The New World

(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:

1. Colonial America

Before taking up the consideration of American jewelry, let us look at a ‘flash back’ in time and history and begin before the beginning. That is to say, first we will set the scene and recall something of the character of life in the earliest Colonial days.

America, in 1607, was a wilderness inhabited by savages. Where great cities now stand, multitudes of wild beasts roamed at will; where aircraft now traverses our skies, birds flew in flocks so dense as to throw great shadows like the shadows of passing clouds upon the land below.

Less than three hundred and fifty years since then! It seems incredible. But history flatly states that it was the year of 1607 when England sent a group of men across the Atlantic to settle in this new and tractless continent.

One of the voyagers was John Smith, whose only unremarkable characteristic appears to have been his name.

Among the objects of the expedition was the search for a river which must bend northwest and lead to the ‘Other Sea’. That wishful belief in the existence of a northwest passage—and easy way to get by ship to the Orient, land of fabulous riches—had obsessed Europe for centuries. Without it, the history of America might have begun at even a later date than it did.

In those days of unchartered seas and unmapped lands, the exact spot where a ship came to port was determined rather by wind and wave than by the ship’s captain. At all events, after five tempestuous months at sea, the group of men from England landed in Virginia. It was springtime and the land must have looked very fair to them—at first. They decided to settle on a peninsula, and called the places Jamestown in honor of the king, naming their town before it existed and then trying to wring consent to their plans from the wilderness. But these men were ignorant of pioneering. The unaccustomed heat of Virginia’s summers, strange fevers, hunger, and hostile Indian beset them. By fall, out of the hundred and four men who came all but thirty eight were dead.

It was forbidden to send any account of these perilous conditions back to England lest it discourage new immigrants. And so, would-be colonists, entirely unfitted for the life that awaited them in this wild and savage country, continued to arrive at intervals. One of the earliest passenger lists included two goldsmiths, a jeweler, six tailors, a perfumer and various ‘gentlemen’.

Men might die, but the love of gold and gems in harder to kill. It persisted in the survivors who kept a weather eye out for any trace of treasure. In records made at the time we find a description of the ornaments worn by an Indian chief: ‘His ears all behung with bracelets of pearl.’ And again, mention is made of a chain of pearls sent as a gift from the great chief Powhatan to John Smith. Even the American Indians had gathered pearls, no one knows since when. Upon one occasion, during a barter with the Indians, certain blue beads brought over by the colonist were the means of saving them from starvation. The Indian chief had refused to give in exchange for other commodities any adequate quantity of corn, until he saw those beads and was told that only royalty might wear them. A few beads tipped the scales of the bargain and many bushels of the precious corn were paid by the redmen for their decorative sake.

Once disaster in the form of a fire fell upon the struggling colonists; the frail dwelling houses of Jamestown burnred to the ground. But every man, instead of rebuilding his house or planting corn, was intent on madly digging up the yellow sand of Virginia and lading it on English ships lately arrived. Someone had joyously declared that the sand was gold! John Smith wrote, ‘There was no talk, no work but dig gold, refine gold.’

The ships were due to sail back to England in two weeks but stayed on for fourteen weeks while their decks were being heaped with yellow sand, while when tested, on arrival in England, proved to be—yellow sand.

Well, at least, early America had seen a mirage of future treasure.

The New World (continue)