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CHAPTER XI.

THE GRATITUDE OF THE WORLD.

HUS struggling in every way to keep up

the courage and spirits of the colonists,

denying himself the enjoyment of even those commonest comforts that were yet to be secured for his brethren, and carefully concealing from them the many doubts, and fears, and anxieties, that sometimes haunted his thoughts of the future, Captain Smith led them slowly along from point to point in their precarious career, never desponding, and never giving over to despair; but offering them daily the shining example of one to whom great obstacles were only incentives to greater exertion.

It is saying but little, indeed, to say that few men could anywhere have been found adequate to such a position as that which he voluntarily sought. Few others could so long have held

together a colony of restless and ambitious men,
themselves united by the bonds of no high and
common motive, and animated them with such
sentiments as he perpetually strove to awaken.
His was a difficult task, to which there never
could seem to be attached the least merely per-
sonal reward. What he did, was done from obe-
dience to his own inward convictions of duty.
If he had impulses, they set him forward on
the road of activity and progress. The results
at which he aimed were in nowise either single.
or selfish.
There seemed to be some secret ele-
ment in his character, pushing him onward to
unflagging effort for others, which he had it not
in his power to overlook or disobey.

And out of this obedience sprang that lofty and distinguished success of his, as the leader of the early settlement at Jamestown, which stamps him forever in the opinion of the world as one of its most shining characters. Though he made no wonderful discoveries of gold-fields, as had been at first anticipated, yet he opened to the view of mankind a field of soul, and mind, and native energy, whose extensive riches both surprised and charmed every one who either heard or read

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of his courageous exploits. The very savages, who at the first saw fit to hate and conspire against him, came finally to respect and revere his superior intelligence and power. From being enemies, he brought them over to be his allies. His continual self-possession they could not help admiring. To the freshness and energy of his individual will they made immediate and ready obeisance. They saw in him what even the members of his own party were too blind themselves to discern, and in truth led the way before them in offering appropriate honor and regard to so noble and flowing a nature. It is exaggerating nothing to say that he was the soul and centre of the entire colony; that his name fairly represented every high and noticeable quality there was among the purposeless settlers; that his energy, and his ingenuity, and his directing will, banded together all the discordant elements around him, and kept alive those sentiments that alone saved the enterprise from destruction; and, finally, that he was the embodiment of its entire existence, and that but for him it must have fallen into dilapidation by the very force of its own unfortunate construction. This is

praise enough for Captain John Smith. It is praise enough for any man.

Right in the midst of his most self-sacrificing endeavors, however, the English government was persuaded to grant another charter for the colony, differing very essentially from the one under which it held its present existence. It was obtained through the one-sided representations of such men as Captain Newport, and was more particularly aimed at the degradation of the brave man who had successfully carried the colony along to its present position. Lord Delaware became, therefore, the Captain-General; and, among the inferior officers, occurs again the name of Captain Newport. The project was now suddenly patronized by men of rank and wealth; and as much parade was made over the appointment of officers as if the feeble little colony had already grown to be a strong and mighty nation. It was as astonishing as it was laughable, to witness the haste with which earls, and knights, and noblemen, all crowded into the enterprise, lifting it in popular opinion from the uncertain character that had hitherto attached to its name, to a

height of favor that even came to be quite the fashion.

Under the auspices of this new charter, which was granted in May, 1609, nine ships, with five hundred people on board, set sail from England in the latter part of the same month, fully equipped for an enterprise of such a noticeable magnitude. Three commissioners were

appointed for the management of the new project, and for the more easy settlement of all irritating and vexatious questions that might arise in the progress of their designs. These commissioners were Sir George Somers, Sir Thomas Gates, and Captain Newport. It was an exceedingly foolish and short-sighted piece of management; but the government placed in the hands of each of these three men a commission, by the terms of which he who happened to arrive first in Virginia should take command of the colony in advance of the other two. Many a difficulty could have been readily foreseen under such an arrangement as this; and it appears that the commissioners themselves were not by any means blind to the dangers in their path. In order, therefore, to remove all obsta