The luckless George Percy, younger son of the earl of Northumberland, in a nineteenth-century copy of a portrait, now lost, made during his lifetime. (Photo credit 2.5)
How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. The first three convoys brought a total of 295 people to Jamestown. According to the historian Edmund S. Morgan, fully 92 of them were gentlemen—and many of the rest were “the personal attendants that gentlemen thought necessary to make life bearable even in England.” The attendants, too, defined their position by not performing manual labor. But even if they had been able to cast aside their life-long, ingrained customs, they might not have been able to survive, because the English were unfamiliar with the Virginia environment. They could have tried fishing for bass and catfish, which are common in the lower river at winter. But they didn’t know where and when these fish like to feed. As anglers know, fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time is futile. The colonists died of ignorance as much as inanition.
John Rolfe was lucky enough to arrive in Virginia the following spring, after the starving time. Almost a year before, he had left England on the flagship of the expedition that brought the Smith-hating gentry. Rolfe’s ship carried Smith’s official replacement. Halfway across, a hurricane slammed into the group. The other ships slipped through the storm and made landfall in Virginia, with the results that I described above (attacking the Nansemond, enraging Powhatan, dying in droves). Meanwhile Rolfe’s vessel was blown south and nearly sank. For three straight days, one passenger remembered, every person aboard, many “stripped naked as men in galleys,” worked bucket chains in chest-deep water. The ship staggered awash to Bermuda, where it wrecked on the northernmost of the country’s four main islands. For nine months the survivors remained on the beach, surviving on fish, sea turtles, and the pigs they had brought for Jamestown. They slowly fashioned two smaller vessels from island cedar and the wreckage of their ship. Rolfe’s party arrived in Chesapeake Bay on May 23, 1610.
Appalled by the famine and ruin they found, the Bermuda group decided within two weeks to abandon Jamestown. Rolfe and the other newcomers loaded Jamestown’s skeletal inhabitants onto their two makeshift vessels and two others at the colony, intending to set off for Newfoundland, where they would beg a ride home from fishing boats that plied the Grand Banks. As they waited for the tide to turn for their departure, a small boat hove into view. It was the longboat preceding yet another convoy, this one containing yet another new governor, 250 new colonists, and, most important, a year’s worth of food. The previous colonists, despondent, returned to Jamestown and the task of figuring out how to survive.
It wasn’t easy. Although they no longer had to depend on Powhatan for food, the Virginia Company later reported, “not less than one hundred and fifty of [the 250 newcomers] died” within months, among them Rolfe’s young wife. Their fate was anything but atypical. Year after year, the company spent outsize sums to send colonists to Virginia—more than a hundred shiploads all told. Year after year, most of the would-be settlers perished within weeks or months—men and women, rich and poor, child and convict. England shipped more than seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. Eight out of ten died.
Most of the thousands of hopeful English who came to Virginia quickly died. This chart represents the author’s best attempt to calculate the total number of migrants, increasing year by year, and Jamestown’s actual population every year. The figures could well be off by several hundred, because the extant records are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. But the overall picture is clear—and dismaying.
So unremitting was the parade of death that even today it is painful to pore through the letters, reports, and chronicles Jamestown left behind. From every page dolorous phrases toll. Few in the Shipp that I came in are left alive.… Many newcomers either have all perished or have suffered horrible extreamities.… In 3 yeares their dyed about 3000 p[er]sons. Reports tally names and fates with the unadorned deadpan of old-fashioned obituary columns. Colony treasurer George Sandys notes that a servant newly shipped from London is dead before delivered. Colonist Hugh Pryse is found in the woods rente in pieces with wolves or other wild Beasts, and his bowels torne out of his body. In a drunken clash William Epps strikes Edward Stallenge so violently that he Cleft him to the scull and next day he died. Surgeon William Rowsley brought 10 men ov[er] w[i]th him to Virginia but within weeks all of his servants are dead. Edward Hill tells his brother in England he remains in Virginia only to gett what I have lost and then god willing I will leave the Contrey. (Hill never did leave; unable to recoup his losses, he died in Virginia a year later.) I am quite out of hart to live in this land, wails Phoebus Canner, god send me well out of it.
