Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  In these years the Steeds paid Pentaquod and the Choptanks substantial sums for any new land they occupied. They now owned 2,160 acres on Devon Island, the exact extent having been calculated by Martha, with the aid of careful measurements made by her husband. Only a few were under cultivation, but they also had title to another 2,488 acres on the mainland. None of this had yet been cleared; it was Steed’s intention to burn down the trees as soon as he had trained enough Indians to tend the fields, from which he would send increasing boatloads of corn to Jamestown.

  It was in 1626 that Steed’s fortunes took a radical turn, after which the clearing of additional acres became an urgent necessity. In December of that year he had guided his bateau back to Jamestown with a heavy cargo of corn, beaver, sassafras and caviar, and as he was unloading onto a two-masted ship from London, he found that a crude river boat from somewhere up the James was unloading on the opposite side of the trader. It was Simon Janney, and the cargo he was hefting about with the aid of ropes was new to Steed.

  “What are those great bales?” he asked.

  “The stinking weed,” Janney replied.

  “Tobacco? Is there profit in tobacco?”

  “The surest,” Janney said.

  “Where’s your farm?”

  “Far upstream.”

  A silence, then, “Is Meg with you?”

  “Never.”

  More silence, then, “What happened to her?”

  Janney did not care to answer this. “If you have cleared land, Steed, you should consider tobacco. Difficult to grow but easy to sell.”

  “I spend my acres on corn.”

  “Switch to tobacco. You’ll never regret.”

  “And where’s Meg?”

  Janney kicked at one of the bales, then confessed, “Two hours after she climbed out of her canoe at Jamestown she met a man looking for a wife. Before nightfall he had paid me her transit money and as soon as proper he married her. She lives in one of the new houses on the riverbank.”

  Steed saw her once. She carried a parasol and wore a large straw hat edged with gold ribbon, her blond hair peeking out provocatively to glisten in the sun. She walked with a light step and seemed to be smiling to herself, even before she spotted her former husband, as Steed insisted upon calling himself. When she saw that it was Steed of Devon beside the road, she nodded gravely, smiled slightly, as if unable to control her inward laughter, and passed on. Her husband, men at the wharf told Steed, was a man of growing importance in the colony.

  But it was Simon Janney who made the lasting impression during this 1626 trip, for when both Steed’s boat and his own were unloaded he led the islander to a tavern, where they talked seriously for a long time. “If you have good land at the ready, Edmund, you should plant tobacco instantly. I have more seed than I need, and I’d be prepared to bring it to Devon to get you started, providing you’d share profits with me.”

  “You said difficult to grow. How difficult?”

  “Many pitfalls. You must watch the land it doesn’t grow musty. Nor get too much heat. And it’s best if you have a shed for drying, but even if you do, you must turn the leaves.”

  They spent that night discussing the cultivation of this delicate plant, and toward morning Janney convinced Steed to take the gamble. “I’d not bother you, Steed, if I had land of my own available, but the Indians are fractious. My wife and I have not been able to clear—”

  “What wife?”

  “Captain Hackett brought her over. One hundred and thirty-seven of them. All disposed of within two days. Mine’s scrawny but she can work.”

  Mrs. Janney had been a serving girl in London, made pregnant by the master, who fell sobbing in his wife’s arms with the lament: “She tempted me, that one.” She had been hauled into court by the clergy and condemned for a harlot; when her child was stillborn everyone involved deemed it best that she be sent to Virginia, so her mistress paid her passage with Captain Hackett.

  He, of course, conveniently forgot that her passage had been paid and offered her for sale upon arrival, a gaunt, gawky thing, meriting her husband’s description of scrawny. She had excited no bidding in the early stages of the auction, for she was certainly not a prime prospect, but this did not deter Hackett. “Someone’s bound to want you,” he kept assuring her. “Women are at a premium ... any women.” And even when she and two other ungainly scarecrows stood alone at the end of the line, the captain was still confident that he would uncover some ill-favored planter who would need her.

