Commodities. The production of commodities which the ungenial climate of the British Islands refused to grow was thought of from the beginning, and they became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from Virginia. For example, Carlisle's treatise, Anderson's Commerce, year 1583. It seemed grievous that England should spend her money in buying wine and silk from southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. The only maxim of political economy generally accepted in that day was that a nation is enriched by getting money from abroad and keeping it at home. The precious metals constituted the only recognized riches. Laws were made to restrain the exportation of gold and silver, and sumptuary laws to discourage the consumption of those things that must be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to raise in Great Britain the products of the Mediterranean region would have proved successful if the climate had been half as favorable to such enterprises as the government. Wine. The arguments advanced in favor of the possibility of producing wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the sunshine of royal favor for experiments made to that end, but climatic conditions were inexorable. King James busied himself to no profit in raising mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silkworms, in imitation of Henry IV, the reigning King of France, who succeeded in producing cocoons in the Tuileries but not in making silk culture profitable in the north of France. Silk. Anderson on the year 1589. Mulberries were first planted in England in 1608, two years after the sailing of the Virginia argonauts. James sent circulars to persons of influence among his subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry trees, and, in the years immediately following, the silk fever ran its course alongside the excitement about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia colony. 1609. Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in every breeze, hastened to announce at the first mention of silk culture that mulberry trees, "apt to feed silke wormes to make silke," were a "chiefe commoditie" of Virginia.
The first principles that govern colony-planting were not yet understood. It was proposed to force everything from a forlorn camp of men dwelling under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treacherous foes and in constant peril of starvation. The raising of silkworms was begun in Virginia in 1613, and before the colony was nine years old it was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a hundred times its market value. The experiment came to nothing. It could not have happened otherwise amid the miseries of those early years. The rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk moth, were made to bear the responsibility for the failure.
A new silk fever. Silk was little known in England at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, but it came into great request a few years later. Cal. Dom. S. P. James I, p. 428. In 1617 Lord Carew declares that there is "a madness for silk instead of cloth." This rage for silk led to the establishment of silk manufacturing in England; throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought to England from abroad and settled in Spitalfields, "the cheap end of its metropolis," and in Moorfields. It seemed more than ever important to produce silk in the king's dominions, in order to supply these manufacturers with material without importation from alien lands. Accordingly, a new effort was made in 1620 to secure raw silk from Virginia. The Earl of Southampton, ever eager to promote the Virginia colony, "writt into Italy, France, and Spayne" for silkworm "seed"; the king gave some from his own stock, and the expert who had charge of the king's worms was sent over to look after the business. A French book on the subject was translated to instruct the colonists. Pory's Report, Pub. Rec. Off. The first Virginia Assembly in 1619 had passed a law to promote the raising of the mulberry. To save expense, the colonists at this time, or later, planted the trees in hedgerows and mowed them with a scythe. Phil. Trans. I, 201. In 1621 orders were sent from England that none but members of the Council and the heads of hundreds should wear silk, unless they had made it themselves. Hening i, 14. The prohibition shows how general was the craze for silk clothing. Original Records of Colony of Va. The climate of Virginia proved genial enough, but the massacre of 1622, the bitter Indian conflicts that ensued in 1623, and the epidemic of the same year, following one another swiftly, were enough to annihilate a hundred feeble projects. The real doom of silk-raising, however, came from the fact that the culture of tobacco in virgin soil was incalculably more profitable and vastly less troublesome to pioneers than hatching silkworms' eggs in one's pocket or bosom, or sleeping with them in a small box under one's bolster and covering them in the warm bed on rising. Note 2. The project was blighted in the bud by adverse economic conditions – a killing frost more deadly to such enterprises than an ungenial climate. But a lesson in economic principles is one of the hardest for men to learn. Long after the colony had become prosperous, English projectors and Virginia experimenters tried again and again to supplant tobacco with silk. If we may credit the report, Virginia furnished a coronation robe of silk for Charles I, and Charles II certainly wore silk from worms hatched and fed in his Virginia dominions. One Esquire Digges brought Armenians to Virginia to attend his worms. 1655. But in the Reformed Virginia Silkworm, by Hartlib, the friend of Milton, it is announced that a young lady had discovered that silkworms would care for themselves on the trees, "to the instant wonderful enrichment of all the planters there, requiring neither cost, labour, or hindrance in any of their other employments." It is also suggested on the eager title-page of the pamphlet that "the Indians, seeing and finding that there is neither Art, Pains, or Skill in the thing," will "incontinently fall to raising silk." Comp. Va. Richly Valued, 1650, and Leah and Rachel, 1636. Not only were the gentle savages, and especially their women and children, to devote themselves to silk, but the American caterpillar – "the natural silkworm" as it was called – was expected to spin for the market if his cocoon could be "refined." 27
Hening ii, 242. By 1666 the silk delusion had passed, and the Virginia Assembly repealed all acts for the encouragement of mulberry trees. Ten years later, Glover, the botanist, found many of these trees still standing as melancholy witnesses to the waste of energy by the earlier promoters and settlers of the colony. Phil. Trans. XI, 628. Almost every other American colony made the same experiment for itself, and Virginia renewed its endeavors from time to time, each generation forgetting what its fathers had learned.
III
Silk-grass. Along with the silk fever went the silk-grass craze. 1585. Ralegh's people had seen the Indians wearing garments woven of the fiber of the Yucca filamentosa, the "Adam's needle and thread" of our popular speech. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Hariot, in his account of it, declares that "the like grows in Persia," and that much of the "silk-works" coming thence to Europe was made of this fiber. He probably confounded the yucca with the ramie plant of the East, of which grass cloth is made. Of the yucca fiber taken to England in 1585, "a piece of silk grogram" was made, and of course pronounced "excellent good"; it was even presented to the queen. The coarse and rather brittle fiber of this plant was exalted by enthusiasts into something nearly equal to silk. Ordinances for planting it were sent from England; at least one legislative act in its favor was passed by the Virginia Assembly, and the most foolish hopes were entertained regarding the profit to be had from it. Proceedings of Va. Assembly, 1619. 2d N. Y. Hist. Society Coll. iii, 348. By 1619 it had come to be called "silk flax," and it was then advocated for homelier uses, such as cordage and linen, and every householder was compelled by law to set a hundred plants; the governor himself set five thousand. In 1624 it is spoken of as "a commoditie of speciall hope and much use." Purchas IV, p. 1777. There were by this time those who ventured to say that the silk-grass enterprise was "full of difficultie"; but the managers in England easily got rid of this objection by attributing the difficulty to "negligence and want of experience." Instr. of 24 July, 1624. MS. Bk. of Instr. Libr. of Cong. They were just then intent