SAVAGE KINGDOM

Virginia and the Founding

of English America

BENJAMIN WOOLLEY

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Part One

1 A Feast of Flowers and Blood

2 Machiavelli

3 The Adventurers

4 Departure

Part Two

5 Tsenacomoco

6 Soundings

7 The Spanish Ambassador

8 Bloody Flux

9 True Relations

10 The Virginian Sea

Part Three

11 El Dorado

12 The Mermaid

13 Promised Land

14 The Astrologer

15 Devil’s Island

16 Deliverance

Part Four

17 A Pallid Anonymous Creature

18 Strange Fish

19 The Good Husband

20 Twelfth Night

Part Five

21 Imbangala

22 The Treasurer

23 The ‘Viperous Brood’

24 The Unmasked Face

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Author’s Note

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

ONE A Feast of Flowers and Blood

ON THE MORNING of 20 September 1565, the sixty-year-old carpenter Nicolas le Challeux awoke to the sound of rain pelting down on the palm-leaf thatch overhead. It had not stopped for days, and a muddy morass awaited him outside.

When he had arrived in Florida the previous month, a sunnier prospect had beckoned. He had left the terrors of his native France far behind, and come to a place where he could practise his craft and religion in peace. Its very name suggested renewal, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León calling it Florida after the season in which he first sighted its shores: Easter Week, or Pascua Florida, ‘the feast of flowers’.

Florida could furnish all that a man could wish on earth, Challeux had been told. It had received a particular favour from heaven, suffering neither the snow nor raw frost of the North, nor the drying, burning heat of the South. The soil was so fertile, the forest so full of wild animals, the honest and gentle natives could live off the land without having to cultivate it. There were even reports of unicorns, and of veins of gold in a great mountain range to the north called the ‘Appalatcy’. It was ‘impossible that a man could not find there great pleasure and delight,’ Challeux was assured.¹

The contrast with the state of his homeland was stark. Europe was in turmoil. To the south, the Catholic Spanish and Holy Roman empires, offshoots of a single dynasty, domineered. In the north, Queen Elizabeth reigned over Europe’s upstart Protestant monarchy England, while her subjects egged on their co-religionists in the Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium), who were fighting for independence from their Spanish overlords. To the east stretched the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent resting an elbow upon the Balkans, a heel upon Basra. And in the middle lay France, a Catholic country penetrated by a powerful Protestant or ‘Huguenot’ minority. Exposed to so many religious and political tensions, it threatened to disintegrate, and in 1562, a series of civil wars erupted across the kingdom that were so brutal, they gave the word massacre, French for a butcher’s block, its modern meaning.

It was from the midst of this maelstrom that Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, had dispatched a fleet under the command of his kinsman René de Laudonnière to found a Protestant refuge in Florida. To the eyes of Coligny’s Catholic enemies, this was a provocative move. Though its coastline was still only hazily charted, and some even doubted it was a single land mass, all of North America was claimed by the Spanish under a famous ‘bull’ or edict issued by Pope Alexander VI shortly after Christopher Columbus’s historic expedition of 1492. This had donated all the ‘remote and unknown mainlands and islands’ in the Atlantic to the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, so they could bring the native populations ‘to the worship of our Redeemer and profession of the Catholic faith’. By sending his men to Florida, which was within convenient reach of Spanish possessions in Cuba and Mexico, Coligny was clearly challenging not only the Spanish claim, but the religious authority underpinning it.²

However, Coligny’s exiles had found Florida untouched by the Spanish, and settled themselves on the banks of the River of May (now called St John’s River, near modern Jacksonville), on a ‘pleasant open space covered with various kinds of grasses and plants’. They called their new home Fort Caroline, after France’s Catholic King Charles IX, in the hope of forestalling reprisals. Old Challeux had arrived the following year with another consignment of refugees, on a supply ship captained by Jean Ribault, a prominent Huguenot, as well as one of France’s most accomplished seamen.³

Conditions for the newcomers turned out to be less Elysian than advertised. The hundred or so settlers who had been there a year had run out of supplies, and were living off wild fruits, berries, the occasional crocodile, and goods stolen from the local Indians. There were also reports that the Spanish had been tipped off about Coligny’s project, and had sent a fleet which was even now roving the coast.

Over the coming weeks, Challeux joined a team of workmen who, under the direction of John de Hais, master carpenter, tried to reinforce La Caroline’s fragile palisade. The state of the fort’s defences was pitiful. The triangular layout was breached in two places, along the western side, and the long southerly wall facing the river, where the foundations for a ‘grange’ to store the settlement’s artillery and munitions lay partially built.

The weather hampered the workmen’s efforts. Daily deluges washed away the embankment supporting the palisade wall, and intervals of baking sunshine were too fleeting to allow the damage to be repaired. Meanwhile, the surrounding landscape became more and more saturated. Rivers burst their banks, meadows became marshland.

And so, on this September morning, Challeux faced another day of hard labour in the remorseless rain. Nevertheless, he managed to rouse himself, put on a damp and rotting cloak, and gather his tools.

A few hundred yards away, beyond the curtain of incessant rain, Don Pedro de Menéndez de Avilés lay in wait at the head of a column of five hundred soaking, disgruntled but well-armed Spanish troops. Menéndez was a Spanish noble and naval commander. He had arrived in Florida with a fleet of Spanish galleons a few days before Ribault, with orders to exterminate the ‘Lutherans’ and establish himself as Adelantado or governor of Florida, which King Philip II of Spain declared extended all the way from the keys on the southernmost tip of the Florida peninsula to Newfoundland.⁴

Menéndez had anchored his ships in the River of Dolphins (modern Matanzas River), about thirty-five miles south of Fort Caroline. There, on 28 August, he had set about building a military base, which he called St Augustine, in honour of the feast day upon which construction work had begun. After several weeks gathering intelligence about Fort Caroline from local Indians, and harrying Ribault’s fleet, he decided to mount a land attack on the French settlement.

The journey from St Augustine to Fort Caroline had proved dangerous and tiring. Though led by Francis Jean, a French defector who had lived in Fort Caroline, Menéndez’s troops got lost. They had to make their way through ‘morasses and desert paths never yet trod’, often up to their armpits in water, holding heavy knapsacks, ladders (for scaling the fort’s palisade) and harquebuses (a heavy forerunner to the musket) above their heads. They had finally reached a ‘little rise in the ground’ overlooking Fort Caroline in the early morning of 20 September, ‘the eve of the day of the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist St Matthew’.⁵

Menéndez commanded his men to stay hidden in the woodland while the camp master, Don Pedro de Valdes, and Francis Jean were sent ahead. They made their way through the thick undergrowth until they found their path blocked by a fallen tree. Turning back, a French sentinel who was patrolling nearby glimpsed them through the thicket. ‘Qui va la? [Who goes there?]’ he called. ‘Un Français [a Frenchman],’ the Spanish captain replied, in a convincing accent. The sentinel approached, and as soon as he was within reach, Valdes drew his sword and slashed him across the face. The sentinel fell backwards, giving a shout.

The cry carried through the thicket of trees, across the waterlogged clearing and turf embankment surrounding the French fort, through the wide gaps of its palisade, reaching the ears of Challeux as he was leaving his quarters. Guards were summoned, and they rushed out to see what had happened, leaving the fort’s gates open behind them.

At the same moment, Menéndez, thinking the cry was from his own camp master, gave the order to attack. Spanish troops burst from the cover of trees and poured through the fort’s still-open gates, firing and slashing at the panicking French settlers, who emerged from their quarters in their nightshirts to see what was going on.

Challeux saw a Spanish pikeman charging at him, and ran to a ladder or scaffold leaning up against one section of the fort’s rampart. ‘Nothing but the grace of God enabled me to double my effort,’ he recalled. ‘Old grey-haired man that I am, I nevertheless jumped over the ramparts, which if I thought about it, I could not have done, for they were eight or nine feet in height.’⁶

Not until he reached the cover of trees did he dare look back. He beheld ‘the horrible slaughter of our people’. Some managed to reach boats moored along the nearby shore, and row out to Ribault’s fleet, which was anchored in the river. The rest were killed where they stood, the Spanish vying ‘with each other as to who could best cut the throats of our men’. They even attacked the ill, the old, women and children, Challeux claimed, ‘in such a way that it is impossible to conceive of a massacre which could be equal to this one in cruelty and barbarity’.⁷

Once the savagery had subsided, the corpses were dragged out of the fort and dumped on the river bank. The Spanish soldiers, frustrated that so many had escaped, ‘vented their wrath and bloody cruelty on the dead’, scooping out their victims’ eyeballs, sticking them on the points of their daggers, and hurling them into the river ‘with shrieks of abuse and ribald laughter’.

Challeux fled into the woods, and made his way to the coast. He was picked up by one of Ribault’s ships the next day, and reached France a few weeks later, where he published a sensational account of his experiences. Others, including Jean Ribault, were less fortunate. Caught in a storm, they were shipwrecked back on the Florida coast. Exhausted and starving, they eventually surrendered to the Spanish, who bound them two by two, took them behind a sand dune, and slaughtered them. Only seven were spared, four who claimed to be Catholics, together with a drummer, a fife player and a carpenter, required by Menéndez to supplement his own troops.⁸

In a report of his actions sent to King Philip, Menéndez boasted, ‘I made war with fire and blood as Governor and Captain General of these Provinces upon all who might have come here to settle and to plant this evil Lutheran sect’. Having ‘come to this coast to burn and hang’ the hated Huguenots, he pledged to continue pursuing them ‘by sea and by land’ until they were annihilated.

To prevent any other adherents of that ‘wicked Lutheran sect’ returning to North America – particularly the English, who he noted had nominated Ribault ‘Captain General of all [their] fleet’ – Menéndez now urged the King to secure the entire eastern coast of North America. In particular, the Spanish should build a fort at the ‘Bahia de Santa Maria’ at thirty-seven degrees of northerly latitude, ‘the key to all the fortifications in this land’. This was the region that would later come to be dubbed by the English ‘Virginia’.⁹

Even in Spain, Menéndez was denounced for ‘inhumanely condemning so many souls to hell for ever’ at Fort Caroline. But he claimed that such brutality had been necessary. He had prevented the weed of Protestantism which had spread so quickly across the northern parts of Europe, from taking hold in the fertile soil of the New World. The massacre was a godly act, born of ‘divine inspiration, rather than from any dictate of human understanding’. Some even suggested that Menéndez had been merciful, ‘since he nobly and honourably put them to the sword, when by every right he could have burnt them alive’, the preferred punishment for heresy.

King Philip, who saw himself and his mighty empire as custodians of the true faith, reinforced this view. ‘The justice you meted out to the Lutheran corsairs who attempted to occupy and fortify Florida in order to sow the seeds of their wicked sect,’ he informed Menéndez, was ‘fully justified’. In the great battle for the soul of Europe and the future of mankind, North America had become the new front line.¹⁰

TWO Machiavelli

ON A COLD JANUARY DAY IN 1606, a messenger walked inconspicuously across the cobbles of London’s Strand, carrying a parcel for delivery to an address opposite the Savoy. It was a journey of only a few hundred yards, but one that crossed from one era of history to another. Just beyond Charing Cross lay York House, where, in 1599, the Earl of Essex, ‘a man of great designs’, had been imprisoned for his attempts to rouse Queen Elizabeth’s hesitant government to a heroic war against the ‘tyranny’ of Catholic Spain. A few yards further on was Durham House, once the home of Sir Walter Raleigh, the swashbuckling adventurer who had tried, and failed, to make North America an English colony, and a beachhead for attacking the Spanish empire. Essex had been executed for his rebellious behaviour in 1601. Raleigh was arrested for treason two years later, and now languished in the Tower of London, his bold schemes mere echoes in the empty halls of his great residence.

Past these mausoleums to old follies and glories lay the messenger’s destination, a brand-new, flat-fronted, perpendicular brick building. At each corner stood a tower, soaring as high as the famous lantern or ‘little turret’ atop Durham House, from which Raleigh had once beheld a ‘prospect which is pleasant perhaps as any in the World’.¹ This building was the London residence of Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, the man who had contrived the downfall of these political giants, shaped the emergence of a new regime under a new king, and cemented his astonishing rise by commissioning the turreted edifice soaring overhead.

The messenger knocked on the door, and was admitted to a small antechamber. Being Secretary of State to King James, and the monarch’s most trusted servant, the Earl was daily assailed by crowds of applicants, supplicants, petitioners and messengers competing for his much divided attention, and the antechamber had been especially set aside to receive them.

A clerk entered the room. He approached the messenger, who handed over the parcel. The clerk broke the wax seal and cursorily glanced at a covering letter, addressed to ‘the Right honourable the Earle of Salisbury of his Majestes privie Councell’. It was from Thomas and Edward Hayes, known to Cecil’s staff as ‘projectors’, agents who tipped off the Secretary of State to speculative schemes that might attract a profit or some political advantage. Attached to the letter was a long, formal document. Its title concerned a controversial subject, and marked it for the Secretary of State’s personal attention. It read: ‘Reasons to move the High Court of Parliament to raise a stock for the maintaining of a colony [in] Virginia’.²

The word ‘Machiavellian’ came into currency in England in the early 1600s, and it was Robert Cecil who in the minds of many personified its meaning. One of the Earl of Essex’s servants, defending his master before a commission of inquiry called following the Earl’s fall from grace in 1599, described the Secretary of State as ‘an atheist, a Machiavel’ who literally embodied the warped morality of political opportunism. ‘It was an unwholesome thing to meet a man in the morning which hath a wry neck, a crooked back or a splay foot,’ said the servant, referring to various deformities with which Cecil had suffered from birth.³

Cecil’s cousin and long-time ally Francis Bacon argued that it was these deformities that conferred upon the Secretary of State the callousness and determination a great political operator needs, making him ‘void of natural affection’, and mindful ‘to watch and observe the weakness of others’.⁴ These were certainly the qualities he had displayed in his dealings with Sir Walter Raleigh.

Raleigh had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s most cherished, if exasperating, favourites, and in 1584, to demonstrate her affections, she had granted him an exclusive licence to colonize North America. His efforts had resulted in establishing a small settlement on the island of Roanoke, on the Carolina Banks. On this basis he claimed the entire region for the English Crown, naming it ‘Virginia’ in honour of the Virgin Queen. But hostilities with Spain had prevented him from sending supply ships to service the fledgling colony, and in 1590, it was found abandoned, the only clue to the inhabitants’ whereabouts being a word carved in one of the fort’s wooden posts: ‘Croatoan’, the name of a local tribe. Attempts to find the missing settlers came to nothing, and the supply ship had returned to England.⁵

Even after 1591, when his licence officially expired, Raleigh had continued to claim Virginia as his, on the basis that his Roanoke settlers may have survived, and established a permanent base elsewhere in the region. But several follow-up missions sent to find his ‘lost colonists’ had proved fruitless. In 1602, a rival mission was dispatched to ‘Norumbega’, in the area of modern-day New England, to find alternative locations for an English colony. Raleigh knew nothing of it until it returned with a lucrative cargo of cedar wood and sassafras (an aromatic bark used to fumigate bedlinen and treat syphilis). His fury at a flagrant attempt to challenge his monopoly over North America resulted in an attempt to confiscate the goods, and an appeal for help and support from his ‘friend’ Cecil. ‘I shall yet live to see [Virginia] an English nation,’ he had promised. But his letter coincided with the final days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and Raleigh was emerging as an obstacle to Cecil’s complex manoeuvres to ensure the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne.

Elizabeth had died on 24 March 1603, and within days the Scots King took her place as James I of England. Soon after, Cecil confronted Raleigh with accusations that he had attempted to plot against the succession, and had him arrested. Sir Walter was tried for treason, sentenced to death, and thrown in the Tower to await his fate, leaving Virginia conveniently available for the new regime to dispose of as it saw fit.

And now Cecil had in his hands this new proposal for ‘the maintaining of a colony in Virginia’. Thomas and Edward Hayes began in a suitably humble tone: ‘Pardon us (right Honourable), that we presume to move this project presented herewith unto you, so remote from the course of your great affairs as America is from England.’ These ‘great affairs’ were the knock-on effects of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a group of disaffected Catholic gentlemen to blow up the House of Commons on 5 November 1605, the day the King and his entire Privy Council, together with most of the English nobility, had assembled at Westminster for the start of a new session of Parliament. Cecil was leading the official investigation into the plot, which was conveniently sweeping up a great many opponents of the new regime.

In their proposal, the Hayeses argued that ‘so great a business’ as colonizing America ‘can never ever be duly effected by private means’, as previous experience had shown. So they and certain associates had ‘devised another way, where by the cause may be completely set forward’: a great public scheme performed under the auspices of Parliament.⁶

Attached to the letter was the motion they intended to be set before the Houses of Parliament. It proposed setting up a large fleet of modern, well-armed and well-equipped ships manned by ‘able Mariners, and worthy chieftains’, which would be sent across the Atlantic to conquer North America in the King’s name. It would be publicly financed, as ‘private purses are cold comfort to adventurers and have ever been found fatal to all enterprises hereunto undertaken by the English, by reason of delays, jealousies and unwillingness to back that project which succeeded not in the first attempt’.

A model for such an undertaking could be found, the Hayeses believed, in the Low Countries. This collection of mostly Protestant city states, dominions of the Spanish Crown fighting for their independence, had created Europe’s most advanced trading region. They had ‘effected marvellous matters in traffic [trade] and navigation in few years’ by financing their expeditions through the issue of ‘main’ or public stock. In contrast, the English strategy of giving a grandee such as Raleigh a monopoly of trade with a particular region had resulted in failure. ‘It is honourable for a state rather to back an exploit by public consent than by private monopoly,’ the Hayeses concluded.

They therefore proposed that the King should give his assent to an Act of Parliament to authorize the setting up of a public company to colonize America. This was a matter of urgency, as ‘the want of our fresh and present supply of our discoveries [in Virginia] hath in manner taken away the title which the law of nations giveth us’ – in other words, use it or lose it.

Cecil was aware of the urgency, as well as the economic advantages, of a colonial venture. Spain’s enormous wealth, after all, rested upon her speculative ventures in South America, which were now profiting the new Spanish King Philip III to the tune of two million ducats a year – more than twice James’s entire annual income.⁷ Cecil was also aware of the growing success of London’s trading companies – indeed, James to a degree was coming to depend upon it, as the profits generated by these companies were helping to bankroll his overstretched royal exchequer. The newest, the East India Company, had been founded in 1600 by Sir Thomas Smythe, a close friend and generous supporter of the Crown. It had already sent several ships loaded with bullion to the Far East to buy spices and other exotic goods direct from suppliers. The sale of these items back in England was not only proving highly profitable, but suggested a lucrative new stream of customs revenue for the Crown.

However, the Hayeses had badly miscalculated. There was no way Cecil would countenance a public colonization venture, whatever the trade benefits. The very name ‘Virginia’ was a reminder why he considered this impossible. During the 1570s and ’80s, he and his father Lord Burghley had worked strenuously to marry Elizabeth off to one of Europe’s Catholic princes, so she could produce an heir. They had been fought all the way by a group of courtiers who opposed any such match on the grounds that she and therefore her kingdom would come under the sway of Catholic regimes they saw as tyrannical. It was this clique, egged on by Huguenot exiles wanting to avenge the massacre in Florida, that had promoted the cult of Elizabeth’s virginity. It became an emblem of Protestant purity and independence, which Raleigh had reinforced with his choice of name for English America.

