"O'^^v^ ^"'^^-'/^ V**"^^*/^ \'^^-\/^ ,^^- "°^^^-**/ ^^,'^^-y' %^^^''y ., ^0 .^B^. .. .^•^^ ' ' * r > \/ >" •!^^. ^*^ o ^ .^ ♦ o « o ' OT ./.yi^-"-^-^ c°*.i^:.>o ,**.v;^.\ /.•;^i."*'- . . . * ,0 ^i5 •0^ 4 o •J^'- '^ A^ ilili*iii!j*lli ©tber boofts in tbe same series anD be tbe same autbor. ||| Issued under the auspices of the Sons and Daughters it of the American Revolution. lllnni THE CENTURY BOOK FOR YOUNG AMERICANS. The Story of the Government. With Introduction by General HORACE PORTER. ■ THE CENTURY BOOK | 11 AMERICAN REVOLUTION, ll JJL The Story of a Young People's *L mil Pilgrimage to Revolutionary Battle-fields. iP fmtmt With Introduction by JJL up Senator CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 11 THE CENTURY BOOK OF FAMOUS AMERICANS. The Story of a Young People's Pilgrimage to Historic Homes. With Introduction by Mrs. ADLAI E. STEVENSON, Fortnerly President-Geueral of the Daughters of the A merican Revolutioti. j^ Uniform ivith this book. Each containing sjo pages and '"iw' JJ^ nearly as many illustrations. Price of each, Si.^o. ^^ IN COLONIAL DAYS. ISSUED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE SOCIETY OF COLONIAL IVARS THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES THE STORY OF THE PILGRIMAGE OF A PARTY OF YOUNG PEOPLE TO THE SITES OF THE EARLIEST AMERICAN COLONIES BY ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS AUTHOR OF "the CENTURY BOOK FOR YOUNG AMERICANS," THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION," " THE CENTURY BOOK OF FAMOUS AMERICANS," ETC. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FREDERICK J. DE PEYSTER GOVERNOR OF THE SOCIETY OF COLONIAL WARS THE CENTURY CO., NEW YORK VJ'Va/ .\»^; , 49594 SEP 20 1900 ^Ck'm c»nr. OCT ::9 .19Q0 Copyright, 1900, by The Century Co. U THE DE VINNE PRESS. INTRODUCTION Office of the Governor-General, Society of Colonial Wars. The object of the Society of Colonial Wars commends itself to every American heart. That object is to rescue from undeserved neglect one hundred and fifty years of American history — the one hundred and fifty years which changed the European immigrant into an American, the one hundred and fifty years which changed the little fringe of struggling settlements at Jamestown and New Amsterdam, at Plymouth and Salem and Boston, into the thirteen mighty provinces which were able to cope with all the might of the British crown. In that stern school of struggle and trial, of victory and defeat, the colonial American was trained up to a nobler standard of man- hood than any that modern Europe can boast. It should be remembered that the great men of the Revolutionary period were the babes of colonial hearthstones, were nursed by colonial dames, and learned their lessons of heroism from the lips of colonial warrior sires. We should never forget that American history is not a thing of shreds and patches, but one long, heroic story of struggle and victory, which does not begin at Bunker Hill and Lexington, or even Plymouth Rock, but goes back to the first successful settlements of the white man on the shores of the Chesapeake and the Hudson. The humble Httle towns along the Atlantic, glorious as they seem to us now, excited but little interest in the contemporaneous historian. But who can view the great republic of to-day without longing to know its history from the beginning ? It is to the study of that history that the Society of Colonial Wars bends all its energies, and it is with the hope that the publicatioi. of " The Century Book of the American Colonies " will stimulate such study that this introduction is written. It is proper to state that the society has no business relations with the publishers of this book, and no pecuniary interest whatever in the publication. Frederic J. de Peyster, Governor- Gotcral. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE I Where the Adelantados Ruled i A Surprise Party in San Marco — Uncle Tom Explains — T/ie Oldest American Colony — AH about the Crab-Fight — Picturesque Old Days — Why the Adelan- tados Gave Way to the Gringos — Uncle Tom's New Scheme. II In the Rival Capitals 19 Over the French Border — The Trip to Mobile — The First French Capital — Why New Orleans Won — Four Faitious Brothers — /;/ the Crescent City — The Father of Louisiana — 1 903 — An Old Town in the Netv JVorld. III Under Live-oak and Magnolia 35 By the Inland Passage — Where Spa?iiard and Englishman Raided the Border — Why Oglethorpe Came to Georgia — Lovely Old Charleston — Where Phi- losophers Failed — The Begifinings of Carolina. IV In the Lost Colony , , 51 Up the Coast to Old Point Comfort — Spain in the Lead — On the Sound Steamer — Roanoke Island — The Lost Colony and its Memorial — Sir Walter Raleigh and Virginia Dai-e — '■'■The White Doe of Roanoke."" V Where the Old Dominion Began 6-] Newport News and Modern Progress — The Father of Virginia — Smith and Pocahontas — San Miguel and Jamestown — The Ruined Tower — Williamsburg and its Memories. VI From the Severn to the Three Counties 81 Terra Marie — Latin Names for American Colonies — A Colonial Memory — St. Marfs and Joppa — Where Rodney Rode — With Swede and Dutchman. VII From Shackamaxon to Sandy Hook 97 In Penn Treaty Park— The Elm Tablet — William Penn — The Walking Pur- chase — Cranks and Citizens — Pastorius — Colonial Philadelphia — /// the Jerseys — Plowden's Patent — Thrifty Farmers. X TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE VIII In Knickerbocker Land 113 IVho Discovered the Hudson — Spanish Tracks and Trade-marks — The First '■'■Apartment-houses " — Colonial New York — The Purposes of Emigration — Stuyvesant and the Knickerbockers — Through the Province. IX In the Old Colony 131 On the Fist of Massachusetts — The Real Landing of the Pilgrims — The Com- pact Tablet at Provincetown — Why They were Pilgrims — The First Civil Gov- ernment in America — Over the Bay to Plymouth — The Faith Monument — The Pilgrims' Story on Pilgrim Land. . X With the Governor and Companions of Massachusetts Bay 147 Ln the Shadoiv of the Gilded Dome — From Salem to Spring Lane — Governor John Wintlvop — The Great Emigration — A Puritan Aristocracy — Lntolcr- a nee and Witchcraft — Up and Down the Bay State — "■The Past is Secure''' — The Massachusetts Spirit. XI Through the Plantations 165 Among the Sybarites — With Roger Williams to Providence — Cranks and Disputafits — A Refuge for Liberty — From Say brook to New LLaven — When Long Island was in Neio Ejigland. XII From Portsmouth to Pemaquid and Beyond 189 How Captain John Smith Used his Eyes — The Struggle for the Eastern Boun- da)y — " Baron Castine of St. Castine" — D'Aulnay and La Tour — Sir Him- phrey Gilbert and Martin Pring — How Maine and New Hampshire Broke from Massachusetts — Fishermeji and Frenchmen — A Land of Many Stirring Alem- ories. XIII On the Heights of Abraham 209 Iti the Land of Evangeline — Louisburg and Halifax — Across New Brunswick — In New and Old Quebec — The Struggle for a La?iguage — The Triumph of English Speech — The Colonial Expansion of the Great Republic. Index 231 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES RUINS OF THE CHURCH AT JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA. THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES CHAPTER 1 WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED A Surprise Party in San Marco — Uncle Tom Explaijis — The Oldest Atnerican Colony — All about the Crab-Fight — Picturesque Old Days — Why the Adelantados Gave Way to the Gringos — Uncle Tonis New Scheme. ^ a sunlit corner of the old coquina fort they came sud- denly face to face with a familiar figure. In vocifer- ous and delighted surprise they pounced upon it. "Why, Uncle Tom Dunlap ! " cried Marian, fol- lowing up her hug of recognition, " where under the sun did you drop from ? " But Jack drew himself up with a military click of heels, and plucking the polo-cap from his head as if it were a plumed sombrero, he made a sweeping medieval salute. " Sefior Don Tomaso Dunlapo, governor and captain-general of St. Augustine for his Most Christian Majesty of Spain," he began grandilo- quently, as one who had studiously deciphered the inscription over the gate, "from what moated bartizan or donjon-keep did you spring? — and, talking of springs, how 's your friend Ponce de Leon ? " "A Spaniard!" cried Bert, bringing his furled sun-umbrella to the "ready," as if it were a Mauser or a Krag-Jorgensen. "A foeman of the republic ! You are our prisoner. Away with him to the lowest dungeon ! " Whereupon the girls and boys once again swooped down upon the new- 2 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES comer, and dragged him into the cool shade of the great archway near the incline, which they speedily electrified into brightness by their rattling fusil- lade of questions. "I surrender; I cry quarter," Uncle Tom responded, flinging up his hands in capitulation, unable to answer twenty questions at once. " I 'm your prisoner. But, let me tell you, the Spaniard was the beginner of the republic. Remember that, my valorous Anglo-Saxons." " The Spaniard ? Why, Uncle Tom Dunlap ! whatever can you mean ? " Marian cried ; while Roger, from the old Bay State, demanded : " How about the Pilgrims of Plymouth ? " "The Pilgrims! Why, bless you, Roger, your ancestors of Plymouth and Boston are newcomers compared with the dons. This very town of St. Augustine had been alive and flourishing for over half a century when the Pilgrims landed on the Rock ; while as for my friend Ponce de Leon, as Jack calls him, he died sixty years and more before Miles Standish was born. Do you realize, boys and girls, that you are standing within the limits of the oldest European settlement in the United States — really the first, as you may say, of all the American colonies ? " " Oh, Spain does n't count," protested Jack. " We 're Americans, we are — Anglo-Saxons; and only Anglo-Saxon colonies are allowed as American." " But you can't kick against the facts, Jack Dunlap," Uncle Tom per- sisted. " ' St. Augustine of Florida,' as the inscription over the gate calls it, discovered in 15 13, settled in 1565, occupied continuously ever since that day, and owning allegiance to four flags during its three hundred and thirty- five years of existence, — five flags, indeed, if we allow that of the Confederate States, — this comes pretty near to being the leader of the line of all the American colonies, does n't it ? " "Spanish-American," Bert admitted, "but not Anglo-American." " What difference does that make, Bert?" Uncle Tom demanded. "It became English ; it became French ; it became American ; while as for its first being Spanish — well, we don't really object to absorbing Spanish colonies when we can get them, do we — even now? I 've just got in here from a floating trip through those very first Spanish colonies — the islands of the Spanish Main ; and from San Salvador to Porto Rico, I can't, for the life of me, see how you can object to calling them the first American colonies, and admitting them into your very exclusive Anglo-Saxon colonial corporation." "Oh, give us time. Uncle Tom," cried Jack, who was an ardent expan- sionist, "give us time, and we '11 cret 'em all in." WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED Bert, who had "convictions," was about to close with his cousin in argument, but Marian's open objection to Uncle Tom's liberality choked off the discussion between the representatives of Boston and New York. " But Spain, Uncle Tom ! " she cried. " Somehow it does n't seem just right to count in, as part of our sister- hood of colonies, a nation so different from us; a nation that — " "We 've just whipped," broke in Jack. " Not for me. Uncle Tom. I hate Spain ! " "The victor can always afford to be generous to the vanquished, my boy," said Uncle Tom. " Spain blun- dered in America, and bitterly has she paid for four hundred years of blunder- ing. The first and greatest colonizer in the New World, she frittered away her vast empire by extortion, neglect, and greed, and to-day, while millions of Americans speak the language of Spain, ' not one so poor to do her reverence.' " " That seems awfully hard, does n't it, though?" said Christine the sym- pathetic. " Was it all Spain's fault, Uncle Tom ? " " Sure ! " exclaimed Roger, who conscientiously read the periodicals. "From all I can make out, Spain has always been like that line in one of Lowell's poems, — COPYRIGHTED BV THE DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. THE WATCH-TOWER AT FORT MARION. ' Wrong forever on the throne '- has n't it, Uncle Tom? So of course it 's all her own fault; is n't it?" "You must n't read all history on the Agassiz plan — building up the whole fish from a single bone, Roger," Uncle Tom replied, with a smile. "Spain has had noble men and glorious epochs; but Spain seems to have been one of those nations that, like some people, young as well as old, learn nothing from experience. As she was in the Punic Wars, so she was in the time of Napoleon. The official Spain of Pedro the Cruel and the Duke 4 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES COPYRIGHTED BY THZ DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. CHURCH OF SAN MIGUEL, SANTA FE. of Alva was the Spain of the equally heartless Weyler of our day, and of the conscienceless De Soto and the bombastic Ponce de Leon, who here, near this very spot on which we are standing, attempted to found, in the years 1513 and 1521, a colony of the King of Spain — the first, as I have said, of all the American colonies." " Was it really the oldest, even from your standpoint. Uncle Tom ? " queried critical Bert. " How about Santa Fe ? " "Pretty old, Bert," admitted Uncle Tom; "but my colony leads yours almost sixty years. Santa Fe de Francisco has been the continuous capi- tal of New Mexico ever since Captain Olate founded it in 1598; but St. Augustine was thirty-three years old then, and had already made a record for itself as the seat of Spanish occupation, Spanish rapacity, Spanish cruelty, and Spanish tyranny." " How about the other colonists. Uncle Tom?" Bert inquired, still criti- cal. "They were n't exactly saints and angels, were they? " "I cannot honestly say they were, Bert," Uncle Tom confessed. "The whole Christian world seemed to have caught the mania for forcible possession in those days, and especially for appropriating other people's 'finds.' Fngland, in tliis, was a quick second to Spain. For, while Spain (remember this, my Anglo-Saxon enthusiasts) was, from the days of Colum- bus, conceded to own all North America south of the present northern boundary of the United States, the real impulse to aggressive occupation WHERE THE ADELAXTADOS RULED and colonization was really English, and was due to a boy, a sailor, and a virgin queen." The children put on their thinking-caps at once. " 'A boy with weak lungs, who kept a diary, and died before he had a chance to show what he could do.' " "*A boy, a sailor, and a virgin queen,'" Marian repeated. "Who were they ? " "The virgin queen," said Bert the scholar, " was surely Queen Elizabeth. But the boy and the sailor corner me. Who were they, Uncle Tom?" "The boy was the brother of the virgin queen," Uncle Tom explained. " He died King of England at sixteen, but — " 6 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Edward VI ? " queried Bert. "Yes, the sad little son of King Henry VIII," Uncle Tom assented, "best known as a boy with weak lungs, who kept a diary, and who died before he really had a chance to show what the son of his father could do. But he did accomplish two things: the introduction of the English prayer- book, and the formation of the famous ' Company of Merchant Adventurers' — a real-estate syndicate whose descendants were the later English coloniz- ers of America. And young King Edward's chief desire was to ' down ' Spain." " Good for the boy ! " cried Jack. *' He had spunk, even if his lungs were weak. Why did n't he come to Florida and get well ? " " Well, just then," Uncle Tom explained, " Florida was not a very healthy climate for Englishmen. The English sailor whom I mentioned as one of the three impelling causes had a notable sea-fight with the Spaniards off yonder in the Gulf of Mexico, when Spanish perfidy cornered him and captured half his fleet. It was Captain John Hawkins, you know." "Oh, yes! he comes in in 'Westward Ho!' " said Roger. "Great book, that," said Jack, with a nod of recollection and approval. "Well, he was perfidiously assaulted in the Gulf," Uncle Tom continued. " The prisoners from his captured crews were sent to the tortures of the Inquisition, and this raised in English breasts so fierce a hatred of Spain that not even the glorious defeat of the Armada was held a sufficient revenge. That hatred determined Queen Elizabeth to make North America English, and kept the English to their purpose until, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, America became Anglo-Saxon." " Hear! hear!" cried Jack and Roger, with enthusiasm. "Three cheers for Queen Elizabeth ! " "A woman, boys," said Uncle Tom, "but the first ruler to send armed aid to the afflicted and oppressed by a proclamation declared by some to l3e worthy a place beside our own Declaration of Independence; a paper that bore fruit even three hundred years later, and by its example sent armed Americans carrying aid to the afflicted and oppressed victims of Spanish oppression, in the very colonies in America which Elizabeth's valiant cap- tains sought to wrest from Spain." "Then really. Uncle Tom," said Bert, "it was a case of 'strained rela- tions' from the first, was n't it?" " It surely was, Bert," his uncle responded. " In fact, relations were strained between all the European peoples who sailed land-hunting over the Western seas. Here they came to a vast continent, big enough and rich enough to support them forty times over; but no sooner did the man of one WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED nation spy the man of another nation shivering on the shore than he sprang at the newcomer's throat, and, Hke that fellow in one of Shakspere's plays, — Trinculo, was it not? — both claimants were mad enough 'to smite the very air for breathing in their faces.' That was the case especially here in THE SEA-WALL AT ST. AUGUSTINE. Florida, where the Spaniards, coming to colonize, found certain 'heretic French' in the land; and then the crab-fio^ht beean." "What do you mean by a crab-fight?" queried Jack and Roger, in a breath. Uncle Tom laughed. "That was a quotation, boys," he said. "A bright American writer, whom you know by his ' King Arthur ' books, — Sidney Lanier, — in describ- ing the perpetual quarrels in this green and peaceful land, as Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen strove for possession, said, if I can recall his words : ' The one thing in nature which approaches these people in truculence is crabs. Bring one crab near another, on shore ; immediately they spit at each other and grapple.' And here and hereabout that spitting and grap- pling was done until the land of peace was made a land of blood." "The French here!" exclaimed Bert. "Why, I thought you said the Spaniards were here first." "As discoverers and colonizers, yes," his uncle replied. "But, between their discovery and colonization, certain Huguenot Frenchmen sailed into 8 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES the St. Johns River about thirty miles above here, and buik on the bluff, not far from Jacksonville, a fort, the site of which I may be able to show you, for it is still known as old Fort Caroline." " Oh, do show it to us," cried Marian. " They never told us about it at Jacksonville. Won't you take us there, Uncle Tom?" COPYRIGHTED BY DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. THE DEMILUNE OF THE OLD FORT. "Why not?" her uncle replied. "We boys and girls who have gone on so many investigating tours up and down the land should surely be able to make a colonial pilgrimage. Wliat do you say, everybody ? " " Everybody " said yes, of course. They always did to Uncle Tom's propositions; for, as Marian declared, they — the propositions — were "just too lovely for anything." That they should have run up against a new one so unexpectedly in Florida, as Jack put it, seemed too good to be true. Who " everybody " was, I hope you all know. But if any of you have not followed these youthful investigators in their American wanderings, let me introduce them as my favorite party of boys and girls, who knew how to use their eyes and their cars, and who, under the guidance of Uncle Tom Dunlap, "did" Washington to study the American system of government, rambled over the land from Boston to St. Louis to see the homes of our greatest and most historic Americans, and made a personally conducted tour of every important battle-field of the American Revolution from Lexington to Yorktown. And here they all were in Florida — Jack Dunlap, and Marian, his sister, WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED 9 Bert Upham, their cousin, Christine Bacon (Marian's "best friend"), and Roger Densmore, the boy from Boston. They had come to Florida for a brief spring outing, with "one or two fathers and mothers," as Jack explained;, but to see things properly, they confessed, they really did need Uncle Tom, for he knew exactly what to show them. They wished he were with them, and behold! as if they stood upon a wishing-carpet in Ponce de Leon's fairy- land, here he was ! And, best of all, he had a new plan to propose. They vociferously seconded his motion, and for the next week he took them, as only he could take them, up and down the land where the adelan- tados ruled, giving them, in its own glorious setting of semi-tropic soil and air, forest, lake, and river, sea and shore, the tragic, turbulent, picturesque, and dramatic story of America's first colony — the land of Florida. And then they returned to St. Augustine. " Just what is an ' adelantado,' Uncle Tom ? " Christine inquired, as they sat, one day, on the demilune of the old fort at St. Augustine, and looked off on the blue water where, in the years gone by, the golden flag of Spain, the fleur-de-lis of France, and the red cross of England had floated above the stately ships of those masters of the main as, in peace and war, in dis- covery and colonization, in wrath and revenge, in succor and pillage, they had sailed the coast of Florida, and opened the stirring story of America's, beginning, growth, development and glory. "Why, it 's something Spanish, of course," said Roger — "captain or something like that, is n't it?" Bert, a born investigator, had run this title down, and was quick to translate. He had not studied his Spanish phrase-book for nothing. " It 's from the Spanish adclantc — forward, advanced," he said. "It; means a commander, the governor of a province, an advanced man — don't you see ? " " No, I don't see," Roger declared. " I should say those old Spanish cutthroats were anything but ' advanced.' They were regular old butchers." Christine shivered in sympathy. "Was n't it dreadful?" she said. "Dear me! those horrid stories that Uncle Tom has told us are enough to give one the nightmare. I 'm glad I live in more Christian times." "When we make men free and independent — peaceably if we can, forci- bly if we must eh, Jack? " said Bert slyly. "Well, sir," retorted Jack, "that 's one of the beauties of the Anglo- Saxon character. "What 's that the professor told us? We must do right for the sake of the rio^ht. Now, if — " lO THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES BY THE DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. THE OLD CITY GATE, ST. AUGUSTINE. But Uncle Tom laid a restraining hand upon the incipient debate. "A truce, a truce, dear boys!" he cried. "We are dealing with adelantados, and not with current topics. Let 's go back to the sixteenth century." "It is not hard to do that here, I 'm sure," cried Marian. "Did you ever see such a dear, delightful old town ? When I get away from the big hotels I don't think I should be one bit surprised to run up against De Soto in his armor, or Ponce de Leon hunting for his spring, or even have that delightfully horrible Menendez stand politely aside, hat off and bowing low, to let me pass through the city gate." "Yes," growled Jack, "and then knife you in the back, afterward, for a young heretic." " Don't speak of it ! " said Christine. " I think that was perfectly dread- ful. Ever since Uncle Tom showed me that spot on Anastasia Island where the Spaniards slaughtered the French, and the bluff near Mayport where the French revenged themselves on the Spaniards, I 'm sure I don't think very much of knights and gentlemen and the days of chivalry. I don't believe I shall ever enjoy 'Ivanhoe' again." "Why not?" cried Jack. " Ivanhoe was an Anglo-Saxon. He did n't go around hacking people to pieces and putting up sign-boards to tell why he did it, as Menendez and Gourgues did, over yonder at Anastasia and WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED II up at old Fort Caroline. I don't believe that the real colonization of Florida began until the English took things in hand ; did it, now, Uncle Tom ? " " Well, no ; I must admit that the real substantial advance began when Oglethorpe and his Englishmen marched across the Georgia boundary in 1742, stormed the walls of St. Augustine, and helped to make Florida an English colony. But you must admit the picturesqueness of the olden times, my dear young moderns, even while granting its bloodthirstiness. For those were the days in which might made right; and mail-clad mio-ht was a wonderfully picturesque figure. I feel as Marian does when I leave the to-day of big hotels and golf links and bicycles and Friday evening receptions, and walk the narrow streets of the ancient town, once aorain dust- less and firm as of old, where over- hanging balconies seem ready to drop on your head, and the coquina walls show brown and time-stained under the tropic green. Then, if I keep away from the modern villa and the Queen Anne house, I can almost picture the growth of this quaint old town. First I see the coming of Juan Ponce de Leon, adelantado of Bimini and dis- coverer of Florida, that old conquis- tador whose restless spirit age could not tame ; then I meet him on his return, eight years later, coming with ships and colonists, and clergymen and cattle, 'to serve his Majesty,' so he declared, ' with life and treasure and person, and all I have, and settle this land that I have discovered.' " " But he did n't settle it, did he ? " said Bert. "No, he did n't," Uncle Tom replied. " Somewhere hereabout he landed his expedition and began to build his town. But the Indians, sore haters of Spaniards, interfered. Dismayed and homesick, the colonists lost enthusiasm ; Ponce de Leon, wounded by an Indian arrow, bundled his %' THE LIGHTHOUSE, ST. AUGUSTINE. This stands on Anastasia Island, near where Menendez slew ihe Huguenots. 12 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES people back to Cuba, and there died of his wound and his disappointment And so the first colonization scheme came to an end." "And he did not find his spring of eternal youth, after all," said Christine. " Neither he nor any other man," Uncle Tom replied — "and fortunately so," he added. " Eternal youth, my dear, would be a curse, rather than a blessing, to any man or woman. Keep the heart young, as you all may do ; but let the years go on as they will. Eternal youth is never eternal progress." "Then Ponce de Leon did n't really found St. Augustine," said Marian. "No; not for forty years after his day was the old town really begun," her uncle replied. " Meanwhile comes here that more famous adelantado Hernando de Soto and his brilliant following, traversing Florida from Tampa to the James, — for all America was Florida then, — leading a disas- trous march up and down the land, only to find a midnight burial, in defeat and disgrace, beneath the turbid waters of the Mississippi, Next, Don Tristan de Luna lands at Pensacola, and would mingle settlement and con- version ; but the Indians will have none of him, and that scheme falls away. And so comes around the year 1565, when French Huguenots beyond Jack- sonville and Spanish Catholics at St. Augustine start rival settlements, and come to bitter blows. Menendez and massacre, Ribault and recklessness, Laudonniere and lunacy, Gourgues and grudges — these are alliterative and almost synonymous terms, and the early history of Florida is just what I said Sidney Lanier called it — a regular crab-fight! But out of that grapple St. Augustine rose, established itself, and flourished. The coquina town grew, though it grew slowly. The colony stretched out its feelers, and even to-day, in the fair upland country about Tallahassee, you may come upon traces of roads and fortifications, relics of Spanish occupation and colonization, dating three centuries back." " But the gringos came at last," said Bert. " What 's a gringo, Bert ? " queried Marian. "You are, me chylde," cried Jack, pointing an apparently accusing finger at liis puzzled and protesting sister. " Aqiii sc Jiabla Espaiiol? Los gringos est los Americanos ! How 's that, Mr. Bert?" — whereat they all laughed heartily over " Jack's Spanish." "Yes, the gringos — the Americans or Yankees, Marian — came at last, as Bert oracularly observes," said Uncle Tom. " The Menendez of 15*^5 gives place to the Jackson of 1821 ; and to-day's discussion over the Philippines is as nothing compared to that over Jackson's stern invasion of Florida. De Soto yields place to Worth in * the bloody sport of killing lOU A PH jTOi A PRINCE OF THE ADELANTADOS. Don Carlos of Spain, son of Philip, King of Spain and Lord of the Indies and of Florida. 14 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES THE OLDEST HOUSE IN ST. AUGUSTINE. " ' If I keep away from the modem villa and the Queen Anne house, I can almost picture the growth of this quaint old town.' " Indians,' and Satourina the sachem reappears in Osceola the Seminole. So, you see, the years are not so very far apart, after all, in methods and motives. Indeed, the history of Florida for three hundred years, if I can give you Lanier's words again, 'is but a bowl of blood; and if a man could cast something into it, like the chemists, that would throw aside the solid ingredients from the mere water of it, he would find for a precipitate at the bottom of it little more than death and disappointment.'" The young people were silent for a moment. Then Christine, looking about her at the glorious combination of sea and sky and shore, gave a little sigh. "Death and disappointment in such a place as this ?" she said. "It does n't seem right, Uncle Tom." " Where ' Every prospect pleases, And only man is vile,' " sang Roger the Puritan ; and then hastened to add, — for Roger was always courteous, — " Present company an exception, of course." WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED I 5 "It does n't at first sight seem just right, my dear," Uncle Tom replied to Christine's remark. " But it is the story of the world. All progress is through pain, and atmosphere counts for little in the logical march of events. It is because of the struggles and grapples of three hundred years and more that such environments as this are possible — the railway, the trolley, golf, bicycles, hotels, stores, and winter homes, the development of a race in peaceful possession out of the strifes of creed and greed and selfish cut- and-thrust. It does n't do for all of us to follow the lazy logic of the Persian Omar: ' Ah ! fill the cup ! — What boots it to repeat How Time is slipping underneath our feet ? Unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday — Why fret about them if to-day be sweet ! ' ' It is the noble logic of our own Longfellow that makes men and nations, you know : ' Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate ; Still achieving, still pursuing. Learn to labor and to wait.' " Jack flung his cap above the sea-wall and caught it deftly. "Hurrah for the Anglo-Saxon !" he cried. "The professor beats the tent-maker every time, does n't he ? " "And the hotel-keeper the hidalgo, too, eh?" said Roger. "Three cheers for American progress ! " " Developed out of strife and passion, disaster and dispute, Roger," said Uncle Tom, " as much among your Puritan ancestors of the Bay State as with Jack's Knickerbockers of Manhattan and the Spanish forerunners of Florida. , ' From seeming evil still educing good,' is the divine plan. But even in the seeming evil lies the element of pic- turesqueness — especially here in the land where the adelantados ruled. Recall them as they threaded the mazes of Florida cypress swamps, hum- mocks, and pine barrens, from Tampa to Tallahassee, from St. Augustine to Pensacola: Ponce de Leon, companion of Columbus, hunting for youth and losing life, unsubdued by disaster, lord of that misty golden empire of Bimini which no man ever saw ; Narvaez, seeking treasure and finding only famine; De Soto, reared in Pizarro's school, to join whose splendid expedition men contended as they did to join our own invading army of Cuba, and which, starting with all the pomp of chivalry, ended in the rags and gloom of defeat. 