Legacy of the Sacred Harp

Chapter 19. The Sea Venture

203 Chapter 19 The Sea Venture aFter absorbing the story of Jerome Dumas and the families of his son and grandsons, I was ready to address Carine’s challenge to learn the other half of the story—Unity Smith Dumas’ family. I expected to find very little information from the seventeenth century, certainly no personal details, about ordinary people. However, the will of Unity’s grandfather, Henry White, recorded in York County, January 10, 1672, provided a glimpse of a man who seemed to possess a sense of humor. Among the unquestionably valuable goods and property bequeathed to Henry White’s beneficiaries was a gift to Major John West—“five pounds sterling to buy him a beaver hat.” John West, White’s brother-in-law, was one of the wealthiest men in Virginia. Whitewasapparentlywealthy,too,andowned“branchoffice”plantations. He left the majority of his land holdings and a mill to his eldest son, Joseph, who was expected to provide for his widowed mother, Mary Croshaw White. The other four children were each given three-hundred-acre parcels of land. Henry White’s will also granted early release to a young—though we don’t know how young—indentured servant: “Whereas Mary Woods is bound for one and twenty yeares, that she be free at eighteen.” At least part of White’s land holdings were received at his marriage to Mary Croshaw from her father, Joseph Croshaw (sometimes spelled Crashaw; pronounced Crah-shaw). A deed in York County, dated 22 March 1659, but recorded on 10 September 1660, describes two parcels of land—two hundred acres and three hundred acres—given to Henry White and Mary Croshaw White, “providing Croshaw in his lifetime may build a mill on the three hundred acres, and after his death, the mill to revert to said Henry White.” Joseph Croshaw’s father, Captain Raleigh Croshaw, came to Jamestown in September of 1608. He wrote an effusive poem in honor of his good friend, Captain John Smith, which Smith attached to his General History of Virginia, Third Book. Smith had great respect for Croshaw’s knowledge of Legacy of the Sacred Harp 204 Indian customs and warfare. He said Croshaw was on a trading mission on the Potomac in 1622 when he learned of the massacres that were meant to wipe out the colony, and almost did. Croshaw immediately challenged Opechancanough, chief of the Powhatan tribe, who was known to be a giant of a man, to fight him naked. The offer was not accepted, however. Joseph Croshaw, who was first married to Elizabeth Yeardley and then four other wives, left a lengthy trail through courts of law, exchanging land and many hundred-pound units of tobacco. educated in england, Croshaw was an attorney who was given to filing or being charged in one lawsuit after another. The second generation of colonists had already established a very litigious society. I finally remembered the good advice to search the earliest records first. Over the next weeks, I read continuously in the Virginia Historical Society’s collection of manuscripts and rare books searching for the earliest accounts of Unity’s ancestors, Sir George Yeardley and Temperance Flowerdew. I found accounts of the same events from various people in the time of occurrence as well as from historical viewpoints. All the while, I tried to keep my mind focused on how George and Temperance were affected and what their perspectives might be. The first mention of George Yeardley was about 1600 as a young Lieutenant Captain with england’s troops in the Netherlands, as they fought against their mutual enemy, Spain and its king, Philip III. After Pope Alexander VI had in 1493 given the entire New World to Spain because of Columbus’ discovery, england and most of the rest of Protestant europe had thought there was surely enough land and trade to be shared. A major part of the competition for the New World was a religious struggle. With the Treaty of 1604-1605, england and Spain agreed to a tentative peace—peace on land, if not on the seas—and the soldiers came home from war. James I had come to the throne after the death of Queen elizabeth in 1603. The new peace with Spain and increasing world trade had built up a group of wealthy London merchants. In 1606, king James granted a charter to establish the Virginia Company of London with the intent of founding a colony in the New World. We know the...