Buoyed by their ocean victories, Elizabeth and her councillors shifted their ambitions to the mainland. The time had come to enter the scramble for American territory. In a remarkable state paper, “A Discourse of Western Planting,” written in 1584, the queen’s adviser Richard Hakluyt laid out the advantages of colonies: they would provide bases for privateers to raid the Spanish Caribbean empire, posts where English traders could tap the Indian market, and plantations for growing tropical products—sugar, for example—that would free the nation from a reliance on the long-distance trade with Asia. These colonies would also help ease England’s social ills by giving the “multitudes of loyterers and idle vagabonds” a place to relocate. Hakluyt urged Elizabeth to establish colonies “upon the mouths of great navigable Rivers” from Florida to the Saint Lawrence. The queen backed away from Hakluyt’s grandest schemes, but she did authorize and invest in several private exploration and colonization attempts. In the 1570s Martin Frobisher sailed on three voyages of exploration to the North Atlantic. He brought back four kidnapped Inuits, including a woman and her child, as well as hundreds of pounds of what he hoped was gold-bearing ore. The natives soon fell ill and died. The ore proved worthless.14
A few years later, in 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of the queen, planted a base for the English to raid Spanish ships on the future Outer Banks of North Carolina. Soldiers and mercenaries landed on an island the local Algonquian-speaking Indians called Roanoke. An advance party treated with chief Wingina, a canny politician who sensed an opportunity. The strangers might help him subdue his Indian rivals. When the English announced their intention to go home and recruit colonizers, Wingina sent two of his men, Manteo and Wanchese, back with them to watch and learn.
They ended up doing some teaching as well. Manteo and Wanchese tutored the Oxford scholar Thomas Harriot and the artist John White. The foursome acquired each other’s language and established friendships. Their mutual respect showed in Harriot’s published report of the subsequent expedition, a sensitive account of Indian culture providing a detailed description of native culture on the eve of colonization. White’s watercolors captured villages, fields, and ceremonies. He recorded native life with an accuracy that would not return to Euro-American depictions on Indians until the nineteenth century.
Respect and understanding, however, couldn’t save Raleigh’s colony, which he christened Virginia in honor of the Virgin Queen. The men—no women or families accompanied the first round of colonists—proved incapable of supporting themselves, preferring to hunt for precious metals or raid nearby villages for treasure, visions of Cortés before their eyes. At first chief Wingina fed them, but when his stores grew short, the colonists took their sustenance by force, beheading Wingina and killing several of his captains. Soon after the sneak attack they returned to England, leaving a legacy of violence and hatred in their wake. In 1587 Raleigh tried again with a mixed cohort of sixty-five bachelors and twenty families. He appointed John White governor, and among the married couples were the artist’s daughter, Eleanor, and his son-in-law, Ananias Dare. White envisioned a colony of farmers living in peace alongside (though above) native people. “There is good hope,” wrote Thomas Harriot, that “through discreet dealing” the Indians may “honor, obey, fear, and love us.” Ever confident in the superiority of their nation and their religion, White and Harriot still held out for love, a sentiment the plunderers never esteemed.15
The Algonquian town of Secota. Engraving by Theodore de Bry, based on a watercolor by John White, from Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Yet the Virginia slate couldn’t be wiped clean. Wingina’s people had seen too much. Wanchese told his fellow villagers about England, where the poor begged, the hungry starved, and the wealthy refused to share, and he warned them not to let these people sink roots in the country. Within the first month of White’s regime, the natives killed an Englishman while he fished for crabs. Shaken and feeling vulnerable, White sailed for home in the only seaworthy vessel to press Raleigh for reinforcements. War with Spain delayed his return for three years. When he finally made it back, no one was there to greet him. The colonists had vanished without a trace, leaving nothing except the word “Croatan” carved in a fence post. Though Roanoke fit the pattern of early English colonies by ending in miserable failure, the Lost Colony’s creepy abandonment endures as a unique and mysterious disaster.
