Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  It must be understood that this small tribe did not refer to itself as the Choptanks; that name would come much later and from strangers. No congregation so inconsequential would presume to appropriate a name. It was proper for others to do so, like the powerful Susquehannocks (from the smooth-flowing stream) or the crafty Nanticokes (those who ply the tidewaters) or the brutal Potomacs who ruled across the bay (those who live where the goods are brought in). But Pentaquod’s little group of inept fishermen referred to themselves as We, or Us, or, sometimes, The People. By the world they would be remembered as Choptanks.

  Nor did they call their river by that name; indeed, they had no concept of it as an entity, with a distant beginning and a termination in the bay. They were content to know their little stretch of it and would have been astonished to learn that they commanded an entire water system which would one day be known by their name.

  Nameless little people living upon a nameless river, they were destined to endow their somnolent region with one of the world’s most tantalizing titles: Choptank. The word must have had a meaning at some point; if so, it has been forgotten. A very old woman once said that it meant where the water flows back strongly, but she could explain nothing.

  Pentaquod’s two sons were now developing into responsible young adults, and Tciblento was an eight-year-old marvel, not so tall as her brothers but much quicker in mastering the lessons her father taught. She had begun to wear her long black hair in braids and had a saucy way of cocking her head when listening to elders. Her father delighted in his children, and it was partly because of wanting to be with them more that he summoned the tribe for his farewell oration:

  “Your food supplies have never been more secure, and your village is no longer ravaged by Nanticokes. Never has your river known a happier time, with crabs for all in the summer and beaver pelts in winter to keep you warm. I have served with you long enough. The time is at hand when you must select one of your own people as werowance.”

  Uneasiness followed this announcement, for the little people realized that without his towering guidance they might revert to the old days of fear and flight. The Nanticokes would learn that he was no longer leading the tribe and might conclude that continuing the peace was not in their interest, but the tall Susquehannock was insistent. Then he gave his reasons:

  “Whenever, in the old days, we fled to the northern rivers I watched one spot where two waters meet, and I have always wanted to live there with Navitan and the children. When I first came to your river I lived on the island where Fishing-long-legs instructed me, and then on the cliff where I saw how beautiful this land can be, and in the marsh where Onk-or the goose came to see me, and then in this mysterious village where no people lived. I am a man who likes to live apart, and I feel a deep urge to build my wigwam between the two waters.”

  “Who will be our werowance?” they asked, and he told them that they should select a young man who could serve them for two generations, and when they protested that they had never chosen their leader before, he allowed his eyes to wander over the frightened crowd. They came to rest on Matapank, who had stood beside him in battle, and when the villagers realized that Pentaquod had indicated his choice, they shouted, “Matapank!” and were gratified.

  Pentaquod believed that once he announced his decision to leave, he should do so in a hurry, for if he lingered, he would detract from the importance of the new werowance. Accordingly, he gave Matapank an intensive series of instructions, until that somber day when he joined him in a canoe and paddled downriver past the island to the margin of the bay. There, as the canoe drifted idly, he handed over the hidden burden of leadership. “You’ve heard of the time when the Great Canoe came into these waters.” The new werowance nodded. “What you haven’t heard is that when it moved along the shore Orapak, who was a boy then, and his grandfather, who was the werowance, crept behind trees and spied upon the people in the canoe.”

  Matapank pursed his lips; he knew the traditions of his tribe, but of such an adventure he had not heard. “What did they see?”

  “The people in the canoe had fair skins, not like us, and they had different bodies.”

  “In what way?”

  “They glistened. When the sun struck their bodies, they glistened.” Pentaquod allowed this information to sink in, then added, “And the Great Canoe moved without paddlers.”

  This was frightening. Values beyond comprehension were involved, and the young leader could make nothing of them. Then Pentaquod added his last intelligence: “One day that canoe will return, and we shall be dealing with people entirely different ... white skins ... glistening bodies.”

  Matapank had been eager to take on the responsibilities of leadership, but these new factors evoked apprehension. “When they come, will you help me?”

