Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  By the time they had finished, the tide was out and the barges were grounded on mud. There was no choice but to spend another night. Both sides were still affecting friendliness, and the Powhatans welcomed Smith and his men back to their quarters from the night before.

  After darkness fell, a visitor appeared at their door. Pocahontas, alone and shaken, had something to tell Smith. Her father, she said, would soon be sending dinner—and the men who brought it were going to kill the English with their own swords while they ate. If those men did not succeed in killing them, there would be a much larger attack afterward. “Therefore if we would live shee wished us presently to be gone.”

  Her forewarning Smith points toward strong feelings of attraction on her part—or, if not that, then some other extraordinarily powerful motive. She had gone far beyond a daughter’s headstrong defiance: this time she was taking a reckless chance with her life. She had come through the woods in mortal fear of being detected. She knew that if a sentry spotted her and reported back to Powhatan, it would be the end for her. She had been his favorite daughter for a lifetime, but he would not be inclined toward leniency if she were caught in the act of treason. Worse, she now had to run the same risk going back.

  That she had been drawn to Smith was unsurprising. He was a strong leader of his people, as her father was of his, and he was capable in the masculine arts of hunting and fighting, which Powhatan girls were brought up to admire. He did not seek her out, as a besotted boy of her own tribe would have done, yet he was approachable to her, and warm.

  Smith, however, was oblivious to any change in Pocahontas from the easy friendliness of their conversations at the fort. He thanked her for her information and, falling upon old habits, offered her some beads and other English trinkets. That was a mistake.

  As she saw the beads in Smith’s hand, tears streaked down her face. The surprising hurt of his rewarding her like a trusty woodland guide evidently got the better of her, along with the grinding anxiety of her journey. As best she could, she explained that no, she could not accept the beads, because if her father were to find her carrying them, she would be as good as dead. “And so shee ran away by herselfe as she came.”6

  Pocahontas’s warning soon came to fruition. Within an hour, eight or ten large, strong men brought platters of venison. Their more sophisticated approach to disarming the English suggests that they may have been tutored that day by the German renegades. Most of Smith’s men had matchlock guns, whose firing mechanisms could not operate without a length of fiber cord—the “match”—that needed to be kept aflame. (Only a few officers, such as Smith, had the more modern snaphaunce guns, fired by flint and steel.) So the food bearers complained of the smoke from the match cords, and demanded that they be extinguished. It was a dubious request in a room that was perpetually smoky from the warming fire, but it showed an acute sense of the colonists’ vulnerabilities.

  Smith disregarded their demands and told them to taste every dish. Satisfied that the food was safe, Smith sent the men back to Powhatan with a sly message: they were expecting him and hoped he would come soon. The party then spent the night vigilantly in watches. The follow-on attack never came. The next morning, the two sides kept up the veneer of amicability, the English striving to appear as friendly to the Powhatans “as they to us.” They sailed at high tide, and left behind Edward Brinton to shoot wildfowl for the Powhatans (and to serve as observer and informant for the English). The Germans stayed to continue work on the house, and more that Smith had not yet guessed at.

  Practically as soon as the Englishmen left Werowocomoco, Powhatan returned. Two of the Germans, named Adam and Franz, either volunteered or were told to bring some weapons from Jamestown. They showed up at the fort and met with councilor Winne. They told him that their situation in Werowocomoco was fine, but that Smith had needed to take their weapons with him—could they have new ones? They also had a list of tools they required. Winne accepted the story and arranged for them to get what they asked for.

  Six or seven colonists with kindred minds had decided that they, too, would be better off casting their lot with the Powhatans. They approached Adam and Franz, who confided that they could “live free of those miseries that would happen [to] the colony” if they brought Powhatan what he wanted: English weapons and metal tools. Adam and Franz then left for Werowocomoco with their prizes. The new coconspirators pilfered swords, guns, shot, and gunpowder from the fort, and sneaked off the next day.

  When Adam and Franz reached Werowocomoco, two of the loyal Englishmen there—Richard Savage, one of the tradesmen, and Edward Brinton, the hunter—perceived that the Germans were arming the Powhatans. Savage and Brinton left to take this disturbing news to Jamestown, but Powhatan’s men apprehended them on the way. Perhaps because the two were exceptionally useful, they were not put to death on the spot, but instead were merely kept under restraint for the time being.7

  In the meantime, Smith and his men had taken stock of the outcome of their adventures in Werowocomoco. On the plus side, everybody was still in one piece; on the minus side, what they had bought was still not enough to get the colony through the winter. They would have to run the gauntlet again. Smith thought that Powhatan’s brother, the powerful weroance Opechancanough, would have plenty, and might be prevailed upon to trade some of it—out of self-interest, to be sure, not love.

  Two or three days after leaving Werowocomoco, the boats arrived at Opechancanough’s village of Pamunkey. The chief welcomed his former prisoner genially. After some prodding from Smith, he sold the English what he had at a fair price (in Smith’s estimation), and promised more to come if they would stay around. He then gave the visitors an oration “with a strained cheerfulness” as to the pains he had taken to help them in their hour of need—an oration that was interrupted by John Russell rushing in and telling Smith that they had all been betrayed. Hundreds of armed men were outside the house and in the fields beyond; Russell guessed there might be as many as seven hundred.

