Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Only the most churlish and nitpicking observer would point out that Dale was already married. His wife Elizabeth, Lady Dale, was at home in England; they had wed on the eve of his departure for Virginia. Moreover, the pursuit of a girl not yet twelve years old by a middle-aged man was abnormal even by the standards of Dale’s era. Although it was permissible under English law for a girl to consent to marriage as young as age seven, and to consummate the marriage as young as age twelve, such marriages were a rarity in practice; both males and females normally married in their twenties.

  For the moment, any moral discomfort that Hamor may have had with his orders was secondary to the physical discomfort of having Powhatan’s hands around his neck. Hamor and Savage persuaded the chief to release his grip, and to disregard the missing chain as an innocent oversight. Powhatan brought the men to his house near the waterside. Inside, he seated himself and his visitors on a mat, joined by his wives and male councilors.

  Then he began to inquire [Hamor recalled] how his brother Sir Thomas Dale fared; after that of his daughter’s welfare, her marriage, his unknown son [his son-in-law, whom he had apparently never met], and how they liked, lived, and loved together. I resolved him that his brother was very well, and his daughter so well content that she would not change her life to return and live with him, whereat he laughed heartily, and said he was very glad of it.12

  Social pleasantries completed, Powhatan invited Hamor to proceed with the business that had brought him there. Hamor explained that his message was to be delivered only in private. Powhatan ordered everyone away, except for two “comely and personable” young women seated on either side of him; these, Savage explained, were his queens and could not be sequestered for any reason.

  Hamor told Powhatan of Dale’s greetings of love and peace, and handed some presents to him: “two large pieces of copper, five strings of white and blue beads, five wooden combs, ten fishhooks, and a pair of knives.” Powhatan examined each of the gifts and indicated his satisfaction. Hamor now came to the point: “The bruit [news] of the exquisite perfection of your youngest daughter, being famous throughout your territories, hath come to the hearing of your brother Sir Thomas Dale . . .” Powhatan interrupted Hamor repeatedly as he spoke, wanting to hear no more. Hamor implored Powhatan to hear him out, and continued:

  . . . who for this purpose hath addressed me hither to entreat you by that brotherly friendship you make profession of to permit her to return with me unto him, partly for the desire which himself hath, and partly for the desire her sister hath to see her [an inspired touch], of whom, if fame hath not been prodigal, as likely enough it hath not, your brother by your favor would gladly make his nearest companion, wife, and bedfellow . . .13

  When Hamor finished, he could anticipate Powhatan’s reply. It was not possible, Powhatan said. The girl that Dale wanted had already been sold to another weroance for two bushels of oyster-shell beads. She was already three days’ travel away.

  Perhaps Powhatan could undo the transaction and bring his daughter home, Hamor suggested. Powhatan could return the beads, and the English would compensate him with three times their value, to be paid in copper, hatchets, and the like.

  Predictably, Powhatan was unmoved, and showed signs of exhausted patience. He loved his daughter, he said, and could not go on living if he were unable to look upon her often. He would see her rarely, if ever, if she were to live with the English, for he had long ago resolved never to make himself vulnerable by visiting English territory. “I hold it not a brotherly part of your king to desire to bereave me of two of my children at once.”

  Powhatan either misunderstood Dale’s motives or pretended to misunderstand them, treating the request for his daughter as though Dale were seeking her as a pledge of peace. It is likely that Dale, already confident of the peace, was primarily interested in landing a “bedfellow.” Powhatan, however, opted for the more charitable interpretation, and assured Hamor that Dale needed no further pledge than he already had. For Powhatan was capitulating to the English, then and there.

