The Romance of American Colonization Author:William Elliot Griffis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. TOBACCO, BRIDES, AND BLACK SERVANTS. THE London Company, in the hope of improving Virginian affairs, had applied for a new charter of privileg... more »es, which greatly increased the area of the colony. This was granted on the 230! of May, 1609, and the expedition of nine vessels, as we have seen, sailed from Plymouth on the ist of June. The discipline now put in force in the settlement was borrowed from that of the model army organized by Prince Maurice in the Dutch republic, and Sir Thomas Dale, the new governor, made it work admirably. The land was divided, and no more rations were given out from the public storehouse. The church edifice was repaired and the fortifications were improved. A new settlement was planned on Varina Neck at the bend in the James River, called Farrar's Island. The isthmus of this peninsula was called "Dutch Gap," after the glass-makers who set up their furnaces here in 1608. Most Englishmen then made, and uneducated people now make, no distinction between the Dutch and theGermans, who are politically different people, each with a language of its own. Over two hundred years later, this site was made famous by a canal dug under General Butler's orders and finished by the United States government in 1873. A new spirit now animated the colony. Men worked cheerfully and gladly. Gardens for hemp, flax, and other seeds were laid out. Under the new code of Dutch laws, " divine, moral, and martial," order and prosperity ruled where disorder and shiftlessness had been. Soon the colony could be called, after a word beloved by Americans, a success. By June, 1611, when Sir Thomas Gates arrived, there were seven hundred settlers, among whom were women and children, with plenty of provisions besides one hundred cows and other cattle. Gates sent Dal...« less