Love and Hate in Jamestown Read online

  England’s record up to that point looked even less promising when measured against the already far-flung empires of Portugal and Spain. By 1606, Portuguese explorers had long since established sizable colonies within present-day Brazil, India, and Indonesia. The Portuguese had been administering the port of Macau, on the coast of China, since 1556 (as they would continue to do until 1999). From their colonies in coastal Africa, the Portuguese were playing a pivotal and inglorious role in the European slave trade, transporting Africans to European colonies in South America.

  Then there was Spain, the other colonial superpower of the day. Decades earlier, Vasco Núñez de Balboa had marched through Panama to find the Pacific Ocean; Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had founded St. Augustine, Florida; law student turned explorer Hernando Cortés had conquered the Aztecs in Mexico; and Francisco Pizarro had crushed the Incas in Peru. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado had explored vast stretches of the present-day southwestern United States and stumbled upon the Grand Canyon. All told, Spain in 1606 dominated most of South America, Central America, Florida, Cuba, and the Philippines. Since 1580, in fact, Portugal itself had been under the Spanish crown, and it would remain so until 1640.

  Along the way, the conquistadors built a well-deserved reputation for brutishness. After the Aztecs received Cortés as a god, he and his forces kidnapped their emperor, plundered their treasures, massacred their nobility, and destroyed their capital city of Tenochtitlán. Pizarro essentially repeated the pattern in Peru, taking a son of the recently deceased emperor for a ransom of tons of silver and gold. The encomienda system in the Spanish territories, which granted ownership of an area’s natives to a favored Spanish settler or military man, then enslaved the people of those once-powerful empires.7

  The leaders of the Jamestown venture—who needed no excuse to hate their Spanish enemies anyway—were disgusted by the Spaniards’ record of bloodthirst. “No Spanish intention will be entertained by us neither to hereby root out the naturals [natives], as the Spaniards have done in Hispaniola and other parts,” vowed colonist William Strachey. A group of colonists, defending the colony’s “charitable” treatment of the natives, later wrote caustically of “others not pleasing, that we washed not the ground with their [the natives’] bloods, nor showed such strange inventions in mangling, murdering, ransacking, and destroying as did the Spanyards the simple bodies of such ignorant soules.” The meager economic fruits of the Virginia colony could not be compared to the riches brought home by the Spanish, the group argued, because “what the Spanyard got was chiefely the spoyle and pillage of those countrey people, and not the labors of their owne hands.” A 1609 tract of the Virginia Company pledged that the natives would be won over to English ways, “not by stormes of raging cruelties (as West India was converted) with rapiers point and musket shot, murdering so many millions of naked indians, as their stories doe relate, but by faire and loving meanes, suiting to our English natures.” The company’s governing council in London, in a 1610 report, ridiculed the Spaniards’ purported religious justification for their doings:

  To preach the Gospel to a nation conquered, and to set their souls at liberty when we have brought their bodies into slavery, it may be a matter sacred to the preachers, but I do not know how justifiable in the rulers, who for their mere ambition do set upon it the gloss of religion. Let the divines of Salamanca [Spain’s University of Salamanca] discuss that question how the possessor of the West Indies [i.e., Spain] first destroyed and then instructed.8

  As it happened, the Powhatans also hated the Spanish. A Spanish party had come to the Chesapeake Bay around 1560 and captured a teenage Powhatan boy; he was baptized and renamed Don Luis de Velasco. Don Luis was educated in Mexico and Spain, and then brought back to Virginia ten years afterward to establish a Catholic mission. Don Luis fled, returning to his own people, and the Powhatans took their revenge on the Spanish by killing the missionaries. The Spanish, tipped off to the events by a native prisoner, sent a gunboat in 1572 to retaliate and look for survivors. The Powhatans’ memory of the affair was still fresh in the early 1600s.9

  But if the English were opposed to the Spanish and their ways, and the Powhatans were as well, why did they become antagonists? Indeed, the Virginia Company, with its intended policy of “liberality” toward the natives to win them over, envisioned a sort of peaceful coexistence between the two groups. Toward that end, the colonists were to seek out only uninhabited ground for settlement. The clue to the trouble, of course, lies in the sympathetic phrase “ignorant souls.” The English, while more humanely inclined than the Spanish at this stage, still saw the natives as savages—and that was their everyday term for them: “savages.” (It was sometimes rendered as “salvages” in the chaotic spelling of the day.)

