ENGLISH AND SPANISH ORIGINS IN NORTH AMERICA.* THE contrast between
these two works, or rather between these instalments of two important works, is a remarkable instance of like drawing to like,—a natural affinity between an author and his subject. When the enterprises which Mr. Doyle and Mr. H. H. Bancroft have commenced are completed and are floating on the sea of public opinion, they will present the different appearances of the manageable and serviceable craft with which Drake made himself the terror of the Spanish Main, and the huge and unwieldy Santissima ' he dodged and worried till it lay a helpless victim before him. Mr. Doyle's book at once suggests the literary English work- man of the best and most reliable class. It is solid, modest, well arranged, grave in tone, yet as free from senti- mentality as it is from literary padding. After a short preface in which he states his hopes and intentions, and a very useful table of contents, be sets to work at once with the true Englishman's delight for grappling with the concrete interests of life. " The aim of this book," he says, " is to describe and explain the process by which a few scattered colonies along the Atlantic seaboard grew into that vast Confederate Republic, the United States of America." Mr. Bincroft's work, on the other hand, recalls nothing so readily as the elaborate preparations made by Philip of Spain to fit out the Armada. In a formidable pre- face, he takes off his coat somewhat after the deliberate manner of Mr. Augustus Snodgrass, and loudly tells his readers that "he is going to begin." He speaks very fully and candidly of his labours in collecting his materials, which have, indeed, been enormous ; and moralises on life in general, and the art of writing history in particular. This preface is followed by a table of contents, and nearly fifty pages of authorities. When at last Mr. Bancroft sets sail, it is in this fashion,—" How stood this ever-changing world four hundred years ago ? Already, Asia was prematurely old. Ships skirted Africa; but save the Northern sea-board, to all but Heaven the continent was as dark as its stolid inhabitants. America was in swaddlings, knowing not its own existence, and known of none ; Europe was an aged youth, bearing the world-disturbing torch which still shed a dim, fitful light and malignant odour. Societies were held together by loyalty and superstition; kingeraft and priestcraft ; not by
• The English in America : Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. By J. A. Doyle. Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford. London : Longmans, Green, and Ca. 1882.
The History of the Pacific Sta'es of North America. By Herbert Howe Bancroft. 'Vol. I., "Central America," 151M-1530. London : Trlibuer and Co. 1/182.
that co-operation which springs from the common interests of the people. Accursed were all things real. Under the shifting sands of progress truth incubates, and the hatched ideas fashion for themselves a great mind in which they may find lodgment; fashion for themselves a tongue by which to speak ; fashion for themselves a lever by which to move the world." We are far, indeed, from disparaging Mr. Bancroft, or from denying his truly marvellous industry, of which we have had proofs before now. He has good reason for his self-confidence, which, besides, must be a great help and stimulus towards the accomplishing of such a herculean task as he has set himself. All the same, we must say that his style looks like that of a picturesque Spanish Don who had gone through a course of Carlyle and Emerson in his youth.
In his present volume, Mr. Doyle has really only begun his work. It contains the early history of Virginia, Maryland, and the two Carolinas. The story of New England and of the other colonies Mr. Doyle proposes to give in two additional volumes,bnt we should suppose they will not prove sufficient for the purpose. So far as he has gone, however, he deserves nothing but praise. It is a genuine pleasure, and rare as it is genuine, to read a work of a historical character which, like this, carries sincerity and modesty in every page of it, which is serious without being dull, and animated without showing partisanship rrnIlarn himself is not more impartial than Mr. Doyle, who, having to write of Cavalier and Roundhead, Anglican and Nonconformist, Indian and white man, deals out justice, and frequently swingeing damages, to each alike ; who seems to hate nothing and nobody, unless, indeed, it be that " anointed pedant," James I. Not that there is wanting in Mr. Doyle a vein of true sentiment, although it must be said that there is but little to call it forth in the history of Virginia, which resembles nothing so much as the history of a greatbusiness concern or Co-operative Store. When he gets hold of a man worth drawing at all he draws him well, such as the celebrated Captain John Smith, whom we are glad to say he rehabilitates; Delaware, Dale, the unscrupulous and shifty Argyll, the " robust " Berkeley, the second and important Lord Baltimore the "Proprietor" of Maryland, and above all, Francis Nicholson, thd real founder, in our opinion, of whatever greatness can be associated with Virginian statesmanship. Mr. Doyle's account, too, of the early English expeditions to America, his narrative of the doings of Cabot and Raleigh and Gilbert, and of the difficulties of the English settlers with French and Spanish rivals, are very agreeable reading. Compare the following with Macaulay :—" Gilbert, like Stukeley, was a member of an old Devonshire family. His ancestral home yet stands, stately in its decay. The Atlantic gales roared round its watch-tower, and from the neighbouring hills Gilbert must have looked down on the noble harbour of Tor Bay. All the land around is lovely, with the peculiar beauty of the West,—neither stern nor languid, a beauty which neither awes nor enervates. It would be hard to find a spot richer in romantic influences, more fit to train up a child in those dreamy hopes which allured the seamen of tha
age." • The early story of Virginia—Maryland is little more than a duodecimo edition of Virginia, with the really unimportant episode of the Baltimore Proprietorship superadded—is singularly unromantic one. They bought, they sold, they planted, they builded,—that is really all, from the days of Richard Hakluyt and John Smith to those of Nicholson and Andros. The planters bad no time to think of anything but land and tobacco. Their dealings with the Indians de- pended entirely upon material considerations. Their religion, their politics, their system of law, they can hardly be said to have thought out for themselves,—they were content to borrow them. It cannot be allowed altogether that the far- reaching politico-religions struggle in England which produced first the Commonwealth, and then the Restoration, had abso- lutely no effect on the Virginians ; if it did nothing else, it affected the character of the men who were sent out to them as Governors. But they did not think either King or Parliament worth fighting for. In his ninth chapter, indeed, Mr. Doyle tells the story of a curious little civil war which broke out in Virginia after the Restoration, and which was really a personal struggle between Governor Berkeley and a singular adventurer, Nathaniel Bacon, who seems to have been a kind of Jefferson Davis before his time, dreaming of a confederation between Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. But the movement had no deep significance, political or other, and it came to little. Even the slave-trade—there is nothing more masterly in Mr. Doyle's work than his concluding account of the growth of this nefarious traffic in the Gulf States, with its disastrous social, political, and moral results—was due to the material necessities of the settlers in the Carolinas, or what they thought to be such. " Slavery came in," says Mr. Doyle, "as the one means by which the capitalist could assert his superiority over the man who owned nothing bat his own labour." The " paper constitution " character of early Virginia is indicated in a very striking way by its first military and civil code, the basis of which was the atrocious military law in force in the Netherlands at the time. Among its provi- sions was one ordaining " that any man who should unworthily demean himself unto any preacher or minister of God's Word," or fail "to hold them in all reverent regard and dutiful entreaty," should be openly whipped three times, and after each whipping should publicly acknowledge his crime. The clergy were also empowered to examine all new-comers to the colony in their religion, and if any one fell short of the standard required, he was to come as often as his minister desired to be catechised and instructed, " To refuse to attend was, if persisted in, a capital crime." The fitness of such a code for Virginia is shown by the naive remark of Mr. Doyle,—" It is consolatory to think that, in all likelikood, the absence of the clergy rendered this clause a dead-letter !"
