successors up to the present day, many of these woodchoppers discovered in the task of removing the forest a source of pleasure and recreation. These early axemen were for the most part gentlemen by birth, and it was remarked that thirty or forty performed the work of a hundred men of the lower rank who were driven to it by the command of their superiors. In the band of men whom Smith, after the return of Newport from his unsuccessful expedition into the Monacan country, led to a point below Jamestown for the purpose of obtaining clapboard, there were two English gallants who had recently come out to the Colony, either in search of adventures or to escape the consequences of dissipated lives at home. Although they had never before cut down a tree, they soon acquired skill in the management of an axe, and were as delighted as school-boys in listening to the thunder of the trees in crashing to the ground. At first, however, their hands were blistered by the unaccustomed touch of the helves, which caused them to exclaim with an oath at every third stroke. To put a stop to this, the president ordered that every oath should be numbered, and, when the work of the day was over, for each oath a can of water was poured down the sleeve of the person who had been guilty of uttering it.[1]
- ↑ In their answer to “a Declaratione of the State of the Colonie in the 12 yeers of Sr Thomas Smith’s government exhibited by Alderman Johnson and others,” the General Assembly of Virginia, referring to these twelve years, said of the persons in the Colony at that time: “Many were of auncyent howses and borne to estates of 1000£ (20,000 or 25,000 dollars) by the yeere, some more, some less . . . those who survived who had both adventured theire estates and personnes were constrayned to serve the Colony as if they had been slaves 7 or 8 yeeres for their freedomes” . . . Neill’s Virginia Company of London, p. 409. The Assembly’s answer was dated 1623. For the authority for the statement in the text, see Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 439. The woodchoppers are there referred to as “these gentlemen” who were unaccustomed to these “conditions.”