  To understand what the English actually meant, though, one has to set aside the intervening four hundred years of American racial history. Seen through the prism of those four hundred years, the English attitude looks like racism; how could it not be? Improbably enough, though, the English of 1606 were not generally racist in their view of the Virginia natives—not in the conventional sense. The English did not believe that white people like themselves were innately superior and the natives innately inferior; savagery had nothing to do with biology. It also did not signify that the natives were necessarily fierce (some tribes were, some weren’t). For the English, “savagery” instead referred to the cultural condition of primitivity. The opposite of “savage” was not “white”; it was “civilized” or “Christian.”

  This may sound, at first, like a distinction without a difference, but its implications were significant. It meant savagery was only the starting point for a people’s progression toward modernity. It was a temporary condition, which did not render those within it less than fully human. Savages could not rightfully be enslaved. Violence could not be unleashed against savages without just cause. Reflecting the spirit of the time, Strachey wrote of the natives, “We are taught to acknowledge every man that beareth the impression of God’s stamp to be not only our neighbor but to be our brother.” John Smith later denounced an English mariner named Thomas Hunt for capturing twenty-seven natives in New England and selling “these poore innocent soules” into slavery in Spain.

  The English did not exclude themselves from the progression: in the days of Roman conquest, as the English now saw it, the Britons themselves were the savages. The civilizing influence of the Roman conquerors, and later of the Christian gospel, had lifted the English up from that savagery. Supporters of the colony expected it to bestow the same benefits on the natives through a relationship of benevolent cultural imperialism—peaceable unless the natives struck first—and mutually beneficial trade.10

  The lack of a racial component to the English attitudes is unsurprising, given that the English in fact regarded the natives as white people (unlike the Moors and black Africans they knew by reputation). The natives were born white, the English believed, and then their skin changed color—from the effects of the dyes that they used to decorate themselves and to ward off mosquitoes. (A colonist aboard the first voyage would recall, “Their skynn is tawny, not so born, but with dying and paynting themselves, in which they delight greatly.” Another suggested, “They would be of good complexion if they would leave painting, which they use on their face and shoulders.”) After an Englishman named William Parker was captured by the natives and reunited with the colonists several years afterward, an observer marveled that Parker had “grown so like both in complexion and habit to the Indians that I only knew him by his tongue to be an Englishman.” 11

  While English attitudes were enlightened by the standard of the era, they were not totally benign from the natives’ viewpoint. Far from it: the civilizing effect of the Romans’ influence served, in turn, as a justification for the English to settle in Virginia in the first place. “Why, what injury can it be to people of any nation for Christians to come unto their ports, havens, or territories,” William Strachey asked, “when the law of
nations, which is the law of God and man, doth privilege all men to do so?”

  It was no injury at all, he answered. The English settlers were merely doing for the natives what others had done for the English: “Had not this violence and this injury been offer’d unto us by the Romans, we might yet have lived overgrown Satyrs, rude and untutor’d, wand’ring in the woods, dwelling in caves, and hunting for our dinners as the wild beasts in the forests for their prey.” Similarly, the Virginia Company argued that it was justifiable to occupy part of the local land, not only because there was plenty of unoccupied territory on the huge continent to go around, but also because “there is no other moderate and mix’d course to bring them to conversion but by daily conversation where they may see the life and learn the language of each other.” In the end, the backers of the colony believed, the natives would be grateful: “Their children when they come to be saved, will blesse the day when first their fathers saw your faces.”12

  So it was that the members of the first Jamestown voyage boarded the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery on December 19 and 20 of 1606—most of them with pure hearts and empty heads, expecting to find riches, welcoming natives, and an easy life on the other shore.

