A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  Forty years later, I found Kelso, a trim white-haired man in shorts and deck shoes, sifting dirt in a pit by the river. “I guess I’m someone who tends to question what he’s told,” he said. Raised in Ohio, Kelso had been taught the conventional line: “Jamestown was a failure,” he recited, “a footnote to the triumph of Plymouth.” Later, when he became an archaeologist in Virginia, Kelso kept hearing that the Jamestown site was a dry hole, just as he’d been told on his first visit. But in the 1990s, he and a team of colleagues went in for another look.

  Over the course of a decade, they’d unearthed trench lines and post holes delineating the foundation of Jamestown’s fort, only 15 percent of which had washed away. They also found house sites, scores of graves, and thousands of artifacts. As it turned out, there was more of historic Jamestown than had ever been found of Roanoke or the original Plymouth colony. To Kelso’s contrarian eye, archaeology also contradicted much of the conventional wisdom about early Virginia.

  “It’s easy to find failure here,” he said, “but that’s not the whole story. There were capable, hardworking people and good decisions made.”

  Using his trowel as a pointer, Kelso traced the outline of the fort. It was triangular, occupied the island’s highest ground, and was built with bulwarks, a moat, and an arc of defensive earthworks, all state-of-the-art military engineering in the early seventeenth century. The colonists had constructed the fort in three weeks—astonishingly fast, given that they had to dig a thousand-foot-long trench and cut and raise a fourteen-foot palisade. “Men who were loafing and disorganized,” Kelso said, “couldn’t have done this.”

  There were also signs that colonists quickly adapted to their environs. Shedding their hot, heavy armor, they refashioned it into buckets and other items. They sided their houses with Indian-style bark shingles, which were cooler than the thick clay walls common in England. And archaeologists had found considerable evidence of craft work and industry, including locally made brick, glass, nails, and barrels. “Their orders were to produce goods for export,” Kelso said, “and they certainly gave it a college try.”

  If the supposed idleness of colonists had been exaggerated, their suffering was not. Kelso showed me dirt marks tracing grave sites, like chalk lines at a crime scene. So far, the remains of seventy-two people had been found, often piled together in shallow holes without clothing or shroud. Half were in their twenties or younger. Their bones bore signs of hard labor, poor nourishment, and violence. One woman had five teeth in her head. The knee of a young man was shattered by a bullet, the leg of another pierced by an arrowhead. A piece of skull, fractured by blunt trauma, was found in a trash pit, discarded after a failed effort to trepan the skull and save the man’s life. Archaeologists had also found crude medical tools such as a spatula mundani, a narrow spoon used to treat extreme constipation by extracting hard stools.

  By 1610, at the end of the Starving Time, survivors at Jamestown occupied a virtual necropolis: the dead outnumbered the living by roughly ten to one. “If you’re looking for evidence of failure,” Kelso said, waving his trowel across the crowded graves, “there it is.”

  But once again, on-site research gave nuance to the story. Tree-ring analysis showed that Jamestown, like Roanoke, was settled during the onset of a severe drought. Only two hoes had been found, evidence that the Virginia Company had failed to equip colonists for farming. Whatever crops the English sowed would have failed, heightening pressure to extract food from Indians, whose own harvests had also suffered; Smith noted in 1608 that natives had little to trade, “their corne being that year bad.” The conflict between colonists and Indians was, at least in part, a desperate, Darwinian struggle.

  “The bottom line is that Jamestown endured,” Kelso said, returning to his work. “That’s success, even if it wasn’t pretty. And given what the people here had to overcome, it’s a miracle any of them survived.”

  THE SUPPLY FLEET that forestalled Jamestown’s abandonment in 1610 brought a new governor, Lord De La Warr, and a harsh shift in policy. To end the chaos, the colony’s London council licensed the ruthless suppression of internal dissent and external threats. De La Warr and his successors introduced martial law, whipping colonists for infractions such as missing church. A second offense of blasphemy was punished by having a lancet thrust through the tongue. Colonists who deserted or robbed from the storehouse were hanged, burned, “broken upon wheles,” and bound to trees until they starved. Even stealing flowers from another colonist’s garden became a capital offense.