  Simon Janney was that man. Once bitterly disappointed in this game, he haggled with Hackett over price, and when a bargain was reached he took her west. This time he encountered no problem in holding his woman; for her, he represented a final haven.

  Steed remained longer in Jamestown than he had intended, because Janney insisted that he sail far up the James to inspect the tobacco fields, and when they landed at the rickety wharf and he saw the foul conditions in which Janney lived, he appreciated Meg’s decision to run away.

  “This is Bess,” Janney said as Steed entered his hovel. He saw an emaciated woman in a torn dress. Her teeth were bad and her hair unkempt. But when she and her husband took him out to inspect their fields he found all things neat and trimmed, and he understood their strategy: fields first. “These are handsome acres, Simon,” he said. “Do they yield good tobacco?”

  “They do. And if I could trust the Indians to help, I’d clear those beyond the trees.”

  “Help may be a long time coming,” Steed said, thinking of how peaceful the Choptanks were and how dangerous the Potomacs.

  “There’s talk of bringing in more blacks from Africa,” Janney said. “But even then us little planters would be at the far end of the barrel. We’d see none of them.”

  “You must have help to clear this country,” Steed agreed. He then watched as Janney unriddled the mysteries of growing tobacco, the cultivation of the fields, the processing of the leaf. Steed had never smoked tobacco and was most doubtful that the fad would be permanent, but when he was told of the earnings Janney had made on his small fields, his cupidity was aroused. “Could I do the same on my big ones?” he asked.

  “Better! I studied your fields when I went to fetch Meg.” This mournful recollection slowed his enthusiasm, so on a more subdued level he argued, “Steed, with your fields and your Indians you could treble what I earn.”

  They reached an agreement whereby Janney would collect as much tobacco seed as possible, then follow Steed to Devon, where he would show the Indians how to grow what he called “the stinking weed.” When he arrived, Steed and his wife talked Pentaquod into lending them six additional Choptanks to till the fields and tend the delicate plants. They also built along the shore a pair of long sheds for drying the leaf, and Janney taught them how to construct oaken hogsheads. A substantial industry developed on Devon, and when the crop was harvested and cured, the great hogsheads were rolled down to the wharf where Captain Hackett docked his Victorious.

  Custom already required that Virginians, as colonists, send their precious tobacco only to the mother country, and only in English ships. This meant that Captain Hackett and his storm-racked Victorious exercised a monopoly which paid the colonists meagerly and the factors in London well. Even so, when shiploads of trade goods began pouring back into Devon, delighting the Indians along the Choptank, Steed realized that he was on his way to building a fortune.

  He was goaded to even greater profits by Janney, who pointed out that since Steed could use Indians, he really must develop the copious lands he owned on the north bank. So in 1631 Steed assembled a work force of himself, Janney and seven new Indians to clear massive fields across the channel, the agreement being as before: Janney would return to Jamestown once the fields were prepared and come back with tobacco seed, sharing in whatever profits were realized.

  All through the winter and spring, fires smoked the sky as Indians knelt about the trunks of towering oaks and loblolly pine, girdling them and forcing them
to die. On fields where the trunks had been earlier burned, ropes were attached to upper branches, now dead, and the forest sentinels were pulled down. Then Steed and Janney would wait for a rainy day, when danger of fire spreading out of control was at a minimum, and on such days they would light vast conflagrations to burn away the fallen trees, for which they could devise no use. For weeks the sky over the Choptank would be black with smoke and the men even blacker with soot.

  “We’re making our fortunes!” Janney exulted. “And when we’ve finished here, we’ll transport these Indians across the bay and burn off some new forests I’ve spotted along the Rappahannock.”

  “Would you leave your farm on the James?”

  “For me it’s been an unfortunate river.”

  “Why not come here? Take up land along the Choptank?”

