Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  The John and Francis was loaded with ore samples, not the planks of wood Smith had argued for. But the ship carried off certain other cargo with Smith’s wholehearted support: namely, Edward-Maria Wingfield and Gabriel Archer, who were being dispatched home in dishonor. Not having much need for “petitions, admirals, recorders, interpreters, chronologers, courts of plea, nor justices of peace,” Todkill said of the two lawyers, the colony “sent Master Wingfield and Captaine Archer with him [Newport] for England to seeke some better place of imploiment.”17

  7

  POWHATAN BECOMES AN ENGLISH PRINCE

  Shortly before Christopher Newport’s second departure in April 1608, Powhatan had sent a band of messengers to him bearing twenty turkeys—and word that Newport was welcome to the birds if he would send back twenty swords. It was an outrageous proposition, but Powhatan had correctly sized up the English captain’s eagerness to please: in a parting gesture of magnanimity, Newport sent him the swords.

  With Newport on his way to the Chesapeake Bay, and thence to the Atlantic, Powhatan decided to try his luck with John Smith. This time, he sent the turkeys to Jamestown accompanied by a young messenger—his foreign exchange student, Thomas Savage, the English boy placed with Powhatan a month or six weeks before. On arriving at the fort, Savage told Smith of the emperor’s renewed offer of turkeys for swords. Smith saw no reason at all to arm a potential enemy; he sent the rest of Powhatan’s messengers home with gifts for themselves and a curt no for Powhatan.

  Powhatan, displeased at Smith’s refusal, began sending small groups of men to try to steal what he had not been able to buy. A series of minor skirmishes followed as the English confronted the intruders. With the council’s assent, Smith put one man, who had been caught stealing two swords, in the stocks. Others were chased away, though some managed to run off with spades, shovels, or tools in the process.

  On Wednesday, April 20, as Smith and other colonists were cutting down trees, an alarm trumpet or an alarm bell called out. They rushed to pick up their guns, assuming a native attack was under way. The alarm instead turned out to be signaling the approach of a ship: the Phoenix, commanded by Thomas Nelson. The Phoenix had left England with Christopher Newport’s John and Francis in 1607, but it had been missing at sea for almost four months and presumed lost. In fact, Nelson had become separated from Newport by a storm near the mouth of the Chesapeake; the storm and contrary winds forced him to turn back toward the West Indies, where he wintered.

  Nelson’s safe arrival, with supplies and forty to sixty more colonists, was cause for satisfaction. Since his passengers and crew had been living off the land in the islands, Nelson could be generous in sharing the ship’s supplies with the colony. If anyone had doubts about his motives in heading to the Caribbean for the cold months, they kept those doubts to themselves. “Now we thought ourselves as well fitted, as our harts could wish,” Smith remembered, “both with a competent number of men, as also for all other needful provisions, till a further supply should come unto us.” 1

  Ratcliffe and Martin, who had still not shaken off their gold obsession, argued with Smith over whether the Phoenix would be loaded with still more “gilded dirt.” Meanwhile, Ratcliffe ordered Smith to explore beyond the falls of the James (perhaps seeing another chance to be rid of his antagonist). Smith was agreeable; he still had his yen for exploring, and he saw an opportunity to do it on a large scale. Not wanting to repeat the failure of the small, undisciplined party that had come to grief on the Chickahominy River, Smith recruited sixty or seventy volunteers from among the colonists and Nelson’s sailors. Leading the expedition with him would be twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Scrivener, the newest councilor, who had come over on Newport’s ship in January; Smith had found him reliable and sensible.

  The volunteers spent a week training under Smith to fight “amongst the trees” against any native attackers. With the training came drilling, drilling, and more drilling. Afterward, they judged themselves ready to take on Powhatan’s entire forces, if need be—this, at a time when it was hazardous for an Englishman even to leave the fort. The project ran into unexpected opposition, however: Captain Nelson, unlike Newport, was not inclined to wait around. At the eleventh hour, he declared that his sailors could not join unless the company were to cover the cost of the ship’s waiting time and the sailors’ extra wages. As the project died on the vine, it nonetheless served the purpose of reminding the colonists who could and could not be trusted to lead. Ratcliffe, by ordering the mission and then declining to take part, had marked himself a coward.2

  The petty assaults from the Powhatans continued, culminating in the apprehension one afternoon of a dozen natives. These men became prisoners, joining another four or five natives that the English were already holding for one cause or another. When the Powhatans observed the next day that their men had not returned, they twice sent emissaries to speak with Smith. Each time, Smith sent a bellicose message back: the Powhatans must return all the English spades, shovels, swords, and tools they had stolen—or the prisoners would hang tomorrow.

