declared himself ignorant because the woods had not been burnt.[1] So open were the primæval forests in Tidewater Virginia, that it was said, with obvious exaggeration, that a person was easily discoverable in them at a distance of a mile and a half. The trees stood so far apart, that a coach, it was also asserted, could have been driven through the thickest groups without danger of coming in contact with the trunks and boughs, and yet so deep was the shade, according to the same authority, that it furnished the amplest protection from the rays of the meridian sun in the hottest day of summer.[2] At no point was it impossible for horse and foot to pass, however dense the growth of timber.[3] So few were the thickets in the woods, indeed, that the early colonists found no obstruction in arranging a perfect order of battle among the trees in repelling the assaults of the savages.[4] In the immediate vicinity of the Indian village, the forests had been so depleted that a horse could be ridden at full speed in the interval between the trunks without risk of touching them.[5] It is interesting, however, to recall that it was said at a later date in the history of the Colony, that it was difficult to keep greyhounds in Virginia, because in their headlong speed they dashed their brains out against the trees, which, in their eager pursuit, they had failed to see, but these were
- ↑ Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 427.
- ↑ Bullock’s Virginia, p. 3. Smith, writing in 1630, said that “in Virginia, all the woods for many an hundred mile for the most part grow sleight like unto the high grove or tuft of trees upon the high hill by the house of that worthy knight, Sir Humphrey Mildmay, so remarkable in Essex, in the parish of Danbery . . . but much taller and greater; neither grow they thicke together by the halfe, and much good grounde between them without shrubs.” See Works, p. 950.
- ↑ Strachey’s Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 128.
- ↑ Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 34.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 67.
