The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

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  Such were the founders of 1607. The story of their fortunes and of those who would follow them until the colony was abandoned in 1610 begins with the instructions and advice issued by the company’s directors to the expedition’s leaders. The instructions were logical and reasonable, but they bore little relation to reality in Virginia and compounded the chaos that the settlers struggled to survive.

  First, they were told, if you have a choice of rivers to follow into the interior, choose the one “which bendeth the most towards the northwest, for that way shall you soonest find the other sea.” Choose a fertile, wholesome, and secure place to settle, clear of surrounding forests, preferably as far up the river as a barque of fifty tons will sail—or if possible, one hundred miles from the entrance. If the natives turn out to be “blear eyed and with swollen bellies and legs,” the place is unhealthy; if “the naturals be strong and clean made it is a true sign of wholesome soil.” Leave a small crew at the river’s mouth with a light boat, to warn the main settlement of impending trouble, and clear the intervening area of the natives, for no matter what you do, “they will grow discontented with your habitation” and will assist any invaders who plan to assault your settlement.

  The main object, the company wrote, was to discover the source of whatever river they entered. If it proves to be a lake, it might give access to “the East India Sea,” for it was well known that the famous Volga, Don, and Dvina rivers fall from a single source into three different seas. As to the “naturals,” try not to offend them, and be sure to trade for food before they realize “you mean to plant among them.” Take care that native guides not lose you in the wilderness, and if you have to shoot them, choose your best marksmen, for if you miss “they will think the weapon not so terrible and thereby will be bould.” And never let them know that any of your people are killed or become sick lest “they perceive they are but common men.” Build public facilities before private, and set the houses in straight lines off a central marketplace so that by a few centrally located “feild pieces you may command every street.” And “lastly and cheifly,” devote yourselves to “the good of your country and … serve and fear God the giver of all goodness.”20

  Pious thoughts were probably far from the minds of the adventurers as they made their first contacts with the land and its people. They sailed slowly and cautiously around the entrance of Chesapeake Bay, probing for a channel into the James River. Exploring short distances inland, they found an exceptionally attractive terrain: “faire meddowes and goodly tall Trees,” George Percy reported, fresh water that “ravished” them, and such oddities as “fine and beautifull Strawberries, foure times bigger and better than ours,” and near still-smoldering campfires they came on “Mussels and Oysters, which lay on the ground as thicke as stones,” some of which, Percy reported, contained pearls, and they came on a forty-five-foot-long “cannow … made out of the whole tree.” Everything was exotic, much was unimaginable. Especially the people.21

  At the outset they were intrigued and puzzled by the people they found. They fitted none of the main stereotypes. As the first exploratory group was returning to their ship they were attacked by Indians who crept “from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their mouthes,” but their arrows had little effect and they withdrew when the English fired their muskets. Some sign-language communication with a few stray Indians on the north shore of the river led to what they took to be an invitation to visit a nearby village, Kecoughtan. There they were treated to a feast of strange food and honored by a performance of singing and dancing (“shouting, howling, and stamping against the ground, with many anticke tricks and faces, making noise like so many wolves or devils”). It was the first of several ceremonial meetings as they rowed and sailed deeper into the land, and came on Indian villages, strange at first sight, with which they were soon to become intimately familiar.

  Passing the site of what would become Jamestown, they came to the village of Paspahegh, where they were welcomed, and treated to a long oration by the chief—the werowance—which no one could understand but which all felt was impressive. There, a rival chief from across the river arrived, to show his displeasure at this dalliance with the Paspaheghs. He invited the strangers to his own village, Quiyoughcohannock, and there they were startled by the fantastic appearance of the chief in full dress. They marveled at his headdress of red deer’s hair and a copper crown, at his body painted crimson and his face solid blue with silver flecks, and at his ears hung with pearls and bird’s claws. He moved solemnly, they reported, with “great majestie,” and he entertained the visitors “in good humanitie.”

