thinks that he came over again to the colony in 1635, as a person of that name arrived that year in the “Hopewell.”[575]

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The New English Canaan, by Thomas Morton, Amsterdam, 1637, “written upon ten years’ knowledge and experiment of the country,” is a sort of satire upon the Plymouth and Massachusetts people, who looked upon the author as a reprobate and an outlaw. He came over, probably, with Weston’s company in 1622, and on the breaking up of that settlement may have gone back to England. In 1625 he is found here again with Captain Wollaston’s company on a plantation at “Mount Wollaston,” where he had his revels. He was twice banished the country, and before his final return hither wrote this book. His description of the natural features of the country, and his account of the native inhabitants are of considerable interest and value, and the side-light which he throws upon the Pilgrim and Puritan colonies will serve at least to amuse the reader.[576] Morton’s book, though printed in Holland “in the yeare 1637,” was entered in the Stationers’ Register in London, “Nov. 18, 1633,” in the name of Charles Greene as publisher; and a copy of the book is now (1882) in the library of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 19 Delahay Street, Westminster, London, bearing this imprint: “Printed for Charles Greene, and are sold in Paul’s Church-Yard;” no date, but “1632” written in with a pen. See White Kennett’s Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordia, p. 77, where this copy is entered, and where the manuscript date is printed in the margin. This date is, of course, an error.[577] Morton’s book was not written till after the publication of Wood’s New England’s Prospect, to which reference is frequently made in the New English Canaan. The New England’s Prospect was entered at the Stationers’, “7 Julii, 1634,” and was published the same year. Morton’s book is dedicated to the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations,—a body not created till April 28, 1634. The book must have been entered at the Stationers’ some time in anticipation of its printing; and when printed, some copies were struck off bearing the imprint of Charles Greene, though only one copy is now known with his name on the titlepage.

AUTOGRAPHS OF LEADERS IN THE WAR.

The first serious trouble with the Indians, which had been brewing for some years, culminated in 1637, when the Pequots were annihilated. This produced a number of narrations, two of which were published at the time, and in London,—one by Philip Vincent,[578] in 1637, and one by Captain John Underhill, in 1638.[579] The former is not known to have been in New England at the time, but the[349] minute particulars of his narrative would lead one to suppose that he had been in close communication with some persons who had been in the conflict. He could hardly have been present himself. Captain John Underhill, the writer of the second tract, was commander of the Massachusetts forces at the storming of the fort, so that he narrates much of what he saw. He prefaces his account with a description of the country, and of the origin of the troubles with the Pequots. Both these narratives are reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., vi.

I may add here that there were other narratives of the Pequot War written by actors in it. A narrative by Major John Mason, the commander of the Connecticut forces, was left by him on his death, in manuscript, and was communicated by his grandson to the Rev. Thomas Prince, who published it in 1736. It is the best account of the affair written. Some two or three years after the death of Mason, Mr. Allyn, the Secretary of the colony of Connecticut, sent a narrative of the Pequot War to Increase Mather, who published it in his Relation of the Troubles, etc., 1677, as of Allyn’s composition. Having no preface or titlepage, Mather did not know that it was written by Major Mason, as was afterward fully explained by Prince, who had the entire manuscript from Mason’s grandson.[580]

Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort during the Pequot War, also wrote an account of the action, prefacing it with a narrative of recollections of earlier events. It was written in his old age. It was first printed in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. 136-160.[581]

For the history of the Antinomian controversy which broke out about this time and convulsed the whole of New England, see the examination of Mrs. Hutchinson in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts Bay, ii. 482; Welde’s Short Story, etc., London, 1644; Chandler’s Criminal Trials, Boston, 1841, vol. i.[582]

A small quarto volume published in London in 1641, entitled An Abstract of the Lawes of New England as they are now Established, was one of the results of an attempt to form a body of standing laws for the colony. I may premise, that, at the first meeting of the Court of Assistants at Charlestown, certain rules of proceeding in civil actions were established, and powers for punishing offenders instituted. In the former case equity according to circumstances was the rule; and in punishing offences they professed to be governed by the judicial laws of Moses where such laws were of a moral nature.[583] But such proceedings were arbitrary and uncertain, and the body of the people were clamorous for a code of standing laws. John Cotton had been requested to assist in framing such a[350] code, and in October, 1636, he handed in to the General Court a copy of a body of laws that he had compiled “in an exact method,” called “Moses his Judicials,” which the Court took into consideration till the next meeting. The subject occupied attention from year to year, till in December, 1641, the General Court established a body of one hundred laws, called the Body of Liberties, which had been composed by the Rev. Nathaniel Ward,[584] of Ipswich. No copy of these laws was known to have been preserved on the records of the colony; and of the earliest printed digest of the laws, in 1648, which no doubt substantially conformed to the Body of Liberties, no copy is extant.

The Abstract above recited, published in 1641, was therefore for many years regarded as the Body of Liberties, or an abstract of them, passed in that year. About forty years ago Francis C. Gray, Esq., noticed in the library of the Boston Athenæum a manuscript code of laws entitled “A Copy of the Liberties of the Massachusetts Colonie in New England,” which he caused to be printed in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 216-237, with a learned introduction, in which he showed conclusively that this body of laws was the code of 1641, and that the Abstract printed that year in London was John Cotton’s code, Moses his Judicials, which the General Court never adopted. A copy having found its way to England, it was sent to the press under a misapprehension, and an erroneous titlepage prefixed to it. Indeed, that John Cotton was the author of the code published in London in 1641 had been evident from an early period, by means of a second and enlarged edition published in London by William Aspinwall in 1655, from a manuscript copy left by the author. Aspinwall, then in England, in a long address to the reader, says that Cotton collected out of the Scriptures, and digested this Abstract, and commended it to the Court of Massachusetts, “which had they then had the heart to have received, it might have been better both with them there and us here than now it is.” The Abstract of 1641, with Aspinwall’s preface to the edition of 1655, was reprinted in 1 Mass. Hist. Coll., v. 173-192. Hutchinson, Papers, 1769, pp. 161-179, had already printed the former.[585]

The religious character of the colony was exemplified by the publication, in 1640, of the first book issued from the Cambridge press, set up by Stephen Daye the year before; namely, The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, by Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot. Prince, in the preface to his revised edition of this book, 1758, says that it “had the honor of being the First Book printed in North America, and, as far as I can find, in this whole New World.” Prince was not aware that a printing press had existed in the City of Mexico one hundred years before.[586] He was right, however, in the first part of his sentence. Eight copies of the book are known to be extant, of which two are in Cambridge, where it was printed. Within a year or two a copy has been sold for fifteen hundred dollars.[587] The first thing printed by Daye was the freeman’s oath, the next was an almanac made for New England by Mr. William Peirce, mariner,—so says Winthrop. What enterprising explorer of garrets and cellars[351] will add copies of these to our collections of Americana? Probably one of the last books printed by Daye was the first digest of the laws of the colony, which was passing through the press in 1648. Johnson says it was printed that year. Probably 1649 was the date on the titlepage. Not a single copy is known to be in existence. Daye was succeeded in 1649 by Samuel Green, who issued books from the Cambridge press for nearly fifty years.[588]

One of the most interesting and authentic of the early narratives relating to the colony is Thomas Lechford’s Plain Dealing, London, 1642. Lechford came over here in 1638, arriving June 27, and he embarked for home Aug. 3, 1641. He was a lawyer by profession, and he came here with friendly feelings toward the Puritan settlement. But lawyers were not wanted in the colony. He was looked upon with suspicion, and could barely earn a living for his family. He did some writing for the magistrates, and transcribed some papers for Nathaniel Ward, the supposed author of the Body of Liberties, to whom he may have rendered professional aid in that work. He prepared his book for the press soon after his return home. It is full of valuable information relating to the manners and customs of the colony, written by an able and impartial hand.[589]

To the leading men in the colony, religion, or their own notion concerning religion, was the one absorbing theme; and they sought to embody it in a union of Church and State. In this regard John Cotton[590] seems to have been the mouthpiece of the community. He came near losing his influence at the time of the Antinomian controversy but by judicious management he recovered himself. He was not averse to discussion, had a passion for writing, and his pen was ever active. The present writer has nearly thirty of Cotton’s books,—the Carter-Brown Catalogue shows over forty,—written in New England, and sent to London to be printed. Some of these were in answer to inquiries from London concerning their church estate, etc., here, and were intended to satisfy the curiosity of friends, as well as to influence public opinion there. Cotton had a long controversy with Roger Williams relating to the subject of Williams’s banishment from this colony. Another discussion with him, which took a little different form, was the “Bloudy Tenet” controversy, which had another origin, and in which the question of persecution for conscience’ sake was discussed. Williams, of course, here had the argument on the general principle. Cotton was like a strong man struggling in the mire.[591] Cotton’s book on the Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven shows his idea of the true church polity. His answer to Baylie’s Dissuasive in The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared is really a valuable historical book, in which, incidentally, he introduces information concerning persons and events which relate to Plymouth as well as to Massachusetts. This book furnished to the present writer the clew to the fact that John Winthrop was the author of the principal part of the contents of Welde’s Short Story, published in London [352] in 1644, relating to the Antinomian troubles and Mrs. Hutchinson. The Rev. Thomas Hooker, of Hartford, entered with Cotton into the church controversy. His Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, etc., written in answer to Rutherford, Hudson, and Baylie, Presbyterian controversialists, was published within the same cover with Cotton’s book last cited, and one general titlepage covered both, with the imprint of London, 1648.

Well known among Cotton’s other productions is his Milk for Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments, chiefly for the Spiritual Nourishment of Boston Babes in either England, but may be of like Use for any Children, London, 1646.[592]

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The discussion of Cotton and others having confirmed the colony in its church polity,—“From New England,” says Baylie, writing in London in 1645, “came Independency of Churches hither, which hath spread over all parts here,”—it was thought best to embody the system in a platform. So a synod was called for May, 1646, which by sundry meetings and adjournments completed the work in August, 1648. The result was the famous “Cambridge Platform,” which continued the rule of our ecclesiastical polity, with slight variations, till the adoption of the constitution of 1780. It was printed at Cambridge, in 1649, by Samuel Green,—probably his first book,—and was entitled A Platform of Church Discipline, etc. A copy of the printed volume was sent over to London by John Cotton (who probably had the largest agency in preparing the work)[593] to Edward Winslow, then in England, who procured it to be printed in 1653, with an explanatory preface by himself.[594]

The important political union of the New England colonies, or a portion of them, in 1643, has been already referred to. The Articles of Confederation were first printed in 1656 in London, prefixed to Governor Eaton’s code of laws entitled New Haven’s Settling in New England,[595] to be mentioned further on.

The trouble of Massachusetts with Samuel Gorton was brought about by the unwarrantable conduct of the colony towards that eccentric person. Gorton appealed to England, and Edward Winslow, the diplomatist of Plymouth and Massachusetts, was sent over to defend the Bay colony. Gorton’s Simplicitie’s Defence, published in London in 1646, was answered by Winslow’s Hypocrasie Unmasked, issued the same year. This was reissued in 1649, with a new titlepage, called The Danger of tolerating Levellers in a Civill State, the Dedication to the Earl of Warwick, in the former issue, being omitted.[596]

Winslow had his hands full, about this time, in defending Massachusetts. The colony was never without a disturbing element in its own population, and about the time of the trouble with Gorton a number of influential persons who held Presbyterian views of church government were clamorous for the right of suffrage, which was denied them. The controversy of the Government with Dr. Robert Child, Samuel Maverick, and others, in 1646, need not be repeated here. An appeal was made to England. Child and some of his associates went thither, and published a book in 1647, in London, called New England’s Jonas cast up at London, edited by Child’s brother, Major John Child, whose[355] name appears upon the titlepage. A postscript comments unfavorably on Winslow’s Hypocrasie Unmasked. This book was replied to by Winslow in a tract called New England’s Salamander Discovered, etc., London, 1647. These books are important as illustrating Massachusetts history at this period.[597]

SHEPARD’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

[A fac-simile of the opening of the little book, which contains Thomas Shepard’s autobiography, now the property of the Shepard Memorial Church in Cambridge.—Ed.]

During this visit of Winslow to England, from which he never returned to New England, he performed a grateful service in behalf of the natives. By his influence a corporation was created by Parliament, in 1649, for propagating the gospel among the Indian tribes in New England, and some of the accounts of the progress of the missions, sent over from the colony, were published in London by the corporation. The conversion of the natives was one object set forth in the Massachusetts charter; and Roger Williams had, while a resident of Massachusetts and Plymouth, taken a deep interest in them, and in 1643, while on a voyage to England, he drew up A Key unto the Language of America,[598] published that year in London. In that same year there was also published in London a small tract called New England’s First-Fruits, first in respect to the college, and second in respect to the Indians.[599] Some hopeful instances of conversion among the natives were briefly given in this tract. In 1647 a more full relation of Eliot’s labors was sent over to Winslow, who the year before had arrived in England as agent of Massachusetts, and printed under the title, The Day breaking, if not the Sun rising, of the Gospel with the Indians in New England. In the following year, 1648, a narrative was published in London, written by Thomas Shepard, called The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel breaking forth upon the Indians, etc., and this in 1649 was followed by The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England, setting forth the labors of Eliot and Mayhew. The Rev. Henry Whitfield, who had been pastor of a church in Guilford, Conn., returned to England in 1650; and in the following year he published in London The Light appearing more and more towards the Perfect Day, and in 1652, Strength out of Weakness, both containing accounts, written chiefly by Eliot, of the progress of his labors. This last tract was the first of those published by the Corporation, which continued thenceforth, for several years, to publish the record of the missions as they were sent over from the colony. In 1653 a tract appeared under the title of Tears of Repentance, etc.; in 1655, A late and further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel, etc.; in 1659, A further Accompt, etc.; and in 1660, A further Account still.[600] Eliot’s literary[356] labors in behalf of the Massachusetts Indians culminated in the translation of the Bible into their dialect, and its publication through the Cambridge press. The Testament was printed in 1661, and the whole Bible in 1663; and second editions of each appeared,—the former in 1680, and the latter in 1685.[601]

Eliot was imbued with the enthusiasm of the time. As John Cotton had deduced a body of laws from the Scriptures, which he offered to the General Court for the colony, so in like manner Eliot drew from the Scriptures a frame of government for a commonwealth. It was entitled The Christian Commonwealth; or, the Civil Polity of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which he sent to England during the interregnum, and commended to the people there. He had drawn up a similar form for his Indian community, and had put it in practice. His manuscript, after slumbering for some years, was printed in London in 1659, and some copies came over to the colony. The Restoration soon followed.[357] Eliot had in his treatise reflected on kingly government, and in May, 1661, the General Court ordered the book to be totally suppressed; and all persons having copies of it were commanded either to cancel or deface the same, or deliver them to the next magistrate. Eliot acknowledged his fault under his own hand, saying he sent the manuscript to England some nine or ten years before. Hutchinson, commenting on this whole proceeding, says, “When the times change, men generally suffer their opinions to change with them, so far at least as is necessary to avoid danger.” How many copies of the book were destroyed by this order of the court, we cannot tell. A few years ago the only copy known was owned by Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, then residing in London; and from this copy a transcript was made, and it was printed in 1846 in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 129.[602]

Eliot was not the only distinguished citizen whose book came under the ban of the Massachusetts authorities. William Pynchon, of Springfield, wrote a book which was published in London in 1650, entitled The Meritorious price of our Redemption, etc., copies of which arrived in Boston during the session of the General Court in October of that year. The Court immediately condemned it, and ordered it to be burned the next day in the market-place, which was done; and Mr. Norton was asked to answer it. Norton obeyed, and the book he wrote was ordered to be sent to London to be published. It was A Discussion of that Great Point in Divinity, the Sufferings of Christ, etc., 1653. Pynchon in the mean time was brought before the Court, and was plied by several orthodox divines. He admitted that some points in his book were overstated, and his sentence was postponed. Not liking his treatment here he went back to England in 1652, and published a reply to Norton in a work with a title similar to that which gave the original offence, London, 1655. Pynchon held that Christ did not suffer the torments of hell for mankind, and that he bore not our sins by imputation. A more full answer to Norton’s book was published by him in 1662, called the Covenant of Nature.[603]

John Winthrop died March 26, 1649. No man in the colony was so well qualified as he, either from opportunity or character, to write its history. Yet he left no history. But he left what was more precious,—a journal of events, recorded in chronological order, from the time of his departure from England in the “Arbella,” to within two months of his death. This Journal may be called the materials of history of the most valuable character. The author himself calls it a “History of New England.” From this, for the period which it covers, and from the records of the General Court for the same period, a history of the colony for the first twenty years could be written. For over one hundred years from Winthrop’s death no mention is made of his Journal. Although it was largely drawn upon by Hubbard in his History (1680), and was used by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia, it was cited by neither, and was first mentioned by Thomas Prince on the cover of the first number of the second volume of his Annals, in 1755. Among his list of authorities there given, he mentions “having lately received” this Journal of Governor Winthrop. Prince made but little use of this manuscript, as the three numbers only which he issued of his second volume ended with Aug. 5, 1633. Prince probably procured the Journal from the Winthrop family in Connecticut. It was in three volumes. The first and second volumes were restored to the family, and were published in Hartford in 1790, in one volume, edited by Noah Webster.[604] The third volume was found in the Prince Library, in the tower of the Old South Church, in 1816, and was given to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It was published, together with volumes one and two, in 1825 and 1826, in two volumes, edited by James Savage.[605] Volume two of the manuscript was[358] destroyed by a fire which, Nov. 10, 1825, consumed the building in Court Street, Boston, in which Mr. Savage had his office.[606]

The earliest published narrative—we can hardly call it a history—relating generally to Massachusetts, is Edward Johnson’s “Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England,”—the running title to the book, which on the titlepage is called a History of New England, etc., London, 1654. The book does not profess to give an orderly account of the settlement of New England, or even of Massachusetts, to which it wholly relates, but describes what took place in the colony under his own observation largely, and what would illustrate “the goodness of God in the settlement of these colonies.” The book is supposed to have been written two or three years only before it was sent to England to be published. It is conjectured that the titlepage was added by the publisher.[607] The book has a value, for it contains many facts, but its composition and arrangement are bad.[608]

The Quaker episode produced an abundant literature. Several Rhode Island Baptists had previously received rough usage here; and Dr. John Clarke, one of the founders of Rhode Island, who had a personal experience to relate, published in London, in 1652,—whither he had gone with Roger Williams the year before,—a book against the colony, called Ill-Newes from New-England, or a Narrative of New-England’s Persecution, etc.[609]

In 1654, two years before the Quakers made their appearance, the colony passed a law against any one having in his possession the books of Reeve and Muggleton, “the two Last Witnesses and True Prophets of Jesus Christ,” as they called themselves. Some of the books of these fanatics had been printed in London in 1653, and had made their way to the colony, and the executioner was ordered to burn all such books in the market-place on the next Lecture day. In 1656 the Quakers came and brought their books, which were at once seized and reserved for the fire; while sentence of banishment was passed against those who brought them. The Quakers continued to flock to the colony in violation of the law now passed against them. They were imprisoned, whipped, and two were hanged in Boston in October, 1659, one in June, 1660, and one in March, 1661. Some of the more important books which the Quaker controversy brought forth must now be named. An account of the reception which the Quakers met with here soon found its way to London, and to the hands of Francis Howgill, who published it with the title, The Popish Inquisition Newly Erected in New England, etc., London, 1659. Another tract appeared there the same year as The Secret Works of a Cruel People Made Manifest. In the following year appeared A Call from Death to Life, letters written “from the common goal of Boston” by Stephenson and Robinson (who were shortly after executed); and one “written in Plymouth Prison” by Peter Pearson, a few weeks later, giving an account of the execution of the two former. In October, 1658, John Norton had been appointed by the Court to write a treatise on the doctrines of the Quakers, which he did, and the tract was printed in Cambridge in 1659, and in London in 1660, with the title, The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation. After[359] three Quakers had been hanged, the colony, under date of Dec. 19, 1660, sent an “Humble Petition and Address of the General Court ... unto the High and Mighty Prince Charles the Second,” defending their conduct. This was presented February 11, and printed, and was replied to by Edward Burroughs in an elaborate volume, which contains a full account of the first three martyrs. This was followed this year, 1661, by a yet more important volume, by George Bishope, called New England Judged, in which the story of the Quaker persecution from the beginning is told. Bishope lived in England, and published in a first volume the accounts and letters of the sufferers sent over to him. A second volume was published in 1667, continuing the narrative of the sufferings and of the hanging of William Leddra, in March, 1661. A general History of the Quakers was written by William Sewel, a Dutch Quaker of Amsterdam, published there in his native tongue, in 1717, folio. Sewel’s grandfather was an English Brownist, who emigrated to Holland. The book was translated by the author himself into English, and published in London in 1722.[610] Joseph Besse’s book,—A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, for the Testimony of a Good Conscience, 1753,—contains a mass of most valuable statistics about the Quakers. Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay has an excellent summarized account, as do the histories of Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Barry.[611]

The records of the colony, as I have frequently had occasion to observe, afford the richest materials for the colony’s history, and never more so than in regard to the trials which the colony experienced from the period following the Restoration to the time of Dudley and Andros. The story of the visit of the royal commissioners here in 1665 is no where so fully told as there. Indeed, the principal source of the history of Maine and of New Hampshire while they were for many years a component part of the colony of Massachusetts is told in the records of the old Bay State.

During the trouble with the Quakers Massachusetts was afflicted by a wordy controversy, imported from Connecticut, but which did not reach its culminating point till 1662. I refer to the “Half-way Covenant,” for the discussion of which a council of ministers from both colonies was called in 1657, in Boston, which pronounced in favor of the system in question. A synod of Massachusetts churches in 1662 confirmed the judgment here given, and the Half-way Covenant system prevailed extensively in New England for more than a century. After the synod was dissolved, and the result was published by order of the General Court, the discussion continued, and several tracts were issued from the Cambridge press, pro and con, in 1662, 1663, and 1664.[612] Of Morton’s New England’s Memorial mention has already been made in the preceding chapter, as it concerns[360] chiefly the Plymouth Colony. It contains, however, many things of interest about Massachusetts; recording the death of many of her worthies, and embalming their memories in verse. It ends with the year 1668, with a notice of the death of Jonathan Mitchel, the minister of Cambridge, and of that of John Eliot, Jr., the son of the apostle, at the age of thirty-two years. There are five unpaged leaves after “finis,” containing “A Brief Chronological Table.”

There was printed in London in 1674 An Account of Two Voyages to New England, by John Josselyn, Gent., a duodecimo volume of 279 pages. This author and traveller was a brother of Henry Josselyn, of Black Point, or Scarborough, in Maine, and they are said to have been sons of Sir Thomas Josselyn, of Kent, knight. John came to New England in 1638, and landed at Noddle’s Island, and was a guest of Samuel Maverick; thence he went to Scarborough, stayed with his brother till the end of 1639, and then returned home. In 1663 he came over again, and stayed till 1671; and then went home and wrote this book. His own observations are valuable, but his history is often erroneous. He frequently cites Johnson. At the end of his book is a chronological table running back before the Christian era. His New England’s Rarities, published in 1672, giving an account of the fauna and flora of the country, has been reprinted with notes in the American Antiquarian Society’s Transactions, vol. iv., edited by Edward Tuckerman.[613]

The interest of John Ogilby’s large folio on America is almost solely a borrowed one, so far as concerns New England history, arising from the use he made of Wood, Johnson, and Gorges.[614]

The modern student will find a very interesting series of successive bulletins, as it were, of the sensations engendered by the progress of the Indian outbreak of 1675-76, known as “Philip’s War,” and of the events as they occurred, in a number of tracts, mostly of few pages, which one or more persons in Boston sent to London to be printed. They are now among the choicest rarities of a New England library.[615] It was to make an answer[361] to one of these tracts that Increase Mather hastily put together and printed in Boston,[616] in 1676, his Brief History of the War, which was reprinted in London in the same year.[617] The year after (1677) the war closed,[618] Foster, the new Boston printer, also printed William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians, which likewise came from the London press the same year with a changed title, The Present State of New England, being a Narrative, etc.,—a book not, however, confined to Philip’s War, but going back, as the Boston title better showed, over the whole series of the conflicts with the natives.[619]

[362]

In the year 1679 it became known to the members of the General Court that the Rev. William Hubbard, of Ipswich, had compiled a History of New England, and in June of that year they ordered that the Governor and four other persons be a committee “to peruse the same,” and make return of their opinion thereof by the next session, in order “that the Court may then, as they shall then judge meet, take order for the impression thereof.” Two years afterward, in October, the Court thankfully acknowledged the services of Mr. Hubbard in compiling his History, and voted him fifty pounds in money, “he transcribing it fairly into a book that it may be the more easily perused.” There was no further movement made for the printing of the volume. The transcript made agreeably to this order is now in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The preface and some leaves of the text are wanting. This was by far the most important history of New England which had then been written. The compiler had the benefit of Bradford’s History and Winthrop’s Journal, though, after the fashion of the time, he makes no mention of them, only acknowledging in a general way his indebtedness to “the original manuscripts of such as had the managing of those affairs under their hands.” The manuscript was first printed in 1815 by the Massachusetts Historical Society; and a second edition, “collated with the original MS.,” was printed in 1848.[620]

The history of the struggles of the colony to maintain its charter during the period immediately preceding the loss of it is largely told in the pages of its records, and in a large mass of documents published in Hutchinson’s volume of Papers, and cited in Chalmers’ Annals and in Palfrey’s New England. Reference may also be made to a paper by the present writer in vol. i. of Memorial History of Boston, on this struggle to maintain the charter.

The history of the Dudley and Andros administrations may be gathered from numerous publications which came from the press just after the Revolution; and, without mentioning their titles, I cannot do better than refer to them as published in three volumes by the Prince Society of Boston, called the Andros Tracts, edited with abundant notes by William H. Whitmore.[621] Palfrey’s History should be read in connection with these memorials. The original papers of the “Inter-charter Period” are largely wanting, though some volumes of the Massachusetts Archives are so entitled.[622]

As materials for the history of the State it should be remembered that there are many town histories which contain matter of more than mere local interest. The history of the town of Boston is in a great degree the history of the colony and State, and the several histories of that town, notably those by Caleb H. Snow (to 1825) and Samuel G. Drake (to 1770), and the Description of N. B. Shurtleff,[623] may be specially mentioned; while the recently published Memorial History of Boston, edited by Mr. Justin Winsor, is indispensable to any student who wishes to know a large part of the story of Massachusetts.[624][363] The History of Salem, by Dr. J. B. Felt, gives many documents of the first importance relating to the settlement of that ancient town, where the colony had its birth; and the same writer’s Customs of New England, Boston, 1853, has a distinctive value.

The Bibliography of the Local History of Massachusetts, by Jeremiah Colburn, Boston, 1871, a volume of 119 pages, deserves a place in every New England library,[625] and it may be supplemented by the brief titles included in Mr. F. B. Perkins’s Check List of American History.[626] There is a good list of local histories in the Brinley Catalogue, no. 1,558, etc. The Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts, by the late Emory Washburn, is a most important book for that phase of the subject.

Maine.[627]—The documentary history of Maine properly begins with the grant to Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The previous operations under the Laconia Company were partly, as we have seen, on the territory of Maine, while in part also their history is preserved in the archives of New Hampshire.[628]

The patent issued to Gorges at the general division, in 1635, of the territory which he named “New Somersetshire,” is not extant. An organization, as we have already said, took place under this grant, and a few records are extant in manuscript.[629]

The royal charter of Maine, dated April 3, 1639, was transcribed into a book of records of the Court of Common Pleas and Sessions for the county of York, and, with the commissions to the officers, has been printed by Sullivan in his History of Maine, Boston, 1795, Appendix No. 1.

The first government organized under the charter[630] was in 1640, and the manuscript records are also at Alfred with the commissions to the officers. Extracts from the records were made by Folsom, as above, pp. 53-57. After the submission of Maine to Massachusetts in 1653, courts were held at York under the authority of the latter. Afterward, when the royal commissioners came over and went into Maine, a portion of the inhabitants were encouraged to rebel against the authority of Massachusetts, and courts were[364] temporarily set up under a commission from Sir Robert Carr. Some records of their doings exist.[631]

AUTOGRAPHS.

[Mason was the proprietor of New Hampshire. Mr. C. W. Tuttle was engaged at his death on a memoir of Mason, upon whom he delivered addresses, reported in the Boston Advertiser, June 22, 1871, and Boston Globe, April 4, 1872. Garde was the mayor of Gorgeana. Thomas Gorges was the deputy-governor of Maine.—Ed.]

The Records of Massachusetts for the years 1652-53 show the official relations which existed between the two colonies. The State-paper offices of England contain a large quantity of manuscripts illustrating the claims of Ferdinando Gorges, the grandson of the original proprietor; and the principal part of these may be seen either in abstracts, or at full length in Folsom’s Catalogue of Original Documents[632] relating to Maine (New York, 1858), prepared by the late H. G. Somerby.[633] Many of these papers may also be found in Chalmers’ Annals, 1780, who had great facilities for consulting the public offices in England.[634]

Of general histories of Maine, the earliest was that of James Sullivan, entitled The History of the District of Maine, Boston, 1795, the territory having been made a Federal district in 1779. Judge Sullivan was too busy a man to write so complicated a history as that of Maine; and he fell into some errors, and came short of what would be expected of a writer at the present day. He was one of the founders and at that time president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and doubtless felt the obligation to do some such work. The next important History of Maine is that of Judge William D. Williamson, published at Hallowell, 1832, in two volumes. This contains a vast amount of material indispensable to the student; but there are serious errors in the work, made known by the discovery of new matter since its publication. In 1830 there was published at Saco, Maine, a small 12º volume, by George Folsom,[635] called History of Saco and Biddeford,[365] with Notices of other Early Settlements, etc. Although a history of two comparatively small towns, now cities, yet they were early settlements; and the author, who had a faculty for history, made his work the occasion of writing a brief but authentic sketch of the history of Maine under all her multiform governments and varying fortunes. It was the best town history then written in New England, as it was also the best history of the Province of Maine..

I might mention a volume of Sketches of the Ecclesiastical History of Maine from the Earliest Period, by the Rev. Jonathan Greenleaf of Wells, published at Portsmouth, 1821.

In 1831-33 William Willis published his History of Portland, in two parts. The work embraced also sketches of several other towns, and it was prefaced by an account of the early patents and settlements in Maine; while the second edition, issued in 1865, is yet more full on the general history of the province.

There are other valuable town histories, and I cannot do better than refer the reader to Mr. William Willis’s “Descriptive Catalogue of Books relating to Maine,” in Norton’s Literary Letter, No. 4, for 1859, and as enlarged in Historical Magazine, March, 1870.[636]

The Collections of the Maine Historical Society,[637] in eight volumes, contain a large amount of material which illustrates this early period. The first volume was issued in 1831, and in fact forms the first part of Willis’s History of Portland. The Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and especially vol. vii. of the fourth series, should be cited as of special interest here.

The Relation of the Council for New England, the narratives in Purchas, Winthrop’s Journal, Hubbard’s Indian Wars, and that author’s History of New England and the Two Voyages of Josselyn, have already been referred to, and they should be again noted in this place, as should Dr. Palfrey’s History of New England especially. Gorges’ Briefe Narration, 1658, is most valuable as coming from the original proprietor himself. Its value is seriously impaired by its want of chronological order and of dates, and by its errors in date. In what condition the manuscript was left by its author, and to what extent the blemishes of the work are attributable to the editor or the printer, can never be known. Sir Ferdinando died in May, 1647. The work was written not long before his death, and was published some twelve years afterward, with two compilations by his grandson and the sheets of Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence.[638] Notwithstanding its blemishes, the[366] tract has great value; but it should be read in connection with other works which furnish unquestionable historical data.

The Memorial Volume of the Popham Celebration, Aug. 20, 1862 (Portland, 1862), contains a good deal of historical material; but a large part of it was, unfortunately, prepared under a strong theological and partisan bias. In its connection with the settlement at Sabino, it has been mentioned in an earlier chapter.

A valuable historical address was delivered at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, Nov. 4, 1876, by Joshua L. Chamberlain, President of Bowdoin College, entitled Maine, Her Place in History, and was published in Augusta in 1877.

New Hampshire.—New Hampshire was probably first settled by David Thomson, in the spring of 1623. The original sources of information concerning him are the Records of the Council for New England; a contemporaneous indenture, 1622, recently found among the Winthrop Papers, and since published; Winslow’s Good News, London, 1624, p. 50; Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, p. 154; Hubbard’s New England, pp. 89, 105, 214, 215; Levett’s Voyage[639] to New England in 1623/24; Pratt’s Narrative, in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., iv. 486, and Gorges’ Briefe Narration, p. 37. All these authorities are summarized by the present writer in a note, on page 362 of Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., May, 1876, to a paper on “David Thomson and the Settlement of New Hampshire.”

For the settlement of the Hiltons on Dover Neck, and for the later history of the town, see Records of the Council; Hubbard; a Paper on David Thomson in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., as above; 1 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. 63; Provincial Papers of New Hampshire, i. 118, and the authorities (A. H. Quint and others) there cited; cf. Mr. Hassam’s paper in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., January, 1882, p. 40; Winthrop’s Journal, i. 276.

For the doings of the Laconia Company, and the settlement of Portsmouth, see Belknap’s New Hampshire, who errs respecting the Laconia patent and the date of the operations of the Company; Hubbard as above; Provincial Papers, where the extant Laconia documents are printed at length; Jenness’s Isles of Shoals, 2d ed., New York, 1875, and his privately printed (1878) Notes on the First Planting of New Hampshire; the paper on David Thomson, as above; Adams’s Annals of Portsmouth; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., ii. 37.

For the history of the settlements of Exeter and Hampton see Belknap, as above; and cf. Farmer’s edition, who holds to the forgery of the Wheelwright deed of 1629; Provincial Papers as above, pp. 128-153. For a discussion of the genuineness of the Wheelwright deed, it will be sufficient, perhaps, to refer to Mr. Savage’s argument against it in Winthrop’s Journal, i. Appendix, which the present writer thinks unanswerable, and Governor C. H. Bell’s able defence of it in the volume of the Prince Society on John Wheelwright.[640]

[367]

Concerning the several patents issued by the Council to cover the territory of New Hampshire, or parts of it, which afterward appeared in history, one was made to John Mason, of Nov. 7, 1629, of territory between the Merrimac and Piscataqua, which, “with consent of the Council, he intends to name New Hampshire” (Mason was governor of Portsmouth co. Hants). This grant[641] was printed in Hazard, vol. i., from “New Hampshire files,” and is in Provincial Papers, i. 21. The Laconia grant of Nov. 17, 1629, to Gorges and Mason, was the basis of a trading company, as we have already seen, and those associates took out a new patent, Nov. 3, 1631, of land near the mouth of the Piscataqua. The Laconia patent is in Massachusetts Archives, and is printed in Provincial Papers, i. 38. The second grant is printed in Jenness’s Notes, above cited, Appendix ii. Hilton’s patent of Dover Neck, or wherever it may have extended, of March 12, 1629/30, is cited in the Council Records, and is printed in extenso in Jenness’s Notes, Appendix i., which also should be read for a discussion relative to its boundaries.[642] At the grand division in 1635 Mason had assigned to him the territory between Naumkeag and Piscataqua, dated April 22, “all which lands, with the consent of the Counsell, shall from henceforth be called New Hampshire.” Hazard (i. 384) printed the grant from the “records of the Province of Maine,” and it is also printed in Provincial Papers, i. 33. Mason never improved this grant. All his operations in New Hampshire, or Piscataqua, as the place was called, was as a member of the unfortunate Laconia Company. He died soon after this last grant was issued, and bequeathed the property ultimately to his grandchildren John and Robert Tufton, whose claims were used to annoy the settlers on the soil who had acquired a right to their homesteads by long undisputed possession.[643]

After the union of the New Hampshire towns with Massachusetts, their history forms part of the history of that colony, and the General Court Records may be consulted for information. John S. Jenness’s Transcripts of Original Documents in the English Archives relating to New Hampshire, privately printed, New York, 1876, is a volume of great value. An early map of Maine and New Hampshire, of about the period of 1655, is prefixed to the book. The Appendix to Belknap’s New Hampshire also contains documents of great value. The Collections of the New Hampshire Historical Society, consisting of eight volumes, 1824-1866, are rich in material relating to the State; and the three volumes of Collections published by Farmer and Moore,[644] 1822-1824, in semi-monthly and[368] then in monthly numbers, should not be overlooked; nor should the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Of the general histories, that of Dr. Belknap is the first and the only considerable History of New Hampshire, Philadelphia and Boston, 1784-92, 3 vols. The work early acquired the name of “the elegant History of New Hampshire,” which it deserved. As a writer, Dr. Belknap’s style was simple and “elegant.” Perhaps after Franklin he was the best writer of English prose which New England had produced; and there has been since little improvement upon him. He had the true historical spirit, and was a good investigator.[645] He fell into an error respecting some of the early grants of New Hampshire, and the early part of his History needs revision. He probably never doubted the genuineness of the Wheelwright deed; but John Farmer, the editor of a new edition (1831) of his work, believed that document to be a forgery, and made his book to conform to this idea, though other errors were not corrected. Palfrey’s New England is of the first authority here after Belknap.[646]

Connecticut.—“Quinni-tuk-ut, ‘on long river,’—now Connecticut,—was the name of the valley, or lands on both sides of the river. In one early deed (1636) I find the name written Quinetucquet; in another of the same year, Quenticutt.”[647]

The name “Connecticut,” as designating the country or colony on the river of that name, was used by Massachusetts in their commission of March 3, 1635/36,[648] and it was early adopted by the colonists.[649]

Quinnipiac,—the Indian name of New Haven, written variously, and by President Stiles, on the authority of an Indian of East Haven, Quinnepyooghq,—is probably “longwater place.”[650] The name New Haven was substituted by the Court Sept. 5, 1640.[651]

The first English settlement was made by the Plymouth people at Windsor in October, 1633, when they sent out a barque with materials for a trading-house, and set it up there against the remonstrances of the Dutch, who had themselves established a trading-house at Hartford some time before.[652] The history of this business is well told by Bradford[369] (pp. 311-314), with whose narrative compare Winthrop (pp. 105, 181) and Hubbard (pp. 170, 305 et seq.).

The story of the settlement of the three towns on the Connecticut River by emigrants from Massachusetts is told by Winthrop, passim, and by Trumbull; and the Records of Massachusetts show the orders passed in relation to their removal, and define their political status during the first year of the settlement, and indeed to a later period. The Connecticut Colonial Records give abundant information as to their political relations until the arrival of the Winthrop charter of 1662, when, after some demurring on the part of New Haven, the two small jurisdictions were merged into one.[653] A spirited letter from Mr. Hooker to Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts, written in 1638, disclosing his suppressed feelings towards some in the Bay Colony for alleged factious opposition to the emigration to Connecticut, may be seen in Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 3-18. What is called the original Constitution of Connecticut, adopted by the three towns Jan. 14, 1638/39, may be seen in the printed Colonial Records, i. 20-25.[654]

The story of John Winthrop’s second arrival from England, in October, 1635, with a commission from Lord Say and Sele, and Lord Brook and others, and with £2,000 in money, to begin an independent settlement and erect a fortification near the mouth of the Connecticut River, and to be governor there for one year, is told in Winthrop’s Journal (i. 170, 173); and is repeated in full by Trumbull, vol. i. Possession was taken in the following month. The patent to Lord Say and others, which was the basis of this movement, is known as the “old patent of Connecticut,” and may be seen, with Winthrop’s commission, in Trumbull’s History, vol. i., both editions. It purports to be a personal grant from the Earl of Warwick, then the President of the Council for New England, bearing date March 19, 1631 (1632 N.S.). Although the authority by which the grant is made is not given in the document itself, as is usually the case, it has been confidently asserted that the Earl of Warwick had received the previous year a patent for the same territory from the Council for New England, which was subsequently confirmed by the King.[655] The grant was interpreted to convey all the territory lying west of the Narragansett River, one hundred and twenty miles on the Sound, thence onward to the South Sea.[656]

[370]

The first and second agreements with Fenwick, the agent of the proprietors, dated Dec. 5, 1644, and Feb. 17, 1646, were first printed by Trumbull.[657] The account of Fenwick’s[371] arrival in the colony, in 1639, with his family, and his settlement, and the naming of Saybrook, may be seen in Winthrop.[658]

The “Capital Laws,” established by Connecticut, Dec. 1, 1642, the first “Code of Laws,” and the court orders, judgments, and sentences of the General and Particular Courts, from 1636 to 1662, are printed in Connecticut Colonial Records.[659]

The contemporaneous accounts of the Pequot War have already been mentioned under “Massachusetts.” What relates specially to Connecticut is largely told in the Colonial Records. Mason’s narrative is by far the best of the original accounts which have been published. The dispute with Massachusetts respecting the division of the conquered territory; the allotments of the same to the soldiers; the account of the younger Winthrop’s settlement in the Pequot country, and his claim to the Nehantick country by an early gift of Sashions, not allowed by the United Colonies,—may be seen in the records of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and in the records of the United Colonies.[660]

The account of the settlement of New Haven by emigrants from Massachusetts—indirectly from the city of London,—in 1638; of their purchases of lands from the natives, and of the formation of their government,—church and civil,—may be seen in Winthrop,[661] and in New Haven Colonial Records.[662]

The Fundamental Articles, or Original Constitution, of the Colony of New Haven, June 4, 1639, which continued in force till 1665, was printed in Trumbull’s History, vol. i., in 1797, in Appendix, no. iv., as also in the later edition, and in the Colonial Records, i. 11-17, in which volume the legislative and judicial history of the colony is recorded for many years. The orders of the General Court, the civil and criminal trials before the Court of Magistrates, with the evidence spread out on the pages of the record, and the sentences following, being, in criminal cases, based on the Laws of Moses, furnish an unpleasant exhibition; perhaps not more so, however, than other primitive colonies would have shown if their record of crimes had been as well preserved. From April, 1644, to May, 1653, the Records of New Haven jurisdiction are lost.

What is known as Governor Eaton’s[663] Code of Laws was sent to London to be printed under the supervision of Governor Hopkins, who had returned to England a few years before; and an edition of five hundred copies appeared in 1656, under the title of New Haven’s Settling in New England, etc. The code was first reprinted by Mr. Royal R. Hinman, at Hartford, in 1838, in a volume entitled The Blue Laws of New Haven Colony,[372] usually called Blue Laws of Connecticut, Quaker Laws of Plymouth and Massachusetts, etc.; and again, in 1858, at the end of the second volume of New Haven Records, from a rare copy in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society.[664] The “Articles of Confederation”[373] of the United Colonies of 1643, whose records are a mine of history in themselves, were prefixed to this code, and were here printed for the first time. The Records were first printed by Hazard in 1794, from the Plymouth copy, and they have more recently been reprinted by the State of Massachusetts in a volume of the Plymouth Records. Each colony had a copy of those records, but the only ones preserved are those of Plymouth and of Connecticut. The latter, containing some entries wanting in the former, are printed at the end of vol. iii. of the Connecticut Colonial Records.

The Quakers gave little disturbance to either of these colonies. While the people in Connecticut were divided with the “Half-Way Covenant” controversy, the Quakers, in July, 1656, made their appearance in Boston. The United Colonies recommended the several jurisdictions to pass laws prohibiting their coming, and banishing those who should come. Connecticut and New Haven took the alarm, and acted upon the advice given. New Haven subsequently increased the penalties at first prescribed, yet falling short in severity of the legislation of Massachusetts.[665]

The territorial disputes of Connecticut and New Haven with the Dutch at Manhados, which began early and were of long continuance, find abundant illustration in Trumbull’s History of Connecticut, and in Brodhead’s History of New York, and in the documentary history, of which the materials were procured by Brodhead, but arranged by O’Callaghan.[666]

The records of the two colonies show the ample provision made for public schools, and indicate a project entertained by New Haven as early as 1648 to found a college,—a scheme not consummated, however, till a later period.

The Winthrop charter of 1662, which united the two colonies, is in Hazard, ii. 597, taken from a printed volume of Charters, London, 1766. It had been printed at New London in 1750, in a volume of Acts and Laws, and is in a volume by Samuel Lucas, London, 1850. The charter bears date April 23, 1662. In an almanac of John Winthrop, the younger, for the year 1662, once temporarily in my possession, and now belonging to the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, I noticed this manuscript note of the former owner, which I copied: “This day, May 10, in the afternoon, the Patent for Connecticut was sealed.” The orders, instructions, and correspondence relating to the procuring of this charter are printed in the Colonial Records, text and Appendix, and in Trumbull, vol. i., text and Appendix.[667]

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The Restoration brought its anxieties as well as its blessings. The story of the shelter afforded to the regicides Whalley and Goffe, by New Haven, is an interesting episode. Dr. Stiles’s volume, A History of the Three Judges [including Colonel Dixwell] of King Charles I., etc. (Hartford, 1794), is a minute collection of facts, though not always carefully weighed and analyzed.[668]

The granting of the royal charter of 1662, which was followed next year by that to Rhode Island, brought on the long controversy with that colony as to the eastern boundary of Connecticut; and the revival of the claim of the heirs of the Duke of Hamilton—a claim more easily disposed of—added to the annoyances. The papers relating to these controversies may be seen in the Colonial Records of Connecticut, ii. 526-554, and of Rhode Island, ii. 70-75, 128.[669]

After the union, the earliest printed Book of General Laws for the People within the Jurisdiction of Connecticut was in 1673,—the code established the year before. It was printed at Cambridge.[670]

COLONIAL SECRETARIES.

[These secretaries held office consecutively: Steele, 1636-39; Hopkins, 1639-40; Wells, 1640-48; Cullick, 1648-58; Clark, 1658-63; Allyn, 1663-65.—Ed.]

The authorities for the history of Philip’s War—so disastrous to Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island, but from which “Connecticut,” says Trumbull, “had suffered nothing in comparison with her sister colonies”—have already been given under the head of “Massachusetts.” Without citing special documents, it may be said that Trumbull’s History of Connecticut and Palfrey’s New England furnish abundant authority from this time down to the conclusion of the government of New England under Andros, and the narrative of each may be referred to as fitting, ample, and trustworthy. Trumbull’s History, as an original authority, may well compare for Connecticut with Hutchinson’s History for Massachusetts. The first volume (1630-1713) was published in 1797; and, although the titlepage to it reads “Vol. I.,” the author says in the Preface to vol. ii., first printed in 1818 (1713-1764), that he never had any design of publishing another volume. The first volume was reprinted in 1818 as a companion to vol. ii.[671]

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The Records of Connecticut for the period embraced in this chapter are abundant, and are admirably edited, with explanatory notes, by Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford, who has done so much to illustrate the history of his State, and indeed of New England.[672] I might add that Dr. Palfrey, in writing the History of New England, often had the benefit of Dr. Trumbull’s learning in illustrating many obscure points in Connecticut history.[673]

The New Haven Colony Records end, of course, with the absorption of that colony by Connecticut. These are well edited, in two volumes (1638 to 1649, and 1653 to 1665), with abundant illustrations in the Appendix, by Charles J. Hoadly, M.A., and were published at Hartford in 1857-58.

The Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society have already been referred to.[674]

The New Haven Colony Historical Society is a separate body, devoted to preserving the memorials of that colony. It has issued three volumes of Papers.[675]

Among the general histories of Connecticut was one by Theodore Dwight, Jr., in Harper’s Family Library, 1840; also another by G. H. Hollister, 2 vols., 1855, and enlarged in 1857. A condensed History of the Colony of New Haven, before and after the Union, by E. R. Lambert, was published at New Haven in 1838; and a more extensive History of the Colony of New Haven to its Absorption into Connecticut, by E. E. Atwater, was published in New Haven in 1881.[676] There are some town histories which, for the early period, have almost the character of histories of the State,—like Caulkins’s Norwich (originally 1845; enlarged 1866, and again in 1874) and New London (1852); Orcutt and Beadsley’s Derby (1642-1880); William Cothren’s Ancient Woodbury, 3 vols., published in 1854-79; H. R. Stiles’s Ancient Windsor, 2 vols., 1859-63. Barber’s Connecticut Historical Collections is a convenient manual for ready reference.[677]

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Rhode Island.[678]—The first published history of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was an Historical Discourse, delivered at Newport in 1738, on the centennial of the settlement of Aquedneck, by John Callender, minister of that place, and printed at Boston the next year.[679]

Twenty-seven years afterward,—that is, in 1765,—there appeared in seven numbers of a newspaper (the Providence Gazette), from January 12 to March 30, “An Historical Account of the Planting and Growth of Providence.” This sketch, written by the venerable Stephen Hopkins, then governor of the State, interrupted by the disastrous occurrences of the times, comes down only to 1645, and remains a fragment.[680]

A Gazeteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island, with maps of each State, was published at Hartford in 1819, in 8º, compiled by John C. Pease and John M. Niles. It furnished for the time a large amount of statistical and historical material. The work gives a geographical sketch of each county, with details of each town, and “embraces notices of population, business, etc., together with biographical sketches of eminent men.”

“Memoirs of Rhode Island” were written by the late Henry Bull, of Newport, in 1832, and published in the Rhode Island Republican (newspaper) of that year.[681] A Discourse embracing the Civil and Religious History of Rhode Island, delivered at Newport, April 4, 1838, by Arthur A. Ross, pastor of a Baptist church at Newport, was published at Providence in the same year, and is full on the history of Newport.

In 1853 there was published in New York an octavo volume of 370 pages, entitled History of Rhode Island, by the Rev. Edward Peterson. “This book abounds in errors, and is of no historical value. It is not a continuous history, but is made up of scraps, without chronological arrangement.”[682]

In 1859 and 1860 was published the History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, by Samuel Greene Arnold, in two volumes,[683]—a work honorable alike to its author and to the State. While Mr. Arnold was writing this history, Dr. Palfrey was engaged upon his masterly History of New England. These writers differed somewhat in their interpretation of historical events and in their estimate of historical personages, and the student of New England history should read them both. The value of these works consists not only in the text or narrative parts, but also in the notes, which for the student, particularly in Dr. Palfrey’s book, contain valuable information, in a small compass, upon the authorities on which the narrative rests.

The late George Washington Greene prepared A Short History of Rhode Island, published in 1877, in 348 pages, which formed an excellent compendium, much needed. It is compiled largely from Mr. Arnold’s work.

“The Early History of Narragansett,” by Elisha R. Potter, was published as vol. iii. of the R. I. Hist. Soc. Coll., in 1835. It is a valuable collection of events, arranged in chronological order, and illustrated by original documents in an appendix.

[377]

“The Annals of the Town of Providence from its First Settlement,” etc., to the year 1832, by William R. Staples, was published, in 1834, as vol. v. of the R. I. Hist. Soc. Coll. The author says that the work does not assume to be a “history;” but it is a valuable and authentic record of events from the time of Roger Williams’s settlement on the banks of the Mooshausic, in 1636, to the year 1832, illustrated by original documents, the whole making 670 pages.

I ought not to omit the mention of several addresses and discourses delivered before the Rhode Island Historical Society, some of which have considerable historical interest, as illustrating the principles on which it is claimed that Rhode Island was founded. Special mention may be made of the Discourse of Judge Pitman, that of Chief Justice Durfee, and that of the late Zachariah Allen.[684]

As Roger Williams is properly held to be the founder of the State of Rhode Island; and as many of his writings had become quite rare, a society was formed in 1865, called the “Narragansett Club,” for the purpose of republishing all his known writings. Vol. i., containing Williams’s Key to the Indian Languages of America, edited by Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull,[685] was issued in 1866; and vol. vi., the concluding volume, in which are collected all the known letters of Williams, in 1874. The volumes were published in quarto form, in antique style, and edited by well-known historical scholars, and are a valuable contribution to the personal history of Roger Williams and to the history of the controversy on religious liberty, of which he was the great advocate.[686]

The earliest publication of any of Williams’s letters was by Isaac Backus, in his History of New England, etc., 1777, 1784, 1796, in three volumes, written with particular reference to the Baptists. It treats largely of Rhode Island history, and is a most authentic work.[687]

A series of Rhode Island Historical Tracts, beginning in 1878, has been issued by Sidney S. Rider, of Providence, each being a monograph on some subject of Rhode Island history. No. 4, on William Coddington in Rhode Island Colonial Affairs, is an unfavorable criticism on the conduct of Coddington in the episode known as “the Usurpation,” by Dr. Henry E. Turner.[688] No. 15, issued in 1882, is a tract of 267 pages, on The Planting and Growth of Providence, by Henry C. Dorr. It is a valuable monograph, and would have been more valuable if authorities had been more freely cited.

One valuable source of the history of Rhode Island is the Records of the colony, and these have been made available for use by publication, under the efficient editorship of the Hon. John Russell Bartlett, for a number of years Secretary of State. To make up for the meagreness of the records in some places, the editor has introduced from exterior sources many official papers, which make good the deficiencies and abundantly illustrate the history of the times. The first volume was issued in 1856, and begins with the “Records of the Settlements at Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick, from their commencement to their union under the Colony Charter, 1636 to 1647.”

The early history of Providence is so intimately interwoven with the life of its founder, that some of the excellent memoirs of Roger Williams may be read with profit as historical[378] works. A Memoir of Williams, by Professor James D. Knowles, was published in 1834, and is a minute and conscientious biography of the man; but it is written with a strong bias in favor of Williams where he comes in collision with the authorities of Massachusetts.

A very pleasant memoir of Williams, by Professor William Gammell, based on that of Knowles, was published in 1845, in Sparks’s American Biography, reissued the next year in a volume by itself. This memoir was followed in 1852 by A Life of Roger Williams, by Professor Romeo Elton, published in England, where the author then lived, and in Providence the next year. This is largely based on Knowles’s memoir, but contains some new matter, notably the Sadlier Correspondence.

The original authorities for Williams’s career in Massachusetts and Plymouth are Winthrop and Bradford and the controversial tracts of Cotton and Williams, from which bits of history may be culled. For a full presentation and discussion of the facts and principles involved in Williams’s banishment from Massachusetts, and his alleged offence to the authorities there, see the late Professor Diman’s Editorial Preface to Cotton’s Reply to Williams, in the second volume of the Narragansett Club, above cited; Dr. George E. Ellis’s Lecture on “The Treatment of Intruders and Dissentients by the Founders of Massachusetts,” in Lowell Lectures, Boston, Jan. 12, 1869; Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter’s As to Roger Williams, etc., Boston, 1876;[689] Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., for February, 1873, pp. 341-358; North American Review for January, 1858, art. xiii. p. 673.

In Dr. John Clarke’s Ill News from New England, London, 1653,[690] being a personal narrative of the treatment, the year before, by the authorities of the Bay Colony, of Obadiah Holmes, John Crandall, and John Clarke, and an account of the laws and ecclesiastical polity of that colony, is a brief account of the settlement of Providence and of the island of Rhode Island.

An important episode in the early history of Rhode Island was the career of Samuel Gorton, who settled the town of Warwick. I have already mentioned, under the head of Massachusetts, the original books in which the story for and against him is told,—Simplicitie’s Defence, written by Gorton, and Hypocracie Unmasked, by Edward Winslow. The former was republished in the R. I. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. ii., in 1835, edited by W. R. Staples, with a preface, notes, and appendix of original papers. Winslow’s book, now very rare, has never been reprinted. A “Life of Samuel Gorton,” by John M. Mackie, was published in 1845 in Sparks’s American Biography. After Nathaniel Morton published his New England’s Memorial, in 1669, containing some reflections on Gorton, the latter wrote a letter to Morton, dated “Warwick, June 30, 1669,” in his own defence. Hutchinson had the letter, and printed an abridgment of it in the Appendix to his first[379] volume. Some forty years ago or less, the original letter came into the possession of the late Edward A. Crowninshield, of Boston, and he allowed Peter Force to print it, and it appears entire in vol. iv. of Force’s Historical Tracts, 1846.

The early settlers of Rhode Island had no patent-claim to lands on which they planted. The consent of the natives only was obtained. Williams’s deed, so called, from the Indians, may be seen in vols. iv. and v. R. I. Hist. Soc. Coll.; and that to Coddington and his friends, of Aquedneck, is also in the Appendix to vol. iv. The parchment charter which Williams obtained from the Parliamentary Commissioners, dated March 14, 1643, is lost, but it had been copied several times, and is printed in vols. ii., iii., and iv., R. I. Hist. Soc. Coll. Some copies are dated erroneously March 17. See Arnold’s Rhode Island, i. 114, note.

For a discussion of the “Narragansett Patent,” so called, issued to Massachusetts, dated Dec. 10, 1643, see Arnold, i. 118-120; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. for February, 1862, pp. 401-406; and June, 1862; pp. 41-77.[691]

The original charter of Charles II., dated July 8, 1663, is extant. It was first printed as prefixed to the earliest digest of laws (Boston, 1719), and has been often reprinted.

The incorporation of Providence plantations under the charter of 1643/44 was delayed for several years, and took place in 1647, when a code of laws was adopted. This code was first printed in 1847, edited by Judge William R. Staples, in a volume entitled The Proceedings of the First General Assembly of “the Incorporation of Providence Plantations,” and the Code of Laws adopted by that Assembly in 1647, with Notes, Historical and Explanatory (64 pages). The original manuscript of these laws is in a volume of the early records in the Secretary of State’s office.

The earliest printed digest of laws, entitled Acts and Laws, was in 1719,—printed at Boston “for John Allen and Nicholas Boone.”[692] In this, the following clause appears as part of a law purporting to have been enacted in March, 1663-64: “And that all men professing Christianity, and of competent estates and of civil conversation, who acknowledge and are obedient to the civil magistrate, though of different judgments in religious affairs (Roman Catholics only excepted), shall be admitted freemen, and shall have liberty to choose and be chosen officers in the colony, both military and civil.” This same clause appears in the four following printed digests named above, and it remained a law of the colony till February, 1783, when the General Assembly formally repealed so much of it as related to Roman Catholics. Rhode Island writers consider it a serious reflection upon the character of the founders of the colony to assert that this clause was enacted at the time indicated; and one writer (Judge Eddy, in Walsh’s Appeal, 2d ed., p. 433) thinks it possible that the clause was inserted in a manuscript copy of the laws sent over to England in 1699, without, of course, being enacted into a law. The clause, it is said, does not exist in manuscript in the archives of the colony, and is not in the manuscript digest of 1708, though Mr. Arnold, History, ii. 492, inadvertently says it is there. If the clause was originally smuggled in among the statutes of Rhode Island at a later period than the date assigned to it (see R. I. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1872-73, p. 64), it was five times formally re-enacted when the several digests named above were submitted by their revising committees, and passed the General Assembly; and it remained a law till 1783.

In 1762, two persons professing the Jewish religion petitioned the Superior Court of the colony to be made citizens. Their prayer was rejected. The concluding part of the opinion of the court is as follows: “Further, by the charter granted to this colony it appears that the free and quiet enjoyment of the Christian religion and a desire of propagating the same were the principal views with which this colony was settled, and by[380] a law made and passed in the year 1663, no person who does not profess the Christian religion can be admitted free of this colony. This Court, therefore, unanimously dismiss this petition, as wholly inconsistent with the first principles upon which the colony was founded and a law of the same now in force” (Arnold, History, ii. 492-495). Arnold says that previous to this decision several Jews and Roman Catholics had been naturalized as citizens by special acts of the General Assembly.

Has there not been a misapprehension as to the bearing of this law or clause disfranchising or refusing to admit to the franchise Roman Catholics and persons not Christians, and as to Roger Williams’s doctrine of religious liberty? The charter of Rhode Island declared that no one should be “molested ... or called in question for any differences of opinion in matters of religion.” The law in question does not relate to religious liberty, but to the franchise. Rhode Island has always granted liberty to persons of every religious opinion, but has placed a hedge about the franchise; and this clause does it. Was it not natural for the founders of Rhode Island to keep the government in the hands of its friends while working out their experiment, rather than to put it into the hands of the enemies of religious liberty? How many shiploads of Roman Catholics would it have taken to swamp the little colony in the days of its weakness? Chalmers (Annals, p. 276) copied his extract of the law in question from the digest of 1730, as per minutes formerly belonging to him in my possession. As an historian where could he seek for higher authority? Indeed, the clause had already been cited by Douglass in his Summary, ii. 83, Boston, 1751; and by the authors of the History of the British Dominions in North America, part i. p. 232, London, 1773. The latter as well as Chalmers omitted the phrase “professing Christianity.” But Chalmers was entirely wrong in his comments upon the clause where he says that “a persecution was immediately commenced against the Roman Catholics.”[693]

THE WINTHROP MAP (Circa 1633).

AMONG the Sloane manuscripts in the British Museum is one numbered “Add: 5,415, G. 3,” whose peculiar interest to the American antiquary escaped notice till Mr. Henry F. Waters sent photographs of it to the Public Library in Boston in 1884, when one of them was laid before the Massachusetts Historical Society by Judge Chamberlain, of that Library (Proceedings, 1884, p. 211). It was of the size of the original, somewhat obscure, and a little deficient on the line where its two parts joined. At the Editor’s request, Mr. Richard Garnett, of the British Museum, procured a negative on a single glass; and though somewhat reduced, the result, as shown in the accompanying fac-simile, is more distinct, and no part is lost.

The map is without date. The topography corresponds in the main with that of the map which William Wood added to his New England’s Prospect (London, 1634), so far as its smaller field corresponds, and suggests the common use of an earlier survey by the two map-makers,—if, indeed, Wood did not depend in part on this present survey. That its observations were the best then made would seem clear from the fact that Governor Winthrop explained it by a marginal key, and added in some places a further description to that given by the draughtsman (as a change in the handwriting would seem to show,—for instance, in the legend on the Merrimac River), if indeed all is not Winthrop’s. Who the draughtsman was is not known. There had been in the colony a man experienced in surveying,—Thomas Graves,—who laid out Charlestown, before Winthrop’s arrival; but he is not known to have remained till the period of the present survey, which, if there has been nothing added to the original draught, was seemingly made as early as that given by Wood. This last traveller left New England, Aug. 15, 1633; and his description of the plantations about Boston at that time, which he professes to make complete, is almost identical with the enumeration on this map, though he gives a few more local names. Wood’s map is dated 1634; but it seems certain that he carried it with him in August, 1633,—a date as late apparently as can be attached to the present draught.

The key added by Winthrop to the north corner of the map reads as follows:—

A: an Iland cont[aining] 100 acres, where the Gouvenr. hathe an orchard & a vineyarde.
B: Mr. Humfryes ferme [farm] house at Sagus [Saugus].
Tenhills: the Gouernrs. ferme [farm] house.
Meadford: Mr. Cradock ferme [farm] house.
C: the Wyndmill}
D: the fforte } at Boston.
E: the Weere

So far as the rivers are laid thus [shaded], they are navigable wth the Tide.

[SCALE.]

Scale of 10: Italian miles
320 pches [perches] to the mile,
not taken by Instrument, but by estimate.

In the north the Merrimac is shown to be navigable to a fall. The stream itself is marked Merimack river; it runnes 100 miles up into the Country, and falles out of a ponde 10 miles broad. It receives the Musketaquit riuer [Concord] just south of the scale. The long island near its mouth is Plum Island, but it is not named. The village of Agawam [Ipswich] is connected by roads [dotted lines] with Sagus [Saugus], Salem, Winesemett, and Meadford, which is called “Misticke” in Wood’s text, but “Meadford” in his map. On Cape Anne peninsula Anasquom is marked. The bay between Marblehead and Marblehead Neck is called Marble Harbour, as by Wood in his map. Nahant is marked, as are also Pulln Point, Deere I., Hogg I., Nottles I. Governor’s Island is marked A., referring to the key. Charlestown is called Char:towne. Spott Ponde flows properly through Malden River, not named, into the Mystic; and Mistick river takes the water of a number of ponds. The modern Horn Pond in Woburn is not shown. The three small ponds near a hill appear to be Wedge Pond and others in Winchester; the main water is Mistick pond, 60 fathoms deepe; horn ponde is the modern Spy Pond; Fresh Pond is called 40 fathom deepe. Their watershed is separated by the Belmont hills, not named, from the valley of the Concord. The villages of Waterton and Newtowne [Cambridge] are marked on the Charls River. The peninsula of Boston shows Beacon Hill, not named, while C and D are explained in the key. Muddy river [Muddy Brook in Brookline] and Stony river [Stony Brook in Roxbury] are correctly placed. Rocksbury and Dorchester appear as villages. Hills are shown on Dorchester Neck, or South Boston. Naponsett river is placed with tolerable correctness. The islands in Boston Harbor are all represented as wooded. The waye to Plimouth, beginning at Dorchester, crosses the Weymouth rivers above Wessaguscus [Wessagussett]. Trees and eminences are marked on Nataskette [Hull], and Cohasset is called Conyhassett. The same sign stands for rocks in the Bay and for Indian villages on the land.

It may be well further to notice that since the printing of this volume A Briefe Discription of New England, 1660, by Samuel Maverick, has likewise been discovered in the British Museum by Mr. Waters, and is printed in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, October, 1884, and in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, January, 1885.—Ed.

EDITORIAL NOTES.

A. Bibliographical.—Rhode Island has been fortunate in its bibliographer. Mr. John Russell Bartlett, the editor of the State’s early Records, issued at Providence, in 1864, his Bibliography of Rhode Island, with Notes, Historical, Biographical, and Critical (150 copies printed). Mr. Bartlett began a “Naval History of Rhode Island” in the Historical Magazine, January, 1870. As the adviser of the late Mr. John Carter Brown in the forming of what is now so widely known as the Carter-Brown Library, and as the cataloguer of its almost unexampled treasures, not only of Rhode Island, but of all American history, Mr. Bartlett has also conferred upon the student of American history benefits equalled in the labors of few other scholars in this department. Mr. Brown erected for himself in his Library a splendid monument. There may exist in the Lenox Library a rival in some departments of Americana, but Mr. Bartlett’s Catalogue of the Providence Collection makes its richness better known. Mr. Brown began his collections early, and was enabled to buy from the catalogues of Rich and Ternaux. The Library is now so complete, and its desiderata are so few and so scarce, that it grows at present [381] but slowly. Mr. Brown, a son of Nicholas Brown, from whom the university in Providence received its name, was born in 1797, and died June 10, 1874. But fifty copies of the two sumptuous volumes (1482-1700) constituting the revised edition of the catalogue (there is a third volume, 1700-1800, in a first edition) have been distributed, and they are the Library’s best history; but those not fortunate enough to have access to them will find accounts of it in the Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1876; Rogers’s Libraries of Providence; N.E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1876; American Journal of Education, xxvii. 237; American Bibliopolist, vi. 77, vii. 91, 228.

The several volumes of the Rhode Island Historical Society, so far as they relate to the period under examination, are noted in the preceding text; but the Society has also issued a volume of Proceedings for the years 1872-1879. Two supplemental publications of the Rhode Island antiquaries have been begun lately,—the Newport Historical Magazine, July, 1880, and the Narragansett Historical Register, July, 1882, James N. Arnold, editor, both devoted to southern Rhode Island.

B. Early Maps of New England.—The cartography of New England in the seventeenth century began with the map of Captain John Smith in 1614 (given in chap. vi.), for we must discard as of little value the earlier maps of Lescarbot and Champlain. The Dutch were on the coast at about the same time, and the best development of their work is what is known as the “Figurative Map” of 1614, which was first made known in the Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 13, and in O’Callaghan’s New Netherland. The part showing New England is figured in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 57. It had certain features which long remained on the maps, and its names became in later maps curiously mixed with those derived from Smith’s map. It gave the Cape Cod peninsula (here, however, made an island) a peculiar triangular shape; it exaggerated Plymouth’s harbor; it ran Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket into one, and divided Long Island into several parts. The marked feature of the interior was the bringing of the Iroquois (Champlain) Lake close down to the salt water, as Champlain had done in his map of 1612, and as he continued to do in his larger map of 1632. Blaeu, in his Atlas of 1635, while he copied the Figurative Map pretty closely, closed the channel which made Cape Cod an island, and gave the “Lacus Irocociensis” a prolongation in the direction of Narragansett Bay. De Laet, in 1630, had worked on much better information in several respects. Cape Cod is much more nearly its proper shape; and he had got such information from the Dutch settlements up the Hudson as enabled him to place Lake Champlain with fair accuracy. A fac-simile of De Laet’s map is given in Vol. IV. chap. ix. Meanwhile the English had enlarged Smith’s plot, as the map given on an earlier page from Alexander and Purchas (Pilgrimes, iii. 853) shows. Champlain’s plotting in 1632 of the great river of Canada could not, of course, have been known to this map-maker of 1624, while Lescarbot’s was.

Pure local work came in with the map which accompanied Wood’s New England’s Prospect, which is called “The south part of New England as it is planted this yeare, 1634.” It only shows the coast from Narragansett Bay to “Acomenticus,” on the Maine shore, with a corresponding inland delineation. Buzzard’s Bay is greatly misshapen; Cape Cod has something of the contemporary Dutch drawing; and, in a rude way, the watercourses lie like huge snakes in contortions upon the land. There are fac-similes of the map in Palfrey, i. 360; Young’s Chronicles of Massachusetts, p. 389, and in other places noted in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 524. Two years later (1636), in Saltonstall’s English version of the atlas of Mercator and Hondius, the English public practically got De Laet’s map; and indeed so late as 1670, the map “Novi Belgii et Novæ Angliæ Delineatio,” which is given alike in Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld and in Ogilby’s America, hardly embodied more exact information. The Hexham English version of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas, intended for the English market, but published in Amsterdam by Hondius and Jannson in 1636 (of which there is a fine copy in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society), in its map of “Nova Anglia,” etc., kept up the commingling of Smith’s plot and names with the present Dutch ones. Blaeu’s of 1635 was the prototype of the chart in Dudley’s Arcano del Mare (1646), of which a fac-simile is given in the preceding chapter.

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NEW ENGLAND, 1650.

This is a reduction of a sketch of a part of a manuscript Map of North America, dated 1650, of which a drawing is given in the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 61. The key is as follows:—

1. Sauvages Hurons.
2. Lac des Iroquois [Lake Champlain].
3. Sauvages Iroquois.
4. Sauvages Malectites.
5. Sauvages Etechemins.
6. Pemicuit [Pemaquid].
7. Pentagouet.
8. Isle des Monts Deserts.
9. Baye de Kinibequi.
10. Sauvages Kanibas.
11. Caskobé [Casco Bay].
12. Pescadoué [Piscataqua].
13. Selem [Salem].
14. Baston [Boston].
15. Nova Anglia.
16. Sauvages Pequatis [Pequods].
17. Plymuth.
18. Cap Malabar.
19. Sauvages Narhicans [Narragansetts].
20. Isle de Bloque [Block Island].
21. Isle de Nantochyte [Nantucket].

For the next twenty years the Dutch plotting was the one in vogue. Visscher, in 1652, disjoined the two principal islands south of Cape Cod, and gave a better shape to that peninsula; but Crane Bay (Plymouth) continued to be more prominent than Boston. The French map of Sanson (1656) so far followed the Dutch as to recognize the claims of “Nouveau Pays Bas” to stretch through Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Plymouth Colony, as shown in the sketch in chap. xi. The old Dutch mistakes and the Dutch names characterize Hendrick Doncker’s Paskaert, in 1659, and other of the Hollanders’ sea-charts of this time. In 1660, François du Creux’s (Creuxius) Historia Canadensis converts into a Latin nomenclature, in a curious jumble, the names of the English, Dutch, and French. This map is given in fac-simile in Shea’s Mississippi, p. 50, and also in Vol. IV. of the present work. The next year (1661) Van Loon’s Pascaerte was based on Blaeu and De Laet, and his Zee-Atlas, though not recognized by Asher, represents the best knowledge of the time. There is a copy in Harvard College Library. There are other maps of Visscher of about this same time, in which Cape Cod becomes as excessively attenuated as it had been too large before.

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NEW ENGLAND, 1680

This follows a manuscript French map preserved in the Depot des Cartes et Plans at Paris, as shown in a sketch by Mr. Poore in the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, iii. 11.

Of the later Dutch charts or maps, the chief place must be given to that in Roggeveen’s Sea-Atlas, which is called in the English version The Burning Fen, and which still insists in calling the Cape Cod peninsula in 1675 a part of “Nieuw Holland,” as does one of Jannson’s of about the same date, in which Smith’s names survive marvellously when those of other towns had long taken their places.[384] A map, La Nouvelle Belgique, covering also New England, and fashioned on one of Jannson’s, is annexed to an article, “Une Colonie Néerlandaise,” by Colonel H. Wauwermans, in the Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Anvers, iv. 173. The Blaeu map, “Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova,” found in the Atlas of 1685, still preserves most of the older Dutch falsities; and that geographer made no one of these errors so conspicuous as he did in making still nearer than before the approach of “Lacus Irocociensis” to Narragansett Bay. A short dotted boundary-line is made to connect them, and he dispelled the old Dutch claim to southeastern New England, by putting “Nieu Engelland” east of this line, and “Nieu Nederlandt” west of it. This map was substantially followed in Allard’s Minor Atlas, of a few years later. A new English cartography sprang up when there came a demand for geographical knowledge, as the events of Philip’s War engaged general attention. The royal geographer Speed issued in 1676 a map of New England and New York in his Prospect; but he seems to have followed Visscher and the other Dutch authorities implicitly, as did Coronelli and Tillemon in the New England parts of their map of Canada issued in 1688. Stevens, in his Bibliotheca Geographica, p. 229, notes an English map of New England and New York, which he supposes to belong to 1690, “sold by T. Bassett, in Fleet Street,” which is seemingly enlarged from so early a Dutch map as De Laet’s of 1625. The text of Josselyn’s Voyages was used as the basis of A Description of New England, which accompanied in folio a folded plate, entitled “Mapp of New England, by John Seller, Hydrographer to the King.” It is without date, but is mentioned in the London Gazette in 1676, and could not have appeared earlier than 1674, when Josselyn’s book was printed. There is a copy in Harvard College Library; and it shows the coast from Casco Bay to New York, with a corresponding interior. These are precisely the bounds in the map which is given in Mather’s Magnalia in 1702, and which seems, in parts at least, to have been drawn from Seller’s. Sabin (Dictionary, vol. xiii. no. 52,629) gives A Description of New England in general, with a Description of the Town of Boston in particular, London, John Seller, 1682, 4º. Seller is also known to have issued a small sketch map in his New England Almanac, 1685 (copy in Harvard College Library); and still another, of which a fac-simile is given in Palfrey’s New England, iii. 489. There is a map (5 x 4½ inches) of New England by Robert Morden in R. Blome’s Present State of his Majesty’s Isles and Territories in America, 1687, p. 210, which is based on Seller’s, and which has been reproduced by the Bradford Club in their Papers concerning the Attack on Hatfield and Deerfield, New York, 1859. A different map, extending to New France and Greenland, is given in the Amsterdam editions of Blome, 1688 and 1715. Hubbard’s map, accompanying his Narrative of the Troubles in New England, 1677, a rude woodcut,—the first attempt at such work in the colony,—extends only to the Connecticut westerly; but northerly it goes far enough to take in the White Hills, which in the London reissue of the map are called “Wine Hills.” This is also given by Palfrey, iii. 155, after the London plate, and further notes upon it will be found in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 328. There is also a detailed delineation of the New England coast in John Thornton’s Atlas Maritimus, 1701-21.

In this enumeration of the maps or charts which give New England, or any considerable part of it, on a scale sufficient for detail, it is thought that every significant draft is mentioned, though some repetitions, particularly by the Dutch, have been purposely omitted.

Modern maps of New England, which indicate the condition of this period, will be found in Palfrey’s New England, vol. i., showing the geography of 1644, and in vol. iii. that of 1689; and in Uhden’s Geschichte der Congregationalisten, Leipsic, 1840.


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CHAPTER X.

THE ENGLISH IN NEW YORK, 1664-1689.

BY JOHN AUSTIN STEVENS.

THE trading spirit is not of itself sufficient to establish successful settlement, and monopolies cannot safely be intrusted with the government of colonies. The experience of the Dutch in the New Netherland established this truth, which later experience has fully confirmed.

Toward the middle of the seventeenth century Holland controlled the carrying trade of the world. Nearly one half of the tonnage of Europe was under her flag. Java was the centre of her East Indian enterprise, Brazil the seat of her West Indian possessions; and the seas between, over which were wafted her fleets, freighted with the rich products of these tropical lands, were patrolled by a navy hardy and brave. Yet it was at the very zenith of her power that her North American colony, which proudly bore the name of the Fatherland, was stripped from the home government at one trenchant blow.

The cause of this misfortune may be found in the weakness of the Dutch settlement compared with the more populous New England communities, which pressed, threatening and aggressive, on its eastern borders. Under the Dutch rule, New Netherland was never in a true sense a colony. Begun as a trading-post in 1621, and managed by the Dutch West India Company, it cannot be said ever to have got beyond leading-strings, and at the time when it fell into the hands of the English its entire population did not exceed seven thousand souls, while the English on its borders numbered not less than fifteen times as many.

Nor did the West India Company seem ever to comprehend that their hold upon the new continent could be maintained only by well-ordered and continuous colonization. Rapidly enriched by their intercourse with the natives of the sunny climes in which they established their strong posts for trade, they seem to have looked for no more from their posts on the North American coast, or to have had further ambition than to secure their share of the trade in furs, in which they were met by the active rivalry and greater enterprise of the French settlers on the Canadian frontier.

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Yet the territory of New Netherland was by natural configuration the key of the northern frontier of the American colonies, and indeed, it may be said, of the continent. The courses of the Hudson and Mohawk form the sides of a natural strategic triangle, and with the system of northern lakes and streams connect the several parts of the broad surface which stretches from the mouth of the St. Lawrence on the Atlantic to the headwaters of the Columbia at the continental divide. This vantage-ground at the head of the great valleys through which water-ways give access to the regions on the slope below, was the chosen site of the formidable confederacy of the Iroquois, the acknowledged masters of the native tribes.

The English jealousy of the Dutch did not spring from national antipathy, but from the rivalry of trade. The insular position of England forced her to protect herself abroad, and when Protestant Holland, by enterprise and skill, drew to herself the commerce of both the Indies, her success aroused in England the same spirit of opposition, the same animosity, which had, the century before, been awakened by the aggrandizement of Catholic Spain. It was the Protestant Commonwealth of England which passed the Navigation Act of 1660, especially directed against the foreign trade of her growing rival of the same religious faith. In this act may be found the germ of the policy of England not only toward her neighbors, but also toward her colonies. This act was maintained in active force after the restoration of Charles II. to the throne. Strictly enforced at home, it was openly or secretly evaded only in the British American colonies and plantations. The arm of England was long, but her hand lay lightly on the American continent. The extent of coast and frontier was too great to be successfully watched, and the necessities of the colonies too many and imperious for them to resist the temptation to a trade which, though illicit, was hardly held immoral except by the strictest constructionists of statute law; and it was with the Dutch that this trade was actively continued by their English neighbors of Maryland and Virginia, as well as by those of New England. In 1663 the losses to the revenue were so extensive that the farmers of the customs, who, after the fashion of the period, enjoyed a monopoly from the King at a large annual personal cost, complained of the great abuses which, they claimed, defrauded the revenue of ten thousand pounds a year. The interest of the kingdom was at stake, and the conquest of the New Netherland was resolved upon.

This was no new policy. It had been that of Cromwell, the most sagacious of English rulers, and was only abandoned by him because of the more immediate advantages secured by his treaty with the Grand Pensionary, a statesman only second to Oliver himself. The expedition which Cromwell had ordered was countermanded, and the Dutch title to the New Netherland was formally recognized by the treaty of 1654. It seems rational to suppose that the English Protector foresaw the inevitable future fall of the Dutch-American settlement, hemmed in by growing English colonies[387] fostered by religious zeal, and that he was willing to wait till the fruit was ripe and of easy grasp to England.

It is the fashion of historians to ascribe the seizure of the New Netherland to the perfidy of Charles; but the policy of kingdoms through successive administrations is more homogeneous than appears on the surface. The diplomacy of ministers is usually traditional; the opportunity which seems to mark a change is often but an incident in the chain. That which presented itself to Clarendon, Charles’s Lord Chancellor, was the demand made by the States-General that the boundary line should be established between the Dutch and English possessions in America. Consent on the part of Charles would have been a ratification of Cromwell’s recognition of 1654. This demand of the Dutch Government, made in January, 1664, close upon the petition of the farmers of the customs of December, 1663, precipitated the crisis. The seizure of New Amsterdam and the reduction of New Netherland was resolved upon. Three Americans who happened to be in London,—Scott, Baker, and Maverick,—were summoned before the Council Board, when they presented a statement of the title of the King, the intrusion of the Dutch, and of the condition of the settlement. The Chancellor held their arguments to be well grounded, and on the 29th of February an expedition was ordered “against the Dutch in America.” The demand of the Holland Government was no doubt stimulated by the intrigues of Sir George Downing, who had been Cromwell’s ambassador at the Hague, and was retained by Charles as an adroit servant. A nephew of the elder Winthrop and a graduate from Harvard, Downing appears to have determined upon the acquisition by England of the Dutch provinces, which were held by the New England party to be a thorn in the side of English American colonization. The expedition determined upon, Scott was sent back to New England with a royal commission to enforce the Navigation Laws. The next concern of the Chancellor was to secure to the Crown the full benefit of the proposed conquest. He was as little satisfied with the self-rule of the New England colonies as with the presence of Dutch sovereignty on American soil; and in the conquest of the foreigner he found the means to bring the English subject into closer dependence on the King.

James Duke of York, Lord High Admiral, was the heir to the crown. He had married the daughter of Edward Hyde, the Chancellor of the kingdom, who now controlled its foreign policy. A patent to James as presumptive heir to the crown, from the King his brother, would merge in the crown; and a central authority strongly established over the territory covered by it might well, under favorable circumstances, be extended over the colonies on either side which were governed under limitations and with privileges directly secured by charter from the King. In this adroit scheme may be found the beginning in America of that policy of personal rule, which, begun under the Catholic Stuart, culminated under the Protestant Hanoverian, a century later, in the oppression which aroused the[388] American Revolution. The first step taken by Clarendon was the purchase of the title conveyed to the Earl of Stirling in 1635 by the grantees of the New England patent. This covered the territory of Pemaquid, between the Saint Croix and the Kennebec, in Maine, and the Island of Matowack, or Long Island. The Stirling claim had been opposed and resisted by the Dutch; but Stuyvesant, the Director of New Netherland, had in 1650 formally surrendered to the English all the territory south of Oyster Bay on Long Island and east of Greenwich on the continent. A title being thus acquired by the adroitness of Clarendon, a patent was, on the 12th of March, 1664, issued by Charles II. to the Duke of York, granting him the Maine territory of Pemaquid, all the islands between Cape Cod and the Narrows, the Hudson River, and all the lands from the west side of the Connecticut to the east side of Delaware Bay, together with the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The inland boundary was “a line from the head of Connecticut River to the source of Hudson River, thence to the head of the Mohawk branch of Hudson River, and thence to the east side of Delaware Bay.” The patent gave to the Duke of York, his heirs, deputies, and assigns, “absolute power to govern within this domain according to his own rules and discretions consistent with the statutes of England.” In this patent the charter granted by the King to the younger John Winthrop in 1662 for Connecticut, in which it was stipulated that commissioners should be sent to New England to settle the boundaries of each colony, was entirely disregarded. The idea of commissioners for boundaries now developed with larger scope, and the King established a royal commission, consisting of four persons recommended by the Duke of York, whose private instructions were to reduce the Dutch to submission and to increase the prerogatives of the Crown in the New England colonies, which Clarendon considered to be “already well-nigh ripened to a commonwealth.”

Three of these commissioners were officers in the Royal army,—Colonel Richard Nicolls, Sir Robert Carr, Colonel George Cartwright. The fourth was Samuel Maverick, an earnest adherent of the Church of England and bitter enemy of Massachusetts, in which colony he had passed his early manhood. These commissioners, or any three or two of them,—Nicolls always included,—were invested with full power in all matters, military and civil, in the New England colonies. To Colonel Nicolls the Duke of York entrusted the charge of taking possession of and governing the vast territory[389] covered by the King’s patent. To one more capable and worthy the delicate trust could not have been confided. He was in the fortieth year of a life full of experience, of a good Bedfordshire family, his father a barrister of the Middle Temple. He had received an excellent education. When, at the age of nineteen, the Civil War broke out, he at once joined the King’s forces, and, obtaining command of a troop of horse, clung persistently to the Royal cause. Later, he served on the Continent with the Duke of York in the army of Turenne. At the Restoration he was rewarded for his fidelity with the post of Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke, to whose interests he devoted himself with loyalty, prudence, and untiring energy. His title under the new commission was that of Deputy-Governor; the tenure of his office, the Duke’s pleasure.[694]

The English Government has never been scrupulous as to method in the attainment of its purposes, justification being a secondary matter. When the news of the gathering of the fleet reached the Hague, and explanation was demanded of Downing as to the truth of the reports that it was intended for the reduction of the New Netherland, he boldly insisted on the English right to the territory by first possession. To a claim so flimsy and impudent only one response was possible,—a declaration of war. But the Dutch people at large had little interest in the remote settlement, which was held to be a trading-post rather than a colony, and not a profitable post at best. The West India Company saw the danger of the situation, but its appeals for assistance were disregarded. Its own resources and credit were unequal to the task of defence. Meanwhile the English fleet, composed of one ship of thirty-six, one of thirty, a third of sixteen, and a transport of ten guns, with three full companies of the King’s veterans,—in all four hundred and fifty men, commanded by Colonels Nicolls, Carr, and Cartwright,—sailed from Portsmouth for Gardiner’s Bay on the 15th of May. On the 23d of July Nicolls and Cartwright reached Boston, where they demanded military aid from the Governor and Council of the Colony. Calling upon Winthrop for the assistance of Connecticut, and appointing a rendezvous at the west end of Long Island, Nicolls set sail with his ships and anchored in New Utrecht Bay, just outside of Coney Island, a spot since historical as the landing-place of Lord Howe’s troops in 1776. Here Nicolls was joined by militia from New Haven and Long Island. The city of New Amsterdam was at once cut off from all communication with the shores opposite, and a proclamation was issued by the commissioners guaranteeing the inhabitants in their possessions on condition of submission. The Hudson being in the control of the English vessels, the little city was defenceless. The Director, Stuyvesant, heard of the approach of the English at Fort Orange (Albany), whither he had gone to quell disturbances with the Indians. Returning in haste, he summoned his council together. The folly of resistance was apparent to all, and after delays, by which the Director-General sought to save something of his dignity, a commission for[390] a surrender was agreed upon between the Dutch authorities and Colonel Nicolls. The capitulation confirmed the inhabitants in the possession of their property, the exercise of their religion, and their freedom as citizens. The municipal officers were continued in their rule. On the 29th of August, 1664, the articles were ratified, and Stuyvesant marched out from Fort Amsterdam, at the head of his little band with the honors of war, and embarked the troops on one of the West India Company’s ships for Holland. Stuyvesant himself remained for a time in the city. The English entered the fort, the Dutch flag was hauled down, the English colors hoisted in its place, and the city passed under English rule. The first act of Nicolls on taking possession of the fort, in which he was welcomed by the civic authorities, was to order that the city of New Amsterdam be thereafter known as New York, and the fort as Fort James, in honor of the title and name of his lord and patron.

At the time of the surrender the city gave small promise of its magnificent future. Its entire population, which did not exceed 1,500 souls, was housed within the triangle at the point of the island, the easterly and westerly sides of which were the East and North Rivers, and the northern boundary a wall stretching across the entire island from river to river. Beyond this limit was an occasional plantation and a small hamlet known as New Haarlem. The seat of government was in the fort. Nicolls now established a new government for the province. A force was sent up the Hudson under Captain Cartwright, which took possession of Fort Orange, the name of which was changed to Albany, in honor of a title of the Duke of York. On his return, Cartwright took possession of Esopus in the same manner (the name of this settlement was later changed to Kingston). The privileges granted to the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were extended to these towns. The volunteers from Long Island and New England were now discharged to their homes.

The effect of the prudent and conciliatory measures of Nicolls, which in the beginning had averted the shedding of a single drop of blood, and now appealed directly to the good sense of the inhabitants, was soon apparent. The fears of the Dutch were entirely allayed, and as no inequality was imposed upon them, they had no reason to regret the change of rule. Their pride was conciliated by the continuance of their municipal authorities, and by the cordial manner in which the new-comers arranged that the Dutch and English religious service should be held consecutively under the same roof,—that of the Dutch church in the fort. Hence when Nicolls, alive to the interests of his master, which could be served only by maintaining the prosperity of the colony, proposed to the chief citizens that instead of returning to Holland, as had been arranged for in the capitulation, they should take the oath of allegiance to the King of Great Britain and of obedience to the Duke of York, they almost without exception, Stuyvesant himself included, accepted the conditions. The King’s authority was thus peaceably and firmly established in the metropolis and in the outlying posts of the province[391] of New York proper, which, by the King’s patent to the Duke, included all the territory east of the Delaware. The commissioners next proceeded to reduce the Dutch settlements on the Delaware, and established their colleague, Carr, in command, always however in subordination to the government of New York. The necessities of their condition, dependent upon trade, brought the Dutch inhabitants into easy subjection. Indeed it seems that though their attachment to the mother country, its laws and its customs, was unabated, the long neglect of their interests by the Holland Government had greatly weakened if not destroyed any active sentiment of loyalty.

The southern boundary established, the commissioners turned to the more difficult task of establishing that to the eastward. The Duke of York’s patent covered all the territory claimed alike by the Dutch and by the Connecticut colony under its charter of 1662,—involving an unsettled controversy. A joint commission finally determined the matter by assigning Long Island to New York, and establishing a dividing line between New York and Connecticut, to run about twenty miles distant eastwardly from the Hudson River. The superior topographical information of the Connecticut commissioners secured the establishment of this line in a manner not intended by the Board at large. The boundary was not ratified by the royal authorities, and was later the source of continual dispute and of endless bad feeling between the two colonies.

Nicolls next settled the rules of the customs, which were to be paid in beaver skins at fixed valuations. Courts were now established,—an English modification of those already existing among the Dutch. These new organizations consisted of a court of assizes, or high court of law and equity. Long Island was divided, after the English manner, into three districts or ridings, in which courts of sessions were held at stated intervals. The justices, sitting with the Governor and his Council once in each year in the Court of Assizes, formed the supreme law-making power, wholly subordinate to the will of the Governor, and, after him, to the approval of the Duke. To this body fell the duty of establishing a code of laws for such parts of the province as still remained under the Dutch forms of government. Carefully examining the statutes of the New England colonies, Nicolls prepared from them a code of laws, and summoning a convention of delegates of towns to meet at Hempstead on Long Island, he submitted it for their approval. These laws, though liberal in matters of conscience and religion, did not permit of the election of magistrates. To this restriction many of the delegates demurred; but Nicolls fell back upon the terms of his commission, and the delegates submitted with good grace. The code thus established is known in jurisprudence as the “Duke’s Laws.” Its significant features were trial by jury; equal taxation; tenure of lands from the Duke of York; no religious establishment, but requirement of some church form; freedom of religion to all professing Christianity; obligatory service in each parish every Sunday; recognition of negro slavery under certain restrictions; and general liability to military duty.

[392]

Next in order came the conforming of the style and manner of the city governments to the custom of England. The Dutch form was abolished, and a mayor, aldermen, and sheriff appointed. The Dutch citizens objected to this change from the habit of their forefathers, but as the preponderance of numbers was given to citizens of their nationality, the objection was not pressed, and the new authorities were quietly inaugurated, if not with acquiescence, at least without opposition or protest. These changes occurred in June, 1665. Thus in less than a single year, in a population the Dutch element of which outnumbered the English as three to one, by the moderation, tact, energy, and remarkable administrative ability of Nicolls, was the conquered settlement assimilated to the English body politic to which it was henceforth to belong, and from the hour of transmutation it was accustomed to look to Great Britain itself for government and protection. Such was the first step in the transition of the seat of the “armed commercial monopoly” of New Amsterdam, through various modifications and changes, to the cosmopolitan city of the present day.

The war which the violent seizure of New Netherland precipitated upon Europe was little felt on the western shores of the Atlantic. There was nothing in New York itself, independently of its territorial situation, to tempt a coup de main. There were “no ships to lose, no goods to plunder.” For nearly a year after the capture no vessel arrived from England with supplies. In the interval the King’s troops slept upon canvas and straw. The entire cost of maintaining the garrison fell upon the faithful Nicolls, who nevertheless continued to build up and strengthen his government, personally disposing of the disputes between the soldiers and settlers at the posts, encouraging settlement by liberal offers to planters, and cultivating friendly relations with the powerful Indian confederacy on the western frontier. While thus engaged in the great work of organizing into a harmonious whole the imperial domain to his charge, which, extending from the Delaware to the Connecticut, with the Hudson as its central artery, was of itself a well rounded and perfect kingdom, he received the disagreeable intelligence that his work of consolidation had been broken by the Duke of York himself. James, deceived as to gravity of the transaction, influenced by friendship, or because of more immediate personal considerations, granted to Carteret and Berkeley the entire territory between the Hudson River on the east, Cape May on the southward, and the northern branch of the Delaware on the west, to which was given the name of Nova Cæsarea or New Jersey. In this grant, however, the Duke of York did not convey the right of jurisdiction; but the reservation not being expressed in the document, the grantees claimed that it also passed to them, an interpretation which received no definitive settlement for a long period.[695]

While the Dutch Government showed no disposition to attempt the[393] recovery of their late American territory by immediate attack, they did not tamely submit to the humiliation put upon them, but strained every nerve to maintain the honor of their flag by sea and land. For them as for the English race, the sea was the natural scene of strife. The first successes were to the English fleet, which, under the command of the Duke of York in person, defeated the Dutch at Lowestoffe, and compelled them to withdraw to the cover of their forts. Alarmed at the triumph of England and at the prospect of a general war, Louis XIV. urged peace upon the States-General, and proposed to the English King an exchange of the territory of New Netherland for the island of Poleron, one of the Banda or Nutmeg Islands, recently taken from the English,—a kingdom for a mess of pottage. But Clarendon rejected the mediation, declining either exchange or restitution in a manner that forced upon the French King a declaration of war. This declaration, issued Jan. 29, 1666, was immediately replied to by England, and the American colonies were directed to reduce the French possessions to the English crown. Here was the beginning of the strife on the American continent which culminated a century later in the conquest of Canada and the final supremacy of the English race on the Western continent.

While the settlers of New England, cut off from the Western country by the Hudson River and the Dutch settlements along its course, and alike from Canada by pathless forests, and in a manner enclosed by races whose foreign tongues rendered intercourse difficult, were rapidly multiplying in number, redeeming and cultivating the soil and laying the foundations of a compact and powerful commonwealth, divided perhaps in form, but one in spirit and purpose, their northern neighbors were no less active under totally different forms of polity. The primary idea of French as of Spanish colonization was the conversion of the heathen tribes. The first empire sought was that of the soul; the priests were the pioneers of exploration. The natives of the soil were to be first converted, then brought, if possible, through this subtile influence into alliance with the home government. This peaceful scheme failing, military posts were to be established at strategic points to control the lakes and streams and places of portage, the highways of Indian travel, and to hold the country subject to the King of France. Unfortunately for the success of this comprehensive plan, there was discord among the French themselves. The French military authorities and the priests were not harmonious either in purpose or in conduct. The Society of Jesus would not subordinate itself to the royal authority. Moreover the Iroquois confederacy of the Five Nations, which held the valley of the Mohawk and the lakes south of Ontario, were not friendly at heart to the Europeans. They had not forgotten nor forgiven the invasion by Champlain; yet, recognizing the value of friendly relations with a power which could supply them with firearms for their contests with the fierce tribes with whom they were at perpetual war, they welcomed the French to dwell among them. French policy had declared itself, even before England made[394] her first move for a consolidation of her power in America. In 1663 the Old Canada Company surrendered its rights to Louis XIV., who at once sent over a Royal Commissary to organize a colonial government. The new administration established by him was not content with the uncertain relations existing with the Iroquois, which the fierce hostility of the Mohawks, the most important and powerful of the confederate tribes, constantly threatened to turn into direct enmity. A policy of conquest was determined upon. An embassy sent by the Iroquois to Montreal to treat for peace in 1664 was coldly received, and the next year the instructions of the French King declared the Five Nations to be “perpetual and irreconcilable enemies of the colony.” Strong military assistance arrived to enforce the new policy, and before the year closed, the Marquis de Tracy, the new viceroy, had erected fortified posts which controlled the entire course of the St. Lawrence. In December four of the confederate tribes,—the Onondagas, Oneidas, Cayugas, and Senecas,—alarmed at this well-ordered progress toward their territory, made submission, and entered into a treaty by which Louis was acknowledged as their protector and sovereign. The Mohawks alone were not a party to this arrangement. They refused to acknowledge subjection. To punish their obstinacy the viceroy at once despatched an expedition against their villages. Missing its way, it was attacked near Schenectady by a party of Mohawks. The news of the skirmish alarmed the English at Albany. From their pickets Courcelles, the commander of the French expedition, first learned of the reduction of the Dutch province to English rule, and, it is reported, said in disturbed mind, “that the King of England did grasp at all America.”

Thus for the first time within the limits of the New York province the English and French were confronted with each other on the territory which was destined to become the scene of a century of strife; and thus also were the Mohawks naturally inclined to the only power which could protect them against the aggressions of the French. Nicolls induced the Mohawks to treat for peace with the French. He also urged the Connecticut authorities to arrange a peace between the Mohicans and the Mohawks; and negotiations were opened in time to counteract the French emissaries, who were already tampering with the former tribe. Shortly after these successful mediations, instructions arrived from King Charles to undertake hostilities against Canada; but Connecticut refusing to join in an expedition, and Massachusetts, considering the reduction of Canada as not at the time feasible, Nicolls changed his tactics, and declared to the Canadian viceroy his purpose to maintain peace, provided the bounds and limits of his Majesty’s dominions were not invaded. Meanwhile, the Oneidas having ratified the treaty made by their colleague tribes with the French, the Mohawks were left alone in resistance, and committed outrages which the viceroy determined to punish. Leading an expedition in person, he marched upon the Mohawks, captured and destroyed their four villages, burned vast quantities of stored provisions, devastated their territory, and took formal possession of the country in the name[395] of the King of France. Yet such was the independent spirit of this proud tribe, that it required the threat of another expedition to bring them to submission. A treaty was made by which they consented to receive missionaries. This completed the title of possession of the Western territory which the French Government was preparing against a day of need.

The war in Europe was closed by the treaty of Breda, which allowed the retention by each of the conflicting parties of the places it occupied. This provision confirmed the English in peaceful and rightful possession of their conquest of New Netherland. The intelligence was proclaimed New Year’s Day, 1668. It enabled the Duke of York to accede at last to the repeated requests of his faithful and able deputy, and permission was granted to Nicolls to return to England. His successor, Colonel Francis Lovelace, relieved him in his charge in August following.

Francis Lovelace, the successor of Nicolls, continued his policy with prudence and moderation. To him the merchants of the city owed the establishment of the first exchange or meeting-place for transaction of business at fixed hours. He encouraged the fisheries and whaling, promoted domestic trade with Virginia, Massachusetts, and the West India Islands, and took personal interest in ship-building. By his encouragement the first attempt toward a post-road or king’s highway was made. During his administration the first seal was secured for the province, and one also for the city. He appears to have concerned himself also in the conversion to Christianity of the Indian tribes,—a policy which Nicolls initiated; but as yet there was no printing press in the province to second his efforts. Of more practical benefit was his interference to arrest the sale of intoxicating liquors to the savage tribes from the trading-post at Albany.

In 1668 the policy of the English Government again veered. A treaty, known as the Triple Alliance, was signed between Great Britain, the United Provinces, and Sweden, to arrest the growing power and ambitious designs of France. Popular in the mother country, the alliance gave peculiar satisfaction to the New York province, and somewhat allayed the disappointment with which the cancellation of the order permitting the Dutch freely to trade with New York was received by its citizens of Holland descent. Throughout the Duke’s province there was entire religious toleration. None were disturbed in the exercise of their worship. At Albany the parochial Dutch church was maintained under his authority, and in New York, he authorized the establishment of a branch of the Dutch Reformed Church, and directed the payment of a sufficient salary to the minister invited from Holland to undertake its charge.

The efforts begun by Nicolls and continued by Lovelace, to bring into harmonious subjection the diverse elements of the Duke’s government[396] were not wholly successful. The inhabitants of eastern Long Island clung tenaciously to the traditions of the Connecticut colony, and petitioned the King directly for representation in the Government; but the Council for Plantations denied the claim, on the ground that the territory was in the limits of the Duke of York’s patent and government. The unsettled boundaries again gave trouble, Massachusetts renewing her claim to the navigation of the Hudson, which the Dutch had, during their rule, successfully resisted. Massachusetts further claimed the territory to the Pacific westward of the line of the Duke of York’s patent. The contiguous territory was however held by the Mohawks, who had never acknowledged other sovereignty than their own. In 1672 this tribe made a considerable sale of lands on the Mohawk River to the inhabitants of Schenectady, by which New York practically acquired title to the soil as well as sovereignty.

In 1672 English politics again underwent a change. The Triple Alliance was dissolved, and a secret treaty entered into with France. War was declared against the Dutch. In a severe action at Solebay, the Dutch won an advantage over the allied fleets of England and France. In the engagement Nicolls, the late governor of the New York province, fell, killed by a cannon ball, at the feet of his master, the Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England, who commanded the British fleet. But while the Dutch maintained an equality at sea with the combined fleets of the powers, their fortune on land was not as favorable. Turenne and Condé led the armies of France to the soil of the Dutch Republic, and to mark his advantage, Louis XIV. brought his court to Utrecht. A revolution in Holland was the immediate consequence. The Grand Pensionary, who in his alarm sought peace, lost the favor of the people, resigned his office, and was quickly murdered by the excited followers of William of Orange. William, having demanded and obtained appointment as Stadtholder, at once placed himself at the head of the war party, and active hostilities were prosecuted by sea and land, both far and near. Among the rumors which reached the inhabitants of the New York province, whose kinsmen were again at war with each other, was one to the effect that a Dutch squadron which had been despatched against the West India colonies was on its way along the Atlantic coast. Lovelace discredited the information, and seems to have made no immediate efforts to strengthen the forts. Troops were called in, however, from the river garrisons and the posts on the Delaware; but their number, with the volunteers, reached only three hundred and thirty men. The alarm soon subsiding, the new-comers were dismissed, and the garrison left in Fort James did not exceed eighty men. Lovelace himself, in entire serenity of mind, left the city on a visit to Governor Winthrop in Connecticut. The rumor, however, proved true. The Dutch squadron, after capturing or destroying the Virginia fleet of tobacco ships in the Chesapeake, sailed northward, and on Aug. 7, 1673, anchored off Staten Island. Informed of the precise state of the New York defences by the captain of a prize captured at the mouth of James River, the Dutch commander made an immediate[397] demand for the surrender of the city. The Dutch fleet, commanded by Evertsen, originally consisting of fifteen ships, had been reinforced in its course by seven men-of-war, and with its prizes now numbered twenty-seven sail, which carried sixteen hundred men. Against this force no resistance was possible. On the morning of the 8th the fleet moved up the bay, exchanged shots with the fort, and landed six hundred men on the shore of the Hudson just above the city, where they were joined by a body of the Dutch burghers. A storming party was advanced, under command of Captain Anthony Colve, to whom Captain Manning, who commanded in the Governor’s absence, surrendered the fort, the garrison being permitted to march out with the honors of war. Thus New York was again surrendered without the shedding of a drop of blood.

A few days later Lovelace, entrapped into a visit to the city, was first courteously entertained, then arrested on a civil suit for debt and detained. The river settlements of Esopus and Albany surrendered without opposition; and those in the immediate neighborhood of the city, where the Dutch population was in ascendency, made submission. The eastern towns of Long Island, of English descent, came in with reluctance. The commodores Evertsen and Binckes, who acted as council of war of New Netherland, after confiscating the property of the Duke of York and of his agent, by proclamation commissioned Captain Anthony Colve Governor-General of the country, and set sail for Holland,—Binckes taking Lovelace with him on his ship at his request.

New York had greatly changed in nine years of English rule. From a sleepy Dutch settlement it had become the capital of a well-ordered province. Colve, the new Dutch governor, went through the form of a return to the old order of city government of the home pattern, and prepared a provincial Instruction to which the outlying towns were to conform. Massachusetts again asserted her old claim to run her southern line to the Hudson, and Connecticut hankered once more after the fertile towns of Long Island, settled by her sons. But Massachusetts had no disposition to take up arms to restore the Duke of York to his possessions. The refusal of the Duke to take the test oath of conformity to the Protestant religion of the Established Church, and the leaning of Charles to the French alliance, alarmed the Puritans, and Connecticut was content, by volunteer reinforcements, to strengthen the eastern towns in their resistance to Colve’s authority.

The news of the recapture of New York reached Holland in October, when Joris Andringa was by the States-General appointed governor of New Netherland under the instructions of the Board of Admiralty. Notwithstanding the earnest request of the Dutch inhabitants of the reconquered province and the petition of persons interested in its trade in the mother country, the States-General recognized the impossibility of holding their American possessions on the mainland, surrounded as they were by a growing and aggressive English population. The Prince of Orange, with true[398] statesmanship, saw that the only safety of the Republic was in a concentration of resources in order to oppose the power of France. The offer of a restitution of New Netherland was directly made to Charles II. as an evidence of the desire for peace and a good understanding. Charles referred the subject to Parliament, which instantly recommended acceptance, and within three days a treaty was drawn up and signed at Westminster, which once more and finally transferred the province of New York to the King of Great Britain. Proclamation of the treaty was made at Guild Hall early in July, 1674. The news came by way of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Connecticut determined to make one more push for the control on Long Island of Southampton, Easthampton, and Southold, and petitions were addressed to the King. At the same time she sought again to include the territory between the boundary line established in 1664 and the Hudson. And it may be stated as a curious instance of the politics of the time, that some friend of Massachusetts, urged by her agent in London, actually contemplated the purchase of the entire province of New York in her interest.

The new governor appointed by the King to receive the surrender of the New Netherland was one Edmund Andros, major in a dragoon regiment. In continuance of the liberal policy of 1664, all the inhabitants were by his instructions confirmed in their rights and privileges, and in the undisturbed possession of their property. By the treaty of Westminster, the New Netherland, the rightful possession of which by the Dutch was implied by its tenor, was ceded to the King. Although termed a restitution, it was held that the rights of the Duke of York had been extinguished by the conquest, and that restitution to the sovereign did not convey restoration to the subject. The Duke of York, now better informed as to the nature and value of the territory, on June 29, 1674, obtained from his royal brother a new patent with enlarged authority. To Andros, who bore the King’s authority to receive submission, the Duke now conferred his commission to govern the province in his name. Lieutenant Anthony Brockholls was named his successor in case of death. Andros was a man of high character, well suited by nature and experience to carry out the policy of his master,—the policy skilfully inaugurated by Nicolls and loyally pursued by Lovelace,—the institution of an autocratic government of the most arbitrary nature in form, but of extreme mildness in practice; one which, insuring peace and happiness to the subject, would best contribute to the authority and revenue of the master. Colonization was encouraged, the customs burdens lightened, the laws equally administered, and freedom of conscience secured. Although the Duke of York, in his refusal to take the test oath prescribed by the Act of 1673, had proclaimed himself an adherent of the Church of Rome, and Brockholls was a professed Papist, and neither master nor servant could hold office in England under that Act, and although the British American colonies were not within its provisions, yet it does not appear that any effort was made by the Church of Rome to exercise its religion under the guarantee of[399] the King and of the Duke. There were doubtless few of that faith in the Protestant colony of New York to claim the privilege. It was left to the wise men who laid the foundations of the Empire State in 1777 to put in practice the freedom of religion to all, which, strangely enough, was first guaranteed in word by the Catholic prince.

The new patent of 1674 restored to the Duke his full authority over the entire domain covered by the original grant, and brought New Jersey again within his rule; yet he was persuaded to divest himself of this proprietorship by a new release to Carteret. No grant of power to govern being named in either the first or the second instrument, this authority was held as reserved by the Duke. The cession was nevertheless of extreme and lasting injury to the New York province, as it impaired its control over the west bank of the mouth of the Hudson and the waters of the bay. On the other hand, the Duke’s title to Long Island and Pemaquid was strengthened by a release obtained from Lord Stirling; and the assumption of Connecticut to govern the eastern towns in the former territory was summarily disposed of. The Duke’s authority in Pemaquid, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, though disturbed by some of the inhabitants who sought to bring them under the government of Massachusetts, had been maintained during the period of Colve’s administration. They had not been named in the commission of the Dutch commanders to Colve. The claim of Connecticut to the strip of land between the Mamaroneck line and the Hudson River was disallowed by the Duke, and possession of the territory entered by Connecticut was demanded by Andros. Connecticut held to the letter of her charter; Andros to the letters-patent of the King. The rising of the Narragansett tribes under King Philip afforded Andros an opportunity to assert the Duke’s authority. Sailing with three sloops and a body of soldiers, he landed at Saybrook, and read the Duke’s patent and his own commission. The Connecticut officers replied by reading the protest of the Hartford authorities. It is reasonable to suppose that had Andros found the Saybrook fort unoccupied, he would have put in a garrison to protect from the Indians the territory which he claimed to be within his commission. Had he intended a surprise, he would not have given notice to Winthrop that the object of his journey was “the Connecticut River, his Royal Highness’s bounds there.” Neither Andros nor the Connecticut authorities desired an armed collision. Andros, content with the assertion of his claim, crossed the Sound, despatched aid to his dependencies of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and returned, after reviewing the militia and disarming the Indians. The course of Andros was approved by the Duke, who, while insisting on his claim to all the territory west of the Connecticut River, ordered that the distance of twenty miles from the Hudson be observed for the dividing line.

The northern frontier was also watched with jealous solicitude. The increase of French influence through their missionaries now became the occasion of an English policy of far-reaching significance,—a policy felt[400] throughout the American Revolution and in the later contest of the States of the Union for Western territory. The friendship of the Mohawks, the only tribe which did not acknowledge French supremacy, was encouraged. Andros personally visited the stronghold of the Mohawks, and on his return to Albany confirmed a close alliance with the Iroquois and organized a board of Indian Commissioners. This sagacious plan served in the future as an effectual check to the encroachments of the French. The ministers of Louis XIV. were quick to feel the blow, and in 1677 the counter claim was set up that the reception of the Jesuit missionaries had given sovereignty to France over the Iroquois. The future contest which was to shake the two continents was already foreshadowed. The same year the supremacy of New York over the Iroquois was tacitly admitted by Massachusetts in the treaty made with them “under the advice” of Andros.

In the details of his administration Andros showed the same firmness. The old contraband trade with the Dutch was arrested; no European goods were admitted from any port that had not paid duties in England. This strict enforcement of the Navigation Laws diminished the coastwise trade with Massachusetts and promoted a direct intercourse with England, which gradually brought the province into close relation with the English commercial towns. Social and political alliance was the natural result, and New York grew gradually to be the most English in sentiment of the American colonies, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan character of her population.

Increasing commerce requiring greater accommodation, a great mole or dock was built on the East River, which afforded protection to vessels in the rapid tide, and for a long period was the centre of the traffic of the city of New York. The answer of Governor Andros to the inquiries of the Council of Plantations as to the condition of the province gives the best existing account of it in 1678. The following are the principal points:—

“Boundaries,—South, the Sea; West, Delaware; North, to ye Lakes or ffrench; East, Connecticut river, but most usurped and yett posse’d by s’d Connecticut. Some Islands Eastward and a Tract beyond Kennebeck River called Pemaquid.... Principall places of Trade are New Yorke and South’ton except Albany for the Indyans; our buildings most wood, some lately stone and brick; good country houses, and strong of their severall kindes. About twenty-four towns, villages, or parishes in six precincts, divisions, Rydeings, or Courts of Sessions. Produce is land provisions of all sorts, as of wheate exported yearly about sixty thousand bushells, pease, beefe, pork, and some Refuse fish, Tobacco, beavers’ peltry or furs from the Indians, Deale and oake timber, plankes, pipestavves, lumber, horses, and pitch and tarr lately begunn to be made. Comodityes imported are all sorts of English manufacture for Christians, and blanketts, Duffells, etc., for Indians, about 50,000 pounds yearly. Pemaquid affords merchantable fish and masts. Our merchants are not many, but most inhabitants and planters, about two thousand able to beare armes, old inhabitants of the place or of England, Except in and neere New Yorke of Dutch Extraction, and some few of all nations, but few serv’ts much wanted, and but very few slaves. A merchant worth one thousand pounds or five hundred pounds is accompted a good substantiall merchant, and a[401] planter worthe half that in moveables accompted [rich?]. With all the Estates may be valued at about £150,000. There may lately have trade to ye Colony in a yeare from ten to fifteen ships or vessels, of which togeather 100 tunns each, English, New England, and our own built, of which 5 small ships and a Ketch now belonging to New York, four of them built there. No privateers on the coast. Religions of all sorts,—one Church of England, several Presbyterians and Independents, Quakers and Anabaptists of severall sects, some Jews, but Presbyterians and Independents most numerous and substantial. There are about 20 churches or meeting-places, of which about half vacant. Noe beggars, but all poor cared for.”

In 1678, the affairs of the province being everywhere in order, Andros availed himself of the permission given him by the Duke to pay a visit to England. He sailed from New York on the 12th of November, leaving Brockholls to administer the government in his absence, with the commission of commander-in-chief. On reaching London Andros was knighted by the King. His administration was examined into by the Privy Council and approved. In May he sailed for New York with the new commission of vice-admiral throughout the government of the Duke of York. He found the province in the same quiet as when he left it.

The marriage of William of Orange with Mary, daughter of the Duke of York and heiress to the throne of England, in the autumn of 1677, was of happy augury to the New York colony. It gave earnest of a restoration of the natural alliance of the Protestant powers against France, the common enemy. To the Dutch of New York it was peculiarly grateful, allaying the last remains of the bitterness of submission to alien rule. Andros wisely promoted this good feeling by interesting himself in the formal establishment of their religion. Under his direction a classis of the Reformed Church of Holland met in New York for purposes of ordination, and its proceedings were approved by the supreme ecclesiastical authority at Amsterdam. New points in law were now decided and settled; strikes or combinations to raise the price of labor were declared illegal; all Indians were declared to be free.

But Andros was on occasion as energetic and determined as he was prudent and moderate. He dallied with no invasion of his master’s rights or privileges, as he evinced when, in 1680, he arrested Carteret in New Jersey and dragged him to trial[696] for having presumed to exercise jurisdiction and collect duties within the limits of the Duke’s patent.

The position of the Duke of York now became daily more difficult, indeed almost untenable in his increasing divergence from the policy of the kingdom. The elements of that personal opposition which was later to drive him from the throne were rapidly concentrating. His adherents and those who favored a Protestant succession were forming the historic parties of Tories and of Whigs. To avoid angry controversy the Duke ordered the question of his right to collect customs dues in New Jersey to be submitted to Sir William Jones. Upon his adverse decision so far as related to West[402] Jersey, the Duke directed the necessary transfer to be made; and when the widow of Carteret made complaint of his dispossession from authority, the action of Andros was wholly disavowed by the Duke, and his authority over East Jersey was relinquished in the same form. Andros himself, against whom complaints of favoring the Dutch trade had been made by his enemies, was ordered to return to England, leaving Brockholls in charge of the government; at the same time a special agent was sent over to examine into the administration.

SIR EDMUND ANDROS.

[Regarding this portrait, see Memorial History of Boston, ii. 5.—Ed.]

Conscious of the integrity of his service, Andros obeyed the summons with alacrity, proclaimed the agent’s commission, called Brockholls down from Albany to take charge of the government, and took ship for England. The absence of his firm hand was soon felt. The term for the levy of the customs rates under the Duke’s authority[403] had expired just before his sailing, and had not been renewed. Immediately after his departure the merchants refused to pay duties, and the collector who attempted the levy was held for high treason in the exercise of regal authority without warrant. He pleaded his commission from the Duke, and the case was referred to England. The resistance of the merchants was stimulated by the free condition of the charter just granted to Pennsylvania, which required that all laws should be assented to by the freemen of the province, and that no taxes should be laid or revenue raised except by provincial assembly. The Grand Jury of New York presented the want of a provincial assembly as a grievance; a petition was drafted to the Duke praying for a change in the form of government, and calling for a governor, council, and assembly, the last to be elected by the freeholders of the colony. On the arrival of the Duke’s agent in London with his report upon the late administration, Andros was examined by the Duke’s commissioners, whereupon he was fully exonerated, his administration was complimented, and he was made a gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber. The Duke’s collector, after waiting in vain for his prosecutors to appear, was discharged from his bond, and soon after appointed surveyor-general of customs in the American Plantations.

Notwithstanding his dislike to popular assemblies, the Duke of York saw the need of some concession, and gave notice of his intention to Brockholls. Thus by the accident of the non-renewal of the customs’ term, the people of New York were enabled, in the absence of the governor, to assert the doctrine of no taxation without representation, to which the Duke in his necessity was compelled to submit.

Great changes had taken place in the neighboring territory of New Jersey, which the Duke had alienated from his original magnificent domain, to its mutilation and lasting injury. Pennsylvania was formally organized as a province, and Philadelphia was planned. East New Jersey passed into the hands of twelve proprietors, who increased their number by sale to twenty-four, selected a governor, summoned a legislature, and organized the State.

While the English race, true to its instincts and traditions, was thus organizing its settlements, bringing its population into homogeneity, and preparing for a gradual but sure extension of its colonization from a firm, well-ordered base, the more adventurous French were pushing their voyages and posts along the lakes and down the Western streams, until the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi by La Salle completed the chain and added to the nominal domain of the sovereign of France the vast territory from the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, to which he gave the name of Louisiana.

The governor selected by the Duke of York to succeed Andros and to inaugurate the new order of government in his province was Colonel Thomas Dongan, an Irish officer who had commanded a regiment in the[404] French service. Though a Roman Catholic, an Irishman, and a soldier, he proved himself an excellent and prudent magistrate. The instructions of the Duke required the appointment of a council of ten eminent citizens and the issue of writs for a general assembly, not to exceed eighteen, to consult with the Governor and Council with regard to the laws to be established, such laws to be subject to his approval,—the general tenor of laws as to life and property to be in conformity with the common law of England. No duties were to be levied except by the Assembly. No allusion was made to religion. No more democratic form of government existed in America, or was possible under kingly authority.

Dongan reached the city of New York, Aug. 28, 1683, and assumed the government. Installing his secretary and providing occupation for Brockholls, he summoned an assembly, and then hastened to Albany to check the attempt of Penn to extend the bounds of the territory of Pennsylvania by a purchase of the valley of the Upper Susquehanna from the Iroquois, who claimed the country by right of conquest from the Andastes. In this Dongan was successful; the Cayugas settling the question by a formal conveyance of the coveted territory to the New York Government, a cession which was later confirmed by the Mohawks. At the same time this tribe was instructed as to their behavior toward the French. The claim of New York to all the land on the south side of the lake was again renewed and assented to by the Mohawks. The astute Iroquois already recognized that only through the friendship of the English could their independence be maintained.