1 6 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES Noble cavaliers were those first adelantados and hidalgos, with their armor as glittering as their ambitions ; stately figures of old Spain moving across these sands of Florida to ignominy, and yet to fame. And after them here, walking the streets of St. Augustine or sallying from its gates in sortie and toray, comes Menendez, the colonizer and the destroyer. Courteous even in his cruelties, suave even in his butcheries, is he. ' Gentlemen,' he says, ' your fort is taken, and all in it are put to the sword. . . . Give up your arms and banners, and place yourself at my mercy, and I will act toward you as God shall give me grace.' And you know what that ' grace ' was ! A pic- turesque fanatic, though, was Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, adelantado of- Florida — he who, as Parkman says, 'crushed F'rench Protestantism in America.' " "The Weyler of 1565," said Bert. **' Quite as picturesque, too," continued Uncle Tom, " was that Frenchman whom Menendez crushed, the Huguenot captain Jean Ribault of Dieppe, as, with his armored company of nobles and gentlemen adventurers, he sailed over the bar of the shining St. Johns and set up the arms of France in token of possession ; and Dominique de Gourgues, hereditary hater of Spain, who stormed Fort Caroline with his adventurers and his Indian allies, 'and on the bluff beside the fort took, as I have shown you, his fearful revenge, and placed above the victims of his wrath the terrible inscription : ' Not because they were Spaniards, or men of no account, but because they were traitors, robbers, and murderers.' "Then, as the colony grows, other picturesque figures walk these narrow streets — the misunderstood and misunderstanding monks and friars and their fiery destroyer, the brave young Indian chieftain of Guale ; Sir Francis Drake, English hero and freebooter, ' Sailing the Spanish Main To singe the beard of the King of Spain,' and dashing here, straight against this very fort and sea-wall, to 'hold up' the frightened Spanish colony in true sea-robber style, and to pillage, burn, and steal, all in the name of God and the true relio-ion ; the langruishine Indian captives building this fort and wall ; the English from Georgia, red- coats and rangers together, swooping down upon the town to invade and burn it while the Spaniards hold the fort ; the stately Governor Monteano, cavalier of Spain, defying the aggressive Oglethorpe and refusing to sur- render the fort wherein, he says, he 'hopes soon to kiss his Excellency's hand, a guest of war within its walls ' ; or, still later, red Rory Mcintosh, WHERE THE ADELANTADOS RULED 17 COURTYARD OF THE PONCE DE LEON HOTEL. " They all drew off to the broad loggia of their hotel." Scotch borderer of Georgia and chieftain of his Highland clan, walking, yonder, down Bay Street in full tartans and kilts, his pipers preceding him, and his dogs at his heels, a hater of Spaniards, and especially a hater of American rebels against King George of England. I 'm not sure but red Rory the Scotchman is about as picturesque a figure as any in colonial Florida. They have stories about him in the Georgia Colony that would have made an extra fortune for Walter Scott." The young people listened, deeply interested. '■ Do you suppose it is possible to find just as picturesque figures in the history of the other colonies. Uncle Tom?" Marian inquired. "Not one that lacks, my dear," her uncle answered. " From young Sir Harry Vane of the Bay Colony to young Governor Galvez of New Orleans, from John Smith and Menendez to Baron Castine and Peter Stuyvesant, the colonial history of America is full of color and dramatic action. I 'm not so sure, my friends and fellow-investigators, that they would not well 1 8 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES repay acquaintanceship in their own homes and haunts. How do you feel about it ? " The shout of approval that rose in reply startled the little " coons " asleep in the shadows of the wall, and called the lone sergeant in command at the old fort to man the bartizan in protest. Whereupon they all drew off to the broad loggia of their hotel, and there, in the comfort of easy-chairs and the company of maps and time-tables, they planned out with Uncle Tom a "complete and personally conducted colonial tour," as Jack at once labeled it. And Jack was a bit of a prophet. V-fr-M^ THE SPANISH COAT OF ARMS, FORT MARION. CHAPTER II IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS Over the French Border — The Trip to Mobile — The First French Capital — Why New Orleans Won — Four Fanions Brothers — In the Crescent City — The Father of Louisiana — 1903 — .In Old Town in the New World. EAVING the "one or two fathers and mothers" still " siestering," as the boys and girls called it, on the wide piazzas of St. Augustine, Uncle Tom and his young people, in the lazy, leisurely fashion of all sensible Southern tourists, made their way across the land of the adelantados to the borders of the old French colony and its rival capitals. " I suppose you mean Mobile and New Orleans by that," Bert said, studying over the adjective; "but why do you call them ' rival ' capitals, Uncle Tom ? " " Because that is what they were, dear boy," his uncle replied. " Mobile was settled first, and started out to be the chief French town on the Gulf; but along came two French boys with a hobby, — a good big one, by the way; no less than the Mississippi River! — and out of the mud-banks of the Father of Waters sprang Mobile's rival — New Orleans." " Why do you say French boys. Uncle Tom ? " queried Marian. " Were they only boys ? " " Litde more than that," Uncle Tom replied. " I '11 introduce you to them when we come upon them on their own stamping-ground." The heat and the sand did not trouble them much as they took their westward way from Jacksonville, for they had learned to expect and accept both; and Jack was even ready to question the truth of history when Uncle 20 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AfvIERICAN COLONIES THROUGH THE COTTON COUNTRY. Tom assured him that many of the first colonists were unable to endure even the rigors of a Florida winter. "They must have struck a freeze here that season, I reckon," Jack de- cided. "That 's one thing Spaniards and oranges can't stand. It takes Anglo-Saxon blood and fall pippins to flourish in a frost." Uncle Tom smiled. " It 's the land of open doors, you know, from here to Texas," he said ; "and a freeze is a serious matter, let me tell you, 'down on the Suwannee River' — which, by the way, we are just about crossing now, so the porter tells me." They crossed the slow and sluggish stream at Ellaville, and did full justice to Foster's famous song, while, touched by the sentiment if not by the sight, even their fellow-travelers in the parlor-car joined in the chorus, and so sped onward through the cotton country to where, in its rich upland country, Tallahassee the seductive sits amid its roses and its live-oaks, ringed about by the beautiful lakes beside which De Soto made his shifting camp, and from whose shores Jackson, stern and relentless, drove the rebellious, home-lovinof Seminoles. They saw the original secession ordinance in the porticoed old State- house in the evergreens ; they rowed over the lily-starred waters of Lake Lafayette, peered into the wondrous crystal depths of Wakulla Spring, IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS 21 hunted up the tumble-down farm-house on the hill where once had lived the farmer-prince and exiled heir to a throne — Murat, the son of Napo- leon's dashing- "golden eagle"; and then, delighted with all this profusion of tree and shrub and flower and romance, pushed on to Pensacola. There they visited the oldest American navy-yard, started, two hundred and seventeen years before the Declaration of Independence, by that same Don Tristan de Luna who, as Uncle Tom had told them, came to Florida with a great Spanish colony only to find famine and failure. There, too, De Soto's fleet waited for the return of the conquistador with his booty of golden spoil and captives — the glittering train that never returned to the A CONQUERED CONQUISTADOR. " Only to find famine and failure." weary, waiting ships of Spain ; and there, on the hill behind the town, they traced out the crumpled ruins of the old Spanish forts, San Miguel and St. Bernard, with which, for long years, Spain had guarded her western border against the threats of France and the encroachments of England. And then, after a day of delightful sailing over the beautiful bay and out into the glorious Gulf, they reluctantly boarded the train again, and ran up and down the railway triangle and then across the borders of the old French colony to where Mobile rises above its sandy plain — the first colonial capital of old Louisiana. "Just what was Louisiana, Uncle Tom?" inquired Bert, as they sat in after-dinner comfort behind the " imposing facade " of the old hotel at Mobile. " I never yet have been clear on that point." "Well, Bert," his uncle replied, "that 's not so easy to say. Its only boundaries appear to have been the limits of French ambition, bluff, and 22 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES bravado. And as, in the days of the great King Louis, fourteenth of the name, these were almost unhmited, Louisiana seems at first to have been just so much of North America as the king's officers could lay hands on and label. Indeed, what with Canada and Louisiana, there was not much of North America left for any one to claim, until England put a stop to French 'expansion,' when a certain young colonial captain opened the war for the supremacy of possession at Great Meadows in Pennsylvania, and a certain brave British brigadier said on the Plains of Abraham, ' I die content.' " " Meaning George Washington and Gen- eral Wolfe, I suppose?" said Bert. Uncle Tom nodded, and Jack, with equal expressions of empha- sis, exclaimed : " There you are ! Anglo-Sax- on pluck always wins ! Eh, Uncle Tom ? " " It certainly did in the long conflict that finally resulted in Louisiana becoming American, by the purchase of 1803," Uncle Tom replied. "That 's when Jefferson bought it from Napoleon, was n't it ?" asked Bert. "Yes," his uncle answered. "The purchase of all this vast section by Thomas Jefferson was the logical conclusion to the strife for possession that began far back in the days when Hawkins and Drake, with their English Jackies, came nosing about these waters a hundred years after Columbus had discovered them for Spain, and when the warlike young Frenchmen of Iberville's day longed to sweep the English colonists from their foothold on the Atlantic water-front from Virginia to New England." "Only they did n't." "No, they did n't. Jack," his uncle assented; "but they shoved 'em pretty hard, as you would say. And that same Iberville, a regular D'Arta- gnan of a French- Canadian, did some of the sturdiest shoving. In Maine and Newfoundland, on the shores of Hudson Bay, as well as in NewYork, New England, and the valley of the St. Lawrence, he proved himself a ON THE BAY ROAD, MOBH^E. IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS 23 daring and desperate fighter, in the days when gentlemen did not scruple to follow the lead of savages, and fight for English scalps as well as for the glory of France." "Oh, Uncle Tom, did they do that?" Christine exclaimed. "Colonial history is full of it, my dear," Uncle Tom replied. "Every French foray, from Deerfield and Schenectady in the north to Pensacola and Fort Roselie down this way, shows how a French officer and gentleman of great King Louis's day could be, on the border, a savage and a barbarian." " What about Mason and Church and the Puritan fighters. Uncle Tom ? " inquired Bert, who was well up in border history. "Observe, I made no comparison, Bert," his uncle replied. "They are always odious, and, in the year i 700, men of every race were apt to be wolfish in war. But what I was getting at was this same Iberville, ' the Cid of New France,' as the hero-worshipers called him, who, feeling his way down from Canada in the wake of La Salle, discovered the beauties of this land of the blessed, and became the father of Louisiana by settling down yonder at Massacre Island." " Br-r-r ! Uncle Tom! Massacre Island? What a horrid name!" exclaimed Marian. " Sounds sort of attractive and Stevensonish, though, does n't it," said Jack, reflectively. " Ought to be a story there. Where is it, Uncle Tom ? " "They call it Dauphine Island here in Mobile now, and they have called it so for two hundred years. But the first comers called it Massacre Island, because, you see, they found so many bones there they supposed it must have been at some time the site of a dreadful tragedy." " Dauphine is a much prettier name," said Christine. "Synonymous," Jack proclaimed oracularly. "The Frenchmen have massacred a dauphin or two, have n't they ? " " Well," returned his uncle, "this Dauphine Island very nearly massacred the few Frenchmen who first tried to make a home upon so ill-named a spot. Pensacola, where they first thought of stopping, had already been preempted by the Spaniards. So Iberville coasted along to the mouth of the Missis- sippi, sailed up to and around the present site of New Orleans, and then, coming back along the coast, built a wooden fort at Biloxi, where we shall go presendy, and, sailing to France for colonists, came back here in 1701 and began his setdement on Massacre or Dauphine Island, as it was soon called. But the Canadians and Frenchmen were not used to the climate. The heat of the sun, the fever in their blood, and their carelessness of life told on them seriously, and reduced both soldiers and colonists by famine and sickness. They moved away from Biloxi ; they moved away from Dauphine Island ; 24 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES they abandoned a site selected on the Mobile River ; and finally, after years of 'pulling up stakes,' they settled on the site of the Mobile we are now visiting — a healthy, sandy plain, lifted above the floods and malaria of the river- bottom." " They stuck to it well, did n't they ? " said Roger, a persistent young fellow himself "Shows they had what they found here at last," said Jack — "plenty of sand." " I imagine the fathers and founders of the colony, Iberville and his famous brother and successor Bienville, to whom I promised to introduce you, had to work hard to keep their 'sand,' as you term it, Jack, from slip- ping away. In fact, Bienville complained that as soon as any of the colo- nists began to succeed and got a little property together, he had to tie them down to keep them from running away." "You would n't think so, in this beautiful place and in this delightful w ould you Marian re- climate, marked. " Think of this after Canada," said Christine. " 1900 and I 700 are quite different standpoints, my dears," Uncle Tom replied; "and a comfortable chair in a pleasant hotel, with dinner ready when you are, and mosquito-netting protecting your bed, is vastly different from nothing to eat, nothing to wear, and nothinof to do but die of home- sickness, fever, and famine. And yet, there is always a picturesque side, even to privation, if but persistence win through at last. Just as in Florida, so here, at Mobile, the pic- turesque element has place. Stately figures march across the page. Here pass the four Lemoine boys (there were really four of these brothers, you see), — Iberville, Bienville, Serigny, and Chateauguay, — founders and governors of the first Louisiana, with bravery, ambition, persistence, pluck, and dreams of glory — everything, in fact, but the practical knowledge how to win success in colonization. They were all bright and brilliant young The fiiunder of Louisiana. IX THE RIVAL CAPITALS 25 IN THE BUSINESS DISTRICT OF NEW ORLEANS. The large building with columns is the old St. Charles Hotel, burned since this picture was made, and replaced by a more modern structure. fellows. Bienville, the second of these Lemoine boys, was only eighteen when, sent by Iberville to cruise along the Mississippi, he came, sixteen miles below the present site of New Orleans, plump upon an English frigate of twelve guns. Most boys of eighteen would have been ' rattled ' by this, to use one of your favorite expressions ; but not so Bienville. He boarded the English war-ship, haughtily proclaimed France's ownership of the Mis- sissippi, and told such big stories of strong and flourishing French colonies that the Englishman, impressed by the great claims of this French boy, sailed away and left him in possession ; and to-day that point in the great river, thanks to a French boy's bluff, is still called the English Turn." " Good for Bienville ! " cried Jack. '' I did n't think he had it in him." "Why, but it was n't true, was it?" queried Christine. " Of course it was n't," said Jack. " That 's where he was smart." Christine mused a moment. " I don't believe George Washington would have told such a fib, even for a continent," she said at length. " 'All '5 fair in love and war,' " quoted Jack. 26 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " I don't think so ; do you, Uncle Tom ? " persisted Christine. "That 's a question as old as the world, my dear," Uncle Tom replied; "and it is still unsettled. For my part, I cannot see that an untruth is ever justifiable. It is the backbone of strategy, however, as it too often is of diplomacy ; and young Bienville was only acting after the manner of men. Jack's proverb, too, calls up another Mobile picture; for if all 's fair in love as well as in war, then the cargoes of young girls (poor in purse, and with all they had in the world put up in such tiny chests that they were called 'the girls with the trunk') sent over here as a matrimonial speculation must have been fair also. For they were all of them married to the bachelor colonists before they had been here a month." "The idea ! " exclaimed Marian. "Young ladies," said Roger, "I think it behooves Uncle Tom, as your chaperon, to get out of this climate as quickly as possible. There is no knowing how soon these gallant Mobile men will be storming the hotel if once they know of your presence." " Don't be absurd, Roger," said Marian. " I 'm sure I think Mobile is perfectly lovely." " Hurry up. Uncle Tom," cried Bert, entering into the fun. " Finish off here and let 's post off to New Orleans, where it is safe. They did n't have any girls with the trunks there, I hope." " Indeed they did, Bert," laughed Uncle Tom ; " these ship-loads of girls for the matrimonial market were a leading feature in French coloni- zation." "Are n't you glad we 're Americans, Marian ?" said Christine. " But so are the descendants of those girls to-day American, my dear," Uncle Tom asserted. "Indeed, it is the pride and boast of many Louisi- anians that they can trace their ancestry back to these fillcs a la cassette, as those convent-bred mothers of Louisiana were called. But come, there is the dinner-call. Afterward we '11 drive around Mobile, and then, ho ! for its rival capital." They "did" the ancient town from the river to the hills, and enjoyed alike its old-time flavor and its shaded modern streets. They promenaded Government Street, and rested beneath the great live-oaks of Bienville Park; they drove over the famous shell road, magnolia-bordered and moss- draped, that skirts the beautiful bay, and saw where once the fleet of Farra- gut passed the flaming forts, with the great commander lashed to the shrouds, and where, along this same historic shore, once had come sailing the ships of Iberville and his brothers to the building of Louisiana's first settlement and the Confederacy's last stronghold. Then, bidding adieu to IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS 27 CANAL STREET, NEW ORLEANS. restful Mobile, as they described the old French colonial capital, they puffed westward along the white-bluffed and island-guarded shore of the great blue Gulf, and saw where, at Biloxi and Bay St. Louis, on the beautiful oak- fringed bluffs, and on Cat and Ship islands off the sandy shore, were planted the first settlements of Louisiana, in the earliest days of French colonization, when Mobile was the capital and New Orleans had not yet sprung into life. "But duty is duty," said Bert; and so, escaping the fascinations of that lotus-land of placid water, fragrant, flower-filled forests, spicy Southern breezes, dry and beautiful bluffs, and " nice Northwestern people," as Marian described the pleasant winter colonists alongshore, they came at last to New Orleans, where, on a great bend of the mighty river, still rests that old part of the French capital which has given to the metropolis of the Gulf the name of the Crescent City. "Bienville was really the father of this town," Uncle Tom said, as, after an early stroll through the old quarter and the French market, they sought the shade and comfort of their fine hotel. "The fibber?" queried Marian. 28 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " The boy that played it on the Englishman ? " asked Jack. "The same," Uncle Tom replied. '-Canadian-born, and reared in all the stateliness of a great Canadian chateau, — half fortress and half palace, — the slight, refined, and haughty young Canadian noble was still a fearless and adventurous voyjgeur, and at twenty, by the death of his brother Iber- ville, became the leader and head of the Louisiana colony. He, first of all Frenchmen, not only saw but insisted upon the value of the Mississippi to France, and urged the setdement of a strong colony at its mouth, linked to Canada by a chain of forts along the Mississippi and across the Ohio country to the Lakes." " How about La Salle, Uncle Tom ? " queried Bert. "La Salle, like Columbus," Uncle Tom replied, "was the victim of a o-reat mistake. Both these adventurers and explorers had ' China on the brain,' and even as the great Genoese died in the belief that his American finds were surely the coasts of India or 'Cathay,' so the great Frenchman (the ' Don Quixote of pioneer chronicles,' as La Salle has been called) died in the belief that the Mississippi down which he sailed was the direct course to that China whose wealth he desired for his king — and for himself" " But he named the land Louisiana, did n't he? " asked Bert. "Yes," his uncle replied; "for he, even before Bienville, had a dream of a colony here at the mouth of the great river, and a string of forts to Canada. But with La Salle it was only a dream. Bienville worked to make the dream reality, and he succeeded. New Orleans, so Miss King, its brightest historian, declares, 'is as much his city as if La Salle and Iberville had not so much as thought of it ' ; and I think she is quite correct" "Good deal of a chap for a young Frenchman, eh?" cried Jack, with enthusiasm. "Good deal of a chap for an American, Jack," Uncle Tom amended. "Remember that Bienville was American-born and American-bred — " "Canadian," insisted Jack. "Which is American nevertheless, my boy," retorted his uncle. "The Yankee has n't a monopoly of all the virtues, simply because he has followed the greater light; and a ' claim-it-all' man, my dear Jack, sometimes overshoots the mark, even as did that appropriative Dutchman who boasted that all his goods were of gold or silver, even his copper kettle." "Well, I don't doubt it shone like gold," declared Jack the unquencha- ble, in the midst of the laugh at his expense, " and that 's the next thing to being gold. So I 'm willing to let Mr. Bienville go as a sort of a copper- kettle American ; for it 's just as I said : he was a good deal of a chap — IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS 29 voila / la Nouvelle Orleans / eh, Mr. Bert ? Oh, yes ; I 'm right up on my French in a French colony." "/\nd think what a French colony it was, boys and girls," said Uncle Tom, with enthusiasm. " Think of the great names of France interwoven with the history of this marsh-builded, levee-defended city which for nearly two cen- AN OLD PLANTATION VILLA IN NEW ORLEANS. turies has gruarded the entrance to the oreat river of North America ! See what a train of knights and nobles, kings and courtiers, governors and gentle- men its story carried in its train from La Salle to Lincoln — and even farther back : De Soto, the great adelantado, Spanish forerunner of France, buried beneath the waves of the Hidden River, where he who, as Dr. Shea says, ' had hoped to gather the wealth of nations, left as his property five Indian slaves, three horses, and a herd of swine' ; La Salle, setting up the cross of French possession where the great river meets the Gulf; Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque, who saw in Louisiana a new Mexico that should fill his empty coffers ; Iberville and his Canadians, Bienville and his plans for French power, Crozat with his millions, Cadaillac and his successors — adventurers and gentlemen made governors of a tottering colony ; John Law^ and his mighty real-estate bubble, that nearly ruined France ; and many another stately and historic name of France, from Richelieu the cardinal to Napoleon the emperor." THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "And Jefferson and Jackson ; don't forget them, Uncle Tom," cried Jack. "I 'm not likel)^ to. Jack," replied his uncle, laughing. " They don't let you forget those names in New Orleans ; and 1903 is coming." "What is 1903, Uncle Tom ? " asked Marian. "The one hundredth an- niversary of the acqu tion of Lou- "^^^^^5^'^?%"'^^^ isianabvthe .JfUllEAtSS A PICTURESQUE HOUSE-FRONT IN THE FRENCH QUARTER. United States, my dear," her uncle replied — "one of r " the most important chap- • ters in American history." " Hurrah for expan- sion ! " exclaimed Jack, waving his polo-cap around his head, to the scandalizing of Marian, while Bert, as logically becomes the other side, shook his head dubi- ously. " But you talk of the French only, Uncle Tom," said Christine. " Did n't the Spaniards own all this country once?" " Certainly they did," Uncle Tom replied. " For forty years they had sway here — from i 760 to 1 80 1. But those forty years made little impress upon the col- ony, save as the cruelties, tyran- IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS nies, stupidities, and ignorance of Spain came very near to sending Louisiana the way of all her colonies — to stagnation, discontent, and decay. If it had not been for Galvez and Grandpre, Spain's hold on this beautiful and fruitful section would have been a blight of the dreariest sort." '• Who were they ? " queried Roger. "Two bright young fellows, soldiers of Spain," Uncle Tom replied. " They were little more than boys — Louis Grandpre, indeed, was a boy no older than you ; but they are the most picturesque and insistent characters in all Louisiana's colonial story. Galvez was governor in 1777, and the way in which he ' rattled ' England and stormed her garrisons hereabout is one of the brightest pages in our Revolutionary history. If all Spain had been like young Bernardo de Galvez, Spain's stay in America would have been a vastly different one." " And Grandpre ? " queried Roger. "Oh, I know about him," said Marian. "I read his story in an old 'St. Nicholas.' It says, ' But Louis Grandpre was no ordinary boy'; does n't it. Uncle Tom ? Let 's see ; he was the last defender of the flag of Spain in Louisiana, was n't he ? " " That 's the lad," her uncle replied. " His story is worth remembering. He was left in charge of the Spanish post at Baton Rouge, like a sort of Casablanca, and he held it to the last against an inroad of American rangers and riflemen, keeping the golden flag of Spain flying until he died, a martyr to duty and loyalty, the last defender of Spain's broken power in the valley of the Mississippi." " That 's great," said Jack ; and each boy and girl mentally resolved to hunt up Louis Grandpre's story in the files of " St. Nicholas." But they found so much to see and to hear about in the delightful capital of America's summer-land that, for a time, even Louis Grandpre was forgotten. For Uncle Tom took them everywhere. Up and down the broad and generous streets they rode, " made for elbow-room," as Jack declared, searching out the points made famous in four wars, from Iberville to Farragut. They promenaded the wonderful levees, and drove out on the THE TYRANT OF NEW ORLEANS. Don Alexander (3'Reilly Governor in 1760. 32 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES JACKSON SQUARE AND THE CATHEDRAL, NEW ORLEANS. shell road to Ponchartrain; they lingered beneath the shade-trees of the beau- tiful old Place d'Armes, now, alas ! Jackson Square, and " trolleyed " out to the battle-field where Andrew Jackson won renown and name; they haunted the French quarter and the French market until they declared themselves to be a composite " Paul and Virginia " ; and from the roof of their big hotel they traced the lines of the great Southern city as it stretched away from the borders of Ponchartrain, which Iberville first explored and named, to the restless, rolling torrent of the great Mississippi. Down that mighty river, so they knew, had La Salle first floated in discovery and possession, setting up the arms of France ; and on that site to-day the wonderful jetties of Eads have taken the place of those massive piles of silt and river deposit which, in La Salle's day, so guarded and yet menaced the five mouths of the great river that the Spaniards called them hs Palizadas (the Palisades). Then they roamed through the old town again, nestled in the broad crescent along the winding river. They lingered about the sun-dial in the Convent of the Ursulines, and heard the story of Madeline Hachard ; they tried the huge knocker on the archbishop's palace, the oldest church building in the Mis- sissippi valley ; before the curious arched doorways of the old Spanish houses they heard of the stern Don O'Reilly, and again of the brilliant Galvez ; until, IN THE RIVAL CAPITALS 33 tired out, but saturated with the foreign flavor of the old days of French and Spanish dominion, they would return to the hotel to talk it all Over ao-ain with Uncle Tom. " But it was n't all New Orleans and Mobile in those days," Roger said. " Where was the rest of the colony, Uncle Tom ? " " Up and down the big river were the forts and plantations and company stores," his uncle replied. " First Mobile was the capital, then Biloxi, then New Orleans ; and rivalries and heartburnings were many as each rival set- tlement claimed precedence, until at last, in i 722, New Orleans carried off the prize. It was a curious life all through this soft, semi-tropical region — curious and picturesque as well; and the struggles of rival races to seize and main- tain supremacy would crowd a book with just such stories as Cable and Maurice Thompson and Grace King have told us — stories of Creole and Spaniard, of riflemen and rangers, of Galvez the soldier, and Lafitte the pirate, and Jackson the conqueror ; stirring, romantic, attractive, and ab- sorbing tales, that fill in as coloring and side-lights the long and varied story of this fascinating colony of Louisiana. La Salle discovered it ; Bienville founded it; Napoleon sold it; America developed it; and so, through all the years, it was French in make-up and composition, even as to-day, after a century of American possession, it is still French in flavor, in color, and in vivacious and delightful attractiveness — the home of Mardi Gras and of Creole romances, as well as the great seaport of the Southern coast." L.__ WHERE JACKSON WON. Battle-ground of Chalmette (battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1815). IN COLONIAL DAYS. A fight with Carolina pirates. CHAPTER III UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA By the Inland Passage — Where Spaniard and Englishman Raided the Border — Why Oglethorpe Came to Georgia — Lovely Old Charleston — Where Philosophers Failed — The Beginnings of Carolina. P among the fair Sea Islands, famous for cotton and ter- rapin, phosphate and lumber-yards, fishing and foliage, they sailed from Fernandina to Brunswick, where, so Uncle Tom informed them, Oglethorpe had raised his conquering banner, and the last cargo of negro slaves was landed in America. And so they reached, in time, Savannah, on its shaded, sandy bluffs. At "a conference of the powers," as Jack called the assembled fathers and mothers at St. Augustine, it was decided, after the return from New Orleans, to adopt Uncle Tom's suggestion and let the young people feel their way northward after the com- fortable fashion of amateur explorers for whom both time and tide might be made to wait. So, instead of going by rapid transit to the North, Uncle Tom and his party took the train to Fernandina amid its cotton-bales, where once Mc- Gregor the filibuster terrorized Spanish commerce, but where now shell roads and electric lights, blooming gardens and pleasant homes and a pub- lic library, had completely modernized the old haunt of the border raiders. From Fernandina they slipped up the coast by steamer, threading the inland passage that leads through broad sounds, narrow inlets, and open reaches, as, by marshland and island, by wooded bluff and sandy shore, the channel shifts and turns amid these same Sea Islands, which, as Uncle Tom informed them, were once the home of feud and foray and of border strife, in the days when two great nations were struggling for mastery and possession. 36 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES A BIG LOAD OF SEA ISLAND COTTON. *'Who got here first, to begin with, Uncle Tom? " Bert inquired. "Oh, the Spaniards, I suppose," grumbled Roger, a bit jealously. " Did n't they, Uncle Tom ? The dons seem to have been first on the ground wherever we 've struck it in these diggings." "But they had to dig out when we got at them," declared Jack, trium- phantly. " We folks had come to stay ; eh^ boys ? " Uncle Tom smiled. " It was a case of Hobson's choice, Jack, when ' we folks,' as you call the English colonists, first sought these island shores. As I shall show you, it was, with a good many of them, a choice between ' live in Georgia or in jail ' ; and of two evils they chose Georgia." " How desolate it must have been here ! " said Marian, looking off toward the silent marsh and beach and forest, where few signs of life were to be seen. "Almost as lonesome now as it was then," Uncle Tom declared. " I 've had sportsmen tell me that they have boated miles upon miles along these beach- and bluff-lined shores without seeing a man, white or black ; and after UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA Zl London streets and London jails, one hundred and seventy years ago, the quiet of these densely wooded shores must sometimes have seemed to the newcomer almost like solitary confinement." " But it was long before then that the Spaniards first came, was n't it?" Bert inquired. "Oh, yes," Uncle Tom replied. "A Spanish sea-captain with a name that was better than his reputation — Captain Angel de Yillafane — came sail- ing along the coast in the spring of 1561, and, following him, for a hundred years and more, here French and Spanish colonists sailed and struggled, Spanish and English colonists sailed and fought, until, gaining their foothold on these very Sea Islands among which we are now sailing, the English just set their teeth and firmly determined to hold the land against all comers. How they did this the story of these islands tells ; and for years after Ogle- thorpe settled here, the fight for the border seldom slackened, while all the section hereabout was clearly debatable ground." " Or water," suggested Jack. " I stand corrected," said Uncle Tom, laughing. " It certainly was debatable water, as the gentleman from Manhattan suggests. For this waterway we are now threading was the path of travel and of trade ; these meant possession and occupation; so the Spaniard of Florida and the Englishman of Georgia grappled in many a struggle for this right of waterway." "And the Englishman got it," said Roger. "And kept it," added Jack, sig- nificantly. " But only at much risk, with hard fighting, and through the eminent strategy of such fighters as Oglethorpe the philanthropist and Jackson the avenofer." " Quite a jump from one to the other, eh, Uncle Tom ? " said Bert. " But why do you call General Jackson the avenger? " queried Marian. A BORDERER. " Determined to hold the land against all comers. 