  Soon there was another message from the Powhatans. They reported they had captured two Englishmen, who had been foraging in the woods beyond the fort. These two men would be returned, Powhatan’s messenger said, in exchange for the sixteen or so men held by the English.

  Smith was not an inhumane man, fundamentally. But where Newport wanted to be loved, Smith had read his Machiavelli and felt it was better to be feared. Nor was Smith interested in a drawn-out game of tit-for-tat. He laid a plan to let the natives “know what we durst [dared] to do.” That night, with the approval of President Ratcliffe and councilor Martin, Smith set out on his first offensive in Virginia. He and Scrivener led a party of Englishmen on the barge to a series of native towns on the river, where they left a path of destruction—the natives’ highly ignitable buildings burned, their canoes wrecked. He may have used the incendiary and explosive arts he had practiced against his enemies in Central Europe. Although no native lives were taken, it was a costly and painful loss for them. Each of the canoes had been laborious to build: the natives had to hollow out a large log by burning it partway, and then form the desired shape by scraping the log inside and out with clamshells. The two English prisoners were returned the next day, with no mention of the prisoners that the English held.

  Ratcliffe released one captive. As for the rest, the council directed Smith to “terrifie them with some torture” to find out the Powhatans’ intentions. He chose one and had him tied down, with six men aiming muskets at him. Smith advised the prisoner to tell him what his comrades were up to, or else. The victim of this treatment, duly terrified, told Smith that he could not answer his questions, but that another prisoner named Macanoe could. Macanoe, he said, was a counselor to the chief of the Paspahegh.

  Smith had the man untied and turned his attention to Macanoe. Once Macanoe was brought to him, Smith directed his gaze to an English rack, an instrument that was unknown to the natives, but whose awful purpose could readily be guessed. Then he put Macanoe before the muskets. Macanoe did not wait. Six tribes, he said, had been hunting together when they took him prisoner near Apokant: the Paspahegh, the Chickahominy, the Youghtanund, the Pamunkey, the Mattaponi, and the Kiskiack. Now the Paspahegh, the colony’s neighbors, together with the Chickahominy, planned to surprise the English and make off with their tools and weapons.

  Newport had taken the servant boy Namontack with him to England; the English had told Chief Powhatan that Newport would bring him back on his next voyage. Powhatan and all his tribes would “seem friends” until Newport returned with the boy, Macanoe said. Upon the boy’s homecoming, the natives would invite Newport and other English leaders to festivities where they would be lulled by good feeling, and then ambushed.

  On hearing this, Smith wondered whether Powhatan had sent Thomas Savage back to Jamestown for a reason: namely, that Savage was on the brink of seeing and hearing too much, and in danger of piecing the emperor’s plans t
ogether. Indeed, Savage had taken note that Powhatan was frequently having secret meetings, and he felt in the air that something was afoot. Smith, testing his theory as to Savage’s return, sent him back to Powhatan again. Sure enough, Savage soon turned up at the fort once more, this time with his chest and his English clothes. Powhatan, he said, wanted another boy—presumably a less perspicacious one.3

  All the while, John Martin was “most confidently” pleading Powhatan’s case, in the belief that the emperor was a true friend. Smith, this time acting without the council’s approval, took it upon himself to settle the question. Smith and Scrivener separated the remaining captives, and then had volleys of gunshots fired; the captives could hear the shots, but could not see them. Smith and Scrivener led the men to believe that their companions were being executed. Each man was then given the chance, so he thought, to save himself by talking. “First I, then Master Scrivener, upon their severall examinations, found by them all confirmed, that [the] Paspahegh, and Chickahammania [the Chickahominies] did hate us,” Smith recorded. The men also revealed that the stolen English tools and swords went to Chief Powhatan, and that the Paspahegh and the Chickahominies were planning further trouble for the colony.

