Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  While some gentlemen of the expedition favored Archer’s Hope, Edward-Maria Wingfield preferred a peninsula that the ships had passed about five miles up the James. That site had the advantage of deep water; any of the colonists’ ships could pull up directly alongside to be moored to the trees and offloaded. It was unoccupied by any natives. It was connected to the Virginia mainland only by a narrow land bridge, which could be guarded to defend against Spanish or native attacks coming from that direction on foot. John Smith, who had no say in the matter, thought the peninsula was a good choice.

  Newport sided with Wingfield, both because the peninsula was more secure and because he thought settling in that out-of-the-way venue would give the least offense to the natives. Hence, the ships left Archer’s Hope the next day for Wingfield’s site, which the colonists would name James Town. The men spent that night on the ships. On May 14, 1607, they landed and brought their provisions ashore.4

  The company’s instructions had mandated that the seven councilors elect a president immediately after Newport, Gosnold, and Ratcliffe opened the orders. For some reason, this had not happened. Perhaps Newport was in no hurry to give up his absolute authority over the expedition, which he had held up to that point as commander of the fleet. In any case, with the fleet’s arrival at the settlement place, the colonists were no longer under nautical authority by any stretch. Now, after a delay of three and a half weeks, the councilors would swear their oaths of office and choose a president for a one-year term.

  Wingfield, Newport, Gosnold, Ratcliffe, Kendall, and Martin pledged to “be a true and faithful servant unto the Kings majestie” and to “faithfully and truely declare my mind and opinion according to my heart and conscience in all things treated of in that counsel.” The presidency went to Wingfield.

  Keeping to their word, they then declared their opinions as to why John Smith should not be admitted to his place on the council. Smith recalled an “oration made” as to why he “was not admitted of the Councell as the rest.” No one recorded what was said, but the likely flavor of it is captured by a later comment of Wingfield that “if he were in England, I would thinck scorne this man should be my companyon.” In short, Smith would not get a seat on the council without divine intervention—and divine intervention was still almost a month away.5

  4

  WINGFIELD

  John Smith did not have his place on the council—but every available hand was needed to prepare the site, so the colony’s leadership released him from his captivity on the Susan Constant. In an initial burst of enthusiasm, even those of the gentlemanly rank joined in the labors. Some men chopped down trees to clear an area for tents; others planted gardens. With the company’s profit motive well in mind, still another group cut the fallen trees into clapboard, to be loaded onto the returning ships and sold in England. Natives made friendly visits. Two messengers from the Paspahegh brought news that their chief, whose name was Wowinchopunck, would soon call on the English and bring a deer for feasting.

  President Wingfield’s policy toward the natives began with a bold stroke. Encouraged by the cordiality of the visitors, and remembering the company’s instruction “not to offend the naturals,” he decreed that there would be no building of fortifications, or any exercises in the use of arms. The guns would remain in their shipping crates. Councilor George Kendall persuaded Wingfield to allow the building of one small wall or fence out of the limbs of trees. Otherwise, Wingfield had committed the colony to remaining intentionally defenseless.

  On May 18, four days after the colonists landed, Wowinchopunck arrived—with an entourage of a hundred men who were armed with bows and arrows, and who were guarding him, as the English saw it, in a warlike fashion. Whether Wowinchopunck’s intentions for the visit were peaceful or malign is impossible to say. Although the peninsula had been empty of people when the English came, the Paspahegh considered it part of their territory. Wowinchopunck may well have wanted harm to befall the newcomers; on the other hand, it could have really been just a social call.

  Regardless, the colonists did not share their president’s trusting attitude. Some of the English had firearms ready. Wowinchopunck motioned for the English to put their weapons down, which they refused to do. A scuffle erupted after one of the colonists saw a Paspahegh pick up an English hatchet, and the weroance “went suddenly away with all his company in great anger”—his villainous plans having been foiled, many of the English believed.

