Chapter Chapter 1 of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

"Sir George Summers being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height from the mainmast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the four shrouds, and for three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night it kept with us, running sometimes along the mainyard to the very end, and then returning. . . .

"It being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little but that there had been a general determination to have shut up hatches and commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the sea."

No wonder that when Strachey's little book, printed in London, fell into the hands of William Shakespeare, this dramatic recital of the furious storm which drove the Virginia fleet on the reefs of "the still vexed Bermoothes" should have inspired the poet in his description of the tempest evoked by Prospero on his enchanted island.¹

So other narratives were written and other chronicles compiled by these industrious Jamestown settlers; but their chronicles and reports were largely official documents prepared for the guidance of the company's officers in London, and for the general enlightenment of Englishmen at home. Nowhere among them do we find the ring of that resounding style which makes literature of Strachey's prose.

George Sandys, 1578-1644.

It did not seem likely that thus early in Virginia history any laurels would be gathered from Apollo's sacred tree to crown a poet's brow -- as Drayton had pleasantly predicted in his lines of farewell. Yet, after all, among these gentlemen adventurers who continued to come from England in increasing numbers, there arrived in 1621, as treasurer of the Virginia company, one who was recognized as a poet of considerable rank -- George Sandys, author of an excellent metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid. To Sandys also, Drayton, now laureate, had imparted a professional benediction, exhorting his friend with appreciative words: --

"Let see what lines Virginia will produce.
Go on with Ovid. . . .
Entice the muses thither to repair;
Entreat them gently; train them to that air."

And amid the exacting duties of his position in a most discouraging time, in experiences of privation and distress, amid the terrors of Indian uprising and massacre, he "went on" with Ovid. After four years of strenuous life in the new America, Sandys went home to England with his translation of the Metamorphoses completed, and in 1626 presented his finished work to the king. It was a notable poem, was so accepted by contemporaries, and afterward elicited the admiration of Dryden and of Pope. Thus came the first expression of the poetic art in the New World -- "the first utterance of the conscious literary spirit, articulated in America."¹

We record with interest these few literary appearances in the annals of our early history, but we can in no sense claim these writers as representatives of our native American literature. Smith, Strachey, and Sandys were Englishmen temporarily interested in a great scheme of colonization. After brief sojourn in the colony, they returned to England. They were not colonists; they were travelers; and while their compositions have a peculiar interest, and are not without significance for us, they cannot be accounted American works.

Development of the Colony.

The record of Virginia's early struggles, its difficulties with the Indians, its depletion by illness and famine, its losses due to the incapacity of leaders and policies ill adapted to the conditions of a true colonial life, its reinforcements, its acquisition of colonists, its advancement in wealth and importance, -- this is familiar history. The remarkable fact is the rapidity with which the colony developed. In 1619, twelve hundred settlers arrived; along with them were sent one hundred convicts to become servants. Boys and girls, picked up in the London streets, were shipped to Virginia to be bound during their minority to the planters. In the same year a Dutch man-of-war landed twenty negroes at Jamestown, who were