Volume 10 — VOLUME X (continued 9)

A contemporary writer laments with pathetic zeal and pious indignation the lot of many famous captains and valiant soldiers, who, after serving the King all their lives and being riddled with wounds, were not only pushed aside into corners without any reward, but condemned to see unworthy men without merit loaded with benefits, merely through enjoying the favor of some minister or courtier.[2] The Duke of Lerma, as one who professed a contempt for all letters and learning, was even less likely to be influenced by Cervantes' literary merits than by his services as a soldier—services which had now become an old story. Disappointed in his hopes of preferment, Cervantes had to maintain himself and his family by the exercise of his pen—writing, as we learn, letters and memorials for those who needed them,[3] while busy upon his new book.

Without the gifts which are in favor at court—unskilled in the arts of solicitation—we can imagine, with a man of Cervantes' temperament, what a special hell it must have been—"in suing long to bide." About this time he seems almost to have dropped out of life. The four years between 1598 and 1602 are the obscurest in his story. We do not know where he lived or what he did. It was the crisis of the struggle with his unrelenting evil destiny. The presumption is that he was still in the South, engaged in his humble occupation of gathering rents, of buying grain for the use of the fleet, with intervals perhaps of social enjoyment among such friends as he had made at Seville; among whom is reckoned the painter Francisco de Pacheco. This was for our hero the darkest hour before the dawn. For already, according to my calculation, he must have begun to write Don Quixote, being now (1602) in his fifty-fifth year.[4] He had duly qualified himself, by personal experience, to tell the story of the adventures of him who sought to revive the spirit of the ancient chivalry. His own romance was ended. The pathetic lines of Goethe might seem to be written for his own case:

Never had any man of letters to go through a severer ordeal. At last his genius found the true path for which it had been beating about so many years; but not until his prime of life had passed, when even that brave heart must have been chilled and that gay spirit deadened.

In 1601 Philip III, at the instance of the Duke of Lerma, removed the court to the old capital of Castile, Valladolid—by nature far better situated for a metropolis than Madrid, which had been the choice of his grandfather, Charles V. Thither Cervantes repaired, in 1603, doubtless with some hope of gleaning some crumbs of the royal favor. He was no more fortunate with the new King than he had been with the old. Despairing of place or patronage, he turned, with his brave spirit unquenched as by the record sufficiently appears, to completing this new thing among books.

Don Quixote was probably finished by the beginning of 1604, though some further time elapsed, as it seems, before the author had courage to go to print. His genius had lain fallow for twenty years. He was now old, and had written nothing, or at least published nothing, since Galatea. What fame was left to him he had earned as a poet among many poets. As an author, if he was remembered at all, it was in a line wholly different from that which he now essayed. There is reason to believe that the manuscript of the new book was in circulation among those who called themselves the author's friends, as was the custom of the age, before he found a patron and a publisher.[6] The publisher was got at last in Francisco Robles, the King's printer, to whom the copyright was sold for ten years.[7] The patron appeared in the person of the Duque de Bejar, a nobleman described by a writer of that age—Cristobal de Mesa—as himself both a poet and a valiant soldier. The choice was not altogether a happy one, for the Duke of Bejar might be said to have an ancestral claim to be regarded as a patron of books of chivalries. It was to his great-grandfather that one of the silliest and most extravagant of the romances had been dedicated by the author, Feliciano de Silva, who is the writer specially ridiculed by Cervantes—the very book which is the subject of a parody in the opening chapter of Don Quixote.[8] The Duke of Bejar was noted, moreover, for his own uncommon affection for the books of chivalries then in fashion, and it is probable that he at first understood Don Quixote to be one such as he was in the habit of reading. Learning of his mistake, he refused, it is said, the dedication, and withdrew his patronage from the author. Then, according to the pleasant story first told by Vicente de los Rios, was enacted that scene which has been so favorite a subject with modern artists. Cervantes begged of the Duke to give him a hearing before deciding against his book; upon which he was permitted to read a chapter, which the Duke found so much to his taste that he graciously readmitted the author into his favor and consented to receive the dedication. There is another tradition which imputes to the Duke's confessor—an ecclesiastic who must have had a cleaner nose for heterodoxy than most of his fellows—the original rejection of the dedication by the Duke, the alteration in its wording, and the subsequent neglect of the author.[9] The dedication which now does duty at the opening of the First Part of Don Quixote I have shown to have been tampered with by someone bearing no good-will to Cervantes.

The privilege of publication is dated September 26th, and the Tasa December 20,1604. The book itself, the First Part of Don Quixote (it was not so called in the first edition, of course), was printed by Juan de la Cuesta during 1604, and published at Madrid in January, 1605.[10] The impression was very carelessly made, and swarms with blunders, typographical and otherwise, showing that it was not corrected or revised by the author. The press-work, however, is quite equal in execution to that of most books of that age.

The reception which Don Quixote met with on its first appearance was cordial beyond all precedent, and such as must have convinced the author, who was evidently doubtful of his new experiment, that here at last his genius had found its true field of exercise. The persons of culture, indeed, received the book coldly. The half-learned sneered at the title as absurd and at the style as vulgar. Who was this ingenio lego—this lay, unlearned wit—"a poor Latin-less author," which is what they said of Shakespeare—outside of the cultos proper, of no university education—who had dared to parody the tastes of the higher circles? The envy and malice of all his rivals—especially of those who found themselves included in the satire—even the great Lope himself, the phoenix of his age, then at the height of his glory—spoke out, with open mouth, against the author. The chorus of dispraise was swelled by all those, persons chiefly of high station, whose fashion of reading had been ridiculed. A book, professing to be of entertainment, in which knights and knightly exercises were made a jest of—in which peasants, innkeepers, muleteers, and other vulgar people spoke their own language and behaved after their own fashion—was a daring innovation, all the more offensive because the laugh was directed at what was felt to be a national infirmity. Who was the bold man who, being neither courtier nor ecclesiastic, made sport for the world out of the weaknesses of caballeros? An old soldier of Lepanto, indeed! Lepanto was a name outworn. Spain was now in a new world. Crusades against the unbeliever, even those more popular ones which combined the saving of souls with the getting of gold, were long out of fashion. Lastly, the entire ecclesiastical body—the formidable phalanx of the endowed, with their patrons dependents, and dupes—though they were too dull to perceive and too dense to feel the shafts aimed at obscurantism and superstition, had something more than a suspicion that this book called Don Quixote was a book to be discouraged.

In spite of the frowns and sneers of the quality, however, and the ill-concealed disgust of the learned, Don Quixote was received with unbounded applause by the common people.[11] Those best critics in every age and country, the honest readers, who were neither bourgeois nor genteel, neither learned nor ignorant, welcomed the book with a joyous enthusiasm, as a wholly new delight and source of entertainment. Nothing like it had ever appeared before. It was an epoch-marking book, if ever there was one.

The proud and happy author himself spoke of his success with a frank complacency which, in any other man, would savor of vanity. Some seven or eight editions of Don Quixote are supposed to have been printed in the first year, of which six are now extant—two of Madrid, two of Lisbon, and two of Valencia.[12] The number of copies issued from the press in one year was probably in excess of the number reached by any book since the invention of printing.[13] But though all Spain talked of Don Quixote and read Don Quixote, and though the book brought him much fame, some consolation, and a few good friends, it does not appear to have helped to mend the fortunes of Cervantes in any material degree. In accordance with the usual dispensation, the author derived the least benefit from his success. Francisco Robles and Juan de la Cuesta, doubtless, made a good thing of it; but to Miguel de Cervantes there must have come but a small share of the profit. The laws of copyright were, in that age, little regarded; and it may be questioned whether, in a book published in Madrid, they could be enforced outside of Castile. The pirates and the wreckers were busy upon Don Quixote from its very earliest appearance; and its quick and plentiful reproduction in all the chief cities, not only of Spain but of the outside Spanish dominions, though highly flattering to the author, could not have greatly helped to lighten his life of toil and penury.

Taking the object of Don Quixote to be, what Cervantes declared it—"the causing of the false and silly books of chivalries to be abhorred by mankind"—no book was ever so successful. The doughtiest knight of romance never achieved an adventure so stupendous as that which Miguel de Cervantes undertook and accomplished. With his pen, keener than the lance of Esplandian or Felixmarte, he slew the whole herd of puissant cavaliers, of very valiant and accomplished lovers. Before him went down the Florisandros and Florisels, the Lisuartes and Lepolemos, the Primaleons and the Polindos, and the whole brood of the invincible. Scarcely a single romance was printed, and not one was written, after the date of the publication of Don Quixote.[14] Such a revolution in taste was never accomplished by any single writer, in any age or country.

