but none adapted to his purpose was found there. He was successful in obtaining the kind which he required from the banks at Cape Henry, but its quality proved so unsatisfactory that Sandys wrote to Ferrer in England requesting him to forward two or three hogsheads of the proper material.[1] The difficulty did not lie only in securing the sand. The Italian workmen employed in the glass-house were wholly intractable; Sandys, in the violence of his anger and disgust, went so far as to say “that a more damned crew hell never vomited,” a character which their actions justified his attributing to them.[2] The Italians were anxious to return to Europe, and in order to effect their release, not only proceeded so slowly in their work as to accomplish nothing of consequence, but cracked the furnace by striking it with a crowbar. Their studied efforts to obtain permission to leave the country by breaking up the industry in which they were engaged ended in failure, for among those who were enumerated in the census of 1624-25 as residing on the Treasurer’s lands, were Bernardo and Vicenso, two of the four Italians who had come out with Norton in 1621.[3]
There is no positive evidence to show for how great a length of time the glass-house remained in existence
- ↑ Sandys to Ferrer, April 8, 1623, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. II, No. 27; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1623, p. 90, Va. State Library.
- ↑ George Sandys to Ferrer, Royal Hist. MSS. Commission, Eighth Report, Appx., 39.
- ↑ Muster of the Inhabitants of Virginia, 1624-25, Hotten’s Original Lists of Emigrants, 1600-1700, p. 235. At the time the census of 1623 was taken there were five persons living at the glass-house. British State Papers, Colonial, vol. III, No. 2; Colonial Records of Virginia, State Senate Doct., Extra, 1874, p. 47. Governor Butler, who arrived in Virginia not long after the massacre took place, states that at the time of his visit the glass furnace was “at a stay and in small hopes.” See his Unmasking of Virginia, Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. II, p. 172.
