Aristopia/Chapter 7
Arrived at London, Ralph left his brothers to dispose of the cargo. When the Company's agent came on board to inspect the cargo Ralph opened one of his boxes and showed the agent the glittering earth. The Company had received some such earth before from which the most skillful metallurgists they could find had failed to extract a grain of precious metal; therefore, when Ralph offered the agent a sovereign as the Company's probable two and one half per cent profit on the contents of the six boxes, the latter took the coin with a smile of pity for the deluded young man.
Ralph hired a house in London and had a furnace built in it, in which to melt the gold, with crucibles capable of containing each two hundred pounds avoirdupois, and cranes with which one man could handle a crucible. He procured some moulds of a size to run bars of about seven hundred troy ounces each. On the bottoms of the molds were engraved the words: "Casa de moneda real. Ciudad de Mégico" (Royal mint, city of Mexico), to make it appear that the gold came from Mexico.
Working all alone, he cast the gold into bars, some of which he sold to the London goldsmiths for ready money, but the rest he carried over to Amsterdam and deposited in the new bank in that city, there being at that time no bank in London.
As soon as possible, Ralph went to the officers of the Virginia Company, and proposed to buy of them a grant of land, to be bounded by the are of a circle whose radius was five miles, and whose center was at the head of tidewater on the Potomac, that part of the circle only lying on the left bank of the river. For this he proposed to pay the Company fifteen hundred pounds.
"Why would you choose that particular spot?" asked the Treasurer. "Captain Smith says the cliffs there look in spots as if sprinkled with silver."
"Captain Smith sent you a load of that glittering earth; how much silver did you get out of it?" retorted Ralph.
"Not a grain, I confess," replied the Treasurer. "Not a grain of gold or silver has come from Virginia."
"The spot I ask." replied Ralph, "lies at the head of navigation of a broad river, and such I deem a fit place for a city. Then, too, just above is a goodly water-power, which I am resolved to make not only turn mills to grind grain, but to saw boards, turn lathes, and do much other work now done by man and beast."
The Treasurer thought the young man a visionary.
As Ralph was to take out a colony at his own expense, and as the Jamestown colony had already cost the Company many thousand pounds, the only return for which had been two or three cargoes of cedar-wood, and little prospect of a betterment, the Company were not loth to take fifteen hundred pounds sterling of good gold and give Ralph a grant in feesimple of the soil, waters, forests, and minerals (though they objected somewhat to this item), with the power of lieutenant-governor in the local government of the colony, the general government subordinate to the Virginia Council.
Ralph's scheme had by this time developed, not merely into establishing a colony, but founding a nation in Virginia.
One of Ralph's first cares was to supply his mother with money sufficient to satisfy all her wants, and the next to induce his oldest brother, James, to give up everything else and act as his agent, in conjunction with John Somers and Edward Morton, Ralph's third brother, now just ready to enter business as a London merchant. As soon as possible he bought a staunch vessel of two hundred tons, called the Flora, and induced Captain Nelson to sell his bark and take command of her.
Meanwhile Ralph and his agents were engaging emigrants for his colony. The first lot he determined should all go out as his employees, or the families of his employees. With the exception of three or four mechanics, they must all be laborers, most of them agricultural laborers.
The next and most difficult consideration was the religious one. Ralph determined there should be full religious toleration in his colony. The times were, above all others of history, those of the fiercest intolerance and bigotry, of which England was a religious hot-bed. Ralph Morton was philosopher enough to see that all the so-called Christian creeds of the age (and ten times more the practice of the sectarians of those creeds) were bloodthirsty and paganistic—a bitter mockery of the teachings of the Prince of Peace.
Perhaps the least intolerant of the people of western Europe of that time were the English Catholics, among whom was only a small class of fanatics. It would do to admit the moderate Catholics to the colony, but for some reasons it would be unwise to have a majority of them. Next to the Catholics the Church of England people were least intolerant. Reference is here made to the body of the Episcopalians, not to the officials of the government. The intolerance these officials showed was rather political than religious, rather aimed at sedition than heresy.
Although the Church people in authority sternly, even cruelly, repressed the Catholics, it was for two strong reasons: first, the diabolical plots of a few fanatics, mostly Jesuits—plots which the great body of English Catholics abhorred and of which they were innocent; and, second, the clamors of the great and growing body of Puritans, a sect or variety of sects of fanatics who, although they did much to restore English political liberty when it was at its lowest ebb, carried religious intolerance to its utmost extremity of virulence and violence. These intractables Ralph resolved to shut out from his colony as long as possible. But as a large portion of the laboring class of England, especially the rural class, were adherents of the established Church, and rather indifferent ones at that, it was not difficult to procure colonists among whom religious toleration could be sustained.
The disasters of the Jamestown colony had been kept as secret as possible, and great numbers of English people were willing to go to America. The Virginia Company could have found ship-loads of honest laborers, but they thought a dissolute "gentleman," or even his footman or valet, was more worthy than an industrious peasant. Ralph Morton had no such class prejudice. He wanted educated persons for teachers, clerks, physicians, etc., but for the rest, no man who was unwilling to do six days, good hard manual labor a week.
The time of sailing was fixed so that the colony should arrive at their destination at the end of the winter, yet early enough to clear ground and plant corn and vegetables.
Ralph again took with him his brothers, Henry and Charles. Besides the Mortons and the crew of the vessel, there were forty-four men, twelve women, and eighteen children. It was not until the third voyage that any women had ventured to go to the Jamestown colony, but Ralph had sufficient confidence to take along the families of twelve of his men whose wives were willing to go. Among the men were two carpenters, one mason, one shoemaker, and one blacksmith.
The Flora sailed from the mouth of the Thames on the twentieth of January, 1610, and arrived at her destination on the Potomac the eighteenth of March. Ralph stopped at the village of the Nacotchtanks and purchased of them a piece of ground bounded by the Potomac and the Eastern Branch, of a day's journey in compass. He paid for the land in red blankets, which the Indians much fancied, and hoes, of which he showed them the use, and gave them a grindstone on which to sharpen them.