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

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The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 8

by Bernard Bailyn


  In three days of elaborate ceremony and elusive conversation, fending off Powhatan’s question of the colonists’ purpose in settling, Smith was urged, on behalf of his people, to acknowledge Powhatan “as their lord” and to accept for himself the role of a subordinate chief. This, of course, to the extent that he understood the proposal, he ignored, but in the end, symbolically at least, he had no choice. After being feasted “in their best barbarous manner” and treated like a defeated enemy about to be slain, he was brought to what appeared to be an execution block, surrounded by warriors “ready with clubs to beate out his braines.” Then at the final moment he was suddenly released, and he thereby, in the Indians’ eyes, symbolically entered a new life, adopted as a subordinate werowance, and by extension his people were symbolically enclosed within the constraints of Powhatan’s regime. Never, of course, experiencing these events as acts of subordination, and declining the benefits offered, Smith recorded the story of his captivity at first briefly and with little drama (he “procured his owne liberty”), then elaborated it in retelling, finally embellished it as an elaborate ceremony centered on the tale of how Pocahontas “the King’s dearest daughter” (who was eleven at the time) “got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.”35

  The parallel effort to subordinate and control barbarous and threatening people, at least symbolically, was played out reciprocally by the English the next year. Smith and Newport, on orders from London, led a troop of musketeers to present Powhatan with a plethora of gifts, including copper objects, a bedstead and bedclothes, a red coat, and a copper crown, the last a gift heavily freighted with symbolism from the great King James. When with difficulty they managed to place the crown on Powhatan’s forcibly bowed head, the ceremonial reduction of the chief of chiefs to the status of a vassal or local lord of King James was complete, symbolically confined within England’s sovereign power.36

  These were calm passages in a tumultuous sea of uncertainty and conflict. And there were others. Young boys were exchanged on both sides, to learn the languages, the “designs,” and the ways of life of the other people. Thomas Savage, Samuel Collier, and Henry Spelman, entering into the lives of the “naturals,” were expected to serve ultimately as interpreters of the Indians’ languages and culture. Similarly Powhatan gave Newport his trusted Namontack, already a willing guide to the settlers; Newport took him to England and returned him with the “third supply.” There were exchanges of food for gifts, and some of the celebrations that followed were so bounteous in food and so magnificent in body paint, costuming, and dance that the articulate Smith confessed that he lacked the power to describe them.37

  But the savage conflict that had begun in the first days intensified. Two weeks after the Jamestown settlement was established, two hundred warriors had assaulted the half-built fort, killing two and wounding ten. Only the guns on the docked vessels had kept the encampment from complete destruction. Random skirmishes to confine and contain the settlement had continued—attacks on exploring teams distant from the fort, ambushes of individuals working outside the palisades or wandering in the woods. The first two settlements outside Jamestown—at the Falls fifty miles upstream of Jamestown, and on an island in the Nansemond River at the mouth of the James—were attacked so severely that they had to be abandoned. Vulnerable settlers were spared nothing. A captured workman accompanying Smith on his journey to the Chickahominies was tortured to death in ways familiar to the Indians but not to Englishmen, despite their knowledge of terror-inducing public executions. At a leisurely pace, his extremities were cut off with mussel shells and tossed into the fire before him; he was flayed—the skin was torn from his face and head—then disemboweled while still alive; and finally burned to ashes. In the same way, before long, would the cantankerous Captain Ratcliffe meet his death.38

  Smith, in his Elizabethan love of drama and pageantry, may have relished the feasts and ceremonies, but most of his contacts with the natives were ruthless raids on their villages to extract corn and other supplies for the starving settlers. When his demands were not met, he threatened murder, took hostages at gunpoint, “negotiated” by intimidation, and without hesitation seized from the natives precious supplies that were necessary for their tribes’ survival. Believing the Indians to be inherently barbarous, he attributed to them deceits and plots they did not have and provoked them in ways they did not understand.