  But by then they realized, as they continued their slow exploration, that they were likely to be caught up in Indian rivalries, and that they would inevitably face violent hostility. At Appomattoc, deeper inland, near the present Petersburg, “many stout and able savages” armed with bows and arrows and also with swords or clubs “beset with sharp stones and pieces of yron able to cleave a man in sunder,” confronted them, blocked their passage, but then relented “and let us land in quietnesse.” But the threat was clear, and they turned back.

  Five days later, drifting back downstream, they finally selected the site for their settlement. It was a narrow, two-mile-long peninsula of swampy land about sixty miles inland from the mouth of the river, connected to the shore by a sandbar that could easily be blocked. The water at the outer edge was deep enough for ships to dock against the shore and tie up to the nearby trees. They called this quasi-island Jamestown, and on May 14, 1607, they unloaded their men and equipment, threw together tents and huts behind a brushwood barrier, and set about building “a triangular palisade of posts, rails, and poles, with bulwarks at the corners where cannon were mounted.”22

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  The three years that followed was a period of violent dissension within the tiny palisaded settlement, confusion of purpose, physical devastation, and the emergence of a permanent pattern of race conflict. Death was everywhere.23

  When the settlers opened their instructions they discovered that they were to be governed by an appointed council of seven—Newport, when he was in residence, Gosnold, Wingfield, and Captains Martin, Kendall, Smith, and Ratcliffe, the last a tempestuous veteran of the Low Countries’ wars. Wingfield was elected president, and the rivalries and disagreements began. By September Wingfield, arrogant, pompous, and incompetent, had stirred up a storm of opposition and was deposed; a “jury” condemned him to pay heavy damages for his offenses. His successor, Ratcliffe, who had led the opposition, was no more successful; he too was deposed. Factions within the small leadership group continued, forming and re-forming; the councilors bickered, competed for domination, and sent to England for support. Orders from designated and insecure leaders with no natural or legal authority would not be obeyed.

  Partly the confusion was generated by conflicts of purpose. Some struggled vainly to fulfill the company’s mandate to find the transmontane passage to the South Sea, to locate deposits of gold or other valuable commodities, to find the survivors of Raleigh’s Roanoke venture, and to establish—by force if necessary—the legal sovereignty of the English Crown over whatever native “princes” could be found. But others—led by Smith—insisted on providing first for the settlement’s long-term survival by building secure fortifications and housing, planting crops, and establishing reliable trading relations with the Indians or coercing them into supplying the colonists’ basic needs.

  In the best circumstances these conflicts would have threatened the survival of the settlement, but the circumstances could hardly have been worse. The settlers had arrived at the peak of an extended drought in the lower Chesapeake region, which in itself, for natives and immigrants alike, created poor harvests that led to famine conditions, a toxic water supply, and a devastating disease environment.24 The summer was hot and their English clothes were no more suitable for the damp heat than for the winter that followed. Their supplies, much of them consumed by Newport’s
sailors who remained for eight weeks, ran out. The daily rations in the small riverside fort were soon reduced to “a small can of barlie sod [soaked] in water to five men.” The beer was quickly consumed, and the river water they were forced to drink was salty and putrid: “full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.” For months their only shelters were tents and light lean- to shacks. They slept on bare ground. There were outbreaks of dysentery, typhus, salt poisoning, and nutritional-deficiency diseases.25

  By August, three months after the expedition’s arrival, the settlers in their small encampment were facing annihilation. The indispensable and inspirational organizer Bartholomew Gosnold died on August 22, one of dozens whose names George Percy recorded despondently day after day—victims, he explained, “of the bloudie flixe … of the swelling … of a wound”—in sum, of many “cruell diseases … and by Warrs … but for the most part they died of meere famine.” The groans “in every corner of the fort [were] most pittifull to heare,” he wrote; it made one’s heart “bleed to heare the pittiful murmurings and out-cries of our sick men.” Some fled to the Indians to avoid starvation, but soon straggled back from that strange world. For six weeks, until some relief came in from the Indians, three or four died each night, and “in the morning their bodies [were] trailed out of their cabines like dogges to be buried.” By September, 46 of the 104 settlers had died, and among the survivors there were not 6 able-bodied men. By January 2, 1608, when Newport arrived back from England in one of the two vessels of the “first supply,” only 38 were still alive—and only barely alive.26

