Comic History of the United States by Bill Nye (free ebook reader for ipad txt) 📖
- Author: Bill Nye
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He planted a colony and a patch of tobacco on Roanoke Island, but the colonists did not care for agriculture, preferring to hunt for gold and pearls. In this way they soon ran out of food, and were constantly harassed by Indians.
It was an odd sight to witness a colonist coming[Pg 32] home after a long hard day hunting for pearls as he asked his wife if she would be good enough to pull an arrow out of some place which he could not reach himself.
Raleigh spent two hundred thousand dollars in his efforts to colonize Virginia, and then, disgusted, divided up his patent and sold county rights to it at a pound apiece. This was in 1589. Raleigh learned the use of smoking tobacco at this time.
RALEIGH'S ASTONISHMENT.
He was astonished when he tried it first, and threatened to change his boarding-place or take his meals out, but soon enjoyed it, and before[Pg 33] he had been home a week Queen Elizabeth thought it to be an excellent thing for her house plants. It is now extensively used in the best narcotic circles.
RALEIGH'S ENJOYMENT.
Several other efforts were made by the English to establish colonies in this country, but the Indians thought that these English people bathed too much, and invited perspiration between baths.
One can see readily that the Englishman with his portable bath-tub has been a flag of defiance from the earliest discoveries till this day.[Pg 34]
This chapter brings us to the time when settlements were made as follows:
The author's thanks are due to the following books of reference, which, added to his retentive memory, have made the foregoing statements accurate yet pleasing:
A Summer in England with H. W. Beecher. By J. B. Reed.
Russell's Digest of the Laws of Minnesota, with Price-List of Members.
Out-Door and Bug Life in America. By Chilblainy, Chief of the Umatilla.
Why I am an Indian. By S. Bull. With Notes by Ole Bull and Introduction by John Bull.
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BONA FIDE PICTURE OF THE MAYFLOWER.
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CHAPTER III. THE THIRTEEN ORIGINAL COLONIES.
SAMPLE PURITAN.
This chapter is given up almost wholly to facts. It deals largely with the beginning of the thirteen original colonies from which sprang the Republic, the operation of which now gives so many thousands of men in-door employment four years at a time, thus relieving the penitentiaries and throwing more kindergarten statesmen to the front.
It was during this epoch that the Cavaliers landed in Virginia and the Puritans in Massachusetts; the latter lived on maple sugar and armed prayer, while the former saluted his cow, and, with bared head, milked her with his hat in one hand and his life in the other.
Immigration now began to increase along the coast. The Mayflower began to bring over vast[Pg 37] quantities of antique furniture, mostly hall-clocks for future sales. Hanging them on spars and masts during rough weather easily accounts for the fact that none of them have ever been known to go.
The Puritans now began to barter with the Indians, swapping square black bottles of liquid hell for farms in Massachusetts and additions to log towns. Dried apples and schools began to make their appearance. The low retreating forehead of the codfish began to be seen at the stores, and virtue began to break out among the Indians after death.
Virginia, however, deserves mention here on[Pg 38] the start. This colony was poorly prepared to tote wood and sleep out-of-doors, as the people were all gents by birth. They had no families, but came to Virginia to obtain fortunes and return to the city of New York in September. The climate was unhealthy, and before the first autumn, says Sir William Kronk, from whom I quote, "ye greater numberr of them hade perished of a great Miserrie in the Side and for lacke of Food, for at thatte time the Crosse betweene the wilde hyena and the common hogge of the Holy Lande, and since called the Razor Backe Hogge, had not been made, and so many of the courtiers dyede."
John Smith saved the colony. He was one of the best Smiths that ever came to this country, which is as large an encomium as a man cares to travel with. He would have saved the life of Pocahontas, an Indian girl who also belonged to the gentry of their tribe, but she saw at once that it would be a point for her to save him, so after a month's rehearsal with her father as villain, with Smith's part taken by a chunk of blue-gum wood, they succeeded in getting this little curtain-raiser to perfection.
