Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Smith had a surprise of his own awaiting. During the month that he had been gone, President Ratcliffe had sworn in a new member of the council, over the ineffectual objections of the still-sickly John Martin. The new councilor, who had not been named to the council in London’s instructions, was Gabriel Archer—yet another lawyer and another gentleman antagonist of John Smith. Archer had long been ambitious for a place on the council, which conferred status and also came with a salary attached. With the onset of winter, however, the reasons behind Archer’s interest had become more urgent: he, along with some other gentlemen (possibly including the president himself), was ready to go home. Of the original 105 colonists, only some 40 were left alive.

  Thus, on the day of his return, Smith found a group of colonists, “some ten or twelve of them who were called the better sort,” commandeering the Discovery in an attempt to head to England. He ordered cannon and muskets trained on them, with an ultimatum to stay or be sunk. They opted to stay, but Smith had won himself still more enemies.

  As word spread that day of the plentiful food that Smith had seen in the Powhatan villages, some colonists took heart that they might survive the winter after all—Jamestown’s rations had been dwindling again. Ratcliffe and Archer, however, felt desperate pressure to get Smith out of the way so they could get the Discovery moving. The fates of Thomas Emry and Jehu Robinson gave them the excuse they needed. Their tactic was cynical and extreme: they held Smith responsible for the deaths of Emry and Robinson, and determined to have him executed the next day. Ratcliffe’s two votes as president plus Archer’s one was all they needed.

  Smith’s accusers did not even try to justify their actions under English common law. Rather, the charges were based on a creative interpretation of Leviticus, probably the passage at chapter 24, verses 17–20: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. The theory, apparently, was that Smith could be considered culpable because the men had been in his care when the natives ambushed them. Having barely avoided Chief Powhatan’s executioners, he was set to hang at the decision of the colony’s own leadership.

  That evening—quite possibly as he was dining on his last meal, his second one in a week—Smith was blessed with another stroke of luck. Christopher Newport reappeared at Jamestown, in command of the ship John and Francis. Newport, finding the colony in chaos, took command of the situation. He quickly saw through Ratcliffe’s charges, and Smith walked free.2 (At the same time, Edward-Maria Wingfield was released from his imprisonment aboard the Discovery, but was not reinstated into the council or his former office.)

  Newport had brought around sixty new colonists and fresh supplies. Both the passengers and supplies stayed on board the ship for a couple of days, then landed on Monday. Several days later, on January 7, one of the newcomers accidentally set off a fire in his lodgings. The fire spread through the town in an instant, leveling all of the living quarters and destroying the supplies in the storehouse, and much else besides. Miraculously, no one seems to have been killed or even seriously hurt. But the colonists were nearly destitute again. “Everything my son and I had was burned, except a mattress which had not yet been taken off the ship,” wrote the newly arrived Francis Perkins to a friend in England. Perkins pleaded for “ten pounds worth of discarded clothing, be it [outer] apparel, underwear, doublet, breeches . . . for we need everything.” Smith took the occasion to laud the fortitude of Robert Hunt, the preacher, who “lost all his library and all he had but the cloathes on his backe; yet none never heard him repine at his losse.”3

  The mariners and the able-bodied among the colonists worked at rebuilding. Some basic rations had not yet been unloaded from the John and Francis when the fire broke out, but what kept the English from dire straits was, once again, trade with the natives. There was also other help: every week or so, Powhatan sent gifts of venison and bread, half for Smith and half for Smith’s “father”—that is, Christopher Newport, whom Smith had extolled as a fearsome leader during his captivity. Powhatan accurately inferred Newport’s presence from the arrival of the large ship.

  While pleased by Powhatan’s generosity, Smith grew worried about the overgenerous prices that the colonists and the mariners were giving the natives for their food. “In a short time, it followed, that could not be had for a pound of copper, which before was sold for an ounce,” wrote John Martin’s servant, Anas Todkill. Todkill, like Smith, blamed President Ratcliffe for setting off the inflationary trend. Ratcliffe, with his prideful jealousy of Smith’s reputation among the natives, had been granting munificent terms to prove to the natives his own “greatnesse and authority.” For the sake of his image, Ratcliffe had “cut the throat of our trade.” 4 But there was nothing to be done.