The New York Assembly met in October. Its first act bore the title of “The Charter of Liberties and Privileges granted by his Royal Highness to the Inhabitants of New York and its dependencies.” The supreme legislative authority, under the King and the Duke, was vested in a governor, council, and “the people met in general assembly;” the sessions, triennial as in England; franchise, free to every freeholder; the law, that of England in its most liberal provisions; freedom of conscience and religion to all peaceable persons “which profess faith in God by Jesus Christ.” In the words of the petition of right of 1628, no tax or imposition was to be laid except by act of Assembly,—in consideration of which privileges the Assembly was to grant the Duke or his heirs certain specified impost duties. The province was divided into twelve counties. Four tribunals of justice were established; namely, town courts with monthly sessions for the trial of petty cases; county or courts of sessions; a general court of oyer and terminer, to meet twice in each year; and a court of chancery or supreme court of the province, composed of the Governor and Council. An appeal to the King was reserved in every case. In addition to these there was a clause unusual in American statutes, naturalizing the foreign born residents and those who should come to reside within the limits[405] of the province, which had already assumed the cosmopolitan character which has never since ceased to mark the city of New York. The liberal provisions of the statute gave security to all, and invited immigration from Europe, where religious intoleration was again unsettling the bases of society. It was not until the 4th of October, 1684, that the Duke signed and sealed the amended instrument, “The Charter of Franchises and Privileges to New Yorke in America,” and ordered it to be registered and sent across sea.

Connecticut making complaint of the extension of New York law over the territory within the contested boundary lines, Dongan brought the long dispute to a summary close by giving notice to the Hartford authorities that unless they withdrew their claims to territory within twenty miles of the Hudson he should renew the old New York claim to the Connecticut River as the eastern limit of the Duke’s patent, and refer the subject directly to his Highness. In reply to an invitation from Dongan, commissioners proceeded from Hartford to New York, who abandoned the pretensions set up, and accepted the line proposed by Dongan, thus finally closing the controversy.

The city of New York was now divided into six wards, certain jurisdiction conferred upon its officers, and a recorder was appointed.

Dongan with the vision of a statesman recognized the value of the friendship of the Indians. The Iroquois tribes he described as the bulwark of New York against Canada. The policy of the Duke’s governors from the time of Nicolls was unchanged. It consisted in a claim to all the territory south and southwest of the Lake of Canada (Ontario), and the confining of the French to the territory to the northward by the help of Indian allies. The French officers by negotiation and threat endeavored first to impose their authority on the several tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, and failing in this to divide them. But Dongan, carefully observing their manœuvres, obtained from a council of chiefs a written submission to the King of England, which was recorded on two white dressed deer-skins. The presence on the occasion at Albany of Lord Howard of Effingham, the Governor of Virginia, added greatly in the eyes of the Indians to this solemn engagement. Four nations bound themselves to the covenant, and asked that the arms of the Duke of York should be put upon their castles; and Dongan gave notice of the same to the Canadian Government, in witness that they were within his jurisdiction and under his protection. But in this submission the Indians recognized no subjection. The Iroquois still claimed his perfect freedom.

The claim of Massachusetts to territory westward of the Hudson was another perplexing element in the Indian question. In answer to a renewal of this demand, Dongan set up his claim as the Duke’s governor to jurisdiction over the towns which Massachusetts had organized on land covered by the Duke’s patent on the west side of the Connecticut River; but the matter being soon disposed of by the cancelling, for various[406] offences, of the Massachusetts patent by the King, through the operation of a writ of quo warranto, the Duke had no further contestant to his claims. The New Jersey boundary was also matter of dispute, but Dongan, at first of his own motion, and later by specific instruction from the Duke, took care to prevent Penn from acquiring any part of New Jersey or from interfering with the Indian trade.

The controversy with Canada as to the country south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario now drew to a head. Dongan clung persistently to the claim asserted by Andros in 1677. Against this the Canadians set up the sovereignty of France, acquired by war and treaties and the planting of missionaries among the tribes. The question turned upon the independence of the Iroquois, parts of which tribes had never made submission, or had repudiated the interpretation set upon their engagements. The new French governor, De la Barre, made ineffectual menace, but not supporting his threat with arms, lost the respect of the savages. The prestige of the English was increased, and the coveted trade passed into their hands to such an extent that in 1684 the Senecas alone brought into Albany more than ten thousand beaver skins. Nor was Denonville, who succeeded De la Barre in the government of Canada, more fortunate in enforcing his policy. His wily effort to engage the sympathies of his co-religionist Dongan in a support of the French missionaries among the tribes, was foiled by the New York governor, who at the same time secured the approbation of his Roman Catholic master by proposing to replace them with English priests.

The death of Charles II., early in the year 1685, and the accession to the throne of the Duke of York as James II., were of momentous influence upon European politics. They at once changed the political position of New York. The condition of proprietorship or nominal duchy altered with that of its master and proprietor. The Duke became a King; the duchy a royal province. The change involved a change in the New York charter, and afforded opportunity for a reconsideration and rejection of the entire instrument. The words “the people” were particularly objected to by the new King as unusual. The revocation of the Massachusetts charter by the late King, the government of which colony had not yet been settled, presented a favorable occasion for an assimilation of all the constitutions of the American colonies as preliminary to that consolidation of government and power at which James aimed as his ideal of government. Nevertheless the existing New York charter remained,—not confirmed, not repealed, but continued. The Scotch risings and the Monmouth rebellion interfered with any immediate action by the Government in American affairs. Yet the New York province hailed with joy the accession of their Duke and Lord proprietor to the throne. His rule had been just and temperate; his agents prudent and discreet. The immediate Governor, Dongan, was thoroughly identified with the interests of the province confided to his care, and aimed to make of its capital the centre of English influence in[407] America. In 1686 the city received a new charter, with a grant of all the vacant land in and about the city. Albany, also, under an arrangement with the landed proprietors, was incorporated and intrusted with the management of the Indian trade. The suppression of the Monmouth rebellion enabling James to turn his attention to America, he directed proceedings to be instituted in the English courts to cancel the charters of the Connecticut, Rhode Island, West Jersey, and Delaware colonies. In the interim a temporary government was established for Massachusetts, Plymouth, Maine, and New Hampshire, in accordance with the order of Charles made in 1684. A board of councillors was appointed, of whom Joseph Dudley was named president.

Weary of the trouble and expense of maintaining authority in distant Pemaquid, Dongan urged the King to annex this dependency to Massachusetts, and to add Connecticut to New York. Dudley pleaded the claim of Massachusetts with the Connecticut authorities. They held an even balance between the two demands, however, and resolved to maintain the autonomy of the colony, if possible, against either the machinations of her neighbors or the warrant of the King.

It has been seen that as Duke of York the policy of James in the government of his American province was, with the exception of the weakness shown in the case of Carteret and New Jersey, the consolidation of power. His accession to the throne enabled him to carry out this policy on a broader field. He determined to put an end to the temporary charge by commissioners of the New England colonies, and to unite them all under one government, the better to defend themselves against invasion. The assigned reason was the policy of aggression of the French on the frontiers. The person selected for the delicate duty of harmonizing the colonies into one province was Sir Edmund Andros, who, as the Duke’s deputy, had first suggested that a strong royal government should be established in New England, and of whose character and administrative abilities there was no question. He was accordingly commissioned by the King “Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief over his territory and dominions of New England in America.” By the terms of his instructions, liberty of conscience was granted to all, countenance promised to the Church of England, and power conferred on the Assembly to make laws and levy taxes. Pemaquid was annexed to the new government.

To assimilate the New York government to that of the new dominion a new commission was issued to Dongan as King’s captain-general and governor-in-chief over the province of New York. The charter of liberties and privileges recently signed was repealed; the existing laws, however, were to continue in force until others should be framed and promulgated by the Governor and Council. The liberty of conscience granted in 1674 and limited in 1683 to Christians, was now extended to all persons without restriction. A censorship of the press was established. The trade of the Hudson River was to be kept free from intrusion by any.

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While the King was thus strengthening his power and gathering into one grasp the entire force of the colonies, his ministers allowed themselves to be outwitted by the French in negotiation. A treaty of neutrality inspired by France engaged non-interference by either Government in the wars of the other against the savage tribes in America, and struck a severe blow at the policy of the New York governors. The announcement of the treaty was accompanied by the arrival of reinforcements in Canada and the organization of an expedition against the Iroquois. The treacherous seizure and despatch to France of a number of chiefs, who had been invited to a conference at Quebec, opened the campaign, at once ended the French missions among the Five Nations, and consolidated their alliance with the English. The expedition of Denonville was partially successful. The Seneca country was occupied, sovereignty proclaimed, and a fort built on the old site of La Salle’s Fort de Conty. But the power of the Iroquois was not touched. Hampered by his instructions, Dongan could only lay the situation before the King and suggest a comprehensive plan for the fortification of the country and assistance of the friendly tribes. Alarmed at the news from the frontier, he resolved to winter in Albany, and ordered the Five Nations to send their old women and children to Catskill, where they could be protected and cared for. A draft was also made of every tenth militia man to strengthen the Albany post. Denonville, despairing of conquering the fierce Iroquois, though they were supported only by the tacit aid of the English, now urged upon Louis XIV. the acquisition of the coveted territory by exchange or by purchase, even of the entire province of New York, with the harbor of the city.

Dongan’s messenger to James easily satisfied the King that the treaty of neutrality was not for the interest of England, and that if the independence of the Five Nations were not maintained, the sovereignty over them must be English. Orders were sent to Dongan to defend and protect them, and to Andros and the other governors to give them aid. To the complaints of Louis, James opposed the submission made at Albany in 1684 by the chiefs in the presence of the Governor of Virginia. As a compromise between the Governments it was agreed by treaty that until January, 1689, no act of hostility should be committed or either territory invaded. The warlike defensive operations against the French put the New York Government to extraordinary charges, amounting to more than £8,000, to which the neighboring colonies were invited to contribute under authority of the King’s letter of November, 1687. The occasion to urge the importance of New York as the bulwark of the colonies, and of strengthening her by the annexation of Connecticut and New Jersey, was not forgotten by the sagacious Dongan. Now that the Dutch pretension to rule in America was definitively set at rest, it was evident to statesmen that a struggle for the American continent would sooner or later arise between the powers of France and England,—indeed the rivalry had already begun. To James, who thoroughly understood the practice as well as the theory of administration,[409] and was as diligent in his cabinet as any of his ministers, it was equally evident that the consolidated power of New France in the single hand of a viceroy was more serviceable than the discordant action of provinces so much at variance with each other in principle and feeling as the American colonies. To the viceregal government of New France he resolved to oppose a viceregal government of British America. To New England he now determined to annex New York. Dongan was recalled, gratified with military promotion and personal honor, and Sir Edmund Andros was commissioned governor-general of the entire territory. His commission gave him authority over

“All that tract of land, circuit, continent, precincts, and limits in America lying and being in breadth from forty degrees of northern latitude from the equinoctial line to the River St. Croix eastward, and from thence directly northward to the River of Canada, and in length and longitude by all the breadth aforesaid throughout the main land, from the Atlantic or Western Sea or Ocean on the east part to the South Sea on the west part, with all the islands, seas, rivers, waters, rights, members, and appurtenances thereunto belonging (our province of Pennsylvania and country of Delaware only excepted), to be called and known, as formerly, by the name and title of our territory and dominion of New England in America.”

On the 11th of August, 1688, Andros assumed his viceregal authority at Fort James in New York. A few days later the news arrived of the birth of a son to King James. A proclamation of the viceroy ordered a day of thanksgiving to be observed within the city of New York and dependencies. Thus New York was formally recognized as the metropolis and the seat of government in the Dominion of New England. By the King’s instructions the seal of New York was broken in council, and the great seal of New England thereafter used.

The Governor of Canada was notified that the Five Nations were the subjects of the King of England, and would be protected as such. The new governor visited Albany, and held a conference with the delegates from the Five Nations, and renewed the old covenant of Corlaer. The Indians showing signs of restlessness all along the frontier as far as Casco Bay, the viceroy endeavored to settle the difficulties between Canada and the New York tribes, and engaged his good offices to secure the return of the prisoners from France. On his return to Boston Andros left the affairs of the New York government in the charge of Nicholson. Dongan retired to his farm at Hempstead on Long Island. Though peaceful, the new dominion was not at rest. The liberty of conscience declared by the King was not precisely that which each dissenting denomination desired. Gradually men of each grew to believe that James was indifferent to all religions that were not of the true faith; and regarding the simple manner in which by legal form he had stripped them of their chartered rights, began to fear that by an act as legal he might strip them of their liberty of worship. The test Act which he had refused to obey, to the loss of his dignities and honors[410] as Duke, might be altered to the ruin of its authors. A Roman Catholic test might take the place of the Protestant form. The King reigned, and a son was born to him, who doubtless would be educated in the papist faith of the Stuarts. William of Orange was only near the throne.

GREAT SEAL OF ANDROS.

[See authorities in Memorial History of Boston, ii. 9.—Ed.]

While the colonies were thus agitated, a spirit of quiet resistance was spreading in England, where alarm was great at the arbitrary manner in which charters were stricken down. Property was threatened. In the American colonies the agitation was chiefly religious. Among their inhabitants were Huguenot families whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had ruthlessly driven from their homes to a shelter on the distant continent. The crisis was at hand. Strangely enough, it was precipitated by the declaration of liberty of conscience and the abrogation of the test oath against Dissenters which King James had commissioned Andros to proclaim in America. This liberty of conscience included liberty to Catholics, which the Protestants would have none of. The abrogation of the test oath opened the way to preferment and honor to Catholics, which the Protestants were equally averse to. Ordered to read the proclamation in the churches, seven bishops, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to obey the command. The prelates were committed, tried, and acquitted. Encouraged by this victory, the great Whig houses of England now addressed an invitation to William of Orange, who was already, with naval and military force, secretly prepared to cross the sea. On the 5th of November the great Stadtholder landed on the shores of Devon, and proclaimed himself the maintainer of English liberties. Thus a declaration of liberty of conscience brought about the fall of a Catholic king. The news caused great excitement in the colonies.

Andros, who had but lately[411] returned to Boston from an expedition to the northeastern frontier of Maine, where he had established posts for protection against the tribes who were threatening a second Indian war, was seized and imprisoned by a popular uprising. In New York the agitation was as intense. Nicholson, the lieutenant-governor, unequal to the emergency, let slip the grasp of power from his hand; and on the open revolt of Leisler, one of the militia captains, who seized the fort, he determined to sail for England, and the control of the province passed to a committee of safety. The revolt of Leisler forms the opening of a new chapter in the story of the New York province.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THERE are several comprehensive general histories of what is now the State of New York. The first edition[697] of Smith’s History was dedicated to the Earl of Halifax, First Lord Commissioner of Trade and Plantations. The dedication bears date New York, June 15, 1756. It is illustrated with a folding frontispiece plate, entitled “The South View of Oswego on Lake Ontario.” In his Preface the author states that his researches while engaged under appointment of the New York Assembly in a review and digest of the laws of the province, a work in which he was associated with William Livingston, induced the preparation of this the first History of the colony. He excuses himself from an attention to details, which he considered would not interest the British public, and declares his purpose to confine himself to a “summary account of the first rise and present state” of the colony. He presents it as a “narrative or thread of simple facts,” rather than as a history.

A second edition of this work appeared at London in 1776, from the press of J. Almon. It is a reprint in an octavo volume of three hundred and thirty-four pages. The troubles with the colonies and the important position of New York as the headquarters of the British army no doubt prompted this venture.

An American edition next appeared, in April, 1792, from the press of Mathew Carey, at Philadelphia, in an octavo volume of two hundred and seventy-six pages. It was announced “to the citizens of the United States as the first part of a plan undertaken at the desire of several gentlemen of taste, who wish to supply their libraries with histories of their native country.” The titlepage describes it as “The Second Edition,” Almon’s reprint having been ignored by Carey. The copy in the Library of the New York Historical Society is illustrated with a “Frontispiece View of Columbia College, in the City of New York,” from the plate originally engraved for the New York Magazine of 1790.

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Another edition appeared at Albany, from the press of Ryer Schermerhorn, in 1814, an octavo volume of five hundred and twelve pages. The anonymous editor, supposed to have been Mr. J. V. N. Yates, states in his Advertisement, that in “copying Smith’s History few deviations from his mode of spelling the names of places, particularly such as are derived from the aboriginal tongues, have been made. It is believed that he [Smith] adopted the mode of spelling which conveyed most clearly the sound of Indian words.” Mr. Yates intended to add a “Continuation from the year 1732 to the commencement of the year 1814,” but these additions stopped at 1747.

A French translation of Smith’s History, by M. Eidous, appeared in Paris in 1767, and bears the imprint “Londres.” It is a duodecimo of four hundred and fifteen pages.

Smith, the historian, who died Chief-Justice of Canada, left behind him a continuation of his History of New York, written by his own hand. It covers the period from 1732 to 1762. This interesting manuscript was communicated to the New York Historical Society in 1824 by William Smith, son of the author, then a distinguished member of the King’s Council in Canada, and also well known as the author of the History of that province. In his note to the Society, Mr. Smith states that “the Continuation of the History is as it was left by the author, with only a few verbal alterations and corrections.” The manuscript appeared in print for the first time in 1826, as the fourth volume of the Collections of the New York Historical Society, an octavo of three hundred and eight pages. Copies of Smith’s original volume having become rare, the Society determined to reprint it from the author’s corrected and revised copy in a form similar to that in which they had published the Continuation, and in 1829 the work appeared complete for the first time. It was accompanied by a memoir of the author, written by his son. In making up sets of the Society’s Collections, the complete work is generally bound as vols. iv. and v. of the first series.

The next year, 1830, the Society issued a second edition of the complete work: also an octavo in two volumes, but printed in larger type and on better paper. This edition bears the press-mark of “Gratton, Printer.” Interesting sketches of the historian, with notices of his family, prepared by Mr. Maturin L. Delafield, appeared in the Magazine of American History, April and June, 1881. A small edition was struck off for Mr. Delafield for private distribution, illustrated with portraits.

Several criticisms on Smith’s History have appeared in print: “Remarks on Smith’s History of New York, London Edition, 1757, in Letters to John Pintard, Secretary of the New York Historical Society, by Judge Samuel Jones,” written in 1817 and 1818, were printed in the Collections of the New York Historical Society, vol. iii., 1821; “Correspondence between Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader Colden and William Smith, Jr., the Historian, respecting certain alleged Errors and Misstatements contained in the History of New York, with sundry other Papers relating to that Controversy,” printed in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. (second series, vol. ii., 1849); “Letters on Smith’s History of New York, by Cadwallader Colden,” printed in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. (Fund series), in 1868; “Letter of Cadwallader Colden on Smith’s History, July 5th, 1759,” N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. (Fund series), 1869.

The late Hon. Benjamin F. Butler, of New York, in an able discourse before the Albany Institute, April, 1830, gives a fair and impartial estimate of the value of Smith’s History. He notices the incomplete and summary manner in which the earlier period was disposed of and ascribes it to the insufficient information within the reach of the author and his want of acquaintance with the Dutch language, in which the ancient records of the colony were written.[698] The posthumous work he condemns as “written in the spirit of a partisan,” and therefore to be received with caution, if not distrust. Yet he freely acknowledges the deep indebtedness of the State and of the friends of[413] learning for the mass of authentic information discovered by him. With this judgment scholars generally concur. In reading the pages of this the first of the historians of New York, it must be borne in mind that Smith was one of the leaders of the Dissenting element in the New York colony, and at a time when religious partisanship was at its height.[699]

The second general history of New York was that of Macauley.[700] Its first volume treats “of the extent of the State, its mountains, hills, champaigns, plains, vales, valleys, marshes, rivers, creeks, lakes, seas, bays, springs, cataracts, and canals; its climate, winds, zoology,” etc. The second, “of the counties, cities, towns, and villages; antiquities of the west; origin of the Agoneaseah, their manners, customs, laws, and other matters; discovery of America; voyages of Cabot and Hudson; settlements of the New Netherlands by the Dutch in 1614; location of the Indian tribes; controversies between the Dutch and English; surrender in 1664, and thence to 1750.” The third volume covers “the war between England and France for the conquest of Canada, the war of the Revolution, and other matters which occurred, etc.” The leaning of the author is, as these words imply, essentially towards the physical features of the State. He himself calls it a compendium, or abridged history. The reader will find little original matter of an historical nature.[701]

The author of the next general history of the State[702] is well known as the historian of the American Theatre and of the Arts of Design in America, both commendable works. With the taste of an antiquary, Mr. Dunlap has gathered some curious details; but The History of the New Netherlands, etc., has little merit as historical authority. The first volume passed through the press during the fatal illness of the author; the second was supervised by a friend who apologized for his want of “intimacy with the subject.” It appeared after the author’s death. The main value of the work consists in the abstracts published as an appendix to the second volume.[703]

A much more thorough work followed, a dozen years later, when Mr. Brodhead began his History.[704] Its two volumes comprise all the known information concerning the period they cover, up to the time of publication. Mr. Brodhead by birth and education was eminently qualified for his ponderous task. He united in his blood the English and Dutch strains; on the father’s side being descended from one of the English officers, who came out with Nicolls at the time of the conquest. A lawyer by profession, he was attached to the legation at the Hague, and was commissioned by the State of New York to procure original materials relating to its early history. In this labor he spent three years in the archives of England, Holland, and France. At his death he left manuscript material for a third volume, which it is the hope of students may yet be made accessible. He divides his work into four marked periods: The first, from the discovery, in 1609, to its conquest by the English in 1664; the second carries the story down to 1691. The treatment is of the most exhaustive character, and the work is a monument of literary industry and careful execution. The authorities are in all cases given in foot-notes. The sympathies of the author are plainly with Holland in the original struggle, and later with New York in her occasional antagonism to the influence of New England. While the reader may sometimes smile at his enthusiasm and differ from his opinions, he will[414] find no occasion to quarrel with his candor. The tendency of his mind will be found legal rather than judicial. His chief merit is his admirable co-ordination of an immense mass of material, covering a vast circuit of investigation.[705]

EDITORIAL NOTES.

A. Specific Authorities.—More particular mention of such sources as pertain jointly to the Dutch and English rule in New York is made in Mr. Fernow’s chapter on “New Netherland,” in Vol. IV.

Chalmers’ Political Annals of the Present United Provinces reviews the English rule; but Brodhead (i. 62) considers that Chalmers’s treatment is biased, and grossly misrepresents the facts.

The documents in Hazard’s Historical Collections of State Papers which relate to New York were reprinted in 1811 in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 189-303, and in the printed series published by the State under the editing of Dr. O’Callaghan, an account of which can better be made, unbroken between the Dutch and English portions, in connection with Mr. Fernow’s chapter. Various papers of importance, however, have appeared in the Collections and Proceedings of the New York Historical Society, and others are in the Manual of the City of New York, edited for thirty years, since 1841, successively by Valentine and Shannon. The journals of the Council and Assembly of the Colony of New York are rich in material.

Some original documents have appeared in connection with inquiries into the history of the boundaries of the State: Report to ascertain and settle the Boundary Line between New York and Connecticut, Feb. 8, 1861; Report on the Boundaries of New York, Albany, 1874; papers of Dawson, Whitehead, etc., in Historical Magazine, xviii. 25, 82, 146, 211, 267, 321. Cf. also C. W. Bowen’s Boundary Disputes of Connecticut, Boston, 1882, part iv.

At a commemoration of the English conquest of 1664, held by the New York Historical Society in 1864, the oration was fitly made by Mr. Brodhead. Historical Magazine, viii. 375. The first printed Dutch report of the capture is given in the Kort en bondigh Verhael, Amsterdam, 1667, p. 27; cf. Asher’s Essay, no. 354. The list of those in New York city who took the oath, October, 1664, is given in Valentine’s Manual, 1854. The patent of March 12, 1664, granted the Duke of York, under whose authority the conquest was made, is given in Brodhead’s New York, ii. 651; cf. also Learning and Spicer’s Grants, etc. of New Jersey, p. 3, and New York Colonial Documents, ii. 295. Charles E. Anthon, in the Magazine of American History, September, 1882, urges that a commemorative sculpture be placed in Central Park, to preserve the memory of the royal Duke whose twin titles of York and Albany are borne by the two chief cities of the State.

The Clarendon Papers, 1662-67, covering this early period of the English rule, are in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. (Fund series), vol. ii. The important code known as the Duke’s Laws are also in the same Society’s Collections. Mr. O. H. Marshall examines the charters of 1664 and 1674 in the Magazine of American History, viii. 24.

A few of the letters of Nicolls and Lovelace to the Secretary of State, dated prior to 1674, are in the London State-Paper Office, but not till that year does the regular record seem to begin. Brodhead, ii. 261.

Of Thomas Willett, the first English mayor of the town, Brodhead gives the best account, in his History of New York, ii. 76, which may be supplemented by the account of his family given in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., ii. 376; xvii. 244. Cf. also Dr. John F. Jameson on the origin and development of municipal government in[415] New York city, in Magazine of American History, 1882. The Manual published successively by Valentine and Shannon preserves much information regarding the city’s history. Cf. General De Peyster on “New York and its History,” in International Review, April, 1878, and Mrs. Lamb’s History of New York City, and other local monographs, of which further mention is made in the notes to Mr. Fernow’s chapter, in Vol. IV.

The English occupation of New York was confirmed by the Treaty of Breda, July 31, 1667. The original Latin and Dutch of its text appeared at the Hague in 1667. (Muller, Books on America, 1872, p. 119; Stevens, Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 31.) A contemporary engraving of the signing is in the Kort en bondigh Verhael, Amsterdam, 1667. (Stevens, no. 1079; Muller, Books on America, 1877, nos. 1697, 2268.) There was a French edition published at Amsterdam in 1668. (Recueil van de Tractaten, Hague, 1684).

The Dutch bibliographies refer to scores of pamphlets launched against Sir George Downing, the English diplomat who is charged with instigating the war with England (1663-67), and not infrequently assigning his animosity towards the Dutch to feelings engendered in his early New England home, Downing being a nephew of Governor Winthrop, and a graduate of Harvard College. (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, i. 28, with a list of authorities, p. 51, and the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 959, 975. Cf. on Downing’s agency, O’Callaghan’s New Netherland, ii. 515; Palfrey’s New England; Brodhead’s New York and his Colonial Documents of New York; and R. C. Winthrop’s paper in 5 Mass. Hist. Coll. vol. i.)

On the Dutch side, Aitzema’s Historie van Saken van Staet en Oorlogh, 1621-1668, Hague, 1657-1671, is a vast repository of documentary evidence, vol. iv. covering Downing’s period, and vol. vi. giving the negotiations of Breda. The best edition, with a supplement by Sylvius, was published in eleven volumes in 1669-1699. (Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 47.) Sabin, Dictionary, v. 20,783, etc., gives various titles of Downingiana, and a full list of Downing’s works is given by Sibley, Harvard Graduates, i. 48. The Dutch also charged upon Downing the initiative in “curbing the progress and reducing the power” of their State through the Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660; cf. Upham, in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, iv. 407.

The relations of the new English province with the French and Indians are particularly illustrated in the papers relating to De Courcelles and De Tracy’s expedition against the Mohawks (1665), published in the Documentary History of New York, vol. i., where will also be found the documents concerning Denonville’s expedition against the Senecas and into the Genesee country in 1687. Cf. also the narrative of Denonville with O. H. Marshall’s notes, in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., ii. 149. For the expedition against Schenectady, 1689-90, see N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1846, p. 137; cf. Historical Magazine, xiii. 263, by J. G. Shea. A further treatment of the French and Indian wars is made in Vol. IV.

The Hon. Henry C. Murphy found in Holland the Relation de sa Captivité parmi les Onneiouts en 1690-91, by Father Millet, the Jesuit, and it was edited by Mr. Shea in New York in 1864. Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1063, says that with the narrative of Jogues it gives us nearly all we know from personal observation of the Five Nations at this time. Further references to the literature of the aboriginal occupation will be given in Mr. Fernow’s chapter.

Regarding the seals of the province, see Documentary History of New York, vol. iv., for various engravings. (Cf. Historical Magazine, ix. 177, and Valentine’s Manual, 1851.) Reports on the Province, 1668-1678, are in the Documentary History of New York, vol. i.; and in vol. iii. the papers on Manning’s surrender in 1673, and the subsequent restoration.

Of the Catholic Governor Dongan there are special treatments by R. H. Clarke in the Catholic World, ix. 767, and by P. F. Dealy, S. J., in Magazine of American History, February, 1882, p. 106. Dongan’s report on the state of the province, 1687, is in the Documentary History of New York, vol. i. A view of his house is given in Lamb’s New York, i. 326.

Upon Andros’s rule, compare the general historians, and Memorial History of Boston, vol. ii. chap. 1.

Something will be said of the more specific local histories, covering both the Dutch and English periods, in connection with Mr. Fernow’s chapter in Vol. IV.

The news of the movements in the province, both under the Dutch and English rule, as it reached Europe, is recorded in De Hollandsche Mercurius, 1650-1690, a periodical. Cf. Asher’s Essay, p. 220; Muller’s Catalogue (1872), p. 104 (1877), no. 2,100; Sabin’s Dictionary, viii. p. 378.

B. Views, Maps, and Descriptions of New York and the Province under English Rule.Views. The earliest views of New Amsterdam date back to the Dutch period, the first being that in the Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, etc., 1651, of which a fac-simile is given on the title of Asher’s List of Maps, Amsterdam, 1851, and in the Popular History of the United States. The next appeared on the several maps issued by N. J. Visscher, Van der Donck, Allard (first map), Nicolas Visscher (first map), and Danckers. It is seen in the heliotype of Van der Donck’s map given in Vol. IV., and in the engraving of the Visscher[416] map, in Asher’s List.[706] A view very like this is that given on p. 124 of Arnoldus Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld of Beschryving van America, a sumptuous folio printed at Amsterdam, 1671, and at present variously priced from $5 to $20. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,066, with fac-simile of title.

The same picture is reproduced in the later, 1673, edition of Montanus, p. 143, and in Ogilby’s America, 1671, p. 171, where the description also follows Montanus, with aid from Denton. (Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,067, 1,092.) Montanus’s account is translated in the Documentary History of New York, iv. 75, 116, with a fac-simile of the view in question. Cf. also Gay’s Popular History of the United States, iii. 1, and the fac-simile issued, with descriptive notes, by J. W. Moulton in 1825 as New York One Hundred and Seventy Years Ago; and Watson’s Olden Times in New York, 1832.

The picture is also given in fac-simile in Mr. Lenox’s edition of Jogues’s Novum Belgium, edited by J. G. Shea, and in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1882, with a paper by J. R. Stanwood on the settlement of New Netherland. Muller, of Amsterdam in one of his catalogues, of recent years, offered for 250 marks a water-color drawing made in 1650, which he claimed as the original sketch upon which the engraver in Montanus worked. Muller, Catalogue of American Portraits, etc., no. 305. This view is now in the New York Historical Society’s Library. It is inscribed “In ‘t schip Lydia door Laurens Harmen Zn Block, Ao 1650.” There is no record of any ship of such name arriving at New Amsterdam, and this together with certain changes in the picture, as compared with Montanus, have led good judges to suspect that it is a copy of that view, by one who was never in New Amsterdam, rather than its original. The paper and frame are old, at all events.

A view purporting to represent the town in 1667 is given in Valentine’s New York City Manual, 1851, p. 131, and in his History of New York City, p. 71.

The view of which an engraving is herewith given is from a map entitled Totius Neobelgii nova et accuratissima tabula, ... Typis Caroli Allard, Amstelodami.

NEW YORK, OR NEW AMSTERDAM, 1673.

The reference-key to the view is as follows:—

A. Fort Orangiensche oft N. Albanische Jachten.
B. Vlagge-spil, daer de Vlag wordt opgehaelt, alsercomen
schepen in dese Haven. C. Fort Amsterdam, genaemt Jeams-fort bij de Engelsche.
D. Gevangen-huijs.
E. Gereformeede Kerck.
F. Gouverneurs-Huijs.
G. ’t magazijn.
H. De Waeg.
I. Heeren-gracht.
K. Stadt huijs.
L. Luthersche Kerck.
M. Waterpoort.
N. Smidts-vallij.
O. Landtpoort.
P. Weg na ’tversche Water.
Q. Wint-molen.
R. Ronduijten.
S. Stuijvesants Huijs.
T. Oost-Rivier, lopende tusschen ’t Eijlandt Manhatans,
en Jorckshire, oft ‘t lange Eijlandt.

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The view is inscribed: “Nieuw-Amsterdam, onlangs Nieuw jorck genamt, ende hernomen bij de Nederlanders op den 24 Aug., 1673, eindelijk aan de Engelse weder afgestaan.” It took the place of the engraved view, already mentioned as appearing in the first edition of Allard’s map, and was probably etched by Romeyn de Hooghe, a distinguished artist of the day, when Hugo Allard retouched his old plate to produce an engraved map to meet the interest raised by the recapture of the town. It also did service in the later issues of the same plate by Carolus Allard and the Ottens, and was reproduced in an inferior way by Lotter on his map. See Asher’s List of Maps and Views, p. 20. A view of 1679 is given on a later page, with its history.

The annexed cut of the Strand follows a view in The Manual of the City of New York, 1869, p. 738. The Central House, with three windows in the roof, was the earliest brick house built in the town, and was at one time the dwelling of Jacob Leisler, and had been built by his father-in-law, Vanderveen; cf. the narrative in the Manual. It is also engraved in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, iii. 14. Other houses of this period are shown in the Manual, 1847, p. 371, 1858, p. 526, and 1862, p. 522; in Valentine’s History of New York City, pp. 177, 214, 319; in Riker’s Harlem, p. 454 (Dutch Church of 1686), etc.

THE STRAND, NEW WHITEHALL STREET, NEW YORK.

Maps. An account of the maps of the Dutch period is given in Vol. IV. For the English period, the earliest of the town of New York was probably that supposed to have been sent home by Nicoll (1664-68) after his occupation, and of which a portion is herewith given.

Of about the same date is the original of the Hudson River Map (1666), which will be found in the next volume. Then came the map of the province by Nicolas Visscher, issued in the first edition of his Atlas Minor about 1670.[707] Not far from the same time (1671) appeared the map which is common to Montanus’s Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld and to Ogilby’s great folio America, which shows the coast from the Penobscot to the Chesapeake, and is entitled “Novi Belgii, etc., delineatio.” It closely resembles Jansson’s earlier map. The Allard map of 1673, from which our engraved view is taken, was the second by that cartographer of New Netherland, who retouched the plate of the earlier one, which had been mainly a reproduction of N. J. Visscher’s, as the later one of Schenk and Valch (1690) was. Asher says (nos. 13, 15, 16) that Allard in this second map confined his additions to new names in the Dutch regions. The same plate was later used by Carolus Allard, and as late as 1740-50 by Ottens.

About 1680, in Danckers’ Atlas, published at Amsterdam, is found a map, “Novi Belgii,[418] etc., tabula, multis in locis emendata a J. Danckers,” which, however, in Asher’s opinion was but a revamping of the earlier Visscher plate.[708] The map which N. J. Visscher published about 1640 was reissued about 1690 by Nicolas Visscher, “Novi Belgii, etc., tabula, multis in locis emendata,” making use of the work of Montanus and Allard, of which there were also later issues. (Asher’s List, no. 14; Muller, no. 2,276.) An eclectic map, showing the province at this period, was made up from Montanus, Roggeveen, and others, by J. P. Bourjé, and appeared in Lambrechtsen’s Korte Beschryving, Middelburg, 1818. The maps of Nicolas Visscher in Sanson’s Atlas Nouveau (1700), and of Henry Hondius and Homan, belong to a later period.

SKETCH PLAN OF NEW YORK CITY, 1664-68.

This is a reduced reproduction of the fac-simile in Valentine’s New York City Manual, 1863, of one of the sheets of Nicoll’s map of Manhattan Island, preserved in the British Museum. It bears an attestation of correct correspondence with the original, from Richard Simms, of the Museum, who transmitted in 1862 the copy to George H. Moore, then of the Historical Society. Cf. also another representation in Valentine’s Manual, 1859, P. 548, and in his History, p. 226.

Of the charts of the coast about New York, there were two standard atlases of this period, the Zee-Atlas of Pieter Goos, of which there were editions in 1666, 1668, 1673, 1675, 1676,—some of them with French text. (Asher’s List, no. 22-24; Muller’s Catalogue, 1877, no. 1254.) Better[419] executed are the charts in the special American collection issued at Amsterdam by Arent Roggeveen under the title of Het Eerste Deel van het Brandende Veen, 1675, and known in the English edition as The Burning Fen. Asher also adds the charts of Van Keulen, remarking, however, upon their inaccurate coast-lines.

THE STADTHUYS IN NEW YORK, 1679.—BREVOORT’S DRAWING.

THE STADTHUYS, 1679.—ORIGINAL SKETCH.

Descriptions. Edward Melton was in New[420] York in 1668, and in his Zee-en Landreizen, Amsterdam, 1681, and again 1702, he gives a detailed description of the place, borrowing somewhat from Montanus. (Asher’s Essay, no. 17; and Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,221, which says the later editions were issued in 1704-1705.) Though an Englishman, his account was not published in the original, and we owe the earliest one in English to Daniel Denton, whose Brief Descriptions of New York appeared in London in 1670. It is now very rare. (Sabin’s Dictionary, v. 350.) It is a small quarto, and Rich priced it in 1832 at £1 12s. There are copies in Harvard College Library; in the State Library, Albany; besides two copies in the Carter-Brown Library, with different imprints. (Catalogue, ii. 1,038.) Sabin, in the Menzies Catalogue, says he had sold a copy for $275, and at that sale it brought $220. (Cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 2,778.) It was reprinted by the Pennsylvania Historical Society in 1845, 16 pp., and by Wm. Gowan in New York the same year, with an Introduction by Gabriel Furman, 57 pp.

A few years later we have another description in the Journal of a Voyage to New York, 1679-80, by Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, which was translated from the original Dutch manuscript by Henry C. Murphy, and, enriched by an Introduction from the same hand, appeared in 1867 as vol. i. of the Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society, and also separately. Some particulars of Danckaerts or Dankers are noted in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1874, p. 309. The MS., when found by Mr. Frederick Muller, of Amsterdam, from whom Mr. Murphy procured it, was accompanied by certain drawings of the town, seemingly taken on the spot. These are given in Mr. Murphy’s volume in fac-simile, with descriptions by Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, who has also re-drawn certain parts of them with better perspective, and other rectifications. The re-drawings are also engraved. The originals consist: (1) of a view of the Narrows, looking out to sea; (2) of a long panoramic view of the town as seen from the Brooklyn shore; (3) the East River shore looking south; (4) a view down the island from the northern edge of the settlement, with the Hudson River on the right, and a supposable East River on the left. The views which Mr. Brevoort has rectified are no. 4; the Stadthuys, with adjacent buildings and half-moon battery, extracted from no. 2; and three parts of no. 3, namely the Dock, the Water-gate (foot of Wall Street), and the shore north of the Water-gate. A reduction of the Brevoort Stadthuys view and the original, full size, are given herewith. This building stood on the corner of Pearl Street and Coentys slip, was erected as a city tavern in 1642, became a city hall in 1655, and was torn down in 1700. The battery when built projected into the river. There are other views of the Stadthuys given in Valentine’s Manual, (1655-56) p. 336, (1852) p. 378, (1853) p. 472; his History, p. 52; Lamb’s New York, i. 106; Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 139, etc. Mr. J. W. Gerard published a monograph in 1875, Old Stadthuys of New Amsterdam.

In the train of Andros, and as his chaplain, a Rev. Charles Wooley came to New York in 1678, and his Journal of Two Years was published in 1701. (Historical Magazine, i. 371.) There is a copy in Harvard College Library. It was edited in 1860, with notes by Dr. O’Callaghan, as Gowan’s Bibliotheca Americana, no. 2; and no. 3 of the same series, J. Miller’s Description of the Province and City of New York (1695), though of a little later date, is best examined in the same connection. It is edited by John G. Shea, as Gowan printed it in 1862. Cf. also C. Lodwick’s “New York in 1692,” in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., vol. ii.


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CHAPTER XI.

THE ENGLISH IN EAST AND WEST JERSEY.
1664-1689.

BY WILLIAM A. WHITEHEAD.

Corresponding Secretary of the New Jersey Historical Society.

ALTHOUGH that portion of the American Continent known as New Netherland was within the limits claimed by England by virtue of Cabot’s discovery, yet those in possession, from the comparatively little interest taken in their proceedings, remained undisturbed until 1664.[709] There had been some attempts on the part of settlers in Connecticut and on Long Island to encroach upon lands in the occupancy of the Dutch, or to purchase tracts from the Indians otherwise than through their intervention, yet nothing had resulted therefrom but estrangement and animosity. An application for the aid of the Royal government was the consequence, and Charles II. was induced to countenance the complaints of his North American subjects, and to enforce his right to the lands in question.

To effect the ends in view, a charter was granted to James, Duke of York,—Charles’s brother,—for all the lands lying between the western side of Connecticut River and the east side of Delaware Bay, including Long Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the islands in their vicinity. This charter was dated March 12, 1663/4, and the following month a fleet of four vessels, having on board a full complement of sailors and soldiers, was despatched to eject the Dutch and put the representatives of the Duke of York in possession.

The fleet arrived in August, and articles of capitulation were signed on the 19th (20th) of the same month. Colonel Richard Nicolls, who commanded the expedition, received the surrender of the Province the following day; and in October Sir Robert Carr secured the capitulation of the settlements on the Delaware. By the treaty of Breda, in 1667, the possession of the country was confirmed to the English.[710]

[422]

Although, as the pioneers of civilization, the Hollanders had developed, to a considerable extent, the resources of what is now New Jersey, yet the cultivation of the soil and the increase of population, during the half century that had elapsed since their first occupancy, were by no means commensurate with what might have been expected. Settlements had been made on tracts known as Weehawken, Hoboken, Ahasimus, Pavonia, Constable’s Hook, and Bergen, on the western banks of the Hudson River, opposite New Amsterdam, but of their population and other evidences of growth nothing definite is known. On the Delaware, Cornelius Jacobsen Mey, in 1623, under the auspices of the West India Company of Holland, and David Pieterson de Vries, in 1631, attempted to colonize South Jersey at Fort Nassau; but to the Swedes must be accorded the credit of making the first successful settlements, though few in number and insignificant in extent.[711] These, in August, 1655, were surrendered to the Dutch under Peter Stuyvesant, and they had experienced very little growth or modification when surrendered to Sir Robert Carr in 1664.

Before the Duke of York was actually in possession of the territory, he had executed deeds of lease and release to Lord John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton, and Sir George Carteret, of Saltrum. The documents bore the dates of June 23 and 24, 1664, and granted all that portion of his American acquisition—

“lying and being to the westward of Long Island and Manhitoes Island, and bounded on the east part by the main sea and part by Hudson’s river, and hath upon the west Delaware bay or river, and extending southward to the main ocean as far as Cape May at the mouth of Delaware bay, and to the northward as far as the northernmost branch of the said bay or river of Delaware, which is forty-one degrees and forty minutes of latitude, and crosseth over thence in a straight line to Hudson’s river in forty-one degrees of latitude; which said tract of land is hereafter to be called by the name or names of New Cæsaria or New Jersey.”

The two courtiers, placed in these important and interesting relations to the people of New Jersey, were doubtless led to enter into them from being already interested in the Province of Carolina, and from their associations with the Duke of York.

Sir John Berkeley had been the governor of the Duke in his youth, and in subsequent years had retained great influence over him. He, as well as Sir George Carteret, had been a firm adherent of Charles II.; and Carteret, at the Restoration, was placed in several important positions and was an intimate companion of James. Both Carteret and Berkeley were connected with the Duke in the Admiralty Board, of which he was at that time the head, and[423] consequently enjoyed peculiar facilities for influencing him. The name of “Cæsaria” was conferred upon the tract in commemoration of the gallant defence of the Island of Jersey, in 1649, against the Parliamentarians, by Sir George Carteret, then governor of the island; but it was soon lost, the English appellation of “New Jersey” being preferred.

The grant to the Duke of York, from the Crown, conferred upon him, his heirs and assigns, among other rights and privileges, that of government, subject to the approval by the King of all matters submitted for his decision; differing therein from the Royal privileges conceded to the proprietors of Maryland and Carolina, which were unlimited. The Duke of York, consequently, ruled his territory in the name of the King, and when it was transferred to Berkeley and Carteret, they, “their heirs and assigns,” were invested with all the powers conferred upon the Duke “in as full and ample manner” as he himself possessed them, including, as was conceived, the right of government, although it was not so stated expressly,—thus transferring with the land the allegiance and obedience of the inhabitants.

On Feb. 10, 1664/5, without having had any communication with the inhabitants, or acquiring a knowledge by personal inspection of the peculiarities of the country, Berkeley and Carteret signed an instrument which they published under the title of “The Concessions and Agreements of the Lords Proprietors of New Jersey, to and with all and every of the adventurers and all such as shall settle and plant there.” This, the first Constitution of New Jersey, was regarded by the people as the great charter of their liberties, and respected accordingly. By its provisions the government of the Province was confided to a governor, a council of not less than six nor more than twelve to be selected by the governor, and an assembly of twelve representatives to be chosen annually by the freemen of the Province. The governor and council were clothed with power to appoint and remove all officers,—freeholders alone to be appointed to office unless by consent of the assembly,—to exercise a general supervision over all courts, and to be executors of the laws. They were to direct the manner of laying out of lands, and were not to impose, nor permit to be imposed, any tax upon the people not authorized by the general assembly. That body was authorized to pass all laws for the government of the Province, subject to the approval of the governor, to remain in force one year, during which time they were to be submitted to the Lords Proprietors. To encourage planters, every freeman who should embark with the first governor, or meet him on his arrival, provided with a “good musket, bore twelve bullets to the pound, with bandoliers and match convenient, and with six months’ provisions for himself,” was promised one hundred and fifty acres of land, and the like number for every man-servant or slave brought with him similarly provided. To females over the age of fourteen, seventy-five acres were[424] promised, and a similar number to every Christian servant at the expiration of his or her term of service. Those going subsequently, but before Jan. 1, 1666, were to receive one hundred and twenty acres, if master, mistress, or able man-servant or slave; and weaker servants, male or female, sixty acres. Those going during the fourth year were to have one half of these quantities.

In the laying out of towns and boroughs the proprietors reserved one seventh of the land to themselves. To all who might become entitled to any land, a warrant was to be obtained from the governor directing the surveyor to lay out the several tracts, which being done, a grant or patent was to be issued, signed by the governor and the major part of the council, subject to a yearly quit-rent of not less than one halfpenny per acre, the payment of which was to begin in 1670. Each parish was to be allowed two hundred acres for the use of its ministers. Liberty of conscience was guaranteed to all becoming subjects of England, and swearing allegiance to the King and fidelity to the Lords Proprietors; and the assembly of the Province was authorized to appoint as many ministers as should be thought proper, and to provide for their maintenance. Such were the principal provisions of this fundamental Constitution of the Province.

On the same day that the Concessions were signed, Philip Carteret, a distant relative of Sir George, was commissioned governor, and received his instructions. Preparations were at once made for his departure, accompanied by all such as were willing to emigrate to New Jersey; and in April he sailed, with about thirty adventurers and servants, in the ship “Philip,” laden with suitable commodities. The vessel was first heard of as being in Virginia in May, and she arrived at New York on July 29. Here Carteret was informed that Governor Nicolls, in entire ignorance of the transfer of New Jersey to Lords Berkeley and Carteret, had authorized and confirmed a purchase made of the Indians, by a party from Long Island, of a tract of land lying on the west side of the strait between Staten Island and the main land, and that four families had emigrated thither. Nicolls had also confirmed to other parties a tract lying near to Sandy Hook, which they had purchased from the Indians. This led to the settlement of Middletown and Shrewsbury, in what is now Monmouth County,—the two grants laying the foundation for much subsequent trouble in the administration of the public affairs of the Province.

In consequence of these developments the prow of the “Philip” was directed by Carteret towards the new settlement at what is now Elizabeth; and arriving there early in August, he landed, as it is said, with a hoe upon[425] his shoulder, thereby indicating his intention to become a planter with those already there, and conferring upon the embryo town the name it now bears, after the lady of Sir George Carteret.

Among Carteret’s first measures for the improvement of the Province was the sending of messengers to New England and elsewhere, to publish the Concessions and to invite settlers,—measures which resulted in a considerable accession to the population. The ship “Philip” returned to England in about six months, and brought out the next year “more people and goods” on account of the Proprietors; and other vessels, similarly laden, followed from time to time.

In 1666 a division of the Elizabethtown tract was effected, leading to the settlement of Woodbridge and Piscataway. Another settlement,—formed by immigrants from Milford, Guilford, Branford, and New Haven, and having a desire, they said in their agreement, “to be of one heart and consent, through God’s blessing, that with one hand they may endeavor the carrying on of spiritual concernments, as also civil and town affairs according to God and a godly government,”—became the nucleus of Newark (now the most populous city in New Jersey), only such planters as belonged to some one of the Congregational churches being allowed to vote or hold office in the town. These, with the settlements mentioned as having been begun under the Dutch administration, comprised all which for some years attracted immigration from other quarters. Thus gradually New Jersey obtained an enterprising, industrious population sufficiently large to develop in no small degree its varied capabilities.

The Indians were considered generally as beneficial to the new settlements. The obtaining of furs, skins, and game, which added both to the traffic of the Province and to the support of the inhabitants, was thus secured with less difficulty than if they had been obliged to depend upon their own exertions for the needed supply. The different tribes were more or less connected with or subordinate to the confederated Indians of New York, and the settlers in New Jersey enjoyed, in consequence, peculiar protection. As the Proprietors evinced no disposition to deprive them of their lands, but in all cases made what was deemed an adequate remuneration for such as were purchased, New Jersey was preserved from those unhappy collisions which resulted in such vital injury to the settlements in other parts of the country.

Governor Carteret did not think that any legislation was immediately necessary for the government of the people or administration of the affairs of the Province. The Concessions having been tried were found quite adequate to the requirements of the new settlements, but on April 7, 1668, he issued his proclamation ordering the election of two freeholders from each town to meet in a general assembly the ensuing month at Elizabethtown; and on May 26 the first Assembly in New Jersey began a session which closed on the 30th. During the session a bill of pains and penalties was passed, identical in some respects with the Levitical law. Other subjects[426] were considered; but “by reason of the week so near spent and the resolution of some of the company to depart,” definite action was postponed until the ensuing session, which was held on November 3, in which deputies from the southern portion of the Province on the Delaware took part. A few acts were passed relating to weights and measures, fines, and dealings with the Indians; but on the fourth day of the session the Assembly adjourned sine die, the deputies excusing themselves therefor in a message to the Governor and Council, in which they say:—

“We, finding so many and great inconveniences by our not sitting together, and your apprehension so different to ours, and your expectations that things must go according to your opinions, they can see no reason for, much less warrant from the Concessions; wherefore we think it vain to spend much time in returning answers by meetings that are so exceeding dilatory, if not fruitless and endless, and therefore we think our way rather to break up our meeting, seeing the order of the Concessions cannot be attended to.”

A proposition by the Governor and Council, that a committee should be appointed to consult with them upon the asserted deviations from the Concessions, was not heeded, and the Assembly adjourned. Seven years elapsed before another, of which there is any authentic record, met. There are intimations of meetings of deputies on two occasions in 1671; but what was done thereat is not known, excepting the establishing of a Court of Oyer and Terminer.

This neglect to provide for the regular meeting of the General Assembly of the Province was doubtless owing to the disaffection then existing among the inhabitants of what was subsequently known as the Monmouth Patent, including Middletown, Shrewsbury, and other settlements holding their lands under the grant from Nicolls, which has been mentioned. As they considered themselves authorized to pass such prudential laws as they deemed advisable, they were led to hold a local assembly for the purpose as early as June, 1667, at what is now called the Highlands; and not being disposed to acknowledge fully the claims of the Lords Proprietors, they refused to publish the laws passed at the first session of the General Assembly and would not permit them to be enforced within their limits, on the ground that the deputies, professedly representing them, had not been lawfully elected. Certain differences in the Nicolls grant, from the Concessions, were insisted on before the deputies representing those towns could be allowed to co-operate in any legislation affecting them.

These views were not acceded to, and the towns were consequently not represented in the Assembly of November, 1668, and the first open hostility to the government of Carteret was inaugurated. This, however, did not interfere materially with his administration of the affairs of the Province. In every other quarter harmony prevailed until the time came when, by the provisions of the Concessions, the first quit-rents became payable by those holding lands under the Proprietors. The arrival of March 25, 1670,[427] when their collection was to begin, introduced decided and, in many quarters, violent opposition. Information received from England of a probable change in the proprietorship, which promised a reannexation of New Jersey to New York, no doubt added to the apprehensions of the Governor and his Council, and gave encouragement to the disaffected among the people.

The Elizabethtown settlers, asserting their right to the lands confirmed to them by Governor Nicolls independent of the requisitions of the Concessions, became the central instruments of action for the disaffected. The claims of the Proprietors’ officers, the oaths of allegiance which many of them had taken, as well as their duty to those whose liberal concessions constituted the chief inducements for settlement within their jurisdiction, were alike unheeded. The titles acquired through Nicolls they attempted to uphold as of superior force, and, following the example of Middletown and Shrewsbury, although on less tenable grounds, they were disposed to question the authority of the government in other matters. For two years there was a prevalent state of confusion, anxiety, and doubt.

On March 26, 1672, there was a meeting of deputies from the different towns; but the validity of such an Assembly, as it was called, the governor and council did not recognize. The proceedings are presumed to have had reference to the vexed question of titles; but the documents connected with the meeting were all suppressed by the secretary, who was also assistant-secretary of the council, and he acted, it is presumed, under their instructions. Another meeting was held at Elizabethtown on May 14, composed of representatives of Elizabethtown, Newark, Woodbridge, Piscataway, and Bergen; but assembling “without the knowledge, approbation, or consent” of the governor and council, they of course did not co-operate. The Concessions stipulated that the general assembly should consist of the “representatives, or the majority of them, with the governor and council,” and their absence afforded an excuse for another step toward independence of the established authorities. The Concessions provided that, should the governor refuse to be present in person or by deputy, the general assembly might “appoint themselves a president during the absence of the governor or the deputy-governor;” and the assembly proceeded to do so (not, however, a president merely to preside over their deliberations and give effect to their acts, but a “president of the country,” to exercise the chief authority in the Province), finding a ready co-operator in James Carteret, a son of Sir George, then in New Jersey on his way to Carolina, of which he had been made a landgrave.

He appears to have been courteously received by the authorities of the Province, from his near relationship to the proprietor, but his course argues little consideration for them or for the interests of his father. He did not hesitate to assume the chief authority; and, although the governor issued a proclamation denouncing both him and the body which had conferred authority upon him, yet power to enforce obedience seems to have been with[428] the usurper. Officers of the government were seized and imprisoned, and in some instances their property was confiscated.

Governor Carteret had deemed it advisable to seek his safety by taking up his residence in Bergen, where on May 28 he convened his council for deliberation. They advised him to go to England, to explain to the Lords Proprietors the situation of the Province, and to have his authority confirmed. This he did, taking with him James Bollen, the secretary of the council, and appointing John Berry deputy-governor in his absence. Their reception by the Proprietors was all that they could have expected or desired. Sir George Carteret sent directions to his son to vacate his usurped authority at once and proceed to Carolina; and the Duke of York wrote to Governor Lovelace, who had succeeded Nicolls in the Province of New York, notifying him, and requiring him to make the same known to the insurgents, that the claims they had advanced would not be recognized by him; and King Charles II. himself sent a missive to Deputy-Governor Berry confirming his authority and commanding obedience to the government of the Lords Proprietors. Other documents from the Proprietors expressed in temperate but decided language their determination to support the rights which had been conferred upon them, and some modifications of the Concessions were made, which circumstances seemed to require, conferring additional powers on the governor and council.

These various documents were published by Deputy-Governor Berry in May, 1673. They served to quiet the previous agitation, and to re-establish his authority. A certain time was allowed the malecontents to comply with the terms of the Proprietors; and the inhabitants of Middletown and Shrewsbury placed themselves in a more favorable position than those of other towns by asking for a suspension of proceedings against them until they could communicate with the authorities in England. This they did, throwing themselves upon their generous forbearance by relinquishing any special privileges they had claimed under the Nicolls patent, receiving individual grants of land in lieu thereof; and thereafter the relations between them and the proprietary government were always harmonious.

The government was resumed by the representatives of the Proprietors without any exhibition of exultation; and further to insure tranquillity and good conduct the deputy-governor and council issued an order with the intent “to prevent deriding, or uttering words of reproach, to any that had been guilty” of the insubordination.

In March, 1673, Charles II., in co-operation with Louis XIV. of France, declared war against Holland; and before the time expired, within which the proffered terms were to be acceded to by the inhabitants, the Dutch were again in possession of the country. The manner in which New Netherland[429] had been subdued by the English prompted a like retaliation, and a squadron of five vessels was at once despatched against New York. The fleet was increased, by captures on the way, to sixteen vessels, conveying sixteen hundred men; and on August 8 possession of the fort was obtained, and for more than a year the authority of the States General was acknowledged. On the one hand, no harshness or disposition to violate the just rights of the inhabitants was manifested; while, on the other, imaginary injuries from the proprietary government led to a ready recognition of what might prove an advantageous change. The natural consequences were harmony and good-will.

The inhabitants generally were confirmed in the possession of their lawfully acquired lands, and placed on an equality, as to privileges, with the Hollanders themselves. Local governments were established for each town, consisting of six schepens, or magistrates, and two deputies toward the constitution of a joint board, for the purpose of nominating three persons for schouts and three for secretaries. From the nominations thus made the council would select three magistrates for each town, and for the six towns collectively a schout and secretary. John Ogden and Samuel Hopkins were severally appointed to these offices on the 1st of September.

On November 18 a code of laws was promulgated “by the schout and magistrates of Achter Kol Assembly, held at Elizabethtown to make laws and orders,” but it does not appear to have been framed with any reference to the English laws in force, which it was intended to subvert. It was singularly mild in the character and extent of the punishments to be inflicted on transgressors, the principal aim of the legislators apparently being the protection of the Province from the demoralizing effects of sensual indulgence and other vicious propensities; but the whole code soon became a nullity, through the abrogation of the authority under which it was enacted.

On Feb. 9, 1674, a treaty of peace was signed at Westminster, the eighth article of which restored the country to the English; and they continued in undisturbed possession from the November following until the war which secured the independence of the United States of America.

On the conclusion of peace the Duke of York obtained from the King a new patent, dated June 29, 1674, similar in its privileges and extent to the first; and on October 30 Edmund Andros arrived with a commission as governor, clothing him with power to take possession of New York and its dependencies, which, in the words of the commission included “all the land from the west side of Connecticut River to the east side of Delaware Bay.” On November 9 he issued a proclamation in which he expressly declared that all former grants, privileges, or concessions, and all estates legally possessed by and under His Royal Highness before the late Dutch government, were thereby confirmed, and the possessors by virtue thereof to remain in quiet possession of their rights. King Charles on June 13, prior to the issuing of a new patent by the Duke of York, wrote a circular letter confirming in all respects the title and power of Carteret in East Jersey.

[430]

On July 28 and 29, 1674, Sir George Carteret received a new grant from the Duke of York, equally full as to rights and privileges, giving him individually all of the Province north of a line drawn from a certain “creek called Barnegat to a certain creek on Delaware River, next adjoining to and below a certain creek on Delaware River called Rankokus Kill,” a stream south of what is now Burlington,—the sale of Berkeley’s interest in the Province being evidently considered as leading to its division.

This had taken place on March 18, 1673/4, Lord Berkeley disposing of his portion of the Province to John Fenwicke,—Edward Byllynge being interested in the transaction. As these two were members of the Society of Quakers, or Friends, who had experienced much persecution in England, it is thought that in making this purchase they had in view the securing for themselves and their religious associates a place of retreat.

Some difficulty was experienced in determining the respective interests of Fenwicke and Byllynge in the property they had acquired, and the intervention of William Penn was secured. He awarded one tenth of the Province, with a considerable sum of money, to Fenwicke, and the remaining nine tenths to Byllynge. Not long after, Byllynge, who was a merchant, met with misfortunes, which obliged him to make a conveyance of his interest to others. It was therefore assigned to three of his fellow associates among the Quakers,—William Penn, Gawen Lawrie, and Nicholas Lucas. This conveyance was signed Feb. 10, 1674. The nine undivided tenths were assigned to the three persons just mentioned, to be held by them in trust for the benefit of Byllynge’s creditors; and not long after Fenwicke’s tenth was also placed under their control, although he had executed a lease to John Eldridge and Edmond Warner for a thousand years, to secure the repayment of sums of money obtained from them. A discretionary power to sell was conferred by the lease, leading to complications of title and management.

Philip Carteret had remained in England until the negotiations subsequent to the surrender of the Dutch were completed and the new grant for East Jersey obtained; and on July 31, 1674, he was recommissioned as governor, and returned to the Province, bringing with him further regulations respecting the laying out of lands, the payment of quit-rents, and other obligations of the settlers. His return seems to have greatly pleased the people of East Jersey. His commission, and the other documents of which he was made the bearer, were published at Bergen, Nov. 6, 1674, in the[431] presence of his council and commissioners from all the towns except Shrewsbury.

After the Governor’s return the assemblies met annually with considerable regularity, the first at Elizabethtown on Nov. 5, 1675, and the others either there or at Woodbridge or Middletown. Sufficient unanimity seems to have prevailed among the different branches of government, to secure legislation upon all subjects which the advancement of the Province in population rendered essential.

As yet no material change in the condition of West Jersey as to settlement had taken place; but in 1675 John Fenwicke, with many others, came over in the ship “Griffith” from London and landed at what is now Salem,—so called by them from the peaceful aspect which the site then wore. No other settlers, however, arrived for two years.

Although the commission of Andros as governor of New York authorized him to take possession of the Province “and its dependencies,” yet having been conversant with the transactions in England affecting New Jersey, which had taken place subsequent to its date, he did not presume at first to assert his authority over that Province, otherwise than to collect duties there similar to those constituting the Duke’s revenue in New York. Soon after his arrival he took measures to collect the same customs at Hoarkill, in West Jersey; and on the arrival of Fenwicke with his settlers at Salem, a meeting of his council was held Dec. 5, 1675, at which an order was issued prohibiting any privilege or freedom of customs or trading on the eastern shore of the Delaware, nor was Fenwicke to be recognized as owner or proprietor of any land. As this prohibition was not regarded by Fenwicke, on Nov. 8, 1676, directions were given to the council at Newcastle to arrest him and send him to New York. This proceeding not being acquiesced in by Fenwicke, a judicial and military force was despatched in December to make the arrest. On producing, for the inspection of Andros, the King’s Letters Patent, the Duke of York’s grant to Berkeley and Carteret, and Lord Berkeley’s deed to himself, Fenwicke was allowed to return to West Jersey, on condition that he should present himself again on or before the 6th of October following,—the fact that the Duke was authorized to, and did, transfer all his rights in New Jersey, “in as full and ample manner” as he had received them, being an argument that Andros could not readily refute. Fenwicke complied with the prescribed terms of his release and, after some detention as a prisoner, was liberated (as asserted by Andros) on his parole not to assume any authority in West Jersey until further warrant should be given.

It being evident that the grant of the Duke of York to Sir George Carteret in July, 1674, had not made an equitable division of the Province between him and the assigns of Sir John Berkeley, the Duke induced Sir George to relinquish that grant, and another deed of division was executed on July 1, 1676, known as the Quintipartite Deed, making the dividing line to run from Little Egg Harbor to what was called the northernmost branch[432] of the Delaware River, in 41° 40´ north latitude; and from that time the measures adopted by the Proprietors of the two provinces to advance the interests of their respective portions were enforced separately and independently of each other.

The trustees of Byllynge effected sales of land to two companies of Friends, one from Yorkshire and the other from London; and in 1677 commissioners were sent out with power to purchase lands of the natives, to lay out the various patents that might be issued, and otherwise administer the government. The ship “Kent” was sent over with two hundred and thirty passengers, and after a long passage she arrived in the Delaware in August (1677), and the following month a settlement was made on the site of the present Burlington.

The commissioners came in the “Kent,” which, on her way to the Delaware, anchored at Sandy Hook. Thence the commissioners proceeded to New York to inform Governor Andros of their intentions; and, although they failed to secure an absolute surrender of his authority over their lands, he promised them his aid in getting their rights acknowledged, they in the mean time acting as magistrates under him, and being permitted to carry out the views of the Proprietors. During the following months of 1677, and in 1678, several hundred more immigrants arrived and located themselves on the Yorkshire and London tracts, or tenths as they were called.

The settlers of West Jersey, as a body, were too intelligent for them to remain long without an established form of government, and on March 3, 1677, a code of laws was adopted under the title of “The Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Province of West Jersey.” It was drawn up, as is presumed, by William Penn and his immediate coadjutors, as his name heads the list of signers, of whom there were one hundred and fifty-one. The chief or executive authority was by these Concessions lodged in the hands of commissioners to be appointed by the then Proprietors, and their provisions cannot but meet with general approval. This code is to be considered as the first example of Quaker legislation, and is marked by great liberality. The framers, as a proprietary body, retained no authority exclusively to themselves, but placed all power in the hands of the people. The document was to be read at the beginning and close of each general assembly; and, that all might know its provisions, four times in a year it was to be read in a solemn manner in every hall of justice in the Province.

The settlers on Fenwicke’s tenth did not participate in the privileges of these Concessions. On returning to the Province, after his confinement in New York, Fenwicke proceeded to make choice of officers for his colony, demanding in the name of the King the submission of the people, and directly afterward issued a proclamation in which he—as “Lord and Chief Proprietor of the said Province [West Jersey], and in particular Fenwicke’s colony within the same”—required all persons to appear before him within one month and show their orders or warrants for “their pretended titles,”[433] assuming an independent authority entirely at variance with the proprietary directions.

The commissioners of the Byllynge tenths, however, do not appear to have made any attempt to interfere with him, confining their authority to the limits of their own well defined tracts; but if Fenwicke escaped annoyance from his near neighbors he was not so fortunate in his relations with his former persecutor, Andros, as he is represented as being, not long after his return, again at Newcastle under arrest, waiting for some opportunity to be sent again to New York.

Although, as has been stated, general quietude prevailed in East Jersey for some years after Carteret’s return from England, yet it must be considered as resulting less from the desire of the people to co-operate with him, than from the want of leaders willing to guide and uphold them in ultra proceedings. The exaction of customs in New York, by direction of the representatives of the Duke of York, operated more to the annoyance of the inhabitants on the Delaware than to those in the eastern portion of the Province, and it was with great anxiety that the adventurers to West Jersey regarded the course of Andros in relation thereto; but in East Jersey, the proximity to New York rendered a direct trade with foreign lands less necessary. Andros steadily opposed all projects of the Governor to render East Jersey more independent of New York, and the death of Sir George Carteret in January, 1680, seems to have inspired him with fresh vigor in asserting the claims of the Duke of York. Recalling to mind that New Jersey was within the limits of his jurisdiction according to his commission, he addressed a letter to Governor Carteret in March, 1679/80, informing him that, being advised of his acting without legal authority to the great disturbance of His Majesty’s subjects, he required him to cease exercising any authority whatever within the limits of the Duke of York’s patent, unless his lawful power so to do was first recorded in New York. To this unlooked for and unwarranted communication, Governor Carteret replied on March 20, two days after its receipt, informing his indignant correspondent that after consultation with his council he and they were prepared to defend themselves and families against any and all aggressions, having a perfect conviction of the validity of the authority they exercised. Before this letter was received by Andros, or even written, he had issued a proclamation abrogating the government of Carteret and requiring all persons to submit to the King’s authority as embodied in himself. Emissaries were despatched to East Jersey to undermine the authority of Carteret, and every other means adopted to estrange the people from their adhesion to the Proprietary government.

On April 7 Andros, accompanied by his council, presented himself at Elizabethtown, and Carteret, finding that they were unattended by any military force, dismissed a body of one hundred and fifty men gathered for his defence; and, receiving his visitors with civility, a mutual exposition was made of their respective claims to the government of East Jersey. The[434] conference ended as it had begun. Andros having now, as he said, performed his duty by fully presenting his authority and demanding the government in behalf of His Majesty, cautioned them against refusal. “Then we went to dinner,” says Carteret in his account of the interview, “and that done we accompanied him to the ship, and so parted.”

Carteret’s hospitality, however, was lost upon Andros. On April 30 a party of soldiers, sent by him, dragged the Governor from his bed and carried him to New York, bruised and maltreated, where he was kept in prison until May 27, when a special court was convened for his trial for having “persisted and riotously and routously endeavored to maintain the exercise of jurisdiction and government over His Majesty’s subjects within the bounds of His Majesty’s letters-patent to His Royal Highness.”

Carteret boldly maintained his independence under these trying circumstances. He fully acknowledged before the court his refusal to surrender his government to Andros without the special command of the King, submitted the various documents bearing upon the subject, and protested against the jurisdiction of a court where his accuser and imprisoner was also his judge.

The jury brought in a verdict of “not guilty,” which Andros would not receive, obliging them to reconsider their action, two or three times; and it is somewhat singular that they should have held firm to their first decision. They, however, gave in so far as to require Governor Carteret to give security not to exercise any authority on his return to East Jersey, until the matter could be referred to the authorities in England.

Andros lost no time in profiting by Carteret’s violent deposition, for although it is said that, attended by his whole retinue of ladies and gentlemen, he escorted Carteret to his home in Elizabethtown, yet on June 2 Andros met the Assembly at that place, presented again his credentials, and recommended such enactments as would confirm all past judicial proceedings, and the adoption of the laws in force in New York. The representatives, while they treated Andros with respect, were not unmindful of what was due to themselves as freemen. They were not prepared to bow in submission even to His Majesty’s Letters Patent, whenever at variance with their true rights. “What we have formerly done,” said they, “we did in obedience to the authority that was then established in this Province: these things, which have been done according to law, require no confirmation.” They presented for the approval of Andros the laws already in force as adapted to their circumstances, and expressed their expectations that the privileges conferred by the Concessions would be confirmed. It does not appear that their views were dissented from by Andros, or that his visit was productive of either good or evil results.

In consequence of the dilatoriness of the Proprietary in England, Carteret was kept in suspense until the beginning of the next year; but on March 2, 1681, he issued a proclamation announcing the receipt by him of the gratifying intelligence that the Duke of York had disavowed the acts[435] of Andros and denied having conferred upon him any authority that could in the least have derogated from that vested in the Proprietary; and a letter from the Duke’s secretary, to Andros himself, notified him that His Royal Highness had relinquished all right or claim to the Province, except the reserved rent.

About this time Andros returned to England, leaving Anthony Brocholst, president of the council, as his representative. There is some mystery about his conduct towards New Jersey. He may have thought that the party in East Jersey, inimical to the proprietary government, might enable him to regain possession of it for the Duke, and thereby increase the estimation in which he might be held by him. For Andros had enemies in New York who had interested themselves adversely to his interests, making such an impression upon the Duke that his voyage to England at this time was taken in accordance with the express command of his superior, to answer certain charges preferred against him.

The withdrawal of the common enemy soon reproduced the bickerings and disputings which had characterized much of Carteret’s administration. He convened an Assembly at Elizabethtown in October, 1681, at which such violent altercations took place that the Governor, for the first time in the history of New Jersey, dissolved the Assembly, contrary to the wishes of the representatives. This was the last Assembly during the administration of Carteret, for the ensuing year he resigned the government into other hands.

Sir George Carteret died, as has been stated, in 1680, leaving his widow, Lady Elizabeth, his executrix. He devised his interest in New Jersey to eight trustees in trust for the benefit of his creditors; and their attention was immediately given to finding a purchaser, by private application or public advertisement. These modes of proceeding proving unsuccessful it was offered at public sale to the highest bidder, and William Penn and eleven associates, all thought to have been Quakers, and some of whom were already interested in West Jersey, became the purchasers for £3,400. Their deeds of lease and release were dated Feb. 1 and 2, 1681/2, and subsequently each one sold one half of his interest to a new associate, making in all twenty-four proprietors. On March 14, 1681/2, the Duke of York confirmed the sale of the Province to the Twenty-four by giving a new grant more full and explicit than any previous one, in which their names are inserted in the following order: James, Earl of Perth, John Drummond, Robert Barclay, David Barclay, Robert Gordon, Arent Sonmans, William Penn, Robert West, Thomas Rudyard, Samuel Groom, Thomas Hart, Richard Mew, Ambrose Rigg, John Heywood, Hugh Hartshorne, Clement Plumstead, Thomas Cooper, Gawen Lawrie, Edward Byllynge, James Brain, William Gibson, Thomas Barker, Robert Turner, and Thomas Warne,—those in italics being the names of eleven of the first twelve, Thomas Wilcox, the twelfth, having parted with his entire interest.

There was a strange commingling of religions, professions, and characters in these Proprietors, among them being, as the historian Wynne observes,[436] “High Prerogative men (especially those from Scotland), Dissenters, Papists, and Quakers.” This bringing together such a diversity of political and religious ideas and habits was doubtless with a view to harmonize any outside influences that it might be deemed advisable to secure, in order to advance the interests of the Province. A government composed entirely of Quakers or Dissenters or Royalists might have failed to meet the co-operation desired, whereas a combination of all might have been expected to unite all parties.

Robert Barclay of Urie, a Scottish gentleman, a Quaker, and a personal friend of William Penn, was selected to be governor. He occupied a high position among those of his religion for the influence exerted in their behalf, and for the numerous works written by him in defence of their principles,—the most celebrated being An Apology for the True Christian Divinity as the same is preached and held forth by the people, in scorn, called Quakers,—and moreover he was equally capable of excelling in worldly matters. He was subsequently commissioned governor for life; and, as if his name alone were sufficient to insure a successful administration of the affairs of the Province, he was not required to visit East Jersey in person, but might exercise his authority there by deputy. He selected for that position Thomas Rudyard, an eminent lawyer of London, originally from the town of Rudyard in Staffordshire. It was probably from his connection with the trials of prominent Quakers, in 1670, that he became interested in the East Jersey project. He took an active part in the preliminary measures for advancing the designs of the Proprietors. The Concessions, their plans for one or more towns, a map of the country, and other documents were deposited at his residence in London for the inspection of all adventurers.

The entire population of East Jersey at this time was estimated at about five thousand, occupying Shrewsbury, Middletown, Piscataway, Woodbridge, Elizabethtown, Newark, Bergen, and the country in their respective vicinities.

Deputy-Governor Rudyard, accompanied by Samuel Groom as receiver and surveyor-general, arrived in the Province in November 1682, and both were favorably impressed by the condition and advantages of the country. On December 10 following the council was appointed, consisting of Colonel Lewis Morris, Captain John Berry, Captain William Sandford, Lawrence Andress, and Benjamin Price, before whom, on December 20, the deputy-governor took his oath of office, having previously on the 1st been sworn as chief register of the Proprietors. The instructions with which Rudyard was furnished by the Proprietors or Governor Barclay are not on record, but they are presumed to have been in accordance with the terms of a letter to the planters and inhabitants, with which he was furnished, inculcating harmony and earnest endeavors to advance their joint interests. The previous Concessions being confirmed, Rudyard convened an Assembly at Elizabethtown, March 1, 1683; and during the year two additional sessions were held and[437] several acts of importance passed. Among them was one establishing the bounds of four counties into which the Province was divided. “Bergen” included the settlements between the Hudson and Hackensack rivers, and extended to the northern bounds of the Province; “Essex” included all the country north of the dividing line between Woodbridge and Elizabethtown, and west of the Hackensack; “Middlesex” took in all the lands from the Woodbridge line on the north to Chesapeake Harbor on the southeast, and back southwest and northwest to the Province bounds; and “Monmouth” comprised the residue.

Although the administration of Rudyard appears to have been productive of beneficial results, securing a great degree of harmony among the varied interests prevailing in the Province, yet, differing from him in opinion as to the policy of certain measures, the Proprietors, while their confidence in him seems to have been unimpaired, thought proper to put another in his place. The principal reason, therefore, appears to have been that Rudyard and the surveyor-general Groom differed as to the mode of laying out lands. The Concessions contemplated the division of all large tracts into seven parts, one of which was to be for the Proprietors and their heirs. Groom refused to obey the warrants of survey for such tracts unless such an interest of the Proprietors therein was recognized, but the governor and his council took the position that the patents, not the surveys, determined the rights of the parties; and, to have their views carried out, Groom was dismissed and Philip Wells appointed to be his successor. The Proprietors in England, regarding this measure as probably in some way lessening their profits in the Province, sustained the surveyor-general’s views and annulled all grants not made in accordance therewith, and appointed as Rudyard’s successor Gawen Lawrie, a merchant of London,—the same influential Quaker whom we have seen deeply interested already in West Jersey as one of Byllynge’s trustees, and whose intelligence and active business qualifications made his administration of affairs conspicuous.

His commission was dated at London in July 1683, but he did not take his oath of office until February 28 following. Rudyard retained the offices of secretary and register and performed their duties until the close of 1685, when he left for Barbadoes, being succeeded as secretary by James Emott. Lawrie retained Messrs. Morris, Berry, Sandford, and Price of Rudyard’s council, and appointed four others, Richard Hartshorne of Monmouth, Isaac Kingsland of New Barbadoes, Thomas Codrington of Middlesex, Henry Lyon of Elizabeth, and Samuel Dennis of Woodbridge.

The new deputy-governor brought out with him a code of general laws—or fundamental constitutions as they were called, consisting of twenty-four chapters, or articles, adopted by the Proprietors in England—which was considered by its framers, for reasons not apparent, as so superior to the Concessions, that only those who would submit to a resurvey and approval of their several grants, arrange for the payment of quit-rents, and agree to pass an act for the permanent support of the government should enjoy its protection[438] and privileges. All others were to be ruled in accordance with the Concessions. This virtually established two codes of laws for the Province. Lawrie, however, seems to have been convinced of the impropriety of putting the new code in force, although in his instructions he was directed as soon as possible to “order it to be passed in an assembly and settle the country according thereto.” Through his discretion, therefore, the civil policy of the Province remained unchanged.

The country made a most favorable impression upon Lawrie. “There is not a poor body in all the Province, nor that wants,” wrote he to the Proprietors in England; and he urged them to hasten emigration as rapidly as possible,—discovering in the sparseness of the population one great cause of the difficulties his predecessors had encountered, an increase in the number of inhabitants favorable to the Proprietors’ interests being essential.

The Proprietors, however, had not been so unmindful of their interests as not to exert themselves to induce emigration to their newly acquired territory. The first twelve associates directly after receiving the deed for the Province published a Brief Account of the Province of East Jersey, presenting it in a very favorable light, and in 1683 the Scotch Proprietors issued a publication of a similar character. These publications, aided by the personal influence of Governor Barclay over their countrymen, who at that time were greatly dissatisfied with their political condition, and suffering under religious persecution, excited considerable interest for the Province, and a number of emigrants were soon on their way across the Atlantic. Many of them were sent out in the employ of different Proprietors, or under such agreements as would afford their principals the benefits of headland grants, fifty acres being allowed to each master of a family and twenty-five for each person composing it, whether wife, child, or servant,—each servant to be bound three years, at the expiration of which time he or she was to be allowed to take up thirty acres on separate account.

Only a limited success, however, attended these exertions; national and religious ties were not so easily severed. Notwithstanding the ills that pressed so heavily upon them and their countrymen, the voluntary and perpetual exile which they were asked to take upon them required more earnest and pertinent appeals; and therefore, in 1685, a work appeared entitled The Model of the Government of the Province of East New Jersey in America, written by George Scot of Pitlochie at the request of the Proprietors, in which the objections to emigration were refuted, and the condition of the new country stated at length. Further reference to this publication will be made hereafter; it is sufficient to state at present that it led to the embarkation of nearly two hundred persons for East Jersey on board a vessel named the “Henry and Francis,”—a name which deserves as permanent a position in the annals of New Jersey as does that of the “Mayflower” in those of Massachusetts.

The instructions of the Proprietors to Deputy-Governor Lawrie—while firm in their requirements for the execution of all engagements which justice[439] to themselves and other settlers called upon them to enforce—were calculated to restore tranquillity, and to quiet, for a time at least, the opposition to their government. The claims under the Indian purchases having been brought to their notice, and relief sought from the evils to which the claimants had been subjected, elicited a dignified letter in reply, upholding the proprietary authority, and presenting in a forcible manner the difficulties which would inevitably arise should that authority be subverted. In order to prevent further difficulties from the acquisition of Indian titles by individuals the right to purchase was continued in the deputy-governor, and he was directed to make a requisition upon the Proprietors for the necessary funds, as had been done in 1682, by shipping a cargo of goods valued at about one hundred and fifty pounds, and expending the amount for that purpose.

The necessity for the cultivation of good feelings with the Province of New York was manifest. Having for its chief executive one whose arbitrary temper and disposition led him to disregard solemn engagements, the relations between the provinces were not likely to be made more harmonious because he was heir-apparent to the throne of England; and it was consequently in accordance both with the principles of the Friends and the promptings of sound judgment and discretion, that the Proprietors urged upon Lawrie the propriety of fostering a friendly correspondence with New York, and avoiding everything that might occasion misapprehension or cause aggressions upon their rights.

Lawrie conformed himself to the tenor of his instructions. He visited Governor Dongan and remained with him two or three days, discussing their mutual rights and privileges, and was treated by him with kindness and respect; and being of a less grasping disposition than his predecessor, there were no open acts of hostility to the proprietary government manifested by him.

Immigration and a transfer of rights soon brought into the Province a sufficient number of Proprietors to allow of the establishment of a board of commissioners within its limits, authorized to act with the deputy-governor in the temporary approval of laws passed by the Assembly, the purchasing and laying out of lands, and other matters,—thus avoiding the necessary and consequent unpleasant delay attendant upon the transmission of such business details to the Proprietors in England before putting them in operation. This body was formed August 1, 1684, and became known as the “Board of Proprietors.” To this board was intrusted the advancement of a new town to be called Perth,—in honor of the Earl of Perth, one of the Proprietors,—for the settlement of which proposals had been issued in 1682, immediately on their obtaining possession of the Province.

The advancement of this town was a favorite project, and at the time of Lawrie’s arrival several houses were already erected, and others in progress[440] (Samuel Groom having surveyed and laid out the site); and attention was immediately given to the execution of the plans of the projectors, based upon the expectation that it would become the chief town and seaport of the Province. Lawrie was particularly cautious, in carrying out their views as regarded the seaport, not to infringe any of the navigation laws respecting the payment of duties, or otherwise,—going so far as to admit William Dyre, in April, 1685, to the discharge of his duties as collector of the customs in New Jersey, which naturally led to difficulties. Previously vessels had been permitted by Lawrie to proceed directly to and from the Province, and the inhabitants valued the privilege; but Dyre had not been in execution of his office more than two or three months before he complained to the commissioners of the customs of the opposition encountered in enforcing the regulations he had established for entering at New York the vessels destined to East Jersey, and receiving there the duties upon their cargoes. This state of affairs continued for some months; for, although the authorities in England took the subject into consideration, it was not until April, 1686, that a writ of quo warranto was issued against the Proprietors,—it being thought of great prejudice to the country and His Majesty’s interest that such rights as they claimed should be longer exercised.

James, Duke of York, by the death of Charles II. in May, 1685, had been raised to the throne of England, and his assumption of royalty simplified considerably the powers for ignoring all measures conflicting with his private interests; and although he had thrice as Duke of York, by different patents and by numerous other documents, confirmed to others all the rights, powers, and privileges which he himself had obtained, the increased revenue which was promised him from the reacquisition of New Jersey could not admit of any hesitancy in adopting measures to effect it. The Proprietors, however, were firm in their expostulations, and made many suggestions calculated to remove the pending difficulties; but all were of no avail except one, looking to the appointment of a collector of the customs to reside at Perth,—or Perth Amboy as it began to be called, by the addition of Amboy, from ambo, an Indian appellation for point. The first session of the Assembly was held there as the seat of government, April 6, 1686.

The establishment of a local government in West Jersey in 1677 has been noticed. The next step toward rendering it more perfect was the election, by the Proprietors in England, of Edward Byllynge as governor of the Province, and the appointment by him of Samuel Jenings as his deputy. These events took place in 1680 and 1681, and Jenings arrived in the Province to assume the government in September of the latter year, the first West Jersey Assembly meeting at Burlington in November. The representatives seem to have had a full sense of the responsibilities resting upon them, and at once adopted such measures as were deemed essential under the altered condition of affairs, acknowledging the authority of the deputy-governor[441] on condition that he should accept certain proposals or fundamentals of government affixed to the laws they enacted. This Jenings did, putting his hand and seal thereto; as did also Thomas Olive, the Speaker, by order and in the name of the Assembly.

Burlington was made the chief town of the Province, and the method of settling and regulating the lands was relegated to the governor and eight individuals. For greater convenience the Province was divided into two districts, the courts of each to be held at Burlington and Salem. The second Assembly met May 2, 1682, and a four days’ session seems to have been sufficient to establish the affairs of the Province on a firm basis. Thomas Olive, Robert Stacy, Mahlon Stacy, William Biddle, Thomas Budd, John Chaffin, James Nevill, Daniel Wills, Mark Newbie, and Elias Farre being chosen as the council.

Subsequent meetings of the Assembly were held in September, and in May, 1683. At this last some important measures were enacted contributing to good government. For the despatch of business the governor and council were authorized to prepare bills for the consideration of the Assembly, which were to be promulgated twenty days before the meetings of that body. The governor, council, and assembly were to constitute the General Assembly, and have definite and decisive action upon all bills so prepared. As John Fenwicke was one of the representatives to this Assembly, it is evident that he recognized for his Tenth the general jurisdiction which had been established. It is understood that Byllynge at this time had resolved to relieve Jenings from his position, as his own independent authority was thought to be endangered by Jenings’s continuance in office.

At this Assembly the question was discussed whether the purchase at first made was of land only or of land and government combined, and the conclusion arrived at was that both were purchased; and also that an instrument should be prepared and sent to London, there to be signed by Byllynge, confirmatory of this view; and, carrying out a suggestion of William Penn, Samuel Jenings was by vote of the Assembly elected governor of the Province,—a proceeding which was satisfactory to the people, as they desired a continuance of his administration. Thus again did the representatives of the people assert their claim to entire freedom from all authority not instituted by themselves.

As Byllynge did not acquiesce as promptly as was desired with the views of the Assembly, it was determined at a session held in March, 1684, that, for the vindication of the people’s right to government, Governor Jenings and Thomas Budd (George Hutchinson subsequently acted with them) should go to England and discuss the matter with Byllynge in person,—Thomas Olive being appointed deputy-governor until the next Assembly should meet. This was in the May following, at which time Olive was elected governor, and his council made to consist of Robert Stacy, William Biddle, Robert Dusdale, John Gosling, Elias Farre, Daniel Wills, Richard Guy, Robert Turner, William Emley and Christopher White.

[442]

The mission of Jenings was only partially successful. The differences between Byllynge and the people were referred to the “judgment and determination” of George Fox, George Whitehead, and twelve other prominent Friends; whose award was to the effect that the government was rightfully in Byllynge, and that they could not find any authority for a governor chosen by the people. This award was made in October, 1684, but was signed by only eight of the fourteen referees, George Fox not being one of them. The document subsequently became the cause of much discussion. As late as 1699 it was printed with the addition of many severe reflections upon the action of Jenings and his friends, drawing from him equally harsh animadversions upon those from whom they emanated. In accordance with this award Byllynge asserted his claims to the chief authority over the Province, and no important concessions appear to have been made to the people.

In 1685 Byllynge appointed John Skene to be his deputy-governor; and on September 25 the Assembly, expressly reserving “their just rights and privileges,” recognized him as such, Olive continuing to act as chairman, or speaker, of the Assembly.

Harmony to a great extent prevailed for some time, Skene not attempting to exercise any authority not generally acknowledged by the people; but in 1687 Byllynge died, and Dr. Daniel Coxe of London, already a large proprietor, having purchased the whole of Byllynge’s interest from his heirs, after consultation with the principal Proprietors in England, decided to assume the government of the Province himself. But while he thus assumed, in his own person, rights which the people had claimed as theirs, he did not refrain from granting to them a liberal exercise of power, giving assurances that all reasonable expectations and requests would be complied with, and that the officers who had been chosen by the people should be continued in their several positions. It is somewhat more than doubtful if Coxe ever visited the Province at all, and indeed he probably did not; meanwhile Byllynge’s deputy, John Skene, acted for him till the death of the latter in December, 1687, when Coxe appointed Edward Hunloke in his stead.

It was during Lawrie’s administration in East Jersey that the first steps were taken to settle the boundary line between that Province and New York. The subject was discussed by him and Governor Dongan at an early date; and on June 30, 1686, a council was held, composed of the two deputy-governors and several gentlemen of both New York and New Jersey, at which the course to be pursued in running the line was agreed upon. The points on the Hudson and Delaware rivers were subsequently determined; but nothing further was done for several years, and nearly a century elapsed before the line was definitely settled.

There are some allusions made to the fact that Lawrie was much interested in West Jersey, as accounting for his dismissal by the Proprietors from[443] his position as their deputy-governor in East Jersey; but so far as the records of the period give an insight into the motives actuating him in the administration of the affairs of the Province, there is no evidence afforded of any want of interest in its prosperity. As the result of his administration did not meet their expectations of profit, it is not surprising that they should have regarded it as due to some mistaken policy on his part. In the appointment of a successor they were evidently led by the large influx of population from Scotland to look among the Proprietors residing there for a suitable person; and they therefore selected Lord Neill Campbell, a brother of the Earl of Argyle, who was obliged to flee from Scotland in consequence of his connection with that nobleman, who had been beheaded June 30, 1685, after the unfortunate termination of his invasion of that country. He left for East Jersey with a large number of emigrants not long after that event, and reached the Province in December of the same year.

Lord Neill was appointed deputy-governor June 2, 1686, for two years, but his commission did not reach him until October, on the 5th of which month it was published; and on the 18th he announced as his council Gawen Lawrie, John Berry of Bergen, Isaac Kingsland of New Barbadoes, Andrew Hamilton of Amboy, Richard Townley of Elizabethtown, Samuel Winder of Cheesequakes, David Mudie and John Johnstone of Amboy, and Thomas Codrington of Raritan.

It is a remarkable circumstance that the great diversity existing in the characters, religions, pursuits, and political relations of the Proprietors of East Jersey should have been overcome to such an extent as to allow of harmonious action in the appointment of Lord Neill Campbell. The Earl of Perth, a prominent member of the body, was one of the jury that found the Earl of Argyle guilty of high treason; and yet, stanch adherent as he was of James, he could consent to have his interests in East Jersey taken care of by that earl’s brother. Robert Barclay, with all the peculiarities of his peaceful sect, the advocate of gentleness and non-resistance, was willing to be associated with a stanch Scotch Presbyterian soldier, and join in commissioning him as his subordinate. It is evident that private prejudices and feelings were not allowed to interfere with whatever was thought likely to conduce to the advancement of their pecuniary interests in East Jersey.

Lord Neill’s administration, however, was very brief. On December 10 of the same year, “urgent necessity of some weighty matters” calling him to England, he appointed Andrew Hamilton to be his substitute, and sailed, it is presumed, the March following, Hamilton’s commission being published on the 12th of that month.

Andrew Hamilton had been a merchant in London, and came to the Province with his family in June, 1686, as an agent of the Proprietors in London. He at first declined accepting the position tendered him, and Lawrie, who was one of the council, openly protested against his appointment, because of his unpopularity with the planters; but his authority having[444] been confirmed by a commission from Governor Barclay in August, 1687, all open opposition thereto seems to have ceased. Hamilton appears to have been a man of intelligence, and to have acted in a manner which he conceived to be calculated to advance the best interests of the Proprietors without involving them with the people, but it is doubtful if any great cordiality existed between the governor and the governed at that period.

Before his death Charles II. had been led to call for a surrender of the charter of Massachusetts Bay, and, meeting with a refusal from the General Assembly, a writ of quo warranto was issued in 1684. The death of the King left the proceedings to be consummated by his successor, whose rapacity prompted him to subvert the liberties of all the colonies; and his pliant servant Andros, whom he had knighted, was sent over with a commission that covered all New England. Sir Edmund took up his residence in Boston, assumed the supreme authority of Massachusetts, and the following year dissolved in succession the governments of Rhode Island and Connecticut, taking to himself all power and dominion, even beyond the limits granted by his royal master.[712]

The Proprietors, finding it impossible to overcome the determination of James to unite New York and New Jersey to New England under the same government, deemed it advisable to abandon the unavailing contest, and by acceding to the King’s design to obtain from him an efficient guarantee that he would respect their rights to the soil. A surrender of their patent, so far as the government was concerned, was therefore made in April, 1688, James having agreed to accept it; and, the Proprietors of West Jersey having acceded also to the arrangement, a new commission was issued to Sir Edmund Andros, annexing both provinces and New York to his government, and Francis Nicholson was appointed his lieutenant-governor.

The course of Andros in accepting the simple acknowledgment of his authority as sufficient, without revolutionizing the government and dismissing the functionaries in office in New Jersey, was doubtless in a great measure owing to the fact that the surrender by the Proprietors of their right to govern rendered necessary the issuing of a new grant to them from the Crown, confirmatory of all the immunities of the soil; and until that could be perfected, it may have been considered expedient not to disturb the existing regulations. It is nevertheless remarkable that any considerations of the kind should have had so mollifying an effect upon one whose arrogance, disregard of the rights of others, and impetuosity of temper were so intrusively manifest as in Edmund Andros.

By the seizure of Andros in New England in April, 1689, in anticipation of the successful revolution in England in favor of William and Mary, which promised the subversion of his authority not only there but also in the other colonies that had been placed within his jurisdiction, an opportunity was afforded the Proprietors of New Jersey to resume all the rights and[445] privileges of which they had been despoiled. But there were impediments in the way. They were not sure of the support of the people, and being separated,—some in England, some in Scotland, and some in New Jersey,—it was not possible that unanimity of action could be secured. Many of them, having been closely allied to King James, were probably disposed to cling to him in his misfortunes, and had the deputy-governor thrown off the responsibilities he had so recently resumed as the representative of the Crown, for the purpose of re-establishing the authority of the Proprietors, it would have been attended with great doubt and uncertainty as to his success, the people having so definitely manifested their preference for a royal government.

In April Hamilton received a summons from the mayor of New York, acting as lieutenant of Andros; and, attended by the justices of Bergen, repaired thither to consult upon the proper course to be pursued in the peculiar situation of affairs prevailing in the two colonies, but nothing of consequence resulted from the conference. The deputy-governor on subsequent occasions was invited to similar consultations in New York, but does not seem to have compromised himself in any way with any party; and, as so much doubt existed as to what was the proper course for him to pursue, he resolved in August to proceed to England in person to advise with the Proprietors there. On his way thither he was taken prisoner by the French, and appears to have been detained in France until the May following, when he, being then in England, resigned his position as the deputy-governor. From the time of Hamilton’s departure for England until 1692 the inhabitants of East Jersey were left to the guardianship of their county and town officers, who seemed to have possessed all necessary powers to preserve the peace. So also in West Jersey. The course of events caused but little alteration in the general condition of the Province after the surrender of the government to Andros in April, 1688, and the subsequent suspension of his authority.

In 1687 George Keith, surveyor-general of East Jersey, under orders from the Proprietors there, attempted to run the dividing line between the two provinces, in accordance with the terms of the Quintipartite deed of 1676; but the result was unsatisfactory to West Jersey, as it was thought too great a quantity of the best lands came thereby within the bounds of East Jersey. In September, 1688, however, a consultation took place in London, between Governor Coxe of West Jersey and Governor Barclay of East Jersey, with the view of perfecting a settlement of Keith’s line, resulting in a written agreement signed and sealed by the two parties; but nevertheless no satisfactory termination of the matter was arrived at for many years. It was in 1688 that the “Board of Proprietors of West Jersey” was regularly organized.

It would be very gratifying to be able to state clearly, upon good authority, the condition of New Jersey at this eventful period in its history, and[446] note its progress since its surrender to the English in 1664, but from the imperfection of the details, the information obtainable is not sufficiently definite to give satisfactory results.

That the population of East Jersey had largely increased there can be no doubt. It was a constant cause of complaint by the government of New York that the freedom from taxation and various mercantile restrictions had tended greatly to increase emigration to East Jersey, much to the detriment of New York; and the first towns, Newark, Elizabethtown, and Middletown, drew large numbers from New England and Long Island, leading to their becoming centres for the development of other towns and villages. The new capital, Perth Amboy, became in a very few years an important settlement, and both from Scotland and England numerous families had already arrived and settled in various parts of the Province; so that it is probable the increase during the quarter of a century had been more than a hundred-fold, making the total number of souls in East Jersey nearly, if not quite, ten thousand. There are no figures upon which any correct estimate can be based of the increase in West Jersey, but it may be safely considered as coming far short of the eastern Province.

Of the five counties recognized in 1670 Monmouth was the most populous; and of its three towns, Shrewsbury, Middletown, and Freehold, the first was the most important. Essex County came next; Elizabethtown, Newark, Acquackanock, and New Barbadoes being its towns, ranking in the order in which they are named. Middlesex followed, with Woodbridge, Piscataway, and Perth Amboy as its towns. Bergen stood fourth, with its towns of Bergen and Hackensack; and Somerset came last, having no specific townships. There were, of course, in all the counties small settlements not yet of sufficient importance to be recognized as separate organizations. In 1683 Bergen County was third in importance, and Middlesex fourth.

One great hindrance to the development of the agricultural and mineral resources of the two provinces was the want of roads and conveniences to promote intercourse between the different sections. The only Indian path ran from Shrewsbury River to the northwest limits of the Province, and the only road opened by the Dutch appears to have been that by which intercourse was kept up with the settlements on the Delaware, in what is now Maryland. From New Amsterdam a direct water communication was had with Elizabethtown Point (now Elizabethport), and thence by land to the Raritan River which was crossed by fording at Inian’s Ferry, now New Brunswick. Thence the road ran in almost a straight course to the Delaware River, above the site of the present Trenton, where there was another ford. This was called the Upper Road; another, called the Lower Road, branched off from the first about five or six miles from the Raritan, and by a circuitous route reached the Delaware at the site of what is now Burlington; but the whole country was a wilderness between the towns in Monmouth County and the Delaware River as late as 1675.

[447]

The first public measures for the establishment of roads was in 1675; two men in each town being clothed with authority to lay out the common highways; and in March, 1683, boards were created in the different counties to lay out all necessary highways, bridges, landings, ferries, etc., and by these boards the first effective intercommunication was established. The present generation have in constant use many of the roads laid out by them. In July, 1683, instructions were given to Deputy-Governor Lawrie to open a road between the new capital, Perthtown, and Burlington; but, although his instructions were complied with, and the road opened in connection with water communication between Perth and New York, the route by way of New Brunswick was the most travelled.

The character of the legislation and laws for the punishment and suppression of crime was very different in the two provinces. The penal laws in East Jersey partook more of the severity of the Levitical law, originating as they did with the settlers coming from Puritan countries, while those in West Jersey were exceedingly humane and forbearing. In the one there were thirteen classes of offences made amenable to the death penalty, while in the other such a punishment was unknown to the laws.

As might reasonably be expected from its proximity to New Amsterdam, the first church erected in New Jersey soil, of which any mention is made, was at Bergen. This was in 1680, the congregation having been formed in 1662. The first clergyman heard of in Newark was in 1667, a Congregationalist, and the first meeting-house was built in 1669. Elizabethtown’s first congregation was formed in 1668. Woodbridge succeeded in getting one established in 1670, and its first church was built in 1681. The Quakers immediately after their arrival in West Jersey, in 1675, organized a meeting at Salem (probably the one which Edmondson says he attended), and in 1680 purchased a house and had it fitted up for their religious services. It is said that the first religious meetings of the Quakers in New Jersey were held at Shrewsbury as early as 1670, the settlers there, about 1667, being principally of that denomination. Edmondson mentions a meeting held at Middletown in 1675. The first General Yearly Meeting for regulating the affairs of the Society was held at Burlington in August, 1681. Local meetings were held there in tents before a house was erected. John Woolston’s was the first, and its walls were consecrated by having worship within them. The Friends at Cape May in 1676, Cohansey in 1683, and Lower Alloway Creek in 1685 secured religious services.

Middletown, in Monmouth County, had an organized Baptist congregation in 1688; and Piscataway in Middlesex County one in 1689.

To what extent education had been fostered up to this period it is difficult to determine. The first schoolmaster mentioned in Newark was there in 1676; but Bergen had a school established under the Dutch administration in 1661. The first general law providing for the establishment and support of school-masters in East Jersey was not passed until 1693.

The currency of both East and West Jersey during the whole period of[448] their colonial existence, for reasons which are not very apparent, was more stable than that of the neighboring colonies. The coins of England and Holland, and their respective moneys of account, were used, and Indian wampum afforded the means of exchange with the Aborigines. Barter was naturally the mode of traffic most followed, and tables are now found showing the value set upon the different productions of the soil that were used in these business operations, marking the diminution in value from year to year as compared with “old England money.” In 1681 an act was passed in West Jersey for the enhancing, or raising, the value of coins, which was extended also to New England money. About that time an individual, named Mark Newbie, increased the circulating medium by putting into circulation a large number of Irish half-pence of less value than the standard coin, which he had brought with him from Ireland; and, as thought by some, continued the manufacture of them after his arrival. The act of 1681, however, was repealed the following year, and another passed making Newbie’s half-pence equal in value to the current money of the Province, provided he gave security to exchange them “for pay equivalent on demand,” and provided also that no person should be obliged to take more than five shillings on one payment.[713] No repeal of this act appears in the records. It became inoperative probably in 1684, when Newbie disappears from the documentary history of the period. This supposition is in some measure confirmed by the passage of an act in May of that year, making three farthings “of the King’s coin to go current for one penny,” in sums not exceeding five shillings.[714]

The only attempt to regulate the value of gold and silver in East Jersey was in 1686. Its object was to prevent the transportation of silver from the Province by raising it above its true value in all business transactions. Its evil tendencies, however, were soon developed, and before the end of the year, at a subsequent session of the same Assembly, it was repealed.

The first grist-mill is mentioned in 1671, and was followed by another in 1679, hand-mills being generally used. The first saw-mill was erected in 1682. In 1683 Deputy-Governor Rudyard, in a letter to a friend, says that at that time there were two saw-mills at work, and five or six more projected, abating “the price of boards half in half, and all other timber for building; for altho’ timber cost nothing, yet workmanship by hand was London price or near upon it, and sometimes more, which these mills abate.”

The cider produced at Newark was awarded the preference over that brought from New England, Rhode Island, or Long Island. Clams, oysters, and fish received well merited commendation for their plentifulness and good qualities.

In 1685 the iron-mills in Monmouth County, belonging to Lewis Morris, were in full operation; but it was not until some years had elapsed that “the hills up in the country,” which were “said to be stony,” were[449] explored, and the mineral treasures of Morris County revealed. Gabriel Thomas, in 1698, mentions rice among the products of West Jersey, adding that large quantities of pitch, tar, and turpentine were secured from the pine forests, and that the number of whales caught yearly gave the settlers abundance of oil and whalebone.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE relations existing between New York and New Jersey, during the era of discovery and settlement, necessarily led to their being jointly noticed by all the early writers, and as they have been referred to in what has preceded this chapter,[715] it is thought unnecessary to comment further upon their revelations. Attention will therefore be given to those whose object was the making known the peculiarities, the advantages, and attractions of New Jersey independent of New York.

The first of these was an issue by John Fenwicke of a single folio leaf, in 1675, containing his proposals for planting his colony of New Cæsarea, or New Jersey. A copy was for sale in London in 1853,—perhaps the same copy sold at the Brinley sale to the Pennsylvania Historical Society. It is printed in Penn. Mag. of Hist., vi.

In 1682 the Proprietors of East Jersey published a small quarto of eight pages, giving an account of their recently acquired province.[716] This publication is not now obtainable, and it is doubtful if any copies have been seen for several generations. It is the basis of all the information respecting East Jersey contained in The Present State of His Majesty’s Isles and Territories in America, etc., by Richard Blome (London, 1687), which is frequently quoted, though abounding in errors. Although the original edition may not now be met with, the Brief Account may be found reprinted in Smith’s History of New Jersey, and in East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments. It gives a very fair and interesting account of the Province, and doubtless aided in inducing adventurers to embark for the new Eldorado.

In 1683 a small quarto of fifteen pages, including the titlepage, was published in Edinburgh for the Scotch Proprietors, of similar purport to the foregoing.[717] The only copy of the original, known, is in the possession of Samuel L. M. Barlow, Esq., of New York. This was used when the work was reproduced in the New York Historical Magazine, second series, vol. i.[718]

In 1684 a work of greater pretensions, comprising 73 pages, 12º, was published in London, entitled The Planter’s Speech to his neighbours and countrymen of Pennsylvania, East and West Jersey; and to all such as have transported themselves into new Colonies for the sake of a quiet, retired life. To which is added the complaints of our Supra-interior inhabitants. The title and introduction of this volume are all that have been met with. They will be found in Proud’s History of Pennsylvania.[719] The author’s name is not known, but it would seem that his object was more to impress upon his “dear friends[450] and countrymen” their moral and religious duties as immigrants, than to portray the advantages of the section of country particularly referred to.

The purport of the treatise is thus summarized by Proud: “Divers particulars are proposed as fundamentals for future laws and customs, tending principally to establish a higher degree of temperance and original simplicity of manners,—more particularly against the use of spirituous liquors,—than had been usual before. Everything of a military nature, even the use of the instruments thereof, is not only disapproved, and the destruction of the human species thereby condemned in this Speech, but likewise all violence or cruelty towards, and the wanton killing of, the inferior living creatures, and the eating of animal food are also strongly advised against in those proposed regulations, customs, or laws, with the reasons given, etc., to the end that a higher degree of love, perfection, and happiness might more universally be introduced and preserved among mankind.”

In 1685 the most interesting and valuable of all the early publications was issued in Edinburgh,[720] reference to which has been made on a preceding page. The author, George Scot, of Pitlochie, was connected by descent and marriage with many distinguished families in Scotland, which connection probably led the Proprietors to confide the preparation of the work to him, as his extensive circle of friends and acquaintances would be likely to insure for it a more general acceptance, particularly as he was ready to add example to precept by embarking himself and family for East Jersey. Accompanied by nearly two hundred persons, he sailed from Scotland about Aug. 1, 1685, but before the vessel reached her destination Scot and his wife and many of their fellow-passengers were no longer living. One daughter, Eupham, became the wife of John Johnstone the ensuing year. Mr. Johnstone was one of her fellow-passengers. Their descendants became numerous, and for years before the war of Independence, and since that period, they filled high civil and military stations in East Jersey.

The author of The Model begins his work with a learned disquisition upon the manner in which America was first peopled, and then proceeds to meet and overcome the various scruples that were presumed to operate against its further settlement from Scotland, by arguments drawn from sacred and profane history and from the consideration due their families and the country; concluding with a portrayal of the advantages to be secured by a residence in East Jersey, and the superiority of that colony over others in America and the West Indies. In this respect the value of the work to the historian is very great, as numerous letters are given from the early settlers, presenting minute descriptions of various localities and their individual experiences in a manner calculated to produce a correct and, at the same time, a favorable impression upon their readers. The original edition is exceedingly rare, only ten copies being known, but the New Jersey Historical Society has caused it to be reprinted as an appendix to the first volume of its Collections, thus placing it within the reach of all.[721]

The year 1685 gave also to the world the interesting book of Thomas Budd, entitled Good Order established in Pennsilvania and New Jersey.[722] Mr. Budd arrived at Burlington,[451] in West Jersey, in 1678, and during his residence there held many important offices; was associated with Jenings on the committee appointed in 1684 to confer with Edward Byllynge, and it was while he was in England that his book was printed. He probably removed to Philadelphia after his return to New Jersey. He made another brief visit to England in 1689, but continued to consider Philadelphia as his residence until his death in 1698. Mr. Budd’s work exhibits the possession of intelligence and public spirit to a remarkable degree. Some of his suggestions as to the education which should be given to the young in various pursuits show him to have been an early advocate of what are now termed Technical Schools, and are deserving of consideration even at this late day. The original work is seldom seen, but in 1865 a reprint was given to the public by William Gowans, of New York, having an introduction and copious notes by Mr. Edward Armstrong, of Philadelphia.

In 1698 Gabriel Thomas published a small octavo of forty-six pages on West Jersey, in connection with a similar work on Pennsylvania, with a map of both colonies. He was then, it is thought, a resident of London, but he had resided in America about fifteen years, the information contained in the book being the result of his own experiences and observation.[723] The book was dedicated to the West Jersey Proprietors, and its intent was to induce emigration of all who wished to better their worldly condition, especially the poor, who might in West Jersey “subsist very well without either begging or stealing.” French refugees or Protestants would find it also to their interest to remove thither where they might live “far better than in Germany, Holland, Ireland, or England.” The modes of life among the Indians, and the prevailing intercourse between them and the settlers were fully discussed, as well as the natural productions of the country and the improvements already introduced or in progress.

In 1699 two pamphlets were published in Philadelphia, referring to the difficulties in West Jersey between the people of the Province and Edward Byllynge in 1684, which led to the despatch, by the Assembly, of Samuel Jenings and Thomas Budd to confer in person with Byllynge. The first of these publications was aimed at Jenings, who was accused of being the head of “some West Jersians” opposed to Byllynge, and emanated from John Tatham, Thomas Revell, and Nathaniel Westland, although published anonymously.[724][452] Jenings took exceptions to many of its statements and answered it under his own name in a small quarto, boldly asserting his innocence of the serious charges made against him.[725] These publications throw considerable light upon a portion of West Jersey history which is very obscure, and have been used in the preparation of the foregoing narrative. They are both exceedingly rare, and historians are indebted to Mr. Brinton Coxe, of Philadelphia, for having them reprinted in 1881.

The Journal of William Edmundson has been referred to as furnishing some interesting items respecting New Jersey during the period we have had under review.[726] He visited the Province in 1676, and his statements respecting the condition of the country and his interviews with prominent Friends are valuable.

In addition to these publications, there are in the Secretary of State’s office at Trenton the original records of both the East Jersey and West Jersey Proprietors, which were transferred from Perth Amboy and Burlington about the middle of the last century, copies only being left in the original places of deposit.

The foregoing references include all the works published, prior to the surrender of the government of New Jersey to the Crown in 1703, relating to the history of the Province, previous to its separation from New York; but others were published subsequently which throw much light upon that early period, although not written for that purpose exclusively. Thus in 1747 the renowned Elizabethtown Bill in Chancery was drawn and put in print by subscription the same year,[727] which will ever be acknowledged as a structure of valuable materials illustrative of the conflicts between the Proprietors and their government and the discontented settlers. The bill was principally drawn by James Alexander, who during a long period was a prominent lawyer in both provinces. A Scotchman by birth he came to America in 1715, and shortly after his arrival entered the Secretary’s office, New York, and was deputy-clerk of the Court in 1719. Throughout his life, which did not terminate until April 2, 1756, he held very highly important positions in both New York and New Jersey, and was the owner of large land tracts in both provinces.[728] This bill, notwithstanding its great length and complicated nature, is drawn with much ability and makes out a very strong case for the plaintiffs. The defendants’ claims would seem to be, beyond controversy, invalid; but other matters were introduced rendering the case one not easily disposed of.

The answer to the Bill in Chancery was filed in 1751 and printed in 1752,—the counsel[453] for the defendants being William Livingston, afterward Governor of New Jersey, and William Smith, Jr., who became Chief-Justice of New York, and subsequently, after the war of Independence, Chief-Justice of Canada. The copies now extant are very rare.[729] Although not as voluminous it was fully as prolix as the document which prompted it. Notwithstanding the great amount of labor which this case required both in its preparation and argument, it was never brought to a conclusion. The Revolution of 1776 effectually interrupted the progress of the suit, and it was never afterward revived. Both bill and answer, however, and other smaller publications which resulted from the trial of the case, must ever be considered as valuable historical documents, emanating as they all did from parties more or less interested in the questions involved, and consequently earnestly desirous of eliciting every fact that could throw any light upon them.[730]

The first general history of New Jersey was that of Samuel Smith, published in 1765.[731] It is valuable to all examining the early history of the State, from the author’s having had access to, and judiciously used, information obtained from various sources not now accessible. He gives some interesting letters from early settlers, elucidating the events comprehended in the period we have had under review; and although, as might naturally be expected, errors are occasionally found in it, Smith’s History of New Jersey has ever[454] been deservedly considered a standard work.[732] Proud, whose History of Pennsylvania contains much matter referring to West Jersey that is usefully arranged, acknowledges his indebtedness to Smith, and gives him the credit of being “the person who took the most pains to adjust and reduce these materials into nice order, as might be proper for the public view,” previous to his own undertaking; and the old historian, if cognizant of what is taking place in his native State at this late day, must be gratified to find how freely modern writers have transferred his pages to their books, even though no acknowledgment of indebtedness to him has been made.

In 1748 the acts of the General Assembly of New Jersey, from the time of the surrender of the government to the Crown in the second year of Queen Anne, were published under the supervision of Samuel Nevill, second Judge of the Supreme Court of the Province, and, in consequence, the popular party were aroused into having the early grants and concessions also arranged and published. About 1750 a committee was appointed to collate the early manuscripts connected with the proprietary grants, and subsequently Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer were empowered to have them printed, and to them does the credit belong of giving to their fellow-citizens the admirable compilation that is generally quoted under their names.[733] It contains all the agreements, deeds, concessions, and public acts from 1664 to 1702, and the object in view by their compilation and the estimate in which they were held are apparent from a remark of the compilers in their preface. “If our present system of government,” say they, “should not be judged so equal to the natural rights of a reasonable creature as the one that raised us to the dignity of a colony, let it serve as a caution to guard the cause of liberty.”

This volume has been of great value to members of the Bar and of the Legislature, as well as to the historian, as it has preserved many documents the original depository of which is not now to be found.[734] At the present time, however, the State of New Jersey is publishing, under the direction of a committee of the Historical Society, a series of volumes entitled the New Jersey Archives, which is intended to include all important documents referring to the colonial history of the State, however widely the originals may be scattered in other depositories,—including all of interest now preserved in the Public Record Office of England,—and will probably be the authoritative reference hereafter for documentary evidence relating to the whole colonial period.[735]

The first volume issued by the New Jersey Historical Society as their Collections was published in 1846, and contained “East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments.”[736][455] The author wrote his work fully sensible of the necessity for verifying much that had been allowed to pass as history, by seeking for and using original sources of information; and the volume elucidates many events that are alluded to in the preceding chapter.


Editorial Note.—The New Jersey Archives will contain every essential document noted in An Analytical Index to the Colonial Documents of New Jersey in the state-paper offices of England, compiled by Henry Stevens, edited with notes and references to printed works and manuscripts in other depositories, by William A. Whitehead, New York, 1858.

In 1843 a movement was made in the State Legislature to emulate the action of New York in securing from the English Archives copies of its early historical documents; and in the next year the judiciary committee made a report on the subject, which is printed in the preface of this Index, p. vii. This, however, failed of effect, as did a movement in 1845; but it made manifest the necessity of an historical society, as a source of influence for such end; and the same year the New Jersey Historical Society was formed, of which Mr. Whitehead has been the corresponding secretary from the start. This society reinforced the movement in the State Legislature; but no result being reached, it undertook of its own action the desired work, and in 1849 gave a commission to Mr. Henry Stevens to make an analytical index of the documents relating to New Jersey to be found in England. This being furnished, the State legislature failing to respond in any co-operative measures for the enlargement of it from the domestic records of the State, Mr. Whitehead undertook the editing, as explained in the title, and appended to the volume a bibliography of all the principal printed works relating to New Jersey up to 1857. Mr. Stevens’s enumeration began with 1663-64, the editor adding two earlier ones of 1649 and 1651. But a small part of the list, however (13 pp. out of 470), refers to the period covered by the present chapter, and many of those mentioned had already been printed.

The Sparks Catalogue shows “Papers relating to New Jersey, 1683-1775,” collected by George Chalmers, which are now in Harvard College Library.

Some of the later general histories of the State may be mentioned:—

The History of New Jersey from its Discovery to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, by Thomas F. Gordon, Trenton, 1834. There is a companion volume, a Gazetteer.

Civil and Political History of New Jersey, by Isaac S. Mulford, Camden, 1848. The author says “no claim is advanced for originality or learning,” his object being to make accessible scattered information in a “simple and compendious narrative,” which is not altogether carefully set forth. A new edition was issued in 1851 in Philadelphia.

The History of New Jersey, by John O. Raum, 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1877, is simply, so far as the early chronicles are concerned, a repetition mostly of Smith and Gordon, though no credit is given to those authorities.

A few of the local histories also deserve some notice:—

Contributions to the Early History of Perth Amboy and adjoining Country, by William A. Whitehead, New York, 1856. The author says, “No attempt has been made to clothe with the importance of history these desultory gleanings.” It has a map of the original laying-out, following what is presumed to have been an original survey of 1684.

An Historical Account of the First Settlement at Salem in West Jersey, by John Fenwicke, Esq., chief proprietor of the same; with[456] R. S. Johnson, Philadelphia, 1839, 24º. pp. 173. Mr. Johnson’s memoir of Fenwicke is in the New Jersey Hist. Soc. Proc. iv.

COLONIAL BOUNDS, 1656.

The Hon. John Clement, of Haddonfield, has prepared a History of Fenwicke’s Colony.

The two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Burlington was celebrated Dec. 6, 1877, when the late Henry Armitt Brown delivered an oration, presenting the early history in a rhetorical way.

Reminiscences of Old Gloucester, ... New Jersey, by Isaac Mickle, Philadelphia, 1845.

History of Elizabeth, New Jersey, including the Early History of Union County, by the Rev. Edwin F. Hatfield, New York, 1868. The author differs from the writer of the present chapter with respect to the merits of the conflict between the Proprietors and the people. The foot-note references are ample.

History of the County of Hudson from its Earliest Settlement, by Charles H. Winfield, New York, 1874.

Historical Sketch of the County of Passaic, especially of the First Settlements and Settlers. Privately printed, by William Nelson, Paterson, 1877.

The History of Newark, New Jersey, being a Narrative of its Rise and Progress from May, 1666, by Joseph Atkinson, Newark, 1878; a book giving, however, only in a new garb, the older chronicles of the place. It gives a map of the town as laid out in 1666.

The annexed sketch-map is an extract from a map entitled, Le Canada, ou Nouvelle France, etc., par N. Sanson d’Abbeville, geographe ordinaire du Roy, Paris, 1656, and by its dotted lines shows the limits conceded by the French to the different colonies of the northern seaboard of the present United States, a few years before the establishment of New Caesaria. New England was defined on the east by the height of land between the waters of the Penobscot and the Kennebec, and on the northwest by a similar elevation that turned the rainfall to the St. Lawrence. New Netherland stretched from Cape Cod to the Delaware, where it met New Sweden, which lay between it and Virginia,—the Maryland charter not being recognized; nor was the absorption of the territory of the Swedes the year before (1655), by the Dutch, made note of. The map-maker, in defining these limits, pretends to have worked on English and Dutch authorities; but the Plymouth colonists would have hardly allowed the annihilation to which they were subjected, and the settlers of Massachusetts would scarcely have recognized the names attached to their headlands and harbors, and never having any existence but in Smith’s map, which the royal geographer seems to have fallen in with.

[457]

NOTE ON NEW ALBION.

BY GREGORY B. KEEN.

Late Professor of Mathematics in the Theological Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo, Corresponding Secretary of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

THE English did not attain supreme dominion in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Delaware until the grant of King Charles II. to his royal brother, the Duke of York, in 1664; yet the history of these States and that of Maryland would not be complete without specific mention of the antecedent attempt to settle this part of America, made by the unsuccessful colonist Sir Edmund Plowden.

