Zúñiga had repeatedly advised his king to move against the interlopers in Virginia before they became too established. “It is wise not to regard it lightly,” he wrote, “because very soon they will have many people, and it will be more difficult to get them out.” In another letter, two days before his meeting with King James, Zúñiga tried another tack to stir King Philip III to action, arguing (logically, but erroneously) that “it is thoroughly evident that it is not their desire to people [populate] the land, but rather to practice piracy, for they take no women—only men.” But Philip preferred to pursue diplomatic means for the time being.
King James received Zúñiga courteously that Sunday afternoon. After Zúñiga had seated himself, he offered the king condolences on the death of his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mary, just a few weeks earlier. The king expressed his appreciation. Then the ambassador got down to business. “I told him how much against good friendship and brotherliness it was for his vassals to dare to people Virginia, since it is a part of the Indies belonging to Castile.” The Virginia Company’s actions, Zúñiga continued, “could have inconvenient results”—a thinly veiled threat of retaliation.
As Zúñiga expected, James embraced a tactic of plausible deniability. James replied to the ambassador that he was unfamiliar with the details of the Virginia voyages, and that he had been unaware that Spain had a right to that territory. Virginia seemed to him quite distant from where the Spanish had settled. But those who went did so at their own risk. If they were captured and punished, so be it. The king’s answer was not entirely disingenuous; apart from granting the company’s charter, he had taken little interest in its affairs.
Zúñiga said it would be preferable if England kept them from going in the first place. “There can be no other object in that place other than it seems good for piracy,” he added. James said that since Zúñiga had assured him Virginia belonged to Spain, and that piracy could be practiced there, he would look into the matter.
Zúñiga understood perfectly that James had put him off. In his report to Philip on the meeting, written the next day, he concluded with another endorsement of military action. “I think it would be a good idea if the few who are there should be finished outright, because that would cut the root, so that it would not sprout again.” Several weeks later, Philip sent Zúñiga his reaction:
I am quite satisfied with the offices which you performed with that King on the subject of Virginia, and you are to continue to keep an eye on it in order to provide what is proper. In the meantime, manage to find out what ships leave there [England] for there [Virginia], and report to me what you learn.3
Philip, in other words, did not view the Virginia Company as a priority. He was unpersuaded by Zúñiga’s alarmist arguments and rejected his recommendation. With his brush-off of the Virginia issue, Philip made John Smith’s situation infinitely simpler. The notion of war in Virginia would recur from time to time in the councils of Spanish government, but there would be no war. Although they did not know it, Smith and his fellow councilors had just been freed from the burden of defending against a Spanish enemy. From Smith’s point of view, the only foreigners he would have to cope with in Jamestown would be the natives.
Christopher Newport had promised the colonists he would be back in twenty weeks—that is, in November—with more supplies. The colonists unwisely placed their hopes on his returning on schedule. They counted on Smith to induce the natives to feed them in the meantime. For reasons that remain enigmatic, most of Smith’s fellow colonists were still not working; they were wallowing “in such despaire,” Smith recalled, “as they would rather starve and rot with idlenes, then be perswaded to do anything for their owne reliefe without constraint.”4
There is no clear-cut explanation for this persistent apathy, but some possibilities can be ventured. Apart from the lack of an ingrained work ethic in the majority of the colonists—this much seems clear— the communal nature of the stores made freeloading powerfully attractive. The motivation to freeload could be dealt with through strict discipline. It could also be dealt with through an individualistic, fend-for-yourself approach to provisioning. At this point, the colony had neither.
Additionally, Smith’s phraseology suggests that many were simply resigned to dying in Virginia sooner or later, and had stopped caring about it—a state of mind that the twentieth-century psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called “emotional death.” Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, observed that those prisoners who forestalled emotional death were the ones who felt a deep-seated purpose in their lives: a desire to see a loved one again, an ambition to carry out some scientific or creative accomplishment. 5 In literal terms, of course, the world of the colonists could not have been more different from that of concentration camp inmates, considering the natural abundance that Virginia offered the colonists for the taking. Yet it takes no great leap to envision certain of the colonists—having come to Virginia for no higher purpose than easy riches, cut off from the English social establishment that defined them, and possibly rejected by their own families—falling into apathy as the gritty reality of Jamestown life hit them.