3^ THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " I 'm sure, when we hunted up his home at the Hermitage, I thought he must have been a delightful old gentleman. Certainly, Uncle Tom, there was nothing about the man who could say such lovely things about his wife, and help people in distress as much as General Jackson did, to suggest such a cruel-sounding name as the avenger." "But he was one nevertheless, my dear," Uncle Tom replied. "In fact, his whole long life was filled with resenting injuries done, as he be- lieved, either to his wife, his country, or himself From the days when, as ON JEKYL ISLAND. a boy, he vowed to be avenged, up yonder in the Waxhaw district," — Uncle Tom nodded his head Carolinaward, — " on the British officer who laid his head open because the plucky Carolina boy would n't blacken the British boots, to the day when he hung the two Englishmen in Spanish territory, and, only at the last, forgave on his death-bed all the world except those who had slandered his wife, the story of Andrew Jackson is the story of the stern and unforgiving avenger." "And served 'em right, too," declared Jack, hotly. " I 'd have done the same if I 'd been he." But Christine said gently, "'Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord'"; whereat Uncle Tom pressed her hand significantly and said: " Dif- ferent men have differing methods, young folks ; but he who sets up to be UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA 39 a law unto himself does n't really have a jolly time of it, and very often finds himself in hot water. It was frequently so with the brave and generous but too impulsive Jackson ; it is a part of the story, as well, of the philanthropic but impracticable Oglethorpe, founder and father of Georgia." "Impracticable, Uncle Tom !" exclaimed Bert. "Why, I thought Oglethorpe was one of the greatest and best of men. That 's what my books say." " In a way he was, Bert," Uncle Tom replied. " His ideals were high, his desires were lofty ; his chief aim was to secure the good and benefit of his less fortunate fellow-men. But the reformer is often a poor executive, and Oglethorpe did not sufficiently realize how hard it is to make all sorts and conditions of men become just your sort and condition. So he had a hard row to hoe, and his crop of benefits ripened slowly. But he was a valiant and noble man, and all this region hereabout is his best and most enduring memorial." It was a pleasant steamer trip through those blue Sea Island waters, and, as Marian said, scenery and history crowded each other so closely she could n't tell which was most attractive. Scarcely had they cleared the big breakers of Fernandina bar, when Cumberland Island loomed in sight, where out of its gray-green olive-groves rose the castle-like walls of stately Dungeness, the mansion of a modern millionaire, built on the site of a historic house. For here, overlooking the salt-marshes and wooded shores of Cumberland River and of Cumberland Sound, now busy with the big tramp steamers freighted with phosphate and naval stores, Oglethorpe had built Fort Andrew as an outlying defense against the encroaching Spaniards ; here, later, Nathaniel Greene, our second greatest Revolutionary general, had built his hospitable mansion of Dungeness, where he soon after died; here Eli Whitney invented the cotton-gin, and thus brought about, in time, the Civil War; and here, in 1814, Light Horse Harry Lee dragged himself to die — ^that Harry Lee whose eulogy of Washino-ton has become immortal. The voyagers coasted the forest-fringed shores of that luxurious sports- man's preserve where, as lack declared, with an attempt at a Stevensonian pun, " statesmen and presidents came to Jekyl Island to hide." They crossed the broad expanse of St. Simon's Sound, where the open ocean breaks in through the island rampart, and the channel sweeps up to busy Brunswick amid its sawmills and lumber-yards. Then on from Brunswick they sailed, under the lee of St. Simon's Bluffs. There Oglethorpe had built his batteries and held the Spaniards at bay until, turning upon them, he well-nigh annihilated them at the "Bloody Marsh," still to be seen near the 40 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES MODERN BATTERY ON ST. SIMON'S ISLAND. Erected during the Spanish-American War, near Oglethorpe's old battery. shell road leading from St. Simon's Bluffs to the northern bluff that over- looks the Altamaha. There Uncle Tom pointed out to his companions the proudest landmark of the inland passage — a great stone arch, black and tunnel-like, supporting a wall of crumbling masonry. •'What is it?" asked Christine. "Oglethorpe's ancient stronghold — all that is left of it," replied Uncle Tom; "his home and fort of ' tabby-built ' Frederica. There, yonder, is the General's Cut, dug narrow but straight by the resourceful Oglethorpe as a back door through which to escape the Spanish fleet. And see, that is Butler's Island, with its fringe of marshes and rice-fields, where a great English actress and writer once found an uncongenial American home, and where Aaron Burr did some successful hiding, after his thwarted conspiracy." " Gracious ! " exclaimed Marian, " what a lot of history there is around here ! " They ran beneath the bluff upon which John Wesley preached under the live-oaks to his congregation of Oglethorpe's Highlanders, dressed in their kilts and tartans, while their sentinels watched, keen-eyed, for Spanish foemen ; they slid across the wide-mouthed Altamaha to where, perched on its timbered bluff, quaint little Darien sits amid its sands and live-oaks. UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA 41 And so, at last, they came to Savannah — the fair Southern city of to-day, stretching away from the bluff at Yamacraw, where Oglethorpe laid the foundations of his colony, the rich and hospitable town which has grown from a refuge for poor debtors into a home of wealth and luxury, the most flourishing and most important of the seaport cities of the South. Oglethorpe was constantly in the air. " Great boy, was n't he ? " said Jack, as Uncle Tom's stories of the famous soldier-philanthropist followed one upon another. " But say, did he do everything here ? " " He was the motive power of the beginnings, surely," Uncle Tom replied. " Sort of a one-man power, eh ? " said Bert. "You will learn, boys and girls," replied Uncle Tom, "as you run over the story of American colonization, that in each colony one man really did stand at the fore. Winthrop in Massachusetts, Stuyvesant in New York, Bienville in Louisiana, John Smith in Virginia, Penn in Pennsylvania — each of these stands out as father, founder, framer, or defender of the colony with which his name is identified. So here, along the Georgia coast, it is, as you have seen, Oglethorpe of whom we hear beyond all others — James Edward Oglethorpe, Marlborough's soldier, Prince Eugene's aide-de-camp, Gold- smith's friend. Dr. Johnson's patron. Pope's paragon, the forerunner of Dickens as the protector of the poor debtors of London, the philanthropist who gave himself freely for others, but who was a boy at heart to the end of his days, and who stands, for all time, one of the heroes of American colonization." "That sounds awfully interest- ing," was Marian's comment. "What more about him. Uncle Tom ? " " Don't you wish we could have been with him, Jack ? had lots of adventures," said Roger. Jack nodded an emphatic assent ; but Uncle Tom hastened to assure them that it was by no means all plain sailing with Oglethorpe. GENERAL OGLETHORPE, THE FOUNDER OF SAVANNAH. From an engraving in the possession of George W. Jones, Esq. I 'm sure he 42 THE CENTURV BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " It is the misfortune of every pioneer and reformer to be misunderstood, boys," he declared, "and Oglethorpe was no exception. Indeed, his story begins with a row and ends with a court martial, and, between, mingled with much good, runs also much of criticism, opposition, and thwarted plans. A soldier and the son of a soldier, his attempts to help a friend imprisoned for debt led him to plan for the relief of the Lon- don poor — the ' honestly unfortunate, 'as he termed them. ' Get away from England; begin life again inanewland,'he preached to them ; and seeking to turn his preaching into practice, he so labored with George, King of EnMand, as to interest him in his project, and secured a charter for all the land hereabout, from the Savannah to the Altamaha, and stretching westward to the Pacific, as all land grants then ran. Parliament and the charitable helped him with money, and in November, 1732, Oglethorpe sailed from the English port of Deptford with one hundred and twenty colonists." " Came with 'em himself, did he ? Good enough ! " said Jack. " Yes ; Oglethorpe v^as one of those practical Christians whom the Bible recommends — he was ready to show his faith by his works," Uncle Tom replied. " He did n't say ' Go along' ; he said ' Come along.' And so they came. He landed first at Charleston ; then they went to Beaufort, and finally brought up here at Yamacraw Bluff, on January 31, 1733, where they put up some tents as the beginnings of Savannah, and gave to the country, in honor of their king, the name of Georgia." " First, second, or third ? " queried Roger. "George II, Roger," Uncle Tom replied — "that German King of Eng- land whom Thackeray called 'the strutting turkey-cock of Herrenhausen.'" "Good gracious! what did he call him that for?" cried Marian. "That was just Thackeray's pleasant way," Uncle Tom replied. "He had n't a very high opinion of the ' four Georges ' ; but I am inclined to think UGLETHoKPEh A.XCIENT STRONGHOLD. The first at Frederica. UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA 43. he was unduly severe — except in the case of the fourth George. Certainly George II, for whom this region was named, entered heartily into Ogle- thorpe's schemes and tried to help them on." "I know he blundered, though," said Roger. "Show me a George, King of England, who did n't." " There was a good deal of blundering, as there always has been in all colonization schemes," Uncle Tom declared. " Oglethorpe's creed as a colo- nizer was simple but emphatic." " 'Trust in God and keep your powder dry,' I suppose?" said Bert. "Very nearly that, Bert," Uncle Tom admitted, with a smile. "It was * Trust in God and down with Spain ! ' And as long as he stayed in Georgia he lived up to his creed." "Where did the blundering come in, then?" queried Bert. "In misunderstanding people," his uncle replied. "Oglethorpe wished to base his colony upon the Golden Rule ; but Roman Catholics were kept out. He prohibited slavery and liquor-dealing, and encouraged honorable labor ; but his colonists declared they could n't and would n't live in Georo-ia, unless they had rum and negroes, like all the other colonies ; and they got them at last, in spite of Oglethorpe. Along with him, too, came the Wes- leys and Whitefield to preach peace — good and great men, all three, but they only stirred up trouble. So, what with malcontent colonists, in- discreet clergymen, and plotting Spaniards, the philanthropist's lot was not a pleasant one ; and at last he gave up in dis- gust and went home to England." " I thought he had more sand than that," was Jack's verdict. " Oh, but. Jack, think how dreadful it is to be unappreciated," said Christine. " After all he had done for them, too ! " exclaimed Marian. " It is the story of every colony and of all colonies," Uncle Tom declared. " Mind, though, I may be wrong, for I 'm not always in accord with the his- WHERE WESLEV PREACHED. Wesley's oak at Frederica. 44 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES ^V torians. They claim that Oglethorpe's worth was appreciated, and that he simply went back to England in the interests of the colony. But I know that he never returned to America, and that, soon after, Georgia was made a royal province. Two things, however, with all his discouragements, Oglethorpe did not lose while here — his hope and his grip. He lost a good deal of faith and a good deal of money, but he stuck by his colony nobly until it was strong enough to force him out, and he led the Spaniards such a dance up and down these island channels from Frederica to Fernandina and St. Augustine that the dons were at last glad to give in and the Georgia border was unmolested." " Then the colony flourished after he left it, did it ? " queried Bert. " Yes, because of the work he had done for it, and the good stock he had put into it," Uncle Tom replied. " His dealings with the Indians were as fair and friendly as those of William Penn or the Pilgrims of Plymouth ; and the sturdy blood of German Lutherans and Scotch Covenanters, of Salzburgers and Moravians from central Europe, entered into the development of this fertile Southern country from the coast-line to the highlands, and so held back Spanish aggression that Oglethorpe's fortified home, of which we saw the crumbling arch at Frederica, was really, as one writer has called it, ' the Thermopylae of the Anglo-American colonies.' " "Thermopylae is good ! " said Jack. " I 'm glad we could see a bit of that old stronghold. It almost made me feel as if I had seen one of the border castles that Walter Scott writes about." " It was a stronghold that would have delighted just such a romancer as Sir Walter," Uncle Tom declared. •' Indeed, this whole section is a store- house of stories, if but the master touch would draw them out, from Ogle- thorpe in his armor, and Mary Musgrave, the border 'empress,' with her Indian retinue, to Rory Mcintosh in his tartan, defying the rebels to the king he had always fought." THE BLUFF, SAVANNAH. Yamacraw, when Oglethorpe landed. UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA 45 WHERE OGLETHORPE SAILED. Scene on the Savannah River. From Savannah, on the sandy bluff where Oglethorpe had planted it, to the very modern and progressive Atlanta, the " Gate City " of the hills, where, in ages gone, De Soto's gold-hunters had wandered in vain, Uncle Tom and his colonial investigators " spied the land." They saw where, on the sands of Tybee, Oglethorpe built the first lighthouse and Wesley started the first Sunday-school in America ; they sought again that field where, with a dash and valor unsurpassed in colonial history, Oglethorpe routed the army and navy of Spain, and caused Whitefield to declare that the de- liverance of Georgia is such as cannot be paralleled but by some instances out of the Scriptures ; they saw the fair and fertile region of middle Georgia, upon whose pine-crested heights De Soto played yEneas to the beautiful Indian queen's Dido, — much to Marian's disgust and outspoken censure, — and where, two hundred years later, Oglethorpe founded Augusta, upon the health-giving Georgia uplands. Then, at last, skirting the low, flat marshlands of the coast, between the Savannah and the Ashley, the " personally conducted " came again to delightful old Charleston, city of Huguenots and hotheads, from the Spaniard-hating Captain Ribault of 1562 to those who defied the Lords Proprietors in 1719, the Royal Governors in 1776, and the Federal Union in i860. 46 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES Charleston, as you know, was alike dear and familiar to Uncle Tom's young people, who had tarried in it on their Revolutionary pilgrimage. So they revisited old scenes, revived old acquaintances, and hunted up the many colonial landmarks of which the city boasts — buildings as well as sites. " Our bloody-minded but eminently religious friend Menendez, ade- lantado of Florida — ' the greatest soldier and the greatest sailor of his day,' so the Spaniards declare — " " Huh ! I like that ! " Jack burst in indignantly. " Oh, but he was so cruel ! " cried Christine. " ' Different times, different manners,' my young friends," said Uncle Tom. " England did not have a monopoly of daring, nor Spain of cruelty. Brave John Hawkins began the odious slave-trade along these very coasts, and even Roger must admit the truth as to Church and the Pequots. Well, as I was about to say, Menendez the Spaniard naturally found fault with Ribault the Frenchman for daring to make a settlement hereabout in what the adelantado declared to be Florida, and Ribault and Menendez and Gourgues the avenger fought it out, as you know, on the sands of Florida. That was in 1568 ; and for a hundred years thereafter Carolina lay unoccu- pied, though by no means unclaimed, until, in 1669, a high-toned English syndicate, known as the Lords Proprietors, sent out a batch of colonists to occupy and develop the land which from that boy king of St. Bartholomew's bloody day, Charles IX of France, and later from the name of the Stuart, kings of unsavory memory, Charles or Carolus, was known as Carolana or Carolina. The newcomers, however, did not like Port Royal ; they did not like Albemarle Point, over yonder across the Ashley. So, after making a start at both places, they came over here to what was known as Oyster Point ; and here they founded Charles Town — the Charleston of our day." "Were they English or Huguenots, Uncle Tom — those first colonists, I mean ? " Bert inquired. " I 'm a little mixed up on the facts." "The first settlers were unquestionably English," Uncle Tom replied; "but after Charles Town was really started here on Oyster Point, men of other nationalities sought it as a home. Many of these were refugee Huguenots from France; and, under the surety of religious freedom, the colony became almost cosmopolitan, English, Irish, Scotch, French, and Ger- man making up its population." "Then why call it a Huguenot colony?" asked Bert. " Because the Huguenot element seems especially to have survived in the atmosphere of the place," Uncle Tom replied. "Those castellated gate entrances to the house-yards, which I have shown you, are distinctly a re- minder of the embattled gateways of the chateaux and castles of old France, JOHN LOCKE THE PfiiLObOPilER. He drew up the " form of government " for the Carolinas. 48 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES and the tinge of French Prot- estantism which the Huguenots brought in still tempers and affects this rose-smothered, mae- nolia-shaded town." "Any one-man power in this colony, Uncle Tom ? " queried Roger. "In a way, yes, although he never came here," Uncle Tom replied. " I'he great man of the South Carolina Colony was un- doubtedly the Earl of Shaftes- buryo He was a famous English statesman ; he was one of the chief of the Carolina syndicate known as the Lords Proprietors, and his family names of Ashley and Cooper reappear in the two rivers that wash the walls of Charleston. He was something of a philosopher in his way ; he had a friend who was a famous philosopher, lecturer, and ' censor ' of college boys' morals — one John Locke of Oxford." " The metaphysician ? " queried Bert. Uncle Tom nodded. " You know him, Bert," he said. " Well, Shaftes- bury and Locke drew up an elaborate form of government for the South Carolina Colony, and so overweighted it with 'fundamental forms,' as they called them, and undemocratic officials, that in due time their philosophic establishment fell to the ground by its own ponderosity, and South Carolina became a regular royal province." "Too much metaphysician, I guess," Roger commented. " I reckon the colonists must have met a physician once too often, and so got sick of the whole show business," Jack suggested, and then warded off an attack by his indignant associates, who protested against his pun. " It was doctored a bit too much," Uncle Tom admitted. "The high- toned proprietary government, with its ' palatines, landgraves, caciques, and barons' ('show business,' indeed, as Jack declares), fell because of its own unwieldiness. Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, Frenchmen, and Ger- mans, men of various lands, faiths, and factions, could hardly be expected to OGLETHORPE'S FIRM FRIENDS. Tono-chi-chi, chief of the Yamacraws. UNDER LIVE-OAK AND MAGNOLIA 49 live together in harmony, or be held by an unpractical if philosophical form of government, in a land whose very vastness spoke of liberty and laughed at social distinctions." "They did come to a lovely land, though," said Christine. "Why could n't they Hve in peace and harmony?" "They did, my dear, as much as any of the American colonists," Uncle Tom replied. " Growth is always restlessness, in Carolina of the palmettos Ti?r A COLONIAL MANSION IN CHARLESTON. Residence of the late William Bull Pringle, Esq. as well as in New England of the elms. The little town here overlooking the Cooper River and the fair roadstead to the sea soon outgrew its first limits, and stretched out along the beautiful highway between the rivers, bordered and embowered then as now with live-oaks and magnolias, jas- mines and roses. Up and down the coast and far inland toward the sand- hills colonization pushed ; plantations and farm-lands blossomed and yielded harvests, and, save among the hardy Highlanders of the western hills, all the colony was either master or slave." " Picturesque old days, were n't they?" said Jack. "The general was giving us some great old pirate stories this morning." 50 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Picturesque, but practical, too, for all its shortcomings," Uncle Tom answered. "And the masters of the land ably proved their manhood. Against Spaniard and pirate, against roving Indian and arrogant lord pro- prietor, against royal governor and British trooper, the colonists of South Carolina made stern protest or open war. Resistance to encroachment be- came their second nature, and side by side with Massachusetts and Virginia, the philosophy-founded colony of Shaftesbury and Locke stood up for the very principle those philosophers most objected to — liberty in a free repub- lic. Here, on a soil seamed with strife and bathed in blood, the American Revolution at last flung Cornwallis and his redcoats from Camden into York- town, and brought triumphant independence to that American Union of which this colony of South Carolina was one of the chief foundation-stones." A RICE-FIELD IN SOUTH CAROLINA. CHAPTER IV IN THE LOST COLONY Up the Coast to Old Point Comfort — Spain in the Lead — On the Sound Steamer — Roanoke Island — The Lost Colony and its Memorial — Sir Walter Raleigh and Virginia Dare — " The White Doe of Roanoke r I N a swift-sailing steam-yacht, northward bound, which had put into Charleston, and upon which Uncle Tom had found an urgent and interested friend, our inves- tigators rounded Hatteras and ran up the coast as far as Old Point Comfort. So it came about that, once again, they entered the historic Virginia region through the broad gateway to the west, where the waters of Hampton Roads sparkled in the bright spring sunlight, and beyond the green and sloping battlements of moated Fortress Monroe rose the splendid hotels of Old Point Comfort. " The very name of which is a reminder of long and disastrous sea voy- ages in old colony days," Uncle Tom remarked, as the familiar shores out- lined themselves into definiteness and welcome. " ' For when, on the thirtieth day of April, 1607, Captain Christopher Newport and his fleet of three small vessels came to anchor off yonder sand-spit, after a weary voyage of three months ' (so good Master George Pevey discourses in his * Observations '), 'wee rowed over to a point of land where wee found a chan- nel, and sounded six, eight, ten, or twelve fathom, which put us in good com- fort ; therefore wee named that point of land Cape Comfort.' " "How interestinof ! " said Marian. "You can almost see those old-time 52 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES sailors in their queer clothes rowing around here hunting for deep water, can't you ? But were they the first to sail in here ? " "Bless you, no," replied Uncle Tom. "The Spaniards had been in these parts long before." "Of course they had," said Roger. "Those old dons w^ere always poking themselves into our concerns." Uncle Tom laughed heartily. "First come, first served, Roger, my boy," he said. "The dons were here first, so I don't see but we were the ones who did the poking into other people's concerns." " How do you make that out, sir ? " asked Roger. "Whether we allow it or not," Uncle Tom replied, " the Spaniards were certainly here first, by right of discovery, by right of the famous papal bull of Pope Alexander VI in 1493, and by right of colonization — for Spain, as I do not again need to assure you, was the first European nation to establish colonies in America." " How about Leif Ericson's Northmen and Norumbega tower, up my way ? " Roger demanded. " Ancient history, ancient history, my son ! " cried Jack, waving aside the Boston boy's claim. " I thought we settled all that business when w^e w^ere at Cambrido-e." "Whether w^e did or not," said Uncle Tom, laughing, "it is, as Jack says, 'ancient history.' The Northmen did not 'stick.' That wave of northern discovery soon receded, and, until Columbus and his successors sailed and settled the American coasts, the real era of discovery and coloni- zation did not begin." "But those Spaniards were just gold-hunters, were n't they?" queried Bert. " It is the fashion to say so; but Spain had higher motives — this we must allow," Uncle Tom replied. "The King of Spain held the new lands by virtue of the autocratic proclamation of a Spanish pope ; and the King of Spain, in that bitter time of religious struggle, aimed not only to make all Europe Roman Catholic, but all America as well. Had Spanish methods been as practical as they were prohibitory, the history of America might have been different. But brutality, greed, and tyranny underlay them all, and England's growing hatred of Spain, due largely to Marian's friend Menendez and his effective measures with the Huguenots in Florida — " " Why, Uncle Tom ! the idea ! " protested Marian. " He 's no friend of mine." IN THE LOST COLONY 53 NAMED THAT POINT OF LAND CAPE COMFORT.'" " How about that sweeping bow and big sombrero at the old gate of St. Augustine?" demanded Bert, laughing. " Oh, that was only a picture," replied Marian. "'In my mind's eye, Horatio,'" cried Jack. "Nice old picture party Menendez was ! I 'd like a biograph of him and all his pleasant ways." " Well, the biograph came," Uncle Tom declared. " For, from the time of that massacre on Anastasia Island in 1565, the history of America was a moving picture of Anglo-Spanish incident during hundreds of years — until, in fact, that momentous ist of January, 1899, when the Spanish flag dropped from its staff in Havana, and the Stars and Stripes ran up in its 54 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES place, proclaiming to the world that the last vestige of Spanish misrule in America had disappeared, and that English blood had won the victory after full four centuries of struggle." Jack doffed his cap to the starry flag that streamed from the gaff. "Three cheers for us!" he cried; while Bert, who did not often drop into poetry, capped his cousin's cheer with a line from Tennyson. " ' We are heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time,' " he said. "But were the Spaniards really here as colonizers, Uncle Tom?" demanded Roger. "Here or hereabout, surely," Uncle Tom replied. "One Captain de Ayllon, a Spanish adelantado, sailed up this very river, and actually founded Jamestown in 1526; while our friend with the gentle name and the ungentle manners who took pos- session of the South Carolina coast in 1561— " "The angel, Uncle Tom ?" queried Marian. "Yes; Captain Angel Villafane," ncle replied. " He came sailing around here that same year, was almost wrecked off Hatteras, and ran in to Old Point Comfort for safety. Then, soon after, your friend Menendez sent an expedition up this way to establish a Spanish post on the Chesapeake ; and in 1572 he came here himself, and some- where hereabout he hanged from the yard-arm of his ves- sel, in his usual breezy and brutal fashion, seven Indians who had objected, Indian fashion, to Spain's method of appropriation." "But the dons did n't stay any more than the Northmen, Uncle Tom," suggested Roger. " They did n't stay just here, Roger," Uncle Tom agreed, "but they CAROLINA INDIAN MAKING A "DUGOUT." THE WAY THE E\DE\NS EISHED. Drawn by John White. 56 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES certainly did stay in America, as the Northmen did n't. In 1605, however, Elizabeth had been succeeded on the throne of England by him whom they called ' the wisest fool in Christendom ' — " "Who was that?" and " Why ?" came the inquiries. But Uncle Tom simply said: "Jot that down in your memory-books, and hunt it up for yourselves sometime " — which Bert alone did ; he was the only one of the group who kept a pocket-diary. "Well, at that time, in 1605," Uncle Tom proceeded, "Englishmen put their forty years of protest into determination. They declared that the Pope's bull was 'no good,' that England and the Reformed religion should possess a part of the New World, and that English colonies in North America should ' put a bit in their enemy's mouth ' and advance the com- monwealth, the commerce, and the Church of England." "That 's the talk ! " cried Jack ; " and did they begin right off? " "Why, of course, Jack Dunlap ! " exclaimed Marian. "Don't you re- member your history dates — settlement of Jamestown, 1 607 ? " " But even before that time," said Uncle Tom, " English enterprise had been seeking a foothold along these shores. On the 4th of July, 1584, Captains Amidas and Barlow sighted the North Carolina coast — " " Good day to start in, was n't it? " said Roger. " First-class," replied Jack. "Sort of prophetic, eh?" " We '11 go down and see about where their vessels must have anchored," said Uncle Tom, "for North Carolina was the beginning of Virginia and of English dominion in these parts ; and you shall have your share in read- ing an American riddle that still remains a mystery — the Lost Colony of Roanoke." "The Lost Colony?" inquired Christine. "Where was that. Uncle Tom ? " " That 's just what you are to find out, I said, my dear," replied Uncle Tom, with a smile. " Did you never hear of Virginia Dare ? " " The first white girl born in the colonies ? " said Bert. " That was here in Virginia, was n't it? " "Was it? " Uncle Tom replied. "That 's part of the puzzle, boys and girls. To-morrow we '11 go down the coast and try to solve it." They left the yacht at Old Point Comfort, and, after a delightful day at that ideal tarrying-place, crossed to Norfolk and, by rail and boat, went down the North Carolina coast on a search for the Lost Colony. Where Elizabeth City, hospitable and comfortable, looks seaward from the low-lying banks of the islet-studded Pasquotank, the travelers boarded one of the big "Sound steamers" of the Old Dominion line, bound on its IN THE LOST COLONY 57 winding route through the inland waters or "sounds" of eastern North CaroHna — a trip, so the boys and girls declared, that was but a "second in- stalment " of the inland waterway from Fernandina north to Savannah. And so they came at last to the landing on Roanoke Island, that pleas- ant, green, low-lying island, ramparted by sand-dunes and shady with pines and oaks, where first, so Uncle Tom declared, the feet of English colo- THE TOWN OF MANTEO, ON ROANOKE ISLAND. Named for the friend of the Lost Colony. nists stepped upon the shores of America, seeking for home and broader opportunities. " Not much opportunity for broadening here, was there?" queried Bert as, after driving from Wanchese across the mile-wide island, they drew up at the inn at Manteo, the county-seat and only town on the island. "They had all the United States before them — or behind them, I mean," said Jack. "What broader opportunities could they ask for .-^ " "Is this where Amidas and Barlow came to anchor?" queried Bert, surveying the broad reaches of Pamlico Sound. " Pretty good place for an anchorage after doubling Hatteras." " Opinions differ on that point," Uncle Tom replied. " Some authori- ties claim that forty miles below here, at Hatteras Bank, as it is sometimes called, or the sandy beach of Chickcomacamack — " " Phoebus ! what a name ! " cried Bert. "Almost as long as a Maine lake," Jack declared. 58 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES CAPTAIN AMIDAS MEETS THE INDIANS OF ROANOKE. Uncle Tom nodded. "It is quite a mouthful," he agreed. "Well, cer- tain history scholars claim that the two captains anchored off there, and that the first landino- of Eno-lishmen on the American coasts was on that Hat- teras beach. But Major Welch of Boston, who has made an exhaustive study of the matter, declares that Amidas and Barlow came to anchor about twenty miles above here, and entered North Carolina waters somewhere near Kitty Hawk or Cuttyhunk. The shifting sands of these Carolina ■coasts destroy old landmarks or make new ones, and it is hard to locate waterways." " Kitty Hawk and Cuttyhunk ! What deliciously absurd names ! " com- mented Marian. "American adaptation of Indian originals, I believe," Uncle Tom ex- plained, "even as these two settlements on this island — Wanchese, where we landed, and Manteo, where we now are — perpetuate the memory of the two Indians who were kidnapped by the twin captains and carried off to England as samples." "Pleasant way of doing things our old forebears had, had n't they?" said Jack. "Was n't it dreadful!" exclaimed Christine. "Did the Indians like it, Uncle Tom ? " IN THE LOST COLONY 59 " Indians are naturally inquisitive and delighted with novelty," Uncle Tom replied ; " but they are also home-lovers and resent indignities. These two red men lived to return to Roanoke, — Ohanoak, they called it, — and lived their lives out here as friend and foe of the white man." " Which was which ? " asked Marian. " Wanchese was ever the bitter and unrelenting foe, Manteo the stead- fast friend," Uncle Tom replied. "Wanchese had a hand, no doubt, in the final tragedy of Roanoke. Manteo was always a helper, and was here proclaimed by the English governor ' Lord of Roanoke and of Dasamon- guepeak.' " " Much good it did him, no doubt," was Bert's comment. " But what was the final tragedy of Roanoke ? " demanded Roger. " We are coming to it rapidly," was Uncle Tom's answer, as, three miles to the north of Manteo, they rode into the region of woods and sand-dunes, and, within a circle of faintly marked upheavals, came upon a memorial slab, set in the midst of trees. "This is old Fort Raleigh," said the driver, reining in his horses. The tourists dismounted, and, gathering at once before the six-foot stone monument set up in that out-of-the-way spot by the enterprise and energy of North Carolinians, they listened while Bert, adjusting his refractory glasses, read aloud the inscription which, surmounted by a Greek cross, told the story of the historic ground on which they stood. " Well, that 's mighty interesting," said Bert, as he concluded. * " Is n't it, though ! " said Marian. But Roger stood silent. "Why, I thought — " he began ; but Jack cut him short. " You thought, my son, that Plymouth Rock was the first and only pebble on the colonial beach, did n't you ? " said the New-Yorker. " But " — wav- On this site, in July-August, 1585, (o. S.), colonists, sent out from England BY Sir Walter Raleigh, built a fort, call- ed BY THEM "THE NEW FORT IN VIRGINIA." These colonists were the First set- tlers of the English race in America, they returned to England in July, 1688, with Sir Francis drake. Near this place was born, on the 18th of august, 1687 virginia dare, The First child of English parents born IN America— daughter of Ananias Dare AND Eleanor White, his wife members of ANOTHER BAND OF COLONISTS SENT OUT BY Sir WALTER Raleigh in 1687. On Sunday August 20, 1687 Vir- ginia Dare was baptized. Manteo, the FRIENDLY CHIEF OF THE HATTEHAS INDIANS, HAD BEEN BAPTIZED ON THE SUNDAY PRE- CEDING. THESE BAPTISMS ARE THE FIRST KNOWN CELEBRATIONS OF A CHRISTIAN SAC- RAMENT IN THE TERRITORY OF THE THIR- TEEN ORIGINAL United States INSCRIPTION ON TABLET AT OLD FORT RALEIGH. ing his hand toward the monument — "you see, you see ! Only I will say, Roger, my boy, that I thought so, too." " But Plymouth stands to-day," said the boy from Boston ; " and this — this — " He looked at the green-capped sand-dunes, untenanted save for the new memorial tablet. -This — is the Lost Colony," Uncle Tom remarked, filling Roger's uncompleted sentence. 