companied by the best wishes of all who took an interest in Virginia; but his weakly constitution was unable to bear up against the hardships of the voyage, and he died before the passage was completed. Argall was in consequence left a little longer in possession of the authority which he had misused. With childish spite he took especial pleasure in ruining the estates which, by De la Warr's death, had become the property of his widow. He left no stone unturned to drive Lady De la Warr's servants from her employment, and to entice them to transfer their services to himself. Hearing that Brewster, the agent in charge of the estate, had remonstrated against his proceedings, he ordered him to be seized, and sent before a court-martial to answer for the words which he had used against the Governor. Sentence upon Brewster. Brewster was condemned to death, and this monstrous sentence would have been carried into execution if the general voice of the colony had not compelled Argall, however unwillingly, to commute it to one of banishment from Virginia.1 Argall is re The news of these extraordinary proceedings excited no little indignation in London. The Company, warned by the failure of their attempt to substitute King Stork for called. King Log, restored Yeardley to the post from which they had recalled him, and ordered him to send Argall home to give an account of his conduct. Yeardley's appointment was fortunately something more than a mere change of governors. By the instructions which he carried out, he was directed to put an end for ever to the system of martial law which had been introduced by Dale, and which had recently been so terribly abused. He was also ordered to call together an assembly, freely elected by the colonists, before which he was to lay a code of laws which had been prepared for their use in England. The new Governor arrived too late to secure the punishment of Argall. Timely notice had been given him, and he had made his escape from the colony. But no time was lost in laying the foundations of a more pros 1619. His flight. Stith's History of Virginia, 149. 1619 THE FIRST COLONIAL PARLIAMENT. 161 The first perous future. On July 30, 1619, the first Colonial Parliament gathered round Yeardley at Jamestown.1 From henceforth Virginia was to be governed by its own. Parliament. laws, freely accepted by its own representatives. England had stamped her own likeness upon her creation, and the first of the free colonies of England had taken firm root by the side of the flaunting glories of the Spanish Empire. The Company in England. The changes by which the colony had been distracted were not without effect upon the Company at home. At the time when Yeardley sailed, Sir Thomas Smith still presided over its fortunes, with the title of Treasurer. It had become the fashion in Virginia to look upon him as the source of all the evils that had befallen the colony, and though there was probably some exaggeration in this, the charges brought against him were not without foundation. His temper was easy, and he was lax in his attention to the duties of his office. It was to his relationship with Smith that Argall owed his appointment. Smith was not without influence even at Court, as his son, Sir John Smith, had married a daughter of Lord Rich, and the support of the Rich family was in consequence given to Argall. Sandys The Company was not to be misled. It refused to reelect Smith to the office of Treasurer. His successor was Sir Edwin Sandys, who had taken a leading part Treasurer in the preparation of the laws which had just been of the Company. sent out to Virginia, and whose services in the English Parliament had well fitted him to preside over the introduction of parliamentary institutions in America.2 It is owing to Sandys that the year 1619 is a date to be remembered in the history of English colonisation. The election of a leading member of the Parliamentary Opposition to the responsible office of Treasurer is an evidence that in the Virginia Company, as in the City of London, and as in every 1 The proceedings of this Assembly, the loss of which was regretted by Mr. Bancroft, are in the Record Office, S. P. Colonial, i. 45. 2 Stith's History of Virginia, 153-158. body of active and intelligent men, the spirit of opposition to the Court and its minions was on the increase. The breach thus made was to grow wider every year, till the Company was swept away by the irritation of the King. But in the meanwhile Sandys had done his work. He had planted the standard of free institutions at Jamestown, and under the shadow of that standard Virginia grew and prospered when the Company which had fostered the colony in its infancy had ceased to exist. The course of English adventure in America finds, in some respects, its parallel in the long struggle of the East India and Dutch 1605. Company for the establishment of commercial relaThe English tions with the extreme East. There, too, English in the East. enterprise was at first attracted to those parts which were richest in the promise of a lucrative trade. As in America, it found them pre-occupied, and, after a long and fruitless struggle with its rivals, it discovered its Virginia in the peninsula of India. In many respects, indeed, there is no