by Tony Horwitz
By September 1607, just four months after the colony’s founding, most of the original settlers were dead. Only a few weeks’ slim rations remained. Starved, sick, and set against one another, the besieged English were all but defenseless, “our men night and day groaning in every corner of the Fort,” Percy wrote.
Then a miracle occurred—the first of several interventions that would rescue Jamestown from impending doom. “It pleased God,” Percy wrote, “to send those people who were our mortall enemies to releeve us with victuals, as Bread, Corne, Fish, and Flesh in great plentie, which was the setting up of our feeble men; otherwise wee had all perished.”
A portrait of John Smith, the frontispiece of
his history of Virginia, 1624
Why the previously hostile Indians chose to save the English isn’t clear. They may have judged the survivors to be of more value alive than dead. English ships brought copper kettles, axes, and other goods, and the colonists’ skill with cannons and muskets could be enlisted against enemy tribes. Also, Europeans had appeared in the Chesapeake before: Spanish Jesuits (slaughtered near Jamestown a generation earlier), mariners on reconnaissance voyages, and possibly refugees from Roanoke. As yet, these intruders had posed little threat, and could be easily starved out or expelled when necessary. Or so Indians may reasonably have supposed in the late summer of 1607, as they kept watch on fifty dying men who seemed utterly clueless, since they drank foul water and couldn’t feed themselves.
What natives couldn’t know is that their rescue of the English would unleash John Smith, the one man capable of mobilizing the beleaguered colony. In a leadership reshuffle, Smith took charge of supplying the fort and immediately set off to trade for food, the first of many trips that would carry him, over the next two years, across eastern Virginia, Maryland, and, possibly, Delaware. Given the obstacles Smith faced, his travels comprise one of the great sagas of survival and improvisation in early America.
In contrast to Roanoke, where the English had settled among relatively small tribes that greeted the strangers peacefully, the Jamestown colonists had planted their fort in the middle of the most powerful and populous society on the Eastern Seaboard. Powhatan, whose capital lay just twelve miles from Jamestown, ruled an empire that stretched from North Carolina to Maryland. He collected tribute from dozens of tribes and fifteen thousand or more Indians.
Most natives lived in small settlements along four broad rivers flowing into the Chesapeake: today’s James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac. These were the superhighways of seventeenth-century Virginia, and Smith traveled them all, in an open boat powered by sail and oar, usually with no more than a dozen men. His first stop, at a village near Jamestown, set the pattern for dozens of encounters to follow.
“The Indians, thinking us near famished,” Smith wrote, offered only “small handfulls of beanes or wheat for a hatchet or a piece of copper.” To avoid seeming desperate—which he was—Smith scorned the offer and anchored nearby. The next day he “let fly his muskets and ran his boat on shore,” then marched on the village. Natives quickly offered venison and corn, at a favorable rate of exchange.
Smith’s gunboat diplomacy violated orders from the Virginia Company in London, which commanded settlers to “have great care not to offend the Naturals.” But Smith “loved actions more than wordes,” he wrote, and valued firsthand experience over the opinions of “tender educats” 3,700 miles away. “I know no reason but to beleeve my own eies, before any mans imagination.”
This scorn was somewhat disingenuous; a well-read man, Smith admired the power politics of Machiavelli. He believed a soft approach toward the “Naturals” would invite their contempt and, ultimately, an attack. By intimidating natives, in pursuit of clear goals, he sought to win their respect and avoid an all-out conflict. “Onlie with fearing them,” he wrote, “we got what they had.”
To keep Indians in awe of the English, Smith adapted the skills at artillery and deception he’d honed as a soldier of fortune. He fired his boat’s cannon into a tree full of icicles, to magnify the shot’s impact; used rivers and encircling woods to create terrifying echoes; and stuck soldiers’ helmets atop sticks, “to make us seeme many.” He also reprised his gladiatorial skills, besting several chiefs in solo combat.
