The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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The constant, often unexpected arrivals of shipload after shipload of sickly, disoriented passengers in a climate that was debilitatingly hot and humid, lacking supplies to carry them over the first phase of resettlement, destined to be housed in crowded huts until they could be distributed, often to places other than their intended destinations—all of this brought repeated outcries from the resident leaders. “I pray sir,” Governor George Yeardley (1618–21) wrote Sandys, “give me both tyme to provide meanes and to build and settell” before you send one load after another. At least, he said, he must be warned: “had not your zealous desires over hasted you and the passage at sea bin soe unfortunate … whereby I had no warning at all given to provide for these people, I should have bine able to have done much better than now I can.” But, sponsored more by private developers than by the company, lot after lot of new settlers continued to arrive—vagrant children, convicts, artisans, farmers, and farmhands from all over England—utterly unfamiliar with conditions in semitropical lowlands. They suffered diseases for which they had no immunities, and moved off, those who survived the first shock, to nascent farms scattered along one hundred miles of riverside land.17
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These farms, increasingly “private plantations,” multiplied remarkably—dangerously as it proved—in the years of Sandys’s ascendancy. In 1618 there had been sixteen settlements, mainly clustered in the middle area near Jamestown and in the western district, around Bermuda City and Coxendale. In 1619 eleven more were founded; in 1620, three more; in 1621, four; in 1622, nine. These new plantations were given names—mostly personal, often romantic and alliterative, sometimes mysterious: Jordan’s Journey, Pace’s Paines, Causey’s Care, Chaplaine’s Choice, Archer’s Hope, Martin’s Brandon, Tanks Weyanoke, Curls, Warrascoyack (or Bennett’s Welcome). They were scattered randomly about the extensive riverside lands and were widely separated: in fact the company required the new settlements to be spaced ten miles apart.18
Some were staked out at immense scale. The patent for Berkeley Hundred, a speculative venture sponsored by five of the company’s major investors and designed, ultimately, to provide homes for “many land-hungry people” in Gloucestershire, contained twelve and a half square miles, with four miles of frontage on the James. Martin’s Hundred, an “enormous corporate settlement” led by the company’s lawyer, Richard Martin, and Sir John Wolstenholme, “one of the City’s greatest merchants,” was said by some to contain 21,500 acres, by others 80,000, by still others 800,000, and it was generally known to have ten miles of riverfront. Southampton’s (or Smith’s) Hundred was patented at 80,000 acres.19
In these major properties, great efforts were made to establish lucrative farming communities and fortified compounds. The owners, in combinations typical of an emerging pattern of merchant-planter partnerships, sent over men, equipment, cattle, supplies, arms and armor, and plans for cultivation and construction on the patented lands, some of which would be farmed by, or more likely for, the owners themselves, most of which would be rented out to tenants in small parcels. The most successful of these enterprises represented very sizable investments. Recruiting, fully equipping, and transporting one man to Virginia with supplies for his settlement in the colony cost approximately £20. Thus the backers of Berkeley Hundred spent over £2,500 to send over ninety people in 1619 and 1620, and it took over £6,000 to establish Southampton Hundred. The results in such exceptional cases, we know from the work of archaeologists, were not merely tobacco plantations but scattered agricultural communities. Governor Yeardley’s Flowerdieu Hundred, for example, on the south shore of the James, a year after its sale in 1624 to Capt. Abraham Peircey, supported a population of fifty-seven (among them seven blacks: four men, two women, and a child), organized into ten “musters” or separate households. Each of these farming units within the Flowerdieu patent, increasingly tobacco producers, possessed its own store of basic food supplies, equipment, and arms. The main farm, Peircey’s, included thirty-six servants, ten dwelling houses, three storehouses, four tobacco sheds, two boats, a windmill, twenty-five cattle, and nineteen swine, plus three hundred bushels of corn and peas on hand, thirteen hundred pounds of fish, six pieces of ordnance, numerous firearms with powder and lead, two “murderers” (breech-loaded cannon), fifteen suits of armor, and twenty swords. Most of the Flowerdieu houses were palisaded, and “ye whole necke [of land] is well railed in.”20
Of one of the more substantial establishments in the years of Sandys’s leadership, Shirley Hundred, much is known. Financed and settled by Francis, John, and Nathaniel West, the younger brothers of Lord De La Warr, the property was located partly on an island in the James and partly on the river’s north shore. In 1625 an incomplete inventory listed sixty-one people at Shirley Hundred, living on seventeen farms. Five of the farm units were worked by nuclear families, with or without servants, who claimed seven houses. Nine units were farmed by adult males, who had among them seven houses, nine servants, and eight “partners”; three units were headed by widows, one of whom had two servants, while another had none. Most of the farms had some kind of fortification, and the most prosperous of them were well staffed and supplied. Richard Biggs’s household included his wife, who had followed him to Virginia after eight years, an infant son, two young cousins who had followed after six years, and four recently arrived servants. Biggs’s farm had three buildings, one boat, supplies of corn, peas, and fish, six firearms with powder and lead, two “compleate” suits of armor, eight cattle, twenty-one swine, and thirty poultry.
