especially by the appearance of these outlandish creatures of another world. Other savages were brought, and some of these were exhibited for money. One of them was, perhaps, shown after he had died, if we may guess the fact from Shakspere's contemptuous sneer at the idle curiosity and far-away philanthropy of the crowd, in Trinculo's assertion that, in England, "any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Out of this interest in savages, no doubt, the fertile invention of the poet evoked the monster Caliban. One Indian thus brought away to England from Cape Cod, by a curious fate, "went a soldier to the wars of Bohemia"; another, from Martha's Vineyard, invented a gold mine, and, on going back to show the way to it, jumped off the ship and escaped.

The animals of America excited equally the wonder of the people in England, and no stories were so easily credited as extravagant ones. It was reported that the progress of Cabot's ships had been retarded by the multitude of codfish he had encountered off the American coast, and that the Newfoundland bears caught these fish "with their claws," and drew them to shore to eat them. King James's favor was won by a present of two living young alligators and a wild boar, and he was childishly eager to possess some of the flying-squirrels that had been introduced into English parks from Virginia. The flying-squirrel, the opossum, and the humming-bird were long considered the great wonders of America, and there was no end to the marvelous stories about them. It is hard to recognize the opossum, in one of the earliest descriptions, of "a monstrous deformed beast, whose forepart resembled a fox, the hinder part an ape, excepting the feet, which were like a man's; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, wherein she bestows her young until they can shift for themselves." The humming-bird, on the highest authority, is declared to be a cross between a fly and a bird; the Dutch on the North River called it simply " the West India bee." They were prepared for exportation to Europe, in the New Netherlands by drying, and in Barbadoes by stuffing with fine sand and perfumery. They were considered in Europe "pretty delicacies for the ladies, who wore them at their breasts and girdles." The dogs of the Indians were said to be snouted like foxes, and were supposed to be quite unable to bark, though they could howl. The muskrat was expected to furnish musk, and the mathematician Hariot believed that the civet-cat would become a source of profit

to planters in America, but his description of the animal points to the skunk, whose perfume has never yet come into request. Some of the earliest authors speak of the raccoon as an ape. But the wild hogs of America were the strangest of all, for they "have their navels upon the ridge of their backs," says Purchas. So great was the number of new creatures revealed by the discovery of America, that European scholars were worried to get them all into the limits of Noah's ark.

The glimpses we have given here of the state of knowledge about America existing in England at the period of colonization, not only give an insight into some of the motives that prompted the planting of English communities in the New World, but also enable us to form a notion of some traits of English character at the time, and throw a light forward upon the early history of the American colonists. Out of an England stirred by the newborn intellectual life of modern times, and producing great poets, philosophers, statesmen, and adventurers, but still clinging tenaciously to the childish romances and superstitions of the middle ages, came the beginners of the new nation, such as the pleasure-seeking planters of Virginia, the rigorists of New England, and the philanthropic enthusiasts of Pennsylvania. Under every guise of sect and opinion there was present the wonder-loving, credulous, and aggressive Englishman of that age of seething religious and intellectual reaction. The mutually repellant Churchmen, Puritans, Papists, and Quakers, who spread themselves into separate communities along the wilderness coast of North America in the seventeenth century, had really more in common than they had of difference.

II.

RALEGH AND THE ROANOKE COLONIES.

IF one might believe the doubtful anecdote in which Walter Ralegh wins the favor of the queen by spreading his cloak to enable her to cross dry-shod the mud of the Strand, he might be said in that act to have made a bridge for English colonists to traverse the Atlantic; for, without the help of Ralegh's bold imagination, adventurous spirit, and statesmanlike foresight, there would hardly have been an English settlement in North America. In that time the difficulty of planting colonies was greater than we can well conceive. The elements of success were not yet understood; there was no recorded experience for a guide; gentlemen, soldiers, ecclesiastics,

and gold-seekers, were sent out in most of the early European colonies, instead of farmers and laborers. Then, too, England was not yet the great commercial nation and dominant maritime power she has since become, but was a small and backward state, whose resources were undeveloped, and whose little ships were ill-adapted to make the perilous voyage across the Atlantic; moreover, all her sea-ventures must run the gauntlet of danger from the hostility of Spain, whose powerful armaments bullied English commerce and preyed upon English shipping. The people of that time, overcrowded as they were, did not understand the true benefits of colonization, and Englishmen were loth to move from home, except when they had a prospect of immediate wealth from mines or conquests. The lucky fortunes amassed by the piratical warfare carried on against Spanish commerce turned men's heads, and Ralegh's schemes were more than once overthrown by the avidity of his agents to engage in the plundering of Spanish ships. John Smith, in allusion to the difficulty he had in inducing men to undertake agricultural settlements in New England, says that his task would have been easy had his design been to persuade them to a gold mine or new invention, to reach the South Sea, to despoil a monastery, capture rich caracks, or rob some poor fishermen. People who engage in privateering, he adds, " do not seek the common good, but the common goods." Unluckily, the habit of seeking the common goods had demoralized many of the bravest spirits in England.

Virginia "contributed nothing to its education," as was wittily said at the time.