  For Indians, the new regime was crueler still. Soon after De La Warr’s arrival, the English attacked a neighboring tribe that had vexed the colony since its founding. A troop led by George Percy “put some fiftene or sixtene to the Sworde,” burning houses and corn. After beheading one prisoner, Percy took the tribe’s “Queen” and her children aboard an English boat. But his soldiers began “to murmur” over their being spared. “Itt was Agreed upon,” Percy wrote, “to putt the Children to deathe the wich was effected by Throweinge them overboard and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water.”

  When Percy returned to Jamestown, Lord De La Warr was displeased; the “Queen,” he said, should be burned. At first, Percy demurred. “Haveinge seen so much Bloodshed thatt day,” he wrote, “I desyred to see no more and for to Burne her I did not holde itt fitteing.” In what passed for mercy at Jamestown, Percy gave the queen “A quicker dispatche.” Soldiers took her into the woods and “putt her to the Sworde.”

  Several years of savage warfare followed. Then, in 1613, Pocahontas came to the rescue again, though not of her own volition. An English mariner, Samuel Argall, learned she was visiting a tribe on the Potomac and decided to “possess myself of her by any stratagem,” to hold her in exchange for prisoners, arms, and tools Powhatan had seized from the English. With threats and bribes, Argall coaxed the Potomac chief to bring Pocahontas aboard his ship, where he feasted and then confined her. “She began to be exceeding pensive and discontented,” a colonist wrote. Argall sent a messenger to Powhatan, telling of the kidnapping and demanding English captives and property, and a large quantity of corn. “Then he should have his daughter restored, otherwise not.”

  Powhatan returned seven prisoners, a few tools and weapons, and a little corn. But the English weren’t satisfied. For almost a year, they awaited the full ransom. Then they took Pocahontas and 150 men to collect it in person. After a tense standoff and no answer from Powhatan, Pocahontas went ashore and met several of her kinsmen, curtly informing them: “If her father had loved her, he would not value her lesse than old swords, Peeces [guns] or Axes: wherefore shee would still dwell with the English men, who loved her.”

  One of the colonists certainly did. During Pocahontas’s captivity, she’d lived with a minister who tutored her in English and Christianity. Then aged about seventeen, she also came to know John Rolfe, a recently widowed settler in his late twenties. Since arriving in Virginia a few years before, Rolfe had experimented with tobacco seeds from the Caribbean. He had also fallen desperately in love.

  In an extraordinary letter to the colony’s governor, Rolfe wrote that his feelings for Pocahontas “hav a long time bin so intangled, and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde my selfe thereout.” By confessing “these passions of my troubled soule,” Rolfe put himself in some peril. The English regarded union with heathen natives as a grievous sin. Rolfe, a pious man, knew “the heavie displeasure which almightie God conceived against the sonnes of Levie and Israel for marrying strange wives.” His love for the member of a “barbarous” and “accursed” people also exposed him to the scorn of settlers, who would “taxe or taunt me.”

  But Rolfe was besotted, unable to control “the many passions and sufferings, which I have daily, hourely, yea and in my sleepe indured.” His torment, he assured the governor, wasn’t “the unbridled desire of carnall affection.” Rather, he felt compelled to marry Pocahontas, to save her soul and his own. She w
anted to become Christian, he wrote, possessed the “capablenesse of understanding” to do so, and gave a “great appearance of love to me.”

  We have only Rolfe’s words as evidence of her affection. According to another colonist, Pocahontas was already wife to an Indian warrior named Kocoum, of whom nothing more is known. Whatever her feelings toward Rolfe, the prospect of their marriage was attractive to everyone else. Both the Indians and the English were exhausted by warfare, and seeking a way to save face. Having failed to collect the full ransom for Pocahontas, the governor, “for the good of the plantation,” approved her marriage, and so did Powhatan.

  In April 1614, she was baptized “Rebecca” (after Isaac’s biblical bride, whom God told, “two nations are in thy womb,” one “mightier than the other”) and wed Rolfe, with two of her brothers and an uncle in attendance. “Ever since,” a colonist wrote later that year, “we have had friendly commerce and trade not only with Powhatan himself but also with his subjects round about us; so as now I see no reason why the colony should not thrive apace.”