6o THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " But how was it lost ? " queried Christine. Thereupon Uncle Tom told the story of Raleigh's dreams and schemes, of Queen Elizabeth's interest, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's fate, and Sir Richard Grenville's efforts, until the boys and girls declared it to be almost like living with the delightful people of Kingsley's "Westward Ho!" He told them how the reports of Captains Amidas and Barlow led Sir Walter Raleigh, then high in the favor of Queen Elizabeth, to ardently desire and determine upon the English colonization of America ; how the AT OLD FORT RALEIGH. Showing also the site of the home of Virginia Dare. queen, hating Spain and loving her own glorification, seconded Raleigh's desires and permitted the attempt at the colonization of the "American land" to which Raleigh, in honor of her whom the men called the "Virgin Queen," had given the name of Virginia; how the queen would not let Raleigh go along, "out of her affection for him," much to his disgust; and how in April, 1585, Sir Richard Grenville sailed from Plymouth with seven ships and "one hundred householders." He tofd the young people how Grenville landed his colony here — "almost where you stand' — on Roanoke Island, and then sailed back to England, while Ralph Lane, whom he left in charge, proceeded to build this very fort within whose faintly marked outlines they had read the memorial tablet, and which he called Fort Raleigh ; how the colony languished and would have starved to death had not Sir Francis Drake, coming upon them in the very nick of IN THE LOST COLONY 6i time, carried them back to England, and, with them, two famous American offerings to Europe's necessities and indulgences — potatoes and tobacco. He told how Grenville, coming to Roanoke with supplies, found the col- ony gone and the fort deserted, but left fifteen men to hold the ground, with two years' provisions ; how Raleigh backed up another colonial enterprise, styled "the Governor and Assistants of the City of Raleigh in Virginia," and saw a second expedition of one hundred and fifty colonists, with John White as governor, sail away to Virginia. He told how the col- onists, with strife between the leaders, were left in an unsup- ported condition in and about Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, and how at last the governor, White, was sent to England to obtain help and supplies. But the Spanish Armada, so Uncle Tom explained, so occupied England's attention and energies at that time that help could not be granted nor supply- ships spared. "Twice," said Uncle Tom, "did Raleigh fit out relief expeditions. But one was seized for the home defense by the British government, while the other was beaten back by the Spaniards; and when, in 1591, four years after he had left the colony. Governor White did get across the seas to relieve the colony and see his dear little granddaughter, Virginia Dare, of whom this tablet tells you, not a living soul was to be found. The colony was lost. To this day, in spite of conjectures and theories, its fate has remained a mystery ; and so it must remain forever one of the tragedies of Ameri- can colonization — the Lost Colony of Roanoke." • " How sad ! " exclaimed Marian. " Poor little Virginia Dare ! " said Christine, glancing at the memorial stone and sighing over the unknown fate of this lost baby of the long-ago. " How many were there in the colony when the governor went off for help ? " queried Roger. SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 62 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES THE LANDING OF GRENVILLE'S "HOUSEHOLDERS." " Over a hundred," Uncle Tom re- plied. " And a dozen of these, at least, were women." "^T^ "And do you mean to say," Jack demanded indignantly, "that one hun- dred men in a fort so well placed as this could n't hold it with guns and powder and shot against a lot of naked Indians armed only w^ith bows and arrows? Kingsley's men in 'Westward Ho! ' would have held it." " I 'm afraid they did n't have many Amyas Leighs among them," declared Marian. "Was n't there any way to find out something about them? " inquired Christine. IN THE LOST COLONY 63 "What did the Indians say about it all ? " asked Bert. "Four years is a long time to hold out on a storm-beaten, harborless coast," Uncle Tom explained. "The first colonists to America did not know how to get along, either in raising crops or conciliating Indians. The colonists of Roanoke — including your little friend Virginia Dare, Christine — were either massacred or adopted by the Indians hereabout, and this memorial tract in the sand-dunes, upon an island to be made yet more fa- mous two hundred and seventy years after by the fierce fighters in America's Civil War, is the only thing left to mark the ambitious beginnings of ' the Governor and Assistants of the City of Raleigh in Virginia,' the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and the fate of little Virginia Dare." " Except the story of 'The White Doe of Roanoke,'" said Christine. " What was that? " queried Uncle Tom. " Why, that nice old colonel we met at Elizabeth City yesterday told the story to Marian and me," Christine replied. " He said that for years after the colony was destroyed a beautiful white doe used to haunt the island and stand on the slope of the grass-grown fort, looking mournfully out to sea. The Indians hunted this doe and tried to kill it, but no arrow or bullet had any effect, until one day that hateful Wanchese, who had been to England and was a foe to the white men, you know, stood here and fired at the white doe a silver bullet which Queen Elizabeth had given him as a defense against witches." " Well, did it work? " cried Jack, as Christine hesitated. " Too well, Jack," Christine replied sorrowfully. " The colonel says that Wanchese's silver bullet brought down the game, and as he dashed forward with his hunting-knife, the white doe sank in death right here where this tablet stands, and sighed out as her last breath the words ' Virginia Dare, Virginia Dare.' " " Every place has its legends," said Uncle Tom, "and old Fort Raleigh, you see, is no exception. But though the first attempt at planting an Eng- lish nation on these shores ended so disastrously that even the fate of those who founded it is a blank page in our history, the efforts of Raleigh led to further and more successful attempts, and the noble earl whom Elizabeth the Great loved and honored, and whom James the Little hated and slew, declared even in the midst of failure, ' I shall yet live to see it an English nation.' " " And did he? " Marian asked. " I hope so." " He did, although he was then a prisoner in the Tower, condemned to an unrighteous death by a small-minded tyrant," Uncle Tom replied. "For when, on that October day in 161 8, he laid his head upon the block, saying 64 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "THE SAVAGES — THE REDSKINS! 'WARE ALL!" How the colony fell. bravely to the hesitating headsman, 'Strike, man ! What dost thou fear?" English colonies had already obtained a foothold, and the advance toward Anglo-Saxon supremacy in America had begun. For Jamestown had been settled." "How soon did they try it again here in North Carolina?" Bert inquired. " Not for a hundred years was Raleigh's attempt at colonization re- peated within the present boundaries of North Carolina," answered Uncle Tom. " And then it was begun by those same high and mighty lords pro- prietors who nearly smothered South Carolina in the cradle by the burden of those absurd and un-American 'forms and fundamentals' of which I told you. But the people who gradually came into North Carolina were not to be held down by lords proprietors or by royal governors. They were among the first in the colonies to demand a free Parliament and freedom of IN THE LOST COLONY 65 religion. From the sea-coast to the mountains their chain of settlements grew. In Alamance, not far from Guilford Court-house, where we once found a restored Revolutionary battle-field, was struck, in 1771, almost the first blow for independence ; at Mecklenburg, near Charlotte, which we also visited, was signed, in May, 1775, the first preliminary declaration of inde- pendence. So, you see, the land which was the first to receive the footsteps of colonizing Englishmen was the first to strike openly for freedom of speech, of religion, and of action, and the plucky colonists of 1776 built into a free and independent State the fertile section of America that had its beo-innino- in the sad and pathetic story of Raleigh's Lost Colony of Roanoke." THE SEAL OF THE LORDS PRUi'RIETORS OF CAROLINA. DRAWN BY HOWARD HILMICK. ENGRAVED BY C. STATE. GOING TO CHURCH AT JAMESTOWN. CHAPTER V WHERE THE OLD DOMINION BEGAN Newport News and Modern Progress — The Father of Virginia — Smith and Pocahontas — San Miguel and Jamestown — The Ruined Tower — Williainsbttrg and its Memories. T HE clang of hammers and the puff of steam filled the air as the steamer swung at the dock at Newport News ; the towering red iron hulls of the big cruisers and great steamers building in the yard filled the eye to the right, while, to the left, men and mules and steam-shovels and cranes were scooping out the great hole in the ground which, so the boys and girls were assured, was to be the largest dry-dock in the world. " Big things going on here, eh. Jack ? " said Roger, as the boys surveyed the busy scene. " Is n't the Illinois a rouser, and would n't Captain John Smith be surprised if he could see what was being done here on his familiar river ? " "I don't know as he 'd find it so very familiar, with all these modern wharves and docks and machine-shops and war-ships; do you, Roger? " queried Bert. " I don't know as he would," Roger admitted. "And phew ! would n't that flame in the foundry scare him ? He 'd imagine he was in some regular Macbeth witch-circle, instead of quiet Virginia." "I don't believe it would," Jack declared. "Nothing ever fazed the cap'n ; did it. Uncle Tom ? " "Not if we can believe his own stories," Uncle Tom replied. " But then — the captain was a master hand at telling stories, you know." 67 THE HARBOR AT NEWPORT NEWS JOHN SMITH'S DAY 68 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "Why ! what do you mean, Uncle Tom ? " demanded Marian. " Were n't they all really so ? " " Well, my dear," Uncle Tom replied, as the steamer moved from the dock and steamed up and across the broad, bluff-bordered river to Fergus- son's, '' qicien sabc, as the Spaniards say. In these days, when even Plutarch is doubted and Herodotus is called the ' Father of Lies,' who can wonder that we criticize a man who, though he died at fifty, and lived forty quiet years in England, declared that he spent thirty-seven years in the midst of war, pes- tilence, and famine, crowded the story of fully five years of adventures into less than eighteen months, and, though in Virginia only a little more than two years (where he landed as a prisoner and left in disgrace), was still so well able to plagia- rize the works of others into a ' General History ' that people for nearly three hundred years have actually believed his yarns and admitted his claim to remembrance as the father of Virginia!" " Oh, come. Uncle Tom, are n't you a bit too rough on the cap'n ? " asked Jack. " Why — then — did n't Pocahontas — " CAPTAIN TOHN SMITH Christine began. But Uncle Tom refused to be led into argument. " I 'm not claiming anything, my dear young protesters," he said. "I 'm only giving you the results of the latest investigations into the value of Cap- tain John Smith's veracity. I once got myself disliked for trying to tell the true story of Pocahontas. So, if it will soothe your perturbed young spirits, I stand as ready to show you the very stone on which the doughty Captain John laid his devoted head as I am to place you upon the very rock in the Catskill Mountains upon which Rip Van Winkle went to sleep." " Oh, I 've seen that," said Marian, confidently. " Of course you have, my dear," said her uncle, suavely ; "and no doubt that piece of wreckage over yonder by White Shoal Lighthouse is a bit of that very same good ship, Sarah Constant, within whose hold, as it came sailing wing-and-wing up this very river, one John Smith lay a prisoner and malcontent — and, therefore, the father of Virginia ! " Roger looked as though he were not sure of Uncle Tom, and even Jack seemed troubled. " Fiut who was the father of Virginia, if he was n't?" Bert demanded. " I don't know as we can give any one man the credit of being really its 'father,'" Uncle Tom answered, "though I fear there were several who had WHERE THE OLD DOMINION BEGAN 69 the colony's affairs in charge whom we might call its stepfathers, don't you know — and pretty poor ones at that ! But if ' father ' means founder or promoter, the first place must be given to Sir Walter Raleigh, who gave the idea of Virginia colonization form and force. Next to him, Thomas West, the good and noble Lord Delaware, has place. Indeed, one of the deepest and most reliable students of Virginia history declares that ' if any one man can be called the founder of Virginia, it is Thomas West, third Lord Delaware.' And there are others, as you boys say : Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, enterprising and practical directors of affairs, of the latter of whom John Rolfe declared that ' Sir Thomas Dale's worth and name in managing the affairs of that colony will outlast the standing of this plantation ' ; New- port, the great captain for whom Newport News was named ; George Percy, the colony's best chronicler, and twice governor pro tern., with other names, less known, of those who had part in the stormy beginnings of the FACSIMILE FROM SMITH'S "GENERAL HISTORY. Old Dominion. And yet all of these have for years and years been over- shadowed by the self-assertive John Smith, who was a failure as explorer, settler, promoter, and president, but who could tell so plausible a story that, because he outlived, even as he out-talked, all his contemporaries, he has linked his name inseparably to the history of Virginia as the colony's father, founder, and foremost man." Up the wide James River they held their zigzag course as the steamer touched at wharves on 'either shore. At last, stretching its park-like meadows before them, on the right bank of the stream they spied a long, low-lying green and tree-sprinkled island, floating almost on the bosom of the river, in marked contrast to the high-facing bluffs of Scotland, across the stream. The sandy beaches gleamed yellow in the sun ; the river 70 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES rippled blue and sparkling from shore to shore ; from a little cove at the northern end there shot out a long, new, commodious steamboat pier, flanked by green trees upon a little rise of ground to the left, while in the fields to the ripfht rose the blackened brick walls of a burned and ruined mansion. Then the steamer slid in alongside the dock, the hawser-loops fell into place over cleat and post, and Uncle Tom and his party descended to the lower gangway as the plank was run out. " All ashore for San Miguel ! " cried Uncle Tom. "Jamestown ! " announced the first officer. And the young people, be- lieving the first officer, and yet having implicit faith in Uncle Tom, backed their conductor against a tier of asparagus-crates filled with the best product of this green, low-lying islet, and demanded : " Now, sir, what do you mean ? Is this Jamestown, or is it — what 's your Spanish name? — San Miguel?" " It 's like the Irishman's problem in pronunciation, boys and girls," he declared with a laugh. " ' It 's nather, for it 's ayther,' so Pat said," "Explain yourself, good sir; you speak in riddles, forsooth," said Jack, striving to get what he called the " colo- nial flavor " into his speech. Uncle Tom paid the " wharfage fees '' for his party, — " as if we were so many bundles of asparagus," objected Marian, — and, as they strolled up the long dock to the tree-shaded inclosure, reminded them that he had already told them of the Spanish Captain de Ayllon's attempt at the colonization of Virginia in 1526. " He came up this river with nearly five hundred colonists," said Uncle Tom. " He landed here, and, almost on the exact site of Jamestown, built houses and started a colony, which he called San Miguel. But malaria, lack of gold, and dislike of the climate and the surroundings dissatisfied the Spanish colonists, who all aimed to be Pizarros at once, and when sickness had killed their leader and reduced their number to one hundred and twenty, they gave up in disgust, and sailed away to the West Indies. Then James- town Island lay here unsettled and unknown for eighty years, when Captain Newport's English colonists came oversea seeking a home in Virginia. THOMAS WEST, LORD DELAWARE. WHERE THE OLD DOMINION BEGAN 71 They picked out this very island as the best place for settlement, and, land- ing here in 1607, began to build a 'city,' the only remains of which is the broken brick church tower yonder, within the inclosure, festooned with ivy and half sheltered by its grove of trees." They passed through the entranceway, and stood before the crumbling square tower, built at once for religion and war, that marks the remains of the vanished colony of Jamestown. Behind it, dark in the shade of hack- RUINS OF THE CHURCH TOWER, JAMESTOWN. berry and sycamore, lay the old, old stones of the ancient cemetery, some of them, like that on Commissary Blair's grave, hoisted high by the aggressive roots of the big sycamore, sprung from the old commissary's bones. "And is this really where John Smith went to church, and where Poca- hontas was baptized and married ? " asked Marian. "The place, assuredly, but not the same," Uncle Tom replied. "This 72 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES old tower marks the fourth church erected here by the Virginia colonists, and was probably built after the burning of Jamestown in the time of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. As to the surroundings — come up with me to the ridge and take a surv^ey." They entered the confines of the encircling mounds that marked the grass-grown ramparts of the old Confederate fort, and, standing on the shore above the almost obliterated ruins of the ancient powder-magazine, they looked about them. One hundred yards from shore, a lone cypress-tree sprang, bent, but green and flourishing, from a single tuft of earth ; still farther out, remains of spiles and piers rose above the rippling water. " That stretch of water was Jamestown," said Uncle Tom ; " that, too, was doubtless San Miguel. The river currents and the northwest winds for three centuries have worn and washed and eaten this island shore until full two hundred yards and more of old Jamestown have disappeared. Govern- ment and the island proprietors have alike tried to save this historic spot from destruction, but, thus far, without avail. The powder-magazine, which stood far inland, has, as you see, been almost washed away, and unless some vital measures are taken, the old church tower and the crumbling gravestones will vanish too, in time. But even thus the colony town which England planted here in 1607, and alternately fostered and neglected through ninety years, vanished finally froiPx the scene ; and to-day that ruined tower and those neglected gravies are the sole reminders of the life and hope, the jealousy and love, the strifes and struggles, that once were active here, in the days when, upon this low and grassy island, the Old Dominion had its beginnings, and, truthfully or not, gave to fame the names and deeds of John Smith and Pocahontas and Rolfe and Nat Bacon and Governor Berkeley, while others even more important in the story of American colo- nization have been neglected or forgotten." "Interesting old spot, is n't it?" said Bert, surveying the scene, where trees and vines, dismantled Confederate fort, and broken ancient tower com- bined in a landscape at once attractive and suggestive. "Water privileges rather too generous, I should say," remarked Jack, looking over the decaying shores to the solitary cypress-tree, the wide-reach- ing river, and the submerged colony lands. But the girls dropped upon the grassy slope of the old fort, and, glancing up at the " ivy-mantled tower," as Christine, remembering her Gray's " Elegy," insisted on calling the picturesque ruin, they demanded of Uncle Tom that here, " on the very spot," he should refresh their minds as to this old Virginia colony. " It is a stirring story, boys and girls," said Uncle Tom, from his lounging- WHERE THE OLD DOMINION BEGAN /6 place beneath the great, flower-crammed rose-bush. "And yet it is briefly told. Suggested by Raleigh, fostered by Elizabeth, evolved from the Lost Colony of Roanoke, backed by British capital, compounded of British rest- lessness, British feuds, and civil wars, this colony of Jamestown was founded by a company of adventurous, illy assorted, and disappointed gold-hunters THE OLD MAGAZINE AT JAMESTOWN. in May, 1607. It began in struggle, was rent by quarrels and jealous- ies, scarcely survived Indian craftiness and lack of home support, and yet was lifted out of failure by the practical statesmanship of Lord Delaware and his liveried retainers, curbed into law and order by wise Sir Thomas Dale, awakened into a love of liberty by the misgovernment of Argall, stirred into faction and feud by the strifes of Cavalier and Puritan, and plunged into open rebellion and civil war by the blunders of Berkeley and the patriotism of Nathaniel Bacon. And yet, in spite of despotic governor and independent coFonist, with all the faction and friction that their antago- nisms meant, the colony grew with constant accessions from England, and with more and more of the wilderness turned into farm-land. Tobacco became the corner-stone of Virginia's wealth. Excepting the litde village of Jamestown on its marshy island, there were few, if any, towns in the colony ; but in seventy years the population of Virginia had grown to forty or fifty thousand. By the increasing wealth of the colony more home- seekers were attracted to Virginia, and when the American Revolution opened, Virginia was the oldest, the most populous, and the most important of all the thirteen colonies, with a total, in white and black, of over half a million inhabitants." 74 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Slavery began here at Jamestown, did n't it, Uncle Tom ^ " asked Roger. "Yes, when the Spaniards first came here in 1526," Uncle Tom replied. " For when the adelantado De Ayllon began to build San Miguel, here on Jamestown Island, he did it with the help of negro slaves brought from the West Indies." " Why, I thought the English colonists were the first slave-owners here," said Bert. " Spaniards first, as usual, you see," said Jack. " I never heard of such * previous' chaps as they were." " But they did n't stick, you know," said Roger. " No, they did n't stick, as we do know," Uncle Tom assented; "and the permanent colonization of America, as well as the beginning of its slave- trade, was really laid by the Englishmen here at Jamestown. The Span- iards were the instruments, however, even in this final curse of the slave- trade ; for, you must know, the first cargo of negro slaves was not the Dutch cargo you have learned of in history, but was brought by Captain Daniel Elfrith on the English privateer Treasurer, and was part of a cargo taken by him in 1619 from a ship of Spain which he had overhauled at sea. So you see how from the Spaniards themselves came the seeds of that crime which, two hundred and fifty years later, almost split the great American republic in twain; and we may remember Captain Daniel Elfrith of the Treasurer as the man who introduced two pests into America — rats and negro slavery." " Rats ! horrors ! " cried the girls, springing to their feet. " Do you suppose they 're here yet, Uncle Tom ? " said Marian, looking anxiously about her. " I do detest rats." Uncle Tom rose laughing from his nook under the big rose-bush. "They 've vanished with the Jamestown colony, I guess," he said. " Come, there 's the carriage ! All aboard for Williamsburg ! " They drove across the creek and through the fair York woods to Williamsburg, successor to Jamestown as the colonial capital. As they crossed the creek Bert said: "The superintendent at the cottage told me that this island used to be a peninsula in the colony days, and that it was over the neck of land that ran across from the north end of the island, yonder, that Bacon rode with his volunteers to capture the town, and that Pocahontas came bringing warning or relief to the colonists." " That way as well as any other," Uncle Tom assented. But Marian did not like his tone. "What do you mean. Uncle Tom? " she demanded. "Was n't it so ?" "As to the peninsula? Oh, yes," her uncle replied. 76 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " And as to Pocahontas ? " persisted Marian. " Gone to join Captain John Smith and Washington's cherry-tree ! " said Jack. " I don't like to have you not believe those things, Uncle Tom," said Christine. " I 'd like to believe anything that pleases you, my dears," said Uncle AN OLD JAMESTOWN STREET. Tom ; " but when you corner me on the truth of history — why, that 's where I am like the greatest of all Virginians : I cannot tell a lie." " No Pocahontas, no Powhatan, I suppose? " said Christine, shaking her head sadly. WHERE THE OLD DOMINION BEGAN 11 " Far from it, my dear," said Uncle Tom, with a smile ; " there were lots of him. We read in the records of the ' great Powhatan ' and the ' little Powhatan,' and the 'river of Powhatan 'and the 'town of Powhatan,' from all of which we must infer that Powhatan was the name of an Indian tribe in possession of this land along the James and the York, with their main lodges or ' capital' on what is known as Timberneck Bay, on the north shore of the York, a little above Yorktown. The chief of the Powhatans, who gave the Jamestown settlers so much trouble, and figures so largely in Captain Smith's story, was really named JMa- monatowick — " " The father of Pocahon- tas ? " queried Marian. Uncle Tom gave his niece a quizzical smile. "Which Pocahontas do you mean, my dear ? " he said. " He seems to have been the father of several Pocahon- tases. For, you see, poca- huntas was Indian for ' tom- boy,' and there are at least three such from the Powhatan tribe to whom this nickname was given. The Pocahontas so dear to all American girls is now proved to have been ten years old in 1608, to have been married to an Indian chief in 1610, and to have been nineteen years old in 1614 ! You cannot make these things agree, you see; so we must conclude that the chief of the Powhatan Indians had two or three ' dear litde daughters ' who were so full of spirit as to be called 'little tomboys,' or poca-huntases ; that one of these was friendly with the English settlers at Jamestown, and warned them of Indian attack or helped them when taken captive, while one, whose name was Ma-ta-oka, and who had married an Indian chief called Ko-ko-un in 1610, was married a second time to John Rolfe in April, 16 14, and so became the Pocahontas of history." The girls and boys were by no means satisfied with this " true-story business," as Jack termed it; but their pleasant ride through the woods to Williamsburcr soon drove Pocahontas from their minds, and as they rode --^'■^"!j^^^^^ CHURCH OF BRUTON PARISH, WILLIAMSBURG. ^8 * THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES past the ancient college and down the broad main street of the old colonial capital, they found fresh matters of interest and inquiry. They roamed up and down the broad streets of the old town, attracted by everything, from the brick-boring insects in the tower walls of old Bruton Church, the font out of which Pocahontas was baptized, and the grave of Martha Washington's first husband, to the red-and-white monogram on the polo-caps of the college boys. They strolled across the green where, on the site of the colonial palace, now stands the " Grammar and Matty School of the College of William and Mary" ; they visited the quaint buildings of the old, old college from which were graduated four signers of the Declaration and three Presidents of the United States; they visited the site of the old Capitol in which historic Virginians had " moved " and " resolved " and " de- clared," from royal governors like Spotswood and Dinwiddle to noble rebels like Patrick Henry and George Washington ; they joined, each of them, the " Order of Jamestown," which the patriotic rector of old Bruton had just instituted ; and they so mingled the past and the present, the ghosts of old renown and the very living and lively collegians of to-day in their walks and talks, that, when they took the cars for Richmond, they were not altogether sure as to which interested them most — the W and M, in the shape of which the loyal Governor Nicholson had laid out the streets of the old capital, or the W and M embroidered on the polo-caps of the boys who, in these athletic days, put new life into the second oldest college in America — the College of William and Mary. The Old Dominion — as it was the fashion to call Virginia, so Uncle Tom informed them, because of its loyalty to the pestilent Stuart King of Eng- land in the days when the great Cromwell laid the foundations of a later and nobler England — was, he said, not so much a colony of towns as of farms and plantations. Its people were scattered and agricultural, and the aris- tocracy of estate had a firmer footing in Virginia than in any of the other colonies. "Convicts, redemptioners, and negro slaves," Uncle Tom said, "of whom there were many in Virginia, went far to create and foster this un- fortunate spirit of caste; but the breath of freedom and the liberty-loving spirit of such men as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry in the fullness of time broke into this un-American spirit and made Virginia one of the stanchest as she was the most aggressive supporter of independence in the days of the American Revolution." "How do you explain that, Uncle Tom?" queried Bert. "One would think that so aristocratic a colony as Virginia would have stuck to the king to the last." WHERE THE OLD DOMINION BEGAN 79 " It was largely because of their own belief in themselves," replied Uncle Tom, " that Virginians became protesters and patriots. They yielded to no one in a question of right or position ; the leaders of Virginia believed themselves the natural leaders of America; and you know what Burke says — you boys and girls who have had to study his great speech : ' Those who have been accustomed to command were the last who would consent to obey.' So the lords of thousands of Virginian acres cast in their lot with the farmers and fishermen of Massachusetts, and from town and plantation, from fertile valley and forest-crested bluff, from the sandy capes of the sea- shore to the verdant slopes of the Blue Ridge, planter and pioneer, redemp- tioner and ranger, aristocrat and artisan, the seed of old Jamestown and the sons of the Potomac sedges joined hands to make the Old Dominion a free and independent commonwealth — the nursery of statesmen and the mother of Presidents." THE POWHATAN CHIMNEY. Above Gloucester Point, on the York River. The last Virginia relic of the Powhatan chiefs. THE LANDING-PLACE, OLD GEORGETOW^\ Three miles above Washington city. CHAPTER VI FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUNTIES Terj^a Marie — Latin Names fo7^ American Colonies — A Colonial Memory — St. Mary s arid Joppa — Where Rodney Rode — With Swede and Dutchman. COAT OF ARMS OF ANNAPOLIS. TERRA MARIE! Is that what you say they called it?" Marian exclaimed. "Who gave the place such a name as that, Uncle Tom?" " Sounds too much like terra-cotta," grum- bled Jack. "What 's the matter with good American for an American colony ? I hate those faked-up Latin names." Christine laughed heartily ; but Bert, his scholarly instincts quite outraged by what Uncle Tom called "Jack's Philistinism," fairly shook his cousin in critical disapproval. " Faked-up Latin ! good American ! Why, what are you talking about, Jack Dimlap ? " he cried. "Terra Marie is the 'land of Mary,' and that comes pretty close to being Maryland, does n't it ? And Maryland is good enough American, I should say." " S'pose I don't know that, Bert the scholar ?" demanded Jack, indig- nantly. " I was only asking why they Latinized it. American 's good enough for an American colony — that 's what I said." " The Latinizing of Maryland, as you call it Jack," Uncle Tom explained, " was the idea of King Charles I, who, in granting this territory to Lord Baltimore, — a territory, by the way, including the present States of Maryland, Delaware, and most of Pennsylvania, — requested that it be known as Terra Marie, in honor of his queen, Henrietta Maria — the Tand of Mary,' and hence Maryland, as Bert explained." 82 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " It was n't the only colony that started with a Latin name, was it, Uncle Tom ? " queried Bert. "Certainly not," his uncle replied. "From Maine to Mexico, Latin names were first given to the new lands. For you must remember, my very American Jack, that Latin was the language of literature, of science, and of diplomacy, and these three professions had very much to do with the work of colonization and land-naminor, Pascua Florida and Terra Marie, Virginia and Carolana, Nova Scotia and Nova Albion, Georgia and Laconia, Nova Francia, Nova Csesarea, and Sylvania or Penn-sylvania — these all were the Latin originals of certain of the colonies in America, some of which to w^ '. [^ THE STATE-HOUSE, ANNAPOLIS. this day, as you know, retain their first-acquired names. The most of them, however, were Anglicized or turned into English equivalents; and so it came to pass that the Terra Marie of King Charles's day became the Maryland of colonial. Revolutionary, and modern American times." They stood within the old State-house grounds in the beautiful city of Annapolis, which persecuted Puritans from Virginia first founded in 1649 under the name of Providence, and where, in March, 1655, was fought, be- tween Puritan and Cavalier, the bloody battle of the Severn, the first armed victory for democracy on American soil, so Uncle Tom asserted. On their left, upon the green slope of the Capitol grounds, rose the colossal bronze figure of Chief Justice Taney, an honored son of Maryland ; to their right they saw springing from the turf the heroic figure of the Baron de Kalb, swinging his sword aloft as he led the Maryland troops to a glorious defeat FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUNTIES 83 INTERIOR VIEW IN THE BRICE HOUSE, ANNAPOLIS. on the battle-field of Camden; behind them rose the symmetrical dome of the old State-house, heralded, when it was built in i 704, as the finest in the land, and hallowed to-day by memories of such great American events as Washington's resignation as general of the American army in i 783, the rati- fication of peace with Great Britian in 1 784, and the session of the first con- stitutional convention of the United States in 1786; before them, stretching down to the beautiful Severn, lay the old town — "perfectly dear," so Marian declared, "with its old colonial houses and its streets with high-sounding names"; and "just immense," so the boys voted, in its crowning glory of the United States Naval Academy, fascinating to every young hero-worshiper who bows before American sea supremacy from Decatur to Dewey. They had come down to Annapolis from Washington, twenty-five miles away, and they were delighted with everything they had seen in Mary- land's capital city. They had roamed its streets, seen its sights, " kodaked " its typical old-time mansions and hostelries, from the double-winged, ample Brice house on Prince George Street, and the broad, hospitable-looking Chase mansion, to the old City Hotel, where Washington always "put up," and the other " photographical finds," as Jack called them, that suggested the days of Pope and Marlborough and good Queen Anne. 84 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES They had sailed down the bay to Kent Island, that big, broad piece of farm-land dropped into Chesapeake Bay, where first the doughty Clayborne, colonial Maryland's "thorn in the flesh," had set up his claim as proprietor, and fought Lord Baltimore's men on land and sea. And last, but by no means least, they had invaded the Naval Academy grounds, and, under escort of the genial chaplain and his gracious wife, had saturated themselves with the atmosphere of American naval heroism, from Perry's immortal pennant — " Don't give up the ship" — to the memorial tablets to Bagley and Jenkins, the Academy's contribution to the honored dead in the war with Spain. Indeed, the new and the old pressed so closely upon each other in the historic old town that Uncle Tom had to break away from the Naval Academy and seek the State-house slope to recover what he called the colonial atmosphere. "What with that Institute Hall just yellow with the captured flags of Manila and Santiago," he said, " and living captains and commodores in the war of '98 saluting you beside the band-stand, I 'm afraid I was as much in danger of the contagion as you; so, as we have an hour before train - time, let 's rally here under Sir Christopher Wren's dome and pull ourselves back into colonial history." " There 's lots of it here in Annapolis, certainly," said Marian. "Sure ! " Jack assented. " But say, Roger, would n't you like to see that match between the cadets and Pennsy? I '11 bet that chap they said was cap'n of the nine is just a hus — " But Marian cut him short. " Base-ball is too disgustingly modern, Jack," she cried. " I want to know about Maryland. Besides, that one you call the captain was n't nearly as good-looking as — " "Where 's St. Mary's?" Uncle Tom broke in, with a ringing laugh. "Talk about contagion ! Come, colonials, where 's St. Mary's ?" "Gone, you told us. Uncle Tom, that day we sailed down the Potomac," Christine reminded him. " That 's so; you have the best memory, after all, my dear," Uncle Tom said, with an appreciative nod. "There is n't much more left of Maryland's first capital than of Joppa, its wide-awake first seaport." "Where was Joppa?" queried Bert. "Up on Gunpowder River, midway between Baltimore and Havre de Grace," replied his uncle. " It was started with a great flourish of trumpets, and was, in its day, the most famous seaport town of Maryland. But as Annapolis swallowed up St. Mary's, so did Baltimore, in turn, absorb Joppa and Annapolis too, and swell to great proportions as a commercial center. To-day a few gravestones and a pile of grass-covered brick-heaps (as in FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUNTIES 85 the vanished colony of Jamestown) are all that remain of the vanished seaport of Joppa on I?ig Gunpowder," " How soon after Virginia was Maryland settled ?" asked Roger. "Twenty-three years after Newport's fleet sailed up the James," Uncle Tom replied, " was the good Lord Baltimore denied a home in Virginia. GEORGE CALVERT, FIRST LORD BALTIMORE. From a portrait presented to the State of Maryland by John W. Garrett. Esq. So he secured from the king a granfof Maryland. But even before his day the William Clayborne of whom I told you had established a trading-post on Kent Island, and — " "And I '11 bet a cooky," Jack broke in, "that those day-before-the-fair Spaniards had been 'snooping around' here, too." "You 'd win your bet, Jack," laughed Uncle Tom. "For, sure enough, between 1560 and 1570 Villafane — " Ju A V ■|, ^% P A. u (- K ^Sz^ftC^ ^ . K'' .j 5 '- 2^ ■': 'L-]k-tz . rB'fi.Krp: ;;I?3i.l ^^: V^.O^'Mv--. (T.'M^. j;iiiiiaimlimil!liiiaiiiiilM!iiiiiiaii:iaii:::i::kiiiiiii! ^^^a^^V^P^^-^^^v^ <:IABu MAP OF THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE Drawn by John Wliite, ■'yaV'^ V\0'Jy G A ux « •# :^^' IVj |bi:f-''-Hi' 4.0 59 5S ■ W ATLANTIC COAST OF NORTH AMERICA. artist to the Raleigh Colony. 