Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Many of the survivors had fervently wished to do just that. Yet the overall reaction of the English defied Opechancanough’s expectations. Following the difficult first year after the massacre, the colonists adapted to the new conditions and harvested a substantial food supply. Not only did the colonists quickly take the military offensive, the influx from England increased their numbers: by the end of 1624, the colony’s population was up to its pre-attack level of a little over 1,200, and the colonists had spread out again into eighteen settlements beyond Jamestown. Governor Wyatt could truthfully advise the company that “the colonye hath worne owt the skarrs of the massacre”—apart from the psychological scars borne by the survivors. The population continued to increase rapidly to around 2,600 in 1629, to 3,200 in 1632, and to 5,200 in 1634.

  The March 22 attack took one last English casualty, however. Complaints from Virginia Company investors and reports of the continuing death toll after the massacre led King James to appoint a commission in April 1623, to investigate the condition of the company. The commission heard testimony in London and examined the company’s records. As the company had been under the control of Sir Edwin Sandys or his supporters since 1619, King James needed little impetus to strike a blow against it. When the commission reported on the extent to which the company had been sending English men and women to their doom in recent years, quite apart from the massacre, King James had ample justification to withdraw his charter. Of course, he had had much the same cause in the colony’s early years, but he had not harbored the same personal or philosophical animosity toward Sir Thomas Smythe, Sandys’s predecessor.

  In the fall of 1623, the king’s advisers, the Privy Council, offered to accept the company’s charter in return for one that would give the king greater oversight, while maintaining the investors’ ownership. The company’s council rejected the proposal—a fatal miscalculation. On May 24, 1624, two years, two months, and two days after the massacre, King James ordered the company dissolved. A staggering £200,000, the total of the private investment in the company since 1606, was wiped out. Virginia became a royal colony, meaning that it was now an arm of the king’s government. It would retain this status until the American War of Independence. For the moment, it was the first foundation stone of the British Empire.21

  The change in control of the colony did not lead to any change in policy toward the natives. The summer of 1624 saw a battle between eight hundred native archers and sixty armed colonists; the latter emerged victorious without the loss of one man. The war continued, to the advantage of the colonists, until a 1632 peace treaty brought the decade-long war to a close.

  Twenty years after the March 22 attack, the colonists in Virginia were still observing the date as a holiday of commemoration. Inevitably, however, memories of the event had faded. The colonists, of whom there were now around eight thousand, had settled on tobacco plantations along all the rivers of the region. They had again achieved security and prosperity. Like the gambler who has lost his fortune, but believes the next draw of the cards will make all the difference, Opechancanough decided to try his luck one more time.

  Skyfall came again to the English on April 18, 1644. With simultaneous attacks on numerous settlements, Opechancanough’s men killed even more than they had in 1622, somewhere between four and five hundred. Still, the impact was far smaller, given that the English population in Virginia had grown more than sixfold in the intervening years. The English quickly got back on a war footing and captured Opechancanough two years later. They understood him to be about a hundred years old: unable to walk, his muscles slack, and “his eye-lids became so heavy,” it was said, “that he could not see, but as they were lifted up by his servants.” The then-governor of the colony, Sir William Berkeley, intended to bring glory to himself by taking the infamous captive from Jamestown to London to show him off.

  An English soldier on duty in Jamestown, his name unrecorded, had other ideas. Within two weeks of Opechancanough’s imprisonment, the soldier found the opportunity to shoot the prisoner fatally in the back.

