The next year saw fifty-seven others added to these. Then came Moravians with their pastor. All these strong, industrious, religious folk made settlements upon the river above Savannah. Italians came, Piedmontese sent by the trustees to teach the coveted silk-culture. Oglethorpe, when he sailed to England in 1734, took with him Tomochi-chi, chief of the Yamacraws, and other Indians. English interest in Georgia increased.
Parliament gave more money--26,000 pounds. Oglethorpe and the trustees gathered more colonists. The Spanish cloud seemed to be rolling up in the south, and it was desirable to have in Georgia a number of men who were by inheritance used to war. Scotch Highlanders-there would be the right folk!
No sooner said than gathered. Something under two hundred, courageous and hardy, were enrolled from the Highlands. The majority were men, but there were fifty women and children with them. All went to Georgia, where they settled to the south of Savannah, on the Altamaha, near the island of St.
Simon. Other Highlanders followed. They had a fort and a town which they named New Inverness, and the region that they peopled they called Darien.
Oglethorpe himself left England late in 1735, with two ships, the Symond and the London Merchant, and several hundred colonists aboard. Of these folk doubtless a number were of the type the whole enterprise had been planned to benefit. Others were Protestants from the Continent. Yet others--notably Sir Francis Bathurst and his family--went at their own charges. After Oglethorpe himself, most remarkable perhaps of those going to Georgia were the brothers John and Charles Wesley. Not precisely colonists are the Wesleys, but prospectors for the souls of the colonists, and the souls of the Indians--Yamacraws, Uchees, and Creeks.
They all landed at Savannah, and now planned to make a settlement south of their capital city, by the mouth of Altamaha. Oglethorpe chose St. Simon's Island, and here they built, and called their town Frederica.
"Each Freeholder had 60 Feet in Front by 90 Feet in depth upon the high Street for House and Garden; but those which fronted the River had but 30 in Front, by 60 Feet in depth. Each Family had a Bower of Palmetto Leaves finished upon the back Street in their own Lands. The side toward the front Street was set out for their Houses. These Palmetto Bowers were very convenient shelters, being tight in the hardest Rains; they were about 20 Feet long and 14 Feet wide, and in regular Rows looked very pretty, the Palmetto Leaves lying smooth and handsome, and of a good Colour. The whole appeared something like a Camp; for the Bowers looked like Tents, only being larger and covered with Palmetto Leaves."*
* Moore's "Voyage to Georgia". Quoted in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America", vol. V, p. 378.
Their life sounds idyllic, but it will not always be so. Thunders will arise; serpents be found in Eden. But here now we leave them--in infant Savannah--in the Salzburgers' village of Ebenezer and in the Moravian village nearby--in Darien of the Highlanders--and in Frederica, where until houses are built they will live in palmetto bowers.
Virginia, Maryland, the two Carolinas, Georgia--the southern sweep of England-in-America--are colonized. They have communication with one another and with middle and northern England-in-America. They also have communication with the motherland over the sea. The greetings of kindred and the fruits of labor travel to and fro: over the salt, tumbling waves.
But also go mutual criticism and complaint. "Each man," says Goethe, "is led and misled after a fashion peculiar to himself." So with those mass persons called countries. Tension would come about, tension would relax, tension would return and increase between Mother England and Daughter America. In all these colonies, in the year with which this narrative closes, there were living children and young persons who would see the cord between broken, would hear read the Declaration of Independence. So--but the true bond could never be broken, for mother and daughter after all are one.
THE NAVIGATION LAWS
Three acts of Parliament--the Navigation Act of 1660, the Staple Act of 1663, and the Act of 1673 imposingg Plantation Duties--laid the foundation of the old colonial system of Great Britain. Contrary to the somewhat passionate contentions of older historians, they were not designed in any tyrannical spirit, though they embodied a theory of colonization and trade which has long since been discarded. In the seventeenth century colonies were regarded as plantations existing solely for the benefit of the mother country. Therefore their trade and industry must be regulated so as to contribute most to the sea power, the commerce, and the industry of the home country which gave them protection. Sir Josiah Child was only expressing a commonplace observation of the mercantilists when he wrote "That all colonies or plantations do endamage their Mother-Kingdoms, whereof the trades of such Plantations are not confined by severe Laws, and good execution of those Laws, to the Mother-Kingdom."
The Navigation Act of 1660, following the policy laid down in the statute of 1651 enacted under the Commonwealth, was a direct blow aimed at the Dutch, who were fast monopolizing the carrying trade. It forbade any goods to be imported into or exported from His Majesty's plantations except in English, Irish, or colonial vessels of which the master and three fourths of the crew must be English; and it forbade the importation into England of any goods produced in the plantations unless carried in English bottoms.
Contemporary Englishmen hailed this act as the Magna Charta of the Sea.