88 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "The angelic gentleman ?" queried Marian. " Yes, my dear," replied her uncle, "and your good friend Menendez — " " Oh, Uncle Tom ! Don't call him that, please," Marian again protested. " I think he was just horrid." " Your picturesque enemy Menendez, then," said Uncle Tom, with a bow in acknowledgment of the protest, " sailed up the Chesapeake to build chapels, found missions, hunt for gold, and hang Indians. But — " "They did n't stick," said Roger, with his favorite expression. " No; Maryland was to be English — English and tolerant," Uncle Tom replied; "for no other expedition of exploration or settlement amounted to anything until Lord Baltimore's colony sailed into the Potomac in 1633, and began, upon the green and beautiful bluff at the mouth of Washington's home river, the settlement known as St. Mary's, the first home of religious toleration in America." "More so than Rhode Island? " queried Roger, who, so Jack declared, always had his New England line and rule ready for a measurement of standards. " I 'm afraid that history will discriminate, Roger," Uncle Tom replied. "Rhode Island was first settled by factious and turbulent fanatics; Mary- land by broad-minded, liberal, and peace-desiring colonists. But, on the other hand, Rhode Island was an independent colony ; Maryland was a pro- prietary colony. It was owned and ' run ' by the Baltimores, good enough to begin with, but petering out sadly in later generations, much the same as did the Penn proprietorship in Pennsylvania." "Why, how was that. Uncle Tom? Were n't the Penn family good and sober Quakers always ? " Marian exclaimed. "We '11 see when we get to Philadelphia," her uncle answered. "The fact is this, however: Both the Baltimores and the Penns were proprietors. That means owners. And Americans have, even from the first, resisted own- ership. The proprietary governments were feudal — based on the traditions of the middle ages. And America stands for progress. A vast and practi- cally an unpeopled country suggests a chance for all, you see ; it fosters the spirit of independence. Hence the proprietors and their tenants were ever at loggerheads ; hence the struggle in this colony between the Puritans and the Cavaliers — between the spirit of progress and the traditions of the past. Maryland became in time ripe for independence, and the names of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, an Annapolis boy, who signed the Declara- tion, and of Francis Scott Key, a Frederick County boy, who graduated over yonder at St. John's College, and later wrote the " Star-Spangled Ban- ner," outlive in American memories even the best and greatest of all the FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUxNTIES 89 AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY. Lords Baltimore, proprietors and feudal lords of this colony of Terra Marie." " Well, good-by to Annapolis ! " said Jack, as he swung- himself on the 90 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES train just before it pulled away from the dingy little station. " It 's a fine old town, anyhow, from Prince George Street and the Severn to the Acad- emy grounds and the commodore, and I 'm mighty glad I Ve seen it." AN OLD MARYLAND MANOR-HOUSE. " Belmont," the seat of the Dorseys, built in 1738. To which sentiment all the boys and girls assented heartily, and Uncle Tom, with " Richard Carvel " in his hands, read aloud, as the engine puffed off to the junction, the chapter that told how Dick and Dorothy, on "one 2d of May," sailed in the squire's pinnace down the Severn and around the toe of Kent Island, from Annapolis to the Hall. Christine had closed her eyes as she listened. '■ I can see it all," she said, " from Marlborough Street to Carvel Hall ; and all those old-time names and old-time houses we heard and saw in An- napolis make the story as real and vivid as if I had been there, too, with Dick and Dorothy and the squire. Is n't it delightful to visit a place where the scene of a story you like is laid ? " " We have been fortunate in that way, my dear," Uncle Tom assented. FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUNTIES 9 1 "What with 'Prisoners of Hope' and 'To Have and to Hold' at Jamestown, and 'Richard Carvel' at Annapolis, we are now quite ready to take our way to Philadelphia and see that famous old town in the time of William Penn and in the atmosphere of 'Hugh Wynne.'" So they came to Philadelphia. But even before " doing " the Quaker City, they ran down the Delaware to Chester and Wilmington, where, in the early days, Dutchman and Swede had struggled for possession until the all- compelling Englishman came with his patents and his charters and took to himself the country alike of Swede and Dutchman, without so much as saying " By your leave ! " The boys and girls confessed to a little disappointment in Chester, for they expected to discover and roam the rambling old-time streets they had read of in "Old Chester Tales," and to meet Dr. Lavender or Miss Maria jogging along in chaise or cabriolet. Instead, they found a very modern setting for the oldest town in Pennsylvania, and, save for the quaint old court-house and the grass-covered site of old St. Paul's, they saw little to remind them of the Upland of the Swedes, who settled it, under that name, in 1643, or of the old-time Chester that Penn called it, when he " ac- quired " it from the Swedes in 1682. So they boarded a car in the square and "trolleyed " to Wilmington, nine miles down the broad and busy Dela- ware, past old stone houses of the ancient type and modern dwellings of to-day, where, from the highway along the first ridge of the Brandywine hills, they could overlook the intervening farm-lands and the wide sweep of the Delaware, around which had sailed, in days gone by, explorer, colo- nist, philanthropist, sectary, refugee, friend, and foe. The river lay, far-reaching and misty, in the distance, and as the scent- laden breeze from grass-land and farm-land came in through the open car- windows. Uncle Tom assured them that they were riding through a historic land. " How the old patroons and burghers of the Valley of the Swans, as the Dutchman De Vries first called this section, would stare in amazement, could they see us whizzing along in this ' witch-chariot,' as they would be sure to term our trolley," said Uncle Tom ; " and how this same trolley line would have helped along Caesar Rodney as, over this very road, he spurred his horse from Dover to Philadelphia to reach Independence Hall before night and give the vote of Delaware for freedom and the Declaration." " Oh, Uncle Tom ! was this where he rode? " exclaimed Christine. "Sure enouo-h ! " cried Jack. " Don't you remember how and where he rode ? Say ! he must have gone almost as fast as the trolley, eh ? 92 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES ' It is five; and the beams of the western sun Tinge the spires of Wilmington gold and dun. Six ; and the dust of the Chester street Flies back in a cloud from his courser's feet.' Great ride that, eh ? " " And it was right along here ? How delightful ! " said Marian. "We are looking down upon reminders of other events, too, from this trolley-shod ridge!" Uncle Tom remarked. "Where the river swings in its great and graceful curve from the bay to the cities, have sailed many ships laden with peace or war in days gone by. Here steered Hudson and Mey and Penn and Franklin ; and yonder, off Wilmington, the British frigates dropped anchor after the battle of Brandywine. Great names, too, are as- sociated with the land — Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish hero-king, and his famous daughter Christina, for whom the creek that flows through Wil- mington was named. The very name first given to that old city was in her honor, for it was called Christina-hamm, or Christina-town. Indeed, my young people, if we remember that the English colonization of America was due to a boy king, Edward of England, we must also set it down that the tide of Swedish emigration to these shores was set in motion by a girl queen, Christina of Sweden." "And a historic girl at that, Uncle Tom ? " suggested Marian. " Yes, eminently so," her uncle answered, with a smile of acknowledg- ment. " From the day when Oxenstiern the chancellor — whose name also is associated with this region — set the girl of six on the throne of her illus- trious father and cried, ' Swedes ! behold your king ! ' Christina of Sweden was, in name and in fact. King of Sweden and lord of this land of Delaware — which they called New Sweden. But the Swedish subjects of the queen- king were raced and driven about this colony by the Dutch as mercilessly as ever the Dutch envoy himself was raced and driven by this tomboy queen — you remember the story, do you not ? " They did remember it, for they all read " St. Nicholas" ; and the region through which they were " trolley ing " took on a new interest when they learned that it was linked to the name of Christina of Sweden. At Wilmington they took a carriage and drove about the town, covering all its points of interest, from the Old Swede Church near the river, with its simple gravestone of our first ambassador to England, to the home of one of the most famous American illustrators and the modern Gilpin Avenue houses on the hill above the town. From that high outlook they could see Christiana Creek — the debatable boundary between Dutchman and Swede — winding this way and that over FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUNTIES 93 the marshy lowlands to the Delaware ; they located the probable site of the Swedish fortress named for a girl, — Fort Christiana, — half a mile above its mouth; and, returning to Philadelphia by the river-boat, noted along the Delaware, on either shore, the points where rival nations strove for footing as, in what was known as the South River country, they sought for peace- ful homes, but secured instead only an uncertain tenure. QUEEN CHRISTINA AND THE DUTCH ENVOY. " Up this broad river," said Uncle Tom, " sailed Captain Thomas Young in an English ship, in the summer of 1634, feeling his w^ay from Cape May to Trenton, fondly expecting to discover that entrance to the Mediterranean Sea which, so the Indians assured him, lay four days' journey beyond the western mountains." "The Mediterranean Sea! " exclaimed Marian, laughing. "What an idea ! " " I 'm afraid those Indians were n't up in geography," said Jack. " Their Mediterranean Sea and that of Captain Young were something altogether different, you see," Uncle Tom explained. " They undoubtedly referred to Lake Erie and that marvelous chain of five great inland, or mediterranean, seas upon our northern border." "Oho ! then they were n't so far out of the way as Captain Young was, were they ?" said Roger. "Anyhow, Captain Young was stopped by the shallow water and rocky ledges above Trenton, and so missed his Mediterranean trip," Uncle Tom continued. " Other explorers had doubtless, long before Captain Young's 94 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES day, sailed far up the river — perhaps even your prying friends, the Span- iards, Jack; for they were in this very region early in their American career, and — " " I was just going to ask if they were n't on deck here first," Jack broke in. "They always seem to have been in the lead when there was any discoverinor to be done." " But the real occupation of the land did not begin until a Swedish syn- dicate, headed by Gustavus Adolphus and his courtiers (and, after his death at Liitzen, continued by his daughter Christina and her advisers), planted a colony here in 1639, and claimed the land from Capes May and Henlopen to Philadelphia and beyond. The Dutchmen of New York, however, — New Amsterdam, you know, — objected to New Sweden, as Christina's colonists called their American home ; for, you see, the Dutchmen claimed everything from Connecticut to Virginia. So they built a fort at Gloucester, just above here on the New Jersey side. The Swedes built Fort Christiana at Wilming- ton, and from words the controversy came finally to blows in 1654, when the Swedish governor captured a Dutch fort which he said was in Swedish terri- tory. Thereupon down to this region came the terrible Governor Stuyvesant, the wooden-legged Dutchman. He captured Fort Christiana, made all the settlers take the oath of allegiance to Holland, and literally wiped New Swe- den off the map. The Dutch, in turn, were swept off by the English in 1664 ; and in 1682, when William Penn came sailing up the river, landing at Newcastle and Wilmington and Chester and Gloucester, and finally at Phila- delphia, the English occupation of the country was complete, and Swede and Dutchman alike became English subjects. Christina-hamm became Wil- mington ; Upland became Chester; Fort Nassau was called Gloucester; and just above the northern boundary of New Sweden rose, in time, the roofs of Philadelphia." "Seems too bad to have had all they did go for nothing, does n't it?" said Roger. "But I suppose that was the only way to make America." "Mark the progress of Anglo-Saxon absorption, my son," said Jack, grandiloquently. " One by one other nations come over here and start things; one by one England embraces them all; and it was a regular bear's hug, for they never came out from that embrace — as nations." "No; but they did as a Nation, don't you see. Jack — a Nation with a capital N, too," Bert responded. " It had to be fusion before it could be freedom; did n't it. Uncle Tom?" '' E phiribiis nnuni, you know," said Uncle Tom, with a nod. "And though all here are now Americans, it is interesting to note how the life FROM THE SEVERN TO THE THREE COUNTIES 95 of the people still retains traces of the founders of each section; for, just as the Old Swede Church in Wilmington, with its distinctively old-world air, still links us to the time of Penn and Printz and Stuyvesant, so out of the sturdy Swedish stock came the men and women who, in later years, were the patriots of Caesar Rodney's day, and the signers of the Constitution." ROM A PHOTOGRAPH OLD SWEDE CHURCH, WILMINGTON. A COLONIAL SCHOOLMASTER. I COAT OF ARMS. CHAPTER VII FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK In Penn Treaty Park — The Elm Tablet — William Penn — The Walking Purchase — Cranks and Citizens — Pastorins — Colonial Philadelphia — In the Jerseys — Plowdens Patent — Thrifty Farmers. I^ROM the high walls of a far-reaching factory and foundry the trim grass-plats and paved walks of a little park ran down to the pier-guarded river. Set almost against the west wall of the factory buildings rose a modest memorial, simple in design, and brief, though positive, in its inscription, its white stone grleaminor against the grreen of the ivied wall. " So this is Shackamaxon, is it ? " said Roger. "Is or was, Roger," replied Uncle Tom. "It is now the Nineteenth Ward of the city of Philadelphia, and, as you see, is in the heart of the manu- facturing district. But in the good old colony days this land, sprinkled with noble elms, sloped down to the Delaware yonder ; and right here, as you may read on this tablet, stood the most notable of all those splendid trees the old Elm of Shackamaxon, beneath whose spreading branches was made, as one historian calls it, ' the one treaty never subscribed to and never broken.' For this is Penn Treaty Park." "Where Penn made his treaty with the Indians, eh?" said Jack. "And bought their land for a song," said Bert. "Could n't do it, my boy," Jack declared. " Quakers don't sing." "But was it what that man called it. Uncle Tom — 'the one treaty never subscribed to and never broken'?" queried Roger. "I 've been taught that the Puritans of Plymouth treated the Indians just as squarely as Penn did." "Of course they did, my venerable Ancient and Honorable," said Jack, ''of course they did. They never had any witches; they never hung any Quakers ; they just loved the Indians to death ! " 98 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Come, come, Jack ! no sarcasm," Uncle Tom broke in. " There is reason in all things, and, as you will learn if you study Massachusetts his- tory, the things you inveigh against were just and necessary. While, as for that Indian treaty, Roger is right, as I can show you. Just now, however, we are more interested in William Penn than in the Pilgrim Fathers. Read the inscription, Bert." The " Reader of Inscriptions to the Expedition," as Bert had been dubbed, read as directed. Upon the front face of the tablet were the words : "Treaty-ground of William Penn and the Indian Nations, 1682. Un- broken Faith." On the right face Bert read : " Pennsylvania Founded 1681. By Deeds of Peace." And on the left face was the inscription : " Placed by the Penn Society a.d. 1827, to mark the site of the great elm-tree." "Unbroken faith and deeds of peace, eh?" said Jack. "Modest, are n't they ? Claim everything, seems to me." "As they had a right to, so far as William Penn was concerned," Uncle Tom declared. " The founder of Pennsylvania was, to my thinking, one of the most remarkable men in history, and as one who was willing to show his faith by his works, this tribute to his principles is altogether justified. The son of a great soldier, and a dashing soldier himself, he sacrificed position, estate, privilege, and his father's good opinion to become the follower of that shepherd boy who became a saint — George Fox, the great Friend, the prophet of absolute equality. Through good report and evil report, in prison and out, William Penn remained steadfast to the principles he had accepted, and when his father's death left him a very rich man, with an in- come of nearly forty thousand dollars a year, he determined to devote his wealth to the good of his fellow-men — and died a bankrupt, the victim alike of his principles and his friends." " Awfully good, was n't he ? " said Marian. " I don't know ; it does n't seem just right," Roger mused. " Sort of an unselfish spendthrift, don't you think? " "It was n't business, at any rate," Jack declared. " How would the world get along if every one did that way ? " " No fear of that happening. Jack," Uncle Tom said, with a smile ; " but though Penn did use up his estate for his hobby, Pennsylvania, he was a wise, shrewd, and practical man of affairs, only, as is the case even with many business men nowadays, he undertook a greater scheme than he could suc- cessfully handle. But he started it so wisely and so well that to-day this great city and this flourishing commonwealth are the result of his labors and the fruitage of his plans." As they sat in the little pavilion overlooking the busy river, Uncle Tom FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK 99 :.... .^^ ■//„ r////A ■//'// y /'////,. 1 /J /';/./'/// ! ... ,/,. /,',.,.,-/,,/„„: ■ /'"■ /,,„.,„,„/,. THE OLD ELM AT SHACKAMAXON. From Birch's Views of Philadelphia. told his boys and girls the story of Pennsylvania, and how the wisdom of William Penn laid the foundations of a mighty State. " King Charles, out of respect to the memory of Penn's father, and as a payment for a debt due his estate, gave the son the value in Pennsylvania grants — a convenient way the Stuarts had of paying their debts without money and in other people's land. These same lands, however, had been sold by the Indians to the white men several times. Dutch, Swedes, and Englishmen alike had bought them. But as the Indian's idea of land titles was altogether different from the white man's, we can't really find fault with the red men for selling, or the white men for buying." " But did n't Penn buy the land from the Indians under the old elm where the monument stands?" asked Bert. " No more than he really made a treaty there," Uncle Tom replied. "Why! did n't he?" cried Christine, who hated to have her idols shattered. " Well, not in the exact sense that tablet implies or your histories assert," Uncle Tom replied. "As a matter of fact, there never was any real 'Penn l. of C. ^ lOO THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES THE LANDING OF PENN AT DOCK CREEK, PHILADELPHIA. From Watson's " Annals of Philadelphia." Treaty ' with the Indians. But, also as a matter of fact, he made many treaties with the Indians." " How you do love to say just such mixy-up things, Uncle Tom ! " exclaimed Marian. "Whatever do you mean?" "Well, you see, my dear, William Penn was a very just and well-mean- ing man," her uncle replied. "He was what the boys call 'square,' Lord Macaulay to the contrary notwithstanding." "Why, what did Macaulay say of Friend William?" demanded Jack. "Said he was an 'unfit man for an honorable career,' and charged him with the crime of selling into slavery those school-girls who embroidered a flag for the rebel Monmouth," Uncle Tom replied. "What, the maids of Taunton — those eirls we read about in the 'Oak Staircase,' Uncle Tom? How dreadful! He did n't do it, did he?" cried Christine. "I 'm glad to say he did n't," Uncle Tom replied. " Macaulay liked to pull down the accepted estimates of great characters — " "As he did the Puritans," said Roger. Uncle Tom nodded and proceeded : " So when he found that a Penn had a hand in that miserable affair, he jumped to the conclusion that it was William the Quaker-, whereas investigation proves it was quite another man." FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK lOI " I 'm glad of that," said Christine. " I think it was real mean of Macaulay," said Marian. "Penn made, as I have told you, several treaties with the Indians," 90 V.'5i SV MAP SHOWING INDIAN TRIBES FIRST KNOWN TO THE COLONISTS. Uncle Tom went on. " One of these, perhaps made under this very tree, in 1683, granted him what was known as the Walking Purchase." '' What was that? " asked Roger. I02 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "The Indians were an odd sort of landowners and real-estate men," Uncle Tom replied, "and under this Walking Purchase they agreed to sell Penn as much land west of the Delaware River as a man could walk over in three days. So Penn and some of his friends filled their lunch-baskets and set off on a sprinting match against time. But they gave it up before it was won, for they only walked about a day and a half. That satisfied Penn, w^ho was forty years old and rather stout. But fifty years later, when THE WALKING PURCHASE. Penn's idea of a fair bargain had died out, some of his successors thought they 'd finish out his walking contract, so they engaged three fast runners, divided the 'event ' into three parts, and by this means in another day and a half added ninety miles in a straight line to Penn's original Walking Purchase, and then claimed it all." " And took the prize, I suppose," said Jack. "Assuredly," his uncle replied. "Business was business, even when it came to outwitting Indians." " I 'm glad William Penn did n't do that," said Christine. " It does n't seem right." FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK 103 " No; it was n't exactly in Penn's style," Uncle Tom declared. " He tried to be just and liberal in all thing's. He gave the Indians equal rights and equal justice with the colonists; he gave the colonists peaceful possession of their land on the fairest terms ; he permitted liberty of conscience as no other colony had done, only stipulating that his colonists should believe in one God and obey the laws. Pennsylvania, indeed, was the only colony in the world which gave religious freedom to all alike — Jew as well as Gentile. The Jews, however, were not allowed a vote ; but, as one discriminating stu- dent remarks, voting was esteemed a privilege and not a right. In fact, William Penn's ' Body of Laws,' as he called the regulations which he made for his colonists, are well worth your reading — and they are by no means dry reading, either." " Did he settle here in Philadelphia riofht off? " asked Marian. " He never really did settle in Phil- adelphia himself, or in Pennsylvania, either, my dear," her uncle replied. "The settlement of Pennsylvania was due to him, but he only visited the colony twice, staying here two years each time. In 1868 the old slate-roofed house in which he lived, at what is to-day the corner of Second Street and Norris Alley, was torn down, and the house he built for his daughter Letitia has been removed to Fairmount Park. He had, too, in Bucks County, four miles above Bristol, what was called his country house. But all his interests lay, as all his life was spent, in England, and his labors in behalf of the colony he founded in America were neither satisfactory nor remunerative. ' I am day and night spending my life, my time, my money, and am not a sixpence enriched by this great- ness,' he wrote home to England; and then he added: 'Had I sought greatness, I had stayed at home.' " "But do you really count William Penn a great man, I'ncle Tom?" Bert asked. " So great, in many ways, that America has not yet properly appre- ciated the influence he was in his day and for all time," Uncle Tom replied. WILLIAM PENN. Taken at fifty-two years ot age. I04 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES THE SLATE-ROOF HOUSE, BUILT 1685. \Hovic of Samuel Carpenter.\ WILLIAM PENN'S HOUSE IN PHILADELPHIA. " He was the first practical promoter of tolerance, independence, and equal rights. He was the first to propose a union of all the American colonies. He first suggested and tried to establish the Court of Arbitration and In- ternational Peace, that even the recent Peace Congress at The Hague has found it hard to pledge the world to. A hater of slavery, and the first nation-builder to seek to unite all men against it, William Penn was at once philanthropist, philosopher, and practical man of affairs. Brave as a lion, gentle as a lamb, rebuking certain of his own following for foolish fanaticism, and yet loyal to his beliefs and principles through life, William Penn stands side by side with John Winthrop as a 'maker of America.'" "Then that monument up there by the factory wall is right, I suppose," said Bert, "when it says ' Pennsylvania founded by deeds of peace.' " " It certainly is," Uncle Tom replied. " The very first people to take up Penn's offer of his broad Pennsylvania acres at forty shillings a hundred — " " For a hundred acres? Whew ! " cried Roger, thinking of the present value of the land about them. " Cheap as dirt that was really, was n't it? " said Jack. "Yes," assented Marian ; "but if you could buy it by just walking over it, you could afford to sell it cheap, I suppose." FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK IO5 "No, no," her uncle corrected; "that was simply for measurement,. Marian. The Indians agreed to sell as much as a man could walk across in three days. Penn settled for it all honorably with the red men, though, of course, at 'bargain prices.' He had fifty thousand square miles of territory granted him, so you see he could afford to sell his land cheap. He offered it to all Europe as purchasers. He was a famous man throughout Europe even then ; for he was widely known as a reformer, and his scheme for an 'open door' to all people and to all religions was quickly taken up by those who had suffered persecution for opinion's sake. As I was about to say, the very first persons to avail themselves of his liberal offer of land at forty shil- lings a hundred acres (with a nominal rent to him as owner and proprietor of one shilling a hundred) were the Mennonites from Germany, lovers of peace, opposed to war, office-holding, and legal oaths." " Huh ! " cried Jack. " They would n't be much good nowadays, would they? Any descendants living. Uncle Tom ? " "Hundreds and thousands, my boy," his uncle replied; "and a good stock of Americans they have developed, in spite of their odd views, I can tell you. They and the Pietists, the Dunkards, the Moravian Brethren, the Ridge Hermits, and Quakers of all degrees held opposition to war and the doctrine of non-resistance as the cardinal point of belief — or the practice of it. So, you see, Pennsylvania really was founded by men of peace and deeds of peace." " I should call them religious cranks," said Jack, bluntly. "Well, some of them were, no doubt," Uncle Tom replied. "In all religious movements the fanatic, or 'crank,' as you call him, is always con- spicuous. William Penn found that out speedily, and to his cost. For, be- sides disputes with Lord Baltimore's colonists over rights to land and divid- ing-lines, Penn had to face the cranks and crooks and charges of his own colonists, even of his own religious following. He had rascally agents and good-for-nothing sons, and before he died he had been forced to give up his proprietary rights to the King of England, and his descendants were bought off by a pension. He had really spent his life and his wealth upon his colony, but he had founded a State which was to become one of the greatest, the strongest, and the proudest in the future sisterhood of States, the home of freemen, of statesmen, and of heroes, of such men as Robert Morris and Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard and Thaddeus Stevens, and of that strong and sturdy German-American stock known as 'Pennsyl- vania Dutch,' which, coming here with the good Pastorius, Whittier's ' Penn- sylvania Pilgrim,' became in time the bone and sinew, the strength and support, of the great industrial commonwealth of Pennsylvania." I06 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " I know that poem of Whittier's, Uncle Tom," Christine observed. " I can almost see the pictures it gives, as you tell of peaceful Pennsylvania here beside the Delaware. Don't you remember that part? — this is for you, too, Roger" ; and Christine's gentle voice almost gave the spirit of peace to the Quaker poet's lines: " ' Who knows what goadings in their sterner way O'er jagged ice, reheved by granite gray. Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay ? * What hate of heresy the east wind woke ? What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke In waves that on their iron coast-line broke ? ' Be it as it may : within the Land of Penn The sectary yielded to the citizen, And peaceful dwelt the many-creeded men. ' Peace brooded over all. No trumpet stung The air to madness, and no steeple flung Alarums down from bells at midnight rung. ' The land slept well. The Indian from his face Washed all his war-paint off, and in the place Of battle-marches sped the peaceful chase, ' Or wrought for wages at the white man's side, Giving to kindness what his native pride And lazy freedom to all else denied.' " "Well, that 's peaceful enough," said Marian. "And stupid enough, too," the critical and " hustling" Jack declared. "All things unite for good, my dears," Uncle Tom reminded them. " Peace and war, creed and conscience, sternness and softness, the warrior and the reformer, have alike played their part in our nation-making, and to-day, as Whittier says in the same poem, ' Lo ! the fullness of the time has come, And over all the exile's Western home From sea to sea the flowers of freedom bloom.' " "But it was n't just here that Pastorius brought his people, was it?" queried Bert. "No; they founded Germantown — hence the name," Uncle Tom re- plied. " I move we go up that way and investigate." They did so ; and they did more. F"or, after once more going up and down the mile-long main street of Germantown, where Pastorius had settled FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK 107 A FAMOUS PENNSYLVANIAN IN PARIS. Benjamin Franklin and his grandsons in the Paris streets. his peace-loving weavers of Crefeld in 1683, and where, a hundred years later, had raged, up and down, the furious battle in the fog while Washing- ton had stood in command upon one of the old-time "fronts," they traced out all the colonial landmarks in Philadelphia ; and, from the Old Swede Church near the river, with the " foreign-churchyard " atmosphere, to the Letitia Penn house in Fairmount Park, the first brick house built in Philadelphia, they studied the early story of the Quaker City, even to the old mansions left as reminders of Hugh Wynne's warlike day. They saw, too, all the pleasant suburbs, new and old, of what had become, at the time of the American Revolution, the first city of America, laid out in checker-board pattern, with its open squares, poplar-lined streets, plain-looking houses and plainer churches, green orchards and gardens, io8 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM THE HOUSE WHICH PENN BUILT FOR HIS DAUGHTER. Now in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. paved crossings, police, firemen, street-cleaners, and street-lamps — all these latter the result, as they remembered, of Franklin's practical, energetic brain. Germantown and Bethlehem, Reading and Lancaster, York and Bristol, were, so Uncle Tom told them, the other growing towns of the province. In and round about them was lived the staid, simple, comfortable, but, as Jack decided, "deadly stupid " life of colony days; while in the scattered farmsteads and the rougher and lonelier frontier homes of the western bor- der were gradually developing, from the sturdy, thrifty, almost patriarchal farmers and pioneers, the substantial, permanent, and democratic freeholders who became, in time, the makers and defenders of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Then they moved up the Delaware and invaded the colony of the Jer- seys, with the ocean to the east, the hills to the west, and wide rivers cutting it into fertile fields and forests. " New Jersey," so Uncle Tom informed them, as from the top of the beautiful battle memorial in Trenton they once again overlooked the pleas- ant capital of the Garden State, "has a somewhat mixed colonial history. Its beo"innino-s were alike Dutch, Swedish, Cavalier, and Quaker. But nei- ther Dutchman nor Swede can be called the real colonizers, and the FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK IO9 practical beginnings of New Jersey may rightfully date from that August day in 1664 when Philip Carteret, first governor for the English Lords Proprietors, rounded Sandy Hook, tacked through the Narrows, sailed across the Kill van Kull, and, dropping anchor in Newark Bay, went ashore with his hoe on his shoulder, ' like any other farmer,' he said, and turned up the soil for the first New Jersey city, to which he gave the name of his wife — Elizabeth." " That 's nice, is n't it ? " said Marian. " I like that Philip Carteret." "Which was more than the Jerseyites did, my dear," said her uncle. " For as the towns in the province sprang up, and more and more colonists came to Elizabethtown and Woodbridge, Piscataway and Bergen and New- ark, they began to find fault with Governor Carteret's ways and methods, and gave him so much trouble that at last they met in Assembly, practically put him out of office, and elected his nephew governor." " Seems to me, in every colony we 've struck, there was just such trouble between the colonists and their governor," said Jack. "Almost without exception," his uncle replied. " Even Oglethorpe and Penn did not escape ; while such governors as Berkeley and Andros were in the hottest kind of hot water. Colonizers in every land and of every time are generally those who are dissatisfied at home, and when they come into a new country the dissatisfaction does not disappear. If they are to plow and plant and reap, if they are to build and develop and establish things, they always wish a voice in the developing and establishing. This is the story of colonization troubles, from Nat Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia to Jameson's Raid in South Africa. It was the story in the Jerseys, too, where, though things began peacefully enough, they ended in the open and armed protests of the American Revolution, and, even in the early days of the Earl- dom of Plowden, swept that noble proprietor's claim to the Jerseys into oblivion and forgetfulness almost before it was established." " What was that. Uncle Tom? " asked Bert. " I never heard of it." " No; it is a forgotten chapter in our colonial history," his uncle replied. " It seems that in 1632 a certain Catholic gentleman of England, Sir Ed- mund Plowden, wishing to equal the Carterets and Baltimores in impor- tance, obtained from King Charles I a grant of land in America which practically embraced all of New Jersey, parts of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, all the coast from Cape May to Sandy Hook, and all of Long Island — " " Tidy little bit of land, that," commented Jack. " Good gracious ! " exclaimed Roger. " How many times was that same land granted to different people ? " no THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Kings had a great habit of forgetting in those days, I guess," said Jack. ^ " Did Plowden ever occupy it ? " asked Bert. " He called the land New Albion, and himself Earl Palatine, Lord Pro- prietor, and Governor- General," Uncle Tom replied. " Plowden came over to visit and inspect his earldom in 1642. But he was a lord proprietor with scarcely a penny. He got into trouble over ownership with the Swedes of Delaware, who claimed the land, and with the Dutchmen of New York, who also claimed it. He was always ' hard up,' and rich only in promises. So, returning to England, he tried, in 1648, to induce colonists to settle New Albion and help to make his title good. But with so many grants and so much risk, English colonists had no great desire to try a settlement in the Jerseys, or New Albion, as he called it, where they could not tell what might happen. So the land remained unoccupied by Englishmen until the day of Philip Carteret and his hoe. Sir Edmund Plowden left his shadowy title and his yet more shadowy grant to his heirs as a legacy ; but they never had spunk enough to champion or defend the claim, and New Albion, as I told you, dropped out of existence even before it existed. It is quite an interesting episode, however, in colonial history — this grant with a title and a list of privileges longer than its life, and this ' onsartin ' claim to a vast territory, believed in but never defended by the heirs of Sir Edmund Plowden until the American Revolution brought it to a sharp and sudden ending." They visited and studied many points of colonial interest in the "Jer- seys." Uncle Tom explained that the quarrel over rights and boundaries and possessions between rival proprietors led them to divide the land, in 1676, into two parts by a line running southwest and northeast, so that the colony became known as East and West Jersey. Hence, even at the time of the Revolution, he said, the province was known as the "Jerseys" in the details of Washington's campaigns. "The population at that time," said Uncle Tom, "was largely English in stock and speech — 'a rustical people,' one of the colonial governors called them. Their towns were small and country-like ; their farms were un- fenced and unscientific. A cow and a side-saddle were the best wedding outfit a Jersey country girl would receive from her father at her marriage." " Gracious ! " cried Marian. " What did he expect her to do ? Saddle the cow and ride to her own wedding ? " " Give it up," said Uncle Tom. " I suppose her husband was expected at least to provide a horse to fit the saddle. The New Jersey of colonial days was a simple, hard-working, thrifty farmers' community, so unostenta- tious in manners that we read of one of its governors sitting on a stump in FROM SHACKAMAXON TO SANDY HOOK III COLONIAL TROUBLES IN NEW JERSEY. his meadow, laying down the law and judging cases, and so loyal to the powers across the sea that ruled or neglected it that one hot-headed man was prosecuted and fined simply for saying bad words about his Grace the Duke of Cumberland, whom loyal Englishmen in England did not hesitate to call the ' Butcher.' But out of thrift and moderation and simplicity came, in time, a sturdy independence that could stand beside Connecticut and Vir- ginia in backing up the rebellious spirit of Massachusetts in i 768, and could give to the new republic such patriots and heroes as the Livingstons of Liberty Hall, the Stocktons of Princeton, signers, soldiers, and sailors, Witherspoon, the college president who taught his students the worth of freedom, and Dayton and Paterson and Brearly, who, with another Livingston, put their names to the great and glorious Constitution." i Hi THE FIRST MINUET. CHAPTER VIII IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND Who Discovered the Hudson — Spanish Tracks and Trade-marks — T/ie First '' Apartment- honses^' — Colonial New York — The Purposes of Emigration — Stuyvesatit and the Knickerbockers — Through the Province. 