Lacking enough willing and able hands to gather food, President Ratcliffe directed Smith to go to the town of the Kecoughtans, the first tribe the colonists had visited, and trade for corn. When Smith and his small party reached their settlement at the mouth of the James River, however, the Kecoughtans were dismissive. The English, for all their showy weaponry, had demonstrated that they could not feed themselves—a damning indictment, in the natives’ eyes. “The Indians thinking us neare famished, with carelesse kindnes offred us little pieces of bread and small handfulls of beanes or wheat, for a hatchet or a piece of copper.”
Smith understood that he would never get anywhere as long as the Kecoughtans (accurately) believed the English to be weak and desperate. “In like scorne” he offered them one-sided bargains. To bolster the image of economic strength that he sought to project, he liberally dispensed small gifts—beads and the like—to the children. Then he retired to his boat for the night.
The next day, the Kecoughtans’ attitude had changed, now “no lesse desirous of our commodities than we of their corne.” Smith and his men traded with them for fish, oysters, bread, and venison; the natives bartered so eagerly that he wished he had brought more men and a larger vessel. On the side, he sent one of his men, on the pretense of fetching water, to “discover” (explore) the town and its corn supply.
The English left with sixteen bushels of corn and a variety of other food. On the way back to Jamestown, they met with a group of natives in two canoes, who evidently saw the contents of Smith’s shallop and assumed he was prosperous. The natives guided Smith to their town of Warraskoyack, about twenty miles up the James from the Kecoughtans; there, Smith’s party bargained for another fourteen bushels, and returned triumphantly to the fort.6
As those victuals dwindled, Smith was off on further trading missions. He took note of the distinct personalities and approaches of the different tribes. At the town of the Rappahannock, some women and children ran from their houses when he arrived, possibly fearful of plunder or worse. Smith gave signs of peaceful intentions, and in the end they had a friendly parley. He visited the colonists’ neighbors, the Paspahegh, “that churlish and trecherous nation.” In the darkness, the Paspahegh tried using stealth to spirit away some English guns and swords, and were angry when Smith’s men stopped them. He succeeded in trading for ten bushels of corn, but with the grim feeling that the Paspahegh were on the lookout for the chance to make an assault. “Seeing them dog us, from place to place, it being night, and our necessitie not fit for warres, we tooke occasion to returne.”
On November 9, Smith departed on the shallop for a mission up the Chickahominy River, a tributary of the James. The colonists were aware that the most distant tribes were the most friendly to them, and the Chickahominy tribe fit the bill; in addition, the Chickahominies were one of the few tribes in the region to maintain t
heir independence from Chief Powhatan’s empire. The Discovery would follow later and rendezvous with the shallop at a place they called Point Weanock, twenty miles upriver. Under Smith’s command were eight men on the shallop and seven on the Discovery.
The first day, they visited at a half dozen towns of the Chickahominies, showing them the copper and hatchets Smith was ready to barter for corn. Rather than amassing all the food he needed from one tribe, he bought smaller quantities here and there, then headed further up the river for more, “least they should perceive my too great want.” Weakness in appearance, in Smith’s mind, was weakness in reality.
With the shallop heavily laden, and the Discovery not to be seen at Point Weanock, Smith returned that night to the fort, where he found the ship run aground. The next morning, after unloading the shallop, Smith returned with it to the Chickahominy town of Mamanahunt. “So desirous of trade wer they, that they would follow me with their canowes, and for any thing give it to me”—that is, they were selling at any price. When the townspeople asked to see Smith shoot an English gun, he was happy to oblige with a touch of spectacle; he fired from the river, where the echo made it sound like cannon fire. He returned to the fort again to unload another boatful.