  “They may not come in my lifetime,” Pentaquod said.

  “I think they will,” the young man replied.

  “Why?”

  “Long ago I dreamed that I would be the werowance. It happened. And at the same time I dreamed that others came to the river, neither Nanticokes nor Susquehannocks. And they will come.”

  Pentaquod liked this response. The leader of a tribe should be one who has visions of the future, who can adjust his thinking to developments which he knows to be inevitable. In his case he had known from the start that peace with the Nanticokes was possible, and his every act as werowance had led in that direction. He had also known that his pitiful little tribe could never defeat the Susquehannocks, and he had kept them from making that fatal effort.

  “You are ready to lead,” he told Matapank as they allowed the canoe to drift, and when they reached shore he handed the new leader a cherished talisman, which he had kept hidden for this moment: the copper disk long worn by the werowance of this tribe. Then he promised, “If the strange ones return while I am alive, I will help.”

  That day he and his family left the village. Putting aside his three turkey feathers, he led his family to a pair of sturdy canoes, one burned from oak, one from pine, and together they paddled west past the marshes and around the white cliffs into a beautiful small river. When they had penetrated for some distance, they came to a secondary stream leading inland, and when they had gone up this a short way it bifurcated, forming within its arms the small peninsula he had noticed long ago.

  Tree-covered, it projected south, to be warmed by the sun in winter. There were no marshes in which mosquitoes could breed, but enough deep salt water to produce oysters and crabs. In the forest there would be deer, and on all the waters geese. It was as fine a setting as the Choptank provided, a refuge with visible security and never-ending beauty. From the point on which Pentaquod and his sons erected their three wigwams the family could look down a broad perspective of the stream to the river and the distant pine trees lining the invisible Choptank.

  Here Pentaquod spent the two happiest years of his life, 1605 and 1606 in the western calendar. He was older now and slightly stooped; his great broad face was deeply etched from years of leadership, and his hair was white. But he felt young, for his oldest son had left the refuge one summer’s day to paddle back to the village, and when he returned he brought with him the sister of Matapank, the werowance, and soon Pentaquod had a grandson, longer and sturdier than the usual Choptank baby. “He’s to be a fine hunter!” Pentaquod predicted, and before the child could crawl the grandfather was making arrows for him.

  But in the next year a canoe came rushing up the creek, and even before it reached land the breathless paddlers shouted in a mixture of confusion and fear, “Pentaquod! The Great Canoe has come!”

  He was forty-nine that year of 1607, a man who had earned repose, but when this long-anticipated information reverberated through the forest, he did what he had always known he must eventually do: he put on his turkey feathers, told his family to pack and ordered them to follow as soon as possible. Almost eagerly, like a young buck bursting into a new meadow, his antlers ready, he jumped into the messengers’ can
oe and headed back to the village. It was as if he had consciously retired from leadership two years before in order to husband his strength and purify his understandings for the profound tests that lay ahead; he was prepared.

  But as the canoe left the small stream to enter the river which would take him to his new responsibilities, he looked back with sorrow and longing at the peninsula which he had transformed. He would not see it again, and he knew this, for with the arrival of the Great Canoe not only would his paradise be lost, but that of all the Choptanks.

  VOYAGE TWO: 1608

  ON A COLD, BLUSTERY DAY IN MID-DECEMBER 1606 CAPTAIN John Smith, a short, choleric, opinionated little man with a beard and a fiery temper, assembled seven daring gentlemen on a dock in the Blackwall section of London and addressed them in crisp terms: “I have brought you to inspect the vessels in which we shall conquer Virginia.” And he showed them the three small ships that would carry them to the New World, calling off their names: “Susan Constant, one hundred tons. Godspeed, forty tons. The little pinnace Discovery, twenty tons. And down here, at the end, the object of our meeting this day.”

  And he showed them, riding on the Thames at the foot of the dock, a small double-ended, single-masted open shallop twenty-three feet long with eight ominous oars. “You, Edmund Steed, jump in,” Smith commanded, and a fair young man of twenty-five, dressed in the clothes of a scholar, obeyed. Soon all seven were aboard manning their oars while Captain Smith, barely five feet tall, stood approvingly on the dock, watching the little craft adjust to the weight.

