Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Now events in the colony became more convoluted than usual. Before getting far, Smith’s boat ran aground. The delay led him to think better of abandoning the situation, and he went back with his five men. In the meantime, a dozen of Parahunt’s men had raided the settlement almost as soon as Smith left. Making quick work of the colonists’ ineffectual defense, the raiders had liberated the prisoners held in West’s makeshift fort and killed some men they found in the woods.

  On his return, Smith found the colonists terrified by the “poore sillie assault”—so much so that the greater part of them were ready to accept Smith’s rule. He ordered the arrest of six or seven of the chief mutineers and directed the rest to settle in Parahunt’s empty, “readie built” town, which he named Non-such. He made peace again with Parahunt.

  As Smith prepared to leave, Francis West—bravely absent until then—came ashore and soon took umbrage at what had been done without his involvement. West and the arrested mutineers incited the other colonists back into factionalism, and into dreams of finding El Dorado on the James. As they abandoned Non-such and filed back to the open-air homes of West’s low-lying settlement (probably tents), Smith realized his aid had been an exercise in futility. West and his company were beyond help. 3

  Smith started downriver a second time with his men, and stretched out for a doze during the seventy-four-mile trip. At some point, a spark or a cinder from someone’s pipe or musket matchcord went astray and landed badly: Smith had lain down still wearing his powder bag, which was ignited into a flash of searing heat. The flame, wrote several colonists, “tore the flesh from his body and thighes, nine or ten inches square in a most pitifull manner; but to quench the tormenting fire he leaped over-boord into the deepe river.” He was nearly drowned before his men could pull him out.4

  This time, there was no doctor on board to treat him. His men rushed him back to the fort, where he was carried to his quarters. There was no doctor at the fort, either. Dr. Walter Russell, credited with saving him from the stingray’s poison a little more than a year earlier, was no longer on the scene, nor was the colony’s other doctor, Anthony Bagnall. (They may have been part of the group dispersed to Nansemond.) Smith was unable to stand, and was helpless against his excruciating pain, which had rendered him “neere bereft of his senses.” In that state, he either saw or imagined he saw a man with a pistol who had been sent to finish him off. The assassin (or phantasm of Smith’s mind) took pity on his intended victim, however, and stopped short of firing on him.

  Although still in agony, Smith recovered sufficiently to be able to assess his circumstances. In the new charter, London had taken his presidency away from him—based on what shortcoming in his loyal service, he did not know. The leaders of the third supply were openly planning to usurp his authority, or what was left of it. In early September, shortly before the end of his term of office, he sent for the masters of the six ships that were to leave for England the next day, and secured a place for himself on board.5

  Smith’s antagonists, unenthusiastic about the idea of him speaking freely in London and pointing fingers, ordered the ships not to leave yet. For the next several weeks, when the council ought to have focused on building up the food stocks, it instead spent its time collecting denunciations of Smith from everyone he had ever punished or contended with. One or more of the survivors among the German turncoats testified that Smith had tried to do them in with rat poison. Others accused him of trying to starve them by sending them to the oyster banks, rather than letting them live off the (nonexistent) rations at the fort. “Some that knewe not anything to say, the councel instructed, and advised what to swear.”

  The most intriguing accusation came from an unnamed “propheticall spirit” (as two of Smith’s supporters sarcastically put it), who accused him of scheming to inherit Powhatan’s kingdom by marrying his daughter. Smith’s attitude toward Pocahontas was platonic from all appearances, and there was no reason to suspect otherwise. In any case, he knew he would not have stood to inherit the role of mamanatowick, or emperor, by marrying Pocahontas. Neither she nor her husband would be in the line of succession, which—radically different from the European model—went from Powhatan to his brothers, to his sisters, and then to his sisters’ children.

  Pocahontas herself had saddening news in store. After Smith’s departure, the colonists told any natives who inquired that he was dead. Pocahontas heard this and accepted it as true.6 She turned her back on the colony, and would not return to it for another four years.