But Smith didn’t succeed through bluff and bullying alone. He traded shrewdly, spreading goods among villages to stoke demand without dampening prices. His time abroad had also made him a skilled linguist. He compiled an extensive Algonquian lexicon, including enduring words such as mockasin and tomahack, and a term for friend, chammay, which may be the source of “chum.”
Smith also had a gift for wiggling out of tight spots. During an exploratory trip late in 1607, he split his small force and went scouting alone with an Indian guide, only to be ambushed and shot in the thigh with an arrow. He grabbed his guide as a human shield while firing his pistols, but in the time it took him to reload he was surrounded and forced to surrender.
Smith’s captor was Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough, a proud warrior who would bedevil the English for decades to come. But the captain managed to engage the chief, at least by his own account. “I presented him with a compass dial,” Smith wrote, “describing by my best means the use thereof, whereat he was so amazedly admired as he suffered me to proceed in a discourse of the roundnes of the earth, the course of the sunne, moone, starress, and plannets.”
Smith was then taken on a long tour of Indian villages and brought before Powhatan. The “Grave and Majesticall” ruler, aged about sixty, wore “Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke” and perched on an elaborate dais, surrounded by wives and retainers. In Smith’s first account of their meeting, published the next year, he wrote that Powhatan welcomed him “with good wordes, and great Platters of sundrie Victuals.”
Pocahontas saves John Smith, from Smith’s 1624 account of the rescue
Not until 1624, seventeen years after his capture, did Smith publish the story familiar to generations of American schoolchildren. “Two great stones were brought before Powhatan,” he wrote. Then the chief’s retainers grabbed Smith and laid his head on the rocks. “Being ready with their clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.”
Smith’s original account of his capture, in 1608, was heavily edited in London and published as propaganda for the Virginia Company. His near execution isn’t mentioned, though it’s possible the scene was censored by editors. It’s also possible that Smith lifted his story from the strikingly similar account of Juan Ortiz, the Spanish captive in Florida who became De Soto’s translator. By 1624, when Smith published the dramatic version of his rescue, Ortiz’s account was available in England, and Pocahontas had become a well-known and admired figure.
Even if Smith really did undergo the ordeal he described, he may have misunderstood its meaning. He was new to Virginia, the other members of his party had just been massacred, and Powhatan’s warriors, by all accounts, were large and fearsome men. They shaved their heads on one side, growing their hair long on the other and decorating it with “the hand of their enemy, dryed.” They adorned their pierced ears with claws, dead rats, and live snakes. Powhatan’s personal guards were also “the tallest men his Country doth afford,” Smith wrote. When these “grim courtiers” seized him and laid his head on a stone, he had every reason to expect they were about to beat out his brains.
But Powhatan may never have intended to kill his captive. Mock executions are believed to have been part of a native ritual, to test prisoners’ mettle prior to adopting them. By Smith’s own account, no sooner had Pocahontas intervened than Powhatan—who moments before had seemed intent on slaying his captive—“was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper.”
If Smith’s “rescue” by Pocahontas is questionable, there’s even less basis to the legend of a romance between the two. In Dis
ney’s animated movie version, Pocahontas is a busty and vaguely Asian Barbie, and Smith a blond Ken Doll. In a recent movie for adults, The New World, the darkly handsome Colin Farrell frolics with a voluptuous young actress in skimpy buckskins.
The real Smith, judging from portraits, was hirsute and homely. Of Pocahontas there are many descriptions, beginning with Smith’s own: “A child of ten years old,” he wrote, she was beautiful in “feature, countenance and proportion” and possessed “wit and spirit” that made her the “Nonpareil” of Virginia.
This is a flattering portrait—of a child. Another colonist later described her as a “young girle” cartwheeling naked through Jamestown, not yet old enough to wear the apron donned by female Indians at puberty. Her proper name was Matoaka, “Pocahontas” being a girlish nickname meaning “Little Lively One.” The only hint that Smith saw her in a more mature light was his mention, years later, that his foes at Jamestown spread the unfounded rumor that he planned to make himself king of Virginia by marrying Pocahontas. In the event, she wed a different John. Smith went to his grave a bachelor.