  2

  THE CROSSING

  The departure of the expedition drew little attention at the time. The three ships left without fanfare from docks at Blackwall, located in what is now known as the London Docklands, just downriver on the Thames from central London. From there, they journeyed through the river’s crowded shipping lanes toward the English Channel.

  The flagship of the voyage, the 120-ton Susan Constant, was modest enough in size, around 116 feet in all. The others were smaller still: the Godspeed was roughly 68 feet long and had a capacity of 40 tons; the Discovery, about 50 feet and 20 tons. Yet even these figures make the ships sound larger than they were. The Godspeed, for instance, was 68 feet long in theory—if one measured from tip to tip. About a quarter of that length, though, was taken up by the spars overhanging her bow and stern, leaving an actual deck length of 52 feet or so. That figure, a more realistic measure of the ship’s usable area for the voyagers, is equivalent in today’s terms to the length of three parking spaces. The Godspeed was around 15 feet wide at its broadest point.1

  How the men were able to cope with their cramped quarters over the four-month journey is difficult to conceive. The 105 or so colonists were joined by some 39 crewmen, with the result that 71 bodies somehow had to be jammed onto the flagship, 52 on the Godspeed, and 21 on the tiny Discovery. The ships had not even been built to carry passengers; they were cargo ships. Christopher Columbus, in his first crossing of the Atlantic, sailed with two-thirds the number of men in larger vessels. The Endurance, the vessel of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition, was 144 feet and carried 28 men. In a 1985 reenactment of the Jamestown voyage, on a modern replica of the Godspeed, those on board found the situation trying—and that time, there were only fourteen of them. “That, to me, is a really hard one to fathom— fifty-two people on that boat,” said Neil Tanner, a crew member. “We talked about that a lot. With the fourteen of us, it was crowded.” 2

  Apart from the cabins already in place for the crew, the ships undoubtedly had a few cabins jerry-built for some of the more elevated gentlemen of the mission. Foremost among these was Edward-Maria Wingfield, a charter investor in the Virginia Company. Wingfield was wellborn (his father was a godson of Queen Mary) and was accompanied on the voyage by at least two servants. He had been trained as a lawyer; he studied at Lincoln’s Inn, one of London’s four Inns of Court, before taking on military service in the Netherlands and then Ireland. Wingfield would soon become the Jamestown colony’s first president but would slink back to England in disgrace less than a year after the landing. With good reason, the venerable Dictionary of National Biography would, in the late 1880s, deem him “self-confident, pompous, and puffed up by a sense of his own superior birth and position, unable to co-operate with common men and unfit to rule them.” The British Empire in America, John Oldmixon’s history published in London in 1708, would judge him “a covetous haughty person.”

  John Smith, like the rest of the passengers, would have slept on a straw mattress on the decks or in a hammock. His companions there were the less exalted gentlemen, as well as the various tradesmen and laborers who had signed on. Among the latter, some are known today only as lines in the passenger list: Henry Tavin, laborer; John Herd and William Garret, bricklayers; Nicholas Scott, drummer. Unlike the Roanoke expedition, this one had no women on board. There were four boys: Samuell Collier, Nathaniell Pecock, James Brumfield, and Richard Mutton.3

  Well-to-do and poor, young and old, the passengers had one thing in common: they had legal ownership of their own bodies. The ships were not carrying any slaves; the slave trade would take another dozen years to reach Virginia, in the form of twenty or so Africans brought over on a Dutch man-of-war. In another sense, though, all of the passengers were in servitude, having bound themselves—in return for a one-way ocean passage and a share of the company’s profits—to obey the company’s appointed leaders and to work without wages. The length of that servitude is uncertain, but was probably around seven years.

  The passengers may have had something else in common: a sense of disquiet regarding their crew. From the time they boarded, the colonists must have wondered whether they had made a serious mistake in trusting the sailors with their lives and welfare. On November 23, about a month before the departure, the Susan Constant had crashed into another ship while sitting at anchor. The Susan Constant suffered minor damage; the other ship, the Philip and Francis, came out worse and needed extensive repairs. When the case went to the High Court of Admiralty in mid-December, the sailors of the Philip and Francis maintained that the men of the Susan Constant had failed to adjust their anchor cables to keep the ship clear because they were “tiplinge and singinge.” (John Harvey of the Susan Constant averred that “none of the company of the Susan Constant were drunck or had drunck hard to his knowledge when the said hurte hapned, for as he sayth there was no other beare but four shillinges beere on borde at that tyme.”)