Cecil had since managed to repair some of the diplomatic damage caused by these struggles, his efforts culminating with the Somerset House Peace Treaty with Spain, which was signed in 1604, a year after James ascended to the throne. But this had done nothing to diminish Virginia’s political potency. Just a few months before Cecil received the Hayeses’ proposal, a play called Eastward Hoe had been staged at the popular Blackfriars Theatre. It featured a dissolute ‘thirty-pound knight’ (a reference to King James selling off titles to raise ready cash) who had attempted to mount an expedition to the colony. ‘Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead,’ the expedition captain had boasted, in an effort to lure footloose and unemployed mariners into joining the mission. ‘You shall live freely there,’ he added, ‘without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers’, the apparatus of oppressive government.

The play’s authors were arrested for such incendiary lines, and even now, one of them, Ben Jonson, was sending Cecil plaintive letters, begging for his freedom. In such circumstances, the idea of a royally endorsed public venture could not possibly be countenanced.⁸

A private venture, on the other hand – that was a different matter, and a proposal for one just happened to be at hand. Cecil’s factotum, Sir Walter Cope, had long held an interest in foreign exploration, and around the same time as the Hayeses, had sent Cecil a private note suggesting a very different venture. Judge Sir John Popham, another prominent member of James’s government, ‘foreseeing in the experience of his place’ as King James’s Chief Justice ‘the infinite numbers of cashiered captains and soldiers, or poor artisans that would & cannot work, and of idle vagrants that may & will not work, is affectionately bent to the plantation of Virginia’. Cope proposed that a select group of trusted merchants and nobles be approached to fund a small, secret exploratory mission to America to trade with the Indians and search for valuable commodities. All that was required from Cecil was ‘two lines from your Lordship in particular, or from the Lords’ of the Privy Council in support of the venture, and an expedition would be under way in no time.⁹

This was far more to Cecil’s liking. For all its negative political associations, there was something about Virginia that not even Cecil could completely resist. Raleigh’s geographer, the cleric and colonial propagandist Richard Hakluyt, had since 1599 adopted Cecil as a patron, and on his new master’s behalf uncovered several convincing reports referring to the existence of gold deposits in the ‘Appalatcy’ or Appalachian Mountains to the west of Roanoke. There were also references to a great salt-water lake lying somewhere to the northwest, which could be reached by river, suggesting there might be a route through the middle of North America to the Pacific – the long-cherished dream of a navigable westerly passage to Cathay and the riches of the Orient. Also, intelligence had revealed that, despite these reports, the Spanish had continued to ignore the areas of America north of Florida.¹⁰

Cecil was in desperate need of new sources of revenue, not least to cover the cost of glorifying his London residence, which, he admitted to a friend, had ‘almost undone me’. Furthermore, to secure his throne, James had been forced to spend heavily on securing the necessary political support among England’s anti-Scottish elite, and the royal exchequer was already stretched to breaking point. Any venture that had the potential for private profit and royal revenue could not be ignored.¹¹

Nothing more was heard of the Hayeses’ scheme. But within a few weeks of Cope’s letter arriving at Cecil House, the King had been presented with a royal charter to launch a new Virginia venture as a private enterprise, enveloped in secrecy.

THREE The Adventurers

AS A FOUNDING DOCUMENT, providing the legal basis for what became English America, the Virginia Charter that received the royal seal on 10 April 1606 was no Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. In return for a 20-per-cent share of any precious metal they discovered, the King merely offered certain ‘Knights, Gentlemen, merchants and other Adventurers’ – the so-called ‘patentees’ – permission to ‘make habitation, plantation and to deduce a Colony of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia’.

Lip service was paid to the mission having a higher religious purpose ‘in propagating of Christian Religion to such people as yet live in darkness’, meaning the Indians, but it was clear that the true motive was monetary, the charter focusing heavily on the ‘commodities and hereditaments’ to which the patentees, as well as the Crown, would be entitled.

‘For the more speedy accomplishment of their said intended plantation and habitation,’ the patentees were split into two groups, each given a different region of North America to colonize. The region between 38 and 45 degrees latitude (from modern Philadelphia to the Canadian border) came under the control of a group of merchants from the West Country ports of Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, led by Chief Justice Sir John Popham. ‘Undertakers [i.e. investors], gentlemen, merchants &amp;c’ of London made up the other group, who formed what became known as the Virginia Company. They were to develop the region between 34 and 41 degrees, the 450-mile stretch of coastline running from modern Cape Fear to Philadelphia.¹

Most of London’s trading companies were managed by a governor, appointed by investors. The Virginia Company was to be different. Instead of a governor, Cecil set up a ‘Royal Council’ of thirteen grandees to supervise the company’s affairs, which reported directly to him. Its powers were modelled on those of the royal councils long established to deal with strategically sensitive royal possessions, such as Ireland and the North of England.² Sir Thomas Smythe, the City’s most powerful merchant and one of the royal exchequer’s most generous creditors, was made company treasurer, responsible for day-to-day business.

These arrangements soon caused problems. Within a month, there were complaints that the council’s interference had ‘exceedingly cooled the heat’ of investors.³ Matters were made worse by Cecil insisting that preparations for the expedition be undertaken in complete secrecy, so as not to alert the Spanish.

Even without such impediments, finding backers was difficult. North America had a reputation as a financial slough. Since the 1570s, many a merchant’s fortunes had been sunk in the middle of the Atlantic, or been lost at the hands of the Spanish or Indians on a distant shore. Those missions that had returned a profit had done so by engaging in ‘privateering’, raiding stray Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean, a practice that had been officially sanctioned in Elizabeth’s time, but banned since the signing of the Somerset House Peace Treaty with Spain.

By the summer of 1606, there were few signs of progress, and gloom about the project’s prospects intensified with news that the West Country group had managed to equip and dispatch a ship called the Richard in August, to reconnoitre a suitable place to settle in the region of Sagadahoc, Maine.

By the autumn, the pressure was intense. If an expedition was not dispatched soon, it would arrive in Virginia too late to plant crops to feed the settlement the following winter.

On or soon after 20 November, a meeting of the London Virginia Company was called at Smythe’s offices in Philpot Lane, an inconspicuous alley just north of Billingsgate, London’s fish market. Smythe’s Great Hall, decorated with souvenirs from his other trading ventures, including an Indian canoe suspended from the ceiling, was a hub of his various global trading interests, and was now inaugurated as the headquarters of the London company’s American venture.

There is no record of that meeting. All the relevant paperwork was later seized by order of the Privy Council, and it has not been seen since.⁴ Nevertheless, it is likely that the motley crew of ‘principal adventurers’ that gathered together for the first time that day would not have inspired confidence, nor the final tally of resources that Smythe had managed to assemble.

Smythe had called the meeting because at last there were signs of progress. Three ships had been hired for the expedition, which were now ‘ready Victualled, rigged and furnished’ for the forthcoming voyage. The government had also decided upon the leadership of the mission, and issued the ‘articles, Instructions and orders’ finalizing the way the colony would be run.

The document specifying these crucial matters was not, according to later complaints, ‘so much as published’ by Smythe, who apparently kept certain key details to himself. However, he must at least have now delineated some of its main points.⁵

The settlement in Virginia, the government had decided, would be run not by a single governor, but, as one settler later put it, ‘aristocratically’, by a local council. This council was to govern the settlement according to laws set down by the Royal Council for Virginia in England, with powers to adjudicate over ‘the offences of tumults, rebellion, Conspiracies, mutiny and seditions in those parts which may be dangerous to the estates there, together with murther, manslaughter, Incest, rapes, and adulteries’, defendants being given the right to be tried before a jury of ‘twelve honest and indifferent persons’.⁶

The membership of the local council, Smythe revealed, would not be chosen by the adventurers, or the wider membership of the Virginia Company, but by the Royal Council for Virginia in England, from among those he had invited to the meeting. The identity of those nominated, however, would not be revealed until they had reached America.⁷

This news must have prompted some speculative glances around the room, as each adventurer sized up those who might soon determine his fortune and fate. Those destined to go on the first mission were ‘strangers to each other’s education, qualities, or disposition,’ one participant noted.⁸ Many were ‘cashiered captains’ in the afternoon of faltering careers, the average age being forty. Most would have described themselves as gentlemen of the Shires, members of a ‘middling’ class who, relative to their urban counterparts the merchants and lawyers, had not prospered in recent years.

The most senior was a 56-year-old veteran of the Irish and Low Countries campaigns, Edward Maria Wingfield. Of those about to sail, he was the only patentee, the only one whose name appeared on the Virginia Charter as one of the ‘humble suitors’ given permission to colonize North America.

To many, Edward Maria’s distinguishing feature was his middle name, which prompted the impressive explanation that it had originally been given to his father, in recognition of being godson to Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor. Edward was the second of many generations to adopt the affectation, proudly showing off the family’s ancient lineage and royal connections. Some of his forebears had been loyal to Queen Mary, Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter, and were implicated in her suppression of Protestants in the 1550s. This has led to accusations that the family had Papist leanings. But another relation, Sir Edward Wingfield of Kimbolton, had taken part in the Essex Rebellion of 1599, usually considered a distinctly Protestant affair. There is no evidence that Edward Maria veered strongly in either direction. He seems to have adopted the religion of many conservative members of the gentry: pragmatic Protestantism, emphasizing social conformity over religious piety.

His father had died when he was seven, and aged 12 he became the ward of an uncle. When he was in his twenties, he studied law at London’s Inns of Court, but preferred soldiering, and served in the Low Countries. In 1586, he fought with distinction alongside his brother Thomas Maria at Zutphen, hailed by English Protestants as a landmark battle in the fight against Catholic oppression. Later, he was briefly prisoner of the Spanish along with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who would later become a leading promoter of American colonization.

In the 1590s, Edward Maria had served in Ireland, where members of his family were leading English attempts to ‘colonize’ areas under Gaelic control. There he would have met Sir Ralph Lane, who had been governor of Raleigh’s ill-fated Roanoke colony, and it was perhaps from Lane that he developed an interest in colonial adventures further afield.⁹

By 1604 he was back in England, and soon after became involved in the revived Virginia project, providing not only desperately needed financial support, but helping to secure the royal patent. He had also recruited some of the key personnel, including the mission chaplain, a 38-year-old Sussex vicar called Richard Hunt, and the ‘surgeon general’, Thomas Wotton. How he came to acquire such a prominent role so early on in the venture is unclear, but a decisive factor was likely to have been his family connection with the famous explorer and privateer Bartholomew Gosnold.¹⁰

Gosnold had led the 1602 mission to Norumbega which had first challenged Raleigh’s Virginia monopoly. His return to England with profitable supplies of cedar wood and sassafras had also demonstrated the potential of North America as a source of natural commodities.

Since then, he and his shipmate, a silver-tongued lawyer called Gabriel Archer, had toured the taverns and company halls of London agitating tirelessly for a full-scale expedition, brandishing a persuasive tract written by Archer about their experiences of the ‘goodliest continent that ever we saw’.¹¹ Their efforts resulted in Gosnold later being described as the ‘first mover’ of the Virginia venture,¹² and attracting the valuable support of at least one prominent member of the Fishmongers’ Company.¹³

However, Gosnold’s name had been conspicuous by its absence from the Virginia patent, and this seems to have been because it had become politically unacceptable. In 1604, a ‘Captain Gosnell’, probably Bartholomew, had made some intemperate remarks about King James at a dinner party held on the Isle of Wight. One of Cecil’s intelligencers happened to be among the guests, and he reported the remarks to his master, prompting a full-scale investigation by the Privy Council. No record remains of the council’s conclusions, but following such an episode, it was wise for someone bearing the Gosnold name to keep a low profile.¹⁴ For this reason, Gosnold might have drafted in Wingfield as his proxy, the two families having connections going back generations.¹⁵

By the time of Smythe’s November gathering, Gosnold was able to adopt a more public role in the venture, and had secured a place for Archer in the forthcoming expedition. But as he and Wingfield were now to discover, neither was to be trusted with the role of mission commander. That role was to go to the formidable 46-year-old, one-armed veteran of the Spanish wars who now joined them: Christopher Newport.

Newport had been hired over the heads of the Virginia Company by the Royal Council. He had no previous connection to the Virginia venture, but was certainly qualified for the job. A war hero who had lost his right arm fighting in the West Indies, his reputation reached as far as Spain, where he was known as ‘un caballero muy principal’, a very great knight.¹⁶ In 1592, he had helped in the capture of the Portuguese carrack the Madre de Dios, the most magnificent prize of the Spanish war, estimated to be worth £150,000.¹⁷ Since the signing of the Somerset House Peace Treaty, he had continued to tour the Spanish Main, but for peaceful purposes, undertaking trade missions on behalf of a number of London merchants. He had returned from one trip with two baby crocodiles, which he presented to the King.

Unlike the other leading members of the venture, Newport was not expected to make any sort of investment in the company, nor to stay in Virginia. He would be responsible for commanding the expeditionary fleet, and leading the initial reconnaissance of the territory. In return, he was to be given sole ownership of any discoveries he made, including deposits of minerals and precious metals.¹⁸

Such terms caused widespread resentment, because the other men of rank who had volunteered to go, many at this late stage in the preparations, were far more exposed. They were expected to pay not only their own way, but to recruit from their own estates the servants and labourers who would make up the bulk of the settlement’s workforce. They were also expected to pay the costs of sending these workers to America, and maintaining them while they were there.

In return for this investment, they were not even to take personal possession of the land upon which they settled. Instead, they were to receive a share in the Virginia Company’s overall profits. Their fortunes therefore rested principally on the speedy discovery of some valuable commodity, such as gold, copper, spices or medical ingredients, rather than the long-term development of the colony.

As most of these gentlemen well knew, the odds were unfavourable. The pages of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations were filled with horror stories of foreign ventures ending in slaughter or ruin. Just this month, Hakluyt had received reports of yet another disaster. A base set up in Guyana by the English captain Charles Leigh had been deserted following a series of mutinies, and a supply ship sent to relieve him had been forced to abandon sixty-seven passengers on the island of St Lucia, where they had all died of starvation or at the hands of the natives.¹⁹ Such were the risks faced by these planters. But then, in most cases, they were going not because of how much they had to gain, but how little they had to lose.

Despite his elevated status, George Percy was typical. Born on 4 September 1580, he was the sickly, epileptic runt of a litter of eight children fathered by Henry Percy, the eighth Earl of Northumberland. George’s family was renowned for its rebellions, which were being replayed every night on the London stage in Shakespeare’s history plays. Henry IV featured that ‘mad fellow of the north’ Henry Percy (the first Earl of Northumberland), and his son Harry Hotspur. ‘Zounds! I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy,’ says one character – a line written before the Gunpowder Plot, so acquiring uncomfortably prophetic force since the revelation that one of George’s kinsmen, Thomas Percy, was a ringleader.²⁰ George was no Hotspur. In fact, he was a disappointment to his family and peers. Someone whispered into King James’s ear just before he succeeded to the English throne that George was hated ‘damnably’ by his brother the Earl, and one official in the Earl’s household was moved to describe George’s infirmities as ‘grievous and tedious’.²¹

George had received the conventional education for a man of his class: Eton College, Oxford University, and the Middle Temple, for legal training. When he was sixteen, his mother had died, leaving him an annuity of around £60 a year, paid by the Earl’s staff. This was enough for a comfortable though not lavish standard of living for those who could keep within their means. However, George insisted on extravagance. He had a compulsion for keeping an impressively aristocratic wardrobe and table, having no title or property of his own to demonstrate his elevated rank.

Then came the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. George was not implicated, but his elder brother and patron Henry, the current Earl of Northumberland, was found guilty of conspiracy, and committed to the Tower. Fined £30,000, Henry no longer felt in a position to support his aimless younger brother, so decided to send him to Virginia. As well as keeping him a safe distance from the political fray, the expedition also promised some alleviation of George’s epilepsy, for, as he would later write, ‘my fits here in England are more often, more long and more grievous, than I have felt them in other parts nearer the line [equator]’.

He had to pay a high price for a place in the venture. He was apparently forced to hand over his annuity to his brother, and to borrow £8 16s from another adventurer to help cover his costs – a debt which he had still to repay years later. Meanwhile, his expenses were far from modest. He subsequently sent home requests to his brother for ‘diverse suits’ (£32 14s 7d), knives (3s), books, paper, ink and wax (£1 14s 9d), biscuits (£3 5s), cheese (8s 2d), butter (£1 17s), soap, lights and starch (13s 6d), storage chests (12s), assorted boxes (10d) and casks (6s 2d). He even asked for a feather bed, complete with bolster, blankets and a covering of tapestry.²²

Percy was a name of French origin going back to the Norman invasion of England, breathed in the rarefied atmosphere of royal courts. In contrast, the name that was to become most closely associated with the Virginia story, and intimately linked to the legend of the Indian princess Pocahontas, carried a whiff of the Anglo-Saxon village forge: John Smith.

A wide, barely navigable ocean divided Smith’s world from Percy’s. Percy was the product of generations of aristocratic breeding and refinement; the stout, bearded Smith prided himself on being a self-made man. ‘Who can desire more content that hath small means, or but only his merit to advance his fortunes, than to tread and plant that ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life,’ Smith wrote.²³ Nevertheless, Smith had one thing in common with Percy: a feeling of social exclusion, of otherness, that made the prospect of starting afresh in the New World irresistible.

According to Smith’s vivid, if sometimes incoherent and unreliable autobiography, True Travels, he was ‘born in Willoughby in Lincolnshire’. His father was ‘anciently descended from the ancient Smiths of Crudley in Lancashire; his mother from the Rickards at Great Heck in Yorkshire’. He was christened with that most ordinary of names at Willoughby by Alford on 9 January 1580. The ceremony took place in the local parish church, which, like many others in a region of reclaimed marshland that could be treacherous to travel, was dedicated to St Helen, patron saint of travellers.

He described these as ‘poor beginnings’, so poor as to earn the scorn of his high-born adversaries. But he was not quite as humble as he sometimes claimed. His father, George, was among the better-off farmers in the region, owning the freehold of several acres of pasture in Great Carlton and property in the market town of Louth. He also leased fields off the local lord, Peregrine Bertie, Baron Willoughby of Eresby. Young John was brought up in a substantial farmhouse comprising a hall, three chambers, a ‘milkhouse’ and a ‘beasthouse’, and with several servants.²⁴

The next stage in John’s life, according to his autobiography, was ‘his parents dying when he was about thirteen years of age’. They left him with ‘a competent means, which he not being capable to manage, little regarded’.²⁵ This is a curious passage, as both parents were very much alive when he was ‘about thirteen’: his father died when Smith was sixteen, and his mother many years later, having remarried.

His mind being ‘even then set upon brave adventures’, he was apprenticed to a merchant in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Bondage to a master did not suit his restless spirit, and soon afterwards he tore up his seven-year indenture and headed off to find new adventures. This probably happened around the time his father died, and produced a rift with his mother, which would explain his decision to write both of them prematurely out of his life.

The elective orphan, free of family ties and the responsibilities of having to manage his father’s farm, went to the Low Countries. Unfortunately for Smith, his arrival coincided with a lull in hostilities, a side effect of Cecil’s peace treaty with Spain. This forced an early return to England. Smith then embarked on a tour of France in the company of Peregrine Bertie, the son of his father’s patron. Returning again to the Low Countries, and finding the opportunities for military glory still limited, he ended up in Eastern Europe, where war between the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires raged more reliably. Though the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was Catholic, this was of no consequence to an English Protestant with military ambitions.

