The History of Virginia, in Four Parts

Excerpt

THE PREFACE.

My first business in the world being among the public records of my country, the active thoughts of my youth put me upon taking notes of the general administration of the government; but with no other design, than the gratification of my own inquisitive mind; these lay by me for many years afterwards, obscure and secret, and would forever have done so, had not the following accident produced them:

In the year 1703, my affairs calling me to England, I was soon after my arrival, complimented by my bookseller with an intimation, that there was prepared for printing a general account of all her majesty's plantations in America, and his desire, that I would overlook it before it was put to the press; I agreed to overlook that part of it which related to Virginia.

Soon after this he brings me about six sheets of paper written, which contained the account of Virginia and Carolina. This it seems was to have answered a part of Mr. Oldmixion's British Empire in America. I very innocently, (when I began to read,) placed pen and paper by me, and made my observations upon the first page, but found it in the sequel so very faulty, and an abridgement only of some accounts that had been printed sixty or seventy years ago; in which also he had chosen the most strange and untrue parts, and left out the more sincere and faithful, so that I laid aside all thoughts of further observations, and gave it only a reading; and my bookseller for answer, that the account was too faulty and too imperfect to be mended; withal telling him, that seeing I had in my junior days taken some notes of the government, which I then had with me in England, I would make him an account of my own country, if I could find time, while I staid in London. And this I should the rather undertake in justice to so fine a country, because it has been so misrepresented to the common people of England, as to make them believe that the servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow as horses and oxen do in England, and that the country turns all people black who go to live there, with other such prodigious phantasms.

Accordingly, before I left London, I gave him a short history of the country, from the first settlement, with an account of its then state; but I would not let him mingle it with Oldmixion's other account of the plantations, because I took them to be all of a piece with those I had seen of Virginia and Carolina, but desired mine to be printed by itself. And this I take to be the only reason of that gentleman's reflecting so severely upon me in his book, for I never saw him in my life that I know of.

But concerning that work of his, I may with great truth say, that (notwithstanding his boast of having the assistance of many original papers and memorials that I had not the opportunity of) he nowhere varies from the account that I gave, nor advances anything new of his own, but he commits so many errors, and imposes so many falsities upon the world, To instance some few out of the many:

Page 210, he says that they were near spent with cold, which is impossible in that hot country....