Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  At Newport’s direction, Smith had stayed behind at the fort to lead eighty or so colonists in starting to produce small quantities of glass, pitch, tar, potash, and clapboard to send home as samples. (Newport’s second supply had brought eight German and Polish tradesmen; the Germans were glassmakers and the Poles made pitch, tar, and potash.) Once Newport returned to Jamestown, however, Smith made himself scarce. Possibly he wanted to spend as little time as he could in Newport’s presence—the disagreement between the two over the crowning of Powhatan had widened into outright hostility. Smith selected thirty men and took them five miles downriver to cut down trees for clapboard, leaving the fort to the council’s supervision.

  Among the thirty were two proper gentlemen from the second supply, Gabriel Beadle and John Russell. At first, Smith recalled, “the axes so blistered their tender fingers that many times every third blow had a loud oath to drown the echo.” Yet they stuck to it. By the end of a week, they were adept lumberjacks, and had come to enjoy the new-found experience of labor, “making it their delight to hear the trees thunder as they fell.” Smith was delighted, too. Thirty gentlemen like that, he thought, would accomplish more than a hundred of the lazy-bones who would work only under compulsion—though twenty good workingmen would be better still.27

  When Smith and his companions returned to the fort, he learned that his fears had been realized: Newport had undermined the colony’s position with the crown and the gifts. Powhatan’s estimation of his own power and importance had evidently increased, or else he had taken offense once he understood that the coronation was supposed to represent his subjugation to the English king. Consequently, he had forbidden his people to bargain with the English for food; he was inclined to let the foreigners starve, and the sooner, the better. At around this time, Smith composed a letter to the treasurer and governing council of the company in England. It was astonishingly frank in its criticisms of his bosses:

  Expresly to follow your directions by Captaine Newport, though they be performed, I was directly against it; but according to our commission [orders], I was content to be overruled by the major part of the counsell, I feare to the hazard of us all; which is now generally confessed when it is too late.28

  The plan to carry the barge past the falls was ridiculous, he continued. “For the quartred boat to be borne by the soldiers over the falles, Newport had 120 of the best men he could chuse. If he had burnt her to ashes, one might have carried her in a bag, but as she is, five hundred cannot.” (The men were “soldiers” in that they were bearing arms.) For Newport to take the majority of the colony on his exploration was inexcusable in any case, Smith argued; one man could have accomplished as much as Newport’s 120. As for Powhatan’s bed and the other offerings, “by whose advice you sent him such presents, I know not; but this give me leave to tell you, I feare they will be the confusion [ruin] of us all ere we heare from you againe.”

  Having burned his bridges with Newport, Smith now made his attack personal. Rumor had it, Smith said, that Newport received £100 a year from the Virginia Company for his services. If so, it was a needless expense: “For every [ship’s] master you have yet sent can find the way as well as he, so that an hundred pounds might be spared, which is more than we have all, that helpe to pay him wages.”

  Finally, Smith made a plea to the company to adjust its expectations of the business. The colony could not supply “present profit”; that would have to wait until the colony had the means to sustain itself. By diverting the colony’s labor into get-rich-quick schemes, like the search for nonexistent gold, and by sending men without needed skills, the company was simply pushing the day of real profitability further into the distance. Goldsmiths, gold refiners, and glassmakers (to say nothing of effete layabouts) could do nothing but eat into the supplies. For the present, the key was to put the right people in place to continue laying the groundwork—literally, in some cases. “When you send againe,” Smith asked, “I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided, then a thousand of such as we have.”29

  Smith had only one way to get his letter to England, and that was by way of Newport’s return trip. In December, Newport left Virginia carrying the trials of glass, pitch, tar, potash, and clapboard—and Smith’s letter, which one assumes was well sealed. The letter did not change the Virginia Company council’s mind about Newport, who would continue to serve for several more years. In another way, the letter was a success: despite its caustic commentary on the council’s management, it substantially influenced their view of relations with the natives and the type of settlers the colony needed. Smith would not learn of this for a long time to come, however, thanks to the vagaries of weather around an uninhabited island called Bermuda.