  Further give him to understand [Powhatan told Hamor] that if he had no pledge at all, he should not need to distrust any injury from me or any under my subjection. There have been too many of his men and mine killed, and by my occasion there shall never be more. I, which have the power to perform it, have said it: no, not though I should have just occasion offered, for I am old now and would gladly end my days in peace. So as if the English offer me injury, my country is large enough; I will remove myself farther from you. Thus much I hope will satisfy my brother. Now, because yourselves are weary and I sleepy, we will thus end the discourse of this business. 14

  It is tempting not to take Powhatan’s speech at face value—to read it, rather, as a rhetorical device to divert Hamor from importuning him for another daughter. Yet the reality was that Powhatan had told Hamor the truth. The English never learned his age, but they had seen he was an elderly man in the colony’s early days. Now Powhatan felt his energies in decline. After seven years of persistence, the colonists had simply outlasted his strength of will. Powhatan stayed faithful to his word, never again waging war on the English.

  12

  POCAHONTAS IN LONDON

  Within a few months of Pocahontas’s marriage in April 1614, Dale began to think of bringing her to England for the company’s benefit. It was such a compelling proposition from the company’s standpoint that the only mystery is why the company took another two years to bring it about. The company’s broadsides, or printed flyers, for the Virginia lottery had been adorned by illustrations of exotic-looking native figures; now the company could bring those drawings to reality. A character in The Tempest remarks that although the English “will not give a doit [half a farthing, a trivial amount] to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” As a publicity device for the lottery—the Virginia Company’s lifeblood since the collapse of the investors’ confidence—nothing could compare to a living, breathing native princess.

  There were other benefits. The ministers of London who had done so much to rally public interest in the company’s stock offering in 1609 would be able to see their reward: a convert to Christianity. And possibly, just possibly, King James could be roused to take an interest in the enterprise, and to lend it royal support. After granting the charter of 1606, he had become either bored or impatient with Virginia, and lost all enthusiasm for it. The only evident attraction the colony had held for him in recent years was as a source of flying squirrels for his exotic-animal collection.1

  Pocahontas and John Rolfe (or, more properly, Rebecca and John Rolfe) landed at Plymouth on or shortly before June 3, 1616. They were now the parents of a one-year-old son, Thomas, who was said to resemble his mother. Samuel Argall was captain of the ship—an awkward circumstance, no doubt, considering the manner of her capture two years before. The Rolfes were joined by an entourage of ten or twelve Powhatans, including a priest named Tomocomo, from whom Chief Powhatan had ordered a firsthand report on the English homeland; Tomocomo’s wife Matachanna, who was also Pocahontas’s half sister; and a group of male and female servants. In the hold were barrels of John Rolfe’s tobacco, along with modest amounts of sassafras (believed to be effective against a range of diseases), sturgeon, pitch, and clapboard.

  Dale was also there to bask in reflected glory and, presumably, to become reacquainted with his wife. He was “safely returned from the hardest task I ever undertook,” he wrote to King James’s principal secretary upon his arrival, “and by the blessing of God have with poor means left the colony in great prosperity and peace, contrary to many men’s expectation.” In truth, the peace could be credited to his fellow passengers, Pocahontas and her husband. Dale did bring discipline and a degree of prosperity to the colony, but it is debatable whether a merciful God would have blessed his methods.

  The first task of reconnaissance that Chief Powhatan had assigned Tomocomo was to count the number of Englishmen he saw by making notches in a lo
ng stick. About as soon as the party set foot in Plymouth, a busy port town, Tomocomo realized the futility of the assignment and threw the stick away.

  The Rolfes and their entourage were carried to London by coach. This was evidently a calculated move on the company’s part. The last native visitor, Namontack, had been brought directly to London via the Thames, and had thus seen little of England outside the city. He logically concluded that the English were suffering from a dearth of fields and trees, and brought back word to the Powhatans that this was the real reason the English had come to Virginia. This time, with an overland trip of nearly 180 miles from southwest England to London, the company would set the natives straight: England was not all buildings.2

  The journey, which would have taken around a week, was a dusty passage on dirt roads—except when the coach passed through more populous areas, at which point it became a tooth-chattering ride over round cobblestones. What the natives saw, to their surprise, was mostly cropland and meadow, the meadow enlivened here and there by grazing cattle. (There was no country, a French visitor remarked in 1606, “which uses so much land for pasture as this.”)

