Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  A gentleman named Henry Paine was not so fortunate. His trouble began when he got into an argument with his watch commander on the night of March 13, as he was about to begin his guard duty. There had been rumors in the air that someone was plotting to empty the storehouse and abscond—though how anyone could abscond without a boat is unclear. For the first time, Gates had ordered a round-the-clock guard, and ordered all of the men to carry weapons (which they had not needed on Bermuda up to then). Paine’s commander told him to keep an extra-careful watch; Paine, fed up with the burdens of guard duty, told his commander off and gave him a shove or some such blow. The exchange escalated into a scuffle as others on duty watched in surprise. Paine was warned that if the governor learned of his insolence, it would mean his life. Paine answered, in Strachey’s prim words, “that the governor had no authority of that quality to justify upon anyone, [no matter] how mean [low-ranking] soever in the colony, an action of that nature, and therefore let the governor (said he) kiss, etc.”

  Paine’s words spread around the settlement, and the next morning, he was brought before Governor Gates with the entire company watching the proceedings. With the testimony of the commander and the witnesses to the fight, Paine was convicted of insubordination and condemned to be hanged on the spot. This time Gates was not inclined to be merciful. Paine’s noose was soon ready. As his last act, before he was to ascend the ladder, he requested the privilege of a condemned gentleman: death by firing squad. “Towards the evening he had his desire, the sun and his life setting together.” 5

  At the end of April, Somers’s bold plan had come to fruition: two new vessels had been built to carry all the Bermudans onward. It had taken nine months. Frubbisher’s 40-foot ship was named the Deliverance;Somers’s 29-foot ship was called the Patience. Somers had labored on the Patience, Jourdain observed, “from morning until night, as duly as any workman doth labor for wages.” On top of all the other challenges he had faced in building the Patience—salvaged parts, no ship-yard, mostly amateur workmen—there was a paucity of iron that could be recovered from the Sea Venture. Somers had surmounted that problem by building the Patience with exactly one bolt, which he used in attaching the keel.

  For their departure, the colonists awaited a westerly wind, which finally came on May 10, 1610. They had reason to feel blessed: all told, they had lost only six of the company (including Henry Paine and Bermuda Rolfe) to various causes during their sojourn. Before setting off, they put up a cross made from timbers of the Sea Venture in memory of their survival of the storm—and, implicitly, in memory of the months they had spent as castaways. Accounts of the colonists’ island adventure would later provide the inspiration for Shakespeare’s romantic comedy The Tempest. 6

  When they arrived in Virginia twelve days later, what they found was neither romantic nor a comedy. They stopped at the new fort at Point Comfort, where George Percy had taken up residence. Percy gave Gates and Somers the general idea that Jamestown had been in misery. Yet nothing could have prepared them for what they would see when they continued upriver. On May 24, they moored at the Jamestown peninsula, walked into the fort, and witnessed a scene that beggared belief. At first, the settlement appeared to be a ghost town. The gates of the fort were off their hinges. Some of the houses had been torn apart, by men who were desperate for winter firewood, and too scared to get it from the forest beyond the fort’s walls. There were no signs of life.

  Gates ordered someone to ring the church bell. With that, men staggered out from their homes, their bodies shrunk down almost to skeletons, resembling corpses held upright by unseen marionette strings. Some could greet their rescuers only with repetitive cries of “We are starved! We are starved!” They were the sixty-odd survivors of the Starving Time. Richard Buck, the preacher, overcome with grief, said a “zealous and sorrowful” prayer for the living and the dead.

  Expecting to arrive at a functioning colony, even a thriving one, Gates and Somers had brought only enough rations for the journey from Bermuda. There was some to spare because Somers had estimated conservatively, but it still amounted to no more than two weeks’ supply. After taking stock of the situation over several days, and organizing two unsuccessful attempts at gathering food, Gates made his inevitable decision: the colony would be abandoned as soon as the ships could be made ready. The settlers would head north to the fishing grounds off Newfoundland and attempt to disperse themselves among English fishing boats there. Everyone, it was hoped, would thereby make his or her way back to England.

  Most of the ships from the 1609 resupply had long since sailed away, but the colonists had four small vessels at hand: the Discovery, the Virginia (which had held together after the Sea Venture cut it loose), the Deliverance, and the Patience. On the morning of June 7, these were loaded with the colonists’ guns and anything else worth bringing home. The cannon from the fort had been buried outside the gate. The beating of a drum was the signal for the colonists finally to line up and board the ships. That drumbeat, solemn as it may have been, no doubt evoked joyful whoops and hollering. (Gates had met the same response when, shortly after his arrival, he announced gravely that he was thinking about sending the men home.)

  Their departure was distinctly lacking in wistful sentimentality. Among the colony’s rank and file, there was much enthusiasm for the idea of setting all of Jamestown on fire just before they left, and watching it burn as it faded from view—a satisfying panorama for those who had endured so much there. Gates opposed the idea, holding that “we know not but that as honest men as ourselves may come and inhabit here.” To make sure Jamestown did not go up in flames, he had to assign a company of his trusted men to stand guard and then board the ships after the rest.

