Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  It was simple enough to learn the men’s names. The taller was called Will-yum, and the smaller one, whose hair and beard were the same bright orange of a maple in taquitock, was named Tom-mass. She tried to correct their way of saying her own name—Pocahuntas—to no avail. She finally broke into gales of laughter, clutching at her sides.

  Her laughter seemed to build their confidence, and they chuckled tentatively at first, and then more openly. Soon the smiles never left their faces. They took to the lesson playfully, like boys splashing in shallow water, and Pocahontas saw that her father had been right: the white men were comfortable with a child, and they opened to her prying in ways they never would have done with a sober-faced young man like Kocoum or Naukaquawis.

  As the two weeks progressed, Pocahontas stripped away the mystery of the tassantassas while Kocoum watched, whittling new shafts for his arrows with one hard, wary eye always on the white men. She learned that their moccasins were called boots, and the scratchy, sour-smelling cloth they wore was wool. The pale-blue metal of their knives was steel, and it was harder and sharper than any copper. Also made of steel were their many strange weapons: snaphaunce and matchlock, musket and piece. The fearsome bits the guns fired were bullets, hard and black as seeds, but with the terrible power to destroy flesh and drain the blood from a man’s body in an instant.

  She learned that the territory they came from, far across the sea, was called Iing-land. It was, they told her, a place of many wonders, where people did not walk or paddle in canoes but went from place to place mounted upon animals they called horses. The wealthiest tassantassas tied their horses to carriages, which were, she understood, rather like canoes that went about the land balanced upon rolling hoops. Will-yum scratched a drawing of a horse in the ash of the fire pit. It was somewhat like a deer, with a hairy tail, long face, and tiny ears.

  With practice, they moved beyond hand signs and scrawling pictures in the dust. Pocahontas grew more skilled in the tassantassa tongue, and she coaxed admissions from the white men with her winning smiles and playful ways. They told her that many of their kind had died at the fort they called Jamestown. The water was poor, the food infested by insects and a type of naked-tailed squirrel they called rats, a creature they had brought with them from Iing-land. They often quarreled about which of them should be chief, and at times leadership of their village broke down altogether.

  Each evening, after returning the tassantassas to the warriors who watched over them at night, she followed Kocoum back to her father’s longhouse, where she told Powhatan everything she had gleaned from the white men.

  Her father nodded, smiling his approval. “You are doing well, Amonute. I am pleased.”

  If only I could keep the tassantassas near me longer. I am important to Powhatan now—I am the only one who can learn about the Iing-lish. I must keep my grip on them for as long as I am able. “Father, wouldn’t it be wise to keep the tassantassas here, and not send them to some distant village where they will do you no good?”

  Powhatan shook his head. “No, child. Recall what I said to Naukaquawis. Their fellows will come hunting them. If we want to keep them alive, so that we may learn more from them, they must go into hiding. And soon.”

  Pocahontas balled her fists in frustration, but she did not allow the emotion to show on her face. “How much longer do I have with the tassantassas?”

  “Three days more. Then I will move them. Make the time count, Pocahontas.”

  “I will. But when they are gone . . .”

  “Perhaps then,” Powhatan said lightly, “we will find another tassantassa for you to learn from.”

  SMITH

  December 1607

  The shallop crept against the current, oarlocks whistling faintly with the rhythm of the silent rowers. The two sails lay bundled like discarded rags along the boom’s length. Not the faintest wind rose to stir the bare branches of the forest. God had not seen fit to send the breath of a breeze for days, and the shallop moved sluggishly under the power of men who grew wearier by the hour.

  At least they were no longer starving. Neither of the two expected supply ships had arrived and rations had been pared from paltry to meager. Just as Smith began to fear that they would have to resort to boiling shoe leather, the skies came alive with food. Migratory birds clattered overheard at dawn and dusk, filling the air with streams of black bodies and a chorus of wild, harsh cries. Attracted by the still waters of the marshy spit, they were easy hunting. Soon the men were eating their fill for the first time in far too many weeks.