  The colony did begin to prosper, thanks not only to the peace following the marriage but also to Rolfe’s introduction of West Indian tobacco. The native Virginia strain, one colonist wrote, was “weak and of a biting taste,” and yielded only a small leaf per plant. The imported species had a fuller, sweeter flavor and grew tall and bushy. Within a few years, settlers were growing tobacco to the exclusion of other crops and exporting it by the ton, at tremendous profit. Tobacco was the gold that Europeans had so long sought in North America and never found.

  IN 1616, THE Rolfes sailed for London with their year-old son, Thomas. The voyage was sponsored by the Virginia Company to trumpet the colony’s success and its “civilizing” of natives. The trip also gave Powhatan a chance to spy on England. He sent along a trusted priest, Tomocomo, telling him to record the number of people he saw in England with “notches on a stick,” so Powhatan could judge if the “multitudes” he’d heard about actually existed. The priest had to quickly abandon this census, and was likewise stunned by England’s abundant crops and trees; he said Indians believed colonists “came into their country for supply of these defects.”

  Tomocomo was also charged with discovering the fate of John Smith, whom Powhatan and his people evidently admired. For months after the Rolfes’ arrival, the captain kept his distance. When he finally appeared, his reunion with Pocohantas proved awkward. The naked Indian girl Smith had first met a decade before was now a wife, mother, and Christian, “and was become very formall and civill after our English manner.” Upon meeting Smith, he wrote, she gave him a “modest salutation” and “without any word she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented.”

  Only later did she speak, reminding Smith of the many promises he’d made to Powhatan. “What was yours should be his,” she said. “You called him father, being in his land a stranger.” Yet Smith had left Virginia, and thereafter the English “did tell us alwaies you were dead.” Indians doubted this, she added, “because your countriemen will lie much.” On this sour note, Smith ended his brief account of their visit.

  He noted with pleasure, however, that Pocahontas made a great impression on “divers courtiers” who met her in London. “They have seen many English ladies worse favored, proportioned, and behavioured.” She went with lords and ladies to balls and plays, including the Twelfth Night masque held at Whitehall Palace.

  Pocahontas also sat for a portrait, the only contemporary image of her that survives. The artist, or his patron, was intent on portraying Pocahontas as a thoroughly English gentlewoman. Unsmiling and stiffly posed, she sits swaddled in courtly attire—puffed sleeves, embroidered velvet mantle, starched lace collar, towering beaver hat—and clutches a fan of ostrich plumes. Except for her strong cheekbones and piercing almond eyes, she is barely recognizable as an Indian.

  A portrait of Pocahontas (a.k.a. Matoaka and

  Rebecca Rolfe) in London, 1616

  By then, she may no longer have felt like one. Pocahontas had known the English for half of her twenty years and lived among them, as Rebecca Rolfe, for the past three. An exceptionally intrepid woman—the mirror image of John Smith—she had inhabited three distinct worlds in her short life: Tsenacomacoh (the Indian name for Powhatan’s realm), colonial Virginia, and Stuart England. Having crossed the Atlantic, she gave signs of wanting to stay. In January 1617, a Londoner wrote that John Rolfe was about to return with his wife to Virginia, “sore against her will.”

  Then, as they waited for favorable winds, Pocahontas and Thomas fell ill. No symptoms were recorded, but the Rolfes had earlier removed from London to a country village, “Being offended by the Smoke of the Town.” Pocahontas and her son may have suffered from a respiratory ailment, possibly tuberculosis.

  Upon finally setting sail, the Rolfes traveled only a short way down the Thames when Pocahontas became too ill to go on. She was taken ashore at Gravesend, to a dockside cottage or inn. According to a local church registry: “March 21.—Rebecca Wrothe wyffe of Thomas Wroth gent. A Virginia Lady borne, here was buried in ye Chauncell.”

  This brief entry, misspelling her name and confusing those of her husband and her son, is the only record in Gravesend of Pocahontas’s death. Daughter to an Indian king, and a celebrity in London, she was just another traveler through the busy river port. The church where she was buried burned a century later, and its many graves became intermingled. To this day, no one knows precisely where Pocahontas’s remains lie.

  “My wife’s death is much lamented,” John Rolfe wrote in a letter two months after her burial. She had been comforted at the end, he said, by the apparent recovery of their two-year-old son. “All must die,” she told her husband, “but ’tis enough that her childe liveth.”

