Indeed, nearly all we know of the uncontaminated American aborigines, their mode of life and domestic economy, is derived from this book, and therefore its influence and results as an original authority cannot well be over-estimated.  We have many Spanish and French books of a kindred character, but none so lively and lifelike as this by Hariot, especially as afterwards illustrated by De Bry’s engravings from White’s drawings described below.

The first breath of European enterprise in the New World, combined with its commercial Christianity, seems in all quarters, particularly the Spanish and English, to have at once taken off the bloom and freshness of the Indian.  His natural simplicity and grandeur of character immediately quailed before the dictatorial owner of property and civilization.  The Christian greed for gold and the civilized cruelty practised without scruple in plundering the unregenerate and unbaptized of their possessions of all kinds, soon taught the Indian cunning and the necessity of resorting to all manner of savage and untutored devices to enable him to cope with his relentless enemies for even restrained liberty and self-preservation; nay, even for very existence, and this too on his own soil that generously gave him bread and meat.  All these by a self-asserted authority the coming European civilizer, with Bible in hand, taxed with tribute of gold, labour, liberty, life.  This has been the common lot of the western races.

It is therefore refreshing to catch this mirrored glimpse of Virginia, her inhabitants, and her resources of primitive nature, before she was contaminated by the residence and monopoly of the white man.  It may have been best in the long run that the European races should displace the aborigines of the New World, but it is a melancholy reflection upon ’ go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature,’ that no tribe of American Indians has yet been absorbed into the body politic.  Many a white man has let himself down into savage life and habits, but no tribe of aborigines has yet come up to the requirements, the honours, and the delights of European civilization.  Like the tall wild grass before the prairie-fire, the aboriginal races are gradually but surely being swept away by the progress of civilization.  Now that they are gone or going the desire to gather real and visible memorials of them is increasing, but fate seems to have swept these also from the grasp of the greedy conqueror.  Cortes gathered the golden art treasures of Montezuma and sent them to Charles the Fifth, but the spoiler was spoiled on the high seas, and not a drinking-cup or ringer-ring of that western barbaric monarch remains to tell us of his island splendour.

A historical word upon the events that led up to Raleigh’s Virginia patent may not be out of place in a bibliographical Life of Hariot.  The patent was no sudden freak of fortune but was the natural outgrowth of stirring events.  Had it not been allotted to Raleigh it would doubtless soon after have fallen to some other promoter.  But Raleigh was the Devonshire war-horse that first snuffed the breeze from afar.  He fathered and took upon himself the burden of this newborn English enterprise of Western Planting.