This person was a member of a Saxon family of Shropshire, England, whose antiquity is sufficiently intimated by the meaning of its surname, “Kill-Dane,”—being the second son of Francis Plowden, Esq., of Plowden, Salop, and grandson of the celebrated lawyer and author of the Commentaries, Serjeant Edmund Plowden, a Catholic, who declined the Lord-Chancellorship of England, offered him by Queen Elizabeth, lest he should be forced to countenance her Majesty’s persecutions of his Church.[737] In 1632, this gentleman, who like his ancestors and other relatives was a Catholic,[738] and at that time resided in Ireland,[739] in company with “Sir John Lawrence, Kt. and Bart., Sir Boyer Worsley, Kt., John Trusler, Roger Pack, William Inwood, Thomas Ryebread, Charles Barret, and George Noble, adventurers,” petitioned King Charles I. for a patent, under his Majesty’s seal of Ireland, for “Manitie, or Long Isle,” and “thirty miles square of the coast next adjoining, to be erected into a County Palatine called Syon, to be held of” his “Majesty’s Crown of Ireland, without appeal or subjection to the Governor or Company of Virginia, and reserving the fifth of all royal mines, and with the like title, dignity, and privileges to Sir Edmund Plowden there as was granted to Sir George Calvert, Kt., in New Foundland by” his “Majesty’s royal father, and with the usual grants and privileges to other colonies,”[458] etc. And a modified form of this prayer was subsequently presented to the monarch, in which the island spoken of is called “Isle Plowden,” and the county palatine “New Albion,” and the latter is enlarged to include “forty leagues square of the adjoining continent,” the supplicants “promising therein to settle five hundred inhabitants for the planting and civilizing thereof.” The favor sought was immediately conceded, and the King’s warrant, authorizing the issue of a patent to the petitioners, and appointing Sir Edmund Plowden “first Governor of the Premises,” was given at Oatlands, July 24, the same year;[740] in accordance with which, a charter was granted to Plowden and his associates above mentioned, by writ of Privy Seal, witnessed by the Deputy-General of Ireland, at Dublin, June 21, 1634.[741] In this document the boundaries of New Albion are so defined as to include all of New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania embraced in a square, the eastern side of which, forty leagues in length, extended (along the coast) from Sandy Hook to Cape May, together with Long Island, and all other “isles and islands in the sea within ten leagues of the shores of the said region.” The province is expressly erected into a county palatine, under the jurisdiction of Sir Edmund Plowden as earl, depending upon his Majesty’s “royal person and imperial crown, as King of Ireland;” and the same extraordinary privileges are conferred upon the patentee as had been bestowed two years before upon Lord Baltimore, to whose charter for Maryland that for New Albion bears very close resemblance.

Two of the petitioners, Worsley and Barret, afterward dying, “the whole estate and interest” in the grant became vested in the seven survivors, and of these, Ryebread, Pack, Inwood, and Trusler, in consideration of gifts of five hundred acres of land in the province, abandoned their claims, Dec. 20, 1634, in favor of “Francis, Lord Plowden, son and heir of Sir Edmund, Earl Palatine,” and George and Thomas Plowden, two other of his sons, their heirs and assigns, forever. The same year, apparently,[742] Plowden granted to Sir Thomas Danby a lease of ten thousand acres of land, one hundred of which were “on the northeast end or cape of Long Island,” and the rest in the vicinity of Watsessett, presumed to be near the present Salem, New Jersey, with “full liberty and jurisdiction of a court baron and court leet,” and other privileges for a “Town and Manor of Danby Fort,” conditioned on the settlement of one hundred “resident planters in the province,” not suffering “any to live therein not believing or professing the three Christian creeds commonly called the Apostolical, Athanasian, and Nicene.”

The plans of the Earl Palatine were simultaneously advanced by the independent voyages of Captain Thomas Yong, of a Yorkshire family, and his nephew and lieutenant, Robert Evelin, of Wotton, Surrey, undertaken in virtue of a special commission from the King, dated Sept. 23, 1633, to discover parts of America not[459] “actually in the possession of any Christian Prince.”[743] These persons sailed from Falmouth, Friday, May 16, 1634, and arriving between Capes Charles and Henry the 3d of July, left Virginia on the 20th to explore the Delaware for a “Mediterranean Sea,” said by the Indians “to be four days’ journey beyond the mountains,” from which they hoped to find an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, affording a short passage to China and the East Indies. On the 25th they entered Delaware Bay and proceeded leisurely up the river (which Yong named “Charles,” in honor of his sovereign), conversing and trading with the savages, as far as the present Trenton Falls, which they reached the 29th of August, and where they were obliged to stop, on account of the rocks and the shallowness of the water. On the 1st of September they were overtaken here by some “Hollanders of Hudson’s River,” whom Yong entertained for a few days, but finally required to depart under the escort of Evelin, who afterward explored the coast from Cape May to Manhattan, and on his return made a second ineffectual attempt to pass beyond the rocks in the Delaware.[744] Both Yong and Evelin “resided several years” on this river, and undertook to build a fort there at “Eriwomeck,” in the present State of New Jersey. Tidings of their actions were frequently reported to Sir Edmund Plowden, and in 1641 was printed a Direction for Adventurers and Description of New Albion,[745] in a letter addressed to Lady Plowden, written by Evelin. Books concerning the province were likewise published, it is said,[746] in 1637 and 1642.

About the close of 1641, the Earl Palatine at length visited America in person, and, according to the testimony of Lord Baltimore,[747] “in 1642 sailed up Delaware River,” one of his men, named by Plantagenet “Master Miles,” either then or about that time “swearing the officers” of an English settlement of seventy persons, at “Watcessit” (doubtless the New Haven colonists at Varkens Kil, now Salem Creek, New Jersey[748]), to “obedience” to him “as governor.” Plowden’s residence was chiefly in Virginia, where, it is recorded, he bought a half-interest in a barque in 1643;[749] and it is probable that he had communication with Governor Leonard Calvert, of Maryland, since a maid-servant belonging to him accompanied Margaret Brent, the intimate friend of the latter, on a visit to the Isle of Kent, in Chesapeake Bay.[750] The longest notice of him during his sojourn on our continent occurs in a report of Johan Printz, Governor of New Sweden, to the Swedish West India Company, dated at Christina (now Wilmington, Delaware), June 20, 1644,[751] the importance of which induces the writer to translate the whole of it. Says Printz,—

“In my former communications concerning the English knight, I have mentioned how last year, in Virginia, he desired to sail with his people, sixteen in number, in a barque, from Heckemak[460] to Kikathans;[752] and when they came to the Bay of Virginia, the captain (who had previously conspired with the knight’s people to kill him) directed his course not to Kikethan, but to Cape Henry, passing which, they came to an isle in the high sea called Smith’s Island, when they took counsel in what way they should put him to death, and thought it best not to slay him with their hands, but to set him, without food, clothes, or arms, on the above-named island, which was inhabited by no man or other animal save wolves and bears; and this they did. Nevertheless, two young noble retainers, who had been brought up by the knight, and who knew nothing of that plot, when they beheld this evil fortune of their lord, leaped from the barque into the ocean, swam ashore, and remained with their master. The fourth day following, an English sloop sailed by Smith’s Island, coming so close that the young men were able to hail her, when the knight was taken aboard (half dead, and as black as the ground), and conveyed to Hackemak, where he recovered. The knight’s people, however, arrived with the barque May 6, 1643, at our Fort Elfsborg, and asked after ships to Old England. Hereupon I demanded their pass, and inquired from whence they came; and as soon as I perceived that they were not on a proper errand, I took them with me (though with their consent) to Christina, to bargain about flour and other provisions, and questioned them until a maid-servant (who had been the knight’s washerwoman) confessed the truth and betrayed them. I at once caused an inventory to be taken of their goods, in their presence, and held the people prisoners, until the very English sloop which had rescued the knight arrived with a letter from him concerning the matter, addressed not alone to me, but to all the governors and commandants of the whole coast of Florida. Thereupon I surrendered to him the people, barque, and goods (in precise accordance with the inventory), and he paid me 425 riksdaler for my expenses. The chief of these traitors the knight has had executed. He himself is still in Virginia, and (as he constantly professes) expects vessels and people from Ireland and England. To all ships and barques that come from thence he grants free commission to trade here in the river with the savages; but I have not yet permitted any of them to pass, nor shall I do so until I receive order and command to that effect from my most gracious queen, her Royal Majesty of Sweden.”

Printz’s opposition to Plowden’s encroachment within his territory was never relaxed, and was entirely successful. In the course of his residence in America, the Earl Palatine of New Albion visited New Amsterdam, “both in the time of Director Kieft and in that of General Stuyvesant,” and, according to the Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland,[753] “claimed that the land on the west side of the North River to Virginia was his by gift of King James [Charles] of England, but said he did not wish to have any strife with the Dutch, though he was very much piqued at the Swedish governor, John Printz, at the South River, on account of some affront given him, too long to relate; adding that when an opportunity should offer, he would go there and take possession of the river.” Before re-crossing the ocean, he went to Boston, his arrival being recorded in the Journal of Governor John Winthrop, under date of June 4, 1648, having “been in Virginia about seven years. He came first,” says the Governor, “with a patent of a County Palatine for Delaware Bay, but wanting a pilot for that place, went to Virginia, and there having lost the estate he brought over, and all his people scattered from him, he came hither to return to England for supply, intending to return and plant Delaware, if he could get sufficient strength to dispossess the Swedes.”

Immediately on reaching Europe, Plowden set about this task, and, to obtain the greater credit for his title as “Earl Palatine of New Albion,” both in and out of that province, as well as recognition of the legality and completeness of his charter, submitted a copy of the latter to Edward Bysshe, “Garter Principal King of Arms of Englishmen,” who received favorable written opinions on the subject from several serjeants and doctors of laws, which, with the letters patent, were recorded by him Jan. 23, 1648/9, “in the[461] office of arms, there to remain in perpetual memory.”[754] At the same time (December, 1648) there was published another advertisement of Plowden’s enterprise, entitled A Description of the Province of New Albion,[755] by “Beauchamp Plantagenet, of Belvil, in New Albion, Esquire,” purporting to contain “a full abstract and collection” of what had already been written on the theme, with additional information acquired by the Earl Palatine during his residence in America.

[462]

The work is dedicated “To the Right Honourable and mighty Lord Edmund, by Divine Providence Lord Proprietor, Earl Palatine, Governour, and Captain-Generall of the Province of New Albion, and to the Right Honourable the Lord Vicount Monson of Castlemain, the Lord Sherard, Baron of Letrim, and to all other the Vicounts, Barons, Baronets, Knights, Gentlemen, Merchants, Adventurers, and Planters of the hopefull Company of New Albion, in all 44 undertakers and subscribers, bound by Indenture to bring and settle 3,000 able trained men in our said severall Plantations in the said Province,”—the author, himself “one of the Company,” professing to “have had the honour to be admitted as” the “familiar” of Plowden, and to “have marched, lodged, and cabbined” with him, both “among the Indians and in Holland.”[756] It opens with a short treatise “of Counts or Earls created, and County Palatines,” followed by an adulatory account of the family of the Proprietor, and a defence of his title to his province, comprising some[463] original statements with regard to the Dutch[757] and Swedes. Specific mention is made of several tribes of Indians dwelling in New Albion, and of numerous “choice seats for English,” some of which have been approximately identified.[758] “For the Politique and Civill Government, and Justice,” says the writer, “Virginia and New England is our president: first, the Lord head Governour, a Deputy Governour, Secretary of Estate, or Sealkeeper, and twelve of the Councell of State or upper House; and these, or five of them, is also a Chancery Court. Next, out of Counties and Towns, at a free election and day prefixed, thirty Burgesses, or Commons. Once yearly these meet, as at a Parliament or Grand Assembly, and make Laws.... and without full consent of Lord, upper and lower House, nothing is done.” “For Religion,” observes the author, “I conceive the Holland way now practised best to content all parties: first, by Act of Parliament or Grand Assembly, to settle and establish all the Fundamentals necessary to salvation.... But no persecution to any dissenting, and to all such, as to the Walloons, free Chapels; and to punish all as seditious, and for contempt, as bitterly rail and condemn others of the contrary: for this argument or perswasion of Religion, Ceremonies, or Church-Discipline, should be acted in mildnesse, love, and charity, and gentle language, not to disturb the peace or quiet of the Inhabitants, but therein to obey the Civill Magistrate,”—the latter remarkable programme of universal tolerance in matters of faith being probably designed to protect Catholic colonists in the same manner as the famous “Act concerning Religion” passed by the Maryland Assembly the following year. The book closes with some practical advice to “Adventurers,” and promises all such “of £500 to bring fifty men shall have 5,000 acres, and a manor with Royalties, at 5s. rent; and whosoever is willing so to transport himself or servant at £10 a man shall for each man have 100 acres freely granted forever.”

The only evidence we possess that any result flowed from this fresh attempt to promote emigration to New Albion is derived from documents in the Public Record Office at London,[759] stating that March 21, 1649-50, a “Petition of the Earl of New Albion relating to the plantation there” was “referred to the consideration of the Committee of Council;” that April 3, 1650, it was “referred to the Committee for Plantations, or any[464] three of them, to confer with the Earl of Albion concerning the giving good security to Council, that the men, arms, and ammunition, which he hath now shipped in order to his voyage to New Albion, shall go thither, and shall not be employed either there or elsewhere to the disservice of the public;” and that June 11, 1650, “a pass” was “granted for Mr. Batt and Mr. Danby, themselves and seven score persons, men, women, and children, to go to New Albion.” We have no other proof of the sailing of these people, nor any knowledge of their arrival in America.

In 1651, there was offered for sale in London, A mapp of Virginia, compiled by “Domina Virginia Farrer,”[760] designating the territory on the Delaware as “Nova Albion,” as well as “Sweeds’ Plantation,” with a note: “This River the Lord Ployden hath a Patten of, and calls it New Albion; but the Sweeds are planted in it, and have a great trade of Furrs.” On the Jersey side of the stream are indicated the sites of “Richnek Woods,” “Raritans,” “Mont Ployden,” “Eriwoms,” and “Axion,” and on the sea-coast “Egg Bay,” all of which are mentioned in Plantagenet’s New Albion.

At that time Plowden was still in England,[761] and we do not know that he ever returned to his province. In his will, dated July 29, 1655, he styles himself “Sir Edmund Plowden, of Wansted, in the County of Southton [Southampton], Knight, Lord, Earle Palatine, Governor and Captain-Generall of the Province of New Albion in America,” and thinks “it fit that” his “English lands and estates be settled and united to” his “Honour, County Palatine, and Province of New Albion, for the maintenance of the same.” In consequence of the “sinister and undue practises” of his eldest son, Francis Plowden, by whom, he says, “he had been damnified and hindered these eighteene yeares,” “his mother, a mutable woman, being by him perverted,” he bequeaths all his titles and property in England and America, including his “Peerage of Ireland,” to his second son, Thomas Plowden, specially mentioning “the province and County Palatine of New Albion,” whereof, he says, “I am seized as of free principality, and held of the Crowne of Ireland, of which I am a Peere, which Honor and title and province as Arundell, and many other Earledomes and Baronies, is assignable and saleable with the province and County Palatine as a locall Earledome.” He provides for the occupation and cultivation of New Albion as follows: “I doe order and will that my sonne Thomas Plowden, and after his decease his eldest heire male, and if he be under age, then his guardian, with all speed after my decease, doe imploy, by consent of Sir William Mason, of Greys Inne, Knt., otherwise William Mason, Esquire, whom I make a Trustee for this my Plantation, all the cleare rents and profits of my Lands, underwoods, tythes, debts, stocks, and moneys, for full ten yeares (excepted what is beqeathed aforesaid), for the planting, fortifying, peopling, and stocking of my province of New Albion; and to summon and enforce, according to Covenants in Indentures and subscriptions, all my undertakers to transplant thither and there to settle their number of men with such as my estate yearly can transplant,—namely, Lord Monson, fifty; Lord Sherrard, a hundred; Sr Thomas Danby, a hundred; Captain Batts, his heire, a hundred; Mr. Eltonhead, a Master in Chancery, fifty; his eldest brother Eltonhead, fifty; Mr. Bowles, late Clerke of the Crowne, forty; Captain Claybourne, in Virginia, fifty; Viscount Muskery, fifty; and many others in England, Virginia, and New England, subscribed as by direction in my manuscript bookes since I resided six yeares there, and of policie a government there, and of the best seates, profits, mines, rich trade of furrs, and wares, and fruites, wine, worme silke and grasse silke, fish, and beasts there, rice, and floatable grounds for rice, flax, maples, hempe, barly, and corne, two crops yearely; to build Churches and Schooles there, and to indeavour to convert the Indians there to Christianity, and to settle there my family, kindred, and posterity.”

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To each of eleven parishes in England, where he owned land, he left forty pounds; and directs that he be buried in the chapel of the Plowdens at Ledbury, in Salop, under a stone monument, with “brasse plates” of his “eighteene children had affixed at thirty or fourty powndes charges, together with” his “perfect pedigree as is drawne at” his “house.” He “died,” says “Albion,” “at Wanstead, county of Southampton, in 1659,” his will being admitted to probate in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, July 27 of that year.[762] Thomas Plowden survived his father forty years, but what benefit he derived from the inheritance of New Albion does not appear. His own will is dated May 16, 1698, and was admitted to probate in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury the 10th of the following September. In it he describes himself as “Thomas Plowden, of Lasham, in the county of Southton, Gent;” and after leaving all his children and grandchildren “ten shillings a piece of lawfull English money,” proceeds: “I do give and bequeath unto my son Francis Plowden the Letters Pattent and Title, with all advantages and profitts thereunto belonging, And as it was granted by our late Sovereign Lord King Charles the first over England, under the great Seal of England, unto my ffather, Sir Edmund Plowden, of Wansted, in the County of Southton, now deceased, The province and County palatine of New Albion, in America, or in North Virginia and America, which pattent is now in the custody of my son-in-law, Andrew Wall, of Ludshott, in the said County of Southton, who has these severall years wrongfully detained it, to my great Loss and hinderance. And all the rest and residue of my goods, chattles, and personall Estate, after my debts and Legacies be paid and funerall discharged, I give and devise unto my wife, Thomazine Plowden, of Lasham.”[763]

That Plowden’s claim to the territory of New Albion was not forgotten in America, appears from the following allusions to it. In a conversation recorded by the Swedish engineer, Peter Lindström,[764] as occurring in New Sweden, June 18, 1654, between the Swedes and “Lawrence Lloyd, the English Commandant of Virginia,” concerning the rights of their respective nations to jurisdiction over the Delaware, the latter laid particular stress upon the fact that “Sir Edward Ployde and Earl of Great Albion had a special grant of that river from King James.” On the other hand, on occasion of the embassy of Augustine Herman and Resolved Waldron on behalf of the Director-General of New Netherland to the Governor of Maryland, in October, 1659, Plowden’s title was spoken of by them as “subretively and fraudulently obtained” and “invalid;” while Secretary Philip Calvert affirmed that “Ployten had had no commission, and lay in jail in England on account of his debts, relating that he had solicited a patent for Novum Albium from the King, but it was refused him, and he thereupon applied to the Viceroy of Ireland, from whom he had obtained a patent, but that it was of no value,”[765]—allegations, it is understood, of interested parties, which therefore possess less weight as testimony against the rights of Plowden. At the same time the title of the Earl Palatine to his American province was recognized in the last edition of Peter Heylin’s Cosmographie, which was revised by the author, and published in London in 1669,[766] and in Philips’s[467] enlarged edition of John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain and Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, printed in London in 1676.[767]

From this period the history of New Albion is more obscure. There is proof, however, of the residence in Maryland, in May, 1684, of certain Thomas and George Plowden, affirmed, on grounds of family tradition, by persons who claim to be descended from one of them, to be sons of a son of the original patentee, who had brought his wife and children to America to take possession of his estates, but had been murdered by the Indians. That the ancestral jurisdiction over the province was never entirely lost sight of, is shown by the circumstance that the title peculiar to it was constantly retained by later generations of this race.[768] Just before the American Revolution, Charles Varlo, Esq., of England, purchased the third part of the Charter of New Albion, and in 1784 visited this country with his family, “invested with proper power as Governor to the Province, ... not doubting,” as he says, “the enjoyment of his property.” He made an extended tour through Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and distributed among the inhabitants a pamphlet,[769] comprising a translation in English of the Latin[468] charter enrolled at Dublin, copies of the lease to Danby, and the release of Ryebread and others, before referred to, an address of the “Earl Palatine of Albion” to the public, and conditions for letting or selling land in New Albion. He likewise issued “a proclamation, in form of a handbill, addressed to the people of New Albion, in the name of the Earl of Albion,”[770] and published in the papers of the day (July, 1785) “A Caution to the Good People of the Province of New Albion, alias corruptly called, at present, The Jerseys,” not to buy or contract with any person for any land in said province.[771] He formed the acquaintance of Edmund (called by him Edward) Plowden, representative of St. Mary’s County in the Legislature of Maryland, a member of the family already mentioned, and endeavored to interest that gentleman in his schemes. Finding his land settled under the grant to the Duke of York, he also sought counsel of William Rawle, a distinguished lawyer of Philadelphia, and “took every step possible,” he affirms, “to recover the estate by law in chancery, but in vain, because judge and jury were landowners therein, consequently parties concerned. Therefore, after much trouble and expense,” he “returned to Europe.”[772] Varlo’s last act was to indite two letters to the Prince of Wales, reciting his grievances and appealing for redress, but conceived in such a tone as would seem to have precluded a response.[773] Thus ended this curious episode in the history of English colonization in America.[774]


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CHAPTER XII.

THE FOUNDING OF PENNSYLVANIA.

BY FREDERICK D. STONE,

Librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

THE founding of Pennsylvania was one of the immediate results of Penn’s connection with West Jersey; but the causes which led to the settlement of both colonies can be clearly traced to the rise of the religious denomination of which he was a distinguished member. This occurred in one of the most exciting periods of English history. The Long Parliament was in session. Events were directly leading to the execution of the King. All vestiges of the Church of Rome had been well-nigh swept away in a country in which that Church had once held undisputed sway, and its successor was faring but little better with the armies of the Commonwealth. The conflict between Presbyterians and Churchmen,—in the efforts of the former to change the Established Church, and of the latter to maintain their position,—was scarcely more bitter in spirit than the temper with which the Independents denounced all connection between Church and State. Other dissenting congregations at the same time availed themselves of a season of unprecedented religious liberty to express their views, and religious discussions became the daily talk of the people.

It was under these circumstances that the ministry of George Fox began. Born in the year 1624, a native of Leicestershire, he was from his youth noted for “a gravity and stayedness of mind and spirit not usual in children.” As he approached manhood, he became troubled about the condition of his soul, and passed through an experience similar to that which tried his contemporary, John Bunyan, when he imagined that he had sinned against the Holy Ghost. His friends had advised him to marry or to join the army; but his immediate recourse was rather to spiritual counsel. He naturally sought this from the clergymen of the Established Church, in which he had been bred; but they failed to satisfy his mind.

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GEORGE FOX.

[This follows Holmes’s engraving of the portrait of Fox, by Honthorst, in 1654, when Fox was in his thirtieth year. This Dutch painter, if Gerard Honthorst, was born in Utrecht in 1592, was at one time in England, and died in 1660; if his brother William, he died in 1683, aged 73. The original canvas was recently offered for sale in England. A view of Swarthmore Hall, where Fox lived, is in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 173.—Ed.]

The first whom he consulted repeated to his servants what George had said, until the young man was distressed to find that his troubles were the subjects of jests with the milk-maids. Another told him to sing psalms and smoke a pipe. A third flew into a violent passion because, as the talk turned upon the birth of Christ, Fox inadvertently placed his foot upon the flower-bed. A fourth bled and physicked him. Such consolations, presented while he was earnestly seeking to comprehend the greatest question of life, disgusted him. He then turned for comfort to the Dissenters; but they, as he tells us, were unable to fathom his condition. From this time he avoided professors and teachers of all kinds. He read the Scriptures diligently, and strove, by the use of the faculties which God had given him, to understand their true meaning. He was not a man of learning, and was obliged to settle all questions as they arose by such reasonings as he could bring to bear upon them. The anguish which he experienced was terrible, and at times he was tempted to despair; but his strong mind held him to the truth, and his wonderfully clear perception of right and wrong led him step by step towards the goal of his desires. By degrees the ideas which had been taught him in childhood were put aside. It became evident to him that it was not necessary for a man to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge to become a minister of Christ; and he felt as never before the meaning of the words, “God dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” To one of his understanding such convictions seemed as revelations from Heaven. That all men are capable of receiving the same Light to guide them, and that all who would follow this Light would be guided to the same end, became his belief; and to preach this faith[471] constituted his mission. He also felt that they who were guided by this Inner Light should be known by the simplicity of their speech and manners; that as the temples of the Lord were the hearts of his people, the ceremonies of the prevailing modes of worship were empty forms; that tithes for the support of a ministry, and taxes for the promotion of war and like measures, should not be paid by persons who could not approve of the purposes for which they were collected; and that the taking of an oath, even to add weight to testimony, was contrary to the teachings of the Scriptures.

These, in brief, were the views of the people called Quakers. That a movement so purely spiritual in its aims should have exercised a political influence seems remarkable. But the principles upon which the movement was founded claimed for the mind a perfect freedom; they counted as nought the privileges of rank, and demanded an entire separation of Church and State.

The first followers of George Fox were from the neighborhood of his own home; but his views soon spread among the yeomanry of the adjoining counties. His theology may have been crude, his grammar faulty, and his appearance ludicrous; yet there was a personal magnetism about the man which drew to him disciples from all classes.

Nothing could check the energy with which he labored, or silence the voice which is yet spoken of as that of a prophet. In his enthusiasm the people seemed to him like “fallow ground,” and the priests but “lumps of clay,” unable to furnish the seed for a harvest. Jeered at and beaten by cruel mobs, reviled as a fanatic and denounced as an impostor, he travelled from place to place, sometimes to be driven forth to sleep under haystacks, and at other times to be imprisoned as a disturber of the peace. But through all trials his faith remained unshaken, and he denounced what he believed to be the falsehoods of the times, until, as he says, the priests fled when they heard that “the man in leathern breeches is come.”

In 1654, but ten years after George Fox had begun to preach, his followers were to be found in most parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Notwithstanding the persecutions with which an avowal of Quakerism was met, they adhered to their convictions with a steadfastness equal to that of their leader. Imprisonment, starvation, and the lash, as the penalties of their religion, had no fears for them. Their estates were wasted for tithes and taxes which they felt it wrong to pay. Their meetings were dispersed by armed men, and all laws that could be so construed were interpreted against them. All such persecution, however, was of no avail. “They were a people who could not be won with either gifts, honors, offices, or place.” Nor is it surprising that their desire to share equally such sufferings in the cause of truth should have touched the heart of one educated in the severe school of the Commonwealth. When Fox lay in Lanceston jail, one of his people called upon Cromwell and asked to be imprisoned in[472] his stead. “Which of you,” said Cromwell, turning to his Council, “would do so much for me if I were in the same condition?”

Satisfied in their hearts with the strength which their faith gave them, the Quakers could not rest until they had carried the glad tidings to others. In 1655, Fox tells us, “many went beyond the sea, where truth also sprung up, and in 1656 it broke forth in America and many other places.”

It has ever been one of the cardinal principles of the followers of Fox to obey the laws under which they live, when doing so does not interfere with their consciences. When this last is the case, their convictions impel them to treat the oppressive measures as nullities, not even so far recognizing the existence of such statutes as to cover their violation of them with a shadow of secrecy. It was against what Fox considered ecclesiastical tyranny that the weight of his ministry was directed. Those who lived under church government he believed to be in as utter spiritual darkness as it is the custom of Christendom to regard the other three-fourths of mankind; and it was with a feeling akin to that which will to-day prompt a missionary to carry the Bible to the wildest tribes of Africa, that the Quakers of 1656 came to the Puritan commonwealths of America.

The record of the first landing of the Quakers in this country belongs to another chapter,[775] and the historians of New England must tell the sad story, which began in 1656, of the intrusive daring for conviction’s sake which characterized the conduct of these humble preachers. In June, 1657, six of a party of eight Quakers who had been sent back to England the year previous, re-embarked for America. They were accompanied by five others, and on October 1 five of them landed at New Amsterdam. The rest remained on the vessel, and on the 3d instant arrived at Rhode Island. It was chiefly through the labors of this little band that the doctrines of the Quakers were spread through the British colonies of North America.

It was in 1661 that the first Yearly Meeting of Friends in America was established in Rhode Island, and in 1672 the government of the colony was in their hands. The Dutch of New Amsterdam did not hold as broad views of religious liberty as were entertained by their kinsfolk in Holland; but while the Quakers were severely dealt with in that city, on Long Island they were allowed to live in comparative peace. In Maryland the treatment of the Friends, severe at times, grew more and more tolerant, and when Fox visited them in 1672 he found many to welcome him; and probably the first letter from a Meeting in England to one in America was directed to that of Maryland. In Virginia the Episcopalians were less liberal than their neighbors in other provinces. The intolerance with which Dissenters were met drove many beyond her borders, and thus it was that some Friends gathered in the Carolinas.

The outbreak of the Fifth Monarchy men in 1660, immediately after the restoration of Charles II., dispelled any hopes which the Quakers might have gathered from that monarch’s proclamation at Breda, since they[473] were suspected of being connected with that party. It is at this time that we find the first evidence that Fox and his followers wished to obtain a spot in America which they could call their own; and the desire was obviously the result of the troubles which they encountered, both in England and America. Before this was accomplished, however, the Quakers experienced many trials. In 1661 Parliament passed an Act for their punishment, denouncing them as a mischievous and dangerous people.

In 1672 Charles II. issued his second declaration regarding liberty of conscience, and comparative quiet was for a few years enjoyed by his Dissenting subjects. In 1673 Parliament censured the declaration of the King as an undue use of the prerogative. The sufferings of the Quakers were then renewed. It is unnecessary to repeat in detail the penalties inflicted under the various Acts of Parliament. Fox was repeatedly imprisoned, and many of his followers died in confinement from ill usage. In 1675 West Jersey was offered for sale. The advantages its possession would afford were at once appreciated by the men of broad views who had obtained control of the Quaker affairs. Fox favored the scheme. Some of his followers felt that to emigrate was to fly from persecution and to desert a cause; but Fox, with more wisdom, had as early as 1660 proposed the purchase of a tract of land in America. Between 1656 and 1675 he and his devoted followers were from time to time braving all kinds of danger in the propagation of their faith throughout the English colonies in America. Their wanderings often brought them into contact with the Indians, and this almost always led to the friendliest of relations.[776]

William Penn possessed more influence with the ruling class of England than did any other of the followers of Fox. His joining the Friends in 1668 is a memorable event in the history of their Society. The son of Admiral Sir William Penn, the conqueror of Jamaica, and of his wife Margaret, daughter of John Jasper, of Amsterdam, he was born in London Oct. 14, 1644, the year in which Fox began to preach to his neighbors in Leicestershire. The Admiral was active in bringing about the restoration of the Stuarts, and this, together with his naval services, gave him an influence at Court which would have enabled him to advance the interests of his son.

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[There are papers on the portraits of Penn in Scribner’s Monthly, xii. 1, by F. M. Etting, and in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., October, 1882. Cf. also Penn. Mag. of Hist. vol. vi. pp. 174, 252. The above cut represents him at twenty-two. It follows a large private steel plate, engraved by S. A. Schoff, of Boston, with the aid of a crayon reduction by William Hunt, and represents an original likeness painted in oils in 1666 by an unknown artist, possibly Sir Peter Lely. It was one of two preserved at Stoke Poges for a long time, and this one was given in 1833 by Penn’s grandson, Granville Penn, to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. (Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Historical Society, 1872, no. 50.) There are other engravings of it in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, i. 361; in Janney’s Life of Penn; in Stoughton’s William Penn; and in Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia. A portrait by Francis Place, representing Penn at fifty-two, is engraved from the National Museum copy of the original in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 487. It was discovered in England in 1874, and its story is told in Mr. Etting’s paper. There is another engraving of it in Egle’s Pennsylvania. Maria Webb’s Penns and Peningtons (1867) gives an account of a recently discovered crayon likeness. (Cf. Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Historical Society, 1872, p. 27.) A steel engraving was issued in Germany some years since, purporting to be from a portrait by Kneller,—which is quite possible,—and this engraving is reproduced a little larger than the German one in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., October, 1882. The likeness best known is probably the one introduced by West in his well-known picture of the making of the Treaty. In this, West, who never saw Penn, seemingly followed one of the medallions or busts made by Sylvanus Bevan, a contemporary of Penn, who had a natural skill in cutting likenesses in ivory. One of these medallions is given in Smith and Watson’s American Historical and Literary Curiosities, i. pl. xv., and in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., October, 1882. Bevan’s bust was also the original of the head of the statue, with a broad-brim hat, which has stood in the grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital since John Penn, son of the Proprietary, bought it from the estate of Lord Le Despenser at High Wycombe, and gave it to the hospital. The same head was again used as the model of the wooden bust which was in the Loganian Library, but was destroyed by fire in 1831. Proud’s History of Pennsylvania (1797) gives an engraving of it; and the likeness in Clarkson’s Life of Penn is also credited to one of Bevan’s busts. Inman’s picture, which appears in Janney’s Penn and in Armor’s Governors of Pennsylvania, is to be traced to the same source, as also is the engraving in the Encyclopædia Londiniensis.

Penn is buried in the graveyard at Jordan’s, twenty miles or so from London; and the story of an unsuccessful effort by the State of Pennsylvania to secure his remains, encased in a leaden casket, is told in The Remains of William Penn, by George L. Harrison, privately printed, Philadelphia, 1882, where is a view of the grave and an account of the neighborhood. There is a picture of the grave in the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Cf. Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Historical Society (1872), no. 151; and Mrs. S. C. Halls article in National Magazine, viii. 109; and Mag. of Amer. Hist., October, 1882, p. 661.—Ed.]

But while a student at Oxford, the young Penn chanced to hear the preaching of Thomas Loe, a Quaker, and so impressed was he by it that he ceased to attend the religious services of his College. For this he was expelled from the University. His father, after a brief impulse of anger which this disgrace caused, sent him to Paris, and in that gay capital the impressions made by the Quaker preacher were nearly effaced. From Paris he went to Saumur and became a pupil of Moses Amyrault, a learned professor of the French Reformed Church. At the conclusion of his studies he travelled in France and Italy, and in 1664 returned to England,—a fashionable gentleman, with an “affected manner of speech and gait.” The dreadful scenes which occurred the next year in London during the Plague again turned his thoughts from worldly affairs. To overcome this seriousness his father sent him to Ireland. While there, an insurrection broke out among the soldiers at Carrickfergus Castle, and he served as a volunteer under Lord Arran in its suppression. The Viceroy of Ireland was willing to reward this service by giving him a military command, but Admiral Penn refused his consent. It was at this time that[475] the accompanying portrait was painted. While in Ireland, Penn again came under the influence of the preaching of Loe, and in his heart became a Quaker. He was shortly afterwards arrested with others at a Quaker meeting. His conduct alienated his father from him, but a reconciliation followed when the Admiral learned how sincere the young Quaker was in his views.

Penn wrote industriously in the cause, and endeavored by personal solicitation at Court to obtain for the Quakers more liberal treatment. Imprisoned in the Tower for heresy, he passed his time in writing No Cross, No Crown. Released through his father’s influence with the Duke of York, he was soon again arrested under the Conventicle Act for having spoken at a Quaker meeting, and his trial for this offence is a celebrated one in the annals of English law.

In September, 1670, his father died, leaving him an ample fortune, besides large claims on the Government. But the temptations of wealth had no influence on Penn. He continued to defend the faith he had embraced, and in the latter part of the year was again in Newgate. There he wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience debated. Had his services to humanity been no greater than those rendered by the pen, they would have secured for him a lasting remembrance; but the experience he gained in defending the principles of the Friends was fitting him for higher responsibilities. His mind, which was naturally bright, had been improved by study. In such rough schools of statesmanship as the Old Bailey, Newgate, and the Tower, he imbibed broad and liberal views of what was necessary for the welfare of mankind, which in the end prompted him to attempt[476] a practical interpretation of the philosophy of More and Harrington. His interest in West Jersey[777] led him to make extensive investments in the enterprise; but notwithstanding the zeal and energy with which it was pushed, the result was far from satisfactory. The disputes between Fenwick and the creditors of Byllynge, and the transfer by the former of a large portion of his interest to Eldridge and Warner in security for a debt, left a cloud upon the title of land purchased there, and naturally deterred people from emigrating. False reports detrimental to the colony were also circulated in England, while the claim of Byllynge, that his parting with an interest in the soil did not affect his right to govern, and the continued assumption of authority by Andros over East Jersey and the ports on the Delaware, added to the feeling of dissatisfaction. This is clearly shown in a pamphlet published in 1681, the preface of which says it was put forth “to contradict the Disingenuous and False Reports of some men who have made it their business to speak unjustly of New Jersey and our Proceedings therein: As though the Methods of Settlement were confused and Uncertain, no man Knowing his own Land, and several such idle Lying Stories.”[778]

It was in this condition of affairs that Penn conceived the idea of obtaining a grant of land in America in settlement of a debt of £16,000 due the estate of his father from the Crown. We have no evidence showing when this thought first took form in his mind, but his words and actions prove that it was not prompted in order to better his worldly condition. Certain it is that the eyes of the Friends had long been turned to what is now Pennsylvania as a spot upon which they might find a refuge from persecution. In 1660, when George Fox first thought of a Quaker settlement in America, he wrote on this subject to Josiah Coale, who was then with the Susquehanna Indians north of Maryland. The reply from Maryland is dated “eleventh month, 1660,” and reads,—

Dear George,—As concerning Friends buying a piece of Land of the Susquehanna Indians, I have spoken of it to them, and told them what thou said concerning it; but their answer was that there is no land that is habitable or fit for situation beyond Baltimore’s liberty till they come to or near the Susquehanna’s fort.”

In 1681 Penn, in writing about his province, said: “This I can say, that I had an opening of joy as to these parts in the year 1661 at Oxford twenty years since.” The interest which centred in West Jersey caused the scheme to slumber, until revived by Penn in 1680.

The petition to the King was presented about the 1st of June, 1680. It asked for a tract of land “lying North of Maryland, on the East bounded with Delaware River, on the West limited as Maryland is, and Northward to extend as far as plantable, which is altogether Indian.” This, “his Majty being graciously disposed to gratify,” was referred to the Lords of Trade[477] and Plantations, and if it should meet with their approval, they were to consider “such restrictions, limitations, and other Clauses as were fitting to be inserted in the Grant.”

The proceedings which followed prevented the issue of the charter for some time. “A caution was used,” says Chalmers, “in proportion to the inattention with which former patents had been given, almost to every petitioner. Twenty years had now taught circumspection, and the recent refractoriness of Massachusetts had impressed the ministers with a proper sense of danger, at least of inconvenience.” The agents of the Duke of York and of Lord Baltimore were consulted about the proposed boundaries, and the opinions of Chief-Justice North and the Attorney-General were taken on the same subjects, as well as on the powers that were to be conferred. The charter as granted gave to Penn and his successors all the territory between the fortieth and forty-second degrees of latitude, extending through five degrees of longitude west from the Delaware River, with the exception of that part which would fall within a circle drawn twelve miles around New Castle, the northern segment of which was to form the boundary between Penn’s province and the Duke of York’s colonies of Delaware. It was supposed that such a circle would be intersected on the west by the fortieth degree of latitude, the proposed boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. This erroneous opinion was the cause of a prolonged litigation. The allegiance of the Proprietary and of the inhabitants was reserved to the Crown. The right to govern was vested in Penn. He could appoint officers, and with the consent of the people make such laws as were necessary; but to insure their unison with those of England they were to be submitted to the Crown within five years for approval. He could raise troops for the defence of his province, and collect taxes and duties; but the latter were to be in addition to those ordered by Parliament. He could pardon all crimes except treason and wilful murder, and grant reprieves in such cases until the pleasure of the King should be known. The Bishop of London had the power to appoint a chaplain on the petition of twenty of the inhabitants, and an agent was to reside near the Court to explain any misdemeanor that might be committed.

The charter was signed March 4, 1681, and on the next day Penn wrote to Robert Turner,—

“After many waitings, watchings, solicitings, and disputes in Council, this day my country was confirmed to me under the Great Seal of England, with large powers and privileges, by the name of Pennsilvania, a name the King would have given in honor of my father. I chose New Wales, being as this a pretty hilly country, ... for I feared lest it should be looked as a vanity in me and not as a respect in the King, as it truly was, to my father, whom he often mentions with praise. Thou mayst communicate my graunt to friends, and expect shortly my proposals; ‘tis a clear and just thing; and my God, that has given it me through many difficulties, will, I believe, bless and make it the seed of a nation. I shall have a tender care to the government, that it will be well laid at first.”

[478]

On the 2d of April a royal proclamation, addressed to those who were already settled within the province, informed them of the granting of the patent, and its character. Six days afterwards Penn prepared a letter to be read to the settlers by his representative, couched in language of friendship and affection. He told them frankly that government was a business he had never undertaken, but that it was his wish to do it uprightly. You are “at the mercy of no governor,” he said, “who comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making, and live a free and, if you will, a sober and industrious people.” On the same day he gave to his kinsman, William Markham, whom he had selected to be his deputy-governor, and who was to precede him to Pennsylvania, instructions regarding the first business to be transacted. Two days afterwards he furnished him with his commission and more explicit directions, and Markham shortly afterwards sailed for America, and probably landed in Boston, where his commission is recorded. By the 15th of June he had reached New York, and Brockholls on the 21st issued an order addressed to the civil officers within the limits of Pennsylvania, yielding to Markham his authority as the representative of the Duke of York. Markham carried letters from the King and from Penn to Lord Baltimore. The former recommended “the infant colony and its leader to his friendly aid.” He also required the patentee of Maryland “to make a true division of the two provinces according to the boundaries and degrees expressed in their patents.” The letter of Penn authorized Markham to settle the boundaries. Markham met Lord Baltimore in August, 1681, and while at his house was taken so ill that nothing was decided upon.

Soon after the confirmation of his charter, Penn issued a pamphlet, in which the essential parts of that instrument were given, together with an account of the country and the views he entertained for its government. The conditions on which he proposed to dispose of land were, a share of five thousand acres free from any Indian incumbrance for £100, and one shilling English quit-rent for one hundred acres, the quit-rent not to begin until after 1684. Those who hired were to pay one penny per acre for lots not exceeding two hundred acres. Fifty acres per head were allowed to the masters of servants, and the same quantity was given to every servant when his time should expire. A plan for building cities was also suggested, in which all should receive lots in proportion to their investments.

The unselfishness and purity of Penn’s motives, and the religious feelings with which he was inspired, are evident from his letters. On the 12th of April, 1681, he wrote to three of his friends,—

“Having published a paper with relation to my province in America (at least what I thought advisable to publish), I here inclose one that you may know and inform others of it. I have been these thirteen years the servant of truth and Friends, and for my testimony sake lost much, not only the greatness and preferments of this world, but £16,000 of my estate, that had I not been what I am I had long ago obtained. But I murmur not; the Lord is good to me, and the interest his truth has given me[479] with his people may more than repair it; for many are drawn forth to be concerned with me: and perhaps this way of satisfaction has more the hand of God in it than a downright payment.... For the matter of liberty and privilege, I propose that which is extraordinary, and to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief,—that the will of one man may not hinder the good of an whole country. But to publish those things now and here, as matters stand, would not be wise, and I was advised to reserve that until I came there.”

To another he wrote,—

“And because I have been somewhat exercised at times about the nature and end of government among men, it is reasonable to expect that I should endeavor to establish a just and righteous one in this province, that others may take example by it,—truly this my heart desires. For the nations want a precedent.... I do, therefore, desire the Lord’s wisdom to guide me, and those that may be concerned with me, that we may do the thing that is truly wise and just.”

And again,—

“For my country, I eyed the Lord in obtaining it, and more was I drawn inward to look to him, and to owe it to his hand and power than to any other way. I have so obtained it, and desire to keep it that I may not be unworthy of his love, but do that which may answer his kind Providence and serve his truth and people, that an example may be set up to the nations. There may be room there, though not here, for such an holy experiment.”

The scheme grew apace, and, as Penn says, “many were drawn forth to be concerned with him.” His prominence as a Quaker attracted the attention of Quakers in all quarters. He had travelled in their service in Wales, and from thence some of the first settlers came. Two visits to Holland and Germany had made him known to the Mennonites and like religious bodies there. His pamphlet was reprinted at Amsterdam, and the seed sown soon brought forth abundantly. By July 11, 1681, matters had so far progressed that it was necessary to form a definite agreement between Penn and the purchasers, and a paper known as “Certain Conditions or Concessions” was executed.

By this time also (July, 1681) troubles with Lord Baltimore were anticipated in England, and some of the adventurers were deterred from purchasing. Penn at once began negotiations for the acquirement of the Duke of York’s interests on the Delaware. Meanwhile, in the face of all these rumors, Penn refused to part with any of his rights, except on the terms and in the spirit which he had announced. Six thousand pounds were offered for a monopoly of the Indian trade, but he declined it; “I would not,” are his words, “so defile what came to me clean.”

William Crispin, John Bezar, and Nathaniel Allen were commissioned by Penn (Sept. 30, 1681) to assist Markham. They were to select a site for a town, and superintend its laying out. William Haige was subsequently added to the number. By them he sent to the Indians a letter[480] of an affectionate character, and another to be read to the Swedes by their ministers.

The first commissioners probably sailed on the “John Sarah,” which cleared for Pennsylvania in October. She is supposed to have been the first vessel to arrive there after Penn received his grant.

On August 24, 1682, Penn acquired from the Duke of York the town of New Castle and the country twelve miles around it, and the same day the Duke conveyed to him the territory lying south of New Castle, reserving for himself one half the rents. The first of these gifts professed to have been made on account of the Duke’s respect for the memory of Sir William Penn. A deed was also obtained from the Duke (August 20) for any right he might have to Pennsylvania as a part of New Netherland.

Having completed his business in England, Penn prepared to sail for America. On the 4th of August, from his home at Worminghurst, he addressed to his wife and children a letter of singular beauty, manliness, and affection. It is evident from it that he appreciated the dangers before him, as well as the responsibilities which he had assumed. To his wife, who was the daughter of Sir William Springett, he wrote: “Remember thy mother’s example when thy father’s public-spiritedness had worsted his estate, which is my case.” To his children, fearing he would see them no more, he said: “And as for you who are likely to be concerned in the government of Pennsylvania and my parts of East Jersey, especially the first, I do charge you before the Lord God and His holy angels, that you be lowly, diligent, and tender, fearing God, loving the people, and hating covetousness.” To both, in closing, he wrote: “So farewell to my thrice-dearly beloved wife and children. Yours as God pleaseth, in that which no waters can quench, no time forget, nor distance wear away.”

On the 30th of August he wrote to all faithful friends in England, and the next day there “sailed out of the Downs three ships bound for Pennsylvania, on board of which was Mr. Pen, with a great many Quakers who go to settle there.” Such was the announcement in the London Gazette of September 4, of the departure of those who were to found one of the most prosperous of the British colonies in America.

With the exception of a narrow strip of land along the Delaware, on which were scattered a few Swedish hamlets, the tract covered by the royal grant to Penn was a wilderness. It contained, exclusive of Indians, about five hundred souls. The settlements extended from the southern limits of the province for a few miles above the mouth of the Schuylkill, and then there was nothing until Crewcorne was reached, opposite the Falls of Delaware. None of these settlements rose to the dignity of a village, unless it was Upland, at which place the Court was held. The territory acquired from the Duke of York contained about the same number of persons as did Pennsylvania. Many, however, who lived in either section were Swedes or Finns. A few Dutch had settled among them, and some Quaker families had crossed from New Jersey and taken up land.

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Penn found the Swedes “a strong, industrious people,” who knew little beside the rudiments of agriculture, and cared not to cultivate beyond their needs.[779] The fertile country in which they dwelt yielded adequate supply with moderate labor, and to the English settlers it appeared to be a paradise. The reports which Penn’s people sent home encouraged others to come, and although their accounts were highly colored, none of the new-comers seem to have been disappointed. The first descriptions we have of the country after it became Pennsylvania are in the letters of Markham. To his wife he wrote, Dec. 7, 1681,—

“It is a very fine Country, if it were not so overgrown with Woods, and very Healthy. Here people live to be above one hundred years of Age. Provisions of all sorts are indifferent plentiful, Venison especially; I have seen four Bucks bought for less than 5s. The Indians kill them only for their Skins, and if the Christians will not buy the Flesh they let it hang and rot on a Tree. In the Winter there is mighty plenty of Wild Fowl of all sorts. Partridges I am cloyed with; we catch them by hundreds at a time. In the fall of the leaf, or after Harvest, here are abundance of wild Turkeys, which are mighty easie to be Shot; Duck, Mallard, Geese, and Swans in abundance, wild; Fish are in great plenty. In short, if a Country Life be liked by any, it might be here.”

Markham, after his arrival, had taken such steps as were necessary to establish the authority of Penn. On the 3d of August nine of the residents, selected by him, took the oath to act as his council. A court was held at Upland September 13, the last court held there under the authority of the Duke of York having adjourned until that time. By Penn’s instructions, all was to be done “according to the good laws of England. But the new court during the first year of its existence failed to comply with these laws in a very essential particular,—persons were put upon trial without the intervention of a grand jury. No provision was made under the Duke’s laws for the safeguard of the citizen, and the new justices acted for a time in accordance with former usage. A petit jury, so rare under the former court, now participated in every trial where facts were in dispute. In criminal cases the old practice was adhered to, of making the prosecutor plaintiff.”[780]

During 1681 at least two vessels arrived with settlers. Of the commissioners who were sent out in October to assist Markham, Crispin died at Barbadoes. April 23, 1682, Thomas Holme, bearing a commission of surveyor-general, sailed from England, and arrived about June. Already the site for Philadelphia had been selected, as James Claypoole, who was in England, wrote, July 14, that he “had one hundred acres where our capital city is to be, upon the river near Schuylkill.” July 15, 1682, Markham purchased from the Indians a tract of land on the Delaware below the Falls.

[482]

The first Welsh emigrants arrived on the 13th of August, 1682. They were Quakers from Merionethshire who had felt the hand of persecution. They had bought from Penn in England five thousand acres of unsurveyed land, and had been promised by him the reservation of a large tract exclusively for Welsh settlers, to the end that they might preserve the customs of their native land, decide all debates “in a Gospel order,” and not entangle themselves “with laws in an unknown tongue.” At Philadelphia they found a crowd of people endeavoring to have their farms surveyed, for although the site of the city was chosen, the town lots were not laid out. In a few days the Welshmen had the first part surveyed of what became known as the Welsh Barony. It lay on the west side of the Schuylkill, north of Philadelphia. The warrant for surveying the entire tract, which contained forty thousand acres, was not issued until 1684. Special privileges appear to have been accorded to these settlers. Township officers were not chosen for their districts until 1690, and their Friends’ Meetings exercised authority in civil affairs. From these facts it is possible that the intention was to protect the Welsh in the rights of local self-government by erecting the tract into a manor. By a clause in the royal charter, Penn could erect “manors, to have and to hold a court baron, with all things whatsoever to a court baron do belong.” To a company known as the “Free Society of Traders” he had (March 20, 1682) granted these extraordinary privileges, empowering them to hold courts of sessions and jail deliveries, to constitute a court-leet, and to appoint certain civil officers for their territory. This was known as the Manor of Frank. To Nicholas More, the president of the Company, the Manor of Moreland was granted, with like privileges; but neither More nor the Company seem to have exercised their rights as rulers. Whatever special rights the Welshmen had, were reserved until 1690, when regular township officers were appointed. Goshen, Uwchlan, Tredyffren, Whiteland, Newtown, Haverford, Radnor, and Merion,—the names these ancient Britons gave to their townships—show what parts of the present counties of Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery the Welsh tract covered. Some of these people settled in Philadelphia and Bucks County. They were chiefly Quakers, although Baptists were found among them.

The ship which bore Penn to America was the “Welcome.” The small-pox made its appearance among the passengers when they had been out a short time, and nearly one-third of them died. Two vessels which left England after Penn had sailed, arrived before him; but at last, after a trying voyage of nearly two months, the “Welcome” came within the Capes of Delaware. Penn dated his arrival from the 24th of October, 1682, but it was not until the 27th that the vessel lay opposite New Castle. The next day he exhibited his deeds from the Duke of York, and took formal possession of the town and surrounding country. He received a pledge of submission from the inhabitants, issued commissions to six justices of the peace, and empowered Markham to receive in his name possession of the country below, which was done on November 7. The 29th of October (O. S.)[483] found him within the bounds of Pennsylvania, at the Swedish village of Upland, the name of which, tradition says, he then changed to Chester. From this point notices were sent out for the holding of a court at New Castle on the 2d of November. At this meeting the inhabitants of the counties of Delaware were told that their rights and privileges should be the same as those of the citizens of Pennsylvania, and that an assembly would be held as soon as convenient.

LETITIA COTTAGE.

A city residence for Penn was begun by his commissioners before he arrived. Parts of it were prepared in England. A portion of it still stands on the west side of Letitia Street, south of Market. The above cut is a fac-simile of the view given in Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia (1845), p. 158. Cf. Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 492.

The attention which Penn gave to the constitution of his province was a duty which had for him a particular interest. His thoughts had necessarily dwelt much on the subject, and his experience had made him acquainted with the principles of law and the abuses of government. The drafts of this paper which have been preserved show how deeply it was considered. Henry Sidney, Sir William Jones, and Counsellor Bamfield were consulted, and portions of it were framed in accordance with the wishes of the Quakers. In the Introduction to this remarkable paper, the ingenuousness of its author is clearly discernible. Recognizing the necessity of government, and tracing it to a divine origin, Penn continues,—

“For particular frames and models, it will become me to say little, and comparatively I will say nothing. My reasons are, first, that the age is too nice and difficult for it, there being nothing the wits of men are more busy and divided upon.... Men side with their passions against their reason, and their sinister interests have so strong a bias upon their minds, that they lean to them against the good of the things they know.

[484]

“I do not find a model in the world that time, place, and some singular emergencies have not necessarily altered, nor is it easy to frame a civil government that shall serve all places alike. I know what is said by the several admirers of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, which are the rule of one, a few, and many, and are the three common ideas of government when men discourse on that subject. But I choose to solve the controversy with this small distinction, and it belongs to all three,—any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.... Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.”

SEAL AND AND SIGNATURES TO THE FRAME OF GOVERNMENT.

[This is reduced from the fac-simile in Smith and Watson’s American Historical and Literary Curiosities, pl. lvii.; and another reduction will be found in Mag. of Amer. Hist., October, 1882; cf. Lossing’s Fieldbook of the Revolution, ii. 256.—Ed.]

The good men of a nation, he argues, should make and keep its government, and laws should bind those who make laws necessary. As wisdom and virtue are qualities that descend not with worldly inheritances, care should be taken for the virtuous education of youth.

The Frame of Government which followed these remarks was signed by Penn on the 25th of April, 1682. By this Act the government was vested in the governor and freemen, in the form of a provincial council and an assembly. The provincial council was to consist of seventy-two members. The first election of councilmen was to be held on the 20th of February, 1682-83, and they were to meet on the 10th of the following month. One-third of the number were to retire each year when their successors were chosen. An elaborate scheme was devised for forming the council into committees to attend to various duties.

The assembly for the first year was to consist of all the freemen of the[485] province, and after that two hundred were to be annually chosen. They were to meet on April 20; the governor was to preside over the council. Laws were to originate with the latter, and the chief duty of the assembly was to approve such legislation. The governor and council were to see the laws executed, inspect the treasury, determine the situation of cities and ports, and provide for public schools.

On May 5 forty laws were agreed upon by the purchasers in England as freemen of the province. By these all Christians, with the exception of bound servants and convicts, who should take up land or pay taxes were declared freemen. The merits of this proposed form, which was to be submitted for approval to the first legislative body assembling in Pennsylvania, have been widely debated. Professor Ebeling says it “was at first too highly praised, and afterwards too lightly depreciated.” It was without doubt too elaborate in some of its details, and the number proposed for the council and assembly were out of all proportion to the wants of a new country.

Shortly after his arrival, Penn found circumstances to require that the laws should be put in force with as little delay as possible. He therefore decided to call an assembly before the time provided, and extended to the inhabitants of the Delaware counties the right to participate in it. Writs were issued to the sheriffs of those parts to hold elections on the 20th of November for the choice of delegates to meet at Chester on the 4th of December, and the inhabitants of Pennsylvania were notified to attend.

The Assembly met at the appointed time. Upon petition from the lower counties, an Act uniting them with Pennsylvania was passed, and at the request of the Swedes a bill of naturalization became a law. Penn submitted to the House the Frame of Government and the code of laws agreed upon in England, together with a new series which he had prepared. In doing this he acted without the advice of a provincial council. The laws agreed upon in England, “more fully worded,” were passed, together with such others as were thought to be necessary, and the Assembly adjourned for twenty-one days. The members, however, do not appear to have met again.

In January Penn issued writs for an election, to be held on the 20th of February, of seventy-two members of the provincial council, and gave notice that an assembly would be held as provided in the Frame of Government. This was not strictly in accord with that document, as it provided that the seventy-two councilmen should be chosen from the province of Pennsylvania, and Penn made the passage apply equally to the Delaware counties, over which he had had no jurisdiction at the time the Frame was signed.

Before the election took place, it was discovered that the number proposed for the council was much larger than could be selected, and that a general gathering of the inhabitants would not furnish such an assembly as the organization of the government demanded. On the suggestion of[486] Penn twelve persons, therefore, were elected from each of the six counties; and through their respective sheriffs the freemen petitioned the Governor that as the number of the people was yet small, and but few were acquainted with public business, those chosen should be accepted to represent them in both council and assembly,—three in the former, and nine in the latter. The Council met at the appointed time, the petitions of the freemen were duly presented by the sheriffs, and the prayers granted by the Governor. It was then moved by one of the members that, as the charter granted by the Governor had again fallen into his hands by the negligence of the freemen to fulfil their part, he should be asked that the alterations which had been made should not affect their chartered rights. The Governor answered that “they might amend, alter, or add for the Public good, and he was ready to settle such foundations as might be for their happiness and the good of their Posterities.” Those selected for the Assembly then withdrew, and, although the time for them to meet had not arrived (March 12), chose Thomas Wynne their Speaker, and proceeded to business. During the session an “Act of Settlement,” reciting the circumstances which made these changes necessary, and reducing the number of members of the Provincial Council and Assembly, was passed by the House, having been proposed by the Governor and Council. By the Frame of Government first agreed upon, Penn had surrendered his right to have an overruling voice in the government, reserving for himself or representative a triple vote in the Council. Fearing that his charter might be invalidated by some action of the majority of the Council and Assembly, he now asked that the veto power should be restored to him, which was accordingly done. The right to appoint officers, which by the first Frame had been vested in the Governor and Council, was given to Penn for life. Other laws necessary for good government were enacted, and to the whole the Frame of Government was appended, with modifications and such alterations as made it applicable to the Delaware counties. On April 2, in the presence of the Council, Assembly, and some of the citizens of Philadelphia, Penn signed and sealed this new charter, solemnly assuring them that it was “solely by him intended for the good and benefit of the freemen of the province, and prosecuted with much earnestness in his spirit towards God at the time of its composure.” It was received by the Speaker of the Assembly on behalf of the freemen; and in their name that officer thanked the Governor for his great kindness in granting them a charter “of more than was expected liberty.”

All that had been irregularly done was thus in a manner legalized; but the matter was not allowed to pass unquestioned. Nicholas More was reprimanded by the Council for having spoken imprudently regarding the course which had been taken, and for saying that hundreds in England and their children after them would curse them for what they had done.

Under the constitution and laws thus formed, the government was[487] administered until 1696. The chief features of local government which had existed under the Duke of York were lost sight of in the new order of affairs, the authority being vested in the provincial or county officers in place of those of the township. True to the doctrines which they had preached, and to the demands which they had made of others, the Quakers accorded to all a perfect liberty of conscience, intending, however, “that looseness, irreligion, and Atheism” should not creep in under pretence of conscience. The observance of the Sabbath was provided for. On that day people were to “abstain from their usual and common toil and labor, ... that they may better dispose themselves to read the Scriptures of truth at home, or frequent such meetings of religious worship abroad as may best suit their respective persuasions.” Profanity, drunkenness, health-drinking, duelling, stage-plays, masques, revels, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, cards, dice, and lotteries were all prohibited. Clamorous scolding and railing were finable offences. The property of thieves was liable for fourfold the value of what they had taken; and if they should have no estates, they were to labor in prison until the person they had injured was satisfied. A humane treatment of prisoners was insured. The poor were under the protection of the county courts. Peacemakers were chosen in the several counties to decide differences of a minor character. Malt liquors were not to be sold at above two pennies sterling for a full Winchester quart. The court records were to be kept in plain English characters, and laws were to be taught in the schools.

“All judicial power, after Penn’s arrival, was vested in certain courts, the judges of which were appointed by the Proprietary, presiding in the Provincial Council.[781]

“The practice in these courts was simple but regular. In criminal cases an indictment was regularly drawn up, and a trial by jury followed. In civil cases the complications of common-law pleading were disregarded. The filing of a simple statement and answer put each cause at issue, and upon the trial the rules of evidence were not observed. Juries were not always empanelled, the parties being frequently content to leave the decision of their causes to the Court. In equity proceedings the practice[488] was substantially that in vogue in the Court of Chancery, simplified to suit the requirements of the province.

“Large judicial powers were also vested in the Provincial Council,—a state of things not infrequently observed in the early stages of a country’s growth, before the executive and judicial functions of government have been clearly defined. Prior to the establishment of the Provincial Court, all cases of great importance, whether civil or criminal, were tried before the Council. The principal trials thus conducted were those of Pickering for coining, and of Margaret Mattson for witchcraft. The latter terminated in a verdict of ‘guilty of having the common fame of being a witch, but not guilty in manner and form as she stands indicted.’ This is the only regular prosecution for witchcraft which is found in the annals of Pennsylvania. Prior to the establishment of the Provincial Court, the Council also entertained appeals in certain cases from the inferior courts. Subsequent to 1684, however, the extent of its judicial power was limited to admiralty cases, to the administration of decedents’ estates, which, although more properly the business of the Orphans’ Courts, was often neglected by those tribunals, and to the general superintendence and control of the various courts, so as to insure justice to the suitors.[782]

“The legal knowledge among the early settlers was scanty. The religious tenets of the Society of Friends rendered them very averse to lawyers, and distrustful of them. There was, therefore, comparatively little demand for skilled advocates or trained judges. John Moore and David Lloyd were almost the only professional lawyers of the seventeenth century. Nicholas More, Abraham Man, John White, Charles Pickering, Samuel Hersent, Patrick Robinson, and Samuel Jennings, with some others, however, practised in the courts with some success; but by insensible degrees, as population increased and the commercial interests of the community grew more extensive and complicated, a trained Bar came into existence.”[783]

Markham not having agreed with Baltimore, 1681, regarding the boundaries of Pennsylvania and Maryland, the two met again in September of the following year at Upland, and Penn visited the latter at West River, Dec. 13, 1682. In May, 1683, Penn again met Lord Baltimore at New Castle, on the same business, but nothing was decided upon. This dispute was a consequence of the lack of geographical information at the time their grants were made. Baltimore’s patent was for the unoccupied land between the Potomac and the fortieth degree of latitude, bounded on the east by Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, with the exception of that part of the Delaware peninsula which was south of a direct line drawn from Watkin’s Point on the Chesapeake to the sea. The southern boundary of Penn’s province was the fortieth degree and a circle of twelve miles around New Castle. When both patents were issued, it was supposed that the fortieth degree would fall near the head of Delaware Bay; but it was afterward found to be so far to the northward as to cross the Delaware River at the mouth of the Schuylkill. If the letter of the Maryland charter was to interpret its meaning, Penn would be deprived of considerable river[489] frontage, which it was clearly the intention of the Lords of Trade to grant him; and he insisted that the boundary-line should be where it was supposed the fortieth degree would be found. This was resisted by Baltimore, who claimed ownership also to that part of the peninsula on the Delaware which Penn had received from the Duke of York. To enforce his claims, Baltimore sent to the Lords of Plantation a statement of what had taken place between Penn and himself. He also ran a line in his own interest between the provinces, and offered to persons who would take up land in the Delaware counties under his authority more advantageous terms than Penn gave. In 1684 Baltimore sent Colonel Talbot into the disputed territory to demand it in his name, and then sailed for England to look after his interests in that quarter.

Penn, when he learned all that had been done, wrote to the Lords of Trade, giving his version of the transaction; but before long he found the business would require his presence in England. Having empowered his Council to act in his absence, he sailed August, 1684.

The Lords of Trade rendered a decision Nov. 7, 1685, which secured to Penn the portion claimed by him of the Delaware peninsula, but which left undefined the southern boundary of Pennsylvania. The Maryland boundary was finally settled in 1760, upon an agreement which had been entered into in 1732 between the heirs of Lord Baltimore and those of Penn.[784] By this a line was to be drawn westward from Cape Henlopen[785] to a point half way between the bays of Delaware and Chesapeake. From thence it was to run northward so as to touch the most western portion of a circle of twelve miles radius around New Castle, and continue in a due northerly course until it should reach the same latitude as fifteen English statute miles directly south of the most southern part of Philadelphia. From the point thus gained the line was to extend due west. These lines were surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. They commenced their work in 1763 and suspended it in 1767, when they had reached a point two hundred and forty-four miles from the Delaware River.

The Indians who inhabited Pennsylvania were of the tribe of the Lenni Lenape. Some of them retained the noble characteristics of their race, but the majority of them, through their intercourse with the Dutch, the Swedes, and the English, had become thoroughly intemperate. Penn desired that his dealings with them should be so just as to preserve the confidence which Fox and Coale had inspired. Besides the letter written by his commissioners, he had sent to them messages of friendship through[490] Holme and others. In all the agreements he had entered into with purchasers, the interests of the Indians had been protected; and he was far in advance of his time in hoping to establish relations with them by which all differences between the white men and the red should be settled by a tribunal wherein both should be represented. The possibility of their civilization under such circumstances was not absent from his mind, and in his first contract with purchasers he stipulated that the Indians should have “the same liberties to improve their grounds and provide for the sustenance of their families as the planters.” Following the just precedent which had been laid down by settlers in many parts of the country, and the advice of the Bishop of London, he would allow no land to be occupied until the Indian title had been extinguished. To obtain the land which was required by the emigrants, a meeting with the principal Indian chiefs was held at Shackamaxon June 23, 1683. The territory then purchased was considerable; but what was of equal importance to the welfare of the infant colony was the friendship then established with the aborigines. Poetry, Art, and Oratory have pictured this scene with the elevating thoughts which belong to each; but no more graphic representation of it has been made than that which is suggested by the simple language of Penn used in describing it. “When the purchase was agreed,” he writes, “great promises passed between us of kindness and good neighborhood, and that the Indians and English must live in love as long as the sun gave light. Which done, another made a speech to the Indians in the name of all the Sachamakers, or kings: first, to tell them what was done; next, to charge and command them to love the Christians, and particularly live in peace with me, and the people under my government; that many governors had been in the river, but that no governor had come himself to live and stay here before; and having now such an one that had treated them well, they should never do him or his any wrong,—at every sentence of which they shouted and said amen in their way.”[786]

“On the 6th of October, 1683, there arrived in Philadelphia, from Crefeld and its neighborhood, a little colony of Germans. They were thirteen men with their families, in all thirty-three persons, and they constituted the advance-guard of that immense emigration which, confined at first to Pennsylvania, has since been spread over the whole country. They were Mennonites, some of whom soon after, if not before, their arrival, became identified with the Quakers. Most of them were linen-weavers.

Among the first to purchase lands upon the organization of the province were several Crefeld merchants, headed by Jacob Telner, who secured fifteen thousand acres. The purchasers also included a number of distinguished persons in Holland and Germany, whose purchase amounted to twenty-five thousand acres, which became vested in the Frankfort Land Company, founded in 1686. The eleven members of[491] this latter Company were chiefly Pietists and people of learning and influence, among whom was the celebrated Johanna Eleanora von Merlau. Their original purpose was to come to Pennsylvania themselves; but this plan was abandoned by all except Francis Daniel Pastorius, a young lawyer, son of a judge at Windsheim, skilled in the Greek, Latin, German, French, Dutch, English, and Italian languages, and carefully trained in all the learning of the day. On the 24th of October, 1683, Pastorius, as the agent for the Crefeld and Frankfort purchasers, began the location of Germantown. Other settlers soon followed, and among them, in 1685, were several families from the village of Krisheim, near Worms, where more than twenty years before the Quakers had made some converts among the Mennonites, and had established a meeting. In 1688 Gerhard Hendricks, Dirck op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff sent to the Friends’ Meeting a written protest against the buying and selling of slaves. It was the first public effort made in this direction in America, and is the subject of Whittier’s poem, The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.”[787]

The progress made in the settlement of the Province between 1681 and 1689 was remarkable, and was largely owing to Penn’s energy. On the 29th of December, 1682, he wrote from Chester: “I am very well, ... yet busy enough, having much to do to please all.... I am casting the country into townships.” On the 5th of the next month he wrote: “I am day and night spending my life, my time, my money, and am not a sixpence enriched by this greatness.... Had I sought greatness, I had stayed at home.” The English were the most numerous among the settlers; but in 1685, when the population numbered seven thousand two hundred, in which French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Finns, and Scotch-Irish were represented, Penn did not estimate his countrymen at above one half of the whole.

Twenty-three ships bearing emigrants arrived during the fall of 1682 and the winter following, and trading-vessels soon began to frequent the Delaware. The counties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks were organized in the latter part of 1682, but were not surveyed until 1685. Philadelphia, named before she was born, and first laid out in August or September, 1682,[788] contained in the following July eighty houses, such as they were, and by the end of the year this number had increased to one hundred and fifty. The founders of the city lived in caves dug out of the high embankment by the river, and the houses which succeeded these primitive habitations were probably of the very simple character described in Penn’s advice to settlers.[789] In July, 1683, a weekly post was established. Letters[492] were carried from Philadelphia to the Falls of Delaware for 3d., to Chester 2d., to New Castle 4d., to Maryland 6d. Notices of its departure were posted on the Meeting-House doors and in other public places.

On the 26th of December of the same year the Council arranged with Enoch Flower, who had had twenty years’ experience as a teacher in England, to open a school. Four shillings per quarter was the charge for those who were taught to read English; six shillings, when reading and writing were studied; and eight shillings, when the casting of accounts was added. For boarding scholars and “scooling,” he was to receive “Tenn” pounds per annum.

[This was the house in Philadelphia in which Penn lived after his return to the colony in 1699. It stood on the southeast corner of Second Street and Norris’s Alley, and was demolished in 1868. A view of it taken just before its demolition is given in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, iii. 171, with an earlier view, ii. 496. There is an account of it by Mr. Townsend Ward, with a view, in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 53; but the most extended account is in Lippincott’s Magazine, vol. i. pp. 29, 191, 298, by General John M. Read, Jr. For other views, see Egle’s Pennsylvania, p. 1016, and Day’s Historical Collections of Pennsylvania, p. 556. The above cut is a fac-simile of one given by Watson in his Annals of Philadelphia, 1845 edition, p. 158; 1857 edition, p. 158. It is lithographed in his 1830 edition, p. 151. Drawings of the interior are in the possession of the Hist. Soc. of Pennsylvania.—Ed.]

The demand in trade at first was for articles of the greatest utility, like mill and “grindle” stones, iron kettles, and hardware. One of the women ordered shoes, and stipulated that they should be stout and large. James Claypoole sent his silver-hafted knives to his brother in Barbadoes, and consigned to him some beaver hats for which he could find at home no sale. But in less than a year a trade sprang up with some of the West India Islands, and rum, sugar, and negroes were ordered, in exchange for pipe-staves[493] and horses. The silver from a Spanish wreck and peltries furnished the means of an exchange with Europe, and soon word was sent out to send “linnen, serges, crape, and Bengall, and other slight stuffs; but send no more shoes, gloves, stockings, nor hats.” Before Penn sailed for England in 1684, Philadelphia contained three hundred and fifty-seven houses, many of them three stories high, with cellars and balconies. Samuel Carpenter, one of the most enterprising of the early merchants, had a quay at which a ship of five hundred tons could lie. Trades of all kinds flourished; vessels had been built; brick houses soon began to be seen; and shop windows enlivened the streets.

In 1685 William Bradford established his printing-press in Philadelphia, the first in the middle colonies of North America. Its earliest issue was an almanac entitled the Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense, printed in 1685 for the succeeding year.

By 1690 brick and stone houses were the kind usually erected, while only the poorer classes built of wood. Manufactures also began to flourish. That year William Ryttenhouse, Samuel Carpenter, William Bradford, and others built a paper mill on the Schuylkill. The woollen manufactures offered such encouragement that there was “a public flock of sheep in the town, and a sheepheard or two to attend them.” The rural districts were also prosperous. The counties were divided into townships of about five thousand acres, in the centre of which villages were laid out. In 1684 there were fifty such settlements in the colony. At first the cattle were turned loose, and the ear-marks of their respective owners were registered at the county courts. Roads were surveyed and bridges built. The first mill was started in 1683 at Chester by Richard Townsend and others. The reports regarding the crops show them to have been enormous for the labor bestowed, and the development of the whole country seems to have been correspondent to the increased wealth of Philadelphia, where, in 1685, the poorest lots were worth four times what they cost, and the best forty-fold. At the beginning of the year 1684 Penn wrote: “I have led the greatest colony into America that ever any man did upon a private credit, and the most prosperous beginnings that ever were in it are to be found among us.”

The early ecclesiastical annals of Pennsylvania are meagre. The wave of religious excitement which swept over England during the days of the Commonwealth spent itself on the banks of the Delaware. Men and women with intellects too weak to grasp the questions which moved them, or possibly instigated by cunning, wandered through the country prophesying or disputing. One declared “that she was Mary the mother of the Lord;” another, “that she was Mary Magdalen, and others that they were Martha, John, etc.,—scandalizers,” wrote a traveller in 1679, “as we heard them in a tavern, who not only called themselves, but claimed to be, really such.”

The Swedish congregations, neglected by the churches in Sweden, were in 1682 falling into decay. The congregations at Tranhook, near Upland,[494] and at Tinnicum, were under the charge of Lars Lock, that at Wicaco under Jacob Fabritius. The former was a cripple, the latter blind. Their salaries were scantily paid, and they were miserably poor. The Dutch had but one church, which was at New Castle.

The first meeting of Quakers for religious worship in Pennsylvania was no doubt held at the house of Robert Wade, near Upland. William Edmundson, the Quaker preacher, speaks of such meetings in 1675. It was then that Wade came to America with Fenwick. In Bucks County meetings are said to have been held as early as 1680 at the houses of Quakers who had settled there. The first meeting near Philadelphia was at Shackamaxon, at the house of Thomas Fairman, in 1682; but it was soon removed to Philadelphia, where one was established in 1683. Early in that year no less than nine established meetings existed in Pennsylvania.

As early as 1684 or 1685 the Baptists established a church at Cold Spring, in Bucks County, about three miles above Bristol. The pastor was the Rev. Thomas Dungan. In 1687 they established a second congregation at Pennepeck, in Philadelphia County, of which the Rev. Elias Keach was the first minister. The Episcopalians and Presbyterians did not own places of worship until a later date.

The early political annals of the colony show a condition of affairs perfectly consistent with the circumstances under which the constitution was formed. While Penn remained in the country his presence prevented any excess such as might be expected from men inexperienced in self-government. In 1684, however, Penn was obliged to return to England, and he empowered the Provincial Council to act in his stead. Thomas Lloyd was the president of that body, and was also commissioned Keeper of the Seal. He was a man of prudence, and seems to have justified the confidence placed in him by Penn. Arrogance on the part of some of the other officers of the government soon awakened feelings of jealousy among the people, who were prompt to resent any violation of their rights. Nicholas More, the Chief-Justice, was impeached by the Assembly for gross partiality and overbearing conduct. He was styled by the Speaker an “aspiring and corrupt minister of state,” and the Council was requested to remove him from office. He was expelled from the Assembly, of which he was a member, for having thrice entered his protest against a single bill. Patrick Robinson, the clerk of the Court, refused to submit to the House the records of the Court in the case of More, and was restrained for his “divers insolences and affronts.” When brought before the Assembly, he stretched himself at full length on the ground, and refused to answer questions put to him, telling the House that it “acted arbitrarily” and without authority. The Council was also requested to remove him; but neither in his case nor in that of More were the prayers granted. “I am sorry at heart for your animosities,” wrote[495] Penn, when he heard of these troubles; “cannot more friendly and private courses be taken to set matters to rights in an infant province whose steps are numbered and watched? For the love of God, me, and the poor country, be not so governmentish, so noisy and open in your dissatisfactions.” It was the love of government, the seeds of which Penn had himself planted, which caused these troubles, and he it was who was to suffer most in that period of political growth. Hundreds, he said, had been prevented from emigrating by these quarrels, and that they had been to him a loss of £10,000. His quit-rents, which in 1686 should have amounted to £500 per annum, were unpaid. They were looked upon as oppressive taxes, for which the Proprietary had no need; but the year previous he wrote: “God is my witness.... I am above six thousand pounds out of pocket more than ever I saw by the province.”

The want of energy shown by the Council in managing his affairs caused Penn to lessen the number in which the executive authority rested. In 1686 he commissioned five of the Council, three of whom were to be a quorum, to attend to his proprietary affairs. By the slothful manner in which the Council had conducted the public business, the charter, he argued, had again fallen into his hands, and he threatened to dissolve the Frame of Government “if further occasion be given.” Under these commissioners but little improvement was made, and in 1688 Penn appointed Captain John Blackwell his lieutenant-governor.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

The Earliest Tracts and Books.—During the first thirty years after the granting of Penn’s charter (1681), there were various publications of small and moderate extent, which are the chief source of our information.

REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF TITLE TO “SOME ACCOUNT.”

The first of these is Penn’s own Some Account,[790] issued in 1681, soon after he received his grant. “It is introduced by a preface of some length, being an argument in favor of colonies,” which is followed by a description of the country, gathered from such sources as he considered reliable, and by the conditions on which he proposed to settle it. Information for those desiring to emigrate, and extracts from the royal charter, are also given.

[496]

This tract appeared at once in Dutch[791] and German[792] editions. The latter edition contains also letters of Penn to Friends in Holland and Germany prior to his receiving his grant, which fact tends to show that the relations he had established by his travels there attracted the attention of persons in Germany to his efforts in America.

In the same year (1681) appeared César de Rochefort’s account,[793] which is usually found joined to his Description des Antilles. Next year (1682) Penn published, under the title of A Brief Account,[794] a short description of his province, giving additional information. Of the same date is William Loddington’s Plantation Work,[795]—a tract, however, by some attributed to[497] George Fox. It was written in favor of Quaker emigration at a time when many Quakers feared that such action might be prompted by a desire to escape persecution. In it we have the earliest descriptions preserved of Pennsylvania after it was given to Penn. These are presented in letters of Markham, written soon after his arrival, the date of which is also indicated. The extracts from Markham’s letters are printed in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 175.

REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF TITLE OF “THE FRAME OF GOVERNMENT.”

The constitution which Penn proposed for his colony, together with certain laws which were accepted by purchasers in England as citizens of Pennsylvania, were issued the same year as The Frame of Government.[796] Both constitution and laws underwent considerable alteration before going into effect; although this fact has been frequently overlooked. A little brochure, of probably a like date, Information and Direction,[797] covers a description of the houses which it was supposed would be the most convenient for settlers to build.

The Free Society of Traders purchased of Penn twenty thousand acres. The Society was formed for the purpose of developing this tract, which was to be known as the Manor of Frank. Nicholas More was president, and James Claypoole treasurer. The letter-book of the latter is in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The charter of the Society will be[498] found in Hazard’s Annals (p. 541), with other information regarding the Society; and in the same volume (p. 552) a portion of a tract[798] which is printed in full with a reduced fac-simile of titlepage in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, v. 37.

A Vindication of William Penn, by Philip Ford, in two folio pages, was published in London in 1683, to contradict stories which were circulated after Penn had sailed, to the effect that he had died upon reaching America, and had closed his career professing belief in the Church of Rome. It contains abstracts of the first letters written by Penn from America.[799]

RECEIPT AND SEAL OF THE FREE SOCIETY OF TRADERS.

The most important of all the series is a Letter from William Penn,[800] printed in 1683.[499] It was written after Penn had been in America over nine months (dated August 16), and may be considered as a report from personal observation of what he found his colony to be. It passed through at least two editions in London; one of which contains a list of the property-holders in Philadelphia, with numbers affixed to their names indicating the lots they held, as is shown on a plan of that city which accompanies the publication, and of which a heliotype is herewith given. The letter appeared the next year (1684) in a Dutch translation[801] (two editions). Of the same date is a new description of the province, of which we have a German[802] and a French[803] text. The pamphlet contains an extended extract from Penn’s letter to the Free Society of Traders, the letter of Thomas Paschall from Philadelphia, dated Feb. 10, 1683 (N. S.), and other interesting papers, many of which were published in A Brief Account. All information in it that is not readily accessible has been lately translated by Mr. Samuel W. Pennypacker from the French edition, and is printed with fac-simile of title in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 311.

A small tract, giving letters from a Dutch and Swiss sojourner in and near Philadelphia, was printed at Rotterdam, in 1684, as Twee Missiven.[804] The only copy of this tract which we know of is in the Library of Congress, and will be shortly published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The copy at Washington, we are told, contains but one letter. Another, or possibly the same, copy is catalogued in Trömel’s Bibliotheca Americana, Leipzig (1861), no. 390.

The Planter’s Speech[805] (1684) and Thomas Budd’s Good Order established in Pennsylvania, etc. (1685),[806] which have been referred to in another chapter, are of like importance to Pennsylvania history. What is called “William Bradford’s Printed Letter” (1685) is quoted in the first edition of Oldmixon’s British Empire in America, p. 158. We have, however, never met with the original publication.

[500]

Another Dutch description of the country was printed the same year (1685) at Rotterdam, Missive van Cornelis Bom,[807] and has become very rare.

In 1685 Penn also printed A Further Account of his grant, signing his name to the tract, which appeared in quarto in separate editions of twenty and sixteen pages, followed the same year by a Dutch translation.[808] After Penn’s letter to the Free Society (1683) this is the most important of these early tracts.

In 1686 the series only shows a brief Dutch tract;[809] but in 1687 we derive from A Letter from Dr. More,[810] etc., partly the work of Nicholas More, president of the Free Society of Traders, an idea of the growth of the province at that date. Of a similar character is a tract printed four years later (1691), Some Letters, etc.[811] In the following year (1692) we have a poetical description[812] of the province, which contains many interesting facts. Little is known of the author, Richard Frame. It is said that he was a teacher in the Friends’ School of Philadelphia. He was certainly a resident of Pennsylvania, and the first of her citizens to give his thoughts to the public in the form of verse. The first four lines will suffice to show its merits as a poem:—

“To all our Friends that do desire to know
What Country ‘t is we live in—this will show.
Attend to hear the Story I shall tell:
No doubt but you will like this country well.”

The pamphlet was a colonial production. It appeared on paper which was possibly made here, and was printed by William Bradford.

[501]

Soon after the appearance of Frame’s verses, the poetic fever seized upon John Holme, and he wrote “A true Relation of the Flourishing State of Pennsylvania.” The poetic taste of the community was either satiated by the effort of Frame, or Holme shrank from the honors of authorship, for his poem did not see the light until published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the thirteenth number of its Bulletin in 1847.

In 1695 one of the party who emigrated with Kelpius gave the public an account of his voyage and arrival,[813] under the pseudonym of “N. N.” He dated his letter “from Germantown, in the Antipodes, Aug. 7, 1694.”

GABRIEL THOMAS’S MAP, 1698.

In addition to Mr. Whitehead’s remarks regarding Gabriel Thomas’s Account of Pennsylvania (see chap. xi.), we will add that the portion relating to Pennsylvania covers fifty-five pages, besides eight pages which are devoted to the preface and title. A person by the name of the author, probably the same, was in America in 1702, and was then solicitous of a commission as collector of quit-rents, etc., within the county of Newcastle. In 1698 he inveighed against George Keith and his followers, and in 1702 sided with Colonel Quarry in his disputes with Penn. Most of the statements in his book can[502] be relied on, but some passages are marked by exaggeration and others by satire. As some of the buildings in Philadelphia mentioned by Thomas were not erected until after he wrote, Mr. Westcott, in his History of Philadelphia, suggests that possibly there was more than one edition of the work bearing the same date.[814]

In 1700 was printed a Beschreibung der Provintz Pennsylvaniæ,[815] the work of Francis Daniel Pastorius, agent of the Frankfort Land Company, and the most active and intelligent of the first German settlers, which is of great interest, as it contains the views of one thoroughly identified with the German movement to America. The descriptions of the country and of the form of government, the advice to emigrants, etc., which it contains, are gathered from letters written to his father. A translation of portions of the work by Lewis H. Weiss is given in Memoir of Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iv. part ii. p. 83. The original edition is generally found bound up with a German edition of Thomas’s Pennsylvania, printed in 1702, and the tract by Falkner hereafter mentioned. While the works bear different dates, there appears to have been some connection in the series. The information in Thomas, originally printed in 1698, supplements to a great extent what will be found in Pastorius, printed in 1700. The titlepage of the German edition of Thomas (1702) speaks of it, therefore, as a continuation of Pastorius, and the same shows Falkner’s tract to have appeared as a supplement to the German edition of Thomas.

An agent of the Frankfort Company, who was in Pennsylvania in 1694 and 1700, issued at Frankfort in 1702 a little book, Curieuse Nachricht,[816] which gives some information in the form of questions and answers, one hundred and three in number. The subjects touched upon are the country in general, its soil, climate, etc; the inhabitants, their manners, customs, and religions; the Indians; how to go to America, etc.

The last of the works to be considered as original authority is J. Oldmixon’s British Empire in America, as it is known that the author got some of his information from Penn himself.[817] It was first issued at London in 1708, and again in 1741. The editions differ materially in the sections on Pennsylvania, so that both need to be consulted.

[503]

The Rise and Progress of the Quakers.—As we have traced the history of Penn’s colony from the origin of the religious society which had such an influence on the formation of his character, and to which Pennsylvania owes its existence quite as much as to Penn himself, a few references must be made to the chief sources of information from which a history of the Quakers can be gathered. The most prominent of these is the Journal of George Fox,[818] the founder of the Quaker Church. It relates, in passages of alternate vividness and ambiguity, the experiences of his life. So different, however, are the opinions entertained, that while Macaulay says that “his gibberish was translated into English, meanings which he would have been unable to comprehend were put on his phrases, and his system so much improved that he would not have known it again,” Sir James Mackintosh, on the contrary, calls the Journal “one of the most extraordinary and instructive narratives in the world, which no reader of competent judgment can peruse without revering the virtues of the writer, pardoning his self-delusions, and ceasing to smile at his peculiarities.”

W. Edmundson made three voyages to America before 1700, the first with Fox, in 1671; his Journal[819] has been often printed.

Penn’s own statements about the sect’s origin were given in his Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers, published at London in 1695, and in his Primitive Christianity Revived, 1696 and 1699.

Robert Barclay is considered the most able exponent of the Quaker belief among early writers of that sect, and his Apology[820] is his chief work. He was the son of “Barclay of Ury,” of whom Whittier has sung, and was governor of East Jersey (see chap. xi.).

The Sufferings of the People called Quakers,[821] by Joseph Besse, is, as its title indicates, an account of their persecutions in various parts of the world. It is written from a Quaker standpoint, but its accuracy can seldom be questioned. It has passed through two editions.

Sewel’s History of the Quakers[822] is a work which possesses great value, not only on account of its freedom from error, but because it was written at an early period in the history of the Society of Friends. Its author was a native of Amsterdam, and was born about 1650. His history was written to correct the misrepresentations in Historia Quakeriana,[823][504] by Gerard Croese, which had been largely circulated. Sewel’s work was published in Dutch at Amsterdam in 1717, and a translation by the author was issued in London, 1722. Gough’s History of the Quakers is a compilation of nearly all that was accessible at the time of its publication. The Portraiture of Quakerism,[824] by Clarkson, treats of the discipline and customs of the Society. The History of Friends in the Seventeenth Century, by Dr. Charles Evans, contains nearly everything that most readers will require. It is an excellent compilation, and presents the subject in a compact, useful form. The same can be said of a History of the Religious Society of Friends from its rise to the year 1828,[825] by Samuel M. Janney. The author was a follower of Elias Hicks, and his work contains a history of the separation of the meetings caused by the doctrines preached by the latter. In Barclay’s Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth[826] the attempt has been made to trace the origin of the Society of Friends to an earlier period than the preaching of Fox. The author of the work was Robert Barclay, of the same family as “the Apologist.” The work, which is an able one, was reviewed by Dr. Charles Evans.[827] A terse criticism was lately made on the book by a Friend, who in conversation remarked, “Robert Barclay seemed to know more of what George Fox believed than George himself.”

The chief manuscript depository of the Friends is in Devonshire House, Friends’ Meeting-House, 12 Bishopsgate Street Without, London, E.C., England, where what is known as the Swarthmore manuscripts are preserved. The collection was made under the direction of George Fox, and many of the papers are indorsed in his handwriting. It consists “of letters addressed to Swarthmore Hall from the Preachers in connection with Fox, giving an account of their movements and success, to Margaret Fell, and through her to Fox. Up to 1661 Swarthmore Hall was secure from violation, and these letters range over the period from 1651 to 1661.”

John Whiting’s Catalogue of Friends’ Books, published in 1708, is the earliest gathering of titles concerning the Quakers. The work, however, has been fully done in our own day by Joseph Smith, who published, in 1867, at London, A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends’ Books, in two volumes, with critical remarks and occasional biographical notices; and in 1873, his Bibliotheca Anti-Quakeriana; or, a Catalogue of Books adverse to the Society of Friends; with Biographical Notices of the Authors: with Answers.[828]

In following the history of the Quakers, particularly in America, the recorder of their career in Pennsylvania must leave unnamed some of the most important books, because their contents concern chiefly or solely the story of their persecutions and progress in the other colonies, particularly New England.[829] Bowden’s History of Friends in America, as[505] it is the most important of the late works, must also be mentioned. Its author enjoyed great advantages in preparing it, having the manuscripts deposited in Devonshire House at his command. In it many original documents of the greatest interest are printed for the first time, among which we may mention a letter of Mary Fisher to George Fox, from Barbadoes, dated Jan. 30, 1655, regarding Quaker preachers coming to America, and of Josiah Coale to the same person, in 1660, in relation to the purchase of a tract of land, now a portion of Pennsylvania. The work is spirited and readable, and while it is written in entire sympathy with the Quakers, its statements are so carefully weighed that but little exception can be taken to them, and then only in cases where the fundamental views of the author and of his readers are at variance.

A defence of the early Friends in America will be found in Colonial History of the Eastern and some of the Southern States, by Job R. Tyson; see Memoirs of Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iv. part ii. p. 5. For the colonies other than New England, a few references will suffice. For New York, O’Callaghan’s History of New Netherland and Brodhead’s New York can be consulted. For those at Perth Amboy, 1686-1688, see Historical Magazine, xvii. 234. The Annals of Hempstead, by Henry Onderdonk, Jr., treats of the Quakers on Long Island and in New York from 1657 to 1826; cf. also the American Historical Record, i. 49; ii. 53, 73. The Early Friends (or Quakers) in Maryland, by J. Saurin Norris, and Wenlock Christison and the Early Friends in Talbot County, Maryland, by Samuel A. Harrison, are the titles of instructive addresses delivered before the Maryland Historical Society, and included in its Fund publications; compare also E. D. Neill’s “Francis Howgill and the Early Quakers,” in his English Colonization in North America, chap. xvii., and his Terra Mariæ, chap. iv. Henning’s Statutes at Large give the laws passed in Virginia to punish the Quakers. The Journals and Travels of Burnyeat, Edmundson, and Fox should also be consulted. A far from flattering picture of the Quakers living on the Delaware shortly before the settlement of Pennsylvania, will be found in the Journal of Dankers and Sluyter, two followers of John Labadie, who travelled in America in 1679-1680. Their account of the condition of the country on the Delaware at that time is very interesting.[830] A Retrospect of Early Quakerism: being Extracts from the Records of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, etc., by Ezra Michener, Philadelphia, 1860, is also a useful work, as it gives the dates when meetings were established.

William Penn.—The collected works of William Penn have passed through four editions;[831] these contain but few of his letters in relation to Pennsylvania.[832] The biographical sketch which accompanies the edition of 1726 is attributed to Joseph Besse. It appeared but eight years after Penn’s death, and has been the groundwork of nearly everything which has since been written concerning him. The Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn, by Thomas Clarkson,[833] was for many years the standard Life. Later evidence has shown that in some particulars the author erred; but it is generally accurate. It however treats more of William Penn the Quaker than of William Penn the founder of Pennsylvania. The same criticism is applicable to The Life of William Penn by Samuel M. Janney.[834] It also is a trustworthy book. All that was in print at the time it was written was used in its preparation, and it is to-day, historically,[506] the best work on the subject. It contains more of his letters regarding the settlement of Pennsylvania than any other work we know of, and they are given in full. The “Life of William Penn,” by George E. Ellis, D.D., in Sparks’s American Biography, second series, vol. xii., is an important and spirited production, the result of careful thought and study.

William Penn: an Historical Biography,[835] by William Hepworth Dixon, is probably the most popular account that has appeared. Its style is agreeable, and it is full of interesting facts picturesquely grouped. In some cases, however, the authorities quoted do not support the inferences which have been drawn from them, and the historical value of the book has been sacrificed in order to add to its attractiveness. Those chapters which speak of the interest taken by Algernon Sidney in the formation of the constitution of Pennsylvania are clearly erroneous. These views are based on the part which Penn took in Sidney’s return to Parliament, and in a letter of Penn to Sidney, Oct. 13, 1681. Without this last, the argument falls. No reference is given to where the letter will be found. It was first printed as addressed to Algernon Sidney, in vol. iii. part i. p. 285 of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In vol. iv. ibid. (part i. pp. 167-212) other letters of Penn are printed, one of which is addressed to Henry Sidney, the brother of Algernon. To this a note is appended, stating that the letter in the former volume was undoubtedly written to the same person. As Mr. Dixon used extracts from these letters, it was, to say the least, unfortunate that he should have overlooked the importance of the note. La Vie de Guillaume Penn,[836] par J. Marsillac, is a meritorious compilation, but its chief interest centres around its author, who styles himself “Député extraordinaire des Amis de France à l’Assemblée Nationale, etc.” He was of noble birth, and an officer in the French army. He joined the Friends in 1778. Being convinced of the unlawfulness of war by the arguments in Barclay’s Apology, he determined “to change his condition of a destroyer to that of a preserver of mankind,” and studied medicine. During the French Revolution he took refuge in America, and resided in Philadelphia. He afterward returned to France, “and threw off at the same time the garb and profession of a Friend. He devoted himself in Paris to the practice of his profession, and obtained under Napoleon a situation in one of the French hospitals.”

Chapters in Janney’s Life of Penn and in Dixon’s Biography are devoted to a refutation of the charges of worldliness and insincerity brought against Penn by Macaulay in his History of England. We append below the titles of other publications of the same character, as well as of additional works which can be consulted with profit by students of his life.[837] The Penn Papers, or manuscripts in the possession of the Historical Society[507] of Pennsylvania, relate chiefly to the history of the province while under the governorship of Penn’s descendants. There are, however, in the collection some papers of personal interest in relation to Penn, and some of his controversial writings and documents connected with the history of the province at the time of its settlement. The history of this collection presents another instance of the perils to which manuscripts are exposed. After having been preserved for a number of years by one branch of the Penn family with comparative care, subject only to the depredations of time, they were sold to a papermaker, through whose discrimination they were preserved. They were catalogued and offered for sale by Edward G. Allen and James Coleman, of London, in 1870.[838] The collections were purchased by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but not until some papers had been obtained by persons more favorably situated. The general interest of the whole, however, was but little lessened by this misfortune. From 1700 until the Revolution the series is remarkably complete, and there are but few incidents in the colonial history of Pennsylvania that cannot be elucidated by its examination. A portion of the papers (about twenty thousand documents) have been bound and arranged, and fill nearly seventy-five folio volumes.[839]

General Histories of Pennsylvania.—The first historian of Pennsylvania was Samuel Smith, author of the well-known History of New Jersey; but his work up to the present time has not appeared in a complete form. It is a history of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Smith’s manuscripts are in the Library of the New Jersey Historical Society. What appears to be a duplicate of the Pennsylvania portion is in that of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Hazard printed the latter in his Register of Pennsylvania, vols. vi. and vii.[840]

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Robert Proud’s History of Pennsylvania[841] has long enjoyed a high reputation, but no more so than its merits entitle it to. For years it was the only history of the State. In its preparation the manuscript of Smith’s History was used, and in it extracts are given from pamphlets that have since been printed in full. Nevertheless, there is much in it that cannot be found elsewhere. Passages are quoted from letters of Penn which have never been printed entire, and the notes regarding the early settlers are of especial value. The care taken in the preparation of the book is so evident that its statements can as a rule be accepted. The author, a native of England, was a teacher of the classics in the Friends’ School, Philadelphia.[842]

Professor Ebeling’s volume on Pennsylvania in his Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von America, Hamburg, 1793-1799, in five volumes, is another valuable contribution. Portions of it, translated by Duponceau, will be found in Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, i. 340, 353, 369, 385, 401.

Thomas F. Gordon’s History of Pennsylvania[843] gives the history of the colony down to the Declaration of Independence. That part which treats of the eighteenth century does so more fully than any other work. It has never enjoyed much popularity. Its style is labored. The author was one who thought that “the names of the first settlers are interesting to us only because they were first settlers,” and that nothing could attract the public in men “whose chief, and perhaps sole, merit consisted in the due fulfilment of the duties of private life.” There is a tone of antagonism to Penn in some parts of the book which lacks the spirit of impartiality. It was reviewed by Job R. Tyson. See “Examination of the Various Charges brought by Historians against William Penn,” etc.,—Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. ii. part ii. p. 127.

The second volume of Bowden’s History of Friends in America[844] is the best Quaker history of Pennsylvania that has appeared.

Sherman Day’s Historical Collections (1843) and An Illustrated History of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,[845] by William H. Egle, M.D., both give the history of the State down to the time of their respective publications. In them the histories of the counties are treated in separate chapters, general histories of the State being given by way of introductions,—that by Dr. Egle being very full.

The Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, from its Origin, which is attributed to Franklin, belongs properly to a later period of the history of the province than we are now considering, and, as it was written to serve a political purpose, has but slight historical claims. In it, however, the attempt is made to trace some[509] of the alleged abuses of power back to the foundation of the colony. It was published in London in 1759, and is included by both Duane and Sparks in their editions of Franklin’s writings.

Bancroft’s chapters on the Quakers in the United States and on Pennsylvania are excellent. Grahame’s Colonial History of the United States is less flattering in the estimate given of Penn and his followers, although far from unappreciative of their efforts. Burke’s Account of the European Settlements in America[846] gives nothing that is new in connection with the settlement of Pennsylvania; but the opinions of its distinguished author in regard to William Penn as a legislator will be read with pleasure by Penn’s admirers. The remarks on the settlement of Pennsylvania in Wynne’s General History of the British Empire in America,[847] are copied bodily from Burke; but no quotation marks are given, and nothing indicates their origin. Douglass’s Summary gives nothing on the subject that will not be found in the charter and a few documents of similar character. From William M. Cornell’s History of Pennsylvania, 1876, nothing new will be gathered regarding the settlement of the province. It is a mere compilation, in which Weems’s Life of Penn is quoted as an authority.

Local Histories.—It is only in the history of the counties first settled that information on the period treated of in this chapter can be sought. John F. Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia[848] is one of the chief authorities. The plan of the work is not one that can be approved of at the present day, as sufficient care has not been taken in all cases to follow the original language of documents quoted, or to give references to authorities. Nevertheless, it is doubtful if any work in America has done more to cultivate a taste for historical study. There is a charm about its gossipy pages which has attracted to it thousands of readers, and provoked more serious investigations. It contains much regarding the domestic life of the first settlers and the building of Philadelphia which has been universally accepted, and many traditions gathered from old persons which there is no reason to question. The most important History of Philadelphia is that by Mr. Thompson Westcott, now printing in the columns of the Sunday Despatch. Eight hundred and ten chapters have appeared up to the present time. It is an encyclopædia on the subject. Some of the early chapters treat of the period under review. A History of the Townships of Byberry and Moreland, in Philadelphia County, by Joseph C. Martindale, M.D.,[849] treats largely of the earliest settlers in that section of the State. The present Montgomery County is formed of a portion of the original County of Philadelphia, and the history of some of its sections treats of the settlement of the colony. For such information, see History of Montgomery County, within Schuylkill Valley,[850] by William J. Buck. Mr. Buck prepared also the Historical Introduction to Scott’s Atlas of Montgomery County, Philadelphia, 1877. The History of Delaware County, by George Smith, M.D.,[851] is by far the best county history of Pennsylvania yet published. It is thoroughly trustworthy, and treats fully of the settlement of the county. Extracts from the records[510] of Markham’s court are given in it. Chester and its Vicinity, Delaware County, Pennsylvania,[852] by John Hill Martin, is a meritorious work.

The history of Bucks County has been twice written; first by William J. Buck, in 1855. His investigations were contributed to a county paper, and were subsequently published in a volume of one hundred and eighteen pages, to which was appended a History of the Township of Wrightstown, by Charles W. Smith, M.D., contained in twenty-four pages. A later History of Bucks County,[853] is that by General W. W. H. Davis, an excellent work.

The History of Chester County, Pennsylvania,[854] by J. Smith Futhey and Gilbert Cope, is a work of merit, being the production of two thorough students, deeply imbued with the love of their subject. The historical and genealogical portions of it are written with care and judgment. It contains extracts from the records of the first courts held in Pennsylvania.

Constitutional History.—Hazard’s Annals of Pennsylvania,[855] 1609-1682, Votes of the Assembly,[856] vol. i., Colonial Records,[857] vol. i., Pennsylvania Archives,[858] vol. i., and Duke of York’s Laws[859] are the chief collections of documents relating to the constitutional[511] history of the colony. The correspondence which preceded the issuing of the royal charter, together with the Proceedings of the Lords of Trade, etc., is in the Votes of the Assembly, vol. i. pp. vii-xiii; the same will be found in chronological order in Hazard’s Annals. The royal charter is given in Votes of Assembly, vol. i. p. xviii; Hazard’s Annals, p. 488; Colonial Records, vol. i. (1st ed.) p. ix, (2d ed.) p. 17; Hazard’s Register, i. 293. A fac-simile of the engrossed copy at Harrisburg is also given as an Appendix to vol. vii., second series, of Pennsylvania Archives, and is in the Duke of York’s Laws in the same form, as well as being printed in that volume on page 81. The paper known as “Certain Conditions or Concessions,” agreed upon in England between the purchasers of land and Penn, July 11, 1681, will be found in Hazard’s Annals, p. 516, Colonial Records, vol. i. (1st ed.), p. xvii (2d ed.), p. 26, Votes of Assembly, vol. i. p. xxiv, and Proud’s Pennsylvania, vol. ii. Appendix. Penn’s instructions to his commissioners—Crispin, Bezar, and Allen—are printed in Hazard’s Annals, p. 527. The original paper is in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. His instructions to his fourth commissioner, William Haige, are in Hazard’s Annals of Pennsylvania, p. 637. The Frame of Government and laws agreed upon in England May 5, 1682, were printed at the time. They are also given in Hazard’s Annals, p. 558, Colonial Records, vol. i. (1st ed.) p. xxi (2d ed.) p. 29, Votes of the Assembly, vol. i. p. xxvii, Duke of York’s Laws, p. 91, and Proud’s Pennsylvania, vol. ii. Appendix. There are a number of rough drafts of the Frame of Government, etc., in the Penn Papers of the Historical Society. One of these is indorsed as the work of Counsellor Bamfield; another bears the name of C. Darnall. Oldmixon says (edition of 1708) that “the Frame” was the work of “Sir William Jones and other famous men of the Long Robe.” Penn’s letter to Henry Sidney (Oct. 13, 1681) shows that Sidney was consulted regarding it; and Chalmers says (on the authority of Markham), that portions of it were formed to suit the Quakers.

THE SEAL OF PENNSYLVANIA.

The Frame of Government, passed in 1683, will be found in Votes of the Assembly, vol. i. part i., Appendix 1, Colonial Records, vol. i. (1st ed.) xxxiv, and (2d ed.) p. 42; Duke of York’s Laws, p. 155; Proud’s Pennsylvania, vol. ii. Appendix 3. There was an edition of it printed in 1689 at Philadelphia, entitled The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania and Territories thereunto annexed in America, 8º, 16 pp. But one copy of this edition is known to have been preserved,—it is in the Friends’ Library in Philadelphia. It has no titlepage or printer’s name; but there can be no doubt that it is from the press of William Bradford; and it was for printing this that Bradford[512] was summoned before the Council by Governor Blackwell, on the 19th of April, 1689. Sabin gives an edition printed in London in 1691, by Andrew Sowle. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 59,697; also, Collection of Charters, etc., relating to Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (B. Franklin), 1740.

Literature relating to the Laws of the Province.—Under this head may be classed various works, the titles of which as a rule indicate their characters, and we note them below.[860]

Landing of Penn.—In 1824 a society was formed in Philadelphia for the commemoration of the landing of William Penn. Its first meeting was held November 4, in the house in which he had once lived, in Letitia Court. An address was delivered by Peter S. Duponceau, and the eighteen members of the Society dined together. In selecting the day to be celebrated, the Society was guided by the passage in Penn’s letter to the Lords of Plantation, dated August, 1683, in which he states that he arrived on “the 24th of October last.” Ten days should have been added to this date to correct the error in computing time by the Julian calendar, which was in vogue when Penn landed, and November 3 should have been considered the anniversary. Through an erroneous idea of the way in which such changes should be calculated, eleven days were added, and November 4 was fixed upon. The next year, however, the Society celebrated the 24th of October, and continued to do so until 1836, the last year that we are able to trace the existence of the organization.[861] Subsequent investigations have shown that Penn did not arrive before Newcastle until October 27 (see Newcastle Court Records in Hazard’s Annals of Pennsylvania, p. 596), and did not land until the following day.[862] It is probable, therefore, that Penn dated his arrival from the time he came in sight of land or passed the Capes of Delaware. The first evidences we have of his being within the bounds of the present[513] State of Pennsylvania are letters dated Upland, October 29, and this day, allowing ten days for the change of time, bringing it to November 8, is the one that it is customary to celebrate.

Nov. 8, 1851, Edward Armstrong delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, at Chester, an able address, which contains nearly all that is known regarding the landing of Penn. In it will be found the names of his fellow-passengers in the “Welcome;” but a more extended list by the same writer is given in the Appendix to the 2d ed., Memoirs of Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. i. In 1852 an address was also delivered on the same anniversary before the Historical Society by Robert T. Conrad.

Penn’s Treaty with the Indians.—This was the subject of a report made to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania by Peter S. Duponceau and J. Francis Fisher. It will be found in Memoirs of Historical Society, vol. iii. part ii. p. 141. In it the opinion is expressed that the treaty which tradition says Penn held with the Indians at Shackamaxon was not one for the purchase of land, but was a treaty of amity and friendship, and was held in November, 1682. This report has been followed by historians generally, and has been accepted by nearly all the biographers of Penn. The subject, however, is one that will bear further investigation. The writer of this chapter published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 217, an article to show that the treaty which has attracted so much attention was that described in Penn’s Letter to the Free Society of Traders, dated August 16, 1683; that it was held on June 23 of that year; that not only “great promises of friendship” passed between Penn and the Indians, but that land was purchased, the records of which are in the Land Office at Harrisburg.[863] In connection with this subject, Mr. John F. Watson’s paper on the “Indian Treaty for Lands now the Site of Philadelphia” (see Memoirs of Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iii. part ii. p. 129) should be read, as well as “Memoir of the Locality of the Great Treaty between William Penn and the Indians,” by Roberts Vaux (see Ibid., i. 79; 2d ed., p. 87). The proceedings of the Historical Society upon the occasion of the presentation to it of a belt of wampum by Granville John Penn, which is said to have been given to William Penn by the Indians at the treaty at Shackamaxon,[864] will be found in Memoirs of Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vi. 205, with a large colored lithograph of the belt. Cf. Historical Magazine, i. 177, and Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 498.

Penn-Baltimore Controversy, and the Southern Boundary of Pennsylvania.—In the “Penn Papers” in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania[514] there are several volumes of documents bearing upon this subject, being the copies of those used in the suit between Lord Baltimore and John Thomas and Richard Penn, decided in 1750. Interesting papers are in the State Paper Office, London, giving accounts of the meetings between Baltimore and Markham and Penn and Baltimore in 1682 and 1683. Copies are in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and will shortly be printed. The following printed volumes and essays treat of the subject:[865]

The Case of William Penn, Esq., as to the Proprietory Government of Pennsylvania; which, together with Carolina, New York, etc., is intended to be taken away by a bill in Parliament. (London, 1685.) Folio, 1 leaf. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 59,686.

The Case of William Penn, Proprietary and Governor-in-Chief of the Province of Pennsylvania and Territories, against the Lord Baltimore’s Pretentions to a Tract of Land in America, Granted to the said William Penn in the year 1682, by his then Royal Highness James Duke of York, adjoyning to the said Province, commonly called the Territories thereof. (n. p. 1682 to 1720.) Folio, 1 leaf. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 59,688.

The Case of Hannah Penn, the Widow and Executrix of William Penn, Esq., late Proprietor and Governor of Pennsylvania (against the pretensions of Lord Sutherland, London, 1720). Folio, 1 leaf. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 59,672.

Articles of Agreement made and concluded upon between the Right Honourable the Lord Proprietary of Maryland and the Honourable the Proprietary of Pennsylvania, etc., touching the Limits and Boundaries of the Two Provinces, with the Commission constituting certain Persons to execute the Same. Philadelphia (B. Franklin), 1733, folio, 19 pp. and map. In the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Another edition was issued from same press in 1736, with the Report of the Commissioners. Cf. C. R. Hildeburn’s List of the Issues of the Press in Pennsylvania, 1685-1759.

The Case of Messieurs Penn and the People of Pennsilvania, and the three lower Counties of Newcastle, Kent, and Sussex on Delaware, in relation to a Series of Injuries and Hostilities made upon them for several Years past by Thomas Cressap and others, by the Direction and Authority of the Deputy-Governor of Maryland (London, 1737). Folio, 8 pp. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 5,985.

Penn against Lord Baltimore. In Chancery. Copy of Minutes on Hearing, May 15, 1750. 8º, 15 pp. n. t. p. In the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Breviate in the case of Penn vs. Baltimore. Cf. also the title, with its two maps, given in Sabin’s Dictionary, ix. 34,416.

Indenture of Agreement, 4th July, 1760, Between Lord Baltimore and Thomas and Richard Penn, Esquires, settling the limits and boundaries of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the Three Lower Counties of Newcastle, Kent, and Sussex. Philadelphia, 1851, folio, 31 pp. and map. Privately printed for Edward D. Ingraham.

“Memoir of the Controversy between Penn and Lord Baltimore.” By James Dunlop (read Nov. 10, 1825), in Memoirs of Historical Society of Pennsylvania, i. 161, or 2d ed. p. 163.

Lecture upon the Controversy between Pennsylvania and Virginia about the Boundary Line. By Neville B. Craig. Pittsburgh, 1843, 8º. 30 pp.

Appendix to Case in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Third Circuit, containing the Pea Patch, or Fort Delaware Case. Reported by John William Wallace. Philadelphia, 1849, 8º, 161 pp. Cf. U. S. Senate, Exec. doc., no. 21, 30th Congress, 1848.

History of Mason and Dixon’s Line. Contained in an address delivered by John H. B. Latrobe before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Nov. 8, 1854. Philadelphia, 1855, 8º, 52 pp.

Colonel Graham’s Report on Mason and Dixon’s Line. Chicago, 1859, 8º. Cf. Pennsylvania Senate Journal, 1850, ii. 475.

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Mason and Dixon’s Line. By James Veech, 1857.

One of the original manuscript reports of Mason and Dixon, signed by them, is in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Immigrations.—Independent of the Welsh and Germans, no large bodies of emigrants came to Pennsylvania during the first decade of its existence, except from England and some Quakers from Ireland. The prosperity of the new colony attracted settlers from other parts of British America and the West Indies; but nearly all, judging from the religious annals of the community, were either Quakers or in sympathy with them. In studying the Welsh emigration, John ap Thomas and his Friends: a Contribution to the Early History of Merion, Pa., by James J. Levick, M.D., should be read; see Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 301. It is a history of the first company which came from Wales, in 1682. The History of Delaware County by Dr. George Smith contains much on the subject, with a map of the early settlements; cf. B. H. Smith’s Atlas of Delaware County, with a History of Land-Titles, Philadelphia, 1880. The agreement entered into between an emigration party from Wales and the captain of a vessel in 1697-1698 will be found in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, i. 330.

The German or Dutch emigration can be studied in The Settlement of Germantown, and the Causes which led to it, by Samuel W. Pennypacker; see Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 1. It is a thorough examination of the question, showing how the emigrants came from the neighborhood of Crefeld, a city of the Lower Rhine, near Holland. The several publications we have mentioned printed in Dutch and German must also be consulted. William Penn’s Travels in Holland and Germany, by Professor Oswald Seidensticker, already mentioned (see Pennsylvania Magazine of History, ii. 237), shows how naturally the event came about. Professor Seidensticker has also contributed “Pastorius und die Grundung von Germantown” to the Deutsche Pionier, vol. iii. pp. 8, 56, 78, and “Francis Daniel Pastorius” to the Penn Monthly, vol. iii. pp. 1, 51.

Special Subjects.—There remain a few monographs worthy of mention.

History of Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, by the Rev. John Heckewelder, Philadelphia, 1819, 8º. This work was first published as vol. i. of the Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society. It was reprinted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with notes by the Rev. William C. Reichel, in 1876, and forms vol. xii. of its Memoirs. Opinions regarding this work differ widely. It was favorably reviewed by Nathan Hale in the North American Review, ix. 178, and severely criticised by General Lewis Cass in the same publication, xxvi. 366. “A Vindication” of the History by William Rawle will be found in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, i. 258; 2d ed. p. 268. There is a portrait of Heckewelder in the American Philosophical Society, and a copy of it in the Historical Society; see Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Historical Society, no. 85. As a further contribution to the aboriginal history, we may mention Notes respecting the Indians of Lancaster County, Pa., by William Parker Foulke; see Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iv. part ii. p. 189. This treats largely of the Susquehannocks.

Contributions to the Medical History of Pennsylvania, by Caspar Morris, M.D.; see Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, i. 337, or 2d ed., p. 347.

Notices of Negro Slavery as connected with Pennsylvania, by Edward Bittle; see Ibid., i. 351, or 2d ed., p. 365; cf. also Williams’s Negro Race in America.

Address delivered at the Celebration by the New York Historical Society, May 20, 1863, of the Two Hundredth Birthday of William Bradford, who introduced the Art of Printing into the Middle Colonies, etc., by John William Wallace. Albany, 1863, 8º, p. 114. Together with the report made by Horatio Gates Jones at the same time. Cf. Thomas I. Wharton’s “Notes on the Provincial Literature of Pennsylvania,” in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, i. 99, or 2d ed., p. 107; and J. W. Wallace’s paper on[516] the “Friends’ Press” in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 432. The Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,367, gives a considerable enumeration of the issues of Bradford’s press.

“Historical Sketch of the Lower Dublin (or Pennepek) Baptist Church, Philadelphia,” etc., by Horatio Gates Jones, in Historical Magazine, August, 1868, p. 76.

“Local Self-Government in Pennsylvania,” by E. R. L. Gould, of Johns Hopkins University, in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 156. It is a comparison of present local administration in Pennsylvania with that under the Duke of York’s government.

Maps.A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pennsylvania, in America, by Thomas Holme, Surveyor-General. Sold by John Thornton in the Minories, and Andrew Sowle in Shoreditch, London. 18½ × 11¾ inches.

The original, of which a reduced heliotype is given in this chapter will be found in Penn’s Letter to the Free Society of Traders, printed in 1683, which also contains a description of Philadelphia, in which the map is referred to. In one of the editions of the Letter to the Free Society a list of the lot-owners in Philadelphia is given, with numbers referring to property marked on the map. This is the earliest map of Pennsylvania. All issued previous to it show the country while under a different dominion.

A Map of the Province of Pennsylvania, containing the three counties of Chester, Philadelphia, and Bucks, as far as yet surveyed and laid out. The divisions or distinctions made by the different coullers respecting the settlements by way of townships. By Thomas Holme, Surveyor-General. Sold by Robert Green, at the Rose and Crown in Budge Row, and by John Thornton at the Platt in the Minories, London.

This is the most important of all the early maps issued shortly after 1681. It contains the names of many of the early settlers, and shows Penn’s idea of settling the country. In some cases the lots front on a square, which it is presumed was dedicated to public uses. This feature is still noticeable in one or two of the original settlements. It was republished at Philadelphia by Lloyd P. Smith in 1846, and by Charles L. Warner in 1870.

A Mapp of ye Improved parts of Pennsilvania, in America, Divided into Countyes, Townships, and Lotts. Surveyed by Tho. Holme. It is dedicated to William Penn by Jno. Harris, who, it is presumed, was the publisher. It measures 16 × 21½ inches, and is a reduction of the larger map by Holme.

A map to illustrate the successive purchases from the Indians was published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1875. Cf. Egle’s Pennsylvania, p. 208.

Pennsylvania Historical Society.—[The chief instrumentality in the fostering of historical studies in the State rests with the Pennsylvania Historical Society, which dates from 1824; and in 1826 it printed the first volume of its Memoirs, which was, under the editing of Edward Armstrong, reprinted in 1864. The objects of the Society were set forth by William B. Reed in a discourse in 1848; and again at the dedication of its new hall in 1872, Mr. J. W. Wallace delivered an address. Besides its occasional addresses and its Memoirs, and the work it has done in prompting the State to the printing of its documentary history, it has also supported the publication of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History.—Ed.]

SECTION OF HOLME’S MAP OF PENNSYLVANIA.


[517]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ENGLISH IN MARYLAND, 1632-1691.

BY WILLIAM T. BRANTLY,

Of the Maryland Historical Society.

MARYLAND was the first Proprietary colony established in America; and its charter contained a more ample grant of power than was bestowed upon any other English colony. To Maryland also belongs the honor of having been the first government which proclaimed and practised religious toleration. The charter was granted in 1632, by Charles I., to Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore. But the true founder of Maryland was George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, a man of singular merit, whose influence upon the fortunes of the colony was such that his character and career belong to its history.