During Smith’s years of European military service, acquiring the rudiments of alien tongues had proven to be an essential survival skill; it seems he could speak at least pidgin French, Dutch, and Italian, and probably one or more local Central European languages. Given that background, and given Smith’s frequent involvement with the natives, it was inevitable that he would emerge as one of the colony’s more effective speakers of Algonquian. That process was already under way, as Smith started to build up his vocabulary in the course of his trading. Among the phrases he left behind in his phrase book are ka ka torawincs yowo, meaning “What call you this?” He ascertained that mockasins are shoes, pokatawer is fire, attonce are arrows, and suckhanna is water. Wingapoh or netoppew meant friends; marrapough meant enemies. The natives counted necut, ningh, nuss for one, two, three, onward to necuttweunquaoughfor one thousand. Among the English goods that the natives wanted were tomahacks (axes), pamesacks (knives), mattassin (copper), and the forbidden pawcussacks (guns).
Smith also acquainted himself with the natives’ daily lives. The men, he found, did no work other than hunting, fishing, and fighting wars, and were accomplished in each of those arts. Groups of men would hunt deer by seeking out a herd, then building fires in a circle around it; the deer, too fearful of the flames to run out of the circle, were then easy pickings. A man hunting alone might disguise himself as a deer using a deerskin with a stuffed head. “Thus shrowding his body in the skinne by stalking he approacheth the deare.” The women and children did everything else, from planting and harvesting corn to making baskets and clay pots, “which is the cause that the women be verie painefull [always taking pains] and the men often idle.” The women, Smith recorded, “love children verie dearly.”7
November came and went, and Newport’s resupply ships never turned up. Some of the men, including Wingfield, anxiously agitated for the reduced colony to return to England on the Discovery. Smith and Martin stood against the idea. Then the approach of winter brought geese, ducks, and other fowl to the rivers, easily hunted. This, together with the provisions from the natives, and the hunting of some deer and other wild game, was enough to quiet the malcontents for the moment, so that (in Smith’s words) “none of our tuftaffaty humorists [fancy-dressed nervous Nellies] desired to go for England.”8
Smith now came under a different sort of pressure, namely, to make progress on the search for a continental river passage. In previous excursions, the colonists had found the James impassable beyond the falls. Smith’s fellow councilors thought that perhaps the route to the Pacific would be found through the Chickahominy River. Smith began hearing “idle exceptions” against his failure to finish exploring the Chickahominy, with an imputation of cowardice. One can only speculate how concerned these voices really were about carrying out the company’s instructions, and how much they simply hoped that Smith would have a fatal encounter with the natives and not come back—thus opening the way for them to return to the old country.9 In any event, his critics had found his sensitive spot; in early December, he left again on the shallop, this time taking nine men.
Thus began the most famous and controversial journey of Smith’s career. In more recent times, some have charged that Smith fabricated key parts of it for the sake of romanticism. Smith himself looked on the episode as “a tragedie,”10 not a romance—and with good reason, as will be seen. To grapple with the controversy over Smith’s account entails a digression into historiography and ethnology, which is taken up in the Marginalia at the back of this book. For the present, suffice it to say that the evidence points compellingly toward the truthfulness of his description of the events.
Smith’s party rowed and sailed the shallop some fifty miles up the Chickahominy. Along the way, he noted plentiful wildfowl and fish, planted fields larger than any he had seen in Virginia, and people in abundance. At around the forty-mile mark, the party passed by Apokant, the last town on the river; beyond was total wilderness. Ten miles or so later, the shallop reached a large tree that was blocking the way, perhaps having been downed in a storm. Smith reckoned hopefully that they were not far from the head of the river, and so the men cut the tree in two to make way.