  He almost didn’t. Before the ship left the English coast, Thomas’s health faltered. Rolfe reluctantly left him at Plymouth, in the care of an admiral, and arranged for a brother to collect him. Rolfe then returned to Virginia, where he became a prominent official, married for a third time, to an Englishwoman, and had a daughter before he died in 1622, never having seen Thomas again.

  Thomas Rolfe recovered his health and moved back to Virginia at about the age of twenty, to a large plantation he’d inherited from his father. He seems to have identified wholly as an Englishman, and been accepted as one. He married the daughter of a leading colonist and made only one visit to his Indian relations, in 1641. Soon after, he became an officer in the colonial militia, which put down an Indian rebellion in 1644, effectively destroying the world in which his mother had been raised.

  Thomas Rolfe died in about 1675, having become, an early Virginia historian wrote, “a Person of Fortune and Distinction in this Country.”

  JOHN ROLFE, HUSBAND of Pocahontas and pioneer husbandman of tobacco, was as critical to Virginia’s survival as his wife, or the captain she allegedly saved. By experimenting with tobacco, Rolfe transformed Jamestown from a struggling startup venture to a thriving concern. His marriage ushered in a period of calm that gave the colony breathing space to grow and prosper. The union also offered hope to the English that their Indian neighbors could be peacefully “civilized” and Christianized.

  But in the centuries following Rolfe’s death, he was gradually airbrushed from American memory. By the time writers in the newborn United States began to celebrate Jamestown, many states had banned marriage between Indians and whites, which made the Rolfes’ union discomfiting. John Smith, on the other hand, seemed a perfect fit for the role of American hero: a man of action and dash, self-made, individualistic, iconoclastic. His “rescue” by Pocahontas also softened the story of Indians’ subjugation by Europeans. In art and writing, she blossomed into a nubile maiden, clasping the brave captain to her breast. The aftermath—her kidnapping, marriage to another man, and premature death—was all but forgotten.

  “John Rolfe is not our ancestor,” Vachel Lindsay wrote in a 1917 poem, “Our Mother Pocahontas.” “We rise fro
m out the soul of her.”

  At Jamestown’s historic park, there is no statue of Rolfe, only of Smith and Pocahontas. Inside the nearby church, bronze and marble memorials to Smith and Pocahontas hang side by side, like connubial tombstones. A small plaque to Rolfe, erected by the Tobacco Association of the United States, looks on from the opposite wall.

  When I returned to the park on Landing Day, the annual commemoration of Jamestown’s founding in May 1607, one of the activities was a tour led by Richard Cheatham, in colonial garb, playing the part of John Rolfe. Only three other visitors followed him through the park. “At best, you’ll find Rolfe in a few coloring books,” Richard complained afterward, over a sandwich at Jamestown’s Starving Time Café. “Rolfe was an innovator, open-minded in work and love. You’d think those are qualities that Americans would admire. But the only John at Jamestown anyone cares about is Smith.”

  There was one exception to this rule. Since Smith died childless, he was of only minor interest to Americans who cherished their blood ties to early Virginia. These descendants were a conspicuous presence on Landing Day: elegantly dressed, they formed a coven by a monument to Jamestown’s founders, busily swapping genealogical credentials while studying the pins on one another’s suits and dresses.

  “I trace back to the Rolfes, Paines, Wares, and Woodsons.”

  “Really? I’m kin to the Winston line. I have Bolling, too.”

  “Are you in the DAR?”

  “Hon, I don’t have the bosom for all those pins.”

  Eavesdropping on their chatter, I was reminded of Maori in New Zealand, who introduce themselves at ceremonies by reciting thirty generations of ancestors. Virginia genealogy seemed, if possible, even more labyrinthine.

  “There’s your Colonial Dames, your Descendants of Ancient Planters, your Jamestowne Society, your First Families of Virginia,” explained one of the Landing Day attendees, Betty Fitzgerald, ticking off a short list of ancestral societies. Each group had its own entry rules, usually to do with the arrival date and status of one’s forebear. Some associations required a “double legacy,” or blood tie to two distinguished Virginia families, many of which had intermarried in colonial times. “It’s like voles in your yard,” Betty said. “Lines go over and under each other and tunnel all around.”