George Calvert was descended from a Flemish family which had long been settled in Yorkshire, where he was born in the year 1582. Graduating Bachelor of Arts at Oxford, he travelled on the Continent, and then entered public life under the patronage of Sir Robert Cecil. Calvert filled various offices until Cecil became Lord High Treasurer, when he was appointed clerk of the Privy Council. He was knighted in 1617, and, upon the disgrace of Sir Thomas Lake, in February, 1619, he was appointed by James I. one of the two principal secretaries of state. He was selected for this important post because there was work to be done, and he had made himself valued in public life for his industry and ability. It is true, indeed, that his theory of the Constitution was similar to that held by the King. He had always been allied with the Court as distinguished from the Country party, and was a stanch supporter of the prerogatives of the Crown. In the Parliament of 1621 he was the leader of the Government forces, and the immediate representative of the King in the House of Commons. When he came to draw the charter of Maryland he framed such a government as the Court, during this period, conceived that England ought to be.

Calvert was not altogether friendly to Spain.[866] It is a mistake to suppose that his political fortunes were so bound up with the success of the Spanish match, that, upon its final rupture in 1623, his position became untenable.[518] He did not resign his secretaryship until February, 1625; and there is no sufficient reason for believing that he did not then do so voluntarily.

See an account of this picture of the first Lord Baltimore, in the Critical Essay.

Fuller, the chief contemporary authority, says that “he freely confessed to the King that he was then become a Roman Catholic, so that he must be wanting in his trust or violate his conscience in discharging his office.” It is certain that he had not forfeited the favor of the King, nor incurred the enmity of the all-powerful Buckingham. He was allowed to sell his secretaryship to his successor for £6,000, and was retained in the Privy[519] Council. A few weeks after his withdrawal from office he was created Baron of Baltimore in the Irish peerage; and in 1627 Buckingham summoned him to a special conference with Charles I. upon foreign affairs. The date of his conversion to the Church of Rome has been the subject of much discussion, but there is no satisfactory evidence that it preceded, for any length of time, the open profession of his new faith.

From early manhood Sir George Calvert had been interested in schemes of colonization. He was a member of the Virginia Company until its dissolution, and was, as secretary of state, one of the committee of the Council for Plantation Affairs. While secretary he determined to become himself the founder of a colony, and in 1620 he purchased from Sir William Vaughan the southeastern peninsula of Newfoundland. In the following year he sent a body of settlers to this region, and expended a large amount of money in establishing them at Ferryland. James I. granted him in 1623 a patent constituting him the Proprietary of this portion of Newfoundland which was called Avalon,—a patent which afterwards became the model of the charter of Maryland. The fertility and advantages of Avalon had been described to Lord Baltimore with the usual exaggeration of discoverers. He made a short visit to it in the summer of 1627, and in the following year he went there, accompanied by several members of his family, with the intention of remaining permanently; but the severity and long duration of the winter convinced him that the attempt to plant an agricultural colony on that inhospitable shore was doomed to failure. In August, 1629, he wrote to the King that he found himself obliged to abandon Avalon to fishermen, and to seek for himself some warmer climate in the New World. He also announced his determination to go with some forty persons to Virginia, and expressed the hope that the King would grant him there a precinct of land, with privileges similar to those he enjoyed in Newfoundland. Charles I., in reply, advised him to desist from further attempts and to return to England, where he would be sure to enjoy such respect as his former services merited,—“well weighing,” added the King, “that men of your condition and breeding are fitter for other employments than the framing of new plantations which commonly have rugged and laborious beginnings.”

Without waiting for an answer to his letter Lord Baltimore sailed for Virginia, where he arrived in October, 1629. To the Virginians he was not a welcome visitor. They either honestly objected to receiving Catholic settlers, being proud of their conformity to the Church of England, or were apprehensive that he had designs upon their territory. They tendered to him and his followers the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. The latter was one which no Catholic could conscientiously take, and it was therefore refused by Baltimore. His offer to take a modified oath was rejected by the council, and they requested him to leave the colony.

While in Virginia Lord Baltimore learned that the northern and southern portions of the territory comprised within the old charter limits of the colony had not been settled, and he determined to ask for an independent grant of[520] a part of this unsettled region. Upon his return to England he learned that the King was willing to accede to his request. Baltimore finally selected for his new colony the country north of the Potomac, and prepared a charter to be submitted to the King, modelled upon the Avalon patent. The name of the colony was left to the choice of the King, who desired that it should be called Terra Mariæ—in English, Maryland—in honor of his Queen Henrietta Maria. This name was accordingly inserted in the patent; but before it passed the seals Lord Baltimore died. His death took place April 15, 1632, and he was buried beneath the chancel of St. Dunstan’s Church. But his great scheme did not die with him. His rights were transmitted to his son and heir Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, to whom the charter was finally issued, June 20, 1632.

THE BALTIMORE ARMS.

[This is a fac-simile of the arms as engraved on the map accompanying the Relation of 1635. The motto was also that of the great seal, furnished to the Province in 1648 by the second Lord Baltimore, which, by a vote of the legislature in 1876, was re-established on the seal of the State. See the Critical Essay.

It is worthy of remark that when an agent of Virginia was sent to London in 1860, to discover papers relating to the bounds between that State and Maryland, he found the representative of the Calverts, and possessor of their family papers, a prisoner in the Queen’s Bench prison, in a confinement for debt which had then lasted twenty years. Colonel McDonald’s Report, March, 1861.—Ed.]

The territory granted was defined with accuracy. The southern boundary was the further bank of the Potomac, from its source to its mouth in the Bay of Chesapeake, and ran thence to the promontory called Watkins Point, and thence east to the ocean. The eastern boundary was the ocean and Delaware Bay to the fortieth degree of latitude; and the northern boundary was a right line, on the fortieth degree of latitude, to the meridian of the fountain of the Potomac, where the southern boundary began. It will be seen that Maryland, as originally defined, comprised all of the present State of Delaware and a large part of what is now Pennsylvania.

The country described in the charter was expressly erected into a Province of the empire; and the Baron of Baltimore, his heirs and assigns, were constituted the absolute lords and proprietaries of the soil. Their tenure was the most liberal known to the law. They held the Province directly of the kings of England, in free and common socage, by fealty only, yielding therefor two Indian arrows, on the Tuesday of Easter week, to the King at the Castle of Windsor. The Province was made a county palatine; and the[521] Proprietary was invested with all the royal rights, privileges, and prerogatives which had ever been enjoyed by any Bishop of Durham within his county palatine. To the Proprietary was also given all the power that any captain-general of an army ever had; and he was authorized to call out the whole fighting population, to wage war against all enemies of the Province, to put captives to death, and, in case of rebellion or sedition, to exercise martial law in the most ample manner. He was empowered to establish courts and appoint judges, and to pardon crimes. He had also the right to constitute ports of entry and departure, to erect towns into boroughs and boroughs into cities with suitable immunities, and to levy duties and tolls upon ships and merchandise exported and imported. He could make grants of land to be held directly of himself, and erect portions of the land granted into manors with the right to hold courts baron and leet. It was further provided that, lest in so remote a region all access to honors might seem to be barred to men well born, the Proprietary might confer rewards upon deserving provincials, and adorn them with any titles and dignities except such as were then in use in England. All laws were to be made by the Proprietary with the advice and assent of the freemen, who should be called together, personally or by their deputies, for the framing of laws in the manner chosen by the Proprietary. In the event of sudden accidents the Proprietary might make ordinances for the government of the Province, provided they should not deprive offenders of life, limb, or property. Freedom of trade to all English ports was guaranteed.

Liberty to emigrate to the Province and there settle was given to all subjects of the Crown, and all colonists and their children were to enjoy the rights and liberties of native-born liegemen. There was an express covenant on the part of the Crown that at no time should any tax or custom be imposed upon the inhabitants or their property, or upon any merchandise to be laden or unladen within the Province. The charter concluded by directing that, in case any doubt should arise concerning the true sense of any word or clause, that interpretation should always be made which would be most beneficial to the Proprietary, “provided, always, that no interpretation thereof be made whereby God’s holy and true Christian religion, or the allegiance due to us, our heirs and successors, may in anywise suffer by change, prejudice, or diminution.”

It is especially to be remarked that the charter contained no provision requiring the provincial laws to be submitted to the Crown for approval. Nothing was reserved to the Crown except the allegiance of the inhabitants and the fifth part of all the gold and silver ore which might be found within the limits of the Province. But the powers conferred on the Proprietary were of a sovereign character; he was lord of the soil, the fountain of honor, and the source of justice. These privileges were the work of a friend of high prerogative; yet the rights of the people were not neglected. The freemen of the Province were entitled to participate in the law-making power, to enjoy freedom of trade, exemption from Crown taxation, and all[522] the rights and liberties of native-born Englishmen. All the laws of the Province must be consonant with reason and not repugnant to the laws of England. If it be true that the powers given to the Proprietary were greater than those ever conferred on any other Proprietary, it is equally true that the rights secured to the inhabitants were greater than an in any other charter which had then been granted.

The charter expressly separated the Province from Virginia and made it immediately dependent on the Crown. The entire territory of Maryland had been included in the grants made in 1609, and subsequently to the London company for the first colony of Virginia. This company became obnoxious both to the Crown and the colonists, and, in 1624, a writ of quo warranto was issued against its patents, the judgment upon which revoked all the charters and restored to the Crown all the franchises formerly granted. Virginia then became a royal colony, and there could be no question of the right of the King to partition its territory at pleasure. But the grant of Maryland nevertheless caused a great discontent in Virginia. Although no permanent settlements had been made north of the Potomac, the Virginians regarded all the territory comprised within the old charter limits as still belonging to them, and objected to having it partitioned.

One member of the Virginia company had, indeed, established stations for traffic with the Indians on Kent Island, almost in the centre of Maryland, and on Palmer’s Island, at the mouth of the Susquehanna River. This man was William Clayborne, destined to become famous in the early history of the Province. He had been Secretary of the Virginia colony and one of the Council. Before the visit of the first Lord Baltimore to Jamestown, Clayborne had been commissioned to explore the great bay and to trade with the Indians. He may then have set up trading stations upon Kent and Palmer’s islands. In May, 1631, he obtained from Charles I. a license authorizing him to trade for furs and other commodities in all the coasts “in or near about those parts of America for which there is not already a patent granted to others for sole trade.” This license, which was merely passed under the privy signet of Scotland, could not be construed as granting any title to the soil or government. In Baltimore’s charter Maryland was described as hitherto unsettled,—hactenus inculta,—and this unlucky phrase was afterwards the source of innumerable difficulties. At the time of his visit to Virginia the region was probably unsettled so far as he could learn.

When intelligence of the grant of Maryland reached Virginia the planters were moved to sign a petition to the King, in which they remonstrated against the grant of a portion of the lands of the colony which would cause a “general disheartening” to them. The petition was referred to the Privy Council, which, after hearing both parties, decided, in July, 1633, that Lord Baltimore should be left to his patent and the Virginians to the course of law; and that, in the mean time, the two colonies should “assist each other on all occasions as becometh fellow-subjects.”

[523]

There can be no doubt that, from the outset, Lord Baltimore intended that Maryland should be a place of refuge for the English Catholics, who had as much reason as the Puritans to flee from persecution. The political and religious hatred with which the mass of the English people regarded the Church of Rome was increasing in bitterness, and the Parliament of 1625 had besought the King to enforce more strictly the penal statutes against recusants. Soon after the grant of his charter Lord Baltimore treated with the Provincial of the Society of Jesus, in England, for his assistance in establishing a mission in the new colony. At the same time he wrote to the General of the Order asking him to designate certain priests to accompany the first emigration, whose duty it should be to confirm the Catholics in their faith, convert the Protestant colonists, and propagate the Roman faith among the savages. These requests were granted, and the first expedition was accompanied by two Jesuits.

But Maryland was to be something more than a Catholic colony. Lord Baltimore had already determined that it should be a “free soil for Christianity.” When the charter was granted, it was well known that Baltimore purposed to settle Maryland with Catholics. How came it to pass that, under these circumstances, a Protestant king made a grant of such large powers to a Catholic nobleman? Different views have been taken of the clauses of the charter relating to religion. One view is that by the patent the Church of England was established, and any other form of worship was unlawful; another that the glory of Maryland toleration is due to the charter, and under it no persecution of Christians was lawful; while a third view is that the charter left the whole matter vague and undetermined, and therefore within the control of the Proprietary and his colonists. The only references to religion in the charter that need be considered are two: the first, in the fourth section, giving the Proprietary the advowsons of all churches which might happen to be built, together with the liberty of erecting churches and causing the same to be consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of England; the second, in the twenty-second section, providing that no law should be made prejudicial to God’s holy and true Christian religion.

These are the exact phrases used in the Avalon patent, which was issued to Sir George Calvert while still a member of the Church of England. In that case they probably operated as an establishment of that church. But these phrases were not retained in the charter granted to a Roman Catholic without good reason. The fourth section merely empowered the Proprietary to dedicate the churches which might be built; it did not compel him to build them: and the fact of being a Catholic did not then disable one from presenting to Anglican churches. There is, moreover, nothing in this section disabling the Proprietary from building churches of other faiths. The proviso in the twenty-second section was conveniently vague. It cannot be held either to establish the Church of England or to prohibit the exercise of any other worship. No such construction was ever placed upon[524] it by the Crown, or the Proprietary, or the people. It is certain that Baltimore would not have accepted a charter requiring the establishment of a church from which he and those whom he intended to be his colonists dissented. It is still more certain that he would not have accepted a charter prohibiting the exercise of the Catholic worship.

The most plausible view of these provisions is that they covered a secret understanding between the Proprietary and the King, to the effect that both Catholics and members of the Established Church should enjoy the same religious rights in Maryland.[867] The opinion entertained by some that the charter itself enforced toleration is altogether untenable. These provisions did not prevent the Church of England from being afterwards established in Maryland nor avert disabilities from Catholics and Dissenters. Apart from the supposed agreement between Baltimore and the King, any persecution of Conformists in the Province would have been extremely impolitic; it would have resulted in the speedy loss of the patent. But Baltimore could without danger have prohibited the immigration of Puritans, and could have discouraged in many ways the settlement even of Conformists. Not only did he not do any of these things, but he invited Christians of every name to settle in Maryland. It is the glory of Lord Baltimore and of the Province that, from the first, perfect freedom of Christian worship was guaranteed to all comers. Because the event proved that this magnanimity was the truest wisdom and resulted in populating the Province, there have not been wanting those who declare that it was not magnanimity at all, but only enlightened self-interest.

By the decision of the Privy Council in July, 1633, upon the petition of the Virginia planters, Lord Baltimore achieved his first victory in the long struggle he was destined to wage with the enemies of his colony. Regarding his title to the territory as unquestionable, he now hastened his preparations for its colonization. He had purposed to lead the colonists in person, but, finding it necessary to abandon this intention, he confided the expedition to the care of his brother, Leonard Calvert, whom he commissioned as Lieut.-General. Jerome Hawley and Thomas Cornwallis were associated as councillors, and George Calvert, another brother of the Proprietary, was one of the emigrants. Lord Baltimore provided two vessels,—the “Ark,” of about three hundred and fifty tons burden, and the “Dove,” a pinnace of about fifty tons. In October, 1633, the colonists,—“gentlemen adventurers and their servants,”—to the number of about two hundred, embarked[525] at Gravesend. The vessels stopped at the Isle of Wight, where Fathers White and Altham (the Jesuits who had been designated for the service) and some other emigrants were received on board. They finally set sail from Cowes on the twenty-second day of November, 1633, and took the old route by the Azores and West Indies.

Soon after their departure Lord Baltimore wrote to his own and his father’s friend, the Earl of Strafford, that, after having overcome many difficulties, he had sent a hopeful colony to Maryland with a fair expectation of success. “There are two of my brothers gone,” he added, “with very near twenty other gentlemen of very good fashion, and three hundred laboring men well provided in all things.”

MAP OF MARYLAND, 1635.

This is a reduced fac-simile of the map accompanying A Relation of Maryland, 1635. See Critical Essay. Compare the heliotype of Smith’s map of Virginia, in chapter v.

The vessels remained for some time at Barbadoes, and did not arrive at Point Comfort until the 27th of February, 1634. Here the colonists were received by Governor Harvey, of Virginia, “with much courtesy and humanity,” in obedience to letters from the King. Fresh supplies having been procured in Virginia, the “Ark” and “Dove” weighed anchor and sailed up the bay to the mouth of the Potomac, which they entered and proceeded up about fourteen leagues, to an island which they called St. Clement’s.[526] The emigrants landed here, and took formal possession of Maryland “for our Saviour, and for our Sovereign Lord the King of England.”

Governor Calvert left the “Ark” at the island and sailed up the river with two pinnaces, in order to explore the country and conciliate the Indian chieftains. He was accompanied by Captain Henry Fleet, of the Virginia colony, who was versed in the Indian tongues and acquainted with the country. They assured the chiefs that the strangers had not come to make war upon them, but to impart the arts of civilization and show their subjects the way to heaven. Not deeming it prudent to seat the first colony so far in the interior, Calvert returned down the river and was conducted by Captain Fleet up a tributary stream which flows into the Potomac, from the north, a few miles above its mouth. This river, which is now called the St. Mary’s, is a deep and wide stream. Six or seven miles above its mouth the Governor’s exploring party came to an Indian village, situate on a bluff on the left bank. They determined to settle here, but, instead of forcibly dispossessing the feeble tribe in possession, they purchased thirty miles of the land from them for axes, hatchets, and cloth, and established the colony with their consent. And thus the method of William Penn was antedated by half a century. By the terms of the agreement the Indians were to give up at once one half of the town to the English and part of the growing crops, and at the end of the harvest to leave the place altogether. The “Ark” was sent for, and on the 27th of March, 1634, amid salvoes of artillery from the ships, the emigrants disembarked and took possession of their new home, which they called St. Mary’s.

Attention was first given to building a guardhouse and a general storehouse, their intercourse meanwhile with the natives being of the most genial character. The Indian women taught them how to use corn meal, and with the Indian men they hunted deer and were initiated into the mysteries of woodcraft. They planted the cleared land, and in the autumn of the same year were able to send a cargo of corn to New England in exchange for salt fish and other provisions. From Virginia the colonists procured swine and cattle; and, within a few months after landing, the settlement was enjoying a high degree of prosperity. The English race had now learned the art of colonization.

Although Governor Harvey visited St. Mary’s and seems always to have been friendly to the new colony, the Virginians were bitterly hostile. Captain Young wrote to Sir Tobie Matthew from Jamestown, in July, 1634, that it was there “accounted a crime almost as heinous as treason to favor, nay, to speak well of, that colony” of Lord Baltimore. Sympathy with what they regarded as Clayborne’s wrongs increased their enmity. Soon after the “Ark” and “Dove” left Point Comfort, Clayborne informed the Governor and Council of Virginia that Calvert had notified him that the settlement upon Kent Island would henceforth be deemed a part of Maryland, and requested the opinion of the Board as to his duty in the premises. The Board expressed surprise at the question. and said that there[527] was no more reason for surrendering Kent Island than any other part of the colony; and that, the validity of Lord Baltimore’s patent being yet undetermined, they were bound to maintain the rights of their colony. It was probably on account of remonstrances from Virginia that the committee of the Privy Council for plantations wrote to the Virginians in July, 1634, that there was no intention to affect the interests which had been settled when Virginia was under a corporation, and that for the present they might enjoy their estates with the same freedom as before the recalling of their patents. This letter, which was merely designed to show that Baltimore’s charter should not invade any individual right, appears to have been regarded by Clayborne as justifying his resistance to Calvert’s claim of jurisdiction over his trading stations.

Clayborne endeavored at once to incite the Indians to acts of hostility against the colony. He told them that the new-comers were Spaniards, enemies of the English, and had come to rob them. These insinuations caused a change in the demeanor of the Indians, which greatly alarmed the people of St. Mary’s. The suspicions of the natives, however, were soon dispelled and friendly relations with them were renewed. Clayborne now resolved to wage an open war against the colony. Early in 1635 a casus belli was found in the capture by the Maryland authorities of a pinnace belonging to Clayborne, upon the ground that it was a Virginia vessel trading in Maryland waters without a license. Clayborne thereupon placed an armed vessel under the command of Lieutenant Warren, with orders to seize any of the ships belonging to St. Mary’s. Governor Calvert determined to show at once that this seditious opposition would not be tolerated. He equipped two small vessels and sent them against Kent Island. A naval engagement between the hostile forces took place in April, 1635, which resulted in the killing of one of the Maryland crew, and of Lieutenant Warren and two others of the Kent Island crew. Clayborne’s men then surrendered and were carried to St. Mary’s. Clayborne himself took refuge in Virginia, and Governor Calvert demanded his surrender. This demand was not granted, and two years later Clayborne went to England. He presented a petition to the King, complaining that Baltimore’s agents had sought to dispossess him of his plantations, killing some of his men and taking their boats. He offered to pay the King £100 per annum for the two islands, and prayed for a confirmation of his license and an order directing Lord Baltimore not to interfere with him.

This petition was referred to a committee of the Privy Council, before which Clayborne appeared in person, and arguments upon both sides were heard. The committee decided, in April, 1638, that Clayborne’s license to trade, under the signet of Scotland, gave him no right or title to the Isle of Kent, or to any other place within the limits of Baltimore’s patent, and did not warrant any plantation, and that no trade with the Indians ought to be allowed within Maryland without license from Lord Baltimore. As to the wrongs complained of, the committee found no reason to remove them, but[528] left both sides to the ordinary course of justice. Clayborne returned to Virginia, postponing but not abandoning his vengeance, and Kent Island was subjected to the government of St. Mary’s, Captain George Evelyn being appointed commander of the isle. In the same year Palmer’s Island was seized, and Clayborne’s property there confiscated.

In February, 1635, the first legislative assembly of the Province was convened. Owing to the destruction of most of the early records during Ingle’s Rebellion, no account of the proceedings of this Assembly has come down to us. The charter required the assent of the Proprietary to the laws, and when the acts of this Assembly were laid before Lord Baltimore he disallowed them. In April, 1637, he sent over a new commission, constituting Leonard Calvert the lieut.-general, admiral, and commander, and also the chancellor and chief-justice of the Province. In certain cases, he was directed to consult the council, which was composed of Jerome Hawley, Thomas Cornwallis, and John Lewger. The governor was directed to assemble the freemen of the Province, or their deputies, upon the 25th of January ensuing, and signify the Proprietary’s dissent from the laws made at the previous assembly, and at the same time to submit to them a body of laws which he would himself send over. John Lewger, the new member of the council, and secretary of the Province, came to St. Mary’s in November, 1637, accompanied by his family and several servants. He was distinguished as a scholar at Oxford, and had been converted to Catholicism by the celebrated controversialist Chillingworth. His appointment is an evidence of the solicitude shown by the Proprietary for the affairs of his plantation. During the first years of the settlement he and his friends expended above £40,000 in sending over colonists and providing them with necessaries, of which sum at least £20,000 was out of Baltimore’s own purse.

There can be no doubt that the Proprietary contemplated the foundation of an aristocratic State, with large tracts of land in the hands of individuals who would be interested in upholding his authority. He published, from time to time, certain “conditions of plantation,” stating the quantity of land to which emigrants would be entitled. In the conditions issued in 1636 he directs that to every first adventurer, for every five men brought into the Province in 1634, there should be granted two thousand acres of land for the yearly rent of four hundred pounds of wheat; and to each bringing a less number, one hundred acres for himself, and one hundred acres for his wife and each servant, and fifty acres for every child, under the rent of ten pounds of wheat for each fifty acres. The conditions offered to subsequent adventurers were, naturally, less favorable. All these grants were of fee-simple estates of inheritance, and the colonists received in addition grants of small lots in the town of St. Mary’s. Each tract of a thousand acres or more was erected into a manor, with the right to hold courts[529] baron and leet, and the other privileges belonging to manors in England. A large number of manors were laid off in the Province, and in some instances courts baron and leet were held.[868]

It was only in this regard that the design of transplanting the institutions of expiring feudalism to the New World was carried out. Political and social equality resulted from the conditions of the environment. The “freemen,” who were entitled to make laws, were early held to include all but indented servants, whether they owned a freehold or not. The second Assembly, which met in January, 1638, was a pure democracy. Writs of summons had been issued to every freeman directing his personal attendance. The governor presided as speaker, and the council sat as members. Those freemen who did not choose to attend gave proxies. Proclamation was made that all persons omitted in the writs should make their claim to a voice in the Assembly, “whereupon claim was made by John Robinson, carpenter, and was admitted.” Upon the question of the adoption of the body of laws proposed by Lord Baltimore, the Speaker and Lewger (who counted by proxies fourteen voices) were in the affirmative, and all the rest of the Assembly, being thirty-seven voices, in the negative. Thus was begun a constitutional struggle between the people and the Proprietary. The latter held that, under the charter, the right of originating legislation belonged exclusively to him. For this reason, he had rejected the laws made in 1635, and had himself proposed a number of bills. The colonists were unwilling to concede this claim, and now rejected, in turn, the propositions of the Proprietary. This early evidence of the persistence with which a handful of emigrants maintained what they conceived to be their rights possesses a peculiar interest. The immediate result of the contest was to leave the colony without any laws under which criminal jurisdiction could be exercised. This subject next occupied the attention of the House. Subsequently a number of laws were made, but with the exception of an act of attainder against Clayborne, their titles only remain. They were sent to Lord Baltimore, who promptly exercised his veto power upon them. In February, 1638, a county court was held at which Thomas Smith, who had been captured in the naval engagement described above, and subsequently held a prisoner, was indicted by a grand jury for murder and piracy. There being no court legally constituted to try Smith, he was arraigned and tried before the Assembly, Secretary Lewger acting as the prosecuting attorney. The House found him guilty, with but one dissenting voice, and he was sentenced to be hanged.

Soon after Lord Baltimore had for the second time rejected the acts of the Assembly, he wisely determined to yield his claim of the right to originate legislation. Accordingly he wrote to his brother in August, 1638, giving him power to assent to such laws as he might approve. The assent of the governor was to give force to the laws till the dissent of the Proprietary[530] should be signified. This double veto power was similar to that which existed in most of the royal colonies, where the first negative was in the governor and the second in the king. In a Palatinate government, like Maryland, the Proprietary exercised the royal prerogative. There being no further obstacle to legislation an Assembly was called to meet in February. 1639, which body was composed partly of delegates elected by the people, and partly of freemen specially summoned by the governor’s writ. It was also held that any freeman, who had not participated in the election of deputies, might sit in his individual right. The laws passed at this session provided principally for the administration of justice in criminal and civil cases. It was enacted that the inhabitants should have all their rights and liberties according to the Great Charter.

One of the acts declared that “Holy Church within this Province shall have all her rights and liberties.” A similar law was made in the following year. Both are founded upon the first clause of Magna Charta and must be held to apply to the Roman Church, since the phrase “Holy Church” was never used in speaking of the Church of England. But these acts can hardly be regarded as evidence of an intention to establish the Roman Church. They do not seem to have had any practical effect whatever. We have seen that Lord Baltimore purposed to make all creeds equal in Maryland. Apart from this fixed purpose, from which he never swerved, the impolicy of granting any peculiar privileges to the Catholic Church, in a province subject to England, was so apparent that it was recognized by the Jesuits themselves. Among the Stonyhurst Manuscripts there is preserved the form of an agreement between the Provincial of the Society of Jesus, and Lord Baltimore, in which, after a statement of the manner in which Maryland had been obtained and settled, it is recited that it is “evident that, as affairs now are, those privileges, etc., usually granted to ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church by Catholic princes in their own countries, could not possibly be granted here without grave offence to the King and State of England (which offence may be called a hazard both to the Baron and especially to the whole colony).” The agreement then binds the members of the society in Maryland not to demand any such privileges except those relating to corporal punishments.[869]

It is certain that, from the time the emigrants first landed at St. Mary’s, religious toleration was the established custom of the Province. The history of Maryland toleration does not begin with the famous Act of 1649. That was merely a legislative confirmation of the unwritten law. Long before that enactment, at a time when intolerance and martyrdom was almost the law of Christendom, and while the annals of the other colonies of the New World were being stained with the record of crimes committed in the name of religion, in Maryland the doctrine of religious liberty was clearly proclaimed and practised. It is the imperishable glory of Lord Baltimore and of the State. For the first time in the history of[531] the world there was a regularly constituted government under which all Christians possessed equal rights. All churches were tolerated, none was established. To this “land of the sanctuary” came the Puritans who were whipped and imprisoned in Virginia, and the Prelatists who were persecuted in New England. In 1638 one William Lewis was fined by the council five hundred pounds of tobacco, and required to give security for his good behavior, because he had abused Protestants and forbidden his servants to read Protestant books. The Puritans were invited to settle in Maryland. In 1643 Lord Baltimore wrote to Captain Gibbons of Boston, offering land to any inhabitants of New England that would remove to his province, with liberty in matter of religion, and all other privileges.[870]

It appears from a case that came before the Assembly in 1642 that there was at that time no Protestant clergyman in Maryland. The only religious guides were the Jesuit missionaries, and they formed the only Catholic mission ever established in any of the English colonies in America. Two priests, as we have seen, accompanied the first emigration. In 1636 the mission numbered four priests and one coadjutor. They labored among the Indians in the spirit of Xavier, establishing stations at points distant from St. Mary’s. Their efforts to elevate the savage were not without success. One of their converts was Tayac, the chief of the Piscataways. He and his wife were baptized in 1640, when Governor Calvert and many of the principal men of the colony were present at the ceremony. The Jesuits also succeeded in converting many Protestants. The annual letter of 1638, as communicated to their Superior, states that nearly all the Protestants who came from England in that year, and many others, had been converted.

Although the missionaries did much towards conciliating the Indians, and a fair and gentle treatment of them was the constant policy of the colony, it was yet impossible to preserve a perfect peace with all the tribes. The increase of the colonists began to alarm them, and they were constantly committing petty depredations. All the inhabitants capable of bearing arms were trained in military discipline, and a certain quantity of arms and ammunition was required to be kept at each dwelling-house. Expeditions were frequently made for the purpose of punishing particular tribes which had committed “sundry insolencies and rapines.” Scarcely anything is known of the details of these Indian wars. It was made a penal offence for the colonists to supply any Indian with arms, but the Swedes on the Delaware had no scruples in this respect.

In 1640 another Assembly was held. St. Mary’s County had now been divided into hundreds, and conservators of the peace appointed for each hundred. In addition to the burgesses elected in each hundred, the governor summoned certain freemen by special writ, as had been previously done. The theory upon which this Assembly and those held in the following years proceeded, in framing laws, was that justice should be done[532] according to the law of England, except in so far as changed by provincial enactments.

The Civil War was now at its height in England, and that mighty convulsion filled all the colonies with alarm and uncertainty. The supremacy of the Puritans foreboded danger to the colony of a Catholic nobleman, who still adhered to the cause of the King. Governor Calvert determined to consult his brother personally in regard to the course to be pursued in this crisis. Delegating his powers to Giles Brent, he sailed for England and soon after joined his brother at Oxford. They received from the King a commission to seize any London ships that might come to St. Mary’s. Baltimore sent this commission to Maryland; and in January, 1644, when one Richard Ingle appeared in the Province with an armed ship from London, Governor Brent seized the vessel, and issued a proclamation against Ingle, charging him with treason to the King. Ingle was taken, but soon after made his escape and returned to England. Governor Calvert arrived in September, 1644, and found the Province torn with internal feuds and harassed by Indian incursions. Many thought that the triumph of Parliament would put an end to the Proprietary dominion. Clayborne availed himself of the confusion to renew his designs upon Kent Island, and, by the end of the year, he had regained his former possession. Ingle soon after arrived in another ship, with parliamentary letters of marque. The Proprietary was as powerless as the King with whose fortunes his own were thought to be linked. Ingle landed his men, allied himself with the disaffected, and easily took possession of the government. Governor Calvert fled to Virginia, and the insurgents were undisturbed. The records of the Province brand Ingle as a pirate. To plunder seems indeed to have been his main purpose, and it is not clear that he even professed to act on behalf of the Commonwealth. He afterwards alleged, in a petition to Parliament, that, when he arrived in Maryland, he found that the governor had received a commission from Oxford to seize all London ships, and to execute a tyrannical power against Protestants; and that, therefore, he felt himself to be conscientiously obliged to come to the help of the Protestants against the Papists and Malignants. His only statement as to his proceedings in the Province is that “it pleased God to enable him to take divers places from them, and to make him a support to the well-affected.” It is, however, certain that the period of Ingle’s usurpation was marked with much oppression and extortion. The Jesuits were sent in chains to England, and most of those deemed loyal to the Proprietary were deprived of their property and banished.

Towards the close of 1646 Governor Calvert, who had been watching the progress of events from Virginia, deemed that the time was ripe for a counter revolution. He appeared at St. Mary’s, at the head of a small force levied in Virginia, and regained the government without resistance. Ingle left the Province, and the body of the people returned to their allegiance with marked alacrity. The most permanent evil caused by this[533] usurpation—commonly called Clayborne and Ingle’s Rebellion, although they do not appear to have acted in concert—was the destruction of the greater part of the then existing records. The entire period is, consequently, involved in obscurity; and it is impossible to determine why it was that so many of the inhabitants were ready to join Ingle in what they afterwards called his “heinous rebellion.” Kent Island alone held out, and Governor Calvert went there in person, and brought back the island to subjection. The entire Province was now tranquillized; but Leonard Calvert did not live to enter upon his labors. On the 9th of June, 1647, he died at the little capital of St. Mary’s, which he had founded seventeen years before, and where he had long exercised, with wisdom and moderation, the highest executive and judicial functions. He had led out the colony from England when a young man of twenty-six years, and in the discharge of various offices he had, in the language of his commission, displayed “such wisdom, fidelity, industry, and other virtues as rendered him capable and worthy of the trust reposed in him.” Upon his death-bed he named Thomas Greene his successor, who now assumed the duties of governor. Greene proclaimed a general pardon to those in the Province who had “unfortunately run themselves into a rebellion,” and a pardon to those who had fled the Province, “acknowledging sorrow for his fault,” except “Richard Ingle, mariner.”[871]

The cause of the monarchy was now prostrate in England, and in the supremacy of Parliament Lord Baltimore saw great danger threatening his colonial dominion. It was necessary to put it out of the power of his enemies to say that Maryland was a Catholic colony, and at the same time he felt bound to protect his co-religionists. He therefore determined to pursue at once a policy of conciliation to the Puritans and of protection to the Catholics. The course he adopted was one well calculated to attain this double end. In August, 1648, he removed Greene, who was a Catholic, and appointed William Stone governor. Stone was a Virginian, and well known as a zealous Protestant and adherent of the Parliament. Lord Baltimore at the same time issued a new commission of the Council of State appointing five councillors, three of whom were Protestants, and he also appointed a Protestant secretary. Accompanying the commissions were oaths to be taken by the governor and councillors. Each was required[534] to swear that he would not trouble or molest any person in the Province professing to believe in Jesus Christ, “and in particular no Roman Catholick for, or in respect of, his or her religion.” While the usual power to assent to laws in the name of the Proprietary was given to Stone, his commission contained a proviso that he should not assent to the repeal of any law—already made or which should thereafter be made—which might in any way concern matters of religion, without special warrant under the seal of the Proprietary. The object of this restriction was to prevent the repeal, by subsequent legislatures, of the act of religious toleration which Lord Baltimore purposed to have passed by the next Assembly. By this act he did not design to have the custom of religious liberty, which had prevailed from the settlement, at all enlarged, but only to be a law of the land beyond the reach of alteration. This security was the more necessary since Stone had agreed to procure five hundred settlers to reside in Maryland, and these might create an overwhelming Protestant majority.

The new governor and council entered upon their duties in the beginning of 1649, and in April of that year the Assembly met. The first law made was the famous “act concerning religion;” which, at least so far as it related to toleration, was doubtless one of the sixteen proposed laws which Lord Baltimore had sent over in the preceding year with the new commissions. The memorable words of this act, the first law securing religious liberty that ever passed a legally constituted legislature, provide that—

“Whereas, the inforcing of the conscience in matters of religion hath frequently fallen out to bee of dangerous consequence in those commonwealths where it hath beene practised, and for the more quiet and peaceable government of this province, and the better to preserve mutuall love and unity amongst the inhabitants here,” it was enacted that no person “professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall, from henceforth, be any waies troubled, molested, or discountenanced for, or in respect of, his or her religion, nor in the free exercise thereof within this province, ... nor any way compelled to the beleefe or exercise of any other religion, against his or her consent.”

The Assembly was composed of sixteen members, nine burgesses, the governor, and six councillors. Their faith has been a matter of dispute, but the most recent investigations make it certain that a majority were Catholics. The governor, three of the council, and two of the burgesses were, without doubt, Protestants. It is equally certain that three of the council and five burgesses were Catholics. The faith of the remaining two members is doubtful; and there is also doubt whether the governor and council sat as a distinct upper house or not.

By the other sections of the “act of toleration,” blasphemy, and denying the divinity of Christ, or the Trinity, were made punishable with death; and those using reproachful words concerning the Virgin Mary or the Apostles, or in matters of religion applying opprobrious epithets to persons, were[535] punishable by a fine, and in default of payment by imprisonment or whipping. It does not appear that any of these penalties were ever inflicted. The toleration established by this act is so far in advance of all contemporary legislation, that it would be invidious to reproach the law-givers because they were not still more enlightened. It may have been that they regarded any broader toleration as prohibited by the provision of the charter respecting the Christian religion, or as likely to excite the animadversion of the Puritans in England. Parliament had recently passed a law (Act of 1648, chapter 114) for the preventing of the growth of heresy and blasphemy, by which the “maintaining with obstinacy” of any one of a number of enumerated heresies—such as that Christ is not ascended into heaven bodily, or that the bodies of men shall not rise again after they are dead—was made a felony punishable with death.

ENDORSEMENT OF THE TOLERATION ACT.

In 1649 Governor Stone invited a body of Puritans who were banished from Virginia, on account of their refusal to conform to the Church of England, to settle in Maryland. These Puritans, the fruits of a mission which had been sent from New England to “convert the ungodly Virginians,” numbered over one hundred. Stone having promised them liberty in the matter of religion and the privileges of English subjects, they accepted the invitation, and in this year settled at a place which they called Providence,—now the site of Annapolis. The settlement was, at the next Assembly, erected into a county, and named Anne Arundel, in honor of Lord Baltimore’s wife, recently deceased, who was a daughter of the Earl of Arundel. The conditions of plantation required every person taking up land in the Province to subscribe an oath of fidelity to his lordship, acknowledging him to be “the true and absolute lord and Proprietary of this province.” The Puritans objected to this oath as being against their consciences, because it required them to acknowledge an absolute power, and bound them to obey a government which countenanced the Roman religion. It is clear that these refugees from intolerance were eager to be intolerant themselves. During a temporary absence of Stone in November, 1649, Greene, the deputy-governor, foolishly proclaimed Charles II. king, and granted a general pardon in furtherance of the common rejoicing. Although this act was promptly disavowed, it afterwards became a formidable weapon against Lord Baltimore.

Notwithstanding their scruples, the Providence Puritans sent two burgesses to the Assembly of 1650, one of whom was elected speaker of the[536] lower house. At this session there was first made a permanent division of the Assembly into two houses, which lasted till the Revolution of 1776. The lower house consisted of the burgesses, and the upper of the governor, secretary, and council. The majority of this Assembly were Protestants; but they made a law enacting, as “a memorial to all posterities” of their thankfulness, fidelity, and obedience to the Proprietary, that, “being bound thereunto by the laws both of God and man,” they acknowledged him “to be the true and absolute lord and Proprietary of this province,” and declaring that they would maintain his jurisdiction till “the last drop of our blood be spent.” Another act was passed altering the oath of fidelity prescribed by the conditions of plantation. The new oath afforded ample opportunity for mental reservation. By it the subscribers bound themselves to maintain “the just and lawful” right and dominion of the Proprietary, “not in any wise understood to infringe or prejudice liberty of conscience in point of religion.”

Lord Baltimore’s trimming at this crisis aroused the displeasure of Charles II. Although a powerless exile, he deposed the Proprietary, and appointed Sir William Davenant royal governor of Maryland, on the ground that Baltimore “did visibly adhere to the rebels in England, and admitted all kinds of sectaries and schismatics and ill affected persons into the plantation.” Baltimore afterwards used this assertion to prove his fidelity to Parliament. Sir William collected a force of French and sailed for Maryland, but was captured in the channel.

Lord Baltimore was soon after threatened from a much more formidable quarter. The revolt of the island of Barbadoes called the attention of Parliament to the necessity of subjecting the colonies to its power, and by an act passed Oct. 3, 1650, for reducing Barbadoes, Antigua, “and other islands and places in America” to their due obedience, the Council of State was authorized to send ships to any of the plantations, and to commission officers “to enforce all such to obedience as do or shall stand in opposition to Parliament.” When the news of this act reached Maryland, the Puritans of Providence thought that the days of the Proprietary dominion were numbered, and they consequently refused to send burgesses to the Assembly which met in March, 1651. Upon information of their conduct and of the perturbed state of the Province being transmitted to Lord Baltimore, he sent in August, 1651, a long message to the governor and Assembly. He declared that the reports concerning the dissolution of his government were unfounded, and directed that in case any of the inhabitants should persist in their refusal to send burgesses to the Assembly, they should be proceeded against as rebels. He also requested the governor and council to use their best endeavors to suppress such false rumors, and suggested that a law be made punishing those spreading false news.

But they who asserted that the Proprietary dominion was about to fall, did not “spread false news.” That steps were not immediately taken to execute the Act of 1650 was probably owing to the fact that Scotland was now[537] in arms under the banner of Charles II. But after the “crowning mercy” of the battle of Worcester, the Council of State, Sept. 20, 1651, appointed two officers of the navy, and Richard Bennett and William Clayborne of Virginia, commissioners under the act. They were directed to use their “best endeavors to reduce all the plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake to their due obedience to the Parliament and the Commonwealth of England.” Maryland was at first expressly named in these instructions; but before they were issued, Baltimore went before the committee of the Council and showed that Governor Stone had always been well affected to Parliament; proved by merchants, who traded to Maryland, that it was not in opposition, and declared that when the friends of the Commonwealth had been compelled to leave Virginia he had caused them to be well received in his province. The name of Maryland was thereupon stricken out of the instructions; but when they were finally issued, a term was used under which the Province might be included.

Clayborne and Bennett were in Virginia; the other commissioners soon after sailed with a fleet carrying a regiment of men, and one hundred and fifty Scotch prisoners who were to be sold as servants in Virginia. A part of the fleet finally reached Jamestown in March, 1652. The commissioners speedily came to terms with Sir William Berkeley, and then turned their attention to Maryland. They appeared at St. Mary’s toward the last of March, and demanded submission in two particulars: first, that all writs and proclamations should be issued in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England, and not in that of the Proprietary; and second, that all the inhabitants should subscribe the test, called “the engagement,” which was an oath of allegiance to Parliament. The instructions of the commissioners expressly authorized them to insist upon these terms. The governor and council acceded to the second demand, but refused the first on the ground that process in Maryland had never run in the name of the king, and that it was not the intention of Parliament to deprive Lord Baltimore of his rights in the Province. The commissioners immediately removed Stone and appointed a council of six to govern the Province independently of the Proprietary. Bennett and Clayborne then returned to Virginia, where they appointed themselves respectively governor and secretary of that colony. A few months later Stone, deeming that he could best subserve the interests of the Proprietary by temporizing, submitted to the terms of the commissioners, who, finding that Stone was too popular a man to be disregarded, reinstated him in his office June 28, 1652.

Now that Virginia and Maryland were both under the authority of the same commissioners, the Virginians thought that the time had arrived when an attempt to regain their lost territory was likely to prosper. In August, 1652, a petition was presented to Parliament praying that Virginia might have its ancient limits as granted by the charters of former kings, and that Parliament would grant a new charter in opposition to those intrenching upon these limits. This petition was referred to the committee of the navy[538] with directions to consider what patent was proper to be granted to Virginia. The committee reported Dec. 31, 1652. They found that Kent Island had been settled three years before the settlement of Maryland; that Clayborne had been unlawfully dispossessed of it; that Baltimore had exacted oaths of fealty to himself; that several laws of Maryland were repugnant to the statutes of England, such as the one protecting Papists; that persons of Dutch, French, and Italian descent enjoyed equal privileges with the English in Maryland; and that in March, 1652, the governor and council of Maryland had refused to issue writs in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England. No action was taken upon this report. Baltimore had previously presented a paper containing reasons of state why it would be more advantageous for the Commonwealth to keep Maryland under a separate government than to join it to Virginia. These reasons were adapted to the existing condition of affairs, and are sufficiently ingenious.

The Province seems to have been quiet during the year 1653. In England, Cromwell turned Parliament out of doors, and the whole strength of the nation was devoted to the Dutch War. Lord Baltimore thought the time propitious for an attempt to recover his colony. Accordingly, in the latter part of the year, he directed Stone to cause all persons who had failed to sue out patents for their land, or had not taken the amended oath of fidelity to the Proprietary, to do so within three months upon pain of forfeiture of their land. Stone was also directed to issue all writs and processes in the name of the Proprietary. In pursuance of these instructions Stone issued a proclamation in February, 1654, requiring those seated upon lands to obtain patents, and swear allegiance to Lord Baltimore. A few weeks later he commanded all officers of justice to issue their writs in the name of the Proprietary, and showed that this change would not infringe their “engagement” to the Commonwealth. In May he proclaimed Cromwell Lord Protector. But the Puritans were not mollified by this act. Before the proclamation of February had been issued, information as to Baltimore’s instructions had reached the Puritans on the Severn and Patuxent; and they had sent petitions to Bennett and Clayborne, in which they complained that the oath of fidelity to be required of them was “a very real grievance, and such an oppression as we are not able to bear,” and prayed for relief according to the cause and power wherewith the commissioners were intrusted. The open disaffection of the Puritans caused Stone in July, 1654, to issue a proclamation in which he charged Bennett and Clayborne, and the whole Puritan party, with leading the people into “faction, sedition, and rebellion against the Lord Baltimore.” The commissioners, still acting under their old authority, resolved again to reduce Maryland. They put themselves at the head of the Providence party, and advanced against St. Mary’s. At the same time a force levied in Virginia, threatened an invasion from the south. Stone, deeming resistance hopeless, submitted. The commissioners deposed him, and by an order dated Aug. 1, 1654, committed the government of the Province to Captain Fuller and a Puritan council. An Assembly[539] was called to meet in the ensuing October for which Roman Catholics were disabled from voting or being elected members. And thus the fugitives from oppression proceeded to oppress those who had given them an asylum. “Ingratitude to benefactors is the first of revolutionary virtues.” The new Assembly met at the house of an adherent on the Patuxent River. Its first act was one denying the right of Lord Baltimore to interfere in the affairs of the Province. An act concerning religion was passed, declaring that none who professed the Popish religion could be protected in the Province, “but to be restrained from the exercise thereof.”

When the news of the deposition of his officers reached Lord Baltimore he despatched a special messenger with letters to Stone, upbraiding him for having yielded the Province without striking a blow, and directing him to make every effort to re-establish the proprietary government. Stone, thus commanded, resolved to dispute the possession of the government with the Puritans. He armed the population of St. Mary’s, and caused the records, which had been removed to the Patuxent, and a quantity of ammunition to be seized. In March, 1655, he advanced against Providence with about two hundred men and a small fleet of bay craft. He sent ahead of him envoys with a demand for submission which was rejected. The Puritans obtained the aid of Roger Heamans, master of the “Golden Lion,” an armed merchantman lying in the port, and prepared for resistance. Stone landed his men near the town on the evening of the 24th of March, and on the next morning the hostile forces advanced against each other. The battle-cry of the Puritans was, “In the name of God fall on!” that of their opponents, “Hey for St. Mary’s!” The fight was short and decisive. The Puritans were completely victorious. About fifty of Stone’s men were killed or wounded, and nearly all the rest, including Stone himself, who was wounded, were taken prisoners. The loss of the Puritans was trifling, but they did not use their victory with moderation. A drum-head court-martial condemned ten prisoners to death, upon four of whom the sentence was executed. Among those thus tried and condemned was Governor Stone, but the soldiers themselves refused to take his life. It is said that the intercessions of the women caused the lives of the others to be spared. They were however kept in confinement, and the estates of the “delinquents” were confiscated.

Each party was now anxious to find favor in the sight of the Protector. Lord Baltimore presented the affidavit of certain Protestants in the Province as to the high-handed proceedings of the Puritans; while the commissioners transmitted documents to prove that he was hostile to the Protector. In the course of the year several pamphlets were published on either side of the controversy. Cromwell, however, does not appear to have concerned himself about the dispute, since both parties acknowledged his supremacy. In January, 1655, Baltimore had obtained from him a letter to Bennett, directing the latter to forbear disturbing the Proprietary or his people in Maryland. Soon after the receipt of this letter Bennett abandoned the governorship[540] of Virginia and went to England. He there made such representations to the Protector, that, in September, 1655, Cromwell wrote to the “Commissioners of Maryland,” explaining that his former letter related only to the boundary disputes between Maryland and Virginia. After the battle of Providence, Cromwell referred the matter to the Commissioners of the Great Seal, and declared his pleasure that in the mean time the government of Maryland should remain as settled by Clayborne. The Commissioners of the Great Seal reported to the council of state in the following year. This report was not acted upon, but was itself referred to the Commissioners for Trade. It was probably favorable to Lord Baltimore, for he made another effort to wrest his Province from the hands of the Puritans. In July, 1656, he appointed Josias Fendall governor of the Province, with all the powers formerly exercised by Stone. Fendall was in reality only a persistent and unscrupulous revolutionist, but his activity had hitherto been exercised on behalf of the Proprietary. Even before his appointment his conduct had excited the suspicions of the Puritan council. He was arrested by them on the charge of “dangerousness to the public peace,” and kept in confinement till September, 1656, when he was released upon taking an oath not to disturb the existing government until the matter was determined in England.

On the 16th of September, 1656, the Commissioners of Trade reported to the Lord Protector entirely in favor of Baltimore. The report was not acted upon, and Bennett and Matthews, the agents of the Puritans, continued the contest. In October they sent to the Protector a paper entitled, Objections against Lord Baltimore’s patent, and reasons why the government of Maryland should not be put into his hands. These objections merely recite the old grievances. Baltimore did not wait for the report to be confirmed, but, confident that his province would be restored to him, directed Fendall to assume the administration of affairs. He also directed large grants of land to be made to those who had been conspicuous for their fidelity to him, and instructed the Council to make provision, out of his own rents, for the widows of those who had lost their lives in his service. Towards the close of the year the Proprietary sent his brother, Philip Calvert, to Maryland as a member of the Council and secretary of the Province. Maryland was now divided between the rival governments. The Puritans held undisputed sway over Anne Arundel, Kent Island, and most of the settlements, while Fendall’s authority seems to have been confined to St. Mary’s County. But there were no acts of hostility between the opposing factions. In September, 1657, the Puritans held another Assembly at Patuxent, at which they again passed an act in recognition of their own authority, and imposed taxes for the payment of the public charges.

Such was the posture of affairs when an agreement was reached by Lord Baltimore and the Puritan agents in England. The favor with which the Protector regarded the old nobility, and his failure to notice the remonstrances[541] which the Puritan agents had addressed to him, caused the latter to despair of setting aside the adverse report of the Commissioners of Trade. The new agent of Virginia, Digges, acted as the intermediary between Baltimore and Bennett and Matthews, and the articles of agreement were signed on the 30th of November, 1657. After reciting the controversies and the “very sad, distracted, and unsettled condition” of the Province, they provide for the submission of those in opposition to the Proprietary and their surrender of the records and great seal. Lord Baltimore, on his part, promised “upon his honor” that he would punish no offenders, but would grant land to all having claims under the conditions of plantation, and that any persons desiring to leave the Province should have liberty to do so. The Puritans now desired the protection of the Toleration Act, and Lord Baltimore therefore stipulated that he would never assent to its repeal. Fendall, who had gone to England for the purpose of consulting the Proprietary, immediately returned to Maryland with a copy of this agreement. At the same time Bennett wrote to Captain Fuller, apprising him of the engagement which had been made on behalf of his party. Fendall arrived in the Province in February, 1658; and the Providence council were requested to meet the officers of Lord Baltimore in order to treat for the performance of the agreement. A meeting of the rival councillors accordingly took place in March. The Puritans, fatigued by the long struggle, were not unwilling to submit, but insisted upon making some changes in the articles of surrender. Fendall accepted their terms, and the new agreement was signed on the 24th of March, 1658. It was stipulated that the oath of fidelity should not be pressed upon the people then resident in the Province, but that, in its place, each person should subscribe an engagement to submit to Lord Baltimore, according to his patent, and not to obey any in opposition to him. It was further agreed that no persons should be disarmed; that there should be a general indemnity for all acts done since December, 1649, and that the proceedings of the Puritan assemblies and courts, in cases relating to property rights, should not be annulled. Proclamation was then made of this agreement and of the governor’s commission, and writs were issued for an Assembly to be held in the ensuing April. At this Assembly the articles of surrender were confirmed. And thus, after six years of civil broils, the Proprietary sway was re-established.

But the spirit of that revolutionary epoch was not yet extinct in Maryland. Another attempt to subvert the authority of Lord Baltimore was made in the following year. This time the leader was Fendall himself, who, after having broken faith with the Puritans, now broke faith with the Proprietary. Upon the confusion which followed the death of Cromwell, Fendall thought that the opportune moment had come for shaking off the rule of his feudal lord. At a session of the Assembly held in March, 1660, the burgesses, in pursuance of Fendall’s scheme, sent to the upper house a message, in which they claimed to be a lawful assembly, without dependence on any other power, and the highest court of judicature. “If any[542] objection can be made to the contrary,” the message concluded, “we desire to hear it.” A conference between the houses was held, at which Fendall stated that he was only commissioned to confirm laws till the Proprietary should declare his dissent, but that in his opinion the true meaning of the charter was that the laws made by the freemen and published by them in his lordship’s name should at once be of full force. On the same day the lower house came in a body to the upper, and declared that they would not permit the latter to continue its sittings, but that its members might take seats among them. Fendall then dissolved the upper house, and, surrendering the powers he had received from the Proprietary, accepted a new commission from the burgesses. Philip Calvert protested against the proceedings, and left the house. The burgesses sought to fortify their authority by making it a felony to disturb the government as established by them.

Lord Baltimore made short work of these treacherous proceedings. As soon as the tidings reached him, in the following June, he appointed Philip Calvert governor. Soon after he obtained from Charles II. a letter commanding all the inhabitants of the Province to submit to his authority. Philip Calvert was sworn in at the Provincial Court held at Patuxent in December, 1660, and had no difficulty in obtaining control of the Province. No one ventured to disobey the commands of a monarch who had just been restored to the throne amid universal enthusiasm. Fendall, indeed, attempted to excite an insurrection, but, failing in this, surrendered himself voluntarily. Lord Baltimore had instructed his deputy not to permit Fendall to escape with his life; and subsequently, while proclaiming a general amnesty, he excepted Hatch and “that perfidious and perjured fellow Fendall, whom we lately entrusted to be our lieutenant of Maryland.” Notwithstanding these instructions, Fendall was punished only by a fine and disfranchisement.

Charles II. was duly proclaimed, and the power of King and Proprietary permanently revived. The tranquillity which now came to the exhausted colony was destined to last, without interruption, till the mighty wave of another revolution in England proved fatal to the lord paramount of Maryland. Clayborne, who has been called the evil genius of the Province, now disappears from its history. His courage and energy have won the admiration of some writers; but, according to the settled principles of public law, his claim upon Kent Island was entirely without foundation. Towards the close of 1661 Charles Calvert, the eldest son of the Proprietary, was appointed governor, and remained in that office till the death of his father. The history of the Province becomes the record of peaceful progress under his wise and just administration. The population, which in 1660 was 12,000, had increased, five years later, to 16,000. In 1676 Lord Baltimore wrote to the Privy[543] Council that the population was 20,000. The provincial assemblies continued to be held at St. Mary’s, and new counties were from time to time erected.

THE BALTIMORE COINS.

[See a “Sketch of the Early Currency of Maryland and Virginia,” by S. F. Streeter, in Historical Magazine, February, 1858, vol. ii. p. 42; and Crosby’s Early Coins of America, from which we have been permitted to borrow our cuts. Specimens of the coins were given by the late George Peabody to the Maryland Historical Society; but they have been surreptitiously removed. Other originals are in the cabinet of William S. Appleton, Esq., of Boston.—Ed.]

The cultivation of tobacco was, from the earliest period, the main occupation of the colonists. Indeed, the prosperity of all the middle colonies reposed chiefly upon this foundation. It was almost the sole export of Maryland. There were no manufactures and no large towns in the Province. It was an agricultural community, scattered along the shores of the noble bay, and of the Potomac and other tributary streams which intersected the country in every direction. The abundance of these natural highways relieved the infant State from a large part of the burden of maintaining roads. Every large planter had at his own door a boat-landing, where he received his supplies, and from which his tobacco was taken to be shipped upon foreign-bound vessels. The high price of tobacco in the second quarter of the seventeenth century (ten times its present value), and the large demand for it by Dutch traders, led the colonists to devote themselves so exclusively to its cultivation, that, on more than one occasion, they suffered from a scarcity of food. Beginning in 1639, numerous acts were passed to enforce the planting of cereals. In order to maintain the excellence of the tobacco exported, the Assembly in 1640 enacted the first tobacco-inspection law,—and thus began a system which has, in some form, been maintained down to the present day. According to the Act of 1640, no tobacco could be exported till scaled by a sworn viewer; and when a hogshead was found bad for the greater part, it was to be burned.

Tobacco was not only the great staple of the Province, but also its chief currency. Taxes were assessed, fines imposed, and salaries paid in tobacco. After the Restoration the restrictive measures, to which we shall refer, and the overproduction of tobacco caused great depreciation in the value of the article. The consequent inconvenience was such that in 1661 the Assembly prayed the Proprietary to establish a mint for the coining of money. Lord Baltimore, by a doubtful stretch of his palatinate prerogatives, caused a large quantity of shillings, sixpences, and groats to be coined for the Province. These coins were put into circulation under an act, passed in 1662,[544] requiring every freeman to take up ten shillings’ worth of them per poll for every taxable person in his custody, and to pay for the same in tobacco at the rate of two pence per pound. But their introduction did not give permanent relief, and tobacco continued to be the chief medium of exchange. Its value decreased so much, that, early in 1663, commissioners were appointed by Virginia and Maryland to consider the evil and its remedy. They could only suggest a diminution of the quantity raised. In the following year the Virginia agents represented to the Privy Council the necessity of lessening the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, and offered proposals for effecting it. These proposals did not meet the approval of Lord Baltimore. The Privy Council ordered that there should be no cessation of the planting of tobacco; but, in order to encourage the planters in cultivating other articles, directed that pitch, tar, and hemp, of the production of those colonies, should be imported into England free of duty for five years. In 1666 an agreement was made between delegates from Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, providing for a total cessation in the planting of tobacco for one year. The legislatures of these colonies passed acts to enforce this agreement; but the Maryland act was vetoed by Lord Baltimore, upon the ground that it would work great injury to the poorer sort of planters, as well as cause a loss of revenue to the Crown. For various reasons these efforts to control the market by limiting the supply never succeeded.

The colonists did not then fully perceive where the root of the evil lay. There was not too much tobacco but too few buyers; and the number of buyers had been artificially lessened. The real cause of this colonial distress was the famous Navigation Act and the statutes which had been made in pursuance of the policy then begun. The Navigation Act, passed by the Long Parliament in October, 1651, provided that no goods should be imported from Asia, Africa, or America but in English vessels, under the penalty of the forfeiture of both goods and ship. Originally designed as a blow at the commercial supremacy of the Dutch, this Act became, to use the language of Burke, the corner-stone of the policy of England with regard to the colonies. This Act was supplemented by still more restrictive statutes passed in 1660 and in 1663 (15 Car. II. c. 7). The result of these regulations was that the colonists could buy nothing except from English merchants, and could sell nothing except to English merchants. They were not even permitted to export their own goods in their own vessels. They suffered from a triple monopoly of sale, of purchase, and of transportation. They bought in the dearest and sold in the cheapest market.

The chief source of the revenue derived by the Proprietary from the Province arose from the quit-rents which, from the earliest period, had been charged on all grants of land. These rents were at first payable in wheat. In later grants they were made payable in money or the commodities of the country, at the option of the Proprietary, until 1671, when an export duty of two shillings per hogshead was imposed on all tobacco, one half of which[545] went to the support of the government, and the other half was granted to the Proprietary in consideration of his commuting his money quit-rents and alienation fines for tobacco, at the rate of two pence per pound. After 1658 another source of Proprietary revenue was an alienation fine of one year’s rent, which was made a condition precedent to the validity of every conveyance. In 1661 there was given to the Proprietary a port and anchorage duty of half a pound of powder and three pounds of shot on all foreign vessels trading to the Province. The fines and forfeitures imposed in courts of justice inured to the Proprietary as the fountain of justice and standing in loco regis. The royal nature of the Proprietary dominion was also shown in the use of his name in all writs and processes, as the name of the king was used in England. Provincial laws were enacted in his name, by and with the advice and consent of the upper and lower houses. Indictments, including those upon the penal statutes of England, charged the offences to be against his peace, good rule, and government.

The first mention of negro slaves occurs in an act passed in 1664; but they had probably been previously introduced into the Province from Virginia, where slavery existed before the settlement of Maryland. In 1671 an act was passed to encourage their importation, and slavery was thenceforth established. It was long, however, before slaves took the place of indented servants, who formed a large part of the population down to the time of the Revolution. They at first consisted of those who had signed an indenture of service for a limited number of years and were brought into the Province by the masters themselves. Subsequently the traffic in servants was taken up by shipowners and others, who sold them for the remainder of their term to the highest bidders. The term of service, which was at first five years, was reduced by the Act of 1638 to four years. Upon the expiration of his indenture a servant was entitled to fifty acres of land and a year’s supply of necessaries. These servants were called “Redemptioners,” and many of them became valuable citizens. After the Restoration the practice of kidnapping men in English seaports and selling them as servants in the colonies became very common. Among the Maryland papers is the petition of one Mrs. Beale to the king, complaining that the master of a ship had taken her brother as his apprentice on a voyage to Maryland, and there sold him as a servant. The lord mayor and aldermen of London complained to the Council that “certain persons, called spirits, do inveigle, and, by lewd subtilities, entice away” youth to be sold as servants in the plantations. Owing to its equable climate, Maryland had more of these indented servants than any other colony, and the statute book contains many acts relating to them. The practice of sending convicts to America, however, was warmly resisted, and in 1676 an act was passed to prevent it.

A temporary exception to the universal religious toleration, which was a capital principle of government in Maryland, occurred in the case of the Quakers. The first Quaker missionaries appeared in Maryland in 1657.[546] Two years later other preachers of that sect visited the Province and caused “considerable convincement.” Their refusal to bear arms, or to subscribe the engagement of fidelity, or to give testimony, or to serve as jurors, was mistaken for sedition.

CECIL, SECOND LORD BALTIMORE.

[See the Critical Essay for an account of this picture.—Ed.]

On July 23, 1659, under Fendall’s administration, an order was passed directing that if “any of the vagabonds and idle persons known by the name of Quakers” should again come into the Province, the justices of the peace should arrest them and cause them to be whipped from constable to constable out of the Province. There is no evidence that this penalty was ever enforced. The most active Quaker missionary simply received a sentence of banishment; and after the suppression of Fendall’s rebellion there was no persecution of the Quakers. They found a refuge in Maryland from the intolerance of New England and Virginia. In 1672[547] George Fox arrived in the Province and attended two “general meetings for all Maryland Friends,” which he describes in his journal as having been largely attended, not only by Quakers but by “other people, divers of whom were of considerable quality in the world’s account.” Maryland was also sought by many French, Bohemian, and Dutch families. In 1666 the first act of naturalization was passed admitting certain French and Bohemians to the rights of citizenship, and from that time forward numerous similar acts were passed.

On the 30th of November, 1675, died Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, after having inscribed his name upon one of the fairest pages in the history of America. The magnificent heritage left him by his father was beset with difficulties; but his courage, perseverance, and skill had triumphed over the hostility of Virginia and the intrigues of Clayborne, over domestic insurrection and Puritan hatred. The first ruler who established and maintained religious toleration is entitled to enduring honor in the eyes of posterity. His name is that of one of the most enlightened and magnanimous statesmen who ever founded a commonwealth.

In the year following his death, Governor Charles Calvert, now the Lord Proprietary, called an assembly at which a thorough revision of the laws of the Province was made. Among the laws continued in force was the Toleration Act of 1649. In the same year Lord Baltimore appointed Thomas Notley deputy-governor, and then sailed for England, where he remained three years. Upon his arrival he found that a clergyman of the Church of England, named Yeo, residing in Maryland, had written to the Archbishop of Canterbury, under the date of 25th May, 1676, begging him to solicit from Lord Baltimore an established support for the Protestant ministry. “Here are ten or twelve counties,” he writes, “and in them at least twenty thousand souls, and but three Protestant ministers of the Church of England. The priests are provided for, and the Quakers take care of those that are speakers, but no care is taken to build up churches in the Protestant religion. The Lord’s day is profaned. Religion is despised, and all notorious vices are committed, so that it is become a Sodom of uncleanness and a pest-house of iniquity.” There is reason to believe that this letter was an exaggerated libel. At any rate the writer considered it easy to cure the evil. It would be sufficient to impose an established church upon the Province. The Archbishop referred the letter to the Bishop of London, who asked the Privy Council to “prevail with Baltimore to settle a revenue for the ministry in his province.” The Privy Council wrote to Baltimore communicating the unfavorable information with regard to the dissolute life of the inhabitants of his province, and desiring an account of the number of Established and Dissenting ministers there. Lord Baltimore replied that in every county of the Province there were a sufficient number of churches which were supported by the voluntary contributions of those attending them, and that there were, to his knowledge, four clergymen of the Church of England in the Province. He also urged that at least three fourths of[548] the inhabitants were Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers, the members both of the Church of England and of the Church of Rome being the fewest, “so that it will be a most difficult task to draw such persons to consent unto a law which shall compel them to maintain ministers of a contrary persuasion to themselves, they having already assurance by an Act for Religion that they shall have all freedom in point of religion and divine worship, and no penalties imposed upon them in that particular.” The Council, however, directed that some provision should be made for the ministry of the Church of England, and that the laws against vice should be enforced. Baltimore returned to Maryland in 1680, but nothing was done to carry out the orders of the Council.

Soon after his return the restless Fendall, in conjunction with John Coode, attempted to stir up an insurrection of the Protestants against the Proprietary. Baltimore, having early notice of the proceedings, arrested Fendall. He was punished by fine and banishment, and the enterprise ended almost as soon as it began. The great preponderance of the Protestant population, and the course of affairs in England were fast making the position of a Catholic Proprietary untenable. Complaints of the favor shown to Catholics were constantly sent to England. In October, 1681, the Privy Council wrote to Baltimore that impartiality must be shown in admitting Catholics and Protestants to the council and in the distribution of arms. In reply to these complaints a declaration was issued in May, 1682, signed by twenty-five Protestants of the Church of England residing in the Province. This declaration certified that places of honor, trust, and profit were conferred on the most qualified, without any regard to the religion of the participants, and that in point of fact most of the offices were filled with Protestants, one half of the council, and by far the greater part of the justices of the peace and militia officers, being Protestants. The subscribers published to the world the general freedom and privilege which all the inhabitants of the Province enjoyed in their lives, liberties, and estates, and in the free and public exercise of their religion.

The first Proprietary had finally come off successful in the long contest for his territory with Virginia and Clayborne. The second Proprietary was now called upon to begin a longer and less successful struggle with William Penn. The charter limits of Maryland included the present State of Delaware and a large part of Pennsylvania. In 1638 a settlement of Swedes was made on the Delaware, which was brought under subjection to the government of the States General in 1655.[872] In 1659 the governor and council, in pursuance of Lord Baltimore’s instructions, ordered Colonel Utie to “repair to the pretended governor of a people seated on the Delaware Bay, within his lordship’s province, and to require them to depart the province.” Utie had an interview with the authorities of New Amstel, and threatened them with war in case of a refusal to leave. They replied that the matter must be left to their principals in England and Holland.[549] Towards the close of the year the Dutch sent Augustine Hermann and Resolved Waldron as ambassadors to Maryland. They had an interview with the governor and council in which the claim of Holland to the territory in question was formally presented. The governor asserted the title of Lord Baltimore and demanded the submission of the settlements. This demand was rejected and the interview terminated. The Dutch power in America was soon after brought to an end by the Duke of York, to whom Charles II. in 1664 granted all the territory between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers.[873] In 1680 Penn asked for a grant of the territory west of the Delaware and north of Maryland. In his patent, which passed the seals in March, 1681, the southern boundary of his province was a “circle of twelve miles drawn around New Castle to the beginning of the forty degrees of latitude,”—a description which it was impossible to gratify. In April, 1681, the King wrote to Baltimore notifying him of Penn’s grant, and directing him to aid Penn in seating himself, and to appoint some persons to make a division between the provinces, in conjunction with Penn’s agents.[874] Lord Baltimore met Penn’s deputy, in September, 1682, at Upland (now Chester), when it was found, by a precise observation, that the fortieth degree of latitude was beyond Upland itself. The knowledge of this fact caused Penn to be anxious to obtain a grant of Delaware. Though the Duke of York’s grant did not extend south of the Delaware, Penn, by dint of importunity, obtained from him in August, 1682, a grant of the territory twelve miles around New Castle, and southward, along the river, to Cape Henlopen. Penn asked for that which he knew to be within the boundaries of Maryland, and beyond the power of the Duke to grant. He also received a release of the Duke’s claim to the territory of Pennsylvania, and soon afterwards sailed for his province.

On August 19, 1682, he had procured from the King a letter to Baltimore directing the latter to hasten the adjustment of the boundaries. An interview between the two Proprietaries took place in December, when Penn handed to Lord Baltimore the King’s letter. Baltimore insisted upon the fortieth degree as his northern boundary, and the conference was fruitless. They had another interview, at New Castle, in the following year, which also made it apparent that no agreement between the rival Proprietaries was possible. Penn now raised against the Maryland charter an objection similar to that which had been urged by Virginia and Clayborne,—that Delaware had been settled by the Dutch before the grant of the charter, and that, if this were not the case, Baltimore had forfeited his rights by failure to extend his settlements there.

Both Penn and Lord Baltimore now resolved to go to England to contest the matter before the King and Council. Baltimore called an assembly—the last over which he presided in person—in April, 1684. He acquainted them with the necessity he was under of going to England, and assured them that his stay would be no longer than requisite for the decision of the[550] differences between Penn and himself. The Assembly then proceeded to revise the laws of the Province; after which the Proprietary appointed a council of nine, under the presidency of William Joseph, to govern the Province during his absence, and sailed for England. Baltimore found that he was no match in court influence for Penn. In November, 1685, the Board of Trade decided that the Maryland charter included only “lands uncultivated and inhabited by savages, and that the territory along the Delaware had been settled by Christians antecedently to his grant, and was therefore not included in it;” and they directed that the peninsula between the two bays should be divided equally by a line drawn from the latitude of Cape Henlopen to the fortieth degree, and that the western portion was Baltimore’s and the eastern Penn’s. The Revolution, however, came in time to prevent the execution of this decision, and the vexed question was not finally settled till the middle of the following century.

The accession of James II. brought increased danger to Lord Baltimore. To a king who designed the subversion of the liberties of the colonies as well as of England, the liberal charter of Maryland was especially odious. In April, 1687, an order in Council was made directing the prosecution of a writ of quo warranto against the Maryland charter. In that age the issuing of such a writ seldom failed to achieve its object; but before judgment could be obtained against Baltimore the Revolution of 1688 had occurred, and the Stuart dynasty was at an end. The tidings that a writ had been issued against Baltimore’s charter alarmed the imaginations of the provincials. When the Assembly met in November, 1688, President Joseph sought to counteract this state of feeling in a manner which only served to increase the anxiety. In his opening speech he claimed his right to rule jure divino, tracing it from God to the King, from the King to the Proprietary, and from the Proprietary to himself. He then took the unprecedented step of demanding an oath of fidelity from the Houses. The burgesses at first refused, and were with difficulty persuaded to yield. The Assembly showed its loyalty to the monarch, who was then a fugitive from his kingdom, by passing an act for a perpetual thanksgiving for the birth of the prince, and fixed a commemoration of it each succeeding tenth day of June.

Upon the accession of William and Mary the Privy Council directed Lord Baltimore to cause their majesties to be proclaimed in Maryland. He immediately despatched a messenger with orders to his council to proclaim the king and queen with the usual ceremonies. This messenger unfortunately died at Plymouth, and, although William and Mary had been acknowledged in the other colonies, the Maryland council shrank from acting without orders from the Proprietary, while they alarmed the inhabitants by collecting arms and ammunition. Information of this delay was sent to the Board of Trade from Virginia. Baltimore was consequently summoned before it, when he explained that he had sent the required directions to Maryland,[551] but that they had failed to arrive. He was ordered to despatch duplicate instructions, but before they reached the Province the Proprietary’s power was overthrown. The absence of all colonial records from the close of the session of 1688 to the year 1692 makes it difficult to understand the exact cause of this revolution. Enough appears from other sources, however, to show that it was a rebellion fostered by falsehood and intimidation,—“a provincial Popish plot.” In April, 1689, John Coode and other disaffected persons formed “An Association in arms for the defence of the Protestant religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province of Maryland and all the English dominions.” Early in July they began to gather in large numbers on the Potomac. They alleged that the Catholics had invited the northern Indians to join them in a general massacre of the Protestants in the following month, and that they had taken arms to defeat this conspiracy. When a similar rumor had been set on foot, in the preceding March, a declaration had been published, signed by several of those who were now Associators, asserting that the subscribers had examined into all the circumstances of the pretended design, and “found it to be nothing but a sleveless fear and imagination fomented by the artifice of some ill-minded persons.” But in July the Association availed itself of this baseless rumor to obtain the adherence of those who were foolish enough to believe it; while to others they asserted that their purpose was only to proclaim William and Mary.

By these means the neutrality or support of the greater part of the population was secured, and the Associators moved upon St. Mary’s. The council prepared for resistance, but, upon the approach of Coode with greatly superior forces, they surrendered the State House and the provincial records. The Association then published a “Declaration of the reasons and motives for the present appearing in arms of their Majesties’ Protestant subjects in the Province of Maryland.” This Declaration, dated July 25, 1689, signed by Coode and many others, was printed at St. Mary’s.[875] It is an ingenious and able paper, but certainly an audacious calumny, which could only have found credence in England. It set forth that, by the contrivances of Lord Baltimore and his officers, “the tyranny under which we groan is palliated,” and “our grievances shrouded from the eye of observation and the hand of redress.” These grievances were then stated in general terms. In the mean time Joseph and his council retired to a fort on the Patuxent. When Coode marched against them with several hundred men they were again compelled to surrender, and the Associators became masters of the situation. On the third of August, 1689, they sent an address to the king and queen congratulating them upon having restored the laws and liberties of England to their “ancient lustre, purity, and splendor,” and declaring that, without the expense of a drop of blood, they had rescued the government of Maryland from the hands of their enemies, and would hold it[552] securely till a settlement thereof should be made. A convention was called to meet on the 23d of August, to which however several counties refused to send delegates. The convention sent an address to the King asking that their rights and religion might be secured under a Protestant government. The matter was now to be determined in England, and addresses from all the counties and from both parties poured in to the King. Many Protestants favored the Proprietary, and, in their addresses, denounced the falsehoods of the Associators. A number of the Protestants of Kent County declared in their address that “we have here enjoyed many halcyon days under the immediate government of Charles, Lord Baron of Baltimore, and his honorable father, ... by charter of your royal progenitors, wherein our rights and freedoms are so interwoven with his Lordship’s prerogative that we have always had the same liberties and privileges secured to us as other of your Majesty’s subjects in the Kingdom of England.” The greater number of signers, however, sided with the revolutionists. A friend of Lord Baltimore wrote that “people in debt think it the bravest time that ever was. No courts open nor no law proceedings, which they pray may continue as long as they live.” The same writer asserted that the best men and the best Protestants stood stiffly up for the Proprietary’s interest.

Those who had benefited by a Protestant Revolution in England were naturally disposed to look with favor upon a similar Revolution in America. And thus it came to pass that the Proprietary government “fell without a crime.”

King William on Feb. 1, 1690, in pursuance of the recommendation of the committee of the Council for Trade and Plantations, wrote to those in the administration of Maryland, acknowledging the receipt of their addresses and approving their motives for taking up arms. He authorized them to continue in the administration, and in the mean time to preserve the public peace. Lord Baltimore struggled hard to retain his province, although his chance of obtaining justice was desperate. He presented to the King and Council various affidavits and narratives showing the falsity of the charges against his government. In January, 1690, he petitioned the Board of Trade to grant a hearing to such inhabitants and merchants as had lived in and dealt with Maryland for upwards of twenty-five years, at the same time forwarding a list of their names. A few days later he requested the Board to hear his account of the disturbances, to the end that the government might be restored to him. In August, however, the Council directed the attorney-general to proceed by scire facias against Baltimore’s charter. Chief-Justice Holt had previously given an opinion that the King could appoint a governor of Maryland whose authority would be legal; and the attorney-general and solicitor-general were directed to draft a commission of governor.

On the 12th of March, 1691, Queen Mary wrote to the Grand Committee of Maryland that the Province was taken under the King’s immediate superintendence,[553] that Copley would be governor, and, until his arrival, they were to administer the government in the names of their Majesties. In the following August Sir Lionel Copley was commissioned by the king and queen. He reached Maryland early in 1692, and the Province became a royal colony for a quarter of a century. The Proprietary was still allowed to receive his quit-rents and export duty, but all his other prerogatives were at an end.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE earliest publication relating to Maryland was a pamphlet which appeared in London in 1634. It is entitled A Relation of the Successful Beginnings of the Lord Baltemore’s Plantation in Maryland: being an extract of certaine Letters written from thence by some of the Adventurers to their friends in England.[876] The similarity of the language of this relation with Father White’s Relatio Itineris would seem to show that he was its author. The relation describes the first settlement and the products of the soil, and narrates the naïve wonder of the Indians at the big ships and the thunder of the guns. It is dated “From Saint Marie’s in Maryland, 27 May, 1634.”

The next publication was, A Relation of Maryland, London, Sept. 8, 1635,—a work of great value to the student. It was evidently prepared under the direction of Lord Baltimore, and is an extensive colonizing programme. It recounts the planting of the colony and their intercourse with the Indians, and describes the commodities which the country naturally afforded and those that might be procured by industry. It also contains the “conditions propounded by the Lord Baltemore to such as shall goe or adventure into Maryland,” and gives elaborate instructions as to what the adventurers should take with them, together with an estimate of the cost of transporting servants and providing them with necessaries.[877]

A very full account of the voyage of the “Ark and Dove” to Maryland is contained in a letter written by Father Andrew White, S. J., to the General of the Order. The originals of this letter, as well as of different letters from the Jesuit missionaries in Maryland from 1635 to 1677, were discovered, about fifty years ago, by the Rev. W. M. Sherry, who was afterwards Provincial of the Jesuits in Maryland, in the archives of the Society in Rome. The copy he then made of these manuscripts is now in the possession of Loyola College, Baltimore. In 1874 and 1877 the Maryland Historical Society published this Relatio Itineris, and extracts from the annual letters, in the original Mediæval Latin, with a translation by Mr. Josiah Holmes Converse. This publication also contains an account of[554] the colony in which the character of the country and its numerous sources of wealth are set forth in the glowing colors of anticipation. The original of this Declaratio Coloniæ was also found at Rome. It was probably written by Lord Baltimore soon after the grant of his patent, and sent to the General of the Society at the time of his request that priests might be sent out to the colony. These publications are enriched with the notes of the late Rev. E. A. Dalrymple, S. T. D.[878] then Corresponding Secretary of the Maryland Historical Society. The letters, which have been frequently used in the preceding narrative, throw much light upon the early days of the Province, and give a vivid picture of the activity of the missionaries.[879]

The reduction of Maryland at the time of the Commonwealth caused several pamphlets upon its affairs to be published in London. The first of these was The Lord Baltemore’s case concerning the Province of Maryland, adjoyning to Virginia in America with full and clear answers to all material objections touching his Rights, jurisdiction, and Proceedings there, etc. London, 1653. This tract was probably called forth by the report of the committee of the Navy on Maryland affairs in December, 1652. Although written by Lord Baltimore, or under his direction, it is a temperate and reliable statement. It contains his reasons of state why it would be more advantageous for the Commonwealth to keep Maryland and Virginia separate.

An answer to this pamphlet was published in London in 1655, entitled, Virginia and Maryland, or The Lord Baltemore’s printed case uncased and answered, etc.[880] This work is of value in giving a full statement of the Puritan side of the controversy down to 1655. It has the proceedings in Parliament in 1652 relating to Maryland, copies of the instructions of the commissioners for the reduction, and other documents.

There are four pamphlets bearing upon the battle of Providence in March, 1655. The first is called, An additional brief narrative of a late Bloody design against The Protestants in Ann Arundel County and Severn in Maryland in the County of Virginia.... Set forth by Roger Heaman, Commander of the Ship Golden Lyon, an eye-witness there. London, July 24, 1655. The author gives a detailed but unfair account of the fight, and of his connection with it, and of the previous proceedings of Governor Stone. Heamans was answered by John Hammond, “a sufferer in these calamities,” in a tract, called Hammond vs. Heamans; Or, an answer to an audacious pamphlet published by an impudent[555] and ridiculous fellow named Roger Heamans, etc. The author was the person despatched by Stone, early in 1655, to remove the records from Patuxent. He declares that he “went unarmed amongst these sons of Thunder, and myself alone seized and carried away the records in defiance.” In the same year were published both Babylon’s Fall in Maryland, etc., by Leonard Strong, and John Langford’s Refutation of Babylon’s Fall, etc. Strong, the author of the former pamphlet, was one of the leading Puritans of Providence, and afterwards their agent in London, where he wrote the tract. It is a party work, containing a garbled statement of the facts. Langford’s Refutation has a letter from Governor Stone’s wife to Lord Baltimore describing the conduct of the Puritans and their treatment of her husband. Langford was rewarded for this work by Lord Baltimore with a gift of fifteen hundred acres of land in Maryland.[881]

In 1656 John Hammond published his Leah and Rachel; or, the Two fruitfull Sisters Virginia and Maryland. Their present condition impartially stated and related, etc.[882] This pamphlet is favorable to Lord Baltimore and condemns the Puritans.

A highly curious production is, A Character of the Province of Maryland, by George Alsop. London, 1666.[883] Alsop had been an indented servant in Maryland, and gives a favorable account of the condition of Maryland apprentices. The tract is written in a jocular style, and was designed to encourage emigration to the Province. It contains some interesting details concerning the Indian tribes.

Various causes, chief among which are Ingle’s Rebellion, time, and negligence, have resulted in the destruction of a large part of the early records of the Province. The principal portion of what now remains relating to the period before the Protestant Revolution is contained in the following manuscript folio volumes:—

1. Liber Z. The Proprietary Record-book from 1637-1642. This is the oldest record-book extant. It contains a full account of the proceedings of the Assembly held in 1638, and of the process against William Lewis for his violation of the proclamation prohibiting religious disputes. This volume also has the records of the Council acting as a county court, and of proceedings in testamentary causes. Many of the original signatures of Leonard Calvert, Secretary Lewger, and others are scattered through the volume.

2. A. 1647-1651. The original second Record-book of the Province. The first fifty-eight pages and several of the last are wanting. It has in it proceedings of assemblies, court records, appointments to office, demands and surveys of land, wills, etc.

3. Y. 1649-1669. Journals and acts of different assemblies, commissions from the Proprietary, etc. This volume contains the Toleration Act of 1649[884] and the proceedings of Fendall’s revolutionary assembly in 1660.

4. H. H. 1656-1668. Council proceedings. The original volume containing instructions from the Proprietary, commissions of Fendall and others, ordinances, and the proceedings against the Quakers.[885]

5. A. M. 1669-1673. Council Proceedings. A copy probably made in the last century.

6. F. 1637-1642. Council Proceedings and other documents in vol. i. of the Land-Office Records. This copy of the original, which is lost, was made in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and is certified by a Judge of the Provincial Court to be correct. This volume contains Governor Leonard Calvert’s commission, Clayborne’s petition to the King, orders of the Privy Council, etc.

[556]

7. A. 1647-1650. Council and Court Proceedings. Some part of the original is lost. A copy in vol. ii. of the Land-Office Records.

8. B. 1648-1657. Council and Court Proceedings and Acts of Assembly. The original is lost. A copy is in vols. i. and iii. of the Land-Office Records. This volume contains the proceedings of Captain Fuller’s council and of the Puritan Assembly in 1654, lists of servants for whose importation land was demanded, etc.

9. Vellum folio. 1636-1657. Council Proceedings. A copy made in the eighteenth century. This volume has Stone’s commission, the conditions of plantation in 1648 and 1649, the proceedings of Bennett and Clayborne in the reduction of Maryland, and of Stone and the Puritans. The documents in this volume are not arranged in chronological order.

10. Vellum folio. 1637-1658. Proceedings of Assemblies. A copy.

11. F. F. 1659-1699. Upper House Journals. A copy. Contains a full account of the proceedings.

12. X. 1661-1663. Council-book. This original volume contains instructions from the Proprietary to Philip Calvert and Fendall, demands and grants of land, etc.

13. 1676-1702. Votes and Proceedings of the Lower House. A copy made by the State Librarian in 1838 from the original papers, which are not now to be found. It has the proceedings of the Assemblies in 1676,1683, and 1684.

14. C. B. 1683-1684. The original Council-book for land.

The first five of the above volumes are in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, having been entrusted to its guardianship by a resolution of the Legislature in 1847. The remaining folios are in the Land Office at Annapolis.

The three following manuscript volumes are in the office of the Clerk of the Court of Appeals, at Annapolis:—

15. Liber W. H. Laws: erroneously lettered on the back 1676-1678. This volume contains laws made at different Assemblies from 1640 to 1688. They are not placed in strict chronological order. These copies were made in the seventeenth century, and many of the transcripts are attested by Philip Calvert as Cancellarius.

16. W. H. and L. 1640-1692. Laws made at some of the Assemblies held during these years.

17. C. and W. H. 1638-1678. Laws. A copy from older books made in 1726, and certified to be correct.

The two following original volumes are in the State Library at Annapolis:—

18. Proprietary, 1642-1644. Contains proceedings of the Council sitting as the Provincial Court, proclamations, commissions, etc. A part of this volume has been transcribed into one of the Land-Office Records.

19. Provincial Court of Maryland. Records. March, 1658-November, 1662. This volume is in bad condition and several pages are wanting. It contains the records of the Council as a Court, oaths of officers, depositions, etc.

A calendar of the state papers contained in Nos. 1-13 of the above volumes, and in some of a later date, was compiled in 1860 by the Rev. Ethan Allen, under the direction of J. H. Alexander.[886] No systematic publication of extracts from these records has ever been made. After the death of Mr. S. F. Streeter, in 1864, his large collection of manuscripts pertaining to the provincial history of Maryland was placed in the hands of Henry Stockbridge Esq., who prepared them for publication, and in 1876 some extracts from these with notes by Mr. Stockbridge were published by the Maryland Historical Society in a volume entitled, Papers Relating to the Early History of Maryland, by S. F. Streeter. This volume contains the proceedings and acts of the Assembly of 1638, with a list of the members and their occupations, the record of the case against William Lewis, the first will, the first marriage license and various court proceedings.

The Legislature of Maryland at its January session, 1882, passed an act directing that[557] all the records and state papers belonging to the period prior to the Revolution be transferred to the custody of the Maryland Historical Society, and appropriating the sum of two thousand dollars to be expended by the Society in the publication of extracts from these documents.

In 1694, when the capital was removed from St. Mary’s to Annapolis,—then called Anne Arundel Town,—the Assembly directed that the records should be transported on horses, and in bags sealed with the great seal and covered with hides. The persons charged with this duty afterward reported to the Assembly that they had safely delivered the books to the sheriff of Anne Arundel County. There is a full list of these volumes in the Journal of the Lower House, and one perceives with regret that the greater part of them no longer exist. Many state papers were greatly damaged during this removal, and others were lost in the fire which destroyed the State House in 1704. When the government of the Province was restored to Lord Baltimore in 1716, an act was passed appointing commissioners to inspect the records and to employ clerks to transcribe and bind them. The preamble to the act set forth the loss of several important records, and that a great part of what remained was “much worn and damnified;” which was partly owing to the want of proper books at first. On such general revisions of the laws as were made in 1676, 1692, and at other times, it was customary to make transcripts in a “Book of Laws” only of those acts which were continued in force. The record of the laws not re-enacted was then neglected.

Very little care was bestowed upon the state papers generally. Many of the volumes cited by Bacon in his Laws of Maryland, published in 1765, are not now to be found. In 1836 the State librarian (Ridgely) made three reports to the governor and council upon the early records, which contain a partial list of those then discovered. He says that in the treasury department he found “the remains of two large sea-chests and one box which had contained records and files of papers which were in a state of total ruin.” He also discovered many early records, whose existence had not been suspected, in different public offices, and some “under the stairway as you ascend the dome.”[887]

Other original authorities for the history of the Province, second in importance only to its own records, are the documents preserved in the state-paper office in London. The peculiar nature of the palatinate proprietorship of Maryland, and the fact that the Proprietary generally resided in England, have caused the Maryland papers to be more abundant than those of any other colony. It was customary to send to the Proprietary documents concerning all the public affairs of the Province. A large number of these, as well as of the papers directly transmitted to the Privy Council or the Board of Trade, are in the state-paper office.[888] In 1852 Mr. George Peabody gave to the Maryland Historical Society a manuscript index, prepared by Henry Stevens, to the Maryland papers, then accessible in that office. This index contains abstracts of 1,729 documents relating to Maryland affairs between the years 1626 and 1780; and the abstracts are somewhat more full than those in Sainsbury’s Calendars of State Papers.[889]

Additional papers have been placed in the state-paper office since the Peabody Index was made, and it is therefore necessary to consult both calendars. There are other manuscripts relating to Maryland in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and elsewhere in England, of which no calendars have been published.[890]

[558]

A letter of Captain Thomas Yong to Sir Tobie Matthew, written from Virginia in July, 1634, describes his interviews with Clayborne and Captain Cornwallis, and passes an unfavorable judgment upon the former. Yong gives an account of various plots of Clayborne and other Virginians against the colony at St. Mary’s, and of Clayborne’s refusal to attend a conference which had been arranged for the adjustment of the controversy. The letter is printed in Documents connected with the history of South Carolina, edited by P. C. J. Weston, London, 1856, p. 29, and in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll. ix. p. 81 (Aspinwall Papers), and in the Appendix to Streeter’s Papers Relating to the Early History of Maryland.

There are scarcely any remains of the buildings erected in the Province before 1688. Lord Baltimore wrote to the Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations in 1678 that “the principal place or town is called St. Mary’s where the General Assembly and provincial court are kept, and whither all ships trading there do in the first place resort; but it can hardly be called a town, it being in length by the water about five miles, and in breadth upwards towards the land not above one mile,—in all which space, excepting only my own house and buildings wherein the said courts and offices are kept, there are not above thirty houses, and those at considerable distance from each other, and the buildings (as in all other parts of the Province), very mean and little, and generally after the manner of the meanest farm-houses in England. Other places we have none that are called or can be called towns, the people there not affecting to build near each other, but so as to have their houses near the water for convenience of trade, and their lands on each side of and behind their houses, by which it happens that in most places there are not above fifty houses in the space of thirty miles.”[891]

The principal building at St. Mary’s was the State House, erected in 1674, at a cost of 330,000 pounds of tobacco. In 1720 it was given to the parish of William and Mary to be used as a church; and in 1830, being very much decayed, it was pulled down, and a new edifice built in the neighborhood. Lord Baltimore’s house—called the Castle—stood on the plain of St. Mary’s, at the head of St. John’s Creek. The spot is marked by a few mouldering bricks and broken tiles, and a square pit overgrown with bushes.[892] At St. Inigoe’s manor, near St. Mary’s, there is preserved the original round table at which the first council sat, besides a few other relics.[893]

[559]

The earliest historian of Maryland was George Chalmers, whose Political Annals of the present United Colonies was published in London in 1780. Chalmers was a Maryland lawyer, who returned to England at the outbreak of the Revolution. He had access to the English state papers in writing his work, and his account of Maryland is fair and, for the most part, accurate.[894]

The ablest man who has written upon the history of the Province was John V. L. McMahon. He was born in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1800, and, after graduating at Princeton, began the practice of the law in Maryland, where he soon became one of the leaders of a very able bar. The first volume of his Historical view of the Government of Maryland from its Colonization to the Present Day was published in 1831. Though the author did not die till 1871, this volume was never followed by its promised successor. The manuscript of the second volume is in the possession of McMahon’s heirs. The volume published brings the history of the Province down to the Revolution, but its strictly historical part is less than one half of the whole, and treats the subject only in outline. The remainder of the book is devoted to an examination of the legal aspects of the charter, the sources of Maryland law, and the distribution of legislative power under the State government. The work is founded on an original study of the records, so far as was thought necessary for its limited historical scope.[895]

The History of Maryland from its first settlement in 1633 to the Restoration in 1660, in two volumes, by John Leeds Bozman, was published in 1837. The manuscript of this work was offered to the State in 1834, after the death of its author, on condition of its being printed within two years. The offer was accepted by the Legislature, and the book was published under its direction. The first volume is introductory, and the history of the[560] Province proper is contained in the second volume. The work is based on an exact study of the original records, and is a very careful and accurate summary in great detail. Bozman did not have access to the papers preserved in the English state-paper office, and much other material has been brought to light since he wrote. His strict pursuance of the chronological order often results in sacrificing the interest of the narrative. The appendix to the second volume has a valuable collection of extracts from the records. The work as a whole may be said to furnish materials for the history of the Province rather than to be the finished history itself.[896]

The History of Maryland from its first Settlement, in 1634, to the year 1848, in one volume, by James McSherry, a lawyer of Frederick City, Maryland, was first published in 1849. It is written in an agreeable style, and, so far as relates to the period under consideration, gives a clear summary of the leading occurrences, but does not appear to have been founded on original investigation of the sources.

In Burnap’s Life of Leonard Calvert, published in Sparks’s American Biography,[897] there is an excellent history of the colony to the death of Governor Calvert in 1647. Dr. Burnap was for many years pastor of the Unitarian Church in Baltimore. His chief authorities were Bozman and Father White’s Relatio Itineris.

To Mr. George Lynn-Lachlan Davis, a member of the Baltimore Bar, who died a few years ago, is due the credit of having settled the vexed question of the religious faith of the legislators who passed the Toleration Act of 1649. His work was based on an examination of wills, rent-rolls, and other records. His conclusions are those stated in the preceding narrative. The result of his investigations was published in 1855 in a volume entitled, The Day Star of American Freedom: or, The Birth and Early Growth of Toleration in the Province of Maryland. It also contains a summary of all that is known of the entire personal history of each member of the Assembly of 1649.[898]

The Rev. E. D. Neill’s Terra Mariæ: or, Threads of Maryland Colonial History, published in 1867, is a digressive account of the career of the first Lord Baltimore, with some notices of men more or less connected with the Province in its early days. He quotes many letters of the seventeenth century, but rarely refers to the source from which he drew them.[899] What the volume contains relative to the internal affairs of the Province is not always accurate. Mr. Neill has published several pamphlets and articles on the early history of Maryland, in which he endeavors to show that Maryland never was a Roman Catholic colony, that a majority of the colonists were from the beginning Protestants, and that the Church of England was established by the charter.[900]

[561]

The latest and most comprehensive History of Maryland is that by Mr. J. T. Scharf, in three octavo volumes, published in 1879. This work extends from the earliest period to the present day. Mr. Scharf publishes in full many valuable documents from the English state-paper office, among which is an English translation of the charter of Avalon.[901]

Histories of Kent, Cecil, and some other counties in the State have also been published.[902]

The subject of religious toleration in Maryland—its causes and significance—has given rise to much discussion both within and without the State. We shall refer only to a few of the many pamphlets and articles which have appeared on this topic. In 1845 the late John P. Kennedy delivered a discourse before the Maryland Historical Society on the Life and Character of the first Lord Baltimore. He maintained that toleration was in the charter and not in the Act of 1649, and that as much credit was due to the Protestant prince who granted as to the Catholic nobleman who received the patent, and that the settlement of the Province was mainly a commercial speculation. This discourse was reviewed in 1846 by Mr. B. U. Campbell, who contended with so much show of reason that the honor of the policy of toleration must be attributed to the Proprietary and the first settlers, that Mr. Kennedy felt called upon in the same year to reply to the review.[903] In 1855 the Rev. Ethan Allen published a pamphlet on Maryland Toleration, in which he upheld Clayborne’s side of the controversy with Lord Baltimore, denied that Maryland was a Catholic colony, and asserted that protection to all religions was guaranteed by the charter. This question was also referred to in the discussion between Mr. Gladstone and Cardinal Manning, concerning the Vatican decrees, in 1875. Cardinal Manning had pointed to the toleration established by Catholics in Maryland to refute Mr. Gladstone’s assertion that the Roman Church of this day would, if she could, use torture and force in matters of religious belief. Mr. Gladstone replied, in his Vaticanism, that toleration in Maryland was really defensive, and its purpose was to secure the free exercise of the Catholic religion, because it was apprehended that the Puritans would flood the Province.[904]

[562]

Students of Maryland history are fortunate in possessing an admirable edition of the laws of the Province, compiled in 1765 by Thomas Bacon, chaplain to the last Lord Baltimore. It contains all the laws then in force, and the titles of all the acts passed in the several assemblies from the settlement. There are references to the books where the different acts are recorded, and numerous notes upon historical and legal points.

The chief impetus to the study of the history of Maryland and to the preservation of its archives has been given by the Maryland Historical Society, which was organized in 1844.[905] One of the originators of this Society was Mr. Brantz Mayer, an accomplished man of letters, who until his death, two years ago, was active and efficient in promoting its welfare. The Society has a large membership and occupies a suitable building in Baltimore. Its library contains about 20,000 volumes, including nearly every book relating to the history of Maryland. The collection of manuscripts bearing upon the Colonial and Revolutionary history of the State is large and valuable. It has also many rare American maps, coins, and pamphlets, and a large collection of Maryland newspapers from the year 1728. The Society has published about eight volumes, relating chiefly to the history of Maryland. It now has a permanent publication fund, which it also owes to the generosity of George Peabody.

Notwithstanding the loss of many original records, there is still in the State archives an abundance of historical material which has never been adequately worked up by any writer. This material is now better known and more accessible than formerly. Many documents in the state-paper office are now being made known for the first time by the calendars published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls. It is probable that the papers in the British Museum and Bodleian Library will also be calendared. This varied treasure of interesting and important material relating to the provincial history of Maryland has never been thoroughly searched, and the history in which a satisfactory use of it is made remains to be written.


[563]

INDEX.


[Reference is commonly made but once to a book if repeatedly mentioned in the text; but other references are made when additional information about the book is conveyed.]


Aa, Van der, Versameling, 79, 188.

Abelin, J. P, 167.

Accomac, 147, 179.

Achter Kol, 429.

Acomenticus, charter of, 364;

river, 322.

See Agamenticus.

Acosta, map in (1598), 196.

Acquines (Hawkins), 82.

Adams, Annals of Portsmouth, 366.

Adams, Charles-Francis, Jr., edits Morton’s New English Canaan, 348;

on “old planters” about Boston Harbor, 347.

Adams, Clement, 36, 41, 43, 44, 47.

Adams, C. K., Manual of Historical Literature, 166, 368.

Adams, Henry, on the Pocahontas story, 162.

Adams, J. Q., on the New England Confederacy, 354.

“Admiral”, ship, 171.

Adventurers in Virginia, 127.

Agamenticus, 190. See Acomenticus.

Aggoncy, 184.

Agnese, Baptista, map (1554), 218;

his portolanos, 218.

Agostino, 77.

Agriculture in New England, 316.

Ahasimus, 422.

Aitzema, Histoire, 415.

Albany, 390, 407.

Alcocke, John, autog., 338.

Alden, John, in Duxbury, 272, 273;

autog., 268;

last survivor of the signers of the Pilgrims’ compact, 271.

Aldsworth, 321.

Alexander, James, 452;

his Bill in Chancery, 452.

Alexander, J. H., 556.

Alexander, Sir William, 327;

his map, 306, 341;

his grant, 299;

his Encouragement to Colonies, 305.

Alexandria, province of, 306.

Allard, C., view of New York, 416;

map of New York, 417.

Allard, Minor Atlas, 384,

Allen, Rev. Ethan, 556, 557, 560;

St. Ann’s Parish, 561;

Maryland Toleration, 561.

Allen, James, autog., 319.

Allen, Nathaniel, 479.

Allen, S. M., 562.

Allen, Zachariah, 377;

Founding of Rhode Island, 377.

Allerton, Isaac, 273, 276, 277;

autog., 268;

assistant, 275.

Allyn, John, 334;

autog, 335, 374.

Alsop, George, Province of Maryland, 555.

Amadas, Philip, 108, 111, 122.

Amazons, 118.

America, part of Asia, 69;

earliest English publications on, 199;

earliest instance of the name on maps, 214.

American Antiquarian Society, 344.

Amsterdam, English Brownists in, 261.

Amyrault, Moses, 474.

Anderson, J. S. M., History of the Church of England in the Colonies, 155, 286.

Andress, Lawrence, 436.

Andringa, Joris, 397.

Andros, Sir Edmund, his rule in Plymouth, 282;

in Connecticut, 335;

in Rhode Island, 339;

governor of New York, 398, 429;

administration, 400;

knighted, 401;

vice-admiral, 401;

arrests Carteret, 401;

portrait, 402;

governor of New England, 407, 444;

New York added, 409;

in Massachusetts, 321;

imprisoned, 411;

interferes in New Jersey, 433, 434;

collects duties in New Jersey, 431.

Andros Tracts, 362.

Andrus, Silas, 371.

Anian straits, 68, 80, 203;

sought by Drake, 69;

gulf, 68;

regnum, 68.

“Ann”, ship, 292.

Ann, Cape. See Cape Ann.

Annapolis in Maryland, 535, 561.

Anne Arundel county in Maryland, 535;

town, 557.

Anonaebo, 77.

Antillæ, 201.

Antinomian controversy, literature of, 349, 351, 352;

in Rhode Island, 336.

Antiquary, a London periodical, 160.

Apian’s map (1532), 199.

Appleton, W. S., 543.

Aquedneck, 336, 376, 377. See Rhode Island.

Arber’s English Garner, 346.

Arboledo, Cape, 77.

Archæologia Americana, or Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, 123.

“Archangel”, ship, 175, 191.

Archdale, 324.

Archer, Gabriel, 130;

his Relation, 131;

his account of Newport’s explorations, 154.

Arctic regions, Cabot in, 36, 39;

discoveries in 1586, 42;

bibliographies, 97.

See Northwest Passage.

Arembec, 170, 185. See Norumbega.

Arenas, C. de las, 197, 213.

Argall, Samuel, 159, 301, 305;

arrested, 142;

expedition to Acadia, 140;

elected deputy-governor of Virginia, 141;

on the Maine coast, 178, 179, 193;

at Jamestown, 134, 139.

Arica, 67.

“Ark”, ship, 524.

Arlington, Lord, 150.

Armor, Governors of Pennsylvania, 475.

Armstrong, Edward, 510, 516;

edits Budd’s Good Order, 451;

edits the Penn Correspondence, 506;

on Penn’s landing, 513.

Arnold, James N., 381.

Arnold, S. G., History of Rhode Island, 376.

Arran, Earl of, 370.

Arundell, Earl of, 297.

Asher, G. M., Hudson the Navigator, 99, 104;

List of Maps and Views of New York, 417.

Ashley, Anthony, 207.

Ashton, Robert, Works and Life of Robinson, 286.

Aspinwall, Colonel Thomas, 350;

his library, 159;

on the Narragansett Patent, 379;

Papers, 164.

Assacumet, 180.

Astrolabe, 207.

Atherton Company, 338. See Narragansett.

Atkinson, Joseph, History of Newark, 456.

Atlas, earliest marine, 207.

Atwater, E. E., History of New Haven Colony, 375.

Augusta (Me.), 365.

Austerfield, 283, 284;

map of vicinity, 259;

church at, 260.

Avalon, 519, 523;

charter, 561.

“Ayde”, ship, 87.

Baccalaos, 3, 9, 10, 12, 14, 26, 27, 29, 32, 37, 42, 56, 101, 185, 203, 213, 215, 216.

Backus, Isaac, 377;

History of New England, 377;

Church History of New England, 377.

Bacon, Francis, aspersions on Ralegh, 120;

his Declaration about Ralegh, 121;

autog., 121;

his Certain Considerations, 247;

Controversies of the Church of England, 217.

Bacon, Leonard, Genesis of the New England Churches, 285;

Thirteen Historical Discourses, 359, 371;

on New Haven’s civil government, 375.

Bacon, Nathaniel, Jr., 151.

Bacon, Thomas, 561;

Laws of Maryland, 561.

Bacon’s laws (Virginia), 152.

Bacon’s rebellion, 151;

authorities, 164.

[564]

Badajoz, junta at, 4, 48.

Baffin, William, 93;

autog., 94;

authorities, 99.

Baffin’s Bay, 99;

Luke Fox’s map, 98.

Bagaduce, 190.

See Pentagöet.

Bagnall, Anthony, 131.

Bagnall, Walter, 322.

Baillie, R., Anabaptism, 288.

Baker, Northamptonshire, 457.

Balboa, 65.

Ballard, Edward, 210.

Baltimore, Lord. See Calvert.

Baltimore (town), histories of, 561.

Bamfield, 483.

Bancroft, George, 154, 160, 162;

on the Cabots, 43;

controversy with Josiah Quincy, 378;

on the Quakers, 509.

Baptists, 228, 377;

in Pennsylvania, 494.

Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 375.

Barcia, Ensayo Chronologico, 48.

Barclay, Alex., 199, 202.

Barclay, David, 435.

Barclay, Robert, 435, 443;

governor of East Jersey, 436;

autog., 436;

his Apology, 436, 503.

Barclay, Robert (of our day), Inner Life, 251, 504.

Bardolo, G. G., 26.

Barentz, 217.

Barker, James N., Settlements on the Delaware, 463, 512.

Barker, J. W., History of New Haven, 372.

Barker, Thomas, 435; autog., 484.

Barlow, S. L. M., Bibliotheca Barlowiana, 159.

Barlow, William, Navigator’s Supply, 208.

Barlowe, Arthur, 108, 122.

Barney, C. G., 163.

Barret, Charles, 457.

Barrow, Sir John, Chronological History of the Voyages to the Arctic Regions, 97;

Life of Drake, 79;

Naval Worthies, 102.

Barrowism, 219, 254.

Barry, J. S., History of Massachusetts, 286, 344;

and the Bradford MS., 286.

Bartlett, John Russell, Bibliography of Rhode Island, 354, 380;

Naval History of Rhode Island, 380;

Catalogue of the Library of John Carter Brown, 380;

edits Rhode Island Records, 377.

Bartlett, W. H., Pilgrim Fathers, 258, 284, 292.

Baudet, Leven van Blaeu, 216.

Bay Psalm-book, 350.

Baylie, Dissuasive, 351.

Baylies, Francis, Memoir of New Plymouth, 291.

Bayne, Peter, English Puritanism, 252.

Beach, Indian Miscellany, 167.

Beare, James, 102.

Beauvois, Eugene, La Norambegue, 184.

Becher on Frobisher, 103.

Bedford, Cape, 90, 91.

Beechey, Voyage towards the North Pole, 98.

Behaim, Martin, his astrolabe, 207;

globe, 212, 217;

life by Ghillany, 8.

Behring’s Straits, 69.

Belknap, Jeremy, American Biography, 94, 188, 291;

on Pilgrim history, 291;

founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 344;

his life, 344;

papers, 344, 368;

History of New Hampshire, 367.

Bell, C. H., on the Wheelwright deed, 366.

Belle isle, 213.

Belleforest, Cosmographie, 36.

Bellingham, Richard, governor of Massachusetts, 318.

Bennet, Richard, 148, 149, 537.

Bergen, 422, 428.

Bergenroth, 57.

Berkeley, John, 144, 145;

in New Jersey, 422;

autog., 422;

sells his right, 430.

Berkeley, Sir William, 147, 537;

autog., 147;

governor of Virginia, 149;

Discourse, 157.

Bermuda, 216;

Gates wrecked at, 134, 135, 156.

Bermuda in Virginia, 138.

Bernard, Recueil de voiages, 188.

Berry, John, 428, 436, 443.

Berry, Leonard, 118.

Bertius, Peter, 46.

Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, 415.

Besse, Joseph, on William Penn, 505;

Sufferings of the People called Quakers, 359, 503.

Beste, George, True Discourse, 36, 102, 204.

Bevan, Sylvanus, 475.

Beverley, Robert, History of Virginia, 164.

Bezar, John, 479.

Bible, authority of the, 227, 229.

Biddle, Craig, 507.

Biddle, Richard, Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, 14, 43.

Biddle, William, 441.

Billings, Hammatt, 293.

Billington Sea, 272.

Binckes, 397.

Birch, Thomas, Lives of Bacon, 121;

General Dictionary, 121.

Biscayan fishermen, 12.

Bishop, George, New England Judged, 359.

Bishop, History of American Manufactures, 166.

Bittle, Edward, 515.

Blackstone, William, autog., 311.

Blackwell, Captain John, 495.

Blaeu map (1685) of New England, 381, 384;

atlas, 381;

globes, 216.

Blagrave, John, Solace for Navigators, 208.

Blanco, Cape, 8, 213.

Bland, Colonel Richard, 158.

Blaxton. See Blackstone.

“Blessing”, ship, 134.

Block, Adrian, 376;

on the Connecticut River, 368.

Block Island, 382.

Blome, Richard, Present State, etc., 384, 449.

Bloody Point (Maine), 367.

Bloody Statute, The, 231.

Blue Hills (Massachusetts), 198, 342.

See Cheviot Hills, Massachusetts Mount.

Blue Laws, 371, 372.

Blundeville, Thomas, Universall Maps, etc., 207;

his Exercises, 207, 208, 217.

Bodega Bay, 74, 75, 80.

Body of Liberties, 314, 350, 371.

Bollen, James, autog., 428.

Bollero’s map, 200.

Bolling, Robert, 141, 162.

Bolling, Thomas, 163.

Bonavista, Cape, 216.

Booth’s Bay, 191.

Bordone, Libro, 194.

Boston, 282, 283;

site of, visited by Smith, 179;

by Dermer, 183;

in Smith’s map, 198;

publication of its Record Commissioners, 343;

Harbor, old planters about, 347;

histories of, 362.

Boterus, Welt-beschreibung, 102.

Bourchier, Sir John, 300.

Bourje, T. P., map of New York, 418.

Bourne, Edward E., 210.

Bourne, William, Regiment of the Sea, 207, 208.

Bouton, Nathaniel, 363, 366;

edits Provincial Papers, 367.

Bowden, Friends in America, 314, 504, 508.

Bowen, C. W., Boundary Disputes of Connecticut, 374.

Bowen, Geography, 185, 188.

Boyle, Robert, 356;

autog., 356.

Bozman, J. L., 560;

History of Maryland, 559.

Bradford, Alden, History of Massachusetts, 344.

Bradford Club, 384.

Bradford, William, notices of him, 289;

Plymouth Plantation, 286, 289;

fac-simile of writing, 289, 292;

will, 289;

Bible, 289;

descendants, 289;

Dialogues, 289;

letter to Winthrop, 289;

his verses, 289;

part author of Mourt’s Relation, 290;

Letter-book, 291;

fac-simile of record of his baptism, 260;

autog., 268, 278;

at Plymouth, 273;

his manuscripts, 283;

life by Cotton Mather, 283.

Bradford, William, printer, 493, 515, 516.

Bradstreet, Simon, autog., 338.

Brain, James, 435.

Brant, Sebastian, Ship of Fools, 199, 201, 202.

Brantly, William T., “The English in Maryland”, 517.

Brasil Island, 101.

Brawnde, Edward, 181.

Brayton, G. A., Defence of Gorton, 354.

Brazil, Prisilia, 201;

Brasiliam, 201.

Breda, Treaty of, 395, 415, 421.

Bremen (Maine), 365.

Brent, Giles, 532.

Brent, Margaret, 459;

autog., 533.

Brereton, John, Brief and True Relation, 187.

Breton, Cape. See Cape Breton.

Brevoort, J. C., his Verrazano, 12;

as an historical scholar, 20, 28, 41, 53;

drawings of old New York, 419, 420.

Brewster, Edward, 137.

Brewster, Jonathan, autog, 349.

Brewster, William, at Scrooby, 258;

teaching Elder, 277;

date of birth, 287;

printer while in Holland, 287;

life by Steele, 285, 287;

autog., 268, 287;

his library, 287;

at Leyden, 263;

in Duxbury, 273;

his sword, 274;

his chair, 278;

Brief Relation of New England, 192.

Brigham, William, on Jones of the “Mayflower”, 288;

edits Plymouth Laws, 292.

Brinley, George, 374;

Catalogue of his Library, 211;

rich in Connecticut history, 375.

Bristol (England), 2, 5.

Bristol (Maine), 365.

Bristol manuscripts, 53.

Brock, Robert A., “Virginia”, 127.

Brockenbrough, W. H., History of Virginia, 165.

Brockholls, Anthony, 398, 401, 402, 404, 435.

Brodhead, J. R., History of New York, 413, 414;

oration to commemorate the English Conquest, 414.

Bronson, Henry, on early government of Connecticut, 375.

Brook, Lord, 326, 331.

Brooks, N. C., 554.

Brown, Alexander, on Virginia history, 162.

Brown, B. F., 560.

Brown, G. W., Civil Liberty in Maryland, 559.

Brown, Henry Armitt, 456.

Brown, John, of Pemaquid, 321.

Brown, John Carter, his library, 380;

rich in Arctic books, 97; autog., 381.

Brown, Nicholas, 381.

Brown, Peter, 273.

Brown University, 381.

Browne, Fox, his English Merchants, 78.

Browne, Robert, and Brownists, 261;

his autog., 261.

Browning, Charles, 559.

Brownists, 219, 248, 261.

Bruce, E. C., 123.

[565]

Brun, Malte, Histoire de la Géographie, 195.

Brunswick (Maine), 365.

Brydges, Sir E., Restituta, 102.

Buck, W. J., Montgomery County, 509;

Bucks County, 510.

Buckley, John, 341.

Budd, Thomas, 441;

Good Order, etc., 450, 499.

Bugg, Francis, Picture of Quakerism, 503.

Bulfinch, Thomas, Oregon and El Dorado, 126.

Bulkley, Gershom, People’s Right to Election, 375.

Bulkley, Peter, autog., 356.

Bull, Henry, Memoirs of Rhode Island, 376.

Bullock, William, Virginia impartially examined, 157.

Burdett, George, 326.

Burk, John, History of Virginia, 165.

Burke, Edmund, European Settlements, 509.

Burke, Bernard, Commoners, 457;

Landed Gentry, 457.

Burleigh, Lord, 86.

Burlington (New Jersey), 432, 441, 456.

Burnap, Life of Leonard Calvert, 560.

Burnet, Gilbert, Reformation, 248.

Burney, Voyages in the South Sea, 78.

Burras, Anne, 132.

Burrough, Edward, 359;

autog., 359.

Burrough, Stephen, 207.

Burton, Robert, English Hero, 83.

Burtsell, R. L., New Jersey colonized by Catholics, 457.

Burwell, Nathaniel, 164.

Butler, B. F. (of New York), on Smith’s History of New York, 412.

Butler’s Hudibras, 237.

Butrigarius, 26.

Butten, William, 284.

Button, Sir Thomas, 93.

Button’s Bay, 96.

Buzzard’s Bay, 278.

Byllynge, Edward, 435, 440;

in New Jersey, 430;

autog., 430;

trustees of, 432;

dies, 442;

difficulties with the Province, 451;

tracts on the difficulty, 451.

Bylot, Robert, 93.

Byrd, Colonel William, 145, 148, 158, 159, 161.

Cabell, N. F., Agriculture in Virginia, 166.

Cabot, Anthony, 18.

Cabot, John, maps now lost, 8, 24, 35, 36;

license (1497-98), 43;

date of his discovery, 44;

career, 1, 52;

family, 3;

first voyage, 2, 8, 32, 33, 51, 216;

second voyage, 3, 8, 57;

first printed notice, 23;

letters patent, 37;

portrait, 58.

Cabot, Sebastian, mappe monde, 6;

described, 20, 217;

fac-simile, 22;

notices of, 24, 34, 43;

rejected by Kohl, 45;

career, 2, 12, 52;

voyage with Pert, 4;

in Spain, 4, 48;

portrait, 5, 31, 47, 58;

not a knight, 32;

earliest notice of, in print, by Peter Martyr, 14, 15;

life of, by Richard Biddle, 14, 43;

voyage of 1516-7, 28;

maps, 39, 41, 44, 45

lives of, 43;

intrigue with Venice, 49;

refuses to return to Spain, 51;

pension, 51, 56;

on ascertaining longitude, 207.

Cabot family, 58.

Cabrillo, 68.

“Cacafuego”, ship, 67.

Cadwalader, John, 464.

Cadwalader, R. M., Law of Ground Rents, 512.

Cæsar, Sir Julius, 47;

autog., 205.

Caines, island, 68.

Calamy’s Nonconformist Memorial, 252.

Campbell, B. U., 554, 561.

Campbell, Charles, History of Virginia, 164.

Campbell, J. W., History of Virginia, 164.

Campbell, Lord Neill, 443.

Campbell’s Lives of the Admirals, 102.

Calendar of State-Papers, 193, 343.

See Sainsbury, Noel.

California, 67;

visited by Portuguese, 68;

gold, 72;

Gulf of, called “Mare Vermeo”, 79.

Callender, John, Historical Discourse, 376.

Callender, Voyages, 79.

Calvert, Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, receives charter of Maryland, 520;

his grants to settlers, 528;

appoints Protestants to office, 533;

deposed by Charles II, 536;

struggles to preserve his province, 537, 539, 540;

succeeds, 541;

his quit-rents, 544;

portrait, 546, 558;

dies, 547;

Papers, 558;

tracts, 554.

Calvert, Charles, third Lord Baltimore, 542, 547;

contest with Penn, 548;

struggles to preserve his province, 552;

autog., 542.

Calvert, George, first Lord Baltimore, 517;

autog., 146, 518;

portrait, 518, 558;

made Baron Baltimore, 519;

a Roman Catholic, 519;

in Newfoundland, 519;

in Virginia, 519;

arms, 520, 558;

dies, 520;

his descendants, 520;

tracts, 553, 554.

Calvert, George, the younger, 524.

Calvert, Leonard, 147, 459, 524, 555;

autog., 524;

dies, 533;

life by Burnap, 560.

Calvert, Philip, 556;

autog., 535.

Calvert, Philip, the younger, 540, 542.

Calvert pedigree, 559.

Cambridge Platform, 314, 334, 354.

Cambridge, Press at, 350.

Camden Hills (Maine), 176, 190, 191.

Canada, 101, 213, 216;

as an island, 203.

Canada Company, 327.

Canaries, islands, as the first meridian, 214.

Candish. See Cavendish.

Cantino’s map, 218.

Cape Ann, 311;

settlement at, 346.

Cape Breton discovered, 2;

landfall of Cabot, 24, 56;

mentioned, 101, 201, 213, 216.

Cape Cod, 381;

visited by Gosnold, 173;

on the old maps, 197;

Pilgrims at, 267;

plan of the harbor, 270.

