Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  “If you finde false orthography or broken English,” Thomas Abbay wrote in his introduction to the Proceedings, “they are small faultes in souldiers, that not being able to write learnedly, onlie strive to speake truely, and be understood without an interpreter.” The authors made themselves understood only too clearly: from the first chapter to the last, they rallied around Smith and excoriated the company’s appointed leaders. It was likely for this reason that the two books were published in Oxford, rather than London; the guild of publishers in London, the Stationers’ Company, had invested substantially in the Virginia Company in 1609, and would have been loath to drive its reputation down any further. 7

  In his book The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia, William Strachey paid Smith the compliment of reprinting around four-fifths of the text of A Map of Virginia without attribution. Smith’s work, in fact, makes up around a third of Strachey’s book. Although this would be considered a kind of theft by today’s standards (and justly so), the standards of attribution in 1612 fell somewhere between lax and nonexistent. It would have been unusual for Smith to have complained. Smith’s book has received due credit in the centuries since, though; thanks to his observant eye, the Map remains today a major source for ethnographers of the Chesapeake natives.

  What was key from Smith’s point of view, however, was that his books, his notoriety, and his circle of connections brought him another Virginia voyage—two of them, in fact, in 1614 and 1615. These voyages would not bring him back to Jamestown, or anywhere near it; “Virginia” was the term in his day for the entire East Coast of North America between Spanish Florida and French Nova Scotia. Smith’s travels would now take him to Virginia’s northeastern shore, and he would give the region its name: New England.

  So on March 3, 1614, Smith was in command of two ships with forty-five men and boys bound for the waters of New England. One Thomas Hunt served under Smith as captain of the smaller ship, though he had evidently signed on to the project before Smith. The sponsors of the voyage, and Smith’s employers, were a group of investors led by Marmaduke Rawdon, a London merchant and wine trader.

  Just how Smith made the connection with Rawdon is unknown. What is clear is that his perseverance had paid off—almost. He was still not involved with a colony. The aim of the enterprise was instead to look for gold and copper, and, if that failed, to fish and to hunt for whales. In Smith’s estimation, the talk of gold had merely been Hunt’s gimmick to draw in the investors. “For our gold,” Smith commented later, “it was rather the masters device to get a voyage that projected it, then any knowledge he had at all of any such matter.”

  The trip yielded neither gold nor copper nor whales, but from Smith’s perspective, those were of secondary interest to begin with. While most of the men fished off the coast of Maine, Smith took eight or nine men in a boat to survey the coastline. He drew a map based on his explorations as he went along:

  I have had six or seven severall plots of those northerne parts [Smith recalled], so unlike each to other, or resemblance of the country, as they did me no more good then so much waste paper . . . but lest others be deceived as I was, or through dangerous ignorance hazard themselves as I did, I have drawne a map from point to point, ile to ile, and harbour to harbour, with the soundings, sands, rocks, and land-markes, as I passed close aboord the shore in a little boat....8

  Among the landmarks Smith recorded were Cape Cod (“Cape James”), the Charles River, and Plymouth (“Accomack”); he landed at the latter some seven years before the Pilgrims. He deemed it “an excellent good harbour, good land, and no want of any thing but industrious people.”

  Smith’s next voyage, in March 1615, was actually intended to colonize New England. If it succeeded, it would be the first permanent English settlement in New England. An earlier attempt had been made in August of 1607 to establish a settlement on the Kennebec River in coastal Maine; that settlement, known as the Popham Colony—so named for its main financier, Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice— was abandoned after only thirteen months. The colony’s president, George Popham, nephew of the Lord Chief Justice, died of unknown causes. His successor, Raleigh Gilbert, soon received word that he had inherited an estate in England. After enduring a New England winter, Gilbert decided to go home, and the other hundred or so colonists went back to England with him.

  Smith was not burdened by any such lack of commitment. He had a false start when the larger of his two ships suffered mechanical problems at sea and had to return to port. On June 24, 1615, he sailed again. In August, as he came near the Azores, two French pirate ships approached and commanded the English to give themselves up. A group of Smith’s men pleaded with him to surrender, fearing that the pirates “were Turks, and would make them all slaves; or Frenchmen, and would throw them overboard if they shot but a peece [gun].” They had not been hired to fight, they told Smith. Smith replied simply that he would blow up his ship with the ship’s own powder before he would surrender.

  Thus chastened, Smith’s men put up a fight and escaped the pirate attack. A day later, though, four more French pirate ships closed in on Smith’s vessel. Smith, perhaps on a hunch, decided to meet with the attackers on board one of their vessels. Using his French, acquired on the battlefield in years gone by, he determined that they were privateers whom the French government had licensed to capture only Spanish, Portuguese, and pirate vessels—not English ones. Despite this, the French captain, François Perret, sieur du Poiron, did briefly take Smith’s crew and their provisions and weapons before restoring them.