  Although Opechancanough’s war-making abilities were exceptional, his faulty understanding of English culture cost him dearly. In particular, he failed to grasp their tendency toward a cycle in which naïveté or indifference would be followed by an event of disillusionment and then extreme anger. The General Assembly boasted in 1646 that the natives were “so routed and dispersed that they are no longer a nation, and we now suffer only from robbery by a few starved outlaws.” About sixty years later, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the historian Robert Beverly could write regretfully, “The Indians of Virginia are almost wasted”—their numbers dwindled to perhaps six hundred and their lands down to a few small reservations. The colonists’ faulty understanding of their neighbors’ culture had also cost them over the years, but it was the natives, in the end, who suffered the worst.22

  15

  SMITH’S VISION FOR AMERICA

  John Smith’s visit to Pocahontas in early 1617 was a brief detour from his preparations for a third New England voyage. After Smith had said his goodbyes to her in Brentford, he made his way to Plymouth harbor to join the fleet of three small ships sponsored by a syndicate of investors in the southwest of England. Those investors, known as the Plymouth Company (or, more formally, the Virginia Company of Plymouth), had undertaken to finance a mission made up of a total of sixteen colonists, with Smith as their leader. It was a paltry effort. It was, nonetheless, the best that Smith could elicit after he had spent the previous summer evangelizing for New England among prospective investors in Cornwall and Devonshire.

  Whether the voyage had sixteen colonists or sixteen hundred turned out not to matter. Smith’s ships, like a hundred others in the harbor, were immobile while adverse winds kept them from the open ocean. For one week after another, Smith could only watch the skies with hope and fretfulness. A similar misfortune had befallen his first voyage to the New World in 1606–1607, when storms kept the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery stuck off the coast of England for a month. This time, however, the uncooperative weather persisted for three times as long. By the time it cleared, the chance for the voyage was over. “The season being past, the ships went for New-found-land [to fish], whereby my designe was frustrate,” Smith recalled.

  Smith had an income from his books, as well as a modest inheritance from his parents; he may still have had some of his reward money from his youthful service in Hungary. Living frugally, he continued to plot a return to New England for the planting of a colony. In 1618, he unsuccessfully approached Sir Francis Bacon, the king’s former attorney general and now his lord chancellor. He sent Bacon a proposal that was essentially a business plan, describing the value of the commodities to be reaped by a New England colony—fish, wood, and beaver skins, among others—and summarizing his own experience in the region. He detailed the financial success of the Dutch fishing fleet, a record that Smith said England could exceed with a permanent presence near the fishing grounds of New England and Newfoundland.

  Despite his extreme desire to win support for his dream, Smith refrained from dangling any specious claims of gold.

  And though I can promise noe mynes of gold [he wrote in closing], the Hollanders are an example of my projects, whose endevoures by fishing cannot be suppressed by all the kinge of Spaynes golden powers. Truth is more than wealth and industrious subjects are more availeable to a king then gold. And this is so certaine a course to gett both, as I thinke was never pro-pounded to any State for so small a charge, seeing I can prove it, both by examples, reason and experience. . . .

  In the interim I humbly desyre your Honor would be pleased to grace me with the title of your Lordshipps servant: Not that I desyre to shutt up the rest of my dayes in the chamber of ease and idlenes, but that I may be the better countenanced for the prosecution of this my most desyred voyage....1

  Smith received no reply from Bacon.

  Another opportunity for Smith would soon arise tha
nks to King James’s dislike for a faction of militant Protestants known as the Puritans. The king held that religious nonconformity had been the seed of long-lasting civil strife in the Netherlands and Scotland, and he wished none of it. What the Puritans sought went beyond freedom of conscience in the modern sense; a number of their disagreements with Anglicanism reached into the civic sphere of English life, including their opposition to theater and to the custom of playing sports on Sundays. In 1618, King James overruled local Puritan magistrates who attempted to ban Sabbath day sports. “When shall the common people have leave to exercise,” he demanded, “if not upon Sundays and holidays, seeing they must apply their labour, and win their living, in all working days?”

  On the scale of European religious repression, King James’s treatment of the Puritans was relatively mild. At his behest, the bishops of the Church of England fired around ninety of the most conspicuous Puritan ministers from Anglican churches. He banned the worship services of a breakaway group, dissenters within the dissenters, known as the Separatists. On the other hand, his sponsorship of a new Bible translation, now known as the King James Bible, came at the suggestion of a prominent Puritan clergyman; several Puritans were also on the team of translators.