Evidence of initial affluence has been unearthed at the Shirley site: fragments of imported Chinese (Wan Li) porcelain, delftware pottery, medicine vials, window glass, and some silver utensils. But most of the houses consisted of a single dirt-floored room and loft, some of them adjacent to a tobacco storage house or other farmyard shelters. A third of Shirley’s adult population, whose leaders were well-connected gentlemen, were bonded servants—a rough, contentious lot drawn from some of the most deprived elements of English society. One, the son of a London porter, was convicted of raping four girls in Virginia and was executed; another was one of the very few survivors of the shipment of one hundred children from the Bridewell correctional hospital; a third sustained such injuries in a shipboard fight just before landing that he died shortly after his arrival.21
But the most elaborate private entitlement in Sandys’s time, and the most fully developed, was Martin’s Hundred. Between 1618 and 1621 its ambitious sponsors sent over at least 280 settlers on seven vessels—220 in 1618 alone—complete with a large quantity of equipment, supplies, farm animals, arms, and building materials. Its satellite farms were scattered through several miles of north shore territory, but its core lay in “Wolstenholme Town,” a farming compound that archaeologists have recovered in great detail and that has been depicted in a vivid modern painting.
Wolstenholme Town was in effect a rudimentary farming village of fifty or sixty people—perhaps one-quarter of the Hundred’s total population at its height. The town contained a fenced-in company compound (a longhouse and store), a sizable company barn for storage of goods before shipment, at least one adjacent cottage-homestead, and several nearby, all dominated by a palisaded fort. That key structure, an irregular rectangle with parapets and a watchtower-gun platform with a clear view downriver, was modeled on an Irish “bawn” and contained the leader’s house and sheds. Its quarter-acre enclosure provided protective shelter for the villagers, and perhaps their animals, if the settlement came under attack.
Yet Wolstenholme Town, a model construction of the ambitious Sandys years, was a primitive affair. The fields of this riverside clearing were still pocked with tree stumps, and its dozen or so buildings, like most of Virginia’s structures in this era, were lightly constructed of wattle-and-daub walls (panels of woven sticks plastered over with clay, between posts sunk a few feet into the ground) and covered with roofs of thatch. They were small. A typical servant’s house was nothing more than an e
nlarged hut: overall fourteen by twelve feet. The original “longhouse” measured only twenty by eighteen; the leader’s “big house,” perhaps thirty-six by nineteen. They were dirt floored and poorly lit and ventilated. The leaders, of gentry origins like those at Shirley Hundred, brought with them some decorative crockery of European manufacture and in addition fancy spurs and elegant swords and armor. There is archaeological evidence of glazed delftware tiles, glass bottles, ornamental fireplace tongs, and enough window glass and lead strips to suggest that, while most buildings had shutters or oiled paper to cover wall openings, at least one had proper windows. But these fineries were residues, emblems of a better existence than that of scattered frontier encampments in which life was so precarious that the population could not begin to reproduce itself.22
The death rate in these larger properties, as well as on the ordinary farms, continued to be devastating. We do not know how many of the 280 settlers sent over to Martin’s Hundred survived the journey, but approximately half of those who did were dead by the end of 1621. A year after 34 men were sent to Berkeley Hundred to join 4 already on the property, 31 were reported dead, 2 of them “slayne.” Of the 120 men and boys sent on the Seaflower to Bennett’s Welcome in 1621, only 10 were alive in 1623, and more than half of the deaths were the result of disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition.