  Shortly before the ships cast off, John Ratcliffe gave one of the captains a letter for Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, a member of the Virginia Company council in London. Ratcliffe reported that the Sea Venture with Sir Thomas Gates and Christopher Newport was feared lost—a harsh blow from the company’s point of view. Smith, he noted, had refused at first to give up authority to the new arrivals. “This man,” he added snidely, “is sent home to answere some misdemeanors whereof I perswade me he can scarcely clear him selfe from great imputation of blame.” Ratcliffe closed by mentioning that it was rather a lot of trouble to clear the wooded ground for planting, and so could the company send a year’s food supply?7

  Smith’s thoughts on the occasion are unrecorded. One imagines him waiting for the ship to be untied from its mooring—a tree or two perched on the edge of the Jamestown peninsula—and then asking a crewman to prop him up for a view of the fort as it receded into the distance. His emotions were likely still raw and confused, a brew of outrage, betrayal, and bewilderment that kept his bile close to the surface. No doubt his plans for the future, while still inchoate, centered on an intention to get to the bottom of why he had been passed over. Then it would surely be a simple matter to straighten things out with the company, and ultimately return to Jamestown with responsibility befitting his talents. Gates, after all, was lost at sea. As for men like Ratcliffe and Archer who had crossed him, well, they would be sorry soon enough—or so Smith must have mused.

  Then there were the thoughts of those Smith had left behind. A total of roughly five hundred colonists were in Jamestown now, the majority of whom were newcomers who neither knew nor cared about his monumental contributions. Like most new arrivals before them over the past two and a half years, they were looking forward to lives of idle leisure supported by supplies from London, food from the natives, and gold from the ground. Smith’s supporters, who had lived through Virginia winters and summers, knew better. There was no free emigration from Virginia, and unlike Smith, they had not been blessed with a passport home. For them, his departure could only presage worse times to come. William Fettiplace, a colonist who served under Smith’s command in the death-defying expedition to Werowocomoco in January, marked the occasion with an account that reads like a manual of leadership:

  What shall I say? But thus we lost him, that in all his proceedings, made justice his first guide, and experience his second; ever hating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignitie, more then any dangers; that never allowed more for himselfe, then his souldiers with him; that upon no danger would send them where he would not lead them himselfe; that would never see us want [in want of] what either he had, or could by any meanes get us . . . whose adventures were our lives, and whose losse our deathes. 8

  The council consisted of George Percy, John Martin, Francis West, and Ratcliffe, with “some few of the best and worthyest” of the rest acting as advisers. The majority of the councilors thought better of putting West in charge, as they had intended to do, and instead elected Percy to take the helm. Percy, twenty-nine, was from the nobility—he was the eighth son of an earl—and had studied at Oxford and the Middle Temple, one of London’s Inns of Court. Because he was not the eldest son, he had not inherited the estate that would have enabled him to continue living in high style and free of monetary worries. That was very likely the reason he had turned up, for the second time, on the shores of the New World, where gold always seemed to be just around the corner.

  Like Smith, Per
cy had put in a stint fighting in the Netherlands, but otherwise the two men could not have been more different. Percy derided his predecessor as “an ambitious, unworthy and vainglorious fellow”; ambition being a character flaw in the mind of the seventeenth-century English gentleman, it is unsurprising that it took first place in Percy’s list of epithets. Where Smith thought it necessary for Englishmen to adapt to the realities of a different land, Percy, like so many others, preferred to bring the ways of London society to Virginia. He felt obliged to maintain, as he put it, “a continual and daily [dining] table” in Jamestown “for gentlemen of fashion”—and then had to ask his eldest brother to pay the bills. He also sent home for, and received, a new wardrobe comporting with the august nature of his position: five suits, adorned in front with taffeta and stiffened with canvas; a dozen pairs of shoes, stockings, and socks, plus ribbon for shoe-strings; six pairs of boots; nine pairs of gloves; a dozen shirts from Holland; three hats (“2 with silke and goulde bands”); a dozen handkerchiefs; six nightcaps; a sword “hatched with goulde”; and six pairs of garters.9

  Yet Percy was by no means an unintelligent man. His writings are those of an articulate person with reasonably acute powers of observation. He may well have been a competent mediocrity within his natural element, that is, noble English society. In the autumn of 1609, however, he was far from his natural element, and he was soon to be plunged into a situation for which neither his education nor his social background had prepared him.

