Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  During the fall of 1607, Smith embarked on a series of exploratory voyages to trade with some of the smaller local tribes for food. When trade failed, Smith and his men took what they wanted by force. In November, while Smith was out on one of these early forays, Powhatan sent a war party to take Smith prisoner. Powhatan's warriors killed Smith's companions, then held him as a hostage for several weeks before bringing him to Powhatan's camp. Here, they paid Smith much terrifying attention, dancing around him by day and tying him to a stake at night. On the third day they brought him before the great chief himself, the first Englishman to be allowed into Powhatan's presence. Several men laid Smith on the ground with his head on a rock and stood over him with clubs, evidently preparing to beat his brains out. Suddenly, Powhatan's 11-year-old daughter, Pocahontas, came running forward “got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.” Two days later, Powhatan summoned Smith, told him they were now friends and promised to treat Smith like a son. Thereafter Powahatan periodically sent Pocahontas to the fort with gifts of food, which kept them alive through the winter.

  Making sense of this episode has long been a puzzle for historians. Smith believed that Pocahontas had saved his life, and nineteenth-century American historians presented the story as a romance. But historians now believe that Smith had actually been subjected to an elaborately staged ritual involving his symbolic death and adoption into the Powhatan Confederacy. For Powhatan, the objective of the ceremony was to overawe Smith with his power, then offer Smith an alliance, which he would gratefully accept.4 Understanding the reasons for Powhatan's behavior has further complicated the puzzle. Why did the Indians agree to provide the English with life-saving food supplies when a permanent European invasion was not in their long-term interest? Put another way, why did Powhatan not destroy the floundering English settlements when he had the chance? Although Smith later convinced himself that the English had managed to overawe the Indians with their superior technology, it makes little sense to think the Indians were overawed, since it was clear to them that the English were starving and dying.

  Understanding what the Indians already knew about Europeans helps us to solve the puzzle. The Powhatans understood that Europeans were both potentially dangerous and potentially valuable allies who had valuable goods to offer in trade, including powerful weapons. Powhatan wanted allies. As the leader of the region's most powerful confederacy, he had enemies and competitors. Previous encounters between the Indians and Spaniards, while sometimes deadly, had always been limited and brief. Although Powhatan may well have understood that the Jamestown settlers planned to stay, he failed to realize that these few men would soon be followed by thousands of others. Moreover, the previous encounter between local Indians and the English settlers at Roanoke had shown that if the Europeans could be kept off guard, they were relatively easy to control. Powhatan's behavior, which alternated between hostility and friendliness, seems to have been deliberately calculated to keep the English off balance so as to make them easier to manipulate.5

  Just as Powhatan tried to set the terms of his relationship with the English, the English were trying on their side to control the terms of their relationship with him. When Newport returned with a supply ship in January, he brought with him instructions from the investors back in England that Powhatan was to be crowned king to secure his allegiance to the colony.6 It is perhaps unsurprising that Powhatan's coronation was a failure; the chief refused to kneel for his crown or to make any acknowledgment of his fealty, merely offering Captain Newport his old moccasins and fur cloak in return. Although Powhatan was still prepared to trade for food, his terms were increasingly high: he now wanted an English-style house and a supply of cannons, hatchets, and swords, which the colony's leaders still refused to supply.

  Though he gave it for his own purposes, Powhatan's help enabled the colony to persist. Only 38 of the original 105 settlers were still alive when Newport returned, but more recruits arrived in the spring and fall of 1608 to swell the ranks, including a few women. Smith's energetic leadership helped the situation. After Newport left again at the beginning of April, Smith compelled his fellow colonists to go to work clearing more land, planting corn, strengthening their defenses, and building dwellings for the colonists and their goods. Some of the new migrants were skilled artisans who were set to work producing glass, pitch, and potash, and forging copper. Smith arranged for the shipment of some timber and had another 30 acres of land cleared. Meanwhile, orders to search for gold and to look for a northwest passage continued in effect. Despite the venture's growing cost, the investors seemed determined to keep trying.

  Figure 9 An artist's impression of Jamestown, Virginia, 1607. Private Collection/Peter Newark American Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  By 1609 the Virginia Company of London was receiving news of similar misfortunes to its sister company. Following a preliminary reconnoiter, the Plymouth Company had sent two ships in May 1607 with 120 men on board. A settlement had been established at Sagadahoc on the coast of Maine at or near the Kennebec River. Here, as in Virginia, the settlers built a fort, a church, a storehouse, and 15 dwellings. But here, unlike Virginia, the local Indians refused to supply the settlers with food. Disputes soon broke out among the council. Supplies of food ran low, and the remaining settlers experienced the full severity of a Maine winter. Although a relief ship arrived in spring 1608, the survivors refused to stay and with their departure sank the hopes of any settlement.