  As the coach came nearer to London, the scene began to look less idyllic. Pocahontas’s disconcerting first view would have been of a slum, the borough of Southwark, across the Thames from the city proper. Out of Pocahontas’s sight, past the tenements of the borough, was Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. After passing through Southwark, the coach crossed London Bridge into the city. At the entryway to the bridge they would have seen the severed heads of convicts, mounted on pikes for public exhibition. Just beyond that didactic display, the visitors would have had a hard time telling they were even on a bridge; with the houses and shops that had been built on London Bridge, lining it on both sides, one could get barely a glimpse of the river.

  To the natives who had lived all their lives in the small, well-ordered riverside villages of the Chesapeake, London could only have made them doubt their own senses. The streets resounded with the rumbling of coaches and carts, the hubbub of the crowds jostling their way along, the barking of stray dogs, and the cries of the hawkers and peddlers—the fishwife’s “Mussels, lily white!” or the costermonger’s “Ripe cherry, ripe!” The city had grown from just 70,000 people a century earlier to more than 200,000, and commerce had multiplied with the population: grocers and vintners, haberdashers and apothecaries, in fancy stores or (more often) open stalls. The houses of London tended to be narrow, with fronts of timber and plaster, but many of them reached five or six stories into the sky.3

  The smells of the city were as hard-hitting as its sights and sounds. The wood smoke from London fireplaces would have been inoffensive to the natives, whose houses in Virginia were kept warm—and smoky—with a log fire. The black, sooty smoke and pungent odor of the burning coal was something else. On the subject of England’s trees, Namontack had been more correct than he knew. With the nation’s population growth, it had been steadily depleting its forests and clearing them for agriculture. That, in turn, was forcing businesses in growing numbers to convert to the only alternative at hand. A Londoner by the name of John Evelyn later made note of the “hellish and dismall cloud of sea-coale” from the chimneys. The city’s inhabitants, he wrote, “breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies, so that . . . coughs and consumption rage more in that one city, than the whole Earth besides.”

  Another smell was the by-product of travel by horse and carriage, namely, dung on the streets. The natives did not have domesticated horses in Virginia, so they had not experienced this odor in full force until now. Lastly, and perhaps most strangely from the perspective of the visitors, there was the abundant human waste: the public latrines in the streets, the sewage in the ditches, and the cesspools behind the houses. The natives must have thought the English a notably unclean people.

  As the coach passed the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral (the predecessor to the Christopher Wren structure now on the same site), the natives would have seen men in stalls selling the mysterious English talking papers—that is, books. A few blocks later, the coach pulled up to their accommodations on Ludgate Hill. Someone with an overactive sense of humor had booked them at an establishment known variously as the Belle Savage, the Bell Savage, or the Belle Sauvage. It was a none-too-elevated combination of inn and tavern, with one wall adjoining Fleet Prison.4

  While the Virginia Company had received Pocahontas with less than royal consideration, another party was working on her behalf behind the scenes.

  When John Smith returned to England seven years earlier, he was twenty-nine years old—a man in early middle age, but still well within his prime. It is unknown whether he had recuperated from his powder burn by the time he landed, or whether he sought medical help once he reached London (as he had planned to do). Details of his activities immediately after his return in late 1609 are sparse, but with his obvious and lifelong passion for Virginia, he surely tried to get himself another tour of duty there. With his lack of political acumen and his long list of accumulated adversaries, it was equally inevitable that he failed. When Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, sailed for Virginia on April 1, 1610, with his fleet of three ships—the De La Warr, the Blessing,and the Hercules—Smith was not on any of them.

  The publication of his True Relation showed him another path. The True Relation had been edited and published while Smith was in Jamestown, and he had learned of it only after the fact. He had become a published author without even trying. His first book had brought him notoriety and influence; might another book bring more of both—and money, to boot? And with more of those tangible and intangible assets, might he be able to engineer a return, somehow, to the American frontier? Could he, in effect, publish his way out of the box he was in? Such are the thoughts that must have turned over in his mind. In any case, as his London friend Samuel Purchas put it, “Seeing he cannot there be employed to performe Virginian exploits worthy the writing, here he employeth himselfe to write Virginian affairs worthy the reading.”