  Once the natives comprehended that Smith was out of the picture, Powhatan saw an opportunity to wage war on the colony, and he took it. An anonymous witness wrote that the natives “all revolted, and did murder and spoile [make spoil of, plunder] all they could incounter.” John Martin left the settlement at Nansemond to join Percy in Jamestown, ostensibly to deal with the colony’s business. Percy suspected the real reason was that Martin had been spooked by the surprise attacks that the natives had started to mount against the settlement. Jamestown, with its fortification and its narrow point of access at the neck of the peninsula, was by far the safer place to be.

  If Percy’s hunch was right (and there is no reason to doubt it), then Martin, with his cowardice, showed a good instinct for self-preservation. Martin had deputized Lieutenant Michael Sicklemore— no apparent relation to John Sicklemore, alias Ratcliffe—to take charge at Nansemond in his absence. As the attacks continued there, seventeen of the men decided to follow Martin’s example; they made off with a boat and fled from the settlement. They did not prove as fortunate as their erstwhile leader. None of the seventeen deserters were heard from again, and it is likely they were captured and killed.

  Sicklemore and an unknown number of his men then went on an expedition from the settlement, apparently to attempt to trade for food. Within a few days, someone from the settlement came across them: all dead, their mouths stuffed full of bread. Here was their food. It was the natives’ suitably mordant expression of scorn for the self-superior foreigners who came to them in weakness, and a warning to any who might follow in search of relief. The scene was reminiscent of the treatment given almost a century earlier, in 1514, to Spanish colonists under the command of Pedro Arias de Ávila in present-day Panama. The natives there, weary of the Spaniards’ gold-seeking, took to capturing them alive and pouring molten gold down their throats. 10

  The rest of the colonists at Nansemond withdrew to Jamestown for safety. Around the same time, Francis West and the rest of the colonists at the falls came back to Jamestown after a series of fatal attacks there. Percy had earlier sent Ratcliffe to Point Comfort, near the bay, with a detachment to build a fort (the command that the company’s instructions had given as a sop to Smith); Ratcliffe and his men were safe there, and so there they stayed. But as for the rest, Percy now had a problem: how to keep everyone fed through the winter?

  The council had spent most of September on its hearings against Smith, and nobody had shown much industriousness in the meantime. With the collapse of the settlements at the falls and Nansemond, no one would be foraging from there. All fourteen of the colony’s fishing nets had been allowed to rot in the water and were useless. The harvest had been eaten. The storehouse had been drawn down to support the sailors from six ships for the extra time they had been kept waiting. Daniel Tucker, the cape merchant, or supply officer, informed Percy that there was no more than three months’ rations left—and that was assuming a meager allowance for each man of half a can of meal a day.

  The solution seemed to come in the form of a communiqué from Chief Powhatan. Powhatan had sent Thomas Savage, escorted by four or five native men, as a bearer of a gift of venison to Percy. A few weeks later, probably in November, Powhatan followed up by sending Henry Spelman either to Percy at Jamestown or to Ratcliffe at Point Comfort (the accounts are unclear) with a message of friendship and an invitation to visit and trade for part of their harvest. It was a godsend. With Percy’s approval, Ratcliffe took fifty men by ship to call on Powhatan at Orapakes.