  Gates, Somers, Percy, and James Davis (who had been in charge of the fort at Point Comfort) were the last to board—Gates on the Deliverance,Somers on the Patience, Percy on the Discovery, and Davis on the Virginia. Around noon, with a ceremonial firing of pistols, they set sail.7

  That day, the ships made it as far as Hog Isle, where the colonists spent the night. The following afternoon, they noticed an unidentified boat approaching with just one man on it. Edward Brewster, the man on the boat, pulled up and presented a letter addressed to Thomas Gates. The letter was about to hit the course of American history with the force of a meteor.

  It was from Thomas West, Lord De La Warr. West had sailed from England on April 1, 1610, ten months after Gates and Somers— unknown to anyone in Jamestown. With him were three ships carrying 150 new settlers, an ample store of provisions, and a commission naming him governor and captain-general of Virginia for life. He had arrived at Point Comfort on June 6, his letter explained. There he found a small detachment of men who were waiting to be picked up by Gates’s departing fleet on its way to the Atlantic. They had given him the news of what had taken place in Jamestown since autumn. (West undoubtedly asked after his younger brother, Francis, and learned— after an awkward silence—that Francis had sailed out in late 1609, when the getting was good.) Help was on the way, West told Gates in so many words, and he ordered him back to Jamestown.

  Gates complied, “to the great grief of all his company,” as some of them later wrote. With favorable winds, the four ships made it back to Jamestown by that night. When West’s fleet pulled up two days later, on the afternoon of Sunday, June 10, West found it “a very noisome [smelly] and unwholesome place occasioned much by the mortality and idleness of our own people.” That, he decided, was going to change. After Richard Buck delivered a sermon marking West’s arrival, Gates formally turned his office over to him. As West took his turn in greeting the colonists, any of them who expected a pep talk were in for a disappointment:

  Then I delivered some few words unto the company [he remembered], laying some blames upon them for many vanities and their idleness, earnestly wishing that I might no more find it so lest I should be compel’d to draw the sword in justice to cut off delinquents which I had much rather draw in their defense to protect from
enemies.

  Not being able to find a suitable house for himself in Jamestown, and likely put off by the smell, West spent the night on his ship. The next day, he dealt with the “noisome” conditions by ordering a general cleanup of the town’s garbage and trash, which the colonists threw into an open pit and then covered with dirt—winning the gratitude of future generations of archaeologists.8

  Despite the grumbling of those who thought they were on their way home, the colony’s situation had, in fact, improved markedly. West’s cargo amounted to enough food for a year. The English in Virginia would never experience another Starving Time. The role of sheer coincidence, or Providence, in restoring English settlement to Virginia was aptly summed up by the Virginia Company in a tract published in London later that year:

  For if God had not sent Sir Thomas Gates from the Bermudas within four days, they had been [would have been] all famished. If God had not directed the heart of that worthy knight to save the fort from fire at their shipping, they had been destitute of a present harbor and succor. If they had abandoned the fort any longer time and had not so returned, questionless the Indians would have destroyed the fort, which had been the means of our safety among them, and a terror unto them. If they had set sail sooner and had launched into the vast ocean, who could have promised that they should have encountered the fleet of Lord La-ware?— especially when they made for Newfoundland, a course contrary to our navy’s approaching. If the Lord La-ware had not brought with him a year’s provision, what comfort could those souls have received to have been relanded to a second destruction?9

  On Wednesday, June 13, West met with his newly appointed advisory council, which consisted of Gates, Somers, Percy, and several others, to discuss the immediate issues in front of them. Foremost among these was how to find fresh meat. Since Jamestown had plenty of other rations, such luxuries could now be considered matters of priority. The problem was that the colonists had killed and eaten all their own horses and other animals, down to the very smallest, during the previous winter. Powhatan’s men had killed the hogs, and driven away most of the deer, all as part of the chief’s starvation plan. West could have brought salted meat with him from England, but no one there had conceived of a scenario in which the colony’s own hogs would be gone.

  As the council pondered, Somers surprised everyone with a suggestion: he would make a return trip to Bermuda, capture some of the wild hogs there, and bring them back. West took him up on it. As attractive as Bermuda was, the voyage would be dangerous, and Somers’s offer was a potentially deadly gamble. As word of the plan spread around the settlement, those who knew Somers were again impressed with (as Jourdain put it) his “being willing to do service to his prince and country without any respect of private gain.” Somers and his crew left on June 19 on the Patience, accompanied by Samuel Argall on the Discovery.

