England at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century: Edward Maria Wingfield and Sir

The ensuing winter was a fearful one. Frost closed the rivers against fishermen, and deep snows blocked the forests against hunters. The settlers had nothing to depend upon excepting the stores brought from England. At one time their huts were nearly buried in the snow-drifts. Of two of them only the chimneys were seen above the snow for a month, out of which rolled the blue smoke along the surface of the white drifts. It was difficult to get fuel to feed the hut fires, and they were about to make the store-house their general home, when, at midnight in January, it took fire and was consumed, with a part of their provisions, which they could not save. That fire produced a wild, weird scene, its red glare spreading a crimson glow far over the snow and through the dark forests. Distress followed. Confinement, hardship and scarcity gendered disease, and when the spring of 1608 opened, Governor Popham was dead.

The settlers were on the verge of despair when a ship came with supplies and brought the sad intelligence that the chief-justice and Sir John Gilbert were dead. These men were the stronger props of the enterprise. This news, with the terrible scenes of the past winter fresh in their memories, discouraged the emigrants, and they abandoned the country and returned home, taking with them a little vessel which they had built, and some furs and other products of the country. They were not fit men to found a state. They were compulsory emigrants sent hither by their personal necessities, and had left their country for their country's good. Happily for New England they were not allowed to be the founders of a commonwealth on its soil. They gave such discouraging accounts of the country that no one seemed willing to follow their example; and for a number of years afterward the Plymouth Company only kept up a little traffic with the natives of their domain, and fished in the neighboring waters.

The king, with commendable vanity, had prepared a code of laws for the colonies, really more liberal in their provisions than the intentions of the patentees, who desired immediate profitable return in money rather than the ultimate blessings of colonization. These laws enjoined the regular preaching of the gospel, kindness to the Indians and the communication of religious instruction to them, and other provisions for the well-ordering of a civil community. Under the charter and this code of laws, the London Company prepared to make a settlement in South Virginia. Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, Richard Hakluyt, and Edward Maria Wingfield were its most active members, and in December, 1606, they sent Captain Christopher Newport with three small vessels and one hundred and five emigrants, with orders to land on Roanoke Island, where Raleigh's colony had perished twenty years before. It was a company of men no better fitted for the founding of a prosperous state than were those who wintered on the coast of Maine. No family, the true nucleus of a colony, accompanied either. Of the whole number who sailed for Virginia, there were only twelve laborers and a few mechanics. The remainder were "gentlemen," a word denoting persons who were not engaged in any industrial employments-drones in society, whose numbers are, happily, small in our country at this day. Many of these were idle and dissolute, whilst a few of those who were classed with the colonists, like Bartholomew Gosnold, the projector of the scheme, Captain John Smith, George Percy brother of the Duke of Northumberland, and Edward Maria Wingfield, were men of energy and steady habits.

The silly king, with his love for concealment, trickery and surprises, had placed the names of the councillors for the Virginia government in a sealed box, with orders not to open it until the emigrants should be landed and were prepared to form a settlement. This foolish order deprived the colonists of a head whilst on the sea, and there was no competent authority to decide questions or to quell disputes, if any should arise, during the long voyage of four months, for Newport took the old southern route by way of the Canary Islands and the West Indies.