The extent of this province is computed to be 260 miles in length and 220 miles in breadth, being mostly flat land. For one hundred miles up the country there is scarce a hill or a stone to be seen.
The air and seasons (it lying between 36 and 39 of north lat.) depend very much on the wind, as to heat and cold, dryness and moisture. The north and north-west winds are very nitrous and piercing cold, or else boisterous and stormy: the south and south-east winds, hazy and sultry hot. In winter they have a fine clear air, which renders it very pleasant; the frosts are short, but sometimes so very sharp, that rivers are frozen over three miles broad. Snow often falls in large quantities; but seldom continues above two or three days at most.
The soil, though generally sandy and shallow, produces tobacco of the best quality, in great abundance. The people's usual food is Indian corn made into hommony, boiled to a pulp, and comes the nearest to buttered wheat of anything I can compare it to. They have horses, cows, sheep, and hogs, in prodigious plenty, many of the last running wild in the woods. The regulation kept here is much the same as in New England; every man [1] from sixteen to sixty years of age is enlisted into the militia, and mustered once a year at a general review, and four times a year by troops and companies. Their military complement, by computation, amounts to about 30,000 effective men; the collective number of the inhabitants, men, women, and children, to 100,500, and, including servants and slaves [2], to twice that number.
Notes
1. White men, only. By Peter’s day the blacks of Virginia had systematically been deprived of every human right, not even counted as men.
2. In Virginia it would now be accurate to refer to unfree whites as servants and unfree blacks as slaves. Our current terminology bias comes from this source, the chief slave state of the original 13, but did not necessarily extend to other colonies, and later states, such as Arkansas, where whites and blacks were both referred to as servants and slaves up until the 1850s.
