Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
And then in other stanzas the anonymous gentleman names more English
heroes and their deeds, as Captain Powell, Hamor, and Pountis, mentions
the industries reinstated and the influx of immigrants whose very numbers
terrify the red man, and notes the arrival of the governor's wife, Lady
Wyatt. The concluding words are pure come-hither advertisements.
There are several later seventeenth-century ballads on Virginia subjects,
and even though it is doubtful that any one of them was actually composed
in British America, their subjects and treatment indicate how close Britain
was to events in her oldest colony. Several are closely akin to the folk
ballad, and perhaps all use what were originally folk tunes. Their dating
is uncertain, for in the broadsides there is rarely any indication save in in­
ternal textual evidence. Sir Charles Firth in An American Garland has
gathered a number of these.
A Voyage to Virginia; Or, the Valiant Souldier's Farewell to his Love38
is one of them. After a verse prologue concerning the maid's entreaties to
her lover that he not go to the New World, "To the Tune of She's gone
and left me here alone," there are twelve eight-line stanzas to "pretty
Betty," each concluding with a variant of the incremental refrain of the
eighth line beginning with "Though I must to Virginia go" and concluding
with "Whilst he did to Virginia go."
There is nothing of the colony in the above ballad, but The Treppan'd
Maiden: Or, The Distressed Damsel, presumably related by a returned
kidnapped indentured servant to the tune of "Virginny, or, When that I
was weary, weary, 0" is based on details of life in the Chesapeake region
such as will be seen in Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor. Five years
under "Master Guy" this betrayed woman declares she served, sleeping
upon straw, performing the heaviest manual labor including plowing and
carrying billets of wood, nursing the landholder's children, and pounding
grain at the mill's mortar. All this has left her "weary, weary, weary, weary,
0." The concluding stanza expresses merely the hope that the narrator will
once "more land on English shore," where ''I'll no more be weary, weary,
weary, weary, 0." Sixteen quatrains of which the second and fourth lines
are repetitive refrains, up to this last stanza, have a plaintive effect.39
In merrier tone, using the old theme of the duper duped or guller gulled,
A Net for a Night Raven; or, A Trap for a Scold, with "The Tune . . .
Let us to Virginia Go," tells in fifteen eight-line stanzas the story of a
shrewish and unfaithful wife who in attempting to get rid of her husband
by persuading him to go to the colonies is herself enticed aboard ship and
sold to a sea captain, who in turn makes a profit by selling her to a new
husband in Virginia. These verses end with the warning and moral tag
of a final stanza addressed to scolding wives.40 Other ballads relating to
Virginia include The Betrayed Maiden, quite close to the tragical folk
1 333