  “Oh no!” Janney said without hesitation. “The center of life will always be over there.” And no argument could persuade him to quit the western shore, where the great fortunes would be gathered, the lasting reputations forged.

  Captain John Smith had become a garrulous old man who bored his London cronies with rambling tales of Hungary and Virginia. It was not until many years after his flight from the colony and the death of the Indian princess Pocahontas that he revealed that when Chief Powhatan had spared him from the chopping block, it was only because the lovely princess had thrown herself across his, Smith’s, prostrate body. “She loved me,” he confided, “desperately she loved me.”

  “Then why did she marry Rolfe and not you?” asked a man who had known Pocahontas when she visited the English court.

  “Marry!” Smith snorted. “An English captain dally with an Indian maid? Let alone marry her! That’s for lesser men like young Rolfe.”

  He was dismayed when travelers from Virginia informed him that Edmund Steed, with whom he had served at Jamestown, had finally disclosed his true colors and stood forth as a Catholic. “A Papist?” he repeated several times, shaking his head incredulously.

  Then his mind cleared and he remembered his adventures with this gallant young man. “He came close to death, that one. They were cutting the flesh off poor Ratcliffe, inch by inch, and the poor fellow died. No regrets from me. He’d voted at Nevis to have me hanged, but I stormed back in time to save young Steed.” It hadn’t happened that way. Smith had been long gone before Ratcliffe died.

  “I was with him in the sickness, too. Steed, that is, not Ratcliffe. In one tent seven of us dead with the flux, except that I fought back. Steed shared his last food with me.”

  There had been other adventures, but Smith could not recall them now. “I remember I had to correct his writing. Careless about details. And I must confess I was always suspicious of him. Devious, I called him once. Not clear, like a decent Englishman. A Papist, eh? I knew he was hiding something.”

  In succeeding months Smith spoke often of Steed and cited his subversive Catholicism as an example of why King Charles should not confer favors on the Catholic Lords Baltimore. “The idea of granting them a colony in Virginia! Shameful! Papists will take over the continent. Devious, they are. Steed’s grandfather, you know, had to be hanged and quartered by Good Queen Bess. All devious.”

  Before the year was out he was dead, lamenting the dark changes engineered by the two kings, James and Charles. One of his last judgments was that things had been much better handled by Elizabeth.

  Pentaquod had foreseen that when the white man came to the Choptank, all traditions of Indian life would be in jeopardy, and he had willingly come out of retirement to help his tribe make the transition. What he had not foreseen were the curious ways in which the impact would manifest itself.

  He had not expected any white man to be as congenial as the one who settled on Devon Island, nor to have in common with him those problems encountered by all men: trouble with women, the constant fight for food, difficulty in rearing children, safeguarding whatever gains had been made. On three different occasions Indian messengers from across the bay had come to the Choptanks, hoping to lead them in rebellion against the whites: on a specified day Pentaquod would murder all of them on Devon, then storm across the bay to slaughter and burn along the James and the Rappahannock. Each time he had replied, “Steed is a friend more to be trusted than most of our own.” Not only had he refused to kill Steed, he had sent extra Choptanks to guard the island against Potomac efforts. So when hideous massacres scarred the western shore, nothing happened on the eastern. Relationships with Steed were better than could have been expected.

  On the other hand, he had been mortally hurt when the quiet Englishman rejected Tciblento; Pentaquod had known why and he suspected that his daughter did, too. Indians were inferior, and any contact between the races must be kept to the level of work and trade. The old man was appalled at the eagerness with which his people grabbed for whatever geegaws white traders dangled before them. Here was the danger, Pentaquod saw: that the values of his people might be destroyed. For the present they were content to keep on fishing and hunting beaver and digging sassafras and tending their corn, but the day would come when the old pursuits would be abandoned, and on that day the Choptanks would begin to diminish.