  Smith’s forays to nearby tribes had reaped only small returns, but coupled with the blessing of the birds, it was enough to restore most of the men to health. Their salvation had come late, however. Throughout the autumn, more colonists had succumbed to privation and the palisade of Jamestown was ringed by marshy graves. Other men were lost to fear. They ran off in the night in twos and threes, likely hoping to find succor with a friendly tribe. Smith watched the faces of the Indians he traded with and he saw suspicion and distaste moving like twin shadows behind their eagerness for beads. He doubted whether the runaways found the refuge they hoped for. It wasn’t worth risking live men to search for their corpses.

  Let them rot with their empty guts full of arrows. A fitting end for cowards and deserters.

  With starvation averted for the time being, Jamestown finally turned to its primary directives. A handful of men moved up tributary streams to pan for gold, seeking evidence of the rich treasure the New World was certainly concealing beneath its boggy black hide. Others felled trees and split clapboard, laying by a stock of lumber to send home to England when the supply ships returned. One cold November morning when the night’s frost made laces of hoar on the logs of the palisade, Ratcliffe took John Smith aside.

  “It is time to find the passage to the Pacific,” Ratcliffe said, his eyes as direct and emotionless as ever. “You’ve done well with the trading, commanded the shallop with great skill. It’s yours again, Smith. Take it upstream. Get the naturals to talk. They must know which of these blasted rivers leads to the Pacific Ocean. Secure England’s trade route to India before the Spanish can get there first, and you’ll be a hero back home, old boy. King James himself will knight you, I’d wager.”

  But it wasn’t the prospect of knighthood that drove Smith back aboard his shallop with a crew of reliable workmen. Knighthood was nothing but a life of unwarranted respect and unearned ease. Discovery, though—that was a different matter. The Spanish had beaten up and down the coast of the New World for years, had sailed up these same rivers dozens of times, trading with and terrorizing the naturals. In all that time, the Indians had kept the secret of the Pacific passage. It was certain that the Spanish had failed to find it; if they had located the passage, that Habsburg lout Philip III would have trumpeted it across the whole of Europe. No, Spain would not claim that particular victory. Only the Indians knew the route. The Spanish worked by sword and fist, and the naturals were resentful of such uncouth tactics. John Smith preferred finesse.

  Some two miles beyond the town of Chickahominy, emptied now of occupants, Smith and his men came upon a village that showed a few signs of life. The lanes between the houses were largely still, stripped of the usual mob of naked children running in play or hauling baskets of corn or tuckahoe roots. But here and there a body ducked through a doorway, a hide flap swung closed, a line of thin smoke coiled and eddied in a slow haze above a pale domed rooftop. Smith had visited this village before. It was called Apocant, a minor tribe sworn, unlike their stubborn Chickahominy neighbors, to Powhatan’s confederation. Smith had found the Apocants no more reluctant or hostile than any other group. Better still, it had been some time since he had paid a visit. They should be willing to assist, eager for the trinkets he would offer in payment.

  But as he stood gazing over the shallop’s rail at the silent village, a finger of doubt traced lightly along Smith’s fl
esh. An early winter dusk had begun to fall in shades of pale violet. Through the darkening trees he saw a strange glow, carmine red, stretching through the maze of forest. It lingered like a half-remembered image from an unsettling dream. A crow scolded, raucous and sharp. From somewhere in the far twilight a voice cried, a rising pitch, thinned and distorted by distance, wavering like a reflection in a pool. Smith could not say whether it was the call of a man or beast.

  “Drop anchor,” he said.

  A few Apocants began to cluster on the riverbank. They were mostly women, though a small complement of armed men stalked warily among them. Men and women alike wore leather aprons painted with bold designs: snakes and blooming flowers, char-black bears and slinking red coyotes, birds with wings spread wide. Though the day was windless, it was quite cold. Jagged shards of ice rimmed the puddles on the shore and clustered in fat frozen drops along the sides of beached canoes. The Apocants were dressed against the chill of winter, with long leggings of furred hide and hooded cloaks that covered their bodies from bare shoulders to equally bare haunches. Their breath rose in soft clouds.

