Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  “You already strain credulity, washed up on our beach like a half-dead eel. You may as well tell whatever tale you please.”

  “Very well,” Smith said. He settled into the warmth of his blanket and began.

  Late in the summer of his final year in Jamestown, a mishap with a horn of black powder left him badly injured. His chest and abdomen were a mass of blisters and broken, weeping skin. His beard was singed away, leaving the reek of burnt hair in his nostrils whenever he had the misfortune to drift out of merciful unconsciousness.

  During his weeks of suffering, Smith heard the men who tended his wounds opine over his immobile body that the president of the colony had finally met his match in a horn of powder; John Smith was not long for the world of the living. When they carried him aboard the Susan Constant for her return voyage to England, it was clear they all expected him to find a watery grave somewhere between the New World and the Old.

  Instead, to the consternation of the ship’s captain, Smith recovered.

  He clawed his way back to life, and then, with a scarred hide to prove his bravery, Smith clawed his way into a captaincy of his own.

  Back in England, he found himself, to his wonder and satisfaction, the foremost authority on the New World. It was a turn of events that would have curled Edward-Maria Wingfield’s pointy little beard. That knowledge alone pleased Smith to no end.

  Even more pleasing were the offers with which he was liberally peppered by all manner of investors, each of whom sought his expertise. Over the following years, he led a handful of expeditions: mapping the coast of the New World, tracking the movement of the whales that yielded precious oil and ambergris, seeking silver and gold, chasing the elusive ghost of a passage to the Indies. Most of these, Smith readily admitted, were not great successes, but his investors didn’t seem to care. The moment he returned from one expedition, an offer was already at his door for another.

  The most recent trek was the dearest to his heart. Under the direction of investors who meant to compete with the Virginia Company, Smith was to lead a mission of colonization. The colony would establish itself somewhere north of Jamestown.

  It seemed a promising venture when they cast off lines in London, but from the start, the expedition was plagued—perhaps even cursed. Lines broke or were blown away in freak squalls. The compass malfunctioned. A pernicious illness of the bowels swept through crew and colonists alike, and two people died before they had even left the European coasts to strike out across the open sea.

  Worries truly began, though, when they reached the Azores, where the ship was dogged for two days by French pirates. The crew wanted to surrender, but Smith would have none of it. He had never feared the French. He declared that they would fight. If they lost, Smith swore to ignite his kegs of powder and destroy his own ship rather than allow it to fall into the hands of pirates.

  With the promise of a fiery end for motivation, Smith’s crew fought admirably. They shook off the French, but barely a day later ran afoul of two more vessels flying the colors of French privateers.

  Smith perceived that it would be better to bargain with them, if a bargain could be struck. He commanded his men to raise a flag of truce. They tied their ship to one of the pirate vessels, and Smith went aboard to parley. There he discovered with great relief that the privateers were after Spanish and Portuguese ships, not English. They hadn’t wished to capture his ship—only to question him. Once they were satisfied he’d seen nothing of any Spanish ships, they agreed to let him go in peace.

  However, while he was engaged with the captain in his cabin, his crew had done him an ill turn. Still reeling from the previous day’s threat, they had already cut the lines and sailed on without him, rather than risk being blasted apart by their own supplies of powder.

  Smith was left a prisoner of the French privateers.

  They treated him well enough, providing better accommodations than Wingfield had offered in the cramped brig of the Susan Constant. He wanted for nothing; the pirate captain even provided him with paper and ink, and in his month of confinement he wrote his memoirs of Jamestown.

  Smith had assured the captain of the Don de Dieu quite convincingly that England would pay a good price for his return. The captain was intrigued, and promised that once he had collected a few bounties on Portuguese scoundrels, he would return Smith to London and trade him for gold.

  As the summer dragged on, though, the Don de Dieu worked its way ever farther from English shores. With each hint of a Portuguese ship, every gleam of white and red on a hazy horizon, Smith’s ransom grew fainter in the captain’s mind. Soon Smith was all but forgotten, a forlorn specter haunting the deck of the Don de Dieu in helpless silence.