  From Opechancanough’s uneasy expression, Smith was sure he had deduced the nature of Russell’s news. There was no time for discussion, but Smith could not resist venting against those who had condemned him for being too hard on the natives. “I could wish those here, that make these seeme saints, and me an oppressor,” he groused to his men. Recovering himself, he assured them they would get out all right; their adversaries would scramble away at the sound of gunfire. Yet if they started killing every native within shooting distance, they would have nothing to show for it but dead natives—and no food. Be ready to “fight like men,” he exhorted. “But first, I will deale with them.”8

  Smith challenged Opechancanough to a man-to-man fight with his choice of weapons. Opechancanough hastened to assure Smith that the men outside were there only to bring him a special present. Smith ordered one of his men to look out the door to see what was afoot, but the man was too scared to do it. Although the rest of Smith’s men quickly volunteered to go, Smith’s fury at the coward had already led him to a more belligerent plan. He surprised Opechancanough by grabbing the long knotted lock of hair hanging from the left side of his head, and put a pistol to his breast. He marched the chief outside, to the astonishment of the assembled crowd. Still grasping the chief’s hair, he shouted out an oration of his own.

  “I see the great desire you have to kill me,” he began. He had made a vow of friendship to them last winter, he said, and his God would protect him as long as he kept it. But if they shed so much as “one drop of bloud of any of my men, or steal the least of these beads or copper . . . I will not cease revenge”—that is, not until he had hunted down every last person who admitted to being a Pamunkey. One way or another, he was going home with food:

  If I be the marke [target] you aim at, here I stand, shoot he that dare. You promised to fraught my ship ere I departed, and so you shall, or I meane to load her with your dead carcasses. Yet if as friends you will come and trade, I once more promise not to trouble you, except you give
me the first occasion.9

  By this time, the chief had submitted, and his men had put down their weapons. Smith and his party would leave Pamunkey enriched with rations. “Men may thinke it strange there should be such a stirre for a little corne,” four of the colonists wrote, “but had it been gold, with more ease we might have got it.”10 He had lost no one and killed no one. His men felt an overwhelming sense of relief when they realized they had gotten out alive—a sense of relief recalled by the second verse of a poem that several of them later wrote in appreciation of their leader:

  Pamaunkees king we saw thee captive make

  Among seaven hundred of his stoutest men,

  To murther thee and us resolved; when

  Fast by the hayre thou ledst this salvage grim,

  Thy pistoll at his breast to governe him:

  Which did infuse such awe in all the rest

  (Sith their dread soveraigne thou had’st so distrest)

  That thou and we (poore sixteene) safe retir’d

  Unto our helplesse ships.11

  Shortly before the colonists sailed from Pamunkey, another Englishman joined the group. Richard Wiffin, gentleman, had spent three days looking for Smith, relying on “extraordinary bribes” to shake his pursuers and get information on Smith’s whereabouts. He came with bad news: there had been an accident with one of the barges, which had overturned on the frigid waters of the James. Two of the councilors, Matthew Scrivener and Peter Waldo, had died along with nine other men. Smith swore Wiffin to secrecy so as not to dispirit the rest of the group; he had more stops to make before returning to the fort to deal with the damage.

  At the villages of the Youghtanund and Mattaponi tribes, Smith’s party searched for food, and learned from the ordinary people that they simply had none to spare. The “teares from the eyes of women and children” convinced Smith that to try to trade with them would be fruitless, and to roll out his practices of intimidation against these needy tribes would be a cruelty. He moved on.

  He had no such compunctions, though, about returning to Werowocomoco to mount a surprise attack on Powhatan’s stores. When he had brought up the idea with the council, he had been voted down. Now virtually all of the council was either gone to England or dead. With the drowning of Scrivener and Waldo, only Peter Winne was left. Smith, with his two votes as president, did not need the council’s permission any longer; he was the council.

  Smith sent Wiffin and Thomas Coe ahead to reconnoiter the capital. When they came back, what they had to report was a shock: Powhatan had cleared out with his wives and children to an unknown location with all of his food. Smith still did not know Powhatan had well-informed spies; the Germans had revealed Smith’s proposal for raiding Werowocomoco, and Powhatan had taken no chances.

