Very shortly after this, Spotswood writes to Col. Blakiston in London pressing him for a resolution of the Royal share. By November the memorial has been presented to Queen Anne. In the typical way that business was done, Queen Anne asks the Lord High Treasurer for his opinion. He in turn, after a delay, sent a request to the Board of Trade asking their opinion. Though not shown here, the Board heard the responses of a number of people. Queen Anne died before a final decision was reached.
That the piece of land patented by Chew was thought to contain silver is confirmed by the remarks of Graffenried in his memoirs, where he referred to the "land that we held together", which he said was a silver mine.
Some writers have said that the reference in Virginia to silver mines was a coverup for iron mines. Now I submit that, if one writes a petition to Her Majesty and refers to a silver mine, the writer means a silver mine.
The discussion at the Board of Trade, after the Lord High Treasurer requested the opinion of the Board, referred to silver mines, not to iron mines. From beginning to end, the subject was silver and gold, not iron. When you are presenting your thoughts before the Queen and you say, “Silver”, you had better mean silver.
One of the best explanations by Spotswood about the Germans was written after he left office. He wrote to Col. Harrison, the Deputy Auditor of the Crown's Revenue, to explain how it was that he came to be owning 85,000 acres. We will review this letter in upcoming notes.
In quoting Spotswood, I have expanded most of the abbreviations but left the punctuation and spelling as he wrote it. The hardest part in understanding his writings is the weak sense of sentence structure.
(09 Dec 04)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.