'HEY stood close up against the zigzag gate that guards the rounded "jumping-off place " of the ferry- boat. "Fine river, is n't it!" exclaimed Roger, as he looked down to the Statue of Liberty and up toward the misty outlines of the Palisades. "Who discovered ■^^rJh^PlI^^b ^^ ^^^^' Uncle Tom? Not the Spaniards this time, mj6iC_T°i'!t^1'' eh?" The great city, with its high-aspiring sky-line, stretched before them, rest- less, vast, and American. And southward to the sea swept, as it had swept for ages, unchecked, unbridled, and uncurbed, the mighty river that in song and story, in fact and fiction, in history, adventure, traffic, war, and peace, out- classes every other river in broad and busy America — the Hudson. "What — de Rivier van den Voorst Mauritius?" said Uncle Tom, nonchalantly enough, but with a twinkle in his eye. "The — what?" cried Marian. "Why, the Great River of Prince Maurice — the River of the Mountains — the Rivier of the Iroquois — in other words, this very North or Hudson River which we are now crossing. It is a much benamed stream, boys and girls, and from the day when England claimed it because Sebastian Cabot happened to be once in this latitude (though out of sight of land) to the day when that same England lowered its flag on yonder Battery and yielded all claim of ownership and dominion to the victorious American republic, 114 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES KiEtjw Amsterdam;, aft d^/nniJUiBbattaiis THE "SKY-LINE" OF NEW YORK IN 1650. the colonial story of this splendid stream was as varied as it was stirring, and as attractive as it was romantic. In fact, no river of America better merits the hackneyed adjective ' storied ' than does the Hudson." "And who — after the Indians, of course — really first saw the 'storied' river, Uncle Tom? " Roger inquired. " The claims are as numerous as the names given it," Uncle Tom replied. "Let me see — we won't count the Norsemen, the Arabs, or the Welsh; we '11 give the go-by to John and Sebastian Cabot, to the Spanish succes- sors of Columbus who, it is claimed, left their traces in the valley of the Mohawk and of the upper Hudson — " "How could they, Uncle Tom?" demanded Roger, while Jack repeated his stereotyped declaration that "those Spaniards were the most persistently previous people that ever were." "There 's the proof of their presence dead ahead, Roger," Uncle Tom answered, pointing to the great city toward whose ferry-slips their boat was forging. "For there are certain philological scholars who claim 'Manhattan' to be a word of Spanish origin, indicating early association, in quite the regular discoverer's fashion, between the white man and the red, in this way : Manhattan, Manhates, Monatoes, Monados; and monados is a Spanish word signifying 'the place of drunken men.'" " Oh, come, now ! I don't believe that ! " " Why, how perfectly horrid!" protested Jack and Marian, like loyal and highly indignant New-Yorkers; while even Bert, who had great faith in philology, pushed back his hat and shook his head dubiously, and Roger from Boston almost fell across the ferry-gate in doubling-up laughter. " Of course, I only give you these stories for what they are worth," said Uncle Tom, in the midst of the protests. " I don't pretend to stamp them as true or false myself, any more than I could assert the truth of the legend of the Pompey stone, which claims to 'locate' Spanish explorers in central New York less than thirty years after Columbus discovered America." "What was that? What about the Pompey stone. Uncle Tom?" (jueried Bert. IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND 115 THE "SKY-LINE" OF NEW YORK TO-DAY. " It was a simple slab, presumably the headstone to an ancient grave, that was unearthed a few years ago near the town of Pompey in central New York. Upon it there was a nearly obliterated inscription in abbreviated old Spanish, which was translated and expanded to mean: 'In the year of our Lord 1520, in the sixth month, died here, in the hope of immortality, our comrade Leo, of the city of Leon in Spain.' Then, too, the Indian name for the section about Albany can be traced back to a Spanish root and made to mean ' the place of the trader ' ; so you see, even though I cannot sub- stantiate these claims, we may at least give them the benefit of the doubt, and admit that here, as at other points on the Atlantic coast, the Spaniards may have been the first comers." The boat bumped into the ferry-slip, and the travelers were soon gathered in Jack's hospitable home, detailing their adventures and investigations to such of the interested fathers and mothers as gathered there to meet them. But New York itself proved so ex- cellent a field forcolonial study that they spent the next week — with semi-occa- sional side-trips for other purposes than " cramming in colonial object-lessons," as Roger called their quest of the ancient — in hunting up old landmarks, or their sites, in the great city and its environs. Of actual landmarks they discovered but few. No. 39 Broadway, they found, singularly enough, to be the offices of a Dutch steamship company. For upon that very spot, so Uncle Tom informed them, Captain Adrian Block in 1 61 3 built the first apartment-houses in New York city, four small DUTCH HOUSE, ALBANY. ii6 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES FROM VALENTINE'S MANUAL ANCIENT VIEW OF THE PRESENT JUNCTION OF PEARL AND CHATHAM STREETS, NEW YORK. A, Catiemuts Hill. B, The Fresh Water. C, The Fresh-water Bridge. D, The Jews' Burying-ground. E, Rutgers Farm-house. F, The Bowery Road. G, The Road to the Ferry (present Pearl Street). H, Road to the City. I, Road to Rolck Pond. J, The City Commons. K, Walpherti Meadow. houses, half cabins, half wigwams, in which to shelter his shipwrecked sail- ors, and to trade with the Indians, after his ship, the Tiger, had been burned off Castle Garden. Down the bay they could discern the dim outlines of the hills of Navesink, off which Hudson first dropped anchor in 1609, ere he entered the famous river, which he explored as far as Castle Island, just below Albany. Uncle Tom also traced or paced with his young people the actual original outlines of the little town that had risen so slowly from the rocky point of the beautiful wooded island where two rivers grandly met, and which in 1626 the " Heer Director" Kieft bought from its Indian owners for twenty-four dollars. " The shore-line, you can see as we go over the ground, was not at all like the present frontage," Uncle Tom explained. " Almost all the water- front is reclaimed or made land. Water, South, and Front streets were all flats or part of the East River, while Nos. 71 and ']i Pearl Street, where the first city hall, or Stadt Huys, stood, was actually on the beach, or "the Strand," as the Englishmen called it. Broad Street was a ditch or little inlet up which the market-boats poled, and on the bridge across it the merchants first met in their open-air exchange, almost upon the site of the present splendid Stock Exchange. Up and down Wall Street stretched a fence to keep the cattle IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND 117 'TOWJVE OF from straying out into the wilderness, and that Hne of fence became palisaded wall to protect the town from Indian foray — hence Wall In fact, for many years it was the upper limit of the town, and the wall itself was not taken down until about 1690." As they walked the thronged and busy streets that crook and stretch along the section between Wall Street and the Battery, Uncle Tom pointed out the site of many important happenings, from Stuy- vesant's day and Leisler's time, when the colony passed its stress of beginnings, to that historic 30th of April, 1 789, when, from the bal- cony of Federal Hall, on the spot where his grand statue now stands, Washinorton took the oath of in- auguration as first President of later a Street. 5ft ivi|v OLD MAP OF NEW YORK. Showing the "wall" (now Wall Street) as the upper boundary. Pro- posals for the construction of this wall were issued in March, 1653, and from the rough drawing attached to the proposals the accompanying plan has been made. The wall was originally built by the Dutch as a means of defense against their New England neighbors. the United States, and the colony of New York became forever a sovereign State in the great republic. " This old town has seen many changes and a marvelous growth," Uncle Tom said, as, gathered once more in the pleasant library of Jack's home, they had the summing up of New York's colonial story. " Captain John Smith is credited with having told Henry Hudson about the trading pos- sibilities of the Hudson River, and as it was a desire for profitable trade even more than religious freedom that sent explorers and colonists over the seas — " PLAN OF THE ORIGINAL WALL WALL STREET. ON ii8 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "All of them, do you mean, or just New-Yorkers?" inquired Roger. " All of them, I imagine, irrespective of race, creed, or condition," Uncle Tom replied. " Here was a land where money could be made from the fisheries, the forests, the fur-trade, or traffic with the Indians, where homes FULTON FERRY IN 1746. could be established with reasonable hope of safety and comfort in due time, and where a man could worship the Lord according to his own desires — for the land was certainly broad enough for all. These were the causes, in their order, that sent Europeans over the Atlantic to the peopling of America, from Pemaquid to St. Augustine." " I thought it was a chance to go to church unquestioned," declared Marian, who could n't get Mrs. Hemans from her mind. " You will take Mr. Parkman's word for it, I hope, even if you won't take mine, boys and girls," said Uncle Tom; " and he distinctly tells you that ' the soldier might be a roving knight, the priest a martyr and a saint, but both alike were subserving the interests of that commerce which formed the only solid basis of the colony.' It took years of a developing Americanism to change commerce into conscience and peltry-getting into patriotism, and as it is desire for gain that has peopled wildernesses, founded states, and pro- duced nations, so, even more than in the other colonies, was eagerness for trading the chief reason for the colony, the State, and the city of New York." "But I don't like that, Uncle Tom," persisted Marian; "it sounds kind of sordid-like and selfish." "I don't see it," said Jack. "If a man does n't look out for No. i, no one else is going to do it for him. I don't believe the kings and compa- nies over the sea did much of the Golden Rule business with their American .? ^ I20 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES iiiMiiiii JOHN BOWNE BEFORE GOVERNOR STUYVESANT. colonists, SO, of course, the colonists had to look out for No. i. Is n't that SO, Uncle Tom ? " "To a certain extent you are right. Jack," Uncle Tom replied. "In fact, in colonization, as in other things, the truth lies in the mean between the two extremes that were expressed by Marian and you. While trading was the main reason for emigration to America, the chance to be less shackled by religious and political overlords impelled men of all European nations to come home-seeking to America. To New York, then as to-day, more than to any other American port, these mingled nationalities came, and thus, even in its early days, New Amsterdam and the later New York took on that cosmopolitan character that the town has ever since retained." "And New Amsterdam became New York in 1664, did n't it?" said Christine, certain of one date at least, she declared. "In 1664, yes, my dear," Uncle Tom nodded. "The Dutch power ' petered out' after about fifty years of uncertain foothold and frequent misrule." "Why, Uncle Tom," cried Bert, "I thought the Dutch boasted of liberty and toleration ! " "So they did, Bert," replied Uncle Tom, "and so, in a certain sense, they had good cause for doing ; but the story of Dutch colonization, especially in IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND 121 America, shows that Dutch governors served first their own interests, then those of their masters, the West India Company, and last of all those of the people, whose aspiration toward independence they always rudely smothered." " Stuyvesant, too?" queried Roger. " More than all the rest," Uncle Tom declared. " Stern and vigorous as he was, Stuyvesant was tyrannical in small things, as well as in important ones, 1 iVl ■ iZ9| ^^^^^^^^Bl ^^^i^H HBi<^^^v^H ^^^^^^^^|H^ ^^^^^^^^^1 liM ^^^^^^^^^^^P ^9|H| jp." fl ^^^^^K:^ ^M? 1 ^I^B^^^^^^^ ~ .M^^'K^i^^^ *s" j8H ^^..^,.,y^ jH mmjm MK^.^ .s;^^^^^^^Sl^Si8 IH^I Hh| 1 "' 1 PETER STUYVESANT. From a painting from life, in the possession of the New York Historical Society. and the mixed population of New York fretted under the restraints of a purely business autocracy, as was the Dutch syndicate that owned them, and became each year more desirous of freedom. So when, in 1664, a piratical sort of an expedition — for England and Holland were not at war that year — came sailincj into the harbor and summoned the Dutch authorities to ' sur- render the island commonly known as Manhattan, with all the forts there- unto belonging,' the people of the town forced the despotic Stuyvesant to IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND 12^ yield. ' I would rather be carried out dead ! ' he burst out, in brave but useless protest, and New Amsterdam became New York." "That was rough on the old Dutchman!" cried Jack. "Why did n't he fi^ht?" "You can't fight successfully if you 've got to do it all alone," said Uncle Tom, "and Stuyvesant had no support. The people were ready for change; as I said, they almost compelled him to surrender ; and the whole province speedily became English in rulers, in name, and in titles, even if not at once in population and customs." " Just what was the colony then, Uncle Tom ? " asked Roger. "The outposts of the New Netherlands which might be considered as marking the limits of Dutch rule," Uncle Tom replied, "were at Fort Orange on the Hudson, now Albany, the Fresh River region, now Hart- ford in Connecticut, Zwanendael on the South or Delaware River (as we saw when at Wilmington), Pavonia, or Jersey City, Breukelen on Long Island, and the capital town on Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam, now New York. This extended region had, in Stuyvesant's day, a population of eight thousand, one thousand of whom were resident on this island of Manhattan, in the quaint and perplexing town which was the metropolis of the colony." " How was it perplexing? " queried Roger. " Even as your own Boston has always had the reputation of being, Roger," Uncle Tom replied — "crooked as a ram's horn." "Well, that 's certainly more picturesque than the checker-board pattern in which you told us William Penn marked out Philadelphia," Roger declared, with a new and kindred affection for old New York. " The land of the Knickerbockers is indeed a picturesque portion of our common country, alike in situation, history, atmosphere, and development," began Uncle Tom, when Marian broke in upon him with a query. "Oh, Uncle Tom! why Knickerbockers?" she said. "Did n't Irving invent the name for us ? " " I 'm afraid he did. my dear," Uncle Tom replied. " I have never been able to hunt down the word beyond Irving's delightful tomfoolery, which too many Americans willingly accept as truth." " Why ! what do you mean, Uncle Tom ? " Christine demanded. " Is n't Irving's ' Knickerbocker ' truly true history ? " " Humor and satire are too apt to be taken as sober fact, my dear, when told with such apparent truthfulness as was ' Knickerbocker's History of New York,' " Uncle Tom replied. "What Mr. Roberts terms Trving's historical opera bouffe ' has, as he further declares, taken its place in our 124 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES literature, and colored the estimates of events in colonial New York. This is unfortunate ; for colonial New York had a mighty influence upon the fu- ture of these United States. Indeed, I am so sure of this that I tell you with OSWEGO IN 1760. all the emphasis of which I am capable that the corner-stone of the American republic rests largely upon the strong supporting soil of Dutch liberty, Dutch toleration, and Dutch integrity." "Carry the news to Plymouth, my boy," cried Jack, clapping Roger upon the shoulder. "The news was carried to Plymouth long before your day, Jack," Uncle Tom declared. "For it was through Holland, you know, that the Pilgrims came to Plymouth. But there, why need we be exclusive ? Every element that entered into the European exodus to America, from redemptioner to reformer, from galley-slave to governor, from Spanish freebooter to English Puritan, Scotch Covenanter, French Huguenot, Palatinate German, perse- cuted papist, and political prisoner, had its share in the compounding and finishing of the imperial republic that is to-day the wonder and admiration of the world. That ' all things work together for good ' has been amply proved in the history of these United States, where ' things ' have certainly been worked together more than in any other land." Bert, meanwhile, had taken a book from one of the library shelves and consulted it closely. "Here it is!" he said. " I thought I 'd find it in Townsend's ' U. S.' IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND 125 Uncle Tom was right ; you can't go back of Irving for the Knickerbockers. The word is a composite, so this book says, and really has no translatable meaning, but was introduced as a word coined by Washington Irving for his character of Diedrich Knickerbocker." " Well, it suits the place," said Roger, " for, as you say, New York is cosmopolitan, and, I suppose, hard to be translated." Jack looked closely at his Boston friend to see if any double meaning lurked beneath his words. But he gave it up at last, and simply said, in the way of query, " But New York is n't all Dutch and Knickerbocker, is it. Uncle Tom ? " "Well, it was largely Dutch and English in its beginnings," his uncle replied, " although the elements became, at last, as mixed throughout the col- ony as in the city of New York. There were really, besides New Amsterdam, but two Dutch towns (as the English called them) of any importance. These were 'Sopus, some eight or nine miles below what is now the city of Kings- ton, and Albany." " Both Hudson River towns," was Bert's comment. " Yes," said his uncle; "the Hudson River was the main artery of com- munication between the fur-traders of the north and the growing commer- cial town at its mouth. Indeed, the outlying posts — they were scarcely villages — were merely Indian trading-places, such as were scattered west- ward from Schenectady to Oswego; and not until the three thousand German refugees, flying oversea from the terrors of Eu- rope's Thirty Years' War, settled first along the middle Hudson and then in the Mohawk val- ley, did the development of that fair and fertile section really begin." " Must have been a slow sort of a life in those' days," declared Jack, who liked, as he said, to " see things hum." " Slow ? Well, Master Jack, I 'm inclined to think you might have pro- nounced it too wearing if you had been a Knickerbocker boy of colonial New York," Uncle Tom replied. "Why, I remember coming across a statement by one of the English governors of this province — about 1770, I A FAMILY COACH OF COLONIAL DAYS. 126 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES think — which declared that throughout the colony ' every house swarms with children, who are set to work as soon as they are able to spin and card ' ; and even in those early days the industries of New York were already struggling out of hard conditions into something like success. They were making glass and working iron along the Hudson ; pearlash and potash, too, with brick- makine and hat-makine; there were salt-works on Coney Island, woolen- manufacturing among the Germans of the Mohawk, while, as early as 1750, New York had over one hundred and fifty ships in the carrying trade, and was already forcing its way to the head as the commercial metropolis of America." "That's good," said Jack. "Glad I didn't have to spin and card, though." " I guess the folks who wanted things spun would have been glad, too. Jack Dunlap," was Marian's comment, evidently out of an intimate acquain- tance with Jack's qualifications as a steady worker. " But, Uncle Tom, was n't the colony full of those dear old-fashioned farm-houses, with the cute half- doors and all that ? " "Oh, yes, my dear," her uncle replied. "The Dutch characteristics, Dutch architecture, and Dutch ways prevailed in the province far into the English occupation — indeed, until the new rush of immigration after the Revolution changed the complexion of the colony. The Phillipse manor- house at Yonkers, the Washington headquarters at Newburg, the old Van Rensselaer house at Greenbush, still stand as types of those early days. And you remember, don't you, our visit to the old house up the Hudson, from which your mother's folks came, and which is crowded with colonial and Revolutionary memories?" " That 's what made me ask," said Marian. " I think it must have been a delightful place to live in when it was at its best." " Very picturesque to look at, with its sloping roof, wide half-door, ample chimneys, quaint tiled mantelpiece, and cavernous fireplace ; but modern improvements are best for modern boys and girls, I think." " Every time ! " declared Jack, evidently still thinking of the spinning and carding. " And I tell you what, Uncle Tom, I 'd rather be Admiral Dewey than Governor Stuyvesant, and run an automobile than a Dutch windmill." They all laughed at that, of course, as they always did at Jack's decisions. But when, later, they had sailed the Hudson to Albany, steeping them- selves once again in the legends and lore of that historic river ; when they had crossed Lake George, shrined in colonial romance, and at Ticonderoga had seen where a potent factor in colonial history had place when Champlain and his Frenchmen fought the Iroquois, who, because of their insatiable SHOPPING IN COLONY TIMES. 128 THE CExXTURV BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES VAN RENSSELAER MANOR-HOUSE AT GREENBUSH, N. Y. revenges, saved all New York from becoming a French colony ; when they had stood divided between interest in the powers of electricity and the romance of colonization in old Schenectady, and had seen many a historic landmark or relic of those earliest times of stress and struggle, they decided that, after all, much as they preferred being the heirs of the ages, the colonial age in New Amsterdam and New York had made Americans who, as Uncle Tom declared, " schooled by hard experience and ceaseless labor into a spirit of independency, gradually developed the manhood to assert and the determination to rule, which alike led to revolt aoainst a selfish and grasping despotism, and made finally the successful experiment of self- government and popular sovereignty." " Meaning the American Revolution, I suppose," said Bert. "Just that," his uncle answered. "For the patriots of New York were eventually the people — descendants of the Dutchman, the Huguenot, the Scotchman, the German, the Irishman, the English Roundhead, and the New England dissenter — the very men who, longing for a larger freedom of opportunity, peopled this broad colony of New York and left to their sons a heritage of hope. It was those very sons who, fighting ' with one spirit for a common cause,' won at Saratoga ' the battle of the husbandmen,' as it IN KNICKERBOCKER LAND 129 has been called, and made possible the success of the American Revolution and the present glory of the republic. So all honor to the colonists of New York, say I ! " " ' So say we all of us ! ' " sang Jack, swinging his cap, while the others joined in the appreciative chorus. IN MODERN NEW YORK. Madison Square, from in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. f>tnikhc.>,Ser>u» &: Co., £i,| CAPE COD — THE FIST OF MASSACHUSETTS. CHAPTER IX IN THE OLD COLONY On the Fist of Massachusetts — The Real Landing of the Pilgrims — The Compact Tablet at Proviiicetown — Why They were Pilgrims — The First Civil Government in A merica — Over the Bay to Plymouth — The Faith Monument — The Pilgrims Story on Pilgrim Land. YOU know where iinwoodecl Wood End curves around into Long Point, and one finger-tip pokes out from the doubled fist of Massachusetts ; where blue water, white-capped and restless in the southwest wind, calms Itself in the comparative smoothness of that remarkable and almost circular harbor of Provincetown — that odd, old city of the whalers and fisherfolk thrown like a long-stretched pr?^:- ribbon at the foot of the green-crested sand-hills that are the very knuckles of the fist of Cape Cod ? Well, rounding that finger-tip and into the hollow of the clenched fist the Mayflower scudded for shelter one November day of 1620 ; and around that same finger-tip, in a stiff southwester and a stanch but creaking old steamer, Uncle Tom and his "pilgrims" sailed the course of the Mayflower. From the end of the long and narrow wharf they walked up to the town, very near the identical spot, so Uncle Tom assured them, where the Pilgrim mothers went ashore for the first Monday wash- day in America, and, while thus laying the foundation of home life in New England, really, so Uncle Tom added, made at Provincetown the first land- ing of the Pilgrims. " I don't see how you can say that," said Bert, as the steamer warped about the end of the long pier. " They did n't settle here." POT AND PLATTER OF MILES STANDISH, IN PILGRIM HALL, PLYMOUTH. 1^2 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES PROVINCETOWN, " I know that," said Uncle Tom ; " but it was largely because of the Pilsfrim mothers that the Pilgrim fathers landed at all on the bleak New England coast. They were away out of their intended track, anyhow, for they had sailed across the sea to make a home either in Virginia or near the Hudson. But when, driven into this harbor of refuge, they determined to explore the land along Cape Cod, and, if possible, make a settlement in these parts, they were urged to that decision largely because there were women and children on board the Mayflower. If men alone had been in the Mayflower expedition, they probably would have hunted up a more conge- nial climate, or sailed back to England — as was often the case with these early explorers. But because of the women and children, weakened and wearied by the long sea voyage, they simply had to stay, and so we had on the Massachusetts sands our historic landing of the Pilgrims." " But I don't see how that makes the landing of the washerwomen here in Provincetown the real landing of the Pilgrims," persisted Bert, as, turning into the quaint old town from the long, narrow, wind-swept wharf, they walked its one main street. "Because, don't you see, Bert," Uncle Tom explained, "it was really the beginning of English domestic life in America. It made the expedition of the Mayflower something more than a voyage of discovery and explora- tion ; it was a real * home-hunt ' ; and the first New England ' wash-day ' on this sandy beach really showed the determination of the women to stay and ' settle down.' It was the introduction of family life into the new land and the new home to which they had come, and for the better protection of which forty-one resolute men over yonder in mid-harbor, and in the cabin of the Mayflower, had drawn up and signed the famous compact — the first IN THE OLD COLONY FROM THE HARBOR. PHOTOGRAPMEO BY ISAAC Step toward that Declaration of Independence that made the United States of America." " How do you make that out ? " said Jack, " What was it all about ? " They made their way along the plank walk on Provincetown's one street to where, in front of the town hall, stood the square stone tablet that com- memorates that very compact — "erected by the Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts," as the inscription informed them. "That famous compact," Uncle Tom declared, as Bert concluded his reading of the inscription, "was really making a virtue of necessity. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower — " "Who called them that first. Uncle Tom ?" Marian inquired. "One of their own company, my dear," her uncle replied — "a famous man who wrote a famous diary." " William Bradford was his name, was n't it. Uncle Tom?" said Roger, " I 've seen his diary — the real thing. They call it the Bradford manuscript now. It is in the library of the new State-house in Boston." "That 's the man and the manuscript," Uncle Tom assented, "and in that, when the emigrants were ready to leave their temporary home in Hol- land, Bradford declared that ' they were pilgrims, who looked not on the pleasant things about them, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country, and so quieted their spirits.' " " What had they been called before that time ? " Christine asked. "'Separatists,' my dear," Uncle Tom replied, "because, you see, they had separated themselves from the established English Church ; and ' Puri- tans ' because they believed that the English Church should be purified of cer- tain beliefs and superstitions. But the Pilgrims, you see, were just that litde 134 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES lot of ' come-outers ' from England Holland, and, later, a pilgrimage They came, as you know, in the In the name of God, amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal SUBJECTS of our DREAD SOVEREIGN LORD KING JaMES, BY THE GRACE OF God OF Great Britain, France, and Ireland, king, defender of the faith, etc, having undertaken for the glory of god and advancement of the christian faith and the honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of god, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers from time to time as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony ; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In WITNESS WHEREOF WE HAVE HEREUNTO SUBSCRIBED OUR NAMES AT Cape Cod, the iT" of November, in the year OF THE REIGN OF OUR SOVEREIGN LORD KiNG JaMES OF England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and OF Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini, 1620. who first made a pilgrimage for peace to for a home across the sea to America. Mayflower — sailing after many break- downs, back-downs, and discourage- ments — to make a settlement in what was described as the northern parts of Virginia — " " Not here, then," said Jack. " No, indeed," replied Uncle Tom ; " it was to be somewhere in the Vir- ginia Colony, north of the Jamestown settlement — not too near, because of religious differences, nor too far off, because of possible need for help in defense. They doubtless had in view some section of that far-reaching and fertile region lost and won by other settlers whose story we learned in con- nection with the strife over Plowden's Patent." "What did they come here for, then ? " demanded Jack, looking up the cross-streets to the high sand-hills that rampart sea-bordering Provincetown, and involuntarily contrasting the sand- swept waste with the fertile fields of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. " Hobson's choice, dear boy," replied his uncle. " It was the only place they found to land, and here they landed. Storm-tossed and wind-driven, the crazy, strained, and creaking Mayflower, which would have foundered in mid-ocean if it had not been held together by a big Dutch screw (which one of the passengers had brought along, like Mrs. Toodles in the play, ' because it might be handy to have in the house '), struck Cape Cod instead of the capes of Virginia, and would go no farther." "Had they a right to land here?" queried conflicting grants and charters of those old days claims. "No, they had not, really," Uncle Tom replied; "but the ship's captain Mr. John Carver William Bradford Mr. Edward Winslow Mr. William Brewster Mr. Isaac Allerton Capt. Miles Standish John Alden Mr. Samuel Fuller Mr. Christopher Martin Mr. William Mullins Mr. William White Mr. Richard Warren John Rowland Mr. Stephen Hopkins Edward Tilly John Tilly Francis Cooke Thomas Rogers Thomas Tinker John Ridgdale Edward Fuller John Turner Francis Eaton- James Chilton John Craokston John Billington Moses Fletcher John Goodman Degory Priest Thomas Williams Gilbert Winslow Edmund Margeson Peter Brown Richard Britteridge George Soule Richard Clarke Richard Gardiner John Allerton Thomas English Edward Dotey Edward Leister THE "MAYFLOWER" COMPACT. From the memorial tablet at Provincetown. This memorial stone is erected by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts TO commemorate the Compact or Constitution of Government, signed by the Pilgrims, on board the Mayflower in Provincetown harbor, November n'''" ie20, old style. THE MEMORIAL TABLET AT PROVINCETOWN. Bert, thinking of all the of claims and counter- IN THE OLD COLONY 135 COMMERCIAL STREET, PROVINCETOWN. simply would not go to the South. The Mayfiozvei', he declared, could not be trusted for the Virginia voyage, and he would not risk the trip." "So it was Cape Cod or nothing, eh?" said Jack. "Well, that was Hobson's choice for a fact." "When the captain said that," Uncle Tom continued, "troubles com- menced. For, you see, the Mayflower s passengers were not all Pilgrims. The London merchants who backed up the venture — for it was a business venture, after all — had run in a lot of men on the free list as a speculation. Well, when these fellows found that, instead of being landed in Virginia, they were to be put ashore on this sand-spit, they declared their contract with the London merchants was broken, and that as soon as they had landed they were freemen, with as much right to run things as the Pilgrim leaders them- selves. They even began to plot for a mutiny to seize the ship and assume control." "That was pleasant," said Roger, " Had they the right to break their agreement ? " asked Bert. "Technically, perhaps they had," Uncle Tom replied; "for, you see, they were not landed where they had signed to go. But in a new country or desert land, man is apt to be a law unto himself, from the children of Israel to the vigilantes of San Francisco. So the leaders of the Pilgrims, — men of strength, determination, and will, — on the very day that the Mayflower rounded Long Point, where the Jighthouse stands, and dropped anchor in Provincetown harbor, gathered in the cabin, and drew up and signed 136 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES one of the most remarkable papers in history ; and this tablet commemo- rates it." "That was the Mayflozver compact, then," said Bert. " How was it one of the most remarkable of papers, Uncle Tom ? " " Because, so far as we know, that compact was the first document estab- lishing civil government by the act of the people, uniting for self-protection and self-government." " How many people? " queried Roger. " Forty-one of the one hundred and two Pilgrims," Uncle Tom replied. " Not a two-thirds vote," Jack declared judicially. " It was n't parliamentary." " But of those one hundred and two. Jack, twenty-nine were women and CENTRAL WHARF, PROVINCETOWN. children, and even Priscilla Mullens and Mary Chilton, though they might in- fluence John Alden's decision, had no voice or vote in the matter, you know." " I don't see why," said Marian. " I 'm sure they had as much interest in what was done as he had, and you said, Uncle Tom, that the Pilgrims stayed here because of the women and children." " Yes, to protect them, not to give them a vote," cried Jack. IN THE OLD COLONY 137 " But they had just as good a right to vote, did n't they, Uncle Tom ? " persisted Marian. "Now, see here, Jack Dunlap, if — " But Uncle Tom lifted a protesting hand. "This is a history hunt, and not a suffrage debate, young folks," he said. " It was a question of right, and I don't believe a single Pilgrim mother thought for an instant of demanding a seat or a vote at that cabin table. The day for such things had not yet arrived, and the situation was serious. So the best and wisest of the leaders — men like Bradford and Brewster and Carver and Winslow and Miles Standish and John Alden — remembered the advice of their good pastor Robinson, whom they had left in Holland, and decided to unite in a civil government for self-protection. In the cabin of the Mayflower ^^ix^"?,^ forty-one men — thirty-four real Pilgrims, and seven servants or laborers, who could be trusted — signed the compact which historians claim to be the first written constitution in the world. Here, I slipped a copy of it into my pocket before we came from Boston, so that you could hear it on the very spot of its origin. Will you read it. Jack ? " "Oh, yes; do let 's hear it here!" exclaimed Christine. "What 's the matter with the other side of the tablet?" Roger inquired. "It 's all there, too." And there they found it, to be sure. So Jack, nothing loath, in the shadow of the town hall, beside the new Pilgrim memorial, read from the tablet in his most impressive manner that famous compact of the founders of New England. " And then the women went ashore, I suppose, and had their wash-day," said Marian, as the reader concluded. "No, not that day," Uncle Tom replied. "That was Saturday. The next day, because it was Sunday, they rested — another good New England custom, you see; and Monday, of course, was wash-day." " Of course," Roger agreed. "Meantime, the forty-one 'compacted' associates," continued Uncle Tom, "had elected John Carver governor of their 'colony,' and as their plans were changed, they set about hunting for a home." " Here ? " demanded Roger. " I thought they went straight to Plymouth." " By no means, Roger," Uncle Tom replied. " They knew nothing about Plymouth. They were on the Cape — wooded then, as it is not now, and HIGHLAND LIGHT AND NORTH TRURO. 1^8 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES J almost to the water's edge. So they spent the week repairing their shallop, or small boat, and exploring the Cape. We '11 do the best we can to follow their tracks hereabout." They did so, afoot and on wheels, from Race Point to Highland Light, and Truro, and Pamet River. They located the anchorage of the Mayflower, and the site of what Jack called the "washing-bee"; they followed Miles Standish and his sixteen explorers into the woods and over the sand-hills and along the beaches ; they noted where they first saw Indians and found Indian corn, and where Bradford was caught in an Indian deer-trap ; where the bended arm of the Cape faded away in the mists of the distant elbow, they marked the roundabout course over which Miles Standish and his men, in the patched-up shallop, coasted Cape Cod, and, landing at Plymouth, decided that it was " a place very good for situation." Then, having finished Provincetown and the " fist" of Cape Cod, even as the wandering Pilgrims had done. Uncle Tom and his tourists had a grand sail with Cap'n Nickerson (they are all Nickersons down on the Cape) over the Pilgrims' own course to Plymouth, and landed, as did they, very near the famous Rock, if not on it, going ashore to the comfortable and hospitable hotel, which Roger, following the Pilgrim itinerary, persisted in calling the Common House. But Uncle Tom assured him that the real, original Com- mon House on Leyden Street, where the poor Pilgrims first " put up," after they had put it up, had little in common with the homelike hotel from which they made their explorations and pilgrimages about Plymouth, from the Rock to Pilgrim Hall and from the Faith Monument to Captain's Hill, above the Duxbury shore. It was in the shadow of the Faith Monument that they gathered, one day, to take in the whole broad view over sea and shore that lay at their feet. And after Jack and Marian had duly reprimanded and dispersed the group of unresponsive small boys who only saw in the upraised finger of the great granite Faith a good far-away target for stones. Uncle Tom recounted briefly the well-known but variously told story of the Pilgrims of Plymouth. " I have told you how the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, and why," Uncle Tom began, but Marian interrupted him. " I don't intend to give up Mrs. Hemans's poem, Uncle Tom," she said. " ' Freedom to worship God' sounds so grand, I think." " So does ' The breaking waves dashed high On a stern and rock-bound coast,' " Jack declared. " But where are the rocks? I ask you; and echo answers, 'Where?'" IN THE OLD COLONY 139 .^"r..:'»v.i-»K-»'^^^^5^^^,Sii^ "But you need n't give them all up," Uncle Tom replied, smiling. "Freedom of conscience and religion did drive the Pilgrims to America, and we certainly did see enough of a cliff at Manomet to make it a ' rock-bound coast' I only wished to assure you that this part of the Pilgrim story has received undue importance, largely because of Mrs. Hemans's stirring lines. The Separatist emigration to Holland was indeed for freedom to worship God. The Pilgrims found there in that land of dikes and ditches the free- dom they sought ; but they found also that they had to work so hard there that some of them declared that life in King James's prisons was preferable to this sort of liberty. They found, too, that their sons and dausfhters were becominor Dutch by association, marriage, and occupation ; they feared they would become Dutch in speech and manners as well, and, next to being good Christians, those Pilgrims de- sired most to be good Englishmen. So, when they made up their minds to come to the new land across the sea, it was to settle an English colony under English laws." " Then that is why the compact on the tablet at Provincetown is so English and loyal," said Bert. " But I thought King James had treated them just horridly," said Christine. " He had, my dear," Uncle Tom re- plied. " You remember what he said when the Separatists would n't go to his church : ' In my kingdom I will have one doctrine, one discipline, one religion, and I will make you conform, or I will harry you out of this land, or worse.'" " Nice, pleasant sort of a party he was," said Jack. " Stubborn as a Stuart, Jack," Uncle Tom replied. " That stubbornness finally lost the Stuarts the crown of England, you know. Well, he did harry the Separatists out of the land. They became pilgrims, went to Holland, stayed there twelve years, grew discouraged with their outlook, decided to move to Virginia, and made application to King James for permission to come to America." " It 's a wonder he did n't object to that," said Jack. " He did object to their request for an assurance that they should not CAP'N NICKERSON. 140 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES A GLIMPSE OF HOLLAND. be molested in America because of their religion," Uncle Tom replied. " ' They '11 be trying to set up a free, popular state there,' said King James, ' and that I won't have.' " " But they did," cried Roger, gleefully. " And their sons and grandsons got the best of ' Scotch Jimmie's' chappies, did n't they, though ? " exclaimed Jack, a bit irreverently. "That was the logic of events and the path of progress, boys," replied Uncle Tom. " Neither the Stuarts nor the Georges, any more than King Canute the Dane, could hold back the restless tide of liberty." " But why did King James say yes at last ? " queried Marian. " Well, he said they 'd be out of England, anyway, and that was what he most desired," Uncle Tom replied ; " and so he permitted the Englishmen in Holland to become Englishmen in America, if they were willing to risk it and behaved peaceably. They had not money enough for the enterprise, however, so they got a London syndicate to back them up, and bound them- selves to work the new lands in partnership with this syndicate for seven years. As you know, they had discouragements galore from the day they left Holland, and instead of reaching Virginia in the early fall with two ships and plenty of material, they reached Cape Cod and Plymouth in midwinter with but one crazy, uncomfortable little vessel ; but they were still firm of purpose, so they drew closer together in comradeship and determination, and finally landed here on the beach at Plymouth." " Not on the Rock, Uncle Tom ? " Christine inquired. " It is unsafe to throw doubt upon that time-honored story," Uncle Tom IN THE OLD COLONY 141 declared. " It has been accepted as fact ever since old Elder Faunce, in I 741, wept over the stone, an old man of ninety-five, and publicly declared that the Pilgrims landed on that very stone." " Oh, did he? " cried Marian. "That ouijht to settle it," Roofer declared. But Bert had made a mathematical calculation. SITE OF WATCH-HOUSE, PLYMOUTH. On Burial Hill. " Ninety-five ? Then he was born in 1646, and that 's twenty-six years after the Pilofrims landed. The elder was n't one of them," he said. " He had the story direct from his own father, who had been shown the Rock by the original Pilgrims," Uncle Tom explained. "The records make no mention of a rock ; but they would n't be likely to enter quite so minutely into details. We know, however, that the Mayflower lay )onder in the harbor, while the men went ashore and built what they called the Common House. Then, as fast as the passengers could be assigned quar- ters in the Common House, the Pilgrims were rowed ashore, a family or a mixed boat-load at a time, and went to housekeeping in the Common House. So, you see, the real landing at Plymouth was not all at once, nor on the same day, but through several days, and as each family or boat-load could be provided for." " But could n't they land on the Rock? " persisted Marian. 142 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "They could; perhaps some of them did," Uncle Tom replied. "It was the only rock on that sandy beach, and it was probably covered at high tide ; but still, a boat-load now and then may have landed there." The sentimentalists of the party did n't really like this negative assur- ance, but the canopied Rock was there below them on the beach, and it would be accepted as the real thing, they knew, in spite of all the icono- clasts, and, as Christine said, "I 'm just going to believe it, anyhow," and so she did. Uncle Tom told his young people the rest of the plucky but tragic story of the Pilo-rims. He told them how, in the deserted "plantations" of the Indians, who had been swept out of southeastern Massachusetts by the grip or some such epidemic, the Pilgrims of the Mayjlower began to make a settle- ment ; of the fort they built for Captain Standish on Burial Hill — the first story a " meeting-house," the second story a bat- tery of six guns; of the half-dozen little log huts that went up on either side of Leyden Street ; of the first New England winter, with pneumonia and hasty con- sumption laying low the unacclimated, sea-worn Pilgrims of the Mayflower ; of the sad but persistent endeavors of the fifty-two survivors ; of the gradual estab- lishment and slow but steady growth of the colony, until, from Plymouth Rock to Scituate and Taunton, the struoro-lincr Pil- grim settlement grew within a dozen years into a province of eight towns and three thousand inhabitants, with " outlanders " running feelers of colonization westward into the Connecticut valley and northward toward Boston. " But how did they fix it up so as to get permission to settle here instead of in Virginia ? " asked Bert. "The compact in the cabin of the Mayflower was the first step," Uncle Tom replied. "That made an independent but united company of them. Then, when the Mayflower returned to England in April, 162 1, they sent an explanation and an application for a change of grant ; this was finally arranged by the syndicate that had originally sent them out, and the partner- ship with the syndicate for fishing and farming continued until 1626, when the leading men of the colony bought out the syndicate and became the ELDER BREWSTER'S CHAIR. In Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth. IN THE OLD COLONY H3 PLYMOUTH ROCK. ' freemen ' of Plymouth, governing themselves under the compact signed in the Mayflower .'' "And that is where they lived and died and grew strong," said Chris- tine. " Does n't it seem stranofe and sad and gflorious as we stand here and think of all that happened here between the time that the Pilgrims landed on the Rock — the Rock, mind you. Uncle Tom — and the day their descen- dants put up this great monument on the hill ? " They turned again to the towering memorial surmounted by the mighty Faith, and read once more the inscription on the main pedestal : " National Monument to the Forefathers, Erected by a grateful people in remembrance of their labors, sacrifices, and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty." " How they must have suffered and sacrificed !" mused Christine. "And yet, just think of their standing on this hilltop and watching the Mayfiozver sail home to England, leaving them behind ! That must have been hardest of all, seems to me. And yet, how brave they were ! How is it Longfellow tells it ? ' Lost in the sound of the oars was the last farewell of the Pilgrims. O strong hearts and true ! Not one went back in the Mayfloxvcr / No, not one looked back, who had set his hand to this plowing ! ' " 144 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES PILGRIM HALL, PLYMOUTH. Filled with Pilgrim relics. "You are right, my dear; it was a brave act," Uncle Tom assented; "braver, indeed, than the coming was the staying in this desolate land and lone. But those that stayed wrought a mighty work. For they conquered adversity and achieved success. They inspired faith and effort in their brothers across the sea, who finally followed them to set up homes in this New World ; and then, in very truth, did they make immortal that famous Rock on the beach yonder — a pilgrim itself, as I have told you, torn and drifted from parent glacier. For, as Longfellow says in the poem from which Christine quoted : ' In haste they went hurrying down to the sea-shore, Down to the Plymouth Rock, that had been to their feet as a door-step Into a world unknown — the corner-stone of a nation ! ' " "That 's so, Uncle Tom," said Jack, looking down to the shore and off toward the Gurnet and its guiding lighthouse. " I guess it was a corner- stone. But what 's the good of a corner-stone unless you keep on building ? You may quote your Longfellow love-story here on the Pilgrims' hill, but, as for me, give me Lowell every time : ' New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes ancient good uncouth ; They must upward still and onward who .would keep abreast of Truth : IN THE OLD COLONY 145 Lo, before us gleam the camp-fires ! We ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayfloiver and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.' " "True enough," said Uncle Tom, who clearly loved to get his young people to quoting and observing; "but remember then it was 'new occa- sions' and ' new duties' to which the Pilgrims awoke here in Plymouth, just as much as do we, their descendants, to-day. To each age come new re- quirements and new problems, but the demand is the same : to decide, to act, to do! " Then, with their faces toward the morning, and with Lowell's inspiring words filling their young hearts. Uncle Tom's five " investigators," in the shadow of that mighty granite Faith, walked down to the Pilgrims' town and steamed northward to the home of the Puritans. CAPTAIN'S HILL, DUXBURY, Showing the Standish Monument. IN THE TRACK OF THE GREAT EMIGRATION. Minot's Ledge Lighthouse, Boston harbor. CHAPTER X WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY In the Shadow of the Gilded Dome — From Salem to Spiking Lane — Governor Johit Winthrop — The Great Emigration — A Puritan Aristocracy — Intolerance and Witchcraft — Up and Down the Bay State — ''The Past is Secure " — The Massachusetts Spirit. PINE-TREE SHILLING. AGAINST the gray granite background of the " sub- . way station " in ScoUay Square rose the dull bronze statue of a calm- faced man in Elizabethan ruff and Puritan costume — a roll of parchment in one hand, a Bible in the other. Uncle Tom halted before it, and Bert, as usual, read the inscription aloud : " ' John Winthrop, The Founder of Boston.' " "And father of New England," added Uncle Tom. "The father of New England, was he?" said Jack, critically, "How do you make that out ? Where do Bradford and Brewster and Standish and the rest of the Pilgrims come in ? " " They come in as a part of New England's story, Jack, as makers and founders, if you will," Uncle Tom replied; "but John Winthrop was the man who inspired, inaugurated, organized, and directed the great movement that settled New England. His energy overcame all obstacles ; his faith strengthened the doubters and made brave the timid ; his wisdom guided, his patience guarded, his courage gave heart and purpose ; and from the day of the organization, in August, 1628, in the university town of the Eng- lish Cambridge, of the ' Governor and Companions of the Massachusetts Bay Company,' until his death in 1649, in the Boston he had founded, John 148 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES Winthrop, as governor, magistrate, and soldier, laid the strong foundation of this noble and famous Old Bay State — the commonwealth of Massachu- setts." Jack lifted his hat as to a great man, and they all looked again with more interest upon the quaint but impressive face of Greenough's statue of STATUE OF JOHN WINTHROP, SCOLLAY SQUARE, BOSTON. the ereat eovernor, while even Roeer admitted that he did n't know that Governor Winthrop was as much of a man as all that. " He has been aptly and justly called the Washington of colonization," Uncle Tom informed them. " One student of his life-work, indeed, declares him worthy to stand as a parallel to Washington." " That 's saying a good deal," Bert decided critically. " But pretty close to the truth, Bert," Uncle Tom responded. " I can't WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY I49 tell you his whole story here ; but it is not too much to say that he made New England possible, while no finer character than Governor John Winthrop appears in all colonial history. He was tolerant when intolerance was the rule ; bold of speech when men were wont to curb their tongues ; and as the organizer and leader of the Great Emigration, he planted a colony that grew into a mighty commonwealth and left a name high placed among the his- toric names of America." "What was this Great Emigration, as you call it?" queried Marian. " Sounds something like Castle Garden and the steerage," said Jack. " Because of it, Jack, came, in time, Castle Garden, the steerage passen- gers, and the never-slacking current of immigration and absorption," Uncle Tom replied. " But that first movement over the sea was an emigration made up alike of high and low, rich and poor ; and when Winthrop's emi- grant fleet of fifteen vessels steered past the deadly rocks now crowned with Minot's Ledge Light, and disembarked its thousand emigrants on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, the blundering Charles, King of England, and his obstinate adviser Laud, little knew that they had set aflame a new fire of freedom that was to burn on Massachusetts shores until its light grew into the grander illumination of American liberty and American union." "Yes, sir; but what was it?" persisted Bert. Uncle Tom laughed. " You 're a great fellow for what they call a categorical answer, are n't you, Bert?" he said. "Well, the Great Emigration, as it is called, was the departure westward of thousands of discontented and persecuted Puritans — nonconformists, they were styled, because they would not conform to King Charles's narrow religious laws, which the intolerant Archbishop Laud insisted on demandincj. The kin^ interfered alike in the business and the religion of the Puritans, and in 1630 great numbers of them began to leave England, and followed the lead of John Winthrop across the sea to New England. In that year alone more than a thousand colonists came to these parts, and, settling first in Boston, founded the towns hereabout." "Where did Winthrop land?" Marian asked. " He came first with an advance fleet of four vessels," Uncle Tom replied, "and anchored just off Baker Island, at the mouth of Salem harbor. But Winthrop took a boat, and, going up the river, landed near what is now the head of the long bridge that spans the river between Salem and Beverly." "What did he go up to Salem for?" inquired Roger, as the tourists walked on toward Faneuil Hall. " To call on the witches, no doubt," said Jack. I50 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Because," replied Uncle Tom, ig-noring Jack's suggestion, " an English syndicate, known as the Dorchester Fishing Company, had planted weak little settlements at Salem and on Cape Ann, and Winthrop went up to con- fer with gruff John Endicott, who was the head man at Salem, while the emigrants of his fleet went ashore, and, at Manchester by the sea, feasted GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP. on wild strawberries to their hearts' content — for it was June and straw- berry-time." " But if Endicott was there first," said Bert, " why don't you call him the leader and first settler rather than Winthrop ? " "Because the peopling of New England was not his idea," Uncle Tom replied. " He was merely one of the Dorchester Fishing Company — a fore- runner, perhaps, like Blackstone and other first settlers, but not filled with a great purpose, as was Winthrop, the real father of Massachusetts." "Then from Salem they came down here to Boston, I suppose," said Bert. "They landed and settled first at Charlestown — " Uncle Tom began. " But that 's Boston now, sir," Roger broke in. "Modern — all very, very modern — that union is, Roger!" exclaimed WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY 151 HEAD OF SALEM HARBUR Uncle Tom. " Charlestown was not joined to Boston until 1872, and for over two hundred and forty years it was a good deal of a town on its own hook. There, across the river, Winthrop and his emigrants landed in Charles- town, and, just back of what is City Square in Charlestown, settled in booths, tents, and huts put up for them alongside the ' great house ' built for the governor on the site of what is now the Public Library building. But the water in Charlestown was bad ; many of the settlers fell sick and died, others went off to outlying settlements, as far as Dorchester and Cambridge, and when Blackstone, the hermit of Beacon Hill, came over and invited Winthrop to cross the river and settle at the foot of Beacon Hill, where there was a good spring of water, the town moved across the river, bag and baggage, and Boston was settled. That was in September, 1630." '• And that 's why that little English-looking alleyway on the upper side of the big Winthrop Building is called Spring Lane," said Roger. " Yes ; and Governor Winthrop's house stood there, his ' green ' extend- ing from Spring Lane to Milk Street, where the Old South Church now stands," Uncle Tom explained. " His first house, however, was built on the spot where now stands the fine Exchange Building on State Street." They turned from Cornhill into Washington Street, and stood beside the old State-house, dwarfed by the surrounding " sky-scrapers," but greatest of all because associated with so much of the story of the Old Bay State. 152 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "Then, if I understand you," said Bert, "it was about in this spot that Boston first began to build." "This was about the center of the town's early life," Uncle Tom replied. " The original Bostonians, after coming across from Charlestown in the fall of 1630, settled here in the region now included between Hanover Street on the south and Milk and Bromfield streets on the north. Tremont Street seems to have been one limit, and the water, beyond the spot where Faneuil Hall now stands, was the other." "Then that would just about make the old State-house the center of the town, would n't it? "said Roger. "Always the center, eh, Roger?" said Jack, slyly, "and right from the first go-off." GOVERNOR JOH^ ENDICOTT. " Sure ! " said the Boston boy. " You know what Holmes says in the * Autocrat.' " They all did, of course, but Christine got in her quotation first: " ' Bos- ton State-house is the hub of the solar system. You could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.' " WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY 153 THE OLD AND THE NEW. The oid State-house, Boston, and the modem " sky-scrapers " around it. " But he did n't mean this State-house, did he, Uncle Tom?" said hteral Marian. "Of course we know that," Roger hastened to explain; "he meant the new State-house on Beacon Hill. But don't you see how his truth runs away back ? This was the old State-house ; it was the center of colonial Boston ; colonial Boston led the land to liberty ; ergo — " "You need say no more, my son," said Jack, as Roger swept his hands about conclusively. " That settles it. You did it all. The other colonies simply were n't in it." " Oh, I don't say that," Roger began. "Of course, the other colonies helped a lot in getting ready for liberty and union, but I do say — " " You do say, Roger, I know," politic Uncle Tom put in, "that without one colony the others would have been of precious little value ; that each played its part in the grand order of progress until it all culminated in e pluribus unum — * out of many, one.' " " That 's so, sir," Roger admitted manfully. "It is n't really what I started out to say, but it 's what I should have said. I guess we all had a hand in the combination." 154 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES PHOTOGRAPHED BY MRS. G. H. WARNER OF WASHINGTON. OLD CUSTOM-HOUSE, ANNISQUAM, NEAR GLOUCESTER. " But that Great Emigration you talk about did n't all settle right down here in Boston, did it ? " Bert inquired. " By no means," Uncle Tom replied. " Restlessness seems to have been ingrained in the Puritan nature, so far as the Bay Colony was concerned. No sooner had they landed than the colonists scattered themselves over the land. In fact, it was agreed that it was better and safer for them to * plant dispersedly,' as they termed it." "What 's the trouble ? Were they afraid of one another?" queried Jack. " Oh, no ; but they were suspicious of France," Uncle Tom explained, "and rumors of French invasion led them to believe that.it was safer to be scattered abroad than crowded into one section or town. So they went on exploring, and followed exploration with settlement. Watertown and Dorchester were started ; Roxbury, Saugus, Lynn, Charlestown, and Cambridge sprang up ; and when these Bay towns were fairly under way, then certain of these very settlers went farther afield. Salem, you know, had already been planted, even before Boston was begun ; but, within ten years after Boston was settled, twenty thousand settlers had come into the WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY 155 Bay Colony, and certain of them began feeling their way west, south, and north. The men of New Town (now Cambridge) went into Connecticut and founded Hartford and Windsor and Wethersfield. The governor's own son built a fort and trading-post at Saybrook, and from Roxbury in 1636 went William Pynchon, foremost of pioneers, blazing the Bay Path and settling Springfield and the fertile region of the Connecticut valley." "Any relation to the 'House of Seven Gables' Pynchon?" demanded Jack. "Hawthorne's Salem family?" queried Uncle Tom. "I guess not, Jack. They were fiction, and William Pynchon was noble and incarnate fact." " But why did they go skipping off that way ? " cried Bert. "If Boston was such a Paradise, as you say Governor Winthrop declared it to be, what sent them out of Paradise searching for new Edens ? " "Good policy, for one thing," Uncle Tom replied, "and, as I have told ON OLD CAPE ANN — PICTURESQUE ANNISQUAM. you, a desire for security. But one of the main causes was the religious autocracy that governed the colony in spite of Winthrop's restraining hand. This would allow no man to hold opinions differing from those of the Gover- nor and Companions of Massachusetts Bay, and the ministers whom they supported and followed." " That was n't very liberal, was it ? " exclaimed Marian. " Was even good Governor Winthrop on that side ? " asked Christine. 156 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " He had to be, my dear," Uncle Tom replied. "The Puritans of the Bay Colony had come over the sea to establish in Massachusetts a religious community of their chosen sort. The charter under which they possessed the land permitted them to rid the country of all obnoxious or objectionable people who were hostile to the peace of the colony. Any man or woman who differed from the accepted church teachings of the Puritans was, in their eyes, both obnoxious and objectionable. They were therefore to be got rid of, and Governor John Winthrop, — leader, guide, and governor as he was, — for policy's sake and the sake of peace, said to these people who differed from the colonists : ' Go ! the world is wide ; there is no place for you among us.' " " And they left, did they ? " said Jack. "Yes," his uncle answered; " this restrictive policy sent many wise and noble men and women into what was practically exile, though it ended in colonization. It was this spirit of religious exclusiveness that sent Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson into the wilderness, that hurried William Pynchon to Springfield, and made the short administration of the brilliant boy governor, young Sir Harry Vane, a stormy and quarrelsome time. Baptists were 'harried,' Quakers were persecuted and martyred, and all dissenters were silenced or driven away. It was narrow ; but it was the right of the colonists of the Bay, and it made them men who dared maintain what they believed to be their right." " Even to hanging and pressing witches ? " suggested Jack. " I expected to hear of the Salem witchcraft before we got through with the Bay Colony," Uncle Tom replied. "It is n't a pleasant episode in the story of Massachusetts, but because of its horrors you must not at once call the Salem people hard names." "How can you help doing so. Uncle Tom? " exclaimed Christine. " I think it was horrid ! " " But witchcraft was an old, old story long before Salem days, my dear," Uncle Tom replied. " People believed in it all over the world. ' Ye shall not suffer a witch to live' was the old Bible injunction; and the story- telling and gossip of a parcel of silly girls, who had nothing better to do in a slow and stupid winter in a somber little shut-in town like Salem, grew into a fad, and then into an epidemic ; the witchcraft craze, outgrowing the village of Salem, extended to Boston and other towns, and a persecution that was as tragic as it was stupid was the result. Salem does n't like to think of the witchcraft days, and yet Salem is better known throughout the land to-day because of its witchcraft spasm than because it was the home of Hawthorne, or the center of Massachusetts' growing commerce." WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY 157 " It was a busy seaport at one time, was n't it? " Bert questioned. " None more so," Uncle Tom replied. " Its sails were in every ocean, its sailors in far-separated ports. The forerunner of Boston, Salem, also became, in time, its commercial rival ; it likewise claims to be the first JOHN ELIOT. By permission, from a portrait in possession of the family of the late William Whiting, Esq. Revolutionary protester; for at its old North Bridge, in February, 1775, was made what Salem folks claim to be the ' first armed resistance to royal authority.' I move we take a run down to look at the quaint old town." They all seconded the motion vociferously, and having finished the colo- 158 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES nial survey of Boston and its beautiful suburbs, with which frequent pilo-rim- ages had made them famihar, they went up the north shore on a hunt for colonial landmarks. They found them in plenty. Lynn, Salem, Marblehead, Gloucester, Newburyport, with the adjacent country and the companion towns, pos- MARBLEHEAD, FROM THE HARBOR. sessed the double charm of natural beauty and colonial history, such as is to be found nowhere so notably as along the beautiful north shore of Massachusetts. They traced the course of Winthrop's fleet from its anchorage off Baker Island and in Massachusetts Bay, where the floating jellyfish were taken by the new-comers to be masses of yellow flowers ; they looked down upon the reef of Normans Woe from the cliffs of Magnolia, and recited " The Wreck o{ Xh& Hesperics'' \ they investigated "Dogtown Common," — the curious "de- serted village" of colonial days, — at picturesque Annisquam; they climbed to the top of gruesome Gallows Hill in Hawthorne's haunted Salem, and hunted up, in Danvers, the ancient house in which bluff old General Israel Putnam was born ; they saw in Salem the old church that Endicott, the " flag- cutter," built; they spent one delightful day at Longfellow's famous "Wayside Inn" at Sudbury ; they followed, for a way, the Bay Path along which William Pyn- chon blazed the path to Springfield and the West ; they heard again the tragedy of Deerfield, sad reminder of the border wave of the French domina- tion of Canada, and in the broad main street of venerable Hadley heard once WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY 1 59 more the romantic story of the gray stranger who, "hke an angel of the Lord," stayed the tide of Indian assault and saved the town from destruction. In fact, they traversed the Old Bay State as time and Uncle Tom permitted, and when, once again, they stood by the shaft that lifts itself beside the new State-house, and marks the site of the beacon that gave the most famous of the three bills of Boston town its name, they felt that they had pretty thoroughly studied colonial Massachusetts. " 'The past, at least, is secure,'" quoted Bert from Daniel Webster, as the thought of all that Massachusetts meant, and all that it had been to the world in effort, achievement, and progress, was forced upon him ; and Jack, with a bow to Roger, spouted, as he so. dearly loved to spout, there on the broad plaza of the extended State-house, and beside the graceful shaft of the Beacon, the glowing " Websterism " that Bert's words recalled: " ' Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts. There she is. There is her history ; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston and Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill ; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia ; and there they will lie forever. And, sirs, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit.'" WAYSIDE INN, SUDBURY. Longfellow's " Wayside Inn." From a photograph made in October, i8 "Say! that 's great, is n't it?" cried Roger, with new-kindled enthusiasm; and Christine said: "It makes me think of something I read that Lowell wrote. He puts it into the mouth of Miles Standish, you remember, as the i6o THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES )''?iiii'if|!