On December 4, 1619, John Woodlief landed with thirty-five men at a new plantation, upstream from Jamestown, called Berkeley Hundred. Woodlief had been instructed by his backers to celebrate the day of arrival “as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god”—the first Thanksgiving in English America. Berkeley Hundred’s founders had ordered the date to be observed every year. By the next December 4, thirty-one of the thirty-five tassantassas who had landed that day were sleeping in the soil.
Why did the Virginia Company keep trying? “Whatever else may have entered into the activities of the company,” Wesley Frank Craven observed in his history of the company, “it was primarily a business organization with large sums of capital invested by adventurers whose chief interest lay in the returns expected from the investment.” Yet the Virginia Company did not act like an ordinary business organization. When the initial hope of discovering precious metals and a route to Asia didn’t pan out, the company tried wine making, shipbuilding, iron monging, silk weaving, salt panning, and even glassblowing. All failed, at dreadful cost in money and lives. Nonetheless, the firm kept dumping money and people into Virginia. Why didn’t the company’s backers pull the plug? Why did they keep sending ship after doomed ship?
Equally puzzling, why did Powhatan allow the colony to survive? Jamestown escaped his first assault but remained at the edge of a precipice for years. Why didn’t Powhatan push it over, once and for all?
Part of the answer to both questions is the Columbian Exchange.
“ENGLISH FLIES”
Pocahontas probably did not save John Smith when he was captured in 1608, but she did help save Jamestown—by marrying the widower John Rolfe six years later. Evidence suggests she was a curious, mischievous child, one who like all children in Tsenacomoco went without clothing until puberty. After Smith’s return from captivity, Pocahontas visited Jamestown, colonist Strachey wrote afterward. The colony’s young men turned cartwheels with her, “falling on their hands turning their heels upwards, whom she would follow, and wheel so her self naked as she was all the fort over.” Her real name was Mataoka; Pocahontas was a teasing nickname that meant something like “little hellion.”
The tassantassas liked the girl—but not enough to prevent them from using her as a hostage. After Smith’s departure, when Powhatan had again brought the English to the brink of annihilation, the colony’s new leaders decided to counterattack. They put Jamestown under strict martial law—one colonist who stole several pints of oatmeal was chained to a tree until he starved to death—divided the men into military companies, and sent out expeditions to bring Tsenacomoco to heel. Attacking without warning, the colonists razed native villages up and down the James. The Indians repeatedly struck back, picking off colonists one by one, forcing them to retreat behind Jamestown’s palisade, where they were claimed by hunger and disease.
It was a classic guerrilla-war stalemate. The tassantassas could win every battle, but never obtain a decisive victory; Powhatan’s troops could always retreat into the hinterland, then reappear t
o deadly effect, arrows rushing from the trees in a sudden cloud. Yet Powhatan could not finish off the tassantassas, either. He could make the colonists so afraid to venture outside that they couldn’t harvest their own crops. But as long as London was willing to keep shipping replacement supplies—and replacement people—the Indians, too, could not win. Both sides were exhausted by March 1613, when Jamestown’s military commander, Thomas Dale, ordered a subordinate to trick the teenage Pocahontas into coming aboard an English ship. Then they sailed away with her.
Regarding the young woman as having noble blood, Dale put her under comfortable house arrest at the home of the colony’s minister. Meanwhile, he sent a ransom note to Powhatan: to get back his daughter, he would have to return all the swords, guns, and metal tools “he trecherously had stolne,” along with all the English prisoners of war. For three months Powhatan refused to negotiate with people he regarded as criminals. Finally he sent back a handful of English captives with an offer: five hundred bushels of maize for the girl. The guns and swords could not be returned, he said, because they had been lost or stolen. Dale scoffed at this claim. Communications ceased for another eight months, during which time some of the freed English captives ran back to the Indians—they preferred Tsenacomoco with its foreign culture and language to Jamestown with its martial law and famine.