  In February, Powhatan sent word that he wanted to meet Smith’s “father.” Newport and Smith headed to Werowocomoco with thirty or forty armed men on the barge and the Discovery. The English were suspicious that Powhatan might be setting a trap for Newport; hence, Smith went ashore without him the first day, taking twenty of the men with him.

  As Smith’s men stood guard outside Powhatan’s house, the chief greeted Smith warmly. With Powhatan were dozens of his wives or concubines—Todkill, who was with Smith, thought there were around forty—as well as a number of his nobles. Smith was again impressed with Powhatan’s aura of command, seeing in him “such a majestie as I cannot expresse, nor yet have often seene, either in pagan or Christian.”5

  Smith presented several gifts from Newport: a suit of red cloth, a white greyhound dog, and a hat. Powhatan seemed gratified, and three of his nobles accepted the gifts “with a great oration” and a pledge of friendship between the two peoples. With regard to the greyhound, at least, Powhatan’s enthusiasm was genuine; the dog stayed with him and dined as well as his royal owner did.

  Powhatan then inquired where Newport was; Smith explained that he remained on board the ship and would come the next day. Thus assured, Powhatan asked “with a merrie countenance” about the guns Smith had promised—having heard from Rawhunt the story of the demiculverins. Smith replied with mock innocence that he had offered the messengers some large guns, just as he had agreed, but for some reason they declined to take them.6

  At that, Powhatan laughed and requested Smith to give him some that were not quite so heavy. Then he asked about Smith’s men. Why were they waiting outside? Powhatan indicated they should come in, too. Smith pretended to concur and stepped out to give orders.

  Gifts and words of friendship were all very well, but Smith remained wary of Powhatan’s motives. Gathering his men inside, he decided, would make them vulnerable to ambush. He told them that the chief wanted them to enter, and so they would—two at a time. Then those two men would leave to rejoin the others in standing watch, and the next pair would enter. No more than two of the English guards would ever be inside at once.

  After Smith returned, his men carried out the plan, presenting themselves in pairs and giving thanks to Powhatan for his hospitality. Powhatan, in turn, gave them each four or five pounds of bread. That concluded, Powhatan told Smith pleasantly that he expected all of the men to lay their weapons down before him, as his subjects would have done. Smith said it was out of the question: this “was a ceremonie our enemies desired, never our friends.”

  But Smith was not interested in facing down Powhatan just now. Newport would be landing tomorrow; it would not do for him to find Powhatan in a peevish frame of mind. Smith had been touting the respect and admiration he had won from the natives, and he was not about to jeopardize that reputation in front of Newport. He prepared to win Powhatan over, at least for the time being, with another spurious promise.

  Powhatan should not doubt the colonists’ love, Smith told him. Smith vowed grandly that the English would, in due course, conquer his enemies—the Monacans to the west and the Susquehannocks to the north—and deliver them to him in subjection. Powhatan, although normally subtle and astute, was only too eager to believe what he had heard. Overjoyed, he loudly
proclaimed Smith a weroance, and that “the corn, women, and country” should be to the English “as to his own people.” Smith thanked him graciously and took his leave. Powhatan rose from his mats and conducted Smith to his lodge, where they spent several hours in “pretty discourses.” 7

  The next morning, as Newport came ashore with the rest of the expedition, Smith met Newport at the river’s edge. An English trumpeter preceded Newport, Smith, and their men on their way to Powhatan’s house. There, with Smith acting as interpreter, Powhatan welcomed Smith’s “father” and provided the English visitors with breakfast. Newport presented Powhatan with an English boy of thirteen to live with him and learn his language. No doubt it was an idle sense of humor, as much as anything, that led the English to pick a boy named Thomas Savage for this purpose. Savage, for his part, seems to have gone along with the idea willingly. Powhatan reciprocated by entrusting to the English one of his servant boys, by the name of Namontack.8