  Smith took three men ashore with him, the three he knew to be the steadiest and most obedient. He would need men with blank faces and tight-shut mouths for this task, men he could count on to do as he said quickly and without fuss—men who would not interfere with Smith’s finesse. Thomas Emry and Jehu Robinson rowed the tiny landing boat while Smith and William Baker crowded on its flat bow. Smith was over the side and splashing through ankle-deep, icy water before the rowers had even shipped their oars.

  “Wingapoh,” he called in greeting.

  After so many weeks of trade, Smith was confident in the naturals’ tongue, and though there were dialectic differences so far upriver, he had no difficulty in making himself understood. Soon he had attracted the few Apocant men with his easy smile and friendly words.

  One of the men, somewhere near Smith’s twenty-eight years, with a pale scar slashing through his left brow, indicated a line of flickering fire with a jerk of his head. It was the distant snake of hunters’ torches twisting through the wood. “The hunt is on, Chawnzmit. Last of the season. There is not much to trade; you will be disappointed.”

  “What we most desire,” said Smith, “is a hunting guide.”

  The man shook his head. He was called Mahocks, and he watched Smith’s tiniest movements with a darting, keen-eyed attention that put Smith in mind of a kingfisher ready to dive on its prey. “All the game is gone for the winter,” he said. “All the deer and turkeys have been hunted, and what wasn’t killed ran away. This is the last; after tonight, no more animals for the shooting. No more until cattapeuk comes again.”

  “We don’t want deer,” Smith said quickly. “Birds. Ducks, geese. We have seen many ducks downriver, but everybody knows that the ducks are best in your territory.”

  A curious light kindled in Mahocks’s eye, a sly, glinting amusement. He nodded slowly.

  “We want the best birds, the most delicious and fattest. We will need a guide who knows the rivers very well.”

  Mahocks tossed his head. The loops of his braid flashed like the sheen on a snake’s skin. “We all know the rivers very well, Chawnzmit.”

  “But I want the man who knows them best. And I will pay him well.” He knew how bargaining with these people worked. Never open with your best goods, but keep the offers small. They would wave their hands and throw out insults, turn their heads away, but soon or late they would cave to an extra chain of copper, a few more strands of blue or yellow beads. Smith had one particular bauble in his leather pouch, a wide cuff of copper beaten so that it was nearly as faceted as a diamond. It was an ornament even Powhatan would be proud to display. In a village as poor and remote as Apocant, the copper cuff would be a treasure almost beyond price. He left it in the pouch in case the bargaining grew truly difficult, and instead lifted out a string of common white glass beads.

  Mahocks fingered his sharp chin in sober deliberation. Then he reached out and took the beads. “Very well, Chawnzmit. If you wish to hunt fat birds, we will hunt the fattest.”

  Smith gave a wide grin, but his breath caught with sudden uneasiness. The price was too cheap, and the bargaining far too easy. Something was afoot, but Mahocks’s wide, hard-edged face was impossible to read.

  “Fetch my canoe paddles,” he said to one of the women, and he clapped John Smith on the shoulder with a rough, heavy hand.

  Four men traveled upriver in the long dugout canoe: Mahocks, Smith, Thomas Emry, and Jehu Robinson. William Baker had returned to the shallop in the rowboat, with Smith’s strict orders for the remaining crew to stay aboard the ship and at anchor until he returned. No man was to go ashore for any reason; they had plenty of food and fresh water, and enough sturdy sleeping mats, obtained in trade with the naturals, to create sufficient shelter if foul weather overtook them. The mats were patterned with strips of contrasting bark, tight-woven and as water-repellent as good oilcloth. Some of the colonists had jeered at Smith when he’d returned from a trading visit with a load of mats and little food, but they had seen the utility of the mats quickly enough. They had balked, however, at the idea of learning to make mats of their own. Weaving was not fit work for men, though apparently shivering in a rainstorm or turning to ice in one’s sleep were respectably masculine pastimes.

