Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Of the same frame of mind was Christopher Brooke, a Virginia Company lawyer and published poet, whose “Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia” appeared in September. When Brooke heard the news of the massacre, his poem recalled, the horror of it seized his power of speech, “and for certaine howres I seem’d a breathing statue.” He then struggled to find God’s purpose in allowing “those bestiall soules” to kill innocent men, women, and children. That purpose, Brooke concluded, was to impart to the English a warning against trust and complacency:

  Securitie, the Heaven that holds a Hell,

  The bane of all that in this slaughter fell;

  For ever be thou ban’d and banish’t quite

  From wisdomes confines, and preventions light.

  Let this example (in the text of blood)

  Be printed in your hearts, and understood

  How deare ’twas bought; for to the price it pulls

  A field of Golgotha [sites of suffering] or dead mens skulls.12

  After eulogizing some of the prominent men among the dead, Brooke ended with an assurance of a bright future for the colony, along with a call to bring earthly justice upon the natives:

  Take heart, and fill your veynes; the next that bleed

  Shall be those fiends: and for each drop of ours,

  I strongly hope, we shall shed theirs in showers.

  Then keepe your seates, and fearlesly go on,

  For greater gaine to the plantation

  From the late losse, may probably be found. 13

  The Reverend Samuel Purchas joined the fray a few years later with his essay “Virginias Verger,” a verger being the person who carries a ceremonial rod or staff in a procession. The procession he had in mind was seemingly a funeral—for the native dead to come. In the aftermath of March 22, Purchas had come far from his days of disputing cordially with Tomocomo and delighting in Pocahontas’s conversion. He conceded at the outset of “Virginias Verger” that it is sinful for Christians to steal land away from heathens; normally, only “vacant places” in a country are rightfully possessed by colonizers. The natives’ violation of natural law, however, opened the way for just conquest of “these barbarians, borderers, and out-lawes of humanity.” The very earth, he argued, “seems distempered with such bloudy potions and cries that she is ready to spue out her inhabitants [the buried dead]: Justice cryeth to God for vengeance, and in his name adjureth prudence and fortitude to the execution.”

  For John Smith, word of the attack came less as a surprise than as an affirmation of old beliefs. It was obvious that the natives did not like seeing the English plant themselves nearby. Gifts of English copper crowns and English houses, Smith recognized, would not cause the native leaders to lose sight of the fact that the English were a rival power. If the colonists kept up their strength and their caution, they could do business with the natives, to be sure. As for the colonists’ dropping the most elementary security to show the natives their good faith and kindness, as for the colonists wanting to be loved—well, that was simply foolish. On the frontier of Virginia, as on the battlefields of Hungary, commanders who substituted wishful thinking for facts were a mortal danger to their men.

  Hearing and reading the stories from Virginia over the years, Smith had been “amazed,” he wrote, that the natives had been “imploied in hunting and fowling with our fowling peeces [guns], and our men rooting in the ground about tobacco like swine; besides that, the salvages that doe little but continually exercise their bow and arrowes, should dwell and lie so familiarly amongst our men that practiced little but the spade.” Smith had read the 1621 letter from the skeptical minister Jonas Stockham to the Virginia Company council; Stockham, Smith said, had been right all along.

  Nonetheless, the March 22 tragedy drew Smith into the same “labyrinth of melancholy” (in his words) as his countrymen. Part of the reason was personal: among the dead was Nathaniel Powell, a 1607 settler who had been part of Smith’s small band of adventurers and supporters in the early years. Powell had contributed favorable accounts of Smith’s leadership to William Symonds’s Proceedings. After devoting twelve years of his life and labor to the betterment of the colony, Powell had been rewarded in 1619 with a six-hundred-acre plantation, which he proudly named Powell-brooke. He had settled down and married. As Smith remembered him, he was “one of the first planters, a valiant souldier, and not any in the countrey better knowne than him.” But Powell, like so many others, was the victim of the colony’s “over-conceited power and prosperitie,” with the result that the natives killed him and his wife, Joyce, and “butcher-like hagled [hacked] their bodies.”

  The proper course of action, Smith thought, was obvious. In past years, “soldiers” had been ordinary working colonists on temporary military duty. Now, as Smith saw it, the necessity to drive the natives away and protect against future attacks made it imperative to establish a professional, full-time fighting force. Smith set pen to paper to make an offer to the Virginia Company:

  If you please I may be transported with a hundred souldiers and thirty sailers by the next Michaelmas, with victuall, munition, and such necessary provision, by Gods assistance, we would endeavor to inforce the salvages to leave their country, or bring them in that feare and subjection that every man should follow their businesse securely. . . .14

  The company did not have the funds to hire a hundred soldiers, however. The council suggested that Smith take on the project himself, at his own expense, in return for half of whatever he could plunder from the natives. Smith walked away from the insulting and ill-informed proposition. “Except it be a little corne at some time of the yeare is to be had, I would not give twenty pounds for all the pillage is to be got amongst the salvages in twenty years,” he noted.

