Love and Hate in Jamestown Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  Maps

  1 - PROLOGUE

  2 - THE CROSSING

  3 - HAVE GREAT CARE NOT TO OFFEND

  4 - WINGFIELD

  5 - THE RESCUE

  6 - GILDED DIRT

  7 - POWHATAN BECOMES AN ENGLISH PRINCE

  8 - POCAHONTAS SAVES JOHN SMITHAGAIN

  9 - THE STARVING TIME

  10 - RESTORATION

  11 - THE MARRIAGE

  12 - POCAHONTAS IN LONDON

  13 - THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICANS

  14 - MARCH 22,1622: SKYFALL

  15 - SMITH’S VISION FOR AMERICA

  Acknowledgments

  Marginalia

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Acclaim for David A. Price’s

  LOVE AND HATE IN JAMESTOWN

  “Not only intellectually palatable, but also a juicy feast of compelling storytelling. . . . Love and Hate in Jamestown deserves an honored spot in any history buff’s library.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Greed, arrogance, intrigue, valor, stupidity, suspense, and cataclysmic tragedy. . . . Price interweaves all these elements with a graceful, reportorial style that never forgets the humanity of the individuals involved.” —The Orlando Sentinel

  “The most historically correct and stylistically elegant rendering of John Smith and Pocahontas that I have ever read.” —Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers

  “The story David Price tells so lucidly is far more compelling than the popular tale. . . . A splendid book.” —The Christian Science Monitor

  “John Smith . . . is scrupulously brought to life. . . . Price has re-created a figure to whom this nation owes a debt.” —The Dallas Morning News

  “The Jamestown story is splendidly realized. . . . Firmly grounded in original sources, particularly Smith’s own vivid records, and in later scholarship.” —Detroit Free Press

  “A superb narrative of the founding of the first colony.” —The New York Sun

  “[Price] has perused literally all existing records, letters, articles, manuscripts, shipping accounts, slavery files, and other accounts to bring us the real story of the complex first years of the colony. . . . A valuable study.” —The Decatur Daily

  “In Price’s research, both Smith and Pocahontas emerge as full, compelling characters.” —Washington City Paper

  “[An] admirable new history. . . . A fine book, one that personifies the virtues I esteem in a work of popular history: clarity, intelligence, grace, novelty, and brevity.” —David L. Beck, San Jose Mercury News

  “[An] impeccably researched and very able retelling. . . . The intersection of the Jamestown story with the careers of Smith and Pocahontas makes a fascinating narrative, and Price has done it full justice.” —The Independent (London)

  “Price puts the first settlement back where it belongs: at the center of the American story. . . . Beautifully written and an authentic page-turner.” —National Review Online

  Maps

  The Voyage of the Susan Constant, the Godspeed,

  and the Discovery 1606–1607 14

  Chief Powhatan’s World 1607 37

  1

  PROLOGUE

  In the year 1606, on a Roman tennis court, the artist Caravaggio killed an opponent after an argument over a foul call. A middle-aged mathematician named Galileo Galilei, who had not yet built his first telescope, published a book of observations about the recent appearance of a supernova in the sky. Japan’s first shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa, had recently begun his rule. The Dutch painter Rembrandt was born. In Oxford, Cambridge, and Canterbury, forty-seven scholars appointed by the king were laboring over a new translation of the Scriptures, which would come to be known as the King James Bible. A new play called Macbeth opened in London. And in late December, in London’s River Thames, three small ships were anchored, awaiting a voyage across the Atlantic.

  Those three ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—went on to change the course of history. After a series of fruitless attempts by the English to create an outpost in North America, the voyagers of 1606 finally broke through. The colony that they established at Jamestown would open the way for later English settlements up and down the East Coast, and eventually for the United States itself.

  The Jamestown colony was an entrepreneurial effort, organized and financed by the Virginia Company of London, a start-up venture chartered eight months earlier; its business model was to extract profits from the gold, silver, and other riches supposedly to be found in that region of North America. Also, because no one yet knew the extent of the North American continent, the company expected to find a trade route by river through Virginia to the Pacific. (Religious conversion of the natives was a distant third objective.) The enterprise was a joint-stock company, its equity held by a limited circle of investors. In a little over two years, the Virginia Company would have its initial public stock offering at twelve pounds, ten shillings a share. English America was a corporation before it was a country.

  Few of the investors were actually on the three ships, fortunately for them. The colony’s ultimate success would come at a fearsome price: disease, hunger, and hostile natives left behind a toll of misery and death. Most of the 105 or so adventurers who went on the ships would be dead within months, and that was only the first wave of mortality to hit the colony.

  It’s amazing the settlement survived at all. The alien territory of Virginia would have been a challenge to the best of explorers. But the 1606 expedition, by and large, was not made up of the best, or for that matter the brightest. Half of the colonists aboard the three ships were “gentlemen”—upper-class indolents who, as events unfolded, literally would not work to save their own lives. (The true meaning of the word “gentleman” in those days is suggested by the 1605 George Chapman farce Eastward Ho, involving adventurers making ready for a voyage to Virginia; one character instructs another, “Do nothing; be like a gentleman, be idle; the curse of man is labor.”) Worse, the “gentlemen” of Jamestown comprised most of the colony’s leaders, who came to revile and plot against one another as the sick and the starving were dropping dead around them.

