The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Unfortunately, that meeting ended in a minor brawl over a hatchet, and shortly thereafter the Paspahegh and neighboring tribes attacked the largely undefended settlement, killing a man and a boy. With most of the guns still packed away, and without any defensive walls, the colonists managed to hang on for an hour before the ship’s cannons opened fire from the riverfront, bringing down a tree limb among the warriors and scaring them into flight.

  It was the beginning of a long seesaw between détente and conflict, as Powhatan tried to find ways to cooperate with, co-opt, or expel the tassantassas—a process during which the Algonquians would prove as resistant to the increasingly bullying commercial focus of the English as they’d been to the clumsy religiosity of the Jesuits. Although Powhatan is remembered for steering his powerful confederacy through these early, tumultuous years of contact, much of that resistance would flow from a single man, one of Powhatan’s younger brothers, the werowance Opechancanough.

  Given his later, fearsome reputation, some historians have suggested Opechancanough was the kidnapped teenager Don Luis, who had led the uprising against the Jesuits in 1571, or that he took part in the attack on the mission. There is nothing to support this speculation, and given his dealings with the English, he hardly needed a Spanish backstory to explain his hostility toward the colonists. The werowance of the twelve-hundred-strong Pamunkey, who lived up the James River from the colony, Opechancanough was a tall, vigorous man with a long scalp lock, worn on one side of his shaved head in the Algonquian fashion. A natural leader, he found himself more and more at odds with the English as time passed.

  Opechancanough’s village was typical of those across Tsenacommacah—a loose scattering of oval houses known as yihakin, framed with bent saplings; covered with bark or, more often, mats made of woven reeds; and sheltering an extended family around a central fire. Werowances and paramount chiefs like Powhatan lived in longhouses; at Powhatan’s capital, Werowocomoco, on the modern York River, the leader’s house and ceremonial areas were set off from the rest of the village by two D-shaped ditches, each hundreds of yards long, but there was no defensive palisade of logs.

  The rivers and tidal creeks provided the easiest and surest transportation by canoe. These were not the lithe bark canoes found to the north, but heavy, much more cumbersome dugouts made from tall, straight pines. The villages were surrounded by rich agricultural land where corn, squash, and other crops were grown. Children armed with piles of stones were set on guard against crows and other raiders, while the women hoed weeds and harvested.

  The Jamestown colonists, however, spared little time for farming, what with hunting for gold and jewels, and had little success when they tried. Although their free-ranging pigs and chickens were increasing (the former becoming a menace to Indian crops that stone-throwing children couldn’t deter), they found their stock of corn “halfe rotten, and the rest . . . consumed with so many thousands of Rats”—a plague that, like the feral pigs, they’d brought with them. Forever short on food, they depended on surplus corn purchased from the Indians. Smith, the de facto governor of the colony and increasingly fluent in Algonquian, traveled among the villages of Tsenacommacah, bartering for a few dozen bushels at a time. Acting as though he was doing the Natives a favor by trading trinkets for corn, he was unwilling to let “the Salvages” see how weak the colony, torn by internal strife and politics, really was.

  In midwinter 1609, Smith and fifteen others sailed to Opechancanough’s village to trade for corn. Striking a bargain, the werowance told them to return the next day, when they found large baskets of corn waiting for them—along with seven hundred Powhatan warriors surrounding the chief’s house and fields.

  There was no love lost between Smith and Opechancanough. During the colony’s first winter, the werowance and a party of Pamunkeys had captured Smith far up the Chickahominy River, killing his companions and putting an arrow through the soldier’s leg. It was from this captivity, and his supposed imminent execution, that Smith was “rescued” by Powhatan’s daughter Matoaka, barely twelve, whose nickname was Pocahontas. Mostly, though, Smith depended on bluff—and the very real threat of English muskets—to cow the Algonquians. He’d done this not long before, demanding tribute of four hundred bushels of corn from a small tribe called the Nansemond after an attempted ambush of the English had failed, and burning houses until they complied.