He enlisted with the battalion of a Slovenian warlord, and marched to Transylvania, on the front line of the war. There, during a siege, he claimed to have beheaded three ‘Turks’ single-handedly before the massed ranks of the opposing Christian and Muslim armies. For this act of bravery, the King of Poland granted him a coat of arms, the title of Captain and the status of ‘an English gentleman’.

He was soon after wounded during a skirmish with Tartars and taken prisoner. He and his fellow captives were sent to Axiopolis (modern Cernavoda), a market town on the banks of the Danube, and ‘sold for slaves, like beasts in a market-place; where every merchant, viewing their limbs and wounds, caused other slaves to struggle with them, to try their strength’.

A dealer bought the young soldier for a client in Constantinople, who turned out to be the beautiful daughter of a Greek noblewoman whom Smith called Charatza Trabigzanda (probably mistaking the Greek description of her as a girl from Trebizond).²⁶ She soon ‘took (as it seemed) much compassion on him’, but not yet being of age, and fearful that he would be sold on, sent him to her brother, a military official working near the Black Sea, ‘till time made her Master of her self’. But ‘within an hour after his arrival’, the brother commanded his servant to strip Smith naked, ‘and shave his head and beard so bare as his hand’ and place ‘a great ring of iron, with a long stalk bowed like a sickle, riveted about his neck’. After enduring several months of this treatment, Smith ‘beat out [his master’s] brains with his threshing bat’, stole his victim’s clothes, and made his escape along an ancient caravan route to Astrakhan. He vividly recalled a journey along this intersection of Asiatic trade, each crossroads being marked with a signpost showing the way to the Crimea with a crescent moon, to Moscow with a cross, and to China with a sun. Ending up in Prague, the capital of the Holy Roman empire, he embarked on another epic trek through Germany, France and Spain to the Barbary coast of North Africa, where he hitched a lift with French pirates. Narrowly escaping Spanish capture and being blown up by an on-board explosion, he returned to England.²⁷

It is not clear how Smith was introduced to the Virginia venture. At the time Gosnold was promoting the idea in London, he appears to have been staying with or near Robert Bertie at the Willoughby London residence in the Barbican. Robert’s father had shown an interest in the Roanoke venture, and he had family connections to both the Wingfields and Gosnolds, so Robert may have effected an introduction.²⁸

Whatever Smith’s credentials, he, like Newport and Gosnold, had at least made a name for himself in the world of military and maritime affairs. The same could not be said of two mysterious figures mingling among the assembled adventurers and planters on that November day. Smythe introduced them as John Ratcliffe and George Kendall. They were to take a prominent though as yet unspecified role in the forthcoming expedition, the assembly was informed. Nothing further was revealed about these men, other than perhaps the merest hint that their participation was non-negotiable, as they had been appointed at the personal behest of Robert Cecil himself.

FOUR Departure

BY LATE NOVEMBER 1606, preparations for the Virginia Company’s first expedition were well advanced. Edward Maria Wingfield had packed a trunk with reading material, together with ‘diverse fruit, conserves and preserves’, and dispatched it to Richard Crofts, probably a relative of the Herefordshire landowner and MP Sir Herbert Crofts.

Crofts lived at Ratcliffe, a hamlet on the north bank of the Thames. The stretch of river overlooked by his house was used to moor ships, and on 23 November the Susan Constant, the 170-ton flagship for the Virginia fleet, arrived, heavily laden with supplies for her forthcoming voyage. She was tied up alongside the Philip and Frances, and Crofts dutifully ensured that Wingfield’s precious trunk was safely stowed in one of the cabins. A consignment of clucking hens and a cockerel was also delivered, from which Wingfield hoped to breed a flock to provide himself, and possibly his associates, with fresh eggs and an occasional chicken for the pot once in America.

That night, the Susan Constant began to shift with the ebb tide. Being so heavily laden, she was difficult to control, and crashed against the neighbouring ship, damaging the Philip and Frances’s bowsprit, sheet anchor and beak-head (defined by Captain John Smith as the part of the ship ‘before the forecastle, and of great use, as well for the grace and countenance of the ship, as a place for men to ease themselves in’).¹ When the master of the Philip and Frances boarded the Susan Constant to remonstrate with the crew, he claimed to find them ‘tippling and drinking’.²

The Susan Constant suffered minor damage to two of her portholes, but she was soon patched up, and a few days later moved further downstream to Blackwall, where she was to rendezvous with her two companion vessels: the 40-ton Godspeed and the 20-ton Discovery. Of the three ships, only the Discovery, a small bark or ‘pinnace’, was actually owned by the Virginia Company. She was to remain in Virginia for use by the settlers, while the other two hired vessels would return to England, laden, it was hoped, with valuable commodities.

On 10 December, ten days before the ships were due to sail, the mission’s leaders were once again summoned to Philpot Lane, this time to receive their final ‘Orders and Directions’ from the Royal Council.

Newport was confirmed as admiral, having ‘sole charge’ of the venture while he was in Virginia. He was also given the box containing the list of names for the local council, which he was under orders to ensure remained sealed until the fleet arrived in America. Meanwhile, he was left to appoint the ‘captains, soldiers and mariners’ for the voyage. Reflecting his experience and prominent role in getting the venture off the ground, Gosnold was put in charge of the Godspeed while, to everyone’s surprise, the mysterious Ratcliffe was given command of the Discovery.

The expedition leaders were then handed a set of ‘Instructions given by way of Advice’, drawn up by Richard Hakluyt. These distilled the collective wisdom of the adventurers’ forerunners, and showed that a great deal had been learned from their abundant mistakes.

Hakluyt insisted that, on arrival in America, their first job was to anchor the fleet in a ‘safe port’ at the mouth of a navigable river. The river was to be the one that ‘runneth furthest into the Land’ and ‘bendeth most towards the Northwest’, in the hope that it might be that mentioned by the Indians at Roanoke, leading to the Appalachian Mountains and even the Pacific.³

As for deciding the location of the settlement, Hakluyt recalled the experience of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline. The settlers must find ‘the Strongest most Fertile and wholesome place’ far enough upriver ‘to the end that you be not surprised as the French were in Florida’. They should also ‘in no Case Suffer any of the natural people of the Country to inhabit between You and the Sea Coast’, which might cut off their means of escape in the event of hostilities.

The settlement should be located away from heavily wooded areas, because the trees would provide cover for enemies, and they did not have the resources to clear large swathes of land (‘You shall not be able to Cleanse twenty acres in a Year’). They should also avoid a ‘low and moist place because it will prove unhealthful’. It was suggested that the best way of finding a suitably wholesome site was to look at the people who lived nearby. If they were ‘blear Eyed and with Swollen bellies and Legs’, then it was best to steer clear; if ‘Strong and Clean’ it would be a ‘true sign of a wholesome Soil’.

Once a base had been found, they were to erect a ‘little sconce’ or lookout post at the mouth of the river. The one hundred and twenty settlers were then to be split up into four groups: forty to build a fortified settlement, thirty to prepare the ground for growing ‘corn and roots’, ten to man the sconce. The remaining forty were to make up exploration parties. Gosnold was to take half of them into the interior, equipped with a compass and ‘half a Dozen pickaxes to try if they can find any mineral’. The others were to explore the river to its source, scoring the bark of trees on the river side as they went, to help search parties retrace their route should they go missing. The instructions did not specify who was to lead this mission.

Those left to construct the settlement were advised to lay out streets of ‘good breadth’ which converged on a central square or marketplace. A cannon was then to be placed in the centre, which could ‘command’ any street in the event of attack. Before setting up housing, the carpenters and ‘other suchlike workmen’ were to work on the public amenities, such as a secure storehouse and assembly room.

As for the Indians, they were recognized to be vital to the settlement’s success. ‘You must have great care not to offend the naturals if you can eschew it and employ some few of your company to trade with them for corn and all other lasting victuals.’ ‘Above all things, do not advertise the killing of any of your men’, and avoid revealing signs of sickness, in case the ‘country people’ realize the settlers are ‘but Common men’.

Trade was both crucial to survival and fraught with difficulties. The settlers should first ensure that the crews of the ships that brought them (which would soon be sailing back to England) should be prevented from having contact with local tribes, ‘for, those that mind not to inhabit [the colony], for a Little Gain will Debase the Estimation of Exchange and hinder the trade’. Before the Indians realize that the settlers mean to stay, special representatives should be appointed to barter with them for sufficient ‘Corn and all Other lasting Victuals’ to last through the first year, the settlers’ own crop to be put in store ‘to avoid the Danger of famine’.

‘The way to prosper and to Obtain Good Success’, Hakluyt concluded, ‘is to make yourselves all of one mind for the Good of your Country & your own’. Every one of them must ‘Serve & fear God the Giver of all Goodness’. They must shun corrupt or antisocial behaviour, as ‘every Plantation which our heavenly father hath not planted shall be rooted out’. Finally, they were ordered to keep all matters relating to Virginia secret, and prevent the publication of any material which did not have the Royal Council’s prior approval.⁴

Having given their solemn oaths to abide by these orders and instructions, the three leaders of the expedition went to Blackwall to inspect the company that was to be carried across the Atlantic, and settled in the New World.

Instead of the one hundred and twenty envisaged by Hakluyt, they found around one hundred men and boys, plus a few dogs, brought for hunting and as pets.⁵

Thirty-six of the company were identified as ‘gentlemen’, many of them the footloose younger sons of distinguished families. Anthony Gosnold was Bartholomew’s younger brother. Thomas Sandys was the younger brother of the prominent MP Edwin Sandys.⁶ Thomas Studley, the man selected to act as ‘cape merchant’ (in charge of supplies) and an enthusiastic chronicler of the coming adventure, may have come from a line of prolific writers.⁷ Kellam or Kenelm Throgmorton was probably related to Bess, the wife of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Other gentleman members of the expedition were from more obscure and modest backgrounds. Nothing is known about the origins of Robert Tyndall, the expedition navigator, beyond the fact that he was the gunner of Prince Henry, James I’s son and heir. He may have been the son of John Tyndall, who wrote in 1602 to his ‘kinsman’ Michael Hicks, Cecil’s close friend, ‘recommending him to his favour,’ but this cannot be verified.⁸

The remainder of the company was made up of an assortment of tradesmen, labourers and young boys. While most of these ‘common sort’ were being shipped out by their masters, those with a trade or skill were contracted directly by the Virginia Company, to work for a specified period without charge, in return for their transport, tools and maintenance. The surly blacksmith James Read, and a professional mariner, Jonas Profit, probably signed up on such terms, as did Thomas Couper, a barber, Edward Brinto the stonemason, William Love the tailor, and Nicholas Skot, a drummer.

All that is known about the boys is their names: Samuel Collier, Nathaniel Pecock, James Brumfield and Richard Mutton.⁹ Some of the labourers and boys were likely to have been ‘pressed’ into service, an order from the Royal Council providing Newport with the authority to round up suitable candidates from taverns and playhouses, or buy them off gang-masters.

The fleet set sail on Saturday 20 December 1606.¹⁰ It was by design a low-key event. None of the government figures concerned with the venture was apparently in attendance, and whereas Elizabeth had waved off previous missions with a salute of cannon, James did not lift a hand for this departure, nor even seek to be informed.

A few days later, the ships reached the ‘Downs’, a well-known anchorage off the forelands north-east of Dover, where they awaited a favourable wind.

For weeks the fleet bobbed on the waves, while a relentless westerly whipped up the Channel, spitting sea spray and rain into the faces of the impatient captains. Every so often, a violent winter storm would throw up waves that threatened to overwhelm the ships, or drag their anchors, but, as George Percy, who was aboard the Susan Constant, loyally noted, ‘by the skilfulness of the captain [Newport] we suffered no great loss or danger’.¹¹

The ships might have been unscathed, but passengers, strangers to each other’s company and many to the sea, were proving to be less resilient. Boredom and frustration soon crept into the makeshift cabins and cramped quarters. The Susan Constant, under 100 foot long and 20 foot wide, was built as a merchantman to carry cargo, not people, so her fifty or so passengers were forced either to bide their time on the freezing, gale-swept decks, or endure the claustrophobia of the airless holds below. The Godspeed, about 70 foot long and 16 foot wide, and the Discovery, 50 or so foot long and 11 foot wide, were marginally more accommodating, as both had fewer crew and proportionately more space for the passengers, but being smaller, their hulls were jolted even more violently by the churning seas.¹²

For a month the fleet was held in this state of agitated immobility, and boredom began to breed division and distrust among the restless passengers. In particular, Edward Maria Wingfield and George Percy, who found themselves much in each other’s company, began to detect in those around them the suggestion of a religious plot, to which Robert Hunt, the mission’s chaplain, was somehow connected.

When recruiting for the voyage, Wingfield had visited the Archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of Hunt, to vouch that the cleric suited the role of vicar of Virginia as he was neither ‘touched with the rebellious humours of a popish spirit’ – a Catholic, in other words, who might be acting for the Spanish – ‘nor blemished with the least suspicion of a factious schismatic’, a religious independent, who might be tempted so far from his homeland to flout the authority of the Church of England, the bishops and the King.¹³ Now, Wingfield began to doubt his own words. Something someone had said, some slight or chance remark, suggested to him and Percy that the vicar might be blemished with a suspicion of factious schismatism after all, which threatened to defile the entire venture.

Meanwhile, another of the passengers, Captain John Smith, had formed an attachment to Hunt, nursing him through a bout of seasickness so severe that, according to Smith, ‘few expected his recovery’. During this time, the captain and the cleric fell into conversation about religious matters, and Smith found himself in close accord with Hunt’s evangelical leanings, judging him to be ‘an honest, religious, and courageous divine’.¹⁴

It was at this point that Wingfield and Percy decided to confront Hunt with their suspicions. Smith, whose choleric temperament made him as quick to argue as to judge, sprang violently to his new friend’s defence, accusing these two ‘Tuftaffaty humourists’ of trying to hide their own irreligiousness.¹⁵

During the ensuing row, certain rumours about Hunt’s past began to surface, like corpses from the deep. Hunt was by no means the Puritan in his own behaviour as he was now suspected of being in his religious beliefs. Three years before, he had been brought before the court of the archdeaconry of Lewes, the regional administrative body for Heathfield, to answer charges of ‘immorality’ with his servant, Thomasina Plumber. He was at the same time proceeded against for absenteeism, and there were accusations that he had neglected his congregation, leaving his friend Noah Taylor, ‘aquaebajulus’ (water bailiff or customs collector), to perform his duties.¹⁶

Smith refused to believe such allegations. How could these men, ‘of the greatest rank amongst us’, circulate such ‘scandalous imputations,’ he wanted to know. They were ‘little better than Atheists’.¹⁷

Other passengers joined the fray, with at least three gentlemen lining up behind Smith.¹⁸ The argument escalated between these nascent factions until, on 12 February, it was interrupted by a change in the weather. That night, several passengers, Percy among them, clambered up to the deck to gaze into a sky that for the first time in weeks was cloudless. Percy spotted in the glistening firmament a ‘blazing star’ or comet.

The appearance of such a spectacle over the ship’s swinging mast, above a fleet trapped between deliverance into a new world and damnation in the old, was auspicious. The wind turned, and in a flurry of activity, anchors were raised, tillers spun and sails unfurled to catch it. Released from their cyclonic trap, the ships raced across the freezing waters towards the Atlantic. Within a day or so they had reached the Bay of Biscay, and soon after closed on the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco.

The six-week delay in the Downs had meant their provisions for the voyage had already been used up, forcing them to break into supplies set aside for their first months in America. So they decided to stop at the Canaries and spend what money they could to make up the deficit.

As soon as the ships dropped anchor, the rows resumed. According to one report, some of the passengers, including one Stephen Calthorp, a gentleman from a prominent Norfolk family, now joined Smith in threatening mutiny.¹⁹ At this point, Newport lost patience, and ordered the ringleader Smith to be ‘committed a prisoner’ in the belly of the Susan Constant, Smith’s furious indignation muffled by the heaps of bulging sacks that furnished his cell, and the layers of sturdy oak decking that would wall him in for the coming weeks.²⁰

Picking up the trade winds, the fleet headed off into the Atlantic, covering over 3,000 miles in six weeks. The freezing temperatures of a European winter melted into the sultry warmth of the tropics, providing Percy with some hope of respite from his attacks of epilepsy.

On 23 March, they had their first sight of the West Indies, passing Martinique before reaching Dominica, ‘a very fair island, the trees full of sweet and good smells’. The island was inhabited by ‘many savage Indians’, who at first kept their distance. As soon as they realized that the European visitors were not Spanish, the mood changed, and ‘there came many to our ships with their canoes, bringing us many kinds of sundry fruits, as pines [pineapples], potatoes, plantains, tobacco, and other fruits’. After weeks of dried biscuits and salted meat, the men consumed the gifts greedily. They also happily accepted an ‘abundance’ of fine French linen, which the Indians had salvaged from Spanish ships that had been wrecked on the island.

The English gave the Indians knives and hatchets, ‘which they much esteemed’, and beads, copper and jewels, ‘which they hang through their nostrils, ears, and lips – very strange to behold’. During the transactions, the English learned that the natives had suffered a ‘great overthrow’ at the hands of the Spanish, which explained their initial wariness and subsequent generosity.²¹

The encounter provided a useful introduction to developing relations with locals, and confirmed English assumptions of Spanish barbarism – the infamous ‘Black Legend’ or leyenda negra. The legend had its origins in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a furious indictment of Spanish imperialism written by a Spanish bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas. It had been translated into English in 1583 ‘to serve as a precedent and warning to the twelve provinces of the Low Countries’.²² Casas wrote of conquistadors eviscerating seventy or eighty women and young girls, of little native boys being fed to hunting dogs, even of Indian coolies being decapitated after they had performed their duties, to save the bother of having to unlock the clasps around their necks. Such reports had been enthusiastically picked up by Protestant propagandists in France, Holland and England as evidence of the Catholic brutality that had produced the Florida Massacre and now threatened to overwhelm the Low Countries. Hakluyt referred to them on several occasions, quoting Casas’s estimate that Spanish actions in the Americas had ‘rooted out above fifteen million of reasonable creatures’.²³

Reassured by the rewards of exercising their higher moral standards, the English continued their tour of the Caribbean. As they pulled away from Dominica, Percy was transfixed by the sight of a whale being chased by a swordfish and a thresher, a kind of shark identifiable by the enormously extended upper lobe of its tail, which it uses to thrash its prey. ‘We might see the thresher with his flail lay on the monstrous blows, which was strange to behold. In the end these two fishes brought the whale to her end,’ he observed.²⁴

On the morning of 27 March, they arrived at Guadeloupe. A landing party explored up to the foot of the 5,000-foot-high active volcano La Grande Soufrière (the big, sulphurous one), and found a pool of scalding hot water. Newport used it to boil up a joint of salted pork, which was ready to eat after half an hour. They returned to their ships and sailed on for a further 90 miles, in the afternoon reaching the island of Nevis. Here, Newport decided to allow the entire company ashore to make a concerted effort to gather supplies, as the ships’ stores were still disturbingly low.