When a young man, Ralegh served in the French civil wars, on the side of the Huguenots, as one of a body of gentlemen volunteers, led by a kinsman of his own. He had opportunity, at that time, to hear of the charms of Florida from those who had escaped destruction in the ill-fated Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline. He brought to London with him, and maintained at his own expense. Le Moyne, the artist, who had fled out of that fort into the wilderness the night of the Spanish massacre, and whose curious sketches of the tattooed Florida Indians are now to be seen in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum, some of these we shall reproduce in future papers of this series. It was. perhaps, by the accounts that he had heard from the Huguenots that Ralegh was led to seek a location for his own colonies far to the south of the region explored by Frobisher and Gilbert, and certainly the change from Newfoundland to the coast of North Carolina and Virginia was a long step toward success.

The character of the queen was an almost insuperable obstacle to American enterprises. Her policy was admirably adapted to check and wear out her enemies in Europe, by delays, intrigues, threats, promises, deceptions, and a steady avoidance of all ambitious projects beyond the bounds of England. But this politic evasion of risks and ventures, and the invincible stinginess of Elizabeth, were main hinderances to success in colonization. she was willing enough that her adventurous and patriotic subjects should consume their estates in plantations beyond the seas; she was lavish in cheap encouragement; she even sent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert "an anchor guided by a lady," whatever that may have been, when he sailed on his fatal voyage; but Gilbert died in the vain hope that the Queen might be induced to contribute a paltry ten thousand pounds toward founding a colony, an enterprise which "required a prince's purse to have thoroughly carried out." She graciously accepted the adroit flattery of Ralegh in naming the American coast Virginia for her virgin queen," but the godmother of VOL. XXV.-7.

as a

In 1585, explorations having been made. in the preceding year, Sir Walter sent out his first plantation under Ralph Lane. This colony deserved success far more than the ill-contrived expedition to Jamestown. It was in every way well-appointed, and contained many men of sagacity and courage. Ralegh instituted a healthy private interest from the start, in granting five hundred acres of land. at the least, to every man in the colony "only for the adventure of his person." Notwithstanding the unfortunate location on the Isl and of Roanoke, the wild-goose chase after the South Sea, and the imprudent attack made on the Indians, the colony had actually taken root, having, in despair of supplies from England, sowed corn on the island. In two weeks more the people would have eaten of an abundant American harvest, had not that valiant sea-rover, discoverer, and free-booter, Sir Francis Drake, on his way back from a prosperous sacking of Spanish towns in the West Indies, bethought him to visit his countrymen, the English colony in Virginia, in obedience to orders given him by the queen Upon Drake's coming, and after the misad venture of a storm, which drove some of his vessels to sea, among which was one that he had allotted to the colony, the whole company were seized with a panic, or a frenzy of homesickness. They prevailed upon Drake to carry them to England again, and thus missed of seeing the ship sent by Ralegh which arrived fifteen days later with supplies Thus ended the first attempted settlement, in which were engaged such men as Thomas

Hariot, the distinguished mathematician, Thomas Cavendish, afterward renowned as a circumnavigator of the globe, and John White, a clever artist. Hariot wrote an account of the country and its products, on his return.

preserved in health." The colonists, he says, "learned to suck it after their manner," and they kept up this habit upon their return to England, "having found many virtues in it." Not only many men, but also "women of great calling," and learned physicians, had adopted it at the time of his writing.

In this he describes at length the virtues of a plant which the Indians called uppowoc, but which took in Europe the Spanish name tobacco. He expatiates particularly on the esteem in which it was held by the natives, tells how it was sprinkled in their fish-weirs for good luck, and how it was considered an offering worthy of the acceptance of their gods in times of danger or thanksgiving;"they think their gods marvellously delighted therewith," he says. He describes the manner in which the Indians were accustomed to take "the fume or smoke thereof, by sucking it through pipes made of clay into their stomach and head, from whence it purgeth superfluous steam and other gross humors, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body whereby their bodies are notably

John White, the artist of the expedition, who became governor of the second colony, made some admirable drawings of the Indians, which give us the first graphic representations of American savages made from life, and the only true pictures of the Indians of the coast between Pennsylvania and Florida. Some of these were reproduced on copper, with only moderate accuracy, in De Bry's famous Voyages, published in 1590, and have been thence copied into innu merable later works. In 1865, the very striking original drawings were discov ered and they are now safely housed in the Grenville Collection of the British Museum, through the courtesy of whose officers we are able to reproduce a por tion of them from photographs, as illustrations to the present series of papers.

Sir Richard Grenville, who arrived later than the supply-ship, was disappointed to find the colony deserted by those who had been transported thither with so much expense and trouble. He left fifteen men, with provisions for two years, to hold the country. But when Grenville came back the next year with more than a hundred settlers, these fifteen, having been attacked by a superior force of Indians, who killed one of them and burned their supplies, had fled away by boat, to meet a fate unknown.

The new colony also ended in dark ness. Ralegh, having perceived that an island without a harbor, on a coast so stormy as that near Cape Hatteras, was not a suitable place, had ordered them to establish the "city of Ralegh in Virginia," at Chesapeake, but these orders were disobeyed, the seamen being very hungry for Spanish booty, and unwilling to carry them farther than Roanoke Island. Here was born, soon after their landing, Virginia Dare, the first English native of America. The governor, John White, on the entreaty of the colonists, went back to England for supplies, where he found the whole nation in a panic and uproar on account of the threatened Spanish invasion, so that his ships, with all others of force, were detained in har

*The map drawn by White, which we reproduce on another page from the original, shows that Chesa peake, or Chesepiuc, was an Indian village just inside Cape Henry.