  So on one foraging raid, after laying out his demands for food in high-blown speeches, Smith realized that he and his men were outnumbered and likely to be ambushed. To head that off and gain coveted corn supplies, he challenged Opechancanough, as years earlier he had his Turkish adversaries, to a personal duel, the two of them to fight on equal terms (“my body shall bee as naked as yours”) on an island in the river. “Our game,” he later recalled of the “plaine tearmes” he offered the Indian, who was probably less fearful than bewildered, “shall be, the conquerour take all.” When nothing came of this, he simply grabbed the warrior chief “by his long locke,” jammed a pistol into his chest, and assured the surrounding warriors, in another florid oration, that if they “shed one drop of bloud of any of my men” he would not only kill their chief on the spot but wipe out every living soul of their “nation.” “You promised to fraught [freight] my ship ere I departed,” he declared, “and so you shall, or I meane to load her with your dead carcasses.” The threat subsided, and Smith obtained the supplies he had come for.39

  5

  By such means a marginal survival was preserved, reinforced by the arrival in August and October 1609 of a contingent of the “third supply”—probably around three hundred people, who were part of a storm-tossed complement of five hundred, the remnants of whom would finally assemble in Virginia a year later.40 But the newcomers were destined to suffer through one of the worst episodes in Anglo-American history. They arrived toward the end of Smith’s presidency of the Council (1608–9), which had seen some promising improvements. The fort at Jamestown was restored and reinforced; a church and some houses were built; thirty to forty acres of the island were planted; a glassworks was constructed nearby; timber was cut up into clapboards for shipment home; some tar, pitch, and soap ashes were made; pigs and chickens were deposited on Hog Island, five miles below Jamestown, and were beginning to multiply; and the two auxiliary settlements—west at the Falls and east on Nansemond Island—were provided with garrisons and some supplies.

  But when Smith left for England in October 1609 the signs, as winter approached, were ominous. Indian attacks were multiplying, the outer settlements were destroyed, and stragglers, foragers, and exploring parties were routinely killed. Supplies for the expanded population dwindled, especially after rats devoured much of the corn reserve. Diseases continued to ravage the settlers. Several of the “Dutchmen” assigned to build a house for Powhatan created great confusion by deserting to the Indians and abandoning the glass furnace. Above all, despite Smith’s stringent rule that only those who worked would eat, most of the settlers remained what he called “distracted lubberly gluttons” who would trade everything they had for some of the Indians’ food rather than pitch in to life-sustaining labor.41

  Besieged over an especially bitter winter by a tightening ring of hostile Indians, the Jamestown band, in Percy’s phrase, began to feel the “sharpe pricke of hunger.” The scene within the palisades grew desperate. As the weeks passed the survivors were forced to eat the horses, then, Percy recorded, “vermin as doggs[,] Catts[,] Ratts[,] and myce”—even eventually “Bootes[,] shoes[,] or any other leather some Co[u]lde come by.” Those who found starch left in their ruffs, Smith wrote, “made a gluey porridge of it.” Frantic men robbed the storehouse; they were caught and executed for their crime. Grubbers searching the nearby woods for edible snakes and roots were killed by arrow shots before they could return. Then the ultimate catastrophes began. A few of the “gastely and pale” inhabitants of the fort—we do not know how many—did “those things w[hi]ch seame inc
redible, as to digge upp deade corp[s]es outt of graves and to eate them … and some have Licked upp the Bloode w[hi]ch hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.” And even beyond that, Percy wrote, one man murdered his wife, “Ripped the Childe outt of her woambe … Chopped the Mother in pieces and sallted her for his foode.” Forced to confess “by torture haveinge hunge by the Thumbes w[i]th weightes att his feete a quarter of an howere,” the murderer was executed. Many of those who “To eate … did Runn away unto the Salvages” fared no better: “we never heard of [them] after.”42

  By May 1610, when the remainder of the delayed flotilla of 1609, including the new interim governor, Sir Thomas Gates, finally arrived in Virginia, only sixty of the four hundred of the previous spring and summer were still alive, and they were, Percy wrote, “so leane thatt they looked lyke anotannes [skeletons], cryeinge owtt, We are starved, We are starved. Others goeinge to bedd as we imagined in healthe weare fownd deade the nexte morneinge.” Gates was horrified by what he saw. Jamestown, he reported, appeared more like “the ruins of some auntient [for]tification” than a place living people might inhabit:

  the pallisadoes … tourne downe, the portes open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty howses … rent up and burnt, the living not hable, as they pretended, to step into the woodes to gather other fire-wood.