  Until the storm.

  It blew up from the southwest, a wall of cloud towering over the sea like the shoulder of God himself. As the storm approached, the water grew dark and angry, and soon Smith knew, as the captain knew, that the Don de Dieu could not outrun it.

  Smith bundled his memoir into a packet of oilcloth, slipped it beneath his clothing, and waited. When the captain was distracted, shouting orders to his fearful crew, Smith slipped into the man’s quarters and found a dagger hidden in a mahogany trunk.

  As the men hunched against the rain and wind, working frantically at the lines, Smith sprinted across the deck. He slashed the ropes securing one of the small landing boats, and flipped it over the rail. He leaped after it, barely pausing long enough to be sure his aim was sound.

  Thank God, the oars were lashed against the hull. He cut those lines, too, and rowed as if the devil himself swam in his wake. A small part of his mind knew that a rowboat could not outpace the Don de Dieu, yet Smith could not countenance staying aboard the French ship, doing nothing to save his own skin. The crew battled on, unaware that several pounds’ worth of English gold had just disembarked the ship.

  Smith rowed, orienting himself first by the sight of the Don de Dieu floundering among the violent waves, and when he lost track of the ship, he kept going in the same direction, or so he hoped, pulling evenly on the oars, praying he was headed toward land. He knew it lay to the east, but determining which direction might be east was an exercise in futility. Now and then he pulled his compass from his leather pouch and peered at its dim face in the storm, but the needle lurched and wobbled as his boat tossed in the waves, and he could never be sure of his orientation. He was obliged to bail often with a little copper scoop that was tied to the boat. Each time he dropped the oars to bail, he begged Christ not to turn his boat around in the pitching, frothing, roaring mountains of waves. He rowed until his arms turned limp and useless, and then he rowed on still. When his body finally collapsed into the hull of his boat, he was already dwelling in the unsettling mist of his dreams.

  “And that is the last I recall, until you found me washed up on your beach.”

  The hunters glanced at one another across their table.

  Smith sipped his wine. It had gone cold, but he felt somewhat recovered from his ordeal, and the coolness of it was pleasant on the tongue. “You don’t believe me?”

  One of the hunters gave a shrug, elegantly uncaring in that special manner only the French can affect, sinuous and half-asleep. The other gave a tentative chuckle.

  Let them laugh. Laughter changes nothing.

  The only thing that mattered to Smith was the manuscript, still wrapped in the oilcloth, safe on the table beside him.

  But later that afternoon, as Smith lay dozing on one of the hunter’s cots, the manuscript safe beneath his pillow, a thin, high shout of amazement broke through his slumber.

  Outside the lodge, the hunters stood on a distant dune, calling to him, their arms waving, slow and small like the filaments on an insect’s head.

  Smith felt stronger as he crossed the stretch of land between the lodge and the beach. Sandy earth rose up to meet each step, cradling him, propelling him forward wit
h a fast and confident stride.

  The hunters rushed him along a narrow trail, barely more than a deer track that clambered along a high bluff. The foliage brushed his face. It smelled of salt spray and wild things.

  They emerged on a promontory of bare gray stone, high above the pounding sea. Smith walked to the edge. Wind pulled at his hair, carrying the smell of low tide and a chalky, sour gust of guano.

  Below, where the surf beat itself to white foam against a fist of jagged rock, a dark shape lay smashed like a child’s dropped toy.

  Smith squinted until he could read the letters on the prow, burned into the wet wood, leafed in scratched and peeling gold: “Don de Dieu.”

  He turned to the hunters. “There’s gold in it for you,” he said in his dismal French, “if you can get me back to England.”