  Two days later, a second visit from the Paspahegh followed the same pattern. This time, Wowinchopunck stayed home, instead sending forty men with another deer. The men sought to spend the night at Jamestown, a suspicious-sounding idea that the English rejected. Before the natives left, one of the gentlemen decided to have some fun at the Paspaheghs’ expense: he set up a target that an arrow would obviously not be able to penetrate—since a pistol shot could not go through it—and motioned to one of the visitors to take aim.

  The Paspahegh took a three-foot arrow from the quiver on his back, drew, and proceeded to send the arrow a foot through the target. The gentlemen onlookers, still unable to grasp that the native weapons might be superior to their firearms, found this “strange.” Not wanting the natives to have the last laugh, they now set up a steel target. The archer shot again, and saw his arrowhead break apart. The Paspahegh left in anger once more.

  Despite the signs that all might not be going smoothly between the English and their Paspahegh neighbors, Wingfield held to his policy of nondefense—a decision that an infuriated John Smith attributed to “the Presidents overweening jealousie” regarding his own authority.1

  Newport, meanwhile, decided he was ready to make the exploratory trip that the company had ordered in its instructions. His orders were to take councilor Bartholomew Gosnold and forty other men up the river for up to two months; if they saw high lands or hills, Gosnold was to take twenty of the men there to look for minerals, while Newport and the rest continued exploring by boat. But the orders assumed that there were 120 colonists altogether; in fact, there were only around 105, perhaps because only that many could be recruited. Jamestown couldn’t spare forty colonists, if the colony was to make any progress on the home front.

  So Newport took twenty-three men and left Gosnold behind. With his years as a privateer, he kept his own counsel in picking a team for a risky journey. While the Virginia Company had been short-sighted in weighting its selection of colonists toward “the better sort,” Newport was far more pragmatic. He brought only five colonists in all. John Smith was one of the five, along with the gentlemen Gabriel Archer (as chronicler), Thomas Wotton (as physician), George Percy, and John Brookes. Newport filled out the group with eighteen seamen from the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery.

  They left on the shallop around noon on Thursday, May 21. They rowed and sailed about eighteen miles that first day, then dropped anchor for the night. The next morning, they encountered a half dozen or so natives in a canoe, and asked them where the river went. After Archer showed one of the men how to draw with pen and paper, the native sketched a map of the river. As Archer recounted, the man had good news: The English would “come to an overfall of water; beyond that, two kingdoms which the river runs by; then, a great distance off, the mountains Quirank, as he named them”—and then the Pacific. Newport’s crew immediately headed off in that direction. 2

  On Saturday, the shallop reached the territory of Arrohattoc, weroance of the tribe of the same name. The canoeists who met the English two days earlier had been alternately following them and paddling ahead of them; they had alerted the Arrohattocs to Newport’s imminent arrival. There, the colonists dined on venison, mulberries, corn, beans, and cakes, and gained a vital piece of information.

  For the first time, they learned of the existence of a paramount chief, or chief of chiefs (the mamanatowick, in Algonquian). Every weroance they had met so far, it turned out, was subservient to a Chief Powhatan. Arrohattoc was merely the first to let this on. The English
were not yet able to understand the significance of what they had been told—fortunately for their dinnertime digestion.

  What the English did not realize was that they were facing a tightly run, martially adept empire. Only gradually, over some months, would they come to understand the reach of Chief Powhatan’s power. The head of the Powhatan Empire had inherited six tribes from his father, and went on to conquer and subjugate at least twenty-two more. He was now in his sixties or seventies (his exact age was indeterminate), and he was still fit in mind and body.

  Chief Powhatan, also known among his people as Wahunsenacah, collected steep tributes from the conquered tribes—fully 80 percent of all that they grew, caught, or made, from grain and fish to pelts and pearls. The tributes went directly to his storehouses and temples. His empire in 1607 covered all of present-day eastern Virginia, spreading from the south bank of the Potomac River down to an approximation of the modern Virginia–North Carolina line. Westward, the border corresponded more or less with today’s Interstate 95, reaching the present sites of Richmond and Fredericksburg. The Algonquian name for his territory was Tsenacommacah.