A company of men armed with muskets marched into the densely wooded interior, catching glimpses as they went of the cloud-capped central peak, over 3,000 foot high. Not far inland they found another hot spring, much cooler than the one on Guadeloupe. For the first time in nearly two months, they enjoyed a relaxing soak, as the sun set in a calm Caribbean sea.

‘Finding this place to be so convenient for our men to avoid diseases, which will breed in so long a voyage, we encamped ourselves on this isle six days, and spent none of our ship’s victual,’ wrote Percy. Instead, they lived off rabbits, birds, fish and fruit plucked from the trees, their peace barely disturbed by an occasional glimpse of the locals, who as soon as they were spotted ‘ran swiftly through the woods to the mountain tops’. They lost themselves in the forests, slashing through the undergrowth with hatchets and swords, until they came among ‘the goodliest tall trees growing so thick about the garden as though they had been set by art, which made us marvel very much to see it’. They saw shrubs with huge tufts of cotton wool bursting from their seed pods, gum trees, and a sort of wild fig, the sap of which made the men ‘near mad with pain’, forcing them to rush back to the hot spring for relief. They also found the source of a stream at the foot of the mountain. After drinking its sweet, clear water, ‘distilling from many rocks’, the men ‘were well cured in two or three days’ of all their ship-borne ailments.

However, even this idyll could not cure every sickness. There was another outbreak of faction fighting, perhaps prompted by Newport’s decision to release Smith from the ship’s brig and allow him to fraternize with the other men. It seems that he now fell out with some of his former associates, who reported him to Newport. The upshot was, according to Smith, that Newport, fearing a loss of authority, ordered the construction of a ‘pair of gallows’ on the beach. But ‘Captain Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them’, so he was returned to the ship. No other reference to this curious incident survives, and whatever the details, the result was a hasty departure. The ships cast off on 3 April, with water and food supplies still depleted, despite the plenitude that the island had offered.²⁵

The fleet sailed past the neighbouring islands of St Kitts, St Eustatius and Saba before anchoring among the Virgin Isles, ‘in an excellent bay able to harbour a hundred ships’. A landing party managed to catch enough fish and turtles to feed the fleet for a further three days, but there was no fresh water to be found anywhere on the island.

Passing Puerto Rico, they reached the tiny island of Mona on 7 April. By now, the drinking water in the ships’ tanks ‘did smell so vilely that none of our men was able to endure it’. A group of sailors managed to find a fresh water supply on the island, and set about filling up barrels to transport back to the ships. Meanwhile, a landing party marched for 6 miles in search of food. They managed to kill two wild boar and an iguana, ‘in fashion of a serpent and speckled like a toad under the belly’, but the path proved ‘so troublesome and vile, going upon the sharp rocks’, and the tropical heat so intense, that several men fainted. According to Percy, the adipose fat of Edward Brookes ‘melted within him by the great heat and drought of the country. We were not able to relieve him nor ourselves, so he died in that great extremity’, the first casualty of the expedition.

The fleet remained at anchor for two days, while a group took a launch to a nearby rocky islet called Monito, some 3 leagues (9 or so miles) away. They had difficulty finding a landing point along the island’s cliff-lined coast, and even more trouble climbing up the ‘terrible sharp stones’ to open land. However, they were rewarded with the discovery of a fertile plain, ‘full of goodly grass and abundance of fowls of all kinds’. White seabirds dived overhead ‘as drops of hail’ and made such a noise ‘we were not able to hear one another speak’. ‘Furthermore, we were not able to set our feet on the ground but either on fowls or eggs, which lay so thick in the grass,’ and within three hours they had filled their boat, ‘to our great refreshing’.

With new supplies of water and food safely loaded, the fleet set off, and on 10 April left the West Indies, heading north for Florida. Four days later, they crossed the Tropic of Cancer, the northerly limit of the tropics.

The following morning, Newport started to take soundings, in the hope of finding the North American continental shelf.

The use of soundings was the old-fashioned method of navigation. A lead weight smeared in tallow and attached to a line knotted at intervals of a fathom was dropped overboard to measure the depth of the sea. When it was hauled up, particles embedded in the tallow were used to tell what sort of seabed lay beneath.

In familiar waters, such as the English Channel, soundings were effective, as a combination of depth measurement and seabed material (‘small shingles’, ‘white stones like broken awls’, ‘big stones rugged and black’) helped to build up a profile of the sea floor that could locate the ship to within a few nautical miles of its position, even when the shore was over the horizon. However, the ocean beneath the fleet’s current position was too deep to sound, leaving Newport with no option but to keep sailing.

They continued north-west for ten days, carried over 1,000 miles by the Gulf Stream. Further soundings were taken, but to no avail. By 21 April, Newport had to accept that he was lost. This was probably the moment that Robert Tyndall suggested he try the mathematically based ‘new navigation’ techniques to plot their position. English mariners, apparently including the crew of the Susan Constant, were suspicious of such methods, considering them hocus-pocus. The prevailing attitude was summed up in Eastward Hoe, when Sir Petronel Flash uses ‘the elevation of the pole’ and ‘the altitude and latitude of the climate’ (garbled descriptions of the relevant techniques) to mistake the Isle of Dogs on the Thames for France.

Nevertheless, traditional methods had failed, so it was time for Tyndall to bring out his cross-staff or astrolabe, and plot a position. Measuring the angle between the horizon and the midday sun, he announced that they had reached 37 degrees north of the Equator, believed to be the latitude of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. All they now had to do was to use the ship’s compass to head due west, and they would eventually reach their destination. The guffaws of sceptical deck-hands probably filled the ships’ sails.

That evening, the fleet was hit by a ‘vehement tempest, which lasted all the night with winds, rain, and thunders in a terrible manner’. Concerned that the coast was nearby, and the ships might be driven on to the shore, Newport ordered the passengers into the hulls, where they were told they would be safest if the ships collided with rocks or the seabed. They emerged the following morning into the calm, and gazed upon an unbroken horizon. A lead was dropped, to see whether they had yet reached the coastal shallows, but the ocean floor was still beyond the line’s 100-fathom reach. Food and water supplies were once again running low. The unpredictable weather threatened another battering. The need to find a safe harbour intensified.

For three days, they aimlessly sounded the seas, doubtful of Tyndall’s assurances that their destination lay just beyond the western horizon. Unease developed into panic, and on 25 April, John Ratcliffe, captain of the pinnace, proposed that the fleet head back to England, in the hope that the Westerlies would get them there before supplies gave out.

Then, at four in the morning of 26 April 1607, as the faintest gleam of dawn crept across the placid ocean, the night watch of the Susan Constant picked out a disturbance on the western horizon. As the sun lifted behind them, crew and passengers began to gather on deck and squint over the ship’s bowsprit. Gradually, the low contours of a coastal plain became distinct, a dark line of trees sitting on the horizon like the pile of a carpet. A few hours later, Tyndall’s navigational methods were vindicated. Not only had they reached America, but they were facing ‘the very mouth of the Bay of Chesapeake’.²⁶

In London, reports reached Robert Cecil that the secret of the Virginia venture was out. The Richard, the ship sent by the West Country group to reconnoitre northern Virginia, had been taken off the coast of Florida by a Spanish fleet. A storm had forced one of the Spanish ships to put in at Bordeaux, where its English captives were released on the orders of the French authorities. It was one of these men who had managed to make his way to London and break the bad news. Other members of the expedition, including the mission’s pilot John Stoneman, were less fortunate. They had been taken to Spain, where ‘rough’ interrogation awaited them.²⁷

The Spanish at this time had only a hazy understanding of English plans. Around the time the Royal Charter had been issued, King Philip III’s ambassador to London, Don Pedro de Zuñiga, had heard of a plan to send ‘500 or 600 men, private individuals of this kingdom to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida’. He had also discovered that ten Indians were being kept in London, who were ‘teaching and training’ prospective settlers of ‘how good that country is for people to go there and inhabit it’.²⁸

By 24 January, 1607, Zuñiga was still unaware of the Newport expedition, but had received garbled information that some sort of venture was under way. He wrote an urgent dispatch to Philip III reporting that the English ‘have made an agreement, in great secrecy, for two ships to go [to Virginia] every month until they land two thousand men’. He also noted that Dutch rebels were to be sent. There followed a brief but mostly accurate summary of James’s charter of the previous April, including a list of those appointed to the Royal Council. The charter itself was a public document, but the order appointing the Royal Council was not, indicating that Zuñiga had found a source close to the Privy Council.²⁹

On 26 February, Zuñiga received a response to his previous dispatch. ‘You will report to me what the English are doing in the matter of Virginia – and if the plan progresses which they contemplated, of sending men there and ships,’ the King wrote, ‘and thereupon, it will be taken into consideration here, what steps had best be taken to prevent it.’ Over the following weeks, the traffic of intelligence intensified. In April, Zuñiga finally learned that the English had already sent three ships, but he believed the Richard to be one of them.

On 7 May, a council of war assembled in Madrid to discuss the implications of the news. The danger, it was decided, was the proximity of the settlement to Spanish interests, since it lay, according to Zuñiga, ‘in 35 degrees above La Florida on the Coast’. Though this region of America ‘has not been discovered until now, nor is it known’, nevertheless it was ‘contained within the limits of the Crown of Castille’, in other words, Spanish territory. It was therefore concluded that ‘with all necessary force this plan of the English should be prevented’.³⁰

While these discussions were under way in Madrid, news of the discovery of the Richard spread panic. If the Spanish found out what was going on, reprisals might ensue and all the hard-won benefits of peace would be lost. In such a fast-developing situation, it was decided that the Royal Council for Virginia was too cumbersome or too prone to infiltration. Its members were ‘dispersed by reason of their several habitations far remote the one from the other, and many of them in like manner far remote from Our City of London’. In response, a new order was published, creating two seperate councils, one for the ‘first’ or southern colony, the other for the ‘second’ or northern colony.³¹

Meanwhile, Cecil considered the fate of the Virginia venture in the light of the Richard’s capture. Having discussed the matter with the King, he consulted the journal of the Somerset House Treaty negotiations, to see if it might cast any light on the diplomatic ramifications. His conclusion was that, although Virginia was ‘a place formerly discovered by us, and never possessed by Spain’, the Spanish commissioners had denied that this gave England the right to ‘trade’ there. With respect to the captured crew of the Richard, he advised the King that ‘it might be better to leave these prisoners to their inconveniences’, though steps should be taken to recover their ship, as it had been captured in international waters. As for those currently on their way ‘to a discovery of Virginia’, Cecil suggested that they ‘should be left unto the peril which they incur thereby’.³²

Part Two

FIVE Tsenacomoco

Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their Poets, who make and sing songs, both of their ancestors’ deeds and praises of their gods.

PHILIP SIDNEY, Defence of Poesy¹

THE AREA OF NORTH AMERICA known to the English as Virginia already had a name: Tsenacomoco. The people who lived there left no written record of their culture or history, which even in Thomas Jefferson’s time appeared, at least to Anglo-Americans, to be on the point of extinction. ‘Very little can now be discovered of the subsequent history of these tribes,’ Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. ‘They have lost their language,’ and several tribes had been forced to merge, reducing themselves ‘by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land’. The remnants ‘have more negro than Indian blood in them,’ he noted, anticipating a later practice of merging the two races, in an effort to extinguish any lingering traces of cultural identity.²

All that remains which can be traced directly back to the time of the English incursion is what the English themselves wrote about Tsenacomoco. Several of the colonizers took extensive notes, some even tried to learn and analyse the language. What they found was by its nature transient and mutable. The very act of removing it from the realm of voices, songs, dances and dress and committing it to the permanence of paper must have meant that some of its dynamic qualities were lost, and are unrecoverable. But sufficient remains in the historical record to give a hint of what the Tsenacomoco world was like, at least as seen from the perspective of an English Otasantasuwak or ‘wearer of leg-coverings’ about to step in and destroy it.

A hut stood between the flat sea and the high mountains. It belonged to a god of many shapes and many names. He was most often seen as a mighty Great Hare, and most usually called Ahone.³

One day, Ahone stood at the door of his hut, and beheld the emptiness around. So he made a world according to his imaginings, without a fixed form: a world of water, shifting sand, soft mud, trackless forests and tangled vines. The earth contained no metal or rock, nor any hard thing.

He populated the world with creatures. He made fish, which swam in the streams, and a great deer, which grazed in the woods and galloped across the meadows. But one creature he left tied up in a sack, which lay upon the floor of his hut.

Four gods from surrounding worlds peered over the rim of Ahone’s, and gazed upon his creation. They were jealous of what he had done, and came to his hut armed with spears to destroy his work. They saw the sack, and they opened it. Men and women sprang out and scurried across the floor, and the four gods tried to catch and eat them. But Ahone returned to his hut and drove those cannibal spirits away.

Hungry and vengeful, the four gods went into the forests of Ahone’s creation, and stalked the great deer. They found him grazing quietly in a grove. As they lay in the undergrowth, one of them dressed his arm in the fashion of the neck and head of another deer, and held it above the foliage to catch the great deer’s attention. Seeing a companion, the deer did not run.

In this way the four gods caught the great deer and slaughtered him. They butchered and ate the meat, sinews, offal and bones, devouring everything except the hide, which they left at the door of Ahone’s hut.

Ahone did not grieve. He picked up the pelt, scraped the skin and sprinkled the hairs across the world, and where each hair fell, a deer sprang up. Then he returned to his hut to fetch his sack, and emptied it over the world, one man and one woman for each country. And so the world took its first beginning of mankind.⁴

The people of each country enjoyed Ahone’s bounties, and they multiplied. They called their world Tsenacomoco, because they lived together, so many of them in the land between the sea and the mountains.⁵

The sun rose white as pearl from the sea each morning, and fell copper red into the mountains at night. The plants yielded berries for the summertime, nuts in the autumn, and roots for the cold winters. The streams and rivers gave up fish, and the shores of the great bay they called Chesapeake, the shellfish water, because of the abundant crabs and oysters. The woodlands stretched from the feet of the mountains where rivers tumbled their waters into Tsenacomoco to the shores of the bay, and were full of deer and turkeys.⁶ And so every person lived each with the other, in all the corners of the land and creeks of the river, in every grove and every mere, which Ahone had given to each and all of them.

Then, when the mountains had grown, the world cooled and became hard.⁷ The Great Hare Ahone left, and Okeus, a scowling warrior, came. The right side of his head was shaven, and from the left side grew a long knot of hair, which draped over his shoulder.⁸ Around his neck dangled magic tokens, white pearls of the sea and red copper of the mountains. The love and devotion of Ahone was chased from the hearts of the people of Tsenacomoco and replaced by fear and awe. They stopped dawdling in the forests and treading the waters, and huddled at their hearths. Their world that once stretched from the sea to the mountains was confined to the glow of their fires.

Now, what Ahone had once freely given they had to make for themselves. To replace the forest canopy they had slept beneath, they wove sapling branches, thatched with leaves, or hides when the hunting was good. For woodland groves and clearings, they burnt undergrowth and slashed trees. For berries and seeds once harvested wild, they planted beans and corn in the winter to fetch from their gardens in summer. For fish once speared in the running waters, they built ingenious weirs to catch them.

The face of Okeus stared at them from the darkness of the forest, goading them to come to him, threatening them if they did. He made them fearful and brave, adoring the things that hurt them beyond their prevention, such as the fire, flood, lightning and thunder.⁹

To make each of their spirits strong, the people of the Tsenacomoco mingled them together with hectic dances around the fire, upon which they cooked great feasts. And this excited Okeus.

And he divided the men from the women. The men he made to face him. To mask their fear, they dressed themselves as he did, and wore their hair as he wore his, with a long black lock on the left side hanging down. They no longer ran with the single deer, but like Okeus himself, they used fires and noise to make whole herds flee to their archers, who would stand in a half-circle to receive them, like a great maw with arrows for teeth. The women watched the home, tending the gardens and the children, keeping the fire alight for the return of the men with their meat.

Then one spring day, as the mountains opened their bowels and emptied them into the rivers, a hunter found pieces of crystal scattered in the tinctured waters.¹⁰ In the subtle world of Tsenacomoco, nothing so hard or sharp had ever been touched. The hunter took one of his arrows, and where a turkey spur or sliver of bone had once been its tip, used a fleck of the crystal, which he fixed with antler glue and bound with the sinew of a deer. When he fired the arrow at a tree, it pierced the wood like muscle. Like everlasting teeth, it never lost its edge.

Men now yearned for these hard, shiny things, which gave those who possessed them the power called manitu. Manitu was not like the deer in the forest or the fish of the sea; it did not die or decay, nor was it replenished with the flying of the geese or the return of the leaf. Manitu did not grow old. It was not washed away by the water or worn away by use. It could be given, taken, hoarded, seized, stolen, and those who had more were lords over those who had less. And so in time he who had most was made chief, and called weroance, to whom the rest must give any precious things they had, and tribute of venison, corn or counsel, so they might live under his protection and benefaction.¹¹

Some weroances rich in manitu built circles of wood around their villages, so the people were protected. But they could not move freely any more. Other weroances built long huts in the forest, for their secret receptions with Okeus. The special men, the quiyoughcosucks, who painted their bodies black and red in the colours of Okeus, would talk to the god in a dark vault at one end of the hut, where only the quiyoughcosucks and not even the weroances could go.

Okeus grinned at the attention given to him, and he craved more. He taunted the weroances at their desire for manitu. He goaded each to prove that he was the great one. But to become the great one, each needed more of the hard things foreign to Tsenacomoco that bestowed manitu. So one had to fight the other, to take the things in their possession, or to protect their own. The time of war followed.

The noise of battle brought people from other worlds. The Monacans came from the mountains and stood where the rivers fall. They did not speak with the same tongue nor did they know Okeus. They lived as the people of Ahone once lived, moving freely through the woods and the seasons, having no abode but the forest. For each Monacan man had all the glittering stone from the rivers and red copper from the mountains he needed, and so his own manitu.¹² They came to the place called Powhatan, the place where the river falls. There, the weroance bought with corn and hides all the blue crystal and red copper the Monacans had.¹³

Then, within the memory of men, the Otasantasuwak, the ones who wear trousers, came across the sea upon great swans.¹⁴ They were ghosts, very pale, weak and bony. Many had beards and whiskers, and they spoke a strange language, though some old men thought they had heard these voices before.

The Otasantasuwak carried sticks which could spit fire, but not with the accuracy or speed of an arrow. The fire sticks were fed with a seed that would not grow in the ground. They could not in their heavy clothes run through the forests, or move stealthily, or hunt down the stag. They had no means of sustaining themselves, but believed they lived by the bread given to them by their quiyoughcosucks, who chanted to their god using a leather pouch stuffed with leaves of white and black markings. They had crystal and copper, some of better quality than that of the Monacans, and piles of rock which lay in the gizzards of their great swans. They gave places their names, and their names places, and once these were chosen, the names stayed the same, even as everything changed.

In these dangerous times, a villager of Powhatan, Wahunsunacock, grew great in stature from these wars and encounters, and came to be chief of weroances, the mamanatowick, with power to save Tsenacomoco in these troubled times.¹⁵

Wahunsunacock understood the people of other worlds, who called him Powhatan after the place of his origin that lay at the heart of his power. From them, he got more precious things than were had by any other weroance. The touch of the Otasantasuwak became deadly to any who approached them, unless they were by him permitted, be they people in his power, or other people jealous of him.