The river became narrower, shallower (only six or seven feet at low tide), and faster. Smith grew concerned about the danger to the boat, but heading back to Jamestown was out of the question: the “malicious tungs” waiting for him there would seize on any perceived failure to try to discredit him. Smith decided to return to Apokant to see if he could hire native guides and a canoe.11
At the town, on the pretext of wanting to hunt for birds, Smith recruited two men to take them upriver by canoe. The next morning, he set off in the canoe with the two guides. Also accompanying him were carpenter Thomas Emry and a gentleman who is referred to in various accounts as either John or Jehu Robinson. The rest of his party stayed at Apokant on the shallop. Unsure how far he could trust the Chickahominies there, Smith gave an order to the men who were staying behind: namely, to remain on board the shallop at all times until he came back.
The five men on the canoe headed out. They paddled about two miles further than the shallop had gone, and then pulled ashore to rest and eat. Meanwhile, back at the town, the seven Englishmen on the shallop had disregarded Smith’s instructions and clambered onto land, having spotted some native women whom they fancied—and who seemed to be returning their admiration. After living for almost a year in isolated, female-free enclaves, the men were primed to make a close study of the subject.
The testosterone-powered move proved to be a miscalculation. The natives, it turned out, were as distrustful of Smith as he was of them, and apparently were not fooled by his cover story: to travel fifty miles for bird hunting did not make sense, even for the English. Determined to find out the real story, the natives had stationed the women near the shore to serve as bait. A contingent of Chickahominy warriors surprised the colonists, who ran back to the boat and shoved off in a hurry. All of them made it except one.
The straggler was George Cassen, a laborer. After seizing Cassen, the natives stripped him of his clothes and tied him to a pair of stakes. The full purpose of what was about to happen to him is unclear. By one account, the natives were using Cassen to placate their god, whom the English took to be “the devill”; by another, the natives were punishing Cassen as an enemy trespasser. Of course, the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
Fate had written a most unhappy ending to Cassen’s life story. The natives prepared a large fire behind his bound and naked body. Then a man grasped his hands and used mussel shells to cut off joint after joint, making his way through Cassen’s fingers, tossing the pieces into the flames. That accomplished, the man used shells and reeds to detach the skin from Cassen’s face and the rest of his
head. Cassen’s belly was next, as the man sliced it open, pulled out his bowels, and cast those onto the fire. Finally the natives burned Cassen at the stake through to his bones.12
Smith, Emry, and Robinson, unaware of the events downstream, were cooking their food on a bank of the Chickahominy. As Smith recalled it, he decided to use the break to explore inland a little and to bag some birds for the meal. He took one of the guides with him. Before departing, he told Emry and Robinson to keep their guns at the ready; at the first sign of any intruders, they were to fire a shot to signal for Smith to rush back.
No more than a quarter of an hour after Smith left, he heard “a loud cry, and a hallowing [hollering] of indians” from the direction of his cohorts—but no distress signal.13 He deduced that the guide with Emry and Robinson had betrayed them. He put a gun to his own guide and felt ready to take revenge, until he noticed that the man “seemed ignorant of what was done.”
The man urged Smith to run. Seemingly out of nowhere, an arrow hit Smith on the right thigh; it did not penetrate far enough to do real harm. He turned and saw two natives drawing their bows. He fired a shot and missed, but it was enough to make the attackers hit the ground and then scurry away. As he reloaded, a time-consuming procedure, three or four new attackers appeared, and sent more arrows harmlessly into his heavy winter clothes. These men, too, ran when fired upon.
Smith brought his guide in front of him as a shield. Momentarily, he discovered that he was now surrounded by what looked like an army of hundreds. The guide, naturally anxious to save his skin, called out that the Englishman was a leader—and thus, according to local custom, was to be taken alive rather than killed, if possible. The man then pled with Smith not to shoot. While waving his pistol at the attackers and staying behind his unhappy bodyguard, Smith demanded to be allowed to return to the canoe. As Smith and the guide moved in that direction, the leader of the attacking force shouted back that he must lay down his weapon. The other men were dead, he continued; “only me they would reserve [spare].”
Love and Hate in Jamestown Page 7
