IV
Wine. It was also proposed to produce wine in Virginia for English consumption. No more gold and silver should go out of the realm to buy port and canary to the profit of foreigners and the impoverishment of the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty. The instructions on this point were clear, and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread to stay their hunger they had made wine of the sour wild grapes of the country. French vine-dressers were sent over a little later and were forbidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to employ themselves about vines, with the care of silkworms for variety. MS. Rec. Va. Co. i, 343. In 1621 these Frenchmen sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which was duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of wine were afterward sent to England from America at long intervals, but without decreasing the profits of wine growers in the Old World.
All the commodities sought from Virginia were unsuited to conditions in a new country. Other products sought. To the folly of making such experiments at all where living itself was an experiment, the managers added the folly of crowding a multiplicity of problematic enterprises on the colony at the same time. With a virgin continent in which to produce novelties, all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. Plants of every clime grew rank in the imagination of projectors. Virginia was a wonderland, and it was readily believed without evidence that the "soyle and clymate" were "very apt and fit for sugar canes"; "also linseed and rapeseeds to make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of 1609 expresses it. Nova Brittania. Along with "orenges, limons, and almonds," this official writer proposes to plant "anniseeds, rice, cummin, cottonwool, carroway seeds, ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke," and, as if this breathless list were not enough for one new land, he adds, "and many such like that I can not now name." If we may trust the publications of the company, various West India plants were tried in the very first days of the colony, while the threefold peril of death from famine, pestilence, and savage war was imminent.
Timber and naval stores. But it was not enough to wring from an infant colony the products of the south; those derived from the north of Europe were straightway to be got there also. MS. Rec. Va. Co. 31 May and 23 June, 1620. German millwrights – "Dutch carpenters," in the phrase of the records – were brought from Hamburg by John Ferrar to build Virginia sawmills; timber was still sawed by hand in England. Pitch, tar, and potash were to be produced by Poles sent out for the purpose in the second year of the colony. Patriotism dictated that England should be relieved of her dependence on foreign countries for naval stores. Virginia had forests: why should she not produce these things? 28
It had been found that the savages eagerly received glass beads in exchange for corn and peltries. Glass-making. Nothing more was required to prove the profitableness of glass-making. Some Germans were sent to the colony in 1608, and glass works were established. 29 For some reason no proper materials were available at first, and it became necessary to request that sand might be sent from England to make Virginia glass of at the glass works in the woods near Jamestown. The German glass blowers were prone to run away to the Indians, among whom work was lighter and food more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these desertions by providing dusky wives for the men whose skill with tools and weapons they valued highly. In 1621 the glass business was revived, and this time it was intrusted to Italian workmen. Iron works. About the same time iron works were established at Falling Creek, with "forty skilled workmen from Sussex to carry them forward." 30 Twenty-five ship carpenters were sent to ply their trade on the James River, and it was also arranged that oil was to be distilled from walnuts by the "apothecaries." George Sandys was sent over in July, 1621, to have entire control of all schemes for staple commodities. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineapples, plantains, and other fruits were to be started forthwith. There was once again great hope from the "rich commodity of silk," an endowed school for Indians was founded, and the little Virginia pool became iridescent with many frail bubbles. Result of the massacre. The sudden and frightful massacre by the savages in March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and premature projects. This calamity did not cause the failure of these foredoomed schemes; it only saved them from a painful and lingering death, and provided their friends with a decent epitaph for them. The people who survived the massacre were decimated by an epidemic in the following year. What strength they could spare from frequent battles with the savages they spent in growing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable for export.
V
Tobacco. Against tobacco King James had written a book. A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 1604. It was denounced in Parliament and regarded by all public-spirited men as an evil. Nevertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. In colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an economic one, and economic problems are solved by coarse and homely means. 31 John Rolfe, the first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, planted the first tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, and by 1616 the better West India variety had perhaps been substituted for the harsh kind grown by the Virginia Indians, and by them called "uppowoc" or "apooke." Tobacco prospered and was profitable, to the disgust of the pedantic king and the sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful products from a colony upon which so much poetic sentiment had been lavished. Neither gold nor spices came as had been expected; the strings of pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to be found, or were perhaps transformed on investigation into wampum beads; the silver mine once discovered on the upper James had vanished forever; tropical fruits refused to grow; even madder and woad failed, and, though the indigo plant would readily mature, nobody knew how to manufacture the dye. Silk was troublesome and unprofitable, shipbuilding, and such coarse but patriotic products as naval stores had come to naught. But the detestable "weed," as King James had dubbed it, throve apace. As early as 1617 the waste margins of the broad streets of Jamestown were planted with it by the eager settlers. The English merchants grasped at the profits of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the heavy duties imposed on it, and a powerful mercenary interest in the prosperity of Virginia was established. 32 By 1624, when the Virginia Company was dissolved, the danger that the colony would be abandoned as a result of Spanish intrigues, Indian massacres, or prolonged discouragement had passed away. Public spirit, patriotism, and religious enthusiasm no longer guarded it as a feeble house plant. It had struck root in the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its life was assured. From that time the colony that had been for seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers in England and a perdition to its inhabitants, became a sober money-making enterprise, uninteresting to enthusiasts and philanthropists. 33
VI
Motives of sentiment. In the preceding sections of this chapter we have traced what may be called the series of commercial motives that, sometimes in succession, often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia movement. The agitation for a colony was primarily a commercial one. The London or Virginia Company by which it was carried forward had been organized in the form of the great trading corporations of the time, such as the Muscovy Company and the East India Company, and it was expected to yield large returns. But though commercial in form and purpose, the Virginia Company from the outset was able to appeal successfully in every emergency to motives that were far from mercenary. Into the chain-threads of commercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic feeling and religious sentiment.
VII
Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company. Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a second place. The company began to pass more and more out of the control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach of voracious noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed into the hands of