  There was no mystery to his success as a conqueror. Under Powhatan, males of the empire were trained from early childhood to be hunters and warriors. Boys began training with bows and arrows by the age of six; mothers did not give their young sons food in the morning until the boys succeeded at the morning’s target practice. When Powhatan judged the time right for action, his men executed it with precision and without mercy.3

  One such occasion had come about shortly before the English arrived at Jamestown. One of Powhatan’s priests had delivered a Delphic prophecy: A nation would arise from the Chesapeake Bay and overcome his empire. After consulting with his council of advisers, Powhatan duly ordered the extermination of the Chesapeake tribe, which became extinct that day. The English, of course, had themselves come from the Chesapeake Bay; soon Powhatan and his advisers would have to decide whether it was the English who were the objects of the prophecy, and if so, what to do about them.

  Although Newport’s party knew nothing of this, they understood that it would be wise to attempt to meet with Powhatan and show their friendship. As they sat eating, the Arrohattocs told them that another chief was coming. The language barrier intervened: the English thought they had been told the visitor was Powhatan—an excellent stroke of luck. In fact, though, it was just Powhatan’s son Parahunt, who, confusingly, was weroance of a town named Powhatan.

  Believing that he was in the presence of the natives’ maximum leader, Newport greeted Parahunt with “gifts of divers sorts, as penny knyves, shears, bells, glasse toyes, etc.,” more than he had given any other native. Parahunt was no doubt delighted by this trove, especially the knives; the Powhatans had no means of making iron tools themselves. The English then departed on amicable terms with the chief of chiefs, or so they assumed.

  The colonists made their way to the furthest navigable point on the James, the falls in present-day Richmond. It was as far as they would go. Along the way back downriver, they returned to the Arrohattoc village on Sunday, and the weroance arranged for a man named Nauiraus, his brother-in-law, to serve as their guide. Over the next several days, Newport had the expedition dawdle with the Arrohattocs and other tribes in the vicinity and make another trip to the falls. (“We trifled in looking upon the rockes and river,” Smith noted.) In their spare time—actually, they had nothing but spare time—the men learned a bit of Algonquian from Nauiraus.4

  On Wednesday, May 27, the colonists were with the Arrohattocs’ neighbors, the Weyanock tribe. Here, Smith evidently began to grow doubtful of Newport’s judgment regarding the natives. Newport was grieved when Nauiraus, whom the men had come to like, abruptly changed his mind about joining the English on the trip back to Jamestown; Nauiraus took his leave of the English with a flourish of apologies. Smith thought it peculiar and worrisome. Moreover, while some of Smith’s fellow travelers thought the Weyanocks “seemed our good friends,” Smith detected animosity on their part.

  Between their guide’s change of heart and the “churlish condition” of the Weyanocks, Smith sensed trouble at home. “This gave us some occasion to doubt some mischiefe at the Fort,” Smith complained, “yet Captaine Newport intended to have visited Paspahegh and Tappahanocke.” (The “fort” was the grandiose name given to Kendall’s fence.) Finally, a favorable change in the winds persuaded Newport to head to Jamestown directly.

  They discovered, when they got back, that there had indeed been trouble. The day before, hundreds of native warriors had taken the colony by surprise. The colonists were unarmed, their guns still packed away—in accordance with Wingfield’s policy. The attackers’ arrows wounded somewhere between eleven and seventeen men, one of whom later died, and killed a boy who had sought refuge aboard the Discovery. The English pulled together a hasty defense and killed at least one native, whose comrades they saw carry him off on their backs for burial. Wingfield, to his credit, was at the forefront of the defense; he felt an arrow pass alarmingly, but harmlessly, through his beard.

  With the overwhelming size of the natives’ force, however, it seemed inevitable that the battle would eradicate Jamestown down to the last man. What finally rescued the colonists was cannon fire from the ships anchored nearby; the booming spectacle—enhanced when one of the cannon hit a large tree branch and brought it down— panicked the natives and prompted them to turn back. “Had it not chanced a crosse bar shot from the ships strooke downe a bough from a tree amongst them, that caused them to retire,” Smith wrote, “our men had all beene slaine, being securely all at worke, and their armes in dry fats [crates].”

