Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  What are you going to do?

  What are you going to do?

  What are you going to do?11

  Marginalia

  In the commentaries below, I address some questions that do not quite fit anywhere else. They seem too laden with methodological issues for the body of the book, and yet too important to leave for the notes. Some of the commentaries address matters of current controversy, on which I venture an opinion about the state of the evidence.

  CONVERTING MONEY FIGURES

  It is obvious that money figures from the early 1600s—such as the cost of a Virginia Company share in 1609, at £12 10s.—must be multiplied by some large factor to yield an equivalent value in today’s currency. Four centuries of inflation (with interspersed periods of deflation) have taken their toll on the purchasing power of a pound sterling. But by how much?

  Any attempt to translate monetary values across the centuries will necessarily rest on a shaky foundation. The consumer’s market basket of goods has changed drastically between the early 1600s and modern times. The English family of the 1600s bought wood or coal to keep its home heated and spent substantially on candles to keep it lit. The purchasing power of a pound in terms of wood, coal, and candles in that day must somehow be translated into modern purchasing power in terms of gas, oil, or electric heat and electric lighting. Four centuries’ worth of inventions did not exist at the start of the period, from cars, computers, and refrigerators to the packaged foods inside those refrigerators. English men and women of the early 1600s did not care to drink water if they had a choice; the idea of actually paying money for a bottle of it would have inspired much hilarity.

  With that caveat in mind, one can assemble a comparison of English price levels over the period using published economic history data. The standard work remains the 1956 Economica article by E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates.” Brown and Hopkins compiled price levels spanning 1264 to 1954, drawing on the purchasing records of schools, colleges, manors, and churches for the years through the seventeenth century. They set out an annual consumer price index, in effect, based on the prices of the items in a representative collection of consumer goods (which varied over the period of their study).

  Useful as they are, these findings take us only as far as 1954. A research paper from the Economic Policy and Statistics Section of the House of Commons Library, however, has joined the Brown and Hopkins data with four other price studies covering more recent periods. The result is a set of data covering the years 1750 through 2001. (The House of Commons Library paper ignored earlier years.) On the scale used in that paper, the price level for 1974 has an index value of 100, and years with higher or lower price levels get higher or lower price index figures accordingly.

  I have adjusted some of the pre-1750 figures from Brown and Hopkins so they can be tacked on to the data in the House of Commons Library series with the same index scale. A few price levels from the Jamestown colonial period, derived in this way, are listed in the following table along with some more recent data:

  With these very approximate figures, one can convert the £12 10s. price of a Virginia Company share to a modern counterpart. The overall inflation factor in England from 1609 to 2001 is 630.1/4.7, or roughly 134—that is, 13,400 percent. A pound sterling at this time was made up of twenty shillings; thus, twelve pounds, ten shillings was twelve and a half pounds. Multiplying 12.5 by 134 gives a value of £1,675 per share. Assuming modern exchange rates in the range of $1.50 to $1.70 to the pound, the dollar figure is between roughly $2,500 and $2,850.1

  THE FIRST RESCUE AND ITS CRITICS

  The story of the first rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas fell into disrepute among historians during the Reconstruction era and stayed there until roughly a century later. Modern scholars have reappraised Smith’s account in light of ethnographic evidence, and most accept it as true. (These scholars tend to believe Smith misunderstood what he had experienced—that what he saw as a thwarted execution was actually part of an adoption ceremony. For reasons I explain in the next note, I disagree with this interpretation.)

  The first direct challenge to the rescue story came in an 1867 article written by Henry Adams for a popular national magazine, the North American Review. The impetus for the article was Adams’s belief during the war that discrediting John Smith would represent a major propaganda victory against the South. Adams told a family friend that he viewed the piece as “some sort of flank, or rather a rear attack, on the Virginia aristocracy, who will be utterly gravelled by it if it is successful.”

  From a historical perspective, the identification of Smith with the Confederate cause was a non sequitur. Smith spent the last seventeen years of his life advocating settlement of New England. “No man rejoiced more than himself in the establishment of the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts [Bay],” Jeremy Belknap wrote in 1794. Smith’s image had changed during the nineteenth century, however, in ways he could not have anticipated. Claimed by Virginia and its leading families, some of whom descended from Pocahontas, Smith was now more or less a regional hero, not a national one. Equally misleading was the view of Pocahontas’s rescue as the central incident of his life. Although Smith expressed gratitude for it, his writings recounted it almost in passing, en route to other adventures.

  In any case, Adams was right about the sentiment of his times. If he could cast Smith as a liar regarding the rescue, he would be pulling down a venerated icon of the enemy. In the process, he could diminish the legend of Pocahontas herself, the ancestral mother of Virginia’s elite. Among the Virginia aristocrats with Pocahontas in their family tree, Adams confided in a letter that he specifically had in mind the late John Randolph, a political adversary of both his grandfather, President John Quincy Adams, and his great-grandfather, President John Adams.2

  The thesis of Henry Adams and later critics was simple: Smith omitted the rescue story from the True Relation and his contribution to the Proceedings because it never happened, and then he fabricated the story in later works to build up his reputation. But Smith would have been puzzled by the idea that the story cast him in a heroic light. From his standpoint, and from the perspective of his era, the story was not inordinately flattering. To be taken prisoner (after stumbling into a mire!) and then to be saved by a young native girl was hardly an admirable achievement; no Englishman of the early seventeenth century would have viewed it as a point of pride.