What happened? Did Wanchese rally his people to exterminate them? Or did another group take them in? Unlike Wanchese, Manteo had remained friendly with the English and argued that their goods and technology would be powerful additions to Algonquian life. His home village was called Croatan. Perhaps the colonists followed a far different route than the ones laid out by Raleigh, White, and Harriot. Instead of wealth or love among unequals, they may have found mercy and acceptance on the Algonquian mainland. Perhaps the children of the Roanoke colonists married into Indian families when they reached adulthood. The marriage of John White’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare, to an Algonquian warrior would have completed White’s picture of Indians and colonists living peaceably side by side, even if the artist would have loathed the idea of happenstance turning his village scenes into family portraits.
. . .
Roanoke cost White his family, Raleigh forty thousand pounds, and Wingina his head. Despite the loss of lives and fortunes, the English still desired the mid-Atlantic region, even if no single person wanted to pay for it. In 1604 King James I issued charters to a string of joint-stock companies, which spread the costs and risks of colonization across an array of investors. They sold shares of stock in various quantities, and the money paid for ships, sundries, and equipment. The king liked joint-stock companies because the stockholders dipped into private pockets instead of his coffers, and individual investors approved because they could gamble on the New World without going all in. The stockholders were liable only for the amount they invested, and if the venture failed, individuals could not be sued for their remaining resources. The companies underscored the power of debt on the frontier. Colonial projects might empower, enlighten, and evangelize. But they also had to pay. Investors lurked in the background of most early American dramas.
In 1607 the Virginia Company employed one hundred colonists to build a fort on the Chesapeake Bay they named Jamestown, in honor of the king. The fort came to represent the first permanent settlement in North America, but it looked paltry at the time. The Chesapeake was home to twenty thousand Algonquian-speaking natives, and their villages trounced Jamestown in size, style, and functionality. One chief, a man named Wahunsenacawh whom the English called Powhatan, ruled a confederacy of tribes and saw the English as potential allies. He watched the strangers build in the swampy lowlands on a site more suitable for raising mosquitos, fevers, and poor attitudes than crops.
The Jamestown adventurers, like the early colonists of Roanoke, saw themselves as latter-day conquistadors. Abhorring the idea of physical labor, they survived the first year only with Powhatan’s assistance. “It pleased God (in our extremity) to move the Indians to bring us Corne,” wrote the colony’s military leader, Captain John Smith, “when we rather expected they would destroy us.” When the English demanded more than Powhatan thought prudent to supply, events took a familiar turn. Smith inaugurated an armed campaign to grab food from surrounding villages, and Powhatan retaliated by attempting to starve the colonists out. Powhatan thought that the English might help him consolidate his power among local tribes with their trade goods and keep the Spanish—who had irked him with a series of sail-by kidnappings of his people—at bay. But now he realized, he declared to Smith, that “your coming is not for trade, but to invade my people and possess my country.” In other words, the English came in the mode not of the French but of the Spanish. Abandoned by their Indian benefactor, scores of English colonists starved in the brutal winter of 1609–10. In their des
peration, the wastrels resorted to cannibalism. By the spring, only sixty persons remained of the more than five hundred sent across the Atlantic by the Virginia Company.16
Determined to stick it out, the company sent additional men, women, and livestock, committing themselves to a protracted struggle with the Indians. By 1613 the colonists had won firm control of the territory between the James and York Rivers. Worn down by violence and disease, Powhatan accepted a treaty of peace in 1614. “I am old and ere long must die,” he declared. “I knowe it is better to eat good meat, lie well, and sleep with my women and children laugh and be merrie than to be forced to flie and be hunted.” Powhatan abdicated in favor of his considerably less merry brother, Opechancanough, an implacable foe of the Europeans.17
Pocahontas in England. Engraving by Simon van de Pass, from The General Historie of Virginia . . . (London, 1632). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
One of Powhatan’s daughters lived with the English in Jamestown. The settlers knew Pocahontas as a teenager who hung around the fort and joshed with Captain Smith. (Smith later turned his friendship—perhaps flirtation—with the pubescent girl into a full-blown romance when he concocted his Virginia memoir. The diminutive captain was a magnificent self-promoter at Pocahontas’s expense.) With the peace of 1614, Pocahontas returned to Jamestown as a grown woman. She served as a guarantor of the peace as well as an ambassador, interpreter, and lookout for her people. She learned English and received religious instruction. She eventually converted to Christianity, took the name Rebecca, and married a leading Jamestown colonist, John Rolfe. Theirs was the best known of many intimate connections between Indians and English during those early years. Similar to the Spanish and French, early English colonization included a good deal of mixing of Europeans and Indians. There was even hope that the couple would beget a Christian line of succession for the Chesapeake chiefdom of Powhatan. But as it did with many hopes for the future among the English and the Indians in the Chesapeake, disease ruined the chance. Pocahontas fell ill during a visit to England and died in 1617 an ocean away from home. Her only child remained there.