  Smith the realist had long understood that the colony’s neighbors hated the English. Not only that, they would hate the English no matter what the English did to make themselves lovable—short of packing up and going back home. Where the colonists saw themselves merely as occupying some fallow, unused ground, the natives plainly had come to regard their presence as an unwanted intrusion. The Virginia Company was not ready to assimilate this unpleasant piece of data.

  One morning, on the third day of the prisoners’ captivity, a pair of emissaries from Powhatan appeared at the fort to appeal for their release. Powhatan had made an adroit choice of representatives. One was Rawhunt, the messenger “of a subtill wit and crafty understanding” who had accompanied Smith on his return from Werowocomoco. The other was his favorite daughter. The symbolism could not be missed: Smith owed his life to Pocahontas, and Rawhunt stood for Smith’s own liberation from captivity some five months earlier.

  Rawhunt presented Smith with a gift of a deer and bread, with apologies for the wrongdoing of “some rash untoward captaines his subjects.” He then entered into a lengthy discourse on Powhatan’s love and respect for Smith. Powhatan missed the boy Thomas Savage, Rawhunt added, and desired for him to come back. It is unlikely that Smith believed any of this. Pocahontas said nothing, allowing Rawhunt to speak for her father. Smith observed that Pocahontas had apparently been instructed not to take any notice of the prisoners herself, that being beneath the dignity of a king’s daughter.

  Later in the morning, the fathers and friends of the prisoners also came to the fort to join Rawhunt and Pocahontas in asking for the men’s liberty. In the afternoon, after those visitors went away, the prisoners were taken to the colony’s makeshift church for prayer, as they had been from time to time over the previous several days. Then Smith returned the prisoners’ bows and arrows and released the men to Rawhunt and Pocahontas. In recognition of his debt to Pocahontas, Smith made a show of claiming he had spared them only at her request, “for whose sake onely he fayned to have saved their lives, and gave them libertie.”4

  The prisoners evidently went on to spread the word of their ordeal to their countrymen: the English, at least in the persons of Smith and Scrivener, were to be feared. The native attacks came to an end for the time being. 5

  Afterward, certain “councel” (who could only have been Ratcliffe and Martin) censured Smith for his cruelty. To modern ears, that charge sounds apt enough. Smith’s supporters, such as Anas Todkill, argued in his defense that “none was slaine to any man’s knowledge”; his modus operandi had been to instill fear, not to slaughter.6 Smith’s actions in the spring of 1608, especially the ravaging of the villages, were a template to which he would return time and again, and he made no apologies for them. It is clear that he respected the talents and intelligence of the native leaders more than he did the leaders of his own side, but he also meant for the colony to survive. The alternative to intimidation was not love and friendship; it was open war—which the English, in 1608, would have lost to the last man.

  On June 2, Thomas Nelson was ready to leave with the Phoenix. This time, Smith had won the battle of the cargo: Nelson would carry cedar, not purported gold ore. Accompanying Nelson would be John Martin, an honorable man, but one who had been ill with one ailment or another for most of the preceding year. “Desirous to injoy the credit of his supposed art of finding the golden mine, [he] was most willingly admitted to returne for England.”7 So wrote his servant Todkill. (No man is a hero to his own valet.)

  Meanwhile, in London, the Virginia Company was exhibiting Namontack, recently arrived with Newport, through social functions and an appearance at court. It was a publicity stunt aimed at drumming up political support and impressing potential investors. The company decided to enhance the fund-raising appeal of Powhatan’s servant boy by having him masquerade as a native prince, a ruse that greatly entertained the Spanish ambassador. “This Newport brought a lad who they say is the son of an emperor of those lands,” Zúñiga wrote to Philip III, “and they have coached him that when he sees the King he is not to take off his hat, and other things of this sort, so I have been amused by the way they honor him, for I hold it for surer that he must be a very ordinary person.”8

  Nelson’s Phoenix followed close behind Newport, returning in early July. “I hear not of any novelties or other commodities she hath brought more than sweet wood,” a disappointed investor in the Virginia Company wrote to a friend.9 The letter writer, John Chamberlain, had probably already heard that Newport’s second load of gold ore proved as worthless as the first.