A few words only are here needed, in the discussion of that question which has occupied so largely the ingenuity of writers, native and foreign, as to what was the object of Cervantes in writing Don Quixote. There are those who insist upon seeking in every work of humor or of wit some meaning other and deeper than in the book appears, as though it were impossible that an author should be disinterested or write merely out of the fulness of his heart or pride in his work. With Cervantes' own declaration, more than once repeated, of the purpose of his book the critics will not be content. So good a book must have had a better reason for being than Cervantes' dislike of the fantastic books of the later chivalry. Who, then, was the man—the original of Don Quixote? Against whom was the satire levelled? Of course nothing was then known to the world outside of poor Don Rodrigo de Pacheco, the Argamasillan hidalgo. Some great man Cervantes must have intended to ridicule. It was Charles V, said some. It was his son Philip, cried others—ignoring the absurdity of the Prudent one losing his wits through excessive reading of romances. It was the Duke of Lerma—or the Duke of Osuna—or some other great man, or Cervantes' wife's cousin, who opposed his marriage with Catalina. It was Ignatius Loyola—our own countryman, the good John Bowle, suggested.

Surely these various theories are a little far-fetched and not a little grotesque and absurd. What there is in either of the two Spanish monarchs to liken him to the Knight of La Mancha it is difficult to see. Those who have looked upon that wonderful equestrian picture of Titian's in the Museo at Madrid, with its weird, weary, far-off expression, are irresistibly led to think of Don Quixote; but the converse is by no means so clear that on looking at Don Quixote we are tempted to think of that most unromantic of monarchs, Carlos Quinto.[15] His son is still more unlike his supposed portrait. As to the Duke of Lerma, they who can believe, on the faith of the cock-and-bull stories told by the Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy and the Jesuit Rapin, that Cervantes satirized the all-powerful minister in revenge for personal injuries suffered at his hands, may be consigned to the same limbo with the believers in the Bacon-Shakespeare. The theory about Loyola, first mooted by Bowle, the English commentator, is of all, perhaps, not the least absurd. The one shred by which it hangs is a passage in Don Quixote where the angry Biscayan, the adversary of Don Quixote, is made a native of Azpeitia—this being the name of the obscure village where Loyola was born.

A sufficient answer to all these theories is that contained in the book itself. Surely no one has read Don Quixote with profit to himself who has been unable to see that the hero is not one whom the author desired to revile or to malign. Never was a satire like this, which leaves us full of love and sympathy for the object. And why cannot we believe the author when he avers that never did his humble pen stoop to satire? He meant, of course, the satire of persons as distinguished from the reprehension and the ridicule of human follies and general vices. As a lampoon, Don Quixote could hardly have endured to this day. The spirit which has given it eternal life is love, and not hate.

To estimate the worth of the service performed by Cervantes—not in abolishing romance, as has been absurdly said, still less in discrediting chivalry, as with even a more perverse misconception of his purpose has been suggested, but in purging books of fiction of their grossness and their extravagance, and restoring romance to truth and to nature—we have to consider the enormous influence exercised by this pernicious literature over the minds of the people of Spain in the sixteenth century.

The ceaseless wars with the Moors had trained the whole manhood of the nation to soldiership. The trade of fighting was familiar to every man of good birth, so that the word for "knight" (caballero) came to be synonymous with that for "gentleman." The constant exercise in arms made of chivalry, in Spain, a more solemn and serious calling than elsewhere. As a native writer says, with equal point and spirit, there was developed by the chronic war with the Moor a caballerismo—there is none but a Spanish word for a quality purely indigenous—essentially distinct from the gay, fantastic chivalry of the North. It extended to all classes of the people. It was not confined to the aristocracy. "Every Spaniard was a warrior, every warrior a noble, and every noble a knight of his country."[16] They had not to go far to seek for adventures. They had the Paynim at home: Mahound and Termagaunt were at their doors. There was a constant supply at hand of men of the wrong faith and alien habits—the delight in fighting whom was enhanced by the fact that they equally were possessed of the chivalric fervor, and, though Moors and misbelievers, gentlemen still and cavaliers.[17] The long and desperate struggle for existence evolved the highest qualities of the race. And small wonder it was that out of that fruitful soil which had grown the Cid and the warriors of the heroic age, who should be rightly classed as prechivalric, there sprung up that ranker produce, the knights-errant. Of these, the seekers after adventure, the bohemians of the knightly order, Spain, as her native historians boast, was the teeming mother. No other country in that age, or in the previous one, could show the world such a scene as that gravely enacted before King Juan II and his court, when eighty knights ran a-tilt with each other, and incurred serious loss of limb and permanent injury to their persons, in order that one of them might fulfil a fantastic vow made to his mistress.[18]

Knight-errantry, which was a caprice in France and in England, in Spain was a calling. No other country could afford such a field for it, and to no other society was it so well suited. The grave and wise Fernando de Pulgar, the counsellor and chronicler of Ferdinand and Isabella, speaks with complacency of the noblemen he knew who had gone into foreign countries in search of adventures, "so as to gain honor for themselves, and the fame of valiant and hardy knights for the gentlemen of Castile"—boasting that there were more Spanish knights of the errant sort than of any other nation.

The romance of chivalry was the natural growth of this fashion of knight-errantry; and, like its parent, flourished nowhere so luxuriantly as in Spain. Amadis Of Gaul and Belianis Of Greece are, in fact, as much "racy of the soil" as Don Quixote itself.

There were some simple or devout enough to take the romance for a gospel, who believed in Amadis as much as in any other hero or saint. In the Arte de Galanteria, written by Francisco de Portugal about the close of the sixteenth century, it is mentioned that a Portuguese poet, Simon de Silveira, once swore upon the Evangelists that he believed the whole of Amadis to be true history. This is capped by another story in the same book of how a certain knight came home from hunting and found his wife and daughters dissolved in tears. Asking them what was the matter—whether any child or relation was dead—they said "No; but Amadis is dead!" They had come to the 174th chapter of Lisuarte of Greece, where the old Amadis finally dies.

The influence of the Palmerins and of the Carlovingian romances, which form a class by themselves, was scarcely inferior to that of Amadis. Palmerin of England himself, the patriarch of the family—that "Palm of England," as Cervantes calls him—may be placed second to his rival in merit. The difference in spirit is great between the two; for Amadis really is, though in its present form of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth century, when chivalry was in its early prime; and Palmerin was not written till the sixteenth century, when the true ideal of knighthood had already been dimmed by the lust of gold-seeking and religious adventure. Southey, perhaps, ranks Palmerin too high in the literary scale by placing it on a level with Amadis, and averring that he knew "no romance and no epic in which suspense is so successfully kept up." Of their successors, the long line of sons, grandsons and nephews, each more valiant and puissant than the last, it must be said that they are as scant of beauty as of grace. In order to keep up the interest of their readers, the authors of the Primaleons and the Polindos—the Florisels and the Florisandos—were compelled to put in wonders on an ascending scale; to pile up adventure upon adventure; to make the dragons fiercer, the giants huger, the fighting more terrible, and the slaughter more bloody. The popular appetite, which craved for more and more excitement with every successive stimulant, could only be fed by inventions so monstrous that it is a wonder the stomach of the readers of romances of chivalry did not reject the nauseous aliment. Yet there is no evidence of any decline in the production of these books up to the date of the appearance of Don Quixote.

It was to do battle with this brood of fabled monsters, against whom the pulpit and the parliament had preached and legislated in vain, that Cervantes took up his pen. The adventure was one reserved for his single arm; and it was achieved with a completeness of success such as must have astonished our hero himself, as we know by many signs that it disgusted and irritated many of his literary rivals. The true nature of the service performed, as well as Cervantes' motive in undertaking it, has been greatly misrepresented. Nothing can be more certain than that his aim in Don Quixote was, primarily, to correct the prevailing false taste in literature. What moral and social results followed were the necessary consequences of the employment of his rare wit and humor on such a work. There is no reason to believe that Cervantes, at first, had any more serious intention than that which he avowed, namely, to give "a pastime to melancholy souls"[19] in destroying "the authority and influence which the books of chivalries have in the world and over the vulgar." That he was not impelled to this work by any antipathy to knightly romances as such—still less by any ambition to repress the spirit of chivalry, or to purge the commonwealth of social and political abuses—is abundantly proved by the whole tenor of his book, if not by the evidence of his life. His own tastes strongly inclined him to books of romance. Perhaps no one in that age had read more of those books, or was so deeply imbued with their spirit.

The opinion of an acute Spanish writer, Don Vicente de Salva, on this point we hold to be a very sensible one—"Cervantes did not intend to satirize the substance and essence of books of chivalries, but only to purge away their follies and impossibilities." What is Don Quixote itself, it is shrewdly added, but a romance of chivalry, "which has ruined the fortunes of its predecessors by being so immensely in advance of them"?[20] What was Cervantes' own last book, as we shall presently show, but in some kind a romance of chivalry—not free, alas! from some of the very errors he had himself burlesqued? Nay, what was Cervantes' own life but a romance of chivalry?

