Saturday, October 18, 2014

At Jamestown, a miracle--or maybe two?

           Many people in the summer of 1610 saw the relief fleet’s arrival as a miracle. Back in London, the Reverend William Crashaw wrote that it was “the Hand of Heaven from above at the very instant sent in the Right Honorable La-War to meet them, even at the river’s mouth with provision and comforts of all kind, who if he had stayed but two tides longer had come into Virginia and not found one Englishman.
John Smith, in his Generall Historie of Virginia wrote of two extraordinary coincidences: first, the arrival of the Bermuda ships, and second, De La Warr’s coming. Smith believed these were the work of divine providence:

Never had any people more just cause, to cast themselves at the very foot-stoole of God, and to reverence his mercie, than this distressed Colonie; for if God had not sent Sir Thomas Gates from the Bermudas, within foure daies they had almost beene famished.....If they had set saile sooner, and had launched into the vast Ocean, who would have promised they should have incountered the Fleet of the Lord la Ware, especially when they made for Newfoundland, as they intended, a course contrarie to our Navie approaching. If the Lord la Ware had not bought with him a yeeres provision, what comfort would those poore soules have received, to have beene relanded to a second distruction?

The little group of colonists at Jamestown were saved--for the moment.


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