  Mahocks’s canoe had a complement of mats, too, as well as the man’s hunting bow and a quiver of long, light bird arrows. The inside of the dugout was shiny and smooth, darkened from many years of use. It was difficult to paddle at first, and Mahocks laughed and mocked good-naturedly while the men accustomed themselves to the alien motion, driving the paddles downward like stakes into the earth, pulling and lifting and crossing, driving down again. When they had learned the motion to Mahocks’s satisfaction, Smith was startled at how smoothly the great lumbering canoe pulled through the water, and he fell into the rhythm of paddling with an easy pleasure, as one falls into the rhythm of an idle stroll. He even warmed with the steady toil, until faint wisps of vapor rose from his body into the cold evening air.

  Before long, though, the darkness had grown too thick to continue. Well out of sight of the village of Apocant—and the shallop—Mahocks directed them to turn up the fork of a tributary stream. Black draperies of bramble hung over its banks; wet clots of dead leaves were evident in the moonlight, still clinging to the thorny canes. Their paddling slowed, and the night’s fierce cold began to cool Smith’s overworked muscles. His back and shoulders ached.

  Mahocks found a low bank where they could beach the canoe. Once ashore, the Englishmen stood hugging themselves and shivering while their guide built a fire in a wide, flat clearing. It was a well-used campsite; even in moonlight Smith could see the circle of char that ringed the existing fire pit. Beyond their campfire’s ruddy glow, an incarnadine trail of distant torches flickered in the night. The forest air burned with the scents of smoke and cold.

  Mahocks settled onto one of his mats near the fire. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I will show you where the best birds are. They come in at dawn.”

  “Good,” said Smith. He and his men hunched close to the flames. The welcome heat coaxed steam from their damp clothes.

  Smith eyed Mahocks surreptitiously. The man seemed pleasantly lost in thought as he removed dried meat from a traveling basket and unwrapped flat corn cakes from their covering of woven grasses. The guide had an air of contentment about him that Smith found puzzling . . . and worrisome.

  “Do you know,” Smith said airily, choosing words in the unfamiliar language with care, “I believe this place is near where the Iroquois did their ill deed some years ago.”

  Mahocks looked up sharply. “What do you know of the Iroquois? They were never in this place. They stay far to the west; they never come here.”

  “I may be wrong,” Smith said. “I have only heard . . . I did not see the deed myself.”

 
Mahocks passed him the basket of food. “What deed?”

  “We have a mamanatowick of our own, across the sea. King James is his name. He sent his most beloved son here to trade and make friends. But a party of Iroquoians captured him. They took him far away, and the mamanatowick’s son never returned. We believe he is dead.”

  Mahocks stared at Smith with an expression of disbelief and annoyance, as if he were a simpleminded child shouting during church. “It never happened here,” Mahocks said.

  Smith shrugged. “As you say. I may well be wrong. But my mamanatowick wishes me to find a way to get to the Iroquoians, so that we might bring justice to the men who killed our mamanatowick’s son.” He indicated Thomas and Jehu, who now dug hungrily into the basket, oblivious to the nature of Smith’s tale. “Perhaps when we have hunted our fowl, you might show us a passage.”

  Mahocks grunted a short laugh. “There is no passage, Tassantassa.”

  “A way to move farther inland, toward the mountains where the Iroquoians dwell . . .”

  “Your feet. That’s the only way. Through Massawomeck territory, or Monacan territory.” Mahocks grinned. “Good luck to you, if you’re foolish enough to attempt walking through Massawomeck territory.”

  The grin faded from Mahocks’s face. He turned his head fractionally, as if catching some faint sound or scent that Smith could not isolate. In the brief moment Mahocks’s eyes shifted, a dark veil fell over his friendly countenance. He seemed to gaze inward with amused satisfaction. In the firelight his features turned fox-sharp, an animal mask.

  Smith looked about tensely. “What do you . . . ?”