  8

  POCAHONTAS SAVES JOHN SMITHAGAIN

  In the wake of Ratcliffe’s maladministration, the colonists faced another winter in which they would have to depend on the natives to ward off famine. When Newport arrived in late September, he had reckoned that Chief Powhatan’s crowning would fill him with such affection for the English that they would have no more worries in that department. Newport planned, in fact, to fill the Discovery twice over with the boatloads of grain he expected to receive from Powhatan and from the Monacans. This assumption had been crucial, because Newport brought little food with him in the second supply. He would, in fact, need to tap into the colony’s stores to feed his sailors on the voyage home.

  But events had transpired differently: Newport returned from his expedition all but empty-handed. Chief Powhatan gave Newport an almost nominal fourteen bushels, and the Monacans gave him nothing. For the second year in a row, Newport had come in, taken charge for a few months, then left behind a mess for the colonists to cope with.

  Now it was December 1608, and Smith once again needed to figure out where the winter’s food would come from. Hunting and fishing were possibilities, in theory, but there weren’t enough capable hunters and fishermen in Jamestown to feed two hundred hungry mouths. “Though there be fish in the sea, fowls in the air, and beasts in the woods, their bounds [territories] are so large, they so wilde, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them,” he had informed the company in his letter.

  Smith elected to begin by collecting on the Nansemonds’ debt. Joined by Peter Winne and Matthew Scrivener, he went back to the Nansemond village to demand fulfillment of the harsh surrender terms he had imposed after beating back their ambush—namely, four hundred baskets of corn. The Nansemond weroance refused him; their own supplies were low, and Powhatan had ordered his tribes not to give the English any food for love or money. Smith resorted to his now customary tactics, frightening the villagers away with musket shots, and then setting fire to one of their homes. The message was clear: capitulate or the rest of the village would be next. As the thatch roof shot up in flames, the villagers called out for the men to stop and promised to give up half of the food they had. Smith accepted the offer, and by nightfall they had loaded the English barges. “How they collected it I know not,” Smith mused. In return for Smith’s forbearance, the Nansemonds promised to plant a field especially for the English the next season.1

  Smith, Winne, and Scrivener camped four miles downriver, returning to Jamestown the following morning. There, Smith and Scrivener split up. Smith and Richard Waldo took two barges to the riverfront villages of various tribes, all of whom fled as they arrived; word of Smith’s reprisal against the Nansemonds had traveled quickly. Finally, the Appomattocs gave them a modest amount of food—Smith understood it to be half of all they had left from their harvest—in exchange for “copper and such things as contented them.” (Smith may have used strong-arm methods on the Appomattocs, as well, though this is unclear.) Scrivener and George Percy went on another barge and came back with nothing.

  Back at the fort, Smith pondered their disappointing results. It was clear that time was working against the colonists. Powh
atan had deemed it expedient to cut off the colony’s food trade while biding his time and waiting for the English to starve.

  A radical plan took shape in Smith’s mind: he would lead a raid on the storehouses in Powhatan’s own capital. He could draw on his observations of Werowocomoco’s defenses from his captivity there a year before. It was the last thing Powhatan would expect. Waldo, who had impressed Smith as “sure in time of need,” would be his second in command.

  Waldo was in favor of the idea, but the rest of the council was not—not even Scrivener, whom Smith could usually count on for support. In all likelihood, they considered the idea audacious to the point of unreality, and it hardly squared with the company’s desire to keep up good relations with the “naturals.” Smith, for his part, was confident of success with the element of surprise on his side—and if he ran afoul of the company’s preferences (not for the first time), the option of seeking forgiveness later was much more attractive than the alternative of starving now.

  Shortly after the rejection of Smith’s proposal, a breakthrough came in the form of a communication from Powhatan. If Smith would send him men to build an English-style house, along with a grindstone, fifty swords, some guns, a rooster and a hen (which were new to Virginia), copper, and beads, Powhatan would load his ship with food. In calling for swords and guns as part of the deal, Powhatan showed that he well understood the dire effect of his trade embargo; indeed, it was a vise tightening on the colony. Smith, mindful of the emperor’s “devises and subtiltie,” thought the offer might be a trap. Left with no palatable choice, however, Smith decided to give Powhatan what he wanted—minus the swords and guns.

