Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Various promotional tracts emphasized the economic possibilities of the colony, and the commendable civic and religious spirit of those who supported it. One of these tracts, entitled A Good Speed to Virginia, gave assurance that the natives, although “savage and incredibly rude [primitive],” are “by nature loving and gentle, and desirous to imbrace a better condition.” There would be no repetition of Spanish brutality by the English; “farre be it from the nature of the English, to exercise any bloudie crueltie amongst these people.” To allay any qualms that investors might have regarding the rights of the natives (and, tacitly, the risk of interference from them), the author explained:

  There is no intendment to take away from them by force that rightfull inheritance which they have in that countrey, for they are willing to entertaine us, and have offered to yielde into our handes on reasonable conditions, more lande then we shall be able this long time to plant and manure: and out of all question uppon easie composition with them, wee may have as much of their countrey yielded unto us, by lawful grant from them, as wee can or will desire, so that we goe to live peaceably among them, and not to supplant them....15

  It was a reasonable description of the company’s intentions, but a largely fictitious version of the natives’ receptivity.

  Apart from raising the funds and recruiting the voyagers for a large-scale expedition, the company realized that it needed to change the terms of its royal charter. As things stood, the local management scheme in Virginia gave the president too little power vis-à-vis the council. This diluted authority was standing in the way of effective action. The company asked for and received a new charter, made final on May 23, 1609, which replaced the current Virginia president and council with a single governor.

  In many ways, Smith was the obvious person for this new position. Through observation of the natives’ culture, plus sheer force of will, he had battled the Grim Reaper and his scythe to a standstill. But he would not be the leader under the new charter. Indeed, it is improbable that he was ever seriously considered. He had ended up in charge through the twists and turns of events in Virginia, not by the choice of the company. Now the company was undoubtedly eager to install someone who would inspire the confidence of investors. Edward-Maria Wingfield had fit the bill; the lowborn young soldier from Lincolnshire did not.

  Beyond that, Smith had another deficiency: he lacked the patience and the diplomacy to hide his disgust with the foolishness of influential people. Smith valued effectiveness over internal politics, but could not understand that playing internal politics was sometimes part and parcel of effectiveness. Hence, one leader after another had gone back to England as his antagonist—Wingfield, Newport, Archer, and Ratcliffe, among others. Smith’s conspicuous lack of collegiality kept him from rising far in the clubby reaches of the Virginia Company. He had proven himself in handling the natives (although a touch harshly for the company’s tastes), and the company would be eager to keep him in that capacity, but that was all.

  Instead, the company’s choice for governor was Sir Thomas Gates, another veteran of the Dutch war of independence. He had commanded English troops in Ireland, and earlier served as a lieutenant in the fleet of Sir Francis Drake that rescued the first Roanoke expedition in 1586. He was well known to the company, having been a charter investor, with Wingfield, in 1606.16 The following year, as the company had planned it, Gates would become second in command, superseded by Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, whose title would be Lord Governor and Captain General.

  Smith received an inkling of the changes on July 13, when a ship under the command of Samuel Argall pulled in. Argall would prove, in time, to be one of the more odious characters of the period. For now, he was just finishing an innocuous mission to test a new, more direct route across the Atlantic—heading west from the Canaries to North America without a stopover in the Caribbean. Although the revamped charter had not been in final form by the time Argall left England in early May, he was able to give Smith some generalities about the new regime and the huge resupply expedition that would come later in the year. Argall found the colonists in good health, though he was surprised to find that many of them were dispersed from Jamestown, either billeted among the natives or living off the oyster beds as they awaited their fall corn harvest.

  Before sailing up the river, Argall had evidently loitered in the bay to do some fishing. By chance, he encountered a Spanish ship under Captain Francisco Fernández de Écija, on a mission to gather intelligence about the English presence. (Zúñiga had finally persuaded Philip III to order that much.) Argall shadowed the Spaniards in the bay until they broke off and fled. Assuming Argall related the incident to the company, it would have added to the general jumpiness in London about Spain’s intentions. “Those who have embarked their capital . . . are afraid that the Spanish will end by making the same slaughter of these as they did of the French in the same Indies,” the Venetian ambassador had reported to his government, “nor are they confident that, if the necessity arose, the king would show himself openly in their defense.”

  Smith, for his part, could only have been surprised and disappointed by the news of the forthcoming change in command. Possibly with an eye toward snaring the leadership job—or, rather, keeping it— he drafted another letter to the company. He knew from Argall that his replacement had already been chosen, but he may well have assumed there was time to change that. He wrote again of the causes of the colony’s problems and the need for more “men and meanes.”17

  On August 11, before Argall could return with Smith’s letter, the first four ships of the resupply (or the “third supply,” as it became known) entered the mouth of the James River. They had come much sooner than either Argall or Smith expected. Informed by sentries that ships had been sighted, Smith assumed they were Spanish and ordered the colony to stand armed and ready for an attack. They turned out to be the Blessing, the Falcon, the Unity, and the Lion, bearing several hundred men, women, and children, plus provisions.

