- mates, sparing neither age nor sex, passed on to aid their brethren in the
same terrible work elsewhere. One alone of the many Indians who had been apparently converted to Christianity was true to his adopted creed, and, instead of murdering, warned his master in time for him to make his own escape, and carry the tidings of the approach of the red men to Jamestown.
In a little open boat the two sped down the river, arriving at the capital of the colony in time to avert much bloodshed. Messages were sent to the outlying settlements; and the Indians, finding themselves outwitted, would have retired to their woods, had not the whites cut off their retreat, and in their turn slain without mercy all who fell into their hands. Throughout the length and breadth of the land desolation now replaced the former plenty, and it soon became evident to the natives that in their wild rising they had sounded their own death-knell. Taught by experience not to trust in the promises of the Indians, the Virginians now gathered more closely together, building large towns, in which the first owners of the soil were only admitted as servants, until at last the fact that they had ever been any thing else passed from the memory of their oppressors.
In 1629, Jamestown was visited, from his little colony of Ferryland, in Newfoundland, by Lord Baltimore, a distinguished Catholic nobleman, who was so charmed with the scenery round Chesapeake Bay, that he asked for and obtained an extensive grant of land on its shores from King Charles I. of England. He died before lie could himself take possession of his new territories, but his patent was renewed in 1632 to his son Cecilius, who endeavored to established himself on the south of James River. So bitter, however, was the opposition he met with from the English already in possession of Virginia, that he persuaded King Charles to give him the land on the north instead of the south of the original colony. Here, in that "irregular triangle" formed by the fortieth degree of latitude, the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, the second Lord Baltimore planted a little colony of English Roman Catholics, naming their new home Maryland, in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria.
The new emigrants, numbering some three hundred in all, landed on one of the islands at the mouth of the Potomac, now reduced to a mere strip of sand, on the 25th March, 1634, and, after celebrating mass on the beach, planted a cross on the loftiest point within reach, round which a second solemn service was held. From the island, excursions were then made up the river by Leonard Calvert—brother to Lord Baltimore, and first governor of