Cape Fear, 213.

Cape. See the various names of capes.

Captain’s Hill, 272, 273, 284.

Captivities, a hobby of collectors, 361.

Carey’s Swan’s Nest, 93.

Carleill, J., Discourse, 205.

Carpenter, Samuel, 493.

Carr, Sir Robert, 421;

in Maine, 364;

autog., 388, 422.

Cartagena, 63, 80.

Cataya. See Cathay.

Cates, Thomas, Summary, 82.

Carter-Brown Catalogue. See Brown, John Carter.

Carteret, Sir George, in New Jersey, 422;

autog, 423;

receives new grant, 430;

dies, 433.

Carteret, James, 427.

Carteret, Philip, governor, 424, 430;

autog., 424;

hostility to his government, 426;

relations with Andros, 433;

imprisoned, 434.

Cathay, 3, 88, 91.

Cartier’s Voyage, 204.

Cartwright, Colonel George, autog., 388.

Cartwright’s Admonition, 233.

Carver, John, 284;

at Leyden, 263;

governor, 271;

his sword, 274;

dies, 274;

his chair, 278.

Cary, Colonel Archibald, 145.

Casco, 190, 382;

Treaty of, 361.

Cass, Lewis, 515.

Castine (Maine), 190, 365.

See Bagaduce, Pentagöet.

Caulkins, Miss, History of Norwich, 375;

History of New London, 375.

Cavendish, Thomas, 74, 77;

in Virginia, 111;

portrait, 83;

voyages, 84.

Cayley, Arthur, Life of Ralegh, 121.

Cedri, island, 67, 68.

Cecil, Sir Robert, 517;

autog., 206.

Ceely, Christopher, 82.

Chaffin, John, 441.

Challer’s Cape, 90.

Chalmers, George, Political Annals, 159, 340, 414, 559;

Revolt of the American Colonies, 559.

Chamberlain, Joshua, Maine, her Place in History, 190, 210, 211, 366.

Champernoun, 365, 366.

Champernoun, Henry, 105.

Champernoun, Sir Philip, 105.

Champlain on the New England coast, 174;

On the Maine coast, 191, 193.

Champlain, Lake, 327, 381, 382, 383, 384.

Chandler, Peleg W., Criminal Trials, 349.

Charles II. proclaimed in Massachusetts, 316;

dies, 406.

Charles City, 147.

“Charles”, ship, 95.

Charlton Island, 95.

Charter Oak, 375.

See Connecticut.

Chasteaux, 213.

Chauveton, Histoire Nouvelle du Nouveau Monde, 36.

Chaves, Alonzo de, 49.

Cheever, Journal of the Pilgrims, 290.

Chesapeake Bay, 213, 216;

De Laet’s map (1630), 125;

explored by John Smith, 131;

maps of 167, 465, 501, 525;

visited by Spaniards, 167.

See Virginia, maps of.

Chester, Joseph L., 364.

Chester (Pennsylvania), 483.

Cheviot Hills (in Massachusetts), 198, 342.

See Blue Hills.

Chiapanak, 213.

Chicheley, Sir Henry, 151, 152.

Child, Major John, 354.

Child, Dr. Robert, 354;

New England’s Jonas, 354, 355.

Childley, Catharine, Independent Churches, 288.

Chilton, Mary, 272.

China, Gulf of, 67;

routes through the continent to, 183.

Christison, Wenlock, 505; autog., 314.

“Christopher”, ship, 65.

Church, Colonel Benjamin, his sword, 274;

autog., 361;

notes on Philip’s War, etc., 361;

spurious portrait, 361.

Church, Thomas, autog., 361;

Entertaining Passages, 361;

edited by Dr. H. M. Dexter, 361.

Church members. See Freemen.

Churchill, Charles, his likeness passed off for Colonel Church’s, 361.

Churchill’s Voyages, 96.

Churchyard, Thomas, on Frobisher’s Voyage, 36, 204.

Chytræus, Variorum in Europa Itinerum Deliciæ, 9, 21, 45, 46.

Cibola, 80.

Cimaronnes, 65.

Cladera, Investigaciones, 212.

Claesz, Voyages, 79.

Claiborne. See Clayborne.

Clarendon, Lord, 310.

Clarendon Papers, 414.

Clark, Daniel, autog., 374.

Clark, James S., Congregational Churches, 285.

Clark, Dr. John, portrait, 315.

Clark’s Island, 271, 272.

Clarke, Dorus, 372.

Clarke, John (sectary), 220.

Clarke, John, of Rhode Island, 336, 337, 338.

Clarke, Dr. John, 378;

Ill Newes from New England, 358, 378.

Clarke, Sir Richard, 187.

Clarke, R. H., 415, 554, 561.

Clarke, Samuel, Life of Drake, 83.

Clarke, Maritime Discovery, 205.

Clarkson, Thomas, Life of Penn, 505;

Portraiture of Quakerism, 504.

[566]

Claudia, island, 213, 216.

Clayborne, William, 144, 146, 148, 458, 522, 526;

incites the Indians, 527;

war with Baltimore, 527;

regains Kent Island, 532;

his rebellion, 533;

disappears, 542;

commissioner, 537;

in the archives, 556;

Yong’s account of, 558;

defended, 561, 562.

Claypoole, James, 481, 492, 497;

autog., 484;

his letter-book, 497.

Cleeves, George, 322, 323.

Clement, John, History of Fenwicke’s Colony, 456.

Clerk, Robert, 212.

Cluverius, Introductio, etc., 184.

Clyfton, Richard, 259, 262.

Coale, James, autog., 273.

Coale, Josiah, 473, 476, 505.

Coast names in maps, 197.

Cobbett, Thomas, Civil Magistrate’s Power, 378.

Cod, Cape. See Cape Cod.

Coddington, William, 377;

in Rhode Island, 336;

autog., 336;

portrait, 378;

commission as governor revoked, 378;

controversy with Massachusetts, 378;

Demonstration of True Love, 378;

deed to, 379.

Coddington usurpation, 337, 377.

See Rhode Island.

Codrington, Thomas, 437, 443.

Coffin, Joshua, History of Newbury, 315.

Coke, Sir Edward, 300, 307.

Colburn, Jeremiah, Bibliography of Massachusetts, 292, 363.

Colden, Cadwallader, on Smith’s History of New York, 412.

Coleman, James, Pedigree of Penn Family, 507.

Colliber, S., Columna Restrata; or English Sea Affairs, 84, 124.

Collier, J. P., Rarest Books in the English Language, 154.

Collier, William, 266.

Collinson, Richard, Voyages of Frobisher, 99, 102.

Columbia College, 411.

Columbus’ third voyage, 218.

Colve, Anthony, 397.

Commelin, Isaac, Begin en Voortgangh, 79.

Commerce of New England, 316.

Comokee, 216.

Compass (sea), 208.

Conant, Roger, 311.

“Concord”, ship, 172.

Congregationalism a modification of Barrowism, 254;

bibliography of, 246, 285, 293.

Connecticut, first settled, 310;

“Old Patent”, 310;

history of, 330;

first constitution, 330;

secures a charter, 334, 374;

quo warranto against its charter, 335;

charter concealed, 335;

first book printed in, 334;

sources of its history, 368;

origin of name, 368;

Indian names in, 368;

the three towns, 368;

original constitution of them, 368;

Say patent, 369;

notes on the constitutions, 369;

royal letters to the governors, 369;

laws, 334, 371, 374, 375;

capital laws, 371;

disputes with the Dutch, 373;

education in, 373;

charter uniting New Haven, 334, 373;

colonial secretaries, 374;

genealogies, 375;

early constitutions, 375;

quarrels with Rhode Island, 374;

boundary disputes, 374;

Records published, 375;

histories of, 375;

laws under Andros, 375;

local histories, 375;

Gazetteer, 376;

bounds with New York, 391, 398, 399, 405, 414;

claims to land in Pennsylvania, 463.

See New Haven.

Connecticut River explored, 368;

rights of the Dutch to, 369;

English settle on it, 369;

map (1666), 333.

Connecticut Valley Historical Society, 344.

Conner, P. S. P., Sir William Penn, 506.

Conrad, R. T., 513.

Constable’s hook, 422.

Constitution of Government, first written, 330.

Contarini, 49.

Converse, J. H., 533.

Convicts sent to Virginia, 152, 160, 545.

See Virginia.

Coode, John, 548;

his rebellion, 551.

Cooke, John, 283;

autog., 268.

Cooley, W. D., 82.

Cooper, Captain Michael, 181.

Cooper, Thomas, 435.

Coote, C. H., 215.

Cope, Gilbert, 510.

Copiapo, 67.

Copland, Rev. Patrick, 144, 166.

Copley, Sir Lionel, 553.

Copper in New England, 197.

Cornelius, Cape, 489.

Cornell, W. M., History of Pennsylvania, 509.

Cornwall county, Maine, 325.

Cornwallis, Thomas, 524, 528;

autog., 524.

Coronelli, map of New England, 384.

Cortambert, E., 217.

Cortereal, 56, 69;

Terra Cortesia, 201;

Cortereali, 201.

Cortes, Martin, Art of Navigation, 207.

Cortes’ conquest of New Spain, 204.

Cosa, Juan de la, his map, 2, 8, 194, 217;

fac-simile, 8.

Cosmographiæ Introductio, 214.

Cothren, W., Ancient Woodbury, 375.

Cotton, John, writings, 255;

Way of the Churches Cleared, 334, 351;

Moses, his Judicials, 350;

portrait, 351;

his books, 351;

controversy with Roger Williams, 351, 378;

with Hooker, 352;

Bloudy Tenet,351;

Keyes of Heaven, 351;

Milk for Babes, 352;

and the Cambridge Platform, 354;

tracts edited by Guild, 377.

Cotton, John, of Plymouth, autog., 356.

Cotton, Josiah, 291.

Coxe, Brinton, 452.

Coxe, Daniel, 442.

Cozones, island, 79.

Cradock, Mathew, 311;

autog., 311.

Craig, Neville B., 514.

Crandall, John, 378.

Crane Bay, 382.

See Plymouth.

Craney Island, 111.

Crashaw, Ralegh, 132.

Crashaw, William, 136;

sermon, 155.

Cressap, Thomas, 514.

Creuxius, map of New England, 382;

Historia Canadensis, 382.

Crispin, William, 479.

Croatoan, 112.

Croese, Gerard, Historia Quakeriana, 503, 504.

Crosby, Early Coins of America, 543.

Cross-staff, 207, 208.

Croswell, Edwin, 372.

Croswell, Rev. Harry, 372.

Croswell, Sherman, 372.

Croswell, Rev. William, 372.

Crowninshield Catalogue, 206.

Cruden, History of Gravesend, 207.

Cuba, name applied to North America, 201.

Cudworth, James, 359.

Cullick, John, autog., 374.

Culpepper, Lord, 150, 152.

Cumberland Isles, 90, 91.

Cunningham, William, Cosmographicall Glasse, 200.

Curteis, G. H., Bampton Lectures,—Dissent in its Relation to the Church of England, 252, 253.

Cushman, David Q., History of Sheepscot, 365.

Cushman, Mary, 283.

Cushman, Robert, at Leyden, 263;

negotiates in London, 266;

in Plymouth, 275;

his Sermon, 290.

Cushman, Thomas, autog., 271.

Cushman Genealogy, 291.

Cutt, John, 330.

Cuttyhunk, 173, 188.

Cyppo Bay, 67.

Dale, Sir Thomas, 137;

governor of Virginia, 138;

sails for England, 141.

Dalrymple, E. A., 554;

dies, 554;

his library, 554.

Dalrymple, Sir John, 559.

Daly, Charles P., Early History of Cartography, 9, 218.

Damariscotta River, 190.

Damariscove Islands, 191.

Danby, Sir Thomas, 458.

Danckaerts, see Dankers.

Danckers’ Atlas, 417;

map of New York, 417.

Danforth, Thomas, in Maine, 326;

autog., 326.

Dankers, Jasper, Journal, 420.

Dankers’ and Sluyter’s Journal, 505, 558.

Danvers, Sir John, 158.

Dapper, Die unbekante neue Welt, 184.

Dare, Virginia, 114.

Darnall, C., 511.

D’Avezac, 217.

Davenant, Sir William, 536.

Davenport, John, portrait, 332;

autog., 332;

Civil Government in a New Plantation, 371;

memoir by Dexter, 375.

Davies, James, Voyage to Sagadahoc, 192.

Davies, Richard, autog, 484.

Da Vinci, Leonardo, his map, 14, 214.

Davis, G. L. L., Daystar of American Freedom, 560.

Davis, J., First Settlers of Virginia, 162.

Davis, Judge John, 291.

Davis, John, of Sandridge, navigator, 73, 99;

voyages, 89;

autog., 89;

authorities, 99;

his World’s Hydrographical Description, 99, 205;

his maps, 99;

Seaman’s Secrets, 207.

Davis, John, of Limehouse, 99.

Davis, William T., on the Pilgrims, 284, 290.

Davis, W. W. H., Bucks County, 510.

Davis Straits, 89.

Davis Island, 90.

Davison, William, 258.

Day-breaking, The, 355.

Day, Sherman, Historical Collections, 508.

Daye, Stephen, 350.

Dealy, P. F., 415.

Dean, John Ward, Memoir of Nathaniel Ward, 350.

Deane, Charles, his library, passim;

on the Cabots, 1;

on Virginia history, 153-155, 158, 159, 167;

on the Smith-Pocahontas story, 161;

edits Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, 208;

notice of J. G. Kohl, 209;

on the Popham question, 210;

on Smith’s New England Trials, 211;

on John Smith, 212;

interest in Pilgrim History, 259, 260, 284, 285;

edits Plymouth Patent, 275;

edits Bradford’s History, 286;

edits Bradford’s Dialogue, 289;

on Roger Williams, 290;

edits Cushman’s Sermon, 291;

on “New England”, 295;

on the Narragansett Patent, 379;

on J. F. Watson, 509.

De Bry, Voyages, 123, 167.

De Bure globe, 214.

De Costa, B. F., on “Norumbega”, 169;

Northmen in Maine, 185;

Cabo de Baxos, 188, 197;

Footprints of Miles Standish, 290;

edits Voyage to Sagadahoc, 190, 192;

Hudson’s Sailing Directions, 193;

Mount Desert, 194;

Verrazano the Explorer, 199.

Dee, Dr. John, 196;

his map (1580), 196;

diary, 171, 196.

Deerfield, attack on, 384.

[567]

De Forest, J. W., Indians of Connecticut, 368.

De Laet, his map of Virginia, 125;

map of the Chesapeake, 167;

Nieuwe Wereldt, 184;

map of New England, 381.

Delafield, M. L., 412.

Delaware Bay, 137, 423, 465.

Delaware, northern bounds of, 477;

bought by Penn, 480;

confirmed to Penn, 489;

mentioned, 548, 549.

De la Warre, Lord, Relation, 81, 156;

governor of Virginia, 133;

autog., 133;

goes to Virginia, 136;

in Virginia, 142;

portrait, 142;

autog., 156.

“Deliverance”, ship, 136.

Delfthaven, 293;

Pilgrims at, 267.

Demarcation, papal line of, 4.

Denison, Daniel, autog., 338.

Denison, George, autog., 338.

Dennis, Robert, 148.

Dennis, Samuel, 437.

Denonville, 415;

and the Iroquois, 408.

Denton, Daniel, Brief Description of New York, 419.

De Peyster, General J. W., 415.

De Quir, 104.

Derby (Connecticut), 375.

Dermer, Captain, 181-183, 194.

Desolation, land, 91, 100.

De Vries, David Pieterson, 422.

Dexter, F. B., “The Pilgrim Church and Plymouth Colony”, 257;

Life of John Davenport, 375;

on Gotfe and Whalley, 375;

on relations of New Netherland and New England, 375.

Dexter, George, First Voyage of Gilbert, 187.

Dexter, Henry M., Congregationalism, 238, 239, 245, 246, 293;

his historical labors, 246;

his bibliography of Congregationalism, 246;

Visits to Scrooby, 284, 285;

interest in Pilgrim history, 285;

explores their Leyden life, 288;

edits Mourt’s Relation, 288, 290;

edits Church’s Entertaining Passages, 361;

As to Roger Williams, 378;

recovers a tract by Williams, 378.

“Diamond”, ship, 134.

Diarium Europæum, 496.

Digges, Sir Dudley, 94, 103.

Digges, Edward, 149.

Diman J. L., edits Cotton’s Reply to Williams, 378.

Dipping-needle, 207.

“Discovery”, ship, 91-93, 128, 173, 289.

Disraeli, Isaac, Amenities of Literature, 122.

Dissenters, 221;

in Virginia, 148.

See Nonconformists.

Dixon, Jeremiah, autog., 489.

Dixon, William Hepworth, William Penn, 306.

Dixwell, Colonel John, 374.

See Regicides.

“Dominus Vobiscum”, ship, 185.

Doncker, Hendrick, New England in his Paskaert, 382.

Dongan, Colonel Thomas, 439;

governor of New York, 403, 407;

autog., 403;

checks Penn’s attempt to extend bounds of Pennsylvania, 404;

retires, 409;

references, 415.

Doppelmayr, 212.

Dorchester Antiquarian Society, 344.

Dorchester Fishing Company, 311.

Dort, Benjamin, 509.

Dorr, H. C., Planting of Providence, 377.

Doughty executed, 66.

Douglass, William, 346;

Summary of British Settlements, etc., 346.

“Dove”, ship, 524.

Dover (New Hampshire), 327;

Neck, 326;

Hilton patent of, 367.

See Hilton.

Downing, Sir George, 333;

intrigues of, 387, 389;

pamphlets against, 415;

his agency, 415;

Downingiana, 415.

Doyle, J. A., The English in America, 168.

Drake, Francis, 207;

with Hawkins, 63;

called “The Dragon”, 64;

voyages to West Indies, 64;

autog., 65;

sees the Pacific, 65;

voyage round the world, 65;

on northwest coast, 69;

and the Indians, 70;

takes possession of the country, 72;

authorities, 79;

World Encompassed, 74, 79;

Sir Francis Drake Revived, 79, 82;

discovers California coast, 465;

at home, 73;

knighted, 73;

again with Hawkins, 73;

dies, 73;

crowned by the Indians, 80;

Le Voyage de Drack, 79;

Le Voyage Curieux, 79;

Expeditio Francisci Draki, 80;

portrait, 81, 84, 168, 465;

his library, 81;

Cates’s Summary, 82, 123;

expedition with Norris, 82;

his log-book, 82;

Maynarde’s account, 82;

lives of, 83;

bibliography of, 84;

Journalen van drie Voyagien, 84;

latest notices, 84;

at Roanoke Island, 112;

on the New England coast, 188.

Drake, S. G., Researches among the British Archives, 160;

Book of the Indians, 290;

editor of Baylies’ New Plymouth, 291;

accounts of, 360;

reprints tracts on Philip’s War, 360;

Old Indian Chronicle, 360;

Narrative Remarks, 361;

History of King Philip’s War, 361;

edits Increase Mather’s Early History of New England, 361;

edits Hubbard’s Narrative, 361;

edits Church’s Entertaining Passages, 361;

History of Boston, 362;

Memoir of Prince, 346.

Drake’s Bay, 69;

where was it? 74, 80.

Dresser, Matthæus, Historien von China, 123.

Drew, John, 91.

Drogeo, 90, 101.

Drummond, John, 435.

Du Creux. See Creuxius.

Dudley, Joseph, portrait, 320;

autog., 320, 356;

president of the Council, 320, 407.

Dudley, Robert, his maps, 74;

Arcano del Mare, 74, 194, 196, 303;

his Coast of New Albion map, 76, 77;

map of New England, 381.

Dudley, Thomas, 265;

Letter to Countess of Lincoln, 346.

Duke’s Laws, 391, 414, 510, 511.

See York, Duke of.

Dungan, Rev. Thomas, 494.

Dunlap, William. History of New Netherlands and New York, 413.

Dunlop, James, on the Penn-Baltimore controversy, 514.

Duponceau, P. S., 512, 513.

Durfee, Job, 377.

Durrie, D. S., Index to American Genealogies, 289.

Dusdale, Robert, 441.

Dutch, The, on the New England coast, 193;

on the Connecticut, 369;

in Pennsylvania, 494, 515;

embassy to Maryland, 557.

See New Netherland.

Dutch Gap, 138.

Duxbury, map of harbor, 272;

settlements at, 273.

Dwight, Theo., Jr., History of Connecticut, 375.

Dyer, Mary, 505.

Dyre, William, 440.

East India Company, 92, 103.

East Jersey, population of, 436;

laws, 437;

Brief Account of, 438, 449;

Board of Proprietors, 439;

bounds with New York, 442;

Records, 452.

See New Jersey.

Easter Point, 90.

Eastman, S. C., Bibliography of New Hampshire, 368.

Easton, John, Narrative of Philip’s War, 360.

Eaton, Cyrus, History of Thomaston, etc., 190.

Eaton, Francis, autog., 268.

Eaton, Theophilus, 333, 334;

memoir, 371;

code of laws, 371;

New Haven’s Settling in New England, 354, 371.

Ebeling, Professor, Erdbeschreibung von America, 508.

Eden, Richard, 35;

Treatise of the Newe India, 27, 199, 204;

fac-simile of title, 200;

Decades, 14, 29, 30, 35, 47, 200;

acquaintance with Sebastian Cabot, 30;

A Brief Correction, etc., 201;

edits Cortes’ Art of Navigation, 207, 208;

Book concerning Navigation, 207.

Edmundson, William, 494;

Journal, 452, 503.

Education in Connecticut, 373;

in Virginia, early efforts, 144;

in Pennsylvania, 492

Edward VI., autog., 6.

Edwards, Edward, Life of Ralegh, 122.

Egle, W. H., History of Pennsylvania, 508.

Elbridge, 321.

El Dorado, 116, 126.

Eldridge, John, 430.

Elephants, 186.

Eliot, John, the Apostle, 315;

his labors, 355;

autog., 356;

Indian Bible, 356;

letters, 356;

portrait, 356;

Christian Commonwealth, 356;

Tracts, 356;

Briefe Narrative, 356;

and the Bay Psalm-book, 350.

Eliot, John, Jr., 360.

Elizabeth, Queen, autog., 106.

Elizabeth (New Jersey), 424;

history of, 456.

Elizabeth Islands (Tierra del Fuego), 66.

Elizabeth city, 147.

“Elizabeth”, ship, 65, 90, 139, 173.

Elizabethtown, Bill in Chancery, 452;

answers to, 452, 453.

Ellis, Arthur B., History of First Church in Boston, 256, 354.

Ellis, George E., “Religious Element in the Settlement of New England”, 219;

on intruders and dissentients in Massachusetts, 378;

Life of William Penn, 506.

Ellis, Thomas, account of Frobisher’s voyage, 102.

Elton, Romeo, edits Callender’s Discourse, 376;

Life of Roger Williams, 378.

Emley, William, 441.

Emott, James, 437.

Endicott, John, sent to New England, 311;

portrait, 317;

autog., 317;

at Salem, 346.

Endicott’s company at Salem, 242.

Endicott Rock, 329.

England, her title to North America, 1, 39, 40, 41;

laggard in colonization, 184.

English in New York, The, 385.

English Public Record Office, 343.

Engronelant. See Greenland.

Epenow, 180.

Erasmus’s Encomium of Folly, 237.

Eriwomeck, 467.

Esopus, 390

Essex Institute, 344.

Estland, 101.

Estotiland, 91, 101.

Etechemins, 382.

Etting, F.M., 474.

Evangelical and Literary Magazine, 168.

Evans, B., Early English Baptists, 252.

Evans, Charles, 504;

Friends in the Seventeenth Century, 504.

Evelin, Robert, 458;

Directions for Adventurers, 459;

autog., 458.

Evelyn, George, 562;

at Kent Island, 528.

Everett, Edward, on the Pilgrims, 293.

Evertsen, 397.

[568]

Exeter (New Hampshire), 329.

Fabritius, Jacob, 494.

Fairbairn, Henry, defence of Penn against Macaulay, 506.

Fairfield (Connecticut), 333.

Fairman, Thomas, 494.

“Falcon”, ship, 106.

Falkland Islands, 66.

Falkner, David, 501, 502;

Curieuse Nachricht, 502.

Falling Creek, 145;

massacre, 163.

False Cape, 489.

Farmer, John, 367;

edits Belknap’s History, 368.

Farmer and Moore, Collections of New Hampshire, 367.

Farollones, 77.

Farrar, Canon, on Ralegh, 126.

Farrar’s Island, 138.

Farre, Elias, 441.

Farrer, John, Discovery of New Britaine, map in, 464.

See Ferrar.

Fear, Cape. See Cape Fear.

Featherstone, Richard, 131.

Fell, Margaret, 504.

Felt, J. B., 343;

History of Salem, 363;

Customs of New England, 363;

Reply to White, 255;

Ecclesiastical History of New England, 256;

arranged Massachusetts archives, 343.

Fendall, Josias, 540, 541, 542;

autog., 540;

arrested, 548.

Fenwick, George, 332.

Fenwick, John, Proposals, 449;

buys grant in New Jersey, 430;

comes over, 431;

a prisoner to Andros, 431;

released, 432;

representation, 441;

memoir by Johnson, 456;

Historical Account of Salem, 455;

history of his colony by Clement, 456.

Fenwick of Connecticut, 370.

Ferdinando, Simon, 113;

in Norumbega, 171, 186.

Ferrar, Domina Virginia, her map of the Chesapeake, etc., 168.

Ferrar, John, 168.

See Farrer.

Ferryland, 519.

Fessenden, History of Warren, Rhode Island, 290.

Figurative map, 381.

Finæus, Orontius and his map, 10, 11.

“First-comers” to Plymouth, 292.

Fisher, J, F., 513;

on William Penn, 506.

Fisher, Mary, 505;

autog., 314.

Fisheries, grant of, 296;

act against monopolies of, 298, 299, 300, 301, 307.

FitzGeffrey, Life of Drake, 83.

FitzHugh, Colonel William, 161.

Five Nations. See Iroquois.

Fleet, Henry, 526;

his Journal, 561.

Fletcher, Francis, in the World Encompassed, 79;

Drake’s chaplain, 66.

Florida, 25, 37, 42, 201;

early described by the English, 60, 61;

Indians, 78;

account in English, following Ribault, 200.

Florio, John, 204.

Flower, Enoch, 492.

Foley, Henry, Records of the English Jesuits, 457.

Folsom, George, 210;

Catalogue of Documents relating to Maine, 208;

Saco and Biddeford, 364;

Catalogue of Original Documents, 364;

on Samuel Argall, 463.

Forbes, Alexander, his California, 78.

Force, Peter, Historical Tracts, passim.

Ford, Philip, autog., 484;

Vindication of Penn, 498.

Forest, Mrs. Thomas, 132.

Forster. W. E., William Penn and T. B. Macaulay, 506.

Fort Nassau, 422.

Fort Orange, 390.

“Fortune”, ship, 275.

Foster, John, printer, of Boston, 361.

Foulke, W. P., 515.

Fox, George, 442;

letter from Roger Williams, 378;

his ministry, 469;

portrait, 470;

plan of settlement in America, 476;

tracts, 497;

Journal, 503;

Swathmore manuscripts, 504;

in Maryland, 547.

See Quakers.

Fox, Luke, 95;

his Northwest Foxe, 95, 99.

Fox, Richard, 148.

Fox Channel, 94, 95.

Fox Island, 190.

Frame, Richard, Short Description, etc., 500.

Frampton, John, Joyfull Newes, 204, 205;

edits Medina’s Arte de Navegar, 207.

Francisca, 201.

See New France.

Frank, manor of, 497.

Frankfort globe, 214, 215, 217.

Frankfort Land Company, 490, 502;

Curieuse Nachricht, 502.

Franklin, Benjamin, Historical Review, 508.

Frascator, 24, 25, 26.

Free Society of Traders, 482, 497;

receipt and seal of, 498;

their articles, etc., 498.

Freeman, History of Cape Cod, 290.

Freemen to be church members, 313.

French claim to the Iroquois country, 406.

Friends. See Quakers.

Friesland, 100, 101.

Frobisher, Martin, 35, 36;

his voyages, 86;

portrait, 87;

autog., 87;

relics of, 89;

authorities, 99, 102;

used the Zeno map, 100;

Beste’s True Discourse, 102, 204;

De Forbisseri Navigatione, 102;

lives, 102;

his Straits, 86, 91, 98;

misplaced, 100;

map of, 103;

map, 195;

Settle’s account of his Voyage, 203;

Churchyard’s account of his Voyage, 204.

Froude, History of England, 79;

Forgotten Worthies, 99.

Fuller, Samuel, 284;

autog., 268;

cradle, 278.

Fuller, Thomas, Holy and Prophane State, 83;

Worthies of England, 102, 161.

Fundy Bay, visited, 176.

Furlano’s map, 68.

Furman, Gabriel, 420.

Futhey, J. S., and Cope, Gilbert, Chester County, 510.

“Gabriel”, ship, 86.

“Gabryll Royall”, ship, 186.

Gævara, Antonio de, 207.

Gali. See Gaulle.

Galvano, Antonio, Tradado, 32.

Gammelt, William, Memoir of Roger Williams, 378.

Garde, Roger, autog., 364.

Gardiner, Lion, 331, 349;

autog., 348.

Gardiner, R. H., 210, 291.

Gardiner, S. R., Prince Charles, etc., 122, 285, 517;

Personal Government of Charles I., 524.

“Gargarine”, ship, 170.

Garrett, J. W., 558.

Gastaldi, 25.

Gates, Sir Thomas, 133, 159;

autog., 133;

wrecked, 134;

reaches Jamestown, 136;

returns to England, 137;

again comes over, 138.

Gaulle, Francis, 80.

Gay, Sidney Howard, on Pilgrims’ history, 290;

Popular History of the United States, passim.

Genealogies of New England, 363;

of Virginia, 160.

“George”, ship, 142.

George, Staughton, 510.

George’s River, 190, 191.

Gerard, J. W., 420.

Germans in Pennsylvania, 490, 502, 515.

Germantown (Pennsylvania), 491, 501, 515.

Gerritsz, H., on Hudson, 103.

Ghillany, Erdglobus von Behaim, etc., 214;

Martin Behaim, 8, 212.

Giants, 201.

Gibbons, Ambrose, 327, 328.

Gibbons, Edward, 531.

Gibson, William, 435; autog., 484.

“Gift of God”, ship, 176.

Gilbert, Bartholomew, 187.

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 89, 105, 171, 187;

Discourse of Discovery, 35, 200;

his voyage, 39;

his expeditions (1578), 106, 122;

(1583), 107;

at Newfoundland, 108;

autog., 187;

his True Report, 187;

his charts lost, 196;

his map (1576), 203.

Gilbert, Sir John, 118.

Gilbert, Otho, 105.

Gilbert, Raleigh, 176.

Gilbert family, 187.

Gilbert’s Sound, 90.

Gillett, E. H., Civil Liberty in Connecticut, 375.

Girardin, L. H., 165.

Gladstone, W. E., on Maryland toleration, 561, 562.

Globes, early, 212;

paper on, 215.

Glorious Progress of the Gospel, 355.

Goche, Dr. Barnabe, 301, 305.

“Godspeed”, ship, 91, 128.

Godfrey, Edward, 324.

Godfrey, J. E., 291.

Goffe and Whalley, 374, 375.

See Regicides.

Gold, supposed to be found by Frobisher, 87;

supposed to be in New England, 180, 181, 183.

“Golden Hind”, ship, 187.

“Golden Lion”, ship, 539.

Gomara, Historia General de las Indias, 26, 27;

account of Cortes, 204.

Gomez, 16, 195.

Gondomar, Count, 119.

Goodell, A. C., 210.

Good Speed to Virginia, 155.

Gookin, Daniel, Sr., 145, 159.

Gookin, Daniel, Jr., goes to New England, 145.

Goos, Peter, Zee-Atlas, 418.

Gordon, Robert, 435.

Gordon, T. F., History of New Jersey, 455;

History of Pennsylvania, 508.

Gorgeana, 190, 322, 323, 324, 364.

Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 175;

autog., 175, 275, 364;

plans of colonization, 180, 184, 192, 296;

grant to, 192;

Brief Narration, 192, 193, 365;

papers, 192;

his fame, 210;

fort named after him, 210;

patent for New England, 297, 299, 300;

his grants under it, 299;

defends his patent, 307;

attacks the Massachusetts Charter, 318;

his province of New Somerset, 322, 323, 324;

dies, 324, 365;

tomb, 366;

pedigree, 366;

Laconia patent, 327, 328;

his patent on the Maine coast, 341;

grants to, in Maine, 310, 363;

commission as governor of New England, 363;

deed to Edgecomb, 363;

chosen governor, 302, 310.

See New England.

Gorges, Ferdinando, the younger, papers regarding him in the State-Paper Office, 364;

patent, 322;

seeks to recover his patrimony, 324;

sells it to Massachusetts, 325;

America Painted to the Life, 192, 365.

Gorges, Robert, sent to New England, 303;

at Wessagusset, 304, 311.

Gorges, Thomas, 323; autog., 364.

Gorges, William, in Maine, 322.

Gorges and Mason Grant, 191.

Gorges Tracts, 365.

Gorton, Samuel, 336, 337;

autog., 336;

his trouble with Massachusetts, 354;

Simplicitie’s Defence, 354, 378;

edited by Staples, 354;

defence of, by Brayton, 354;

in Rhode Island, 378;

[569]

letter to Morton, 378.

Gosling, John, 441.

Gosnold, Anthony, 132.

Gosnold, Captain Bartholomew, 128;

dies, 129;

on the New England coast, 172;

authorities, 187;

his landfall, 188.

Gottfried’s Voyages, 79;

Neue Welt, 167.

Gough, History of the Quakers, 504.

Gould, E. R. L., 516.

Gowans, William, 420.

Graeff, A. op den, 491.

Grahame, Colonial History of United States, 378, 509.

Grande, Rio, 80.

Granganimeo, 109.

Granite Monthly, 368.

Grantham, Sir Thomas, his Historical Account of some Memorable Actions, 151, 164.

Grants from the English Crown, 153.

Gray, Francis C., 350.

“Great Galley”, ship, 186.

Green, Samuel, printer, 351.

Green, S. A., Bibliography of Massachusetts Historical Society, 343.

Greene, G. W., Short History of Rhode Island, 335, 376.

Greene, Thomas, 533; autog., 533.

Greenhow, Oregon and California, 78.

Greenland, 91, 100, 101;

earliest map of, 101;

Fox’s map, 98;

Gronlandia, 203.

Greenleaf, Jonathan, Ecclesiastical History of Maine, 365.

Grenville, Sir Richard, 110, 114.

Gresham, Sir Thomas, 86.

Griffin, Press in Maine, 209.

Griffith, T. W., Early History of Maryland, 561;

Annals of Baltimore, 561.

“Griffith”, ship, 431.

Grigsby, H. B., 158, 163.

Griswold, A. W., Catalogue of Library, 211.

Grocland, 90, 101.

Grolandia. See Grocland.

Gronland. See Greenland.

Groom, Samuel, 435, 436, 440.

Grynæus, Novus Orbis, 10, 199.

Gualter, Rodolph, 248.

Guamas, R. das, 197.

Guatulco, 68.

Guiana, voyage to, 105;

empire of, 117;

Ralegh in, 124;

Ralegh’s account, 124, 126;

Newes of Sir Walter Rawleigh, 126.

Guild, R. A., edits Cotton Tracts, 377.

Guilford (Connecticut), 333.

Guinea, 200; coast, 60.

Gulf Stream, Dr. Kohl on, 209.

Gurnet, 272.

Guy, Richard, 441.

Hacket, Thomas, 200;

his version of Thevet, 32.

Haies, Edward, 187.

Haige, William, 479, 511.

Hakluyt, Richard, 123, 204, 205;

autog., 204;

depreciated by Biddle, 29, 39;

connection with colonization, 189;

his life, 189;

Divers Voyages, 37, 189, 204, 205;

Principal Navigations, 41, 44, 46, 97, 185, 189, 205;

Virginia Richly Valued, 189;

Westerne Planting, 40, 108, 189, 208;

map (1587), 196;

encourages public lectures on navigation, 207.

Hale, Edward E., “Hawkins and Drake”, 59.

Hale, Nathan, 515;

edits Prince’s Annals, 346.

Half-way Covenant, 334;

literature of, 359.

Hall, Christopher, 102.

Hall, James, in the Arctic seas, 92.

Hallam, Henry, Constitutional History of England, 250.

Hamilton, Andrew, 443.

Hamilton, Duke of, 370;

claim to Connecticut, 335, 374;

autog., 275.

Hammond, John, Hammond vs. Heamans, 554;

Leah and Rachel, 166, 555.

Hamor, Ralph, 139, 141, 146;

True Discourse, 81, 157.

Hampton (New Hampshire), 329.

Hanam, Thomas, 175.

Hanbury, Historical Memorials, 288.

Hanson, George A., Old Kent, 561.

Hariot, Thomas, 111, 113, 123;

his Virginia, 81, 123, 205;

on rhumbs, 208.

Harlow on the Maine coast, 178;

captures an Indian, 180.

Harris, John, Map of Pennsylvania, 491, 516.

Harris, J. Morrison, 122.

Harris’s Voyages, 79.

Harrison, George L., Remains of William Penn, 475.

Harrison, S. A., Wenlock Christison, 505, 555.

Harrisse, Henry, Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, 9;

Bibliotheca Barlowiana, 159;

Jean et Sebastian Cabot, 218.

Hart, Thomas, 435.

Hartford (Connecticut), 330.

Hartop, 64.

Hartshorne, Hugh, 435.

Hartshorne, Richard, 437.

Harvard College founded, 314.

Harvey, Sir John, 140, 146;

autog., 156.

Hasty-pudding, 62.

Hatch, Edwin, Organization of the Early Christian Churches, 254.

Hatfield, E. F., History of Elizabeth, New Jersey, 456.

Hatfield, attack on, 384.

Hatherly, Timothy, 266.

Hatorask, 112.

Hatteras Indians, 116.

Hatteras, Cape, 213, 216, 465.

See Hatorask.

Haven, S. F., on the Popham Question, 210;

History of the Grants, 209, 302, 340.

Hawkes, Ecclesiastical History of the United States, 166.

Hawkins, John, voyages, 60;

autog., 61;

portrait, 61;

his coat armor, 63;

defeated by Spaniards, 64;

authorities, 78;

his Voyages to Guynea, 78;

lands sailors at Gulf of Mexico, 170;

again with Drake, 73;

dies, 73.

Hawkins, Richard, his Voyage to the South Sea, 78;

on the New England coast, 181, 182, 194.

Hawkins, William, voyages, 59;

authorities, 78.

Hawkins Voyages, 79.

Hawks, Francis L., 533;

History of North Carolina, 124.

Hawley, Jerome, 524, 528.

Haynes, John, governor, 331;

autog., 331;

alleged portrait, 331.

Hazard, Ebenezer, Historical Collections, 153, 283.

Hazard, Samuel, Annals of Pennsylvania, 510;

Pennsylvania Archives, 510;

Register of Pennsylvania, 510.

Hazard, Willis P., Annals of Philadelphia, 509.

Hazlett, W. C., Bibliographical Collections and Notes, 204.

Heamann, Roger, 539, 554.

Heath, Sir Robert, 561.

Heckewelder, John, Indians in Pennsylvania, 515.

“Helen”, ship, 90.

Hellowes, Edward, Invention of Navigation, 207.

Hemans, Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, 294.

Hendricks, Gerhard, 491.

Hening, Statutes at large, 164.

Henlopen, Cape, 489.

Hinman, R. R., Royal Letters to the Governors of Connecticut, 369;

edits New Haven Laws, 371.

Henri II. (Dauphin), map, 195, 217.

Henrico, 138; college at, 141, 144.

Henry VII., his sign-manual, 1.

Henry VIII., autog., 4.

Henry, M. S., 162.

Henry, William Wirt, “Sir Walter Ralegh”, etc., 105;

on the Pocahontas story, 162;

champions Smith, 162.

“Henry and Francis”, ship, 438.

Herman, Augustine, 466, 549.

Hermosa Bay, 80.

Herrera, Historia General, 47;

Description, etc., 185.

Hersent, Samuel, 488.

Heylin, Peter, Cosmographie, 466.

Heywood, John, 435.

Hicks, Elias, 504.

Higginson, Francis, at Salem, 346;

Journal, 346;

New England Plantation, 211, 346.

Hildeburn, C. R., Press in Pennsylvania, 514.

Hildreth, Richard, History of the United States, 562.

Hill, Edward, 147, 149.

Hillard, George S., Life of John Smith, 211;

Memoir of James Savage, 353.

Hilton, Edward, 326.

Hilton, William, 326.

Hilton’s Point, 326, 327.

See Dover.

Hiltons on Dover Neck, accounts of, 366;

their patent, 367.

Hinckley, Thomas, autog., 278, 356.

Hingham Meeting-house, view of, 319.

Hinman, R. R., Early Puritan Settlers in Connecticut, 375.

Hispaniola, 201.

See San Domingo.

Historical Commission (England), reports of, 159.

Historical Magazine, passim.

Historical Memorials relating to Independents, 252.

Hixon, Ellis, 82.

Hoadley, C. J., edits Connecticut and New Haven Records, 375.

Hoboken, 422

Hobson and Harlow, 193, 194.

Hobson on the Maine coast, 178, 180.

Hochelaga, 213, 216.

See Montreal.

Hogenberg, 34.

Holland, Henry, Heroologia, 81.

Holland, English exiles in, 231.

Hollanders, 193.

See Dutch.

Hollandsche Mercurius, 415.

Hollister, G. H., History of Connecticut, 375.

Holme, John, True Relation, etc., 501.

Holme, Thomas, 481;

Map of Philadelphia, 516;

Map of Pennsylvania, 516.

Holmes, Abiel, 187.

Holmes, Obadiah, 378.

Holmes, O. W., 286.

Honda, Rio, 213.

Hondius, Jodocus, 46;

map, 47, 75, 208;

map of California coast, 79, 80;

globe, 216.

Hood, Thomas, on Jacob’s staff, 207;

Mariner’s Guide, 207;

Use of Mathematical Instruments, 208;

his map, 196, 197, 217.

Hooker, Richard, Ecclesiastical Polity, 228, 249;

Walton’s life of him, 249.

Hooker, Thomas, in Connecticut, 330;

autog., 330;

his Survey of Church Discipline, 334, 352;

controverts Cotton, 352.

Hope Sanderson, 90.

Hope’s Check, 93.

“Hopewell”, ship, 347.

Hopkins, Edward, governor, 371;

autog., 374.

Hopkins, Samuel, 429;

Youth of the Old Dominion, 162.

Hopkins, Stephen, on Rhode Island history, 376.

Hopkins, governor of Connecticut, dies, 371.

Hoppin, James M., Old England, 285.

[570]

Hortop, Job, Rare Travailes, 186, 205.

Hotten, Original Lists, etc., 160.

Hough, F. B., on Pemaquid, 365.

Houghton, Lord, 285;

poem on the Pilgrims, 294.

Houses, early, in Pennsylvania, 491.

Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia, 165.

Howgill, Francis, Popish Inquisitions in New England, 358.

Howison, R. R., History of Virginia, 165.

Howland, John, 273;

autog., 268;

his marriage, 284;

family, 284.

Hoyt, A. H., on the laws of New Hampshire, 367.

Hubbard, William, autog., 362;

Troubles with the Indians, 361, 384;

Present State of New England, 361;

History of New England, 291, 362;

map of New England, 384.

Hudson, Henry, voyages, 92, 103;

authorities, 99, 103, 104, 193;

Detectio Freti Hudsoni, 104;

on the New England coast, 178, 193.

Hudson, William, autog., 338.

Hudson Bay, Cabot in, 26, 28, 34;

James’s map of, 96;

Fox’s map, 98.

Hudson River, connects with the St. Lawrence, 465.

Hues, Robert, Tractatus de Globis, 208.

Humboldt, Alexander, Examen Critique, 8, 214.

Hume, David, History of England, attacks Ralegh, 122.

Hunloke, Edward, 442.

Hunnewell, J. F., 155.

Hunt, Robert, 129.

Hunter, Joseph, 284;

on Pilgrim history, 283;

Founders of New Plymouth, 284.

Huston, Charles, Land in Pennsylvania, 512.

Hutchinson, Edward, autog., 338.

Hutchinson, George, 441.

Hutchinson, Thomas, History of Massachusetts Bay, 283, 344;

controversy over his papers, 344;

publications, 344;

Original Papers, 344;

on the Pilgrims, 291.

Huth Catalogue, 82.

Hylacomylus. See Waldseemüller.

Icaria, 101.

Iceland, 101.

Independents, 248.

Indian Bible, Eliot’s, 356;

bibliography of, 356.

Indian corn, 113.

Indian languages, 355.

Indian names in Virginia, 153.

Indian trails, 186.

Indian wars, books on, 361.

Indians, the community-buildings of the southern tribes, 62;

houses on the northwest coast, 69;

in Virginia, 131;

about Plymouth, 290;

conversion of, 315, 355, 393;

Society for Propagating the Gospel among them, 315, 316, 355, 356;

their right to the soil, 341;

in Connecticut, 368;

books on, 368;

in New Jersey, 425;

and the Quakers, 473;

in Pennsylvania, 489, 514, 515;

in Maryland, 526, 527, 531, 555.

See Iroquois, and other names of tribes.

Ingle, Richard, 147, 532, 533.

Ingle’s rebellion, 555.

Ingram, David, 64, 170, 186;

his Relation, 186.

Inter-charter period in Massachusetts, 362.

Interlude of Four Elements, 16, 28.

Inwood, William, 457.

Iron manufactured in Jersey, 448;

in Virginia, 163;

first in America, 144, 145.

Iroquois nations, 393;

wars with the French, 394, 408, 415;

Jesuits among, 400, 406;

friends of the English, 404-406, 408.

See Mohawks.

Jack’s Bay, 74, 75.

Jacob’s staff, 207, 208.

Jamaica, 201.

James I., autog., 127.

James II. proclaimed in Massachusetts, 321;

on the throne, 406.

James, Captain Thomas, 95;

his map, 96;

his Strange and Dangerous Voyage, 96.

James River, 128.

Jameson, J. F., 414.

Jamestown founded, 129;

view of, 130;

early history of, 153.

See Virginia.

Janney, S. M., Religious Society of Friends, 504;

Life of Penn, 505.

Jannson, map of New England, 384.

Japan, 67, 68, 85;

(Zipangri), 201;

(Giapan), 203.

Jasper, John, 473.

Jeffrey, Lord, on William Penn, 505.

Jeffreys, Herbert, 152.

Jenings, Samuel, 440, 451, 488;

governor of West Jersey, 441;

Truth Rescued, 452.

Jenkins, M. C., 561.

Jenness, J. S., Isles of Shoals, 198;

New Hampshire, 366;

Original Documents, 367.

Jerseys, the English in the, 421.

See New Jersey.

Jesuit Relations, 193.

Jesuits in Maryland, 523, 525, 531;

their letters, 553.

“Jesus”, ship, 60.

Jews denied being freemen in Rhode Island, 379.

Jogues, Novum Belgium, 416.

“John and Francis”, ship, 139.

“John Sarah”, ship, 480.

Johnson, Edward, 358;

autog., 358;

Wonder-working Providence, 210, 358, 365.

Johnson, Francis, 220, 261;

autog., 261.

Johnson, George, 220.

Johnson, Isaac, 369.

Johnson, Robert, his New Life of Virginia, 156.

Johnson, R. S., Memoir of Fenwicke, 456.

Johnson, Samuel, Life of Drake, 84.

Johnston, John, History of Bristol, etc., 190, 365.

Johnstone, George, Cecil County, 561.

Johnstone, John, 443, 450.

Jomard, Monuments de la Géographie, 8, 21, 217;

notices of, 217.

“Jonathan”, ship, 326.

Jones, Edmund, 173.

Jones, F., Life of Frobisher, 102.

Jones, H. G., 500, 515, 516.

Jones, Joel, Land-office Titles, 512.

Jones, Samuel, criticises Smith’s History of New York, 412.

Jones, Skelton, 165.

Jones, Captain Thomas, of the “Mayflower”, 269, 271, 288;

his alleged treachery, 289.

Jones, Sir William, 483, 511.

Jones, Present State of Virginia, 164.

Joseph, William, 550.

Josselyn, Henry, 360.

Josselyn, John, 372;

Two Voyages, 360, 384;

New England’s Rarities, 360.

Judæis, Cornelius de, Speculum Orbis Terrarum, 196;

his map (1593), 196.

“Judith”, ship, 63.

Juet, companion of Hudson, 103.

Jury trial, first in Virginia, 146.

Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense, 493.

Kanibas, 382.

Keach, Elias, 494.

Keen, Gregory B., “Note on New Albion”, 457.

Keith, George, 445, 501, 503.

Keith, Sir William, History of Virginia, 165.

Kelpius, 501.

Kemp, Richard, 147.

Kendall, John, 128.

Kennebec River, 190, 382, 383;

Plymouth patent of it, 278, 291, 308, 324;

projected settlement on, 302.

Kennedy, J. P., Life of Lord Baltimore, 561.

Kennett, White, Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordia, 348.

Kent Island, 522, 526, 527, 528, 532, 533, 538, 542, 562.

“Kent”, ship, 432.

Kerr, Voyages, 84.

Kest, Robinson, Prediker, 286.

Keymis, Lawrence, 118, 120;

his account of Ralegh’s voyage, 124.

Kidder, Frederic, 123;

on the Popham Question, 210.

King’s Province (Rhode Island), 339.

“Kingfisher”, frigate, 321.

Kingsland, Isaac, 437, 443.

Kingsley, Charles, on Ralegh, 126;

Westward Ho!, 78.

Kingsley, J. L., Historical Discourse, 371.

Kingston (New York), 390.

Knight, John, 92.

Knowles, J. D., Life of Roger Williams, 378.

Kohl, J. G., his career and likeness, 209;

his Discovery of Maine, or Documentary History of Maine, 8, 12, 208, 209, 218;

his Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von America, 16;

his cartographical labors, 209;

his maps in the State Department at Washington, 209;

in the American Antiquarian Society, 209;

on the name of Rhode Island, 376;

Maps in Hakluyt, 80, 124.

Kort en bondigh Verhael, 415.

Kunstmann, F., Entdeckung Amerikas, 8, 82, 217.

Labadists, 505.

Labanoff, Catalogue, 200.

Labrador, 90, 101;

Cabot’s landfall, 34;

as an island, 203.

Laconia, 308;

patent, 340, 367;

Company, 327, 328, 363;

sources of its history, 366, 367.

La Cosa. See Cosa.

Lacour, Louis, 82.

Lafreri, Geografia, 10.

Lake, Sir Thomas, 517.

Lakeman, Sijverts, Treatyse, etc., 208.

Lamb, Joshua, 123.

Lamb, Martha J., History of New York City, 415.

Lambert, E. R., History of New Haven Colony, 375.

Lambrechtsen, Korte Beschryving, 418.

Lancaster Sound, 95.

Lane, Ralph, 187;

in Virginia, 110, 111;

autog., 110;

his narrative, 122;

letters, 123, 124.

Langford, John, Refutation of Babylon’s Fall, 555.

Langren’s globes, 216.

Laon globe (1493), 212.

La Plata River, Cabot at, 4, 48.

Larkham, Thomas, 327.

La Roque, Armorial, 58.

La Salle’s discoveries, 403.

La Tour, 383.

Las Casas, English translation, 205.

Latitude, instruments for taking, 207.

Latrobe, J. H. B., 514.

Laudonuière’s colony, 61.

Lawrence, Sir John, 457.

Lawrie, Gawen, 430, 435, 437, 438, 443;

autog., 430.

Lawton on William Penn, 506.

Lawyer, first, in Massachusetts, 351.

Laydon, John, 132.

Leaming, Aaron, 454.

Leaming and Spicer, Grants, etc., of New Jersey, 454.

Lechford, Thomas, 351;

Plain Dealing, 351;

its manuscript, 351;

fac-simile of, 352;

autog., 351, 353;

note-book, 351.

[571]

Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, 217.

L’Ecuy globe, 214.

Leddra, William, hanged, 359, 505.

Lederer, John, Discoveries, 157.

Lefroy, History of Bermuda, 156.

Legislature, first, in America, 143.

Leicester, Earl of, 64, 74.

Leigh, Sir Thomas, 141.

Leigh, William, 158.

Leisler, Jacob, 411;

autog., 411;

his dwelling, 417.

Lelewel, Géographie du Moyen Âge, 8, 217.

Leng, Robert, 82.

Lenox, Duke of, 297, 301, 341;

autog., 275.

Lenox globe, 14, 212.

Lenox Library, 380.

Leroux, 212.

Lescarbot’s map (1609), 197.

Levett, Christopher, 303, 308, 366.

Levick, J. J., John ap Thomas, etc., 515.

Lewger, John, 528;

autog., 528.

Lewis, Alonzo, History of Lynn, 347.

Lewis, Lawrence, Jr., 488;

Land Titles, 512;

Courts of Pennsylvania, 512

Lewis, William, 531, 555, 556.

Leyden, Pilgrims in, 262;

university, 262, 263;

plan of the town, 263;

Pilgrims leave, 267;

later emigrations from, 276, 277;

H. C. Murphy on the Pilgrims at, 287;

George Sumner on the same, 286.

See Pilgrims.

Libraries in Virginia, 153.

Lightfoot, Bishop, Christian Ministry, 254.

Lil, H. van, on William Penn, 506.

Linn, J. B., 510.

Linschoten, Discours, 205;

portrait, 206.

Lions, 186.

“Little James”, ship, 292.

Little Harbor (New Hampshire), 326.

Livermore, George, 354.

Livingston, William, 411, 453.

Lloyd, Charles, autog., 484.

Lloyd, David, 488.

Lloyd, Lawrence, 466.

Lloyd, Thomas, autog., 494.

Local histories, 363.

Lock, Lars, 494.

Locke, John, and Churchill’s Voyages, 205.

Locke or Lok, Michael, 86;

his map, 39, 205;

fac-simile, 40;

History of West Indies, 47.

Loddington, William, Plantation Work, 496.

Lodge, H. C., Life of George Cabot, 58;

English Colonies, 160;

on the Pocahontas story, 162.

Lodge, Thomas, with Cavendish, 84;

his Margarite of America, 84.

Lodwick, C., 420.

Loe, Thomas, 473, 475.

Log invented, 207.

Logan and Penn correspondence, 506.

Lok. See Locke.

London coast, 90.

London Company, 127.

London Spy, 373.

Longfellow, H. W., Courtship of Miles Standish, 294.

Long Island, 388, 457, 458;

assigned to New York, 391.

Longitude, methods of, 35, 41;

first meridian of, 212, 214.

“Lord Sturton”, ship, 186.

Lorrencourt, 79.

Lotteries, 141; in Virginia, 158.

Lovelace, Francis, governor, 395;

autog., 395;

leaves, 397;

letters, 414.

Lucas, Charters of the Old English Colonies, 153.

Lucas, Nicolas, autog., 430.

Ludlow’s laws (Connecticut), 334.

Ludwell, Thomas, 149.

Lumley’s Inlet, 90.

Lyford, John, 277.

Lygonia, 191, 323, 324.

Lyon, Henry, 437.

Macaulay, T. B., on William Penn, 506;

his views controverted, 506.

Macauley, James, History of New York, 413.

Mace, Captain Samuel, 115.

Mackie, J. M., Life of Samuel Gorton, 378.

Macock, Samuel, 143.

Madison, Isaac, 141, 146.

“Madre de Dios”, ship, 116.

Maffeius, map (1593), 196;

Historiarum Indicarum libri, 196.

Magellan, 66; his straits, 201, 203.

Magin, Histoire Universelle, 184.

Magnetic pole first suggested, 207.

Maine, documentary history, 208;

grants and charters, 209;

province of, 310, 324;

bought by Massachusetts, 320, 324;

her history, 321;

patents, 321;

Massachusetts again in possession, 325;

authorities on the history of, 363;

origin of name, 363;

patent to Gorges, 363;

royal charter, 363;

records, 363, 364;

royal commissioners in, 325, 363;

histories of, 364;

bibliography of, 209, 365;

map of the coast, 190;

English on the coast, 193.

See Gorges, Norumbega, Pemaquid, Popham.

Maine Historical Society, 208;

Collections, 365.

Major, R. H., 191;

on Cabot’s voyage, 45.

Malabar, Cape, 382, 383.

Malectites, 382.

Malignants, 147.

Man, Abraham, 488.

Manchese, 110, 111.

Mangi, sea, 67, 68;

region, 68.

Manning, Captain, 397.

Manoa, 117.

Manomet, 272.

Manor of Frank (Pennsylvania), 482.

Manteo, 110, 111, 114.

Manufactures in Virginia, 166;

in New England, 316.

Marco, Cape, 101.

“Maria”, ship, 95.

Mariana, 367.

“Marigold”, ship, 65, 187.

Mariner’s Mirrour, 207.

Markham, A. H., Voyages of John Davis, 99.

Markham, C. R., 79;

Voyages of Baffin, 99.

Markham, William, 478;

letters, 497.

Maroons, 65.

Marriage, first, in Virginia, 132.

Marshall, O. H., on the charters of New York, 414;

on Denonville’s expedition, 415.

Marsillac, J., Vie de Penn, 506.

Marston, Eastward ho!, 128.

Martha’s Vineyard, 180.

Martin, John, 128, 137, 143, 146.

Martin, J. H., Chester and its Vicinity, 510.

Martin, Gazetteer of Virginia, 165.

Martin Mar-Prelate Tracts, 237, 238.

Martindale, J. C., Byberry and Moreland, 509.

Marvin, W. T. R., edits the New England’s Jonas, 355.

Mary, Queen, autog., 7.

“Mary and John”, ship, 176.

“Mary of Guilford”, ship, 170, 185, 186.

Maryland, history of, 517;

charter, 517;

name of, 520;

bounds, 520;

powers of the Proprietors, 520, 521;

rights of the settlers, 522;

controversy with Virginia, 522, 528;

Jesuit missions, 523, 554;

the charter’s significance of toleration, 523, 530, 562;

map of, 465, 525;

colonists arrive, 526;

early assemblies, 527, 528, 530, 531;

struggle of colonists with the Proprietor, 529;

Ingle’s usurpation, 532;

overthrown, 532;

Toleration Act, 534, 541, 555, 560;

passed by Catholics, 534;

indorsement of, 535;

Puritan settlers, 535;

two houses of the Assembly formed, 536;

commissioners’ demands, 537;

second conquest, 538;

victory of the Puritans of Providence, 539;

the Proprietor reinstated, 541;

population, 543;

coinage, 543;

boundary disputes with Pennsylvania, 478, 488, 489, 548;

writ of quo warranto against the charter, 550;

Coode’s “Association”, 551;

proprietary government ends, 552;

a royal province, 553;

sources of its history, 553;

Relation (of 1634), 553;

(of 1635), 553;

letters of Jesuit missionaries, 553;

map, 553;

boundary disputes with Virginia, 554;

battle of Providence, authorities on, 554;

archives of the State, 555-557;

laws, 529, 556, 557, 562;

calendar of State papers, 556;

loss of records, 557;

documents in State-Paper Office in London, 557;

index to them, 557;

other manuscript sources, 557;

histories, 559;

seal of the colony, 559;

proportion of Catholics, 560;

the question of toleration discussed, 561;

source of charter, 561;

bibliography of, 561;

local histories, 561.

See Calvert, Kent Island, etc.

Maryland Historical Society, 562; publications, 562.

Mason, Charles, autog., 489.

Mason, Captain John, of New Hampshire, on the Maine coast, 193;

his will, 367;

grant of Laconia, 308, 327, 328;

vice-president of Council for New England, 309;

grant of New Hampshire, 310, 367;

his grants, 329;

autog., 364;

dies, 328;

memoir by C. W. Tuttle, 364.

Mason, John, of Connecticut, in Pequot war, 348;

autog., 348;

his narrative, 349.

Mason, Robert Tufton, 329, 367.

Mason and Dixon’s line, 489, 514, 515.

Massa, 104.

Massachusetts, 310;

early meant Boston Harbor, 179, 183;

patent, 309, 310, 342;

charter, 311, 342, 343;

government of, 312;

objects of the founders, 312;

charter attacked, 313;

charter concealed, 318;

her relations with the other colonies, 316;

buys the patent of Maine, 320, 364;

writ of quo warranto against the charter, 321;

origin of name of, 342;

authorities for its history, 342;

government transferred to the soil, 343;

archives of, 343;

records printed, 343, 359;

manuscripts elsewhere, 343;

histories of, 344;

laws of, 314, 349-351, 373;

struggle to maintain its charter, 362;

authorities on the struggle, 362;

bibliography of, 363;

claims westward to the Pacific, 396;

claim to lands west of the Hudson, 405.

See New England.

Massachusetts Company, 342, 343.

Massachusetts Historical Society, archives of, 343;

publications, 343;

Collections, 343;

Proceedings, 343.

Massachusetts Mount, 342.

See Blue Hills.

Massachusetts River, 342.

Masson, Life of Milton, 245.

Massonia, 367.

Massasoit, 274, 282;

his family, 290.

Mataoka. See Pocahontas.

Mather, Cotton, autog., 319;

his library, 345;

Ecclesiastical History of New England, or Magnalia, 240, 283, 345;

portrait, 345;

Diary, 345;

Parentator, 345;

on the Wheelwright deed, 367;

map of New England, 345, 384;

forged letter of, 502.

Mather, Increase, Relation of the Troubles, 340, 361;

Brief History of the War, 361.

Mather, Richard, 255, 350.

Mather Papers, 374.

Matowack, 388.

Matthews, Samuel, 149.

[572]

Mattson, Margaret, 488.

Maverick, Samuel, 360;

autog., 311, 388;

controversy with Massachusetts, 354.

Mavooshen, 363.

Maxwell’s Virginia Historical Register, 168.

May, Dorothy, autog., 268.

May’s Arctic expedition, 104.

Mayer, Brantz, 533, 559, 562;

Calvert and Penn, 507.

Mayer, Lewis, 557, 562.

“Mayflower”, ship, 267;

passengers on, 267, 292;

their autographs, 268;

last survivor, 271;

passengers, origin of, 284;

her history, 290.

See Pilgrims, Jones.

Maynarde, Thomas, 82.

McCall, Peter, 512.

McCamant, Thomas, 510.

McCormick, S. J., 372.

McDonald, Colonel A. W., his report on Virginia bounds, 159.

McMahon, J. V. L., History of Maryland, 559.

McSherry, James, History of Maryland, 560.

McSherry, Richard, 560;

Essays and Lectures, 560.

Meade, Old Churches and Families of Virginia, 160.

Medina, Arte de Navegar, 207.

Meeting-houses, old, in New England, 319.

Megiser, Septentrio novantiquus, 104.

Melton, Edward, Zee- en Landreizen, 419.

Mendocino, Cape, 74-76, 80.

Menzies Catalogue, passim.

Mennonites, 251, 479, 490.

Mercator, Gerard, his engraved gores of a globe, 214;

Hondy’s edition, 167, 381;

his projection improved by Wright, 208.

Merchant adventurers, 266.

Merlan, J. E. V., 491.

“Mermaid”, ship, 89.

Merrill, James C., 353.

Merry Mount, 278.

Metacomet, 282.

Meta Incognita, 86, 89, 91.

Meusel, Bibliotheca Historica, 124.

Mew, Richard, 435.

Mexico, press in, 350.

Mey, Cornelius Jacobsen, 422.

Miantonomo, 368.

“Michael”, ship, 86.

Michener, Ezra, Early Quakerism, 505.

Mickle, Isaac, Old Gloucester, 456.

Middletown (New Jersey), 424, 427.

Milford (Connecticut), 333.

Millard, F. J., 104.

Millenary petition, 239.

Miller, J., Description of New York, 420.

Millet, Father, his Relation, 415.

“Minion”, ship, 64.

Minot, G. R., History of Massachusetts, 344.

Mint in Boston, 316;

illegal, 320;

in Maryland, 543;

in New Jersey, 447.

Mitchell, Jonathan, 360.

M’Kinney and Hall, Indian Tribes, 163.

Mohawks, 394, 396;

friendship with, 400;

French expeditions against, 415.

See Iroquois.

Mohegan case, 349.

Molineaux, Emeric, map, 44, 46, 77, 91, 99, 197, 216, 217;

of California coast, 80;

his globe, 90, 196, 205, 207, 208, 212, 213.

Moll, Herman, his maps, 345.

Moluccas, 48;

discovered, 68.

Monardes, Joyfull Newes, 204.

Mondidier Catalogue, 348.

Monhegan, 176, 178, 179, 181-183, 190, 191, 321.

Monmouth patent, 426.

Montanus, Arnoldus, De Nieuwe Weereld, 184, 416;

map of New York, 381, 417.

Monterey, 74, 75.

Montreal (Mont Royal), 213.

See Hochelaga.

Moody, Joshua, autog., 319.

“Moonshine”, ship, 89.

Moore, George H., 368;

on Poole’s edition of Johnson’s Wonder-working Providence, 358.

Moore, J. B., 367;

Governors of New England, 289.

Moore, John, 488.

Moorhead, Sarah, portrait of Cotton Mather, 345.

Mooshausic, 377.

Moravians’ (Bethlehem) library, 500.

Morden, Robert, map of New England, 384.

More, Caleb, 360.

More, Nicholas, 482, 486, 488, 494, 497;

autog., 484;

Letter from Dr. More, 500.

Moreland, manor of, 482.

Morris, Caspar, 515.

Morris, J. G., Lord Baltimore, 559;

Bibliography of Maryland, 561.

Morris, Colonel Lewis, 436.

Morrison, Francis, 148, 149, 152.

Morton, Charles, autog., 319.

Morton, George, 290.

Morton, Nathaniel, 283;

New England’s Memorial, 283, 291, 359;

autog., 291.

Morton, Thomas, 278, 309, 322;

New English Canaan, 348;

edited by C. F. Adams, Jr., 348.

Mount Desert, 178, 179, 190, 194, 382, 383.

Mount Wollaston, 311.

Mountfield, D., The Church and Puritans, 253.

Moulton, J. W., New York One Hundred and Seventy Years Ago, 416.

Mourt’s Relation, 288, 289;

its authorship, 290.

Mudie, David, 443.

Mulford, I. S., History of New Jersey, 455.

Muller, Frederick, Catalogue of American Portraits, 416;

Books on America, passim.

Muller, Geschiedenis der noord Compagnie, 98.

Muller, History of Doncaster, 102.

Munsell, Joel, 372.

Munster, or Münster, Sebastian, Cosmographia, 27, 36, 199, 200;

map (1532), 199, 201;

edits Grynæus and Ptolemy, 199;

in English by Eden, 200, 201;

map (1540), 201, 217.

Murphy, H. C., Henry Hudson in Holland, 104;

Verrazzano, 214;

on the Pilgrims in Leyden, 287;

and Milet’s captivity, 415;

edits Danker’s Journal, 420.

Muscongus, 191.

Muscovy Company, 6, 46, 103.

Myritius, Johannes, Opusculum Geographicum, 10.

“Nachen”, ship, 181.

Nancy globe, 214.

Nantasket, 311.

Nantucket, 382.

Napier, Lord Bacon and Ralegh, 126.

Narragansett country, Connecticut’s claim, 335, 339;

settled, 336;

Massachusetts proprietors of, 338;

townships, 361;

histories of, 376;

patent, 379.

See Rhode Island.

Narragansett Club, 377.

Narragansett Historical Register, 381.

Narragansetts, 382.

Naumkeag, 311.

See Salem.

Naunton, Sir Robert, 265.

Navigation, early books on, 206.

Navigation Act, 150, 386, 387, 400, 415, 544.

Nead, B. M., 510.

Neal, Daniel, History of the Puritans, 250;

History of New England, 345;

its map, 345.

Neale, Walter, 327, 328;

autog., 363.

Needle, variation of, 9, 23, 41.

Nehantic country, 371.

Neill, E. D., his Virginia and Virginiola, 154;

Notes on the Virginia Colonial Clergy, 157;

History of the Virginia Company of London, 158, 288, 340;

English Colonization in America, 155, 158, 288, 561;

his notes on Virginia history, 158, 160, 162, 163, 166;

on Sir Edmund Plowden, 457;

on Robert Evelyn, 459;

Francis Howgill, 505;

Light thrown by the Jesuits, etc., 554;

Terra Mariæ, 560;

Lord Baltimore and Toleration, 560;

Founders of Maryland, 560;

Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, 561.

Nelson, Captain, at Jamestown, 131.

Nelson, William, History of Passaic County, 456.

Nelson River, 93.

“Neptune”, ship, 142.

Nevada, 67.

Nevada River, 101.

Nevill, James, 441.

Nevill, Samuel, 454.

New Albion (Drake’s), 80;

under “Caput Draconis”, 69, 72.

New Albion (Plowden’s), 457;

bounds, 458, 463;

medal and ribbon of the Albion knights, 461, 462.

See Plowden.

New Amsterdam surrenders to the English, 389, 421;

first reports of, 414;

burghers take the oath, 414;

early views, 415.

See New York.

New Cæsaria. See Nova Cæsaria.

New England, name first given, 198;

thought to be an island, 197;

Cartography, 194, 381, 382, 383;

Dudley’s map, 303;

Paskaart, 333;

Mather’s map, 345;

Confederation (of 1643), 281, 315, 334, 338, 354;

its records, 373;

religious element in, 219;

sources of her history, 340;

relations with the Dutch, 375;

dominion extends to the Pacific, 409;

Andros seal, 410;

bounds as allowed by the French, 456;

Council for, 295;

their Briefe Relation, 296;

patent, 297;

seal, 341, 342;

Platform, 302;

records, 301, 308, 340;

partition the coast, 305;

grants, 308, 340;

surrenders patent, 309;

authorities on, 340.

New England Almanac, 384.

New England Historic Genealogical Society, 344.

New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 344.

New England Society of New York, 293.

New England’s First Fruits, 355.

New France, 101.

New Haarlem, 390.

New Hampshire, grant of, 310;

history of, 326;

submits to Massachusetts, 327, 329;

name first used, 329, 367;

Provincial Papers, 363, 367;

sources of her history, 366;

Wheelwright deed, 366;

patents, 367;

map (1653), 367;

laws, 367;

histories of, 368;

local histories, 368;

bibliography, 368.

New Hampshire Historical Society Collections, 367.

New Haven, 310, 368;

founded, 332, 371;

united to Connecticut, 334;

fundamental articles in original Constitution, 371;

laws, 371;

Blue Laws, 371;

charter of union with Connecticut, 373;

Records, 371, 375;

histories of, 375;

maritime interests, 375.

See Connecticut.

New Haven Historical Society Papers, 375.

New Interlude, 199.

New Jersey, grants of, 392;

boundary disputes, 406;

named, 422, 423;

Concessions, etc., 423, 425, 426, 427;

government, 423;

earliest Assembly, 425;

[573]

lords proprietors, 428;

laws, 429, 447;

quintipartite deed, 431;

under Andros’ government, 444;

attempt to run the line between East and West Jersey, 445;

Planter’s Speech, etc., 449;

sources of its history, 449;

counties and towns, 446;

churches in, 447;

education in, 447;

coinage in, 447, 448;

early tracts on, 453;

histories of, 453, 455;

Archives, 454;

map by Van der Donck, 455;

efforts to complete its archives, 455;

Chalmers papers on its history, 455;

Testimonys from the Inhabitants, 476.

See East and West Jersey.

New Jersey Historical Society, 454, 455.

New London (Connecticut), 375.

New Netherland, relations with New England, 375;

taken by the English, 385;

capture contemplated by Cromwell, 386;

bounds of, 456.

See Dutch, New York.

New Plymouth, 276.

See Plymouth.

New Scotland, 306.

New Somerset, 322, 363;

records, 363.

New Sweden, 456, 465;

surrenders to the Dutch, 422.

New York (city), 405, 407;

view of the Strand, 417;

Stadthuys, 419, 420;

Water-gate, 420;

first named, 390;

taken by the Dutch, 397, 415, 429;

restored to the English, 398;

government, 414;

early views, 415;

maps, 417, 418;

its history, 415.

See New Amsterdam.

New York (province), described (in 1678), 400;

boundary disputes with Connecticut, 405;

sources of its history, 411;

under English rule, 385;

charter of liberties, 404;

charter of franchises, 405;

annexed to New England under Andros, 409;

histories of, 411;

literature of disputed boundaries, 414;

charters, 414;

seals, 415;

maps, 417;

descriptions, 419.

See New Netherland.

Newark (New Jersey), 425;

history of, 456.

Newbie, Mark, 441, 448.

Newce, Thomas, 144.

Newfoundland, 519.

See Avalon, Baccalaos.

Newichwaneck, 327, 328.

Newport, Captain Christopher, 128, 132, 133, 139;

his discoveries, 154.

Newport (Rhode Island), founded, 336, 338.

Newport-Historical Magazine, 381.

Newport-News, origin of the name, 154.

Nicholas, Thomas, his Pleasant History, 204, 205;

his Peru, 204.

Nicholls, Richard, 389;

killed, 396;

autog., 388. 421.

Nichols, Philip, 83.

Nichols, Dr. William, Doctrine of the Church of England, 248.

Nicholson, Francis, 444.

Nicholson, Joseph, autog., 314.

Niles, T. M., 376

Noble, George, 457.

Noddle’s Island, 311.

Nombre de Dios, 65.

Nonconformists, 219, 223.

See Dissenters, Separatists.

Norman, Robert, Newe Attractive, 207, 208;

Safeguard of Saylers, 207.

Norris, J. S., 555; Early Friends in Maryland, 505.

North, J. W., History of Augusta, 365.

North Carolina, Indians of, 109;

map of, by John White, 124.

Northeast Passage, 6, 30.

“North Star”, ship, 90.

Northwest explorations, 85;

Passage, 203.

See Arctic.

Northwest Territory, Virginia’s claims to, 153.

Norton, Francis, 328.

Norton, John, Discussion of the Suffering of Christ, 357;

autog., 358;

Heart of New England Rent, 358.

Norton, Literary Gazette, 205.

Norumbega, 101, 188;

its English explorers, 169;

bounds, 169;

meaning of the name, 184;

authorities, 184;

varieties of the name, 195, 214.

See Arembec, Maine

Norwich (Connecticut), 375.

Norwood, Colonel Henry, 148.

Norwood, Voyage to Virginia, 157.

Notley, Thomas, 547.

Nova Albion, 42.

See New Albion.

Nova Britannia (Virginia), 155, 156, 199.

Nova Cæsaria, 422.

See New Jersey.

Nova Francia. See New France.

Nova Scotia, 299.

Oakwood Press, 500.

O’Callaghan, E. B., on New York history, 414;

New Netherland, 415;

edits Wooley’s Journal, 420;

his Catalogue, passim.

Ocracoke Inlet, 111.

Ogden, John, 429.

Ogilby, John, America, 167, 184, 360, 416;

map of New York, 417;

map of New England, 381.

Oiseaux, Isle des, 213.

Olaus Magnus, 101.

Old Colony Club, 293.

Old Colony Historical Society, 291, 344.

“Old Dominion”, name of, 153.

Oldham, John, 303.

Oldmixon, John, British Empire in America, 345, 499, 502.

Oldys, William, Life of Bacon, 121;

British Librarian, 205.

Olive, Thomas, 441.

Onderdonk, Henry, Jr., Annals of Hempstead, 505.

Opecancanough, 131.

Orcutt and Beadsley, History of Derby, 375.

Oregon coast, 68.

Orinoco River, 117;

valley, map, 124.

Orleans, Isle of, 213.

Ortelius’s map in Hakluyt, 205;

Theatrum orbis terrarum, 34.

Oswego, 411.

Otten’s map of New York, 417.

Oviedo, Historia de las Indias, 49.

Oxford Tract, 156.

Oxford Voyages, 79.

Pacific, passages to the, 183, 459;

called Mare del Sur, 203.

See South Sea.

Pack, Roger, 457.

Paget, John, Inquiry, etc., 506.

Paine, John, autog., 338.

Palfrey, John G., his interest in Pilgrim history, 284;

History of New England, 293, 344, 375, 376.

Palmer, W. P., 161.

Palmer’s Island, 522, 528.

Pamunkey Indians, 131.

Paper manufacture in Pennsylvania, 493.

Parias, 201, 215.

Parmenius, 171, 187.

Partridge, Ralph, 280.

Paschall, Thomas, 499.

“Pasha”, ship, 65.

Passao, island, 79.

Passe, Simon, 212.

Patterson, James W., 210.

Pastorius, F. D., 491, 515;

Beschreibung, etc., 502.

“Patience”, ship, 136.

Patowomekes, 135.

Patuxet, 273.

Pavonia, 422.

Payne, Elizabethan Seamen, 78, 187.

Peabody, George, 557, 562.

Pearls sought for on the New England coast, 181.

Pearson, Peter, 358;

autog., 314.

Pease, J. C., 376.

Peckard, Peter, Memoir of Nicholas Ferrar, 158.

Peckham, Sir George, 39, 196;

his True Report, 187, 205.

Peirce, E. W., Indian History, etc., 290;

Civil Lists, etc., 293.

Peirce, James, Vindication of the Dissenters, 248.

Peirce, John, 269, 275, 299, 301, 341.

Peirce, William, Almanac, 350.

Pejepscot patent, 324.

Pelham, Peter, 345.

“Pelican”, Drake’s ship, 65;

broken up, 73.

Pemaquid, 190, 191, 193, 365, 382, 400, 407;

Popham at, 176;

map, 177;

settled, 321;

Papers, 365;

books on, 365;

purchased by Duke of York, 325, 388;

grant of, 399.

See Maine.

Pembroke, Earl of, 64, 86.

Pemisapan, 112.

Penhallow, Indian Wars, 349.

Penington, John, on New Albion, 461.

Penn, Granville, Sir William Penn, 506.

Penn, Hannah, 514.

Penn, Richard, 514.

Penn, William, intervenes in New Jersey disputes, 430, 432;

purchases Carteret’s interest in Jersey, 435;

his Letter (printed in 1683), 498, 499;

Further Account, 500;

Sir W. Popple’s Letter to Penn, 502;

alleged plot to capture him, 502;

Brief Account, etc., of the Quakers, 496, 503;

Primitive Christianity Revived, 503;

his Works, 505;

lives of, 505, 506;

connection with Algernon or Henry Sidney, 506;

Papers, 506, 507;

Apology, 506;

correspondence with Logan, 506;

his family, 507;

travels in Holland, 507;

deeds, grants, letters, etc., 507;

his career, 473;

portraits, 474, 475;

autog., 474, 484;

his burial-place, 475;

No Cross, no Crown, 475;

Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, 475;

interest in West Jersey, 476;

petitions for land east of the Delaware, 476;

charter granted, 477

Some Account, etc., 478, 479, 495, 496;

arrives in America, 480, 482;

Letitia Cottage, 483;

at Shackamaxon, 490, 513;

his country-house, 491;

slate-roof house, 492;

Brief Account, 496;

vindicated by Ford, 498;

his letters, 498;

his landing, 512;

treaty with the Indians, 513;

belt of wampum, 513;

Treaty Tree, 513;

and the Indians, 513;

controversy with Baltimore, 514, 548, 549;

letter to Free Society of Traders, 516.

See Pennsylvania.

Penn, Sir William, 506.

Pennsbury manor, 491.

Pennsylvania, origin of name, 477;

founding of, 469;

charter granted, 477;

bounds with Maryland, 404, 473, 488, 513, 514, 548;

country described, 481;

Frame of Government, 497, 511;

its seal and signers, 484;

courts, 487;

population, 491;

Harris’s map, 491;

education, 492;

trade, 492;

press in, 493;

ecclesiastical affairs, 493;

sources of its history, 495;

early tracts on, 495, 496;

Twee Missiven, 499;

Beschreibung der Pensylvanien, 499;

Recüeil de pieces, etc., 499;

Missive van Bom, 500;

Nader Informatie, 500;

Some Letters, 500;

Copia eines Send-Schriebens, 501;

Gabriel Thomas’s map, 501;

Curieuse Nachricht, 502;

histories of, 507;

constitutional history, 510;

local histories, 509;

seal, 511;

documents in State-Paper Office, 510;

Votes of the Assembly, 510;

Colonial Records, 510;

Pennsylvania Archives, 510;

charter and laws, 485, 510, 511, 512;

Certain Conditions, etc., 511;

maps, 516;

purchases from the Indians, 516.

[574]

See Penn, William.

Pennsylvania Historical Society, 516;

Memoirs, 516;

Pennsylvania Magazine of History, 516.

Pennypacker, S. W., 491, 499, 515.

Penobscot River, 190;

the Pilgrims on the, 291.

Pentagöet (Castine), 190, 382, 383.

Pentecost Harbor, 175, 190, 191.

Pepperrell, Sir William, his sword, 274.

Pequods, 382;

war with, 348;

literature of, 348, 349, 371.

Percy, Abraham, 143, 146.

Percy, George, 134, 136;

portrait, 134, 154;

his Observations, 154.

Perfect Description of Virginia, 157.

Perkins, F. B., Check-List of American Local History, 292, 363.

Perle, island, 67.

Pero, Cape, 197.

Peru, 203.

Perry, W. S., The Church in Virginia, 166.

Pert, Sir Thomas, 4, 26, 28, 48.

Perth Amboy, 439, 440, 446;

history of, 455;

Quakers at, 505.

Perth, Earl of, 435;

autog., 439.

Peter Martyr, 10;

his Decades, 15, 200;

quoted, 18, 19, 20, 35;

edited by Hakluyt, 42;

map from, 42;

translation by Locke, 47;

his manuscript, 47.

Peters, Samuel, his false Blue Laws, 372;

General History of Connecticut, 372.

Peterson, Edward, History of Rhode Island, 376.

Petitot, Mémoires, 193.

Pethedam, John, Bibliographical Miscellany, 99.

Philadelphia founded, 481;

laid out, 491;

Holme’s plan, 491;

growth of, 493;

histories of, 509;

map, 516.

“Philip”, ship, 424.

Philip, William, 205.

Philip’s War, 281, 318, 374;

in Rhode Island, 339;

tracts on, 360;

its end, 361.

Phillipps, Sir Thomas, 208;

library at Middlehill, 208;

now at Cheltenham, 208.

“Phœnix”, ship, 131.

Pickering, Charles, 488.

Pierpont, John, Pilgrim Fathers, 294.

Pierse, Thomas, 143.

Pigmies, 101.

Pike, James S., New Puritan, 359.

Pike, Robert, autog., 359.

Pilgrim Society, 293.

Pilgrims of Plymouth, 257;

their relations with the Massachusetts Puritans, 242;

at Leyden, 263;

apply to the Virginia Company, 264, 265;

their declaration in seven articles, 265, 281, 287;

the Wincob patent, 265, 269;

plans changed for New Netherland, 266;

agree with Weston, 266;

leave Leyden, 267;

at Delfthaven, 267;

sail from Southampton, 267;

return to Dartmouth, 267;

sail from Plymouth (Devon), 267;

reach Cape Cod, 267;

the Peirce patent, 269;

seek Hudson River, 269;

their compact, 269, 271;

explorations from Cape Cod, with map, 270;

choose Carver governor, 271;

land at Plymouth, 271;

date of landing, 290;

the spot in dispute, 271, 290;

Samoset visits them, 273;

the “Fortune” arrive, 275;

their new patent, 275;

their common stock, 276;

land allotted, 276;

their governors, 278;

new patent (1641), 279;

relics of, 279;

government of, 280;

poverty of, 281;

the ministry among, 281;

education among, 281;

authorities on their history, 283;

and the Indians, 290;

in Scrooby, authorities on, 285;

in Holland, authorities on, 285, 286;

genealogy of, 292;

monuments to their memory, 293;

their patents, 293;

pictures representing their history, 293;

poems, 294;

landed within the patent of the Council for New England, 302.

See Leyden, Mayflower, Plymouth, Robinson, Scrooby.

Pinkerton, Voyages, 102, 124.

Piscataqua, 326, 327, 367, 382;

patent, 367.

Piscataway (New Jersey), 425.

Pitman, John, 377.

Place, Francis, 474.

Plaia, R. de la, 197.

Plancius, Peter, map, 217.

Plantagenet, Beauchamp, Description of New Albion, 461.

Planter’s Speech, 449, 499.

Plastrier, 178, 193.

“Plough”, ship, 322.

Plough patent, 322, 323.

Plowden, Sir Edmund, his grant of New Albion, 457;

his origin, 457;

his family, 457;

his sons and descendants, 458, 467;

in America, 459, 460;

in Boston, 460;

his will, 464.

See New Albion.

Plowden, Francis, 466.

Plowden, Thomas, 458, 466.

Plumstead, Clement, 435.

Plumstead, Francis, autog., 484.

Plymouth Colony, 257, 382;

character of colonists, 210;

united to Massachusetts Bay, 282;

authorities on its history, 283;

laws, edited by Brigham, 292;

Records printed, 292;

fac-simile of first page, 292;

patent, 310;

has no charter, 341;

sends emigrants to Windsor, on the Connecticut, 368;

grant on the Kennebec, 191.

See Pilgrims.

Plymouth Harbor, map, 272;

visited by Pring, 174, 188;

by Smith, 179;

by Dermer, 183.

Plymouth Rock, 272, 290, 293.

Plymouth, town, palisade of, 276;

fort, 276.

Plymouth Company, 127.

Plymouth County Atlas, 292.

Pocahontas, 135, 157;

in London, 119, 141;

betrayed, 139;

married, 139, 161, 162;

dies, 141, 162;

her descendants, 141, 162;

doubtful story of, 154, 161;

pictures of, 163, 211.

Pocasset (Rhode Island), 336.

Podalida, 101.

Point Comfort, 128.

Pontanus, History of Amsterdam, 103.

Poole, W. F., on the Popham question, 210;

edits Johnson’s Wonder-working Providence, 210, 358.

Poor, John A., 210.

Popellinière, Les trois Mondes, 37.

Popham, Sir Francis, 178.

Popham, George, 176.

Popham, Sir John, 175; autog., 175.

Popham Colony, 177, 190, 295;

authorities, 192, 209;

Popham Memorial, 192, 210, 366;

rival views, 209;

its relation to New England colonization, 210.

Porpoise, Cape, 322.

Port Nelson, 93, 96.

Port St. Julian, 66.

Portland (Maine), founded, 322;

history of, 365.

Portsmouth (New Hampshire), 328;

treaty of, 361.

Portuguese portolano (1514-1520), 56;

discoveries, 56.

Pory, John, 143, 159.

Post service, early, in Pennsylvania, 491.

Potatoes, found in Virginia, 113.

Pott, Dr. John, 144, 146.

Potter, C. E., Military History of New Hampshire, 368.

Potter, E. R., History of Narragansett, 376.

Potter’s American Monthly, 166.

Powell, Nathaniel, 142, 143.

Powhatan River, 128.

Powhatan, Indian king, 131.

Prato, Albert de, 185, 186.

Prémontré globe, 214.

Prence, Thomas, autog., 272.

Presbyterianism in Massachusetts, 354.

Press, early, in Philadelphia, 493;

in Massachusetts, 350, 356.

Pretty, Francis, Famous Voyage of Drake, 79;

in Hakluyt, 79;

with Cavendish, 84.

Price, Benjamin, 436.

Prichard, Edward, autog., 484.

Pricket, Abacuk, with Hudson, 93.

Priest, Degory, 284.

Prince Edward Island, 24.

Prince, John, Worthies of Devon, 121.

Prince, Thomas, on Pilgrim history, 285;

Chronological History, or Annals, 283, 346;

publishes Mason’s Narrative, 349.

See Prence.

Prince Society, 344.

Pring, Martin, on the New England coast, 173, 175;

in Plymouth Harbor, 174, 188;

authorities, 188.

Printer, James, autog., 356.

Printz, Johan, governor of New Sweden, 459.

Proud, Robert, History of Pennsylvania, 454, 508.

Proude, Richard, 207.

Providence (Maryland), 535.

Providence (Rhode Island), founded, 336;

history of, 377;

its libraries, 381.

Providence Gazette, 376.

Providence Plantations, 337, 338.

Pulsifer, David, edits Plymouth Records, 293;

edits the Simple Cobler, 350.

Punchard, George, History of Congregationalism, 285, 288.

Punta de los Reyes, 75, 77.

Purchas, Samuel, his Pilgrimage, 47;

his Pilgrimes, 47, 97.

Purchase, Thomas, in Maine, 324.

Puritans, 219, 223;

their agitation, 232;

satires upon, 237;

become Nonconformists in New England, 242;

distinction between Puritans and Pilgrims, 288.

See Dissenters, Nonconformists, Pilgrims.

Pynchon, William, Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, 357;

Covenant of Nature, 357.

Quakers, printing among, 516;

Barclay’s Inner Life, 251;

in Carolina, 472;

in Connecticut, 373;

in England, 473;

and the Indians, 473;

on Long Island, 505;

in Maryland, 472, 505, 545, 555;

in Massachusetts, 313, 317, 358, 472;

autographs of, 314;

in New England, 504;

in New Jersey, 430, 447, 505;

their legislation, 432;

in New Netherland, 472;

in New York, 505;

in Pennsylvania, 469, 515;

their views, 471;

their meetings, 494;

rise and progress of, 503;

best exposition of their views, 503;

Historia Quakeriana, 503;

books on, 358, 503-505;

Hicksites, 504;

archives of the sect, 504;

Swarthmore manuscripts, 504;

in Plymouth, 280, 281;

in Rhode Island, 378, 472;

in Virginia, 166, 472, 505.

Quarry, Colonel, 501.

Quincy, Josiah, President, controversy with George Bancroft, 378.

Quinnipiack, 310, 332, 368.

Quisan, 68.

Quivira, 67, 68, 76, 77.

Raccolta di Mappamondi, 218.

Race, Cape (Razo), 213;

(Raso), 216.

Raimundus, 54.

Raine, Parish of Blyth, 258, 284.

Ralegh, 105, 188, 193, 213;

autog., 105;

spelling of his name, 105;

sails with Gilbert, 106;

in favor with Elizabeth, 107;

and Spenser, 107;

plans of colonization, 108;

his marriage, 116;

at Trinidad, 117;

arrested, 119;

in the Tower, 119;

wrote his History of the World, 119;

his last voyage, 120;

[575]

burns St. Thomas, 120;

beheaded, 120, 122;

authorities, 121;

Bacon’s book, 121;

lives of him, 121, 122;

his works, 121;

Voyages edited by Schomburgk, 122;

Discoverie of Guiana, etc., 124;

his voyage criticised, 126;

commemorated by a window at St. Margaret’s, 126;

and Gosnold’s voyage, 173.

Ralegh, Mount, 90, 91.

Ramusio, 19, 20, 50;

his Navigationi, etc., 24-26, 184.

Randolph, Edward, 319, 335, 339.

Randolph, Henry, 150.

Randolph, John, 158.

Randolph, Peyton, 158.

Randolph, Richard, 163.

Ratcliffe, John, 128;

Rational Theology, 252.

Raum, J. O., History of New Jersey, 455.

Rawle, William, 467, 468, 512, 515.

Rawliana, 465.

Read, John M., Jr., 492.

Real, Cape, 213.

Receuil d’ Arrests, 104.

Recueil van de Tractaten, 415.

Redemptioners, 545.

Reed, John, Map of Philadelphia, 491, 509.

Reed, W. B., 516.

Reformation in England, 222.

Regicides in Connecticut, 374.

See Goffe and Whalley.

Reichel, W. C., 515.

“Resolution”, ship, 93.

Revell, Thomas, 451.

Reynel’s chart, 12.

Rhode Island, History of, 335;

doctrine of soul-liberty, 336, 337;

Massachusetts seeks to govern, 337;

excluded from the New England Confederacy, 338;

Royal Commissioners in, 339;

education in, 339;

origin of name, 376;

sources of her history, 376;

Gazetteer, 376;

histories of, 376;

Records, 377;

charter got by Williams, 337, 379;

charter from Charles II., 338, 379;

Laws, 337, 379;

excludes Roman Catholics as freemen, 379;

excludes Jews as freemen, 379;

bibliography of, 380.

See Williams, Roger.

Rhode Island Historical Society, Proceedings, 381;

Discourses, 377.

Rhode Island Historical Tracts, 377.

Rhode Island Republican, 376.

Rhumbs, 208.

Ribault, Terra Florida, 33, 200.

Ribero’s map (1529), 16, 24.

Rice, John Holt, 168, 211.

Rich, Obadiah, Catalogues, passim.

Rich, R., Newes from Virginia, 81, 155.

Rich, Robert, Lord, 370.

Richardson, Amos, autog., 338.

Richardson, W., Granger’s Portraits, 163.

Richmond Dispatch, 162.

Richmond, Duchess of, portrait, 211.

Richmond Island, 190, 322.

Rider, S. S., 377.

Ridgeley, David, Annals of Annapolis, 561.

Ridpath, History of the United States, 153.

Rigby, Alexander, 323, 324.

Rigby, Edward, 324.

Rigg, Ambrose, 435.

Riker, History of Harlem, 417.

Rio de la Hacha, 63.

Roanoke, Voyage to, 105;

Island, 110, 111, 123;

bird’s-eye view of, 124;

colony, survivors, 129.

See Virginia.

Robbins, Chandler, The Regicides, 374.

Roberts, Thomas, 327.

Robertson, William, 162.

Robertson, Wyndham, Descendants of Pocahontas, 162.

Robinson, Conway, 154;

Discoveries in the West, 43, 167, 168;

contributions to Virginia history, 158, 159.

Robinson, Edward, Memoir of William Robinson, 286.

Robinson, Rev. John, of Duxbury, 286.

Robinson, John, of Leyden, 231;

autog., 259;

farewell address, 259, 285;

in Amsterdam, 261;

in Leyden, 262, 286;

his house, 262, 288;

his burial-place, 263;

death of, 277, 288;

his relation to the Pilgrims, 285;

life by Kist, 286;

by Ashton, 286;

his family, 286;

H. M. Dexter on, 285;

his influence, 288;

attempts to remove schisms among the Brownists, 288.

See Pilgrims.

Robinson, John, of Maryland, 529.

Robinson, Patrick, 488, 494.

Robinson, William, autog., 314;

hanged, 505.

Rochefort, César de, Description des Antilles, 496;

Recit, etc., 496.

Rocroft, Captain, 182, 194.

Roe, Sir Thomas, 297.

Rogers, Horatio, Libraries of Providence, 381.

Roggeveen, Arent, chart of New York coast, 419;

Brandende Veen, 382, 419;

Burning Fen, 383, 419.

Rolfe, John, 135;

begins tobacco culture, 139;

marries Pocahontas, 139;

secretary, 141;

Relation of Virginia, 157.

Roman Catholics excluded from being freemen in Rhode Island, 379;

in Maryland, 560.

“Rose”, frigate, 321.

Roselli, mappemonde, 217.

Rosier, James, True Relation, 81, 191.

Rosignol, Port, 306.

Ross, A. A., Discourse on History of Rhode Island, 376.

Rotz, John, Idrography, 195.

Rough, John, 239.

Rous, John, autog., 314.

Rowlandson, Mrs., her captivity, 361.

Royal Commissioners, 388;

in Boston, 318, 389.

Royall, W. L., on Virginia colonial money, 166.

Rudyard, George, autog., 484.

Rudyard, Thomas, 435, 436.

Ruggles, George, 159.

Rundall, Thomas, Narratives of Voyages, etc., 98.

Ruscelli, 25.

Russell, Dr. Walter, 131.

Russell, W. S., Guide to Plymouth, 292;

Pilgrim Memorials, 292.

Rut, John, 170, 185, 186.

Rutherford, Samuel, Due Rights, etc., 288.

Rutters, 207.

Ruysch’s Ptolemy map (1508), 9, 217;

fac-simile, 9.

Ryebread, Thomas, 457.

Ryttenhouse, William, 493.

Sabin, Joseph, American Bibliopolist, passim;

Dictionary of Books relating to America, passim;

Menzies’ Catalogue, passim.

Sabino, peninsula, 177, 190, 210.

Sable Island, 216.

Sablons, Cape, 195.

Saco River settlement, 190, 321, 322, 323.

Sadlier Correspondence, 378.

Sagadahock River, 190, 191;

settlement on, 177.

Saguenay River, 101, 213, 383.

Sainsbury, Noël, Calendar of State Papers, 159;

and the English records, 343.

Saint. See St.

Salado River, 77, 197.

Salem (Massachusetts), 311;

history of, 363.

Salem (New Jersey), 431, 455.

Salterne, Robert, 175.

Samoset, 184, 273, 290.

“Samson”, ship, 170, 183, 185, 186.

San Domingo, 82.

See Hispaniola.

San Francisco, 74;

is it Drake’s Bay? 78;

derived from Drake’s name, 84.

San Juan d’Ulua, 63.

San Lorenzo, bay, 80.

San Miguel, 79, 213.

San. See St., Santa.

Sanderson, William, 212, 216.

Sanderson’s tower, 90, 91.

Sandford, William, 436.

Sandys, Sir Edwin, 142, 265, 297, 298;

State of Religion, 259;

arrested, 299.

Sandys, George, 145, 146.

Sandys, Sir Samuel, 259.

Sanson, Nicholas, map of New England, 382;

extract from his map of Canada, 456.

Santa Barbara, 77.

Santa Cruz, 213.

Santa Maria, Cape, 197.

Santa. See San, St.

Santarem’s Atlas, 9, 217;

Essai, 217.

Santiago, 197.

Sanuto Livio, Geographica distincta, 41.

Saquish, 272.

“Sarah”, ship, 139.

Sargeant, Thomas, Land Laws of Pennsylvania, 512.

Sasanoa River, 193.

Savage, James, Genealogical Dictionary of New England, 289;

New England antiquary, 351;

endorsement on Lechford’s book, 353;

memoir by G. S. Hillard, 353;

edits Winthrop’s Journal, 357;

on the Wheelwright deed, 366;

on Pilgrim history, 283.

Savage, Thomas, in Virginia, 131.

Savage Rock, 172, 173.

Savile, Henry, Libell of Spanish Lies, 82.

Say, Lord, 326, 331, 370;

patent to, 369.

Saybrook, 322;

platform, 334.

Schanck, George C., 463.

Scharf, J. T., Chronicles of Baltimore, 561;

History of Maryland, 561.

Schele de Vere, Romance of American History, 162.

Schenectady, 396.

Schenk and Valch, map of New York, 417.

Scrivener, Matthew, 130.

Schomburgk, R. H., edits Ralegh’s Voyage, 122.

Schondia, 18, 101.

Schoner or Schöner, John, globe (1520), 214, 217;

his Terræ descriptio, 214.

Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, 258;

site of its manor-house, 258;

map of vicinity, 259;

visits to, 284, 285;

described, 285.

See Pilgrims.

Scot, George, Model of the Government of East New Jersey, 438, 450, 454.

Scott, Benjamin, on the Pilgrims, 288.

Scull, G. D., Memoir of Captain Evelyn, 459;

The Evelyns in America, 459, 562.

Sea-manuals, 206.

“Sea Venture”, ship, 134.

Selden, John, 299.

Seeskabinet, 8.

Seidensticker, Oswald, 501;

Penn in Holland, 507.

Seller, John, Description of New England, 384;

maps of New England, 384.

Sellman, Edward, account of Frobisher’s voyage, 102.

Separatists, 219, 223.

See Dissenters, Nonconformists.

Settle, Dionysius, account of Frobisher’s voyage, 102, 203.

Seven Cities, 53.

Sewall, R. K., Ancient Dominion of Maine, 185;

on Popham’s town, 210.

Sewel, William, History of the Quakers, 359, 503, 504.

Seymour, Richard, 176.

[576]

Shackamaxon Conference, 490.

Shakespeare’s “new map”, 217.

Shannon, Manual of the City of New York, 414, 415.

Sharswood, George, Common Law of Pennsylvania, 512.

Shawmut, 311.

See Boston.

Shawomet, 336.

Shea, J. G., edits Millet’s Relation, 415;

edits Jogues’ Novum Belgium, 416;

edits Miller’s Description of New York, 420;

edits Alsop’s Maryland, 555.

Sheepscott River, 190;

town, 365.

Sheffield, Lord, autog., 275.

Shepard, Thomas, Clear Sunshine, 355;

Autobiography, 355;

fac-simile of writing, 355.

Sheppard, J. H., 361.

Sherry, W. M., 533.

Ship of the Seventeenth Century, 347.

Shoals, isles of, 327.

Shrewsbury (New Jersey), 424, 427.

Shrigley, Nathaniel, True Relation, 157.

Shurt, Abraham, autog., 321.

Shurtleff, N. B., on the “Mayflower” passengers, 292;

edits Plymouth Records, 293;

edits Massachusetts Records, 343;

death of, 362;

his library, 362;

Description of Boston, 362.

Sibley, J. L., Graduates of Harvard University, 256, 415.

Sidney, Henry, 483.

Sidney, Sir Philip, 86.

Silk-worms in Virginia, 158.

Silva, Mina da, 79.

Sir Thomas Roe’s Welcome, 95.

Skeats, H. S., Free Churches, 251.

Skeyne, John, 442.

Slack, Dr. James, 500.

Slaughter, History of St. Mark’s, Culpepper, etc., 160.

Slave-trade begun by Hawkins, 60;

how conducted, 62, 63;

first public protest against, 491.

Slavery in Virginia, 143, 166;

in Pennsylvania, 515;

in Maryland, 545.

Sloane manuscripts, 557.

Sluyter, Peter, Journal, 420.

Smith, Buckingham, 214;

his Inquiry, 214.

Smith, B. H., 515.

Smith, C. C., “Explorations to the Northwest”, 85.

Smith, Charles, edits laws of Pennsylvania, 512.

Smith, Charles W., Wrightstown, 510.

Smith, George, Delaware County, 509.

Smith, Rev. Henry, 330.

Smith, Captain John, 128;

at Jamestown, 129;

explores the Chesapeake, 131, 132;

his map of Virginia, 132, 167;

elected president at Jamestown, 132;

his services, 135;

his True Relation, or Newes from Virginia, 153;

his Oxford Tract, 156;

Map of Virginia, 156, 211;

account in Fuller’s Worthies, 161;

credibility of the story of his rescue by Pocahontas, 161;

on the New England coast, 179;

his Description of New England, 179, 181, 194, 211;

his Map of New England, 180, 197, 212, 341, 381;

heliotype of, 198;

used by Sanson, 456;

captured by the French, 181;

admiral for life, 182;

Generall Historie, 194, 211;

variety in copies, 163, 211;

his portrait, 198, 211;

autog., 211;

his letter to Bacon, 211;

New England’s Trials, 211, 290;

life, by George S. Hillard, 211;

by W. G. Simms, 212;

by C. D. Warner, 162, 212;

True Travels, 211;

Advertisements for Planters, 147, 212;

his character for truth, 212;

tomb, 212.

See New England, Virginia.

Smith, John Jay, 454;

Memoir of the Penn Family, 507.

Smith, Joseph, Friends’ Books, 359, 504;

Anti-Quakeriana, 359, 504.

Smith, Lloyd P., 516.

Smith, Margaret, autog., 314.

Smith, Ralph, 280.

Smith, Roger, 146.

Smith, Samuel, History of New Jersey, 453, 507;

his manuscripts, 507;

History of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, 507.

Smith, Sir Thomas, 113;

portrait, 94;

treasurer of the Virginia Company, 127.

Smith, Thomas, in Maryland, 529.

Smith, William, 412;

History of New York, 411, 412;

criticised, 412.

Smith, William, Jr., 453.

Smith and Watson, American Historical and Literary Curiosities, 484.

Smith’s Islands, 131.

Smucker, S. W., 371.

Smyth, John, the “Se-Baptist”, 227;

autog., 257;

in Amsterdam, 261.

Snow, C. H., History of Boston, 362.

Somerby, H. G., 208, 364.

Somers, Sir George, 133, 137.

Somers, Matthew, 137.

Somers, Sir Thomas, 136.

Somersetshire (Maine), 191.

Sonmans, Arent, 435.

Soule, George, 284;

autog., 268;

in Duxbury, 273.

Soulé and others, Annals of San Francisco, 78.

South America, earlier known than North, 85.

South Sea, 88.

See Pacific.

Southern Literary Messenger, 164, 168.

Southey, Robert, Life of Ralegh, 122.

Sowle, Andrew, autog., 484.

Spain seizes Hawkins’s ships, 60.

Spaniards on the Chesapeake, 167.

Spanish Main ravaged by Drake, 65, 73.

Sparks, Jared, his library, 211.

Speed, John, Prospect, 384;

map of New England, 384;

Theatre of Great Britain, 467.

“Speedwell”, ship, 173, 267.

Spelman, Henry, 135;

rescued, 137;

his Relation, 155.

Spelman, Sir Henry, 299.

Spicer, Jacob, 454.

Spooner, Z. H., Poems of the Pilgrims, 294.

Springett, Harbt, autog., 484.

Springett, Sir William, 480.

Springfield (Massachusetts), settled, 330.

Squamscott patent, 367.

Squanto, 182, 194, 274.

“Squirrel”, ship, 187.

St. Anthoine Bay and River, 195.

St. Augustine, 80.

St. Brandon, 42.

St. Brandon Island, 101.

St. Christopher, Cape, 195;

Bay, 197.

St. Christoval, 213.

St. Clement’s Island, 525.

St. Inigoe’s manor, 558.

St. Jacques, 82.

St. James Island, 77.

St. Joan Cape, 197.

St. John, Life of Ralegh, 122.

St. John River (New Brunswick), 186.

St. John, 213.

St. John Baptiste Bay, 195, 197.

St. Lawrence Gulf, 101, 213;

explored by Cabot, 55;

River, 213.

St. Mary’s River, 526;

Town, 526;

ruins of, 558.

St. Nicholas, 213.

St. Thomas, island, 79.

St. See San, Santa.

Stacy, Mahlon, 441.

Stacy, Robert, 441.

Stadin River, 213.

Standish, Alexander, autog., 273.

Standish, Miles, at Leyden, 263;

autog., 268;

at Cape Cod, 271;

at Duxbury, 273;

his swords, 274, 278;

origin of, 284;

his will, 284;

monument to his memory, 284;

his faith, 284;

his books, 284;

his descendants, 284;

alleged portrait, 293;

Longfellow’s Courtship of, 294;

Lowell’s Interview, 294;

sent to England, 308.

Stanley, A. P., Christian Institutions, 254.

Stanwood, J. R., 416.

Staples, W. R., Annals of Providence, 377;

edits Rhode Island Laws, 379;

edits Gorton’s Simplicitie’s Defence, 378.

“Star”, ship, 138.

State-Paper Office, 343.

Steel, John, autog., 374.

Steele, Ashbel, Elder Brewster; or, Chief of the Pilgrims, 285, 287.

Steg, Robert, 148.

Stephenson, Call from Death to Life, 358.

Stevens, Henry, rescues White’s drawings, 123;

Historical and Geographical Notes, 8, 167, 218;

Bibliotheca Geographica, 9;

Mondidier Catalogue, 348;

Index to New Jersey Documents, 455;

Index to Maryland Documents, 557;

Historical Collections, passim.

Stevens, J. A., “The English in New York”, 385.

Stevenson, Marmaduke, 505.

Stevin, Simon, De Haven-vinding, 208.

Stiles, Ezra, History of the Judges, 374.

Stiles, H. R., Ancient Windsor, 375.

Stillman, Seeking the Golden Fleece, 78.

Stirling, Earl of, grant to, 310, 388.

Stith, William, History of Virginia, 165.

Stobnicza’s map, 10, 13;

his Introductio in Ptholomei Cosmographiam, 10.

Stockbridge, Henry, 556.

Stone, Frederick D., “The Founding of Pennsylvania”, 469.

Stone, Samuel, 330.

Stone, William, 533;

autog., 534.

Stone, W. L., Uncas and Miantonomo, 368.

Stonyhurst manuscripts, 530.

Stoughton, Israel, autog., 348.

Stoughton, J., Church and State, 252.

Stoughton, John, William Penn, 507.

Stoughton, William, autog., 356.

Stow’s Chronicle or Annals, 37.

Stowe, Survey of London, 211.

Strachey, William, 156;

in Virginia, 137;

autog., 156;

his Lawes Divine, 137, 156;

Historie of Travaile, 156, 191, 192;

Map of Virginia, 167.

Strange News from Virginia, 164.

Stratford (Connecticut), 333.

Stratton, John, 322.

Strawberry Bank, 327-329.

See Portsmouth (N. H.).

Streeter, Sebastian F., 457, 543, 556, 562;

Early History of Maryland, 556;

his manuscripts, 556;

Maryland Two Hundred Years Ago, 560;

his manuscript history of Clayborne, 562;

First Commander of Kent Island, 562;

Fall of the Susquehannocks, 562.

Strong, Leonard, Babylon’s Fall, 555.

Strong, Richard, 172.

Strype, John, his Works, 248.

Studley, Daniel, 220.

Studley, Thomas, 128.

Stuyvesant, Peter, 389, 390.

Sullivan, James, Land Titles in Massachusetts, 341;

History of Maine, 364.

Sumner, George, on the Pilgrims in Leyden, 286.

“Sunshine”, ship, 89.

“Susan Constant”, ship, 128.

Susquehanna Indians, 131, 515, 562;

[577]

lands, 490.

Sutherland, Lord, 514.

Sutliffe, Dean of Exeter, 198.

“Swallow”, ship, 60, 134, 194.

“Swan”, ship, 65.

Swarthmore Hall, 470.

Swedes on the Delaware, 480, 481, 548;

their churches, 493.

Symmes, Benjamin, 147.

Symondes, William, sermon on Virginia, 155.

Symson, Cuthbert, 239.

Synods in New England, 354.

Syon, County Palatine, 457.

Tadenac, Lake, 216.

Taisnierus, Joannes, on navigation, 35, 207.

Talbot, Sir William, 157.

Tanner, Robert, Mirror for Mathematiques, 207.

Tarbox, I. N., on Pilgrim history, 288.

Tatham, John, 451.

Taylor, Christopher, autog., 484.

Tazewell, L. W., 153.

Telner, Jacob, 490.

Terra Mariæ, 520.

See Maryland.

Thacher, Dr., American Medical Biography, 315;

manuscript on the Winslows, 277;

History of the Town of Plymouth, 291.

Thevet, André, 32;

New found Worlde (English translation), 200;

Cosmographie, 184.

Thomas, Gabriel, Description of West New Jersey, 451;

map of Pennsylvania, 501;

Some Account, etc., 501.

Thomas, Isaiah, History of Printing, 351.

Thomas, John, 514.

Thomas, William, 266.

Thomason, George, his collection of tracts, 245.

Thompson, Mrs. A. T., Life of Ralegh, 121.

Thompson, David, 326, 328;

in New Hampshire, 366.

Thompson’s Island, 311.

Thompson, Long Island, 349.

Thomson, C. W., 508.

Thorne, Robert, his map in fac-simile, 17;

described, 18.

Thornton, John, Atlas Maritimus, 384.

Thornton, J. Wingate, First Records of Anglo-American Colonization, 158;

on the Gosnold expedition, 188;

on the Popham question, 210;

and the Bradford manuscript, 286;

Ancient Pemaquid, 365.

Thorpe, George, 144, 145.

Thurloe, State Papers, 555.

Thurston, Thomas, 473.

Tienot, Cape, 213.

Tierra del Fuego, 66.

Tigna River, 67.

Tignes, 79.

Tilley, Edward, 284.

Tinker, Thomas, 284.

Tobacco, 69, 166;

in Florida, 60;

in Virginia, 113, 139, 141, 146, 147, 149, 150;

as currency, 143, 166;

production of, 144;

in Maryland, 543, 544, 558.

Tobàh, 69.

Tockwogh River, 131.

Tontoneac River, 67.

Torres, Relacion, 82.

Town system of New England, 363.

Townley, Richard, 443.

Townsend, Richard, 493.

Trask, Mary, autog., 314.

Trask, W. B., 361.

“Treasurer”, ship, 139, 193.

Triple Alliance, 395, 396.

Trinidad, 117;

Ralegh’s map, 124.

Trinity Harbor, 213.

Trömel, Bibliotheca Americana, 499.

Tross globe (gores), 214.

Trowbridge, J. R., Jr., on New Haven’s maritime interests, 375.

Trumbull, Rev. Benjamin, History of Connecticut, 374.

Trumbull, Governor Jonathan, his papers, 374.

Trumbull, J. H., edits Brinley Catalogue, passim;

edits Lechford, 351;

on the Indian languages, 355;

on Indian names in Connecticut, 368;

on the Constitutions of Connecticut, 369;

True Blue Laws, etc., 372;

edits Connecticut Records, 375;

edits Williams’s Key, 377.

Trusler, John, 457.

Tucker, 322.

Tucker, Daniel, 132.

Tucker, St. George, Hansford, 164.

Tuckerman, Edward, edits Josselyn’s New England Rarities, 360.

Tulloch, John, Leaders of the Reformation, 252;

English Puritanism, 252.

Turner, H. E., on Coddington, 377;

Settlers of Aquedneck, 377.

Turner, Robert, 435, 441, 477.

Tuttle, C. W., 153, 210;

on John Mason, 364;

on Champernoun, 366;

on the Wheelwright deed, 366;

on New Hampshire history, 367.

Twine, John, 143.

Tyler, M. C., History of American Literature, 154, 165.

Tyson, Job R., 508;

Colonial History, etc., 505.

Tytler, P. F., Life of Ralegh, 122;

Historical View, 43.

Uhden, Geschichte des Congregationalisten, 384.

Ulpius globe, 214.

Uncas, 368;

his pedigree, 368;

and Miantinomo, 368.

Underhill, Captain John, 327, 349;

Newes from America, 348.

Upham, Ratio disciplinæ, 359.

Upland, 480, 481, 483.

Upsall, Nicholas, autog., 314.

Utie, Colonel, 548.

Vadianus’ map, 217.

Valentine, David, History of New York City, 417;

Manual of the City of New York, 414, 415.

Van der Aa’s Voyages, 79, 188.

Van Heuvel, El Dorado, 126.

Van Keulen, charts, 419.

Van Loon’s Pascærte, 382;

Zee-Atlas, 382.

Van Meteren, 82.

Varina Neck, 138.

Varkens Kil, 459.

Varlo, Charles, 467;

The Finest Part of America, 467;

Nature Displayed, 468;

Floating Ideas, 468.

Vaughan, R., English Nonconformity, 252.

Vaughan, Sir William, 519.

Vaux, Roberts, on Penn’s treaty, 513.

Vaux, W. S. W., 79.

Veech, James, 515.

Venegas’ California, 75.

Venetian calendars, 51.

Verrazano, 185, 376;

his sea, 183, 218;

influence on Gosnold, 172;

his map, 194.

Vetromile, History of the Abnakis, 184.

Vincent, C., Vie de Penn, 506.

Vincent, Philip, 348;

Late Battell, 348.

Vines, Richard, 182, 303, 322, 323.

Vinton, J. A., on the Wheelwright deed, 366;

Giles Memorial, 365.

Virginia, 127;

(1580), 42;

True Declaration, etc., 81;

Declaration of the State of the Colony, 81;

Good Speed to, 81;

New Life of, 81;

named by Elizabeth, 110, 153;

map of, by White, 124;

map of “Ould Virginia”, 124;

earliest map, 124;

De Laet’s map (1630), 125;

Farrer map, 464, 465;

other maps, 167;

charter of 1609, 133;

first legislature, 143;

constitution (1621), 145;

massacre (1622), 145, 163;

massacre (1644), 147;

under the Commonwealth, 148;

Bacon’s Rebellion, 151;

“convict” emigrants, 152, 160;

Indian names in, 153;

the early patents, 153;

authorities on the history of, 153;

Laws Divine, 156;

bounds of, 159;

Colonial Records, 159;

lists of arrivals, 160;

destruction of archives, 160;

families, 160;

county and parish records preserved, 161;

Calendar of State Papers, 161;

histories of, 164, 165;

boundary disputes, 167;

in America Richly Valued, 168;

disputes with Maryland, 554;

Northern Colony of, 295, 342;

Southern Colony of, 295.

See Jamestown, Roanoke, Smith.

“Virginia”, pinnace, 177.

Virginia Company, 143;

seal, 140, 143;

charter annulled, 146;

records, 158;

silk-worm culture, 158.

Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine, 164.

Virginia Historical Reporter, 160, 162, 168.

Virginia Historical Society, 168.

“Virginia Merchant”, ship, 148.

Virginia’s Cure, 157.

Viscaino’s map, 75.

Visscher, map of New England, 382;

Atlas Minor, 417;

map of New York, 418.

Vitellus, 104.

Vullieum, L., William Penn, 506.

Waddington, John, Track of the Hidden Church, 285, 288;

Congregational History, 285, 288.

Wade, Robert, 494.

Wagenaer, Luke, 207.

Walckenaer’s Catalogue, 8.

Waldo, Richard, 132.

Waldo Patent, 191.

Walford, Thomas, autog., 311.

Waldron, Resolved, 466, 549.

Waldseemüller map (1507-13), 14.

Walker, John, 187;

in Norumbega, 171.

Wallace, J. W., 514, 516;

on William Bradford, 515.

Walsingham, Sir Francis, 86.

Walter, Nehemiah, autog., 319.

Waterhouse, Edward, his Declaration, 163.

Wampanoags, 274.

Wamsutta, 282.

Ward, Edward, Trip to New England, 373.

Ward, Nathaniel, autog., 350;

Body of Liberties, 350;

Simple Cobler, 350.

Ward, Townsend, 492, 509.

Ware, William, Memoir of Nathaniel Bacon, 164.

Warham, Rev. John, 330.

Warne, Thomas, 435.

Warner, Charles D., Study of John Smith, 162.

Warner, C. L., 516.

Warner, Edmond, autog., 430.

Warren, Henry, 365.

Warrosquoyoke, 147.

Warwick, Earl of, 86, 308, 309, 342, 354, 369;

autog., 275;

grants to, 370;

and the Council for New England, 370.

Warwick (Rhode Island), 337.

“Warwick”, ship, 327, 363.

Warwick’s foreland, 90, 91.

Washburn, Emory, Judicial History of Massachusetts, 363.

Washburn, John D., 75.

Watson, J. F., Annals of Philadelphia, 509;

on Penn’s treaty, 513;

Olden Times in New York, 416.

Watson, Thomas, 154.

Wattes, John, 114.

Waugh, Dorothy, autog., 314.

Waymouth, Captain George, 91, 174, 189;

autog., 91;

authorities, 189.

Webb, Maria, The Penns and Peningtons, 507.

[578]

Webster, Daniel, on the Pilgrims, 293.

Webster, Noah, edits Winthrop’s Journal, 357.

Weehawken, 422.

Weems’s Life of Penn, 509.

Weir, R. W., picture of the Pilgrims at Delfthaven, 293.

Weiss, L. H., 502.

“Welcome”, ship, 482.

Welde, Thomas, Short Story, etc., 349, 351;

Bay Psalm Book, 350.

Welles, Thomas, autog., 374.

Wells (Maine), 324.

Welsh Barony (Pennsylvania), 482.

Welsh in Pennsylvania, 482, 515.

Wenman, Sir Ferdinand, 136.

Wessagusset, 304.

West, Benjamin, picture of Penn’s Treaty, 513.

West, Francis, 132, 134, 143, 146;

admiral of New England, 303.

West India Company, 385, 389, 422.

West Jersey, 432;

concessions, etc., 432;

local government, 440;

Records, 452;

Quakers in, 473;

Penn’s interest in, 476;

map of, 501.