  Instead of waiting for temperate weather, the company had sent the ships off in early June, as soon as the money was collected and the ink dried on the charter. As a result, the voyagers crossed the Atlantic on their tropical route with the summertime sun straight overhead. Heatstroke was widespread, and thirty-two bodies had to be thrown overboard. Two baby boys were born at sea, and died there.

  Soon Smith would wish the ships had been Spanish attackers after all. Four more ships were coming, he learned. The fleet had become caught in a hurricane in the West Indies, and so the eight ships were temporarily separated. (A ninth ship had also sailed from England, but turned back about six days out.) Soon John Sicklemore, alias Ratcliffe, would be back in Jamestown, along with George Percy. Christopher Newport would be arriving on the flagship, the Sea Venture. Gabriel Archer was already there, having sailed on the Blessing. Excepting Edward-Maria Wingfield, it would be a reunion of practically all of the leaders that Smith had quarreled with or offended over the past two years. Also on the flagship would be Smith’s replacement, Thomas Gates.

  The Diamond arrived in a few days with Ratcliffe (he of the “pallace” in the woods), and the Swallow landed three or four days after that. Archer recorded that Smith “gave not any due respect to many worthy gentlemen that came in our ships.”18 That was an understatement of Smith’s feelings on the matter.

  While the colonists waited for Gates’s ship, the senior men among the new arrivals delivered their demand to Smith: step down. Under the new charter, he was relieved of his duties. Reading between the lines of the surviving accounts, Smith seems to have said, fine, show me the charter. As it happened, the sealed box with the charter and company’s orders to Gates was also on the flagship. Smith then appears, in essence, to have shrugged; as far as he was concerned, they were still operating under the first charter until the alleged second charter turned up. Although he had long criticized the sailors of the various expeditions for undermining the colonists’ trade with the natives, he found it expedient th
is time to form an alliance with the sailors to protect his authority. In any case, his one-year term of office was due to run out shortly, on September 10.

  He would have been more dismayed by the changes if he could have seen the company’s orders. On the plus side, the company showed that it had been persuaded by his cautions regarding the natives. “If you hope to winne them and to provide for your selves by trade,” the orders instructed, “you will be deceived for already your copper is embased by your abundance and neglect of prizing it, and they will never feed you but for feare.” But Smith’s own role was to shrink dramatically, far beyond his loss of his presidency. The company wanted to keep him on, but on its own terms. To be exact, the rescuer of English America and dominator of the Powhatans was to have command of a small lookout garrison near the mouth of the James, some thirty miles away.

  In a ham-handed effort to soothe Smith’s ruffled pride, the company claimed that this was actually what he wanted—and was by no means to be mistaken for a demotion: “To this commaunde wee desire Captain Smythe may be allotted as well for his earnest desire as the greate confidence & trust that we have in his care & diligence.” Smith was also named as a member of the colony’s new nine-member council, which was now strictly advisory, not having any “bindinge or negative” power on the governor.19

  Gradually, the colonists realized that the Sea Venture was not going to appear, ever. None of the other ships had seen it after the hurricane. The notion that it was going to be spotted the next morning, or the morning after that, was recognized as wishful thinking. Smith’s antagonists gave grudging acceptance to his opinion that the first charter still controlled for the time being, and he would be permitted to finish out what little was left of his term.

  Fed up with infighting, Smith then turned his office over to John Martin, the former councilor, who had come back on the Falcon. Notwithstanding Martin’s record of gold lust, sickliness, and general inadequacy, Smith regarded him as the least objectionable of the newcomers. After a few hours of dealing with the demands of the colony’s “unruly gallants,” however, Martin reconsidered whether he really wanted to be president—and turned that hot potato back over to Smith.

  The leaders from the third supply then agreed that after Smith’s term elapsed, Francis West would serve as provisional president in Gates’s absence while they figured out what to do. (West’s only apparent qualification was that he happened to be the twenty-three-year-old younger brother of Thomas West, the future Lord Governor and Captain General.) Smith, meanwhile, ruminated on his “ill chance to end when he had but only learned how to begin.” 20

  9

  THE STARVING TIME

  At some point in early 1609, Smith was alerted to the role of the German traitors in bringing English weapons to the Powhatans. After an abortive attempt to secure their return to Jamestown for punishment, Smith sent word to the Germans that they would be pardoned if they came back of their own accord. Although the offer was an unusual one for him, he may have looked around at the talent he had on hand and decided it was a necessity: better to forgive and forget if that was the price of bringing more practical men onto the scene. Or he may have felt pressure from the company not to stand in the way of its experiment with Virginia glassmaking. Whatever the reasons for his offer, two of the men, Adam and Franz, took him up on it in July, around the time Samuel Argall arrived.

  Within a month, however, Adam and Franz shifted their loyalties again. They absconded to the new capital that Powhatan had established at Orapakes (which was farther from the English, and therefore safer for the chief of chiefs). There, they told Powhatan of the expected coming of a new supply, and of a new leader who was rumored to be a lord. They proposed to collect intelligence about the vulnerabilities of the strengthened colony. Powhatan considered this and then answered them curtly through an interpreter: “You that would have betrayed Captaine Smith to mee, will certainely betray me to this great lord for your peace.” With that, he ordered Adam and Franz’s execution, and his men beat out their brains with clubs.1

  In Jamestown, during the waning weeks of Smith’s presidency, Smith faced a knotty question regarding the several hundred newcomers: should he continue his policy of dispersing the colonists, or keep as many of them as possible in Jamestown? Dispersing the colonists put more food within reach while consolidating them near the fort kept them safer from attack. (He could have embraced a third alternative— to defer making a decision, so that the issue became someone else’s problem—but it is doubtful that he seriously considered it.)

