Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Thorpe’s policies brought him critics among the colonists, and not just the owners of the deceased dogs. A minister named Jonas Stockham, who arrived in Virginia shortly after Thorpe, declared sardonically in 1621 that “as for the gifts bestowed on them they devour them, and so they would the givers if they could.” Stockham found little to admire in the conversion efforts of Thorpe, a layman—or perhaps Stockham was merely jealous. “Though many have endeavored by all the meanes they could to convert them,” he continued, “they find nothing from them but derision and ridiculous answers.”

  Yet most of the colony eventually became content to embrace Thorpe’s policy, and the company’s policy, of drawing the natives closer. The colonists’ sentiment probably came less from their hearts than from their purses: smooth relations with the natives meant unhindered profits and an extra source of labor. The longtime colonists could look forward to enlarging their plantations or clearing new ones. In accord with the spirit of openness, they commonly welcomed the natives in their homes and hosted them at their dining tables.

  The Powhatans’ leader was a particular object of Thorpe’s interest and generosity. Thorpe ordered the construction of an English-style house and then gave it to Opechancanough. (Opechancanough was said to have locked and unlocked the front door a hundred times a day at first, so intrigued was he with the lock and key mechanism.) By the summer of 1621, Thorpe was periodically meeting with him to discuss the idea of the Powhatans sending boys to live in the colony and to receive an English education. In aiming to separate the boys from their families, Thorpe was clearly calculating that an immersion in English culture would lead the boys to become promoters of “civility” when they returned home to their villages. Although Opechancanough would not agree to Thorpe’s plan, he left open the possibility of sending some entire families to live among the English.4

  In the course of Thorpe’s conversations with Opechancanough, the Powhatan leader dropped hints that he might be won over to Christianity himself. As the local council of state reported to London with enthusiasm, Thorpe had learned “that he [Opechancanough] had more motiones of religion in him, then coulde be ymmagined in soe greate blindnes, for hee willinglye acknowledged that theirs was nott the right waye, desiringe to bee instructed in ours and confessed that God loved us better than them. . . .” It was just what Thorpe hoped to hear.

  Opechancanough also told Thorpe something else. He and his brother had taken on new names: Opechancanough was now known as Mangopeesomon, and Opitchapam had become Sasawpen. The English took note of the information for purposes of protocol, but gave it no other significance. Had the colonists of 1621 been more alert students of native culture, they would have found the change of names worth pondering. In the Powhatan tradition, men received additional names to mark great military exploits—or, in the case of chiefs, their leadership of a great military operation still to come. 5

  Opechancanough had just such an operation in mind. He revealed his intentions to the chief of the Accomacs, a tribe of the Powhatan Empire residing on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. Opechancanough would need the Accomacs’ help with a key element of his plan. During the era of Sir Thomas Dale’s retaliatory raids a decade earlier, Chief Powhatan had experimented with deploying a nonlethal drug against the English. It was a hallucinogen, of unknown origin. On two occasions, a small party of Englishmen was somehow exposed to it, and the men began fighting one another in a delirium. In both instances, however, the men’s senses were so addled that they never inflicted any harm on each other, and they recovered their faculties before any injury could be done. After the second failure, the Powhatans abandoned their trial of drug warfare. Opechancanough, not yet holding the reins of power, must have regarded the whole episode as another of his brother’s frustrating half measures.

  Now in command, Opechancanough was ready to move past drugs of the nonlethal variety. For all his affirmations of friendship with the English, he was inwardly set on the colony’s destruction—seething, no doubt, from a hundred slights by the English toward his people over the years. He was well able to foresee, also, that the rapid expansion of the plantation lands would inevitably lead the English and the Powhatans to become enemies sooner or later. The plantations already dotted both sides of the James for 140 miles; there were still miles of open spaces between the plantations, but those spaces would only become smaller with time.

  While Opechancanough undoubtably knew that disease was still taking a toll of scores, if not hundreds, of colonists every summer, he also knew there were always more ships bringing newcomers: forty-two shiploads in the three years from 1619 to 1621. There were over twelve hundred colonists alive in 1621, vastly more than the hundred or so who landed in 1607. Opechancanough had decided to take action at a time when he could do so on his terms. Having lulled the English into perfect complacency, he contemplated a blow that would kill enough of them to drive any survivors away for good.

  Thus, Opechancanough requested from the Accomac chief a supply of deadly poison from a plant that grew in Accomac territory. The plant was most likely Cicuta maculata, which occurs naturally on the Eastern Shore; it is also known as water hemlock. Although the Accomacs were subjects of the Powhatans, they, like the Patawomecks, were distant enough that they could exercise their own will as a matter of practice. The Accomac chief, who was on good terms with the English, balked at Opechancanough’s request. Opechancanough sent him presents to soften his attitude. The chief steadfastly refused, and in turn gave the English the most valuable gift he could have given them: a warning of Opechancanough’s intentions.