  The Indians were not even bothering to attack the protected blockhouse since they assumed the people within it would shortly perish.

  And so they would have, if Gates had not rescued them. But he was experienced in the ways of survival (he had served on Drake’s marauding expeditions and fought in the Dutch wars); he knew that the supplies he had would quickly be consumed, and he saw that no help would come from the natives. He therefore gathered up the remnants of the Jamestown community, loaded them together with his own people aboard his vessels, and after cautiously preventing the men from burning the remnants of the town to the ground (“we knowe nott butt that as honeste men as our selves may come and inhabitt here”), on June 10, 1610, “giving a farewell with a peale of small shott,” abandoned the Jamestown settlement.43

  CHAPTER 3

  The “Hammerours’ ” Regime

  1

  IT WAS no doubt a remarkable coincidence that Gates, moving downstream with his rescue party and the survivors of Jamestown, met the advance boats of the rest of the delayed fleet of 1609, including the new governor, the third Baron De La Warr. But the three ships and a pinnace then approaching—“w[i]th many gentlemen of quallety and thre hundrethe men[,] besydes greate store of victewles[,] municyon[,] and other p[ro]vissyon”—would in any case have reestablished the colony.1 They—and two additional fleets that arrived a year later with more than five hundred men, women, and children—were the product of a basic restructuring and refinancing of the Company in London and of its strenuous efforts at population recruitment. As a result, by 1618 Tidewater Virginia was transformed. Race relations were still not resolved—savage conflicts mingled with signs of accommodation—but the vague outline of a new civic order, based on an unexpected and still uncertain economy, had emerged after years of brutal coercion and social confusion.

  THE POWER BEHIND the life-saving reinforcements that arrived in the fleet of 1609–10 was generated by the company’s major investors, led by its governor, Sir Thomas Smith. That domineering merchant—at one time or another the governor or director of all the major overseas trading companies and some of the lesser—had led the Virginia Company of London from its inception. By 1609 Newport’s and others’ accounts of the internal squabbles in Jamestown and race conflicts in Virginia, together with the failure of the settlers to produce valuable goods or a new route to the Pacific, led Smith and his coinvestors to recast the entire venture. Their original idea of a fort, trading station, and base camp for exploration would never succeed. A permanent, self-supporting, and productive colony was needed, and they drew up plans to achieve it. The land would be owned by the company and worked by servants sent out and maintained at the company’s expense. The company would have a complete monopoly of all marketing of goods shipped home and would establish a severely coercive regime in the colony to overcome any future factionalism and enforce an effective work regime.2

  The success of all of this would depend, in the end, on the recruitment of labor. Company servants were needed in much larger numbers than before—and they had to be people of the right sort. “Idle and wicked persons,” a company spokesman wrote, escaping from shame or fear, would ruin the place: they are “the weedes and ranknesse of this land who … must needes be the poison of [a new social body] so tender, feeble, and as yet unformed.” The colonists would have to be responsible working people, “families, of wife, children and Servants, to take fast holde and roote in that land.” Such a migration would not harm England by depletion. On the contrary, it would benefit the home country “by transplanting the rancknesse and multitude of increase in our people, of which there is left no vent but age, and evident danger that the number and infinitenesse of them will out-grow the matter whereon to worke for their life and sustentation, and shall one infest and become a burthen to another.”3

  Such recruitment would cost money and would require tight managerial control. The Company, therefore, in a chartered reorganization of 1609, was transformed from the earlier loose investment group under Crown supervision into an independent joint-stock corporation able to direct its own affairs and to solicit investments in the form of shares. Under the auspices of this new corporation, whose land grant was enlarged to stretch two hundred miles north and south of the mouth of the James and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a short northern transatlantic route to Virginia was quickly charted; a well-educated soldier-politician, Lord De La Warr, “whose Honour nor Fortune needs not any desperate medicine,” was chosen to serve as the all-powerful, “absolute” resident governor in chief; and a carefully detailed list of the kinds of people desired as settlers, their “faculties, arts and trades,” was published.