  Yet Nelson had brought a kind of treasure, in the form of a sketch map of Powhatan’s tribes and a bundle of papers, both of which Smith had handed to him just before he headed homeward. The latter was a manuscript of more than 13,000 words that recounted what the colonists had experienced, starting with the foul weather they endured off the English coast and ending with the release of the native prisoners and some minor shenanigans afterward. Smith had obviously started the chronicle during his captivity on the Atlantic crossing, and had somehow found time to continue writing in the midst of his explorations and political wrangling.

  Smith’s intentions for the document are unknown, as is its intended recipient. It could have been a report to the company, or a private letter to a friend. The style was mostly understated and matter-of-fact; the grammar was often convoluted. But its contents were too sensational to stay private for long. Within weeks after Nelson’s landing, the document had made its way, second- or thirdhand, to an editor named John Healey, and from there to the printing press.10 By summer’s end, it appeared for sale under the prolix title of A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Hapned in Virginia Since the First Planting of that Colony, which is now resident in the South part thereof, till the last returne from thence.

  The True Relation was the first published account of the distant colony to reach the public’s hands. The soldier with a grammar school education had, as it turned out, written the earliest history of English America’s birth. He had done it unwittingly; the editing and publishing of the book took place entirely without Smith’s involvement, or even his knowledge. Healey explained that he had omitted some material “fit to be private.” He also tacked on a hopeful concluding sentence in which he had Smith portray the colonists as “being in good health, all our men wel contented, free from mutinies, in love one with another, and as we hope in continuall peace with the Indians.”11

  The colonists were not all in love with each other. Smith’s adversaries on the council, however, were down to one: Ratcliffe. Indeed, with the departure of Martin, and in the absence of Newport, the entire council consisted of Ratcliffe, Smith, and Smith’s ally, Matthew Scrivener. The latter two were by now distrustful of th
e president’s self-aggrandizing tendencies, which were becoming ever more pronounced. Smith had already been disturbed by the indulgent trading prices Ratcliffe had given the natives—for the sake of his own image, Smith believed. More recently, Smith and Scrivener had become concerned about his prodigious consumption of the colony’s diminishing rations.

  At the same time, Smith clearly felt there was no use just sitting around. As Nelson set off for England, Smith took fourteen men with him on the barge to explore the Chesapeake Bay. Scrivener stayed behind to attempt to apply some degree of restraint to Ratcliffe. Joining Smith were newcomer Walter Russell, a “doctor of physicke”; Anas Todkill, who had quit John Martin’s employ to stay in Virginia; a half dozen tradesmen and laborers, including a fisherman, a fishmonger, and a carpenter; and another half dozen from the gentlemanly ranks. Among the tradesmen, Smith pointedly included James Read, the blacksmith, who had struck Ratcliffe during an altercation soon after Ratcliffe became president.12

  Over the next seven weeks, the men explored countless inlets and waterways, eventually making their way beyond Powhatan’s domain and reaching as far as present-day Delaware. They sought to determine the “mineralls, rivers, rocks, nations, woods, fishings, fruites, victuall, and what other commodities the land afforded.”13 They stopped to parley with various tribes along the way to make the acquaintance of these more distant nations, and in hopes of hearing something about a route to the “other sea.” The threat of villainy was always an issue, and so the English and the natives lubricated some of these encounters by exchanging hostages temporarily to ensure each side’s good behavior.

  By this time, it was conventional for English explorers to name the places they found after kings, queens, and princes. The Spanish were sometimes in the habit of naming places for saints. As Smith and his men made their way through uncharted territory, they did neither of these things. They made careful note of the natives’ place-names, and amused themselves now and then by putting their own names on the map: Keales Hill for Richard Keale, the fishmonger; Russells Isles for their doctor. A group of islands near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore became Smiths Isles (today’s Smith Island). Extreme wind, rain, and lightning forced them to spend two days on an island that they unaffectionately dubbed Limbo.