  Having taken his measure of John Smith, Powhatan now took that of Christopher Newport. Powhatan asked why the party had come bearing weapons: “Seeing hee was our friend, and had neither bowes nor arrowes, what did we doubt?” Smith interpreted for Newport, then answered Powhatan himself, explaining that it was merely an English custom—not any aspersion on his kindness. Newport, however, overruled Smith and sent the rest of the men to the shore, more than a half mile distant. Smith was profoundly irritated; Newport’s gesture did not square at all with Smith’s own view of Powhatan, which was “to beleeve his friendship, till convenient opportunity suffered [allowed] him to betray us.”9

  The discussion now turned to trading. The English had brought hatchets and copper cooking pots to exchange for food. As Newport moved to initiate the bargaining on the first item, Powhatan stopped him short: “Captain Newport, it is not agreeable with my greatnes in this peddling manner to trade for trifles, and I esteeme you a great weroance. Therefore lay me down all your commodities together. What I like I will take, and in recompense give you that I thinke fitting their value.”

  Smith, interpreting, urged Newport not to go along. From his trading up and down the river, he believed they would do better by offering and selling one piece at a time, and seeing what price they could get for each. Newport preferred instead to outshine Powhatan in “ostentation of greatnes,” as Todkill put it. So he agreed to Powhatan’s plan, with the disheartening result that “we had not 4 bushels for that which we expected 20 hogsheads.” Now Smith’s frustration was evident to the other Englishmen, “Newport seeking to please the humour of the unsatiable salvage; Smith to cause the salvage to please him.”10

  Smith then assumed an outward calmness and began toying with some blue beads. Powhatan inquired about them. Smith put him off. Powhatan pressed him. Smith said he was very sorry, but he could not possibly part with his collection. These beads, he said, were “composed of a most rare substance of the colour of the skyes” and favored “by the greatest kings in the world.” The conversation continued in this vein until Powhatan was “half madde” for the alleged valuables. In the end, Smith allowed himself to be prevailed upon to part with the beads for two or three hundred bushels of corn, and the English shoved off from Werowocomoco with their barge well loaded.11

  If Newport felt outdone by Smith, he did not have time to dwell on it. One thing after another—the factionalism he found when he arrived, the fire, the meeting with Powhatan—had distracted him from the real mission of his return trip. When he made it back to England the previous July, he had sent good news to the earl of Salisbury, a member of the Virginia Company board in London. “The countrie is excellent and verie rich in gold,” he reported, adding that he had brought back a sample to be assayed. “I wishe I might have come in person to have brought these gladd tidings.”12

  The company hired experienced assayers, who made four trials of Newport’s sample and came up with the same answer each time: “All turned to vapour.” Newport had brought back fool’s gold. (Don Pedro de Zúñiga, the efficient and all-knowing Spanish ambassador, promptly passed word to Madrid.) The gold-colored flecks in Newport’s bucket of soil may have been pyrite, marcasite, or even mica that had been yellowed by sediment. Whatever they were, Newport was in an embarrassing position.

  Instead of cutting his losses, Newport insisted he truly had found gold; he had merely brought the wrong sample to England. He was certain of it, he said. Perhaps he believed the company’s own propaganda about Virginia’s riches too earnestly. Or he may have been taken in by the English folk wisdom of the day, which held that spiders— plentiful in Virginia—are “signs of great store of gold.” He was determined to get the credit for discovering those riches on England’s behalf. If he were right, it would make the booty from the Madre de Dios seem like small change. Through an intermediary, he passed word to the earl that he resolved “never to see your lordshippe before he bring that with him which he confidentlie beleeved he had broughte before.”13

  Thus was born the gold fever of 1608. On his resupply voyage, Newport had brought with him two gold refiners, William Dawson and Abram Ransack, who could test ore for purity on the spot at Jamestown. Also with him were two goldsmiths, Richard Belfield and William Johnson, to craft jewelry and other objects from the gold that the colonists were going to find. In March, after returning with Smith from Werowocomoco, Newport was impatient to put these men, and the rest of the colony, to work locating gold for London.

