a cargo of cedar-wood, which was a marketable commodity in England.

In 1609, the company in London sent nine ships and a large number of men to Jamestown, with Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Captain Newport, as its leaders. These three gentlemen all went on one ship, and were wrecked off the Bermuda Islands. Seven out of the nine ships came safely to Virginia. But the men sent were poor material to build up a colony in a wilderness. Instead of the hardy, industrious mechanics and workmen, who were wanted there, they had sent ship-loads of men who were idle and good for nothing at home, and worse than useless in America.

As they had still no leader, Smith retained the command, and with great difficulty tried to keep order among them. At length he was so severely wounded by an explosion of gunpowder, that he was forced to go back to England to be healed. We shall hear of John Smith again, but not in Virginia, for he never after returned there.

Six months after Smith had returned to England, Newport, Gates, and Somers, who I told you had been wrecked on one of the Bermudas, made their appearance in the colony. They had rigged up one of their wrecked vessels, built a small pinnace from the remains of the other, and got off safely. The Bermuda Islands were uninhabited, and supposed to be barren, but the shipwrecked crew had suffered no lack of provisions. They had found plenty of swine running wild all over the island, which furnished them with abundance of fresh meat. Many conjectures were raised to account for the presence of the hogs there. It is probable that a Spanish ship, loaded with supplies for its colonies, in the West Indies, had touched at the same point, and left some swine which had multiplied till they filled the island. It was a fortunate circumstance for Somers and his company, for it not only saved their lives while there, but they were able to salt enough to furnish them with food to Virginia.

Of course the shipwrecked wanderers expected to find plenty of provisions in Jamestown, and it did not occur to them to salt down any pork for their use. It would have been well if they had done. so, for on arriving in James River they found their friends in a state of great distress and destitution. John Smith was gone, and there was nobody else who could bring order out of confusion, and make plans for their relief.

Sir George Somers offered to take the pinnace they had built

and go back to the Bermudas, and bring her back filled with provisions, but they would not accept the offer. Sir Thomas Gates was appointed governor, and was so inefficient to keep up the spirits of the colony, that they all agreed to desert Jamestown and go to Newfoundland, to seek food and passage home from English ships there. Their preparations to leave were nearly completed, when they saw three ships with the English flag at their mast-head, sailing up the river. That was a welcome sight. It was Lord De la Ware, with provisions and men for their relief. This lord had been appointed governor of Virginia by the London Company. You will remember his name easily, because the little State of Delaware has been named for him.

He did many good things for the colony. He fought the Indians who had been hostile, strengthened the fort, and set up a trading port where the Indians and whites might trade peaceably together. Then, his health failing him, he returned to England.

After him Sir Thomas Dale came to be governor, with another ship-load of colonists, and in a year or two Sir Thomas Gates, who had been back to the old country, returned with three hundred colonists.

They had still much trouble with the Indians, and Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, was not disposed to be friendly. During Sir Thomas Dale's governorship, it was proposed that the young Indian princess should be taken as a hostage till her father should make peace with the English. This was accordingly done, and the young Indian girl was kept on board ship in the harbor. I hope she was a willing hostage, for she deserved nothing but kind treatment from the white man, as she seems always to have been his devoted friend and ally. She was now a young maiden of nineteen, and is said to have been really beautiful. At any rate she was charming enough to win the heart of a young Englishman named John Rolfe, who wished to make her his wife. The consent of the governor of the colony, and of Powhatan, was obtained, and in 1613 Pocahontas was married in Jamestown. Before her marriage she was baptized and christened by the name of Rebecca. But by this name she has never been called, and history knows her only as Pocahontas.

After her marriage she went to London, was introduced at court, and presented to King James. Every one was eager to see this young Indian princess and English bride. While in England a little son was born to her, who afterward returned to Virginia, and

whose descendants are said to be living to this day. In the spring

Pocahontas.

of 1617, as Pocahontas was just on the point of embarking for America, she was taken ill, and died.

There are few stories. in history more romantic than that of Pocahontas. To the imagination, this dusky maiden, reared

among savages, appears
like a wild flower of the
forest. And like the wild
flower, which droops and
dies when transplanted to
garden or hot-house, so
this little wild maiden died
soon after she was taken
from her native soil.
After the marriage of

his daughter, Powhatan kept peace with the English during the rest of his life; and the colonists did not suffer from Indian warfare until by his death his brother Opecancanough became chief of the tribes in Virginia.