See New Jersey.

West, John, 147;

autog., 164.

West, Robert, 435.

West, Thomas, Lord De la Warre, 133.

See De la Warre.

Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 502.

Westcott, Thompson, 509.

Westland, Nathaniel, 451.

Westminster, Treaty of, 398.

Weston, P. C. J., Documents of South Carolina, 186, 558.

Weston, Thomas, 266, 267, 304;

settles at Weymouth, 278, 311.

Westover manuscripts, 159.

Wethersfield (Connecticut), 330.

Weymouth (Massachusetts), 278, 311.

Wharton, Thomas I., 515.

Whiddon, Jacob, 116.

Wheeler, History of North Carolina, 124.

Wheeler, G. A., History of Brunswick, 365;

History of Castine, 365.

Wheelwright, John, memoir of, 366;

at Exeter, 329;

deed of New Hampshire, controversy over, 366, 368.

Whitaker, Alexander, 137, 138, 141;

Good Newes from Virginia, 81, 157.

White, Father Andrew, 554;

Relatio itineris, 553, 554.

White, Christopher, 441.

White, D. A., New England Congregationalism, 255.

White, Henry, on New Haven Colony, 375.

White, John (governor), views in Virginia, 113;

governor, 113;

his drawings engraved by De Bry, 123, 164;

his map of Virginia, 124, 183.

White, Rev. John, 311.

White, John, of Dorchester, Planter’s Plea, 346.

White, John, of Pennsylvania, 488.

White, Peregrine, autog., 268;

his chest, 278.

White, Resolved, autog., 268.

Whitehead, George, 442.

Whitehead, W. A., “The English in East and West Jersey”, 421;

East Jersey under the Proprietary Government, 454;

Documents relating to New Jersey, 454;

Index to Colonial Documents, 455;

History of Perth Amboy, 455.

Whitfield, Rev. Henry, 355;

The Light Appearing, 335;

Strength out of Weakness, 355.

Whiting, John, Truth and Innocency Defended, 359.

Whiting, John, Catalogue of Friends’ Books, 504.

Whitmore, William H., American Genealogist, 292;

Peter Pelham, 345;

edits Andros Tracts, 362;

his chapter on Andros in the Memorial History of Boston, 362.

Whitson Bay, 174.

Whittier, J. G., Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 491.

Wickham, Rev. William, 141, 143.

Wiggin, Thomas, 326.

Wigglesworth, Michael, autog., 319.

Wilberforce, Samuel, Episcopal Church in America, 286.

Wilcox, Thomas, 435.

Wilkinson, William, 128.

Willard, Samuel, autog., 319.

Willes, Richard, 35;

edits Eden’s Peter Martyr as History of Travayle, 204.

Willett, Thomas, autog., 338, 414;

mayor of New York, 414;

his family, 414.

William and Mary College founded, 144, 160.

William of Orange, 396;

invited to England, 410.

Williams, Captain, on the Maine coast, 179.

Williams, Dr. Daniel, his library, 245.

Williams, Edward, Virgo triumphans, 168.

Williams, Francis, 328, 329.

Williams, George W., Negro Race in America, 168.

Williams, John Foster, 190.

Williams, Roger, in his youth, 242;

at Plymouth, 290;

views on civil polity, 290;

settles Rhode Island, 335, 336;

goes to England, 337;

autog., 339;

his Key, 355, 377;

lives of, 378;

deed from the Indians, 379;

letters, 377, 378;

letter to George Fox, 378;

banished from Massachusetts, 378;

Christenings make not Christians, 378;

Charter obtained by, 379.

See Rhode Island.

Williamson, History of North Carolina, 124.

Williamson, W. D., historical labors, 208;

History of Maine, 364.

Willis, William, 209, 210;

History of Portland, 365;

Bibliography of Maine, 365.

Willoughby’s expedition, 30.

Wills, Daniel, 441.

Wilson, John, first minister of Boston, 312;

portrait, 313;

autog., 313.

Wincob, John, 265.

Winder, Samuel, 443.

Windmill, First, in America, 144.

Windsor (Connecticut), 330, 375;

settled, 368.

Wine made early in Florida and Massachusetts, 61.

Winfield, Charles H., History of Hudson County, 456.

Wingfield, Edward Maria, 128;

Discourse, 155.

Wingina, 109, 153.

Winslow, Edward, his chair and table, 278;

part author of Mourt’s Relation, 290;

Good News from New England, 291;

portrait, 277, 293;

at Leyden, 263;

autog., 268, 278;

settles in Marshfield, 273;

his descendants, 277;

accounts of, 277;

Hypocrasie Unmasked; or, Danger of Tolerating Levellers, 285, 354;

founds Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, 315, 355;

New England’s Salamander Discovered, 355.

Winslow, General John, his sword, 274.

Winslow, Josiah, autog., 278;

portrait, 282.

Winsor, Justin, The Bradford Manuscript, 287;

edits Memorial History of Boston, 362.

Winter Harbor, 303.

Winter, John, with Drake, 79.

With, John. See White, John.

Winthrop, John, governor, goes to New England, 311;

death, 316, 357;

and the Short Story, 351;

Journal or History of New England, 255, 357.

Winthrop, John, Jr., governor of Connecticut, 331, 334;

autog., 331;

portrait, 331;

in Connecticut, 369;

charter procured by him, 388.

Winthrop, R. C., on the Pilgrims, 293;

on Sir George Downing, 415.

Wisner, Old South Church in Boston, 359.

Witchcraft trial in Pennsylvania, 488.

Wolcott, Roger, 369;

Poetical Meditations, 369.

Wolfe, John, 208;

editor of Linschoten, 101, 205;

its map, 101.

Wollaston, Captain, 348.

Wolstenholme, Sir John, 94.

Women sent to Virginia, 144, 158.

Wood, Anthony, Athenæ Oxoniensis, 204.

Wood, Leonard, his historical labors, 208;

notices of him, 208.

Wood, William, New England’s Prospect, 347, 348;

map of New England, 381.

Woodbridge (New Jersey), 425.

Woodbury (Connecticut), 375.

Woodstock Letters, 554.

Wooley, Rev. Charles, Journal, 420.

Woollen manufactures, 493.

Woolston, John, 447.

Worcester Society of Antiquity, 344.

Worsley, Sir Boyer, 457.

Worthington, William, 7, 31, 44, 51.

Wotton, Thomas, 128.

Wright, Edward, 207;

The Haven-finding Art, 208;

Certain Errors, 208, 216;

and the Molineaux map, 216.

Wyatt, Sir Francis, 144, 146, 147.

Wyatt, Haut, 144.

Wynne, British Empire in America, 509;

Historical Documents, 162.

Wynne, Peter, 132.

Wynne, Thomas, autog., 486.

Wynne, Thomas H., 159.

Wytfliet, Descript. Ptolemaicæ Augmentum, 184.

Yates, J. V. N., 412.

Yeardley, George, 141, 146;

governor, 142.

Yeardley, Francis, 149.

Yong, Captain Thomas, 458, 558;

autog., 558.

York, Duke of, 310;

patent to, 387, 388;

alienates East Jersey, 403;

grants of New Jersey, 392, 399;

new patent of New York, 399;

becomes James II., 406;

patent (1664), 414, 421, 423;

proposed memorial of, 414;

autog., 421;

grants to Berkeley, etc., 422;

grants to Penn, 480;

Laws, 510, 511.

York (Maine), 326.

Young, Alexander, Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 283, 292;

Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay, 347.

Yucatan, 201.

Zaltieri’s map (1566), 67.

Zarate’s Peru, 204.

Zeno map, 100;

its influence, 100.

Ziegler, James, on Cabot, 18;

as geographer, 19;

Schondia, 101.

Zipangu, 85.

Zürich archives, letters of the exiled Puritans in, 247.

Zürich Letters, 248.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An error in Eden’s translation of a passage in Peter Martyr, written in 1515, makes him a member of the Council of the Indies.

[2] It will be understood that we now regard it as satisfactorily settled that the voyage of discovery took place in 1497, followed by a second voyage in 1498.

I have spoken of the map of the discoveries of the Cabots being made known to rival courts. In a letter dated Dec. 18, 1497, written from London by the Abbé Raimondo, envoy of the Duke of Milan to the Court of Henry VII., recently brought to light, and printed on page 54, the writer, speaking of the return of John Cabot from his voyage of discovery, says: “This Master John has the description of the world in a chart, and also in a solid globe, which he has made, and he shows where he had landed.” Don Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish Minister, also writes to Ferdinand and Isabella, in the following year, July 25, 1498, after the second expedition had sailed: “I have seen the map which the discoverer has made.”

In the year 1500, the Spanish navigator, Juan de la Cosa, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the West in the years 1493-96, compiled a map of the world on which he delineated all he knew of the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries in the New World. He also depicted, undoubtedly from English sources, the northern portion of the east coast of the continent, as is shown by a broad legend or inscription running along the coast: “Mar descubierta por Ingleses.” There was also placed at the eastern cape of the coast: “Cavo de Ynglaterra.” It is the earliest map known on which the western discoveries are depicted. A few copies of the map are supposed to have been made soon after its compilation, one of which hung up in the office of the Spanish Minister of Marine. The map afterwards fell into neglect and was forgotten. In the year 1832 it was found and identified by Humboldt, in the library of his friend the Baron Walckenaer, in Paris. [It is on ox-hide, measuring five feet nine inches by three feet two inches, drawn in colors, and was afterwards bought in 1850 for 4,020 francs (see Walckenaer Catalogue, no. 2,904) by the Queen of Spain, and is now in the Royal Library at Madrid. See Humboldt’s appendix to Ghillany’s Geschichte des Seefahrers Ritter Martin Behaim, and the appendix to Kunstmann’s Entdeckung Amerikas; also Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, 151, 179. This Cosa map is given in part full-size and in part half-size, in Humboldt’s Examen Critique, vol. v., 1839, but not accurately; and again in connection with Humboldt’s essay in Ghillany’s Behaim, Nürnberg, 1853. This essay was also issued at Amsterdam in the Seeskabinet, with the fac-simile of the map. The only full-size fac-simile in colors is in three sheets in Jomard’s Monuments de la Géographie, pl. 16; and there are reductions of the American portion in Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, 1869, pl. 1 (following Jomard’s delineation); in De la Sagra’s Cuba; in Lelewel’s Géog. du Moyen Age, 1852, no. 41. A biographical study of Juan de la Cosa, by Enrique de Leguina, was published at Madrid in 1877. Cosa died while accompanying Ojedo in December, 1509. Peter Martyr, in 1514, gave him a high rank as a cartographer. The American (Asian) part of his map is given in phototype herewith, reduced from Jomard’s fac-simile.—Ed.]

Some have supposed that Cosa drew his whole eastern coast of North America as a separate and independent continent, entirely distinct from Asia, on the authority of the maps of the Cabots on which their discoveries were delineated. Of course, in the absence of the maps or globes of the Cabots, it is impossible for us to tell precisely what was delineated upon them, or how much of Cosa’s coast-line was copied from them; but from whatever source this line was drawn, it must be evident that it was supposed by Cosa to be the eastern coast of Asia. Cosa, so far as is observed from the fac-simile of his map,—which is a map of the world,—drew no east coast of Asia at all, unless this be it. (See Stevens’s Notes as above, pp. 14, 17; Cf. Kohl, pp. 145, 152, 153.)

I have already said that the discoveries of the English on Cosa’s map were noted on the northern portion of the east coast of the continent, and if confined, as they appear to be, to that region, we have no right to assert that the remaining portion of the east coast-line was supplied from the Cabots, but rather that it was taken from well-known existing representations of the east coast of Asia. The map and globe of the Cabots, already referred to, had laid down upon them the results of their experience on their first voyage, the voyage of discovery, in 1497. Of the results of the voyage of 1498, with which Sebastian Cabot is now more particularly associated, we know but little. Accounts narrated by others, but originally proceeding many years after the event from Sebastian Cabot himself, of a voyage to the new-found lands, have been supposed by modern writers to refer more particularly to this voyage; and these accounts, as we shall see further on, speak of a run down the coast to a considerable extent. That the Cabots, or Sebastian Cabot, should have prepared maps of the second voyage at the time of its occurrence, as well as of the voyage of discovery, is in every respect probable. But all these early maps are lost. Perhaps they are yet slumbering in some dusty archive.

[The Editor cannot derive from the reasons expressed by Stevens (Hist. and Geog. Notes, p. 15) that the coast where the legend is put, represents the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; for it is not easy to account for the absence of the characteristics of a gulf, if “mar,” unaccompanied by “oceanus,” signifies, as Stevens holds, an enclosed sea; and if so, why is the genuine gulf between Cuba and the Asian coast called “mar oceanus”?—Ed.]

Cosa’s map not having been engraved, or to any extent copied, exercised but little influence on the cartography of the period, and although the information relating to the English discoveries depicted upon it could have come from no other source than the Cabots themselves, their names were not inscribed upon the map; neither was the legend already quoted copied upon any one of the maps, relating to the new-found lands, which soon followed. The enterprising Cortereals, who are supposed to have seen Cabot’s or Cosa’s map, soon spread their sails for the West, and the maps of their discoveries, in the regions visited by them, contained a record of their own name, or inscriptions which have perpetuated the memory of their exploits. (See vol. iv. of the present work.) Not so with the Cabots unless we should adopt the improbable statement of Peter Martyr, in 1515, that Sebastian Cabot gave the name Baccalaos to those lands because of the multitude of big fishes which he saw there, and to which the natives gave that name. This subject is considered in a later note.

Another important map will be briefly referred to here, as it may possibly have some connection with the Cabots,—that of John Ruysch, published in the Ptolemy of 1508, at Rome. It is the first engraved map with the discoveries of the New World delineated upon it. [There are accounts of this map (which measures twenty-one and a quarter by sixteen inches) in Harrisse’s Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, p. 108; in the Catalogue of the John Carter-Brown Library, i. p. 39; in Henry Stevens’s Bibliotheca Geographica, No. 3058; and reproductions are given in Humboldt’s Examen Critique, v., in his essay on the earliest maps appended to Ghillany’s Martin Behaim; in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, pl. 2 (cf. Historical Magazine, August, 1869, p. 107); in Santarem’s Atlas composè de mappemondes depuis le ve jusqu’au xviie, siècles; in Lelewel’s Moyen Age; in Judge Daly’s Early History of Cartography, p. 32 (much reduced); and a section is given in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 156. A copy of the original is in the Sumner Collection in Harvard College Library, and has been used for the fac-simile herewith given.—Ed.] A northeastern coast similar to that on the Cosa map is drawn, but there is no record on it that the English had visited it, and “Cabo de Portogesi” takes the place of “Cavo de Ynglaterra,” on the point of what is now called Cape Race. Concerning John Ruysch, the maker of the map, who was a German geographer, Kunstmann (Die Entdeckung Amerikas, p. 137) says that he accompanied some exploring expeditions undertaken from England to the north. Marcus Beneventanus, an Italian monk, who edited this edition of Ptolemy, and included in it “A new Description of the World, and the new Navigation of the Ocean from Lisbon to India,” says: “But John Ruysch of Germany, in my judgment a most exact geographer, and a most painstaking one in delineating the globe, to whose aid in this little work I am indebted, has told me that he sailed from the South of England, and penetrated as far as the fifty-third degree of north latitude, and on that parallel he sailed west toward the shores of the East, bearing a little northward (per anglum noctis), and observed many islands, the description of which I have given below.” Mr. Henry Stevens, from whom I have taken this extract, thinks that Ruysch may have sailed with the Cabots to the new-found islands. We know that among the crew one was a Burgundian and one a Genoese. Beneventanus professed to know of the discoveries of the English as well as of those of the Spaniards and Portuguese: “Columbi et Lusitanorum atque Britannorum quos Anglos nunc dicimus.” (Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, p. 32; Biddle, p. 179.)

In his Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, p. 179, Mr. Biddle calls attention to a remarkable inscription on this map, placed far at the north, some twenty degrees above “I. Baccalauras,” namely, “Hic compassus navium non tenet nec naves quæ ferrum tenent revertere valent” (“Here the ship’s compass loses its property, and no vessel with iron on board is able to get away”). Mr. Biddle cites this inscription as showing the terror which this phenomenon of the variation of the magnetic needle, particularly noticed by Cabot, had excited. (See Humboldt’s Examen Crit. iii. 31, et seq.; Chytrœus, Variorum in Europa Itinerum Delicicæ, published at Herborn, in Nassau, 1594, pp. 791, 792.) Columbus had noticed the declination of the magnetic needle in his first voyage.

All these places in the new-found lands,—Terre Neuve, Baccalaos, Labrador, etc.,—named by European visitors to these shores, were supposed to be sections and projections of the Old World, and to belong to the map of Asia; and this continued to be the opinion of navigators and cartographers, advancing and receding in their views, for a number of years afterward.

[Johannes Myritius in his Opusculum Geographicum, published at Ingoldstadt in 1590, is accounted one of the last to hold to this view. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 314. After the discovery by Balboa in 1513 of the South Sea, the new cartographical knowledge took two—in the main—distinct phases, both of which recognized South America as an independent continental region, sometimes joined and sometimes disjoined from the northern continent; while in one, North America remained a prolongation of Asia, as in the map of Orontius Finæus, and in the other it presented a barrier to western sailing except by a northern circuit. An oceanic passage, which seemed to make an island of Baccalaos, or the Cabot region, nearly in its right latitude and longitude, laid New England, and much more, beneath the sea. The earliest specimen of this notion we find in the Polish Ptolemy of 1512, in what is known as the Stobnicza map, one of the evidences that on the Continent the belief did not prevail that the Cabots had coursed south along a continental shore. It was a year before Balboa discovered the Pacific that this map was published at Cracow; and we are forced to believe that divination, or more credible report, had told John de Stobnicza what was beyond the land which the Spaniards were searching. The map is striking, and, singular to say, it has not been long known. The only copy known of the little book of less than fifty leaves, which contains it, was printed at Cracow without date as Introductio in Ptholomei Cosmographiam, and is in the Imperial Library at Vienna; and though there are other copies known with dates (1512), they all lack the maps, there being two sheets, one of the Old World, the other of the New, including in this latter designation the eastern shore of Asia, which is omitted in the fac-simile given herewith. A full-size fac-simile of the New World was made by Muller of Amsterdam (five copies only at twenty-five florins), and one is also given in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 53. We note but a very few other copies, all however, except one, without the map. One is in the great library at Munich. A second (forty-three leaves and dated 1512) was sold by Otto Harrassowitz, a dealer of Leipsic, in 1873, to Muller of Amsterdam (we suppose it to be the copy described in the latter’s Books on America, iii. 163, which was sold for 240 florins), from whom it passed into the Carter-Brown Library in Providence. Harrisse, Bib. Amer. Vet., no. 69, says there are two copies at Vienna, one in the Imperial Library (which has the map, a woodcut), and the other in the City Library, both without date. One or both of these copies are said to have forty-two leaves,—Kunstmann, Die Entdeckung Amerikas, p. 130. A fifth was advertised in 1876 by Harrassowitz, Catalogue no. 29, as containing forty-six leaves, dated 1512, but without the map, and priced at 500 marks. In the same dealer’s Catalogue no. 61, book-number 56, a copy of forty-six leaves is dated 1511, and priced 400 marks, which is perhaps the same copy with a corrected description. See also Panzer, Annales Typographici, vi. 454. From this it would appear, as from slight changes said to be in the text, that there were three separate issues and perhaps editions about 1511-12. Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s copy of 1513 has no map. A second edition was printed in Cracow in 1519, but without the map,—Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 60; Harrisse, Bib. Amer. Vet. no. 95. The Finæus map, above referred to, was a heart-shaped projection of the earth, which appeared in Grynæus’s Novus Orbis, in the edition of Paris, 1532. A fac-simile of it has been published by Muller, of Amsterdam, and in Stevens’s Notes, pl. 4. America occupies the extreme edge of the plate, and is greatly distorted by the method of projecting. Mr. Brevoort reduced the lines to Mercator’s projection for Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, 1869, pl. 3; and a fac-simile of this reduction, which shows also the true Asian coast-line in its right longitude, and curiously resembling the American (Asian) coast of the map, is given herewith. See also Stevens’s Bibliotheca Geographica, p. 124; Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 104; Harrisse, Bibliographia Americana vet. pp. 294, 297. There are copies of the map also found in the 1540 editions of Pomponius Mela, and in the Geografia of Lafreri and others, published at Rome, 1554-72.—Ed.]

[3] The first Decade, which was begun in 1493, and completed in 1510, was printed at Seville in 1511.

[4] Baccalaos is an old ante-columbian name for codfish, in extensive use in the South of Europe. Humboldt says (Ghillany, p. 4), “Stockfischland, von Bacallao, dem Spanischen Namen des stockfisches.” Mr. Brevoort says it is the Iberian name for codfish; see his Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 61, 137, where the etymology of the word is given. The name is found on many of the early charts. On that of Reynel, the Portuguese pilot, assigned by geographers to the year 1504 or 1505, it appears on the east coast as “Y dos Bocalhas” (Island of Codfish). On the chart of Ruysch, 1508, it is seen as applied to a small island, or cape, as “J. Baccalaurus.” On another Portuguese map published by Kunstmann, assigned to the year 1514, or a little later, the name “Bacalnaos” is applied to Newfoundland and Labrador, including also Nova Scotia. After various fortunes the name became subject to the limitations which overtook “Norumbega,” and has settled down on a small island on the east coast of Newfoundland. There appears to be no evidence, except Martyr’s statement, that Cabot gave the name to the region he discovered; and it may well be asked on what book or map he had caused it to be inscribed? There is no such name on Cosa’s map, the only early record of the Cabots’ discoveries in the New World. The name was probably applied by the Portuguese. Dr. John G. Kohl, the distinguished geographer, says that the Portuguese originated the name of Tierra de Bacalhas (“the stock-fish country”) and gave currency to it, though the word, like the cod-fishery itself, appears to be of Germanic origin. See his learned note in full in Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 188, 189, and compare Parkman’s Pioneers of France, pp. 170, 171. Parkman says: “If, in the original Basque, baccalaos is the word for codfish, and if Cabot found it in use among the inhabitants of Newfoundland, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Basques had been there before him.” The affirmative of this proposition—that the Cabots had been preceded by the fishermen—has been held by a few writers, but it is generally believed that the evidence for it is insufficient. Dr. Kohl says: “That the name should have been introduced by the Cabots is for many reasons most improbable; and that they should have heard and received the name from the Indians, is certainly not true; though both these facts are asserted by Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, dec. iii. ch. 6.” (Kohl, pp. 188, 189; and compare his statement on p. 481.) Dr. Kohl had already said that the name, with some transposition of the letters, had long been used, before the discoveries of the Cabots and Cortereals, in many Flemish and German books and documents. It should be added that the statement of Peter Martyr, that the savages on the coast visited by Sebastian Cabot called a certain kind of fish found there in abundance baccalaos, is repeated in the legend on Cabot’s map, published in 1544, as rendered by Hakluyt in his folio of 1589, p. 511. Indeed, much in the general description of the coast and the inhabitants, both of the sea and the land, is similar in both accounts, and indicates one origin.

[In a dispute with England so early as 1672, the Spaniards claimed a right to fish at Newfoundland by reason of the prior discovery by the Biscayan fishermen. Papers relating to the rupture with Spain, London, 1672. The latest claim for the Basques’ antedating Cabot in this region is in C. L. Woodbury’s Relation of the Fisheries to the Discovery of North America, Boston, 1880.—Ed.]

[5] This, the earliest notice of Cabot which I have seen in print, and, written by one so distinguished as Peter Martyr, who had such rare opportunities for information, is given almost entire. It is from the quaint English version of Richard Eden, made some three hundred and thirty years ago, and published in his Decades, fol. 118, 119. The translation has been compared with the Latin text of Martyr, in the De Orbe Novo of 1516, “Tertie decadis liber sextus,” printed the year after it was written, and a few redundances eliminated. See M. D’Avezac’s criticism on some of Eden’s English renderings, in Revue Critique, v. 265.

[6] When Mr. Biddle was issuing the second London edition of his Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, in 1832, he cancelled one leaf in the book, at pages 77, 78, that he might insert a notice of an early dramatic poem cited by J. Payne Collier in his then recently published History of English Dramatic Poetry ... and Annals of the Stage, London, 1831, ii. 319. The play was entitled, A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the iiij elements declaryinge many proper poynts of phylosophy naturall and of dyvers straunge landys and of dyvers straunge effects and causis, etc. Dr. Dibdin, in his Typogr. Ant., iii. 105, inserts it among the works from Rastell’s press, and in a manuscript note at the beginning of the copy in the British Museum, it is said to have been printed by him in 1519. This copy, the only one known, formerly belonged to Garrick. I saw it in London in 1866, and collated it with the brief extracts in Collier. It is imperfect; and, as the colophon is wanting, the imprint, including date, is gone. Different years have been assigned to the book according as the reader has interpreted the historical references in it. The citations from the “Interlude” which follow are taken from the publications of the Percy Society, vol. xxii. issued in 1848. Among the characters is one Experyens (Experience), who represents a practical navigator who had been a great traveller:—

“Right farr, Syr, I have ridden and gone,
And seen straunge thynges many one
In Affrick, Europe, and Ynde;
Both est and west I have ben farr,
North also, and seen the sowth sterr
Bothe by see and lande.

And, apparently pointing to a map, Experience proceeds:—

“There lyeth Iselonde where men do fyshe,
But beyonde that so colde it is
No man may there abyde.
This see is called the Great Occyan;
So great it is that never man
Coulde tell it sith the worlde began
Tyll nowe within this xx. yere,
Westewarde be founde new landes
That we never harde tell of before this
By wrytynge nor other meanys.
Yet many nowe have ben there;
And that contrey is so large of rome,
Muche lenger then all Crestendome,
Without fable or gyle;
For dyvers maryners had it tryed,
And sayled streyght by the coste syde
Above V. thousande myle!
But what commodytes be wythin,
No man can tell nor well imagin.
But yet not long ago
Some men of this contrey went,
By the Kynge’s noble consent,
It for to search to that entent,
And coude not be brought thereto;
But they that were they venteres
Have cause to curse their maryners,
Fals of promys, and dissemblers,
That falsly them betrayed,
Which wold take no paine to sail farther
Than their own lyst and pleasure;
Wherfor that vyage, and dyvers other
Such kaytyffes have destroyed.
O what a thinge had be than
Yf that they that be Englyschemen
Myght have ben furst of all
That there shulde have take possessyon,
And made furst buyldynge and habytacion,
A memory perpetuall!
And also what an honorable thynge
Bothe to the realme, and to the Kynge,
To have had his domynyon extendynge
There into so farr a grounde,
Whiche the noble Kynge of late memory,
The most wyse prynce, the VII. Herry,
Causyd furst for to be founde, ...”

Percy, in his essay on the Origin of the English Stage, 1767, supposed this play to have been written about the year 1510, from the following lines which he referred to Columbus:—

“... Within this xx. yeer
Westewarde be founde new landes.”

But Columbus is not named in the play, and the finding of America is attributed to Americus Vespucius, whose earliest alleged voyage was in 1497:—

“But this newe lands founde lately,
Ben callyd America, bycause only
Americus dyd furst them fynde.”

The date ascribed to the play by the writer of the memorandum in it, 1519, would seem to be not far from the truth. But the verses which speak of the discovery made for the late king, Henry VII., principally interest us here. They would seem to refer to the Cabots, who made the only authentic Western discovery for England in that reign. The whole poem has been reprinted by the Percy Society. See Winsor’s Halliwelliana, p. 8, and references there. Mr. J. F. Nicholls, in his Life of Sebastian Cabot, London, 1869, p. 91, prints these lines, and thinks “that the Experyens herein depicted was none other than Sebastian Cabot himself.”

[7] [A sketch of a portion of the North American coast is given in another chapter. It was reproduced in Sprengel’s translation of Muñoz’s Geschichte der neuen Welt, Weimar, 1795, and separately in his Ueber J. Ribero’s älteste weltcharte, size 50 by 65 centimetres, and shows the coast from Labrador to Magellan’s Straits. Cf. Humboldt’s Examen Critique, iii. 184. It is also given in Lelewel’s Atlas; in Murphy’s Verrazzano, p. 129; and in De Costa’s Verrazano the Explorer, p. 43. The original is at Weimar, with a replica at Rome.—Ed.]

[8] I might mention here an interesting map composed by the English merchant, Robert Thorne, while residing in Seville in Spain, in 1527, and sent, with a long discourse on cosmography, to Dr. Ley, English ambassador to Charles V. The map is very rude, and was first published with the discourse by Hakluyt in his little quarto in 1582. Along the line of the coast of Labrador is a Latin inscription of which the following is the English reading: “This land was first discovered by the English.” Thorne was very urgent—as well in his letter to Dr. Ley as in a letter to the king, Henry VIII., also published by Hakluyt—that the English should engage in those maritime discoveries to the west which the Spaniards and the Portuguese were monopolizing.

[9] In Ziegler’s original work he begins this sentence thus: “Petrus Martyr mediolanensis in hispanicis navigationibus scribit, Antoninum quendam Cabotum solventem a Britannia,” etc. This clerical or typographical error as to Cabot’s Christian name probably arose from a misreading of Martyr’s language in Dec. iii. lib. 6: “Scrutatus est eas Sebastianus quidam Cabotus.” Eden did not hesitate to substitute Sebastian for Anthony. As a mystification concerning the name Antoninum (or Anthony) Cabot, I will add that Mr. Brevoort has called my attention to the following entry in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII., vol. i. pt. 1, p. 939, doc. 5639, Nov. 27, 1514: “Patent denization to Anthony Chabo, surgeon, native of Savoy,” with another entry showing that in 1512 an annuity of twenty pounds was granted to him; and Mr. Brevoort asks the question if Anthony could have been another son of Jean Cabot, arriving in England later; and also whether the Cabots might not have come originally from Savoy? [Ziegler’s title reads: Syria, Palestina, Arabia, Ægyptus, Schondia, Holmia,—the section on Schondia, as he calls the north, takes folios 85-138; and the last of the eight maps in the book is of Schondia. See Harrisse’s Biblio. Amer. Vetus, no. 170; F. Muller’s Catalogue, 1877, no. 3595. The Schondia section was reprinted in Krantzius’s Regnorum Aquilonarium, etc., Frankfort, 1583. F. Muller’s Catalogue, 1872, no. 844.—Ed.]

[10] [It is also so drawn in Ruscelli’s map of 1544.—Ed.]

[11] Ziegler’s book is rare and curious; he was a geographer of great repute. Such books often serve to perpetuate references to more important works, and to show the erroneous geographical opinions of the period. A second edition, under a different title, was published at the same place in 1536. See Harrisse’s Biblio. Amer. Vetus, pp. 290, 291, 350, and the Carter-Brown Catalogue, pp. 106, 120, where will be found a notice of Ziegler. Biddle, p. 31.

[12] Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 110.

[13] See Année Véritable de la Naissance de Christophe Colomb, p. 10, n. 8.

[14] See also Relationi del S. Pietro Martira Milanese, Della cose notabili della provincia dell’ Egitto, etc., by Carlo Passi, Venetia, 1564.

[15] In a recent letter from Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, the distinguished bibliographer and historical scholar, of Brooklyn, N. Y.,—who has kindly communicated for my use his abundant materials relating to the Cabots, and has laid me under great obligations for aid in preparing this paper,—he says he has been collating the first part of the Summario of 1534 with the Latin Decades of Peter Martyr, and he finds them to differ in a way that no mere translator would have ventured to effect; that in one instance two books of the Decades are condensed into a few lines, and the whole worked over as an author only could do it. The Italian Summary closes at the end of the ninth book of the third Decade. He thinks that Ramusio, with the edition of 1516 before him, would not have omitted the tenth book. Mr. Brevoort therefore is led to believe that Martyr himself rewrote in 1515, in Italian, the three Decades (the last book not having yet been written) and sent the MS. to a friend in Italy, where it slumbered until 1534, when it fell into the hands of Ramusio, who committed it to the press. This is a curious question in bibliography.

It should be added here that the statements of Martyr included in the Latin Decades of 1516 (afterward published in the entire work of 1530) are so often referred to by the author, in the course of his correspondence, that we are bound to accept that edition as the genuine work. It was published during his lifetime, and received his imprimatur.

[16] The figures of men and animals on the map are colored. I have recently received from my friend M. Letort, of the National Library in Paris, a more particular description of the legends of this map than has hitherto been published.

[17] It is supposed that a new edition of this map was published in 1549, the year after Sebastian Cabot returned to England. The only evidence of this is contained in a thick duodecimo volume first published in 1594, at Herborn, in Nassau, edited by Nathan Chytræus, entitled Variorum in Europa Itinerum Deliciæ,—a work consisting of monumental and other inscriptions, antique legends, and curious bits of antiquity in prose and verse, picked up by the diligent compiler in almost every country in Europe. He was in England in 1565; and apparently at Oxford he saw a document, “a geographical table,” under which he found several inscriptions in not very elegant Latin, which he copied and printed in his volume, filling twenty-two pages of the book. They are wholly in Latin, and correspond substantially with the Latin inscriptions on the Paris map described above. There is this difference. The inscriptions here are but nineteen in number, whereas on the Paris map there are twenty-two, five of them in Spanish only. No. xviii., of Chytræus, is in the body only of the map, and in Spanish; and No. xix. appears only in Spanish. In Chytræus each inscription has a title prefixed, wanting, as a rule, on the Paris map. There are some verbal variations in the text, owing probably to the contingencies of transcription and of printing. In the legend, No. xvii., which has the title, “Inscriptio sev titulus Auctoris,” the date 1549 is inserted as the year in which the map to which the inscriptions belonged was composed, instead of 1544, as in the Paris map.

[18] I copy here this legend entire, in the original Spanish as on the Paris map:—

“No. 8. Esta tierra fue descubierta por Ioan Caboto Veneciano, y Sebastian Caboto su hijo, anno del nascimiento de nuestro Saluador Iesu Christo de M.CCCC.XCIIII. a ueinte y quarto de Junio por la mannana, a la qual pusieron nôbre prima tierra uista, y a una isla grâde que esta par la dha tierra, le pusieron nōbre sant Ioan, por auer sido descubierta el mismo dia lagente della andan uestidos depieles de animales, usan en sus guerras arcos, y flechas, lancas, y dardos, y unas porras de palo, y hondas. Es tierra muy steril, ay enella muchos orsos plancos, y cieruos muy grâdes como cauallos, y otras muchas animales, y semeiantemête ay pescado infinito, sollos, salmōes, lenguados, muy grandes de uara enlargo y otras muchas diversidades de pescados, y la mayor multitud dellos se dizen baccallaos, y asi mismo ay en la dha tierra Halcones prietos como cueruos Aquillas, Perdices, Pardillas, y otras muchas aues de diuersas maneras.”

In the Latin inscription we read that the discovery was made “hora 5, sub diluculo;” that is, at the hour of five, at daybreak. The Spanish simply says that the discovery was made in the morning.

[19] [We give reduced a part of the North American coast. Other representations will be found in Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, pl. 4; Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 358; Jurien de la Gravière’s Les Marins du XVe et du XVIe siècle, Paris, 1879, with an essay on the map,—papers originally printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1876; Nicholl’s Life of S. Cabot, but inaccurate in the names; Hist. Mag., March, 1868, in connection with Mr. Brevoort’s paper; F. Kidder’s Discovery of North America by John Cabot; Bryant and Gay’s United States, i. 193. Also in Augusto Zeri’s Giovanni e. Sebastiano Caboto, Estratto dalla Rivista Marittima, Marzo, Roma, 1881. The whole of the map is given, but on a much reduced scale, in Judge Daly’s Early History of Cartography, N. Y., 1879.—Ed.]

[20] The following extract of a letter from Sebastian Cabot to the Emperor Charles V., dated London, Nov. 15, 1554, speaks of a sea-chart intended for his Majesty, and refers also to the subject of the variation of the needle, which interested Cabot in an especial manner:—

“With respect to laying down the position of the coast of Guinea conformably with the variation made by the needle with the pole, if the King of Portugal falls into an error, I give your Majesty a remedy.

“The same Francisco de Urista, whom I have named before, takes with him to show to your Majesty two figures which are: a mappe monde divided by the equator, from which your Majesty can see the causes of the variation of the needle, and the reasons why it moves at one time towards the north, at another towards the south pole; the second figure shows how to take the longitude on whatever parallel a man happens to be. The results of both these the said F. de U. will relate to your Majesty as I have here instructed him fully about them, and as he is himself skilled in the art of navigation. In regard to the sea-chart (?) which the said F. de U. has, I have written to your Majesty before about it, that it is of importance to your service, and also [have written] about a relation in my own handwriting to Juan Esquefe, your ambassador, to send it to your Majesty. From what I am told, it is in the possession of the Secretary Eraso. To it I refer you, and I assert that the chart will be of great service in reference to the division line agreed upon between the royal crown of Spain and Portugal for the reasons set forth in my relation.

“I beg you to receive my good will, etc. (Would come in person but am ill, etc.).”

(Col. de Doc. Ined. Madrid, 1843, iii. 512.) Andrés Garcia de Céspedes, in his Regimiento de Navigation, etc., 1606, speaking of the longitude, p. 137, probably alludes to this very map: “Sebastian Cabott de nacion Inglés, Pilóto bien conocido, in un Mapa que dio al Rey de Castilla,” etc.

[21] Cf. the learned dissertations on this map, by Dr. Kohl and M. D’Avezac, in Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 358-77, 506, 507; and Mr. Major’s review of the whole question in the Archæologia, xliii. 17-42, in 1870.

[Reference may also be made to D’Avezac’s paper in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 4th ser., iv. 266; Asher’s appendix to his Henry Hudson, p. 260; and papers by Mr. Deane himself in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1867, Historical Magazine, November, 1866, p. 353; and his note in Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, p. 225. Cf. also Kohl’s Descriptive Catalogue of those Maps relating to America, mentioned in Hakluyt’s Third Volume, p. 11.—Ed.]

[22] The geographical designation here employed has been thought by some to be very indefinite, inasmuch as the Spaniards, who discovered Florida, subsequently gave that name to the whole country northward and westward of the territory now bearing that name; but it must be remembered that that designation was not accepted by geographers of other nations. After the voyages of Verrazano and Cartier the name “La Nouvelle France” was applied by French geographers to the territory as far down as 40° N., and the name was sometimes applied to the whole of North America. The maps of the Italian geographer, Gastaldi, who made maps for Ramusio’s third volume, and of Ruscelli, his pupil, confined Florida to more southern limits; and so did Sebastian Cabot himself, if the map of 1544 was made by him. Indeed, in the conversation of these Italian savans at the house of Fracastor, that geographical status was assumed; that is to say, the country of Cabot’s landfall, and the land by which he sailed north and south, was not understood to be Florida, for the statement is that “he sailed down the coast by that land toward the equinoctial, and came to that part of this firm land which is now called Florida.” Of course the point which he reached is very indefinite. Peter Martyr had said, thirty-five years before, that Cabot told him that he went south almost to the latitude of the strait of Gibraltar, which is in 36° N. Nobody knows whether these two accounts relate to the same voyage. That to which the conversation refers is assumed by the narrator to be the voyage of discovery. Indeed, for two hundred years and more there was no suspicion that a voyage by the Cabots followed immediately the voyage of discovery; though some incidents are related which may have taken place in a subsequent voyage, and others which never took place at all. Modern critics, who accept the above story as to the latitude reached at the south, generally agree that it was only on the second voyage that this was accomplished.

[23] The conversation at Caphi, at the house of Fracastor, who was a friend of Ramusio, took place a short time only before its publication. Ramusio says, in his report, “a few months ago.” We do not know precisely when he wrote his report, but there is a reference in it to a book of Jacob Tevius, published in 1548. As I have said above, we do not know the year of the interview with Cabot at Seville. The narrator says that it was “some years ago,” and I should infer that it was some years after Cabot’s return in August, 1530, from the La Plata expedition, to which Cabot in the interview refers. He also mentions that he is growing old, and retiring from active duties. In 1540 he would probably have been approaching seventy years of age, and this date may safely be assumed as not far from the time when the conversation took place. M. D’Avezac, in Revue Crit., v. 265, gives 1544 or 1545 as the probable date.

To the publication of this report relating to Cabot, Hakluyt, in 1589, prefixed the name of Galeacius Butrigarius, the Pope’s legate in Spain, as the distinguished person who reported the conversation with Cabot; and ever since that time, down to the publication of Biddle’s Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, in 1831, the statement passed without question. Biddle, who regarded the matter as of little moment, said there was no authority for that name in Ramusio, who says himself that he withholds it from motives of delicacy; but Biddle did not say, perhaps he did not observe, that Hakluyt got the name from Eden (Decades, f. 252, verso), who made the original blunder. Martyr, in the beginning of his second Decade, written in 1515, speaks of knowing Butrigarius of Bologna, when the latter was of the Pope’s embassy in Spain; and I find that he died in 1518, in the forty-third year of his age (see Zedler’s Universal Lexikon, v. 4, Halle, 1733). M. D’Avezac had noted, as early as 1869, that Butrigarius had died thirty years before the conversation took place at the house of Fracastor, and also that the editor of Ramusio, Tomaso Giunti, had added the word Mantuan to this anonymous person’s name; and now, through the researches instituted by Charles Bullo and by the mediation of the superintendent of the archives of the state at Venice, it is ascertained that this unknown person was Gian Giacomo Bardolo, of Mantua. See Intorno a Giovanni Caboto, etc., by Cornelio Desimoni, Genova, 1881, pp. 26, 27; also, in Atti, vol. xv., of the Società ligure di storia patria.

[24] Fracastor died Aug. 8, 1553, over seventy years of age. He was a maker of globes. Humphrey Gilbert says that he was a traveller in the northern parts of America. (Kohl, p. 229; Hakluyt, 1589, p. 602).

[25] Ramusio, ii. 4; Hakluyt, 1589, p. 513.

[26] Hakluyt, 1589, p. 602.

[27] Eden’s Decades, fol. 318, corrected by the original. [The first edition of Gomara is a rare book, and a copy has been lately priced by Quaritch at £36. It proved to be one of the most popular of all the books of that century on the New World; and, as we count, including varieties of titles, there were more than a score of editions in fifty years, so that his statements became widely known. There were seven such issues in Spanish, either in Spain or in Flanders, in two years, when the demand for it seems to have failed in its original tongue, and was transferred to Italy, where at Rome and Venice there were six editions in twenty years (1556 to 1576). Sabin says eighteen in that interval, but I fail to find them. There was a seventh near the end of the century (1599). In 1568 or 1569 there seem to have been three issues of the first French translation, and six others followed, from 1577 to 1597. These statements are based chiefly on the lists of editions given in Sabin, vii. 306 (said to have been drawn up by Mr. Brevoort); in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 169; and Leclerc’s Bibliotheca Americana, No. 143.—Ed.]

[28] [See a later Editorial note on “The earliest English publications on America.”—Ed.]

[29] Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 206.

[30] Mem. of Sebastian Cabot, 110-119.

[31] Vol. iii. p. 4, 1556.

[32] Divers Voyages, Hakluyt Soc., pp. 50, 51.

[33] Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 208-210.

[34] Mr. Brevoort has submitted some notes to my attention, on this voyage. Rejecting the year 1516-17 as impracticable, he adopts an earlier date, before Cabot had left England, and finds some authority for it in a book of George Beste, London, 1578, on the three voyages of Frobisher, hereafter to be mentioned. The writer there gives 1508 as the year of Sebastian Cabot’s discovery of North America, probably never having heard of any previous voyages. Mr. Brevoort thinks he had authority for a voyage of Cabot about the year named. Thomas Pert, or Spert, against whom the charge of “faint heart” is alleged by Eden, is mentioned in vol. i. of Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII., 1512, C. 1514, as master of the “Mary Rose,” and of the “Great Harry.” In 1514 he is pensioned, and in 1517 is placed on shore duty. There is no report of him in 1516, but as he was a veteran in 1514 it is hardly probable that he would have been on a voyage of discovery in 1516. He is usually mentioned as Thomas Spert; only once is he called Pert. As evidence that an expedition left England on a voyage of discovery some time during the last years of Henry VII., or during the early years of his successor, the Interlude of the Four Elements, of uncertain date, but probably written before 1519, cited above, is adduced as showing that the incident related occurred “not long ago.” And certain verses which speak of the disobedience of the mariners, which put an end to the voyage, and to the hopes of the projector, afford the earliest reference to the mutiny story. Mr. Brevoort is of opinion that Eden’s vague reference to an event occurring in the reign of Henry VIII., “about the same year of his reign,” was intended to place it in the 8th year of the century. But that would bring it within the reign of Henry VII.

[35] Mem. of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 62-66.

[36] Dedication of the book, folios 1, 2; Biddle, pp. 64, 65.

[37] Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages, 1582.

[38] He printed it on folios 316, and 317 of his Decades. See the inscription in Latin in a work already cited, by Nathan Chytræus, pp. 779-781.

[39] See vol. iii, 807, and iv. 1812. See Doc. Hist. of Maine, ii. 224.

[40] Appendix to his Mem. of Sebastian Cabot. Mr. Biddle is said to have paid £500 for the picture.

[41] See their Proceedings, ii. 101. 111.

[42] No. 103 in the Catalogue of its gallery. A copy of this picture, painted in the year 1763, now hangs in the Sala della Scudo, in the ducal palace in Venice, with a long Latin inscription composed probably at the time the copy was made. Notes and Queries, 2d ser. vol. v. p. 2.

[43] See Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. Jan. 1865, pp. 91-96. Hist. Mag. Nov. 1869, pp. 306, 307.

[44] See the Appendix to the Historical View of the progress of Discovery on the more Northern Coasts of America, by Patrick Fraser Tytler, Esq.

[45] Examen Crit. iv. 232.

[46] iv. 1177.

[47] I might mention here that an English version of this book, made by Thomas Hacket, was published in England in 1568, dedicated to Sir Henry Sidney. The passage in question occurs in fol. 122 H. C. Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 241. [This version is perhaps rarer than the two French editions (Paris and Anvers) of 1558, and the Italian of 1561, and is worth ten guineas or thereabout. A recent French catalogue prices the original Paris edition at about the same sum. It has been recently, 1878, reprinted in Paris with notes by Paul Gaffarel.—Ed.]

[48] Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, p. 89.

[49] See La Historia General de las Indias, 1554, cap. xxxix, fol. 31.

[50] [Huth Catalogue, ii. 572, Brinley Catalogue, i. no. 29. This translation is also contained in J. S. Clarke’s Progress of Maritime Discovery, London, 1803, Appendix. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 224, says an English translation was printed in the Oxford Collection of Voyages, ii.—Ed.]

[51] Pages 87, 88.

[52] Or inlet.

[53] Under the year 1526 Galvano says: “In the year 1526 there went out of Sevill one Sebastian Cabot, a Venetian, being chief Pilote to the emperor,” etc. There is added to the old English version, not in the Portuguese text, after “a Venetian,”—“by his father, but born at Bristol in England.” Hakluyt Society’s volume, p. 169.

[54] Mr. J. Winter Jones, the editor of the Divers Voyages for the Hakluyt Society, says, concerning the original French edition of this work, that it “is not known to exist, and it is doubtful if it ever was printed.” Hakluyt, however, in his “Discourse on Westerne Planting,” published as vol. ii., Doc. Hist. of Maine, p. 20, says it is “extant in print, both in French and English”. [Sparks, in his Life of Ribault, p. 147, says that he cannot find that the original French was ever published; but Gaffarel, Floride Francaise, says it was published in London, 1563, as Histoire de l’Expédition Francaise en Floride, and soon became scarce.—Ed.]

[55] Hakluyt Society’s Divers Voyages, p. 92.

[56] As the language of Hacket’s English version of Ribault was accessible to me only through Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages, 1582, in which he reprinted it, I had an ungenerous suspicion that he might have substituted that date for another, he having placed the year 1498 in the margin of the page on which he first prints the alleged extract from Fabian. The only known copy of Hacket’s translation is in the British Museum, and on an appeal to that, through a transcript of it taken for Mr. John Carter-Brown, I find Ribault’s date to be 1498. [Hacket’s version as given by Hakluyt is also reprinted in B. F. French’s Hist. Coll. of Louisiana and Florida, ii. 159.—Ed.]

[57] [Ortelius was not far from thirty years old, when Sebastian Cabot died. He had been in England, and possibly had seen the old navigator. Felix Van Hulst’s account of Ortelius was published in a second edition at Liege in 1846. Ortelius was the first to collect contemporary maps and combine them into a collection, which became the precursor of the modern atlas. His learning and integrity, with a discrimination that kept his judgment careful, has made his book valuable as a trustworthy record of the best geographical knowledge of his time. His position at Antwerp was favorable for broadening his research, and a disposition to better each succeeding issue, in which he was not hampered by deficiency of pecuniary resources, served to spread his work widely. The first Latin edition of 1570 was followed by others in that language, and in Dutch, German, French, and Italian, with an ever-increasing number of maps, and recasting of old ones. These editions, including epitomes, numbered at least twenty-six, down to 1606, when it was for the first time put into English, followed by an epitome in the same language, with smaller maps, in 1610. There were a few editions on the continent during the rest of that century (the latest we note is an Italian one in 1697), but other geographers with their new knowledge were then filling the field.—Ed.]

[58] See Biddle’s Cabot, p. 56.

[59] Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 255.

[60] The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, Hakluyt Soc. 1867, p. 22. [This putting forth of energy by the English at this time in pursuit of maritime discovery is reflected in the larger production of the English press in this direction, as shown in a later Editorial note.—Ed.]

[61] Biddle’s Cabot, p. 291.

[62] Vol. iii, p. 4.

[63] See also Hakluyt, 1589, p. 602.

[64] Richard Eden died about this time, perhaps in the previous year. He left among his papers a translation, made “in the year of our Lord, 1576,” and from the Latin of Lewis Vartomannus, which Willes includes in his own edition. The last book published by Eden was an English translation from the Latin of a book on navigation, by Joannes Taisnierus, public professor in Rome and of several universities in Italy. It bears no date, but it is supposed to have been issued in 1576 or 1577. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, pt. 1. p. 262, which puts its date 1576; but it is given 1579 in Markham’s Davis’s Voyages. In the Epistle Dedicatory, Eden speaks of attending “the good old man,” Sebastian Cabot, “on his death-bed,” and listening to his flighty utterances about a divine revelation of a new method for finding the longitude. See Biddle, pp. 222, 223. Eden was also engaged in other literary enterprises not mentioned by me.

[65] Willes’s History of Travayle, etc., fol. 232, 233; Biddle’s Cabot, p. 292; Hakluyt, 1589, pp. 610-616.

[66] Kohl, p. 364.

[67] I quote from Biddle’s Cabot, p. 27; but Brunet, iii. 1945, and Supplement, i. 1129, notice an edition in 1575, 3 vol. folio. See also Stevens’s Bibliotheca Historica, 1870. p. 121.

[68] Tom. ii. p. 2175.

[69] Biddle, p. 28.

[70] [See Carter-Brown Catalogue, pt. i. p. 292, which shows there were two editions the same year. The book is rare, and was priced by Leclerc in 1878 at 650 francs. Stevens, Hist. Coll. i. 135, says he has seen but two copies of the map which should accompany the book. This is a folded woodcut, which in the main is a reduced copy of the map in Ortelius’s first edition. The map is in the Harvard College copy. The Huth Catalogue, iv. 1169, shows the map.—Ed.]

[71] Hakluyt, in a Discourse on Westerne Planting, written in 1584, which was printed for the first time by the Maine Hist. Soc. in 1877, cites this book of Popellinière, and gives an English version from it of the conversation in Ramusio. Hakluyt is here asserting the Queen of England’s title to all the territory “from Florida to the Circle Arctic,” and he enlarges upon the exploits of Sebastian Cabot, on which the claim of England is based.

[72] Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 42-47.

[73] [They were subsequently reprinted in Rymer’s Fœdera, in Chalmers’s and Hazard’s Hist. Coll. and in the Hakluyt Society’s ed. of the Divers Voyages.—Ed.]

[74] In the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society for October, 1881, Mr. George Dexter has traced the publication of this alleged extract from Fabian to an earlier date than had usually been assigned to it. It was published by Stow, in his Annals, in 1580, together with the paragraph relating to the savage men said to have been brought home by Sebastian Cabot, and also printed by Hakluyt in 1582. They were also printed in the second edition of Holinshed, 1586-87. The Cotton manuscript, Vitellius, A. xvi., has been re-examined, and proves not to be a Fabian. Mr. Dexter has printed the two extracts from it, the latter, relating to the “savage men,” for the first time. In the Cotton collection, Nero, C. xi., is a genuine Fabian, but it contains nothing about Cabot. The conclusion to which I have arrived from this examination by Mr. Dexter is, that the Vitellius manuscript was not the original used by Stow and Hakluyt. They give facts and details not to be found in that manuscript; and this remark will particularly apply to the extract relating to the three savage men, which in the Vitellius is brief and meagre. Both Stow and Hakluyt must have used a genuine Fabian manuscript yet to be discovered. For though neither would probably hesitate to add or change a name or a date, if he thought he had sufficient authority for so doing, they would not manufacture a narrative.

As regards the savage men referred to, Stow, under the date of 1502, says they were that year presented to the King, yet that they were brought over by Sebastian Cabot in 1498, giving Fabian as his authority. Hakluyt, in his quarto of 1582, repeats the same story, on the same authority; yet in his folio of 1589 he changes the date in his heading as to the year of their presentation to the King, making it conform to the year in which they were brought over. Mr. Biddle (Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 230, 231) has a labored argument to show that the men were not brought over by Cabot, but by some one else, in the year they were presented to the King, 1502, reflecting severely on Hakluyt for changing this last date. It is not at all probable that the name of either John Cabot or Sebastian Cabot was given in the original manuscript used by Stow and Hakluyt. I will add that George Beste, in his work on the voyages of Frobisher, cited above, says that Sebastian Cabot brought home “sundry of the people” of the country he visited, “and many other things, in token of possession taken,” very oddly assigning the voyage, which he regarded as the voyage of discovery, to the year 1508.

[75] I had called attention to this fact in some notes on Cabot’s map in the Proceedings of the Am. Antiq. Soc. for April, 1867, and Dr. Kohl, p. 371, says that Locke is supposed to have copied the inscription from a map of Cabot in England. The fact must have been inscribed on some other map of Cabot than the recently recovered one in Paris, for that certainly does not bear out the conjecture.

[76] Hakluyt, 1589, p. 680.

[77] Hakluyt, iii. 173.

[78] In the year 1584 Richard Hakluyt, at the request of Sir Walter Raleigh, wrote a Discourse on Westerne Planting,—to which I have already made a brief reference,—supposed to embody the opinions of the statesmen of England at that period on the colonization of North America. It is a remarkable paper, intended for the eye of the Queen. After giving all the reasons why England should enter upon this work speedily, he presents, in chapter xviii. “the Queen of England’s title to all the West Indies, or at least to as much as is from Florida to the circle Arctic,” as being “more lawful and right than the Spaniards’, or any other Christian princes’;” and the claim is based mainly on the discovery by Sebastian Cabot, in the year 1496, as related in the first volume of Ramusio, which is cited. Hakluyt is anxious to make it appear that Cabot discovered North America before Columbus discovered the firm land of the Indies; yea, more than a year before, and he recurs more than once to this date as showing the fact. Indeed, he once goes so far as to cite the date on Clement Adams’s map, 1494, as carrying the claim yet farther back. [The history of this manuscript, published as vol. ii. of the Documentary History of Maine, is traced in an Editorial note to Dr. De Costa’s chapter.—Ed.]

[79] Memoir of S. Cabot, pp. 30, 178-180.

[80] Ibid. p. 31.

[81] This book of Mr. Biddle was published in London in two editions, 1831 and 1832, and in the United States, 1831, all without the name of the author, an eminent jurist and statesman of Pittsburg, Penn., who was born in 1795, and died in 1847. It is a work of great value for its authorities, and displays much critical talent; and though composed with little system and with a strong bias in favor of Sebastian Cabot, whom the author makes his hero, it may be regarded as the best review of the history of maritime discovery relating to the period of which he treats, that had appeared.

[The most important notice of Mr. Biddle’s book occurred in Tytler’s Historical View of the Progress of Discovery on the more Northern Coasts of America, Biddle’s reflections upon Hakluyt being the particular occasion of a vindication of that collector. George S. Hillard also reviewed Biddle in the North American Review, xxxiv. 405, and it elicited other essays in contemporary journals. It supplied largely the material for Hayward’s Life of Cabot in Sparks’s American Biography. The most recent treatment of the subject is in a condensed and somewhat enthusiastic Remarkable Life, Adventures and Discoveries of Sebastian Cabot, by J. F. Nicholls, the public librarian of Bristol, London, 1869. This writer ascribes the chief glory to Sebastian and not to the father, and rather grandly lauds his achievements. This provoked Henry Stevens to putting a note in his Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, no. 2519, in vindication of John Cabot’s greater claim,—a view he again emphasized in a little tract, with the expressive mathematical title, Sebastian Cabot-John Cabot = O: Boston, 1870. Some of the later information has been embodied by Bancroft in a paper on Cabot in the New American Cyclopædia, which he has used again in vol. i. of his Centenary Ed. History of the United States. A very good resumé of existing knowledge as it stood forty-five years ago, is given in Conway Robinson’s Discoveries in the West and Voyages along the Atlantic Coast, Richmond, 1848. A somewhat similar treatment is given in Peschel’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, book ii., ch. 6, and notice may also be taken of the same author’s Geschichte der Erdkunde, vol. iv. Fox Bourne, in his English Seamen under the Tudors, gives a summary of the Cabots’ career as explorers, and in his English Merchants he treats of their relation to British commerce and the enterprise of Bristol. Mr. Travers Twiss communicated some papers on the relative influence of Columbus and Cabot on American Discovery to the Nautical Magazine, July and August, 1876; and a review of a somewhat similar kind will be found in Admiral Jurien de la Gravière’s Les Marins du xve et xvie Siècles, composed of papers which had originally appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes, 1876, et seq. Among other views, reference may be made to F. von Hellward’s Sebastian Cabot, 43 pp.; Malte-Brun’s Annales des Voyages, xcix., p. 39.—Ed.]

[82] Page 126.

[83] Vol. iii. p. 807.

[84] See D’Avezac in the Bulletin de la Soc. Géog., Quar. Ser., xvi. 272, 273.

[85] [The titles of these works in full, with some further account of the instrumentality of Hakluyt in advancing discovery, are given in Dr. De Costa’s chapter on “Norumbega,” and in the notes accompanying it.—Ed.]

[86] M. D’Avezac, in the Bulletin de la Soc. Géog., Quar. Ser., xiv., 271, 272, 1857, and Dr. Asher in his Henry Hudson (Hakluyt Soc.), pp. lxviii, 261, 1860, both express the opinion that Clement Adams deliberately altered the date from 1494 to 1497, the latter being the date copied by Hakluyt into his extract from Adams’s map, as published in the third volume of his fol. of 1600; neither of these writers being aware of the fact that in Hakluyt’s first citation from Adams’s map, in his folio of 1589, the date 1494 was given. All we know of Adams’s map is derived from Hakluyt; and as an additional evidence that the extract cited from it bore the date 1494, we have Hakluyt’s previous statement, in his Discourse on Westerne Planting, cited above, where this fact is clearly affirmed.

In the Proceedings of the Am. Antiq. Soc. for April, 1867, I called attention, in some notes on Cabot’s map, to the inadvertences of these distinguished historians; and, in a later paper by M. D’Avezac, printed in the Bulletin de la Soc. Géog., in Paris for 1869, and translated in the Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 506, 507, he revises his opinion, and affirms his belief that the change of date from 1494, in Hakluyt’s first folio, to 1497 in that of 1600 was caused by a typographical error. [D’Avezac’s paper was entitled: Les navigations Terre-neuviennes de Jean et Sébastien Cabot—Lettre au Révérend Leonard Woods: and was also printed separately in Paris.—Ed.]

[87] [See the note on Molyneaux’s map, with a sketch of it, appended to the chapter on “Norumbega.”—Ed.]

[88] It has been suggested that Hakluyt had access to Cabot’s papers in possession of William Worthington, and that they revealed the true date. It is a pity he did not “make note of it” among his authorities. See R. H. Major’s True Date of the English Discovery, etc., London, 1870, originally printed in the Archæologia, xliii, 17.

The mention of the name of William Worthington, against whom Mr. Biddle has emphasized a suspicion of unjust dealing with Sebastian Cabot, reminds me of a remark of M. D’Avezac in speaking of the marriage of Cabot to Catherine Medrano,—that he suspected that Worthington, instead of being hostile to Cabot, was, on the contrary, bound to him by family ties. See Revue Critique, v. 268, 269.

[89] Page 511.

[90] Page 128.

[91] Mr. Major concludes his paper by producing incontestable evidence from the recently published Venetian and Spanish Calendars, to be adduced farther on, that the true date of discovery was 1497.

[92] See a more full analysis of this subject in Proceedings of the Am. Antiq. Soc. for April, 1867.

[93] See vol. i. 226, 274; ii. 243, 267; iii. 10; cf. Biddle, 184-187, 311, who doubts as to Cabot’s appointment as “grand pilot,” as asserted by Hakluyt. [Davis, in his World’s Hydrographical Descriptions, does not give him any official title in 1595. “Sebastian Gabota, an expert pilot, and a man reported of speciall judgment, who being that wayes imployed returned without successe.” Davis’s Voyages (Hakluyt Soc.), p. 195.—Ed.]

[94] The Legend no. xvii. of the map is copied from Chytræus into the text of the Tabularum Geog. Contractatrum of Peter Bertius, published in Latin and in French. In the Latin edition of 1602 or 1603, the second edition, the Legend is given on page 627, and in the French of 1617 on page 777. The text is ascribed to Jodocus Hondius, who died in 1612, says Lelewel, in his Géographie du Moyen Age. (Letter of J. Carson Brevoort.)

[95] Among the many works whose publication was inspired by Hakluyt, was the issue in 1612 of an English version of the eight Decades of Peter Martyr, translated by Michael Locke, thus laying before the English reader whatever that industrious chronicler had written concerning Sebastian Cabot. The first three Decades, as we have already seen, had been translated by Richard Eden, many years before, and those were now adopted by Locke into his completed version; the work was entitled De Novo Orbe, or the History of the West Indies, etc., London, 1612. It contained a Latin dedication to Sir Julius Cæsar, and an address in English to the reader. The same sheets were also issued with another titlepage without date, and omitting the Latin dedication, and also again in 1628 with a new title, calling the book a second edition. [Copies of either issue are worth from £5 to £10, and even more. Fifty years ago Rich (1832, no. 130) priced one at £1 16s. The text was reprinted in the supplement to the 1809 edition of Hakluyt.—Ed.]

Purchas has several notices of the Cabots taken from Hakluyt principally, hereafter the great authority cited, and from Ramusio. His is the earliest mention made, within my knowledge, of Sebastian Cabot’s picture in Whitehall gallery, but he speaks of it as though it were displayed on Clement Adams’s map hanging there. He probably never took the trouble to visit the gallery himself, but wrote from wrong information.

[Purchas’s Pilgrimage gave his own form and language to the accounts of the voyages which he collected, and those in his eighth and ninth book concern America. It was published in 1613, when he was thirty-six years old. There was a second edition in 1614, and a third with additions in 1617, the year after Purchas inherited Hakluyt’s manuscripts. He now set about his greater work,—Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas, his Pilgrimes,—in which he changed his method, and preserved the language of the narratives, which he brought together. This was published in four volumes (part of the third and all of the fourth volume pertaining to America), in 1625; and the next year a new edition of his first work was brought out, which has ever since constituted the fifth volume of the entire work. The set has nearly or quite quadrupled in value during the last fifty and sixty years, and superior copies are now worth £100; such a copy however must contain the original engraved frontispiece with its little map of the world, which is seldom found, and “Hondius his Map of the World,” which is rarer still, on page 95, where ordinary copies show a reduplication merely of the map properly belonging on page 115. Mr. Deane owns Thomas Prince’s copy of the American portions, which are enriched with Prince’s notes. Samuel Sewall’s copy is in Harvard College Library. Purchas survived the publication but two years, and died in 1628. His service to the cause in which he and Hakluyt were so conspicuous workers, was great, but is not generally accounted as equal to that of the elder chronicler. See Clarke’s Maritime Discovery, i. xiii., and the references in Allibone’s Dictionary. Bohn’s Lowndes p. 2010, is useful in determining the collation, which is confused.—Ed.]

Bacon, in his Life of Henry VII. published in 1622, notices the voyage of Sebastian Cabot, in which North America was discovered; but mentioning no year implies that it took place in 1498. His principal authority seems to have been Stowe’s Chronicle.

A valuable work was published at Madrid in 1629, by Pinello D. Ant. de Leon, entitled an Epitome de la bibliotheca oriental i occidental, nautica i geographica, etc. of which a second edition, edited by De Barcia, was published in 1737-38. Particular mention is made in it of the several editions of the writings of Peter Martyr, though the information is not always correct. He says that Juan Pablo Martyr Rizo, a descendant of Peter Martyr, had a manuscript translation in Spanish of the Decades for printing, which we may well believe never appeared.

[96] In the Foreign and Domestic Calendars of Henry VIII., ii. pt. ii. p. 1576, Sebastian Talbot (Cabot) is named as receiving twenty shillings, in May, 1512, “for making a card of Gascoigne and Guyon.” He left soon after for Spain.

[97] Dec. i. p. 254, Madrid, 1730; Biddle, p. 98.

[98] Navarrete, Historica Nautica, p. 138.

[99] Page 119.

[100] D’Avezac, in Revue Critique, v. 265.

[101] Herrera, Dec. ii. p. 18.

[102] Navarrete, Coll. iii. 319.

[103] Navarrete, Bibl. Maritima, tome ii. pp. 697-700; Herrera, Dec. ii. p. 70; Venetian Calendar, vol. ii. no. 607.

[104] Herrera, Dec. ii. p. 226; Cf. Biddle, p. 121.

[105] Gomara, cap. xcix. Navarrete, Coll. iv. 339; Bibl. Maritima, as above. Cf. Biddle, pp. 122, 123.

[106] Biddle’s Cabot, pp. 123-128, where will be found a good summary of these events, with the original authorities cited; with which cf. Peter Martyr, Dec. vii. cap. 6; Navarrete, Bibl. Maritima, as above.

[107] Bibl. Maritima, as above.

[108] Navarrete, Bibl. Maritima, ii. 697-700; Ibid. Coll. v. 333; Herrera, Dec. iv. pp. 168, 169, 214; D’Avezac, Bulletin Soc. Géog. Quart. Ser. xiv. 268.

[109] Navarrete, Nautica, pp. 135, 136, 155.

[110] Viage del Sutil y Mexicana, in 1792; Madrid, 1802, Introduction (by Don M. F. Navarrete, then a young man), p. xlii.

[111] Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, ii. p. 169, 1852.

[112] In a notice of the settlement of the estate of Sir Thomas Lovell, who died May 25, 1524, among the debts unpaid and now, February 18, discharged, was one to John Goderyk of Cornwall, draper, for conducting Sebastyan Cabot, master of the pilots in Spain, to London, at testator’s request, 43s. 4d.Letters and Papers, Henry VIII., vol. iv. pt. i. p. 154.

[113] Venetian Calendars, vol. iii., nos. 557, 558, 589, 607, 634, 669, 670, 710, 1115; V. 711; Foreign, under date Sept. 12, 1551; Hardy’s Report upon Venetian Calendars, pp. 7, 8.

[114] Strype, Eccl. Mem. Oxford, 1822, vol. ii. pt. i. p. 296; Harleian MSS., quoted by Biddle, p. 175, where the story is told in a letter dated April 21, 1550, from the Council to Sir Philip Hoby, resident minister in Flanders. Bancroft, American Cyclopædia, iii. 530.

[115] Biddle, pp. 187, 217, 219; Rymer’s Fœdera, xv. 427, 466; Bancroft, as above.

[116] [It is well known that in commemoration of the English discovery, Cabotia a has been urged as a name for North America; but if Sebastia, urged by William Doyle in his Acc. of the British Dominion beyond the Atlantic, 1770, had been adopted, we should have had a misapplication, quite mating the mishap which gave the name of America to the western hemisphere.—Ed.]

[117] Venetian Calendars, vol. i. no. 453; D’Avezac, Doc. Hist. Maine, i. 504, 505; S. Romanin, Storia Documentata, iv. 453.

[118] Mr. J. F. Nichols, in his Life of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 20, 21, appears to misapprehend the terms of this privilege of naturalization, supposing it was a grant of citizenship for fifteen years to come, and not on account of fifteen years’ residence already passed. The memorandum reads: “Quod fiat privilegium civilitatis de intus et extra Joani Caboto per habitationem annorum xv. juxta consuetum,”—“That a privilege of citizenship, within and without, be made for John Cabot, as usual, on account of a residence of fifteen years.” That such is the proper interpretation of the grant is shown by the full document itself, issued four years previously to another person, and referred to in the Register, where the privilege to John Cabot is recorded. The document recites that “Whereas, whoever shall have dwelt continuously in Venice for a space of fifteen years or more, spending that time in performing the duties of our kingdom, shall be our citizen and Venetian, and shall enjoy the privilege of citizenship and other benefits,” etc. Then follows the statement that the person applying had offered satisfactory proofs that he had dwelt continuously in Venice for fifteen years, and had faithfully performed the other duties required, and he was thereupon declared to be a Venetian and citizen, within and without, etc. (See Intorno a Giovanni Caboto, etc., by Cornelio Desimoni, Genova, 1881, pp. 43-45.)

[119] Ramusio, i. 374.

[120] Decades, f. 255.

[121] M. D’Avezac believed that Sebastian Cabot was born in 1472 or 1473, and that John Cabot and his family removed to England not far from the year 1477. He infers this last date from a conviction that John Cabot early engaged in maritime voyages from Bristol, and that the mention of a vessel sailing from that port in 1480, belonging to John Jay the younger, conducted by “the most skilful mariner in all England,” pointed to John Cabot as the real commander. And he thought he derived some support for this opinion from some passages in the letter of D’Ayala, the Spanish ambassador, mentioned farther on, in regard to voyages made from Bristol to the west for several years before the date of his letter. See Corry’s History of Bristol, i. 318, a work not accurate in relation to the Cabot voyages; cf. Botoner, alias William Wyrcestre, in Antiquities of Bristol, pp. 152, 153.

[122] Spanish Calendars, vol. i. no. 128.

[123] Strachey, in his Historie of Travaile into Virginia (written between the years 1612 and 1619), p. 6, says that John Cabot, to whom and to his three sons letters patents were granted by Henry VII. in 1496, was “idenized his subject, and dwelling within the Blackfriers,” etc.

[124] History and Antiquities of Bristol, 1789, p. 172.

[125] In vol. iv. of the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, now publishing, at p. 350, under the article Bristol, is the following:—

“This year (1497), on St. John’s the Baptist’s Day, the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristol called the ‘Matthew,’ the which said ship departed from the port of Bristow the 2d of May, and come home again 6th August following.”

Some of the dates are new. This statement is credited to an ancient manuscript “in possession of the Fust Family of Hill Court, Gloucestershire, the ‘collations’ of which are now, 1876, in the keeping of Mr. William George, bookseller, Bristol.”

This memorandum, containing the name of “America,” must have been written many years after the event described. Bristol manuscripts have been subjected to much suspicion. See an article in the English Notes and Queries, 2d series, vol. v. p. 154.

[126] Biddle’s Cabot, p. 80.

[127] Venetian Calendars, i. 262.

[128] Venetian Calendars, i. 260. These papers were for the first time printed in America by the American Antiquarian Society, in their Proceedings for October, 1866, in an interesting communication from the Rev. Edward E. Hale, D.D., principally relating to the Cabot voyages. [Mr. Rawdon Brown, who calendared these papers, made his discoveries the subject of a paper on the Cabots in the Philobiblion Society’s Collections, ii. 1856; and in the preface to the first volume of the Venetian Calendars, A.D. 1202 to 1509, he describes the archives at Venice, which yield these early evidences. The late Professor Eugenio Albèri edited at Florence Le Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato durante il Seclo xvio, in fifteen volumes, which contain numerous reports of English transactions at that time.—Ed.]

[129] And is copied by Cornelio Desimoni, in his Giovanni Caboto, Genoa, 1881.

[130] “John Cabot’s Voyage of 1497,” in Hist. Mag. xiii. 131 (March, 1868), with a section of the Cabot (Paris) map. See also “The Discovery of North America by John Cabot in 1497,” by Mr. Frederic Kidder, in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. (Oct. 1878), xxxii. 381 [who reproduces also a part of the same map, and gives a sketch-map marking Cabot’s track around the Gulf. He bases his argument partly on Pasqualigo’s statement that Cabot found the tides “slack,” and shows that the difference in their rise and fall in that region is small compared with what Cabot had been used to, at Bristol. In the confusion of the two Cabot voyages, which for a long while prevailed (see an instance in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. x. 383, under date, 1663), the track of his first voyage is often made to extend down the eastern seaboard of the present United States, and it is thus laid down on the map in Zurla’s Di Marco Polo e degli viaggiatori Veneziani, Venezia, 1818. Stevens, Hist. and Geog. Notes, does not allow that on either voyage the coast south of the St. Lawrence was seen; and urges that for some years the coast-line farther south was drawn from Marco Polo’s Asiatic coasts; and he contends for the “honesty” of the Portuguese Portolano of 1514, which leaves the coast from Nova Scotia to Charleston a blank, holding that this confirms his view. It may be a question whether it was honesty or ignorance. Dr. Hale, Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. Oct. 21, 1871, gives a sketch-map to show the curious correspondence of the Asian and American coast lines. Observe it also in the Finæus map, already given.—Ed.]

[131] I am indebted to Professor Franklin B. Dexter, of Yale College, for the privilege of using this paper, copied by him from the collection of Privy Seals, no. 40, in her Majesty’s Public Record Office in London. Other valuable memoranda, including a copy of the renewal to Sebastian Cabot, in 1550, of the patent of 1495/6, were also generously placed in my hands by Professor Dexter.

[132] Of course, neither John Cabot nor Sebastian could furnish ships at his own charge, any more than Columbus could. Raimondo says that John was “poor,” and the acceptance by him of small gifts from the King proves it. He was probably aided by the wealthy men of Bristol, with whom he may have taken up a credit.

Among the Privy Purse expenses under date of 22d March and 1st April, 1498, are sums of money, £20, £20, £30, £2, paid to several persons in the way of loan, or of reward, for their “going towards the new isle.” Three of these payments were to Lanslot Thirkill, of London, who appears to have been an owner or master of a ship. (Biddle, p. 86.)

[133] Calendar of Spanish State Papers, i. 176-77. [This letter was discovered by Bergenroth in 1860, the document being preserved at Simancas. See also Bergenroth’s Memoirs, p. 77, and Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. Oct. 21, 1865, p. 25.—Ed.]

[134] Biddle, pp. 227-234, 312.

In a work entitled Armorial de la Noblesse de Languedock, by M. Louis de la Roque, Paris, 1860, vol. ii. p. 163, there is an account of the family of Cabot in that Province. The writer says that this family derived its name and origin from Jean Cabot, a Venetian nobleman who settled in Bristol in the reign of Henry VII.; was a distinguished navigator, the discoverer of Terre Neuve, thence passing into the service of Spain; that he had three sons,—Jean (who died in Venice), Louis, and Sebastian (who continued in the service of England and died in France without posterity); that Louis, here called the second son, settled at Saint-Paul-le-Coste, in the Cévennes, had a son Pierre, who died Dec. 27, 1552, leaving a will, by which is shown his descent from Jean the navigator, through his father Louis. Through Pierre the family is traced down to the present time. The arms of the family are given: Device, “D’azur à trois chabots d’or;” motto, “Semper cor cabot Cabot,”—the same as those of the ancient family of Cabot in the island of Jersey, whence the New England family of Cabot sprung. Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, in the introduction to his Life of George Cabot, has given reasons for believing that the French family was derived from that of Jersey. The three sons of John Cabot named in the letters patent of March 5, 1496, are Louis, Sebastian, and Sancius, the last of whom is not named in the list here cited.

It may well be doubted if Jean Cabot is properly styled above “a Venetian nobleman.” See the grant of denization to him in Venice, the several letters patent to him of Henry VII., and the letter of Raimondo on page 54. In the statement that he entered into the service of Spain, he is evidently confounded with his son Sebastian, who, it may be added, did not die in France, but in England. Whether Sebastian left posterity is not known, but he had a wife and children while he was living in Spain. Referring to the motto of the family here given, I may add that the motto on Sebastian’s picture is “Spes mea in Deo est.”

Mention is made on page 31 of a portrait of Sebastian Cabot, till recently attributed to Holbein, painted in England when Cabot was a very old man, of which a copy taken in 1763 now hangs in the Ducal Palace in Venice. At a meeting of the French Geographical Society, April 16, 1869, M. D’Avezac stated that M. Valentinelli, of Venice, had recently sent to him a photograph copy of a portrait of John Cabot, and one of his son Sebastian Cabot, at the age of twenty years, after the picture of Grizellini, belonging to the gallery of the Ducal Palace. He proceeded to say that some guarantee for the authenticity of the picture of Sebastian was afforded by some traces of resemblance between it and the well-known portrait of him by Holbein at the age of eighty-five years (Bulletin de la Soc. de Géographie, 5 ser. to. 17, p. 406). The existence of a portrait of Sebastian Cabot taken at so early an age, before he left Venice to live in England, would be an interesting fact if authentic. An authentic picture of John Cabot, the real discoverer of North America, would have even higher claims to our regard. Prefixed to a Memoir of “Giovanni Cabotto,” by Carlo Barrera Pezzi, published at Venice in 1881, which has just come under my notice, is a medallion portrait, inscribed “Giovanni Cabotto Veneziano.” It is not referred to by the author in the book in which it is inserted.

[135] [See Editorial Note, A, at end of chapter vi. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[136] In this narrative is an account of tobacco twenty years before that luxury was introduced into England by Ralph Lane. The account is in these words (the grammar is defective, but the copy is accurate): “The Floridians, when they travel, have a kinde of herbe dryed, which with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with fire, and the dried herbs put together, do sucke thoro the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live foure or five days without meat or drinke, and this all the Frenchmen vsed for this purpose: yet do they holde opinion withall that it causeth water and fleame to void from their stomacks.” It is a little curious that he should thus connect tobacco with Florida, as if he had not observed its use in the West Indies. It had, indeed, been used in Southern Europe before this time.

[137] A recently discovered letter of Winthrop shows that the Massachusetts colonists made wine of their grapes in the first summer. The appetite for such wine does not seem perilous.

[138] [The story of this French colony is told in Vol. II.—Ed.]

[139]

“Thy name is hasty pudding: how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush!”

Barlow: Hasty Pudding.

[140] One hundred and forty years later, Daniel De Foe, a devoted Christian man, wrote his celebrated biography of Robinson Crusoe, who, when he had been long living in Brazil as a planter, met his critical shipwreck in a voyage to the African coast for slaves. The romance is intended by its author to be what we call a religious novel. The religious experiences of the hero are those to which De Foe attached most importance. In the relation of these experiences he enumerates and repents his “manifold sins and wickedness.” But among these, although he regrets his own folly in risking so much in the pursuit of wealth, it is never intimated that there is anything wrong in dragging these wretched negroes unwilling from their homes: so slow had been the development of the spirit of humanity in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century, and so ill defined were the rights of man!

[141] [See the note on Ingram’s and Hortop’s narratives in the critical part of chap. vi. Since hat chapter was in type, Dr. De Costa has examined anew the story of Ingram’s journey, and has printed Ingram’s relation, from a manuscript in the Bodleian, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883.—Ed.]

[142] By a play upon his name,—“Dracus,” or “Draco.” See the curious coincidence of “Caput Draconis,” mentioned in a later note.

[143] Cortes was never “silent upon a peak in Darien,” except in Keats’s poem.

[144] The World Encompased.

[145] [It is to be observed, however, that the Portuguese, who had made their way to the Moluccas by the Cape of Good Hope in 1512,—a year before Balboa disclosed the great sea to the Spaniards,—claim that in the very year (1520) when Magellan was finding a passage by the straits, and Cortes was exploring the Gulf of Mexico in the vain endeavor to find another, their ships from the Moluccas crossed the ocean eastward and struck the coast of California. It is also represented that the expedition conducted by Cabrillo, a Portuguese in the King of Spain’s service, went up to 44° in 1542-43. This phase of the subject is more particularly examined in Vol. II.—Ed.]

[146] It should be remembered that all these dates are of old style, and correspond to dates ten days later now.

[147] [It is a question how far north Drake went. Up to the middle of the last century, the writers, except Davis in his World’s Hydrographical Discovery, and perhaps Sir William Monson, had fixed his northing at 43°,—these two exceptions placing it at 48°, and this last opinion has been followed by Burney, Barrow, and the writer of the Life of Drake in the 1750 edition of the Biographia Britannica. Greenhow, Oregon and California, 2d edition, p. 74, doubts the later view. Drake’s aim was to find the westerly end of what was for a long time the conjectural Straits of Anian, or the northern passage to the Atlantic, which, ever since Cortereal, in 1500, had found what he supposed the easterly end of such a passage in Hudson’s Straits, had been a dream of navigators and geographers. An examination of the unstable views which were held regarding the shape and inlets of the western coast of North America, from the time of Cortes’ first expedition north, belongs to another volume of this work. A notion of the continuity of Asia and America, which was temporarily dispelled by Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific in 1513, was revived twenty years later by a certain school of geographers, and continued to be held by some for thirty or forty years. Before Drake’s time it had given place to views which more distinctly prefigured the Straits of Behring, not yet to be determined for a hundred and fifty years. The earlier conjectural propinquity of America and Asia at the north—as shown in the maps of Münster, Mercator, and others—was giving place to a more minute configuration, as shown in the maps of Zaltieri and Furlano, of which outlines are given in the text, indicating the kind of view which was prevailing regarding this northern part of the Pacific, which Drake was baffled in his attempt to explore. It is curious to observe, moreover, that Mercator in his map in zones, dated 1541, marks the region later to be called New Albion as having the star Caput Draconis in the zenith,—almost in strange anticipation of its being the spot where the English “dragon” was first to contest Spanish supremacy on the North American continent. Spain had as yet had no sharer of this northern new world.—Ed.]

[148] In the narrative in Hakluyt tobàh is always called tobacco. But Fletcher and Drake’s nephew in The World Encompassed call it tobàh or tabàh; and they knew tobacco and its name perfectly well. They speak of it as an herb new to them. There is no evidence that the natives smoked tobàh.

[149] Alarcon’s account is in these words. He speaks of the winter houses of which Nargarchato informed him. “He told me that these houses were of wood covered with earth on the outside, and plastered with clay within; that they were in form of a round room.” The reader should remember that Fletcher alludes to the architectural device, still to be seen in old New England churches, where the roof rises on all sides to a spire in the middle.

[150] The fondness for feathers is observed by later voyagers; cf. La Perouse.

[151] So in Shelvocke’s journal of his voyage in 1719. “The soil about Puerto Seguro, and very likely in most of the valleys, is a rich black mould, which, as you turn it up fresh to the sun, appears as if intermixed with gold and dust.”

[152] [The Spanish minister, indeed, protested against Drake’s piracies and his sailing in those waters; but the English Government made a declaration denying such prescriptive right to the Spaniards, unless it was enforced by possession. Cf. Camden’s History of Elizabeth, 1688, p. 225; Purchas, iv. 1180; Deane’s edition of Hakluyt’s Discourse, 236.—Ed.]

[153] “The course which Sir Francis Drake held to California,” etc.

[154] [Mr. Hale has written of Dudley and his atlas in the American Antiquarian Society’s Proceedings, October 21, 1873. Cf. also the chapter on “New England” in the present volume.—Ed.]

[155] See Editorial Notes following this chapter.

[156] [See a later page.—Ed.]

[157] Colonel John D. Washburn, in a very careful paper in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., no. 58, 1872, suspects from Torquemada’s account (1615, published at Seville), as cited in the English version of Father Venegas’s History of California (Field, Indian Bibliography, 1,599, 1,600), that the port visited by Viscaino was Jack’s Bay, as indeed the original Spanish of Venegas (iii. III) distinctly says. Cf. also John T. Doyle’s paper, with an introduction by Colonel Washburn in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., October, 1873.

[158] [They had learned by this time to avoid the head-winds that swept westerly from Acapulco to Manila, by stretching northeastwardly on the return voyage, making the coast above San Francisco, and so to follow the shore south. Cf. the Key to a section of Molineaux’s map in the Editorial Notes following this chapter.—Ed.]

[159] Sayer and Bennett, 1774. [I find this twenty years earlier, as shown in the annexed sketch from Jefferys’ Chart of California, New Albion, etc., 1753. Key:—

1. C. das Navadas, or Snowy Cape,
2. Punta de los Reys.
3. Les Farollones.
4. Isles of St. James.
5. Port Sr. Francis Drake, 1578, not St. Francisco.
6. Pto. de Anno Novo.—Ed.]

[160] “He does smile his face into more lines than are in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies.”—Act iii, sc. 2. [The map referred to is Molineaux’ map of 1600, and it has been disputed that it was the map alluded to by Shakespeare. See chap. vi., Editorial Note, F. A section showing the point referred to in the text is given further on.—Ed.]

[161] [The coast-survey authorities have usually favored San Francisco. This was the opinion of Alexander Forbes in his California, 1839, where he gives (p. 127) an interesting view of the bay before commerce had marked it. Dr. Stillman, in the Overland Monthly (October, 1868, March, 1869), and later in his Seeking the Golden Fleece (p. 295), has advocated San Francisco. S. G. Drake, in the American Historical Record, August, 1874, took the same view.

Greenhow, in the second edition (1845) of his Oregon and California, p. 74, does not think the question can be definitely settled between San Francisco and Bodega.

There have been many disputes over Jack’s Bay,—the Sir Francis Drake Bay of the maps. Soulé and the writers of the Annals of San Francisco accept it as the spot; so does Kohl. Professor J. D. Whitney (Encyclopædia Britannica, art. “California”) says the evidence points strongly to Jack’s Bay.

Vancouver seems to have reported the story of the Spaniards calling it Sir Francis Drake’s Bay. Captain Beechey thought it too exposed to have deserved Drake’s description; and it has been held he could not have graved his ship in it. It is claimed, however, that Limantour’s Bay, which opens through an inlet westwardly from Jack’s Bay, answers the required conditions of water and shelter.—Ed.]

[162] There are copies in the Library of Congress, and in the New York State, Harvard, Lenox, and Carter-Brown (ii. 263) libraries. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, vol. viii. no. 30,957; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 667. Hawkins’s voyage is also included in Purchas’s Pilgrimes; and Charles Kingsley in his Westward Ho! pictures vividly the spirit of Hawkins’s day. Cf. also Burney’s History of Voyages in the South Seas.

[163] It is reprinted by Vaux, later mentioned.

[164] They are in the Harvard College, Carter-Brown, and Charles Deane copies, not to name others.

[165] Brinley Catalogue, no. 21; Stevens’s Nuggets, no. 921; Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 20,853. S. G. Drake bought a copy in Boston in 1844 for $4. It was priced by Vaux in 1853 at as many pounds, and is worth much more now. The later editions are worth somewhat less. S. G. Drake (Genealogical Register, i. 126) gives a partial list of those who accompanied Drake, being about one-third of his one hundred and sixty-four men. Among the fullest of the modern narratives are those in Barrow’s Life of Drake, and in Froude’s England, vol. xi. chap. 29. [But Mr. Froude has used his valuable authorities carelessly. He depends in part upon some reports of Spanish officers, which exist in manuscript in Spain, and upon some which are in England, brought home by English cruisers. One of the most interesting, which should still be in the national library in Madrid, I found in 1882 had been cut from the volume and carried away.—E. E. H.]

[166] Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 423.

[167] Ibid., ii. 731.

[168] Hakluyt, vol. iii., or quarto edition, vol. iv.; Harris, vol. i.; Oxford, vol. ii. Hakluyt also gives the relation of Nuna da Silva, a Portuguese pilot whom Drake had captured, and who made his report to the Viceroy of Spain, and John Winter’s account of his companionship with Drake. Vaux collates his text with a manuscript preserved in the British Museum, which may have been the collection of Fletcher’s notes which the compiler of The World Encompassed used. Several narratives are also in the Callender collection of Voyages, Edinburgh, 1766. There are German versions in Gottfried and Vander Aa (1727, vol. xviii.), Cornelius Claesz (1598, 1603), etc. Appended to the Begin en Voortgangh (1645 and 1646) of Isaac Commelin, of Amsterdam, is sometimes a Dutch narrative of the voyages of Candish, Drake, and Hawkins, “described by one of the fleet,” and with an imprint of 1644, which is very rare. Frederic Muller says, in his Books on America, 1872 (no. 1,871), that he had never seen but the one then described, and another, sold to Stevens in 1867.

A French edition, Le Voyage de François Drack alentour du Monde, was originally issued in Paris in 1613, and is now scarce, and sometimes priced at 300 francs. There were other editions, with additions, in 1627 (Sabin, vol. v. no. 23,845), 1631, 1641, 1690. Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 668. The Dedicatory Epistle is signed F. de Lorrencourt. Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, no. 2,743. The title of the later edition runs: Le Voyage curieux faict autour du Monde, etc. Muller’s Books on America (1877), no. 973. [This curious book affects in the dedication to be an original narrative: “I dedicate it to you, Monsieur, because you gave it to me, telling me that you received it from one of your subjects of Courtomer, who had made the voyage with this gentleman.” On examination, however, it proves that the narrative is a rough translation, not very accurate, and generally abridged from that in Hakluyt: generally, but not always; for in a few instances details of local color are added, which I think important, and which appear, so far as I know, in no other narrative. With no apparent purpose but to make the book bigger, a second part is added, entitled Seconde Partie des Singvlaritez remarquees aux isles et terres fermes du Midy et des Indes Orientales: par l’Illustre Seigneur et Chevalier Francois Drach, Admiral d’ Angleterre. It is a botch of travels in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and America, in places mostly which Drake never saw.—E. E. H.]

[169] Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 374; Brinley Catalogue, no. 20; Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana (205 francs); Huth Catalogue, ii. 442. Leclerc, no. 2,744, prices the maps alone at 400 francs; and Quaritch, in 1877, advertised them for £50. The Lenox Library has a copy with the four maps, and a second copy with different vignettes on the title.

[170] Quaritch prices a copy at £10 10s.; Stevens, Nuggets, puts one at £5 15s. 6d. Hakluyt’s third volume (1600) gives the narrative. In some copies of Hakluyt’s volume of 1589 there is found, before page 644, a broadside, giving a journal from Drake’s log-book, Sept. 14, 1585, to July 22, 1586. (Sabin, vi. 543.) It was on this voyage that Drake on his return visited the new settlement in Virginia, as mentioned in chap. iv. of the present volume.

[171] Quaritch, in 1877, claimed that only three copies of this map were known, and only four or five complete sets of the other four are known. The mappemonde is in the Grenville copy, and was in a copy possessed by Rodd, the London dealer, fifty years ago. Baptista B. (or Boazio) seems to have been the designer or engraver. There is also a copy of this fifth map in the Lenox Library.

[172] The Huth Catalogue also gives all five maps to the first edition (52 pages); says the errata are corrected in the second edition, and the words “with geographical mappes,” etc., are left out of the title; while for the third edition (copy in the King’s Library, in the British Museum) a smaller type is used, contracting it to 37 pages. An edition of 1596 is sometimes cited, but it is doubtful if such exists. Lowndes mentions a somewhat doubtful French edition of the same year.

[173] Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 669.

[174] Bare mention may, however, be made of the English accounts, A true coppie of a Discourse, London, 1589, which has been reprinted by Collier, and Robert Leng’s Sir Francis Drake’s valuable Service done against the Spaniards, in the Camden Society’s Miscellanies, vol. v., and the Latin account, printed at Frankfort, 1590, and a German one at Munich, the same year. Stevens’s Bibliotheca Historica (1870), no. 597; Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 668.

[175] This name is the Spanish rendering of John Hawkins; and Draque and Aquines figure also in Torres’ Relacion de los servicios de Sotomayor, Madrid, 1620. Rich (1832), no. 156.

[176] Mr. J. P. Collier printed a small (one hundred copies) fac-simile edition of the 1596 book; but most of the copies were destroyed by fire. A full Relation of this voyage, dated 1652, was included in the 1653 edition of Sir Francis Drake Revived, and is sometimes found separately; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 753.

[177] There were other Dutch editions in 1643 (called by Muller the best; cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 521, for Journalen van drie Voyagien) and 1644. A German account was added in 1598 to the narrative of Candish’s voyages, printed at Amsterdam. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. no. 520. The rendering in De Bry, part viii., is incorrect and incomplete.

[178] Rich (1832), no. 294, £1 8s.; Sunderland, ii. 4,052; Huth, ii. p. 444; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 312. There is a copy in Charles Deane’s collection. It is worth £6 or £7.

[179] The Grenville Catalogue errs in making this the first edition. Huth, ii. 444; Brinley, i. 49; Carter-Brown, ii. 332.

[180] Sunderland, vol. ii. no. 4,053; Huth, ii. 444; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 753. There is also a copy in Harvard College Library.

[181] Reprinted in 1819, at the Lee Priory press, by Sir Egerton Brydges.

[182] Sabin (Dictionary, iv. 13,445) says the title differs in some copies. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,056.

[183] For a Drake bibliography we must go to Sabin’s Dictionary, v. 20,827, etc., and Bohn’s Lowndes. Stevens (Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 202) notes a collection of copies from manuscripts in public depositaries in England which had been brought together as materials for writing a memoir of Drake. As a Devonshire hero, Drake figures in the local literature of Plymouth and its neighborhood.

[184] Cf. Journalen van drie Voyagien, which covers both Drake and Cavendish’s expeditions, and Commelin’s Begin ende Voortgang, and the collection of Gottfried and Vander Aa (1727). Thomas Lodge, the Elizabethan dramatist, accompanied Candish in his voyage of circumnavigation, and translated upon it, from the Spanish, his Margarite of America, published in London in 1596. Sabin’s Dictionary, x. 41,765; Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 1,383.

[185] [Cf. map given on page 11.—Ed.]

[186] [Cf. the Lenox Globe and other delineations, in chap. vi.—Ed.]

[187] [Chap. i., by Charles Deane.—Ed.]

[188] Collinson’s Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, p. 72; Hakluyt’s Voyages (ed. 1600), iii. 58.

[189] Collinson’s Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, p. 75; Hakluyt’s Voyages, iii. 59.

[190] Collinson’s Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, p. 119.

[191] Ibid., p. 242; Hakluyt’s Voyages, iii. 80.

[192] In his first expedition to seek for traces of Sir John Franklin, 1860-1862, our countryman, Captain Charles F. Hall, obtained and brought home numerous relics of Frobisher’s voyages. Some of these were sent to England, and others are deposited in the National Museum at Washington. See Hall’s Arctic Researches, passim; Collinson’s Three Voyages, etc., Appendix; and the Semi-Annual Report of the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, October, 1882.

[193] [See Dr. De Costa’s chapter, and Gilbert’s map and comments in Editorial Note A, sub anno 1576, at the end, and also the notes at the end of Mr. Henry’s chapter.—Ed.]

[194] Northwest Fox, p. 42.

[195] Letter to Mr. Sanderson, in Hakluyt’s Voyages, iii. 114.

[196] Rundall’s Narratives of Voyages towards the Northwest, p. 62.

[197] Northwest Fox, p. 50.

[198] Northwest Fox, p. 117. The documents relating to Hudson’s fourth voyage are in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, iii. 596-610, and in Asher’s Henry Hudson, the Navigator, pp. 93-138.

[199] Northwest Fox, pp. 117, 118.

[200] Ibid., p. 118.

[201] Northwest Fox, p. 244.

[202] [The reader may consult the following, which has a parallel English text: Die Literatur über die Polar-regionem der Erde. Von J. Chavanne, A. Karpf, F. Ritter v. Le Monnier. Herausg. von der K. K. geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien. Wien, 1878, xiv. + 333 pp., 8º.

This book shows 6,617 titles, including papers from serials and periodicals. It is far from judiciously compiled, however; containing much that is irrelevant, and not a little that indicates the compilers’ ignorance of the books in hand, as when they were entrapped from the title into including Dibdin’s Northern Tour and other works equally foreign to the subject. One of the best collections of Arctic literature in this country is in the Carter-Brown Library at Providence; and this, putting strict limits to the subject and not including papers of a periodic character, shows a list of between six and seven hundred titles. Letter of John R. Bartlett.—Ed.]

[203] A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions; undertaken chiefly for the Purpose of discovering a Northeast, Northwest, or Polar Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific: from the earliest Period of Scandinavian Navigation to the Departure of the recent Expeditions under the Orders of Captains Ross and Buchan. By John Barrow, F. R. S. London: John Murray. 1818. 8º. pp. 379 and 48.

[204] Narratives of Voyages towards the Northwest, in Search of a Passage to Cathay and India, 1496 to 1631. With Selections from the Early Records of the Honourable the East India Company, and from MSS. in the British Museum. By Thomas Rundall, Esq. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society. 1849. 8º. pp. xx. and 260.

[This book has a convenient map of Arctic explorations between 1496 and 1631. The general reader will find condensed historical summaries of antecedent voyages, often prefixed to the special narratives, as in the case of Captain Beechey’s Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, 1843, and in the introductions to Asher’s Henry Hudson and Winter Jones’s edition of Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages.—Ed.]

[205] [Cf., for instance, Muller’s Geschiedenis der noordsche Compagnie, 1614-1642. Utrecht, 1875.—Ed.]

[206] The three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the Northwest, A. D. 1576-78. Reprinted from the First Edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages, with Selections from Manuscript Documents in the British Museum and State-Paper Office. By Rear-Admiral Richard Collinson, C. B. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society. 1867. 8º. pp. xxvi. and 376.

[207] The Voyages and Works of John Davis the Navigator. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Albert Hastings Markham, Captain R. N., F. R. G. S., Author of A Whaling Cruise in Baffin’s Bay, The Great Frozen Sea, and Northward Ho! London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society. 1880. 8º. pp. xcv. and 392.

[This volume gives a fac-simile of the Molineaux map of 1600; and reprints Davis’s Worlde’s Hydrographical Description, London, 1595. The presentation copy to Prince Henry, with his arms and a very curious manuscript addition, is in the Lenox Library. Cf. John Petheram’s Bibliographical Miscellany, 1859, and the note, p. 51, in Rundall’s Voyages to the Northwest. In this last book the accounts in Hakluyt are reproduced. Respecting Davis’s maps, see Kohl’s Catalogue of Maps in Hakluyt, pp. 20, 27.—Ed.]

[208] Henry Hudson, the Navigator. The Original Documents in which his Career is recorded, collected, partly translated, and annotated, with an Introduction. By G. M. Asher, LL.D. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society. 1860. 8º. pp. ccxviii. and 292. See Editorial Notes.

[209] The Voyages of William Baffin, 1612-1622. Edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by Clements R. Markham, C.B., F.R.S. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society. 1881. 8º. pp. lix. and 192.

[Purchas first printed Baffin’s narrative of his first voyage, and Rundall re-edited it, supplying omissions from the original manuscript preserved in the British Museum. Markham reprints it, and adds a fac-simile of Baffin’s map of his discoveries; and he also gives a series of five maps from Fox’s down (the first is reproduced in the text), to show the changes in ideas respecting the shape and even the existence of Baffin’s Bay. Of the voyage in which this water was discovered, Purchas also printed, and Markham has reprinted, the account as given in Baffin’s journal.—Ed.]

[210] North-West Fox, or, Fox from the Northwest passage. Beginning With King Arthur, Malga, Octhvr, the two Zenis of Iseland, Estotiland, and Dorgia; Following with brief Abstracts of the Voyages of Cabot, Frobisher, Davis, Waymouth, Knight, Hudson, Button, Gibbons, Bylot, Baffin, Hawkridge; Together with the Courses, Distance, Latitudes, Longitudes, Variations, Depths of Seas, Sets of Tydes, Currents, Races, and over-Falls, with other Observations, Accidents, and Remarkable things, as our Miseries and Sufferings. Mr. Iames Hall’s three Voyages to Groynland, with a Topographicall description of the Countries, the Salvages lives and Treacheries, how our Men have been slayne by them there, with the Commodities of all those parts; whereby the Marchant may have Trade, and the Mariner Imployment. Demonstrated in a Polar Card, wherein are all the Maines, Seas, and Islands, herein mentioned. With the Author his owne Voyage, being the XIVth, with the opinions and Collections of the most famous Mathematicians, and Cosmographers; with a Probabilitie to prove the same by Marine Remonstrations, compared by the Ebbing and Flowing of the Sea, experimented with places of our owne Coast. By Captaine Lvke Fox, of Kingstone vpon Hull, Capt. and Pylot for the Voyage in his Majesties Pinnace the Charles. Printed by his Majesties Command. London, Printed by B. Alsop and Tho. Fawcett, dwelling in Grubstreet. 1635. 4º. pp. x. and 273.

[This little book is now worth about $40 or $50; Rich priced it in 1832 at $10. Brinley, no. 27; Huth, ii. 542; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 556. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., October, 1878. The copy in the Dowse Collection (Mass. Hist. Soc.) has the rare original map. The Menzies and Carter-Brown copies show the map; the Brinley lacked it, as does Mr. Deane’s, which has it in fac-simile.—Ed.]

[211] The name Ralegh was written in thirteen different ways. We have adopted the usual spelling of Sir Walter himself. See Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, p. 171, and C. W. Tuttle in Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings, xv. 383.

[212] [See chapter vi.—Ed.]

[213] See Chalmer’s Annals, chaps. xiv. and xv., and Journals of Congress, October, 1774.

[214] [It was in 1584 that Hakluyt wrote for Ralegh his Westerne Planting, to be used in inducing Elizabeth to grant to Ralegh and his friends a charter to colonize America; and Dr. Woods, in his Introduction to that book, writes, p. xliii, of Ralegh as the founder of the transatlantic colonies of Great Britain. See the history of the MS. in the notes following Dr. De Costa’s chapter.—Ed.]

[215] Strachey, Hakluyt Society’s Publications, vi. 85.

[216] See Works of Bacon, edited by Basil Montague, ii. 525.

[217] [It was prefixed to an edition of Ralegh’s History of the World in 1736.—Ed.]

[218] [One was added to an edition of Ralegh’s Works in 1751.—Ed.]

[219] [This work was in two volumes, 4º, and appeared in a second edition in 1806, 8º.—Ed.]

[220] [History of England, chapters xlv. and xlviii.—Ed.]

[221] A paper read by George Dexter, Esq., before the Massachusetts Historical Society, Oct. 13, 1881, upon “The First Voyage under Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Patent of 1578,” corrects an error into which Mr. Edwards had fallen about this voyage, and shows that it was undertaken in 1578 instead of 1579, as stated by Mr. Edwards, and that Ralegh was the captain of one of the vessels. A few additional references may serve the curious student. Some new material was first brought forward in the Archæologia, vols. xxxiv. and xxxv. Ralegh’s career in Ireland is followed in the Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1881. His last year is considered in Gardiner’s Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage. A contemporary account of his execution from Adam Winthrop’s note-book is printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Sept. 1873. A psychological study may be found in Disraeli’s Amenities of Literature. Two American essays may be mentioned,—that in Belknap’s American Biography, and J. Morrison Harris’s paper before the Maryland Historical Society in 1846.

As to the story at one time prevalent of Ralegh’s coming in person to his colony, Stith, History of Virginia, p. 22, thinks it arose from a mistranslation of the Latin. Cf. Force’s Tracts i. p. 37, Georgia Tract, 1742,—“Mr. Oglethorpe has with him Sir Walter Ralegh’s written journal,” etc.—Ed.

[222] [The sources for this first colony may be concisely enumerated as follows:—

1. Diary of the Voyage, April 9-Aug. 25, 1585, originally in Hakluyt, 1589; also in Hawks.

2. Ralph Lane’s letters, Aug. and Sept. 1585. Some in Hakluyt, vol. iii.; also in Hawks and others referred to in the text, edited by E. E. Hale, in the Archæologia Americana, vol. iv. (1860).

3. Hariot’s narrative originally published in 1588; then by Hakluyt in 1589; and by De Bry in 1590. See later note.

4. Lane’s narrative given in Hakluyt and Hawks.

5. A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, London, 1589; also in Hakluyt, 1600. The copy of the former in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Library was the one used by Prince; see ch. ii.; also Barrow’s Life of Drake, ch. vi. Mr. Edward C. Bruce, in his “Loungings in the Footprints of the Pioneers,” in Harper’s Monthly, May, 1860, describes the condition of the site of the colony at that time. Roanoke Island was sold to Joshua Lamb, of New England, in 1676; Hist. Mag. vi. 123. Cf. Continental Monthly, i. 541, by Frederic Kidder.—Ed.]

[223] [A notice of the original English issue of Hariot (1588) is described on a later page as the second original production relating to America presented to the English public (see notes following Dr. De Costa’s chapter); but it became more widely known in 1590, when De Bry at Frankfort made it the only part of his famous Collection of Voyages, which he printed in the English tongue, giving it the following title: A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, of the commodities, and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants. Discovered by the English colony there seated by Sir Richard Greinuile in the yeere 1585.... This forebooke is made in English by Thomas Hariot. Francoforti ad Moenvm, typis Joannis Wecheli, svmtibus vero Theodori de Bry, cicicxc. It is also the rarest of the parts, and only a few copies of it are known, as follows:—

1. Carter-Brown Library. Catalogue, i. 397, where a fac-simile of the title is given.

2. Lenox Library.

3. Sold in the Stevens Sale (no. 2487), Boston, 1870, to a New York collector for $975. This was made perfect by despoiling another copy belonging to a public collection.

4. Harvard College Library; imperfect.

5. Grenville copy in the British Museum, bought at Frankfort for £100 in 1710 (?).

6. Bodleian Library.

7. Christie Miller’s collection, England.

8. Sir Thomas Phillipp’s collection, England; imperfect.

Rich in 1832, Catalogue, no. 71, had a copy which was made up, and which he priced at £21, but would have held it at £100 if perfect.

A photo-lithographic fac-simile edition of this English text was issued in New York from the Stevens copy in 1871-72, about 100 copies, which is worth $20. (Griswold Catalogue, no. 309.) The original may be worth $1000.

In the same year, 1590, De Bry also issued it in Latin, German, and French. Brunet gives three varieties of the original Latin issue, besides two varieties of a counterfeit one. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 322, gives the collations of the five varieties slightly varying; cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, vol. iii.; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 653. There was a second (1600) and third edition of the German version (Carter-Brown Catalogue, pp. 354, 355; also for the French, p. 329). A German translation by Cristhopher P—— is also contained in Matthæus Dresser’s Historien von China, Halle, 1598; cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, v. 536; Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 429.

De Bry engraved the drawings which White made at Roanoke, or rather a portion of them; for nearly three times as many as appear in De Bry, who copied only twenty-three, are now in the collection of drawings as preserved in the British Museum. What De Bry used may possibly have been copies of the originals, and in any case he gave an academic aspect to the more natural drawings as White made them. Henry Stevens secured the originals in 1865, and in a fire at Sotheby’s in June of that year they became saturated with water, so that a collection of offsets was left on the paper which was laid between them. Mr. Stevens sold the originals for £210, and the offsets for £26 5s., both to the British Museum, in 1866; and his letter offering them and telling the story is in his Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, cf. Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. Oct. 20, 1866. In the Sloane Collection are also near a hundred of White’s drawings; see E. E. Hale in Archæologia Americana, iv. 21. One section of Hariot’s paper, entitled “Of the nature and maners of the people,” appeared in the author’s original English in the Hakluyts of 1589 and 1600, and also in De Bry, who likewise added to his English Hariot a statement called, “The true pictures and fashions of the people in that parte of America now called Virginia,” etc. This statement is not in the printed Hakluyts, though it is said by De Bry to have been “translated out of Latin into English by Richard Hackluit.” It is there said of the pictures that they were “diligently collected and drowne by John White, who was sent thiter speciallye by Sir Walter Ralegh, 1585, also 1588, now cutt in copper, and first published by Theodore De Bry att his wone chardges.” De Bry’s engravings have often been reproduced by Montanus, Lafitau, Beverly, etc. Wyth’s, or White’s “Portraits to the Life and Manners of the Inhabitants,” following De Bry, with English text, was printed at New York in 1841.

The map which accompanies Hariot’s narrative, as given by De Bry, was procured by him from England, and is subscribed “Auctore Joanne With,”—once De Bry writes it “Whit.” It was made in 1587, and Kohl in his Maps relating to America mentioned in Hakluyt, pp. 42-46, thinks that there can be no doubt With is John White, the captain, and that he based, or caused to be based, his drawing on observations made by Lane, who had been in the Chesapeake, while White had not. Stevens, Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, p. 222, identifies the John White the artist with Governor John White. A largely reduced fac-simile of this map is herewith given, for comparison with the Coast Survey chart of the same region. Other fac-similes of the original are given in the Histories of North Carolina by Hawks and Wheeler, in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, i. 243. It was later followed in the configurations of the coast given by Mercator, Hondius, De Laet, etc. The map which is given in Smith’s Generall Historie as “Ould Virginia” closely resembles White’s, which however extends farther north, and includes the entrance of the Chesapeake. There had been one earlier representation of “Virginia” on a map, and that was in Hakluyt’s edition of Peter Martyr on a half globe. De Bry also gives a bird’s-eye view of Roanoke and its vicinity.—Ed.]

[224] [The original sources are also made use of by Williamson and Wheeler in their histories of North Carolina. Some of them are printed in Pinkerton’s Voyages, in Payne’s Elizabethan Seamen, p. 211, and elsewhere; cf. Strachey’s Virginia, p. 142.—Ed.]

[225] [His narrative of the first voyage was published in 1596, the year following his voyage, and was called The Discoverie of the large, rich and bewtiful empire of Guiana, with a relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado), etc. Huth Catalogue, iv. 1216. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 507. I have compared Mr. Charles Deane’s copy. There are three copies of this in the Lenox Library, with such variations as indicate as many contemporary editions. Quaritch recently priced a copy at £20.

Ralegh had written this tract in large part on his voyage, when he made the map of Trinidad and that of Guiana, which he mentions as not yet finished. Kohl, Maps relating to America, etc., p. 65, thinks he has identified this drawing of Ralegh in a MS. map in the British Museum, which was acquired in 1849. The text of the Discoverie was reprinted in Hakluyt, iii. 627; in the Oldys and Birch’s edition (Oxford, 1829) of Ralegh’s Works, vol. viii.; in Pinkerton’s Voyages, xii. 196; in Cayley’s Life of Ralegh. The Hakluyt Society reprinted it under the editing of Sir R. H. Schomburgk, who gives a map of the Orinoco Valley, showing Ralegh’s track. Colliber’s English Sea Affairs, London, 1727, has a narrative based on it; Sabin, iv. 14414.

There was a Dutch version published at Amsterdam in 1598 by Cornelius Claesz; and it is from this that De Bry made his Latin version, in his part viii., 1599 (two editions), and 1625, also in German, 1599 and 1624. Also see part xiii. (1634). There were other Dutch editions or versions in 1605, 1617, 1644. Muller, Books on America, 1872, no. 1268, and 1877, no. 2654; Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 454. It also formed part v. of Hulsius’s Collection of Voyages, and the Lenox Library Bibliographical Contribution on Hulsius gives a Latin edition, 1599, and German editions of 1599, 1601, 1603, 1612, 1663, with duplicate copies of some of them showing variations. See Asher’s Bibliography, p. 42; Camus’s Mémoire, p. 97; Meusel’s Bibliographia Historica, vol. iii. There are also versions or abridgments in the collections of Aa, 1706 and 1727, and Coreal, 1722, and 1738.

The report of Captain Lawrence Keymis was printed at London in 1596, of which there is a copy in Harvard College Library. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 500; it is also given in Hakluyt. Kohl cannot find that either Keymis or Masham made charts, but thinks their reports influenced the maps in Hondius, Hulsius, and De Bry.

The accusations against Ralegh in regard to his Guiana representations have been examined by his biographers. Tytler, ch. 3, defends him; Schomburgk shields him from Hume’s attacks; so does Kingsley in North British Review, also in his Essays, who thinks Ralegh had a right to be credulous, and that the ruins of the city may yet be found. Napier in the Edinburgh Review, later in his Lord Bacon and Ralegh, clears him of the charge of deceit about the mine. Van Heuvel’s El Dorado, New York, 1844, defends Ralegh’s reports, and gives a map. See Field’s Indian Bibliography no. 1595. St. John, in his Life of Ralegh, ch. xv., mentions finding Ralegh’s map in the archives of Simancas. See also the Lives by Edwards, ch. x.; by Thompson, ch. ii.; S. G. Drake in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1862, also separately and enlarged; Fox Bourn’s English Seamen, ch. viii.; Payne’s Elizabethan Seamen, pp. 327, 332; Bulfinch’s Oregon and El Dorado, etc. Further examination of the quest for El Dorado will be given in volume ii.—Ed.]

[226] [This was originally printed at London, 1618, pp. 45. There is a copy in Harvard College Library and in Charles Deane’s collection.—Ed.]

[227] Quoted by Neill in his Virginia Company of London, preface, pp. vi, vii. The play was written by Marston and others in 1605.

[228] Purchas, iv, 1685.

[229] Neill’s Virginia Company, p. 16.

[230] Generall Historie, pp. 53-65.

[231] Wingfield’s Narrative, quoted by Anderson in his History of the Church of England in the Colony, i. 77.

[232] The height of the chimney is 17-7/12 feet; the greatest width 107/12 feet; the fireplace is 7-10/12 feet wide.

[233] Archer was identified by the late William Green, LL.D., Richmond, Va., as the author of the tract, “A Relatyon of the Discovery of our River, from James Forte, into the Maine, made by Captain Christopher Newport, and sincerely written and observed by a Gentleman of this Colony,” reprinted in the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv. pp. 40-65.

[234] Stith, History of Virginia, p. 67.

[235] Generall Historie, ed. 1624, p. 59.

[236] In the outfit of a settler enumerated by Smith is the item, a complete suit of armor. It is of interest to note that portions of a steel cuirass, exhumed at Jamestown, are in the collection of the Virginia Historical Society at Richmond.

[237] Sainsbury’s Calendar of State Papers (1574-1660), p. 8.

[238] [See chapter vi.—Ed.]

[239] This was the first wife of Rolfe, whom history records in 1614 as the husband of Pocahontas. He died in 1622, leaving “a wife and children, besides the child [Thomas] he had by Pocahontas,” for whose benefit his brother, Henry Rolfe, in England, petitioned the Company, Oct. 7, 1622, for a settlement of the estate of the deceased in Virginia.

[240] The text was, Daniel xii. 3: “They that turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever.” The sermon was published by William Welby, London, 1610.

[241] Strachey, in the Hakluyt Society’s Publications, vi. 39.

[242] The tradition is that Dutch Gap derived its name from the German artisans brought over by Newport in 1608, and that the “glass house” was located here. A navigable canal across its narrowest breadth, the digging of which, for military advantages, was begun by the Federal General, Benjamin F. Butler, has since (in 1873) been completed.

[243] Letter of Sir Thomas Dale, dated “James Towne, the 25th of May, 1611,” preserved in the Ashmole Collection of MSS. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England, communicated by G. D. Scull, Esq., and published by the present writer in the Richmond Standard, Jan. 28, 1882.

[244] Fragments of brick, memorials of this town, are still numerously scattered over its site.

[245] In a letter of Governor Argall to the Company in 1617, the Rev. Alexander Whitaker is said to have been recently drowned in crossing James River, and another minister is desired to be sent to the colony in his stead.

[246] Newport was after this appointed one of the six Masters of the Royal Navy, and was engaged by the East India Company to escort Sir Robert Shirley to Persia. Chamberlain, in Court and Times of James I., i. 154.

[247] Neill’s Virginia Company, p. 75.

[248] [See Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[249] [This statement is disputed by some.—Ed.]

[250] See Hening’s Statutes, i. 98; Stith, 126, and Appendix no. 3.

[251] It has been assumed in America that the descendants in Virginia of Pocahontas were limited to those springing from the marriage of Robert Bolling with Jane, the daughter of Thomas Rolfe; but it appears that the last left a son, Anthony, in England, whose daughter, Hannah, married Sir Thomas Leigh, of County Kent, and that their descendants of that and of the additional highly respectable names of Bennet and Spencer are quite numerous. See Deduction in the Richmond Standard, Jan. 21, 1882.

[252] The parish register of Gravesend contains this entry, which has been assumed as that of the burial of Pocahontas “1616, March 21, Rebecca Wrothe, wyffe of Thomas Wrothe, Gent. A Virginia Lady borne, was buried in the Chancell.” Its relevancy has recently been questioned by the Rev. Patrick G. Robert, of St. Louis, in the Richmond Daily Despatch of Sept. 10, 1881, and by Mr. J. M. Sinyanki, of London, in the Richmond Standard of Nov. 12, 1881, both of whom claim upon tradition that the interment was in a corner of the churchyard.

[253] Stith, p. 146.

[254] Smith, Generall Historie, ed. 1627, p. 126.

[255] One of these indentures from the original, dated July 1, 1628, was published by the writer in the Richmond Standard of Nov. 16, 1878.

[256] The engraver was William Hole, engraver of Smith’s map of Virginia. The arms adopted were an escutcheon quartered with the arms of England and France, Scotland and Ireland, crested by a maiden queen with flowing hair and an eastern crown. Supporters: Two men in armor having open helmets ornamented with three ostrich feathers, each holding a lance. Motto: En dat Virginia quintum,—a complimentary acknowledgment of Virginia as the fifth kingdom. After the union of England and Scotland in 1707, the motto, to correspond with the altered number of kingdoms, was En dat Virginia quartam, the adjective agreeing with coronam understood, and it appeared on the titlepage of all legislative publications of the colony until the Revolution. Neill’s London Company, pp. 155-56.

[257] This was not the only material effort made. In 1621, under the zealous efforts of the Rev. Patrick Copland (the chaplain of an East India ship), funds were collected for the establishment of a free school in Charles City County, to be called the East India School. For its maintenance one thousand acres of land, with five servants and an overseer, were allotted by the Company.

The advantage of private education, in the families at least of the more provident of the planters, was increasingly secured by the employment as tutors of poor young men of education, who came over from time to time, and by indenture served long enough to pay the cost of their transportation. Later in the seventeenth century, all whose means enabled them to do so educated their sons in England,—a custom which largely continued during the following century, though William and Mary College had been established in 1692.

[258] A gentleman of the honorable family of Beverstone Castle, County Gloucester.

[259] He was the brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, the late Treasurer of the Company. He was born in 1577, and in 1610 visited Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt. An account of his travels was published at Oxford in 1615.

[260] Chalmers’ Introduction, i. 13-16. The Ordinance and Wyatt’s Commission may be seen in Hening’s Statutes, i. 110-113.

[261] In the Indian massacre of March 22, 1622, Daniel Gookin bravely maintained his settlement. He served as a burgess from Elizabeth City, and later returned to Ireland. His son, of the same name, becoming a convert to the missionaries sent from New England in 1642, and declining to take the oath of conformity, removed in May, 1644, to Boston. He afterwards became eminent in New England, was the author of several historical works, and held various offices of dignity and importance.