  Although the colonists would have to take action against the natives on their own, the news of the massacre did bring forth an enormous supply of armaments from the mother country. The company immediately sent forty-two barrels of gunpowder, and King James made a gift of weapons from his supply: a thousand halberds (spears with axlike blades), a thousand light muskets, three hundred pistols, a hundred brigandines (armored vests), four hundred chain-mail shirts and coats, four hundred bows, eight hundred sheaves of arrows, and two thousand iron helmets. A private donor gave another sixty chain-mail coats.

  The company sent all of the materiel to Virginia except for the bows and arrows, the donation of which had put the company in a quandary. While the bows and arrows were obsolete for warfare in Europe, they could serve effectively against the enemy in Virginia. The difficulty was that the natives were better-trained archers than the colonists, and it would be potentially disastrous to put hundreds of metal arrows within their reach. Yet to turn the gift away, offending the king in his moment of generosity, was scarcely any more attractive. The company’s council arrived at the solution of ordering the bows and arrows to be deposited on Bermuda en route to the mainland—“in a readiness against there should be occasion to use them in Virginia,” as the councilors tactfully expressed it. There the cache stayed.

  Governor Wyatt, after recovering from the shock of the massacre, ordered the majority of the plantations to be abandoned. It was clear that the colonists had heightened their vulnerability to attack by spreading the settlements so far distant; they could neither warn nor aid their neighbors in case of trouble. To make the colony defensible, Wyatt relocated all of the nine hundred or so survivors either to Jamestown or to one of the five plantations that he had decided to keep in English hands. The college lands were left behind, along with the notion of founding a college for the natives. The first retaliatory raids got under way in June with two expeditions against the Rappahannocks. Wyatt subsequently ordered his predecessor, Sir George Yeardley, to “make warr, kill, spoile, and take by force or otherwise whatsoever boote of corne, or any thing else he can attain unto, from any the salvadges our enemies.”

  The company sent a letter to Wyatt and his council in August, patently written with an eye to d
iverting blame from the the company’s own policies in setting the stage for the massacre:

  We have to our extreame grief understood of the great massacre executed on our people in Virginia, and that in such a manner as is more miserable then the death it self; to fall by the hands of men so contemptible; to be surprised by treacherie in a time of known danger . . . and almost guiltie of the destruction by a blindfold and stupid entertaining of it; which the least wisdome or courage suffised to prevent even on the point of execution: are circumstances, that do add much to our sorrow....15

  After that starkly unsympathetic preamble, the company urged the colonists to undertake “perpetual warre without peace or truce.”

  King James’s weapons arrived late in the year, together with another letter from the company. In this missive, the council scolded Wyatt for ordering the withdrawal from most of the plantations. “We conceave it a sinne against the dead, to abandon the enterprize, till we have fully settled the possession, for which so many of our brethren have lost theire lives.” The council then repeated its admonition to pursue unstinting warfare: “a sharp revenge upon the bloody miscreants,” it directed, “even to the measure that they intended against us, the rooting them out for being longer a people uppon the face of the Earth.”16

  The leadership in Virginia fully agreed with the goal of exterminating the natives. “Wee have much anticipated your desires by setting uppon the Indyans in all places,” Wyatt responded on January 20, 1623.

  We have slaine divers [diverse, many], burnte their townes, destroyed their wears [fishing weirs] and corne. . . . It is most aparant that they are an enemy nott suddenly to be destroyde with the sworde by reasone of theire swyftnes of foote, and advantages of the woode . . . but by the way of starvinge and all other means that we can possiblely devise we will constantlie pursue their extirpatione. By computation and confessione of the Indyans themselves we have slayne more of them this yeere, then hath been slayne before since the begininge of the colonie.17

  London’s feigned ignorance of its own culpability, however, was too much for Wyatt and his council to stomach.

  Wheras in the begininge of your letters by the [ship] Trewlove you pass soe heavie a censure uppon us as if we alone were guiltie, you may be pleased to consider what instructions you have formerly given us, to wynn the Indyans to us by a kind entertayninge them in our houses, and if it were possible to cohabitt with us, and how ympossible it is for any watch and warde to secure us against secrett enemies that live promiscouslie amongst us, and are harbored in our bosomes, all histories [accounts of the massacre] and your owne discourse may sufficyently informe you.18

  Notwithstanding the colonists’ aggressive tactics, they still had much to fear from the natives, who continued to make periodic smaller raids. In addition, a series of circumstances brought about near-famine conditions: the loss of many men just before planting season, the danger of fresh attacks on laborers in the fields, and the need to divert men from field work to guard duty meant that there was little to harvest in the autumn of 1622. Inadequate diet, disease, and renewed attacks from the natives would kill more colonists over the year than the massacre itself had—more than five hundred, by one account.

  Letters sent home in March and April of 1623 told of despair. “To write of all crosses and miseries which have befallen us at this time we are not able: The Lord hath crossed us by stricking most of us with sicknes and death,” wrote Samuel Sharpe. “Thorp he hath brought such misery upon us by letting the Indians have their head and none must controll them,” William Capps complained to John Ferrar, the company’s former deputy treasurer. “Instead of a plantation itt [Virginia] will shortly get the name of a slaughter house,” opined a visitor, Nathaniel Butler. Colonist Edward Hill wrote to his brother Joseph, “We lyve in the fearfullest age that ever Christians lyved in.”