That, after all, the overthrow of the books of chivalries was but a small part of the good work which Cervantes performed in Don Quixote is only to say that, like all great writers, he "builded better than he knew." The pen of the genius, as Heine says, is ever greater than the man himself. Rejecting all the many subtle and ingenious theories as to what was Cervantes' object in writing his book; that it was a crusade against enthusiasm, as even Heine seems to suspect; that it was a missionary tract, intended to destroy popery and throw down antichrist, as some, even bearded men, have dared to suggest; that it was a programme of advanced liberalism artfully veiled under a mask of levity, and, indeed, the forerunner of that gospel of sentimental cosmopolitanism since preached by other eminent persons supposed to resemble Cervantes in their characters or Don Quixote in their careers—I hold that the author wrote but out of the fulness of his own heart, giving us, by a happy impulse, a fable in which are transparently figured his own character, his own experiences, and his own sufferings. What is the key but this to the mystery which makes this book, on a purely local subject of passing interest, the book of humanity for all time—as popular out of Spain as among Spaniards? A mere burlesque would have died with the books which it killed. A satire survives only so long as the person or the thing satirized is remembered. But Don Quixote lives, and, by a miracle of genius, keeps Amadis and Palmerin alive.

The invention is the most simple, as it is the most original, in literature. From Don Quixote dates an epoch in the art of fiction. For once Cervantes was happy in his opportunity. And what is the secret of his success? It is that this "child of his sterile, ill-cultured wit" is no creature of pure fancy, but fashioned in the very likeness of its parent, drawn out of his life, shaped after his pattern—an image of its creator. How could Cervantes' romance fail of holding the field against all the romances? It was his own life from which he drew—that life which had been a true knight-errantry. The hero himself, the enthusiast, nursed on visions of chivalry, who is ever mocked by fortune; the reviver of the old knighthood, who is buffeted by clowns and made sport of by the baser sort; who, in spite of the frequent blows, jeers, reverses, and indignities he receives, never ceases to command our love and sympathy—who is he but the man of Lepanto himself, whose life is a romance at least as various, eventful, and arduous; as full of hardships, troubles, and sadness; as prolific of surprising adventures and strange accidents, as the immortal story he has written? This is the key to Don Quixote, which, unless we use, we shall not reach to the heart of the mystery.

EARLIEST POSITIVE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA

A.D. 1606

LOUIS BECKE and WALTER JEFFERY

As shown by the authors of the following account, there is no lack of evidence that it was belief in a great southern land which led early geographers and sailors to belief in the existence of the Australian continent. Notwithstanding this, it is held by some students of the subject to be doubtful whether the first navigators who reached the shores of Australia set out with any expectation of discovering a great land in the south.

Whether this was the case or not, it is argued that the earliest achievements in that quarter were either of no definite consequence or were imperfectly estimated by those who made or promoted the discoveries in connection with which not even their names have been preserved.

The narrative of Becke and Jeffery, with its references to other leading authorities, furnishes the completest and most recent information on this subject available within the compass of a reasonably brief survey.

Learned geographers have gone back to very remote times, even to the Middle Ages, and, by the aid of old maps, have set up ingenious theories showing that the Australian continent was then known to explorers. Some evidence had been adduced of a French voyage in which the continent was discovered in the youth of the sixteenth century, and, of course, it has been asserted that the Chinese were acquainted with the land long before Europeans ventured to go so far afloat. There is strong evidence that the west coast of Australia was touched by the Spanish and the Portuguese during the first half of the sixteenth century, and proof of its discovery early in the seventeenth century. At the time of these very early South Sea voyages the search, it should always be remembered, was for a great antarctic continent. The discovery of islands in the Pacific was, to the explorers, a matter of minor importance; New Guinea, although visited by the Portuguese in 1526, up to the time of Captain Cook was supposed by Englishmen to be a part of the mainland; and the eastern coast of Australia, though touched upon earlier and roughly outlined upon maps, remained unknown to them until Cook explored it.

Early Voyages to Australia, by R.H. Major, printed by the Hakluyt Society in 1859, is still the best collection of facts, and contains the soundest deductions from them on the subject, and although ably written books have since been published, the industrious authors have added little or nothing in the way of indisputable evidence to that collected by Major. The belief in the existence of the Australian continent grew gradually and naturally out of a belief in a great southern land. G.B. Barton, in an introduction to his valuable Australian history, traces this from 1578, when Frobisher wrote:

"Terra Australis seemeth to be a great, firm land, lying under and about the south pole, being in many places a fruitful soil, and is not yet thoroughly discovered, but only seen and touched on the north edge thereof by the travel of the Portiugales and Spaniards in their voyages to their East and West Indies. It is included almost by a parallel, passing at 40 degrees in south latitude, yet in some places it reacheth into the sea with great promontories, even into the tropic Capricornus. Only these parts are best known, as over against Capo d'buona Speranza (where the Portiugales see popinjayes commonly of a wonderful greatness), and again it is known at the south side of the Straight of Magellanies, and is called Terra del Fuego. It is thought this south land, about the pole Antarctic, is far bigger than the north land about the pole Arctic; but whether it be so or not, we have no certain knowledge, for we have no particular description thereof, as we have of the land under and about the north pole."

Then Purchas, in 1578, says: "This land about the Straits is not perfectly discovered, whether it be continent or islands. Some take it for continent, and extend it more in their imagination than any man's experience toward those islands of Saloman and New Guinea, esteeming (of which there is great probability) that Terra Australis, or the Southern Continent, may for the largeness thereof take a first place in order and the first in greatness in the division and parting of the Whole World."

The most important of the Spanish voyages was that made by De Quiros, who left Callao in December, 1605, in charge of an expedition of three ships. One of these vessels was commanded by Luis Vaez de Torres. De Quiros, who is believed to have been by birth a Portuguese, discovered several island groups and many isolated islands, among the former being the New Hebrides, which he, believing he had found the continent, named Tierra Australis del Espiritu Santo. Soon after, the ships commanded by De Quiros became separated from the other vessels, and Torres took charge. He subsequently found that the land seen was an island group, and so determined to sail westward in pursuance of the scheme of exploration. In about the month of August he fell in with a chain of islands—now called the Louisiade Archipelago and included in the British possession of New Guinea—which he thought, reasonably enough, was the beginning of New Guinea, but which really lies a little to the southeast of that great island. As he could not weather the group, he bore away to the southward, and his subsequent proceedings are here quoted from Burney's Voyages:

"We went along three hundred leagues of coast, as I have mentioned, and diminished the latitude 2½ degrees, which brought us into 9 degrees. From thence we fell in with a bank of from 3 to 9 fathoms, which extends along the coast to 7½ south latitude; and the end of it is in 5 degrees. We could go no further on for the many shoals and great currents, so we were obliged to sail south-west in that depth to 11 degrees south latitude. There is all over it an archipelago of islands, without number, by which we passed; and at the end of the eleventh degree the bank became shoaler. Here were very large islands, and they appeared more to the southward. They were inhabited by black people, very corpulent and naked. Their arms were lances, arrows, and clubs of stone ill-fashioned. We could not get any of their arms. We caught in all this land twenty persons of different nations, that with them we might be able to give a better account to your Majesty. They give (us) much notice of other people, although as yet they do not make themselves well understood. We were upon this bank two months, at the end of which time we found ourselves in twenty-five fathoms and 5 degrees south latitude and ten leagues from the coast; and having gone 480 leagues here, the coast goes to the north-east. I did not search it, for the bank became very shallow. So we stood to the north."

The "very large islands" seen by Torres were, no doubt, the hills of Cape York, the northernmost point of Australia, and so he, all unconsciously, had passed within sight of the continent for which he was searching. A copy of the report by Torres was lodged in the archives of Manila; and when the English took that city in 1762, Dalrymple, the celebrated geographer, discovered it, and gave the name of Torres Straits to what is now well known as the dangerous passage dividing New Guinea from Australia. De Quiros, in his ship, made no further discovery. He arrived on the Mexican coast in October, 1606, and did all he could to induce Philip III of Spain to sanction further exploration, but without success.

Of the voyages of the Dutch in Australian waters much interesting matter is available. Major sums up the case in these words: "The entire period up to the time of Dampier, ranging over two centuries, presents these two phases of obscurity: that in the sixteenth century—the period of the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries—there are indications on maps of the great probability of Australia having already been discovered, but with no written documents to confirm them; while in the seventeenth century there is documentary evidence that its coasts were touched upon or explored by a considerable number of Dutch voyagers, but the documents immediately describing these voyages have not been found."

The period of known Dutch discovery begins with the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, and a knowledge of the west coast of Australia grew with the growth of the Dutch colonies, but grew slowly, for the Dutchmen were too busy trading to risk ships and spend time and money upon scientific voyages.

In January, 1644, Commodore Abel Janszoon Tasman was despatched upon his second voyage of discovery to the South Seas, and his instructions, signed by the Governor-General of Batavia, Antonio van Diemen, begin with a recital of all previous Dutch voyages of a similar character. From this document an interesting summary of Dutch exploration can be made. Tasman, in his first voyage, had discovered the island of Van Diemen, which he named after the then Governor of Batavia, but which has since been named Tasmania, after its discoverer. During this first voyage the navigator also discovered New Zealand, passed round the east side of Australia without seeing the land, and on his way home sailed along the northern shore of New Guinea.

But to come back to the summary of Dutch voyages found in Tasman's instructions: During 1605 and 1606 the Dutch yacht Duyphen made two exploring voyages to New Guinea. On one trip, the commander, after coasting New Guinea, steered southward along the islands on the west side of Torres Straits to that part of Australia, a little to the west and south of Cape York, marked on modern maps as Duyphen Point, thus unconsciously—for he thought himself still on the west coast of New Guinea—making the first authenticated discovery of the continent.