  Word of the plot caused a momentary panic in the colony. Governor Yeardley himself went to each of the boroughs and all of the forty or so plantations, ordering them to keep a continual watch for trouble. Opechancanough, however, denied having ever plotted against the English. With no other evidence coming to light, the colonists finally accepted Opechancanough’s denial. It was more appealing, from the colonists’ point of view, to assume the best than to assume the worst, since the lookout duty was an unwelcome diversion of energy from more lucrative pursuits. “Our people by degrees fell againe to theire ordinary watch,” the council in Jamestown later wrote, “not beeinge able to follow their severall labors and keepe so strict a guarde.”

  In October 1621, nine ships brought another load of settlers; among them was Sir Francis Wyatt, the company’s choice to succeed Yeardley as governor when his term ended on November 18. In a report to the company in January, Wyatt’s council of state described one of his first official acts upon taking his post: “Findinge the countrey at his arrivall in very greate amytie and confidence with the natives, and beinge desirous by all good meanes to continue and enlarge the same,” Wyatt sent Thorpe with presents and a message of friendship to both Opechancanough and Opitchapam. The real and nominal heads of the Powhatan Empire responded that they were gratified to learn of the new governor’s desire for concord.6

  Opechancanough bided his time through the first months of 1622. A possible setback occurred in the second week of March—a violent incident involving a Powhatan captain named Nemattanew. Nemattanew was a familiar figure to the colonists, who had nicknamed him “Jack of the Feather” for his habit of dressing himself flamboyantly in plumage, and fastening swan’s wings to his shoulders as though he might fly. During the earlier era of conflict with the English, he had inspired his troops by claiming to possess special powers that rendered him immune to the effects of English gunshot.

  The incident in March began when Nemattanew invited an Englishman named Morgan to join him for a trading journey to the Pamunkeys. After Nemattanew returned alone a few days later, two of Morgan’s young servants asked him where their master was. Nemattanew told them he was dead, and did not elaborate further. Noticing that Nemattanew had Morgan’s cap on his head, the servants concluded that Nemattanew had robbed and killed their master. As they told the story later, they intended to bring Nemattanew to George Thorpe, but he resisted. Whateve
r the truth of the matter, the scene ended with Nemattanew dead, of gunshot wounds.

  Fortunately for Opechancanough, the matter did not rouse the colonists’ bygone fears. The governor and council in Virginia offered “to doe him [Opechancanough] justice” if Nemattanew were shown to be innocent. Opechancanough suppressed any anger he might have felt and assured the English by messenger that Nemattanew “being but one man should be no occasion of the breach of the peace.” He avowed that he wanted no part in disrupting the peace. “The sky,” he told them, “should sooner fall.” 7

  The sky was about to fall.

  For the colonists, Friday, March 22, 1622, started as a day like any other. Morning found native men visiting the plantations in their usual manner, bringing deer, turkeys, fish, and fur to trade in return for beads, glass, and metal. Some of the men joined the English at their tables for breakfast. Others mingled among the English in their work-places—in the fields, at their brick-firing kilns and their forges, at their building sites and workbenches. The visitors carried no weapons.

  A colonist named Richard Pace landed at Jamestown that morning in a state of anguish, demanding to see the governor. He had rowed from his plantation three miles across the river, where a native working as a servant had broken ranks and told him what was going to happen. On account of Pace’s warning, Jamestown itself was prepared for March 22—militarily, at least. Governor Wyatt was able to get warnings out by boat to a number of other communities, but the English plantations were too widely scattered for word to reach all of them in time. Some sixteen plantations and numerous smaller settlements were left totally exposed.

  At those sites, the colonists and the natives interacted in their everyday manner until the natives abruptly began their assault. They slaughtered men, women, and children with the colonists’ own swords and work tools—axes, knives, saws, and hammers. In an instant, hundreds of English were lying lifeless. “Not being content with taking away life alone,” noted a report after the attack, “they fell after againe upon the dead, making as well as they could, a fresh murder, defacing, dragging, and mangling the dead carkasses into so many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision, with base and bruitish triumph.”

  To achieve surprise, Opechancanough had sent the men without bows and arrows or shields; wherever they encountered resistance, they withdrew. Thus Jamestown suffered no loss of life, while the plantation of Martin’s Hundred just seven miles downriver lost nearly its entire population, more than seventy in all. The long list of the dead at Martin’s Hundred opened with these entries, which suggest the frenzied and indiscriminate character of the killing:

  Lieutenant Richard Kean

  Master Thomas Boise, & Mistris Boise his wife, & a sucking childe

  4 of his men [servants]

  A maide

  2 children

  Nathaniel Jeffries wife

  Margaret Davies

  Richard Staples, his wife, and childe

  2 maides

  6 men and boyes 8

  On the college lands at Henricus, the site of George Thorpe’s project, seventeen workmen died in the attack. At a location nearby, where the company had been attempting to establish an ironworks, everyone present was killed except for a boy and girl who found a hiding place.

  Thorpe was at his home at Berkeley Hundred plantation that morning. There, too, residents had no foreknowledge of Opechancanough’s plan. Thorpe himself did have a kind of warning, however: as the time approached, his servant became suspicious of the natives’ behavior and urged him to leave for a safe place. Thorpe dismissed the man’s fears. The servant then took his own advice and ran off, thereby ensuring he would live to see another day. Berkeley Hundred evidently managed to put up a defense once the attack started, but still lost nine men along with a woman and her child.