  President Ratcliffe and John Martin shared Newport’s enthusiasm for the project. The plan was to send the John and Francis back laden with promising soil for further assaying. The colonists and Newport’s sailors spent weeks poring over the riverbanks, scooping up dirt in their buckets and pans, and swirling the dirt around in hopes that it would turn out to be studded with little gold flakes.

  Smith vehemently disagreed with the turn that events had taken, feeling that the men were chasing after a phantom. He had once hoped, evidently, that the colonists would locate silver and gold in Virginia; he had signed on to the council’s report to the Virginia Company the preceding June, in which the council urged London to send another supply quickly “leaste that all devouring Spaniard lay his ravenous hands” upon Virginia’s ore. In the months since then, however, he had seen more of the land and its people, and had adjusted his expectations accordingly. If there was so much gold to be found, why did the natives not have any—unlike the natives of the Spanish New World? “Victuals you must know is all their wealth,” Smith wrote of the native Virginians around this time.14

  England’s slice of the New World did offer riches, Smith believed, but they were to be found in more mundane articles, like cedar, fish, and iron, not in the glistening daydreams he saw taking hold of those around him. Meanwhile, important work was being left undone, and the sailors were maintaining themselves with the colony’s food supply long after they should have sailed off. “Our gilded refiners with their gilded promises made all men their slaves in hopes of recompenses,” Todkill recalled. “There was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, refine gold, load gold.” Todkill overheard Smith arguing with his employer, councilor Martin, over the project. “Never did any thing more torment him [Smith], then to see all necessary business neglected, to fraught such a drunken ship with so much gilded durt.”15

  Amid Smith’s aggravations, he found respite from time to time in the visits of a young acquaintance. “Very oft she came to our fort, with what she could get for Captaine Smith,” two colonists wrote of Pocahontas. “Her especially he ever much respected.” If she had originally pictured him as a captive servant who would spend his days making her bells and jewelry, their relationship had evolved to give her something of greater value: friendship with someone who shared her inquisitive sensibility. She was curious about the English, and she enjoyed being among them; in Smith, she had found an Englishman who could speak her language and requite her curiosity about these foreigners. Although Smith had practical reasons to encourage the visits—honing his Algonqu
ian, maintaining lines of communication with an ally in Powhatan’s court—he also formed an admiration for the “nonpareil” and took an avuncular interest in her. Kekaten pokahontas patiaquagh ningh tanks manotyens neer mowchick rawrenock audowgh, he wrote in his phrase book: “Bid Pocahontas bring hither two little baskets, and I will give her white beads to make her a chaine.”

  She was not yet on the cusp of womanhood, and her visits found her playing energetically with the few boys of the fort as well as talking with Smith. She would, a colonist remembered, rally the boys “and make them wheel falling on their hands, turning their heels upwards, whom she would follow and wheel herself so naked as she was all the fort over.” (Only when girls reached puberty would they regularly wear the apronlike deerskin dresses of Powhatan women.) Whether she visited furtively or with her father’s knowledge is unclear, but it is doubtful that Powhatan would have knowingly let his daughter go to Jamestown alone and make herself vulnerable to capture by the untrustworthy colonists.16

  On Sunday, April 10, Newport and his men finally set sail, having stayed almost three and a half months. As far as Smith was concerned, two weeks would have been time enough for them to unload and get going. Doubtless Smith continued to feel a measure of respect for Newport, as well as gratitude for Newport’s having saved him from the noose with his providential arrival. Nonetheless, the men’s widening rift on matters of policy—the gold digging, the amateurish bargaining with Powhatan—left Smith relieved to see Newport go.