  In any event, a group of 125 Separatists left England for Amsterdam in 1608. They became troubled by their inability to support themselves in Amsterdam with the trades they knew, and left after a year for Leiden, Holland. They also found it difficult to make a living in Leiden. In 1620, working through connections in England, they obtained a patent from the Virginia Company of London to establish a private plantation on the Hudson River, in the vicinity of what is now New York City, at the northern edge of the company’s territory.

  Smith heard about the Separatists’ plans through his own connections in Virginia Company circles, and hastened to write to them offering his services. Smith’s qualifications would have made him the ideal adviser, guide, and military commander for the Separatists in their projected colony. He knew the Atlantic coast of North America and its native peoples better than any Englishman alive. In terms of personality, however, Smith and the Separatists would have been a horrendous combination—both of them sure of their correctness in all things, both of them resistant to any direction or compromise.

  Perhaps having sensed this fundamental incompatibility, the Separatists opted to take Smith’s books and maps with them in lieu of Smith himself. They engaged a man with no North American experience, Miles Standish, as their military leader. Smith’s absence cost them even before they reached shore: bad navigation sent their ship, the now famous Mayflower, to Cape Cod instead of the Hudson. Smith, meanwhile, had once again seen his dream of involvement in a new colony pulled away from his grasp. It would be his last real chance—that is, assuming he had had a chance with the Separatists to begin with.2

  Smith was forty years old. He had spent eleven years since his return from Virginia, more than a quarter of his life, largely in frustration and disappointment. A man of weaker spirit, looking back on those times, might have withdrawn from the field altogether. Yet the ensuing years of Smith’s life would prove in some respects to be his most fertile. Channeling his energies once again into his writing, he would turn out a series of books promoting New England, instructing novice mariners in seamanship, and laying out an authoritative history of English colonization. His object, and his passion, remained the settlement and growth of an English New World.

  Sometime after the Separatist Pilgrims sailed for Virginia in August 1620, Smith edited and expanded his letter to Bacon into a small book, and saw it published in December under the title New EnglandsTrials (with “trials” meant in the sense of “attempts”). He followed it with a kind of author’s tour, addressing thirty or so of the major London guilds and encouraging them to invest in New England exploration. Two years later, he published an enlarged edition of New Englands Trials with a report on the first year of the Plymouth colony; “for want of experience,” Smith noted pointedly, they wandered “to and again, six weeks [actually five weeks] before they found a place they liked to dwell on.”

  In reaction to news of the March 22, 1622, massacre in Virginia, Smith added a digression on that event. While angry and heartsick over the results of the attack, he found it unnecessary to account for the attack by projecting a vile, subhuman nature onto the natives— unlike those formerly optimistic toward Anglo-Native relations, such as Samuel Purchas. When the natives attacked the Jamestown colony in its initial years, Smith said, they did so in pursuit of the colonists’ “weapons and commodities, that were rare novelties.” The March 22 attack had origins that were different, but equally grounded in the natives’ basic self-interest: “Now they feare we may beate them out of their dens, which lions and tygers would not admit [allow] but by force.”

  Needless to say, Smith’s recognition of Opechancanough’s motives did not translate into tenderness toward his cause. Smith emphasized that the attack should not deter Englishmen from occupying Virginia and New England. Pointing to his own record of success in keeping the Powhatans at bay, he argued that all the English needed to deal with the native threat was martial readiness—which, incidentally, he could provide. “For Virginia, I kept that country with 38 [around this number of colonists were left alive in early 1608], and had not to eate but what we had from the savages.” While accurate, it was a less-than-subtle pitch for his services.

  The year before, a new edition of Richard Knolles’s Generall Historieof the Turkes appeared in London. Its title mirrored those of other ambitious works of history during that era, works that traced the entire history of a nation from its beginnings to the present day. (Others of the genre included the Generall Historie of France by Jean de Serres, published in England in 1611, and the Generall Historie of the MagnificentState of Venice by a Frenchman named Thomas de Fougasses, which reached England in 1612.) Whether or not Smith actually bought a copy of Knolles’s book, it can be surmised that the tale of Smith’s former adversaries caught his attention.