  Smith’s attitude is indicated by his first published reference to the rescue, in the revised 1622 edition of his book New Englands Trials. After two long paragraphs reciting his success in fighting and intimidating the Virginia natives, he added, “It is true in our greatest extremitie they shot me, slew three of my men, and by the folly of them that fled took me prisoner; yet God made Pocahontas the King’s daughter the means to deliver me.” This terse statement is his entire reference to the rescue in the book. It is palpable both from the context and from Smith’s reticent phraseology (“it is true . . .”) that he preferred not to bring up the subject at all. The statement is, as the lawyers say, an admission against interest. He is mentioning his captivity and rescue because he anticipates that they will be brought up by his opponents. The reference in the Generall Historie is almost as terse.

  Although Smith’s account is the only source for the rescue, there are a number of reasons for accepting it. The story of the rescue was believed and reprinted by the Reverend Samuel Purchas, who had numerous connections in and around the Virginia Company, including both friends and adversaries of Smith. It is unlikely that the cleric would have willingly opened himself up to ridicule by including the story (or Smith’s other writings) in his chronicles if the story had an odor of fraud or if Smith had a reputation as a liar. Henry Wharton’s 1685 biography, The Life of John Smith, English Soldier, also accepted the rescue story. Pocahontas’s second rescue of Smith had multiple English eyewitnesses, and has never been seriously ques
tioned, so far as I can determine.

  The fact that Smith’s books carried commendatory verses from Purchas and from his fellow colonists is further indicative of his general reputation for veracity. Colonist William Strachey recommended Smith’s writings, as did William Crashaw, another London cleric with Virginia Company connections. John Stow’s Annales or a General Chronicle of England noted in 1631 that Smith “wrote a book of every particular place [in the Virginia colony] and of all that hapned there.” The entry for Smith in Thomas Fuller’s 1662 comical biography collection, The Worthies of England, held it “much to the dimunition of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them,” but this ignored the accounts of Smith’s adventures originating in the 1612 Proceedings, most of which came from the nine other colonists who contributed to that book. Twentieth-century scholarship confirmed obscure details of Smith’s accounts of his Central European military adventures wherever they could be checked.3

  The best and most detailed treatment of the historical controversy over the rescue is J. A. Leo Lemay’s Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (1992). I am indebted to Professor Lemay for many of the points above. In my view, he makes an overwhelming case for believing Smith’s report.

  RESCUE OR ADOPTION CEREMONY?

  Some researchers have argued that Smith misunderstood what he had experienced during the December 30, 1607, assembly at Werowocomoco. According to these theories, the Powhatans never actually meant to execute him at all. Rather, Smith was undergoing an adoption-like ceremony, one that brought him into the tribe, or one that made the entire English colony a vassal nation of the Powhatans. Pocahontas’s role, in this view, was prearranged and scripted.

  An immediate problem with such theories is that nothing is known about seventeenth-century Powhatan adoption ceremonies (assuming they existed), nor is any other tribe in North America known to have had an adoption procedure comparable to what was undergone by Smith. It has been suggested that the ceremony follows the “structure” of “the classic pattern of rites of passage.” Yet the Powhatans’ own rite of passage for young males does not bear this argument out. The ritual, known to the English as the “black boys” ceremony, did include mock deaths—and, it was said, some real deaths—but otherwise it had little in common with Smith’s experience.4

  Most notably, the black boys ceremony was not based on a near execution followed by a rescue. Rather, it involved the boys running a gauntlet under the protection of a priest, then playing dead. In other words, it climaxed in a symbolic killing, not in a symbolic rescue and commutation. In addition to this fundamental distinction between the actual Powhatan rite of passage and the one Smith allegedly experienced, there are an array of lesser ones. For example, the participants in the black boys ceremony (aside from the boys themselves) were male guards and priests—not princesses. There was no execution stone. A sacrificial fire was built, though the English witnesses were not permitted to stay to see how it was used.5

  Apart from the paucity of empirical support, the theories have another problem: Smith’s involvement with the Powhatans did not end on December 30, 1607. Why, then, did Smith never learn of his supposed mistake? How did he stay so clueless about the true nature of what he believed had been his near execution? These questions seem hard to surmount. Smith remained in Virginia, in frequent contact with the natives, including Powhatan and Pocahontas, for some time to come. Indeed, on account of Smith’s detailed study of native life and culture in Virginia, his writings are among the principal sources for Powhatan ethnologists today. For that matter, Smith later witnessed the black boys ceremony himself; if his experience had been comparable, he was in a position to put two and two together.6

  The one piece of hard evidence relied upon by proponents of the adoption theory is the later conversation between Smith and Pocahontas in England, in which she refers to him as “father” and “countryman.” It is more reasonable to assume that the “father” reference was figurative, just as Smith and Powhatan had referred to Christopher Newport figuratively as Smith’s “father.”7 (Also inconvenient for the adoption argument is that an adoption would have rendered Smith her brother, not her father.) In calling Smith her countryman, she is not calling him a Powhatan; she is referring to her own status by that time as an Englishwoman, and his as an Englishman. This becomes plain toward the end of the exchange, when she says discontentedly, “Your countrymen will lie much”—certainly meaning the English. (That she said “your countrymen” instead of “our countrymen” is a revealing slip.)

