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then, would have taken their lives upon any terms. The vessels were sometimes half-decked, or even undecked, and seldom exceeded 100 tons burden. The little Squirrel, in which Sir Humphrey Gilbert went down, was a cockboat of barely ten tons; and when the Christian Cavalier trusted his fortunes to her, he tempted the Providence he glorified in his memorable dying speech. When the crews expected to fight the Spaniards, they were packed together like herrings in a barrel; and when scurvy or more deadly epidemics broke out among them, they died like flies, and were tossed overboard to the sharks. Moreover, they steered away westwards to the unknown, where they had to grope among reefs and sandbanks along a low-lying coast, made doubly dangerous by the absence of harbours, When they sighted land the ominous roar of the Atlantic surge was always sounding in their ears, and they knew that in case of ship-wreck, they would fall into the hands of savages. The Puritans who settled New England fled from summary conviction by arbitrary tribunals, and each man of them was prepared to suffer much for liberty of conscience and personal security. But the common seamen on these Virginian voyages served simply for their wages, and signed articles very much for the fun of the thing, or from pure love of perilous adventure. With their reckless dash and their bulldog courage, they proved the best fighting material in the world under the leadership of a Drake or a Grenville. Gates’s first expedition of permanent colonists to Virginia consisted of three small ships, carrying some 300 men; but the men, whether they were recruited from the country gentry or the commercial classes, whether they were rough sea-dogs or sturdy farmers, were of the types that did as much to make the greatness of England as the sagacious statesmanship of Walsingham or the Cecils.
The early American literature gives dramatic and realistic pictures of the perils and sufferings these adventurers had to endure. Their simple narratives are in accordance with probabilities, and we see no reason to believe they exaggerated horrors. In ‘The True Repertory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates,” William Strachey gives a graphic account of a storm off the “still-vexed Bermoothes”:—
“On St James his day, July 24 (preparing for no less all the black night before), a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow out of the north-east, which swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven, which like an hell of darkness turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all, which (taken up with amazement) the ears lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the winds and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed and best prepared, was not a little shaken.”
Though we have suppressed a sentence here and there, it will be seen that the worthy William is somewhat prolix, and his melodramatic style is slightly redundant. But the terrors of that awful time had evidently made a deep impression on his memory. Phrases that sound like those of a land-lubber are interspersed through nautical language:—
“Qur sails, wound up, lay without their use; and if at any time we bore but a Hollocke or half fore-course, to guide her before the sea, six and