Whether or not Pocahontas saved Smith from execution, she did rescue Jamestown. One night, she came to the fort to warn the English of a trap Powhatan was laying. At other times, she hid an English messenger and saved a captive boy whose fellow prisoners were killed. She also served as an intermediary and frequent visitor to the fort, bringing desperately needed food in exchange for trinkets. Smith’s Algonquian lexicon includes a phrase that translates: “Bid Pokahontas bring hither two little Baskets, and I will give her white beads to make her a chaine.”
With Pocahontas’s aid, Smith’s initiative, and the arrival of more settlers, the troubled colony began to find its feet. As other councilors died or were deposed, Smith rose to become president and acted quickly to mobilize the listless colonists. “He that will not worke shall not eate,” the captain famously declared, “for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers.”
Under Smith’s stern rule, colonists performed military drills, built houses, and dug a well of “excellent sweet water.” But what made Smith exceptional was his recognition that survival in America meant learning to live as Americans. Settlers sowed forty acres of corn, guided by two Indian prisoners who “taught us how to order and plant our fields.” Natives also showed them how to clear land by cutting notches in tree trunks and stripping the bark so the trees would rot. At one point, Smith dispersed his men among villages, to live off the land and learn from Indians “how to gather and use their fruits as well as themselves.” During his one-year tenure as leader, almost no English died, an unprecedented success.
Smith was also the first English colonist to see the folly of pursuing “gilded hopes” of mineral riches and the dream of a Pacific passage. America’s true promise, he believed, lay in its soil, timber, fish, game, and other resources. And tapping this wealth required patient and humble labor, not the idle “Gallants,” metal refiners, perfumers, and other supernumeraries the Virginia Company kept sending.
“I intreat you,” Smith wrote his superiors in London, “send but thirty Carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, fisher men, blacksmiths, masons and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided; then a thousand of such as we have.”
Smith wasn’t a democrat; he ruled despotically and treasured his feudal coat of arms. But he believed that power and privilege should flow from merit, not birth. It “is a happy thing,” he wrote, to inherit wealth and honor. “But that which is got by prowesse and magnanimity is the truest lustre.”
Smith’s high opinion of himself, and his disdain for inherited rank, put him at odds with the well-born men sent by the Virginia Company to Jamestown. Typical was George Percy, the earl’s son, who reviled the upstart captain as “an ambitious, unworthy and vayneglorious fellow, attempting to take all men’s authorities from them.” In 1609, Smith’s foes engineered his removal as leader, and may have tried to kill him. During a river trip, Smith was asleep in his boat when someone “accidentallie” ignited his gunpowder bag, “which tore his flesh from his bodie and thighs, 9 or 10 inches square in a most pittifull manner.” Ferried back to the fort, he was “unable to stand, and neare bereft of his senses.” A ship was about to depart for England and Smith sailed home, never to return to Jamestown.
THOSE LEFT TO run the colony in the captain’s stead quickly brought it to the brink of ruin again. Shortly before Smith’s departure, they began a campaign of terror against Indians, burning villages, looting the tombs of “dead kings,” and cutting off natives’ heads and limbs to force tribes to hand over food. Smith, for all his harshness, knew that such tactics would invite retribution. Sure enough, natives responded by massacring trade parties, in one case stuffing the mouths of English corpses with food, as a warning to any others who “shold come to seeke for breade and reliefe amongste them.”
George Percy, the new leader of the colony, also failed to store grain, let fishing nets rot, and so angered Indians that they killed the hundreds of hogs Smith had bred as a reserve food supply. As a result, the English found themselves, at the end of 1609, back where they’d been two years before, besieged and ill-provisioned inside their wretched fort. Except now there were five times as many settlers, competing for scarce food through a long winter known as “the Starving Time.”