  POCAHONTAS

  March 1616

  When the wind moved through the tobacco leaves, they whispered, a broad-leafed murmur of music that was almost like corn in summer. Pocahontas liked the plants. Even now, just sprouts pushing from the dark earth, their leaves were glossy and cheerful. The pale sun of early spring glanced off the leaves and all around her the field glowed as she moved through the rows on hands and knees, crushing the first grubs of the season between her fingers.

  The grubs covered her hands in their sticky brown juice, and she plucked a tobacco leaf and scrubbed her palms and fingers. It smelled fresh and bright, faintly spicy. It scoured away the residue of the grubs and left a tingling sensation on her skin.

  This was not the tobacco she had known in childhood. The sacred leaf of the Real People grew in shady dells, with jagged-edged leaves and tiny, forked flowers of violet blue. This—the plant that dominated the cleared fields around her home with John Rolfe—loved sun and grew shoulder high, spreading its leaves in dense clusters like the canopy of the forest. The flowers clustered long and white, with flared petals that looked like the trumpets the boys at the fort sometimes blew.

  John had brought the plant all the way from the southern islands. Sometime after he had buried his wife and daughter, he had obtained a bag of rare seeds from one of the naturals of Bermuda. He had carefully preserved the seeds ever since that day, keeping the bag tightly sealed and periodically spreading them on a bit of cloth to ensure damp did not take hold and ruin them with mildew. He had shown them to Pocahontas, and she had convinced him to plant the seeds. By that autumn a drying rack, thick with wide, brown tobacco leaves, stood proudly before the Rolfe home.

  Even better than the harvest were the seeds Pocahontas had collected after the last of the white flowers had withered and dropped. The original bag from Bermuda could not contain them all, so she wove a tight basket to store them in, and dug a small cellar behind the house where the tobacco seeds slept through the winter, dreaming of the warm soil of spring.

  The tobacco was not the only thing that sprouted and grew. Her son, Thomas, had now seen nearly eighteen months. He ran shrieking through the garden, chasing flies and cabbage moths, his black hair and the hem of his little gown streaming behind. He had only just begun to speak, lisping half-formed words, and he demanded to know the name of everything his bright-black eyes touched. When her work was done, Pocahontas would sweep Thomas up on her hip and carry him about the fields, and everything he pointed at she would name, first in English, then in the Real Tongue.

  Sometimes when she looked at her son, she thought she could see an echo of Kocoum in his features, and she often wondered whether the spirit of the child she should have borne to her first husband had found its way to the world after all, in the body of little Thomas Rolfe.

  She picked herself up from the earth as Thomas came running toward her with his arms outstretched. The hems of her long skirts were tucked in the edge of her bodice, which she had loosened for work. Pocahontas brushed the soil from her knees and hands, and then pulled the skirts free so they swung about her feet. Thomas squealed and buried his face in the wool.

  She lifted him, pressing her face against his sun-warmed hair, breathing in his fresh, sweet smell.

  “What?” he said, pointing.

  “Leaf,” Pocahontas answered. “Attasskuss.”

  Thomas pointed across the field, where John dug into the earth with his long-handled hoe. She watched his strong back bend, his arms straighten and pull, his dark hair brushing his broad shoulder.

  “Father,” she said. “Kowse.”

  It had taken Pocahontas many months to grow used to the sight of John working in the tobacco fields. She could not fault his industriousness; the man never ceased working. But among the Real People, the garden was the woman’s domain. The field was her sacred space where no authority was greater than her own—not even her husband’s. Seed and root were female mysteries, like the magic of life-giving blood. Yet John had always insisted on working his own land. “My wife will not toil like a slave while I take my ease,” he had said when she protested. And he kissed her protestations away.

  And even if he did prefer to spend his days gardening rather than hunting or fishing, he yielded to her superior knowledge of plants and the rhythm of the soil. Husband and wife worked together, always under Pocahontas’s direction. Before Thomas’s first birthday their small estate near the village of Henrico, not far from Jamestown, was green and flourishing.