  When Smith returned to the fort, he found—predictably, by this point—that little good had happened in his absence. The food in the stores had become infested with rats and worms (the rats, incidentally, had been brought over by the English ships). Most of the tools and a good many of the weapons had disappeared, having been spirited away and turned over to the Powhatans. With the food that Smith and his men had brought back, there was enough to carry the colony through the next harvest. Now that Smith was fully in charge, however, some things were going to change. He called an assembly of all the colonists and told them bluntly that neither his own efforts nor the investors’ money could support them forever while they sat on their hands:

  I speake not this to all of you, for divers of you I know deserve both honour and reward, better then is yet here to be had. But the greater part must be more industrious, or starve, how ever you have been heretofore tollerated by the authoritie of the councell. . . . You see now that power resteth wholly in my selfe: you must obey this now for a law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled), for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers. . . . There are now no more counsellers to protect you....12

  He that will not work shall not eat. The new operating principle of the colony was alien to the “loyterers,” but it proved effective. Within three months, the men had built twenty houses, dug a well that brought clean, fresh water, and planted thirty or forty acres. In the latter endeavor, they had the help of two native prisoners, by the names of Kemps and Tassore, who had been treated well enough that they took it upon themselves to teach the English native methods of planting. Smith commanded the building of a checkpoint at the neck of the peninsula, guarded at all times by a well-armed garrison that allowed neither Englishmen nor natives to cross without his orders. With that measure, the mysterious pilfering of the colony’s weapons and tools came to an end, and the colonists no longer lived in fear of petty raids as they had the year before.

  In the springtime, work was under way on a new hillside fort; Spanish attack was still a worry, and the fort was intended as a highly defensible retreat in case that happened. In the midst of the project, Smith received a spot of bad news. Much of his hard-won corn had been put away in casks for later use—and someone had just discovered that those casks were infested by the English rats. The rats had multiplied to such an extent that there was no hope of saving what little corn was left.

  The loss was not the dire crisis that it would have been in the cold months, but it was crisis enough. Smith opted to emulate the natives, who, he noticed, took a divide-and-survive approach when their food ran low by dispersing into small groups. The colonists, he decided, would do the same. Around a third of them went downriver to live on oysters; twenty went to a place near the mouth of the bay to fish; another twenty went upriver. They would be exposed and vulnerable to attack there, but it was a necessary gamble. Smith reduced the risks somewhat by sending the men far enough that they would not be within the range of the colony’s most hostile neighbors. To hedge his bets further, Smith sent some men away to live temporarily with friendly tribes, who hosted them in exchange for copper.13

  The gamble paid off: no attacks came, and no one died of starvation. A group of natives—their tribe was not recorded—brought daily presents of squirrels, turkeys, and deer. Some of the Englishmen rose to the occasion of their own accord, gathering “more sturgeon then could be devoured by dog and man,” along with herbs and fruits. Others had to be compelled. “Such was the strange condition of some 150,” Smith noted, “that had they not been . . . forced to gather and prepare their victuall they would all have starved or eaten one another.” These “lubberly gluttons,” as he called them, demanded that Smith sell the colony’s swords, guns, even its cannon, to enable them to live off the natives’ food in idleness. They would have sold their very souls, Smith marveled, for a half basket of corn that would have lasted them less than a week.

  A gentleman named William Dyer—“a most craftie knave”— organized another plot to make off with the Discovery. Someone tipped off Smith, and Dyer was “worthily punished” (probably by whipping). Smith called together the rest of the colonists and told them of the collapse of Dyer’s scheme. The next time, Smith added, he would not be so forgiving; if anyone else wished to try their luck at commandeering the ship, “let him assuredly look to arrive at the gallows.” And if they considered themselves too elevated in their stations to partake of the same fruits and wild animals that the natives ate, it was no one’s problem but theirs. “This salvage trash you so scornfully repine at; being put in your mouthes your stomackes can digest. If you would have better, you should have brought it.”

  While Smith was attacking the colony’s troubles in his usual truculent form, ambitious plans had been moving forward in London, unknown to him or anyone else in Jamestown. Those plans were about to bring him new challenges.

  From Smith’s reports and others, the officers of the company had come to believe that they were taking the wrong approach. First of all, they decided, they had been thinking on too small a scale. Where they had been sending colonists over in little drib
s and drabs, only to see most of them die off, they now believed the answer was to plant a comparatively massive group that would be harder to dislodge—whether by famine, disease, native attack, or Spanish invasion. With that group, moreover, would go a greater number of practical men, such as fishermen, bird hunters, and carpenters; the company had assimilated that much of Smith’s critique.

  Conceiving a large expedition and talking about it was all very easy. To make it happen in the real world, the company needed a new round of funding. This time, the shares would be offered to the public at large; the offering price would be twelve pounds, ten shillings per share. The company hit on an effective promotion strategy: enlisting clergymen—who believed the New World ripe for Christian evangelism—to support the stock offering by spreading the word from their pulpits.

  “They have collected in 20 days an amount of money for this voyage that frightens me,” the ever watchful Don Pedro de Zúñiga informed King Philip III. The campaign enlisted some 659 individuals as shareholders, including some who had invested in the first round. These ranged from peers and knights to merchants and ordinary citizens. In addition, fifty-six London companies and guilds bought shares, among them the Company of Grocers, the Company of Fishmongers, and the Company of Brewers. Another six hundred or so people had agreed to venture themselves, so to speak—that is, to go to Virginia as colonists in return for one share of stock. All of these “adventurers” of purse or person were entitled to a payout at the end of seven years: a grant of land, plus, in the hopeful words of the stock certificates, their proportionate share of “such mines, and mineralls of gold, silver, and other metall or treasure . . . or profitts whatsoever which shall be obteyned.”14