On the Nanticoke River, at a town inland from the Eastern Shore, the party met with the Nantaquake, whom Smith termed “the best merchants of all other salvages.” The Nantaquake told the English of Powhatan’s mortal enemy, the Massawomeck, a powerful and cruel nation that was feared by the other tribes of the region. Smith seized on the idea of establishing relations with the Massawomecks, and in short order the barge was on its way up the bay to find them.
The party never reached the Massawomecks’ dominion, thanks to uncooperative weather and the fearfulness of some of the men. They did, however, accomplish the colonists’ first exploration of the Patawomeck River—the Potomac—reaching as far as the future site of Washington, D.C.14
In mid-July, as Smith was about to lead the men back to Jamestown, he elected to take a brief detour up the Rappahannock en route. With the ebb of the tide, the barge ran aground on a shoal near the river’s mouth, and so the men opted to while away some time. There were plentiful fish in the shallow water, and Smith made a game of catching them by skewering them on his sword. The rest of the men followed suit, with satisfying results; “thus we tooke more in one houre than we could eate in a day,” several of the voyagers recalled. After hundreds of miles of sailing and rowing, after at least a dozen encounters with unfamiliar native tribes (some of them violently unwelcoming), the grounding of the barge had opened up a hard-won occasion for simple fun.
In this unlikely setting, Smith encountered a deadly adversary. He took a stab at a strange-looking creature, flat and undulating, which onlookers found hard to describe: “much in the fashion of a thornback, but with a long tail like a ryding rodde, whereon the middest is a most poysoned sting, of two or three inches long, bearded like a saw on each side.” Smith had caught a stingray, almost certainly one of the variety known as Dasyatis sabina, which is found in the Chesapeake Bay and sometimes even ranges into fresh water. The stingray defended itself by whipping around its black-tipped tail, which finally connected with Smith’s forearm and plunged in almost an inch and a half. Smith screamed. “No bloud nor wound was seene, but a little blue spot, but the torment was instantly so extreame.”
The stingray’s venom was working. Dr. Russell hastened to apply a “precious oyle” of unknown description, but Smith’s hand, arm, and shoulder swelled frighteningly. As his agony continued for some hours, Smith asked his men to dig a grave for him on a nearby island. This they did, and “with much sorrow” prepared for his funeral. But the grave was not to be filled; Russell’s ointment, or perhaps Smith’s own robust constitution, unexpectedly overcame the effects of the poison. As Smith’s pain receded, he addressed the situation with typical pugnacity by eating the stingray for supper.
The party then hurried back toward Jamestown, where Smith could recuperate. As they made a stop at the village of the Kecoughtans the next day, the natives noticed that he had been injured and that another man was bloody (from a minor wound, seemingly incurred by tripping on something). The Kecoughtans also noticed the men’s swords, as well as the piles of furs and other loot they had bought during their travels. From that scene, the natives logically concluded that the fifteen Englishmen had just come back from battle, and insisted on knowing whom they had beaten and plundered. Smith, seeing an opportunity to instill awe in the locals, demanded secrecy and then confided that they had taken the spoil from the Massawomecks. The lie had its intended result. “This rumor went faster up the river than our barge,” the explorers found.15
Arriving back at Jamestown on July 21, Smith found that the state of the colony had taken a turn for the worse. Scrivener, who was now feverish, had been unable to check President Ratcliffe’s excesses. Ratcliffe himself had fallen into alarming delusions of grandeur. During the height of Jamestown’s humid and malarial summertime, he had commanded the colonists to leave everything else aside in order to build him a stately capitol in the woods—“Ratcliffe’s Pallace,” some groused—while he continued to fatten himself on their limited food supply. Several members of the party recalled the conditions they discovered when they came back:
There we found the last supply [that is, the colonists recently brought by Newport and Nelson] were all sicke, the rest some lame, some bruised, all unable to doe any thing but complaine of the pride and unreasonable needlesse crueltie of the silly president, that had riotously consumed the store: and to fulfill his follies about building an unnecessary building for his pleasure in the woods, had brought them all to that misery. 16
A faction of the colonists was ready to take matters into its own hands and wreak revenge on Ratcliffe personally. With the return of Smith’s party, a more level-headed idea took hold: namely, to replace Ratcliffe with Smith, a leader who had shown that his ambitions were for the colony, not just for himself. If there was any vote on the idea, that vote was never recorded, and it is unknown how many colonists supported Smith’s taking office. In any event, Ratcliffe either resigned or was illicitly overthrown, although he had less than two months left in his term of office. One colonist would later describe him tersely as “not worthy of remembering, but to his dishonor.”