  He was meticulous in not interfering with the prerogatives of the young werowance. He had come back to serve as senior counsel, and in spite of great pressures to resume the leadership, he restricted himself to that role. He did so from deep conviction: the younger men must learn how to work with whites if they hoped to bring their people through these perilous times. Therefore, when Captain Smith first appeared at Patamoke, Pentaquod had kept to the background so that the werowance might have experience in estimating the newcomers’ intentions, and in all dealings with Steed, Pentaquod effaced himself. When the deeds to Devon Island had to be signed, it was the werowance who made the first mark.

  The old man did retain his three turkey feathers, and as he moved among the Choptanks they knew that he was their leader, and it was to him that they looked whenever crisis neared. Now they came to him, perplexed.

  “Each day new fires rage,” they protested. “They consume all the trees between the rivers where we used to hide.”

  So Pentaquod got into his canoe and paddled downriver to talk with Steed. “Is it necessary to burn the ancient trees?”

  “It is.”

  “With such desolation?” And he pointed to deer fleeing the flames and a bewildered beaver clinging to his lodge as fire approached.

  “We must have more fields for tobacco,” Steed explained.

  “We grow all the tobacco we can smoke,” Pentaquod said, pointing to the trivial clearings in which the women of his tribe had cultivated the weed.

  “Enough for you, but not enough for London.”

  “Must we burn our forests for London?” the old man asked.

  Steed found it difficult to clarify the intricacies of transoceanic trading, to explain that it was not only obligatory but morally imperative to burn forests in Virginia so that tobacco might be burned in London. Pentaquod could not understand.

  Three times he returned to protest this abuse of the Choptank forests, and on the last visit Simon Janney grew impatient. Knowing no Choptank words, he would not allow the old man to waste precious time. Shoving him aside, he growled, “Be gone, old man! We’ve work to do.”

  Pentaquod returned to his canoe, defeated. Heavily he plied his paddle, and when he reached the village he informed the werowance that soon something must be done to halt these hungry fires. The two leaders talked a long time, neither willing to face up to the inevitable: fight or flee. And when a silent impasse had been reached, two young members of the tribe ran in with harsh news: “Pentaquod! They have set fires which will burn your refuge!”

  Together the two leaders paddled down past the marsh and up the small river to the forked creek where Pentaquod once lived, and as they approached they saw vast fires creeping in from many sides, erasing the field Navitan had cultivated for yams, burning away the spot where Tciblento had been
born, destroying the trees in which his sons had kept their bear cubs. As the two Indians watched, the crackling grew stronger, until it seemed as if the creek itself might boil, and then all was gone: the trees, the small wharf, the memories of Tciblento playing by the house. Transfixed, Pentaquod refused to believe that men would destroy everything for tobacco leaves, but they had.

  “We must go back,” Pentaquod told the werowance, and that night they made their decision: it was impossible to live side-by-side with the white man, so messengers bearing firm orders were dispatched in secrecy, and next morning when Steed and Janney prepared to set new fires they found no Indians to help them. Steed assumed that they must have slept the night at Devon with their friends, but when he sailed his small boat home he found that not only were the field crew missing, but the island Indians as well, including their wives. “Canoes came for them last night,” Martha reported. “Took everything with them. I doubt they’ll be coming back.”

  “Impossible! Where’d they go?”

  “To their village, I judge.”

  Without waiting to collect Janney, he sailed as speedily as he could to Patamoke, and there his Indians were, sitting disconsolately before the long hut. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, but none would speak. When he repeated his question, one of the wives gestured toward the door of the hut. “Did they make you leave us?” Steed shouted.

  His loud voice alerted the werowance, who appeared at the doorway, hesitant and unwilling to face the white man. In a moment Pentaquod appeared, leaning on the shoulder of Tciblento. Together the three Indians approached Steed, and on the face of each showed the respect they held for this honest Englishman. It was a moment that would never be forgotten by any participant, for this was the day when parting became inevitable.