  While the colonists waited for Somers to return, West and his advisers turned their attention to the problem of relations with the natives. The company in London still believed in winning the natives over to English ways, with the ultimate result of an integrated society in Virginia, one rooted in Protestant Christianity and English culture. Yet the reports of Smith and others had led to a modicum of realism: the natives would never accept the English presence, the company believed, as long as they were under the influence of their present chiefs and the priests. Accordingly, the company (still unaware of Powhatan’s war of starvation) had recommended that if the natives gave resistance, the colonists should capture “their weroances and all other their knowne successors at once, whom if you intreate well and educate those which are younge and to succeede in the government in your manners and religion, their people will easily obey you and become in time civil and Christian.” The priests, too, should be seized—and, if necessary, put to death:

  For they are so wrapped up in the fogge and miserie of their iniquity, and so terrified with their continuall iniquity tirrany chayned under the bond of the devil, that while they live amonge them to poyson and infect them their mindes, you shall never . . . have any civill peace or concurre with them.10

  That was the theory. The course that the colonists actually pursued, however, tended to be made up on the spur of the moment in reaction to the latest events. John Smith had been reprimanded by the company for his hard dealings with the natives, but it was only now, with Smith absent from the scene, that English massacres of native civilians would begin.

  The tenderhearted Gates, whom West had made his lieutenant general, started with a belief in nonviolence toward the natives— “thinking it possible by a more tractable course to win them to a better condition,” Strachey recorded. But on July 6, on a sailing expedition downriver to Point Comfort, Gates witnessed one of his men, Humphrey Blunt, captured and killed by a party of Kecoughtans. Shaken by what he had seen, Gates wanted vengeance.

  Several days later, most likely with West’s approval, Gates led an attack on the Kecoughtan town. Reflecting the English view of the natives as childlike in their ignorance, Gates had settled on the tactic of drawing the Kecoughtans out with the entertainment of a taborer—a musical jester who played a drum and fife. Arriving by boat in the early morning, Gates directed the taborer to play and dance in a clearing. When the natives emerged to watch the spectacle, Gates’s men ambushed them and killed five of them by the sword and wounded a large number of others. The rest of the townspeople fled into the woods. No one on the English side was hurt. Gates ordered his company to occupy the town and its adjacent fields. About two weeks later, Gates left for England to provide an update to the council in London.

  West himself began more cautiously. Sometime after Gates’s assault, West sent two gentlemen as messengers to Chief Powhatan with a demand that he return the tools and weapons the natives had stolen, which evidently numbered in the hundreds. West also demanded that Powhatan return the prisoners that the English believed he was keeping, and turn over the perpetrators of a recent murder at Point Comfort (apparently the killers of Humphrey Blunt). West diplomatically suggested that the misdeeds were done without the chief’s knowledge. If Powhatan met West’s demands, the gentlemen told him, then West, “their great weroance,” would extend his friendship on behalf of King James.

  At this point, Powhatan no longer took the English seriously as a threat; he found West’s message laughable. He sent the gentlemen back with, in the words of George Percy, “proud and disdainful answers.” Either stay on the Jamestown peninsula or leave the country, Powhatan told West. Otherwise, he would kill the English at his pleasure. The messengers should not come back, he added with a final dash of scorn, “unless they brought him a coach and three horses, for he had understood by the Indians which were in England [presumably Namontack] how such was the state of great weroances and lords in England to ride and visit other great men.” 11

  Now West, too, was violently angry. He put Percy in command of seventy men to strike at a nearby Powhatan tribe, the Paspahegh. The strategic value, if any, of the target was immaterial; West had been insulted. Percy had his own reasons to spoil for a fight, having been duped by Powhatan into sending Ratcliffe and fifty others into a fatal ambush the previous year. This puffed-up nonentity also despised Powhatan because he blamed the chief of chiefs (rather than his own failure of leadership) for the Starving Time. Percy saw no need to bring a taborer for comic relief. On the night of August 9, his troops killed fifteen or sixteen men in the village of the Paspahegh, burned down the village, and captured the Paspahegh queen and her children.

  When Percy’s lieutenant brought him the queen and children and another native man, Percy was irked that the lieutenant had spared their lives. The lieutenant told him indifferently that the prisoners were his to deal with as he pleased. “Upon the same I caused the Indian’s head to be cut off,” Percy wrote.

  As the queen and her children were marched three miles back to the boats, Percy’s men grumbled because they had not been executed. When the party reached the boats, Percy called a council,
in which the men prevailed on him to allow the killing of the children. This they accomplished by throwing them overboard and firing at them in the water, riddling their heads with musket shot. “I had much to do to save the queen’s life,” Percy noted.

  But he had not saved her life for long. When he and his men returned to Jamestown, they rowed directly to the ship where West was still keeping his quarters. For some reason, Percy did not speak directly with West, instead sending Captain James Davis in his place. Davis reported back to Percy that the governor did not understand why the queen had been taken alive, and he wanted her “dispatched”— preferably burned to death. Percy was unsure that West had actually said this, but unaccountably, he did not take the trouble to confirm the orders himself. His own preening account tells the rest:

  To the first I replied that having seen so much bloodshed that day, now in my cold blood I desired to see no more; and for to burn her I did not hold it fitting, but either by shot or sword to give her a quicker dispatch. So turning myself from Captain Davis, he did take the queen with two soldiers ashore, and in the woods put her to the sword. And although Captain Davis told me it was my lord’s direction, I am persuaded to the contrary. 12