Dirk Hartog, in command of the Endragt, while on his way from Holland to the East Indies, put into what Dampier afterward called Shark's Bay, and on an island, which now bears his name, deposited a tin plate with an inscription recording his arrival, and dated October 25, 1616. The plate was afterward found by a Dutch navigator in 1697, and replaced by another, which, in its turn, was discovered in July, 1801, by Captain Hamelin, of the Naturaliste, on the well-known French voyage in search of the ill-fated La Perouse. The Frenchman copied the inscription, and nailed the plate to a post, with another recording his own voyage. These inscriptions were a few years later removed by De Freycinet, and deposited in the museum of the Institute of Paris. Hartog ran along the coast a few degrees, naming the land after his ship, and was followed by many other voyagers at frequent intervals down to the year 1727, from which time Dutch exploration has no more a place in Australian discovery.

During the one hundred twenty-two years of which we have records of their voyages, although the Dutch navigators' work, compared with that done by Cook and his successors, was of small account, yet, considering the state of nautical science, and that the ships were for the most part Dutch East Indiamen, the Dutch names which still sprinkle the north and the west coasts of the continent show that from Cape York in the extreme north, westward of the great Australian Bight in the south, the Dutchmen had touched at intervals the whole coast line.

But before leaving the Dutch period there are one or two voyages that, either on account of their interesting or important character, deserve brief mention. In 1623 Arnhem's Land, now the northern district of the northern territory of South Australia, was discovered by the Dutch yachts Pesa and Arnhem. This voyage is also noteworthy on account of the massacre of the master of the Arnhem and eight of his crew by the natives while they were exploring the coast of New Guinea. In 1627 the first discovery of the south coast was made by the Gulde Zeepard, and the land then explored, extending from Cape Leeuwin to the Nuyts Archipelago, on the South Australian coast, was named after Peter Nuyts, then on board the ship on his way to Batavia, whence he was sent to Japan as ambassador from Holland.

In the year 1628 a colonizing expedition of eleven vessels left Holland for the Dutch East Indies. Among these ships was the Batavia, commanded by Francis Pelsart. A terrible storm destroyed ten of the fleet, and on June 4, 1629, the Batavia was driven ashore on the reef still known as Houtman's Abrolhos, which had been discovered and named by a Dutch East Indiaman some years earlier—probably by the commander of the Leeuwin, who discovered and named after his ship the cape at the southwest point of the continent. The Batavia, which carried a number of chests of silver money, went to pieces on the reef. The crew of the ship managed to land upon the rocks, and saved some food from the wreck, but they were without water. Pelsart, in one of the ship's boats, spent a couple of weeks in exploring the inhospitable coast in the neighborhood, in the hope of discovering water, but found so little that he ultimately determined to attempt to make Batavia and from there bring succor to his ship's company. On July 3d he fell in with a Dutch ship off Java and was taken on to Batavia. From there he obtained help and returned to the wreck, arriving at the Abrolhos in the middle of September; but during the absence of the commander the castaways had gone through a terrible experience, which is related in Therenot's Recueil de Voyages curieux, and translated into English in Major's book, from which the following is extracted:

"While Pelsart is soliciting assistance, I will return to those of the crew who remained on the island; but I should first inform you that the supercargo, named Jerome Cornelis, formerly an apothecary at Haarlem, had conspired with the pilot and some others, when off the coast of Africa, to obtain possession of the ship and take her to Dunkirk, or to avail themselves of her for the purpose of piracy. This supercargo remained upon the wreck ten days after the vessel had struck, having discovered no means of reaching the shore. He even passed two days upon the mainmast, which floated, and, having from thence got upon a yard, at length gained the land. In the absence of Pelsart, he became commander, and deemed this a suitable occasion for putting his original design into execution, concluding that it would not be difficult to become master of that which remained of the wreck, and to surprise Pelsart when he should arrive with the assistance which he had gone to Batavia to seek, and afterward to cruise in these seas with his vessel. To accomplish this it was necessary to get rid of those of the crew who were not of his party; but before inbruing his hands with blood he caused his accomplices to sign a species of compact, by which they promised fidelity one to another. The entire crew was divided (living upon) between three islands; upon that of Cornelis, which they had named the graveyard of Batavia, was the greatest number of men.

"One of them, by name Weybehays, a lieutenant, had been despatched to another island to seek for water, and having discovered some after a search of twenty days he made the preconcerted signal by lighting three fires, but in vain, for they were not noticed by the people of Cornelis' company, the conspirators having during that time murdered those who were not of their party. Of these they killed thirty or forty. Some few saved themselves upon pieces of wood, which they joined together, and, going in search of Weybehays, informed him of the horrible massacre that had taken place.

"Having with him forty-five men, he resolved to keep upon his guard, and to defend himself from their assassins if they should make an attack upon his company, which in effect they designed to do, and to treat the other party in the same manner; for they feared lest their company, or that which remained upon the third island, should inform the commander upon his arrival, and thus prevent the execution of their design. They succeeded easily with the party last mentioned, which was the weakest, killing the whole of them, excepting seven children and some women. They hoped to succeed as easily with Weybehays' company, and in the mean while broke open the chests of merchandise which had been saved from the vessel. Jerome Cornelis caused clothing to be made for his company out of the rich stuffs which he found therein, choosing to himself a bodyguard, each of whom he clothed in scarlet, embroidered with gold and silver. Regarding the women as part of the spoil, he took one for himself, and gave one of the daughters of the minister to a principal member of his party, abandoning the other three for public use. He drew up also certain rules for the future conduct of his men.

"After these horrible proceedings he caused himself to be elected captain-general by a document which he compelled all his companions to sign. He afterward sent twenty-two men in two shallops to destroy the company of Weybehays, but they met with a repulse. Taking with him thirty-seven men, he went himself against Weybehays, who received him at the water's edge as he disembarked, and forced him to retire, although the lieutenant and his men had no weapons but clubs, the ends of which were armed with spikes.

"Finding force unavailing, the mutineer had recourse to other means. He proposed a treaty of peace, the chaplain, who remained with Weybehays, drawing up the conditions. It was agreed to with this proviso, that Weybehays' company should remain unmolested, and they, upon their part, agreed to deliver up a little boat in which one of the sailors had escaped from the island where Cornelis was located to that of Weybehays, receiving in return some stuffs for clothing his people. During his negotiations Cornelis wrote to certain French soldiers who belonged to the lieutenant's company, offering to each a sum of money to corrupt them, with the hope that with this assistance he might easily compass his design. His letters, which were without effect, were shown to Weybehays, and Cornelis, who was ignorant of their disclosure, having arrived the next day with three or four others to find Weybehays and bring him the apparel, the latter caused him to be attacked, killed two or three of the company, and took Cornelis himself prisoner. One of them, by name Wouterlos, who escaped from this rout, returned the following day to renew the attack, but with little success.

"Pelsart arrived during these occurrences in the frigate Sardam. As he approached the wreck he observed smoke from a distance, a circumstance that afforded him great consolation, since he perceived by it that his people were not all dead. He cast anchor, and threw himself immediately into a skiff with bread and wine, and proceeded to land on one of the islands. Nearly at the same time a boat came alongside with four armed men. Weybehays, who was one of the four, informed him of the massacre, and advised him to return as speedily as possible to his vessel, for that the conspirators designed to surprise him, having already murdered twenty-five persons, and to attack him with two shallops, adding that he himself had that morning been at close quarters with them. Pelsart perceived at the time the two shallops coming toward him, and had scarcely got on board his vessel before they came alongside.

"He was surprised to see the people covered with embroidery of gold and silver, and weapons in their hands, and demanded of them why they approached the vessel armed. They replied that they would inform him when they came on board. He commanded them to cast their arms into the sea or otherwise he would sink them. Finding themselves compelled to submit, they threw away their weapons, and, being ordered on board, were immediately placed in irons. One of them, named Jan de Bremen, confessed that he had put to death or assisted in the assassination of twenty-seven persons. The same evening Weybehays brought his prisoner on board.

"On September 18th the captain and the master pilot, taking with them ten men of Weybehays' company, passed over in boats to the island of Cornelis. Those who still remained thereon lost all courage as soon as they saw them, and allowed themselves to be placed in irons."

Pelsart remained another week at the Abrolhos, endeavoring to recover some of the Batavia's treasure, and succeeded in finding all but one chest. The mutineers were tried by the officers of the Sardam, and all but two were executed before the ship left the scene of their awful crime. The two men who were not hanged were put on shore on the mainland, and were probably the first Europeans to end their lives upon the continent. Dutch vessels for many years afterward sought for traces of the marooned seamen, but none was ever discovered.

