America, is a garden in fertility, and of exceeding beauty. Yet west of this valley the Alleghanies proper extend, a wide belt of mountains, far to the westward. Their surface is generally rugged, but not infertile; they, as well as the Blue Ridge, are clad with thick forests to their very summits.

The shore of this, the distinctly southern part of the North American coast, is deeply indented by estuaries, which have been cut out principally by the tides. These deep sounds and bays,—the Delaware, Chesapeake, Pamlico, Albemarle, and others, — with their very many ramifications, constitute a distinctive feature in North America. Although these indentations are probably not of glacial origin, except perhaps the Delaware, they much resemble the great fjords which the glaciers have produced along the shores of regions farther to the northward. By means of these deep and ramified bays all the country of Virginia and Maryland lying to the east of the Appalachians is easily accessible to ships of large size. This was a very advantageous feature in the development of the export trade of this country, as it enabled the planters to load their crops directly into the ships which conveyed them to Europe, and this spared the making of roads, a difficult task in a new country. The principal advantage of this set of colonies lay in the fact that they were fitted to the cultivation of tobacco. The demand for this product laid the foundations of American commerce, and was full of good and evil consequences to this country. It undoubtedly gave the means whereby Virginia became strong enough to be, on the part of the South, the mainstay of the resistance of the colonies to the mother country. On the other hand, it made African slavery profitable, and so brought that formidable problem of a foreign and totally alien race to be for all time a trouble to this country. Although the cultivation of cotton gave the greatest extension to slavery, it is not responsible for its firm establishment on our soil. That was the peculiar work of tobacco.

The climate of this region is perhaps the best of the United States. The winters want the severity that characterizes them in the more northern States, and the considerable height of the most of the district relieves it of danger from fevers. I have elsewhere spoken of the evidences that this district has maintained the original energy of the race that founded its colonies.

The Carolinian colonies are somewhat differently conditioned from those of Virginia, and their history has been profoundly influenced by their physical circumstances. South of the James River the belt of low-lying ground near the sea-shore widens rapidly, until the nearest mountain ranges are one hundred and fifty miles or more from the shore. This shore belt is also much lower than it is north of the James; a large part of its surface is below the level where the drainage is effective, and so is unfit for tillage. Much of it is swamp. The rivers do not terminate in as deep and long bays, with steep clay banks for borders, as they do north of the James. They are generally swamp-bordered in their lower courses, and not very well suited for settlements.

The soil of these regions is generally rather infertile; it is especially unfitted for the cultivation of grains except near the shore, where the swamps can often be converted into good rice-fields. Maize can be tilled, but it, as well as wheat, barley, etc., gives not more than half the return that may be had from them in Virginia. Were it not for the cotton crop, the lowland South would have fared badly.

All the shore belt of country is unwholesome, being affected with pernicious fevers, which often cannot be endured by the whites, even after the longest acclimatization. The interior region, even when not much elevated above the sea, or away from the swamps, is a healthy country, and the district within sight of the Blue Ridge and the Black Mountains is a very salubrious district. This region was, however, not at once accessible to the colonists of the Carolinian shore, and was not extensively settled for some time after the country was first inhabited, and then was largely occupied by the descendants of the Virginian colonists.

The history of this country has served to show that much of the lowlands near the shore is not well fitted for the use of European peoples; they are likely to fall into the possession of the African folk, who do not suffer, but rather seem to prosper in the feverish lowlands. The interior districts beyond the swamp country are well suited to Europeans, and where the surface rises more than one thousand feet above the sea, as it does in western North and South Carolina, the climate is admirably well suited to the European race. It is probable that the English race has never been in a more favorable climate than these uplands afford.

This Carolinian section was originally settled by a far more diversified population than that which formed the colonies to the northward. This was especially the case in North Carolina. This colony was originally possessed by a land company, which proposed to find its profit in a peculiar fashion. This company paid contractors so much a head for human beings put ashore in the colony. One distinguished trader in population, a certain Baron de Graffenreid, settled several thousand folk at and about New Berne, on the swampy shores of the Eastern sounds. They were from a great variety of places, a part from England, others from the banks of the Rhine, others again from Switzerland. There was a great mass of human driftwood in Europe at the close of the seventeenth century, the wreck of long-continued wars; so it was easy to bring immigrants by the shipload if they were paid for. But the material was unfit to be the foundation of a State. From this settlement of eastern North Carolina is descended the most unsatisfactory population in this country. The central and western parts of North Carolina had an admirable population, that principally came to the State through Virginia; but this population about Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, though its descendants are numerous, perhaps not numerically much inferior to that which came from the Virginia settlements, is vastly inferior to it in all the essential qualities of the citizen. From the Virginia people have come a great number of men of national and some of world-wide reputation. It is not likely that any other population, averaging in numbers about five hundred thousand souls, has in a century furnished as many able men. On the other hand, this eastern North Carolina people has given no men of great fame to the history of the country, while a large part of the so-called "poor white" population of the South appears to be descended from the mongrel folk who were turned ashore on the eastern border of North Carolina.