Smith does not appear to have been longing for the promotion, as evidenced by the fact that he immediately named Scrivener as his substitute—and then took off several days later for the Chesapeake again. (He named some “honest officers” to assist Scrivener while he recovered from his illness.) For this voyage, Smith took a dozen men, some who had been with him on the barge the last time and others who were starting fresh. Much like the previous exploration, this trip found Smith and his men engaged in diplomacy, hard bargaining, and fending off both illness and occasional enemy attacks.
The six-week trip had one casualty, of unrecorded cause: Michael Fetherstone, gentleman. For all of Smith’s resentment and suspicion of “the better sort,” he chose a select few for his missions—those who had redeemed themselves in his eyes through meritorious conduct. Fetherstone was one of these. “All the time he had beene in this country, [he] had behaved himselfe, honestly, valiantly, and industriously,” his companions wrote.17 They fired a volley of gunshot in his honor as they buried him.
Shortly before the barge was to return to Jamestown, Smith decided to investigate some of the less-familiar lands near the settlement. Among these was the village of the Nansemonds, who lived on a river by the same name near the mouth of the bay. From their proximity to Cape Henry, Smith no doubt considered the possibility that they were behind the attack on the English landing party there the year before. On Smith’s approach, though, the Nansemonds made a great display of hospitality as they waved the barge further up the narrowing river, “with all shew of love that could be.” Smith complied, and invited some in nearby canoes to come on board—to guarantee the Nansemonds’ good behavior.
When none of the natives would join him and his men on the barge, Smith sensed that he had been too trusting. The Nansemonds had set their eyes, it seems, on the hoard of weapons, tools, and other treasures on the barge. Smith’s men braced themselves behind wooden shields—which, as it happened, they had recently received as gifts from another tribe—and got their muskets ready to shoot. Soon seven or eight canoes of armed men were behind him, and arrows were flying from the canoes and from shore. The English got off twenty or so musket shots, enough to make the attackers on shore back away and to scare the canoeists into jumping overboard and swimming off.
Smith’s party took stock and found that none of the company had been hurt; one man had an arrow resting harmlessly in his hat, and another had an arrow dangling from his sleeve. Scores of arrows were embedded in the shields.
If the watching Nansemonds expected the party to retreat gracefully to Jamestown, they were wrong. The colonists commandeered the now empty canoes and moved them out of range of the shore. Smith directed the men to take their hatchets and axes and begin chopping the canoes into pieces. Seeing the slow destruction of their invaluable and painstakingly built watercraft, the Nansemonds put down their bows and arrows and called o
ut that they wanted peace. Fine, Smith told them; they could have their peace if they brought out their chief’s bows and arrows, and a chain of pearls. Also, when the English came again at harvesttime, the Nansemonds would have to give them four hundred baskets of corn. “Otherwise we would breake all of their boats, and burne their houses, corne, and all they had.” The Nansemonds had little choice but to acquiesce.18
From there, the barge headed to Jamestown and arrived the same day, three days before Ratcliffe’s official term of office was to expire and Smith was to take over. Scrivener, the interim president, was now healthy. Ratcliffe was in prison for mutiny, having apparently tried to regain his former post in Smith’s absence.