  Along with the colonists and crew, the three ships held provisions, tools, and the parts for a smaller boat to be assembled in Virginia for inland exploration. The Susan Constant was armed with cannon for protection against pirates. The ships also carried another crucial article—namely, a sealed box containing the Virginia Company’s instructions to the colonists and the names of the settlement’s leaders. For safety’s sake, there were three copies, one on board each ship, in case one of the ships was unlucky enough to run into trouble on the way across. The instructions were to be opened “within four and twenty hours” of arrival at Virginia, the company directed, “and not before.”

  Smith traveled on the Susan Constant, which was under the command of Christopher Newport. Newport, a battle-tested veteran of the Atlantic, had Smith’s respect—at least for the time being. For fifteen years, off and on, Newport had been a privateer raiding Spanish freighters in the Caribbean. A group of London merchants financed his missions and shared in his spoils, all under the approving eye of the British government. Commanding a series of privateer ships—the Little John, the Margaret, and the Golden Dragon—Newport captured or destroyed some twenty Spanish vessels. Among his exploits was his leadership in the capture of the greatest English plunder of the century, the Madre de Dios, off the Azores in August 1592. In bringing the Madre de Dios to port in England with its treasure of more than five hundred tons of spices, silks, gemstones, and other valuables, he became England’s preeminent mariner of the American seas. He continued to return to Caribbean waters; in 1605, knowing of King James’s fascination with exotic animals, he brought back two baby crocodiles and a wild boar as gifts for the king.

  The Virginia Company put great store in Newport’s reputation. Besides giving him the helm of the fleet’s largest ship, the company put him in overall command of the fleet �
��until such time as they shall fortune to land upon the coast of Virginia.” Newport led the Jamestown voyage single-handedly, having lost his right arm during one of his privateering attacks off the coast of Cuba.4

  The Godspeed was under Bartholomew Gosnold. Educated at the University of Cambridge and the Inns of Court, Gosnold had entered privateering in his late twenties, making a successful career change from law practice. In 1602, Gosnold explored present-day New England, discovering Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard in the process and naming Martha’s Vineyard for his firstborn daughter, who had died at a young age. Gosnold and his twenty men attempted to establish a trading post, but abandoned it after realizing they lacked enough food for the winter—another chapter in the history of failed efforts to create an English outpost in the New World. He would then spend the years leading up to 1606 as an organizer of the Virginia Company, setting the enterprise into motion.

  At the time of the Virginia sailing, both Newport and Gosnold were well into midlife by the standards of the day, with Newport around forty-six and Gosnold roughly thirty-five. They were among the few known family men of the voyage: Newport left behind his wife, Elizabeth Glanfield, and four young children; waiting for Gosnold were his wife, Mary Golding, and three young children.

  John Ratcliffe, captain of the Discovery, is a comparatively shadowy figure, who apparently had left few tracks in the sands of human events before going to Virginia. He was a gentleman, born John Sicklemore, later adopting the alias of Ratcliffe—a quirk that would lead to taunting from his antagonists in the colony. (“A poore counterfeited imposture,” John Smith tagged him.)5

  Of the three captains, only Newport would escape death in Virginia.

  At the opposite end of the pecking order from the captains, officially speaking, the lowest-ranking member of the crew was the swabber, whose duty was to keep the ship clean. Yet unofficially, on English ships of the period, there was one person whose rank was lower still: the liar. Each week, the unfortunate crewman first caught in a lie would loudly be proclaimed the liar by the rest of the crew. At that point, he would be placed under the command of the swabber and given the truly Herculean task of keeping the beakhead clean—the beakhead, a platform of open slats suspended at the bow, being the rudimentary sanitary facility that served the entire ship.