  By Smith’s account, the majority of his men supported his plan to continue onward to New England. When he returned to du Poiron’s flagship to collect the last of their arms, however, a mutinous officer named Chambers refused to send a boat over to pick Smith up, claiming, falsely, that it was split. Chambers and his faction sailed the ship away from du Poiron’s fleet and returned to Plymouth. Many of those on board attested later that they were “land-men,” not sailors, and hence did not initially understand what the mutineers were up to. Possibly they understood more than they let on, and had simply lost their nerve after this second encounter with pirates on the high seas. Smith, meanwhile, was stuck on du Poiron’s ship, the Don de Dieu, with nothing but the clothes on his back.

  Du Poiron promised to let Smith off at the Azores, but broke that promise. The French captain may have had ransom in mind, or, more prosaically, he may have been worried that Smith would report his unauthorized harassment of an English vessel. As Smith’s captivity stretched into September and then October, he began to while away his time by compiling his observations of “north Virginia” into a book called A Description of New England—an exercise he undertook “to keepe my perplexed thoughts from too much meditation of my miserable estate [state of affairs],” as he put it.

  Around October 23, with the fleet near the coast of France, Smith was transferred to a smaller Portuguese caravel that du Poiron had captured. The caravel was now under the command of du Poiron’s lieutenant, who held him captive for about a week before confronting him one night with a choice: sign a paper relieving the Frenchmen from any responsibility before the Judge of the Admiralty, or else “lie in prison, or a worse mischiefe.” Smith found neither of these agreeable. A storm blew up that drove everyone below decks, and Smith saw his chance. He made a run for the ship’s boat and lowered himself and his manuscript into the Atlantic. Under cold gusts and heavy rain, he rowed and frenetically bailed out seawater until he lost consciousness.

  The next morning, some hunters found Smith run aground on the shore of the Charente River, “neere drowned, and halfe dead, with water, cold, and hunger.” The night had gone worse for his former shipmates. The Don de Dieu had wrecked on a reef some twenty miles down the coast, and du Poiron had drowned along with fifteen others.9

  Smith made his way back to England by the end of the year. The first six months of 1616 found him preparing his Description of New England for the press, checking proofs
at the printer’s, and working with the engraver—a Dutch immigrant named Simon van de Passe— on the accompanying map of the region, taken from the survey he made in 1614. The book was an account of Smith’s voyages, a report of the land along the New England coast, and propaganda for the concept of a New England colony. Soon it would come to the attention of a group of English Puritans, then in self-imposed exile in Leiden, Holland, who were beginning to cast about for a new place of settlement.

  A Description of New England was emerging from the printing press in mid-June, shortly after Pocahontas and John Rolfe landed. Smith received word of their arrival through some unnamed channel, perhaps the Reverend Samuel Purchas, who was collecting and editing various accounts of English colonization, and who was in touch with many of those involved in the Virginia Company. Seeing the chance to do a good turn for his young friend, Smith penned a letter of introduction to Queen Anne before Pocahontas arrived in London.

  “The love I beare my God, my King and countrie,” Smith began, “hath so oft emboldened mee in the worst of extreme dangers, that now honestie doth constrain me to presume thus farre beyond myselfe, to present your Majestie this short discourse: if ingratitude be a deadly poyson to all honest vertues, I must be guilty of that crime if I should omit any means to be thankful.”

  Smith then recited his debts to Pocahontas for saving his life at Powhatan’s capital in December of 1607, and again when she saved him from ambush there in January of 1609. “At the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her owne braines to save mine; and not onely that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to James towne, where I found about eight and thirty miserable poore and sicke creatures, to keep possession of all those large territories of Virginia.”

  Smith gave the queen an abbreviated history of the colony’s travails, Pocahontas’s friendship to the colony, and her capture. “At last rejecting her barbarous condition,” Smith explained, she “was married to an English Gentleman, with whom at this present she is in England; the first Christian ever of that Nation, the first Virginian ever spake English, or had a childe in marriage by an Englishman.”

  Smith now came to his point. He had evidently discerned— correctly—that the Virginia Company would deal with her as cheaply as it could. From his own experience with the company, he could readily guess that the Rolfes’ accommodations would be undistinguished, their allowance for expenses piddling. For England’s own sake, he urged Queen Anne, it was crucial that Pocahontas be received as a royal visitor, not as a sideshow attraction:

  However this might bee presented you from a more worthy pen, it cannot from a more honest heart, as yet I never begged any thing of the state, or [from] any: and it is my want of abilitie and her exceeding desert, your birth, means, and authoritie, her birth, virtue, want and simplicitie, doth make mee thus bold, humbly to beseech your Majestie to take this knowledge of her, though it be from one so unworthy to be the reporter, as my selfe, her husbands estate not being able to make her fit to attend your Majesty.