The 1644 voyage of Tasman was made expressly for the purpose of exploring the north and northwestern shores of the continent, and to prove the existence or otherwise of straits separating it from New Guinea. Tasman's instructions show this, and prove that while the existence of the straits was suspected, and although Torres had unconsciously passed through them, they were not known. Tasman explored a long length of coast line, establishing its continuity from the extreme northwestern point, Arnhem Land, as far as the twenty-second degree of south latitude, Exmouth Gulf. He failed to prove the existence of Torres Straits; but to him, it is generally agreed, is due the discovery and naming of the Gulf of Carpentaria—Carpenter, in Tasman's time, being president at Amsterdam of the Dutch East India Company—and the naming of a part of North Australia, as he had previously named the island to the south, after Van Diemen. From this voyage dates the name "New Holland." The great stretch of coast lines embracing his discoveries became known to his countrymen as Hollandia Nova, a name which, in its English form, was adopted for the whole continent, and remained until it was succeeded by the more euphonious name of Australia. Tasman continued doing good service for the Dutch East India Company until his death, about 1659, at Batavia.

SETTLEMENT OF VIRGINIA CHARTER UNDER WHICH AMERICA WAS COLONIZED

A.D. 1607

R. R. HOWISON

As the first of the original English colonies in North America, Virginia enjoys a primacy in our history which, however other sectional claims may be contested, is beyond dispute. The name Virginia, which in 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh gave to his settlement on the Carolina coast, at first covered an indefinite extent of the great central territory of the continent.

After the failure and disappearance of Raleigh's colony, no further attempts were made to settle the region until 1606, when new interest in American colonization had been aroused in England. The credit for awakening this interest is given to Bartholomew Gosnold, an English navigator who, in 1602, sailed directly west and in May reached Cape Cod. Then, coasting along New England, he found and named Martha's Vineyard, and in July returned to England.

English adventurers were so much impressed with his enthusiastic reports and his arguments in favor of new endeavors to occupy western lands, that they began to urge a fresh undertaking. Gosnold's views were strongly supported by the geographer Richard Hakluyt, "to whom America owes a heavy debt of gratitude." There were numerous offers of money and service, and when application was made to King James I he was quite ready to sanction the project. He is said to have thought of the profits that might return to him and also of the satisfaction to be found in being rid of the "turbulent spirits" sure to be drawn into the enterprise.

On April 10, 1606, James I issued a patent to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, Richard Hakluyt, and others with them associated, under which they proposed to embark upon their eagerly sought scheme. This royal grant deserves our close attention, as it will explain the nature of the enterprise and the powers originally enjoyed by those who entered upon it.

Selecting for the scene of operations the beautiful belt of country lying between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth parallels of north latitude, the King certainly provided an ample field for the success of the patentees. This tract extends from Cape Fear to Halifax, and embraces all the lands between its boundaries in North America, except perhaps the French settlement in Arcadia, which had already been so far matured as to come under the excluding clause of the patent. For colonizing this extensive region the King appointed two companies of adventurers—the first consisting of noblemen, knights, gentlemen, and others in and about the city of London, which, through all its subsequent modifications, was known by the title of the London Company; the other consisted of knights, gentlemen, merchants, and others in and about the town of Plymouth, and was known as the Plymouth Company, though its operations were never extensive and were at last utterly fruitless.

To the London adventurers was granted exclusive right to all the territory lying between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels and running from the ocean to an indefinite extent westward into the wilds of America, even to the waters of the Pacific. They were also allowed all the islands, fisheries, and other marine treasures within one hundred miles directly eastward from their shores and within fifty miles from their most northern and most southern settlements, following the coast to the northeast or southwest, as might be necessary. Within these limits ample jurisdiction was conferred upon them. To the Plymouth Company were granted in like manner the land and appurtenances between the forty-first and forty-fifth parallels. Thus the whole region between thirty-eight and forty-one was left open to the enterprise of both companies; but to render angry collision impossible, the charter contained the judicious clause above noted, by which each colony might claim exclusive right fifty miles north or south of its extreme settlements, and thus neither could approach within one hundred miles of the other.

The hope of gold and silver from America was yet clinging with tenacity to the English mind. James grants to the companies unlimited right to dig and obtain the precious and other metals, but reserves to himself one-fifth of all the gold and silver and one-fifteenth of all the copper that might be discovered. Immediately after this clause we find a section granting to the councils for the colonies authority to coin money and use it among the settlers and natives. This permission may excite some surprise when we remember that the right to coin has been always guarded with peculiar jealousy by English monarchs, and that this constituted one serious charge against the Massachusetts colony in the unjust proceedings by which her charter was wrested from her in subsequent years.

To the companies was given power to carry settlers to Virginia and plant them upon her soil, and no restriction was annexed to this authority except that none should be taken from the realm upon whom the King should lay his injunction to remain. The colonists were permitted to have arms and to resist and repel all intruders from foreign states; and it was provided that none should trade and traffic within the colonies unless they should pay or agree to pay to the treasurers of the companies 2½ per cent, on their stock in trade if they were English subjects, and 5 per cent, if they were aliens. The sums so paid were to be appropriated to the company for twenty-one years from the date of the patent, and afterward were transferred to the crown. James never forgot a prospect for gain, and could not permit the colonists to enjoy forever the customs which, as consumers of foreign goods, they must necessarily have paid from their resources.

The jealous policy which at this time forbade the exportation, without license, of English products to foreign countries, has left its impress upon this charter. The colonists were, indeed, allowed to import all "sufficient shipping and furniture of armour, weapons, ordinance, powder, victual, and all other things necessary," without burdensome restraint; but it was provided that if any goods should be shipped from England or her dependencies "with pretence" to carry them to Virginia, and should afterward be conveyed to foreign ports, the goods there conveyed and the vessel containing them should be absolutely forfeited to his majesty, his heirs and successors.

The lands held in the colonies were to be possessed by their holders under the most favorable species of tenure known to the laws of the mother-country. King James had never admired the military tenure entailed upon England by the feudal system, and he had made a praiseworthy though unsuccessful effort to reduce them all to the form of "free and common soccage," a mode of holding land afterward carried into full effect under Charles II, and which, if less pervaded by the knightly spirit of feudal ages, was more favorable to the holder and more congenial with the freedom of the English constitution. This easy tenure was expressly provided for the lands of the new country; and it is a happy circumstance that America has been little affected even by the softened bonds thus early imposed upon her.

But how shall these colonial subjects be governed? and from whom shall they derive their laws? These were questions to which the vanity and the arbitrary principles of the King soon found a reply. Two councils were to be provided, one for each colony, and each consisting of thirteen members. They were to govern the colonists according to such laws, ordinances, and instructions as should afterward be given by the King himself, under his sign manual and the privy seal of the realm of England; and the members of the council were to be "ordained, made, and removed from time to time," as the same instructions should direct. In addition to these provincial bodies a council of thirteen, likewise appointed by the King, was to be created in England, to which was committed the general duty of superintending the affairs of both colonies.

And to prove the pious designs of a monarch whose religion neither checked the bigotry of his spirit nor the profaneness of his language it was recited in the preamble of this charter that one leading object of the enterprise was the propagation of Christianity among "such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and might in time be brought to human civility and to a settled and quiet government."

Such was the first charter of James to the colony of Virginia. We will not now pause to consider it minutely either for praise or for blame. With some provisions that seem to be judicious, and which afterward proved themselves to be salutary, it embraces the most destructive elements of despotism and dissension. The settlers were deprived of the meanest privilege of self-government, and were subjected to the control of a council wholly independent of their own action, and of laws proceeding directly or indirectly from the King himself. The Parliament of England would have been a much safer depositary of legislative power for the colonists than the creatures of a monarch who held doctrines worthy of the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of the Russian empire.

But all parties seemed well satisfied with this charter, and neither the King nor the adventurers had before their minds the grand results that were now giving birth. The patentees diligently urged forward preparations for the voyage, and James employed his leisure hours in preparing the instructions and code of laws contemplated by the charter. His wondrous wisdom rejoiced in the task of acting the modern Solon, and penning statutes which were to govern the people yet unborn; and neither his advisers nor the colonists seemed to have reflected upon the enormous exercise of prerogative herein displayed. The adventurers did not cease to be Englishmen in becoming settlers of a foreign clime, and the charter had expressly guaranteed to them "all liberties, franchises, and immunities" enjoyed by native-born subjects of the realm. Even acts of full Parliament bind not the colonies unless they be expressly included, and an English writer of subsequent times has not hesitated to pronounce this conduct of the royal law-maker in itself illegal (November 20th). But James proceeded with much eagerness to a task grateful alike to his vanity and his principles of government.

By these articles of instruction, the King first establishes the general council, to remain in England, for the superintendence of the colonies. It consisted originally of thirteen, but was afterward increased to nearly forty, and a distinction was made in reference to the London and Plymouth companies. In this body we note many names which were afterward well known both in the interests of America and the mother-land.

Sir William Wade, lieutenant of the Tower of London; Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Oliver Cromwell, Sir Herbert Croft, Sir Edwin Sandys, and others formed a power to whom were intrusted many of the rights of the intended settlement. They were authorized, at the pleasure and in the name of his majesty, to give directions for the good government of the settlers in Virginia, and to appoint the first members of the councils to be resident in the colonies.

These resident councils thus appointed, or the major part of them, were required to choose from their own body a member, not being a minister of God's Word, who was to be president, and to continue in office for a single year. They were authorized to fill vacancies in their own body, and, for sufficient cause, to remove the president and elect another in his stead; but the authority to "increase, alter, or change" these provincial councils was reserved as a final right to the King.

