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(11) Where did Leif Erikson land? (12) Columbus's own accounts of his discoveries. (13) Was Americus Vespucius truthful? (14) What kind of people were the Mexicans? (15) Where did De Soto cross the Mississippi? (16) Present state of the "Seven Cities of Cibola." (17) The Spanish silver mines. (18) Early descriptions of New York Harbor. (19) Drake's quarrel with Fletcher. (20) Profits of Drake's voyages around the globe. (21) Accounts of the Armada by eyewitnesses. (22) Did Sebastian Cabot discover the coast of Virginia ?

Geography

Secondary authorities

Sources

Illustrative works

Pictures

REFERENCES

See maps, pp. 34, 45; Semple, Geographic Conditions, 1-18; Epoch Maps, no. 2; Bourne, Spain in America.

Thwaites, Colonies, §§ 7-12, 14-16; Fisher, Colonial Era, 1229; Bourne, Spain in America; Wilson, American People, I. 1–33; Larned, History for Ready Reference, I. 47; Sparks, Expansion, 17-35; Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 1-24; Winsor, America, II. III. 1-126, IV. 1-103, - Columbus, Cartier to Frontenac, 176; Fiske, Discovery of America, I. 147-516, II. 1–293, 365–569, Old Virginia, I. 1-40; Doyle, English in America, I. 18–100; Parkman, Pioneers of France, 9-228; Higginson, Larger History, 26-120; Reeves, Finding of Wineland; Markham, Christopher Columbus; Major, Prince Henry the Navigator; Corbett, Sir Francis Drake; Creighton, Sir Walter Ralegh.

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Hart, Source Book, §§ 1-4, 7,—Contemporaries, I. §§ 16–36, 44– 48,- Source Readers, I. §§ 1–9, 55, 56 ; American History Leaflets, nos. 1, 3, 9, 13; Old South Leaflets, nos. 17, 20, 29, 31, 33–37, 39, 71, 90, 92, 102, 115–120, 122; Higginson, American Explorers, 1– 228; Payne, Elizabethan Seamen. See N. Eng. Hist. Teachers' Ass'n, Syllabus. 293–296, — Historical Sources, §§ 66, 67.

Longfellow, Skeleton in Armor, · Sir Humphrey Gilbert; Tennyson, Columbus; Lowell, Columbus, Voyage to Vinland ; R. M. Ballantyne, Erling the Bold (Iceland), Norsemen in the West;

S. Baring-Gould, Grettir the Outlaw (Iceland); Lewis Wallace, Fair God (Mexico); Cooper, Mercedes of Castile ; Gordon Stables, Westward with Columbus; Simms, Vasconselos (De Soto); Kingsley, Westward Ho! (English and Spaniards); James Barnes, Drake and his Yeomen; Kirk Munroe, Flamingo Feather (Huguenots in Florida).

Winsor, America, II.-IV.; Wilson, American People, I.

CHAPTER III.

THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA, 1607-1660

THE unsuccessful experience of forty years showed that no individual was powerful enough to found English colonies in

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royal charter, April 10, 1606, which created two such corporations to settle the region indefinitely called Virginia: (1) the

ginia

grants

(1606)

Plymouth Company, to make a settlement somewhere between the 38th and 45th degrees of north latitude; (2) the London Company, to colonize somewhere between the 34th and 41st degrees. For the government of either settlement, under this charter, it was provided that there should be a royal council in England and a local council to sit in the colony.

This charter at once involved England in a controversy with Spain, which claimed the Atlantic coast indefinitely northward, and which, with some reason, looked upon the scheme as an attempt to plant a naval station for the vexation of Span

[graphic]

ish commerce. The Span-
ish ambassador at London
suggested to his master,

Brown,
Genesis of
U. S.

"It will be serving

God and Your Majesty to drive these villains out from there and hang them," but sloth, poverty, and hesitation to renew the war held back the Spaniards from anything stronger than protest.

The Plymouth Company sent out a colony

under the auspices

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH IN 1624. From title-page of his Generall Historie.

28. Settlement of of Chief-Justice Popham (May, 1607) which settled on Virginia (1607-1681) the Kennebec in Maine; but one severe winter broke it up, and the company never sent another. The London Company, in which Bartholomew Gosnold appears as an active promoter, in December, 1606, sent 120 emigrants, who arrived at Chesapeake Bay, and on May 3, 1607, selected a peninsula

on the James River for their settlement, which they called Jamestown. It was low and marshy, mosquito-cursed, unhealthful, and hard to defend from the Indians, who attacked it within two weeks. The colonists were not accustomed to hard labor, and for some years they had to be supported from England.

The most picturesque figure in these early days is Captain John Smith, who wrote two accounts of the colony: the True Relation in 1608, and

[graphic]

the Generall Historie in 1624. In the latter he relates what was entirely omitted in the earlier story, how when he was a prisoner the Indians were about to beat out his brains; how Pocahontas (then a child of ten or twelve years), daughter of the great "Weroance" Powhatan, sprang between him and the club and saved his life. Whether this story be true or imagined, the

courage and spirit of

POWHATAN'S LODGE, 1607.

From Smith's Generall Historie, 1624.

Smith are undeniable. He alternately pacified and fought the Indians; he found supplies, explored the country, and was the principal man in the little government.

The beginnings of Virginia are a terrible tragedy of famine, desperation, and death; of 630 early colonists 570 died in the first two and a half years. Yet its founders did not lose courage; and the company reorganized in 1609, and secured a

second charter, granting a distinct territory, two hundred miles each way along the coast from Old Point Comfort and "all that Space and Circuit of Land, lying from the Sea Coast of the Precinct aforesaid, up into the Land throughout from Sea to Sea, West and Northwest." The local government, however, was a mere tyranny - under the fierce Governor Dale the colonists were little better than slaves. In 1612, by a third and last charter, the company was reorganized and received larger powers of control of its own affairs.

The turn of the tide came in 1616, when Dale departed and when the company began to assign definite tracts of land to the settlers, in strips fronting on the tide rivers, so that they had water communication with one another and with the rest of the world. Sassafras was a valued export; and in 1615 began the export of tobacco, then sold for three shillings a pound.

29. Vir

to the crown

Yet in 1619, after at least £100,000 had been spent, there were only 400 colonists in Virginia. When the London Company (then often called the Virginia Company) came under the control of liberal and public-spirited men, (1619-1650) headed by Sir Edwin Sandys, they instructed their governor in Virginia to summon a popular assembly the first free representative government upon the western continent. Accordingly twenty-two "burgesses," elected from the various settlements of Virginia, met in the church at Jamestown in July, 1619, and drew up numerous laws for the colony. In 1621, by the so-called "Sandys constitution," this assembly was formally recognized. The year 1619 also marks the beginning of colonial slavery. A Dutch man-of-war in Virginia exchanged twenty negro slaves for provisions; and thus began a new source of labor for the cultivation of tobacco, which quickly became almost the sole industry of Virginia.

In 1623 the Indians rose and killed nearly 350 settlers; and the tragedy gave point to enemies of the colony in England, who

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