[262] In 1687, and again in 1696, Colonel William Byrd, the first of the name in Virginia, undertook the revival of the iron-works at Falling Creek; but there is no record preserved of his plans having been successfully carried out. New iron-works were, however, erected here by Colonel Archibald Cary prior to 1760, which he operated with pig-iron from Maryland, but in the year named he abandoned the forge because of its lack of profit, and converted his pond to the use of a grist-mill. The site of the works of 1622 on the western bank of the creek, and that of Cary’s forge of 1760 on the opposite side of the same water, have both been identified by the present writer by the scoriæ remaining about the ground. The manufacture of iron in Virginia was revived by Governor Alexander Spotswood at Germanna about 1716.

[263] [See chapter xiii.—Ed.]

[264] These were James City, Henrico, Charles City, Elizabeth City, Warwick River, Warrosquoyoke, Charles River, and Accomac.

[265] These magnates, who were called colonels were usually members of the Council, and their functions were magisterial as well as military.

[266] Hening states that “there is a patent granted by Harvey 13th April, 1636.”—Statutes at Large, i. 4.

[267] It was fully three quarters of a century thereafter before Dissent became appreciable in the colony. Governor Spotswood wrote the Bishop of London, Oct. 24, 1710: “It is a peculiar blessing to this Country to have but few of any kind of Dissenters;” and adds the following, which may be taken in refutation of many gross misrepresentations of the moral and social condition of the colonists at the period: “I have observed here less Swearing and Prophaneness, less Drunkenness and Debauchery, less uncharitable feuds and animositys, and less Knaverys and Villanys than in any part of the world where my Lot has been.” He also wrote to the Council of Trade, Dec. 15, 1710: “That happy Establishment of the Church of England, which the Colony enjoys with less mixture of Dissenters than any other of her Majesty’s plantations;” and to the Earl of Rochester, July 30, 1711, in ample confirmation of his earlier judgment, he wrote: “This Government, I can joyfully assure your Lordship, is in perfect peace and tranquility under a due Obedience to the Royal Authority and a Genll. Conformity to the Established Church of England.” See The Official Letters of Governor Alexander Spotswood, 1710-1722, published by the Virginia Historical Society, with Introduction and Notes by R. A. Brock, vol. i. pp. 27 and 108.

[268] His signature is Stegge. He was the maternal uncle of Colonel William Byrd, the first of the name in the colony, who came thither a youth, as the heir of his large landed estate, which included the present site of Richmond.

[269] A son of Sir George Yeardley, a former governor of Virginia, and Lady Temperance, his wife, who was born in Virginia.

[270] The letter is given in full in Thurloe’s State Papers, ii. 273, and is republished in the Richmond Standard of Feb. 11, 1882, by the present writer.

[271] Hening, ii. 24.

[272] Ibid. ii. 49.

[273] The quit-rent was one shilling for every fifty acres of land, the latest consideration in its acquirement. It was first granted to the Adventurers, by the Company, in tracts of one hundred acres, after five years’ service in the colony. If planted and seated within three years, the quantity was augmented by another hundred acres. Later, each person removing to the colony at his own expense, with the intention to settle and remain, was entitled to fifty acres of land. The right extended also to every member of his family or person whose passage-money he defrayed. These rights upon “transports” were called “head-rights,” and were assignable.

[274] The locality of the murder is indicated by a small stream known as Bacon Quarter Branch.

[275] It is given in a rare little tract: An Historical Account of some Memorable Actions, Particularly in Virginia; Also Against the Admiral of Algier, and in the East Indies: Perform’d for the Service of his Prince and Country. By Sr Thomas Grantham, Kt [Motto]. London: printed for J. Roberts, near the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, MDCCVI. 18º. The copy in the Virginia State Library is thought to be the only one in this country, pp. 12, 13: “If Virtue be a Sin, if Piety be Guilt, if all the Principles of Morality and Goodness and Justice be perverted, we must confess that those who are called Rebels may be in Danger of those high Imputations, those loud and severe Bulls, which would affright Innocency, and render the Defence of our Brethren and the Enquiry into our sad and heavy Oppressions Treason. But if there be (as sure there is) a just God to appeal to; if Religion and Justice be a Sanctuary here; if to plead the Cause of the Oppress’d; if sincerely to aim at the Publick Good, without any Reservation or By-Interest; if to stand in the Gap, after so much Blood of our Dear Brethren bought and sold; if after the Loss of a great Part of His Majesty’s Colony, deserted and dispeopl’d, and freely to part with our Lives and Estates to endeavor to save the Remainder, be Treason,—Let God and the World judge, and the Guilty die. But since we cannot find in our Hearts One single Spot of Rebellion and Treason, or that we have in any manner aimed at the Subversion of the Settl’d Government, or attempting the Person of any, either Magistrate or Private Man,—notwithstanding the several Reproaches and Threats of some who for sinister Ends were disaffected to Us, and censure our Just and Honest Designs,—Let Truth be bold and all the World Know the Real Foundation of our Pretended Guilt.”

[276] This is shown by the preservation of books to this day in the several departments of literature which are identified, by ownership in inscribed name and date, with the homes of the Virginia planter of the seventeenth century, many of which have fallen under the personal inspection of the present writer, who has some examples in his own library. A little later, private libraries were numerous in Virginia, and in value, extent, and variety of subject embraced, the exhibit will contrast favorably with that of any of the English colonies in America.

[277] [On the later designation of “Old Dominion,” see Historical Magazine, iii. 319; and J. H. Trumbull on Indian names in Virginia in Historical Magazine, xvii. 47.—Ed.]

[278] The editor of the tract, “J. H.,” in his preface, says: “Some of the books were printed under the name of Thomas Watson, by whose occasion I know not, unlesse it were the ouer-rashnesse or mistakinge of the workmen.”

The words “by a gentleman” got also through ignorance of the real authorship into the titles of some copies as author, there being four varieties of titles. It is sometimes quoted (by Purchas for instance) by the running head-line Newes from Virginia. Mr. Deane edited an edition of it at Boston in 1866. There are eight copies of it known to be in America: one each belonging to Harvard College, S. L. M. Barlow, and the Carter-Brown Library; two in the New York Historical Society, and three in the Lenox Library. (Magazine of American History, i. 251.) The text is the same in all cases, and those copies in which Smith’s name is given have an explanatory preface acknowledging the mistake. Mr. Payne Collier, in his Rarest Books in the English Language, 1865, is of the opinion that Watson was the true author, which Mr. Deane shows to be an error. An earlier, very inaccurate reprint was made in the Southern Literary Messenger, February, 1845, from the New York Historical Society’s copy. Use is also made of it in Pinkerton’s Voyages, vol. xiii. [Mr. Deane suggests that the reason Smith omitted this tract in his Generall Historie, substituting for it the Map of Virginia, is to be found in the greater ease with which the narratives of others in the latter tracts would take on the story of Pocahontas, which his own words in the True Relation might forbid.

Tyler, History of American Literature, i. 26, calls this tract of Smith’s the earliest contribution to American literature. The latest copy sold which we have noted was in the Ouvry Sale, London, March, 1882, no. 1,535 of its Catalogue, which brought £57.—Ed.]

[279] A portrait of “Captaine George Percy,” copied in 1853 by Herbert L. Smith from the original at Syon House, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland, at the instance of Conway Robinson, Esq., then visiting England, is among the valuable collection of portraits of the Virginia Historical Society at Richmond. Its frame, of carved British oak, was a present to the Society from William Twopenny, Esq., of London, the solicitor of the Duke of Northumberland. Percy (born Sept. 4, 1586, died unmarried in March, 1632) was “a gentleman of honor and resolution.” He had served with distinction in the wars of the Low Countries, and his soldierly qualities were evidenced in the colony, as well as his administrative ability as the successor of John Smith. A mutilated hand represented in the portrait, it is said, was a memorial of a sanguinary encounter with the savages of Virginia. The head from this portrait is given on an earlier page.

[280] The author of the “Relatyon,” etc., was identified by the late Hon. William Green, LL.D., of Richmond, as Captain Gabriel Archer. [Newport’s connection with the colony is particularly sketched in Neill’s Virginia and Virginiola, 1878. Neill describes the MS. which is in the Record office as “a fair and accurate description of the first Virginia explorations.” Mr. Hale later made some additions to his original notes (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct. 21, 1864), where some supplemental notes by Mr. Deane will also be found as to the origin of the name Newport-News as connected with Captain Newport. See H. B. Grigsby in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. x. 23; also Hist. Mag. iii. 347.—Ed.]

[281] Preface to Deane’s True Relation, p. xxxiii. [Wingfield’s Discourse was first brought to the attention of students in 1845 by the citations from the original MS. at Lambeth made by Mr. Anderson in his History of the Church of England in the Colonies.—Ed.]

[282] [The MS. was bought at Dawson Turner’s Sale in 1859 by Lilly, the bookseller, who announced that he would print an edition of fifty copies. (Deane’s ed. True Relation, p. xxxv; Hist. Mag., July, 1861, p. 224; Aspinwall Papers, i. 21, note.) It was only partly put in type, and the MS. remained in the printer’s hands ten years, when Mr. Henry Stevens bought it for Mr. Hunnewell, who caused a small edition (two hundred copies) to be printed privately at the Chiswick Press.—Ed.]

[283] Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,800.

[284] This was reprinted in Force’s Tracts, i., and by Sabin, edited by F. L. Hawks, New York, 1867.

[285] Sabin, vii. 323; Rich (1832), £1 8s.; Ouvry Sale, 1882, no. 1,582, a copy with the autograph, “W. Ralegh, Turr, Lond.”

[286] There is a copy in Harvard College Library. (Rich, 1832, no. 121, £1 8s.) It was an official document of the Company.

[287] Another official publication. A copy in Harvard College Library. (Rich, 1832, no. 122, £2 2s.) It is reprinted in Force’s Tracts, iii.

[288] But one copy is now known, which is at present in the Huth collection (Catalogue, iv. 1247), having formerly belonged to Lord Charlemont’s Library at Dublin, where Halliwell found it in 1864, bound up with other tracts. The volume escaped the fire in London which destroyed the greater part of the Charlemont collection in 1865, and at the sale that year brought £63. In the same year Halliwell privately printed it (ten copies). Winsor’s Halliwelliana, p. 25; Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors, vol. ii. p. 1788. In 1874 it was again privately reprinted (twenty-five copies) in London. It once more appeared, in 1878, in Neill’s Virginia and Virginiola. Cf. Lefroy’s History of Bermuda.

[289] Tyler’s American Literature, i. 42. Malone wrote a book to prove that this description by Strachey suggested to Shakespeare the plot of the Tempest,—a view controverted in a tract on the Tempest by Joseph Hunter.

[290] Reprinted in Force’s Tracts, iii. no. 2. The dedication is given in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. 1866, p. 36.

[291] [There is a copy in the Lenox Library; it was reprinted (50 copies) in 1859, and again by Mr. Griswold (20 copies) in 1868. A letter of Lord Delaware, July 7, 1610, from the Harleian MSS., is printed in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Strachey, p. xxiii.—Ed.]

[292] [There is a copy in Harvard College Library. A very fine copy in the Stevens Sale (1881, Catalogue, no. 1,612) was afterward held by Quaritch at £25. Fifty years ago Rich (Catalogue 1832, no. 131) priced a copy at £2 2s. (See Sabin, xiii. 53249.) It was reprinted in Force’s Tracts, vol. i. no. 7, and in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll. vol. viii.—Ed.]

[293] [A further account of this tract will be found in a subsequent editorial note on the “Maps of Virginia;” and of Smith’s Generall Historie a full account will be found in the Editorial Note at the end of Dr. De Costa’s chapter.—Ed.]

[294] [Tyler, American Literature, i. 46; Neill, Virginia Company, 78; Rich (1832), no. 135, priced at £2 2s. Mr. Neill has told the story of Whitaker and others in his Notes on the Virginian Colonial Clergy, Philadelphia, 1877.—Ed.]

[295] [The original edition is in the Lenox Library and the Deane Collection; and copies at public sales in America have brought $150 and $170. (Field, Indian Bibliography, nos. 642-43, where he cites it as one of the earliest accounts of the Indians of Virginia; Sabin, viii. 46.) A German translation was published at Hanau as part xiii. of the Hulsius Voyages in 1617 (containing more than was afterwards included in De Bry’s Latin), and there were two issues of it the same year with slight variations. The map is copied from Smith’s New England, not from his Virginia. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 491; Lenox Contributions (Hulsius), p. 15.

In 1619 De Bry gave it in Latin as part x. of his Great Voyages, having given it in German the year before. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 348, 368.—Ed.]

[296] [Some of them follow in chronological order:—

Norwood’s Voyage to Virginia, 1649; Force’s Tracts, vol. iii.; Virginia Hist. Reg. ii. 121.

Perfect Description of Virginia, 1649; Force’s Tracts, vol. ii.; Virginia Hist. Reg. ii. 60; original edition in Harvard College Library; priced by Rich in 1832, £1 10s., by Quaritch in 1879, £20.

William Bullock’s Virginia impartially Examined, London, 1649; Force’s Tracts, vol. iii. The original is now scarce. Rich in 1832 (Catalogue, no. 271) quotes it at £1 10s. (it is now worth $75). Sabin, iii. 9145; Ternaux, 685; Brinley, 3725.

Extract from a manuscript collection of annals relative to Virginia, Force’s Tracts, vol. ii.

A short Collection of the most remarkable passages from the Originall to the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, London, 1651; there are copies in the Library of Congress and in that of Harvard College.

The Articles of Surrender to the Commonwealth, March 12, 1651; Mercurius Politicus, May 20-27, 1652; Virginia Hist. Reg. ii. 182.

Virginia’s Cure; or, an advisive narrative Concerning Virginia; Discovering the True Ground of that churches unhappiness, by R. G. 1662. Force’s Tracts, vol. iii. The original is in Harvard College Library.

Sir William Berkeley’s Discourse and View of Virginia, 1663; Sabin’s Dictionary, ii. 4889.

Nathaniel Shrigley’s True Relation of Virginia and Maryland, 1669; Force’s Tracts, vol. v.

John Lederer’s Discoveries in Three Marches from Virginia, 1669, 1670, London, 1672, with map of the country traversed. It was “collected out of the Latin by Sir William Talbot, Baronet.” There is a copy in Harvard College Library, Griswold Catalogue, 422; Huth Catalogue, iii. 829.

There are in the early Virginian bibliography a few titles on the efforts made to induce the cultivation of silkworms. The King addressed a letter to the Earl of Southampton with a review of Bonœil’s treatise on the making of silk, and this was published by the Company in 1622. (Harvard College Library MS. Catalogue; Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,760.) The Company also published, in 1629, Observations ... of Fit Rooms to keepe silk wormes in; and as late as 1655 Hartlib’s Reformed Virginian Silk-worm indicated continued interest in the subject. This last is reprinted in Force’s Tracts, vol. iii. no. 13, and the originals of this and of the preceding are in Harvard College Library. Sabin’s Dictionary, viii. 121.—Ed.]

[297] The Orders and constitutions ordained by the treasvror, covnseil, and companie of Virginia, for the better gouerning of said companie, is reprinted in Force’s Tracts, vol. iii.

[298] Fortieth Congress, Second Session, Misc. Doc. no. 84, Senate. Another effort was made in Congress for this eminently desirable measure in 1881. The bill introduced by Senator John W. Johnston, of Virginia, passed the Senate, but for some reason failed in the House of Representatives.

[299] [While these two volumes were yet in his possession, Mr. Jefferson, in a letter to Colonel Hugh P. Taylor, dated October 4, 1823, says, that the volumes came to him with the Library of Colonel Richard Bland, which Mr. Jefferson had purchased,—Colonel Bland having borrowed them of the Westover Library, and never returned them. (See H. A. Washington’s ed. of Jefferson’s Writings, vii. 312.) Colonel Bland died in October, 1776. A duplicate set of these Records (transcripts made in Virginia some hundred and fifty years ago) are now in the possession of Conway Robinson, Esq., of Richmond. They were deposited with him by Judge William Leigh, one of the executors of John Randolph of Roanoke, in whose library they were found after his death, in 1833, where they were inspected and described by the late Hugh Blair Grigsby, before the dispersion of the library at a later period. (Letters of Conway Robinson and H. B. Grigsby to Mr. Deane). These Randolph-Leigh-Robinson volumes were examined by Mr. Deane in Richmond, in April, 1872, just after he had inspected the Byrd-Stith-Jefferson copy in the Law Library in Washington.—Ed.]

[300] [Mr. Neill has published numerous notes on early Virginia history in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., namely, “English maids for Virginia,” 1876, p. 410; “Transportation of Homeless Children,” 1876, p. 414; “Lotteries,” 1877, p. 21; “Daniel Gookin of Virginia,” 1877, p. 267 (see also i. 345; ii. 167; Paige’s Cambridge, 563, and Terra Mariæ, 76).—Ed.]

[301] [Colonel Aspinwall collected during his long consulship at Liverpool a valuable American library, of about four thousand volumes (771 titles), which in 1863 was sold to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Esq., of New York, but all except about five hundred of the rarest volumes which Mr. Barlow had taken possession of were burned in that city in 1864. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xv. 2. This collection was described in a catalogue (a few copies privately printed), Bibliotheca Barlowiana, compiled by Henri Harrisse.—Ed.]

[302] John Pory’s lively account of excursions among the Indians is given in Smith’s Generall Historie. Neill, N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. 1875, p. 296, thinks that George Ruggles was the author of several of the early tracts in Force’s Tracts. See Neill’s Virginia Company, p. 362.

[303] [The history of the dividing line (1728) between Virginia and North Carolina is found in William Byrd’s Westover MSS., printed in Petersburg in 1841. It shows how successive royal patents diminished the patent rights of Virginia. See Virginia Hist. Reg. i. and iv. 77; Williamson’s North Carolina, App.—Ed.]

[304] A copy of this portion of the Records, collated with the original by Mr. Sainsbury, is in the library of the present writer. The other papers of this 1874 volume included a list of the living and dead in 1623, a Brief Declaration of the Plantation during the first twelve years (already mentioned), the census of 1634, etc.

[305] [The Speaker’s Report of their doings to the Company in England was printed in the New York Hist. Coll. in 1857. See also on these proceedings the Antiquary, London, July, 1881.—Ed.]

[306] [There is a copy in Harvard College Library; Rich (1832), no. 133, £2 2s.; Brinley, nos. 3,739-40. It was reprinted in Force’s Tracts, vol. iii. no. 5. Mr. Deane, True Relation, p. xli, examines the conflicting accounts as to the number of persons constituting the first immigration.—Ed.]

[307] [The vexed question as to how far the convict class made part of the early comers is discussed in Jones’s ed. Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages, p. 10; Index to Remembrancia, 1519-1664, with citations in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xvii. 297; Aspinwall Papers, i. 1, note; E. D. Neill, English Colonization in North America, p. 171, and his “Virginia as a Penal Colony,” in Hist. Mag., May, 1869. “It would be wholly wrong, however, to suppose that immigrants of this sort were a controlling element,” says Lodge in his English Colonies, p. 66; and this is now the general opinion.—Ed.]

[308] Bishop Meade’s Old Churches and Families of Virginia, 2 vols. 8º, 1855, Slaughter’s History of St. Mark’s Parish, Culpeper County, 1877, and Bristol Parish, Dinwiddie County, 2d edition, 1879, and the files of the Richmond Standard may be referred to for purposes of genealogical investigation.

[309] A transcript of this “Register” is in the hands of the present writer for preparation for publication, with an Introduction, Notes, and Indices.

[310] A second volume, continuing the series, has been published the present year (1882). An Introduction in vol. i. recounts the losses to which the archives have been subjected, and enumerates the resources still remaining.

[311] Chapter vi.

[312] This iconoclastic view was also sustained by Mr. E. D. Neill in chapter v. of his Virginia Company in London, 1869, which was also printed separately, and in chapter iv. of his English Colonization in America. He goes farther than Mr. Deane, and, following implicitly Strachey’s statement of an earlier marriage for Pocahontas, he impugns other characters than Smith’s, and repeats the imputations in his Virginia and Virginiola, p. 20. There is a paper on the marriage of Pocahontas, by Wyndham Robertson, in the Virginia Historical Reporter, vol. ii. part i. (1860), p. 67. (Cf. Field’s Indian Bibliography, p. 383.) See Neill’s view pushed to an extreme in Hist. Mag. xvii. 144. A writer in the Virginia Hist. Reg. iv. 37, undertook to show that Kokoum and Rolfe were the same. Matthew S. Henry, in a letter dated Philadelphia, Sept. 11, 1857, written to Dr. Wm. P. Palmer, then Corresponding Secretary of the Virginia Historical Society, gives us the Lenni Lenape signification of Kakoom or Kokoum, as “‘to come from somewhere else,’ as we would say, ‘a foreigner.’”

[313] [See Maxwell’s Hist. Reg. ii., 189; and a note to the earlier part of this chapter. Her story is likely still to be told with all the old embellishment. See Prof. Schele de Vere’s Romance of American History, 1872, ch. iii. A piece of sculpture in the Capitol at Washington depicts the apocryphal scene. W. G. Simms urges her career as the subject for historical painting (Verses and Reviews). She figures in more than one historical romance: J. Davis’s First Settlers of Virginia, New York, 1805-6, and again, Philadelphia, 1817, with the more definite title of Captain Smith and the Princess Pocahontas; Samuel Hopkins, Youth of the Old Dominion. There are other works of fiction, prose and verse, bearing on Pocahontas and her father, by Seba Smith, L. H. Sigourney, M. W. Moseby, R. D. Owens, O. P. Hillar, etc.—Ed.]

[314] [See an earlier note on her descendants.—Ed.]

[315] Its place is sometimes supplied by a fac-simile engraved for W. Richardson’s Granger’s Portraits, 1792-96. The original Mataoka or Pocahontas picture was neither in the Brinley, the Medlicott, nor the Menzies copies, and is not in the Harvard College, Dowse, Deane, or in most of the known copies.

The Crowninshield copy (Catalogue, no. 992) had the original plate; and that copy, after going to England, came back to America as the property of Dr. Charles G. Barney, of Virginia, and at the sale of his library in New York in 1870 it brought $247.50; but it is understood that it returned to his own shelves. The Carter-Brown (1632) edition, the Barlow large-paper copy, and one copy at least in the Lenox Library have it.

[316] There exists at Heacham Hall, Norfolk, the seat of the Rolfes, a portrait thought to be of Henry, the son of Pocahontas. This is the painting mentioned by error in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xiii. 425, as of Pocahontas.

[317] Grigsby’s authority for his statements was the son of Sully, who also painted an ideal portrait of Pocahontas. Copies of a picture of Pocahontas by Thomas Sully, and of another painted by R. M. Sully are in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, and it is palpable that they are both mere fanciful representations. The original of the picture which was at Cobb’s, the writer was informed by the late Hon. John Robertson, a descendant of Pocahontas, represented “a stout blonde English woman,”—a description which does not agree with the picture by Robert M. Sully purporting to be a copy.

The late Charles Campbell, author of a History of Virginia, stated that Thomas Sully was allowed to take the original from Cobb’s (it being little valued), and that after cleaning it he altered the features and complexion to his own fancy. Of the picture by Thomas Sully he states: “The portrait I painted and presented to the Historical Society of Virginia was copied, in part, from the portrait of Pocahontas in the ‘Indian Gallery,’ published by Daniel Rice and Z. Clark. In my opinion the copy by my nephew [Robert M. Sully] is best entitled to authenticity.”

[318] There is a copy in Harvard College Library; Rich (1832), no. 165, priced it at £2 2s.

[319] [Force copied from the Richmond Inquirer of September 1804, where Jefferson had printed it from a copy in his possession. Another copy was followed in the Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine in 1820, which is the source from which it was again printed in the Virginia Hist. Reg., iii. 61, 621.—Ed.]

[320] [See an earlier note.—Ed.]

[321] [See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. 1861, p. 320, and Massachusetts Archives, Colonial, 1, 475; Democratic Review, vii. 243, 453. For the later historians see Bancroft’s History of the United States, vol. ii. ch. 14, and Centenary Edition, vol. i. ch. 20; Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 296; and the memoir of Bacon by William Ware in Sparks’s American Biography, vol. xiii.

Articles of peace were signed by John West and the native kings, May 29, 1677 (Brinley Catalogue, 5484.)

Mrs. Aphra Behn made the events rather distantly the subject of a drama, The Widdow Ranter; and in our day St. George Tucker based his novel of Hansford upon them. See Sabin, ii. 4372.—Ed.

[322] In 1722 the book was reissued in London, revised and enlarged as the author had left it, and this edition is now worth £10 10s. It was again reprinted in 1855, edited by Charles Campbell. (Sabin, vol. ii.; Brinley, 3719; Muller, 1877, no. 318, etc.) Jones’s Present State of Virginia, 1724, may also be noted.

[323] [Thomas Hollis wrote in the copy of Keith which he sent to Harvard College in 1768, “The Society, the glorious society, instituted in London for promoting Learning, having existed but a little while, through scrubness of the times, no other than Part I. of this history was published, and it is very scarce.”—Ed.]

[324] [Some claim to be printed in London in 1753; the copy in Harvard College Library is of this 1753 imprint; see Hist. Mag. i. 59, and ii. 61 (where it is asserted that only the title is of new make), and the bibliographical note which Sabin added to his reprint of Stith in 1865, where he describes three varieties. There is a collation in the Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,796, not agreeing with either; cf. Hist. Mag. ii. 184, and North American Review, October, 1866, p. 605.—Ed.]

[325] [Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, 557; Hist. Mag. i. 27; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,502; Tyler, American Literature, ii. 280; Allibone, ii. 2264; article by William Green in Southern Literary Messenger, September, 1863.—Ed.]

[326] See Charles Campbell’s Memoir of John Daly Burk, 1868.

[327] Sabin, iii. 9273.

[328] [C. K. Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, 557; Potter’s American Monthly, December, 1876, the year of Campbell’s death.—Ed.]

[329] [See this map in chapter i.—Ed.]

[330] [The French explorations will be treated, and the illustrative maps will be given, in Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[331] Lane, in 1585, heard of houses covered with plates of metal. Hakluyt, iii. 258. Others repeated similar stories about other places.

[332] Dee’s Diary in the Publications of the Camden Society.

[333] [See chap. iv.—Ed.]

[334] [See chapter iv.—Ed.]

[335] It should be noted that Robert Salterne, who was with Pring at Plymouth, soon after took Orders in the Church of England. This leads to the conjecture that public worship may have been conducted at Plymouth in 1603; though the subject is not referred to.

[336] [See chap. ix. of Vol. IV—Ed.]

[337] [These transactions of the French will be noted in detail in Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[338] [This is counting Pring as the first, not usually reckoned such however, and Champlain as the second. See the Critical Essay.—Ed.]

[339] [A heliotype of this map, somewhat reduced, is given at page 198. It is the second of the ten different states of the plate. See Memorial History of Boston, i. 54; and the Critical Essay—Ed.]

[340] Gorges’ Brief Narrative, ch. xv. [The map made during the Raleigh voyage of 1585, now with the original drawings of De Bry’s pictures in the British Museum, shows a strait at Port Royal leading to an extended sea, like Verrazano’s, at the west. We have been allowed by Dr. Edward Eggleston to examine a photograph of this map.—Ed.]

[341] [See chapter viii.—Ed.]

[342] [See editorial note, A, at the end of this chapter.—Ed.]

[343] On the signification of this word see “The Lost City of New England” in Magazine of American History, i. no. 1, and printed separately. The most notable monograph that has appeared in connection with the general subject is that by M. Eugène Beauvois, entitled, La Norambegue. Découverte d’une quatrième colonie Pré-Colombienne dans le Nouveau Monde. Bruxelles, 1880, pp. 27-32. This very learned author labors with great ingenuity to prove that the word is of old northern origin, and that by a variety of transformations, which he seeks to explain, it means Norrœnbygda, or the country of Norway; and that, consequently, it must be regarded as showing the early occupation of the region by Scandinavians. [Cf. also the paper by the same author on “Le Markland et l’Escociland,” in Congrès des Américanistes; Compte rendu, 1877, i. 224.—Ed.] To the claim that the word is of Indian origin we may oppose the statement in Thevet’s Cosmographie (ii. 1009), evidently derived by that mendacious writer from an early navigator, to the effect that, while the Europeans called the country Norumbega, the savages called it Aggoncy. Father Vetromile reported that he found an Indian who knew the word Nolumbega, meaning “still water;” yet he does not say whether he recognized it as an aboriginal or an imported word. [Vetromile, History of the Abnakis, New York, 1866, p. 49; and assented to by Murphy, Verrazano, p. 38. Father Vetromile says in a letter: “In going with Indians in a canoe along the Penobscot, when we arrived at some large sheet of water after a rapid or narrow passage, men would say Nolumbeghe.” Dr. Ballard, in a manuscript, says the coast Indians in our day have called it Nah-rah-bĕ-gek.—Ed.]

[344] See his account in vol. iii. p. 129 of The Principal Navigations, voiages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation made by Sea or overland, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeeres: Divided into three severall Volumes, according to the positions of the Regions whereunto they were directed, etc., etc. By Richard Hakluyt, Master of Arts, and sometime Student of Christ-Church in Oxford. Imprinted at London by George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1598; in three volumes folio, the third, relating to America, printed in 1600. [This edition was reprinted (325 copies) with care in 1809-12 by George Woodfall, edited by R. H. Evans, and the reprint is now so scarce that it brings £20 to £30. Such parts of Hakluyt’s earlier edition of 1589, as he had omitted in the new edition (1598-1600), were reinserted by Evans, and the completed reprint including other narratives “chiefly published by Hakluyt or at his suggestion,” is extended to five volumes. See an account of the earlier publications of Hakluyt in the note following this chapter.—Ed.]

[345] See Purchas His Pilgrimes, iii. 809.

[346] Bowen’s Complete System of Geography, two vols. folio, London, 1747, vol. ii. p. 686, where reference is made to Cape Lorembec. See also Charlevoix’s reference to Cap de Lorembec, in Shea’s edition, v. 284; also some modern maps.

[347] Descripcion de las Indias ocidentales de Antonio de Herrera, etc. 1601, dec. ii. lib. v. c. 3.

[348] This pilot has also been taken for Verrazano, said by Ramusio to have been killed and eaten by the savages on this coast. See also Biddle’s Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, second edition, London, 1832, p. 272. See also Brevoort’s Verrazano the Navigator, p. 147 [and Mr. Deane’s chapter in the present volume.—Ed.]

[349] Hakluyt, 111, 500.

[350] In 1525 the “Mary of Guilford,” 160 tons, and one year old, was reserved for the King’s use. Manuscripts of Henry VIII. iv. 752. “John Rutt” was at one time master of the “Gabryll Royall.” In 1513 he was master of the “Lord Sturton,” with a crew of 250 men; and, in April of the same year, master of the “Great Galley,” 700 tons, John Hoplin being captain. Ibid., under “Ships.”

[351] Hakluyt, iii. 208; and De Costa’s Northmen in Maine, a Critical Examination, etc.,—Albany, 1870, p. 43,—[in refutation of the arguments of Kohl in his Discovery of Maine, p. 281, who contends for Rut’s exploration.—Ed.]

[352] Folio, 557. A copy of the manuscript is preserved in the British Museum, Sloane manuscripts, 1447, and one is also in the Bodleian, Tanner manuscripts, 79. They present no substantial variations. Hakluyt accepts the relation in his “Discourse,” 2 Maine Hist. Coll. ii. 115-220, [but his editor, Charles Deane, thinks it “has all the air of a romance or fiction.” The Sloane copy was followed by P. C. T. Weston, who privately printed it in his Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, London, 1856 (121 copies), with the following title: “The Land Travels of Davyd Ingram and others in the years 1568-69 from the Rio de Minas in the Gulph of Mexico to Cape Breton in Acadia.” A manuscript copy in the Sparks Collection (Catalogue, App. No. 30) is called “Relaçon of Davyd Ingram of things which he did see in Travellinge by lande for [from?] the moste northerlie pte of the Baye of Mexico throughe a greate pte of Ameryca untill within fivetye leagues of Cape Britton.” Mr. Sparks has endorsed it: “Many parts of this narrative are incredible, so much as to throw a distrust over the whole.”—Ed.

[353] Purchas, iv. 1179. Ingram’s reference to Elephants reminds the reader of the Lions of the Plymouth colonists (Dexter’s Mourt, p. 75). In this connection consult the Rare Travailes of Job Hortop, who was put ashore with Ingram, being twenty-two years in reaching England. Cabeça de Vaca, who came to America with Narvaez in 1528, was six years in captivity, and spent twenty months in his travels to escape. At this period there were Indian trails in all directions for thousands of miles; on these Ingram and his companions travelled. See, for the Indian trails, Maine Hist. Coll., v. 326.

[354] [The Sloane text, according to Weston, has a blank for the name of this river.—Ed.]

[355] Nouvelle France, p. 598.

[356] Œuvres, iii. 22.

[357] Hakluyt, iii. 283. [See also chapter iv. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[358] Williamson’s History of North Carolina, i. 53.

[359] Hawks, History of North Carolina, i. 196., ed. 1857.

[360] Archæologia Americana, iv. 11; and Colonial State Papers, i., under August 12, 1585.

[361] Calendar of Colonial State Papers, i. no. 2.

[362] [His patent is in Hakluyt, iii. 174, and in Hazard, i. 24.—Ed.]

[363] [See chapter iii. in the present volume, for notices of earlier parts of Gilbert’s career. J. Wingate Thornton points out his pedigree in “The Gilbert Family,” in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1850, p. 223. In the same place, July, 1859, is one of Gilbert’s last letters (from the state-paper office), with an autograph signature which is copied in a later note.—Ed.]

[364] See Richard Clarke’s narrative of “The Voyage for the discovery of Norumbega, 1583,” in Hakluyt, iii. 163; [and Edward Haies’s account of the voyage of 1583, Ibid., iii. 143, and also in E. J. Payne’s Voyages of Elizabethan Seamen, London, 1880, p. 175. Soon after Haies, in the “Golden Hind,” reached England, after seeing Gilbert, in the “Squirrel,” disappear, A True Reporte of the late Discoveries (London, 1583) came out, purporting on the titlepage to be by Gilbert; but Hakluyt, who reprinted it in 1589 and 1600, interpreted the initials G. P., of the Dedication, as those of Sir George Peckham, who had in his tract urged another attempt under Gilbert’s patent, as Captain Carlyle had done in his discourse just before Gilbert sailed, which was also reprinted in Hakluyt. See also Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, ed. by Deane, p. 201; George Dexter’s First Voyage of Gilbert, p. 4. The Rev. Abiel Holmes, D.D., printed in Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 49, a memoir of Parmenius the Hungarian, who went down in Gilbert’s largest ship.—Ed.]

[365] Principal Navigations, iii. 246. [Also chapter iv. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[366] Ibid., iii. 193.

[367] A Briefe and true Relation of the Discouerie of the North part of Virginia; being a most pleasant, fruitfull, and commodious Soile. Made this present yeare, 1602, by Captaine Bartholomew Gosnold, Captaine Bartholomew Gilbert, and divers other gentlemen their associats, by the permission of the honourable Knight, Sir Walter Ralegh, etc. Written by Mr. Iohn Brereton, one of the voyage. Whereunto is annexed a Treatise of Mr. Edward Hayes. 4º, London. Geor. Bishop, 1602.

[Of Brereton’s book there are copies in Harvard College Library (imperfect) and in Mr. S. L. M. Barlow’s collection. One in the Brinley sale, No. 280, was bought for $800 by Mr. C. H. Kalbfleisch of New York.

This narrative is followed in Strachey’s Historie of Travaile, book ii. ch. 6. Thornton in notes c and d to his speech “Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges,” at the Popham celebration, enumerates the evidences of the intended permanency of Gosnold’s settlement.

The site of Gosnold’s fort on Cuttyhunk was identified in 1797 (see Belknap’s American Biography), and again in 1817 (North American Review, v. 313) and 1848 (Thornton’s Cape Anne, p. 21).—Ed.]

[368] 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. viii. This reprint was made from a manuscript copy sent from England by Colonel Aspinwall. Proceedings, ii. 116.

[369] Purchas his Pilgrimes, iv. 1651; also in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. [A French translation of the accounts of Gosnold’s and Pring’s voyages appeared at Amsterdam, in 1715, in Bernard’s Receuil de Voiages au Nord; and in 1720, in Relations de la Louisiane, etc.—Sabin’s Dictionary, ii. p. 102.—Ed.]

[370] [This Versameling was issued in 1706-7 at Leyden in two forms, octavo and folio, from the same type, the octavo edition giving the voyages chronologically, the folio, by nations. It was reissued with a new title in 1727. Muller, Books on America, 1872, no. 1887; and 1877, no. 1. Sabin, Dictionary, i. 3.—Ed.]

[371] This subject was first brought to the attention of students by a paper on “Gosnold and Pring,” read before the New England Historic Genealogical Society [by B. F. De Costa], portions of which were printed in the Society’s Register, 1878, p. 76. This shows the connection between the voyage of Gosnold and the letter of Verrazano. See also, “Cabo de Baxos, or the place of Cape Cod in the old Cartology,” in the Register, January, 1881 [by Dr. De Costa], and the reprint, revised. New York: T. Whittaker, 1881. Also Belknap’s American Biography, ii. 123.

[372]New England was originally a Part of that Tract Stiled North-Virginia, extending from Norimbegua (as the old Geographers called all the continent beyond South-Virginia) to Florida, and including also New York, Jersey, Pensylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina. Though Sir Walter Raleigh’s Adventures and Sir Francis Drake’s were ashore in this Country, yet we find nothing very material or satisfactory either as to its Discovery or its Trade, till the Voyage made hither in 1602 by Captain Gosnold, who, having had some Notion of the Country from Sir Francis Drake, was the first Navigator who made any considerable Stay here, where he made a small Settlement, built a fort, and raised a Platform for six Guns.”—Bowen’s Complete System of Geography, London, 1747, ii. 666. [There is a long note on the landfall of Gosnold on the Maine coast, in Poor’s Vindication of Gorges, p. 30.—Ed.]

[373] The relation of Pring’s voyage is derived from Purchas, iv. 1654 and v. 829, where it is attributed to Pring himself. [It should be noted that the identifying of Whitson Harbor with the modern Plymouth was first brought forward by Dr. De Costa in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., January, 1878. It has generally been held that Pring doubled Cape Cod, and reached what is now Edgartown Harbor in Martha’s Vineyard, or some roadstead in that region. Such is the opinion of Bancroft, i., cent. ed., 90; Palfrey, i. 78; Barry, i. 12; and Bryant and Gay, i. 266—all these following the lead of Belknap.—Ed.]

[374] Voyages and Travels, London, 1742, ii. 222. See on Raleigh’s Patent, Palfrey’s New England, i. 81, note. [Also chapter iv. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[375] Divers voyages touching the discouerie of America and the Islands adiacent vnto the same, made first of all by our Englishmen, and afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons, etc., etc. Imprinted at London for Thomas Woodcocke, dwelling in paules Church-Yard, at the signe of the blacke beare, 1582. [See further in the note following this chapter.—Ed.]

[376] The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or over Land, to the most remote and fartherest distant quarters of the Earth, etc. Imprinted at London by George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, Deputies to Christopher Barker, Printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie, 1589. See further in the note following this chapter.—Ed.

[377] Virginia richly valued, By the description of the maine land of Florida, her next neighbor, etc., etc. London, 1609.

[378] [See Editorial note, B, at the end of this chapter, and the chapter on “The Cabots.”—Ed.]

[379] Hakluyt of Yatton. See Divers Voyages, ed. 1850, p. v. note.

[380] American Biography, ii. 135.

[381] Mr. McKeene in the Maine Hist. Coll., v. 307; Hist. Mag., i. 112.

[382] Maine Hist. Coll., vi. 291.

[383] Memorial Volume, published by the Maine Historical Society, p. 301. Other writers have treated the subject, or touched upon it in passing, and some from time to time have changed ground,—one blunder leading to another.

[Belknap had employed a well-known Massachusetts navigator, Captain John Foster Williams, to track the coast with an abstract of Rosier’s journal in hand. His theory, even of late years, has had some supporters like William Willis, in Maine Hist. Coll., v. 346. R. K. Sewall in his Ancient Dominions of Maine, 1859, and Hist. Mag., i. 188, follow McKeene; as does Dr. De Costa himself in the Introduction to his Voyage to Sagadahoc, and General Chamberlain in his Maine, her place in History. George Prince was the first to advocate the George’s River, and his views were furthered by David Cushman in the same volume of the Maine Hist. Coll. Prince, in 1860, reprinted Rosier’s Narrative, still presenting his view in notes to it.

This essay by Prince incited Cyrus Eaton, a local historian (whose story has been told touchingly by John L. Sibley in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiii. 438), to the writing of his History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, which he published at the age of eighty-one years, having prepared it under the disadvantage of total blindness. In this (ch. ii.) the theory of George’s River is sustained, as also in Johnson’s Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid, and in Bancroft. See p. 218.

More recent explorations to ascertain Waymouth’s anchorage are chronicled in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Aug. 23, 1879, and June 11, 1881.—Ed.]

[384] The writer has two sketches of the mountains as seen from Monhegan; yet the Maine Hist. Coll., vi. 295, inform the reader that “the White Mountains with an elevation above the level of the sea of 6,600 feet, being distant 110 miles, could not on account of the curvature of the earth be seen from the deck of the “Archangel,” even with a naked eye.”

[385] 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 122.

[386] The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; expressing the cosmographie and comodities of the country, togither with the manners and customes of the people, gathered and observed as well by those who went first thither, as collected by William Strachey, Gent. Edited by R. H. Major for the Hakluyt Society, London, 1849. p. 159.

[387] Œuvres, iii. 74. “Il nous dit qu’il y auoit un vaisseau à dix lieues du port, qui faisoit pesche de poisson, & que ceux de dedans auoient tué cinq sauuages d’icelle riuiere, soubs ombre amitié: & selon la façon qu’il nous despeignoit les gens du vaisseau, nous les lugeasmes estre Anglois, & nommasmes l’isle où ils estoient la nef: pour ce que de loing elle en auoit le semblance.”

[388] A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeare, 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Discouery of the Land of Virginia: where he discouered 60 miles of a most excellent River; together with a most fertile land. Written by Iames Rosier, a Gentleman employed in the voyage. Londini, Impensis Geor. Bishop, 1605. [The copy of this tract in the Brinley sale, no. 280, was bought by Mr. C. H. Kalbfleisch, of New York, for $800. There are other copies in the New York Historical Society’s Library and in the private collection of Mr. S. L. M. Barlow.—Ed.]

[389] Purchas, iv. 1659.

[390] 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 125. Mr. Sparks procured a transcript of the Grenville copy, and this was used by the printer in this reprint.

[391] Pilgrimage, London, 1614, p. 756.

[392] A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England, London, 1622, pp. 2-4.

[393] Generall Historie of New England, London, 1624, pp. 203-4.

[394] Sir Ferdinando Gorges’ Briefe Narration of the Originall Undertakings of the advancement of plantations into the parts of America, especially showing the beginning, progress, and continuance of that of New England, London, 1658, pp. 8-10. When first published, Sir Ferdinando had been dead some years, and his grandson, Ferdinando Gorges, Esq., included it in a general work, America Painted to the Life, etc.

[395] Fourth Series, i. 219.

[396] Maine Hist. Coll., iii. 286, with an introduction by W. S. Bartlet.

[397] A Relation of a Voyage to Sagadahoc, now first printed from the original manuscript in the Lambeth Palace Library, edited with preface, notes, and appendix, by the Rev. B. F. De Costa. Cambridge, John Wilson & Son, University Press, 1880. [The Preface reviews the story of the settlement; and the Appendix reprints the extracts from Gorges, Smith, Purchas, and Alexander, from which, previous to the publication of Strachey’s account, all knowledge of the colony was derived.—Ed.]

[398] Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. (1880-1881) 82, 117.

[399] Smith’s Generall Historie, p. 203.

[400] [The literary history of this controversy is traced more minutely in the Editorial note C, at the end of this chapter.—Ed.]

[401] [The Gorges papers, which might prove so valuable, have not been discovered. Dr. Woods examined some called such, in Sir Thomas Phillipps’s collection, but they proved unimportant. Hakluyt, Westerne Planting, Introduction, p. xx. The grant from James I. to Gorges, April 10, 1606, covering the coast from 34° to 45° north latitude, and which was afterwards the cause of not a little controversy with the Massachusetts colonists, is given in Hazard’s Historical Collections, i. 442, and in Poor’s Vindication of Gorges, p. 110.—Ed.]

[402] See Nova Britannia, London, 1609, p. 1, no. vi., p. 11, in Force’s Tracts, vol. i.

[403] It should also be observed that Captain John Mason says: “Certain Hollanders began a trade, about 1621, upon the coast of New England, between Cape Cod and Delaware Bay, in 40° north latitude, granted to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, and afterwards confirmed and divided by agreement by King James, in 1606. The plantations in Virginia have been settled about forty years; in New England about twenty-five years. The Hollanders came as interlopers between the two, and have published a map of the coast between Virginia and Cape Cod, with the title of “New Netherlands.” Calendar of State-papers (Colonial), 1574, p. 166, by Sainsbury, London, 1860, p. 143, under April 2 (1632?). Mason is in error respecting the beginning of the Dutch trade, which was in 1598.

[404] For studies and speculations concerning Sabino, Monhegan, Penobscot, and other names found in Maine, see Dr. Ballard in the Report of the United States Coast Survey, 1848, p. 243. Also Williamson’s History of Maine, i. 61, and the Rev. Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter’s edition of Mourt’s Relation, p. 83. [See Dr. Ballard on the location of Sasanoa’s River in Hist. Mag., xiii. 164.—Ed.]

[405] Published by the Hakluyt Society in their volume edited by Asher, and entitled Henry Hudson the Navigator, London, 1860, p. 45. See also Read’s Historical Inquiry concerning Henry Hudson, etc., 1866, with the Sailing Directions of Henry Hudson, prepared for his use in 1608, from the Old Danish of Ivar Bardsen, with an introduction and notes; also a dissertation on the Discovery of the Hudson River, by B. F. De Costa, Albany, Joel Munsell, 1869. Also, Petitot’s Memoires, vol. xx. 141, 232, 421. [See further in ch. x. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[406] Purchas, iv. 1758 and 1664.

[407] Purchas, iv. 1827.

[408] Brief Narration, c. xiv. See also Pinkerton’s Voyages, xiii. 206.

[409] See Biard’s Letter in Carayon’s Première Mission, p. 62.

[410] Relations des Jésuites, Quebec, 1858, 3 vols., vol. i. p. 44.

[411] Colonial State Papers, 1574, vol. i. articles 18 and 25, 1613.

[412] For authorities see Champlain’s Œuvres, iii. 17; also, Lescarbot’s Nouvelle France, ed. 1618, lib. iv. c. 13. A translation of the narrative of Father Biard is given in Scenes in the Isle of Mount Desert, by B. F. De Costa, New York, 1869. [Further accounts of these proceedings will be given in Vol. IV. of the present history.—Ed.]

[413] See A Description of New England: or The Observations and Discoueries of Captain Iohn Smith (Admirall of that Country), in the North of America, in the year of our Lord 1614: with the successe of sixe Ships that went out the next yeare, 1615, and the accidents befell him among the French men of Warre: with the proofe of the present benefit this countrey affoords, whither this present yeare, 1616, eight voluntary ships are gone to make further Tryall. At London printed by Humfrey Lownes for Robert Clerke; and are to be sould at his house called the Lodge, in Chancery lane, ouer against Lincolnes Inne, 1616. Also The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles ... from their first beginning Ano. 1584, to the present, 1626. London, 1632. [See note D, at the end of this chapter.—Ed.]

[414] Brief Narration, in Maine Hist. Coll., ii. 27, and Dexter’s Mourt’s Relation, p. 86.

[415] Generall Historie.

[416] Bradford’s Plimouth Plantation in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. 95. Mourt’s Relation says that Hunt took seven Indians from Cape Cod. Dexter’s Mourt’s Relation, p. 86. Dermer says that Squanto was captured in Maine.

[417] See the Hakluyt Society’s publication, edited by Markham, The Hawkins Voyages, 1878.

[418] See the letter in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 248; and the Cotton Manuscripts, British Museum. Also Neill’s Colonization, p. 91.

[419] Gorges in Brief Narration, ch. xiv., and New England’s Trials, p. 11, in Force’s Tracts. Briefe Relation of the President and Council, Purchas, iv. 1830; also in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., i. Prince’s New England Chronology, Boston, 1736, p. 64, and Dermer’s letter in 2 New York Hist. Coll., i. 350.

[420] Doc. Hist. of New York, i. [This is a map “Della nuova Belgia è parte della nuova Anglia,” of which a portion is given in fac-simile in chapter ix. of the present volume. The editor of the Doc. Hist. gives no clew to its origin, but it can be traced to Carta II., in Robert Dudley’s Dell Arcano del Mare, Firenze, 1647.—Ed.] See, on the tourists in the New World, Verrazano the Explorer, p. 65.

[421] [It may be worth mentioning that the map in the Libro di Benedetto Bordone, 1528, gives “Norbegia” as the form of the name. Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 91. The matter will be further considered in connection with the French explorers in another volume.—Ed.]

[422] [It is described in the Catalogue of the MS. Maps, etc., in the British Museum, 1844, i. 23; and map no. 17 shows the east coast of North America from 6° N. to 51° N.; and no. 20, both hemispheres. Malte Brun describes it in his Histoire de la Géographie, Ed. Huot., i. 631.—Ed.]

[423] [See further on this map in the chapter on “The Cabots,” where a fac-simile is given.—Ed.]

[424] This map embraces the country from Newfoundland to Florida, showing a part of the Gulf of Mexico. It is found in a collection of eleven beautifully executed maps, bound in one large volume, preserved in the British Museum. [Cf. Kohl’s Maps, Charts, etc., mentioned in Hakluyt, 1857, p. 16; and Collinson’s Frobisher’s Voyages, published by the Hakluyt Society.—Ed.] See Verrazano the Explorer, New York, 1880, p. 56. This map shows the Euripi of Nicholas of Lynn. See Inventio Fortunata.

[425] The Private Diary of John Dee, edited by Halliwell, and published by the Camden Society, 1842, P. 5. [This diary is written on the margins of old almanacs, which were discovered in the Ashmolean Museum. Halliwell calls Disraeli’s account of Dee, in his Amenities of Literature, correct and able. Winsor’s Halliwelliana, p. 5.—Ed.]

[426] [It measures 3¾ by 2¼ inches; and is carefully drawn on vellum, and accompanied by another, sketchily drawn, of the same date. Catalogue of MS. Maps, etc., in the British Museum, 1844, i. 30.—Ed.]

[427] Dee’s Diary, p. 16, and Hakluyt, iii.

[428] [We can only regret that Gilbert’s “cardes and plats that were drawn with the due gradation of the harbours, bayes, and capes, did perish with the admirall.” Haies in Hakluyt.—Ed.]

[429] See reproduction in the Historical and Geographical Notes of Henry Stevens, 1869, and another in chapter i. of the present volume. [A fac-simile has also been separately issued in London, worth about thirty shillings. The map, which is a considerable advance on earlier maps and shows the English tracks down to about 1584, is dedicated to Hakluyt by F. G. (initials which have so far concealed the true name), and is so rarely found in copies that its presence more than doubles the value of the book, which without it may be put at eight guineas. Fifty years ago a good copy with a genuine map was not worth more than four guineas,—now twenty guineas. Rich’s Catalogue, 1632, No. 68. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, No. 370, does not show the map.—Ed.]

[430] Atlas zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Amerikas, by Kunstmann and others, Munich, 1859, Plate xiii. [The original is said, in Markham’s Davis’s Voyages, p. 361, to be preserved in Dudley’s own copy of the Arcano del Mare, at Florence. The large map of 1593 in Historiarum Indicarum Libri xvi. Maffeii, also gives place to Norumbega; as does Wytfliet’s edition of Ptolemy, 1597. The Speculum Orbis-terrarum of Cornelius de Judaeis, published at Antwerp, 1593, has a map, “Americæ pars borealis, Florida, Baccalaos, Canada, Corterealis.” The German edition of Acosta, 1598, gives a map of Norumbega and Virginia, making them continuous. Carter-Brown Catalogue, nos. 517, 520.—Ed.]

[431] Preserved in the Library of the Middle Temple. A tracing is in possession of the writer, from which a sketch of a section is given in note E, following this chapter.

[432] [See note F, at the end of this chapter.—Ed.]

[433] See Cabo de Baxos, or the Place of Cape Cod, in the old Cartology, by B. F. De Costa, New York, 1881, p. 7.

[The Editor dissents from the views given in this elaborate tract and adopted in the text of the present chapter; and thinks that Cape Cod, and not Sandy Hook, is the conspicuous peninsula which appears on the early maps. In the general coast-line Cape Cod is a protuberant angle, while Sandy Hook is in the bight of a bay which forms an entering angle, and, unlike Cape Cod, is of no significance in relation to the trend of the continental shore. There is the least difficulty, in the matter of the bearings of one point from another, with considering this feature to be Cape Cod; and we must remember that the compass was the only instrument of tolerable precision which the early navigators had, and its records are the only ones to be depended upon. It is accordingly never safe to discard the record of it, unless under strong convictions as to a misreading of its evidence. The Editor does not receive such convictions from the moderate variations of latitude, which often were one or two degrees or even more out of the way in the old maps; nor from the coast names, which by no means were constant in position, and were not infrequently sadly confused and made to appear more than once under translated forms. The process of copying such from antecedent maps was far more liable to error than the transmission of the general direction and the sinuosities of the coast line. The cartographers sometimes scattered names, seemingly for little purpose but to fill up spaces. Coast names, before settlements were fixed, were of the utmost delusiveness, except sometimes in the case of isolated features, not to be confounded.—Ed.]

[434] [See vol. iv. of this present work.—Ed.]

[435] On the variations found in ten different impressions of the map, see Winsor, in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 52 [where a section of it, with the portrait of Smith, is given in heliotype. A reduced heliotype of the whole map is given herewith. Hulsius, when he translated Smith’s book for his voyages, made an excellent reproduction of the map, which appears in three of his sections. The earliest of the modern reproductions was that in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. Palfrey has given it, reduced by photolithography, but not very satisfactorily, in his New England, i. 95. It was re-engraved by Swett in 1865 for Veazie’s edition of the Description, and the plate was subsequently altered to correspond with later states of the original plate, and in this condition appears in Jenness’s Isles of Shoals. It is reduced from this re-engraving in Bryant and Gay’s United States, i. 518.—Ed.]

[436] In his Description, p. 67, Smith says, “At last it pleased Sir Ferdinando Gorge, and Master Doctor Sutliffe, Deane of Exceter, to conceve so well of these proiects and my former imployments, as induced them to make a new adventure with me in those parts, whither they have so often sent to their continuall losse.”

[437] See his Henry Hudson in Holland, printed at The Hague, 1859, pp. 43-66.

[438] Beschryvinghe van der Samoyeden Landt in Tartarien, etc., Amsterdam, 1612. The language on the map is, “ende by Westen Nova Albion in mar del sur.” See also Henry Hudson in Holland, which shows how Hudson happened to make his voyage to our coast.

[439] Verrazano the Explorer, 1881, p. 57. Hakluyt, iii. 737. Endicott, in 1661, called New England “This Patmos;” Calendar of State Papers, America and the West Indies, London, 1880, p. 9.

[440] True Travels, p. 58.

[441] [It however still kept its place on the maps of De Laet, 1633, 1640, etc.—Ed.]

[442] Bourne (d. 1582) first issued almanacs with Rules of Navigation in 1567. In 1578 he printed an account of sea devices, making in it the earliest mention of Humphrey Cole’s invention of the log. Cruden’s History of Gravesend, 1843.

[443] In Dexter’s Congregationalism, pp. 277-78, are citations of English State Papers relating to this voyage and to journals of it.

[444] Dexter, Congregationalism, p. 314.

[445] Neal, History of the Puritans, iii. 347.

[446] Preface to Christian Institutions.

[447] Dexter, Congregationalism, pp. 395, 397.

[448] A full and evidently impartial account of this dissension, its method and its results, though anonymous, was published in London in 1575, under the title of A Brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford, in Germany, Anno Domini 1554, Abowte the Booke of common prayer and Ceremonies, and continued by the Englishe men there to thende of Q. Maries Raigne, in the which discours the gentle reader shall see the very originall and beginnenge off all the contention that hath byn, and what was the cause off the same (no place given). This, with an Introduction, was reprinted in London in 1846, as A Brief Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort in the Year 1554, about the Book of Common Prayer and Ceremonies.

[449] Exhort. ad Castita, c. 7.

[450] Village Communities, p. 201.

[451] In Morton’s New England Memorial.

[452] Morton, p. 76.

[453] New York, 1880.

[454] The works of John Strype include Historical Memorials, six volumes; Annals of the Reformation, seven volumes; and his Lives of Cranmer, Parker, Whitgift, Grindall, Aylmer, Cheke, and Smith, published at Oxford, 1812-1828, which should be accompanied by a General Index, by R. T. Lawrence, in two volumes.

Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation of the Church of England was originally published in London in three volumes in 1679, 1681, and 1715. There have been various editions since.

[455] University Press, Cambridge. Cf. The Zurich Letters.

[456] [Cf. the Critical Essay appended to the chapter on the “Pilgrim Church” in the present volume.—Ed.]

[457] The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, London, 1594. The seventh and eighth books did not appear till 1618; and the whole was issued together in 1622. There have been various editions since.

[458] Literature of Europe, ii. 166.

[459] Constitutional History of England.

[460] The History of the Puritans, or Protestant Nonconformists: from the Reformation in 1517 to the Revolution in 1688. Comprising an Account of their Principles, their Attempts for a Further Reformation in the Church, their Sufferings, and the Lives and Characters of their Most Considerable Divines. By Daniel Neal, M.A. Cf. Bohn’s edition of Lowndes, p. 1655.

[461] The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, considered principally with Reference to the Influence of Church Organization on the Spread of Christianity. By Robert Barclay. London, 1876, 4º, 700 pp.

[462] [See the chapter on “The Founding of Pennsylvania” in the present volume.—Ed.]

[463] A History of the Free Churches of England, from A. D. 1688 to A. D. 1851. By Herbert S. Skeats. London, 1868.

[464] See the Annual Congregational Year-Book.

[465] Bampton Lectures, p. 68.

[466] Among the more important volumes of a historical character prompted by the occasion above referred to, may be mentioned, English Puritanism, its Character and History, etc. (by P. Bayne); The Early English Baptists (by B. Evans); Church and State Two Hundred Years Ago (by J. Stoughton); and English Nonconformity (by R. Vaughan).

[467] Leaders of the Reformation; English Puritanism and its Leaders,—Cromwell, Milton, Baxter, Bunyan; and Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century. These works were published in 1859, 1861, and 1872, respectively, and there have been later editions.

[468] Dissent in its Relations to the Church of England: Eight Lectures, on the Bampton Foundation, preached before the University of Oxford in 1871. By George Herbert Curteis, M.A., London, 1872.

[469] History of Free Churches of England, p. 14.

[470] Constitutional History, chap. iv.

[471] The Church and Puritans: a Short Account of the Puritans; their Ejection from the Church of England, and the Efforts to restore them. By D. Mountfield, M.A., Rector of Newport, Salop. London, 1881.

[472] The Organization of the early Christian Churches: Eight Lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, in the year 1880. Bampton Lectures. By Edwin Hatch, M.A. London, 1881.

[473] Christian Institutions: Essays on Ecclesiastical Subjects. By Dean Stanley, of Westminster. London, 1881.

[474] [Cf. also chapter ix.—Ed.]

[475] N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. xviii. 20.

[476] Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xii. 98.

[477] Calendar of Domestic State Papers, Aug. 18, 1603.

[478] Historical Magazine, iii. 358.

[479] Eighth Report of Royal Commission on Hist. MSS., pt. 2, p. 45; Hanbury’s Memorials, i. 368.

[480] In the household of this Countess (widow of the fourteenth Earl), Thomas Dudley, later one of the founders of Massachusetts, was steward. The patentee did not go with the emigrants, and is never heard of again. Another John Whincop was matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in July, 1618, graduated B.A. in 1622, was a member of the Westminster Assembly in 1643, and died Rector of Clothall, Herts, May 6, 1653, in his fifty-second year.

[481] [We only know this compact in the transcript given in Mourt’s Relation, and in the copy which Bradford made of it in his MS. history.

Its last surviving signer was John Alden, who died in Duxbury, Sept. 12, 1686, aged eighty-seven; though that passenger of the “Mayflower” longest living was Mary, daughter of Isaac Allerton, who became the wife of Elder Thomas Cushman (son of Robert Cushman), and she died in 1699, aged about ninety.—Ed.

[482] By New Style the 21st; through an unfortunate mistake originating in the last century (Palfrey’s History of New England, i. 171) the 22d has been commonly adopted as the true date.

[483] Mourt’s Relation, p. 21. Mr. S. H. Gay has suggested (Atlantic Monthly, xlviii. 616) that this landing was not at Plymouth, but on the shore more directly west of Clark’s Island (Duxbury or Kingston), and that consequently the commemoration of a landing at Plymouth on that day rests on a false foundation; but the Rev. Henry M. Dexter, D.D., has conclusively shown (Congregationalist, Nov. 9, 1881) that the soundings must have led the explorers, unless the deep-water channels have unaccountably changed since then, directly to the neighborhood of the rock which a chain of trustworthy testimony on the spot identifies as the first landing-place of any of the “Mayflower” company within Plymouth Harbor. Tradition divides the honor of being the first to step on Plymouth Rock between John Alden and Mary Chilton, but the date of their landing must have been subsequent to December 11.

[484] [The burials of that first winter were made on what was later known as Coale’s Hill, identical with the present terrace above the rock.

It perpetuates the name of one of the early comers.—Ed.

[485] Printed in 1854 in Mass. Hist. Coll. vol. xxxii, with Introduction by Mr. Charles Deane; also separately (one hundred copies). [The original parchment was discovered, in the early part of this century, in the Land Office in Boston; and having been used by Judge Davis when he edited Morton’s Memorial, was again lost sight of till just before it fell to Mr. Deane to edit it. Besides the autographs of the Duke of Lenox, the Marquis of Hamilton, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Sheffield, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, it bore one other signature, of which a remnant only remains. It is now at Plymouth.—Ed.]

[486] Bradford’s History, xi.; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., August, 1866, p. 345.

[487] Mass. Hist. Coll., xxviii. 298.

[488] [The main parts of it were also reprinted in the Congregational Board’s edition of Morton, in 1855. There is a memoir of Hunter in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xvii. 300.—Ed.]

[489] Priest, Tinker and Soule, are names found in the records of parishes near Scrooby (Palfrey’s History of New England, i. 160), and it is not unlikely that Degory Priest, Thomas Tinker, and George Sowle, of the “Mayflower,” may have come from this region. It is also said by Mr. W. T. Davis (Harper’s Magazine, lxiv. 254, January, 1882, “Who were the Pilgrims?”), that a William Butten’s baptism is found in Austerfield, under date of Sept. 12, 1589. But it would be hazardous to identify this man of thirty-one years with the “William Butten, a youth, servant to Samuel Fuller,” who died on the “Mayflower’s” voyage to America. It is also believed that Miles Standish was a scion of the Standish family of Duxbury Hall, Lancashire. [This view is encouraged, if not established, by the expressions of Standish’s own will, which is printed in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., v. 335. The story of Standish’s career has been more than once reviewed of late years, on account of the efforts, not yet completed, to erect a tower to his memory on Captain’s Hill, in Duxbury. Its proposed height is not yet reached; and when completed, it will bear his effigy on its top. There were Proceedings printed to commemorate the consecration of the ground, Aug. 17, 1871, and on laying the corner-stone, in 1872. It is known that Standish was never of the Pilgrim communion; and “Was Miles Standish a Romanist?” is discussed in Mag. of Amer. Hist., i. 390. The inventory of his books is given in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 54. Bartlett, Pilgrim Fathers, and the illustrated edition of Longfellow’s Poems, 1880, give some views connected with the English family. On the descendants of the Captain, see N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 145; Winsor’s Duxbury; Savage’s Dictionary, etc.

Of the origin of Carver, their first governor, nothing is known. Cf. N. B. Shurtleff, in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1850, p. 105; 1863, p. 62; and 1872, p. 333. The Howlands were long supposed to be his descendants through the marriage of his daughter to the Pilgrim John Howland, and the modern inscription on the latter’s monument on the Burial Hill, at Plymouth, repeats a story seemingly disproved by the recovery of Bradford’s manuscript history, which states that Howland married a daughter of another Pilgrim, Edward Tilley. A recent revision of the story, by W. T. Davis, in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Nov. 25, 1881, rather urging the traditional belief, was met by Charles Deane, in Ibid., Dec. 7, 1881, who showed that John Howland, Jr., was born in Plymouth, in 1626, and could not have sprung from an earlier marriage of John, Sr., with Carver’s daughter. The decision turns upon the identity of “Lieutenant Howland,” as mentioned by Sewall, being met near Barnstable. It is barely possible that Joseph Howland, and not John, Jr., was meant; but Joseph did not live at Barnstable, as John, Jr. did. Cf. Historical Magazine, iv. 122, 251; and New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1860, p. 13, 1880, p. 193.—Ed.]

[490] [Cf. Mr. Deane’s memorandum, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., October, 1870, p. 403.—Ed.]

[491] [This book contains a full exposition of the influence which the Plymouth Pilgrims exerted upon the New England Congregational system. Cf. further Dr. Jas. S. Clark’s Congregational Churches in Massachusetts, 1858; the Appendix to the Congregational Board’s edition of Morton’s Memorial; and Dexter’s Congregationalism, p. 415.—Ed.]

[492] [Winslow’s tract was reissued unchanged in 1649, as The Danger of tolerating Levellers in a Civill State. There are copies in the Lenox, Charles Deane, and Carter-Brown libraries. A copy is worth, perhaps, $100. Winslow’s report of Robinson’s sermon seems to have been a reminiscence of his own, twenty-five years after the event. It is not decided when it was delivered. It has usually been held to represent advanced and liberal views; but Dr. Dexter dissents, and says that “polity, and not dogma, is the keynote of the still noble farewell.” See Congregationalism, etc., pp. 403, 409; and Palfrey’s History of New England, i. 157. The whole subject of Robinson’s relation to the Leyden congregation is treated by Dr. Dexter, p. 359; and of his union with Johnson’s church at Amsterdam, on p. 318, note. The only copies of the original edition of 1646 known to the Editor are in Dr. Dexter’s and the Carter-Brown libraries.—Ed.]

[493] [Dr. O. W. Holmes has thrown a little light on contemporary life in Leyden from Scaligerana, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. (June, 1874), xiii. 315.—Ed.]

[494] See a memoir of Mr. Sumner, by R. C. Waterston, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 189. also, a report of his speech at Plymouth, in 1859, in the Hist. Mag., iii. 332; and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1859, p. 341.

[495] With the specific title: John Robinson, Prediker der Leidsche Brownistengemeente en grondlegster der Kolonie Plymouth. Leiden, 1846. [What is known of Robinson’s family and descendants can be learned from the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1860, p. 17; 1866, pp. 151, 292. The question of the Rev. John Robinson, of Duxbury, being a descendant, was set at rest negatively by Dr. Edward Robinson, in his Memoir of the Rev. William Robinson, New York. 1859.—Ed.]

[496] The story of the manuscript and of its transmission to our times is given by the editor of the present volume, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., vol. xix.,—a paper also issued separately (75 Copies).

[497] [They are also given in Steele’s Chief of the Pilgrims, p. 316; in Neill’s English Colonization, ch. vi.; in Poor’s Gorges; and in the English calendars, Colonial, i. 43.—Ed.]

[498] The Bibliographical Appendix to Dr. H. M. Dexter’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature, mentions nine of these imprints, viz., nos. 459, 467, 470, 475, 476, 478, 481, 482, 495. Three or four others are also known. See the Brinley Catalogue, no. 530. [Brewster’s career has been made the subject of an extended memoir, Chief of the Pilgrims, Philadelphia, 1857, as it is somewhat unsatisfactorily called. It has merit in tracing the European existence of the Pilgrim Church, but is unfortunately disfigured (p. 350) in a minor part by some genealogical fabrications imposed upon the author, the Rev. Ashbel Steele. (Cf. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary, sub “Brewster.”) Dr. Dexter, N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1864, p. 18, in examining the evidence for his birth, puts it in 1566-67; so that at his death, in 1644, he was seventy-seven, or possibly seventy-eight. See Mr. Neill, Hist. Mag., xvi. 69, and cf. Mr. Deane, Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xii. 98; also Poole’s Index, p. 160.

The well-known trembling autograph of the Elder (given in fac-simile on an earlier page) is one of the sights in the Record Office at Plymouth, where it appears attached to a deed, as recorded,—a practice not uncommon in the days when the colony was small. This was long thought to be the only signature known, while it was a cause of some surprise that no one of the four hundred volumes of his library (given by title in his inventory,—Plymouth Wills, i. 53) had been identified by bearing his autograph. Three of these books, however, have since been found,—one a Latin Chrysostom, Basil, 1522, now in the Boston Athenæum, bears his autograph, with the motto, “Hebel est omnis Adam,” which is also found, as shown in the fac-simile in Steele’s Chief of the Pilgrims, in another volume, similarly inscribed, now at Yale College Library. The fact that the Athenæum volume bears evidence, in another inscription, of having belonged to Thomas Prince, the grandson of the Elder, and son of the governor of the colony of the same name, and of his receiving it in July, 1644, while the Elder died in the preceding April, would seem to indicate that the Pilgrim’s collection of books was distributed among his relatives. The Rev. Dr. Dexter, in his Congregationalism, gives a fac-simile of an autograph of Brewster written at an earlier period than the others; and this is found in a third volume belonging to Dr. Dexter, and numbered 211 in his Bibliography. Hunter, in his Founders of New Plymouth, p. 86, has shown how close a resemblance the autograph of James Brewster, the master of the hospital near Bawtry, and friend of Archbishop Sandys, bears to the Elder’s signature.—Ed.]

[499] [Dr. Punchard’s work was unfortunately left incomplete. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1880, p. 325, and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 3. The painstaking student will doubtless compare these works with Dr. Waddington’s Hidden Church and Cong. Hist., in which, however, Dr. Dexter seems to have little confidence. (Cf. his Congregationalism, pp. 70, 201, 211, 262, 322, and his article in the Cong. Quarterly, 1874.) The Hidden Church was published in 1864, with an Introduction by E. N. Kirk. (Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1864, p. 219; and 1881, p. 195.)

In the archives of the English Church at Amsterdam there is a document, signed by Ant. Walæus and Festus Hommius, theological professors at Leyden, dated May 25-26, 1628, testifying to Robinson’s exertions to remove the schisms between the various Brownist congregations in the Low Countries, and his resolution, upon discouragement, to remove “to the West Indies, where he did not doubt to effect this object.” A photo-lithographic copy of this paper has been issued (Muller’s Books on America, 1877, no. 2,780). The contemporary rejoinders to Robinson’s arguments can be seen in Samuel Rutherford’s Due Rights of Presbyteries, London, 1644.

The student will not neglect Hanbury’s Historical Memorials relating to the Independents, London, 1639-44; R. Baillie’s Anabaptism, London, 1647, and Catherine Chidley’s Justification of the Independent Churches (? 1650). The distinction between the Puritans and the Pilgrims is maintained in Dr. Waddington’s books; in Dr. I. N. Tarbox’s papers in the Congregational Quarterly, vol. xvii., and in the Old Colony Hist. Soc. Papers, 1878; in an appendix, p. 443, to Punchard, vol. iii.; in Benjamin Scott’s Lecture, London, 1866, reprinted in the Hist. Mag., May, 1867, from which is mostly derived a paper in Scribner’s Monthly, June, 1876. Scott also printed a lecture, “An Hour with the Pilgrim Fathers and their Precursors,” in 1869. (Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1871, p. 301; also, see Hist. Mag., May and November, 1867; October, 1869; Essex Institute Hist. Coll., vol. iv., by A. C. Goodell; besides Baylies, Palfrey, Barry, etc.) Dr. Dexter, Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xvii. 64, has pointed out a curious instance of tampering with one of Robinson’s books. See further, Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., x. 393, and N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1859, p. 259.—Ed.]

[500] [This charge was first printed by Morton in his Memorial, and the earliest mention of it known is in some papers of the Record Office, London, printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., December, 1868, p. 385. Neill, in his English Colonization, p. 103, intimates that Jones may have purposely guided his vessel to Cape Cod from an understanding with Pierce and Gorges. Neill identifies the “Mayflower” captain with Jones of the “Discovery,” a vessel despatched to Virginia. (Cf. Young’s Chronicles, p. 102, and Palfrey’s New England, i. 163.) O’Callaghan, New Netherland, i. 80, rejects the bribe theory. The name of Jones is preserved in Jones River, shown on the map of Plymouth Bay on a previous page.—Ed.]

[501] [Our chief accounts of Bradford, other than from his own writings, are derived from Mather’s Magnalia, and from Hunter’s Founders of New Plymouth. Belknap, in his American Biography, gives a judicious summary of what was then known, and there is a brief one in Cheever. Besides what may be found in the general histories, the reader can find other accounts in Tyler’s American Literature, i. 116; by J. B. Moore in Amer. Quart. Reg. xiv. 155, and in his Governors of New Plymouth, etc.; by W. F. Rae in Good Words, xxi. 337; in the Congregational Monthly, ix. 337, 393. His will is in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1851, p. 385; and an account of his Bible in same, 1865, p. 12. For accounts of his descendants, see genealogy by G. M. Fessenden in Register, 1850, pp. 39, 233; also, 1855, pp. 127, 218; 1860, pp. 174, 195. Cf. also Durrie’s Index to American Genealogies, and Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary.

Bradford’s views on the Separatist movement, and on church government, are given in several “Dialogues between Old Men and Young Men;” one of which, written in 1648, and copied in the Records by Morton, is given by Dr. Young in his Chronicles, and another, probably written in 1652, was printed with comments by Charles Deane in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., October, 1870, vol. ix. p. 396. See also the Congregational Board’s edition of Morton’s Memorial. A letter of Bradford to Governor Winthrop on the early relations of the Plymouth Colony with the Bay, dated Feb. 6, 1631-32, is now in the possession of Judge Chamberlain, of the Boston Public Library; and, with its signatures of Bradford and his associates, it is the most precious autograph document of the Pilgrims in private hands. It is printed in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., ii. 240, annotated by Charles Deane. Some verses by Bradford, illustrating in a slender way the colony’s early history, were referred to in his will, and were printed as a fragment in Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. 77, by Dr. Belknap. The original manuscript came with Belknap’s papers to the Society,—Proceedings, iii. 317. Other verses of a similar character were printed in 3 Collections, vii. 27; still others are edited by Mr. Deane in Proceedings, xi. 465.—Ed.]

[502] [Smith gave an abstract of Mourt in his Generall Historie; then Purchas, vol. iv., condensed it; and this condensation was reprinted, with notes, in 1802, by Dr. Freeman in Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 203; but in 1819 Dr. Freeman and Judge Davis procured from a copy in the Philadelphia Library the parts omitted by Purchas in Ibid., xix. 26. (Cf. Proceedings, i. 279.) Dr. Young first printed it entire in his Chronicles. Dr. Cheever, in 1848, gave it with disorderly and homiletical editing in his Journal of the Pilgrims. Dr. Dexter used Charles Deane’s copy. There are other copies in the Carter-Brown and S. L. M. Barlow libraries. (Cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 1,909; Menzies Catalogue, no. 1,447; Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 742; and N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1849, p. 282, and 1866, p. 281.) Rich, in his 1832 Catalogue, 164 and 171, priced a copy at £2 2s., and in his 1844 Catalogue at £1 8s.; Quaritch recently held one at £36. Doctors Young and Dexter agree that “G. Mourt” must represent George Morton. A previous note has given Dr. Dexter as the best authority for tracing the localities named in this journal. See, also, Freeman’s Cape Cod and De Costa’s Footprints of Miles Standish.

Mourt makes no record of the landing from the “Mayflower” being upon a rock, nor does he indicate the precise spot, or fix a commemorative day. In an earlier note mention has been made of a recent controversy on these points. Mr. Gay found an earlier opponent than Dr. Dexter in Mr. William T. Davis, Boston Daily Advertiser, Nov. 17, 1881, to which Mr. Gay replied, Nov. 30, 1881; and again Mr. Davis rejoined, Dec. 3, 1881. As to the mistake of celebrating the 22d instead of the 21st December, which arose from the Committee of the Old Colony Club adding for the change of style one day too many, a Committee of the Pilgrim Society in 1850 recommended a change in the commemoration day; but though for a few years followed, it has not effected a permanent compliance, and by a recent vote of the Society the 22d has been re-established. The 1850 Report was printed. (Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., iv. 350, 369) Mr. Gay, in the Popular History of the United States, i. 393, takes another view of the mistake. It was in 1769 that the Plymouth people determined to institute a celebration, and fixed upon the day, December 11, Old Style, when the exploring party from the “Mayflower,” then in Provincetown harbor, first landed on the mainland and explored it.

Attempts have been made to trace the earlier and later career of the “Mayflower.” Mr. Hunter, in an appendix to his Founders of New Plymouth, p. 186, has shown how common the name was. She is thought to have been identical with one of Winthrop’s fleet ten years later; but the slaver “Mayflower,” with which she has been sometimes identified, was a larger vessel. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1871, p. 91, and 1874, p. 50; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, April 12, 1588.

Of Samoset, the Indian whom the colonists first encountered after landing, there are accounts in Dexter’s edition of Mourt’s Relation; Sewall’s Ancient Dominion of Maine, p. 101; Popham Memorial, by Professor Johnson, p. 297; Thornton’s Pemaquid, p. 54; and in Maine Hist. Coll., v. 186.

Mourt’s Relation and Winslow’s Good News give the earliest accounts of the Indians in the Pilgrims’ neighborhood, who had been nearly exterminated by a recent plague. (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., v. 130.) Of Massasoit and his family,—this chief being the nearest sachem,—Fessenden’s History of Warren, R. I., gives an account. See also E. W. Peirce’s Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy pertaining to the good Sachem Massasoit and his descendants, North Abington, 1878. Drake, in his Book of the Indians, book ii. chap. ii., and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1858, p. 1, examines the colonists’ relations with the Indians. See Congregational Quarterly, i. 129, for a paper, “Did the Pilgrims wrong the Indians?” Their efforts to Christianize them are examined in the Appendix to the Congregational Board’s edition of Morton’s Memorial.

It was at Plymouth (1631-1633) that Roger Williams drew up his treatise attacking the validity of the titles acquired under the patents granted by the king, in accordance with the common-law principle as understood at the time. Acceptance of his views as to the sole validity of the Indian title would have disturbed the foundations of the colony’s government; and it was not without satisfaction that the authorities saw Williams return to the Bay, where his factious and impracticable views on civil policy, quite as much or even more than any views on theology, led to his subsequent banishment. The later history of Williams was Massachusetts’ best vindication. Charles Deane has thoroughly examined his position as regards the patent, with an amplitude of references, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., February, 1873.—Ed.]

[503] [The bibliography of this famous discourse is traced in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg, April, 1861, p. 169; and in the Hist. Mag., ii. 344; iv. 57; v. 89. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, v. 156. Dr. Dexter notes three copies,—his own, the Bodleian’s, and Charles Deane’s. The sermon has been several times reprinted; is given in part by Dr. Young; also in the Cushman Genealogy, and was photo-lithographed (60 copies), in 1870, from Dr. Dexter’s copy, then in Mr. Wiggin’s hands, with a historical and bibliographical preface by Charles Deane. Dexter, Congregationalism, App., p. 30, gives the reprints.—Ed.]

[504] [It was printed in London in 1624. There are copies in Charles Deane’s and the Carter-Brown collections. Rich (1844), £1 8s. Purchas, vol. iv., abridged it; and his abridgment was printed in Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 239, with omissions supplied in xix. 74; cf. also Proceedings, i. 279. Young first printed it entire in his Chronicles, from a copy formerly in Harvard College Library; it is also in the Appendix of the Congregational Board’s edition of Morton’s Memorial.—Ed.]

[505] [See a memoir of Judge Davis by Convers Francis, in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., x. 186.—Ed.]

[506] [The second edition, Boston, 1721, had a supplement by Josiah Cotton, with changes of title, indicating perhaps successive impressions. The third edition appeared in 1772, at Newport. In 1826 an edition appeared at Plymouth, followed the same year by Judge Davis’s at Boston. The last edition was issued by the Congregational Board in 1855, with notes and appendix of Bradford’s account of the church from the Colony records, and Winslow’s visit to Massasoit, from his Good Newes. The Harvard College copy of the 1669 edition has autographs of “W. Stoughton” and “John Danforth.” The Prince Library copy is imperfect, restored in manuscript, and has Prince’s notes. There were different imprints to the 1721 edition, the Harvard copy reading, “Reprinted for Daniel Henchman;” Charles Deane’s copy has “Reprinted for Nicholas Boone;” otherwise the two seem to be alike. See Brinley Catalogue, nos. 329, 330; Dexter’s Congregationalism, App. p. 94; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., vi. 427; Tyler’s American Literature, i. 126.—Ed.]

[507] [Certain of the letters, being the correspondence between the Plymouth and New Netherland Colonies in 1627, are reprinted in the New York Hist. Coll., 2d series, vol. i. See an account of the MS. in Cheever’s Journal of the Pilgrims, chap. xxiii.—Ed.]

[508] [Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. 246, 279. S. G. Drake added a fifth part and an index to Baylies’, when he reissued the remainder-sheets of the original work, giving an account of the 1628 Kennebec patent, with an old map of that region. See, also, for the Pilgrims’ experiences on the Kennebec, R. H. Gardiner’s paper in the Maine Hist. Coll. ii., and the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1855, p. 80, and 1871, pp. 201, 274; for their Penobscot experiences, J. E. Godfrey’s paper in Maine Hist. Coll. vii. 29.—Ed.]

[509] [An “Old Colony Historical Society,” whose seat is at Taunton, began to publish papers of a Collection in 1878. The local aspect of the colony’s history is traced in various town and parish histories, to which clews will be found in F. B. Perkins’s Check List of American Local History, Colburn’s Massachusetts Bibliography, and in the historical sketch prefixed to the Plymouth County Atlas, Boston, 1879.

These local histories usually contain more or less genealogical information about the descendants of the “first comers,” as those who came in the first three vessels (“Mayflower,” 180 tons, in 1620; “Fortune,” 55 tons, in 1621; “Ann,” 140 tons, and “Little James,” 44 tons, 1623) are distinctively called; and various family histories have also traced the spread of Pilgrim blood throughout the American States. Savage’s Geneal. Dict. of N. E., and the bibliographies of American genealogies by Whitmore and Durrie, will indicate these. Dr. N. B. Shurtleff published the long-accepted list of the “Mayflower” passengers in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 47 (also separately privately printed); but several errors were corrected on the recovery of the Bradford manuscript, and the true list is printed in that History.—Ed.]

[510] [A memoir of Dr. Young by Chandler Robbins will be found in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., ii. 241.—Ed.]

[511] N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1863, p. 366.

[512] [A Dutch translation of this, published in 1859, may indicate the interest still felt in the story in the land of their exile.—Ed.]

[513] Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiii. 390.

[514] See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 114.

[515] See Ibid., iv. 367.

[516] [It was remodelled in 1880, when a fragment of the rock, which was taken from the larger portion in 1774, and after having been kept before the Court House till 1834, when it was placed before this hall, was taken back to its original site beneath the present monumental canopy.—Ed.]

[517] The family tradition fixes the painting of it in 1651, and Vandyke, to whom it has been assigned, died in 1541. See the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xv. 324, for a notice of an alleged portrait of Miles Standish; also Memorial History of Boston, i. 65.

[518] [See Dr. Waddington’s description of a picture in one of the compartments of the Lords’ corridor at Westminster, representing with some misconception the same scene. Historical Magazine, i. 149. Sargent’s picture of the landing at Plymouth, well known from engravings, is in Pilgrim Hall. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., iv. 193.—Ed.]

[519] [This monument, after a design by Hammatt Billings, was originally intended to be one hundred and fifty feet high; but it was reduced nearly one-half, as the necessary subscriptions failed. It bears a colossal figure of Faith, and four other typical figures surrounding the base, not all of which are yet in place. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1857, p. 283.—Ed.]

[520] [This well-known production is for the historical student much disfigured by abundant anachronisms, which, as it happens, do not conduce to the effect of the poem. Crayon, v. 356; Mag. of Amer. Hist., April, 1882.—Ed.]

[521] [A collection of the minor commemorative poems, edited by Zilpha H. Spooner, was published as Poems of the Pilgrims, Boston, 1882, with photographs of associated localities. Cf. Boston Daily Advertiser, April 22, 1881.—Ed.]

[522] The stories of these two colonies are told respectively in chapters v. and vi.

[523] The records of the Council for New England frequently refer to the subject of the renewal of their patent. Under the date of Aug. 6, 1622, we read: “Forasmuch as it has been ordered by the Lords of his Majesty’s Privy Council that the Patent for New England shall be renewed, as well for the amendment of some things therein contained as for the necessary supply of what is found defective,” etc. Then follow some minutes of additional changes desired by the patentees themselves.

[524] [See Vol. IV. chap. iv.—Ed.]

[525] “Mr. Glanvyle moveth to speed the bill of fishing upon the coast of America, the rather because Sir Ferdinand Gorge hath executed a patent since the recess. Hath, by letters from the Lords of the Council, stayed the ships ready to go forth.

“Mr. Neale accordant, that Sir Ferdinando hath besides threatened to send out ships to beat off from their free fishing, and restraineth the ships, ut supra.

“Sir Edward Coke, that the patent may be brought in; and Sir T. Wentworth, that the party may be sent for.

“Ordered, the patent shall be brought in to the Committee for Grievances upon Friday next, and Sir Jo. Bowcer [Bourchier, one of the patentees] and Sir Ferdinando his son, to be sent for, to be then there, if he be in town, Sir Ferdinando himself being captain of Portsmouth” (Plymouth).

On the 24th, “Neale moveth again concerning ... restraint of fishing upon the coasts of ... it may be brought in at the next ... for grievances and the Com....

“Ordered, the patent, or in the default thereof [a copy?], shall be considered of by the said com[mittee] in the afternoon. Sir Jo. Barr [Bowcer?...] attend the said committee at that time.”—Journal of the House of Commons.

[526] See chapter viii.

[527] Two parts of the territory were to be divided among the patentees, and one third was to be reserved for public uses; but the entire territory was to be formed into counties, baronies, hundreds, etc. From every county and barony deputies were to be chosen to consult upon the laws to be framed, and to reform any notable abuses; yet these are not to be assembled but by order of the President and Council of New England, who are to give life to the laws so to be made, as those to whom it of right belongs. The counties and baronies were to be governed by the chief and the officers under him, with a power of high and low justice,—subject to an appeal, in some cases, to the supreme courts. The lords of counties might also divide their counties into manors and lordships, with courts for determining petty matters. When great cities had grown up, they were to be made bodies politic to govern their own private affairs, with a right of representation by deputies or burgesses. The management of the whole affair was to be committed to a general governor, to be assisted by the advice and counsel of so many of the patentees as should be there resident, together with the officers of State. There was to be a marshal for matters of arms; an admiral for maritime business, civil and criminal; and a master of ordnance for munition, etc. (Cf. the Council’s “Briefe Relation,” in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 21-25; S. F. Haven’s Lecture before the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jan. 15, 1869, on The History of the Grants, etc., pp. 18, 19.)

[528] Tradition has preserved the name of “Winter Harbor” there, and this name appears on a map of the New England coast, which is one of the collection known as Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, issued at Florence in 1646, and of which a reduced fac-simile is given herewith. Dudley was an expatriated Englishman, of the Earl of Leicester, and had a romantic story, which has been told by Mr. Hale in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., 1873. Dudley’s first wife had been a sister of Cavendish, and he is otherwise connected with American exploration; but there is no evidence that he had much other material for this map than Smith and the Dutch. [Dudley and his cartographical labors are also brought under notice in chap. ii. of the present volume, and in chap. ix. of Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[529] Of thirty-six meetings recorded to have been held between May 31, 1622, and June 28, 1623, Sir F. Gorges was present at thirty-five meetings; Sir Samuel Argall, thirty-three; Goche, treasurer, twenty-two. The average attendance at a meeting was but four. One half the patentees originally named in the grant never attended a meeting.

[530] The record says that there was presented to the King “a plot of all the coasts and lands of New England, divided into twenty parts, each part containing two shares, and twenty lots containing the said double shares, made up in little bales of wax, and the names of twenty patentees by whom these lots were to be drawn.” The King drew for three absent members, including Buckingham, who had gone to Spain. There were eleven members present, who drew for themselves. Nine other lots were drawn for absent members.

[531] Yet it should be mentioned here that the grant to the Marquis, afterward Duke, of Hamilton of land between the Connecticut River and Narragansett, which lay dormant during his life, was claimed by his heirs at the Restoration, and at a later period, but was not allowed. The grant to the Earl of Sterling, between St. Croix and Sagadahoc, was in 1663 sold by his heir to Lord Clarendon, and a charter for it was granted next year to the Duke of York.

[532] Palfrey’s History of New England, ii. 51-56.

[533] Ibid. pp 57, 403-405; Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iii. 281-300.

[534] [See chap. x. of the present volume, and chap. x. of Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[535] See chapter x.

[536] Hilton’s Point (Dover) about the year 1640 was called North-ham, in compliment to Thomas Larkham, who in that year arrived there from North-ham in England. Wiggin was governor here five years, George Burdett two, John Underhill three, and Thomas Roberts one.

[537] It is by virtue of this agreement that the lands are still held.

[538] [The so-called Endicott Rock, with its inscription dated 1652, fixed the northern limits of New Hampshire at the headwaters of the Merrimac River, and as part of Massachusetts. Cf. Granite Monthly, v. 224; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 311; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 400; New Hampshire Historical Collections, iv. 194.—Ed.]

[539] Bacon, quoted by Palfrey, i. 535, 536.

[540] [What purported to be a portrait of Haynes appeared in C. W. Elliott’s History of New England; but it was later proved to be a likeness of Fitz John Winthrop, and the plate was withdrawn. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xii. 213.—Ed.]

[541] At last, in 1696, what was termed “owning the covenant” was first introduced into the church at Hartford. Under the influence of the synod held in Boston in 1662 of Massachusetts churches alone, the “Half-Way Covenant” had been adopted in that colony. A want of a closer union among the churches was a growing feeling in the colony of Connecticut not provided for by the Cambridge Platform; and the Saybrook Platform, the result of a Connecticut synod held in 1708, was an attempt to provide for this want. This ecclesiastical document was printed in New London in 1710, in a small, thin volume called a Confession of Faith, etc.; and is the first book, says Isaiah Thomas, printed in Connecticut. Trumbull, i. 471, 482.

[542] Palfrey’s History of New England, vol. iii. p. 238.

[543] See Belknap, History of New Hampshire, i. 5. It was also printed by Dr. Benj. Trumbull, History of Connecticut, vol. i. 1818, App., from a copy furnished by Chalmers, under the impression that it had been “never before published in America,” and has since appeared in Brigham’s Charter and Laws of New Plymouth, pp. 1-18, Baylies’ New Plymouth, i. 160, and in the Popham Memorial, pp. 110-118.

[544] Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 52,619,—very rare.

[545] [Dr. Haven also contributed to the Memorial History of Boston, i. 87, a chapter on the subject of these early patents and grants. He closed a valuable life Sept. 5, 1881. Cf. Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., October, 1881, and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 4, 63.—Ed.]

[546] See Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., for October, 1868, pp. 34, 35; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., May 1876, p. 364.

[547] See Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. for October, 1875, pp. 49-63. Most of the grants of the Council are extant, either in the original parchments or in copies; and many of them have been printed. Some enterprising scholar will probably one day bring them all together in one volume, with proper annotations. It would be a convenient manual of reference.

[548] The rare list of these names in duplicate inserted in some copies of Smith’s tract may be seen in his Generall Historie, p. 206. [The map itself, with some account of it and of Smith, may be found in chapter vi. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[549] [See a previous page.—Ed.]

[550] See Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts, i. 9; Belknap’s New Hampshire, App. xv.

[551] Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, pp. 89, 90; Brigham, Charter and Laws of New Plymouth, pp. 36, 49, 50, 241; 1 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., iii. 56-64. For the discussion of questions of European and Aboriginal right to the soil, see Sullivan, History of Land Titles in Mass., Boston, 1801, and John Buckley’s “Inquiry, etc.,” 1 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., iv. 159.

[552] But cf. Magazine of American History, 1883, p. 141; and Davis’s Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth, p. 61. I should add here that it has been recently suggested to me as a possible alternative, that this seal is that of the Council for the Northern Colony of Virginia.

[553] The name “Massachusetts,” so far as I have observed, is first mentioned by Captain Smith, in his Description of New England, 1616. He spells the word variously, but he appears to use the term “Massachuset” and “Massachewset” to denote the country, while he adds a final s when he is speaking of the inhabitants. He speaks of “Massachusets Mount” and “Massachusets River,” using the word also in its possessive form; while in another place he calls the former “the high mountain of Massachusit.” To this mountain, on his map, he gives the English name of “Chevyot Hills.” Hutchinson (i. 460) supposes the Blue Hills of Milton to be intended. He says that a small hill near Squantum, the former seat of a great Indian sachem, was called Massachusetts Hill, or Mount Massachusetts, down to his time. Cotton, in his Indian vocabulary, says the word means “a hill in the form of an arrow’s head.” See also Neal’s New England, ii. 215, 216. In the Massachusetts charter the name is spelled in three or four different ways, to make sure of a description of the territory. Cf. Letter of J. H. Trumbull, in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct. 21, 1867, p. 77; and Memorial History of Boston, i. 37.

[554] See S. F. Haven’s “Origin of the Massachusetts Company,” in Archæologia Americana, vol. iii.

[555] This matter is discussed by Dr. Haven in the Lecture above cited, pp. 29, 30; and by the present writer in Memorial History of Boston, i. 341-343, note. See also Gorges, Briefe Narration, pp. 40, 41.

[556] It is printed in Hutchinson’s Collection of Papers, 1769; and also in vol. i. of the Colony Records.

[557] See 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii. 159-161.

[558] [In six volumes, royal quarto; cf. Massachusetts Historical Society Lectures, p. 230; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1848, p. 105; and 1854, p. 369. They were published at $60, but they can be occasionally picked up now at $25.—Ed.]

[559] [See Memoir and portrait in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1870, p. 1; cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 113; and Historical Magazine, xvii. 107.—Ed.]

[560] [Dr. Palfrey (vol. iii. p. vii) has pointedly condemned it, and the arrangement will be found set forth in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1848, p. 105. Besides much manuscript material (not yet put into print) at the State House, and in the Cabinet of the Historical Society, and the usual local depositories, mention may be made of some papers relating to New England recorded in the Sparks Catalogue, p. 215; and the numerous documents in the Egerton and other manuscripts, in the British Museum, as brought out in its printed Catalogues of Manuscripts, and Colonel Chester’s list of manuscripts in the Bodleian, in Historical Magazine, xiv. 131. Mr. S. L. M. Barlow, of New York, has an ancient copy of the Records of the Massachusetts Company (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., iii. 36).

Brodhead’s prefaces to the published records of New York indicated the sources of early manuscript material in the different Government offices of England, equally applicable to Massachusetts; but these records have now been gathered into the public Record Office, some account of which will be found in Mr. B. F. Stevens’s “Memorial,” Senate, Miscellaneous Documents no. 24, 47th Congress, 2d session, and in the London Quarterly, April, 1871. It requires formality and permission to examine these papers, only as they are later than 1760. The calendaring and printing of them, begun in 1855, is now going on; and Mr. Hale has described (in the Christian Examiner, May, 1861) the work as planned and superintended by Mr. Sainsbury. Three of these volumes already issued—Calendar of State Papers, Colonial America, vol. i., 1574-1660; vol. v., 1661-1668; vol. vii., 1669—are of much use to American students. Mr. F. S. Thomas, Secretary of the public Record Office, issued in 1849 a History of the State Paper Office and View of the Documents therein Deposited. Mr. C. W. Baird described these depositories in London in the Magazine of American History, ii. 321.—Ed.]

[561] [A list of the publications of this Society, brought down, however, no later than 1868, will be found in the Historical Magazine, xiv. 99; and in 1871 Dr. S. A. Green issued a bibliography of the Society, which was also printed in its Proceedings, xii. 2. The first seven volumes of its first series of Collections were early reprinted. Each series of ten volumes has its own index. The Society’s history is best gathered from its own Proceedings, the publication of which was begun in 1855; but two volumes have also been printed, covering the earlier years 1791-1854. The first of these dates marks the founding of this the oldest historical society in this country. Its founder, if one person can be so called, was Dr. Jeremy Belknap, who was one of the earliest who gave the writing of history in America a reputable character. His Life has been written by his granddaughter, Mrs. Jules Marcou, and the book is reviewed by Francis Parkman in the Christian Examiner, xliv. 78; cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. 117; iii. 285; ix. 12; xiv. 37. His historical papers are described by C. C. Smith in the Unitarian Review, vii. 604. The two principal societies working parallel with it in part, though professedly of wider scope, are the American Antiquarian Society, at Worcester (not to be confounded with the Worcester Society of Antiquity,—a local antiquarian association), and the New England Historic, Genealogical Society, in Boston. The former has issued the Archæologia Americana and Proceedings (cf. Historical Magazine, xiv. 107); while the latter has been the main support of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, which has published an annual volume since 1847, and these have contained various data for the history of the Society. Cf. 1855, p. 10; 1859, p. 266; 1861, preface; 1862, p. 203; 1863, preface; 1870, p. 225; 1876, p. 184, and reprinted as revised; 1879, preface, and p. 424, by E. B. Dearborn. To these associations may be added the Essex Institute, of Salem, the Connecticut Valley Historical Society (begun in 1876), the Dorchester Antiquarian Society, the Old Colony Historical Society (cf. the chapter on the Pilgrims),—all of which unite historical fellowship with publication,—and the Prince Society, an organization for publishing only, whose series of annotated volumes relating to early Massachusetts history is a valuable one.—Ed.]

[562] It is a volume of great value, and brings from $10 to $15 at sales. It is sometimes found lettered on the back as vol. iii. of the History. A third edition of the History was published in Boston in 1795, with poor type and poor paper. [A reprint of the Papers was made by the Prince Society in 1865. For other papers of Hutchinson, see 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., x., and 3 Ibid., i.; cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1865, P. 187. A controversy for many years existed between the Historical Society and the State as to the custody of a large mass of Hutchinson’s papers. This can be followed in the Society’s Proceedings, ii. 438; x. 118, 321; xi. 335; xii. 249; xiii. 130, 217; and in Massachusetts Senate Documents, no. 187, of 1870. These papers, mostly printed, are now at the State House.—Ed.]

[563] See Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. 286, 397, 414; and xi. 148; also a full account of Hutchinson’s publications in Ibid., February, 1857; cf. Sabin, Dictionary, xi. 22. A correspondence between Hutchinson and Dr. Stiles, upon his history, is printed in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1872, pp. 159, 230.

[564] Cf. a Memoir of Minot, in Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. viii.

[565] A fourth volume, carrying the record to 1741, was published in 1875; and since Dr. Palfrey’s death a fifth volume has been announced for publication under the editing of his son.

[566] Good copies of the original folio edition, with the map, bring high prices. One of Brinley’s copies, said to be on large paper (though the present writer has a copy by his side much larger), brought $110. The Menzies copy (no. 1,353) sold for $125. See “The Light shed upon Mather’s Magnalia by his Diary” in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., December, 1862, pp. 402-414; Moses Coit Tyler, History of American Literature, ii. 80-83. Of the map, Dr. Douglass says (i. 362): “Dr. Cotton Mather’s map of New England, New York, Jerseys, and Pennsylvania is composed from some old rough drafts of the first discoveries, with obsolete names not known at this time, and has scarce any resemblance of the country. It may be called a very erroneous, antiquated map.” [See Editor’s note following this chapter. For some notes on the Mather Library, see Memorial History of Boston, vol. i. p. xviii. The annexed portrait of Mather resembles the mezzotint, of which a reduced fac-simile is given in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 208, and which is marked Cottonus Matherus, Ætatis suæ LXV, MDCCXXVII. P. Pelham ad vivum pinxit ab origine fecit et excud. Its facial lines, however, are stronger and more characteristic. It may be the reduction made by Sarah Moorhead from the painting, thus mentioned by Pelham, for the purpose of the engraving. It is to be observed, however, that the surroundings of the portrait are different in the engraving. This same outline, but reversed, characterizes a portrait of Mather, which belongs to the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, and which is said to be by Pelham. Paine’s Portraits, etc., in Worcester, no. 5; W. H. Whitmore’s Peter Pelham, 1867, p. 6, where the Pelham engraving is called the earliest yet found to be ascribed to that artist.—Ed.]

[567] See what Beverly says of him in the Preface to his History of Virginia, 1722. The numerous maps in his book were made by Herman Moll, a well-known cartographer of that day. Oldmixon’s name appears only to the dedication prefixed to the first edition.

[568] Carter-Brown Catalogue, iii. nos. 281, 855; and 510, for the Bishop of Winchester’s examination of Neal’s History of the Puritans.

[569] [These supplementary parts have been reprinted in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii. It was republished in Boston in 1826, edited by Nathan Hale. Mr. S. G. Drake, having some sheets of this edition on hand, reissued it in 1852, with a new titlepage, and with a memoir of Prince and some plates, etc., inserted. It has been again reprinted in Edward Arber’s English Garner, 1877-80, vol. ii. Prince’s own copy, with his manuscript notes, is noted in the Brinley Catalogue, no. 350. Mr. Deane has several sheets of the original manuscript of this work.—Ed.]

[570] A memoir of Dr. Douglass, by T. L. Jennison, M.D., was published in Medical Communications of the Massachusetts Medical Society, vol. v. part ii., Boston, 1831. Cf. Memorial History of Boston, Index; Sabin, v. 502; Carter-Brown Catalogue, iii. 899.

[571] [This is reprinted in full in Force’s Tracts, ii. It was printed in 1630, and original copies are in Mr. Deane’s and in the Lenox libraries; cf. also Brinley Catalogue, nos. 373, 2,704; Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 744; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 371.—Ed.]

[572] [The Journal of Higginson, which is a relation of his voyage, 1629, is in Hutchinson’s Collection of Papers, and an imperfect manuscript which that historian used is in the Cabinet of the Historical Society. His New England’s Plantation is reprinted in Young’s Chronicles; in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Coll., iii. 79; in Force’s Tracts, vol. ii.; and in Mass. Hist, Coll., vol. i. The narrative covers the interval from July to September, 1629, and three editions were issued in 1630; the Lenox Library has the three, and Harvard College Library has two,—one imperfect. Rich, Catalogue (1832), nos. 186, 191; Brinley Catalogue, no. 312; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. nos. 362, 363; Menzies Catalogue, no. 927 ($66.)—Ed.]

[573] [This, besides being in Young’s Chronicles, can be found in Force’s Tracts, vol. ii., with notes by John Farmer; and in the N. H. Hist. Coll., vol. iv., following a manuscript more extended than the text given on its first appearance in print in Massachusetts, or the First Planters; 1696, copies of which are noted in the Prince (p. 37) and Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 1,494) catalogues.—Ed.]

[574] [This tract was reprinted in Boston in 1865, and also in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. There are copies of the original in Mr. Deane’s, Harvard College, and the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, ii. 379) libraries. Cf. the editorial note at the end of chap. vi., and Memorial History of Boston, i. p. 50.—Ed.]

[575] The volume was reissued in 1635, 1639, and 1764. The Prince Society reprinted the volume in 1865, with a prefatory address by the present writer. [Copies of the original edition are noted in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. no 421 (later editions, nos. 433, 469); and Brinley Catalogue, no. 377. Cf. also Rich, Catalogue (1832), no. 296, and (1844) priced at £1 8s. Mr. Deane’s copy of the first edition has ninety-eight pages, besides the Indian words. The Rice copy brought $200. Cf. Menzies Catalogue, no. 2,187. The second and third editions had each eighty-three pages, besides an appendix of Indian words. The 1764 edition has an anonymous introduction, perhaps by Nathaniel Rogers (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., November, 1862) or James Otis (Ibid., September, 1862). Mr. Deane reprints this preface.—Ed.]

[576] Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., recently prepared a new edition of Morton’s book for publication by the Prince Society. It is accompanied by a memoir of Morton.

[577] [There has been a strange amount of misdating in respect to this book. The Mondidier Catalogue (Henry Stevens) gives it, “Printed by W. S. Stansby for Rob. Blount, 1625.” (Sabin, Dictionary, xii. 51,028.) The Sunderland Catalogue, iv. no. 8,684, gives it 1627,—a date followed by Quaritch in a later catalogue. Cf. Rich, Catalogue (1832), no. 218; (1844), priced at £1 8s.; Menzies, no. 1,440, $160; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 443; Memorial History of Boston, i. 80. It is included in Force’s Tracts, ii.—Ed.]

[578] His tract of twenty-three pages is entitled A True Relation of the Late Battell fought in New England between the English and the Salvages, etc., London, 1637. [There was a reissue in 1638 of the first edition, and a second edition the same year, which last is in Harvard College and the Prince libraries. There is an account of Vincent by Hunter in 4 Coll., i. Cf. Rich (1832), Catalogue, no. 221; Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 766; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 448, 461, 462; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,606.—Ed.]

[579] His tract was entitled, Newes from America, etc., London, 1638. [There is a copy in Harvard College Library and in Charles Deane’s. Cf. also, Rich (1832), no. 220, and Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 460, with fac-simile of title.—Ed.]

[580] [It was again reprinted in a volume on the Mohegan Case in 1796 (cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 2,085; Menzies, 1,338, $40); and afterward, following Prince’s edition, in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 120; and in New York by Sabin, in 1869. Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 1,021. Cf. references on Mason in Memorial History of Boston, i. 253.—Ed.]

[581]

It is also reprinted in some copies of Dodge’s edition of Penhallow’s Indian Wars Cincinnati, 1859. Cf. Sabin, Dictionary, vii. 165; and accounts of Gardiner in Thompson’s Long Island, i. 305, and 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., x. 173.

Further references on the Pequot War will be found in Memorial History of Boston, i. 255; and in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., May, 1860, will be found a letter from Jonathan Brewster describing its outbreak.—Ed.

[582] [More extensive references will be found in Memorial History of Boston, i. 176, and Harvard College Library Bulletin, no. 11, p. 287.—Ed.]

[583] See Hutchinson, i. 435.

[584] [Ward is better known, however, by his Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America, which passed through four editions in London in 1647,—a rarity now worth six or seven pounds; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 624; O’Callaghan Catalogue, 2,351; Menzies Catalogue, no. 2,038, etc. It was not reprinted in Boston till 1713, and again, edited by David Pulsifer, in 1843. Mr. John Ward Dean published a good memoir of Ward in 1868. The book in question is no further historical than that it illustrates the length to which good people could go in vindication of intolerance, in days when Antinomianism and other aggressive views were troubling many.—Ed.]

[585] [The Abstract is also in Force’s Tracts, iii. A note on the bibliography of the subject will be found in Memorial History of Boston, i. 145. Cf. Brinley Catalogue, p. 108; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 483; Sabin, no. 52,595. Mr. Deane has a copy.—Ed.]

[586] A list of books there printed from 1540 to 1599 may be seen in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 131-135.

[587] [Something of its bibliographical history is told with references in Memorial History of Boston, i. 458-460. Of two copies of the original edition there mentioned, one, the Fiske copy, is now in the Carter-Brown library (Catalogue, ii. 470); another, the Vanderbilt copy, has since been burned in New York.—Ed.]

[588] For a list of Daye’s and Green’s books see Thomas’s History of Printing, 2d ed.; and other references to the early history of the press in New England will be found in Memorial History of Boston, i. ch. 14.

[589] It was reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii. A new edition, with learned notes and an introduction by the editor, Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, was published in Boston in 1867. [A portion of the manuscript is in the cabinet of the Historical Society, and a fac-simile of a page of it is given herewith, together with the accompanying statement on the manuscript in the hand of the learned Boston antiquary, James Savage, of whom there is a memoir by G. S. Hillard in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xvi. 117. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 81. The autograph of Lechford is from another source. The Ebeling copy is certainly no longer unique, though the book is rare enough to have been priced recently in London at $75. Cf. Sabin, Dictionary, x. 158; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 506, 545; Brinley Catalogue, no. 322; Menzies, no. 1,202. There is a note-book of Lechford preserved in the American Antiquarian Society’s Cabinet.—Ed.]

[590] [A portrait of Cotton of somewhat doubtful authenticity, together with references on his life, will be found in Memorial History of Boston, i. 157.—Ed.]

[591] [The best bibliographical record of the books in Cotton’s controversy with Williams, as indeed of most of the points of this present essay, is the appendix of Dexter’s Congregationalism; a briefer survey, grouping the books in their relations, is in Memorial History of Boston, i. 172. See a later page under “Rhode Island.”—Ed.]

[592] This is the earliest edition of this famous book; and I know of but two copies of it,—one before me, and one in the Thomason Library in the British Museum. Mr. Arthur Ellis, in his History of the First Church in Boston, has given a fac-simile of the titlepage. An edition was printed at Cambridge in 1656, of which a copy is in the library of the late George Livermore.

[593] Palfrey, New England, ii. 184.

[594] In 1725 the Results of Three Synods ... of the Churches of Massachusetts, 1648, 1662, and 1669, was reprinted in Boston. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, iii. no. 362.

[595] A copy of the rare first edition is in the library of the American Antiquarian Society, from which twenty copies were reprinted by Mr. Hoadly, Secretary of State of Connecticut, in 1858. The important subject of this confederation is sufficiently illustrated in a lecture by John Quincy Adams, in 1843, published in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 187. [See references to reprints of the articles, and notes on the Confederacy in Memorial History of Boston, i. 299.—Ed.]

[596] Copies of Winslow’s book are very rare, and are worth probably one hundred dollars or more, being rarely seen in the market. [There are copies in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, ii. 600, with fac-simile of title), and in Mr. Deane’s collection. The second edition appears in the Brinley Catalogue, no. 691.—Ed.] Gorton’s book, also rare, has been reprinted by Judge Staples, with learned notes, in the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Collections, vol. ii. [and is also in Force’s Tracts, vol. iv. There are copies in the Prince, Charles Deane, Carter-Brown (Catalogue, ii. 589, with a long note), and Harvard College libraries. Cf. also Sabin’s Dictionary, vii. 352, and Brinley Catalogue, no. 578.—Ed.] While writing this note there has come to my hand no. 17 of Mr. S. S. Rider’s Rhode Island Historical Tracts, containing “A Defence of Samuel Gorton and the Settlers of Shawomet,” by George A. Brayton. See other authorities noted in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 171, and in Bartlett’s Bibliography of Rhode Island.

[597] Child’s book was reprinted in part in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., iv. 107. It was reprinted in 1869 by William Parsons Lunt, with notes by W. T. R. Marvin. A copy of the original edition is in the library of the Boston Athenæum, and in that of John Carter Brown (Catalogue, ii. 608), which also has a copy of Winslow’s New England’s Salamander (Catalogue, ii. 623), and there is another in Harvard College Library. This is also reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., ii. 110. The Remonstrance and Petition of Child and others, and the Declaration in answer thereto, may be seen in Hutchinson’s Papers, p. 188 et seq.

[598] [For an account of this book and its history, and much relating to the embodiment of the Indian speech in literary form, see Dr. J. H. Trumbull’s chapter on “The Indian Tongue and the Literature fashioned by Eliot and others,” in Memorial History of Boston, i. 465, with references there noted.—Ed.]

[599] That part relating to the college was published in an early volume of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

[600] The originals of these tracts, with one exception, are in the possession of the writer, and they are for the most part in the Carter-Brown Library; and seven of them are published in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iv. [Further bibliographical detail can be found in Dr. Dexter’s Congregationalism; Sabin, Dictionary; Dr. Trumbull’s Brinley Catalogue, p. 52; Field’s Indian Bibliography; Memorial History of Boston, i. 265, etc.; and more or less of the titles appear in the Menzies (nos. 1,475, 1,815, 1,816, 2,124, 2,125), O’Callaghan (nos. 852, etc.), and Rich (1832, nos. 237, 261, 263, 273, 280, 287, 292, 304, 316, 355) catalogues. Some of these Eliot tracts were used in compiling the postscript on the “Gospel’s Good Successe in New England,” appended to a book Of the Conversion of ... Indians, London, 1650 (Sabin, xiii. 56,742). Eliot’s own Briefe Narrative (1670) of his labors has been reprinted in Boston, and in the appendix of the reprint is a list of the writers on the subject. Letters of Eliot, dated 1651-52, on his labors, are in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1882. For an alleged portrait of Eliot and references, see Memorial History of Boston, i. 260, 261. A better engraving has since appeared in the Century Magazine, 1883.—Ed.]

[601] [Some copies of the second edition have a dedication to Robert Boyle and the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians, signed by William Stoughton, Joseph Dudley, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hinckley.

AUTOGRAPHS CONNECTED WITH THE INDIAN BIBLE.

Eliot was assisted in this second edition by John Cotton, of Plymouth, son of the Boston minister; and the type was in part set for both editions by James Printer, an Indian taught to do the work. There is a notice of Boyle by C. O. Thompson in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1882, p. 54; and one of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, by G. D. Scull, in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1882, p. 157. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, viii. 552. A portion of the original manuscript records of the society (1655-1685) were described in Stevens’s Bibliotheca Historica (1870), no. 1,399, and brought in the sale $265. The bibliographical history of the Indian Bible is given in Dr. Trumbull’s chapter in the Memorial History of Boston, as before noted.]

[602] A copy is in the Carter-Brown Library, and another in the possession of the writer.

[603] See the list of Norton’s and Pynchon’s publications in Sabin’s Dictionary.

[604] A journal of the Transactions and Occurrences in the Settlement of Massachusetts and the other New-England Colonies, from the year 1630 to 1644.... Now first published from a correct copy of the original manuscript. Hartford, 1790.

[605] The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. From his original manuscripts. With Notes to illustrate the Civil and Ecclesiastical concerns, the Geography, Settlement, and Institutions of the Country, and the Lives and Manners of the principal Planters. By James Savage. Boston, 1825-26. 2 vols. New ed., with additions and corrections. Boston, 1853. 2 vols.

[606] [For other details and references see Memorial History of Boston, i. p. xvii.—Ed.]

[607] A curious bibliographical question is connected with a later issue of the volume as bound up with several of the Gorges tracts, for the discussion of which see the Introduction to Mr. W. F. Poole’s valuable edition of Johnson’s book, Andover, 1867, pp. li-vi; with which cf. North American Review, January, 1868, pp. 323-328; and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., June, 1881, pp. 432-35. [Geo. H. Moore printed some strictures on Poole’s edition in Historical Magazine, xiii. 87. Cf. Dexter’s Congregationalism; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 771, 851; and other references in Memorial History of Boston, i. 463.—Ed.]

[608] It was republished in fragmentary parts in several volumes of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections, second series.

[609] It is reprinted in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. ii., from a copy of the rare original in the Carter-Brown Library.

[610] Charles Lamb speaks of the book in his Elia under “A Quaker Meeting.”

[611] [The literature of the Quaker controversy is extensive and intricate in its bearings.

It can best be followed in Mr. J. Smith’s Catalogue of Friends’ Books, and in his Anti-Quakeriana. Dr. Dexter’s Congregationalism, and the Brinley and Carter-Brown Catalogues will assist the student. The 1703 edition of Bishope’s New England Judged, abridged in some ways and enlarged in others, contains also John Whiting’s Truth and Innocencey Defended, which is an answer in part to portions of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia; cf. also the note in Memorial History of Boston, i. 187. There were a few of the prominent men at the time who dared to protest boldly against the unwise actions of the magistrates; and of such none were more prominent than James Cudworth, of Plymouth Colony, and Robert Pike, of Salisbury. The conduct of the latter has been commemorated in James S. Pike’s New Puritan, New York, 1879.—Ed.

[612] For their titles see Thomas’s History of Printing, 2d ed. vol. ii. pp. 313-315; the bibliographical list in Dr. H. M. Dexter’s Congregationalism, whose work may also be consulted for a history of the subject itself; Mather’s Magnalia, v. 64 et seq.; Upham’s Ratio Disiplinæ, p. 223; Trumbull’s Connecticut, chaps. xiii. and xix. of vol. i.; Hutchinson, i. 223-24; Wisner’s History of the Old South Church in Boston, pp. 5-7; Bacon’s Discourses, pp. 139-141.

[613] [Mr. Tuckerman revised his notes and introduction in a reprint, published by Veazie in Boston in 1865. The Voyages, which had been reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., iii., was also reissued in 1865 in a companion volume to the Rarities, the text being corrected from a copy of the “second addition,” 1675, in Harvard College Library. The earlier book usually brings £3 or £4, the later one from £5 to £10. Both are in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,080, 1,104. Cf. Sabin, ix. 340; Menzies, 1,104, 1,105.—Ed.]

[614] [It is further characterized in Vol. IV., chap. x.—Ed.]

[615] There are at least eight titles in this interesting list:—

1. The Present State of New England with respect to the Indian War, 1675 (19 pages), purporting to be by a merchant of Boston.

2. A Briefe and True Narration of the late Wars, 1675 (8 pages); cf. Sabin, vol. xiii. nos. 52,616, 52,638.

3. A Continuation of the State of New England, 1676 (20 pages).

4. A New and Further Narrative of the State of New England, 1676 (14 pages), signed N. T.

5. A True Account of the most considerable Occurences that have hapned in the War, 1676 (14 pages).

6. New England’s Tears for her present Miseries, 1676 (14 pages).

7. News from New England, 1676 (6 pages). Sabin only records one copy; and of a second edition, 1676, there are copies in the British Museum and Carter-Brown libraries.

8. The War in New England visibly Ended, 1677 (6 pages), containing news of the death of Philip, brought by Caleb More, master of a vessel newly arrived from Rhode Island.

[These tracts are all in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii., and several are in Mr. Deane’s collection, and in Harvard College Library. Rich supposed that nos. 1, 3, and 4 were written by the same person. Five of them were reprinted by S. G. Drake in his Old Indian Chronicle in 1836, and again in 1867, with new notes; and no. 7 was reprinted in 1850 by Drake, and in 1865 by Woodward. Sabin, xiii. 321, 322.

These tracts are priced at twelve and eighteen shillings, and at similarly high sums, even in Rich’s catalogues of fifty years ago. Whenever they have occurred in sales of late years they have proved the occasion of much competition and unusual prices. Cf. Stevens’s Hist. Coll., i. 1523, 1524.

Another contemporary account by a Rhode Island Quaker, as it is thought, John Easton, was printed at Albany in 1858, as a Narrative of the Causes which led to Philip’s War. Cf. Palfrey, iii. 180; Field, Indian Bibliography, p. 479.

Mr. Drake, whose name is closely associated with our Indian history, was one of the foremost of American antiquaries for many years. There is a memoir of him by W. B. Trask in Potter’s American Monthly, v. 729; and another in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1863, by J. H. Sheppard, also separately issued. In 1874 he printed Narrative Remarks, anonymously, embodying some personal grievances and notes of his career, not pleasantly expressed. For his publications, see Sabin’s Dictionary, v. 526, and Field’s Indian Bibliography, p. 452.—Ed.]

[616] John Foster had now set up a press in Boston, for the history of which and its successors see Memorial History of Boston, i. 453.

