The Birth of the Nation:Jamestown, 1607
Jamestown, 1607
9781465594983
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
We are about to commemorate the settlement of the English at Jamestown three hundred years ago. Under God’s blessing, we are not only at peace with all the world, but are bound by ties of close friendship to the great kingdoms and republics on earth. Therefore, we may confidently expect to welcome numbers of their representatives to our three hundredth birthday celebration. Many will be the banners unfurled in waters which ebbed and flowed in awful silence but three hundred years ago, or were stirred only by the paddle of the Indian canoe; and loud the thunders of welcome and greeting from shores which echoed then with the scream of the eagle and the war-whoop of the savage. The story of a world emerging from the darkness in which it had been hidden for countless ages will always thrill the imagination. Phantom ships loom dimly out of the mists of a far-off time. Strange names are whispered in vague traditions, which are found in no written record—names of mighty mariners, who were blown by tempests upon a strange coast,—Arthur; Malgro; Brandon; a "Fryer of Lynn," who by reason of his "black art" reached the North Pole in 1360; Madock, "sonne of Quinneth, Prince of Wales," a man of peace, who sought refuge in a wilderness because of strife among his brethren; Leif, the Norwegian; Nicolo Zeno, the Venetian; Hanno, the Carthaginian! Colossal figures tremble for a moment on the horizon, and are lost in fog and doubt. At last the great Genoese sails forth, and becomes a tangible figure in history. Often as his story may be told, familiar as it is to every schoolboy in the land, we can never hear it without a keen realization of its personal relations to ourselves. "It would be impossible," said Daniel Webster, "for us to read the discovery of our continent without being reminded how much it has affected our own fortunes and our own existence.
