Career
Thomas Dale was enlisted when a youth, about 1588, as a soldier in the service of the Netherlands. Later we find him in Scotland, in the retinue of Prince Henry, to whom he became deeply attached. He returned about 1603 to the Netherlands, where his bravery and the favor of King James won him advancement to a captaincy.
On June 19, 1606, he was knighted at Richmond, as Sir Thomas Dale of Surrey, after which he returned to his company.
In January 1611, the States General granted him leave for three years.
On March 27, 1611, he set sail with the Starr, Prosperous, and his wife, carrying settlers, stores, and live stock, and eight weeks later cast anchor off Point Comfort. In the absence of the governor, Lord De la Warr, Dale ruled the colony until August, when he was relieved by Sir Thomas Gates.
Gates left in March 1614, and Dale again assumed control. Finding the colony suffering from insubordination, epidemics, Indian attacks, and famines, he was instrumental in surmounting all these evils.
Publishing certain martial laws, he enforced them with great severity.
This won him the approbation of the London Company, for it restored order to the colony, but brought upon him the execration of the settlers.
The Assembly of 1624 said that in defiance of their charter rights he had subjected the people to a cruel tyranny. Men had been hanged, tortured, broken upon the wheel. One for stealing two or three pints of oatmeal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue and was tied with a chain to a tree until he starved.
By founding a new settlement near the falls of the James, Dale checked the epidemics of malaria. In a sweeping bend of the river, far from the mosquito-infested marshes of Jamestown, he built Henrico, enclosed a large tract of land with palisades, and laid out fields of corn. Peace with the Indians came when he sanctioned the marriage of John Rolfe with Pocahontas, the captive daughter of the chieftain Powhatan.
When Dale returned to England in 1616 he could boast that he had left the colony tranquil and prosperous. On November 28, 1617, he was appointed commander of a London East India Company fleet, and on February 26, 1618, sailed for the East Indies. At this time the rivalry between the English and the Dutch for the eastern trade was intense, and on December 23, Dale fought with a Dutch fleet “a cruel, bloody fight, ” which ended in a draw. On July 19, 1619, his fleet arrived at Masulipatam, India, and there he died “after twenty days of languishing sickness. ” “