[617] [Rich in 1832, no. 368, priced it, either edition, at eighteen shillings. It was a quarto of 51 pages. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,150; Field’s Indian Bibliography, 1,022; Brinley Catalogue, 948, 5,531. It has of late years brought about $80. S. G. Drake included this and the section of the Magnalia on the war in his History of King Philip’s War, 1862. Another book by Mather, A Relation of the Troubles which have hapned in New England, etc., was also printed in 1676, and traces the Indian wars from 1641, including the causes of Philip’s War. Drake also reprinted this in 1864, as the Early History of New England.—Ed.]

[618] [King Philip’s War, which was but the beginning of a long series of wars which devastated the frontiers, may be said properly to end with the treaty of Casco, April 12, 1678, which is preserved in the Massachusetts Archives; though a continuation of hostilities intervened till the treaty of Portsmouth, Sept. 8, 1685. Cf. Belknap’s New Hampshire, p. 348.—Ed.]

[619] [Rich priced this book in 1832 (no. 375) at £1 10s.,—an extraordinary high sum for those days. I have seen the London edition priced recently at £26, and $75; and the Boston edition in the Menzies sale (no. 990) brought $200. It was reprinted in New England at least six times (all spurious editions) between 1775 and 1814 (Brinley Catalogue, 5,523, etc.; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,167, 1,168, 1,170); and S. G. Drake brought out an annotated edition in two volumes in 1865. Cf. Hist. Mag., i. 252, 348; ii. 62.

Perhaps the most popular book touching the events of the war was one which was not published till 1716, from notes of Colonel Benjamin Church, and compiled by that hero’s son, Thomas Church, and called Entertaining Passages relating to Philip’s War. It is an extremely scarce book, and has brought $400. (Brinley Catalogue, no. 383; Sabin, Dictionary, no. 12,996; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., iii. 293.) A second edition, Newport, 1772, is said to have been edited by Dr. Stiles, but it is not supposed he was privy to the fraud practised in that edition of presenting an engraving of the portrait of Charles Churchill, the English poet, with the addition of a powder-horn slung over the shoulder, as a likeness of Church. (Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 243; also iii. 293; and Hist. Mag., December, 1868, pp. 27, 271.) Drake first reissued it in 1827, and made stereotype plates of the book, and they have been much used since. He continued to use the spurious portrait as late as 1857. Sabin, iv. 12,996; Brinley, no. 5,514. Dr. H. M. Dexter did all that is necessary for the text in his edition (two volumes) in 1865-67. Another class of books growing out of the war during its long continuance, particularly at the eastward, is what collectors know as “captivities,” the most famous of which is, perhaps, that of Mrs. Rowlandson, of Lancaster, printed in 1682. The Brinley Catalogue, nos. 469, 5,540, etc., groups them, and they are scattered through Field’s Indian Bibliography. The Brinley Catalogue also groups the works on the Indian wars of New England (nos. 382, etc.); and a condensed exposition of the authorities on Philip’s War will be found in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 327. The local aspects of the war involve a very large amount of citation and reference. What are known as the “Narragansett Townships” grew out of the war. Before the troops marched from Dedham Plain, Dec. 9, 1675, they were promised “a gratuity of land beside their wages,” and not till 1737 were the promises fulfilled, when 840 claimants or their representatives met on Boston Common, and dividing themselves into seven groups, they took possession of seven townships in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, granted by the General Court. New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1862, pp. 143, 216.—Ed.

[620] For reference to the recovery of the preface and other missing lines, see Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xvi. 12, 38, 100; also, cf. i. 243; ii. 421; iii. 321. Hubbard, besides the above aid, had a large number of official documents which he incorporated into his History. Cf. Sabin, Dictionary, viii. 499; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 730.

[621] [Mr. Whitmore also epitomized the history with references in the Memorial History of Boston, ii. chap. i. Cf. also Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,351, 1,370, 1,372, 1,388, 1,398, 1,400, 1,403, 1,408, 1,420, 1,421.—Ed.]

[622] A copy of Dudley’s commission (Oct. 8, 1685) has been recently printed in 5 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., ix. 145.

[623] [Dr. N. B. Shurtleff, an eager Boston antiquary, died in that city, Oct. 17, 1874, and his library was sold at auction, Nov. 30, 1875, etc.—Ed.]

[624] The preface of the Memorial History enumerates the sources of Boston’s history.

[625] [A law was placed on the statute book of Massachusetts in 1854, by which towns may legally appropriate money for publishing their histories. The authorities on the town system of New England are cited in W. E. Foster’s Reference Lists, July, 1882.—Ed.]

[626] [The different keys to the genealogy of New England are indicated in Memorial History of Boston, ii. Introduction.—Ed.]

[627] “Maine” took its name probably from the early designation, by the sailors and fishermen, of the main land—that is, “the main,”—in distinction from the numerous islands on the coast. See Weymouth’s “Voyage,” in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 132, 151; Palfrey, i. 525; Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., i. 371. The earliest use of the name, officially employed, that I have met with, is in the grant to Gorges and Mason of Aug. 10, 1622, which recites that the patentees, “by consent of the President and Council, intend to name it the Province of Maine.” See the Popham Memorial Volume, p. 122. This grant was never made use of, but the name was inserted in the royal charter to Gorges of April 3, 1639, which secured its future use. Sullivan’s Maine, Appendix, 399. The territory had been previously included in the European designations of Baccalaos and Norumbega. The Indian name was Mavooshen. See Purchas, iv., 1873; Maine Hist. Coll., i. 16, 17.

[628] These manuscripts were made use of by Dr. Belknap in writing his History of New Hampshire, and are now all printed in the Provincial Papers of that State, vol. i., 1867, edited by the late Nathaniel Bouton.

The grant of Aug. 10, 1622, is printed in Poor’s Ferdinando Gorges, from the Colonial Entry Book, p. 101, no. 59. An account of the voyage of the barque “Warwick,” in 1630, which brought Captain Neal to be governor for the Company, is given in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1867, p. 223.

[629] Citations are made from them by Folsom in his History of Saco and Biddeford, pp. 49-52. The original manuscript is among the old county of York records at Alfred. The commission to Sir Ferdinando Gorges as governor of New England, 1637, is printed in Poor’s Gorges, p. 127. For his deed to Edgecombe, 1637, see Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ii. 74.

[630] See Massachusetts Archives, Miscellanies, i. 130.

[631] These old Maine records have all been removed to the county town of Alfred, and they have never been printed. Extracts from time to time have been published, as by Folsom above, and by Willis in vol. i. of his History of Portland, who gives a description, from Judge David Sewall, of the manner in which the original records were made and kept. The charter of incorporation of Acomenticus as a town, April 10, 1641, and the charter of Gorgeana as a city, March 1, 1642, were among the papers which Hazard found at old York, and printed in his Collection, vol. i. Cf. “Sir Robert Carr in Maine,” in Magazine of American History, September, 1882, p. 623; and a paper on Gorgeana in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1881, p. 42.

[632] [Cf. Historical Magazine, ii. 286, and Note B to chapter vi. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[633] [Mr. Somerby, a native of Massachusetts, who died in London in 1872, did much during a long sojourn in England to further the interests of American antiquaries and genealogists. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 340. Colonel Joseph L. Chester also for many years filled a prominent place in similar work in England, till his death in 1882. A portrait and notice of him by John T. Latting is in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, 1882; also issued separately: Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., January, 1883, p. 106.—Ed.]

[634] [The deed to Usher as agent of Massachusetts, in 1677, and his conveyance to Massachusetts are at the State House in Boston. Cf. Maine Hist. Coll., ii. 257; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xi. 201.—Ed.]

[635] Mr. Folsom, a graduate of Harvard in 1822, was at this time living in Saco. He subsequently removed to New York, became an active member of the New York Historical Society, was minister at the Hague, and died in Rome, Italy, in 1869.

[636] Special mention should perhaps be made of the enumeration of Maine titles in the Brinley Catalogue no. 2,571, etc., and of several town histories published since Mr. Willis wrote his Catalogue, which in their treatment go back to the early period, namely, History of Augusta, by James W. North; History of Brunswick, etc., by G. A. Wheeler and H. W. Wheeler, 1878; History of Castine, by G. A. Wheeler, Bangor, 1875; History of Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid, by John Johnston, Albany, 1873; History of Ancient Sheepscot and New Castle, by David Q. Cushman, Bath, 1882. Most of the local historical literature can be picked out of F. B. Perkins’s Check-List of American Local History.

A volume entitled Papers relating to Pemaquid, collected from the archives at Albany by Franklin B. Hough, was printed at Albany in 1856. They relate to the condition of that part of the country when under the colony of New York, and are of great value. Cf. also Mr. Hough’s contributions in the Maine Hist. Coll., v. and vii. 127. Pemaquid as a centre of historical interest is also illustrated in J. W. Thornton’s Ancient Pemaquid; in Johnston’s papers in his History of Bristol, etc.; in the Popham Memorial Volume, p. 263; in Maine Hist. Coll., vol. viii.; Vinton’s Giles Memorial, 1864; Historical Magazine, i. 132; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1871, p. 131. [See also Vol. IV. of this History.—Ed.]

[637] [The early history of this society is told by Mr. Willis in an address printed in their Collections, vol. iv. Cf. also Note B at the end of chapter vi. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[638] This collection, entitled America painted to the Life, passes by the name of the Gorges Tracts. There are copies in Harvard College Library, and noted in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 127; Brinley Catalogue, nos. 308, 2,640 ($225.) Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, vii. 348; Rich’s Catalogue, no. 314; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 432, and xix. 128; Stevens’s Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 247. The relations of Gorges and Champernoun are discussed by C. W. Tuttle in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 404. See further on Champernoun in Ibid., 1873, p. 147; 1874, pp. 75, 318, 403. There is an account of Gorges’ tomb at St. Bordeaux in the Magazine of American History, August, 1882; and notes on his pedigree, in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1861, p. 17; 1864, p. 287; 1872, p. 381; 1877, pp. 42, 44, 112.—Ed.

[639] [Captain Christopher Levett. His account was published in London in 1628. The reprint in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 164, was made from a copy got in England by Sparks. The Maine Historical Society reprinted it in their Collections, ii. 73 (1847); and the copy in the New York Historical Society’s Library was then considered to be unique. The Huth Catalogue, iii. 843, and Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. no. 338, show original copies.—Ed.]

[640] [The principal contestants may be thus divided:—

Pro,—New Hampshire Historical Collections, i.; Bell’s Wheelwright; cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1869, p. 65.

Con,—Farmer’s Belknap; Savage’s Winthrop; Palfrey’s New England; and, besides Mr. Deane, the recorded opinions of Dr. Bouton, Mr. C. W. Tuttle, Mr. J. A. Vinton; cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1868, p. 479; 1874, pp. 343, 477; and Historical Magazine, i. 57; and also a letter of Colonel Chester in the Register, 1868, p. 350.

The deed is printed in the Provincial Papers, i. 56. Cotton Mather’s original letter regarding it, dated March 3, 1708, is noted in the Brinley Catalogue, no. 1,329. Belknap has printed it, and it is also in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1862, p. 349.—Ed.]

[641] Mason made no use of this grant; and no use had been made of his grant of Mariana, of March 9, 1621/22, and that to him and Gorges of Aug. 10, 1622; Hubbard’s New England, p. 614.

[642] [Governor Bell discovered in 1870 what is known as the Hilton or Squamscott patent, of March 12, 1629, and it is printed in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1870, p. 264; it was found not to agree as to its bounds with Piscataqua patent. Jenness, in his Notes, contends that Wiggin set up the title of Massachusetts to the territory under the 1628/29 charter. It was the conclusion of Mr. C. W. Tuttle (a studious explorer of New Hampshire history, who died July 18, 1881; cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 2, 11) that Bloody Point, being included in both grants, became the cause of the trouble between Neale and Wiggin, as told by Hubbard.—Ed.]

[643] Mason’s will, or a long extract from it, may be seen in Hazard, i. 397-399, dated Nov. 26, 1635; also in Provincial Papers. These papers last named are a publication of the State. The Rev. Dr. Nathaniel Bouton, between 1867 and 1876, completed ten volumes of Papers. They contain nothing before 1631; few from 1631 to 1686. Most of the original papers between 1641 and 1679 are in the Massachusetts Archives. The papers of interest in the present connection are in vols. i. and ii. The series has since been resumed under another editor, with the publication (1882) of the first part (A to F) of documents relating to towns, 1680-1800. Very few of the papers, however, are before 1700. Colonel A. H. Hoyt’s “Notes, Historical and Bibliographical, on the Laws of New Hampshire,” are in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1876. Like most of the patents issued at the grand division, Mason’s grant included ten thousand acres more of land on the southeast part of Sagadahoc, “from henceforth to be called by the name of Massonia.”

[644] [John Farmer (1789-1838) and Jacob B. Moore (1797-1853). Each did much for New Hampshire history. For an account of Farmer, see N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 12, 15. He published a first volume (Dover, 1831) of a projected new edition of Belknap’s History of New Hampshire, from a copy “having the author’s last corrections.” Moore was the father of the well-known historical student, Dr. George H. Moore, of the Lenox Library.—Ed.]

[645] [Cf. C. K. Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, p. 549. Mention has been made elsewhere of the Belknap Papers; cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., March, 1858.—Ed.]

[646] [The reports of the Adjutant-General of the State, 1866 and 1868, contained Mr. Chandler E. Potter’s Military History of New Hampshire, from 1623 to 1861, issued separately at Concord in 1869. The histories by Whiton (1834) and Barstow (1853) are of minor importance.] There are many valuable histories of separate towns in New Hampshire, and I cannot do better than refer to the “Bibliography of New Hampshire,” in Norton’s Literary Letter, new series, no. i. pp. 8-30, by S. C. Eastman. [A current periodical, The Granite Monthly, is devoting much space to New Hampshire history; cf. Sabin, vol. xiii. no. 37,486, etc.—Ed.]

[647] J. Hammond Trumbull, in Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., ii. 8. [Dr. Trumbull has compassed a large part of the field of the Indian nomenclature of Connecticut in his Indian Names of Places: ... in Connecticut, etc., Hartford, 1881. The fortunes of the natives of this colony have been traced in J. W. De Forest’s History of the Indians of Connecticut (with a map of 1630), of which there have been successive editions in 1850, 1853, and 1871. Of Uncas, the most famous of the Mohegan chiefs, there is a pedigree, as made out in 1679, recorded in the Colony Records, Deeds, iii. 312, and printed in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1856, p. 227. The will of his son Joshua is in Ibid., 1859, p. 235. An agreement which Uncas made in 1681 with the whites is in the Public Records, i. 309, and in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., x. 16. The warfare in 1642 between Uncas and Miantonomo, the chief of the Narragansetts, and which ended with the latter’s death in captivity, the English approving, is described by Winthrop and Hubbard; also in Trumbull’s Connecticut, chap. 7; Arnold’s Rhode Island, chap. 4; Palfrey’s New England, vol. ii. chap. 3; and it was the subject of an historical address in 1842 by William L. Stone, called Uncas and Miantonomo.—Ed.]

[648] Massachusetts Colonial Records, i. 170.

[649] See Connecticut Colonial Records, i. 4.

[650] J. Hammond Trumbull, as above, p. 15.

[651] New Haven Records.

[652] [Block, in 1614, had been the first to explore the river for the Dutch; and both O’Callaghan (New Netherland, i. 169) and Brodhead (New York, i. 235) set forth the prior right of the Dutch; cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., vi. 368.—Ed.]

[653] [Roger Wolcott celebrated Winthrop’s agency in London, in 1662, in a long poem, which was printed in Wolcott’s Poetical Meditations, London, 1725, and in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, iii. 369; Brinley Catalogue, no. 2,134.—Ed.]

[654] It had been printed by Trumbull in 1797, in the Appendix to the first edition of his History, i. 528-533; and is repeated in the second edition, 1818; cf. Dr. J. H. Trumbull’s Historical Notes on the Constitutions of Connecticut, 1639-1878, published in 1873. Hinman published a collection of Letters of the Kings of England to the Successive Governors (1635-1749).

[655] Douglass’s Summary, ii. 160; Neal’s New England, 2d ed., i. 163; Trumbull’s 2d ed. 1818, i. 21; Hubbard, p. 310.

[656] Trumbull, i. 28, from manuscripts of President Clap. This old Connecticut patent has always been a mystery. Some of the colonists of the Winthrop emigration to Massachusetts in 1630 were unfavorably impressed on their arrival with the place selected for a plantation. The sad mortality of the preceding winter was appalling, and they began to cast their thoughts on a more southerly spot than Massachusetts Bay. In a letter of John Humfrey, written from London, Dec. 9, 1636, in reply to one just received from his brother-in-law, Isaac Johnson, from the colony, he says, in speaking of Mr. Downing: “He is the only man for Council that is heartily ours in the town; and yet, unless you settle upon a good river and in a less snowy and cold place, I can see no great edge on him to come unto us.” Further on he says, “My Lord of Warwick will take a patent of that place you writ of for himself, and so we may be bold to do there as if it were our own.” (4 Mass. Hist. Coll., vi. 3, 4.) No further hint is given as to the location of Warwick’s intended grant, and we have no contemporaneous record of any patent having been taken by him at this time or later. The Earl was a great friend of the Puritans. It was through him that the Massachusetts patent was obtained; and the patent to the people of Plymouth was signed by him alone, but in the name of the Council, and sealed with their seal.

The title to Connecticut was contested. On the grand division of 1635, James, Marquis, afterward Duke, of Hamilton, received for his share the territory between the Connecticut and Narragansett rivers, and a copy of his feoffment was cited by Chalmers, as on record bearing date April 22, 1635, that being the date which all the grants of that final division bore. From a copy on the Connecticut files Mr. R. R. Hinman, Secretary of State, published the deed in a volume of ancient documents, at Hartford, in 1836. On the Restoration the heirs of the Duke, in a petition to the King, asked to “be restored to their just right,” and their claim was, in 1664, laid by the King’s commissioners before the Connecticut authorities. These in their answer set up, in the first place, the prior grant of Lord Say and Sele and others, which Connecticut, as they alleged, had “purchased at a dear rate,” and which had been recently ratified and confirmed by the King in their new charter; then, secondly, a conquest from the natives; and, thirdly, they claimed thirty years’ peaceable possession (Trumbull, i. 524, 530). At a period still later, the Earl of Arran, a grandson, applied to King William for a hearing; and when in a formal manner several patents were exhibited on the part of Connecticut, the Earl’s final reply was, “that when they produced a grant from the Plymouth Council to the Earl of Warwick, it should have an answer.” (Chalmers, pp. 299-301; Trumbull, i. 524.)

Some entries in the recently recovered records of the Council for New England tend to deepen the suspicion that the Earl of Warwick never received the alleged grant from that body. It is true that the records as preserved are not entire, and do not cover the year 1630, and for the year 1631 they begin at November 4. But some later entries are very significant. Under date of June 21, 1632, which is three months after the date of the grant to Lord Say and Sele and associates, is this entry: “The Secretary is to bring, against the next meeting, a rough draft in paper of a patent for the E. of Warwick, from the river of the Narrigants 10 leagues westward. Sir Ferd. Gorges will forthwith give particular directions for the said patent.” At the next meeting, June 26, “The rough draft of a patent for the E. of Warwick was now read. His Lordship, upon hearing the same, gave order that the grant should be unto Rob. Lord Rich and his associates, A, B, etc. And it was agreed by the Council that the limits of the said patent should be 30 English miles westward, and 50 miles into the land northward, provided that it did not prejudice any other patent formerly granted.” A committee was appointed to take further order respecting this patent, and there is no evidence that it was ever perfected or issued. This proposed grant, it will be seen, covered in part the same territory previously included in the grant above cited to Lord Say, Lord Brook, Lord Rich, and others by the Earl of Warwick himself.

Three days afterward some very singular orders were adopted by the Council, indicating that there had been a serious disagreement with the Earl, or that a feeling akin to suspicion, of which the Earl was the object, had found a lodgment in that body. The Earl being president, the meetings for some years had been held at “Warwick House in Holborne.” At a meeting on the 29th of June, at which the Earl was not present, “It was agreed that the E. of Warwick should be entreated to direct a course for finding out what patents have been granted for New England.” (Did not the Council keep a record of their grants?) Also, “The Lord Great Chamberlain and the rest of the Council now present sent their clerk unto the E. of Warwick for the Council’s great seal, it being in his Lordship’s keeping.” Answer was brought that as soon as his man Williams came in he would send it. It was then voted that the meetings of the Council, which for some time, as I have already said, had been held at Warwick House, should hereafter be held at Captain Mason’s House, in Fenchurch Street. But the seal was not then sent, and during the next five months two other formal applications were made for it. In the mean time and thence after the records indicate the Earl’s absence from the meetings, and finally Lord Gorges was chosen President of the Council in his place.

The patent to Lord Say and Sele, it may be added, was never formally transferred to Connecticut. In the agreement of 1644/45 Fenwick conveyed the fort and lands on the river, and promised to convey the jurisdiction of all the lands between Narragansett River and Saybrook Fort, “if it come into his power,”—which he seems never to have done, though the authorities of Connecticut claimed that they had paid him for it. For a long time the Connecticut authorities appear to have had no copy of this patent, for they were often challenged to exhibit it, and were not able to do so; though they say that a copy was shown to the commissioners when the confederation of the colonies was formed,—then of course in the possession of Fenwick; and in 1648 it is referred to as having been recently seen. (Hazard, ii. 120, 123.) A transcript of this patent was found in London by John Winthrop, among the papers of Governor Hopkins, who died there in 1658. See Connecticut Colonial Records, pp. 268, 568, 573, 574.

[657] First edition, vol. i. Appendix v. and vi. See also Ibid., i. 149, 507-510, edition of 1818, with which compare Connecticut Colonial Records, pp. 568, 573, 585.

[658] Vol. i. p. 306; cf. Trumbull, i. 110; Hutchinson, i. 100, 101.

[659] Vol. i. pp. 77-80, 509-563, 1-384. The twelve Capital Laws of the Connecticut Colony, established in 1642, were taken almost literally from the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts, established in 1641. The preamble to the code of 1650, the paragraph following it, and many, if not all, of the laws were taken from the Massachusetts Book of Laws published in 1649. A copy of the constitution of 1639 was prefixed to the Code. This was first printed in a small volume in 1822 at Hartford, by Silas Andrus, called The Code of 1650, being a Compilation of the Earliest Laws and Orders of the General Court of Connecticut; also, the Constitution, or Civil Compact, entered into and adopted by the Towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Weathersfield, in 1638-39, to which is added some Extracts from the Laws and Judicial Proceedings of New Haven Colony commonly called Blue Laws. There was an edition at Hartford in 1828, 1830, 1838, from the same plates; and in 1861 there appeared at Philadelphia A Collection of the Earliest Statutes, Edited with an Introduction, by Samuel W. Smucker.

[660] Cf. also Trumbull, i. chap. viii.; Caulkins, New London, pp. 27-50.

[661] Vol. i. pp. 259, 260, 404, 405.

[662] Vol. i. 1, et seq.; cf. Trumbull, i. chap. vi.; Hubbard, chap. xlii. See also Davenport’s Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation, Cambridge, 1663, probably written at this early period; Leonard Bacon, Thirteen Historical Discourses, New Haven, 1839; and Professor J. L. Kingsley, Historical Discourse, New Haven, 1838.

[663] [Of Governor Eaton, the first governor of New Haven, there is a memoir by J. B. Moore in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii. 467.—Ed.]

[664] A copy of the original edition is also in the Library of the Boston Athenæum, not quite perfect. Two copies were in the sale of Mr. Brinley’s library in 1879, and they brought, one $380, the other, not perfect, $310. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, in his learned Introduction to his edition of The True-Blue Laws of Connecticut and New Haven, and the False Blue Laws Invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters, etc., Hartford, 1876, says: “Just when or by whom the acts and proceedings of New Haven Colony were first stigmatized as Blue Laws cannot now be ascertained. The presumption, however, is strong that the name had its origin in New York, and that it gained currency in Connecticut among Episcopalian and other dissenters from the established church, between 1720 and 1750” (p. 24). He thinks that “blue” was a convenient epithet for whatever “in colonial laws and proceedings looked over-strict, or queer, or ‘puritanic’” (pp. 24, 27).

Mr. Peters, of course, did not invent the name. He says of these laws: “They consist of a vast multitude, and were very properly termed Blue Laws, i.e., bloody laws.” In his General History of Connecticut, London, 1781, Peters gives some forty-five of these laws as a sample of the whole, “denominated blue laws by the neighboring colonies,” which “were never suffered to be printed.” The greater part of these probably never had an existence as standing laws or otherwise. The archives of the colony fail to reveal such, though we do not forget that the jurisdiction records for nine years are lost. Peters’ laws have often been reprinted, and appear in Mr. Trumbull’s volume above cited, along with authentic documents relating to the foundation of Connecticut and New Haven colonies, already referred to in this paper. (See Peters’ Connecticut, pp. 63, 66; the New-Englander, April, 1871, art. “Blue Laws;” and Methodist Quarterly Review, January, 1878.)

It might be inferred from the conclusion of the titlepage (cited above) of the small volume published by Silas Andrus, at Hartford, in 1822, on bluish paper, bound in blue covers, with a frontispiece representing a constable seizing a tobacco taker, which was stereotyped and subsequently issued at different dates, that the book contained the Peters’ laws; but what related to New Haven here were simply extracts of a few laws and court orders from the records. The Blue Laws of Peters were reprinted by J. W. Barber, in his History and Antiquities of New Haven, 1831, with a note in which the old story is repeated, that the term blue originated from the color of the paper in which the first printed laws were stitched. They were also printed by Mr. Hinman, formerly Secretary of the State of Connecticut, in 1838, in a volume already cited, along with other valuable documents relating to the colony, and with what he called the Blue Laws of Virginia, of Barbadoes, of Maryland, New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Plymouth.

Peters’ Connecticut (1781) is now a scarce book. The copy in the Menzies sale, no. 1,590, brought $125. Cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 2,088, etc. The interest in this apocryphal history of Connecticut and in Peters’ Blue Laws was revived in modern times by the publication in 1829 of a new edition of Peters’ History, in 12º., at New Haven, with a preface and eighty-seven pages of supplementary notes. The anonymous editor of the new edition was Sherman Croswell, son of the Rev. Harry Croswell,—a recent graduate of Yale College, who furnished the supplementary notes. Nearly all the type of this edition was set by the late Joel Munsell, then a young man just twenty-one years of age. Mr. Croswell subsequently went to Albany as co-editor with his cousin, Edwin Croswell, of the Albany Argus. (Joel Munsell, Manuscript Note; October, 1871.) Professor Franklin B. Dexter, of Yale College, writes me under date of Feb. 20, 1883, respecting the enterprise of publishing the new edition of Peters’ History: “I have heard that the publisher, Dorus Clarke, used to say that he lost $2,000 by the publication. Sherman Croswell was a young lawyer then living here, a son of the Rev. Dr. Harry Croswell, and brother and classmate (Yale College, 1822) of the more gifted Rev. William Croswell, of the Church of the Advent in Boston. Sherman was born Nov. 10, 1802; removed to Albany in 1831, and became an editor of the Argus with his cousin, Edwin Croswell; returned to New Haven in 1855, and died here March 4, 1859. I have repeatedly heard that he edited this publication, though my authority has never been a very definite one. Munsell’s note I should not hesitate to accept as far as this fact is concerned.” Munsell inadvertently calls Sherman Croswell a brother of Edwin. A spurious edition of this book was published in New York in 1877, edited by a descendant of the author, S. J. McCormick. Cf. Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct. 22, 1877, and N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1877, p. 238.

But New Haven was not the only New England colony whose laws were satirized or burlesqued by those who did not sympathize with the strict ways of the Puritan. John Josselyn, who visited the Massachusetts Colony twice, in his account of the country published in 1674 professes to give some of the laws of that colony. Some of those cited by him are true, and some are false. Some were court orders or sentences for crimes. One is similar to a law in Peters’ code: “For kissing a woman in the street, though in the way of civil salute, whipping or a fine” (p. 178). Of course there were at an early period in the colony instances of ridiculous punishments awarded at the sole discretion of the magistrate, of which the record in all cases may not be preserved, and it is hazardous to deny, for that reason, that they ever took place. The existence of standing laws are more easily ascertained. Josselyn (p. 179) refers the reader to “their Laws in print.” During his second visit to Massachusetts (1663-1671) he could have seen the digest of 1649, and that of 1660. Of the first no copy is now extant, but the Connecticut code of 1650, first printed in 1822, was perhaps substantially a transcript of it. 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. viii. 214. Josselyn probably never examined either of the Massachusetts digests.

The notorious Edward Ward published, in 1699 a folio of sixteen pages, entitled A Trip to New England, etc. (Carter-Brown, ii. 1580.) A large part of it, where he speaks of “Boston and the Inhabitants,” is abusive and scandalous. He enlarges upon Josselyn in the instance cited, whose book he had seen. Mr. Drake and Dr. Shurtleff, in their histories of Boston, both quote from it. No one would think of believing “Ned Ward,” the editor of the London Spy, who was sentenced more than once to stand in the pillory for his scurrility; yet for all this he probably was as truthful, if not as pious, as Parson Peters of a later generation.

[665] See Trumbull, i. 297; New Haven Colonial Records, ii. 217, 238, 363; Connecticut Colonial Records, ii. 283, 303, 308, 324.

[666] [See chap. x. of the present volume, and chap. ix. of Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[667] See also Winthrop’s letter in Connecticut Historical Society’s Collections, i. 52, and Secretary Clarke’s in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xi. 344. The earnest protest of New Haven against the union, till the time it really took place, may be seen in the records of that colony from 1662 to 1665.

[668] See also Hutchinson, i. 213-220; the lecture on The Regicides sheltered in New England, Feb. 5, 1869, by Dr. Chandler Robbins, who used the new materials published in a volume of “Mather Papers” in 4 Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections, vol. viii.; J. W. Barber’s History and Antiquities of New Haven, etc., 1831.

[669] Cf. Trumbull, History, i. 524, 526, 362, 363; Arnold’s Rhode Island, vol. i., passim; Palfrey, New England, vol. ii. [An elaborate monograph of the Boundary Disputes of Connecticut, by C. W. Bowen, Boston, 1882, covers the original claims to the soil, and the disputes with Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. It is illustrated with the Dutch map of 1616, an Indian map of 1630, and various others.—Ed.]

[670] Copies are rare. A copy sold in the Brinley sale (no. 2,001) for $300. Mr. Brinley issued a private reprint of it, following this copy, in which he gave a fac-simile of the title and an historical introduction.

[671] [Cf. C. K. Adams’s Manual of Historical Literature, p. 552. The author was the Rev. Benjamin Trumbull, D.D. (b. 1735; d. 1820). The papers of Governor Jonathan Trumbull (b. 1710; d. 1785), bound in twenty-three volumes, are in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society; and the writer of the present chapter is the chairman of a committee preparing them for publication. Their chief importance, however, is for the Revolutionary period. The papers were procured in 1795, by Dr. Belknap, from the family of the Governor. One volume (19th) was burned in 1825. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. 85, 393.—Ed.]

[672] [Dr. Trumbull’s labors ceased, with the second volume after the union; when, beginning with 1689, the editorial charge was taken by Mr. Hoadly.—Ed.]

[673] Reference may here be made to a valuable note on the alleged incident, as related by Dr. Benjamin Trumbull in 1797, which has for so many years invested “The Charter Oak” with so much interest. See Palfrey, iii. 542-544. Vol. iii. of the Colonial Records contains a valuable official correspondence relating to this period, and also the “Laws enacted by Governor Andros and his Council,” for the colony, in 1687.

[674] The first volume (1860) has reprints of Gershom Bulkeley’s The People’s Right to Election ... argued, etc., 1869, following a rare tract of Mr. Brinley on Their Majesties’ Colony of Connecticut in New England Vindicated, 1694. A second volume of Collections was issued in 1870.

[675] [The first, in 1865, contained a history of the colony, by Henry White; an essay on its civil government, by Leonard Bacon; and others on the currency of the colony, etc. In the second is a valuable sketch of the life and writings of Davenport, by F. B. Dexter, and some notes on Goffe and Whalley from the same source. The third includes J. R. Trowbridge, Jr., on “The Ancient Maritime Interests of New Haven;” Dr. Henry Bronson on “The early Government of Connecticut and the Constitution of 1639;” and F. B. Dexter on “The Early Relations between New Netherland and New England.”—Ed.]

[676] It has a map of New Haven in 1641.

[677] [There is no considerable Connecticut bibliography of local history; and F. B. Perkins’s Check-List of American Local History must be chiefly depended on; but the Brinley Catalogue, nos. 2,001-2,340, is very rich in this department. So also is Sabin’s Dictionary, iv. 395, etc., for official and anonymous publications. There are various miscellaneous references in Poole’s Index, p. 292. E. H. Gillett has a long paper on “Civil Liberty in Connecticut” in the Historical Magazine, July, 1868. Mr. R. R. Hinman’s Early Puritan Settlers of Connecticut was first issued in 1846-48 (366 pages), and reissued (884 pages) in 1852-56. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1870, p. 84. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, however, is the chief source of genealogical information for the earliest comers.—Ed.]

[678] The official name of this State since 1663 is “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” The Island of “Aquedneck,” its Indian name, spelled in various ways, was so called till 1644, when the Court ordered that henceforth it be “called the Isle of Rhodes, or Rhode Island.” It is said that Block, the Dutch navigator, in 1614, gave the island the name of “Roodt Eylandt,” from the prevalence of red clay in some portions of its shores. There are traditions connecting the name with Verrazano and the Isle of Rhodes in Asia Minor, which require no further mention. See Arnold’s Rhode Island, i. 70; Rhode Island Colonial Records, i. 127; Verrazano in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., i. 46; Brodhead’s New York, i. 57, 58; Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., i. 367; J. G. Kohl, in Magazine of American History, February, 1883.

[679] In 1838 it was republished as vol. iv. of Rhode Island Historical Society’s Collections, edited by Professor Romeo Elton, with notes, and a memoir of the author, and reissued in Boston in 1843; cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, iii. 600.

[680] It was reprinted in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 166-203. It is called “inaccurate” by Bancroft.

[681] Cited by S. G. Arnold, History of Rhode Island, i. 124.

[682] Bartlett’s Bibliography of Rhode Island, p. 204.

[683] [A second edition was published in 1874; cf. C. K. Adams’s Manual of Historical Literature, p. 552.—Ed.]

[684] John Pitman’s Discourse was delivered in August, 1836; Job Durfee’s in January, 1847; and Zachariah Allen’s in April, 1876; and another, by Mr. Allen, on “The Founding of Rhode Island,” in 1881.

[685] The original edition of the Key was issued in London in 1643. Brinley Catalogue, no. 2,380. It is also reprinted in the R. I. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. i. See an earlier page under “Massachusetts.”

[686] It was at first intended to republish also such of the writings of John Cotton, George Fox, and John Clarke as were connected with Roger Williams, to be followed by the writings of Samuel Gorton and Governor Coddington; but with the exception of two pieces by Cotton, edited by R. A. Guild, the publications of the Club have been limited to the writings of Williams.

[687] He published an abridgment in 1804, which was reprinted in Philadelphia, in 1844, with a memoir of the author, under the title of Church History of New England, from 1620 to 1804. Backus was born in 1724, and died in 1806.

[688] [Dr. Turner also read a paper—Settlers of Aquedneck and Liberty of Conscience—before the Historical Society, in February, 1880, which was published at Newport the same year.—Ed.]

[689] [Dr. Dexter a few years since recovered a lost tract by Williams, Christenings make not Christians, 1645, which he found in the British Museum, and edited for Rider’s Historical Tracts, no. 14, in 1881, adding certain of Williams’s letters. Williams’s letter to George Fox, 1672, in his controversy with the Quakers, is printed in the Historical Magazine, ii. 56.—Ed.]

[690] [Sabin’s Dictionary, iv. 106; Menzies Catalogue, no. 392; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 729. It was reprinted in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., ii. pp. 1-113. Thomas Cobbett’s Civil Magistrates’ Power in Matters of Religion modestly debated, London, 1653, was in part an answer to this “slanderous pamphlet” (Prince Catalogue, no. 97-154). The character of Clarke and the influence of his mission to England, wherein he procured the revocation of William Coddington’s commission as governor, gave rise to a controversy between George Bancroft and Josiah Quincy in relation to the misapprehension of Grahame on the subject in his History of the United States; cf. Historical Magazine, August, 1865 (ix. 233), and the references noted in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ii. 339. Coddington (of whom there is an alleged portrait in the Council Chamber at Newport,—N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 241) also had his controversy with the Massachusetts authorities, and his side of the question is given in his Demonstration of True Love unto ... the rulers of the Massachusetts, ... by one who was once in authority with them, but always testified against their persecuting spirit, which was printed in 1674. Menzies Catalogue, no. 422 ($36); Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,101. See Magazine of American History, iii. 642; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1882, p. 138.—Ed.]

[691] [A copy of the charter is in the Massachusetts Archives (Miscellaneous, i. 135), and it is printed in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1857, p. 41. The discussion in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. was by Mr. Deane and Colonel Thomas Aspinwall. The latter’s contribution was also issued in Providence (2d ed.) in 1865, as Remarks on the Narragansett Patent.—Ed.]

[692] Other digests followed in 1730, 1745, 1752, and 1767.

[693] [Cf. Thomas T. Stone on Roger Williams the Prophetic Legislator, Providence, 1872.—Ed.]

[694] [Cf. Mr. Whitehead’s chapter in the present volume.—Ed.]

[695] See chapter xi.

[696] See chapter xi.

[697] The History of the Province of New York, from the first Discovery to the year MDCCXXXII. To which is annexed a Description of the Country, with a short Account of the Inhabitants, their Trade, Religious and Political State, and the Constitution of the Courts of Justice in that Colony. By William Smith, A.M. London; MDCCLVII., 4º, pp. 255.

[698] [Of Smith and his History O’Callaghan (ii. 64) says “Smith knew about as little of the history of New Netherland as many of his readers of the present day.”—Ed.]

[699] [Cf. Mr. Fernow’s estimate of Smith in Vol. IV. Also, Hist. Mag., xiv. 266.—Ed.]

[700] The Natural, Statistical, and Civil History of the State of New York, in three volumes, by James Macauley. New York, 1829. 8º.

[701] [Cf. Mr. Fernow’s estimate in Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[702] History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York, and State of New York, to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. In two volumes. By William Dunlap. Printed for the author by Carter & Thorp, New York, 1839-1840. 2 vols. 8º.

[703] [Cf. Mr. Fernow’s estimate in Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[704] History of the State of New York, by John Romeyn Brodhead. First period, 1609-1664. New York, 1853; second edition, 1859. Second period, 1664-1691. New York, 1871. Harper & Brothers, New York. 2 vols. 8º. Mr. Brodhead was born Jan. 21, 1814, and died May 6, 1873.

[705] [Cf. Mr. Fernow’s estimate of Brodhead in Vol. IV., where, in the chapter on New Netherland, an examination is made of the labors of Brodhead and others in amassing and arranging the documentary history of the State.—Ed.]

[706] See also Bowden’s Friends in America, i. 309; Lamb’s New York, i. 180; Valentine’s Manual, 1842-43, p. 147; Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 236.

[707] There were later enlarged editions in 1680 and 1705, or of about those dates. Muller, Catalogue (1877), no. 3,389.

[708] Cf. Mr. Fernow’s chapter in Vol. IV. It was afterwards followed in part in Lotter’s map. (Asher’s List, no. 20.)

[709] [See a chapter in Vol. IV. for the Dutch rule.—Ed.]

[710] [See this volume, chap. x., for the English Conquest.—Ed.]

[711] [See Vol. IV. for the Swedish rule.—Ed.]

[712] [See chapter ix.; and the full treatment of the struggle to maintain the charter, given by Mr Deane, in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 329.—Ed.]

[713] East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments, pp. 250, 251.

[714] Leaming and Spicer’s Grants and Concessions, p. 493.

[715] [See chapter x.—Ed.]

[716] It was entitled A Brief Account of the Province of East Jersey in America, published by the present Proprietors, for information of all such persons who are or may be inclined to settle themselves, families, and servants in that country.

[717] It was styled A Brief Account of the Province of East New Jersey in America. Published by the Scots’ Proprietors having interest there, For the information of such as may have a desire to Transport themselves or their Families thither; wherein the Nature and Advantage of, and Interest in, a Forraign Plantation to this Country is Demonstrated. Printed by John Reid.

[718] Twenty-five copies were printed separately, bearing date 1867. Sabin’s Dictionary, xiii. 53,079. Alofsen Catalogue, No. 823.

[719] Vol. I. p. 226.

[720] It was entitled The Model of the Government of the Province of East New Jersey in America; And Encouragements for such as Designs to be concerned there. Published for Information of such as are desirous to be Interested in that place.

[721] [The copies known are these: 1. New Jersey Historical Society. 2. Harvard College Library. 3. John Carter Brown Library, Providence. 4. William A. Whitehead, Newark. 5. J. A. King, Long Island. 6. British Museum. 7. Huth Library, London. 8. Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh. 9. Göttingen University. 10. Lenox Library, New York.—Ed.]

[722] The title, in full, is quite a correct table of contents, and under the several headings is given very excellent advice as to the course to be followed to insure success in the new settlements. It is as follows: Good Order Established in Pennsilvania and New Jersey in America. Being a true Account of the Country, With its Produce and Commodities there made, And the great Improvements that may be made by means of Publick Store-houses for Hemp, Flax, and Linnen-Cloth; also, the Advantages of a Publick School, the profits of a Publick Bank, and the Probability of its arising, if those directions here laid down are followed; With the advantages of publick Granaries. Likewise, several other things needful to be understood by those that are or do intend to be concerned in planting in the said Countries. All which is laid down very plain in this small Treatise; it being easie to be understood by any ordinary Capacity. To which the Reader is referred for his further satisfaction. By Thomas Budd. Printed in the year 1685.

[723] The title, which may also be considered a table of contents, was as follows: An Historical Description of the Province and Country of West New Jersey in America. A short View of their Laws, Customs, and Religions. As also the Temperament of the Air and Climate, The fatness of the Soil, with the vast Produce of Rice, etc., the improvement of the Lands as in England to Pasture, Meadows, etc. Their making great quantities of Pitch and Tar, as also Turpentine, which proceeds from the Pine Trees, with Rosen as clear as Gum Arabick, with particular Remarks upon their Towns, Fairs, and Markets; with the great Plenty of Oyl and Whale-Bone, made from the great number of whales they yearly take: As also many other Profitable and New Improvements. Never made Publick till now. By Gabriel Thomas.

[This book is rare, and may be worth, when found, $200. Copies have brought, however, $300 within ten years. Griswold Catalogue, Part I. No. 851. It was reprinted in lithographic fac-simile in New York in 1848 for Henry Austin Brady. One copy, on blue writing paper and illustrated, was in the Griswold sale, No. 852.—Ed.]

[724] It was entitled The Case put and decided. By George Fox, George Whitehead, Stephen Crisp, and other the most Antient and Eminent Quakers. Between Edward Billing, on the one part, and some West Jersians, headed by Samuell Jenings, on the other part, In an Award relating to the Government of their Province, wherein, because not moulded to the Pallate of the said Samuell, the Light, the Truth, the Justice, and Infallibility of these great Friends are arreigned by him and his Accomplices. Also Several Remarks and Anniversations on the same Award, setting forth the Premises. With some Reflections on the Sensless Opposition of these Men against the present Governour, and their daring Audatiousness in their presumptuous asserting an Authority here over the Parliament of England. Published for the Information of the Impartial and Considerate, particularly such as Worship God and profess Christianity not in Faction and Hypocrisie, but in Truth and Sincerity. Ending with the texts Isa. xxx. 1, Isa. xlvii. 10, and [no book given] v. 11.

[725] He entitled it Truth Rescued from Forgery and Falshood. Being An Answer to a late Scurralous piece, Entituled The Case put and Decided, etc.; Which Stole into the World without any known Author’s name affixed thereto, And renders it the more like its Father, Who was a Lyer and Murtherer from the Beginning. By Samuel Jenings.

[726] A Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Worthy Elder and faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, William Edmundson, Who departed this Life the thirty-first of the sixth Month, 1712.

[727] It received the following title: A Bill in the Chancery of New Jersey, at the Suit of John, Earl of Stair, and others, Proprietors of the Eastern-Division of New Jersey, against Benjamin Bond, and some other Persons of Elizabeth-Town, distinguished as Clinker Lot Right Men; With three large Maps, done from Copper Plates. To which is added The Publications of the Council of Proprietors of East New Jersey, and Mr. Nevill’s Speeches to the General Assembly, Concerning the Riots committed in New Jersey, and the Pretences of the Rioters, and their Seducers. These Papers will give a better Light into the History and Constitution of New Jersey than any Thing hitherto published, the Matters whereof have been chiefly collected from Records. Published by Subscription: Printed by James Parker, in New York, 1747, and a few Copies are to be Sold by him and Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia. Price, bound, and Maps coloured, Three Pounds; plain and stitcht only, Fifty Shillings, Proclamation Money.

[728] It is to be regretted that one who is styled by Smith, the historian of New York, “a gentleman eminent in the law, and equally distinguished for his humanity, generosity, great ability, and honorable stations,” should never have had his biography written. [Alexander’s own copy of the bill was sold in the Brinley sale, 1880, No. 3591, and contained considerable manuscript additions in his handwriting.—Ed.]

[729] The following is the title of the publication: An Answer to a Bill in the Chancery of New Jersey, at the suit of John, Earl of Stair, and others, commonly called Proprietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey, against Benjamin Bond and others, claiming under the original Proprietors and Associates, of Elizabeth-Town. To which is added: Nothing either of The Publications of The Council of Proprietors of East New-Jersey, or of The Pretences of the Rioters and their Seducers; Except, so far as the Persons meant by Rioters Pretend Title against the Parties to the above Answer; but a Great Deal of the Controversy, Though Much Less of the History and Constitution of New Jersey than the said Bill. Audi Alteram Partem. Published by Subscription. New York: Printed and Sold by James Parker at the New Printing Office in Beaver Street. 1752, pp. 218, folio.

[730] Of the minor publications meriting attention the following are thought worthy of notice here:—

A Brief Vindication of the Purchassors Against the Proprietors in a Christian Manner. 48 pages 20º. New York, 1746.

An Answer to the Council of Proprietors’ two Publications, set forth at Perth Amboy the 25th of March, 1746, and the 25th of March, 1747. As also some observations on Mr. Nevill’s Speech to the House of Assembly in relation to a Petition presented to the House of Assembly, met at Trentown, in the Province of New Jersey, in May, 1746. New York: Printed and sold by the Widow Catharine Zenger, 1747. Folio, pp. 13. This is very rare, only two copies known.

A Pocket Commentary of the first settling of New Jersey by the Europeans; and an Account or fair detail of the original Indian East Jersey Grants, and other rights of the like tenor in East New Jersey. Digested in order. New York: Printed by Samuel Parker. 1759. 8º.

To these may be added the following of an earlier date:—

A further account of New Jersey in an Abstract of Letters lately writ from thence by several inhabitants there resident, 1676. This has been reprinted in fac-simile by Mr. Brinton Coxe.

The true state of the case between John Fenwick, Esq., and John Eldridge and Edmund Warner, concerning Mr. Fenwick’s Ten Parts of his land in West New Jersey in America. London, 1677; Philadelphia, reprinted 1765. A copy is in the Pennsylvania Historical Society’s Library, as I am informed by Mr. F. D. Stone, the librarian.

An Abstract or Abbreviation of some few of the many (Later and Former) Testimony from the inhabitants of New Jersey and other eminent persons who have wrote particularly Concerning that Place. London, 1681. 4º. 32 pp. Several of these letters, between 1677 and 1680, are printed in Smith’s History. The preface and whole tenor of the publication shows that rumors published in London were having a detrimental effect. There is a copy in the Carter-Brown Library.

Proposals by the Proprietors of East New Jersey in America for the building of a town on Amboy Point, and for the disposition of Lands in that Province. London, 1682, 4º. 6 pp.

[731] The History of the Colony of Nova-Cæsaria, or New Jersey: containing an account of its First Settlement, progressive improvements, the original and present Constitution, and other events, to the year 1721, with some particulars since; and a short view of its present state. By Samuel Smith, Burlington, in New Jersey. Printed and sold by James Parker. Sold also by David Hall, in Philadelphia, MDCCLXV. 8º. [Smith was born in 1720, and died in 1776. This edition is a rare book, and may be worth $25.00. Copies have brought much higher sums.—Ed.]

[732] As late as 1877, a second edition was published without any alteration,—a questionable proceeding, but evincing the estimation in which the work is held at the present day. [It was issued by William S. Sharp at Trenton, and contains a brief memoir of the author by his nephew, the late John Jay Smith, of Germantown, Pennsylvania.—Ed.]

[733] It is entitled The Grants, Concessions, and Original Constitutions of the Province of New Jersey: The Acts Passed during the Proprietary Governments, and other material Transactions before the Surrender thereof to Queen Anne; The Instrument of Surrender, and Her formal acceptance thereof; Lord Cornbury’s Commission and Instructions consequent thereon. Collected by some Gentlemen employed by the General Assembly, And afterwards Published by Vertue of an Act of the Legislature of the said Province. With proper Tables, alphabetically digested, containing the principal Matters in the Book. By Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer. Philadelphia: Printed by W Bradford, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty for the Province of New Jersey. Small folio, pp. 763. The date of printing does not appear upon the titlepage; but it is presumed to have been in 1758.

[734] Since this notice of the book was written a new edition of it has unexpectedly appeared, printed by Honeyman & Co., Somerville, New Jersey.

[735] Documents relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey. [First Series.] Edited by William A. Whitehead. Vol. I. 1631-1687. Newark: Daily Journal Establishment. 1880. 8º. Succeeding volumes cover a period later than that which now occupies us.

[736] Its full title was East Jersey under the Proprietary Governments; a Narrative of Events connected with the settlement and progress of the Province, until the Surrender of the Government to the Crown in 1702. Drawn principally from original sources. By William A. Whitehead. With an appendix containing The Model of the Government of East New Jersey in America. By George Scot, of Pitlochie. Now first reprinted from the original edition of 1685. 8º. pp. 341. A second edition, revised and enlarged, making a volume of 486 pages, with a large number of fac-simile autographs, was published in 1875. [It was also published separate from the Collections. It contained a map of New Jersey, 1656, following Vanderdonck’s, and another of East Jersey, with the settlements of about 1682, marked by Mr. Whitehead.—Ed.]

[737] On the family of Sir Edmund Plowden, see Burke’s Commoners and Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, under “Plowden;” Baker’s Northamptonshire, under “Fermor;” the Visitation of Oxfordshire, published by the Harleian Society, and other works cited below, particularly Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, by Henry Foley, S. J. (London, 1875-1882), especially vol. iv. pp. 537 et seq.

[738] On this point, see Father Foley’s Records, just mentioned, and “A Missing Page of Catholic American History,—New Jersey colonized by Catholics,” by the Rev. R. L. Burtsell, D.D., in the Catholic World for November, 1880 (xxxii. 204 et seq., New York, 1881). Sir Edmund Plowden was not so stanch in his adherence to his faith as was his illustrious grandfather, for in 1635 he is said (temporarily, at least) to have counterfeited conformity in religion. See “Sir Edmund Plowden in the Fleet,” by the Rev. Edward D. Neill, in the Pennsylvania Magazine, v. 424 et seq., an article which “furnishes some facts relative to the career of Sir Edmund Plowden just before he left England for Virginia,” from “the calendars of British State papers during the reign of Charles the First.”

[739] See “Sir Edmund Plowden or Ployden,” by “Albion,” in Notes and Queries, iv. 319 et seq. (London, 1852), containing so many statements not elsewhere met with as to have provoked a series of pertinent queries from the late Sebastian F. Streeter, Secretary of the Maryland Historical Society, Ibid., ix. 301-2 (London, 1854), several of which, unfortunately, are still unanswered.

[740] The petitions and warrant mentioned, with a paper entitled “The Commodities of the Island called Manati ore Long Isle within the Continent of Virginia,” extracted from Strafford’s Letters and Despatches (i. 72) and Colonial Papers (vol. vi. nos. 60, 61), in the Public Record Office at London, are given in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1869, pp. 213 et seq. (New York, 1870). “Between this period and 1634,” according to “Albion,” “Sir Edmund was engaged in fulfilling the conditions of the warrant by carrying out the colonization by indentures, which were executed and enrolled in Dublin, and St. Mary’s, in Maryland, in America. In Dublin the parties were Viscount Muskerry, 100 planters; Lord Monson, 100 planters; Sir Thomas Denby, 100 planters; Captain Clayborne (of American notoriety), 50; Captain Balls; and amounting in all to 540 colonizers, beside others in Maryland, Virginia, and New England.” The same persons, with “Lord Sherrard” and “Mr. Heltonhead” and his brother, are named as lessees under the charter of New Albion, in Varlo’s Floating Ideas of Nature, ii. 13, hereafter spoken of.

[741] “Confirmed,” says “Albion,” “24th July, 1634.” The Latin original of this charter may be seen in the Pennsylvania Magazine, vol. vii. p. 50 et seq. (Philadelphia, 1883), with an Introductory Note by the writer, embracing Printz’s account of Plowden, extracts from the wills of Sir Edmund and Thomas Plowden, and a portion of Varlo’s pamphlet, hereafter referred to.

[742] So “Albion.”

[743] Printed in Rymer’s Fœdera, xix. 472 et seq., A.D. 1633, and reprinted in Ebenezer Hazard’s Historical Collections, i. 335 et seq., Philadelphia, 1792. For biographical accounts of Yong and Evelin, see Memoir and Letters of Captain W. Glanville Evelyn (Oxford, 1879), and The Evelyns in America (Ibid., 1881), both edited and annotated by G. D. Scull; cf. also “Robert Evelyn, Explorer of the Delaware,” by the Rev. E. D. Neill, in the Historical Magazine, second series, vol. iv. pp. 75, 76; and Neill’s Founders of Maryland, p. 54, note.

[744] These facts are stated in letters from Yong to Sir Tobie Matthew, referred to in the chapter on Maryland, which also contains a fac-simile of the signature of Thomas Yong.

[745] Direction for Adventurers, and true description of the healthiest, pleasantest, and richest Plantation of New Albion, in North Virginia, in a letter from Mayster Robert Eveline, that lived there many years. Small 4º. (“Liber rarissimus,” Allibone.) It was reprinted in chapter iii. of Plantagenet’s Description of New Albion, hereafter mentioned.

[746] So Beauchamp Plantagenet.

[747] Before the Committee of Trade. See Samuel Hazard’s Annals of Pennsylvania, p. 109.

[748] With regard to whom see Vol. IV., chapter on “New Sweden.”

[749] Hazard’s Annals, pp. 109, 110, citing “Albany Records,” iii. 224.

[750] “Sir Edmund Plowden,” by the Rev. Edward D. Neill, Pennsylvania Magazine of History, v. 206 et seq., citing “Manuscript records of Maryland, at Annapolis.”

[751] Printed at the end of Kolonien Nya Sveriges Grundläggning, 1637-1642, af C. T. Odhner (Stockholm, 1876), referred to in Vol. IV., chapter on “New Sweden.” The “former communications” spoken of in it cannot be found, although they have been diligently sought for, on behalf of the writer, in Sweden.

[752] Accomack and Kecoughtan (as it is usually spelled by English writers), the present Hampton. The diverse orthography of the text conforms to the original. The places are noted on contemporary maps.

[753] Cited in Vol. IV., chapter on “New Sweden.” John Romeyn Brodhead, in his History of the State of New York, i. 381, 484, mentions Plowden’s visits to Manhattan as occurring in 1643 and 1648.

[754] Scull’s Evelyns in America, p. 361 et seq. The lawyers referred to were Henry Clerk and Arthur Turner, serjeants-at-law, and Arthur Ducke, Thomas Ryves, Robert Mason, William Merricke, Giles Sweit, Robert King, and William Turner, doctors of laws; of whom, says the editor, two at least, Ducke and Ryves, are “recognized as very able and learned lawyers in their day.” The rest, as well as Bysshe, speak of the letters patent as “under the Great Seal of Ireland.” I am informed by Mr. Scull that the documents mentioned constitute a manuscript folio volume now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[755] A Description of the Province of New Albion. And a Direction for Adventurers with small stock to get two for one, and good land freely: And for Gentlemen, and all Servants, Labourers, and Artificers to live plentifully. And a former Description reprinted of the healthiest, pleasantest, and richest Plantation of New Albion in North Virginia, proved by thirteen witnesses. Together with a Letter from Master Robert Evelin, that lived there many years, shewing the particularities, and excellency thereof. With a briefe of the charge of victuall, and necessaries, to transport and buy stock for each Planter, or Labourer, there to get his Master £50 per Annum, or more in twelve trades, at £10 charges onely a man. Printed in the Year 1648. Small 4º, 32 pp. (Sabin’s Dictionary, vol. v. no. 19,724.) On the verso of the titlepage (reproduced here from the copy of the book in the Philadelphia Library) appear: “The Order, Medall, and Riban of the Albion Knights, of the Conversion of 23 Kings, their support;” the medal (given also in Mickle’s Reminiscences of Old Gloucester) bearing on its face a coroneted effigy of Sir Edmund Plowden, surrounded by the legend, ‘Edmundus. Comes. Palatinus. et. Guber. N. Albion,’ and on the reverse two coats of arms impaled; the dexter, those of the Province of New Albion, namely, the open Gospel, surmounted by a hand dexter issuing from the partiline grasping a sword erect, surmounted by a crown; the sinister, those of Plowden himself, a fesse dancettée with two fleurs-de-lis on the upper points; supporters, two bucks rampant gorged with crowns,—the whole surmounted by the coronet of an Earl Palatine, and encircled with the motto, ‘Sic suos Virtus beat;’ and the order consisting of this achievement encircled by twenty-two heads couped and crowned, held up by a crowned savage kneeling,—the whole surrounded with the legend, ‘Docebo iniquos vias tuas, et impii ad te convertentur.’ These engravings are accompanied by Latin mottoes and English verses on “Ployden” and “Albion’s Arms.” The work is the subject of an essay entitled “An Examination of Beauchamp Plantagenet’s Description of the Province of New Albion,” by John Penington, in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iv. pt. i. pp. 133 et seq. (Philadelphia, 1840), for which the writer is very justly censured by a reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for August, 1840, in these terms: “He has shown himself not unskilful in throwing ridicule upon the exaggerations and falsifications with which (as unhappily has been generally the case with such compositions in all ages) the prospectus of Ployden, or Plowden, abounds; but he has failed in the more difficult task of separating truth from falsehood.” The same critic says: “It is clear to us that the pamphlet was issued with the consent, and probably at the procuration and charges, of Sir Edmund Ployden;” and he attempts to throw some light upon the personality of the author, whose name of “Plantagenet,” undoubtedly, is fictitious. Besides the copy of the Description of New Albion in the Philadelphia Library, there is another in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 649), at Providence; three are mentioned by Mr. Penington as included in private libraries; and two, says the writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, are preserved in the British Museum. The book was reprinted from the Philadelphia copy in Tracts and Other Papers collected by Peter Force, vol. ii. no. 7 (Washington, 1838), and again reprinted from Force in Scull’s Evelyns in America, p. 67 et seq. The citations in the text are taken directly from the Philadelphia and Carter-Brown copies, which will account for some variations from these occasionally inaccurate reprints. A second edition of the original is mentioned by Lowndes as published in 1650. See the Huth Catalogue, which says: “The original edition was doubtless published at Middleburgh in 1641 or 1642.”

[756] An intimacy which authorized Plantagenet to speak thus of the Earl Palatine: “I found his conversation as sweet and winning, as grave and sober, adorned with much Learning, enriched with sixe Languages, most grounded and experienced in forain matters of State policy, and government, trade, and sea voyages, by 4 years travell in Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium, by 5 years living an Officer in Ireland, and this last 7 years in America.” “Sir Edmund Plowden,” says “Albion,” “was not inferior to any of his co-governors in ability, fortune, position, or family.”

[757] Reproduced in Heylin’s Cosmographie, in Philips’s enlarged edition of Speed’s Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, in Stith’s History of Virginia (Williamsburg, 1747), and in the Pocket Commentary of the first Settling of New Jersey by the Europeans (New York, 1759). Compare “Councells Opinions concerning Coll. Nicholls pattent and Indian purchases,” in Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., xiii. 486, 487 (Albany, 1881). On certain of these points, see “Expedition of Captain Samuel Argall,” by George Folsom, in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, i. 333 et seq. (New York, 1841), and Brodhead’s History of the State of New York, i. 54, 55, 140, and notes E and F.

[758] See Sketches of the Primitive Settlements on the River Delaware, by James N. Barker (Philadelphia, 1827), Penington’s work already cited, and “An Inquiry into the Location of Mount Ployden, the Seat of the Raritan King,” by the Rev. George C. Schanck, in New Jersey Hist. Soc. Proc., vi. 25 et seq. (Newark, N. J., 1853). According to Plantagenet, “The bounds is a thousand miles compasse, of this most temperate, rich Province, for our South bound is Maryland North bounds, and beginneth at Aquats or the Southermost or first Cape of Delaware Bay in thirty-eight and forty minutes, and so runneth by, or through, or including Kent Isle, through Chisapeack Bay to Pascatway, including the fals of Pawtomecke river to the head or Northermost branch of that river, being three hundred miles due West; and thence Northward to the head of Hudson’s river fifty leagues, and so down Hudson’s river to the Ocean, sixty leagues; and thence by the Ocean and Isles a crosse Delaware Bay to the South Cape, fifty leagues; in all seven hundred and eighty miles. Then all Hudson’s river, Isles, Long Isle, or Pamunke, and all Isles within ten leagues of the said Province being; and note Long Isle alone is twenty broad, and one hundred and eighty miles long, so that alone is four hundred miles compasse.” These limits of New Albion, as given in Smith’s History of New Jersey, are cited by the Rev. William Smith, D.D., in An Examination of the Connecticut Claim to Lands in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1774), with the remark, page 83: “This Grant, which was intended to include all the Dutch Claims, was the Foundation of the Duke of York’s Grant.”

[759] Domestic Interregnum, Entry Book, xcii. 108, 159, 441. Reprinted in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. 1869, pp. 221-22.

[760] Reproduced herewith from a copy in the possession of John Cadwalader, Esq., of Philadelphia. It will be seen that Mr. Penington was correct in his account of this map, op. cit., notwithstanding the criticisms of the reviewer of his work in the Gentleman’s Magazine, which were based not on this, but on a similar map in The Discovery of New Britaine (London, 1651), in the British Museum, collated by “John Farrer, Esq.” Cf. Editorial Note A, following chapter v.

[761] Neill’s Sir Edmund Plowden, before cited.

[762] The document is on file in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, London, and has two seals attached to it,—described by “Albion” as Sir Edmund’s “private seal of the Plowdens, and his Earl’s with supporters, signed ‘Albion,’ the same as is given in Beauchamp Plantagenet’s New Albion.” The extracts in the text were copied from the original will by a London correspondent of the writer.

[763] Extract courteously made from the original at Somerset House, London, by the same correspondent. This gentleman assures me that, notwithstanding the declaration of “Albion” to the contrary, the will contains “no allusion whatever to the death of anybody at the hands of American Indians.”

[764] In his manuscript Journal, preserved in Sweden.

[765] See Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., ii. 82, 92.

[766] In these terms: “A Commission was granted to Sir Edmund Ploydon for planting and possessing the more Northern parts [of New Netherland], which lie towards New England, by the name of New Albion.” Similarly (following Heylin) the Pocket Commentary of the first Settling of New Jersey.

[767] Maps of “New England and New York” and “Virginia and Maryland,” in this work, name the region on the west side of the Delaware south of the Schuylkill “Aromaninck,” which was understood by Mr. Neill to be the “Eriwomeck” of Yong and Evelin, placed, therefore, at that point by him in articles in the Historical Magazine and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, before referred to. “Aromanink” is given on another map, one of Visscher’s (from which these in Speed’s work were partly derived), agreeing with several of the period in assigning “Ermomex” (quite as likely the true “Eriwomeck”) to the eastern side of the Delaware. Modern historians of New Jersey, following a statement of Evelin, place Yong’s Fort near Pensaukin Creek.

[768] For information with regard to this family, see Note B to Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s translation of “The Representation of New Netherland,” N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, ii. 323 et seq. (New York, 1849), and the Rev. Dr. Burtsell’s article, already quoted. The latter lays particular stress upon the devout fidelity to the Catholic Church of the kinsfolk of the Earl Palatine of New Albion, whether in England or America, and intimates the Catholic character of Sir Edmund Plowden’s projected colony.

[769] In 8º, 30 pp., with the following titlepage: The Finest Part of America. To be Sold, or Lett, From Eight Hundred to Four Thousand Acres, in a Farm, All that Entire Estate, called Long Island, in New Albion, Lying near New York: Belonging to the Earl Palatine of Albion, Granted to His Predecessor, Earl Palatine of Albion, By King Charles the First. [asterism] The Situation of Long Island is well known, therefore needs no Description here. New Albion is a Part of the Continent of Terra Firma, described in the Charter to begin at Cape May; from thence Westward 120 Miles, running by the River Delaware, closely following its Course by the North Latitude, to a certain Rivulet there arising from a Spring of Lord Baltimore’s, in Maryland; to the South from thence, taking its Course into a Square, bending to the North by a Right Line 120 Miles; from thence also into a Square inclining to the East in a right Line 120 Miles to the River and Port of Reacher Cod, and descends to a Savannah or Meadow, turning and including the Top of Sandy Hook; from thence along the Shore to Cape May, where it began, forming a Square of 120 Miles of good Land. Long Island is mostly improved and fit for a Course of Husbandry. N.B.—Great Encouragement will be given to improving Tenants, by letting the Lands very cheap, on Leases of Lives, renewable for ever. Letters (Post paid) signed with real Names, directed for F. P., at Mr. Reynell’s Printing-Office, No. 21, Piccadilly, near the Hay-Market, will be answered, and the Writer directed where he may be treated with, relative to the Conditions of Sale, Charter, Title Deeds, a Map, with the Farms allotted thereon, etc., etc. Just Published, and may be had as above (Price One Shilling), A True Copy of the Above Charter, With the Conditions of Letting, or Selling the Land, and other Articles relating thereto. A copy of this rare tract (that collated by Sabin, and consulted by the writer) is owned by Mr. Charles H. Kalbfleisch, of New York; others are mentioned in Mr. Whitehead’s East Jersey under the Proprietors (2d ed.), p. 11, note, as belonging to the late John Ruthurfurd, of Newark, N. J., and the late Henry C. Murphy, of New York. The copy formerly pertaining to Varlo’s counsellor, William Rawle, long since passed out of the possession of his family. Of the contents of the book mentioned in the text, the translation of the charter and the lease and release were reprinted in Hazard’s Historical Collections, i. 160 et seq.; the address is given (with the error “Sir Edward” for “Sir Edmund Plowden”) in a “parergon” to Penington’s essay; and the conditions for letting or selling land appear in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vii. 54, as before intimated.

[770] “The Proclamation,” says Mr. Murphy, “has not been republished. The only copy which we know of is the one for the use of which we are indebted to the kindness of the Hon. Peter Force, of Washington.”

[771] Notice was also given that “True copies in Latin and English of the original charter registered in Dublin, authenticated under the hand and seal of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1784, may be seen, by applying to Captain Cope, at the State Arms Tavern, New York.”

[772] An account of Varlo’s “Tour through America” was given in his Nature Displayed, p. 116 et seq. (London, 1794), and was reprinted (with slight variations of phrase) in his Floating Ideas of Nature, ii. 53 et seq., London, 1796. A copy of the former book is in the Mercantile Library of Philadelphia, and one of the latter is in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

[773] The letters appear in the Floating Ideas of Nature, ii. 9 et seq.

[774] The authorities cited in this paper contain, it is believed, all the facts in print concerning New Albion, although the subject is mentioned in all the general and in many of the local annals of New Jersey, as well as in several histories of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York.

[775] See chapter ix.

[776] As early as 1658 Josiah Coale and Thomas Thurston visited the Susquehanna Indians. They were received with great kindness, and spent some weeks with the red men, travelling over two hundred miles in their company. Coale also visited the tribes of Martha’s Vineyard and others of Massachusetts. He returned to them after being liberated from prison at Sandwich, and was told by a chief: “The Englishmen do not love Quakers, but the Quakers are honest men and do no harm; and this is no Englishman’s sea or land, and the Quakers shall come here and welcome.” Of this early teacher Penn wrote: “Therefore shall his memorial remain as a sweet oyntment with the Righteous, and time shall never blot him out of their remembrance.” Fox had several meetings with the Indians, and at one he says, “They sat very grave and sober, and were all very attentive, beyond many called Christians.” After Fox’s return to England, his interest in the Indians continued, and in 1681 he wrote to the Burlington Meeting to invite the Indians to worship with them. It was thus that the way was prepared for the peaceful settlement of West Jersey and Pennsylvania.

[777] [See Mr. Whitehead’s chapter in the present volume.—Ed.]

[778] An Abstract or Abbreviation of some Few of the Many (Latter and Former) Testimonys from the Inhabitants of New Jersey, etc. London, 1681.

[779] [The history of the Swedish period is told in Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[780] History of Chester County, Pa., by Judge J. Smith Futhey and Gilbert Cope, p. 18.

[781] The courts were of three different kinds: namely, the County Courts, Orphans’ Courts, and Provincial Court. The County Courts sat at irregular intervals during the year, and were composed of justices of the peace, commissioned from time to time, the number of whom varied with the locality, the press of business, or the caprice of the government. They had jurisdiction to try criminal offences of inferior grades, and all civil causes except where the title to land was in controversy. In proper cases they exercised a distinct equity jurisdiction, which seems, however, to have been excessively irritating to the people. In many instances they were materially assisted in their labors by boards of peacemakers, who were annually appointed to settle controversies, and who performed pretty nearly the same functions as modern arbitrators. The Justices of the County Courts sat also in the Orphans’ Courts, which were established in every county to control and distribute the estates of decedents. For some cause now imperfectly understood, the conduct of the early Orphans’ Courts was exceedingly unsatisfactory, and their practice so irregular that but little can be gleaned respecting them.

The Provincial Court, which was established in 1684, was composed of five, afterwards of three, judges, who were always among the most considerable men in the province. They had jurisdiction in cases of heinous or enormous crimes, and also in all cases where the title to land was in controversy. An appeal also lay to this court from the County and Orphans’ Courts, in all cases where it was thought that injustice had been done.

[782] In 1700 the admiralty jurisdiction was done away with by the establishment of a regular vice-admiralty court in the province.

[783] Manuscript note furnished by Lawrence Lewis, Jr., Esq.

[784] [See the Maryland view of this controversy in chap. xiii.—Ed.]

[785] This must not be confused with the present Cape Henlopen, which was in 1760 called Cape Cornelius. The line was eventually run from a point known as “The False Cape,” about twenty-three or twenty-four miles south of the present Cape Henlopen.

[786] While in America, Penn made other purchases from the Indians. One purchase from the Five Nations for land on the Susquehanna was delayed until after the limits between Pennsylvania and Maryland were settled, when it was consummated in 1696, through the agency of Governor Dongan of New York, and confirmed by the Indians in 1701.

[787] Manuscript note furnished by Samuel W. Pennypacker, Esq.

[788] [There is a contemporary map showing the laying out of Philadelphia by Holme (concerning which much will be found in John Reed’s Explanation of the Map of Philadelphia, 1774), and also a part of Harris’s map of Pennsylvania, which gives the location of Pennsbury Manor, Penn’s country house, in Bucks County, four miles above Bristol, on the Delaware, which was built during Penn’s first visit, on land purchased by Markham of the Indians. See the view in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, iii. 174.—Ed.]

[789] Their frames were logs; they were thirty feet long and eighteen wide, with a partition in the middle forming two rooms, one of which could be again divided. They were covered with clapboards, which were “rived feather-edged.” They were lined and filled in. The floor of the lower rooms was the ground; that of the upper was of clapboards. These houses, he said, would last ten years; but some persons, even in the villages, had built much better. The house built for James Claypoole was about such as we have described. It had, however, a good cellar, but no chimney. He said it looked like a barn.

[790] Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania in America, Lately Granted under the Great Seal of England To William Penn, etc., Together with Priviledges and Powers necessary to the well-governing thereof. Made public for the Information of such as are or may be disposed to Transport Themselves or Servants into those Parts. London: Printed and Sold by Benjamin Clark, etc., 1681.

See Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,225; Rice Catalogue, no. 1,753. There is a copy in Harvard College Library, from which the accompanying fac-simile of title is taken. The chief portion of it is reprinted in Hazard’s Annals of Pennsylvania, p. 505; Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, i. 305.

In this pamphlet we have the origin of the quit-rents, which gave considerable uneasiness in the province. It gives also a picture of the social condition of England.

[791] Een Kort Bericht van de Provintie ofte Landschap Pennsylvania genaemt; leggende in America; Nu onlangs onder het groote Zegel van Engeland gegeven aan William Penn, etc. Rotterdam: Pieter van Wynbrugge, 1681, 4º, 24 pp. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,227; Trömel, Bibliotheca Americana, no. 381.

A copy of this was sold at the Stevens sale (no. 619) in 1881 for £10 5s.

[792] Eine nachricht wegen der Landschaft Pennsylvania in America: welche jungstens unter dem Grossen Siegel in Engelland an William Penn, etc. Amsterdam: Christoff Cunraden, 4º, 31 pp. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,226. A copy is in the Philadelphia Library. (Loganian, no. Q, 1,262.) [Harrassowitz of Leipzig, in recently advertising a copy (28 marks) with the imprint, Frankfort, 1683, says that it originally formed a part of the Diarium Europæum, and was never published separately.—Ed.]

[793] Recit de l’Estat Present des Celebres Colonies de la Virgine, de Marie-Land, de la Caroline, du nouveau Duché d’York, de Pennsylvania, et de la Nouvelle Angleterre, situées dans l’Amerique septentrionale, etc. Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 4º, 43 pp. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,230; Leclerc’s Bibliotheca Americana, no. 1,324.

[794] A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania, lately granted by the King, under the Great Seal of England, to William Penn and his Heirs and Assigns. London: Printed by Benjamin Clark, in George-Yard in Lombard Street, 4º; also abridged and issued in folio, without place or date.

There is a copy in Harvard College Library. Cf. Smith’s Catalogue of Friends’ Books, and Rëcuel de Diverses pieces concernant la Pensylvanie. See infra, p. 31.

[795] Plantation Work the Work of this Generation. Written in True-Love To all such as are weightily inclined to Transplant themselves and Families to any of the English Plantations in America. The Most material Doubts and Objections against it being removed, they may more cheerfully proceed to the Glory and Renown of the God of the whole Earth, who in all undertakings is to be looked unto, Praised, and Feared for Ever. Aspice venturo lætetur ut India Sêclo. London: Printed for Benjamin Clark, in George-Yard in Lombard Street, 1682, 4º, 18 pp. and title.

Copies of the tract are in the Carter-Brown Library, vol. ii. 1,252, Friends’ Library, Philadelphia, and in that of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

[796] The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania in America: Together with certain Laws agreed upon in England by the Governour and divers Free Men of the aforesaid Province. Folio, 11 pp., 1682.

Penn’s copy of the above, with his bookplate, is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It was purchased at the Stevens sale in 1881 for £10 5s. (Stevens’s Historical Collection, no. 623; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,251.) There is another copy in Harvard College Library, from which the annexed fac-simile of title is taken. Later editions of the Frame, containing the alterations made in 1683, are spoken of on a subsequent page.

[797] Information and Direction To Such Persons as are inclined to America, more Especially Those related to the Province of Pennsylvania. Folio, 4 pp.

The title of this tract is given in Smith’s Catalogue of Friends’ Books, under date of 1681. It is reprinted, with a fac-simile of the half-title, in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 329, from a copy in possession of Mr. Henry C. Murphy. An edition was published at Amsterdam in 1686, which is given on a following page.

[798] There is a copy of the original tract in Harvard College Library. Its title is as follows,—

The Articles, Settlement, and Offices of the Free Society of Traders in Pennsilvania: Agreed upon by divers Merchants and others for the better Improvement and Government of Trade in that Province. London: Printed for Benjamin Clark, folio, 14 pp., 1682.

[799] Copies of it are in the British Museum and in the Friends’ Library, London. It is reprinted in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 176, from a transcript obtained from the British Museum.

[800] A Letter from William Penn, Proprietary and Governour of Pennsylvania in America, to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that Province, residing in London. To which is added An Account of the City of Philadelphia, etc. Printed and Sold by Andrew Sowle, at the Crooked-Billet in Holloway Lane in Shoreditch, and at several Stationers’ in London, folio, 10 pp., 1683.

A copy of the edition, with list of property holders, is in the Library of the New York Historical Society. It has been lately reprinted by Coleman, of London. Copies of the edition, which does not contain the list of purchasers, are in the Philadelphia Library and in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It is reprinted in Proud’s History of Pennsylvania, i. 246; Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, i. 432; Janney’s Life of Penn, p. 238; and in the various editions of Penn’s collected Works. Menzies’ copy sold for $65. Harvard College Library has a copy without the list; another is in the Carter-Brown Library. Cf. Rich’s Catalogue of 1832, no. 403.

[801] Missive van William Penn, Eygenaar en Gouverneur van Pennsylvania, in America. Geschreven aan de Commissarissen van de Vrye Societeyt der Handelaars, op de selve Provintie, binnen London resideerende. Waar by noch gevoeght is een Beschrijving van de Hooft-Stadt Philadelphia, etc. Amsterdam: Gedrukt voor Jacob Claus, 1684, 4º, 23 pp.

A copy is in the Carter-Brown Library, Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,293, and in the O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 1,816 ($20). The one in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania lacks the map. It contains, in addition to what is in the London edition, a letter from Thomas Paschall, dated from Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 1683 (N. S.), the first, we believe, dated from that locality. This letter will be found translated in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 322.

[802] Beschreibung der in America new-erfunden Provinz Pensylvanien. Derer Inwohner Gesetz Arth Sitten und Gebrauch: auch samlicher reviren des Landes sonderlich der haupt-stadt Philadelphia. (Hamburg.) Henrich Heuss, 1684, 4º, 32 pp. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,295.

[803] Recüeil de Diverses pieces concernant la Pensylvanie. A La Haye: Chez Abraham Troyel, 1684, 18º, 118 pp.

Of the copy in the Carter-Brown Library, Mr. J. R. Bartlett, its curator, writes that it is the same with the German. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,295. Another copy is in the possession of a member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; cf. Stevens, Historical Collection, no. 1,539.

[804] Twee Missiven geschreven uyt Pensilvania, d’ Eene door een Hollander, woonachtig in Philadelfia, d’ Ander door een Switser, woonachtig in German Town, Dat is Hoogduytse Stadt. Van den 16 en 26 Maert, 1684, Nieuwe Stijl. Tot Rotterdam, by Pieter van Alphen, anno 1684, 2 leaves, small 4º.

[805] See Mr. Whitehead’s chapter in the present volume, and Proud’s History of Pennsylvania, i. 226.

[806] We are unable to give any information additional to that furnished by Mr. Whitehead, except that a copy of this tract sold for $160 at the Brinley sale, and that the original edition can be found in the Carter-Brown, Lenox, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Friends’ (of Philadelphia) libraries; cf. Historical Magazine, vi. 265, 304. A biographical sketch of Budd will be found in Mr. Armstrong’s introduction to the work as published in Gowan’s Bibliotheca Americana, no. 4.

[807] Missive van Cornelis Bom Geschreven uit de Stadt Philadelphia in de Provintie van Pennsylvania Leggende op d’ vostzyde van de Zuyd Revier van Nieuw Nederland Verhalende de groote Voortgank van deselve Provintie Waerby komt de Getuygenis van Jacob Telner van Amsterdam. Tot Rotterdam, gedrukt by Pieter van Wijnbrugge, in de Leeuwestraet, 1685.

The title we give is from a copy in the “Library of the Archives” of the Moravians, Bethlehem, Pa.

[808] A Further Account of the Province of Pennsylvania and its Improvements. For the Satisfaction of those that are Adventurers and enclined to be so. No titlepage. Signed “William Penn, Worminghurst Place, 12th of the 10 month, 1685.”

Tweede Bericht ofte Relaas van William Penn, Eygenaar en Gouverneur van de Provintie van Pennsylvania, in America, etc. Amsterdam: By Jacob Claus, 4º, 20 pp.

Copies of all three editions are in the Carter-Brown Collection. (Catalogue, ii. 1, 320-22). The two English editions are in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Extracts from it are given in Blome’s Present State of His Majesties Isles and Territories in America, London, 1687, pp. 122-134. We do not think that the work has ever been reprinted. Trömel, Bibliotheca Americana, no. 390, gives the Dutch edition.

[809] Nader Informatie en Bericht voor die gene die genegen zijn, om zich na America te begeeven, en in de Provincie van Pensylvania Geinteresseerd zijn, of zich daar zocken neder te zetten. Mit een Voorreden behelzende verscheydene aanmerkelzjke zaken vanden tegenwoordige toestand, en Regeering dier Provincie; Novit voor dezen in druk geweest: maar nu eerst uytgegeven door Robert Webb t’ Amsterdam. By Jacob Claus, 1686, 4º, i+11 pp. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,332.

[810] A Letter from Doctor More, with Passages out of several Letters from Persons of Good Credit, Relating to the State and Improvement of the Province of Pennsilvania. Published to prevent false Reports. Printed in the Year 1687.

It is reprinted in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 445, from a copy in the Carter-Brown Library, Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,339.

[811] Some Letters and an Abstract of Letters from Pennsylvania, Containing the State and Improvement of that Province. Published to prevent Mis-Reports. Printed and Sold by Andrew Sowe, at the Crooked Billott in Holloway Lane in Shoreditch, 1691, 4º, 12 pp.

Penn’s copy is in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; see Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,423. It is reprinted in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 189.

[812] A Short Description of Pennsilvania, or, A Relation What things are known, enjoyed, and like to be discovered in the said Province. [Imperfect.] By Richard Frame. Printed and sold by William Bradford in Philadelphia, 1692, 4º, 8 pp.

But one copy is known to have survived, and it is preserved in the Philadelphia Library. A small edition was printed in fac-simile, in 1867, on the Oakwood Press, a private press of “S. J. Hamilton” (the late Dr. James Slack). Its introduction is in the form of a letter by Horatio Gates Jones, Esq.

[813] Copia Eines Send-Schriebens ausz der neuen Welt, betreffend die Erzehlung einer gefäherlichen Schifffarth, und glücklichen Anländung etlicher Christlichen Reisegefehrten, welche zu dem Ende diese Wallfahrt angetratten, den Glauben an Jesum Christum allda Ausz-zubreiten. Gedruckt im Jahr 1695, 4º, 11 pp.

A copy was purchased by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania at the Stevens sale in 1881 for £26. It has been translated by Professor Oswald Seidensticker for publication in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History. Professor Seidensticker inclines to the belief that it was written by Daniel Falkner.

[814] There are two copies of the book in Harvard College Library; from the map in one the annexed fac-simile is taken. Cf. Wharton’s paper on provincial literature in Hist. Soc. Mem., i. 119; and the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 1,550.

[815] Umstandige Geographische Beschreibung Der zu allerletzt-erfundenen Provintz Pensylvaniæ, In denen End Grantzen Americæ In der West-Welt gelegen durch Franciscum Danielem Pastorium, etc. Vattern Melchiorem Adamum Pastorium, und andere gute Freunde. Franckfurt und Leipzig. Zu finden bey Andreas Otto, 1700, 16º, 140 pp.

The Harvard College copy is dated 1704; cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,077; and O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 1,807, with a Continuatio of 1702 ($43 00).

[816] Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania in Norden-America welche auf Begehren guter Freunde, etc. Von Daniel Falknern, Professore, Burgern und Pilgrim allda. Franckfurt und Leipzig. Zu finden bey Andreas Otto, Buchhandlern, 1702, 16º, 58 pp.

[817] It is worth while to make record of two tracts of this early period whose titles might deceive the student with the belief that they pertained to the subject, but they do not. The first is a burlesque indorsement of the Protestant Reconciler, entitled Three Letters of Thanks to the Protestant Reconciler: 1. From the Anabaptists at Munster; 2. From the Congregations in New England; 3. From the Quakers in Pennsylvania. London: Benjamin Took, 1683, 4º, 26 pp.

The other is a Letter to William Penn, with His Answer, London, 1688, 4º, 10 pp; again the same year in 20 pp.; and in Dutch, 16 pp., Amsterdam, 1689.

This letter, by Sir William Popple, is addressed “To the Honourable William Penn, Esq., Proprietor and Governor of Pennsylvania.” It is a friendly criticism on his conduct while living in England, after his return from America. It has nothing to do with his province but is of a biographical nature. Proud prints the correspondence in his History of Pennsylvania (i. 314). It has been catalogued as connected with the history of the province. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii., nos. 1,363 and 1,390. Both of the London editions are in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The student may also need to be warned against a forged letter of Cotton Mather, about a plot to capture Penn. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1870, p. 329.

[818] A Journal or Historical Account of his Life, Travels, Sufferings, etc. London, 1694, folio. Again, London, 1709; 1765; 7th ed., 1852, with notes by Wilson Armistead. Allibone’s Dictionary, i. 625; Sabin’s Dictionary, vi. 25, 352.

[819] London, 1713; Dublin, 1715; London, 1715, 1777; Dublin, 1820; and in two different Friends’ libraries, 1833 and 1838. Sabin, vi. 21,873.

[820] Apology for the Church and People of God called in derision Quakers; Wherein they are vindicated from those that accuse them of Disorder and Confusion on the one hand, and from such as calumniate them with Tyranny and Imposition on the other; shewing that as the true and pure Principles of the Gospel are restored by their Testimony, so is also the ancient apostolick order of the Church of Christ re-established among them, and settled upon its Right Basis and Foundation. By Robert Barclay, London, 1676, 1 vol., 4º.

There have been various later editions in English and German. Masson calls this book by far the best-reasoned exposition of the sect’s early principles.

[821] A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, for the testimony of a good Conscience. London, 1753, 2 vols., folio.

[822] The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers, intermixed with several remarkable occurrences. Written originally in Low Dutch by W. S., and by himself translated into English. London, 1722, folio, 752 pp. There are later editions,—London, 1725; Philadelphia, 1725; Burlington, N. J., 1775; again, 1795, 1799-1800; Philadelphia, 1811; again, 1833, in Friends’ Library; New York, 1844, etc. The Philadelphia edition of 1725 bears the imprint of Samuel Keimer. It was this book which Franklin, in his Autobiography, tells us he and Meredith worked upon just after they had established themselves in business. Forty sheets, he says, were from their press.

[823] [This was published at Amsterdam in 1696, and was translated into English, with a letter by George Keith, vindicating himself, the same year; and also into German. Sabin’s Dictionary, v. 17,584. The next year (1797) Francis Bugg’s Picture of Quakerism was printed as “A modest Corrective of Gerrard Croese” (Sabin, iii. 9,072); Bugg having, since about 1684, joined their opponents. Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,503.—Ed.]

[824] Portraiture of Quakerism, 3 vols., London, 1806; New York, same date.

[825] Four vols., Philadelphia, 1860-67.

[826] London, 1876.

[827] An Examen of Parts relating to the Society of Friends in a recent work by Robert Barclay, entitled, etc. Philadelphia, 1876.

[828] See also Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,479, for a variety of titles; and Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 2017.

[829] It may not, however, be out of place to mention here the chief reasons on which the followers of Fox base their objections to the manner in which it is customary to speak of the first Quakers who visited New England. It is generally represented that it was the behavior of these early ministers which caused their persecution; but before a European Quaker had set foot on Massachusetts the court had denounced them, and in October, 1656, a law was passed which spoke of them as a “cursed sect of heretickes.” It is also customary to speak of the executions of Quakers in Boston in connection with certain acts of indecency committed by women who were either laboring under mental aberrations or believed that they were fulfilling a divine command, leaving on the mind of the reader the impression that the capital law was called into existence to correct such abuses. No such acts were committed until after the capital law had fallen into disuse. Nor is it clear, from printed authorities, that the death penalty was only inflicted after every possible means had been tried by the Massachusetts authorities to rid themselves of their unwelcome visitors. The language of the law of 1658, which declared that if a banished Quaker returned he or she should suffer death, does not show that it supplemented that of 1657, by which punishments increasing in severity were visited on Quakers upon their first, second, and third return. Neither will the practice under the law of 1658 justify this interpretation. The penalties of the law of 1657 had not been exhausted in the cases of Mary Dyer, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and William Ledera, when they were hanged.

[830] See Memoirs of Long Island Historical Society, vol. i.

[831] London, 1726, 2 vols., folio; London, 1771, 1 vol., royal folio; London, 1782, 5 vols., 8º; London, 1825, 3 vols., 8º.

[832] A list of the most important of these, with references to where they will be found, is printed in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vi. 368.

[833] London, 1813, 2 vols.; Dover, N. H., 1820; new edition, with preface by Forster, 1849. It is reviewed by Jeffrey in Edinburgh Review, xxi. 444.

[834] Philadelphia, 1852; cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, vol. ix. p. 221. Mr. Janney was appointed Indian Agent by President Grant, 1869. He died April 30, 1880.

[835] London, 1851; again, 1856. It is reviewed in the Edinburgh Review, xciv. 229, and Christian Observer, li. 818.

[836] Two vols., 1791. It is of some interest to note another French life by C. Vincent, Paris, 1877, and a Dutch life by H. van Lil, Amsterdam, 1820-25, 2 vols.

[837] 1. Answers to Macaulay.Defence of William Penn from Charges, etc., of T. B. Macaulay, by Henry Fairbairn. Philadelphia, 1849, 8º, 38 pp.

2. William Penn and T. B. Macaulay, by W. E. Forster. Revised for the American edition by the author. Philadelphia, 1850, 8º, 48 pp. This first appeared as an Introduction to an edition of Clarkson’s Life of W. Penn, London, 1850.

3. William Penn, par L. Vullieum. Paris, 1855, 8º, 83 pp.

4. Inquiry into the Evidence relating to the Charges brought by Lord Macaulay against W. Penn, by John Paget. Edinburgh, 1858, 12º, 138 pp. Cf. also Westminster Review, liv. 117; and Eclectic Magazine, xxiii. 115; xxxix. 120. Sabin’s Dictionary, 49,743.

Additional Works.Memorials of the Life and Times of [Admiral] Sir W. Penn, by Granville Penn. London, 1833, 2 vols. 8º. Cf. also P. S. P. Conner’s Sir William Penn, Philadelphia, 1876, and “The Father of Penn not a Baptist,” in Historical Magazine, xvi. 228.

“The Private Life and Domestic Habits of W. Penn,” by Joshua F. Fisher, in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iii. part ii. p. 65 (1836); published also separately.

“Memoir of Part of the Life of W. Penn,” by Mr. Lawton, a contemporaneous writer, in Ibid., p. 213.

“Fragments of an Apology for Himself,” by W. Penn, in Ibid., p. 233.

“Penn and Logan Correspondence.” Edited by Edward Armstrong, in vols. ix. and x. of Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. These volumes cover only the years between 1700 and 1711; they also contain Mr. J. J. Smith’s Memoir of the Penn Family, reprinted in Lippincott’s Magazine, v. 149. Cf. Magazine of American History, ii. 437; also James Coleman’s Pedigree and General Notes of the Penn Family, 1871.

“William Penn’s Travels in Holland and Germany,” by Oswald Seidensticker. See Pennsylvania Magazine of History, ii. 237. Penn’s journal of these travels will be found in his collected works.

The Penns and the Penningtons, and The Fells of Swarthmore Hall, by Maria Webb, are two interesting books throwing light on the Quaker society in which Penn moved.

Calvert and Penn; or, the Growth of Civil and Religious Liberty in America, by Brantz Mayer. Delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, April 8, 1852. Baltimore, 1852, 8º, 49 pp.

John Stoughton’s William Penn, the Founder of Pennsylvania. London, 1882. This book, called out by the Bi-Centenary of Pennsylvania, is founded on the standard Lives, but adds some new matter.

[838] Coleman, James, bookseller. Catalogue of Original Deeds, Charters, Copies of Royal Grants, petitions, Original Letters, etc., of William Penn and his Family. July, 1870. Also Supplement. London, 1870, 8º, 32, 12 pp.

Also see The Penn Papers. Description of a large Collection of Original Letters, Manuscript Documents, Charters, Grants, Printed Papers, rare Books and Pamphlets relating to the Celebrated William Penn, to the early History of Pennsylvania, and incidentally to other parts of America, dating from the latter part of the 17th to the end of the 18th century, lately in the possession of a surviving descendant of William Penn, now the property of Edward G. Allen. London, 1870.

Also see Original Deeds and Charters, State and Boundary Documents, Letters, Maps, and Charts, also Books and Papers relating to America, the Penn Family, and the Quakers, many of them from the Penn Library. July, 1876. London, 1876, 8º, 24 pp.

[839] The published address delivered upon their presentation to the Historical Society is entitled Proceedings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on the Presentation of the Penn Papers, and Address of Craig Biddle, March 10, 1873, Philadelphia, 1873, 8º, 30 pp. Cf. Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Pennsylvania Historical Society, no. 177.

[840] Mr. Whitehead informs me that the papers in the Library of the New Jersey Historical Society consist of 17 parts (no. 10 missing), and are called, “The History of the Colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania in America. From the time of their first discovery to the year 1721. Together with an Appendix containing several occurrences that have happened since, down to the present time. Undertaken at the desire of the Yearly Meeting of the people called Quakers, of the said Colonies, and published by their order. By——. Psal. cv. 12. 13. 14, when they were but a few, etc.” Several of the passages, marked “Transfer to History of Friends,” correspond to the Philadelphia manuscript, which is apparently the portion designated as the second part in the author’s scheme, as thus detailed by himself in the New Jersey manuscript: “The History of the Province of Pennsylvania in two parts. Part I. The time and manner of the grants of territories, the arrival of settlers, a general view of the original state of the country and of the public proceedings in legislation, and other matters for the first forty years after the settlement made under William Penn. Part II. The introduction and some account of the religious progress of the people called Quakers therein, including the like account respecting the same people in New Jersey as constituting one Yearly Meeting.”

[841] The History of Pennsylvania in North America, from ... 1681 till after the year 1742, with an Introduction respecting the Life of W. Penn, ... the Religious Society of the People called Quakers, with the First Rise ... of West New Jersey, and ... the Dutch and Swedes in Delaware; to which is added a Brief Description of the said Province, 1760-1770. Philadelphia, 1797-1798.

[842] A biographical notice of him by the Rev. Charles West Thomson will be found in vol. i. of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (2d ed. p. 417), together with some verses which show the sympathies of a Loyalist. He was born in 1728, and died in 1813. A Portrait after a pencil sketch is noted in the Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Pennsylvania Historical Society, no. 86.

[843] Philadelphia, 1829.

[844] London, 1854; vol. i. appearing in 1850. The work was never completed.

[845] Harrisburg, 1876; 2d ed., Philadelphia, 1880.

[846] London, 1757, 2 vols., 8º.

[847] London, 1770, 2 Vols., 8º.

[848] [This book has passed through several editions,—1830, with lithographic illustrations; 1844, 1850, 1857, and 1868, with woodcuts. A tribute to Mr. Watson (who was born June 13, 1779, and died Dec. 23, 1861), by Charles Deane, is in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., v. 207; and Benjamin Dorr published A Memoir of John Fanning Watson, Philadelphia, 1861, with a portrait. Mr. Willis P. Hazard’s Annals of Philadelphia, 1879, supplements Mr. Watson’s book. The local antiquarian interest will be abundantly satisfied with Mr. Townsend Ward’s papers on the old landmarks of the town, which have appeared in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, though much in them necessarily fails of association with the early years with which we are dealing. This is likewise true of Thompson Westcott’s Historic Buildings of Philadelphia, 1877; cf. the papers on old Philadelphia in Harper’s Monthly, 1876; cf. An Explanation of the Map of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia. By John Reed. Philadelphia, 1794 and 1846.—Ed.]

[849] Philadelphia, 1867, 12º, 379 pp.

[850] Norristown, 1859.

[851] Philadelphia, 1862. See Memoir of Dr. Smith in Pennsylvania Mag. of Hist., vi. 182.

[852] Philadelphia, 1877.

[853] Doylestown, Pa., 1876, 8º, 875 + 54 pp.

[854] It is unfortunate that a book of such merit should have been given to the public in so objectionable a form. It is a 4º, 782 + 44 pages (Philadelphia, 1881), profusely illustrated with pictures calculated to gratify the vanity of living persons and to mislead students as to the value of the work.

[855] Annals of Pennsylvania, from the Discovery of the Delaware, by Samuel Hazard, 1609-1682, Philadelphia, 1850, 8º, 664 pp. An excellent compilation, containing nearly all the documentary information on the subject, arranged in chronological order.

A catalogue of the papers relating to Pennsylvania and Delaware in the State-Paper Office, London, was printed in the Memoirs of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, vol. iv. part ii. p. 236.

[856] Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania. Beginning the Fourth Day of December, 1682. Volume the First, in Two Parts. Philadelphia, 1752. This collection was continued down to the Revolution. It is contained in six folio volumes. The first three are from the press of Franklin and Hall. They are always known as “Votes of the Assembly.”

[857] The first ten volumes of the series known as the Colonial Records bear the title of Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, from the Organization [1683] to the Termination of the Proprietary Government; the last six: Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania from its Organization to the Termination of the Revolution. They contain, however, the Minutes down to 1790. The publication of this series was begun by the State in 1837, the American Philosophical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania having petitioned the Legislature to adopt measures for this end. After three volumes were issued (Harrisburg, 1838-1840) the publication was suspended. In 1851, at the request of the Historical Society, the matter was again brought before the Legislature by Edward Armstrong, Esq., a member of the Society, then a delegate to the Legislature. The sixteen volumes of the Colonial Records and twelve of the Pennsylvania Archives were issued between the years 1852 and 1856. The volumes issued in 1838-1840 were reprinted in 1852, and an index volume to both works in 1860. The latter does not apply to the volume of the Records published in 1838-1840.

[858] Pennsylvania Archives, selected and arranged from Original Documents in the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. By Samuel Hazard, Commencing 1664. 12 vols., 8º. Harrisburg and Philadelphia, 1852-1856. To Mr. Samuel Hazard, who was also the author of the Annals of Pennsylvania and publisher of Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania (16 vols., 8º, Philadelphia, 1828-1835), the students of history are greatly indebted for the preservation of some of the most important documents relating to the history of the State.

[859] Charter to William Penn and Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania, 1682 and 1700; preceded by Duke of York’s Laws in Force from the year 1676 to the year 1682. Published under the direction of John Blair Linn, Sec. of Commonwealth, Compiled and edited by Staughton George, Benjamin M. Nead, and Thomas McCamant. Harrisburg, 1879, 8º, 614 pp.

Appendix A of this volume contains a compilation of the laws, etc., establishing the Courts of Judicature; it is by Staughton George. Appendix B contains Historical Notes of the Early Government and Legislative Councils and Assemblies of Pennsylvania; it is by Mr. Nead. Both are valuable pieces of work; but we do not agree with Mr. Nead that the laws printed and agreed upon in England, and the written ones prepared by Penn and submitted to the Assembly that met at Upland, December, 1682, were both passed. The passage in Penn’s letter of Dec. 16, 1682, which reads, “the laws were agreed upon more fully worded,” indicates that the printed series was superseded by the written one.

[860] Laws of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1810 (Beoren’s edition). The second volume of this edition contains an elaborate “note” on land-titles; it will be found on pp. 105-261. It was prepared by Judge Charles Smith.

View of the Land-Laws of Pennsylvania, with Notes of its Early History and Legislation. By Thomas Sargeant. Philadelphia, 1838, 8º, xiii + 203 pp.

Address before the Law Academy. By Peter McCall. Philadelphia, 1838. A valuable historical essay.

Essay on the History and Nature of Original Titles of Land in Pennsylvania. By Charles Huston. Philadelphia, 1849, 8º, xx + 484 pp.

Syllabus of Law of Land-Office Titles in Pennsylvania. By Joel Jones. Philadelphia, 1850, 12º, xxiv + 264.

The Common Law of Pennsylvania. By George Sharswood. A lecture before the Law Academy. Philadelphia, 1856.

Equity in Pennsylvania. A lecture before the Law Academy of Philadelphia, Feb. 11, 1868. By William Henry Rawle. With an Appendix, being the Register Book of Governor Keith’s Court of Chancery. Philadelphia, 1868, 8º, 93 + 46 pp.

A Practical Treatise on the Law of Ground-Rents in Pennsylvania. By Richard M. Cadwalader. Philadelphia, 1879, 8º, 356 pp.

An Essay on Original Land-Titles in Philadelphia. By Lawrence Lewis, Jr. Philadelphia, 1880, 8º, 266 pp.

The Courts of Pennsylvania in the Seventeenth Century. Read before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, March 14, 1881. By Lawrence Lewis, Jr. See Pennsylvania Magazine of History, v. 141, also, separately.

Some Contrasts in the Growth of Pennsylvania and English Law. A Lecture before the Law Department of the University of Pennsylvania, Oct. 3, 1881. By William Henry Rawle. Philadelphia, 1881, 8º, 78 pp., 2d ed., 32 pp., 1882.

[861] A number of addresses were delivered before this Society. That of J. N. Barker, delivered in 1827, is the most valuable of the series, and is entitled Sketches of the Primitive Settlements of the River Delaware, Philadelphia, 1828.

[862] That no doubt should exist regarding the accuracy of these dates, we have had Penn’s letter to the Lords of Plantation in the State-Paper Office, London, examined, and in it the 24th is clearly written. This is confirmed by the original draft of his letter to the Free Society of Traders, in which the same date of arrival is given. The “New Castle County old Records transcribed,” quoted by Hazard, give the 27th as the time of his arrival before that town, and the 28th as the day on which he took official possession. These statements are verified by the Breviate of Penn vs. Lord Baltimore, in which the original Newcastle Records appear to have been quoted, since the volumes and folios referred to differ from those given by Hazard.

[863] This conclusion has been reached by examining the evidence we have in strict chronological order. There is nothing to show that Penn met the Indians in council until May, 1683. At this conference the Indians either failed to understand him, or refused to sell him land. His next meeting with them was on June 23, 1683. He then purchased land from them, and the promises of friendship quoted on a former page were exchanged. It is a significant fact that while there is scarcely any allusion to the Indians in his letters prior to the meeting of June 23, subsequent to that time they are full of descriptions of them, and of accounts of his intercourse with them.

[864] [The elm-tree known as the Treaty-tree which was long venerated as the one under which the interview was held, was blown down in 1810, and a picture of it taken in 1809 is preserved in the Historical Society. (Cf. Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Historical Society, no. 167. Cf. views in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 493; Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia; one of the latter part of the last century in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 186.) For the monument on the spot, see Lossing’s Field Book of the Revolution, ii. 254. It is well known that Benjamin West made the scene of the treaty the subject of a large historical painting. The original first deed given by the Indians to Markham is in the possession of the Historical Society. Cf. Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Historical Society, no. 174.

William Rawle’s address before the Pennsylvania Historical Society in 1825 was upon Penn’s method of dealing with the Indians as compared with the customs obtaining in the other colonies. (Cf. Historical Magazine, vi. 64.) Fac-similes of the marks of many Indian chiefs, as put to documents from 1682 to 1785, are given in Pennsylvania Archives, vol. i.—Ed.]

[865] [Cf. also Pennsylvania Archives, 2d series, vol. vii. There is a map illustrating the boundary dispute in Pennsylvania Archives (1739), i. 595; cf. Neill’s Terra Maria, chap. v., Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, ii. 200, and Mr. Brantley’s chapter in the present volume.—Ed.]

[866] S. R. Gardiner’s Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage, i. 164.

[867] S. R. Gardiner’s Personal Government of Charles I., ii. 290.

[868] In the Maryland Historical Society are preserved the original manuscript records of courts baron and leet held in St. Clement’s manor at different times from 1659 to 1672.

[869] Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. London, 1878, iii. 362.

[870] [See Memorial History of Boston, i. p. 278.—Ed.]

[871] At a session of the Assembly held in Januuary, 1648, an incident occurred which annalists have generally deemed worthy of mention as the first instance of a demand of political rights for women. Miss Margaret Brent—who was the administratix of Governor Calvert, and as such held to be the attorney, in fact, of Lord Baltimore—applied to the Assembly to have a vote in the House for herself, and another as his lordship’s attorney.

Upon the refusal of her demand, the lady protested in form against all the proceedings of the House. The Assembly afterwards defended her from the censures passed by Lord Baltimore upon her management of his affairs in the Province.

[872] [See Vol. IV.—Ed.]

[873] See chapter x.—Ed.

[874] See chapter xii.—Ed.

[875] [It is reprinted in the Magazine of American History, i. 118.—Ed.]

[876] A copy of the original, which is very rare, is in the British Museum. It was reprinted by Munsell, of Albany, as No. 1 of Shea’s Early Southern Tracts. [It is suggested in the preface of the reprint, which was edited by Colonel Brantz Mayer, that it “was perhaps prepared by Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, from the letters of his brothers, Leonard and George Calvert, who went out with the expedition.” It was also reprinted in the Historical Magazine, October, 1865—Ed.]

[877] This second tract was reprinted by Sabin, of New York, in 1865 [under the editing of Francis L. Hawks. A perfect copy should have a map, engraved by T. Cecill, “Noua Terræ-Mariæ tabula.” It is often wanting, as in the Harvard College copy; it is, however, in the Library of Congress copy. Sabin reproduced it full size, and a reduced fac-simile of it is given in Scharf’s History of Maryland, i. 259. Another is given in the text. The Chalmers Catalogue says that at the time of the boundary disputes between Maryland and Pennsylvania the only copy to be found was in the Sir Hans Sloane Collection. See the Sparks Catalogue, and the Huth Catalogue, iii. 926.—Ed.]

[878] [Dr. Dalrymple was born in Baltimore, in 1817, and was for twenty-four years the Corresponding Secretary of the Maryland Historical Society. He is said to have possessed the largest private library (over 14,000 volumes) south of Pennsylvania. He died Oct. 30, 1881.—Necrology (1881) of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia.—Ed.]

[879] [In 1844 Georgetown College presented to the Maryland Historical Society a copy of McSherry’s transcript of the Relatio Itineris; and in 1847 Dr. N. C. Brooks made a translation from this copy, which was later printed in Force’s Tracts, iv. No. 12. The Latin text, with a revision of Brooks’s version, was printed privately in the Woodstock Letters, in 1872. Two years later (1874) the Maryland Historical Society reprinted it as stated in the text, following, however, the original McSherry transcript, which had been transferred to Loyola College, Baltimore. This, however, then wanted the concluding pages, but in 1875 the whole was found, which necessitated the printing of a supplement to the Fund Publication of the Society (No. 7) which contained it. The later version of Converse is largely reprinted in Scharf’s Maryland, i. 69, etc.

Various accounts of Father White have been printed: B. U. Campbell’s in the Metropolitan Catholic Almanac, 1841, and in the United States Catholic Magazine, vol. vii. Mr. Campbell also read before the Historical Society a paper on Early Missions in Maryland, and printed a chapter on the same subject in the United States Catholic Magazine in 1846. There is also an account of Father White, by Richard H. Clarke, in the Baltimore Metropolitan, iv. (1856), and a sketch in the Woodstock Letters. Upon all these is based the account in the Fund Publication already mentioned. Other accounts of the Maryland missions may be found in Shea’s Early Catholic Missions; and in Henry Foley’s Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, London, 1878, vol. iii. Mr. Neill has used this last in his tract, Light Thrown by the Jesuits upon Hitherto Obscure Points of Early Maryland History, Minneapolis. See also his Eng. Col., ch. xv.—Ed.]

[880] Reprinted in Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. ii. There is a copy of it in Harvard College Library.

[881] The documents transmitted by Bennett and Matthews to the Protector, during their contest with Lord Baltimore in 1656, may be found in Thurloe’s State Papers, v. 482-486. Copies of Strong’s and Langford’s rare tracts are in the Boston Athenæum.

[882] Reprinted in Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. iii. There is a copy of it in Harvard College Library. See Sabin, viii. 30276.

[883] Reprinted in Gowan’s Bibliotheca Americana, No. 5. New York, 1869. [This edition has a map, with introduction and notes by John Gilmary Shea. It has again been reissued as one of the Fund Publications of the Maryland Historical Society.—Ed.]

[884] It is reprinted in Scharf’s Maryland, i. 174.

[885] [The early Quakers of Maryland have been the subject of two publications of the Historical Society: one by J. Saurin Norris, issued in 1862; and the other, Dr. Samuel A. Harrison’s Wenlock Christison and the early Friends in Talbot County, 1878. See also Neill’s Terra Mariæ, ch. iv. On Wenlock Christison see Memorial History of Boston, i. 187.—Ed.]

[886] This manuscript volume is in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society. An Index to the Calendar was printed in 1861.

[887] In 1860 another valuable report to the governor on the condition of the public records was made by the Rev. Ethan Allen, D. D.

[888] Cf. Preface to Alexander’s Calendar.

[889] Published in the Master of the Rolls series. [The Peabody Index is described in Lewis Mayer’s account of the library, 1854.—Ed.]

[890] The Maryland Historical Society has a manuscript copy of some of the Sloane manuscripts in the British Museum, pertaining to the first Lord Baltimore and Maryland. Mr. Alexander gave to the State Library at Annapolis some of the manuscripts relating to Maryland in Sion College, London. A number of the Maryland papers in the state-paper office have been published in Scharf’s History of Maryland, and in the Report on the Virginia and Maryland Boundary Line, 1873. The Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland in 1659, and some of the communications between the Maryland Council and the Dutch at New Amstel have been published in Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, ii. 84 et seq. The 1880 Index, p. 246, to accessions of manuscripts in the British Museum shows various papers of Cecil Calvert.

[891] A description of the occupations of the planters of Maryland, and of the culture of tobacco by them in the year 1680, is contained in the “Journal of a voyage to New York and a Tour in several of the American colonies,” by Jaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter, published in the Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society, vol. i. pp. 194, 214-216, 218-221.

[892] An article in Lippincott’s Magazine for July, 1871, describes the topography and the present condition of St. Mary’s.

[893] There is a fine portrait of the first Lord Baltimore in the gallery of the Earl of Verulam at Glastonbury, England. It was painted by Mytens, court painter to James I. An engraving from it is in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society. In 1882 a copy of this portrait was presented to the State of Maryland by John W. Garrett, Esq. It is engraved in McSherry’s Maryland, p. 21, as from an original in the great gallery of Sir Francis Bacon; and again in S. H. Gay’s Popular History of the United States, i. 485. An engraved portrait of Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, at the age of fifty-one, made by Blotling, in 1657, is in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society. Engravings of these portraits of the two lords are given in the present chapter.

The Baltimore arms are those of Calverts, quartered with Crosslands. The Calvert arms are barry of six, or and sable, over all a bend counterchanged. Crosslands: quarterly, argent and gules, over all a cross bottony counterchanged. Lord Baltimore used: quarterly, first and fourth paly of six, or and sable, a bend counterchanged; second and third, quarterly, argent and gules, a cross bottony counterchanged. Crest: on a ducal coronet proper, two pennons, the dexter or, the sinister sable; the staves, gules. Supporters: two leopards, guardant coward, proper. Motto: Fatti maschii, parole femine.

The first great seal of the Province was lost during Ingle’s Rebellion; and in 1648 the Proprietary sent out another seal, slightly different. This seal had engraven on one side the figure of the Proprietary in armor on horseback, with drawn sword and a helmet with a great plume of feathers, the trappings being adorned with the family arms. The inscription round about this side was: Cecilius absolutus dominus Terra Mariæ et Avaloniæ Baro de Baltimore. On the other side of the seal was engraven a scutcheon with the family arms; namely, six pieces impaled with a band dexter counterchanged, quartered with a cross bottony, and counterchanged; the whole scutcheon being supported with a fisherman on one side and a ploughman on the other (in the place of the family leopards), standing upon a scroll, whereon the Baltimore motto was inscribed; namely, Fatti maschii, parole femine. Above the scutcheon was a count-palatine’s cap, and over that a helmet, with the crest of the family arms; namely, a ducal crown with two half bannerets set upright. Behind the scutcheon and supporters was engraven a large ermine mantle, and the inscription about this side of the seal was, Scuto bonæ voluntatis tuæ coronasti nos. In 1657 Lord Baltimore sent out another seal, similar in design, which was used till 1705. Subsequent changes were made in the seal and arms of the Province and State, but in 1876 the last described side of the Great Seal sent out in 1648 was adopted as the arms of Maryland. A full account of the pedigree of the Calverts will be found in An Appeal to the citizens of Maryland, from the legitimate descendants of the Baltimore family, by Charles Browning, Baltimore, 1821. [Fuller’s Worthies of England and Anthony Wood’s Athenæ Oxoniensis give us important facts regarding the first Lord Baltimore. See John G. Morris’s The Lords Baltimore, 1874, No. 8 of the Fund Publications of the Historical Society; and Neill’s English Colonization in North America, ch. xi.—Ed.]

[894] [He undertook it at the instance of Sir John Dalrymple. See his chapters ix. and xv. See, also, his Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the American Colonies. Chalmers had come to Maryland in 1763 to give legal assistance to an uncle in pursuing a land claim. Many of his papers were bought at his sale by Sparks, and are now in Harvard College Library.—Ed.]

[895] [Compare George William Brown’s Origin and Growth of Civil Liberty in Maryland, a discourse before the Historical Society in 1850. And Brantz Mayer’s Calvert and Penn,—a discourse before the Pennsylvania Historical Society in 1852.—Ed.]

[896] [Bozman was born in 1757 and died in 1823. He had published in 1811 a preliminary Sketch of the History of Maryland during the three first years after its Settlement. Some of the old records, supposed to have been lost since he used them, were found at Annapolis in 1875, and serve to show the accuracy with which he copied them. Gay’s Popular History of the United States, i. 515.—Ed.]

[897] New Series, vol. ix.

[898] [Following Chalmers, it had been often stated that the Assembly of 1649 was Catholic by majority; but four or five years before this publication of Davis, Mr. Sebastian F. Streeter, in his Maryland Two Hundred Years Ago, had claimed that the Assembly which passed the Toleration Act was by majority Protestant, for which, so late as January, 1869, he was taken to task in the Southern Review by Richard McSherry, M.D., who reprinted his paper in his Essays and Lectures. The question of the relations of Protestant and Catholic to the spirit of toleration is discussed by E. D. Neill, in his “Lord Baltimore and Toleration in Maryland,” in the Contemporary Review, September, 1876; by B. F. Brown, in his Early Religious History of Maryland: Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, 1876; in “Early Catholic Legislation, 1634-49, on Religious Freedom,” in the New Englander, November, 1878. The Rev. Ethan Allen, in his Who were the Early Settlers of Maryland? published by the Historical Society in 1865, aimed to show that the vast majority were Protestant. Kennedy also had asserted that the Assembly of 1649 was Protestant.—Ed.]

[899] [He says in his preface that he picked up his threads from the printed sources in the Library of Congress while he was one of the Secretaries of President Johnson.—Ed.]

[900] [The principal of Mr. Neill’s other contributions are The Founders of Maryland as portrayed in Manuscripts, Provincial Records, and early Documents, published by Munsell, of Albany, in 1876; and English Colonization of America, chapters xi., xii., and xiii., where he first printed Captain Henry Fleet’s Journal of 1631. Streeter, in his Papers, etc., gives an account of Fleet.—Mr. Neill also printed Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, Minneapolis, 1875.—Ed.]

[901] A manuscript copy of this charter, both in Latin and English, is in the Maryland Historical Society. Many writers, including the Rev. E. D. Neill, so late as 1871, in his English Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, have made the mistake of supposing that the charter of Maryland was copied from the charter of Carolina, granted in 1629 to Sir Robert Heath. The last two named charters were both copied from the charter of Avalon, issued in 1623. [The Maryland charter of June 20, 1632, is printed by Scharf, i. 53, following Thomas Bacon’s translation, as given in his edition of the Laws, Annapolis, 1765; where is also the original Latin, which is likewise in Hazard’s Collection, i. 327. Lord Baltimore had printed it in London, in 1723, in a collection of the Acts, 1692-1715,—an edition which Bacon had never found in the Province. See the Brinley Catalogue, No. 3657. The Philadelphia Library has an edition printed in Philadelphia in 1718.—Ed.]

[902] [The Rev. John G. Morris, D.D., began a Bibliography of Maryland in the Historical Magazine (April and May, 1870), but it was never carried beyond “Baltimore.” If a topical index is furnished to Sabin’s Dictionary, when completed, it may supply the deficiency; but in the mean time the articles “Baltimore” and “Maryland” can be consulted. Of the local works references may be made to a few: George A. Hanson’s Old Kent, 1876, is largely genealogical, and not lucidly arranged. T. W. Griffith published in 1821 his Sketches of the Early History of Maryland, and in 1841 his Annals of Baltimore. J. T. Scharf published his Chronicles of Baltimore in 1874. David Ridgely published in 1841 his Annals of Annapolis (1649-1872). Rev. Ethan Allen’s Historical Notes of St. Ann’s Parish (1649-1857), appeared in 1857; and George Johnstone’s History of Cecil County in 1881.—Ed.]

[903] [Mr. Kennedy’s reply appeared in the United States Catholic Magazine, and Mr. Michael Courtney Jenkins printed a rejoinder in the same number.—Ed.]

[904] [Mr. Gladstone was answered by Dr. Richard H. Clarke, in the Catholic World, December, 1875, in a paper which was later issued as a pamphlet, with the title, Mr. Gladstone and Maryland Toleration. Mr. Gladstone had reissued his Vaticanism essays with a preface, styling the book, Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion, in which he reiterated his arguments.

It is perhaps largely owing to the deficiency of early personal narratives bearing upon Maryland history and throwing light upon character, that there is so much diversity of opinion regarding the interpretation to be put on the charter as an instrument inculcating toleration. The shades of dissent, too, are marked. Hildreth, History of the United States, says, “There is not the least hint of any toleration in religion not authorized by the law of England.” Henry Cabot Lodge, Short History of the English Colonies, p. 96, says, “There is no toleration about the Maryland charter.” Some light regarding Calvert, on the side of doubt, may be gathered from Gardiner’s Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage.

In Baltimore’s controversy with Clayborne, the side of the latter has been espoused by Mr. Streeter in his Life and Colonial Times of William Claiborne, which he has left in manuscript, and of which an abstract of the part relating to Clayborne’s Rebellion is given by Mr. S. M. Allen in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, April, 1873. Mr. Streeter was of New England origin, a graduate of Harvard (1831), and had removed to Richmond in 1835, and to Baltimore the following year, where he had been one of the founders, and was long the Recording Secretary of the Maryland Historical Society. He contributed also in 1868 to its Fund Publication (No. 2), The First Commander of Kent Island,—an account of George Evelin, under whose administration the island passed into Calvert’s control. This tract has been reprinted in G. D. Scull’s Evelyns in America, privately printed at Oxford (England), 1881. Streeter’s “Fall of the Susquehannocks,” a chapter of Maryland’s Indian history, 1675, appeared in the Historical Magazine, March, 1857, being an extract only from a voluminous manuscript work by him on the Susquehannocks.—Ed.]

[905] [Lewis Mayer published an account of its library, cabinets, and gallery in 1854; and No. 1 of its Fund Publications is Brantz Mayer’s History, Possessions, and Prospects of the Society, 1867.—Ed.]

 

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

—Obvious errors were corrected.

—The transcriber of this project created the book cover image using the title page of the original book. The image is placed in the public domain.