Optimists among the settlers—and there continued to be such—groped for explanations of the colony’s miseries that might relieve the concerns of the colony’s backers. George Thorpe, the enthusiastic, evangelizing leader of the Berkeley plantation, wrote late in 1620 that he had never been in better health than he was then, after almost seven months in the colony. There was no shortage of good food in the colony, he insisted, nor even of good drink, for, he reported, they had found a way of making such excellent liquor out of Indian corn that he preferred it to “good stronge Englishe beare.” “More doe die here of the disease of theire minde,” he insisted, “then of theire body by havinge this countrey[’s] victualls over-praised unto them in England,” and they suffer too by “not knowinge they shall drinke water here.” The colony was prospering, he wrote, and his mission to improve the lives and spiritual estate of the Indians was succeeding. He hoped his wife and children would join him, and he advised his close friend, John Smyth, steward of the Berkeley Hundred in Gloucestershire and a sponsor of the Berkeley plantation, to send his younger son to Virginia, well equipped with servants and cattle.
It was bad advice. Thorpe’s optimism betrayed him. He was dead by early 1622—murdered by the Indians, and mutilated. He was decapitated, John Smith reported in his Generall Historie, his body hacked to pieces “with such spight and scorn … as is unfitting to be heard with civill eares.”23
CHAPTER 5
“A Flood, a Flood of Bloud”
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RACE RELATIONS HAD TAKEN a strange turn after the ambiguous “peace” of 1614. Powhatan’s personal dominance, essentially moderating if not conciliatory, quickly faded. Uncertain and confused in his relations with the English, he withdrew from the leadership of his people in 1617 and died the next year. His successor, his more belligerent, enterprising, and realistic brother Opechancanough, understood the mortal threat to the tidewater tribes that the expansion of English settlements implied. In 1618, the year that Sandys took over control of the company in London, he began planning for a coordinated attack, by all the tribes he could assemble, that would reassert the Powhatans’ control of the coastal region and with it their sense, if not of their superiority over the aggressive English, then of the autonomy they seemed to have lost. He did not intend to drive the English off the land, to exterminate them in genocidal warfare. The English were useful, if properly confined, kept within a careful balance of forces; the problem was how to confine them and thus reestablish the coherence of life that was being destroyed by English expansionism. His aim was to strike a single, devastating blow, a violent coup that would drive the English into a limited eastern enclave from which they might conduct their trade. The situation that developed between 1618 and 1622 was therefore paradoxical, for the company, under Sandys, was also developing a plan for future race relations—an ostensibly benevolent plan but one no less ethnocentric and no less dangerous to their opponents’ survival.
Sandys, a son of the Archbishop of York, had taken holy orders at Oxford, and though a merchant and man of affairs, he never abandoned his religious commitment. Under his vigorous leadership, the elaborate plans for the development of the colony and the rationale for its promotion were cast increasingly in terms of rescuing the Indians from paganism and thereby converting them to European civility. The conversion of the Indians had been one of the company’s stated goals from the beginning, and the Anglo-Powhatan War of 1609–14 had been seen by many of the English involved as a holy war fought “under the banner of Jesus Christ.” But though missionary zeal had surfaced repeatedly in the colony over the years—as in Rolfe’s passionate justification of his marriage to Pocahontas as a holy obligation “to make her a Christian” (a passion, he insisted, in no way contaminated by an “unbridled desire of carnall affection”)—it had faded amid the turmoil of war, disease, and the expansion of settlement.1
Sandys and his colleagues, determined to devise the broadest possible appeal for increased funding, and sincere in their religious commitments, reawakened the gospel mission and issued a flood of pronouncements aimed at making the advancement of the colony not only a national cause but a religious crusade. Governor Yeardley was instructed to set aside ten thousand acres for “the building and planting of a college for the training up of the children of those infidels in true religion, moral virtue, and civility, and for other godly uses.” Thorpe, deeply sympathetic to the Indians, determined to see them treated with kindness and understanding, and convinced that they were “very loving, and willing to parte with their children” for conversion, was made the overseer of the college and its lands. The instructions to Governor Wyatt in 1621 went beyond institutional projects. He was told to see to it that “no injurie or oppression bee wrought by the English against any of the natives of that countrie wherby the present peace may be disturbed”; he was also to find Indian children for conversion and education in preparation for the college; and above all, he was “to converse” with the natives and “labor amongst them … that therby they may growe to a likeing and love of civillty and finallie bee brought to the knowledge and love of God and true religion.”
