f
which were published in London in 1626. He stands as the first purely
literary man of the English New World. But vigorous enough literature,
though the writers thereof regarded it as information only, had, from
the first years, emanated from Virginia. Smith's "True Relation",
George Percy's "Discourse", Strachey's "True Repertory of the Wracke
and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates", and his "Historie of Travaile
into Virginia Brittannia", Hamor's "True Discourse", Whitaker's "Good
News"--other letters and reports--had already flowered, all with
something of the strength and fragrance of Elizabethan and early
Jacobean work.

For some years there had seemed peace with the Indians. Doubtless
members of the one race may have marauded, and members of the other
showed themselves highhanded, impatient, and unjust, but the majority
on each side appeared to have settled into a kind of amity. Indians came
singly or in parties from their villages to the white men's settlements,
where they traded corn and venison and what not for the magic things
the white man owned. A number had obtained the white man's firearms,
unwisely sold or given. The red seemed reconciled to the white's
presence in the land; the Indian village and the Indian tribal economy
rested beside the English settlement, church, and laws. Doubtless a
fragment of the population of England and a fragment of the English in
Virginia saw in a pearly dream the red man baptized, clothed, become
Christian and English. At the least, it seemed that friendliness and
peace might continue.

In the spring of 1622 a concerted Indian attack and massacre fell like
a bolt from the blue. Up and down the James and upon the Chesapeake,
everywhere on the same day, Indians, bursting from the dark forest that
was so close behind every cluster of log houses, attacked the colonists.
Three hundred and forty-seven English men, women, and children were
slain. But Jamestown and the plantations in its neighborhood were warned
in time. The English rallied, gathered force, turned upon and beat back
to the forest the Indian, who was now and for a long time to come their
open foe.

There followed upon this horror not a day or a month but years of
organized retaliation and systematic harrying. In the end the great
majority of the Indians either fell or were pushed back toward the upper
Pamunkey, the Rappahannock, the Potomac, and westward upon the great
shelf or terrace of the earth that climbed to t