On September 10, 1608, Smith took his oath of office as president of Jamestown. His immediate concerns were predictably practical. Scrivener, with Smith’s concurrence, had allowed the men a respite from work during August in consideration of “the weaknesse of the company, and the heat of the yeare”;19 indeed, the labors on Ratcliffe’s “pallace” had likely brought that weakness about. Now, with summer turning into fall, Smith declared the respite over. Storehouses and living quarters had to be made ready for the provisions and the new colonists that Newport was expected to bring—the “second supply,” as it was called. The rotation of the watches, or lookouts, had to be beefed up and the men trained. The whole colony needed regular target practice to keep up their shooting skills. The colony’s crops, meager as they were, would have to be harvested.20
All of this was getting under way when Newport arrived in late September, sooner than expected. With him were seventy colonists, including two new councilors by the names of Peter Winne and Richard Waldo, two boys known only as Milman and Hilliard, and the colony’s first women: a Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras. Mistress Forrest was with her gentleman husband, Thomas. Anne Burras was thus the only unattached woman in a colony of about two hundred long-deprived men. None of her letters or journals have survived, if there were any, so it can only be imagined how she felt about being at the center of this particular attention. At any rate, she did not care to keep it going; one of the original settlers from 1607, John Lay-don, quickly won her over and the two were married before the end of the year. 21
Newport also brought orders from the Virginia Company directing the colony’s leaders to assist and obey him in carrying out his new mission. That mission was twofold. First, he must find something in Virginia of major value: a site for a gold mine, a route to the Pacific Ocean, or the survivors of the lost Roanoke Colony. The company’s management and investors had become impatient with “ifs and ands, hopes, and some few proofes.” Yet the company continued to have faith in Newport, who had the benefit of being present in London to make his case—a tactical advantage that Smith did not possess.
Second, Newport was to place an English crown on Chief Powhatan’s head, thus rendering him (in theory) a loyal tributary prince of King James. This was exceptionally ludicrous, and it can be assumed that Smith’s jaw dropped when Newport read it to him. Smith made a futile attempt to rally the rest of the council against the idea. Winne and Waldo were “auncient soldiers, and valiant gentlemen, yet ignorant of the busines (being but newly arrived).” Although Scrivener was usually a Smith ally, he too supported the idea of crowning Powhatan; he was “desirous to see strange [foreign, unfamiliar] countries,” and he welcomed the chance to see Powhatan’s capital.22
So management’s orders would be followed without question, as usual, whether they made any sense or not. In Smith’s mind, the orders seemed almost like a deliberate effort to make the enterprise fail: “Now there was no way to make us miserable, but to neglect that time to make provision [gather food] whilst it was to be had,” he wrote. Newport’s “strange coronation” would accomplish nothing, he thought, but to puff up the emperor’s self-importance vis-à-vis the English, meanwhile causing the colony to “lose that time [and] spend the victualls we had. . . . God doth know they little knew what they did.”23
Newport chose 120 men to accompany him as guards at his meeting with Powhatan, perhaps wanting to project a stately image. Smith, having been outvoted, bowed to Newport’s authority. As a last-ditch attempt to avoid losing the labors of 60 percent of the colonists for the duration, Smith proposed to take a message to Powhatan inviting the chief to come to Jamestown. That was all right with Newport.
Taking a dig at Newport for the inordinate size of his party, Smith brought just three men with him. He also brought two boys, Powhatan’s servant Namontack and Samuel Collier. (Smith was probably indulging the latter’s youthful curiosity.) When Smith arrived at Werewocomoco, Powhatan was at another village. The natives sent for the chief, and gave the English visitors a surprise in the meantime.
The natives took Smith and his companions to a field at the rim of a forest, and seated them on mats in front of a fire. It was night, and the setting put the men on edge. Shrieks emerged from the woods nearby. The visitors seized two or three old men nearby as shields, fearing that Powhatan had set an ambush. A young girl rushed to the scene; she turned out to be Pocahontas, who vowed that no harm was meant. Smith saw that spectators had arrived, including women and children, and realized that his men were being treated to royal entertainment.