  Newport brought with him, in this first relief shipment, 120 new settlers, again a mixture of adventurous gentlemen (33) and employeelaborers. Among them, however, reflecting the London Company’s rising expectations stirred by Newport’s enthusiasm, were not only six tailors and two apothecaries but eleven artisan specialists, among them a jeweler, two goldsmiths, two “refiners” (to make assays of the gold and other precious materials that the investors expected to find), a perfumer, a surgeon, a gunsmith, and a “tobacco-pipe-maker.” The newcomers outnumbered the survivors of 1607 almost four to one and would in any case have had difficulty cramming themselves into such shelters as existed. But even that was denied them when, three days after their arrival, the entire fort and all but three of the shelters within it, together with all the supplies and ammunition, were destroyed by fire.27

  Many of the relief supplies Newport had carried with him were consumed by his sailors, who remained in and around Jamestown for fourteen weeks. When in April the second vessel of the “first supply” arrived with thirty more settlers, conditions were only slightly better, and in October a “second supply,” again led by the shuttling Newport, arrived with seventy passengers. This time Newport had with him, besides the usual gentlemen and laborer-employees, two women and eight “Dutchmen” and Poles, hired to build a glassworks and to produce pitch, tar, and potash. At that point the population may have reached two hundred, and John Smith had become president of the Council, successor to Ratcliffe.28

  By then, thanks mainly to Smith, much more was known about the land they had invaded and about its native peoples than had been known before, but very little of the news was hopeful for the success of the company or the survival of the colony.

  Seeking fresh food supplies, knowledge of the Indians, and possible routes north and west, Smith set out on a series of explorations, roaming first west along the James to the Falls, near the site of the present city of Richmond, beyond which he discovered not a mountain leading to the South Sea but the threatening Monocans, deadly enemies of the coastal tribes with whom the English were attempting to establish useful relations. He then went north, overland, a short distance, to capture desperately needed corn supplies from the semi-independent Chickahominies, and followed the Chickahominy River to its sources. In early 1608 he led a further series of expeditions up into Chesapeake Bay, reaching north to Delaware and southern Pennsylvania. At that point he encountered the Susquehannocks, whose iron tools and weapons, Smith realized, could only have come from French Canada, and he learned about their fear of enemies pressing down on them from the northwest.

  Having penetrated that far north—almost three hundred miles from Jamestown—Smith turned west and south, crossing the upper Potomac River beyond the site of present-day Washington, where he tangled dangerously with groups of Rappahannock warriors. Returning south, with his barge now ringed with protective shields of tightly woven reeds, he ended his explorations with a tour of the south shore of the James River, before returning to the fort, to begin his year-long, controversial term as president of the resident Council.29

  He had traced a huge circle west, north, and south of the Jamestown settlement and discovered the geographical boundaries and contours of the tidewater region that the Virginia Company had entered, stretching from south of the James River north to the Potomac and from the Atlantic coast west to the Piedmont. He knew that neither the sources of the coastal rivers he had found—the James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac—nor of Chesapeake Bay itself, lay in mountain lakes whose western outlets would flow into the South Sea. He had learned that the entire coastal lowland, and especially its tidewater edge, was fertile in its soil and rich in animal and plant life, though not in precious metals, and that it was easily traversed through its intricate network of streams and Indian trails. He knew too that there were human boundaries, formed by hostile Iroquoian and Siouan tribes that would confine the settlers as they did the coastal natives, and he therefore grasped something of the great demographic pressure system reaching from Canada south through the Appalachian backcountry to the Carolina coastal region that enclosed the obscure settlements on the James.