Under this rule, he fetched copper from the Monacans.¹⁶ From beyond the swamp, in the land of a wise chief impotent in his limbs, he fetched pearls of the purest white, unlike the grains gathered from the Tsenocomoco shores, which were the colour and hardness of rotten teeth.¹⁷

It is said Wahunsunacock had received secret knowledge from the Otasantasuwak of more precious and strange things than any that had ever been known, for which he had prepared the great temple in Tsenocomoco, at the branch of a river atop a red sandy hill among the woods, in a place called Uttamussack.

Wahunsunacock had placed there seven grave men who were the quiyoughcosucks. Their chief was dressed in regalia of a stuffed snake and weasel skins, a cloak and a crown of feathers. Wahunsunacock set these priests over the things he had won, and the bones of his forefathers, and a great rock, which they planted in the ground.¹⁸

At Uttamussack, Okeus was called and in a mighty rage made it known to Wahunsunacock’s priests that from the great bay a people would arise who would overthrow the mamanatowick. So Wahunsunacock declared that the people of the Chesapeake, who lived on an opposite shore of the bay that took their name, were his mortal enemies, for they had been touched by the Otasantasuwak, and so he made them extinct.

But Okeus spoke again. He said Wahunsunacock might overthrow and dishearten attempters and such strangers as should invade his territories or labour to settle amongst his people. He would do this twice, and their tribute of copper, crystal and other precious things that were due to him would make his power even greater. But of a third attempting, these people would defeat him, and he would fall unto their subjection and under their conquest.¹⁹ Then would white clouds of those ghosts blow across the great sea and blank out the sun, and the soft mud would dry, and the trees and plants turn to stone, and all that was supple would become hard, and all the sounds and songs of the Tsenacomoco would become trapped in the black marks upon white leaves.

SIX Soundings

THE FRAGILE FLEET of three wooden ‘eggshells’ sailed past a cape on the southerly lip of the Chesapeake Bay, and dropped anchor on the south shore. To the north, a vast body of water stretched to the horizon. To the west, low-lying land receded as far as the eye could see. The English had found Virginia.¹

‘There we landed and discovered a little way,’ wrote Percy, who was a member of the first thirty-strong landing party to go ashore that warm spring day in late April 1607. ‘But we could find nothing worth the speaking of but fair meadows and goodly tall trees, with such fresh waters running through the woods as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof.’

They stayed all afternoon, using the remains of a long day to take in their new surroundings. As darkness fell, they made their way back to the beach. Then, ‘there came the savages creeping upon all fours from the hills like bears, with their bows in their mouths, [who] charged us very desperately’. The English let off volleys of musket fire, which to their surprise the Indians ‘little respected’, not withdrawing until they had used up all their arrows. Gabriel Archer was injured in both his hands, and Matthew Morton, a sailor, was shot ‘in two places of the body very dangerous’. The casualties were carried back on to the boats, and the English withdrew to their ships.²

Later that evening, there was a solemn gathering of all the leading members of the expedition aboard the Susan Constant. According to their orders from the Royal Council, within twenty-four hours of their arrival at Virginia, they were to ‘open and unseal’ the secret list nominating the settlement’s ruling council, ‘and Declare and publish unto all the Company the names therein Set down’.³

Newport announced the names chosen by the Royal Council in England. His own was listed first, followed by Wingfield’s and Gosnold’s. Another nomination was John Martin, the sickly son of Sir Richard, a prominent goldsmith and the Master of the Mint. Martin’s election was probably a foregone conclusion, given the wealth of his family and their generosity as patrons of this and other ventures.⁴

More surprising was the appearance of the mysterious George Kendall and John Ratcliffe on the list, together with Captain John Smith. The latter’s inclusion might have suggested his immediate release from the brig, but Newport decided to keep him there for the time being.

George Percy and Gabriel Archer were not nominated. Percy may have been excluded because of worries about the loyalty of his brother, the Earl of Northumberland. The reasons for excluding Archer, who had worked so hard with Gosnold to promote the venture in its early years, were more opaque, and he took the news badly.

The council’s first job was to nominate a president, who would supervise the taking of the oath of office. But rumbles of recrimination, puzzlement about the roles of Ratcliffe and Kendall, and the difficulty of deciding what to do about Smith discouraged such finalities.

The following day the mariners brought up from the hold the expedition’s collapsible three-ton barge or ‘shallop’, and started to assemble it. Meanwhile, a landing party continued reconnoitring the surrounding territory. Several miles inland, they spotted smoke. They walked towards it, and came upon a campfire, still alight with oysters roasting on a barbeque. There was no sign of the picnickers, so the English polished off the meal, observing as they licked their fingers that the oysters were ‘very large and delicate in taste’.⁵

The next day, 28 April, the shallop was launched, and Newport, together with a group selected from the ranks of the ‘gentlemen’, set off in search of a river or harbour suitable for settlement. The only map they had was one based on explorations made during the Roanoke expedition of 1585. This showed the south shore of the bay as interrupted by a series of inlets, one leading to the village of Chesapeake, the other to ‘Skicoac’. The shoreline ended at what appeared to be the mouth of a river, which flowed west. The river’s northern bank was a peninsula, which was marked with a dot, indicating an Indian settlement. To the north of the peninsula was another river, flowing north-west. Along the top of the map was what appeared to be the northern shore of the bay, populated by two villages, ‘Mashawatec’ and ‘Combec’.

What they might have imagined to be the inlet leading to Skicoac proved to be nothing but shoal water, barely suitable for their shallop, let alone a ship. As they coasted deeper into the bay, they apparently passed the first river mouth, and came to the peninsula. They disembarked on one of the beaches, and explored its perimeter. They found a huge canoe, 45 foot long, made from the hollowed-out trunk of a large tree. They also found beds of mussels and oysters ‘which lay on the ground as thick as stones’, some containing rough pearls.⁶

Exploring inland, they found the land became more fertile, ‘full of flowers of divers kinds and colours,’ remarked Percy, ‘and as goodly trees as I have seen, as cedar, cypress, and other kinds’. They also found a plot of ground ‘full of fine and beautiful strawberries four times bigger and better than ours in England’. Great columns of smoke could be seen rising from the interior, and they wondered anxiously whether the Indians were using fires to clear land for planting, or ‘to give signs to bring their forces together, and so to give us battle’.

Returning to the shallop, they sounded the surrounding waterways, but could find none deep enough for shipping. They returned both buoyed up and dragged down by the day’s discoveries. The land was so inviting, but worthless to them if they could not find a suitable river or safe harbour.

Later that evening, a group rowed out to examine further the river mouth they had passed earlier that day. They started to zigzag across the water, taking soundings as they went. Slowly, painstakingly, their measurements built up a profile of the river bed beneath, revealing a channel 6 to 12 fathoms deep, enough for heavy shipping. So great was their relief, that Archer named the neighbouring point of land ‘Cape Comfort’.

With this discovery, the decision was taken to commit the settlement’s fortunes to the Chesapeake. To mark the decision, a group rowed to the southern side of the mouth of the bay, and on the promontory they had passed when they arrived erected a large cross, facing out to the ocean. They named the land upon which they stood Cape Henry, in honour of Tyndall’s patron, James’s 13-year-old heir.

On 30 April 1607, the fleet nosed past Cape (later known as Point) Comfort and into the broad river that lay beyond. Five Indians appeared on the shore, running along the beach to keep up with the ships. Newport called to them from the deck of the Susan Constant. At first they did not respond. Newport then laid his hand upon his heart as a gesture of friendship. They laid down their bows and arrows, and waved to him to follow them. Newport, together with Percy and a few others, clambered into a boat, and rowed towards the shore. The Indians dived into a tributary and swam across with their bows and arrows in their mouths. The English followed, until they found themselves floating towards a group of warriors waiting for them on the bank. From there, they were escorted to a town, which the English understood to be called ‘Kecoughtan’.

Kecoughtan comprised a cluster of twenty or so dwellings built ‘like garden arbours’, interspersed among the trees. The walls of each house were made of saplings, the roof by the branches bent over to create a vault. The entire construction was covered with reed mats and in some cases with bark, a free-hanging mat acting as the door. The English were intrigued by the elegant simplicity of the buildings, and the lack of permanent structures or even of locked doors.⁷

The Indians who emerged from the houses presented a sight not altogether unfamiliar to some of the English, as they wore clothes and followed customs similar to those at Roanoke, whose appearance had been carefully recorded by the painter John White. The most distinctive feature was the hair. The men shaved the right side of their heads, and let the left side grow to the length of an ‘ell’ (3 foot 9 inches), which they tied in an ‘artificial knot’ and decorated with feathers. In the intensifying heat of the Virginian late spring, they dressed sparingly, covering their ‘privities’ with an animal hide decorated with teeth and small bones, but were otherwise naked. To welcome the English, some had painted their bodies black, others red, ‘very beautiful and pleasing to the eye’, and wore turkey claws as earrings.⁸ Gabriel Archer, standing among the exhausted, louse-ridden, poorly-nourished English could only admire the strength and agility of the ‘lusty, straight men’ whom they now encountered.⁹

As soon as the English entered the village, the men greeted them with a ‘doleful noise’, and approached ‘laying their faces to the ground, scratching the earth with their nails.’ Percy, a man of insecure religious convictions, was alarmed, fearing that the Indians were practising their ‘idolatry’ upon him.

Once the welcome was over, the Indians brought mats from their houses and lay them on the ground. The elders sat in a line, and were served with corn bread, which they invited the English to share, but only if they sat down. The English crouched awkwardly on the mats ‘right against them’, and accepted the offer. The elders then produced a large clay pipe, with a bowl made of copper, and filled it with tobacco. It was lit, and they offered it to their guests, who puffed it appreciatively.

To complete the ceremonies, the Indians put on a frantic dance, ‘shouting, howling, and stamping against the ground, with many antic tricks and faces, making noise like so many wolves or devils’. The display lasted half an hour, during which Percy, drawing on a knowledge of courtly dance acquired as a child, noticed that they all kept to a common tempo with their feet, but moved to an individual rhythm with the rest of their bodies.

When the dance ended, Newport presented the elders with beads and ‘other trifling jewels’. The English then returned to the fleet, content that, as instructed by the Royal Council, they had not only taken ‘Great Care not to Offend the naturals’, but laid the basis of a fruitful trading relationship.

Over the following few days the fleet carefully felt its way up the broad river, which even 20 or so miles upstream was wider than any in England, the channel deep enough for large ships. Tyndall carefully mapped the route of the channel, naming a large and treacherous sandbank about 30 miles upstream ‘Tyndall’s Shoals’. Just beyond, the river turned sharply, forming a loop similar to that of the Thames around the Isle of Dogs, which was later named the ‘Isle of Hogs’ (now home to a wildlife reserve, and a nuclear power plant). Opposite it, Gabriel Archer spotted an island which looked ideal as a location for their settlement. He had a fondness for puns, so he dubbed it ‘Archer’s Hope’, a ‘hope’ also being a stretch of land cut off from its surroundings by marsh or fenland.

Continuing slowly upstream a further 20 miles, they reached a point where the river forked. They anchored the fleet in the broad waters of the confluence, and a landing party was sent to reconnoitre. They came to a town called Paspahegh, on the northern shore of the wider tributary, where they were entertained by an ‘old savage’ who made ‘a long oration, making a foul noise, uttering his speech with a vehement action, but we knew little what they meant’. While witnessing this unimpressive spectacle, they were approached by the chief or weroance of the tribe on the southern bank of the river, who had paddled over in a canoe to remonstrate with them for favouring the Paspahegh over his own people. Gratified by this competition for their attention, and dismissive of the Paspahegh’s efforts, the English said they would visit him the next day.

The following dawn was heralded by the arrival of a canoe alongside the Susan Constant, paddled by a messenger, who signified that he had come from the chiefdom on the opposite bank of the river. He beckoned the English to follow him. They duly manned their shallop, and pursued the canoe to the southern shore, which some had begun to call the ‘Salisbury Side’, in honour of Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury. As the English drew up by the river bank, Percy beheld the chief and his warrior escort waiting for them, ‘as goodly men as any I have seen of savages or Christians’.

The chief, called Chaopock, presented a particularly impressive spectacle, his body and visage a map of promising commodities. His torso was painted crimson, which was perhaps how he got his name, the local word chapacor being the name of a root used to produce red dye. His face was painted blue, ‘besprinkled with silver ore as we thought’, probably a paste made of antimony, which was mined further north. He wore ‘a crown of deer’s hair coloured red in fashion of a rose fastened about his knot of hair’, and on the shaven side of his head, a ‘great plate of copper’. He played a reed flute as the English clambered ashore, and then invited them to sit down with him upon a mat, which was spread out for them on the bank. There, sitting ‘with a great majesty’, he offered them tobacco, his company standing around him as they watched the English puff on the pipe. He then invited them to come to his town, which the English understood to be called Rappahannock (but which they later learned was called Quiyoughcohannock). He led them ‘through the woods in fine paths, having most pleasant springs’, past ‘the goodliest cornfields that ever was seen in any country’, up a steep hill to his ‘palace’, where they were entertained ‘in good humanity’.¹⁰

The next day, Newport left the fleet riding at anchor before Paspahegh and continued in the shallop up the wider branch of the river, stopping at a point where it once again divided. There he encountered another tribe, the ‘most warlike’ Appamattuck, who came to the banks of the river and confronted the English, their leader crouched before them ‘cross-legged, with his arrow ready in his bow in one hand and taking a pipe of tobacco in the other’ uttering a ‘bold speech’. After an exchange of peaceful gestures, the English were allowed ashore, giving them an opportunity to admire the swords the Appamattuck carried on their backs, a unique weapon with a blade of wood edged with sharp stones and pieces of iron, sharp enough ‘to cleave a man in sunder’.

Having established that there was no suitable location for the settlement upstream, the shallop returned to the fleet. On 12 May, Wingfield and other members of the council took the pinnace back downriver to Archer’s Hope, to assess its viability as the best site for their settlement. A landing party found that ‘the soil was good and fruitful with excellent good timber’. They found vines as thick as a man’s thigh running up to the tops of the trees, turkey nests full of eggs, hares and squirrels in the undergrowth, birds of every hue – crimson, pale blue, yellow, green and mulberry purple – fluttering through the forest canopy. Returning to the ship, the council assembled to consider whether this should be the site for their settlement. Gosnold and Archer, perhaps with Percy’s support, argued strongly for its merits: the abundance of natural resources around, its defensible location, ‘which was sufficient with a little labour to defend ourselves against any enemy’. But Wingfield was worried about the sandbanks, which prevented shipping coming close enough to the shoreline to allow cargo and people to transfer directly on to land, a handicap that many considered the reason the Roanoke settlement had proved unsustainable. The other worry was the position of the Kecoughtans. Hakluyt had advised that the settlers should ‘in no case suffer any of the natural people of the Country to inhabit between you and the sea’.

After a heated debate, they sailed around the Isle of Hogs to look at an alternative site. It had been brought to the settlers’ attention by the Paspahegh, who claimed it to be part of their territory. It was a promontory sticking into the river, creating a constriction that forced the deep-water channel right up to the shore. In a daring test of its suitability, one of the ships was sailed up to the river bank, close enough to be tethered to the trees.

The settlers disembarked and investigated the area. They were standing on a peninsula which dangled like a piece of fruit from the mainland, its stalk a thin causeway across an otherwise impassable swamp. They also noted that the shoreline used to moor the pinnace was shielded by woods from enemy vessels coming upstream. It had once been inhabited by Indians, and some evidence may have survived of their presence, but they were long gone.

The site presented difficulties. The river and surrounding creeks and streams were brackish, so a well would have to be dug, or fresh water supplies brought in by ship. The site was also covered with large trees and thick vines which would take considerable effort to clear. There was also the issue of the Kecoughtans controlling land access to the bay.

After further arguments, during which Gosnold repeated some of his objections, the fateful decision was taken to make this the site of their settlement. As tools and supplies were unloaded from the ships, the council now gathered to constitute itself. More arguments erupted over whether Smith and even Archer should be co-opted, but in the end it was decided they should be excluded. Each council member then took the oath of allegiance, and elected Wingfield their president.

‘Now falleth every man to work,’ as Smith later put it, labourers to clearing the ‘thick grove of trees’ covering the western end of the site, soldiers to scouting the mainland, farmworkers to tilling soil and planting seeds, and President Wingfield to tending the breeding flock of thirty-seven chickens he had brought from London.

Conditions were tough. Most of the settlers slept under trees. Those who could afford to bring one enjoyed the comforts of a tent. The elderly Wingfield benefited from this and other indulgences, including the ‘divers fruit, conserves, and preserves’ he had packed into his trunk, though he later claimed that some had been pilfered.¹¹

For spiritual sustenance, the settlers erected a makeshift chapel out of an ‘awning (which is an old sail)’ hung between the trunks of ‘three or four trees to shadow us from the Sun’. ‘Our walls were rails of wood, our seats unhewed trees, till we cut planks, our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighbouring trees,’ Smith recalled, and ‘in foul weather we shifted into an old rotten tent, for we had few better.’¹² In honour of their King, the council dutifully called this ramshackle collection of tents pitched on a sweaty island in the middle of a teeming forest ‘Jamestown’.

The activity on the island attracted the attention of the Paspahegh people, who visited the site on several occasions to see what was going on. To prevent causing offence, Wingfield banned the building of any permanent defensive structures and the performance of military exercises. This was in line with Hakluyt’s instructions, which urged the settlers to develop trading relations with the Indians ‘before they perceive you mean to plant among them’. Smith, however, had different ideas.

It is unclear whether Smith had yet been released from his shackles, but he was still excluded from the council’s deliberations, and he railed at Wingfield’s decision, claiming it was motivated by ‘jealousy’, his possessiveness of power. According to the Charter, the King had accepted the patentees’ request to settle Virginia principally so that they ‘may in time bring the infidels and savages living in those parts to humane civility and to a settled and quiet government’. This for Smith was royal absolution for a great civilizing mission, which should begin as it was supposed to proceed.¹³

For the time being, Wingfield’s low-key policy prevailed, though Kendall, who it now transpired had some experience of military engineering in the Low Countries, managed to erect one bulwark, ingeniously constructed out of ‘the boughs of trees cast together’, possibly towards the isthmus joining the island to the mainland.

On 18 May, the Paspahegh chief himself paid a regal visit to the island with a hundred of his warriors, who ‘guarded him in a very warlike manner with bows and arrows’. The chief asked the English to lay down their arms, which they refused to do. ‘He, seeing he could not have convenient time to work his will, at length made signs that he would give us as much land as we would desire to take,’ Percy claimed. Whether or not it had been properly understood, the chief’s gesture relieved the tension, and the English put away their weapons. Then a fracas erupted between one of the English soldiers and an Indian, apparently over a stolen hatchet. One struck the other, and soon bystanders were joining in, provoking the nervous English to ‘take to our arms’. In response, the chief left ‘in great anger’, followed by his retinue.

Two days later, forty of the Paspahegh arrived with a deer carcass, apparently a peace offering. At the invitation of one of the English soldiers, they also put on an impressive demonstration of their shooting skills. The soldier propped a ‘target’ or shield ‘which he trusted in’ up against a tree, and gestured to the Indian to take a shot at it with his bow and arrow. To the soldiers’ astonishment, the arrow penetrated the shield ‘a foot through or better, which was strange, being that a pistol could not pierce it’.

