In Dale's years there rises above the English horizon the cloud of New France. The old, disaster-haunted Huguenot colony in Florida was a thing of the past, to be mourned for when the Spaniard wiped it out--for at that time England herself was not in America. But now that she was established there, with some hundreds of men in a Virginia that stretched from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia, the French shadow seemed ominous. And just in this farther region, amid fir-trees and snow, upon the desolate Bay of Fundy, the French for some years had been keeping the breath of life in a huddle of cabins named Port Royal. More than this, and later than the Port Royal building, Frenchmen--Jesuits that!--were trying a settlement on an island now called Mount Desert, off a coast now named Maine. The Virginia Company-doubtless with some reference back to the King and Privy Council--De La Warr, Gates, the deputy governor, and Dale, the High Marshal, appear to have been of one mind as to these French settlements. Up north there was still Virginia--in effect, England! Hands off, therefore, all European peoples speaking with an un-English tongue!
Now it happened about this time that Captain Samuel Argall received a commission "to go fishing," and that he fished off that coast that is now the coast of Maine, and brought his ship to anchor by Mount Desert. Argall, a swift and high-handed person, fished on dry land. He swept into his net the Jesuits on Mount Desert, set half of them in an open boat to meet with what ship they might, and brought the other half captive to Jamestown.
Later, he appeared before Port Royal, where he burned the cabins, slew the cattle, and drove into the forest the settler Frenchmen. But Port Royal and the land about it called Acadia, though much hurt, survived Argall's fishing.*
* Argall, on his fishing trip, has been credited with attacking not only the French in Acadia but the Dutch traders on Manhattan. But there are grounds for doubt if he did the latter.
There was also on Virginia in these days the shadow of Spain. In 1611 the English had found upon the beach near Point Comfort three Spaniards from a Spanish caravel which, as the Englishmen had learned with alarm, "was fitted with a shallop necessarie and propper to discover freshetts, rivers, and creekes." They took the three prisoner and applied for instructions to Dale, who held them to be spies and clapped them into prison at Point Comfort.
That Dale's suspicions were correct, is proved by a letter which the King of Spain wrote in cipher to the Spanish Ambassador in London ordering him to confer with the King as to the liberty of three prisoners whom Englishmen in Virginia have captured. The three are "the Alcayde Don Diego de Molino, Ensign Marco Antonio Perez, and Francisco Lembri an English pilot, who by my orders went to reconnoitre those ports." Small wonder that Dale was apprehensive. "What may be the daunger of this unto us," he wrote home, "who are here so few, so weake, and unfortified, . . . I refer me to your owne honorable knowledg."
Months pass, and the English Ambassador to Spain writes from Madrid that he "is not hasty to advertise anything upon bare rumours, which hath made me hitherto forbeare to write what I had generally heard of their intents against Virginia, but now I have been . . . advertised that without question they will speedily attempt against our plantation there. And that it is a thing resolved of, that ye King of Spain must run any hazard with England rather than permit ye English to settle there . . . .Whatsoever is attempted, I conceive will be from ye Havana."