For such benevolent purposes, private donors were eager to contribute. An anonymous benefactor (“Dust and Ashes”) gave first £550 in gold for the conversion of the Indians and their subsequent apprenticeship in trade, then followed that with £450 for the company to send eight or ten Indian children to England for education, to be clothed “as the children of Christes Hospitall do.” Another gave £300 for the education of ten Indians and an annual stipend for settlers who would supervise their preparatory education. The shipboard preaching of the Rev. Patrick Copland led the crew and passengers of one East India ship to raise over £70 to support a collegiate school in Virginia, and the mariners of another gave over £66. By 1620 such contributions totaled over £2,000. And the company, to advance the cause of Anglo-Powhatan conciliation, voted support for the abandoned Indian women who had accompanied Pocahontas to London, made careful selection of the plantations permitted to house Indian children, prohibited Indian children from being transported to the alien climate of England, and dispatched to America ministers who could be relied on to “allure the heathen people to submit themselves to the scepter of Gods most righteous and blessed kingdome.”
But however useful the gospel appeal was for fund-raising in England, it did little to divert the settlers in Virginia from expanding tobacco planting as far and as quickly as they could. With tobacco prices high in England, with private plantations being started up on both sides of the James, from Chesapeake Bay to Henrico, and with immigrants flooding in to serve as tenants and general laborers, acre after a
cre of private land was scratched open to cultivation in a pell-mell rush for quick profits, with little regard to physical protection, company projects, or public welfare. Each of the new plantations added to the encroachments on Indian land, yet not systematically and not comprehensively. There were no sharp boundaries. The two worlds permeated each other. New clearings sliced into tribal lands, to be surrounded by Indian camping and hunting grounds. The English commonly visited Indian settlements, and the natives wandered among the scattered plantations, where they were welcomed for trade. In many settlements they were fed at the settlers’ tables, and they were even reported to be “commonly lodged in [the colonists’] bed-chambers.”2
Contact between the races was thus continuous and, despite occasional raids and skirmishes, relatively peaceful. The stability was ostensibly reinforced by the terms of a “peace” and “league” that Opechancanough confirmed with Governor Yeardley in 1621, which was extended in a series of remarkable concessions the Indian leader agreed to. Opechancanough promised to encourage trade with the settlers, to assist in the search for the South Sea and “certaine mynes,” to come to terms on mutual defense, to permit the exchange of families, to give up the mysterious huskanaw ceremony (“makinge their children black boyes”), and since, he told the receptive Thorpe, God apparently “loved us [the English] better then them,” to take instruction in the Christian religion.
Thorpe felt justified in his proselytizing labors, though it was uphill work. The heathens, he wrote Sandys, “live round aboute us and are dayly con[v]ersant amongst us & yeat there is scarce any man amongst us that doth soe much as affoorde them a good thought in his hart.” Most in fact “give them nothinge but maledictions and bitter execrations.” A fierce misapprehension has developed, he noted, “that these poore people have done unto us all the wronge and iniurie that the malice of the Devil or man can affoord, whereas in my poore understandinge if there bee wronge on any side it is on o[u]rs who are not soe charitable to them as Christians ought to bee, they beinge (espetiallye the better sort of them) of a peaceable and vertuous disposition.” So he did what he could, indulging the Indians in every way possible. If the English attack dogs frightened them, he had the animals killed; if the dominant chief’s dwelling was too crude, he had “a faire house” built for him “after the English fashion”—all in an effort to reach them personally in the hope of their conversion.