  Smith sent the German glassmakers and two Englishmen to begin work on Powhatan’s house at first; then he sent a dozen more men, nearly all of them tradesmen and laborers. He directed one of the glassmakers to serve as a spy and take note of any clues to Powhatan’s war preparations. After giving those men a head start to get the house under way, Smith appointed Scrivener as his substitute at the fort and made ready to travel to Werowocomoco with another two dozen men and Powhatan’s goods.

  Traveling by river on the Discovery and two barges, Smith stopped for the first night at the village of the Warraskoyacks, with whom he had established friendly relations on an earlier trip. The Warraskoyack chief, Tackonekintaco, cautioned Smith against continuing the journey: Powhatan may treat you well at first, he told Smith, but he has sent for you only for the chance to seize your weapons and cut your throats. Smith thanked him for the advice, but he had already decided to take his chances. He left the boy Samuel Collier in Tackonekintaco’s care to learn the language as Thomas Savage had, and continued on.2

  The next night, they stayed at the Kecoughtan village. Before they could shove off the next day, extreme winds and rain hit, and so they were forced to remain for the next week, celebrating Christmas 1608 among the “savages.” Despite the blustery weather and the uncertainty as to whether they would come back alive—or perhaps because of that—it was as warm and joyous as any Christmas at home in England. “We were never more merry, nor fed on more plentie of good oysters, fish, flesh, wildfoul, and good bread,” several of the voyagers remembered, “nor never had better fires in England, then in the dry smoky houses of Kecoughtan.”

  Unfavorable weather continued to hamper their travels as they made their way toward Werowocomoco, which they finally reached on January 12. After sitting down with the visitors for a welcoming meal, Powhatan asked when they would be on their way home, pretending ignorance of the message offering food for guns. Smith noticed that the messengers who had brought the offer were right there among them, and said so. “The president shewing him the men there present that brought him the message and conditions, asked Powhatan how it chanced that he became so forgetfull.” Powhatan took this jovially and conceded the truth of the matter, but insisted that there was no deal without the guns and swords. To this, Smith replied with some posturing of his own:

  Though I had many courses to have made my provision, yet beleeving your promises to supply my wants, I neglected all to satisfie your desire: and to testifie my love, I send you my men for your building, neglecting mine owne. What your people had, you have engrossed, forbidding them for our trade: and now you thinke by consuming the time, we shall consume [die] for want....3

  As for guns and swords, Smith continued, Powhatan already knew that the colony could not spare any. “And you must know those I have can keepe me from want,” he added archly. But he would not violate their friendship unless Powhatan forced him to with ill treatment.

  Powhatan listened to this impassively, and told Smith he would spare what he could in a couple of days. But he had a grievance of his own. “Some doubt I have of your coming hither,” he continued, “that makes me not so kindly seeke to relieve you as I would: for many do inform me, your coming hither is not for trade, but to invade my people, and possesse my country.”

  Strictly speaking, Powhatan was only half right. While the English did indeed mean to settle themselves in Virginia permanently, their conception at this point was to occupy only “waste ground”—territory the natives were not inhabiting. (When it came to waste ground, the marshy Jamestown peninsula was a prime specimen.) Support for dispossessing the natives outright would not come until later: four years after Powhatan’s death, to be precise. In this, the emperor proved prescient.

  Powhatan’s rebuke was not meant as idle prophecy, though; it was a gambit to persuade Smith to disarm. Leave your weapons on your ships “to free us of this feare,” he now admonished Smith. “Here they are needlesse.”

  Smith stuck to his guns, in both senses. That night, he and his men lodged in Werowocomoco. The Germans who had been working on Powhatan’s house took the occasion to agree covertly on a course of action. They had been surprised by the comparative abundance and comfort that the natives enjoyed, and it was looking ever more appealing than the privation they had left behind in Jamestown. There was no real reason to believe their English hosts would even last through the winter. All of the Germans, including the man Smith had sent to spy on the Powhatans, concurred in the plan: to save their skins by turning against the English.