  The most and least I can doe, is to tell you this, because none so oft hath tried it as my selfe, and the rather being of so great a spirit, however her stature: if she should not be well received, seeing this Kingdome may rightly have a Kingdome by her means; her present love to us and Christianitie, might turn to such scorne and furie, as to divert all this good to the worst of evill, where [whereas] finding so great a Queene should doe her some honor more than she can imagine, for being so kind to your servants and subjects, would so ravish her with content, as endear her dearest bloud to effect that, your Majestie and all the Kings honest subjects most earnestly desire.10

  Pocahontas apparently never had a formal audience with King James and Queen Anne. Yet Smith’s letter had its desired effect. The colonial-era historian Robert Beverly, writing in 1705, recounted that “Pocahontas had many honours done her by the Queen upon account of Capt. Smith’s story; and being introduced by the Lady Delawarr, she was frequently admitted to wait on her Majesty, and was publicly treated as a prince’s daughter; she was carried to many plays, balls, and other publicke entertainments, and very respectfully receiv’d by all the ladies about the Court.” Purchas remembered that the bishop of London, John King, “entertained her with festivall state and pomp beyond what I have seen in his greate hospitalitie afforded to other ladies.” She won the respect of those who met her, Purchas wrote, because she “still carried her selfe as the daughter of a king”—the class consciousness of England in 1616 operated in her favor.

  Notwithstanding Pocahontas’s royal status, Purchas took a greater interest in another member of her retinue. Purchas, a round-faced cleric in his late thirties, was the rector of St. Martin’s Ludgate, a church near the Belle Savage Inn. Although he never set foot in the New World, he was acutely fascinated by it. He had already produced two editions of his book Purchas His Pilgrimage or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered from the Creation unto this Present. (The modern equivalent of the phrase “Purchas His Pilgrimage” would be “Purchas’s Pilgrimage.”) When he learned that a group of Virginia natives were staying in town, it was inevitable that he would attempt to interview one of them. Intending to learn about the religion of the Powhatans, he sought out the priest Tomocomo at the Ludgate Hill home of Theodore Goulston, a physician with connections to the Virginia Company.

  “With this savage I have often conversed at my good friends Master Doctor Goldstone [sic], where he was a frequent guest,” Purchas recorded, “and where I have both seen him sing and dance his diabolicall measures, and heard him discourse of his countrey and religion.” The sight of the native dances had unsettled the colonists who witnessed them in Virginia; they would have seemed even more occultlike and “diabolicall” to observers in the wainscoted formal parlor of a well-to-do Londoner, where Purchas no doubt watched in amazement as Tomocomo stomped the floor, and undulated his body, in time with a beat supplied by his howling voice.

  For their conversations, a man brought over from Virginia by Sir Thomas Dale served as interpreter; whether this man was an Englishman or a native is unclear. Through him, Tomocomo explained to Purchas that their god was called Okeus, and that it was Okeus who “made heaven and earth.” He comes to Powhatan’s temples, Tomocomo said, and renders instructions and prophecies. “Being asked what became of the souls of dead men, he [Tomocomo] pointed up to heaven,” Purchas reported, “but of wicked men they hung between heaven and earth.”

  Purchas inferred that Okeus was the Christian devil, and concluded sadly that the natives were devil worshippers. Tomocomo was “a blasphemer of what he knew not,” and unlike Pocahontas, he would listen to no encouragement to accept Christianity. Tomocomo waved the subject aside by advising Purchas to try teaching the younger men and women who had come over with Pocahontas; as for himself, he said, he was too old to learn. Purchas, in keeping with the wellintentioned mind-set of many of his countrymen, asked readers of his account to look upon the natives’ heathen practices “with pity and compassion,” and to “endeavor to bring these silly souls out of the snare of the devil by our prayers, our purses, and all our best endeavors.”11

  Among the festivities that Pocahontas attended, the highlight, in terms of opulence and social cachet, was the royal Twelfth Night masque. Masques were a form of courtly entertainment in King James’s day that bore a passing resemblance to musical theater. Their players included selected members of the audience, mostly men and women of the court, who sprang from their seats on cue to join the dancing. Staged in the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace on January 5, 1617, the masque that Pocahontas attended, “The Vision of Delight,” was written for the evening’s merriment by Ben Jonson. The extravagant scenery and costumes were designed by the architect Inigo Jones.

  Some idea of the event’s prestige can be gleaned from the wrangling between the French and Spanish ambassadors over the privilege of attending; both men eagerly sought an invitation, but e
ach one insisted on the exclusion of the other. Because the French ambassador had been invited for the past two years running, that year’s invitation went to his Spanish counterpart. On learning of this, the disgruntled Gaul sent “passionat reports into France of the prejudice.”

  Pocahontas’s invitation was a sign of her own social success. She was “well placed” at the masque, having a place of some prominence in the gallery, according to the gossipy John Chamberlain. She was accompanied by Lord and Lady De La Warr and Tomocomo. She met a stream of notables in the course of the evening, one of whom was the none-too-majestic King James himself.

  Earlier in his reign, the king had been described by a foreign visitor as “handsome, noble and jovial.” But by this time, he was fifty-one years old, and a lifetime of gluttony and immoderate drinking had much reshaped his head and body. (His physician noted that the king’s drinking “errs as to quality, quantity, frequency, time and order.”) His teeth were gradually falling out, and so he tended to gulp down his food, dispensing with the step of chewing. One Anthony Weldon, knighted by James that year, thought it peculiar that the king “would never change his clothes until worn out to very rags.” He was prone to excessive sweat, but his dislike for water was such that he would not bathe on any account.