suitable for this purpose to be found in the Colony.[1] The period of service for which some of the silk-men were bound expiring, Sandys addressed a letter to Mr. Wrote in England, urging him to obtain from the superintendent of the Royal Silk Establishment two Frenchmen who were trained in the art of silk-making. He offered to pay such experts as annual wages, either twenty marks in coin, or tobacco to the value of twenty pounds sterling, and in addition, furnish all of their meals. Sandys admitted with evident regret that the planters in Virginia were so much absorbed in erecting houses and planting tobacco, that they showed no interest in silk culture.[2]
The effort to manufacture wine in the Colony began as early as the attempt to produce silk, and was, as in the instance of silk, prompted by a desire on the part of the English people to escape the heavy charges imposed by foreign importations. During the brief period of Smith’s residence in Virginia, the abundance of the wild grapes in the natural hedges had led the colonists to convert this fruit into wine, although the appliances in possession of the settlers for doing so must have been of the rudest nature. On a later occasion, a quantity, amounting to twenty gallons at least, was manufactured, and it was thought to resemble the French wines in flavor.[3] Francis Maguel, who was in the Colony in 1609, declared that the wines expressed from the grapes of Virginia reminded
- ↑ George Sandys to John Ferrer, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. II, No. 27; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1623, p. 89, Va. State Library. These worms had very probably been raised from the eighty ounces of seed which the Company had sent to Virginia in September, 1622. See Declaration of the Present State of Virginia, Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. II, p. 149.
- ↑ Letter of George Sandys to Samuel Wrote, March 28, 1623, Neill’s Virginia Vetusta, pp. 127, 128.
- ↑ Strachey’s Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 120.
