For
long, both North and South clung to the sea-line and to the lower stretches
of rivers where the ships could come in. Only by degrees did English
colonial life push back into the forests away from the sea, to the hills,
and finally across the mountains.
CHAPTER XV. ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD
In the spring of 1689, Virginians flocked to Jamestown to hear William and
Mary proclaimed Lord and Lady of Virginia. The next year there entered, as
LieutenantGovernor, Francis Nicholson, an odd character in whom an
immediate violence of temper went with a statesmanlike conception of things
to be. Two years he governed here, then was transferred to Maryland, and
then in seven years came back to the James. He had not been liked there,
but while he was gone Virginia had endured in his stead Sir Edmund Andros.
That had been swapping the witch for the devil. Virginia in 1698 seems to
have welcomed the returning Nicholson.
Jamestown had been hastily rebuilt, after Bacon's burning, and then by
accident burned again. The word malaria was not in use, but all knew that
there had always been sickness on that low spit running out from the
marshes. The place might well seem haunted, so many had suffered there and
died there. Poetical imagination might have evoked a piece of sad
pageantry -- starving times, massacres, quarrels, executions, cruel and
unusual punishments, gliding Indians. A practical question, however, faced
the inhabitants, and all were willing to make elsewhere a new capital city.
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