The Church of England was at once established, and the local powers were to require that the true word and service of God, according to her teachings, should be preached, planted, and used, not only among the settlers, but, as far as possible, among the sons of the forest.

The crimes of the rebellion, tumults, conspiracy, mutiny, and sedition, as well as murder, incest, rape, and adultery, were to be punished with death, without benefit of clergy. To manslaughter, clergy was allowed. These crimes were to be tried by jury, but the president and council were to preside at the trial—to pass sentence of death—to permit no reprieve without their order, and no absolute pardon without the sanction of the King, under the great seal of England.

But with the exception of these capital felonies, the president and council were authorized to hear and determine all crimes and misdemeanors, and all civil cases, without the intervention of a jury. These judicial proceedings were to be summary and verbal, and the judgment only was to be briefly registered in a book kept for the purpose.

For five years succeeding the landing of the settlers, all the results of their labor were to be held in common, and were to be stored in suitable magazines. The president and the council were to elect a "cape merchant" to superintend these public houses of deposit, and two clerks to note all that went into or came out from them, and every colonist was to be supplied from the magazines by the direction and appointment of these officers or of the council.

The adventurers of the first colony were to choose from their number one or more companies, each to consist of at least three persons, to reside in or near London, and these were to superintend the general course of trade between the mother-country and her distant daughter, and direct it into such channels as would be most advantageous to both.

No person was to be admitted to reside in the colonies but such as would take oath of obedience to the King, in the ample form provided for by a statute passed early in the reign of James, and any rash offenders who should attempt to withdraw from allegiance to his majesty was to be imprisoned until reformation, or else sent to England, there to receive "condign punishment."

The president and councils, or the major part of them, were empowered, from time to time, to make, ordain, and constitute laws, ordinances, and officers for the better government of the colony, provided that none of these laws affected life or limb in the settlers. Their enactments were also required to be, in substance, consonant to the jurisprudence of England, and the King or the council in the mother-country was invested with absolute power at any time to rescind and make void the acts of the provincial councils.

As the colonists should increase in population and influence the King reserves to himself the right to legislate for them; but condescends to restrict his law-making energies to such action as might be "consonant to the law of England or the equity thereof."

And to show his tender feelings toward the aborigines, whose lands he was so deliberately appropriating to the use of his subjects, his majesty requires that they shall be treated with all kindness and charity and that all proper means should be used to bring them to "the knowledge of God and the obedience of the King, his heirs and successors, under such severe pains and punishments as should be inflicted by the respective presidents and councils of the several colonies."

On these kindly ordinances the philosophic reader will not fail to observe the impress of the man. The stern penalty of death visited the crimes of rebellion and conspiracy, which aimed a blow at sovereign power, and even the popular tumult, which kings have so much cause to dread, was stilled by the same bloody monitor; yet arson and burglary were left to the discretion of the councils. Adultery was punished with death—a penalty never inflicted even in England, except during a time of puritanic zeal, which offered God a service without knowledge. In the eye of divine purity the offender, by this crime, may be the vilest of the vile, but if the Redeemer of the world refused to denounce the punishment of death against one taken in the act, it devolved not on this Scottish Draco to render it a capital crime. The whole legislative power is vested in the council, without any reference to the interests or the rights of the people whom they were to govern, and the King retains absolute control over the present and future laws of the colony, thus rendering their great distance from his face the best protection they could have against his tyranny. The trial by jury was required for capital felonies and manslaughter; but all inferior offences and every civil interest, however overwhelming in importance to the colonist, were to be summarily decided upon by the provincial councils. In the same space it would have been difficult to compress more absurd concession and of ruinous restraint. The clause requiring all things to be held in common was destructive of the most powerful stimulus that urges man to labor; the semblance of mercy which forbade war upon the savages often held the hand of the settler when raised in self-defence; and the church establishment, forced by the arm of the law upon reckless adventurers, made religion a hated bondage and the tithe-gatherer more odious than the author of evil.

But notwithstanding the defects and deformities of a charter which, in modern times, would have been indignantly rejected as an invasion of the rights of man, the London Company eagerly prepared for their proposed scheme of settlement. Sir Thomas Smith was elected treasurer—a gentleman who had amassed great wealth by merchandise, who was one of the assignees under Raleigh's patent, and was soon afterward made governor of the East India Company. Much has been said against him; but he was a man of public spirit and expanded views, and urged forward the enterprise with his influence and his contributions. The means of the company were at first very limited; three ships only were prepared, the largest of which was of not more than one hundred tons burden, and Christopher Newport was selected for the command. He was a navigator of some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five persons, to form the settlement. And it does not seem extravagant to assert that Virginia has felt, through all her subsequent history, the influence of these first settlers in giving a peculiar bias to her population. Besides the six gentlemen intended for the council, and Mr. Robert Hunt, a minister of the gospel, we find the names of more than fifty cavaliers, who are carefully reckoned in the shipping list as "gentlemen," and who were better fitted for the adventures of the drawing-room than for the rude scenes of the American forest. Disappointed in hope and reduced in fortune, these restless wanderers sought the New World with desire for exciting adventure and speedy wealth. Among them was George Percy, a member of a noble family and brother to the Earl of Northumberland. In this singular band we note but eleven professed laborers, four carpenters, one blacksmith, one bricklayer, and one mason: but we are not surprised to find a barber to aid in making the toilet of the "gentlemen," a tailor to decorate their persons, and a drummer to contribute to their martial aspirations!

Thus prepared with the elements of a refined colony, Newport set sail from Blackwall, December 19, 1606. Adverse winds kept him long upon the coast of England, and with disappointment came discord and murmuring among the voyagers. The preacher suffered with weakening disease, but his soothing counsels alone preserved peace among this wild company. Instead of following Gosnold's former voyage immediately across the Atlantic, they sailed by the Canaries and West Indies; and while in full route, the dissensions among the great men raged so furiously that Captain John Smith was seized and committed to close confinement on the false charge that he intended to murder the council and make himself King of Virginia. Arriving at length near the coast of America, their false reckoning kept them in suspense so alarming that Ratcliffe, commander of one of the barks, was anxious to bear away again for England.

But heaven, by its storms, contributed more to the settlements of Virginia than men by their infatuated counsels (1607). A furious tempest drove them all night under bare poles, and on April 26th they saw before them the broad inlet into the Bay of Chesapeake. The cape to the south they honored with the name of Henry, from the Prince of Wales, a noble youth, whose character gave the fairest promise of a career of high-souled action, whose love to Raleigh was only succeeded by his father's hatred, and whose early death gave England cause for unaffected mourning. The northern headland was called Charles, from the King's second son, who afterward succeeded to his throne.

As they passed the first cape a desire for recreation possessed them—and thirty, without arms, went on shore; but they were soon attacked by five savages, and two of the English were dangerously hurt. This inhospitable treatment promised but little for future peace. The sealed box was now opened, and it was found that Bartholomew Gosnold, John Smith, Edward Maria Wingfield, Christopher Newport, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and George Kendall were named as members of the Provincial Council.

Sailing leisurely up the beautiful expanse of water to which the Indians had given a name that Europeans have never violated, the voyagers were charmed with the prospect before them. The season was mild, and nature had fully assumed that emerald robe of spring. On either side the distant land presented a scene of tranquil verdure, upon which the eye might rejoice to repose. The noble bay received into its bosom the waters of many broad streams, which descended from the highlands faintly visible in the dim horizon. Green islands saluted them at times as they advanced and invited their approach by their peaceful loveliness.

At length they reached the mouth of the magnificent river, that tempted them too strongly to be resisted. This was the "Powhatan" of the Indians; and no true lover of Virginia can cease to deplore the change which robbed this graceful stream of a title pregnant with all the associations of Indian valor and of the departed glory of their empire, and bestowed a name that can only recall a royal pedant and a timid despot!

Seventeen days were employed in searching for a spot suited to a settlement (May 13th). At length they selected a peninsula, on the north side of the river, about forty miles from its mouth, and immediately commenced the well-known city of Jamestown.

A commendable industry seems at first to have prevailed. The council contrived a fort, the settlers felled the trees, pitched their tents, prepared gardens, made nets for the fish which abounded in the river, and already began to provide clapboards to freight the ships on their return to England.

But these fair promises of good were destined to a speedy betrayal. Already discord prevailed in their counsels, and a flagrant act of injustice had been committed, which soon recoiled upon the heads of its authors. We have heretofore mentioned the name of John Smith among the persons nominated for the council, and have spoken of the violent imprisonment to which he was subjected during the outward voyage. Jealousy of his merit and commanding talents did not stop at this point. He was excluded from his place in the council, and an entry was made in their records detailing the alleged reason for this act.

John Smith is the hero of the romantic destinies that attended the early life of Virginia; and the historian who would attempt to tell of her fortunes and yet neglect his story would be recreant to his trust. Nations have generally owed their brightest days of power or of happiness to the genius of a single person—directing their energies, subduing their follies, enlightening their seasons of early ignorance. Assyria has had her Semiramis, China her Confucius, Arabia her Mahomet, England her Alfred; and were we required to point to the man to whom America is principally indebted for the care of her infant years, we would not hesitate to name the heroic spirit who now appears before us.