  “Sturdy vessel!” he cried, snapping his words as if issuing a command. Then, drawing himself to maximum height, he saluted the boat.

  He was twenty-six that winter—difficult, vain, unbearably ambitious. He had, by his account, already survived dangers that would have destroyed an ordinary man: mercenary in the most brutal years of the German wars, heroic defender of Christianity when the Muhammadans invaded Hungary, captured slave immured in a Turkish dungeon, foot-traveler to Muscovy and Madrid. And now he surveyed his fleet on the eve of his finest adventure: the establishment of a new colony, the subjugation of a new world.

  “We’re off!” he shouted as he jumped into the shallop. Grabbing the eighth oar, he began rowing with an energy that shamed the others, and soon they were moving briskly down the Thames. When they passed the three larger ships Smith yelled, “Mister Steed, have you handled sail?”

  “That I have not, sir,” the scholar replied, at which Smith bellowed, “Then stand clear as Mister Momford runs it up.” And a gentleman who had knowledge of boats manipulated the sheets so that a fore-and-aft sail climbed the mast. With it in place, the shallop moved so smartly that rowing was no longer required.

  “Ship the oars!” Smith ordered, but since the gentlemen were unfamiliar with this command, confusion resulted. “Bring in the oars!” Smith roared, and they were shipped, as he had wanted.

  When the brief trip was completed, with the shallop safely in dock, Smith surprised his crew by ordering them to haul the little craft ashore, after which he handed Steed and Momford buckets of paint and brushes, instructing them to number every board used in construction of the boat. “Each is to have its proper number, at four different spots, indicating its relation to every other board that touches it.”

  When this curious task was completed he summoned carpenters, who dismantled the boat, knocking out sails and wooden wedges until only piles of timber lay on the dock. These he ordered tied in lots and carried aboard the Susan Constant, where they were stowed below decks, and when all was secure, Smith led Steed to the edge of the hold in which they could see the bundled spars.

  “An idea of mine,” he said. “Conceived while imprisoned in a Turkish harem,” and once more he saluted the boat which would play so crucial a role in establishing the Virginia Colony.

  Because of his arrogance and vile temper, Captain Smith fared poorly in Jamestown. Thrown in jail for attempted mutiny, captured by Indians, near death at the hands of Powhatan, and actually led to the gibbet to be hanged for insubordination, he was saved by a last-minute revelation. Cocksure and prescient, he survived travail, gave the colony the iron leadership it required, and found time to pursue his major preoccupation: the exploration of the Chesapeake. “This is a noble sea,” he told his men at night, after the day’s work ended. “Calm and hospitable, majestic in size. Its potential cannot be imagined.”

  He had already mounted two preliminary explorations and was encouraged by what he had found: broad rivers, innumerable harbors, a plenitude of fish and crabs, and meadows yearning to be cultivated. But his two preconceived targets had eluded him: he had not found a passage to India, he had not uncovered the gold and silver which were known to exist somewhere along the shores of the Chesapeake.

  “Infuriating,” he growled one July day in 1608. “Three years ago I heard the facts for myself. The leaders of the expedition were busy securing permissions in London, so a noble lord and I attended a play, very little substance and I was about to leave, for I do not waste my time idly. But destiny tugged my sleeve and kept me ... for a purpose. An actor in this play strode to the edge of the stage and orated directly at me, none other. He spoke of Virginia and told me what I should find here. Silver more common than copper. Kitchen pans and bedroom pots made of pure gold. Rubies and diamonds in the streets. Children gathering pearls along the streams. The riches are here, if only we can find them.”

  On Saturday, August 9, he outlined his plan: “The gold lies, I am convinced, in towns hidden along the eastern shore of the bay, and there we shall explore most carefully. The passage to India probably starts from the northern tip, so after we have found our gold we shall probe north to identify the passage, then return to Jamestown with our profit.”