  Smith now tried bluff again. First, he challenged Opechancanough to a hand-to-hand fight. Then he “snatched the King by his long locke in the middest of his men, with his Pistolle readie bent against his brest.” Smith claimed that the chief was “neare dead with feare”—an unlikely condition for a war leader in a culture that prized personal bravery—but Smith was forever blowing his own horn. “You promised to fraught [load] my Ship ere I departed,” he told the Pamunkey, “and so you shall, or I meane to load her with your dead carcasses.” He got the grain. “Men may thinke it strange there should be such a stirre for a little corne,” Smith wrote, “but had it beene gold with more ease wee might have got it; and had it wanted, the whole Colony had starved.”

  For the first two years of Jamestown’s existence, neither the Indians nor the colonists seemed to know exactly how to act toward each other, uncertain of intentions or capabilities. Powhatan tested the English defenses with open attacks like those in the initial days and weeks after the ships arrived. He tried to capture or kill the tassantassas leaders with stealth, as Opechancanough had done, and to suborn disaffected members of the colony into turning against their fellows—not a difficult task, given Werowocomoco’s prosperity and the periodic famine at Jamestown. At times, he offered what seemed like sincere assistance, and he and his people certainly welcomed the chance to acquire English goods, especially weapons.

  Neither side understood fully what the other was doing. Smith’s ritual “execution” involving Pocahontas may have been an Algonquian adoption ceremony in which Powhatan granted the Englishman status as a werowance, bound to serve the mamanatowick. If so, Smith no more comprehended that honor and responsibility than did Powhatan when, later the same year, the English crowned the chief with much pomp and declared him a vassal of their king.

  C. Smith Taketh the King of Pamaunkee Prisoner

  There was no love lost between Captain John Smith and Opechancanough, the younger, physically imposing brother of Powhatan, paramount leader of the eight-thousand-square-mile chiefdom in which Jamestown was founded. In one dramatic encounter in 1609, Smith and fifteen men, desperate for corn, confronted Opechancanough and seven hundred warriors. Grabbing the Pamunkey werowance by his long scalp lock and jamming a pistol into his chest, Smith held the man hostage until the food was loaded onto Smith’s ship. That humiliating act only fueled Opechancanough’s hatred of the English, which, after he assumed control of the chiefdom, led to two bloody attacks on the Virginia colonists. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-51971)

  But the old mamanatowick finally saw the colony for what it was—a growing menace in the heart of his empire. “Some doubt I have of your comming hither,” Powhatan told Smith in 1609, “for many doe informe me, your comming hither is not for trade, but to invade my people, and possesse my Country.” This was confirmed when a fresh influx of colonists arrived, including a bevy of aristocrats who wrested the leadership from the lowborn Smith, forcing him to return to England. Then they set about confirming Powhatan’s worst fears.

  Smith had been no shrinking violet when it came to dealing with the Indians, but the newcomers, having spread to other encampments up and down the James River, simply terrorized the villages close to where they settled, stealing food, beating people, burning houses, and even desecrating the dead. The English were no longer just strangers, tassantassas. They had proved to be marrapoughs, “enemies.”

  The Algonquian confederacy struck back, killing hundreds of colonists until the survivors cowered behind the triangular palisades of James Fort, too scared to venture outside even to bury their dead. It was England’s first exp
erience with war in the New World, and it was terrifying. John Ratcliffe, one of the original captains, had been captured while trying to barter for corn and skinned alive with mussel shells, then burned. The men with him were left where they fell, full of arrows, their mouths stuffed with corn bread: You want food, Powhatan seemed to be saying. Here’s food. Another party, led by one of the newly arrived young fops, acquired a significant quantity of corn by murdering several members of the only tribe not actively hostile toward the colonists, then sailed away with it, going directly home to England.