By this stage, life for the settlers was settling into a routine, and some were beginning to feel a little at home. A group surveying the surrounding land found ‘the ground all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colours and kinds as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England’.¹⁴

Many of the settlers were by now anxious that Newport should head back home at the earliest opportunity to fetch more supplies. The mission plan had been drawn up on the basis of a return by May of that year 1607, and provisioned accordingly. But on Thursday 21 May, Newport declared that, rather than embark for England, he would lead the ‘discovery’ of the river commissioned by the Royal Council. From his perspective, his own future, as well as that of the mission, rested upon the discovery of precious metals, or navigating a new route to the South Seas. He could not afford to go home empty-handed.

He chose to accompany him George Percy, Robert Tyndall, Gabriel Archer – who was to keep a journal – and Thomas Wotton, the surgeon. He also decided to release Smith from custody and take him too, perhaps to keep him out of Wingfield’s way, or to offer him an opportunity to redeem himself. The rest of the company was made up mostly of the crew of his ship, the Susan Constant. The Royal Council had also called for Gosnold to ‘cross over the lands’ with twenty men, ‘carrying half a dozen pickaxes to try if they can find any mineral’. No such expedition was mounted.

As the time approached for Newport’s departure, he called his men before him, and pledged that none would return until they had found ‘the head of this river, the lake mentioned by others heretofore, the sea again, the mountains Apalatsi, or some issue’, by which he meant the legendary saltwater lake somewhere in the American interior, which might provide navigable access to the ‘South Sea’ or Pacific, and the Appalachian mountain range, from which was said to run the ‘stream of gold or copper’.¹⁵

At noon, they climbed aboard the shallop, hoisted its sails, and, beneath a hot, early summer sun, began their slow progress upstream.

By the first night they had managed 18 miles, reaching a ‘low meadow point’ on the south side of the river. There they met the Weyanock people, who claimed to be hostile towards the Paspahegh. The following morning, they set off early, managing 16 miles before breakfast. Stopping at an islet created by a large loop in the river, they found ‘many turkeys and great store of young birds like blackbirds, whereof we took divers which we break our fast withal’.

A canoe carrying eight Indians appeared on the river, and the English hailed them with one of the first words they had learned: ‘wingapoh’, which they understood to mean ‘good fellow’. The Indians approached, and ‘in conference by signs’, the English asked them for guidance on the river’s course. One of the Indians, apparently the leader of the group, stepped forward and offered to help. Archer was unable to discover his name, so dubbed him the ‘Kind Consort’.

Using his toe, the Kind Consort started to draw a map in the sand of the river bank. Archer stopped him, offering him a pen and paper, and showing how he could use it. Immediately understanding what he had to do, the Kind Consort began to draw, laying out for the delighted English ‘the whole river from the [Chesapeake] Bay to the end of it, so far as passage was for boats’. He indicated that, upstream of ‘Turkey Isle’, as Archer had dubbed their current location, lay another islet, and beyond that, a series of waterfalls, marking the end of the navigable river. A day’s march beyond the falls, the river divided in two, both branches coming from the mountains. This was the land of two other ‘kingdoms’. ‘Then, a great distance off,’ stood the mountains of ‘Quirank’, which, he whispered, had rocks containing veins of caquassan, understood to be the Indian word for red earth, which might signify the presence of copper or even gold. Furthermore, the Kind Consort confirmed that just beyond these mountains lay ‘that which we expected’, as Archer coyly put it in his journal, referring to the saltwater lake.

Anxious to proceed, Newport declined offers of hospitality from the Kind Consort, and sailed on. However, the Indian ‘with two women and another fellow of his own consort’ was anxious to track the English, and continued to follow them in the canoe, proffering dried oysters from a basket as they went. Eventually, the English found they could no longer resist, and, rendezvousing at a ‘point’ on the river bank, ‘bartered with them for most of their victuals’.

Two miles further up lay the first signs of the rockier world ahead, the shore being ‘full of great cobblestones and higher land’. Once again, the Kind Consort appeared, this time offering ‘sweet nuts like acorns (a very good fruit), wheat, beans, and mulberries sod [soaked] together’. Newport bought what he could, after which the Indian disappeared.

The following day, a further 5 miles on, the English landed, and ‘found our kind comrades [the Indians] again’, who escorted them to a town on the north bank of the river called Arrohateck. There they received their most opulent welcome yet. A feeling spread among the English that, as they proceeded west, they were closing in on the centre of Indian power.

‘King Arrohateck’, as Archer named the town’s weroance, honoured Newport by laying a reed mat across his shoulders and placing a crown of ‘deer’s hair dyed red’ upon his head. He offered the visitors ‘mulberries, sod wheat and beans, and he caused his women to make cakes for us’. He also volunteered some of his men as guides for the journey into the interior.

It was from King Arrohateck that the English first discovered that there was a ‘great king’, a supreme ruler or mamanatowick to whom all the chiefs around the river paid homage and tribute. His name was Powhatan. ‘Now as we sat merry banqueting with them, seeing their dances and taking tobacco,’ the chief’s warriors suddenly got to their feet, and formed a guard of honour for another guest, whom they welcomed with a ‘long shout’. This, the English thought, must be the mamanatowick Powhatan himself. It was in fact his son Parahunt, known as ‘Tanxpowhatan’ or ‘Little Powhatan’, the confusion arising because the town he ruled was also called Powhatan, perhaps because it was the mamanatowick’s birthplace.¹⁶

Noting that King Arrohateck had remained seated, the English guests did likewise, ‘our captain in the middest’. However, acknowledging the status of the new arrival, Newport offered ‘gifts of divers sorts, as penny knives, shears, bells, beads, glass toys, etc., more amply than before’. In gratitude for the generosity, ‘King Powhatan’ offered provisions and guides to escort the English to his town, further upriver. ‘Thus parting from “Arrohateck’s joy”,’ wrote Archer, brimming with optimism, ‘we found the people on either side the river stand in clusters all along, still proffering us victuals.’

A further 10 miles upstream, the river narrowed. On the northern bank rose the most striking landmark they had yet seen: a tall mound in the midst of fields full of wheat, beans, tobacco and other crops, intermingled. On top of the mound there was a collection of houses, which for the English had the appearance of the Indian capital. Archer called it ‘Powhatan’s Tower’.

They landed, and walked up to the town, where they found the Powhatan and Arrohateck chiefs waiting for them. The English noticed that they now sat apart from their own people. The only other person with them was a man who appeared to be a counsellor, who sat beside Parahunt. Once again, food was offered, ‘but our best entertainment was [the] friendly welcome’. There followed a discussion by ‘words and signs’ during which King Powhatan explained that all the ‘kingdoms’ on the north bank of the rivers were cheisc, which the English understood to mean ‘all one with him’ or ‘under him’. But the Chesapeake people, who lived on the southerly shore of the bay, were the enemy ‘generally to all these kingdoms’. Archer showed the chief the scars on his hands, barely healed, which had been inflicted by these Indians when the English first landed, and ‘for which we vowed revenge, after their manner pointing to the sun’.

Parahunt now placed his own gown upon Newport’s shoulders, which the English understood to mean he was offering a ‘league of friendship’. Putting his hand on his heart, he said to Newport, ‘Wingapoh chemuze,’ Archer taking this to be the kindest of all salutations in the Indian language.

It was now late, and the English said they needed to return to their ship. They were sent on their way with six of Parahunt’s men, and the English left behind one of their own as a gesture of trust. Rather than return directly to the shallop, they rowed 3 miles up the river, where they found what the Indians had warned them of: a great cataract that was clearly impassable. Even this far inland, the river was still tidal, rising 4 foot between high and low tide, and suitable for vessels with a draft less than 6 foot. But beyond, the only way forward was on foot.

‘Having viewed this place between content and grief,’ Archer concluded, ‘we left it for this night, determining the next day to fit ourselves for a march by land.’

The guides who were with them were sent home, except one, called Navirans, who asked if he could sleep on board the shallop with the English. Newport agreed, a gesture of faith rewarded with the safe return of the Englishman left at Powhatan’s Tower, ‘who coming told us of his entertainment, how they had prepared mats for him to lie on, gave him store of victuals, and made as much [of] him as could be’. A close relationship developed between Navirans and the English, particularly with Archer. The Indian ‘had learned me so much of the language,’ Archer wrote, ‘and was so excellently ingenious in signing out his meaning, that I could make him understand me, and perceive him also well-nigh in anything’.

The following day, Whitsunday, 24 May, Newport decided to return some of the hospitality the English had received. His men built a fire on the shore, and they boiled two pieces of pork and some peas, the best that could be offered from their dwindling supplies. Newport invited the two chiefs to join him. Parahunt accepted, but Arrohateck excused himself on the grounds that he needed to return to his village.

As Arrohateck was about to leave, the convivial mood abruptly changed. An English mariner reported that two ‘bullet bags’ containing ‘shot and divers trucking toys’ had gone missing.

The chiefs acted quickly and decisively, ordering the immediate return of all stolen property. The speed with which the items reappeared was impressive evidence of the chiefs’ authority. Everything that had gone was now laid at Newport’s feet, including a knife the English had not even realized was missing. ‘So Captain Newport gave thanks to the kings and rewarded the thieves with the same toys they had stolen, but kept the bullets.’ Newport also warned that the custom in England was to punish theft with death.

Good relations apparently restored, the Powhatan weroance sat down to the feast, ‘and we fed familiarly’, Archer reported, ‘without sitting in his state as before’. The relaxed atmosphere was helped by quantities of beer, aqua vitae (spirits) and sack (Spanish white wine). Alcoholic drinks were not part of the local diet, and this first exposure to some potent European brews had an unusually strong effect on Newport’s guest. This might explain why the chief fell into such an uninhibited mood, talking about the copper, iron and other rich and rare commodities to be found in the mountains beyond the waterfalls.

As the merrymaking was drawing to a close, Newport said he wanted to embark on a three-day expedition further inland to see if he could find these commodities. The chief, perhaps prompted by a sobering word whispered in his ear, suddenly fell silent. He got up to leave, promising only that he would rendezvous with the English later that day at the foot of the falls.

In the afternoon, the English rowed upriver. They found the Powhatan chief sitting on a bank next to the lower reaches of the cascading water.

At this point, the nameless Kind Consort who had appeared to the English at Weyanock approached in a canoe, continuing his mysterious knack of reappearing at significant moments of the English exploration. He told Newport’s men to ‘make a shout’. They were unsure why, but they did as they were asked and cried out. They assumed it was to welcome King Powhatan, though it may have been to acknowledge some other power that inhabited the falls, or paquacowng, as the Indians apparently called them.¹⁷

Newport led a group across the rocks to talk to Parahunt. The expansiveness had evaporated. The chief ‘sought by all means to dissuade our captain from going any further’. It would be tedious travel, he claimed. Ahead lay the Monacan people, who were enemies, and liable to attack Powhatan guides if not the whole party, and even if they got past them, the Quirank mountains that lay beyond were difficult and dangerous, devoid of the food supplies they would need for a proper exploration. The Monacans ‘came down at the fall of the leaf’, he told Newport, and attacked his people’s villages. Newport offered five hundred English troops to fight alongside the Powhatan people upon the Monacans’ return, ‘which pleased the king much’.

To Archer’s surprise, Newport agreed not to proceed any further, ‘holding it much better to please the king, with whom and all of his command he had made so fair way, than to prosecute his own fancy or satisfy our requests’.

The weroance now departed, followed by all his men except Navirans, who accompanied the English to an ‘islet’ in the middle river, which stood before the falls. There, Newport announced that the river would henceforth be known as the James, and ordered the soldiers to erect a large cross, as they had done at Cape Henry. It bore the Latin inscription ‘Jacobus Rex. 1607’: King James 1607. As the cross rose into the sky, Navirans gave out a great cry. Newport was reassuring, explaining ‘that the two arms of the cross signified King Powhatan and himself, the fastening of it in the middest was their united league’. This explanation apparently ‘cheered Navirans not a little’.

The English prepared for their journey back down the river they had renamed the James, and Newport sent Navirans to invite ‘King Powhatan’ for a farewell meeting. The chief duly appeared with Navirans and his retinue on the river bank, and Newport rowed alone from the shallop to the shore, to present a gown and a hatchet as farewell gifts.

The mood had changed. The chief seemed angered by the appearance of the cross, casting its long evening shadow across the river’s sacred waters. Percy noted that the ‘savages’ now ‘murmured at our planting in the country’. Newport prompted Navirans to pass on the explanation that the cross symbolized peace. Parahunt appeared to be reassured, and, according to Navirans’s translation, rebuked his people: ‘Why should you be offended with them as long as they hurt you not, nor take anything away by force? They take but a little waste ground which doth you nor any of us any good.’¹⁸

With feelings of reassurance mixed with uncertainty, the English left and headed back for Jamestown. As night fell, they stopped at Arrohateck. The chief was ill, complaining that the ‘hot drinks’ the English had given him had made him sick. Newport confidently predicted that he would feel better in the morning, which was duly the case, and to celebrate his recovery, the chief ordered venison to be roasted for the visitors.

While they were there, some of the Arrohateck people offered to show the guests their homes and gardens. Passing among the houses, scattered around groves of tall trees, the English entered a world hidden from them by the diplomatic formalities experienced so far. This was the domain of women. While the men ‘fish, hunt, fowl, go to the wars’, the women kept the home and hearth, and tended the fields. They also raised and educated the children, shaved the men, foraged for fuel, chopped wood, spun flax, ground corn, baked bread, butchered meat, gathered medicinal herbs, healed the sick and mourned the dead, ‘which’, Smith observed, ‘is the cause that the women be very painful [i.e. burdened] and the men often idle’.

Being allowed to mingle with them provided the curious Englishmen with their first proper exposure to female company since leaving London. The effect was powerful. The women appeared natural and unaffected. They had ‘handsome limbs, slender arms, and pretty hands; and when they sing they have a delightful and pleasant tang in their voices’. They wore make-up to enhance their features rather than disguise their blemishes, and shared cosmetic tips and recipes freely, unlike the ‘great ladies’ of English society, who kept secret from one another ‘their oil of talcum or other painting white and red’. The Indian women wore clothes not to hide their age, but, as Captain Smith put it, to be ‘agreeable to their years’. Their bodies were not trussed, bustled and costumed, but flaunted. Their arms, thighs and breasts could be openly admired, being elaborately advertised with ‘cunningly embroidered’ tattoos. They were ‘voluptuous’, fully developed sexual beings, scantily dressed and approachable, yet retaining that feminine virtue most vaunted by European men, ‘modesty’. It was a combination that aroused the Englishmen’s imaginations and starved libidos.

Mothers breast-fed their babies, a practice that English women of all but the poorest classes avoided, favouring the use of wet-nurses. They also loved their children ‘very dearly’, but were tough as well as tender, making them ‘hardy’ by washing them in the river even on the coldest mornings, and ‘tanning’ their skins with ointment until ‘no weather will hurt them’. Their houses, Smith observed, were as ‘warm as stoves, but very smoky’, due to the fire in the centre of the floor, which vented through a simple hole in the roof. It being summertime, the mats covering the walls may have been rolled up to let in the air, but the women continued to tend the fire, as, ‘if at any time it goes out, they take it for an evil sign’.

A set of simple bedsteads was the only recognizable domestic furniture to be found inside an Indian house. They were made of short posts stuck into the ground, with ‘hurdles’ or frames made with sticks and reeds placed on top to act as the mattress. There was a bed for each member of the family, upon which they would sleep ‘heads and points’, head to feet, in a circle around the fire. Mats acted as bedlinen, and, while they slept, the perpetual smoke, which darkened their skins but did not sting their eyes, kept away mosquitoes and fumigated clothes.¹⁹

While he was being shown around one of the huts, an Indian woman took Archer’s hand and pressed the leaves of a herb into his wounded palm. The plant was wisakon, he was told (the word was in fact a general term for medicinal herb). It looked to him like liverwort or bloodwort, two well-known medicinal herbs used in England. He was also shown a root which contained the poison that had laced the arrowheads.

The visitors watched the women bake rolls and cakes, and a demonstration of ‘the growing of their corn and the manner of setting it’. The fields, just a few hundred foot square, were more like gardens, cleared by burning sections of the surrounding woodland. The soil was neither cultivated (the Indians had no draft animals or tilling equipment) nor manured, producing, in the opinion of Smith the farmer’s son, ‘so small a benefit of their land’. He was sure the most basic English agricultural techniques would multiply the yields.²⁰

Finally, the chief took the English into what Archer dubbed the ‘Mulberry Shade’, a hunting lodge set apart from the village, where King Arrohateck laid on a meal of ‘land turtle’ while his men went into the surrounding woods to see if they could catch a deer. The chief also asked for a demonstration of English firearms. Newport duly ordered ‘a gentleman discharge his piece soldier-like before [King Arrohateck], at which noise he started, stop’d his ears, and express’d much fear, so likewise all about him’.

There was also an incident, confusingly documented, which enabled the two nations to compare their methods of summary discipline. Navirans drew attention to one of Arrohateck’s people who, as Archer put it, ‘press’d into our boat too violently upon a man of ours’. Newport, ‘misconstruing the matter, sent for his own man, bound him to a tree before King Arrohateck, and with a cudgel soundly beat him’. The chief intervened, saying one of his men was responsible for the ‘injury’. He went over to the culprit, who tried to run away. The chief set off in pursuit, running ‘so swiftly as I assure myself he might give any of our company 6 score in 12’ (i.e. beat them ten times over). The offender was brought back, and the rest of the king’s retinue brandished cudgels and sticks ‘as if they had beaten him extremely’. Archer does not mention if the punishment was actually executed, or only threatened.

These violent proceedings did not dampen the convivial mood, but seemed to draw the two leaders, Newport and King Arrohateck, closer together. As the day drew to an end, Newport presented the chief with a red waistcoat as a farewell gift, ‘which highly pleased him’. The English boarded their shallop and cast off, the Arrohateck men saluting them with two hearty shouts as they pulled away from the shore.

That night, they anchored near Appamattuck, home of those ‘most warlike’ people Newport had visited while reconnoitring the site of the English settlement. The following day, they went ashore and were led by Navirans through fields newly planted with corn to a ‘bower’ of mulberry trees. They sat down to await the Appamattuck chief, but were instead surprised by the regal approach of a ‘fat, lusty, manly woman’ clothed in deerskin, covered in copper jewellery, including a crown, and attended by a retinue of women ‘adorned much like herself, save they wanted the copper’. This, the English decided, must be a queen, as she was treated with the same reverence as the Powhatan and Arrohateck chiefs, ‘yea, rather with more majesty’. Her name, though they did not yet know it, was Opussoquonuske.²¹

The English, struggling to readjust their assumption that Indian royalty must be exclusively male, were anxious to discover her role. She explained that she was a chief under the authority of Powhatan, ‘as the rest are’, but the visitors noted that ‘within herself’ she was ‘as great authority as any of her neighbour weroances’, if not greater. For two hours the English gazed upon this Indian Elizabeth, while feasting on the ‘accustomed cakes, tobacco, and welcome’. They offered to demonstrate their weapons, and Archer noted that, when a musket was fired, ‘she showed not near the like fear as Arrohateck’. Newport then decided they should leave for the final leg of their expedition.