  Hence, after completing the enlarged edition of his New Englands Trials, Smith tackled his most audacious work yet: a comprehensive history of English America, which he titled The Generall Historie of Virginia,New-England, and the Summer Isles [Bermuda]. The officers of the Virginia Company had considered the idea of commissioning a history of Virginia, but with a significant difference. The project they had in mind was a tribute to “the memory and fame of many of her worthies,” living and dead. Smith, however, meant to tell the unvarnished truth as he had seen it and heard it—letting the chips, and the daggers, fall where they may. There was also another difference: the Virginia Company’s proposed history never went beyond the discussion stage. Smith had his history fully outlined sometime in 1623 and on the streets of London in July of 1624.

  Smith pieced much of the Generall Historie together from earlier works by himself and others. The resulting work was as comprehensive as its title promised. The first of its six parts set out the early years of English exploration in North America, from the fateful spurning of Christopher Columbus by King Henry VII (which drove Columbus into the service of the Spanish) to the failed Roanoke colony and other efforts up to 1605. For these accounts, Smith drew on material compiled by the Reverend Richard Hakluyt in his 1589 Principall Navigations,Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation and by Samuel Purchas. The second part gave a detailed description of Virginia, essentially reprinting the text of his Map of Virginia. The third was an enlarged version of the Proceedings, setting out a history of the Jamestown colony up to his departure in 1609. Part four picked up the story and continued it to the royal investigation of the Virginia Company in 1623–1624. The fifth gave an account of English activities on Bermuda, most notably the castaways of Sir George Somers’s fleet. In the final part, he turned to New England, incorporating his Description of New England, New Englands Trials, and other accounts.

  Characteristic of the period, the Generall Historie was accompanied by commen
datory verses—poetical words of praise for the author and his book. Fifteen such verses appeared in the Generall Historie, one of them contributed by Samuel Purchas and another four written by current or former colonists. Colonist David Wiffin recalled that while Smith governed, neither “force of theirs [the natives’], nor guile / Lessened a man of thine; but since (I rue) / In Brittish blood they did deeply imbrue.” (Two years after the March 22 massacre, it was still not far from Wiffin’s mind; in all likelihood, it was not far from the mind of anyone involved with Virginia.) John Codrington, signing himself “your sometime souldier,” urged Smith to disregard the “spight of envie” from naysayers. Raleigh Crashaw lauded him for handling the natives “with due discretion, and undanted heart . . . In deepest plunge of hard extreamitie.” Michael Fettiplace, William Fettiplace, and Richard Wiffin, identifying themselves as “souldiers under Captaine Smiths command,” offered one of the lengthiest of the verses, a thirty-eight-line accolade to his skill in extricating them from hopeless situations.

  During the time Smith was preparing the Generall Historie, the royal commission on the Virginia Company sought Smith’s insights for its investigation. The commissioners posed Smith a set of written questions, and Smith printed his responses in the book. His answers returned to a theme he had been sounding from the start: the key to a successful colony was to have the right kinds of colonists in place— hardworking laborers, a small number of capable leaders on the scene (instead of armchair experts setting policy in London), and soldiers for security against outside threats. “To rectifie a common-wealth with debauched people is impossible . . . for there is no country to pillage as the Romans found: all you must expect from thence must be by labour.”3

  Other additions that Smith made to the Generall Historie highlighted the bravery and accomplishments of those who had aided him, and whom he admired: among these were Anas Todkill, the former manservant to John Martin; John Russell, the “exceeding heavie” gentleman who had helped Smith fight his way out of the 1609 ambush at Werowocomoco; and Pocahontas, who had died at Gravesend soon after Smith last spoke with her. Smith reprinted his letter recommending Pocahontas to Queen Anne, and told the stories of his conversations in England with Pocahontas and Tomocomo. Although Smith was a firm nationalist, his account was forthright enough to give the English the worst of both conversations, with her rebuke that “your countriemen will lie much” and Tomocomo’s lamentation of King James’s incivility.