  Smith opted for dispersal, a choice probably favored by the senior men of the latest supply; with new outposts beyond Jamestown, there would be additional leadership positions for them. Whether Smith knew it or not, the plan also fit with the company’s desire to build up new outposts.

  Thus, Smith sent John Martin and George Percy with roughly sixty colonists to settle in Nansemond territory downriver, and sent Francis West upriver with somewhere between 120 and 140 colonists of West’s choosing to settle near the town called Powhatan, ruled by the emperor’s son Parahunt. The town was located by the falls in present-day Richmond, on the perimeter of the Powhatan Empire. With ten weeks’ worth of rations in the storehouse and a newly gathered harvest, and with plenty more wild game, fish, and berries there for the foraging, a little prudence was all it would take for the colony to muddle through another winter.

  Dispersing the colonists had been a necessary risk in the spring when food supplies were down to nothing. It was still risky now. The English were technically at peace with local tribes, but the peace was more a result of intimidation than any feelings of friendship on the part of the natives. Neither of the settlements would be close enough to receive timely help from Jamestown in case of an attack. For the policy to work, the leaders of the outposts would have to be capable survivalists and able to deal on a practical level with the natives. The risks were magnified by the fact that, as a political matter, Smith was stuck with choosing the leaders from among the worthies sent by London, rather than his own trusted and proven men.

  The combination of people and policy was problematic from the outset. Shortly after Martin and Percy landed in Nansemond country, they led an attack on the natives. A group of Smith’s supporters claimed that the Nansemonds had treated the interlopers amicably, and that Martin and Percy had attacked out of nothing more than fear. Percy claimed that the casus belli was the disappearance of two messengers who had been sent to negotiate with the Nansemonds for the purchase of a populated island near their settlement. When the messengers did not return, Percy said, he and Martin assumed the worst and decided to take the island by force. In either case, in Percy’s words, they “beat the savages out of the island, burned their houses, ransacked their temples, took down the corpses of their dead kings from off their tombs, and carried away their pearls, copper, and bracelets wherewith they do decorate their kings’ funerals.” The Nansemonds, who had formerly submitted to Smith’s terms of surrender, no longer saw much benefit to peaceable coexistence.

  Colonists under Martin’s command captured a son of Parahunt and held him as a prisoner on the island. While the man was tied down, a young sailor picked up a pistol and accidentally shot him in the chest—at least, Percy said it was an accident. The wound was not fatal; the agitated prisoner managed to break loose from the cords with which he had been tied, dive into the river, and swim across to the mainland with blood streaming behind him.2

  It is tempting to conclude that Smith had Machiavellian purposes in sending Martin, Percy, and West out as commanders—calculating that their ineptitude would ensure their failure, thereby strengthening Smith’s own power. Yet the reality is that Smith took an interest in the welfare of the new settlements. After receiving no reports from West’s company, he headed to the falls to see how those men were faring. On his way, he was puzzled to notice West himself sailing back to Jamestown.

  When Smith arrived, he found out why West had fled: attacks from
Parahunt’s men had been constant. Smith found an inspired solution, sending word to Parahunt that he wanted to buy the town. Parahunt was agreeable to relocating himself and his villagers for a suitable quantity of copper, plus English protection from the Monacans beyond the falls. It was an attractive deal for the colonists, inasmuch as the town was on higher ground than the area West had chosen (which was periodically inundated by the river) and was bordered by hundreds of acres of good farming fields. A fourteen-year-old Englishman named Henry Spelman would stay with Parahunt to learn the Algonquian language. Parahunt’s people would be obliged to leave behind their lodgings for the colonists to move into, and to pay an annual tribute to the English for their defense.

  The new arrivals would have none of it, however. Like earlier colonists, they were obsessed with “great guilded hopes” of gold mines, and they had little interest in moving into native dwellings to tend crops. “Both this excellent place and those good conditions did those furies refuse, contemning both him, his kind care and authoritie,” wrote two of Smith’s supporters. He stayed for nine days to attempt to defuse the situation. With only five men under his command, he found it a challenge to save his own skin, let alone to impose government on West’s 120 settlers. “That disorderlie company so tormented those poore naked soules [the natives], by stealing their corne, robbing their gardens, beating them, breaking their houses, and keeping some prisoners, that they daillie complained to Captaine Smithe he had brought them protectors worse inimies then the Monacans themselves.”

  Smith was sympathetic, but felt there was nothing he could do. Percy would claim that Smith had “incensed and animated the savages against Captain West and his company.” It is safe to assume that the colonists successfully incensed the natives without the need of Smith’s help. Smith finally gave up on West’s men and sailed toward Jamestown.