The Heart

I know not if my Lord Culpeper had any inkling of what was about to

happen. Some were there who always considered him to be one who

feathered his own nest with as little risk as might be, regardless

of those over and under him, and one who saw when it behooved him to

do so, and was blind when it served his own ends, even with the

glare of a happening in his eyes. And many considered that he was in

England when it seemed for his own best good without regard to the

king or the colony, but that matters not, at this date. In truth his

was a ticklish position, between two fires. If he remained in

Virginia it was at great danger to himself, if he sided not with the

insurgents; and on the other hand there was the certainty of his

losing his governorship and his lands, and perhaps his head, if he

went to tobacco-cutting with the rest of us. He was without doubt

better off on the high sea, which is a sort of neutral place of

nature, beyond the reach for the time, of mobs or sceptres, unless

one falls in with a black flag.

At all events, off sailed my Lord

Culpeper, leaving Sir Henry Chichely as Lieutenant-Governor, and

verily he might as well have left a weather-cock as that

well-intentioned but pliable gentleman. Give him but a head wind

over him and he would wax fierce to order, and well he served the

government in the Bacon uprising, but leave him to his own will and

back and forth he swung with great bluster but no stability. None of

the colony, least of all the militia, stood in awe of Sir Henry

Chichely, nor regarded him as more than a figure-head of authority

when my Lord Culpeper had set sail.

The morning of the day after the sailing, the people of Jamestown

whom one happened to meet on the road had a strange expression of

countenance, and I doubt not that a man skilled in such matters

could have read as truly the signs of an eruption of those forces of

human passion in the hearts of men, as of an earthquake by the

belching forth of smoke and fire from the mouth of a volcano.

Everybody looked at his neighbour with either a glare of doubt and

wariness, or with covert understanding, and some there were who had

a pale seriousness of demeanour from having a full comprehension of

the situation and of what might come of it, though not in the least

drawing back on that account, and some were all flushed and glowing

with eagerness and laughing from sheer delight in danger and daring,

and some were like stolid beasts of the field watching the eye of a

master, ready at its wink to leap forth to the strain of labour or

fury. Many of these last were of our English labourers, whom I held

in some sort of pity, and doubt as to whether it were just and

merciful to draw them into such a stew kettle, for in truth many of

them had not a pound of tobacco to lose by the Navigation Act, and

no more interest in the uprising than had the muskets stacked in

Major Robert Beverly's first wife's tomb. Yet, I pray, what can men

do without tools, and have not tools some glory of their own which

we take small account of, and yet which may be a recompense to them?