  The fact that they could stake a plot of land outside the bounds of Jamestown, or any of the other stockades that ringed the new English settlements, was a testament to the success of Pocahontas’s marriage. Her union with John Rolfe had enforced a peace across the land. There had been no ambushes by Real People, and no firing of English cannons or burning of longhouses. Now, two years after he had broken the white beads in the Jamestown chapel, Opechancanough had even resumed trading with the white men. Pocahontas was pleased, and rejoiced that her sacrifice had even brought her happiness. John was a gentle, thoughtful husband, and Thomas filled her heart like nothing had before.

  But Pocahontas could not help feeling sad now and then when she looked out from the door of her house across the stretch of her fields. The Rolfe estate stood in Appamattuck territory, on land that belonged by rights to Oppossu-no-quonuske. The old werowansqua had traded it to the Rolfes for an ample share of English goods, but Pocahontas never felt as if she owned it. And she wondered how many more estates would spread across the land. What would the Real People do when the boundaries of their territories constricted? Where would her people go, as her husband’s people continued to spread across Tsenacomoco?

  Such musings made her sick at heart. She tickled Thomas to chase her sorrows away. He laughed and squirmed in her arms, as soft and happy as a pup. Then the boy suddenly pointed toward the beaten track that led down to the Rolfe estate from the village of Henrico.

  “What?” Thomas demanded.

  Pocahontas watched the man as he wandered out of the wood. She could just make out his neat, ash-colored beard against the dark of his tunic.

  “Friend,” she said. “Netap.”

  She eased Thomas to the ground. The boy followed her out onto the lane, where she greeted Reverend Whitaker with a smile. “It has been a long time,” she said.

  “I’m pleased to see you looking so well, Rebecca. And young Thomas—my word, how you have grown!”

  Pocahontas called John in from the field, and set about preparing the midday meal while the reverend entertained Thomas with a story about Christ walking on the surface of the sea. When they gathered at the table and the meal was blessed, the reverend looked somberly at John.

  “The latest shipments have come in at Jamestown.”

  “So soon?” John said, crumbling corn bread into his stew. “Did they bring anything of note?”

  “I should say so. I’ve received a letter from the Virginia Company, directing me to implore you, John Rolfe, to bring your lady wife to London so that she may be seen among society.”

  Joh
n sat back. His hands were pale and flat on the surface of the table.

  Pocahontas watched him uneasily, but did not speak.

  “Society?” John said at last. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “It seems your wife has become quite popular in London. Now that Jamestown Colony has been declared a success, everybody desires to meet Lady Rebecca Rolfe, the princess of the New World.”

  “But,” Pocahontas ventured, “I’m not a princess. Not in the way the English mean it.”

  “I know,” Reverend Whitaker said, chuckling deep in his chest. “But all England is convinced that you are royalty. Your name flies about the tables at parties and balls, or so I hear.”

  She shook her head, bewildered. “How can they even know my name?”

  “I confess I do not know how they’ve learned of you. Some letter from the colony, perhaps. But the Virginia Company was most adamant. London will not be satisfied until it sees you for itself. All your expenses will be paid, of course. Courtesy of the V.C.”

  “No,” John said. “No. Whitaker, you know this is only a ploy. The Virginia Company thinks to parade my wife at parties and at court, like some prize milk cow with ribbons about her neck, so they might secure more funding for their ventures. That’s all this is—surely you can see that.”

  “Likely,” the reverend admitted. “But alas, the king and queen have gotten wind of the idea. Queen Anne especially has expressed her great desire to host and entertain the Lady Rebecca. I don’t know that you can refuse them, John.”

  “We simply won’t respond. Letters are lost all the time. They’ll believe we never saw their letter.”

  But Pocahontas leaned forward with sudden interest. Opechancanough would want to know about the white mamanatowick—how he lived, how he might be reasoned with. How the tide of white men might be stemmed. “Meet the king and queen? Oh, John, we must!”

  John sighed. “Rebecca, I do not think it wise.”