  Powhatan received Ratcliffe with all the courtesies of local protocol. Ratcliffe reciprocated. In doing so, however, he made a mistake right at the start, by failing to insist on the usual trading of hostages as a guarantee of good behavior. It was seemingly a repetition of the habit he had developed during his presidency the previous year: trying to build up an image of lordliness for himself among the natives by giving away the store. Perhaps he also felt that he was essentially a supplicant, and thus in no position to insist on anything. Smith, with his philosophy of projecting overwhelming strength (regardless of the facts), would not have fallen into the same error.

  An unknown number of the Englishmen stayed behind on the ship. Powhatan directed Ratcliffe and the others to a house about a half mile from the river, where they were to spend the night. The next morning, Powhatan and a group of his guards escorted the visitors to his storehouse. There, Ratcliffe bartered copper and beads for corn; as the baskets of corn accumulated, he surely savored the idea of the enthusiastic reception he would get from hundreds of grateful settlers when he made a hero’s return to Jamestown.

  Accounts differ as to what happened next. By one report, the natives began cheating the English by pushing up the bottoms of the baskets, so that less corn would appear to make a full basket. The English and the natives quarreled over this, with the result that Powhatan left the scene with his wives, his young guest Henry Spelman, and a German named Samuel who was still living with him. As the English were carrying their baskets the half mile back to the ship, native men who were hidden in the cornfields along the way attacked and killed them. By another report, Ratcliffe carelessly let his men straggle away in ones and twos into the natives’ homes, lured there by who knows what—promises of food? women?—and the men were then ambushed and killed. Given the dual accounts, it is thus unclear whether the conflict between Powhatan and the English flared up on the spot, or whether Powhatan’s invitation had been a trap for the English all along.

  The outcome was the same from the perspective of the expedition’s leader. In failing to exchange hostages, and in letting his men drop their guard, Ratcliffe had ignored the realities of life on the Virginia frontier. He paid for his insouciance in much the same way George Cassen had. Captured alive, Ratcliffe was tied to a stake in front of a large fire. This time it was women, rather than men, who carried out the procedure, removing his skin from his flesh with mussel shells, and then tossing it into the flames as he watched. Finally he was burned at the stake. “And so for want of circumspection [he] miserably perished,” Percy recorded, sparing scant sympathy for a fallen comrade.11

  The natives rarely attacked any English vessel larger than the twenty-four-man shallops, or barges, since the English ships possessed intimidating firepower. Giving further proof of their new boldness, however, the natives carried out an assault on Ratcliffe’s ship, now under the command of William Fettiplace, as it made its hurried get-away from Orapakes. Fettiplace lost an unrecorded number of men, and barely escape
d being completely overwhelmed by the attackers. The ship was expected to return to Jamestown fully laden with corn, thus saving the day for the English. Instead, it appeared at the colony bearing no food at all, and it carried only sixteen of the fifty men who had gone out.

  After Percy saw the remnants of Ratcliffe’s failed mission, he sent Captain James Davis to replace Ratcliffe as the commander of the fort at Point Comfort, and he directed Francis West to attempt to trade with the Patawomecks. Percy intended a peaceful bartering session, doubtless assuming that the distant Patawomeck tribe would be less hostile to the English. When cooperation was not forthcoming, West “used some harsh and cruel dealings,” Percy explained, “by cutting off two of the savages’ heads and other extremities.”

  West’s mission succeeded—up to a point. His bloody tactics caused the Patawomecks to load his ship with as much grain as he wanted. But when he emerged from the mouth of the Potomac River, instead of turning into the James to bring relief to Jamestown, he and his men headed for the open ocean and, from there, to the comforts of home in England. Captain Davis watched in dismay from Point Comfort as West sailed away with the food that had been Jamestown’s last hope.12 “Now wee all found the want of Captaine Smith,” wrote the anonymous witness, “yea his greatest maligners could then curse his losse.” The thirty-six men who had left with West were fortunate indeed. The thirty-four or so who perished with Ratcliffe were only slightly less so. For the rest, the winter of 1609–1610 became known as “the Starving Time.” With the stores running low, the English now felt what Percy called “that sharp prick of hunger, which no man truly describe but he which hath tasted the bitterness thereof.”