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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