Opecancanough was not of so peaceful a temper as Powhatan, and in 1622 he made an attack on Jamestown and all the country around, and massacred hundreds of white men. In a few months the number of colonists was reduced from 4,000 to 2,500. Whole families were butchered on distant plantations, without opportunity for defense, and the name of Opecancanough was a word of terror in Virginia.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PLANTER IN VIRGINIA.

How a Settlement was begun - Exports of the Colonists. -- Choosing Sites for Plantations. Slavery introduced into Virginia. - Buying a Wife with Tobacco. - Life in England in 1607. A Virginia Planter's House in 1649.

BEFORE I go any farther with the history of the English colonies in America, I want to give you an idea of the kind of people who

came to Virginia to settle, what sort of homes they made in the wilderness, and how they finally made Virginia a successful colony. When these colonies, which were sent from England, landed on these shores, of course their first impulse was to provide some kind of houses to shelter them. This they did by cutting down trees and making log-houses for themselves, and a fort into which all could retire in case of an attack from the Indians.

They were often very careless about providing for winter, by planting corn and laying in stores of provisions, and for the first two or three years relied on ships from England to bring them supplies. But as soon as they were able to provide for themselves, the London Company demanded that they should send something home to pay for the expense of fitting out so many ships and men. You can see the company must have spent a great deal of money, and that they were a long time getting any return for it.

All these early colonists had a strong hope of finding gold and rich treasures in Virginia, as Cortez and Pizarro had found it in Peru and Mexico; and at first rumors were constantly afloat of discoveries of gold, now in one place and then in another. In John Smith's governorship, they were about to load a ship with glittering sand, which they had dug up in the river's bed and supposed to be gold.

When they learned by repeated disappointments that there was no gold nor silver to be found, they very wisely turned their attention to the natural productions of the country. In the first place, there was plenty of timber, which was exceedingly welcome in England, where there was a great want of building material for ships and houses. The huge trees in Virginia astonished the colonists. "One fir-tree in Virginia is able to make a main-mast for the greatest ship in England," writes one of the new-comers home to his relatives in England. Consequently, they soon began to cut down the timber, and to saw it up into clapboards and masts, and beams and door-posts, and all kinds of boards. Then also they began to manufacture wood-ashes, and pitch and tar, to send back to England. Previously pot and soap ashes had been brought from Prussia, and commanded a high price, but now the colonies furnished them plentifully, and at a cheap rate. The tar and pitch was obtained from the numberless pine-trees of the forest. Then they sent great stores of deer and beaver skins, bought of the Indians, and quantities of salted fish caught all along the sea-coast. But the main staple of export in the colony was tobacco.

This weed-which perhaps it would have been quite as well if the white man had never learned to use had been introduced into England more than twenty years before. As near as we can find out, the homesick colony of Raleigh's, which Sir Francis Drake had taken back to England in his ship in 1586, carried this plant home with them. Sir Walter began to smoke a pipe immediately, and in Queen Elizabeth's time, tobacco was fashionable, but very scarce.

As soon as the colony at Jamestown tilled the soil to any extent, they began to raise tobacco. King James, who was a strange man, -a mixture of learning and foolishness, strongly discouraged the culture of tobacco. He thought it was not a good thing for the colony, and wrote a book to prove it was unwholesome. On this

the company tried to substitute other things in its place. There were many mulberry-trees, on whose leaves the little silk-worm which spins silk depends for food. This led them to try and raise silk in Virginia. But this project failed. Silk is not a good product for a colony in a wilderness, always on the look-out for danger and attacks from Indians. The worms soon died, and there was an end of silk-culture.

Then the company sent out some Dutch and Germans, and set them to glass-making and other manufactures. The English themselves at this time. did not know how to make glass, and were very poor manufacturers, so they called in the aid of these foreigners, thinking they would teach their colonies these arts. But I cannot find that much came of these attempts. Nothing succeeded like tobacco, and for a long time that was the principal export.

Tobacco Plant.

There were two classes of colonists in the early settlement of Virginia. The first class was that of the "master-planter," who owned a share in the colony, or had purchased lands of the company in London. These gentlemen paid their passage on the ships, and took many comforts from England abroad with them. When they arrived they selected their lands and chose sites for their houses.