sting at Barbados; then they swung to the north
and, in February, 1634, came to Point Comfort in Virginia. Here they
took supplies, being treated by Sir John Harvey (who had received
a letter from the King) with "courtesy and humanity." Without long
tarrying, for they were sick now for land of their own, they sailed on
up the great bay, the Chesapeake.

Soon they reached the mouth of the Potomac--a river much greater than
any of them, save shipmasters and mariners, had ever seen--and into this
turned the Ark and the Dove. After a few leagues of sailing up the wide
stream, they came upon an islet covered with trees, leafless, for spring
had hardly broken. The ships dropped anchor; the boats were lowered; the
people went ashore. Here the Calverts claimed Maryland "for our Savior
and for our Sovereign Lord the King of England," and here they heard
Mass. St. Clement's they called the island.

But it was too small for a home. The Ark was left at anchor, while
Leonard Calvert went exploring with the Dove. Up the Potomac some
distance he went, but at the last he wisely determined to choose for
their first town a site nearer the sea. The Dove turned and came back
to the Ark, and both sailed on down the stream from St. Clement's Isle.
Before long they came to the mouth of a tributary stream flowing in
from the north. The Dove, going forth again, entered this river, which
presently the party named the River St. George. Soon they came to a high
bank with trees tinged with the foliage of advancing spring. Here upon
this bank the English found an Indian village and a small Algonquin
group, in the course of extinction by their formidable Iroquois
neighbors, the giant Susquehannocks. The white men landed, bearing a
store of hatchets, gewgaws, and colored cloth. The first Lord Baltimore,
having had opportunity enough for observing savages, had probably handed
on to his sagacious sons his conclusions as to ways of dealing with the
natives of the forest. And the undeniable logic of events was at last
teaching the English how to colonize. Englishmen on Roanoke Island,
Englishmen on the banks of the James, Englishmen in that first New
England colony, had borne the weight of early inexperience and all the
catalogue of woes that follow ignorance. All these early colonists alike
had been quickly entangled in strife with the people whom they found in
the land.

First they fell on their knees,
And then on the Aborigines.

But by