South Carolina was much more fortunate in its early settlers on its seaboard than the colony to the north. Its population was drawn from rather more varied sources than that of Virginia, New York, or New England, but it would be hard to say that

its quality was inferior; despite the considerable admixture of Irish and French blood, it was essentially an English colony.

On the whole, although the quality of the climate would lead some to expect a lowering of the quality of the English race in these southern colonies, it is not possible to trace any such effect in the people. Although the laboring classes of whites along the seaboard appear to occupy a physical level rather below that of the same class in Virginia and the more northern regions, they have great endurance, -as was sufficiently proven by the fact that they made good soldiers during the recent Civil War. In the upland districts of these States, in western North and South Carolina, and especially in northern Georgia, the physical constitution of the people is, I believe, the best in this country. In the district north of Pennsylvania, the elevation of the mountains, or the table-lands which lie about them, is not profitable to the dwellers in these districts; each added height scarcely gives any additional healthfulness, and the additional cold is hurtful to most crops. In this southern region, however, the greater height and width of the Appalachian mountain system, including its elevated valleys, is a very great advantage to this region in all that concerns its fitness for the use of man. The climate of one half of the country south of the James and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi is purified and refreshed by the elevations of this noble mountain system. It is the opinion of all who have examined this country, that it is extremely well fitted for all the uses of the race: an admirable climate, much resembling that of the Apennines of Tuscany, a fertile soil admitting a wide diversity of products, and a great abundance of water-power characterize all this upland district of the South.

A few words will suffice for all that concerns the mineral resources of the original colonies. At the outset of the colonization of America we hear a good deal about the search for gold; fortunately there was a very uniform failure in the first efforts to find this metal, so that it ceased to play a part in the history of these colonies. Very little effort to develop the mineral resources of this region was made during the colonial period. A little iron was worked in Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia, some search of a rather fruitless sort was made for copper ore in Connecticut, but of mining industry, properly so called, there was nothing until the Revolutionary War stimulated the search for iron and lead ores. The discovery of the gold deposits in the Carolinas did not come about until after the close of the colonial period. These deposits were not sufficiently rich to excite an immigration of any moment to the fields where they occur.

Practically the mineral resources of what we may term the Appalachian settlements of North America never formed any part of the inducements which led immigrants to them. In this respect they differ widely from the other colonies which were planted in the Americas. The greater part of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in America were made by gold-hunters. The state of morals which led to these settlements was not favorable to the formation of communities characterized by high motives. There were doubtless other influences at work to lower the moral quality of the settlements in Mexico and South America, but the nature of the motives which brought the first settlers upon the ground and gave the tone to society is

certainly not the least important of the influences which have affected the history of the American settlements.

To close this brief account of the physical conditions of the first European settlements in North America, we may say, that the English colonies were peculiarly fortunate in those physical conditions upon which they fell. There is no area in either of

the Americas, or for that matter in the world outside of Europe, where it would have been possible to plant English colonies that would have been found so suitable for the purpose climate, soil, contact with the sea, and a chance of dominion over the whole continent were given them by fortune. They had but the second choice in the division of the New World; yet to the English fell the control of those regions which experience has shown to hold its real treasures. Fortune has repeatedly blessed this race; but never has she bestowed richer gifts than in the chance that gave it the Appalachian district of America.

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

...

NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL

HISTORY OF AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

CORTEREAL, VERRAZANO, GOMEZ, THEVET.

BY GEORGE DEXTER.

OHN CABOT discovered the continent of North America June 24,

JOHN

1497; and his son Sebastian the next year coasted its shores for a considerable distance, — perhaps even, as some accounts say, from Hudson's Bay to North Carolina.1 The reports of their voyages doubtless reached the Continental courts of Europe without delay. Spain was occupied with the attempts of Columbus to attain the Indies by a southern route promising success; while Portugal, always among the foremost maritime nations, had now an energetic ruler in her young King Emanuel, who had succeeded to the throne in 1495. He had already sent out Vasco da Gama and Cabral, who followed the route to the Indies by the way of the Cape of Good Hope; 2 and he was well disposed also for an attempt to pursue the indications given by the Cabots, that a short way to the Land of Spices might lie through a northwest passage among the islands, of which the New World was still supposed to consist. Such is at least generally thought to have been the reason for the expeditions of the Cortereals, although we have no official reports of their voyages or their aims.

The family of Cortereal was not without position in the Portuguese kingdom. Ioâo Vaz Cortereal had been appointed, some years before this time, hereditary governor of the Island of Terceira; and his sons had perhaps learned there the secrets of navigation. It has been even asserted by some Portuguese writers that this Ioâo Vaz had himself discovered some part of America nearly thirty years before the first voyage of Columbus, and had received his governorship as the reward of the discovery; but there is no evidence for this claim.

1 [See Vol. III. chap. i.— ED.]

2 [See Vol. II. chap. i. —ED.¡

VOL. IV. - I.