('liiiiilli THE FAIRBANKS HOUSE, DEDHAM. Built by Jonathan Fairbanks in 1636. ghost of the captain stood on what Lowell called the ' Mount of Prophesy- ing ' — I wonder if it was Beacon Hill : ' Child of our travail and our woe, Light in our day of sorrow, Through my rapt spirit I foreknow The glory of thy morrow; I hear great steps that, through the shade, Draw nigher still and nigher, And voices call like that which bade The prophet come up higher.' " "That is, indeed, prophetic, my dear," said Uncle Tom, nodding his approval. "The glory of the morrow, indeed, did come — it Aas come — to this Old Bay State. Her sons have done much for her and for America. The names of Standish and Winthrop and young Sir Harry Vane, of Otis and the three Adamses, of Hancock and Revere, of Daniel Webster and WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY l6l Horace Mann, of Andrew and Everett and Sumner, belong not to Massa- chusetts alone, but to the republic they loved and served." " Will there ever be any more like them, do you suppose ? " asked Roger, thoughtfully and just a bit uncertainly. "Like them? , Why, of course, Roger, old chap," cried Jack. "You don't suppose we go backward anywhere in America, do you ? Massachu- JOHN HANCOCK'S MANSION, BOSTON. This house stood at the left of the State-house, and was torn down about 1870. setts in the future is bound to be even better than Massachusetts in the past ; is n't she. Uncle Tom?" " Let us hope so," his uncle replied. " I am possessed of your spirit of progress and optimism. Jack. If Massachusetts keeps alive the memory ot what she has been in the determination to better her past, as Lowell makes Standish say, 'great steps' will, indeed, 'draw nigher still and nigher.' See here, boys and girls, it is fitting that here, on the very crown and top of the commonwealth, I should read you what the Old Bay State's devoted servant. Senator Hoar, the successor of the great Sumner, has to say about it." And taking from his pocket-book a neatly folded clipping. Uncle Tom read them what the senator said : I02 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES BEACON MONUMENT, STATE-HOUSE PARK, BOSTON. "'Whatever Massachusetts has done,' so said Mr. Hoar, 'whatever she is doing, whatever she is to accomphsh hereafter,- is largely owing to the fact that she has kept unbroken the electric current flowing from soul to soul, forever and forever, as it was generated, now nearly three hundred years ago, at Plymouth. Her generations have taken hold of hands.' " " That 's good ! " cried Jack ; and Roger nodded his emphatic ap- proval. " ' The men of Plymouth Rock and of Salem,' " Uncle Tom went on, con- tinuing his reading, " ' the men who cleared the forests, the heroes of the Indian and the old F"rench wars, the men who imprisoned Andros, the men who fought the Revolution, the men who humbled the power of France at Louisburg and the power of Spain at Martinique and Havana, the men who won our independence and builded our Constitution, the sailors of the great sea-fights of the War of i8i 2, the soldiers who saved the Union, and the men who went with Hobson in the Merrimac, or fought with Dewey at Manila, or with Sampson, or before the trenches at Santiago, have been of one temper from the beginning — the old Massachusetts spirit, which we hope may endure and abide until time shall be no more.'" WITH THE GOVERNOR AND COMPANIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY 1 63 " It shall ! it shall ! " cried Jack and Roger, shaking hands in appreciation and fellowship; while, beside the tall Beacon shaft, the young colony-hunters listened with glowing hearts to the praise of the men who, from the days of the "Governor and Companions," had followed where Winthrop led and Vane labored and Otis and Adams wrought — all men of Massachusetts. GLOUCESTER HARBOR — SUNSET. PRINCE CHARLES OF ENGLAND, AFTERWARD CHARLES H. CHAPTER XI THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS Among the Sybarites — With Roger Williauis to Providence — Cranks and Disputants — A Refuge for Liberty — From Saybrook to Neiu Haven — When Long Island was in New E7igland. I :;«^.Hr8te-^-:^4_ N a cozy corner of the vine-screened piazza of their charming hotel on the CHffs, while the two girls, bolstered up with many-colored pillows, swung themselves in the hanging seat, and the boys stretched themselves at leisure in easy-chairs of every Oriental style and shape, Uncle Tom went back to the ante-luxury days of the pioneers and sketched in rapid outline the planting of the Providence plantations and the beginnings of Rhode Island. " I wonder if it is possible for you girls and boys in these sybaritic surroundings of modern Newport — " " Go easy. Uncle Tom!" Jack broke in, as he swung a lazy leg over the arm of his easy-chair. " What kind of surroundings did you say ? " "Those that you are enjoying, you young Sybarite," laughed Uncle Tom. "Tell him who they were, Bert." And Bert the scholar, always ready to air his information, explained to Jack that the Sybarites were an Italian people of old Greek colonial days, celebrated for their wealth and love of luxury and ease — so devoted to luxury and pleasure, indeed, that their name has become a synonym for the gilded luxury and surfeited pleasure-hunters of modern civilization. " Where 's the 'sin,' if you can pay for it ? " demanded Jack the pleasure- OLD LIGHTHOUSE, SAYBROOK, CONN THE CONNECTICUT I over. 165 1 66 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES TOWER OF THE CASINO COURT AT NEWPORT. " It is sin to be simply a non-producer, my boy," replied Uncle Tom. " Your rich men are often the hardest workers ; but riches which simply fatten on luxury and benefit no one are not only of no benefit : they are really of positive harm to the world. Do something, boys and girls, if it be but slight and simple. Let me throw this text of Carlyle, the prophet of work, into your minds : ' Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce ! Produce ! were it but the pitifulest infinitesimal frac- tion of a Product, produce it, in God's name ! 'T is the utmost thou hast in thee : out with it, then. Up, up ! Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy might. Work while it is called To-day ; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.' " Jack fairly sprang up from his easy-chair. "Whew!" he cried, "that sets me tingling. Let 's do something. Uncle Tom. Come out and hunt up some more relics, you lazy young Syb — what d' ye call 'ems? Up, up! say I and Carlyle." Uncle Toni laughed heartily. "I did n't imagine my call would be so instantly fruitful," he said. "I THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS 167 spoke only in a general way, Jack. I have little fear that my boys and girls will not be doers when the time comes. Those who display such sleepless enthusiasm on a colonial-landmark hunt can be relied upon to be modern 'producers' when duty calls. It 's in the American blood — a direct heritage from those days of the pioneers when such men as Bradford and John Winthrop and Stuyvesant and Penn and Sir Thomas Dale 'did things ' in America in spite of obstacles and odds, and Roger Williams — a THE "OLD MILL" AT NEWPORT. misfit in Massachusetts — became the pioneer in nation-building here in Rhode Island when along the shores of Narragansett Bay he first planted the Providence plantations." " First, Uncle Tom ? " queried Roger. " What about the Dighton Rock and the old mill ? " 1 68 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES "Your friends the Northmen, eh, Roger?" said Uncle Tom. "Well, you know what I told you as we came along the Taunton River and through Dighton station. Picture-writings are not real proof; and the old mill here in Truro Park, upon whose crumbling, picturesque arches we looked this morning, where it stands at the very elbow of the noble Channing, liberty's tireless pioneer, is simply a sentimental sup- position, and more likely to be, as old Gov- ernor Arnold spoke of it in his will, ' my stone-built windmill ' than the poetical fantasy of the legend-loving Longfellow : ' There for my lady's bower Built I the lofty tower, Which to this very hour Stands looking seaward.' No; I 'm afraid we must dismiss the North- men of old Vinland as bordering too closely on the mythical, and come down to Roger Williams as really the father and founder of these Plantations." "Why do you call them 'plantations,' Uncle Tom ? " demanded Marian. " I thought plantations were down South only — cotton and rice and sugar fields, you know." " By no means, my dear," Uncle Tom replied. "A plantation is simply a place planted ; and when our forefathers came to America reclaiming waste lands, they planted colonies. So the word came to mean the same as colonies ; in fact, in the time of Charles II the commission or committee of the King's Privy Council which had the management of colonial affairs in hand was called the Council of Plantations." " But Newport was not really a part of Providence plantations, was it. Uncle Tom ? " inquired Bert, who remembered what they had seen and heard in Providence city. " Not originally," was Uncle Tom's answer. " Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts — from the standpoint of Massachusetts of that day, righteously banished, I must say — " "Oh, how can you. Uncle Tom?" cried Christine. "I thought the PULPIT OF TRINITY CHURCH, NEWPORT. THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS 169 Puritans of Boston just persecuted this good Mr. Williams because he believed in religious liberty." " Williams never said so, my dear," replied Uncle Tom, " and he is surely his own best authority. The fact is that Roger Williams, when he first came to America — to Boston — in 1631, w^as a young man who dearly loved discussion, courted oppo- sition, and mixed with some ex- cellent principles some very — well ! what one student of his- tory labels 'whimsical conceits,' to call them nothing else. He first settled at Salem, — you saw his house there, you remember, — where he made the Boston ministers angry because he criti- cized their having ' communed ' with the churches of England when they had lived in Eng- land ; and ' pitched into ' the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay because they exercised the old narragansett church, rhode island. rights especially granted them by their charter. Naturally the authorities of the Bay objected to this trouble-breeder, and invited him to get out. So he went to Plymouth, where the people liked him until he began to criticize and censure both the colonists and their king ; thereupon he returned to Salem and again began his wordy war against the powers of church and state." " Persistent chap, was n't he ? " commented Jack. "Too persistent for the men who were so laboriously endeavoring to found a permanent state along the shores of Massachusetts Bay," Uncle Tom replied. "Indeed, as Mr. Durfee, a Providence historian himself, puts it, ' Roger Williams does not appear to have been, at any period of his life, a paragon of conventional propriety.'" " Sort of a bull in a china-shop," said Jack. "In the Massachusetts china-shop, surely," laughed Uncle Tom; "for Governor Winthrop and his comrades had to proceed very carefully, in order to keep their colony from breaking into pieces, with new ' cranks ' coming in continually to disturb therii and endanger the charter which was the sole safeguard of their colony. So when Roger Williams began his ' unlamblike ' criticisms again — • that is what the Bay people called them — I-O THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES the magistrates, as they had a perfect right to do, decided to send him packing back to England and out of their way. They did not feel that it would be safe even to have him in some neighboring colony. And on an October Friday in 1635 they banished him back to England by the first returnino- vessel. But that was precisely where Williams did not wish to go ; so he broke jail and, plunging into a winter wilderness, wandered about, ' sorely tossed,' so he declares, for fourteen weeks through the Indian country of southeastern Massachusetts, and finally put up a bark hut for himself, at what is now called Manton's Cove, above the bridge over the Seekonk River, just east of Providence. You remember, we found the place. This land he obtained as a gift or grant from Massasoit, the old chief of the Wampanoags." " King Philip's father, was n't he?" queried Roger. " Yes ; that very anti-English and patriotic young redskin who made thincrs so very lively for colonial New England was the son of Roger Williams's Indian benefactor," Uncle Tom explained. "Well, some of Williams's Salem friends and supporters joined the exile at Manton's Cove. But the authorities of Plymouth and Boston \vere after him ' with a sharp stick,' as you boys say; so he pulled up stakes again, and, with the five friends who had joined him on the Seekonk, he took a canoe trip around to Providence harbor, and there, at a spring on a hillside, — just to the north of the heart of the wealthy and beautiful city of Providence, as it stands to- day, — he began, in June, 1636, the first plantations of Providence. "Why Providence, Uncle Tom?" asked Marian. " Because, my dear," her uncle replied, " Roger Williams, though a fighter, was as pious as Pilgrim or Puritan, and, in grateful recognition of the watchful providence of God, which had protected and guided him to this spot, he called the land Providence." "That was nice," Christine remarked. " I think I like Roger Williams, even if he was wdiat you call cranky." " He was in many respects a great man, my dear," Uncle Tom replied, " He had a gentle as well as a pugnacious side, and his coming into our colonial life marked an era in American history. He was a pioneer in the cause of personal as well as religious liberty, and his experiences among his Massachusetts brethren, where he was ever a disputant, seemed to have broadened his mind and disciplined his heart, so that when he came to settle the Providence plantations he made this land the home of religious liberty as well as of personal and political equality. He was not always an easy man to get along with. He had what is called the courage of his convictions, and never believed in half-way measures. But that sort of man is neces- sary for progress, and as the founder of a commonwealth based on really THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS 171 democratic principles, Roger Williams, as Mr. Straus assures us, * deserves a high niche in the temple of fame, alongside of the greatest reformers who mark epochs in the world's history.' " "Good enough !" exclaimed Jack. " Off hats to Roger! — the old as well as the new," he added, with a friendly arm on the young Roger's BIRTHPLACE OF NATHAN HALE, COVENTRY, CONN. shoulder. " But he was at Providence, Uncle Tom. Who started in here at Newport — the land of the modern what d' ye call em ? — Sybarites, eh ? " "Another crank, if we allow that name to the misunderstood people of colonial days," Uncle Tom replied. "This beautiful island of Aquidneck — which was later called the Isle of Rhodes, and then Rhode Island — " "Why, Uncle Tom? After the Colossus island in the Mediterranean?" queried Bert. "Some people try to so explain the name," Uncle Tom replied; "they say that Verrazano, the Italian explorer of 1524, so christened it. But I am inclined to believe that the name is Dutch, after all, given to the island 172 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES DEAN (AFTERWARD BISHOP) BERKELEY. Resident at Newport in 1728, and author of the famous " American " stanza beginning: *' Westward the course of empire takes its way." by Adrian Block — who built the first houses in New York, you know — because of the red-clay soil hereabouts : ' Roodt Eylandt ' — the red isl- and ! And there you have it!" "Aha! Roger, my boy," cried Jack. " New York in the lead, you see. Even then we were ahead of t' other Roger from Boston ! " "It was people from Bos- ton who really did settle this island, though," continued Uncle Tom. " For while Anne Hutchinson — the Boston dis- turber, and founder of the first woman's club, as I explained to vou — was undergoing perse- iTition in Boston, her husband md certain of her followers, being advised that their room was better than their company, hunted around for a new home. Plymouth would have none of ihem, as in Roger Williams's I ase ; and when that excellent Rhode Island 'boomer' told them of this island of Aquid- I leck, they ' prospected ' here, ,nd at once fell in love with it. So forthwith the Hutchinson syndicate purchased it from the Narragansett Indians for forty fathoms of white wampum, ten coats, and twenty hoes." " Whew ! " exclaimed Jack. " Carry the news to Ochre Point ! The ' Man with the THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS 1 73 Hoe' began Newport, eh? Times have changed in — how long? When was that real-estate transaction carried through ? " " In 1638 — a good many years ago, Jack," Uncle Tom replied. "Nine- teen persons signed an agreement much like the one signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, and set up a government modeled after the Bible one of Israel under the Judges. After her Boston troubles, Anne Hutchinson came here to live, and stayed until her husband's death in 1642, after which she went, as I told you, to New Rochelle and her tragic death. Meantime, another crank, Samuel Gorton by name, a London tailor, who was forever in hot water because of his religious views — so that, as we are told, ' his arrival in any community was the signal for an immediate disturbance of the peace — ' " " Nice party to have for a neighbor," said Roger. " I don't wonder my ancestors had a hard time with all those flighty chaps." " They did, surely, Roger," Uncle Tom assented. " Well, Gorton had been driven out of Boston and pushed out of Plymouth, and had stirred up trouble here on this island of Aquidneck, where he helped found the town of Ports- mouth, at the northern end of the island ; but Portsmouth had such a row with Gorton that he was actually whipped out of the settlement. Then he went to Pawtuxet, near Providence, and almost worried the life out of good and tolerant Roger Williams. At last even the Providence people could n't stand him ; and — although Roger Williams took no hand in this business — some of them appealed to Massachusetts for help against this ' political dis- turber.' So Boston, although she had no right to do so, summoned Gorton and his followers (for he had. followers — there never was a ' reformer ' who had not!) to the Hub for examination and discipline. Gorton told Boston to mind its own business ; but as Newport and Providence spurned him, he and his followers went across Narragansett Bay and settled the ' Warwick plantations,' on the western shore of the big bay. But even there Massa- chusetts got at them, and, claiming the land, sent soldiers after Gorton and his friends, arrested them, imprisoned them in Boston for ' blasphemy against Massachusetts,' but finally banished them into Rhode Island. Then Gorton sailed across the sea and appealed to the English government for what he called justice — and so disappeared from the story." " Dear, dear! " exclaimed Marian, " it seems to me those colonists were always quarreling. Why, Uncle Tom ? " " All new communities have their disturbers, my dear," her uncle replied, "from Anne Hutchinson to Cecil Rhodes. If it is n't liberty it 's land, or if it is n't religion it 's railroads. Our thirteen colonies from Maine to Georgia, and the Western border from Ohio to Oklahoma, had to pass 174' THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES through all phases of dispute, lawlessness, and quarreling to final law and order ; for dissension is discipline, and out of rivalries comes progress. Miles Standish had to 'pacify' the Indians even as General Lawton did the Filipinos, and neither of the native races took kindly to the process. The disputes of Englishmen with French- men, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and Swedes in North America's colonial days were just as harsh and just as vital as those of Briton and Boer in South Africa's colonial days ; for thus go on forever the mixinof, molding, fermentino". and uniting processes that bake at last (yet so as by fire) the toothsome, peaceful, health-giving batch of civilized bread. The world is the same old world in its methods and ways of progress, and the colonists of America rose to nationality only through strife that strengthened and rivalries that united." " But did n't anybody have any good times in those colonial days ? " queried Christine. " I. think it 's nicer to-day." "As it should be, my dear," Uncle Tom replied. " I told you at the open- ing of our talk that there was a vast difference between the season of beginning here and these luxurious surroundings of to-day. The early times of Rhode Island were days of religious fanaticism, wrangling, faction, and intolerance ; but I suppose there were many gentle souls in these parts, and that the good influence of Roger Williams developed and united them into an order-loving and peaceful community. I must say, however, that it took some years to bring about this better condition of afiairs. But the vigor of the race that peopled ' Little Rhody ' grew steadily ; better men brought better manners, and trade and commerce built up the ports of this Bay into enter- prising and prosperous communities. When the days of the American Revolution came, Rhode Island was in the van. She was one of the first colonies to demand a General Congress, and her foremost soldier, Nathanael Greene, is held as second in ability only to Washington. Founded by re- ligious reformers and radicals, the best of the restless elements finally came to the surface, and the first colony that made slaveholding a crime was also "PARSON" JOHN DAVENPORT OF NEW HAVEN. From a painting in Yale College. THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS 175 the one from which first sprang that rehgious toleration that has made America the land of liberty and the home of freedom." The young people saw a good deal of Rhode Island as they traversed the little State from Newport the luxurious, and Narragansett Pier, its picturesque rival, and Providence the wealthy, to Chepachet, where Gen- eral Dorr raised his armed rebellion against aristocracy and exclusion, and IN THE CITY OF ELMS. Temple Street, New Haven. Block Island, ten miles out at sea, whose bold cliffs and green pastures so attracted the stout Dutch sailor, Captain Block, in the early days of dis- covery, as to link it to his name forever. Then, starting from the shores of Long Island Sound, where the "Shore Line" connects prosperous and long-established towns, through Stonington and Groton, and New London and Lyme, and Saybrook and Guilford, they came at last to the chief city of the Nutmeg State, where, near the head of the "spacious bay" at Ouinapiack, good, clear-headed Parson Davenport, 176 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES under a spreading oak, preached his first sermon to the pioneer colonists, and entered with them into the 'plantation covenant' which, in June, 1639, developed into the ' fiandamental experiment,' or first constitution of the present State of Connecticut. " 'Parson Davenport,' as New Haven people still love to call him, was a good deal of a man," Uncle Tom declared as, after they had "done" the THE CLASH OF RACES — " STALKING ' THE PEQUOTS. beautiful Elm City from the College fence to the Judges' Cave, he and his young people gathered for conference in the pleasant hotel of the rock -guarded, elm-shaded, sea-washed old town. " He was John Davenport, a London minister, who emigrated to Boston with a well-to-do company of setders ; but finding that colonial capital rent and torn by the feud with Mistress THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS " J 77 Anne Hutchinson, he looked about for some quieter and less discussion-filled home, and finally decided on the region about this spacious bay, under Ouinapiack, or 'Red Hill,' as the Dutchmen called it, as a place eminently fitted for settlement." "'Red Hill,' eh?" said Jack; "and the Dutch? Were n't the New York Dutchmen here first, Uncle Tom ? " "Yes," his uncle replied. "Even before the pioneer Englishmen came into these parts the New York Dutchmen had purchased from the Indians the land where Hartford now stands, and had put up there, at " Dutch Point," as we term it now, in 1633, a trading-post which they called the House of Good Hope." " But the English had the title to the land, had n't they?" asked Roo-er. " They claimed it, as did the Dutch also, by right of discovery," Uncle Tom replied. " But it really seems to have been a case of simultaneous pos- session and settlement. In 1631 an English nobleman. Lord Say and Sele, obtained a grant — with other noble investors — of the land from Point Judith to New York, and north as far as Worcester in Massachusetts. They also had the usual western annex to the South Sea — that is, to the Pacific; so, you see, Connecticut was quite a long wedge driven into the American continent." "But did not the other colonies stretch away west like that, too?" asked Bert. " Yes," Uncle Tom replied. " The western limits of the American con- tinent were almost unknowm in those early days of colonization. Even up to 1732 the colonial grants had no defined western limit other than that vague and cheerful border, the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, the royal charters to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ran west indefinitely, only those lands being excepted from that territory that were, so the charters ran, ' actually possessed by any Christian prince or people.' " " How about New York? " queried Jack. " That, my boy," replied Roger, with ill-assumed glee, " was a conquered province — eh. Uncle Tom ? " Uncle Tom nodded, while laughing at Jack's gesture of protest. " That 's right, Roger," he said ; " but the new rulers of New York after its capture from the Dutch, though they had no claim under any charter, did have a cession of land from the Iroquois owners of New York. These Indians, under the assumed authority of conquest and tribute, claimed the ownership of all that land north of the Tennessee River. This vast western section the white rulers of New York claimed as successors to Iroquois authority, 178 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES PHOTOGRAPHED BY MISS C. M. ACTON. THE VILLAGE STREET AT SAYBROOK. The building on the right is the original old inn. and this claim led to continuous and often pugnacious debates and squabbles as to ' who owned which.' " " Did that affect the Connecticut Colony, too? " asked Bert. "It did, indeed," Uncle Tom replied. "In fact, from the first the boundary controversy between New York and Connecticut was hot. But England was stronger in America than the Dutch, and when Governor Stuyvesant agreed at Hartford to arbitrate the dispute over the Connecticut River and Long Island lands, the Dutch got the worst of it." "An old case of Outlanders and Boers, was it?" queried Bert. "There 's nothing new under the sun, Bert — even in Dutch-English disputes over possession and supremacy," said Uncle Tom, recognizing the analogy. " And English progress generally comes out ahead. It was so in the Connecticut-New York case. Stuyvesant had to agree, in spite of him- self, to the 'Hobson's choice' decision forced upon him, and to give up the most of his Connecticut claim, excepting the fort at Hartford and almost all of Long Island." "That must have made him angry," said Marian. " He was n't a very patient man, you know." " No doubt it did," her uncle replied; "but, angry or not, he had to be THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS 1/9 satisfied, and Connecticut was English from Stamford to the Rhode Island line." "When was that, Uncle Tom?" Bert asked. "That was in September, 1650," said Uncle Tom. "But for twenty years the English had been coming into these lands. As early as 1631, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MISS C. GRAVE OF LADY ALICE FENWICK AT SAYBROOK. you remember, the syndicate of English noblemen headed by Lord Say and Sele — " "Funny sort of a name," was Marian's comment of interruption ; "sounds like a story." " It is the combination title of a certain eminent English nobleman of that day," Uncle Tom explained, "and it really is a story-name, too, Marian; for, years ago. Miss Warner, the author of 'The Wide, Wide World,' wrote a novel of this Connecticut region with the title of ' Say and Seal.' " " I must read it," Christine and Marian both declared. "Another member of the 'noble syndicate,'" Uncle Tom went on, "was Lord Brooke, of whom you may read in Scott's 'Marmion'; so, when they came to make a settlement on their land under that first charter, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, they worked in the names of both the noble lords, and called their settlement Saybrook." i8o THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES '' Oh ! where we went the other day," said Christine. " I 'd forgotten about that name. Lovely sea-shore town, is n't it ? " " Loveher now than when, in the days of Pequot and Puritan, Connec- ticut had its beginning there at the mouth of what the Indians called Ouonektacut, or the ' Long River.' You remember, we saw the place." They did remember. The Saybrook trip was, indeed, a charming memory. When first laid out. Uncle Tom had told them, Saybrook was to have been a great city, and young John Winthrop, son of the famous Mas- THE CHARTER OAK, HARTFORD. Blown down in 1856. sachusetts governor, was the first governor of the Saybrook Colony. To-day Saybrook is a quiet New England village, aspiring to be a summer resort, and proud of its old-time greatness when Lion Gardiner laid out its fortifica- tions, and beautiful Alice Fenwick died of homesickness and hardship; when it beat the marauding Pequots into defeat, adopted the rigid platform of pains and penalties known as the " Blue Laws," and was the original site of Connecticut's famous university — Yale College. Uncle Tom recalled the story of Saybrook's unfulfilled promise as again, in the home of the real Yale University, — for the college removed from Say- brook to New Haven in 1718, — they put into shape the colonial story of THROUGH THE PLANTATIONS l8l OM A PHOTOGRAPH BY THE NER PHOTOGRAPH CO. THE ANCIENT BURYING-GROUND OF HARTFORD. Many of the early colonists of Hartford are buried in this ground, which is situated in the rear of the First Congre- gational Church. Through the patriotic efforts of the Daughters of the American Revolution the grounds have recently been made accessible to the public and are being beautified, and the old gravestones restored. Connecticut. As this was outlined, it formed itself, in brief, into a union of several colonies or settlements — Windsor and Hartford and Wethers- field ; Saybrook and Ouinapiack, or New Haven ; Milford and Branford and Guilford; and the eastern half of Long Island — which, under the general title of the " Governor and Company of the English Colony of Connecticut in New England in America," received a charter from King Charles II in 1662. " Is n't that where the Charter Oak story comes in ? " asked Bert. " Yes; in the Andros troubles of 1687," Uncle Tom replied. " That was at Hartford. That selfish and mean-spirited English king, James II, tried some of his tyrannical tricks on the Connecticut Colony, annexed it to the general New England government, and ordered his trooper-governor, Major Andros, to get back the royal charter under which Connecticut held its lands and rio-hts." " But he did n't get it, did he ? " said Roger. '• No, he did n't," Uncle Tom replied. " The Connecticut patriots ' swiped ' the charter, as you boys say, and — " "-Oh, yes, I know," cried Marian, eager to display her information ; " they hid it in a tree so that Andros could n't get it, and that tree is called the Charter Oak, Where is it, Uncle Tom? Can't we see it?" I«2 THE CENTURY BOOK OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES " Not for over forty years — had you lived so long — could you have seen the Charter Oak, Marian," her uncle replied. " For it was blown down by a storm in 1856. You have told the legend correctly, but the facts are a little different. Somebody did blow out the lights just as Andros was to re- ceive the precious charter ; somebody did run away with it and hide the document in a tree — but it was not the original : it was a duplicate copy of the charter that was run away with ; where the real charter went no one FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY THE WARNER PHOTOGRAPH CO. DUTCH POINT, HARTFORD. Site of the first Dutch trading-fort really knows. But Andros declared himself master, charter or no charter, and proclaimed himself ' Captain-General of New England, by order of the Kin '»/■•• "^oV^ .<" ^^-'^^ V .^' ^°-^^. • "i-^ w^i.w'.. ^«''V, -.,^p,: ^^^\ ■.,,., ^^-^^ v^ ^^-^K !^^^ N M&Nri-ip<;TPP