Early images of northeastern Indians are rare. This 1616 engraving of Pocahontas (left), executed during her visit to England, is the only known full portrait of a Powhatan. No portraits exist of Opechancanough, though one can imagine him looking something like this shaven-headed man (right), possibly a Virginia Indian visiting London, whose likeness was captured by the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar in 1645. (Photo credit 2.6)
Determined to end the standoff, Dale led Rolfe and 150 musket-wielding tassantassas in March 1614 to meet Powhatan. In an angry standoff, several hundred native troops faced Dale’s men on the banks of the York River. With both sides fearing a battle that would inflict many casualties, England and Tsenacomoco finally began active parley. Rolfe was on the English negotiating team. Tsenacomoco was represented by Powhatan’s brother, Opechancanough, the man who had seized John Smith in the swamp. Over two days they put together an informal pact. Perhaps surprising, a key tenet was that Pocahontas would not return home.
After her abduction Pocahontas had been, one colonist reported, “exceeding pensive and discontented.” In addition, one assumes, she was bewildered by the tassantassas, with their unwieldy clothes, their practice of confining women to the home and garden, their strangely rigid eating habits (at home, people simply dipped into the stewpot when hungry). But over time her attitude changed. Perhaps she was angered by her father’s initial refusal to ransom her. Perhaps she liked being treated royally by the English—in her father’s house, she was but one of many children from many wives. Perhaps she thought that by staying with the English she could end the war, with its intermittent eruptions of atrocity. Perhaps she simply fell in love with John Rolfe, whom she met while she was in captivity. In any case, she agreed to stay in Jamestown as his bride.
Nobody cared that Pocahontas was already married. Because she was still childless, Rountree says, native custom allowed her to sunder the marital bond at any time. And the English were willing to overlook “savage” marriages—they were un-Christian, and therefore nonexistent. In consequence, both natives and newcomers could treat Pocahontas’s wedding to Rolfe as a de facto cease-fire—a “timely and face-saving method of ending the war without capitulation, a written treaty, or a formal winner,” as Fausz put it in his history of the strife.
Opechancanough used the suspension of hostilities to take the levers of power from his brother (Powhatan retired in about 1615 and died three years later). Unyielding and methodical, opposed to the tassantassas from the day of their arrival, Opechancanough manipulated Jamestown into attacking his native rivals, augmenting his empire even as the English domain expanded. Determined to understand his enemy, the new ruler infiltrated his people into Jamestown. Working in English homes, trading with English ships, and serving in English militias, the Indians studied the ways of the foreigners. Opechancanough’s men acquired a stockpile of guns, and trained themselves to use them.
The colonists were blithely unaware of Opechancanough’s schemes. Nonetheless, they initiated, all unintentionally, a devastating countermeasure: the Columbian Exchange. The constant flow of ships to Virginia brought with them an entire suite of new species, opening what would become a multilevel ecological assault. One of the most potent weapons was tobacco.
Even at the height of the war John Rolfe had been experimenting with N. tabacum. King James I had initially excoriated smoking as “lo[a]thsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, [and] harmefulle to the braine.” He thought about banning it but changed his mind—the perpetually cash-short monarch had discovered that tobacco could be taxed. English smokers were relieved, but not happy; the Spaniards kept raising prices. Much as crack cocaine is an inferior, cheaper version of powdered cocaine, Virginia tobacco was of lesser quality than Caribbean tobacco but also not nearly as expensive. Like crack, it was a wild commercial success; within a year of its arrival, Jamestown colonists were paying off debts in London with little bags of the drug. The cease-fire with Powhatan let colonists expand production explosively. By 1620 Jamestown was shipping as much as fifty thousand pounds a year; three years later the figure had almost tripled. Within forty years Chesapeake Bay—the Tobacco Coast, as it later became known—was exporting 25 million pounds a year. Individual farmers were making profits of as much as 1,000 percent on their initial investment.