Pocahontas was afterwards married, if the author's memory does not fail him, to John Rolfe. Pocahontas was not beautiful, but many good people sprang from her. She never touched them. Her husband sprang from her also just in time.[Pg 39] The way she jumped from a clay-eating crowd into the bosom of the English aristocracy by this dramatic ruse was worthy of a greater recognition than merely to figure among the makers of smoking-tobacco with fancy wrappers, when she never had a fancy wrapper in her life.
Smith was captured once by the Indians, and, instead of telling them that he was by birth a gent, he gave them a course of lectures on the use of the compass and how to learn where one is at. Thus one after another the Indians went away. I often wonder why the lecture is not used more as a means of escape from hostile people.
THE REHEARSAL.
By writing a letter and getting a reply to it, he made another hit. He now became a great man among the Indians; and to kill a dog and fail to invite Smith to the symposium was considered as[Pg 40] vulgar as it is now to rest the arctic overshoe on the corner of the dining-table while buckling or unbuckling it.
Afterward Smith fell into the hands of Powhatan, the Croker of his time, and narrowly saved his life, as we have seen, through the intervention of Pocahontas.
Smith was now required in England to preside at a dinner given by the Savage Club, and to tell a few stories of life in the Far West.
While he was gone the settlement became a prey to disease and famine. Some were killed by the Indians while returning from their club at evening; some became pirates.
The colony decreased from four hundred and ninety to sixty people, and at last it was moved and seconded that they do now adjourn. They started away from Jamestown without a tear, or hardly anything else, having experienced a very dull time there, funerals being the only relaxation whatever.
But moving down the bay they met Lord Delaware, the new Governor, with a lot of Christmas-presents and groceries. Jamestown was once more saved, though property still continued low. The company, by the terms of its new charter, became a self-governing institution, and London was only too tickled to get out of the responsibility. It is said that the only genuine humor up[Pg 41] to that time heard in London was spent on the jays of Jamestown and the Virginia colony.
Where is that laughter now? Where are the gibes and bon-mots made at that sad time?
They are gone.
All over that little republic, so begun in sorrow and travail, there came in after-years the dimples and the smiles of the prosperous child who would one day rise in the lap of the mother-country, and, asserting its rights by means of Patrick O'Fallen Henry and others, place a large and disagreeable fire-cracker under the nose of royalty, that, busting the awful stillness, should jar the empires of earth, and blow the unblown noses of future kings and princes. (This is taken bodily from a speech made by me July 4, 1777, when I was young.—The Author.)
Pocahontas was married in 1613. She was baptized the day before. Whoever thought of that was a bright and thoughtful thinker. She stood the wear and tear of civilization for three years, and then died, leaving an infant son, who has since grown up.
The colony now prospered. All freemen had the right to vote. Religious toleration was enjoyed first-rate, and, there being no negro slavery, Virginia bade fair to be the republic of the continent. But in 1619 the captain of a Dutch trading-vessel sold to the colonists twenty negroes.[Pg 42] The negroes were mostly married people, and in some instances children were born to them. This peculiarity still shows itself among the negroes, and now all over the South one hardly crosses a county without seeing a negro or a person with negro blood in his or her veins.
NEGROES STILL HAVE FAMILIES.
After the death of Powhatan, the friend of the English, an organized attempt was made by the Indians to exterminate the white people and charge more for water frontage the next time any colonists came.
PREPARING THE FEAST.
March 22, 1622, was the day set, and many of the Indians were eating at the tables of those they had sworn to kill. It was a solemn moment.[Pg 43] The surprise was to take place between the cold beans and the chili sauce.
But a converted Indian told quite a number, and as the cold beans were passed, the effect of some arsenic that had been eaten with the slim-neck clams began to be seen, and before the beans had gone half-way round the board the children of the forest were seen to excuse themselves, and thus avoid dying in the house.
Yet there were over three hundred and fifty white people massacred, and there followed another, reducing the colonists from four thousand to two thousand five hundred, then a massacre of five hundred, and so on, a sickening record of death and horror, even worse, before a great nation could get
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