With that, the English relaxed and watched with Pocahontas as thirty young women emerged from the woods. They were naked except for body paint and a few strategically placed leaves; each wore a pair of buck’s horns on her head. More exotic still, the women had assumed the form of warriors; some women carried bows and arrows in their hands, while others held clubs or swords. For an hour, the women danced in a circle around the fire, transfixing the visitors “with most hellish shouts and cryes, rushing from among the trees, casting themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and dauncing with most excellent ill varietie, oft falling into their infernal passions, and solemnly againe to sing and daunce.”
The women left and then reappeared, this time inviting Smith to their house; there, they found it amusing to crowd around him, chanting “Love you not me? Love you not me?” Smith and his men afterward enjoyed an evening of banqueting, singing, and dancing with them. The women then conducted each visitor to his sleeping quarters—and here Smith’s account of the evening chastely ends. It was customary, however, for native chiefs to provide honored guests with a bedmate, and it can be assumed that the dancers and the Englishmen continued their entertainment into the night.24
The next day, Chief Powhatan returned. Smith presented Namontack to him, and extended the invitation on behalf of Newport for Powhatan to come to Jamestown and receive certain “presents” from the English king.
Powhatan balked. For him to come to Jamestown was beneath the dignity of his station. “If your king have sent me presents, I also am a king, and this is my land,” Smith translated his answer. “Eight days I will stay [at Werowocomoco] to receive them. Your father [Newport] is to come to me, not I to him, nor yet to your fort, neither will I bite at such a bait.”25
Smith’s fallback measure had failed. After Smith and his party returned to Jamestown with the news, Newport sent Powhatan’s presents ahead to Werowocomoco on three barges—including an English bed, a washbasin, a pitcher, a scarlet cloak, a pair of shoes, and some other furniture and clothing. Newport and his party, which did not include Smith, went by foot.
The morning after they arrived was to be the occasion of Powhatan’s coronation, whether he wanted it or not. Powhatan had stayed at Werowocomoco, as promised, waiting for his presents. He accepted them with equanimity until the English came to the cloak; he distrusted their intentions in trying to put the cloak on his back until Namontack convinced him that they meant no harm.
Newport now turned to the solemn ceremony, which he had no doubt organized in some detail and rehearsed beforehand. There was just one glitch: Powhatan did not understand (or pretended not to understand) what the crown was for, and could not be persuaded to bend his knee to receive it. Newport tired himself out showing h
im what to do and trying to persuade him to follow suit. Finally, someone on the English side had the presence of mind to lean hard on Powhatan’s shoulders, forcing him to stoop a little. As three men rushed to put the crown on his head, another man fired a pistol into the air as a signal to the Discovery to unleash cannon fire marking the moment. Powhatan jumped, startled by the barrage. He quickly regained his self-possession and thanked Newport for his kindness, giving him his old deerskin mantle and moccasins.
Before leaving Werowocomoco, Newport irked the emperor by mentioning that he would be calling on one of Powhatan’s enemy tribes, the Monacans. Newport stopped briefly at Jamestown, then took his men up the James River in the Discovery to explore beyond the falls. The plan was to carry a disassembled barge (which Newport had brought from England) past the falls, then assemble it and seek a route to the Pacific. The five pieces of the barge proved too heavy to carry, however, so Newport abandoned that idea and the men went to the Monacan settlement on foot. The Monacans treated the English visitors with indifferent courtesy. Newport nonetheless had one of their petty chiefs captured and forced him to serve as a guide while the English searched for a gold mine. On the expedition was one of the gold refiners, who reported at one point that he thought he had found a little silver, and that “better stuffe might be had for the digging.” Nothing ever came of the samples; it was another wasted effort, like the rest of Newport’s trip.26
Love and Hate in Jamestown Page 11