Navirans led them 5 miles downstream, and persuaded them to put in for one final meeting. The location, he said, was ‘one of King Pamunkey’s houses’, a structure that may have been a hunting lodge, or even specially constructed for the occasion, as the Pamunkey homeland lay 20 miles away, along the banks of a river neighbouring the James. The English seemed unaware that such encounters were now being carefully orchestrated, nor did they realize the importance of the man they were about to meet. He was Opechancanough, whose name meant ‘man of a white (immaculate) soul’. Later described as possessing a ‘large stature, noble presence, and extraordinary parts’, he was said by some to be Powhatan’s brother, but by others to have come from ‘a great way from the south-west … from the Spanish Indians, somewhere near Mexico’. In his forties at the time of this first encounter, he acted as the military chief of Tsenacomoco, the Indian name for the Powhatan empire. He had come to meet the English to assess their intentions and strength.²²

After the magnificent Queen Appamattuck, Archer found ‘King Pamunkey’ a ridiculous figure, ‘so set [upon] striving to be stately as to our seeming he became a fool’. He claimed to come from a ‘rich land of copper and pearl’, and showed off a pearl necklace and a sample of copper ‘the thickness of a shilling’ which Archer managed to bend round his finger ‘as if it had been lead’. Affecting nonchalance at this information, the English asked what other commodities his land offered. The king obligingly boasted it was also ‘full of deer’ though added that ‘so also is most of all the kingdoms’.

Archer called the venue for the encounter with Opechancanough ‘Pamunkey’s Palace’, mocking the king’s extravagant claims, and ignoring Navirans’s hints that the name was inappropriate.

Continuing their journey home, they spent the night at the ‘low meadow point’ where they had anchored the first night of the expedition, 18 miles away from the settlement. The following morning, they went ashore with Navirans. They encountered a hunting party of ten or twelve Indians who were camping on the shore, and Navirans arranged for them to go fishing for the English. ‘They brought us in a short space a good store,’ Archer noted, who accounted them ‘good friends’.

Then, without warning or explanation, Navirans ‘took some conceit’ of the English, and refused to go any further with them. ‘This grieved our captain very deeply,’ Archer observed, ‘for the loving kindness of this fellow was such as he trusted himself with us out of his own country.’ By now, Newport imagined that he had managed to establish a rapport with the Indians, that his diplomacy had been embraced, his honourable intentions accepted, the superiority of his weaponry acknowledged and admired. Navirans’s sudden change of heart punctured this presumption. Newport ordered the shallop’s immediate return to Jamestown, ‘fearing some disastrous hap at our fort’.

They arrived back on 27 May, to find the settlement in chaos. It transpired that the day before, two hundred Indian warriors had mounted a sustained attack. Following his meeting with Newport, Opechancanough had evidently decided the English presence must be eliminated, before it became permanent.

At the time of the attack, the settlers had been planting corn in the newly cleared fields. Most of their weapons were still packed in ‘dryfats’, waterproof storage casks, so they only had a few pistols and swords to defend themselves. As the ranks of Indian warriors descended upon them, they had been forced to run for cover, to few finding shelter behind the island’s single defensive bulwark. Led by President Wingfield, all five council members apparently put up a fight with hand weapons, but were forced to retreat. In the ensuing skirmish, which ‘endured hot about an hour’, one boy was slain and as many as seventeen labourers wounded. Every single member of the council sustained injuries, except Wingfield, who had a miraculous escape from an arrow which passed through his beard. According to later reports, the entire company would have been slain, had not the sailors loaded one of the ships’ cannons with a ‘crossbar’ (round shot with a spike embedded in it), and fired it towards the Indian position. The projectile had hit a tree, bringing down one of its branches, which apparently fell among the attacking Indians and ‘caused them to retire’.²³

‘Hereupon the president was contented the fort should be palisaded,’ Smith noted dryly.

George Kendall was put in charge of designing the defences, Archer of laying out the street plan for the town. The best-known work in English on military architecture at the time was a translation of a French work by William de Bellay called The Practice of Fortification. It was sufficiently influential for Christopher Marlowe to lift a section verbatim for his popular first play, Tamburlaine the Great, and for Percy’s brother the Earl of Northumberland to hold a copy in his library. Rule one for Bellay was: ‘the figure triangular is not to be used at all’ in the ‘delineation’ of a fort, because it resulted in long, penetrable walls and vulnerable bulwarks or ramparts at each corner. Similar advice had been offered to the Roanoke settlers, who had been told to build their fort in the shape of a pentangle. Despite these warnings, Kendall chose a triangular shape. This was possibly because the river acted as a natural defence, and de Bellay had also advised that ‘if any part [of the fort’s proposed location] may be better assured of the situation than the rest’, that was the side to have any sharper angles or longer walls. Kendall proposed putting the fort’s longest side, which measured 140 yards, along the waterfront, with two shorter sides, 100 yards each, jutting into the island, enclosing an area totalling just over an acre.²⁴

Meanwhile, Archer had been working in the pinnace, drawing up plans for the town that would lie within the defensive walls. Wingfield had gone to inspect them. He rejected Archer’s work, and a confrontation ensued, defeating the president’s efforts to give Gosnold’s restless, rebellious friend a useful role. Alternative plans were drawn up, which, from archaeological remains, appear to have allowed for a row of barracks next to the southern palisade, officers’ dwellings on the western side, a storehouse to the east, and a church in the middle.

The labourers worked around the clock, with the reluctant help of the ships’ crews, and within days Kendall’s design was taking shape. The curtain wall was made of rows of split logs, sunk into a ditch that was backfilled to keep them upright. At each corner, large crescent-shaped bulwarks were built using the same method, upon which the company’s carpenters constructed stout platforms to carry lookouts and artillery. Winches and cranes were erected to lift some of the ‘four and twenty pieces of ordnance’ brought from England, and soon the bulwarks bristled with culverins, enormous cannons with barrels 11 foot long, capable of shooting 18-pound shot over a distance of nearly 2,000 foot.²⁵

While excavating around the neck of land connecting the island to the mainland, workers found a stream flowing down a small bank. In the glint of the trickling water they saw what looked like yellow crystals. Captain John Martin was immediately summoned to inspect what they had found. Samples were taken and, using apparatus brought from London, he performed an assay or test to see if any metal could be drawn off. The news that he had managed to extract a small amount of what appeared to be gold ‘stirred up in them an unseasonable and inordinate desire after riches’. A barrel was filled with soil taken from the surrounding area, for testing back in England.²⁶

Meanwhile, the Indians kept up their attacks. As the fortifications rose, their tactics changed from full-frontal assaults to harassment. On Friday 29 May, they managed to shoot forty or so arrows ‘into and about the fort’ from the cover of the surrounding woodland, before being repulsed by a volley of musket fire. ‘They hurt not any of us,’ Archer wrote, ‘but finding one of our dogs, they killed him.’ The following Sunday, while feverish construction continued, ‘they came lurking in the thickets and long grass’. Eustace Clovill, a hapless offspring of Norfolk gentry, was found ‘straggling without the fort’, and was shot six times. His brief moment in history came when he staggered back to the fort with the arrows still stuck in his body, and shouted, ‘Arm! Arm!’ before collapsing. He died eight days later.

On Thursday 4 June, as dawn was breaking, one of the settlers left the fort ‘to do natural necessity’ in the latrine just beyond the palisade. As he squatted on the ground, he was shot with three arrows by Indians who had ‘most adventurously’ crept under the bulwark blocking access to the island.

The relentless assaults soon took their toll on English morale, and the acrimony that had been stewing since the ships were stuck on the Downs erupted with new vigour. The council began to disintegrate. ‘The cause of our factions was bred in England,’ Smith later observed, but ‘grew to that maturity among themselves that spoiled all’.

Religion remained a point of contention. On arrival, the settlement chaplain Robert Hunt had implemented a puritanical regime of daily common prayer, and lengthy sermons on Sunday mornings. Wingfield made his dislike of such pious earnestness known, and on several occasions found opportunities to miss, and even to cancel, the sermons.

In fact, according to their accusers, Wingfield and Newport had no interest in the venture’s spiritual mission, even though it featured prominently in the Royal Charter. They were merely ‘making Religion their colour, when all their aim was nothing but present profit’.

The most forceful critic was Captain Smith. Having kept uncharacteristically quiet during the James river expedition, he was driven by an overwhelming sense of vindication to confront Wingfield and the council. He demanded that the president take manful possession of this virgin land. The Indians had not cultivated it, so it no more belonged to them than to the wildlife in the undergrowth or the birds in the trees. In any case, these vast expanses contained ‘more land than all the people in Christendom can manure, and yet more to spare than all the natives of those Countries can use’.²⁷

This land was waiting to be fashioned ‘by labour’ into a new ‘commonwealth’, a new England. What could command more honour for a man, Smith later wrote, ‘with only his own merit to advance his fortunes … than planting and building a foundation for his posterity, got from the rude earth by God’s blessing and his own industry without prejudice to any?’ He continued:

What can he do less hurtful to any, or more agreeable to God, than to seek to convert those poor Savages to know Christ and humanity, whose labours with discretion will triple requite thy charge and pain? What so truly suits with honour and honesty, as the discovering things unknown, erecting Towns, peopling Countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue and gain to our native mother country?²⁸

Several of the gentlemen excluded from the council could identify with these sentiments, and began to agitate for a more active, aggressive policy. Archer started ‘spewing out … venomous libels and infamous chronicles’ about Wingfield’s government. Wingfield had ‘affected a kingdom,’ he claimed. Archer was trying to summon a parliament, Wingfield retorted. On 6 June, Archer led a group, including several soldiers who had left their positions, who ‘put up a petition to the council for reformation’.²⁹

The content of the petition was not recorded, but its consequence was that four days later, Smith was finally absolved of all charges and made a member of the council. According to Smith’s later testimony, Wingfield was also required to pay him compensation to the value of £200, an enormous sum, which Smith claimed he magnanimously donated ‘to the store for the general use of the colony’.³⁰ The following day, ‘articles and orders for gentlemen and soldiers were upon the court of guard and content was in the quarter’, meaning that peace had been restored among the unsettled ranks.

On Saturday 13 June, to reinforce a new but still fragile mood of accord, Newport presented the soldiers and labourers with a sturgeon 7 foot long, which had been caught by the crew of his ship. The next day, the settlement was approached by two unarmed envoys. Archer recognized one of them to be the ‘Kind Consort’ who had followed them in the early days of the James river expedition. The reappearance of this mysterious individual comforted the settlers, and he was invited into the fort, which was in its final stages of construction. The envoy endeavoured to explain what had been going on, reassuring the embattled, bewildered Englishmen around him that the chiefs of the Pamunkey and Arrohateck were still their friends, as were those of two tribes the English had not yet encountered, the Mattapanient and Youghtanan, who lived on western tributaries of the Pamunkey, the river north of the James. However, several other tribes were their ‘contracted enemies’, including the Quiyoughcohannock, the Weyanock and the Paspahegh, upon whose land the English had now settled. ‘He counselled us to cut down the long weeds round about our fort and to proceed in our sawing,’ Archer reported. ‘Thus making signs to be with us shortly again, they parted.’

The day after this encounter, the fort was pronounced complete. It was crudely made and far from impregnable, but probably sufficient to frustrate a full-scale attack. Inside, however, conditions for the settlers were not much better than when they had arrived, possibly worse. Having failed to extract any trade or tribute from the Indians, their food was little more than bran. ‘Our drink was water, our lodgings castles in the air,’ as Smith put it. There were no permanent buildings, except perhaps for a store to keep provisions and armaments.³¹

Newport decided the time had come for him to leave. The ships were now fully laden with clapboard timber, the barrel of soil to test for metals, and upwards of two tons of sassafras, the highly profitable commodity brought back by Gosnold on his 1602 voyage.

The council assembled to draft a progress report for the Royal Council in London. It was brief and began on an optimistic note:

Within less than seven weeks, we are fortified well against the Indians; we have sown good store of wheat; we have sent you a taste of clapboard; we have built some houses; we have spared some hands to a discovery; and still as God shall enable us with strength we will better and better our proceedings.

There followed a complaint about the sailors, ‘waged men’ who fed off their supplies, and gathered valuable commodities such as sassafras for their own private gain, losing or damaging many tools in the process. However, mindful that these same sailors might be recruited for future relief missions, the council asked that they be ‘reasonably dealt withal, so as all the loss neither fall on us nor them’.

‘The land would flow with milk and honey if so seconded by your careful wisdoms and bountiful hands,’ the report continued. ‘We do not persuade to shoot one arrow to seek another, but to find them both. And we doubt not but to send them home with golden heads. At least our desires, labours, and lives shall to that engage themselves.’

They then listed the bountiful glories of their new home, the mountains, the rivers, the fish, the fruit, the miraculous medicinal herbs, before ending on a note of desperation:

We entreat your succours for our seconds with all expedition lest that all-devouring Spaniard lay his ravenous hands upon these goldshowing mountains, which, if it be so enabled, he shall never dare to think on.

This note doth make known where our necessities do most strike us. We beseech your present relief accordingly. Otherwise, to our greatest and last griefs, we shall against our wills not will that which we most willingly would.

The report was dated ‘James town in Virginia, this 22th of June’ and signed ‘your poor friends’ followed by a list of council names. Smith’s name appeared after President Wingfield’s.

As the council handed their report to Newport, another was pushed into his hand by one of the settlers, William Brewster. Brewster may have been related to the Pilgrim Father of the same name who set sail for America aboard the Mayflower 13 years later. He had been secretly commissioned by Cecil to write a private report on the expedition and in particular the conduct of the council.³²

Like the council, Brewster began with an optimistic assessment of the settlement’s prospects, and added an equally desperate plea for a supply mission to ensure their fulfilment:

Now is the King’s Majesty offered the most stately, rich kingdom in the world, never possess’d by any Christian prince. Be you one means among many to further our seconding to conquer this land as well as you were a means to further the discovery of it.

This was just the garnish for what followed: a report on the conduct of the council, describing the faction fighting that had nearly destroyed it. Unfortunately, although the beginning of the letter is still to be found among Cecil’s papers, the confidential part was torn off, and has never been recovered.

On Sunday 22 June, Hunt led the company in Holy Communion, the first to be held since their arrival. In the evening, Newport invited some of the gentlemen aboard his ship for a last supper. Final preparations were made on the Susan Constant and Discovery, while the Godspeed, which was to remain in Virginia, was decommissioned, her sails removed to the fort to prevent her being taken by renegades or attackers.

Newport set sail the following morning, promising to return within twenty weeks.³³ The settlers lined the shore and watched the fleet cast off and make its way down the majestic James. The ships disappeared within minutes behind the thick canopy of trees covering the eastern end of the island.

Anxiety, if not dread, gripped those left behind, as they walked back into their makeshift accommodation. Living conditions were still rough. Their ‘houses’ were for the most part fragile tents, devoid of home comforts. The weather, Indians and supplies were erratic, preventing all attempts to find a settled or familiar routine. Worse yet, the councillors in whose hands their fate now rested seemed to be infected with the scheming and plots, petty rules and brutal punishments they had hoped to leave behind in England.

‘You shall live freely there [in Virginia], without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers,’ a character in Eastward Hoe had promised. The hollow laughter aroused by those scurrilous words at the Blackfriars Theatre each night echoed all the way across the Atlantic.

SEVEN The Spanish Ambassador

SOMETIME IN JULY, 1607, Robert Cecil was strolling under a warm summer sun in the gardens of Whitehall Palace, the royal residence in Westminster. One Lanier, either John, son of a Huguenot refugee and a royal musician, or his son Nicholas, also a musician, approached him, accompanied by a soldier called Captain Hazell. A discussion took place between this Hazell and Cecil about which nothing is known, except that it concerned Hazell embarking on a secret mission to Spain accompanied by someone ‘best experienced’ in the coasts of Virginia.

Hazell apparently recommended for the job one George Weymouth, ‘a special favourite of Sir Walter Cope’s’, and an experienced mariner who as recently as 1605 had led a reconnaissance mission to Cape Cod. Weymouth was duly hired, and a few days later, he and Hazell slipped out of London, and made their way towards Deal in Kent, where they were to pick up a ship bound for Spain.¹

Meanwhile, on 29 July, the Susan Constant slipped into Plymouth harbour. Newport scribbled a letter to Cecil, announcing his arrival, and the discovery of ‘a river navigable for great ships one hundred and fifty miles’. ‘The country is excellent and very rich in gold and copper,’ he reported, adding that ‘of the gold we have brought a Say’ or sample, which he hoped to present to the King and the Privy Council. ‘I will not deliver the expectance and assurance we have of great wealth, but will leave it to Your Lordship’s censure when you see the probabilities.’

The remainder of the letter contained excuses for not leaving his ship and making the journey overland to London. His ‘inability of the body’ detained him, he wrote, possibly referring to the difficulty of making a long journey on horseback with a missing arm. So he would sail his ship round to London as soon as ‘wind and weather be favourable’.²

His desire to spend some time at Plymouth might not have been motivated by medical needs alone. He had probably decided to allow the crew time to sell some of the sassafras they had brought from Virginia. They would have found on the quayside at Plymouth any number of merchants happy to buy the precious commodity without declaring it to the port authorities. The lack of any subsequent references to it in the official correspondence would suggest this is what happened, depriving the settlers and investors of some of the cash needed to pay for the promised supply mission.

The Susan Constant took two weeks to make the final leg of the journey to London. Sir Walter Cope was waiting impatiently for her, eager to get his hands on the ‘sperm’, as he called the ore sample, which he hoped would fertilize England’s new American possession.

In a letter of 12 August, reporting the ship’s arrival to Cecil, Cope’s excitement was uncontainable: ‘If we may believe either in words or Letters, we are fallen upon a land that promises more than the Land of promise: instead of milk we find pearl, & gold instead of honey.’ He acknowledged that Cecil might treat such claims with ‘slow belief’. There was, after all, ‘but a barrel full of the earth’ to show for this first mission. But he hoped that tests to be conducted that very day would reveal ‘a kingdom full of the ore’.³

‘I could wish your Lordship at the trial,’ Cope continued. Cecil’s ‘word and presence may comfort the poor citizen of London’. Many had evidently refused requests to continue backing the venture, despite an attempt the previous March to enlarge the Royal Council and thereby increase the investors’ representation.⁴ In Cope’s opinion, they might be persuaded to ‘adventure much more in this most hopeful discovery’, but would need ‘a little help’ from Cecil, probably meaning further reform to the council and the company’s unusual structure. There was no shortage of money, he noted. Sir Thomas Smythe (who, Cope added in a marginal note, would benefit from ‘a word of thanks’ from Cecil ‘for his care and diligence’), had recently persuaded ‘fifty citizens’ to offer £500 apiece for a share in an East India Company expedition to the Far East.⁵

By the following day, Cope’s mood was very different. Four trials of Newport’s soil samples, conducted in various laboratories around the city, had produced not so much as a grain of gold. ‘In the end, all turned to vapour.’ There had been suspicions the previous day that John Martin, who had tested the soil in Jamestown, had not done so properly. Now, Martin was accused of having ‘cousined’ (fooled) not only Newport, but the King, the State and his own father – the latter, Cope suggested, in a desperate attempt to persuade the mean old plutocrat to send some private supplies, ‘which otherwise he doubted never to procure’.⁶ Newport at this stage appears to have given up hope, and announced that he did not intend to return to Virginia.