One thousand percent! And all that was needed was sun, water, and soil! The sums skyrocketed if farmers could afford servants—laborers’ annual pay was about £2, but they could grow £100 or even £200 of tobacco in that time. In an object demonstration of the power of economic order to focus the human mind, the tassantassas whom John Smith had to order into their fields at gunpoint now became intent on wringing tobacco from the soil. Newcomers poured in, grabbed some land, and planted N. tabacum. English-style farms spread like rumors up and down the James and York rivers. So many colonists poured in that the company realized they could not be controlled entirely from across the ocean and created an elected council to resolve disputes—the first representative body in colonial North America. Its opening session lasted from July 30 to August 4, 1619.
Barely three weeks later a Dutch pirate ship landed at Jamestown. In its hold was “20. and odd Negroes”—slaves taken by the pirates from a Portuguese slave ship destined for Mexico. (About thirty more showed up in another ship a few days later.) In their hurry to extract tobacco profits, the tassantassas had been clamoring for more workers. The Africans had arrived at harvest time. Without a second thought colonists bought the Africans in exchange for the food the pirates needed for the return trip to Europe. Legally speaking, the “20. and odd” Africans may not have been slaves—their status is unclear. Nevertheless, they were not volunteers; their purchase was a landmark in the road to slavery. Within weeks of each other, Jamestown had inaugurated two of the future United States’ most long-lasting institutions: representative democracy and chattel slavery.
Not that the colonists paid attention to these landmarks—they were too busy exporting Virginia leaf. Obsessed by tobacco, some of the leadership complained, the colonists let Jamestown fall once again into ruin: “the Church down, the Palizado’s [walls] broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the store-house they used for the Church; the market-place, and streets and all other spare places planted with Tobacco.” Massive celebratory drunkenness was common; incoming ships brought liquor and profitably transformed themselves into floating temporary taverns. Dale was forced to issue an order to Virginia’s planters: grow food crops, too, or forfeit your tobacco to the colonial government. Few paid attention.
Alas, the boom came too late for the Virginia Company. Shipping colonists across the Atlantic only to
have them die had exhausted its start-up capital. Company officers persuaded London’s powerful clergy that helping Jamestown find more investors was the duty of all English Christians. Sunday after Sunday, ministers urged their parishioners to buy shares in the Virginia Company. “Goe forward,” Rev. William Crashaw urged potential “noble and worthy Adventurers,” some of whom sat in the pews of his Temple Church, one of the nation’s most influential houses of worship. If England did not seize its opportunity in Virginia, Crashaw predicted, future generations would ask, “Why was there such a pri[z]e put into the hands of fooles who had not hearts to take it?” (Emphasis in original.)
The tactic worked. Ministers enticed more than seven hundred individuals and companies to put at least £25,000 into the Virginia Company.4 (By contrast, historians believe that fewer than a dozen men were the original backers of the company and that they put in no more than several hundred pounds.) The new sum was enough to send over hundreds of colonists, Rolfe and Dale among them, who eagerly grew tobacco. But even the rush of tobacco profits could not offset the debts from the company’s years of losses. The Virginia Company was again running out of money on March 22, 1622, when Opechancanough attacked.
Early that morning Indians slipped into European settlements, knocking on doors and asking to be let in. Most were familiar visitors. They came unarmed. Many accepted a meal or a drink. Then they seized whatever implement came to hand—kitchen knife, heavy stewpot, the colonists’ own guns—and killed everyone in the house. The assault was brutal, widespread, and well planned. So swift were the blows that many colonists died without knowing they were under attack. Entire families fell. Houses burned across what had been Tsenacomoco. At the last minute several Indians told English friends about the attack, providing enough warning to let Jamestown gather its defenses. Nonetheless the attackers killed at least 325 people.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Page 9