  The men agreed that this was prudent strategy, and on Sunday all sixteen—seven gentlemen, eight sailors and Captain Smith—attended church, where long prayers were uttered, and on the morning of August 11 he marched his crew to the banks of the James, where he addressed them in solemn tones: “We shall be gone thirty days, and at the end you will wish it had been ninety.” He then ordered his fifteen hands into the reassembled shallop, directed them to take up their oars, and stood like Alexander the Great in the bow of the boat, looking for new horizons.

  Among the gentleman rowers Edmund Steed, who had not participated in Smith’s two earlier explorations, had been selected for a particular purpose. Smith had not been entirely pleased with the narrative reports of his first journeys; they had been geographically accurate but had paid insufficient attention to his moral and heroic qualities. This time he was determined that his accomplishments be presented with proper flourishes.

  Steed came from an ancient Devon family and was a graduate of Oxford. He wrote well, was familiar with classical allusions and showed a proper respect for the captain. Both on the Susan Constant and ashore at Jamestown he attracted attention, and Smith now assured him, “I seek only an accurate account of what occurs during our exploration. Strict attention to where we sail and special detail when we move ashore.” He paused as Mister Momford prepared to break out the sail, then added confidentially, “And it would be prudent if you paid attention to the words and heroic deeds of the commander.”

  Steed understood. He had always been properly attentive whenever Smith entertained his companions with reports of his adventures in Hungary ... his painful months undergoing Turkish tortures ... his romantic escapes in Muscovy ... his daring in Spain. Steed sometimes marveled that a man only a year older than himself should have experienced so much, and he might have been tempted to brand the little warrior a liar except for the fact that Smith always spoke with an inherent veracity. His tales sounded true, and he quickly convinced the impartial listener that he had really been to the places whose names rolled off his tongue, for he gave the temperature, and how the city lay in relation to its river, and what his captors wore and which specific weapons were carried by the enemies he had slain in hand-to-hand c
ombat.

  Steed’s belief in his commander stemmed from an incident which had occurred during the long voyage from England, when Smith told in one brief afternoon of wild adventure in four different lands, ending with Spain, and Steed had thought: I’ll wager he never touched foot in Spain, the braggart. But then the little captain, as if alerted to the fact that an unbeliever lurked among his hearers, closed with a remarkable evocation:

  “And of all the cities I was to see in my travels, the one I remember most fondly is the dusty town that lies at the mouth of the great river leading to Sevilla in Spain. Sanlúcar de Barrameda is its name, and it holds the left bank of Wady-al-Quivir, as they call it. It’s a small and sun-baked town, with many grazing fields nearby and vast swamps filled with birds. It’s favorably regarded by sailors for the delicious pale wine its vintners make, for there is a square near the center of Sanlúcar where the wine-men sell their goods, accompanied by a salty little fish they call the anchoovy. I tasted the fish but not the wine.”

  The words rang like a bell at dusk, and Steed abandoned any doubts he may have had. Smith might not have been prisoner in a Turkish harem, and he probably did not kill three adversaries during a horseback tournament with lances, but that he had visited a dusty Spanish town at the mouth of a river, no one could deny.

  As Jamestown disappeared behind a bend, Steed took careful note of the shallop lest he omit significant details: no decking, no refuge from storms, barrels of bread already turning sour, a batch of dried meats, some with worms, and a large supply of fishing lines. “There’ll be plenty of fish,” Smith assured the rowers, and when Mister Momford got the frayed sail aloft, Steed took note that it had been mended twice. Such deficiencies he intended to report, for their existence would make the captain’s ultimate discovery of gold and the passage even more impressive.

  If the gentlemen and the sailors felt any apprehension about exploring with such inadequate gear, their captain did not. His buoyancy was remarkable, and when the shallop responded nicely to the wind he cried, “Fairly launched! It’s to be a famous journey!” Steed wrote down these remarks and others on the folded sheets he carried in a canvas bag, and that night he transcribed them into a proper journal, which Captain Smith reached for as soon as it was completed.