  The Virginia Company believed that the failings of both companies were the result of the 1606 charter, which gave the Crown the power to make decisions but left the adventurers with the responsibility and the expense of implementing them. Consequently, in February 1609 an application was made to turn the company into a proper joint stock corporation. The Crown, now less sanguine of an immediate profit, was happy to see its role diminished. A new charter was thus granted in May 1609, including an enlarged territory extending 200 miles north and south of Point Comfort and stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The royal council was to be abolished and replaced by one elected annually by the stockholders. In the future the company could make its own laws and regulations, provided that they were to be as closely as possible “agreeable to the laws, statutes, government, and policy of this our realm.”

  Armed with the new charter, the company took immediate steps to put itself on a sounder footing. Even though Newport's ore had turned out to be worthless, more investors bought shares, hoping that the colony's expanded territory could yield precious minerals or other sources of profit. Stock was sold in lots of £12. 10s., £25, and £50, with the promise of a dividend from whatever gold or other valuable commodities, including land, were accumulated after seven years. To avoid further disputes in Virginia itself, the company decided to concentrate authority in the hands of a governor with full powers, including that of exercising “martial law in cases of rebellion or mutiny.”

  This reorganization happened just in time, for events in Virginia had taken a turn for the worse. The rapid growth of the English settlement appears to have convinced Powhatan that the newcomers threatened his authority. Powhatan therefore repudiated his former alliance with the English and turned openly hostile. Members of the Confederacy began attacking the settlers, taking some of them prisoner, killing their livestock, and burning their crops. Ominously, as the colonists had learned from Indian informants, it appeared that Powhatan had located the survivors of the lost Roanoke colony living in a village in what is now the Carolinas. Here they had been murdered, most likely on Powahatan's orders to prevent them from forming an alliance with the new settlers in Jamestown and threatening his control over the region.7

  All of this put the Jamestown colonists in an especially precarious position. Smith had lost his ability to rally the settlers and would shortly be leaving the colony. Meanwhile the colonists were still not self-sufficient. When ships from a large relief fleet were wrecked in Bermuda after a violent storm in Octobe
r 1609 and failed to arrive in Virginia, the outcome was little short of catastrophic. Powhatan's warriors, well aware that the colonists were struggling, killed the settlers' livestock and laid siege to the fort to prevent them from leaving to search for food in the surrounding woods. During the bitter winter that followed, known as “the starving time,” most of the settlers in the fort perished either from malnutrition or in attacks from outside. Many were reduced to eating the flesh of their dead companions or local inhabitants, disguising the taste with herbs and roots. One man even murdered (and ate) his wife. The situation was so bad that in June 1610 the 60 survivors were on the point of quitting, as at Sagadahoc, when Lord De La Warr, the new governor, arrived with 375 new settlers, provisions, and news of the company's new charter and future plans.

  Powhatan's war against the English would continue until 1614, but the English had by now decided to abandon their attempts to trade with the Indians. The colony's leaders devoted their energies to making the colony self-sufficient, and forcing the settlers to work. De La Warr ordered buildings to be repaired and fields brought back into cultivation. He divided the settlers into groups of 15, so that they could work safely and ward off the hostile native inhabitants. At the same time he launched a policy of search and destroy in a series of raids against the Indians, with resulting atrocities on both sides. During one such operation the children of the queen of the Paspaheghs were thrown into the water and shot before she herself was led into the woods to be put to death. De La Warr also ordered the settlers to seize or destroy Indian food supplies, which provoked the Indians to step up their attacks.

  Although De La Warr himself succumbed to sickness and had to leave to save his health, the Virginia Company remained determined to persevere with its investment and sent out a fresh batch of ships in 1611. An advance guard sailed under Deputy Governor Sir Thomas Dale, who had seen extensive military service in the Netherlands. Dale used the more direct route to Virginia via Bermuda which had been pioneered five years earlier by Captain Argall. By the time Sir Thomas Gates, the new governor, arrived, Dale had provided men for three additional forts, and moved a good part of Jamestown's growing population to a new settlement, Henrico, at a more healthful spot 50 miles upriver. The new settlement gave the English a new base of operations from which to launch raids against the Indians, with whom hostilities continued.

  For the next two years the colony was governed first by Gates (1611–13) and then by Dale (1614–16). The problems of earlier years – a contentious, undisciplined settler population and Indian antagonism – continued. For Gates, an upper-class English gentleman with views typical of men of his station, the colony's disastrous early experiences confirmed his assumption that common sorts of people were prone to lawlessness and savagery unless subjected to strong external controls. To manage the colony, Gates enacted a code of laws “Divine, Morall, and Martial,” which imposed rigorous controls upon the settlers' behavior. The laws required daily attendance at divine service, imposed stiff penalties for blasphemy and other crimes against the church, and prohibited criticism of company officials. The code stipulated that work hours be from six o'clock till ten o'clock in the morning and again from two till four in the afternoon, the rest of the day being devoted to the personal repair of cottages and the cultivation of garden plots. Among the offenses carrying the death penalty were sodomy, adultery, theft, desertion, mutiny, and running away to the Indians. While Gates appears to have used the laws mostly as a threat, Dale's administration enforced them to their fullest extent, in effect imposing order through terror. Men were executed for these offenses in a manner that shocked many of the colonists, not only by being hanged but also by being burned to death, broken on the wheel, or tied to stakes and starved to death. The order imposed upon Virginia was to be an order much harsher than the one familiar to contemporaries in England.