  Hemmed in by an Indian siege, more than half the two hundred colonists died during the winter of 1609–10. They cannibalized the houses for firewood, and some literally cannibalized the dead for food, including the corpse of an Algonquian dug up and eaten by “the poorer sort.” One Englishman “did kill his wife, powdered [salted] her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne.”

  “Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of,” Smith wrote with ghastly humor that immediately turned bleak. “This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time; it were too vile to say, and scarce to be beleeved, what we endured.”

  When spring came, the emaciated survivors buried their cannons beneath the filthy ground of James Fort, packed themselves onboard ship, and prepared to sail for home. Powhatan had won. Just as the Spanish had been driven out of Tsenacommacah a generation earlier, so now had the English. But if the mamanatowick breathed a sigh of relief, it was premature. At almost the very moment that the colonists were setting sail from the James River, a relief fleet under Sir Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, hove into sight with supplies, soldiers, and more colonists. Jamestown was reestablished, and the bloody fighting would go on for four more years, until an uneasy peace was sealed by the marriage of John Rolfe, one of the newcomers in De La Warr’s fleet, and Pocahontas, who had converted to Christianity after being kidnapped a year earlier.

  Rolfe and Pocahontas were married in April 1614, just as John Smith was returning to the New World, having been offered command of a whaling and fishing expedition based far to the north on Monhegan Island, in what was still called Norumbega.%8 That summer, the fishing well in hand, he took eight men—including George Waymouth’s former captive, the Wapánahki sagamore Ktə̀hαnəto—and roamed the coast from Maine south to Cape Cod in a small boat, trading for pelts. Smith fell in love with the land he named “New-England.” “Of all the foure parts of the world I have yet seene . . . I would rather live here then any where,” he wrote.

  But everywhere he went (except the “high craggy clifty Rockes and stony Iles” east of Penobscot Bay), Smith saw a densely occupied country. Penobscot Bay was “well inhabited with many people,” and the coast of Massachusetts was likewise “well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people.” The “country of the Massachusits,” Smith said, was the “Paradice of all those parts . . . the sea Coast as you passe shewes you all along large Corne fields, and great troupes of well proportioned people.” The area that is now Cape Ann and Gloucester Harbor struck him as an especially magnificent location, “not much inferior . . . (for) any thing I could perceive but the multitude of people.”

  Again and again, the earliest European explorers found the same discouraging situation: a lush and verdant land that cried out for civilized use but that was already solidly inhabited by healthy, well-armed Natives, who, though generally friendly, could brush away any attempt to settle their territory. It must have seemed a cruel joke for Providence to have presented this New World to Christian explorers, having already populated it with another race.

  And then, it seemed, Providence changed the rules.

  In the early seventeenth century, Western medicine still blamed the outbreak of disease on various “miasmas”—fetid air, the effluvia of rotting vegetation or bodies, the “falling damps” of swamps, and noxious elements released by earthquakes or floods. People did realize that some diseases could, inexplicably, pass from person to person, and even the least educated could see that some diseases conferred immunity on their survivors, while others did not. But how diseases emerged and how they moved were facts still unknown. Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of bacteria and other microbes was more than eighty years away, and the germ theory of disease transmission would not finally supplant miasmas until the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these were far from academic questions for the Native inhabitants of North America.

  Bitter feuds have been fought in the pages of scholarly journals on the size of pre-contact Native populations, on the origins and nature of the epidemics that followed European arrival, and on the timing and severity of the nearly hemispheric depopulation that they caused. Arguments have been made for a North America (north of the Rio Grande) that held as few as 900,000 or as many as 18 million people in 1491. Those arguing for the higher figure put the human population of the entire Western Hemisphere at as many as 112 million, far more than were then living in Europe.

  For all the controversy, two points are clear. First, by the time all but the very earliest European colonists arrived, Indian populations along the Atlantic seaboard were a fraction of what they had been just a few decades before. Second, without this monstrous loss of life (which probably exceeded 90 percent of many Native groups), Europeans would have had little chance of establishing more than a beachhead in the New World.