  Besides ordinary laborers and four “honest and learned ministers,” artisans in thirty-three specified occupations were listed as necessary for the colony’s success. The most urgently needed were sawyers, fishermen, and “iron men for the furnace and hammer”: ten of each were required. Then came blacksmiths, carpenters, shipwrights, gardeners, fowlers, coopers, and vine-dressers—six of each; then turners, brickmakers, rope makers, pitch boilers, and “sturgeon dressers and preservers of the caveary [caviar]”—four each; and all the rest, including surgeons, druggists, “minerall men,” “planters of sugar-cane,” and “pearle drillers”—two each.4

  To attract the investments needed to recruit such a population, transport it, and supply it until it could become self-sustaining and commercially profitable, the company issued a glittering prospectus—one of several that would follow—entitled Nova Britannia. It justified, morally and legally, England’s claim to the land of North America; lavishly praised the richness of Virginia—an “earthly paradise”—and the immense profits that would flow from it; explained how the colony would contribute to England’s growing greatness in the world; and offered specific incentives for investors and settlers. In a distribution of the company’s assets after seven years, the pamphlet explained, stockholders, who would have voting rights in the company’s general meetings, would receive, in addition to a prorated proportion of the company’s profits, parcels of land in similar proportions. As for settlers, in an eventual land distribution “every individual, man or woman, and every child of twelve years and upwards,” would receive the value in land of one share of stock; and “persons of extraordinary character”—officials, justices, knights, gentlemen, physicians, and others “who are able to render very special services to the colony”—would be given provisions to help them settle “in proportion to the quality of each one” and eventual dividends in profits and land “according to the amount at which their persons and their services were estimated.”5

  These entice
ments were broadcast throughout the nation. Every effort was made to raise capital. Former subscribers were dunned for renewals, and specific appeals were directed to the principal towns of England, to bishops, noblemen, and gentry, and to the Lord Mayor and livery companies of London. At first the campaign worked reasonably well. The company’s new corporate charter, when issued in May 1609, listed as subscribers the names of 56 London companies and 659 individuals. In all, between 1609 and 1612 the company attracted 1,152 investors—ten times the number of subscribers to either the East India Company or the Levant Company in the same years. By 1611, £18,000 in subscriptions had been pledged, and it was this first flush of financial interest in the renewed Virginia enterprise that made possible the two rescue fleets of 1609 and 1610. The nine vessels in that flotilla were a sensation as they sailed, with more than six hundred people aboard, slowly out of the Thames.6

  Thomas West, Third Lord De La Warr (illustration credit 3.1)

  But the majority of the passengers aboard were far from the company’s ideal. The flow of well-connected, adventurous men “of birth and quality” continued, but the company’s efforts to recruit “sufficient, honest, and good artificers” still showed few results. The company had been obliged to solicit the magistrates of London and other cities to encourage some of their “swarme of unnecessary inmates” who otherwise “must lye in the streetes” to join the emigration. And indeed the majority of those who reported to Smith’s office in Philpot Lane “to proffer their service in this action” were still of that “idle crue … of lascivious sonnes … bad servants … and ill husbands” who would “rather starve for hunger than lay their hands to labor.” But in addition to these “unruly youths … of most leaud [lewd] and bad condition,” casual laborers, rural vagrants, and urban drifters, there was added, by deliberate recruitment, a large contingent (perhaps as many as 150) of “old soldiers trained up in the Nether-lands” with experience in English military operations. Veterans not only of the Dutch wars but also of the savage campaigns in Ireland, typical of the plundering, half-vagabond troops of the time who were traded among commanders like cattle and whose service was likely to be cut short by death under degrading conditions, they would soon earn, in their time in Virginia, Hakluyt’s description of them as “hammerours” who would know how to “prepare” the Indians for “our preachers’ hands.”7

 

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