His talent for command excited the mean jealousy of inferior souls, only that his merit might appear brighter by contrast. If we have aught to urge against him, it is that he met the treachery of the Indians with a severe spirit, but too much akin to that of the Spaniards in the South. Yet we cannot reproach him with undeserved cruelty or with deliberate falsehood, and the stern demands of his circumstances often rendered inevitable acts which would otherwise have been ungrateful to his soul.

When the council was constituted, Edward Maria Wingfield was elected president—a man who always proved an inveterate enemy to Smith, and who speedily attracted the hatred even of his accomplices by his rapacity, his cowardice, and his selfish extravagance. Smith demanded a trial, but the council feared to trust their wretched charge to an impartial jury, and pretended, in mercy to him, to keep him under suspension. But their own incompetence soon brought his talents into demand. He accompanied Newport upon an exploring voyage up the river, and ascended to the residence of King Powhatan, a few miles below the falls, and not far from the spot now occupied by the city of Richmond. The royal seat consisted of twelve small houses, pleasantly placed on the north bank of the river, and immediately in front of three verdant islets. His Indian majesty received them with becoming hospitality, though his profound dissimulation corresponded but too well with the treacherous designs of his followers. He had long ruled with sovereign sway among the most powerful tribes of Virginia, who had been successively subdued by his arms, and he now regarded with distrust the event of men whom his experience taught him to fear and his injuries to detest.

On their return to Jamestown they found that, during their absence, the Indians had made an attack upon the settlement, had slain one boy, and wounded seventeen men. The coward spirit of Wingfield had caused this disaster. Fearful of mutiny he refused to permit the fort to be palisaded or guns to be mounted within. The assault of the savages might have been more fatal, but happily a gun from the ships carried a crossbar-shot among the boughs of a tree above them, and, shaking them down upon their heads, produced great consternation. The frightened wretches fled in dismay from an attack too mysterious to be solved, yet too terrible to be withstood.

After this disaster the fears of Wingfield were overruled—the fort was defended by palisades, and armed with heavy ordnance, the men were exercised, and every precaution was used to guard against a sudden attack or a treacherous ambuscade.

Smith had indignantly rejected every offer held out to him by the artifices of the council. He now again demanded a trial in a manner that could not be resisted. The examination took place and resulted in his full acquittal. So evident was the injustice of the president that he was adjudged to pay to the accused two hundred pounds, which sum the generous Smith immediately devoted to the store of the colony. Thus elevated to his merited place in the council, he immediately devised and commenced active schemes for the welfare of the settlers, and on June 15th Newport left the colony, and set forth on his voyage of return to England.

Left to their own resources, the colonists began to look with gloomy apprehension upon the prospect before them. While the ships remained, they enjoyed sea-stores, which to them were real luxuries, but now they had little whereupon to feast, except a miserable compound of wheat and barley boiled with water, and even to the larger portion of this the worms successfully laid claim. Crabs and oysters were sought with indolent greediness, and this unwholesome fare, with the increasing heats of the season, produced sickness, which preyed rapidly on their strength. The rank vegetation of the country pleased the eye, but it was fatal to the health. In ten days hardly ten settlers were able to stand. Before the month of September fifty of their number were committed to the grave, and among them we mark, with sorrow, the name of Bartholomew Gosnold. The gallant seaman might have passed many years upon the stormy coasts of the continent, but he sank among the first victims who risked their lives for colonization.

To this scene of distress and appalling mortality the president Wingfield lived in sumptuous indifference. His gluttony appropriated to itself the best provisions the colony could afford—"oatmeal, sacke, oyle, aqua vitae, beefe, egges, or whatnot"—and, in this intemperate feasting, it seemed as though his valueless life were only spared that he might endure the disgrace he so richly merited. Seeing the forlorn condition of the settlement he attempted to seize the pinnace, which had been left for their use by Newport, and make his escape to England. These outrages so wrought upon the council that they instantly deposed him, expelled his accomplice, Kendall, and elected Ratcliffe to the presidency. Thus their body, consisting originally of seven, was reduced to three. Newport had sailed, Gosnold was dead, Wingfield and Kendall were in disgraced seclusion. Martin, Ratcliffe, and Smith alone remained. They seem to have felt no desire to exercise their right of filling their vacant ranks. The first had a nominal superiority, but the genius of the last made him the very soul of the settlement.

It is related by the best authority that in this dark crisis, when their counsels were distracted, their hopes nearly extinguished, their bodies enfeebled from famine and disease, the savages around them voluntarily brought in such quantities of venison, corn, and wholesome fruits that health and cheerfulness were at once restored. Their condition now brought them in almost daily contact with the aborigines.

Ratcliffe and Martin were alike incompetent, and Smith assumed the guidance of affairs. Finding their provisions again nearly exhausted, he went with a party down the river to Kecoughtan to obtain supplies from the natives. Savage irony was all they received; a handful of corn and a piece of bread were offered in exchange for swords and muskets. The Indians came against them in numbers, frightfully dressed, and bearing their okee in the form of a monstrous idol, stuffed with moss, and hung with chains and copper. But they were received with a volley of pistol-shot. The omnipotent okee fell to the earth, and with him several of his worshippers. The rest fled to the woods, and, finding resistance vain, they brought quantities of corn, venison, turkeys, and wild-fowl, and received in exchange beads, copper, hatchets, and their discomfited deity.

During the absence of the ruling mind, Wingfield and Kendall seduced a few sailors and made another attempt to carry off the bark to England. At the critical moment Smith returned, and, instantly directing the cannon of the fort against them, commanded submission. A skirmish ensued, and the seditious Kendall lost his life. A similar effort to the settlement was soon made by Captain Gabriel Archer and the imbecile President Ratcliffe, and again the decision of Smith arrested them and forced them to their duty. He was ever prompt, and hesitated not at any measures required to govern his turbulent compeers.

And now the winter came on, and with it immense numbers of swans, geese, and ducks, which covered the rivers and afforded delightful food to the settlers. They daily feasted upon them, and enjoyed in abundance the peas, pumpkins, persimmons, and other vegetable treasures which the season matured. But Smith could not be contented with a life of inactivity, however plentifully supplied. The council had ungratefully charged him with negligence, in not searching for the head of the Chickahominy, and his own adventurous spirit urged him to renewed enterprise.

He prepared his boat for a voyage, and, in a season of uncommon rigor, he set forth upon an expedition destined to add greatly to the fame of his already wonderful career.

The Chickahominy falls into the James not many miles above the site of Jamestown. It flows through a very fertile region, and upon its banks were native settlements well supplied with the stores of savage labor.

Up this stream Smith urged his boat with great perseverence, cutting through trunks of trees and matted underwood which opposed his progress. At length, finding the obstacles to increase, he left the boat in a broad bay, where Indian arrows could not reach her, and, strictly forbidding the crew to leave her, he pressed on, with two Englishmen and two Indians, eager to penetrate with their canoe the swamps beyond them. Hardly had he disappeared before the disobedient seamen left the boat and sought amusement upon the shore. Opecancanough, an Indian chief of great subtlety and courage, was near with a lurking band of savages, and, instantly seizing his advantage, he made prisoner George Cassen, one of this party, and obtained from him full information as to the movements of Captain Smith. The cowardice of Cassen did not save him. The savages put him to death with cruel tortures, and then pursued their more dreaded foe.

Smith had now penetrated twenty miles into the marshes; and, leaving the two Englishmen in the canoe, he went forward with an Indian guide. The savages found the two men sunk in stupid slumber by the side of the canoe, and shot them to death with arrows ere they could escape. But they had now to encounter a superior being. Two hundred savages, approaching with fatal intent, caused no dismay in the heart of Smith. Binding the Indian guide firmly to his arm, he used him as a shield to preserve him from the arrows of the enemy, and with his musket he brought two of them dead to the ground. He would perhaps have reached the canoe—the savages fell back appalled by his courage—but while in full retreat he sunk to the middle in a swamp from which his utmost efforts could not extricate him. Excessive cold froze his limbs and deprived him of strength, yet the Indians dared not approach him until he threw away his arms and made signals of submission. Then they drew him out, and, chafing his benumbed body, speedily restored him to activity. His self-possession was never lost for a moment. Discovering that Opecancanough was the chief, he presented to him a small magnetic dial, and made the simple savages wonder at the play of the needle beneath the glass surface.

On this excursion he was made prisoner, and he himself assures us was saved by the Indian maiden Pocahontas. After a captivity of seven weeks he returned to Jamestown, with increased knowledge of savage life and manners. He treated his Indian guides with great kindness and gave them two heavy guns and a millstone for the monarch. But the present was too heavy for his strength, and when one of the cannons was discharged among the boughs of a tree, and crashing of wood and ice was heard, the timid natives declined any further interference with agents so formidable.