  Thorpe’s servant had counseled him wisely, and Thorpe paid a high price for his disbelief. The natives took special care of their would-be benefactor that morning. First, the attackers stabbed him or bludgeoned him to death. Then, it was reported, they “cruelly and felly [fiercely], out of devilish malice, did so many barbarous despights and foule scornes after to his dead corpse, as are unbefitting to be heard by any civill eare.” The circumspect phrasing was out of consideration, perhaps, for the wife, eight-year-old daughter, and three young sons he had left in England.

  At the morning’s end, at least 347 English were dead, and possibly as many as 400. The colony’s population beforehand had been roughly 1,240, so the mortality amounted to somewhere between a quarter and a third of the colonists. Of equal significance, the membrane of normality that had recently surrounded the English in Virginia—or which they had assumed to be surrounding them—was now punctured. “I thinke the last massacre killed all our countrie,” wrote colonist William Capps in a letter to a friend. “Beside them they killed, they burst the heart of all the rest.”9

  Even news as shocking as this could not reach England any faster than the winds over the Atlantic. So it was that when the Reverend Patrick Copland delivered a sermon to the investors of the company in London on April 18, his subject was “Thanksgiving for the Happie Successe of the Affayres in Virginia This Last Yeare.” Copland, who had raised money for the planned free school for the natives, gave the sermon at the company’s invitation at St. Mary-Le-Bow Church. Neither he nor anyone in his audience had a hint of knowledge about the massacre that had taken place nearly a month before. “Blessed be God,” Copland told the company, “there hath been a long time, and still is a happie league of peace and amity soundly concluded, and faithfully kept, between the English and the natives, that the feare of killing each other is now vanished away.”

  Not until mid-July did a ship called the Sea-flower arrive from Virginia with letters recounting the attack. The news prompted John Donne, the poet and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, to preach in favor of keeping the colony on the same course Thorpe had set. The colonists, Donne argued, must continue to attempt to win the natives’ esteem— and forswear revenge:

  Enamore them with your justice, and (as farre as may consist with your security) your civilitie; but inflame them with your godliness, and your religion. Bring them to love and reverence the name of that King, that sends men to teach them the wayes of civilitie in this world, but to feare and adore the name of that King of Kings, that sends men to teach them the waies of religion, for the next world.10

  Donne, however, was distinctly in the minority. Although Opechancanough had achieved an impressive tactical victory, his attack would prove to be a strategic error. Indeed, it was a blunder of seismic proportions. The news of the massacre forced the English— gentleman investors, members of Parliament, and divines alike—to reconsider the entire ideology of coexistence and cultural assimilation in the New World. If Opechancanough had been offended by the manifestations of that ideology, he would find its replacement still less congenial. Where English commentators had formerly expressed disgust at the murderous practices of the Spanish colonials, the English view of the conquistadors would now be tempered with some admiration. For those involved in the Virginia Company, the events of March 22 demanded not only revenge, but total and thorough revenge. In his hour of victory, Opechancanough had set in motion nothing less than the inexorable destruction of his own people.

  The first written work to be published on the massacre appeared in July, shortly after the news had reached London. No copies of that work, entitled Morninge [Mourning] Virginia, are known to have survived. The next to appear, in August, was the company’s Declaration of the State of the Colony and A faires in Virginia: With a Relation of the BarbarousMassacre in the time of peace and League, treacherously executed by the Native Infidels upon the English, the 22 of March last. The company had commissioned Edward Waterhouse, its former secretary, to assemble an authoritative account from the various letters and from the eyewitnesses who came back on the Sea-flower. His book foreshadowed the angry tone of much commentary to come, casting aside the earlier hopeful d
epictions of the natives.

  For the first time in Virginia Company literature, Waterhouse characterized the natives as “these beasts,” or as worse than beasts. Even lions and dragons, he wrote, were known to show gratitude to those who helped them. “But these miscreants [the natives], contrariwise in this kinde, put not off onely [not only put off] all humanity, but put on a worse and more then unnaturall bruitishnesse.” Yet there was a positive side to the situation. In light of the natives’ perfidy, the English could now justly exercise free rein over the Virginia countryside:

  Because our hands which before were tied with gentlenesse and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the savages, not untying the knot, but cutting it: So that we, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground then their waste, and our purchase at a valuable consideration to their owne contentement, gained; may now by right of warre, and law of nations, invade the country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby wee shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious mattocke [hoe] into the victorious sword....11

  For the achievement of that conquest, Waterhouse found convenient models at hand. He praised the mastery of Hernando Cortés over the Aztecs in Mexico, and that of Francisco Pizarro over the Incas in Peru. Their victories had been achieved through strategies of divide and conquer—methods that he felt the English could emulate in Virginia. The English could also emulate the Spaniards’ enslavement of the natives. “The Indians, who before were used as friends, may now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery. . . .” All in all, Waterhouse held, the natives had wounded themselves more than the colony.