OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY NARRATIVES OF EARLY VIRGINIA 1606-1625 EDITED BY LYON GARDINER TYLER, LL.D. LATE PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY New York COPYRIGHT, 1907 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS ALL RIGHTS ASSIGNED TO BARNES & NOBLE, INC., 1946 All rights reserved REPRINTED, 1959 973.1 C, 2 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NOTE THIS volume is intended to include the most important and interesting narratives of that part of Virginian history which extends from the formation to the dissolution of the Virginia Company. In the selection, Captain John Smith's True Relation and the Description of Virginia and account of the Proceedings of the English Colonie which he and his friends drew up have, on well-known historical principles, been preferred to the somewhat ampler but less strictly contemporary version of the transactions of the same period which he gave in the Generall Historie; but the ensuing period was deemed to be in the main best covered. by reproducing the fourth book of the latter treatise. Dr. Reuben G. Thwaites, Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and the Burrows Brothers Company of Cleveland, the publishers, have kindly permitted use to be made in this volume of the translation of Father Biard's Relation which appeared in the third volume of The Jesuit Relations, edited by Dr. Thwaites. The Massachusetts Historical Society has permitted the use of the text of the letter of John Pory, printed in their Collections. The Virginia Historical Society has allowed the editor to reprint from the Virginia Magazine of History "The Discourse of the Old Company." Grateful acknowledgments are made for these favors. Those texts which have been taken from books printed in the seventeenth century have been carefully collated with copies of the original editions in the Library of Congress. But the use of u and v and i and j has been modernized; many words printed in italics in the original have been put into roman type when the present practice required it; and while the spelling of the original has of course been closely followed, the punctuation of Purchas or of Captain John Smith has not been regarded as equally sacred. The punctuation has been left as in the original whenever no strong reason existed to the contrary; but where the original punctuation does not make sense, nor indicate what was without doubt the author's meaning, as for instance in the case of the True Relation, of which the author had no chance to examine the proofsheets, appropriate alterations have been introduced. J. F. J. |