  The survival of the small English outpost was thanks mostly to two extraordinary people, one a commoner and one a royal. The commoner was Captain John Smith, a former soldier with an impatient nature and a total lack of respect for his social betters—or anyone else who hadn’t proven himself through his merits. The royal was Pocahontas, the beautiful, headstrong daughter of the most powerful chief in Virginia.

  The names of John Smith and Pocahontas have by now passed into American legend. Like the Jamestown story as a whole, their stories have been told over the generations with varying degrees of accuracy. The imaginative 1995 Walt Disney Co. movie, for example, endowed Pocahontas with a Barbie-doll figure, dressed her in a deerskin from Victoria’s Secret, and made her Smith’s love interest. Or, as Peggy Lee sang,

  Captain Smith and Pocahontas

  Had a very mad affair

  When her daddy tried to kill him

  She said, “Daddy, oh don’t you dare

  He gives me fever with his kisses

  Fever when he holds me tight

  Fever, I’m his missus

  Oh Daddy, won’t you treat him right.”1

  Trouble is, Smith and Pocahontas were never romantically involved. That isn’t surprising; when Smith was in Virginia, Pocahontas was a girl of eleven or so. The real Pocahontas was a child of privilege in her society—that is, the Powhatan Empire—who was curious about the English newcomers, befriended Smith, and
gave him and the rest of the English crucial assistance. Years later, looking back on her contributions, Smith would recall that her “compassionate pitiful [pitying] heart . . . gave me much cause to respect her.” 2 He credited her with saving the colony. The English in Virginia, for their part, chose a strange way to repay her: after Smith left the colony, they kidnapped her and held her hostage for ransom from her father, Chief Powhatan. Yet during that time, she came to embrace English ways, married a thoroughly lovestruck Englishman named John Rolfe, and lived out the rest of her short life in his country.

  Smith, at the other end of the social scale, was born in 1580 in rustic Willoughby by Alford, Lincolnshire, to a simple farm family, putting him just one rung above peasanthood. Soldiering was to be his ticket out. He was of slightly below-average height, even by the standards of his time, measuring in at perhaps five-foot-three or five-foot-four, but he was stocky and tough. He had dark hair and a full beard, and eyes that showed intelligence and confidence. In a portrait made later in his life, Smith meets the onlooker’s gaze with neither haughtiness nor servility, but instead with unassuming equality—an unusual attitude in his class-conscious homeland. “He was honest, sensible, and well informed,” Thomas Jefferson wrote of him a century and a half later.

  The young John Smith attended grammar school in nearby Louth while dreaming of overseas adventure; at the age of thirteen, no longer content with fantasizing, he tried to run away from home in hopes of making his way abroad. His father, George Smith, had other ideas and succeeded in stopping him. At fifteen, bowing unhappily to his father’s wishes, John Smith became an apprentice to a merchant. A year or two later, however, in a bittersweet turn of events for the young man, the path to the sea became open: Smith’s father died.3

  This time, there was no one to stand in John Smith’s way. Bored with counting his master’s money, Smith headed to the Continent and fought under a Captain Joseph Duxbury in the Netherlands, aiding that country in its war of independence against Spain. Life on the battlefield agreed with him. Returning to England a few years later, he had a plan ready: He withdrew to “a little woody pasture,” as he called it, to make a single-minded study of all things martial. He was twenty years old.

  In that pasture, Smith showed the first signs of what would become his lifelong preoccupation with practical knowledge. He practiced horsemanship. He read Machiavelli’s The Art of War. He learned the life story of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher (and patriarch of the 2000 film Gladiator). Smith became an explosives expert, with the aid of a translated copy of Vannoccio Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia. He memorized codes for sending signals over distances using torchlight. Although some of his study seems more on the side of erudition than practicality, Smith would have seen no bright line between the two: history, biography, and munitions were all pragmatic subjects that a military man needed to operate effectively in the world.

  Smith was ready to embark on his chosen profession. He made his way back to the Continent. In the summer of 1601, he enlisted with Austrian forces in Hungary that were fighting the occupying armies of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the Muslim superpower that had conquered much of Central Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. In Hungary, Smith deployed his signaling torches, his explosives (he called them his “fiery dragons”), and other devices and strategems to lethal effect, earning himself the title of captain. Here he experienced a taste of meritocracy: with individual excellence and contribution came respect and advancement. It made its impression on the young soldier.