  Tsenacommacah—the center of the Powhatan chiefdom. The independent Chickahominy tribe is shown in dark shading.

  Click here to see a larger image.

  And the local demographic environment was now unmistakable. In the central area of Tidewater Virginia he knew there was a scattering of several hundred Algonquian villages, organized into some thirty chiefdoms, each village with less than one hundred souls, totaling perhaps fifteen thousand people. They were led, with imperfect authority, by the “chief of chiefs,” Powhatan and his warrior brother Opechancanough, operating through subordinate chiefs from whom tribute and military service were due. And Smith knew that Jamestown’s survival would depend on the goodwill or the forceful subjection of these tidewater natives, the Powhatans. They were, he knew, in no way like the sophisticated Incas, Maya, or Aztecs; nor were they utterly savage and barbarous like the “wild Irish.” They were, for him, primitive pagans at an early stage of human development, culturally inferior to the last degree. But they were coherently organized for civil and political discourse, and they were effective in the warfare they knew. Their mores were primitive but recognizably civil, if in some ways mysterious, and they understood commerce, within their own value system, and could be useful trading partners when it was in their own interest. But Smith was never in doubt of his, and his people’s, superiority and the inevitability of their successful dominance of Powhatan’s empire.30

  Untroubled by doubts, determined to subordinate the natives to English rule, and driven by the fear that the Jamestown settlement faced annihilation, Smith swept into the Powhatans’ world like a tornado, beginning a campaign to extract from the natives, themselves on short supply, sufficient food to keep the settlers alive.31 The Powhatans in turn tried to assess his purposes and the benefits and dangers he and the other Englishmen might bring. They had dealt with threatening incursions before, especially from harassing border tribes raiding from north and west, and they knew of Spanish threats in the south and of vague dangers from the remnants of the Roanoke settlement closer to hand. Their fear was not simply that they might face brutal attacks but, in a deeper sense, that the equilibrium of their lives would be permanently upset, subject to shattering disturbances. Their response was not only to defend themselves but
to retaliate in ways that would restore the balance of their lives. They would return violence for violence, but they did not need or seek the annihilation of their enemies. Their wars were rarely genocidal. What they fought for, however savagely and cruelly, was the restoration of the equilibrium of forces, human and spiritual, that formed the inner stability of their world. The English, whose mere presence was disbalancing and whose designs were unknown, would have to be tested and constrained—not destroyed, for their goods were peculiarly valuable, but contained within and subordinated to the larger native system.32 For Powhatan himself, the need to contain the intruders was especially urgent. He was tormented by his priests’ prophecy that his rule would one day be ended by people invading from Chesapeake Bay, and he was determined at all costs, and in any way he could think of, to keep this from happening.33 The English too did not seek destruction for its own sake. They would be content with accommodation, so long as they were free to plant, to explore, and to exploit independently with the natives contained within and subordinated to England’s larger system.

  Two episodes, minuscule events in a confused world, seemingly mere curiosities in the bloody struggles for survival, reveal the mutuality, the parallelism, of hopes and expectations, reasonable in themselves but that would prove to be contradictory, ultimately the source of bitter conflict.

  Late in 1607 Smith, on a foraging trip with two companions, was captured by Opechancanough. After several weeks of marches and countermarches and obscure ceremonial maneuvers, Smith, despite establishing his magical power by displaying his compass and demonstrating the effect of written communication, was brought before Powhatan, the first Englishman to meet the dominant chief face-to-face. By then elderly, the dominant chief was still impressive. “Of a tall stature, and cleane lymbes,” William Strachey wrote, “he hath bene a strong and able saluadge, synowie, active, and of a daring spirit, vigilant, ambitious, subtile to enlarge his dominions.” His cruelty had served, Strachey noted, “to stryke a terrour and awe” even into his loyal subordinates.34