The absence of Smith had caused disorder and insubordination in the colony. The pinnace had again been seized, and again he was obliged to level the guns of the fort against her and compel submission. He was now personally assailed by a charge replete with stupid malignity. Some, who believed themselves skilled in the Levitical law, accused him of being the cause of the death of Emry and Robinson, the two unfortunate men whom the Indians had slain, and, with this pretext, they clamored for capital punishment. To their insane charge Smith replied by taking the accusers into custody, and by the first vessel he sent them for trial to England. By his courage, his address, and his firmness he now wielded great influence with the Indians, and proved the salvation of the settlement.

FOUNDING OF QUEBEC CHAMPLAIN ESTABLISHES FRENCH POWER IN CANADA

A.D. 1608

H. H. MILES

From the period of Cartier's and Roberval's expeditions nearly fifty years elapsed before France renewed her efforts to colonize the New World. About the year 1598 the lucrative fur trade began to be encouraged by Henry IV, of France, who in the brief respite from religious wars was turning his attention to colonization and commerce. In 1603 Samuel de Champlain, a French naval officer of high character and chivalrous instincts, made his first voyage to Canada in company with M. Pontegravé, a merchant of St. Malo, and together they pushed their way up the St. Lawrence as far as the rapids above Montreal, which Champlain named Lachine (à la Chine), for he thought he had at last found a waterway to China. In 1608 he proceeded to found at Stadacona (Quebec) a fixed trading-post of the Merchant Company, in whose service he had again come to the country. Champlain brought with him among the colonists a number of artisans, who, on the magnificent headland of Quebec, erected a fort which was to become the refuge of the sadly menaced little European colony, and was long the centre of French influence and dominion in the New World.

The rivalries of various commercial companies and the conflicting colonial policy of France seriously retarded settlement and were a great vexation to Champlain. Moreover, his quarrels with the powerful Iroquois Indians, as here related by Dr. Miles, secretary of the Quebec Council of Instruction, long prevented the southward extension of French power in America.

In 1627 Cardinal Richelieu, prime minister to Louis XIII, cancelled the old trading-charters, and established the Company of One Hundred Associates, with power to trade throughout New France from Florida to Hudson Bay. By the terms of the charter the "Hundred Associates" were given the sole right to engage in the fur trade, with control over the shore and inland fishing and of all commerce with the French settlements in the country. In return for this monopoly the company agreed to carry out mechanics and tradesmen to the colony, to settle within a specified period some six thousand colonists, and to make provision for the support of a certain number of Catholic clergy. The French King, at the same time, made Champlain governor, so that he finished his life in the service of the colony he had founded.

Samuel de Chaplain, who must be regarded as the real founder of the Canadian colony, was already a noted man when invited by De Chates (or De Chastes), commandant of Dieppe, to take part in the enterprise for colonizing New France. He had served in the French marine at the Antilles, and also in the South of France against the Spaniards, and De Chates had met him at court. He was a man of noble and virtuous disposition, chivalrous, and inspired with a deep sense of religion, and at that time about thirty-six years of age. It will also be seen that Champlain was gifted with qualities which endeared him both to his own followers and to the native Indians of Canada. He was of good address—always able, when he desired it, to render himself acceptable to the highest personages in France, so as to secure a willing attention to his representations. Such was the man who, under the auspices of De Chates and of M. de Monts, first made his appearance in New France, in whose early annals he figured conspicuously upward of thirty years.

In 1603 Champlain, in conjunction with Pontegravé, made his first voyage to the St. Lawrence. At Tadoussac they left their ships and ascended the river in boats to the then farthest attainable point—the Sault St. Louis, now known as the Rapids, above the city of Montreal. The features of the country, so far as they could be examined from the river, were carefully observed. The Indian towns of Carrier's time, Stadacona and Hochelaga, were no longer in existence; but Champlain regarded with attention the scenery around their sites. Hochelaga is not even mentioned by him, although, acting as Carrier had done nearly seventy years before, he ascended Mount Royal in order to obtain a good view. Returning to Tadoussac, where their three small vessels had been left, Champlain and Pontegravé, toward autumn, set sail for France.

De Chates had died during their absence, and the company formed by him was already almost broken up. Champlain, however, prepared a narrative, and a map to illustrate what he had seen, and submitted these for the information of Henry (IV of France), who expressed his willingness to countenance the resumption of plans for settling the country.

Almost immediately afterward the company was reorganized by M. de Monts. He also was a Huguenot, patriotic, of great abilities and experience, and possessing much influence at court, without which he could not have surmounted impediments that were purposely raised against his designs from the first. The King, unmoved by the objections to De Monts, appointed him lieutenant-general of the North American territory between 40° and 46° north latitude, with instructions to establish colonists, cultivate the soil, search for mines of gold and silver, build forts and towns, and with power to confer grants of land, as well as the exclusive right of trading with the natives in furs and all kinds of merchandise. Although a Protestant, while De Monts and his friends were to enjoy the free exercise of their religion, he was bound by the charter to provide for the conversion of the natives, and their training, exclusively, in the principles and worship of the Church of Rome.

The King was the more willing to grant a charter on these terms, because De Monts and his company were to bear all the costs that might be incurred in their enterprise. Preparations were then made for the despatch of an expedition on a larger scale than any that had yet left France for America.

Early in the spring of 1604 De Monts set sail with four vessels, well manned, and equipped with all means requisite both for carrying on the fur trade and for starting a colony at any place that might be judged suitable. He had under him Champlain and Pontegravé, also a French nobleman named Poutrincourt, who was going out to settle with his family in America, and the subsequently celebrated historian Lescarbot. Two of the ships were specially intended for the fur traffic, and in the first instance to scour the coasts and inlets for the purpose of driving away or capturing all persons found illegally trading with the natives. The other two ships had on board the intending colonists; among whom were soldiers and workpeople, priests, ministers, and some gentleman volunteers. This expedition did not steer for Canada, but for that part of New France then called Acadia (Nova Scotia), De Monts being under the impression that he should there find localities more favorable for settlement than by ascending the St. Lawrence. But it carried with it those whom Lescarbot justly styled "the hope of Canada"; for besides De Monts, there were Champlain and Pontegravé, and probably many of inferior grade, whose participation in this attempt to found an Acadian colony must have greatly assisted in rendering their future services more valuable elsewhere.

The effort at colonization in Acadia may be said to have been sustained under many vicissitudes during about nine years until the year 1613; but long before this the attention and services of Champlain and Pontegravé were withdrawn. De Monts lost his charter in 1606, about which time Champlain having, in conjunction with Pontegravé, made a number of maritime excursions from Port Royal, and some geographical discoveries, during the previous two years, became urgent for the renewal of attempts up the river St. Lawrence, which he never ceased to represent as offering a more favorable field for enterprise than the shores of Acadia. In 1607, therefore, De Monts procured the restoration of his charter for the space of one year; and, following Champlain's suggestions, turned his attention to Canada. Two vessels were fitted out and despatched in April, 1608. Arriving at Tadoussac in June, Champlain left his colleague there to traffic with the natives, while he continued his route up the river, until he came to the place where Cartier and his companions had wintered in 1535.

Champlain landed, and having ascended some distance from the mouth of the St. Charles toward the promontory now called Cape Diamond, judged the situation favorable for permanent settlement. Artisans, provisions, merchandise, arms, and tools were brought on shore, and a commencement made in the work of constructing wooden buildings and defences. At the same time preparations were made for cultivating the ground and for testing the productiveness of the soil by sowing various seeds brought from France. In these operations, begun on July 3, 1608, Champlain had in view the establishment of a fixed trading-station for the advantage of the company he represented, as well as the more immediate purpose of providing for the security and accommodation of his people during the ensuing winter. But on the site of these rude works the city of Quebec grew up in after-times. Champlain is, therefore, entitled to be regarded as its founder, and the date last mentioned as that of its foundation.

During the autumn the works were continued, Champlain himself superintending them with indefatigable activity. Pontegravé returned to France with the results of the season's traffic at Tadoussac.

Champlain's experience, previously acquired at Port Royal, doubtless was of service in giving effect to his forethought and energy as regards preparations for the winter; for it is recorded that the thirty persons composing his party were comfortably protected from the ordinary rigors of the climate.

On the return of spring Champlain's activity of disposition did not suffer him to await the coming of Pontegravé from France. He set out at once up the St. Lawrence. Meeting parties of Indians belonging to Algonquin and Huron tribes, he entered into friendly communication with them. Between these tribes and the Iroquois, or Five Nations, a state of warfare subsisted. Champlain, on his part, desired to secure the friendship of those natives who were to be the more immediate neighbors of the French on the St. Lawrence, while the Algonquins and Hurons were equally solicitous about forming an alliance with the Europeans for the sake of aid against their enemies. An understanding was soon established. The Indians engaged to visit the French trading-posts with abundance of furs for the purposes of traffic, and promised to assist Champlain with facilities for exploring their country westward. On the other hand, Champlain undertook to help them in their conflicts with the Iroquois. In pursuance of this agreement the French, under Champlain, first intervened in Indian warfare. Returning to Quebec, Champlain procured reënforcements and supplies for his establishment from Pontegravé, who had by this time arrived at Tadoussac from France. Before the end of May he set out again on his way up the river to join his Indian allies, and to accompany them into the country of their enemies, the Iroquois.