  In the aftermath, the colonists realized that preparations for the attack had likely been under way for the past week. After Newport’s shallop departed, native visitors had been coming every now and then to the fort, one or two at a time—“practicing upon opportunity,” as Gabriel Archer put it—sizing up the colony’s defenses and gauging the right time to strike.5

  The colonists also understood something else: the ships’ cannon would not be enough to protect them indefinitely. For one thing, Newport was to sail the two larger ships back to England the next month. For another, the efficacy of the cannon during the attack had come from their shock value, and there was no telling how much longer that would last.

  “Hereupon the President was contented the Fort should be pallisadoed, the Ordinance mounted, his men armed and exercized,” Smith recounted wryly. By “pallisadoed,” he meant that the fence of tree limbs was replaced with palisades—substantial walls made of upright logs. The new fort was in a triangular form, with turretlike semicircular areas for artillery at the corners. If erecting fortifications sounds like an unworthy task for gentlemen, that is probably why, as Archer recorded, Newport’s seamen did “the best part thereof.”6

  As work on the fort was under way, the colonists felt vulnerable in the extreme. The colonists had come prepared to meet a friendly foreign population that required only a civilizing influence, the colonists’ own example, to become fully English themselves. As reality set in, they instead found themselves in a setting where a dull anxiety of further attack was constantly gnawing—and where a man setting foot outside the fort could only interpret the sound of a snapping twig or rustling grass as an omen of another deadly intrusion. Archer’s diary reports the unpredictable, haphazard assaults that came and went, all of them minuscule next to the raid that tore out of the woods on May 26, but doubtless unnerving to those who had just lived through it:

  May 28. Thursday we labored, pallozadoing our fort.

  May 29. Friday the salvages gave on again, but with more feare, not daring approche scarce within musket shotte: they hurt not any of us, but finding one of our dogges they killed him: they shott above 40 arrowes into, & about the forte.

  May 30. Satterday, we were quyet.

  Sunday they came lurking in the thickets and long grasse; and a gentleman one Eustace Clovell unarmed stragglin
g without the fort, [they] shott 6 arrowes into him, wherwith he came runinge into the fort, crying Arme Arme, thes stycking still: He lyved 8 dayes, and dyed. The salvages stayed not, but run away.

  June 1. Monday some 20 appeared, shott dyvers arrowes at randome which fell short of our forte, and rann away.7

  The English spent Tuesday and Wednesday in peace, continuing the fortification, cutting clapboard, and planting. Thursday brought an attack by three natives who managed to hide themselves in long grass near the fort; they spotted a colonist “going out to doe naturall necessity”—that is, responding to a call of nature—and shot him in the head.

  The violence had vindicated Smith’s criticisms in the worst way. It was therefore only natural that Wingfield and unknown others wanted John Smith on the ships with Newport when he left for England. But Smith avoided the return trip; Robert Hunt, the preacher, spoke up for Smith and for unity, as he had when the ships were languishing near the coast of England. Hunt had the respect of both sides; Wingfield had recruited him for the mission in the first place. Added to Hunt’s “good doctrine and exhortation” was Newport’s own support. The council met on Wednesday, June 10, and Newport “vehemently with ardent affection wonne our hartes by his fervent persuasion to uniformity of consent.” Smith was permitted to take his oath of office and assume his seat on the council.8

  That Sunday, following another incident in which a man was shot outside the fort, two native men came unarmed to the fort’s entrance. Newport and Wingfield met them there, and Newport saw that one of them was the canoeist-mapmaker who had helped his party during their explorations. The men had tried to visit a week earlier, yelling out “Wingapoh!”—Algonquian for “friend”—but had been driven away by the gunfire of a nervous gentleman who had been standing guard. Now the men laid out for Newport and Wingfield which of the tribes were their enemies and which were willing to help them make peace.