  Even at the time, the colonists recognized how lucky they were, although it was generally acknowledged as the hand of God moving to clear the pagans from a new Eden, not a chance throw of the dice. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after concepts of immunity and genetics were better understood, the epidemics were still taken as a sign of some inherent weakness in the Native constitution.

  No one knows how soon after contact epidemic disease hit the New World. It’s unlikely that the Vikings allowed Natives to linger close enough to spread germs, but the Spanish inadvertently unleashed waves of infection almost from the moment they settled the Caribbean and South and Central America. Coupled with the collapse of indigenous societies, starvation, and slavery—all of which magnified the effects of disease—epidemics took a horrific toll.

  On the island of Hispaniola, the native Taino may have numbered between 300,000 and several million before Columbus landed there in 1492. A year later, days after fifteen hundred Spaniards and herds of pigs, horses, and other domestic animals arrived, Columbus and almost all of his men fell ill with what may have been an unusually potent strain of swine influenza. Up to half the Spaniards died, but once the disease spread to the Taino, the carnage was orders of magnitude greater. After that, one disease after another, including a major smallpox epidemic in 1518 that left only a few thousand survivors, whittled down the population. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Taino were effectively extinct.

  The same catastrophe played out again and again on a staggering scale. By 1568, just three-quarters of a century after Columbus made landfall, 90 percent of the Amerindian population was dead, from the Mexican cities of the Aztecs (infected in 1520, according to one story, by an African slave with smallpox in the train of Hernán Cortés) to the Inca Empire in the Andes, where a smallpox epidemic in the 1520s may have killed fully half the people in a single blow. The decimation of the Indian population has been called the greatest loss of human life in history.

  Such virulent epidemics, accompanied by extraordinary mortality, are referred to as “virgin soil” outbreaks, since the Indians had never been exposed to these pathogens and had no acquired immunity to them. Although some early scientists, such as the French Comte de Buffon, saw this vulnerability as a sign of racial decrepitude (a prejudice that was more subtly advanced as late as the twentieth century), the Indians were not inherently more susceptible to disease; their immune systems were just as robust as any European’s. But in order to beat back an infection, the immune system must be primed by earlier exposure, often in childho
od. Europeans and their livestock brought novel microbes against which New World inhabitants didn’t stand a chance, including many viral diseases that are far more dangerous to adults than to children.

  The diseases of Europe were, by and large, so-called crowd diseases—maladies such as smallpox, typhus, and measles that require large populations living in close proximity. Some, like cholera, spread through feces and contaminated water. Others, such as typhus and plague, are passed through external parasites such as lice and fleas. Many crowd diseases emerged from domestic livestock. Measles appears to have derived from the virus that causes the cattle disease rinderpest, while one strain of pertussis (whooping cough) apparently arose in pigs. The variola virus that causes smallpox seems to have evolved from either the cowpox virus (which despite its name is primarily a rodent disease) or from a similar pathogen that causes camelpox. Malaria evolved in birds, while influenza moves among human, pig, and avian hosts, shuffling its genes each time to produce exotic and sometimes deadly strains.

  While the New World had some large urban centers in Mesoamerica and the Andes, most of its population was more diffuse than Europe’s, limiting the development of crowd diseases. Measles, for example, requires a minimum population of 200,000 to remain viable. Native Americans also had far fewer domestic animals—and thus fewer avenues for viruses and bacteria to travel to human hosts.

  So when boatloads of Europeans began anchoring along the American coast, they brought a microbial stew against which Native immune systems had no immediate defense. And with only a few exceptions, the traffic was one-way, because there were few endemic pathogens of similar virulence to attack the newcomers. The Americas had plenty of diseases of their own—from parasitic infestations such as hookworms, tapeworms, and roundworms to pneumonia, and possibly chickenpox—but little to match the sheer killing power of the European pathogens.