  Overall, there is no compelling reason to believe that the events in Powhatan’s assembly hall were anything other than what Smith perceived them to be. There is even less reason to doubt that Pocahontas was just who she appeared to be that day: a girl acting compassionately toward the pitiable stranger in front of her.

  OF TREE RINGS AND SECRET AGENTS

  The heavy death toll in the English colony from 1607 to 1610 continues to pique the interest of researchers. Was a hidden cause at work? Were the colonists doomed to die in large numbers no matter how well prepared, no matter how hardworking?

  Proponents of two recent theories have argued that the answer to both questions is yes. One of these theories gives an intriguing view of new data, though some important questions remain to be answered. The other theory has had the salutary effect of bringing Jamestown history to greater public attention, but otherwise has little to recommend it.

  The first theory holds that both the Jamestown colony and the failed Roanoke colony were established during periods of extreme drought. A team led by David W. Stahle of the University of Arkansas came to this conclusion based on an analysis of tree rings in the regions around Jamestown and Roanoke. In Jamestown, they wrote in a 1998 article in Science, the years 1606 to 1612 were “the driest 7-year episode in 770 years.”

  The researchers obtained core samples from ancient bald cypress trees in those areas (without destroying the trees), and correlated the spacing of the tree rings from 1941 to 1984 with local moisture records. They created a simple mathematical model based on those data and confirmed that their model also worked reasonably well on moisture records for the period 1896 to 1940. They then applied the model to centuries of earlier rings to identify the dry spells. In addition to the 1606–1612 period at Jamestown, they found a severe three-year drought in Roanoke from 1587 to 1589, as well as an earlier drought from 1562 to 1571.

  The challenge lies in validating the findings by checking them against the observations of the people who were alive at the time. The researchers were able to corroborate the Roanoke findings for 1562–1571 by pointing to observations of a Spanish missionary of that period. The Jamestown findings, however, are a different story. While the narratives from the theorized “drought” years indicate occasional episodes of dry weather (naturally enough), in no way do they point to a period of either drought or bad harvests spanning multiple years.

  The colonists’ writings of the period make numerous incidental references to stormy weather, rain, and snow. John Smith’s 1612 Map of Virginia noted brief extremes of weather, both wet and dry, but specifically stated that the climate was congenial for good crops if men would take the trouble to raise them. “Some times there are great droughts other times much raine, yet great necessity of neither, by reason we see not but that all the variety of needfull fruits of Europe may be there in great plenty by the industry of men, as appeareth by those we planted.” Elsewhere in the same book, he described the native planting cycle in some detail, depicting the natives as successful planters. Gabriel Archer in 1607 found the soil moist (“somewhat slymy in touch”); based on the colony’s limited attempts at agriculture that year, he judged it to be “more fertill then can be wel exprest.”8

  Further research and analysis may lead to a reconciliation of the tree-ring data with the human record. Continued work in this area could lead to new insights into the application of tree-ring data to climate issues across periods of many centuries—de
ndroclimatology, as this subdiscipline of tree-ring analysis is called—with potential benefits far beyond the boundaries of Jamestown.

  Not so promising, at least for the present, is the theory that the waves of Jamestown deaths from 1607 to 1610, including the Starving Time of 1609, represent a case of mass murder. Dr. Frank Hancock, a pathologist by training, has argued in the news media that the deaths probably came about through deliberate poisoning. He believes the symptoms reported, such as dysentery and weakness, point to arsenic. Dr. Hancock suspects a Spanish plot, carried out on their behalf by an English Catholic, Baron Thomas Arundell.

  It is a fact that Arundell offered his services to Don Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador, to aid in defeating the English settlers. He told Zúñiga he would bring a Spanish agent of King Philip’s choosing to Virginia, and advise that person as to how the settlers could be forced out “without recourse to arms.” By that, Zúñiga understood Arundell to mean that the settlers would be threatened and ordered to leave.9 Anything is possible, however, and it is conceivable Arundell was talking about poisoning.

  Unfortunately for the theory, the discussion between Zúñiga and Arundell came in March of 1609, well after the colony had already suffered its first waves of mortality. Equally significant, the intrigue went no further: the Spanish did not accept Arundell’s offer. King Philip’s junta de guerra, or war council, reported on the situation in Virginia in May of 1611, and recommended that the king take action to drive the English away—with no indication that any prior attempt had been made, by Baron Arundell or anyone else. Lists of colonists show no record of Arundell ever having traveled to Jamestown.