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MRAP Directory 12
Page 05
Just beyond, upriver, lie ruins of the Ludwell House and the Third and Fourth Statehouses. In 1900-01, Col. Samuel H. Yonge, a U.S. Army Engineer and a keen student of Jamestown history, uncovered and capped these foundations after building the original seawall. A strange discovery was made here in 1955 while the foundations were being examined by archeologists for measured drawings. Tests showed that no less than 70 human burials lay beneath the statehouse walls, and an estimated 200 more remain undisturbed beneath the remaining structures or have been lost in the James River. Here may be the earliest cemetery yet revealed at Jamestown--one so old that it was forgotten by the 1660's when the Third Statehouse was erected. It is, indeed, quite possible that these burials, some hastily interred without coffins, could date from the "starving time" of 1609-10, when the settlers strove to dispose of their dead without disclosing their desperate condition to the Indians.
A volume might be filled with stories of the strange and exciting incidents that grew out of this pretended popish plot. Its consequences extended disastrously through many years, and involved a vast number of innocent persons in irretrievable ruin. The true character of Oates and his accomplices was, however, at length fully proved, and they themselves suffered the fate at last which they had brought upon others. The whole affair was a disgrace to the age. There is no circumstance connected with it which can be looked upon with any pleasure except King Charles's fidelity to his injured wife in refusing to abandon her, though he no longer loved her. His defense of her innocence, involving, as it did, a continuance of the matrimonial tie, which bound them together when all the world supposed that he wished it sundered, seems to have resulted from a conscientious sense of duty, and implies certain latent traits of generosity and nobleness in Charles's character, which, though ordinarily overpowered and nullified by the influences of folly and vice, still always seem to have maintained their hold, and to come out to view from time to time, in the course of the gay monarch's life, whenever any emergency occurred sufficient to call them into action.
I heard at that place an extraordinary account of how a dirigible balloon, with nobody on board, had some few years before passed over the house. The balloon--which my informant, in his ignorant language, called a "huge square globe"--flew, according to him, a flag, the stars and stripes, and had an anchor dangling down. The balloon was travelling in a westerly direction. It flew a little higher than the trees, and caused a great scare among the natives. My informant told me that there was no one in the car at all, but they waved their hands at him (_sic_) when they passed over his house! He then told me that the air-ship had passed in the daytime and had quickly disappeared, but that it was beautifully lighted with coloured lights at night. So that it would be difficult from that truthful account to place much reliance on what the man said or on what he had seen at all. It is quite possible--after discarding all the indisputable embroidery from the story--that a balloon actually went over that place, and it may probably have been Wellman's abandoned balloon with which he had tried to go across the Atlantic.
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