parallel to be drawn between the attitude of Spain towards the English in the West Indies and the attitude of the Dutch in the Eastern Seas. As far as the Continent, or even the larger islands were concerned, it would have been madness, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, for either England or the Netherlands to think of establishing an empire similar to that which had been built up by Spain in America. The native states were far too powerful, and the climate was too unsuited for permanent occupation by large bodies of the inhabitants of Northern Europe. It was enough if factories could be established at the points most suitable for commercial intercourse. That bitter jealousies should arise between the merchants of the two nations was only to be expected. Here and there a party of Englishmen would come to blows with a party of Dutchmen, and broken heads, or even the loss of some lives, would be the result. The chiefs of the rival factories would intrigue with the native princes for exclusive privileges. But, on the whole, no very great harm would be done. The peace would be kept by a strong native Government, which it would be hopeless to resist. 1605 EUROPEANS IN THE EAST. 163 The local hatreds would be bitter enough; but they would not blaze out into internecine war, nor would they be of sufficient importance to call for more than a passing notice from the Governments. of London and the Hague. Islands. There were in part of the Indian Ocean a few islands, teeming with valuable productions, where these conditions were The Spice reversed, and where was no native state powerful enough to defy European aggression. Pepper might be shipped at any port in Java or Sumatra. It was a mere matter of convenience at what point in the Indian peninsula the trade in calicoes should be conducted. But nutmegs were, at that time, only to be found in the little group of the Banda y Isles, and cloves grew nowhere in the world except on the five islands to which the name of the Moluccas had originally belonged, and on the more southerly archipelago which clustered round the noble harbour of Amboyna as its commercial centre. It was after a long and arduous struggle that the Dutch had succeeded in driving the Portuguese, at that time counted amongst the subjects of the King of Spain, out of The Portuguese ejected by the Dutch. Amboyna and the Moluccas. They did not profess come to Guiana, to defend the natives from the oppression of their tyrants. All that they required in return from the grateful islanders, for whose sake, as they said, they erected forts and kept up garrisons, was that they should enter into an engagement not to sell spice to any but themselves. From Amboyna an expedition was fitted out in 1609 to take possession of the Bandas. The fear of the Dutch 1609. The Dutch in the Bandas. compelled the inhabitants of Neira, the principal, though not the largest, island of the group, to grant to them by treaty a monopoly of their trade;1 and this treaty was long afterwards appealed to as conferring upon the Dutch East India Company the sovereignty not merely of the island of which they were actually in possession, but of the whole surrounding group. In spite of the treaty, the Purchas, i. 717. L natives soon combined in an attempt to drive out the invaders. The next year, however, David Middleton, coming to the Bandas in search of nutmegs, found that a fort had been built by the Dutch, and that Neira was in complete subjection, although the remaining islands still maintained a precarious independence.1 These proceedings of the Dutch formed a strange comment upon the Mare Liberum, the celebrated treatise, published in 1609, by Grotius at Leyden, in which he proved, to the logical discomfiture of the Portuguese, that commercial monopolies were contrary to all laws, human and divine. The Mare Liberum of Grotius. That Grotius was in the right no one in the present day will be found to question. Liberty of trade is a good thing in all places and at all times. But what Grotius, workThe commercial ing out his problem with all theoretical correctness, question preceded by the failed to see, was that there was another question to territorial. be settled before the commercial difficulty could even be approached. It was, in fact, as impossible to agree to freedom of trade before the territorial limits of the European Powers in the newly-discovered countries had been settled, as it was to allow religious liberty before the absolute independence of the national Governments was admitted. An English merchant landing at Surat in the seventeenth century, came like a French merchant landing at Sydney in the nineteenth century, merely to buy the products of the country. But an English merchant asking for freedom of trade at the harbour of Amboyna or at the mouth of the Orinoco in the reign of James I. was not unreasonably regarded with as much suspicion as a Jesuit asking for freedom of conscience in England in the reign of Elizabeth. The request was denied, not so much to the unarmed trader by whom it was preferred, as to the armed force which he was supposed to have at his back. That the Dutch should form commercial establishments in a number of small islands without acquiring territorial 1 Purchas,. 238. |