History took a different turn. John Rolfe ensured Virginia’s future by developing a hybrid of hearty North American and mild West Indian tobacco, and by 1615 Jamestown was shipping cured tobacco to England. Francis Drake first introduced tobacco to English consumers in the 1580s, and though King James despised the noxious weed as “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs,” smoking had become a fad by the 1610s. Nicotine addiction made the Virginia colony a success. Soon the company began to send over large numbers of indentured servants—Hakluyt’s “loyterers and idle vagabonds”—to work the tobacco fields. The servants came from the young crowd kicked up by the first stirrings of the market and industrial revolutions in England. Most had moved from their homes in the English countryside to cities like London before they signed contracts that financed their journeys to North America. This working population pushed Indians to the edges of the English colonial world. In contrast to the Spanish and French, who built societies based on the inclusion of Indian people, the English established a frontier of exclusion, consigning Indians to the periphery rather than incorporating them within colonial society.18
. . .
Despite their lack of multicultural desire and imagination, the English could not stay away from the Chesapeake Algonquian tribes. Tobacco drove them together. The boom in tobacco prices encouraged expansion into Indian territories, as did the plant itself. Tobacco leached soils of their nutrients, prompting growers to search for new fields. The colonists pressed the Indians for more land, and Opechancanough prepared for an assault that would drive the tobacco cultivators into the ocean from whence they came. The uprising began on Good Friday, March 22, 1622. Caught off-guard, the colonists lost 350 people, a quarter of their number. Yet they hung on, and instead of delivering a killer blow, the sides settled into a ten-year war of attrition.
The war bankrupted the Virginia Company, and in 1624 the king converted Virginia into a royal colony. The tobacco economy continued to skyrocket, doubling the English colonial population every five years from 1625 to 1640, by which time it numbered approximately ten thousand. The native population headed in the other direction. Disease and warfare decimated them. In 1644, Opechancanough, now almost a hundred years old, organized a final desperate assault. More than five hundred colonists died, but the demographic weight and military aggression of the Virginians crushed the Algonquians within two years. Taken prisoner, Opechancanough died when a Jamestown colonist shot him in the back.
Animosities simmered along the Virginia frontier for decades. Colonists pressed for tobacco lands while their livestock, especially their untended pigs, infested the countryside. By the 1670s the Susquehannocks of the upper Potomac River were under pressure from both human and animal interlopers. Small squabbles turned deadly as tensions reached a boiling point. In 1675 a wealthy frontier planter and his neighbors took the law into their own hands and launched a series of violent raids against belligerent and peaceful Indian communities. The ringleader, Nathaniel Bacon, called his attacks “a mighty conquest.” The governor of Virginia disagreed. Sir William Berkeley wanted calm along the leading edges of agricultural expansion. Wars cost lives and money, neither of which he wanted to spend. Who did these frontier malcontents think they were, anyway? They should follow the lead of their royally appointed headmen, not run amok with that rogue gentleman Bacon. Incensed by their governor’s passivity, Bacon and his rebels—six hundred in all—turned their fury on Jamestown in the spring of 1676. Berkeley fled by boat into the Chesapeake Bay while Bacon pillaged and burned the place. Soon thereafter, however, Bacon sickened and died in the swamps of the lower James River, cut down like thousands before by an intestinal infection. His revolt died with him.
Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 fed on overlapping discontents. The settlers on the leading edge of English tobacco expansion felt betrayed by their leaders in Jamestown when Berkeley refused to sanction their violence against their Indian neighbors. From the settlers’ perspective, they suffered on the margins for the comfort of their downriver countrymen. Their blood paid for the stately homes and the wine cellars enjoyed by the gentlemen along the James River. Class resentment mixed with geographic marginality, a sense of cultural superiority, and racial entitlement to produce the first outburst of agrarian dissent in American history. During his reign as “General of Virginia,” Bacon issued a manifesto demanding the death and removal of all Indians from the colony as well as an end to the rule of the aristocratic “grandees” and “parasites.” Western settlers tested Indian patience and Eastern Seaboard controls. In 1677, in a replay of Virginia events known as Culpeper’s Rebellion, North Carolina settlers overthrew their local government and established their own before English authorities ended their rule. But as a result both Virginia and North Carolina shifted their policy in favor of the armed agrarians on the margins. Colonial governments put up with incidents of mayhem and foul play to placate their own subjects and grab huge chunks of Indian territories for themselves. The inability of imperial authorities to manage frontier anger, greed, and terrorism would become a recurrent theme across time, space, and nations.
Many Indians withdrew to the west away from the conflict zones created by the English. Those left behind signed compulsory treaties granting them small reserved territories within colonial bounds. By the 1680s, when the English population of greater Virginia numbered more than fifty thousand, only a dozen tribes with about two thousand residents remained. Over the next three centuries, however, these Indian communities hung on to their land through tremendous struggle. Today some fifteen hundred people claiming descent from the original tribes continue to live in the Chesapeake area. With their own churches and schools, they fish and farm and commute to jobs in metropolitan Richmond or Washington, D.C.
. . .
In their northern colonies the English
carried out a similar policy of exclusion. Coastal New England seemed an unlikely spot for permanent English habitation. Traders from Holland vied with traders from New France to control the region’s Indian trade. The Dutch reached north along the Delaware, Hudson, and Connecticut Rivers and found powerful allies and trading partners among the Mohawks, one of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee. The French extended their trade among Algonquian peoples along the coast as far south as Cape Cod.
The contest for furs and allegiance left scant room for the English until an infectious epidemic that attacked native populations on the northern coast from 1616 to 1618. Whole villages disappeared, and the trade system of the French and the Dutch collapsed. Indians perished so quickly and in such numbers that few remained to bury the dead. A surviving Indian reported that “the population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died.” The native population of New England as a whole dropped from an estimated 120,000 to fewer than 70,000. The scattered “bones and skulls made such a spectacle,” wrote one observer, “it seemed to me a new found Golgotha.”19
In 1620 a group of English religious dissenters and colonial adventurers stepped into one of these graveyards and thought it a promised land. They entered the abandoned Algonquian village of Patuxet, observed the heaps of unburied bones, and fell to their knees to thank God for “sweeping away the great multitudes of natives” to “make room for us.” But the Pilgrims and Strangers, as generations of American schoolchildren would come to know them, were not paragons of health themselves. Skinny and debilitated by scurvy, many looked as skeletal as the dead. Nearly half perished the first winter. Like the Virginians, they depended on Indians to feed them. Massasoit, the sachem, or leader, of the Wampanoags, who lived along the coast, offered food and advice in the early months of 1621, anxious to establish an alliance with the newcomers as protection against the Narragansetts, the mighty neighboring tribe who miraculously had been spared the ravages of the plague.20
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