  His fortunes took a decided turn for the worse on a cold winter’s day in 1602, when he was captured on the battlefield in present-day Romania. He was taken to an auction with others to be sold into slavery—“like beasts in a market-place,” he recalled. Smith ended up on a Turkish farm under a cruel master, where his head was shaved bare and a ring of iron placed around his neck. He found he was joining hundreds of slaves—European, Turk, and Arab—who informed him that escape was impossible. That was all he needed to hear. He was laboring in the fields one day when the master came by on horseback to beat him; seizing his chance, Smith turned the tables, beating the man to death with a threshing bat. Smith then put on the dead man’s clothes and took off on his horse for friendly territory.4

  Smith wrangled a place in the Virginia expedition several years afterward. The historical record doesn’t reveal why he was picked. The leadership of the Virginia Company probably saw him simply as a hired military hand in case of an attack from the Spanish or trouble with the natives. If so, he proved to be larger than that role. No matter how or why he got the job, it seems obvious in retrospect that he was unusually well suited to become the colony’s leader, as he ultimately did. His adventures in Hungary gave him the experience of dealing with foreigners both as comrades and as adversaries. Those years also shaped his distinctive worldview, one in which ignorance was to be treated as a dangerous enemy, and in which people were to be judged by their effectiveness rather than by their bloodlines.

  Hence, unlike most Englishmen of his day, Smith believed it was important to understand and deal with the natives as they actually were, not as symbols of primitive evil or virtue. Accordingly, he studied the Powhatan language and culture closely, and indeed, he left behind our most detailed ethnographic writings on those people. With the benefit of that information, he was able to keep Chief Powhatan at bay through a mix of diplomacy and intimidation—not through massacre—at a time when the Powhatan Empire outnumbered the English by well over a hundred to one. It was this record that led several of Smith’s admirers among the colonists to write later, with only slight exaggeration, that “thou Virginia foild’st, yet kep’st unstained”—that is, he foiled the natives in Virginia, but didn’t stain Virginia with their blood.

  At the same time, Smith faced the daunting task of whipping his own countrymen into shape, particularly “the better sort” (as gentlemen were often called). They “exclaim of all things, though they never adventured to know any thing,” Smith groused, “nor ever did anything but devour the fruits of other men’s labors.” The gallants, he added with a sneer, were discontented because they didn’t have “any of their accustomed dainties, with feather beds and down pillows, taverns and alehouses in every breathing place, neither plenty of gold and silver and dissolute liberty as they expected.” Once they were truly under Smith’s thumb, as he moved from serving as a council member to colony president, he gave the “better sort” reason to squirm with his decree that “he that will not work shall not eat.” 5

  All that was to come later. As the three ships sat at anchor in late 1606, there was little reason to assume that the mission would succeed. The crews could lose heart and mutiny, like the crew of explorer Sebastian Cabot almost a century earlier. The ships could go down in bad weather, as Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s did during a 1583 attempt at colonizing. And, of course, the colony could establish itself and then fail for any number of reasons, like the Roanoke settlements of 1585 and 1587.

  Those expeditions, organized by Sir Walter Ralegh, sent colonists to Roanoke Island off present-day North Carolina. Ralegh—or Raleigh, or Rawleyghe—became famous to succeeding generations for an alleged episode of chivalry involving Queen Elizabeth and a mud puddle. (Ralegh supposedly took off his best cloak and laid it over the puddle for the queen to step over.) In his own time, Ralegh was better known as an accomplished mariner and poet and as a handsome object of the queen’s affection. Like Humphrey Gilbert, his half brother, he was also known for his enthusiastic butchery of the Irish as an officer in that country, not sparing women or children.

  After he received encouraging reports from a brief reconnaissance mission to Virginia, Ralegh sent off his first colonizing expedition from England in April 1585; it left 107 men at Roanoke that summer. Ralph Lane, one of their leaders, was awestruck by, as he wrote, the “huge and unknowen greatnesse” of the continent. Things went awry early on; the colony lost most of its food supply when its supply ship, the T
iger, struck ground during a storm; salt water flowed in and spoiled the provisions. That meant the settlers would have to live off the land—or freeload off the natives. Lane opted for the latter, using the threat of force when charity wasn’t forthcoming. (Perhaps fortunately for the natives of Roanoke Island, Ralegh himself never set foot in the New World.) After putting up with the English through the winter, the natives began starving them out. In June, after months of desperation, the colonists were rescued by Sir Francis Drake and taken back home.

  The next attempt took a different and less militaristic tack, with Ralegh sending a group of 110 men, women, and children under the rule of a painter, John White. Two of the women, including White’s daughter, were pregnant and soon gave birth to the first English children to be born in the New World. A month after the settlers arrived at Roanoke, White headed back to England for supplies. War between England and Spain kept White from returning until 1590. When he did, he found that the settlers—including his daughter and granddaughter—had disappeared without a trace. There were no bodies or any other signs of a struggle. The only clues were a tree carved with the letters “CRO” and a post carved with the word “CROATOAN.” From this, White logically inferred that the group had moved to Croatoan Island, home of the Croatoan tribe. But bad weather, and the snapping of two anchor cables, foiled his plan to sail to that island to investigate; with his return to England went the last chance of finding the so-called Lost Colony. No Europeans would ever see the colonists again.6

  Such was England’s record of failure upon failure in attempting to create foreign outposts. In 1606, some 114 years after Christopher Columbus’s world-altering discovery, England remained less than a third-rate colonial power. Indeed, the notion that English-speaking people would someday occupy and govern most of the North American continent would have seemed literally insane. The unimportant island nation of England was noted mostly for its irksome privateers— government-licensed pirates, in effect—who looted Spanish cargo ships.