  In 1612, with bad news continuing to emanate from the colony, yet another charter was sought as a way to solve the venture's financial problems. This time the charter allowed the company to run a lottery, a popular form of speculation in the seventeenth century, from which profits could be used to finance other operations. The company also asked to have its domain extended to include Bermuda, which appeared to be suitable both for the production of cash crops and as a protective base against the Spanish. Finally, the new charter provided for more meetings of the general court to facilitate the better government of the company, and greater responsiveness to the interests of the ordinary investors, or adventurers, as they were called. With this second reconstruction of authority it was hoped that the company would finally begin to turn a profit.

  Fortuitously, two new developments now helped to improve the colony's prospects. The first of these was the discovery of a potentially profitable commercial crop. Although the various staples first favored by the company had not materialized, tobacco was emerging as a promising alternative. The local plant, nicotiana rustica, was extremely bitter; but in 1612 John Rolfe, who had arrived in 1609, began experimenting with a West Indian variety, nicotiana tabaccum, which was sweet like the Spanish product. When the drought which had plagued the region in 1607 finally ended around 1613, this new crop offered the prospect of a profitable export trade to England; for although James I equated smoking with the fires of hell, his kingdom was a growing market for tobacco. Rolfe's first consignment of four hogsheads – about 2,600 pounds – was shipped in 1614. Three years later 20,000 pounds were dispatched.

  The second development that would help the colony to prosper was a truce with the Indians. During a raid in 1613, Samuel Argall, a member of the council, kidnapped Pocahontas and demanded the return of English prisoners and English weapons along with a new supply of corn in exchange for her release. Pocahontas, now aged 17, lived at Henrico, learned English, and befriended some of the Englishmen, who were determined to try to convert her to Christianity. Apparently the old dream of civilizing the Indians remained alive in the minds of some of the colonists. Powhatan now agreed to a truce with the English, but not before the intelligent and culturally adaptable young woman had decided to stay with the English, convert to Christianity, and marry John Rolfe. Pocahontas may have taken this course because she believed it would help to cement a long-term alliance between the English and the Powhatans on the favorable terms that her father had sought.8 Much romanticizing has surrounded this event, not least for its implication that the two races might have lived in harmony. Yet the record shows that this was the only formal marriage between an Englishman and a Native American in the English colonies at this time, in stark contrast with the Spanish colonies, where interracial marriages were common.

  Document 5

  John Rolfe's request for permission from Governor Sir Thomas Dale to marry Pocahontas, 1614, reprinted in Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), 216–19

  Since the colonists' lives were still strictly controlled by the Virginia Company, Rolfe needed permission from the governor's council to marry Pocahontas. Among others, he had to win over Dale, the chief enforcer of the Laws Divine, Morall and Martiall. Questions to consider: What concerns about his marriage to a Native American woman is Rolfe trying to overcome? How does he seek to persuade his readers to allow the marriage? What kinds of assumptions about Native Americans and their relationships with the English does Rolfe communicate in this passage?

  Let therefore this [constitute] my well advised protestation … if my chiefest intent and purpose be not to strive with all my power of body and mind, in the undertaking of so mighty a matter, no way led (so far forth as man's weakness may permit) with the unbridled desire of carnal affection: but for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our country, for the glory of God, for my own salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbelieving creature, namely Pokahuntas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have a long time been so intangled …

  I h
ave not only examined but thoroughly tried and pared my thoughts … I forgot not to set before my own eyes the frailty of mankind … Nor was I ignorant of the heavy displeasure which Almighty God conceived against the sons of Levie [sic] and Israel for marrying strange wives, nor of the inconveniences which may thereby arise … which made me look about warily and with good circumspection, into the grounds and principal agitations, which thus should provoke me to be in love with one whose education hath been so rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all from my self, that often times with fear and trembling, I have ended my private controversy with this: surely these are wicked instigations …

  Now if the vulgar sort, who square all men's actions by the base rule of their own filthiness, shall tax or taunt me in this my godly labor: let them know, it is not any hungry appetite, to gorge my self with incontinency … Nor am I so desperate in estate, that I regard not what becometh of me; nor am I out of hope but one day to see my Country, nor so devoid of friends, nor mean in birth, but there to obtain a match to my great content; nor have I ignorantly passed over my hopes there, or regardlessly seek to lose the love of my friends, by taking this course.

  The marriage, along with the truce it seemed to symbolize, marked an important milestone for the colony. John Rolfe and Pocahontas, now known as Lady Rebecca Rolfe, traveled to London in the spring of 1616 with their newborn son, Thomas. Pocahontas's visit caused a sensation. A portrait of her wearing expensive English clothing was painted and widely reproduced; she was invited to parties and social events all over London and received by the king and queen in December. Everywhere, she was seen as proof that the North American Indians could be successfully civilized and turned into English subjects. Tragically, she died in London before returning to America, but the Virginia Company could not have asked for better publicity for their venture. With Pocahontas as its symbol, the colony had finally been able to present an appearance of peace and stability.