Note 755 — Chapter XI · (continued 2)

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.”