When rations ran out, colonists ate horses, dogs, cats, rats, and mice. They ate shoes, cooked starch from their collars into “a gluey porridge,” and devoured excrement. When nothing else remained, they ate one another. “Some have Licked up the Bloode which hath fallen from their weake fellows,” Percy wrote. Others disinterred corpses. The nadir was reached when a man killed his pregnant wife, “chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food.” Percy executed the man after extracting a confession by hanging him from his thumbs.
Of five hundred colonists at Jamestown when Smith left in the autumn of 1609, only sixty remained alive the following May, when a supply fleet arrived. The newcomers had endured a trauma of their own, having been shipwrecked on Bermuda for almost a year following a great storm (a stranding that inspired Shakespeare’s play The Tempest). At Jamestown, they found the fort’s gate hanging from its hinges, walls torn down for firewood, and crazed survivors, “so Leane that they looked Lyke Anatomies,” running naked through the fort, crying, “We are starved. We are starved.”
The incoming governor decided there was no hope of resurrecting Jamestown, and ordered its evacuation. This news was greeted with “a generall acclamation and shout of joy.” On June 7, 1610, just over three years after Jamestown’s founding, the English abandoned the fort, “with a peal of small shot.” Like so many New World ventures before it, Virginia had failed.
Then came yet another deus ex machina. After sailing a short way toward the sea, Percy wrote, “Suddenly we espied a boat making towards us.” Its captain was English, and he heralded the arrival of a fleet carrying 150 fresh settlers and a year’s supply of provisions. “Whereupon,” Percy wrote, “we all returned to James Town again.”
MISBEGOTTEN, ABANDONED, AND miraculously rescued four centuries ago, Jamestown still feels like an orphan of early America. Plymouth, founded thirteen years afterward, is a rock star for tourists. So is Williamsburg, which lies just twelve miles from Jamestown, the settlement it supplanted as Virginia’s capital in 1699. Even the meager remains at Roanoke Island, Jamestown’s failed predecessor, attract as many tourists annually as the first permanent English colony in America.
One reason for this relative neglect is the bashing Jamestown has taken from generations of historians, particularly nineteenth-century New Englanders. Eager to anoint Plymouth as the birthplace of America, they cast the country’s English beginnings as a regional morality play. Pilgrims, in frigid Massachusetts, scraped through by dint of pious, shared labor. Virginians, their degenerate Southern twins, were greedy, godless, class-ridden, and indolent, playing bowls in the stree
ts as their settlement rotted around them.
In the Yankee view, not only was Jamestown a disgrace; its founding hero was a colossal liar, as evidenced by the many versions he gave of his rescue by Pocahontas. Henry Adams, who launched a famous broadside against Smith just after the Civil War, saw his salvo as “a rear attack on the Virginia aristocracy” he so despised. Though regional passions later cooled, many twentieth-century historians were just as harsh. In 1975, Edmund Morgan branded Jamestown a “fiasco” that endured despite the worst efforts of its colonists.
Jamestown’s physical remains fared almost as poorly as its reputation. Semiabandoned by the late 1600s, most of the colony site was planted over with crops, and then buried beneath a Confederate fort. The isthmus linking the peninsula to the mainland washed away, leaving Jamestown an island. Not until 1893 did the quaintly named Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities buy one corner of the island, which became a small historic park that still evokes its Victorian origins.
The park’s statue of Pocahontas depicts the naked Indian girl as a woman of about twenty, demurely clad in a deerskin dress. Nearby stands a towering statue of John Smith, hand on sword hilt, gazing resolutely toward the river. The colony’s restored church is hung with musty plaques put up by groups such as the National Society of Colonial Dames, honoring the “Ancient Planters of Virginia.”
Until recently, there wasn’t much else to see. When the archaeologist William Kelso first visited in the 1960s and asked about the English fort, a park ranger pointed at a cypress in the river and said, “You’re too late—it’s out there.” The spit of land on which the fort stood was believed to have eroded into the James.
