The Jamestown Brides by Jennifer Potter

Author:Jennifer Potter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Catastrophe

The Lord hath sayd to the destroying angel,

It is sufficient, hold now thy hand; the mortality of your

people is ceased abroad: and the hope of your good

returnes is increased at home.1

News travelled slowly then. By the time Patrick Copland preached his sermon of thanksgiving for the happy success of Virginian affairs on Thursday 18 April 1622, a month had elapsed since the so-called Good Friday Massacre had devastated the colony in Virginia. The tag is wrong on two counts: fairness demands that you call it an Indian attack, not a massacre; and Easter that year fell on 17 March by the Julian calendar then in use across English North America.2 Language aside, neither Copland nor his congregation of Virginia Company worthies gathered at Bow church in Cheapside had any inkling of how sickeningly inappropriate was his chosen theme.

Taking his text from Psalm 107, Verses 23 to 32, about God calming a storm at sea, Copland spoke of the ‘happie league of Peace and Amitie soundly concluded, and faithfully kept, betweene the English and the Natives, that the feare of killing each other is now vanished away’. Among his many wonderful works, God had stayed the hungry lions and mollified the savages, said Copland, setting out his vision of Virginia as a place to take England’s excess population, especially the starving poor who cluttered up the streets of its capital, a kind of bloodletting, said Copland, ‘For, even as bloud, though it be the best humour in the body, yet if it abound in greater quantitie, then the vessell and state of the body will contayne and beare, doeth in danger the body, and oftentimes destroyes it.’ But as Copland and his audience would learn to their horror nearly three months later, the bloodletting in Virginia was all too real and in no way metaphorical.

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