  An enduring mystery is the number of African deaths in the massacre. Waterhouse’s roster of the dead did not include any Africans; if any had appeared in the list, he or she would certainly have been identified as “a negro” or in some similar form, in keeping with the custom of the day. (A few white, non-English victims did appear on the list, such as “Francis, an Irishman” and “Mathew, a Polander.”) This raises the possibility that all of the Africans were spared, whether on account of good luck, their greater caution around the natives, or a feeling of solidarity on the part of the natives themselves. Because the list was explicitly intended for the benefit of the victims’ heirs at home, however, it is not clear that Waterhouse would have included any African dead in the first place. A high proportion of the Africans in Virginia did die around this period—their numbers fell from thirty-two in 1620 to twenty-three in 1624, or by nearly a third—but they could have died from the same malnutrition and illnesses that were killing the whites.

  The company continued to recruit new settlers with promises of ready wealth to be had thanks to the labors of those now dead. What time could be more opportune, many of the newcomers must have reckoned. No doubt some were moved by a desire to aid an important national enterprise. Others, as in years past, were recalcitrant or otherwise unemployable youths sent abroad by their parents. One of these was Richard Frethorne of Martin’s Hundred, who arrived around Christmas of 1622, and soon wished he had not:

  Loveing and kind father and mother, my most humble duty remembered to you hopeing in God of your good health, as I my selfe am at the making [writing] hereof, this is to let you understand that I your child am in a most heavie case by reason of the nature of the country is such that it causeth much sicknes . . . and when we are sicke there is nothing to comfort us; for since I came out of the ship, I never ate anie thing but peas, and loblollie (that is water gruell) as for deare or venison I never saw anie since I came into this land, ther is indeed some fowl, but wee are not allowed to goe, and get yt, but must worke hard both earlie, and late for a messe of water gruell, and a mouthful of bread, and beife. . . .

  People crie out day, and night, Oh that they were in England without their lymbes and would not care to loose anie lymbe to bee in England againe, yea though they [would have to] beg from doore to doore, for wee live in feare of the enimy everie hour. . . .

  If you love me you will redeeme me suddenlie [pay off my indenture immediately], for which I doe intreate and begg....19

  Throughout 1622 and early 1623, raiding parties from the colony continued to strike at the native towns, stealing their corn, destroying what the raiders could not carry away, and setting their homes to the torch. The natives, too, were feeling the effects of a diminished food supply. In late March, Opechancanough sent a messenger to Martin’s Hundred proposing a truce. The gist of the message, as Wyatt and his council summarized it for London, was “that blud inough had already been shed on both sides, that many of his people were starved by our takinge away their corne and burninge theire howses,” and so Opechancanough asked for his people to be able to plant freely in some of their territories. If so, he said, he would release twenty English who had been taken prisoner on March 22, and would also allow the English to plant in peace.

  The English had been frustrated by their inability to achieve a truly decisive blow against the natives, with their capacity to vanish into the woods. Opechancanough’s offer opened up an appealing alternative: not peace, but the appearance of peace. If the natives came to feel safe, Wyatt and the council decided, it would be all the easier to surprise them. Two could play at the game of treachery. In the words of George Sandys, the colony’s treasurer in Virginia (and brother of Sir Edwin), the English would “trie if wee can make them as secure as wee were, that we may follow their example in destroying them.” (Emphasis in original.) The colonists readily assented to Opechancanough’s proposal.

  The opportunity to betray Opechancanough came on the very day the peace was ratified. On May 22, 1623, William Tucker sailed with a dozen colonists to the Pamunkey River to meet with the Powhatan leader and to receive the English captives. Opechancanough was accompanied
by the chief of the Kiskiack tribe and a large contingent of his own men. After many speeches were made on both sides, Tucker offered to share the contents of a large wooden cask of white wine that he had brought for the occasion—wine that had been laced with poison by the colony’s physician, John Pott. Tucker and his English interpreter made a show of drinking first; their drinks had been drawn from a separate container out of the natives’ sight. Opechancanough somehow survived, but a large number of the natives fell from poisoning in the countermassacre (around two hundred, by an estimate at the time). Tucker’s men encountered more native men afterward and shot some fifty of them. They released Opechancanough’s English prisoners and brought home a collection of native scalps.20

  Governor Wyatt recognized the lasting significance of the March 22 attack with a decree shortly before the first anniversary of the event. To ensure it would not be forgotten, Wyatt ordered that March 22 would now be an annual occasion for the colonists to abstain from work and give prayers of thanksgiving, in observance of “God’s most mercifull deliverance of so many” from the natives on that date. The General Assembly enacted the holiday into law the next year.

  Opechancanough had expected the event to have an epochal effect on English attitudes, but an effect of a very different kind. Shortly after the attack—shortly after he brought the sky down on the English—he had boasted to the chief of the Patawomecks that “before the end of two moons” there would not be a single Englishman left in their lands. He was convinced, clearly, that the blow would force the English to recognize his superior strength and to evacuate the colony while they could.