As we have already said, the most notable figure in Vir- ginian history, after the early settlers, is Francis Nicholson, .who, about the time of the Revolution of 1688, became Lien- tenant-Governor of the colony. He was trained in the worst school of public and private morals England has ever seen, in the Whitehall of the second Charles. Yet Mr. Doyle is able to testify, " It is no small praise of a public man trained in such a school, to say that he was guiltless of all attacks on private rights, that he was clean-handed as a governor and a judge, and that he was honestly and laboriously attentive to the welfare of those under his rule. Nicholson, too, stands out as something more than an efficient and upright administrator. To him, more than to any one man of that age, belongs the credit of clearly seeing and setting forth that policy which the two next generations of statesmen adopted towards the colonies." As soon as he appeared on the scene, he saw that the original founders of the colony were mistaken in their hopes of estab- lishing "a self-supporting community, with varied forms of pro- ductive industry." Soil and climate had settled that Virginia -was to be emphatically a tobacco-producing colony, and there- fore he considered that the most statesmanlike course for the Home Government to pursue towards the colony was to en- courage the production of tobacco. He wrote home to this effect in vigorous despatches, which appear in the Colonial papers referring to Virginia, about the year 1690, and which Mr. Doyle says are, even in style, far above most of the documents which bear on his subject. Nicholson was, further, a vigorous advocate of a defensive confederation of the Colonies, to meet the danger of French encroachment. But, above all things, he was sagacious enough to throw himself heartily into the work of religious and educational reform, being much aided in his efforts by James Blair, an energetic Scotchman with an Anglican training, who, Mr. Doyle says, "might be not inaptly described as a colonial Barnet." They were ultimately able to establish a college in Virginia. That it did not come to much simply proves that Nicholson was considerably in advance of his time. Subsequently, we find him turning up in Maryland as its Governor, "grasping at once the true principles on which the commercial prosperity of the colony should rest, stirring up a torpid community into some zeal for education and religion, and at the same time throwing a vigilant and comprehensive glance on the whole body of the colonies, and missing no feature which bore either on their own welfare or their utility to the Crown." Nicholson's career as a reformer was much interrupted, and he was bitterly attacked while he was in Maryland—Mr. Doyle pays but slight attention to the scandalous reports spread about his private life—but he managed to establish a system of free schools. Finally, he was despatched to South Carolina as Governor, at a critical period in its history, and presided over its peaceful settlement as a Crown colony. In his subsequent volumes, Mr. Doyle will necessarily give us portraits of much more heroic figures than Francis Nicholson ; but of few men so versatile, so energetic in administration, or taking so compre- .hensive a view of colonial statesmanship.
The time has not yet come for offering anything like an adequate criticism of Mr. H. H. Bancroft's work. It is to con- sist of twenty-five volumes, averaging- about 700 pages each. Of these, three are to be devoted to the history of Central America, and the first, now before us, deals with a period of about thirty years from 1501 to 1530. Still, as it narrates the adventures of Columbus, and the discovery and settlement of Darien, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala under the Spaniards, and as Cortes, Alvarado, and Vasco Nunez figure in it, it traverses tolerably familiar and very volcanic ground. In this volume a good deal of Mr. Bancroft's space is taken up with intro- ductory and controversial matter; and certainly his first chapter, on" Spain and Civilisation at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Cen- tury," is unconscionably long, and burdened with digressions. There is, however, no doubt as to the extent of his reading ; and his style, in spite of the peculiarities we have already noticed, is not without its attractions. The most remarkable character that appears in this volume, with the exception of Cortes, is Pedrarias Davila, who governed both Darien and Nicaragua, but who is best known for his judicial murder of Vasco Nunez. Surely, of all the truculent Spanish adventurers of his time, Pedrarias must have been at once the most remorselessly unscrupulous and fanatically Catholic; and not without reason does Mr. Bancroft style him the " Timur of the Indies." Imagine a man who is credited with having caused the deaths of two millions of Indians, dying in his bed, at the age of ninety, in the odour of sanctity, and at peace with himself !
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