  The next day, they made it known to the Powhatans that they wished to enter the emperor’s service. Would he care to learn the details of the colony’s defenses and its state of affairs? As expected, the Powhatans were very much interested. It was agreed that they would slow the construction of the house; the more the project was stretched out, the longer they would have cover for traveling between Jamestown and Werowocomoco.

  Powhatan and Smith, meanwhile, got their negotiations started in Powhatan’s bark-and-thatch home. The emperor opened with another try at inducing Smith to disarm. Where Newport’s weakness was his eagerness to please, perhaps Smith’s would be vainglory. Powhatan’s tack this time, then, would be flattery. “Thinke you I am so simple, not to know it is better to eate good meate, lye well, and sleep merrily with my women and children, laugh and be merry with you, have copper, hatchets, or what I want, being your friend?” he asked. The alternative, he said, was to be “so hunted by you that I can neither rest, eate, nor sleep; but my tired men must watch, and if a twig but breake, every one cryeth, ‘There commeth Captain Smith.’ ”

  Surely Smith realized that Powhatan had no wish for such a life, Powhatan observed. “Let this therefore assure you of our loves, and every yeare our friendly trade shall furnish you with corn; and now also, if you would come in friendly manner to see us, and not thus with guns and swords as to invade your foes.”

  Smith was always both impressed with and wary of Powhatan’s “subtill” cunning. He would not be taken in so easily. “Had we intended you any hurt, long ere this we could have effected it,” he riposted. “Your people coming to Jamestown are entertained with their bows and arrows without any exceptions; we esteeming it with you as it is with us, to wear our armes as our apparell.” As for the corn, Smith put on a mask of indifference. If food was no
t forthcoming from Powhatan, he asserted, he could find it somewhere else. Powhatan’s “friendly care” in that regard was “needlesse.” 4

  As the two men continued in this vein, Smith concluded that Powhatan was merely passing the time while awaiting some preplanned attack. At the time, Smith had only one Englishman in the house with him—the “exceeding heavie” John Russell, one of the gentlemen-turned-lumberjacks from the previous year. (Russell had continued to earn Smith’s respect with his hard work.) Smith felt they were vulnerable, and sent word for some of the men who were waiting on the boats to come to the house. Shortly afterward, Powhatan received the news that his own warriors were ready; he had several women distract Smith and Russell with conversation while he excused himself. Powhatan’s men quietly ringed the building outside.

  Smith became aware of the activity outside, possibly hearing the men’s movements through the flimsy bark walls as they made footfalls in the snow. Smith indicated to Russell that they would be making a run for it. Russell followed Smith in pushing through the low-slung door. As Smith fired a warning shot from his pistol, the warriors backed away, and the two Englishmen sprinted flat out, with guns and shields in hand. They ran until they reached the cluster of Smith’s men who were still making their way to the house. Now there were twenty of them altogether, with considerable firepower among them.

  Seeing this, the natives claimed Smith had misunderstood. “With the uttermost of their excuses they sought to dissemble the matter,” several English participants wrote later. An elderly man sent by Powhatan gave Smith a bracelet and a pearl chain, and explained that Powhatan had fled out of fear of their guns. The warriors, he said, were there to protect Powhatan’s corn in case one of Smith’s men tried to steal it—without Smith’s knowledge, of course.

  Smith’s response is unknown. He was scarcely in a position to take umbrage at the idea, since, after all, he had just tried to sell the council in Jamestown on a plan to do more or less what Powhatan’s messenger had just said. Nonetheless, he regarded the explanation as a lie and remained suspicious. When some native men brought heavy baskets of corn in trade for Smith’s presents, they solemnly offered to guard the Englishmen’s guns and swords while the English loaded their boats. The English cocked their guns and said, in effect, no thanks: We’ll guard the weapons while you load the boats.5