  Smith thus took the notes he made while in Virginia and began assembling them into a description of the country. It is clear that the pistol was still a more natural instrument for him than the pen. He started with a list of Algonquian words and phrases, and then launched into a matter-of-fact—even mundane—account of Virginia’s geography and climate:

  Virginia is a country in America that lyeth betweene the degrees of 34 and 44 [actually 45] of the north latitude. The bounds thereof on the east side are the great ocean. On the south lyeth Florida: on the north Nova Francia. As for the west thereof, the limits are unknowne. . . .

  The sommer is hot as in Spaine; the winter colde as in Fraunce or England. The heat of sommer is in June, Julie, and August, but commonly the coole breeses as-swage the vehemencie of the heat. The chiefe of winter is halfe December, January, February, and halfe March. The colde is extreame sharpe, but here the proverb is true that no extreame long continueth. 5

  In subsequent chapters, Smith detailed the plants and animals of Virginia, the agriculture of the natives, the goods that England could bring from Virginia, and, finally, the natives’ culture. Reflecting his own interests and, perhaps, a canny calculation of his readers’ appetites, he devoted over half of his book to his copious observations of the natives—among other things, their attire, their religion, their means of making war, and their government under Powhatan. He showed relatively little overt bias against his erstwhile adversaries; neither did he spend any ink assessing them as potential converts to the English way of life. Rather, his voice is mostly that of a neutral observer saying, in effect, This is who they are and this is what they are like—take them or leave them:

  Their buildings and habitations are for the most part by the rivers or not farre distant from some fresh spring. The houses are built like our arbors of small yo
ung springs [saplings] bowed and tyed, and so close covered with mats, or barkes of trees very handsomely, that notwithstanding either winde, raine, or weather, they are as warm as stoves, but very smoaky, yet at the toppe of the house there is a hole made for the smoake to goe into right over the fire. . . .

  In their hunting and fishing they take extreame paines; yet it being their ordinary exercise from infancy, they esteeme it a pleasure and are very proud to be expert therein. And by their continuall ranging, and travel, they know all the advantages and places most frequented with deare, beasts, fish, foule, rootes, and berries. . . .

  Against all these enemies [the Monacans, the Mannahoacs, and the Massawomecks] the Powhatans are sometimes constrained to fight. Their chiefe attempts are by stratagems, trecheries, or surprisals. . . .

  Although the countrie people be very barbarous, yet have they amongst them such government, as that their magistrats for good commanding, and their people for due subjection, excell many places that would be counted very civill. The form of their common-wealth is a monarchicall governement, one as emperor ruleth over many kings or governours....6

  Along with the notes and recollections that went into his manuscript, Smith had sketched some maps showing the rivers of the Chesapeake and the locations of the native villages. He worked with an artist and engraver named William Hole to turn these into a polished and detailed diagram of the region. The map and the manuscript together went to Joseph Barnes at Oxford, who published them in 1612 under the title A Map of Virginia with a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities,People, Government and Religion.

  While Smith was assembling his Map of Virginia, a group of Smith’s friends and supporters were working on a series of eyewitness accounts of the colony’s early history. Richard Pots, a colonist who was newly returned from Virginia, collected the chronicles of a half dozen other colonists and contributed some of his own. The other contributors were Anas Todkill (John Martin’s former servant), Dr. Walter Russell (who had saved Smith from the venomous stingray), Thomas Abbay, William Fettiplace, Nathaniel Powell, Richard Wiffin, and Smith himself. Pots also obtained notes made by Thomas Studley, the colony’s first supply officer, prior to his death in August 1607. William Symonds, a preacher in Southwark, then edited the collection, at which point it too went to Joseph Barnes, and was published as The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia since their first beginning from England in the yeare of our Lord 1606, till this present 1612, with all their accidents that befell them in their Journeys and Discoveries.