By mid-August, things were looking a little more hopeful. On 17 August, Sir Thomas Smythe, braiding every strand of influence in the hope of keeping the project together, informed Cecil that Newport was back on board. The captain now claimed he must have brought back the wrong sample. He pledged to lead the supply mission back across the Atlantic, ‘never to see your Lordship before he bring that with him which he confidently believed he had brought before’.⁷

Others remained sceptical. A week later, the diplomat Dudley Carleton, one of Cecil’s protégés, sent his regular correspondent John Chamberlain a downbeat assessment of the settlement’s prospects. ‘They write much commendations of the air and the soil and the commodities of it, but silver and gold have they none,’ he wrote, ‘and they cannot yet be at peace with the inhabitants of the country.’

He seemed well-informed, having somehow managed to see a copy of a letter from George Percy smuggled to his brother the Earl of Northumberland, who was still languishing in the Tower for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. ‘They have fortified themselves and built a small town which they call Jamestown,’ Carleton added, ‘and so they date their letters.’ He then proceeded to produce a series of convoluted puns ridiculing the settlers’ efforts. Never mind a supply from England, they could expect a ‘double supply’ from the Spanish – a mission sent to wipe them out. ‘The town methinks hath no graceful name,’ he mused, pointing out that it was not only dangerously close to Spanish Florida, but came ‘too near Villiaco’, meaning villainy. George Percy, he noted, called the town ‘James-fort, which we like best of all the rest, because it comes near to Chemesford’, Chelmsford, a town in Essex which one Puritan inhabitant described as a ‘dunghill of abomination’.

Carleton then added a postscript about Captain George Weymouth. Weymouth had apparently been ‘taken’ the week before, ‘shipping himself for Spain, with intent as is thought to have betrayed his friends and showed the Spaniards a means how to defeat this Virginian attempt’.⁸

Carleton, who was usually well informed on political matters, was obviously unaware that Weymouth had been ‘shipping himself for Spain’ on Cecil’s orders. However, he was correct in guessing that the mission somehow threatened ‘to defeat this Virginian attempt’, for as soon as Newport arrived back in England, the government made strenuous efforts to prevent Weymouth from leaving the country.⁹ For the sake of his cordial relations with Spain, Cecil had evidently been poised to abandon England’s claim to North America, and only the belated appearance of Newport’s ship had won a stay of execution.

Don Pedro de Zuñiga, the Spanish ambassador, had remained poorly informed about the Virginia mission since the issuing of the patent. He was aware that some sort of venture was under way, but felt it was too insignificant to bother his King. News of Newport’s return seemed to reinforce his complacency. ‘They do not come too contented,’ he told the King in a monthly report, ‘for in that place there is nothing other than good wood for masts, pine-tree pitch and resin, and some earth from which they think they can extract bronze’.¹⁰

A month later, however, Zuñiga’s tone was transformed. ‘They are mad about the location,’ he reported to the Spanish King, ‘and frightened to death that Your Majesty will throw them out.’ Preparations were in hand for a supply mission, and ‘many here and in other parts of the kingdom … are already arranging to send people there’. ‘It would be very advisable for Your Majesty to root out this noxious plant while it is so easy,’ Zuñiga concluded.

Zuñiga had undergone such a radical change of mind since recruiting one of the members of the Royal Council for Virginia as an informer. The spy’s identity is unknown, but a candidate is Sir Herbert Crofts, who had joined the council in March 1607. Crofts, probably a kinsman of the planter Richard Crofts, is known to have become disenchanted with James’s regime, and a decade later fled to the Spanish Netherlands, where he ‘turned popish’.¹¹

In the following month’s dispatch, Zuñiga reported that ships were ready to take a new supply to the colony, together with one hundred and twenty fresh settlers. He once again urged Philip to preempt the enterprise by launching an attack. ‘It is thoroughly evident that it is not their desire to people [the land], but rather to practise piracy, for they take no women – only men.’ He also reported that James was ‘urging the Scots to go there’.¹²

Philip commanded Zuñiga to speak to King James about the matter, ‘expressing regret on my part, that he should permit any of his subjects to try and disturb the seas, coasts, and lands of the Indies’. Zuñiga duly asked Cecil for a royal audience, but for several months, his requests were ignored.¹³

Then, on the night of Saturday 26 September, an invitation from the Royal Chamberlain unexpectedly arrived at the ambassador’s residence in Highgate. Having been indisposed for a week, following the death of his infant daughter Mary, His Royal Highness now felt able to grant Zuñiga an audience at 2 p.m. the following day. The venue was to be Hampton Court, the magnificent royal retreat on the bank of the Thames west of London.

Zuñiga arrived at the palace at the appointed time, and was shown into the State Apartments, where James was waiting for him. He was welcomed ‘as usual, very courteously’. The ambassador passed on condolences on the death of the King’s daughter, for which James thanked him ‘very much’.

The formalities dispensed with, Zuñiga got straight to the point. King Philip, he said, considered it ‘against good friendship and brotherliness’ for English subjects ‘to dare to want to settle Virginia, since it is a part of the Indies belonging to Castile, and that this boldness could have inconvenient results’. ‘Inconvenient’ was the diplomatic word for deadly. Spain, he was suggesting, was prepared to go to war over the issue.

James affected insouciance, claiming ‘he was not informed as to the details of what was going on, so far as the voyages to Virginia were concerned’. He had ‘never known’ Philip ‘had a right to it [Virginia], for it was a region very far from where the Spaniards had settled’. Nevertheless, he did not want the matter to become a point of contention between him and Spain. The settlers, he said, ‘went at their own risk, and if they were caught there, there could be no complaint if they were punished’. In other words, if Spain chose to attack the colony, there would be no English reprisals.

Zuñiga was not satisfied; at least, not according to the version of the conversation he reported to Philip. The whole enterprise was, the ambassador told James, a ‘shabby deceit, for the land is very sterile, and consequently there can be no other object in that place than that it seems good for piracy’. James was inclined to agree. He too had heard ‘that the land was unproductive, and that those who thought to find great riches there were deceived’. He also thought that the sort of people who had gone there were ‘terrible’.

There followed a discussion on other matters, including Irish affairs and the indiscipline of James’s English Parliament, a body which they agreed had become a ‘poblacho’ (dump). Zuñiga then prepared to take his leave. Thanking the King for his time, he urged him again to find a remedy ‘for the Virginia affair’ as soon as possible. James said he would ‘look into the matter’, and promised that the Privy Council would give Zuñiga ‘satisfaction’.¹⁴

Over the following few days, Zuñiga sent several messages to the Privy Council at ‘Moptoncurt’ (his Spaniolated rendering of Hampton Court), urging decisive action. Cecil eventually agreed on a meeting to finalize matters. Having studied the relevant treaties, Cecil (according to Zuñiga) agreed that the English ‘cannot go to Virginia’. Furthermore, he accepted that ‘if something bad happens to them, let it be their fault’.

With typical inscrutability, Cecil simultaneously told Smythe he wanted ‘a speedy dispatch of the ship intended to be sent to Virginia’.¹⁵ This instruction, together with Newport’s decision to rejoin the expedition, energized frantic efforts to equip and man two ships hired for the purpose, the John & Francis, and the Phoenix, both 250 tons.

As always, the expedition was desperately underfunded. To provide the settlers with cloth to keep them warm through the winter, Sir Thomas Smythe was reduced to buying moth-eaten samples left over from a previous East India Company voyage.¹⁶

By the beginning of October 1607, Newport was ready to sail. Smythe had managed to gather more than one hundred new settlers, including six tailors or cloth workers to look for opportunities for textile manufacturing, two apothecaries to find medicinal ingredients such as herbs, rare earths and animal parts, two goldsmiths and two refiners, to ensure more reliable tests of ore samples. A physician, a surgeon, a tobacco-pipe maker, a perfumer and a white greyhound made up the complement.¹⁷

The two ships sailed from the port of Gravesend, east of London, on 8 October. They stopped off at Plymouth to await favourable winds, and two weeks later set out into the Atlantic.¹⁸

EIGHT Bloody Flux

IN THE LIST OF SETTLERS who went to Virginia on the first voyage, William White is described as a ‘labourer’. This did not necessarily mean he was humbly born, as the term was used in passenger lists to identify those brought at another’s expense, such as sons brought by their fathers, or servants brought by their masters.¹

However, nearly all the labourers have one feature in common: very little is known about them. The only trace of biographical information relating to William White is a marginal note by George Percy describing him as a ‘made man’, a phrase used to refer to someone of low social standing who has unexpectedly come into a fortune, an arriviste or parvenu.²

Percy’s snooty assessment of this social inferior probably arose from White’s decision, soon after Newport’s fleet had first sailed up the James, to jump ship and join the Indians. He was one of several ‘renegades’ who understandably found the prospect of life with the Indians preferable to the dangers and depredations of the English camp.³

The renegades were rarely mentioned in official records or letters home. Their very existence was not officially recognized until 1612, when a regulation was introduced making it a capital offence to live without permission in the town of ‘any savage weroance’.⁴ The conspiracy of silence arose out of a combination of envy and resentment. When they slipped from the settlement, the renegades entered into the feverish imaginations of those left behind. They became voices from beyond the veil of trees and vines, taunting the settlers for putting up with such hardships, ridiculing English assumptions of cultural and technological superiority, beckoning their former comrades to drop their tools, and wander through the woods into the alluring Indian embrace.

White had somehow fallen into that embrace. He ended up ten miles upstream of Jamestown, at the town of Quiyoughcohannock, visited by the English during their first reconnaissance of the river. It sat on a high bluff overlooking the James (modern Claremont, Virginia). Its name meant ‘priest of the river’, and it served as the religious centre for those living along the banks. This may have been why its people were so curious about the English and their religion, and why they welcomed the nervous, bewildered interloper who had come among them.⁵

White would have been placed in the care of one of the senior women of the village, probably Oholasc, the stately queen of the Quiyoughcohannock, the most ‘handsome a savage woman as I have seen’, an English admirer noted. She was raising a son named Tatacoope, whose father was believed to be the mamanatowick Powhatan. Tatacoope was heir to the village chief, Pepiscuminah, or ‘Pipisco’, as the English called him. But Pipisco was in disgrace, having ‘stolen away’ one of Opechancanough’s wives. For this impertinence, he had been exiled to a nearby settlement, ‘with some few people about him’, including the offending woman. As a result, Chaopock, who was Pipisco’s brother from the neighbouring village of Chawopo, had been made acting weroance until Tatacoope came of age.⁶

Life for White in the court of this great queen would have been comfortable, at least compared to the conditions being endured at Jamestown. Just being part of a rhythm of daily life was a relief, particularly among such positive people. White noted that before dawn, the men and women, together with children older than ten years, would leave their beds and run down to the river. There they would bathe and wash, and await the sun’s arrival sitting on the bank, within a circle of dried tobacco leaves, such was their delight in the coming of a new day.⁷

After these daily ablutions, mothers would set out the breakfast, and summon their youngest boys to come to them with their toy bows and arrows. Only when they had managed to shoot a piece of moss tossed into the air could they tuck into a meal typically comprising boiled beans, fresh fish and corn bread, garnished with venison if the hunting was good. Older boys then went off with their fathers, to learn how to weave weirs and nets to catch fish, or to stalk game and butcher carcasses.⁸

And so one day passed into another, until White began to notice this idyll’s fragilities. In recent years, hunting had been bad. For reasons that mystified the Indians, the deer population in the vast woodlands surrounding the river was dwindling. As supply continued to shrink, demand was becoming desperate, if only to fulfil an annual tribute demanded by the mamanatowick Powhatan. Adding to the pressure was concern about a continuing lack of rain. The village store of corn and beans was running low, but the plants in the fields were not yet a foot high, suffering from the second year of a drought more extreme than even the elders could recall.⁹

The Quiyoughcohannock weroance Chaopock was also concerned about the amount of loot rival chiefs across the river were extracting from the starving English. The blue beads, copper and glittering minerals being offered in an ever greater multitude were valuable as symbols of chiefly power, and good substitutes for venison as tributes to offer Powhatan. The circumstances that had led to Chaopock’s promotion to chief made him sensitive about matters of status, and going to the English with his begging basket would be demeaning. But, with so many of his fellow weroances proving so greedy for the interlopers’ wares, Chaopock felt he had no choice but to go downriver to see what he could get. He went sometime in the summer, and returned a few days later, showing off a bright red waistcoat presented to him by the English weroance, Wingfield.¹⁰

Then the English were forgotten, as the village became preoccupied with internal matters. White had no idea what was going on, but frantic preparations signalled an important and rare event. The first sign that it was taking place was the appearance of community leaders in heavy make-up. ‘The people were so painted that a painter with his pencil could not have done better,’ White noted. ‘Some of them were black like devils, with horns and loose hair, some of divers colours.’

One day, White awoke to find the town deserted. Probing the surrounding woodland, he discovered the entire community congregating in a clearing, preparing for some grand event. There followed two days of frantic dancing, intensifying the mood of anticipation. The horned satyrs, carrying tree branches in their hands, danced in a quarter-of-a-mile circle around the village fire, one group moving in the opposite direction to the other, both emitting a ‘hellish noise’ when they met. The branches were then thrown to the ground, and the satyrs ‘ran clapping their hands into a tree’, from which they would tear another branch. Anyone who lagged behind was beaten by Chaopock’s personal guard with a ‘bastinado’ or cudgel made of tightly packed reeds. ‘Thus they made themselves scarce able to go or stand.’

On the third day, fourteen strong boys aged ten to fifteen years, painted white from head to foot, were led into the village’s central arena. For the rest of the morning, the adults danced around them, shaking rattles. In the afternoon, women arrived with dry wood, mats, skins and moss. White, with a growing sense of foreboding, noted that they had also brought funerary goods used in the preparation of corpses. The women then began a terrible wailing.

The boys were led to the foot of a tree, where they were made to sit, watched by warriors brandishing bastinados. Presently, a guard formed up into two lines facing each other, creating a path leading from where the boys were sitting to another tree. Five young men dressed as priests were allowed to fetch the boys one by one, and lead them along the path. As they went, the guards subjected them to a hail of blows, forcing the priests to shield the boys with their naked bodies, ‘to their great smart’. Once all fourteen boys had been transferred from the foot of one tree to another, this ritualized abduction was repeated, then repeated a third time. Finally, the pummelling ceased, and the guards tore down the last tree under which the boys had been seated, and decorated themselves with its dismembered branches and twigs.

White could not make out what had happened to the boys in the midst of the mêlée, and it was at this point in the proceedings that he was asked to leave. Later, however, he glimpsed them again, somewhere near the torn tree. They were ‘cast on a heap in a valley as dead’. His shock was compounded by Chief Chaopock, standing ‘in the midst’ of them, summoning his warriors to bring wood to build a great pyre, ‘set like a steeple’. White was convinced that these were preliminaries to sacrificing the children ‘to the devil, whom they call Kewase [Okeus], who, as they report, sucks their blood’.¹¹

Later that day, everyone returned to their houses, as if nothing had happened. Okeus’s work with the Quiyoughcohannock was evidently done, and the frenzied, gruesome mood that had gripped the town was allowed to subside. The smoke of the smouldering town fire carried the wanton spirit away from the houses, through the trees and out on to the river, where it turned towards the bay, following the smell of fresh blood.

On 6 August 1609, a Jamestown settler named John Asbie succumbed to ‘the bloody flux’. His death marked the start of a month of mortality in the English fort.

Sickness and desertion were already rife. Supplies were all but spent. There was nothing left to drink, and in the absence of a working well, the men were forced to use the river, ‘which was at a flood very salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men’.¹²

Rations from the ‘common kettle’ were ‘half a pint of wheat and as much barley boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fried some 26 weeks in the ship’s hold’. This put pressure on other sources of sustenance, including Wingfield’s flock of chickens. Only three survived to peck at the hard ground between the frail tents, when they were not being chased by ravenous labourers.¹³

Responsibility for this sorry state of affairs has traditionally been laid at the feet of the English class system. Unlike the hard-working, clean-living Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in 1620, the ‘gentlemen’ who made up such a large proportion of Jamestown’s population have been portrayed as work-shy fops and dandies who ‘were used to social strata but not to discipline’, and who preferred the ‘narcissistic contemplation of heredity’ to getting their hands dirty.¹⁴

In fact, most of the gentlemen of Jamestown had military backgrounds, and, while some hated the idea of heavy manual labour, they by no means saw themselves as due a life of ease.

Captain John Smith was himself a gentleman, and proud to be called so, advertising in his autobiography that the title had been endorsed by no less a figure than the King of Poland.¹⁵ Most of the others similarly classified had less heredity to contemplate than even Smith. He, at least, had a ‘competent means’ from his father and the patronage of a prominent member of the English nobility. Many had lived hard lives on the battlefields of the Low Countries, France and Ireland, or on the edge of destitution. Some were quite poor, the family of one military captain, for example, boasting an estate worth just twenty shillings.¹⁶ Perhaps one or two were feckless opportunists who preferred to rely on their charm and wits rather than honest toil to make a living. But their behaviour was a consequence of the relative lack of social privilege, not an excess of it. Similarly, they had not crossed the Atlantic and put themselves in the predicament in which they now found themselves because life at home had been so easy, but because it had been so hard.

Smith’s peers, particularly the squabbling council members, may have contributed to the settlement’s first crisis, but even he acknowledged that the damage they caused was collateral. The origin of Jamestown’s woes, at least in these early stages of settlement, lay in the simple lack of food. Calculations for provisioning the expedition had inevitably erred on the side of stinginess, with enough to cover a two-month crossing, and six more months in America while a planting of crops ripened, the fort was built, and trade relations with the Indians were established. According to this timetable, a harvest would be ready by the time the supplies started to run out, which could supplement, and ultimately replace, food bought from the Indians.¹⁷ Unfortunately, the crossing had taken not two months but five. This triggered a cascade of problems: by the time they arrived, the planting season had been all but missed, so there was no hope of a proper harvest in August; the crews of the Susan Constant and the Godspeed, who were due to return to England, had run out of their own supplies, so had to be fed out of the settlement’s store while Newport reconnoitreed the river. This left the settlers fewer than twelve weeks to acclimatize to their new surroundings and become self-sufficient.¹⁸

Both at the time and since, critics have wondered why they could not live off Virginia’s natural resources, given the abundance apparently at their disposal. Smith, Archer, Percy and countless successors boasted about the fat vines and fruitful trees, the nuts and berries, the deer running through the forest and the rodents scampering in the undergrowth, the sturgeon in the river and the oysters on the shore. Could that not feed a hundred or so men, in the middle of summer? The Indians’ own experience demonstrates otherwise. Hunting, fishing and scavenging, which they performed with astonishing efficiency, provided only a third of their daily needs, averaged out over the year; the other two thirds coming from their staple crop of cultivated corn and beans. The English, being in an alien environment, were bound to rely on a staple crop to provide a much higher proportion of their diet – four fifths at least, which meant finding between one and two tons of corn every week, just to survive.¹⁹

Back in June, there had been hopes that the Indians would make up the deficit. A messenger had arrived at the fort, claiming to be an emissary of the ‘Great Powhatan’. The mamanatowick wanted peace with the English, and ‘desired greatly’ their friendship. Furthermore, he had commanded all attacks on the fort to cease, so that the English ‘should sow and reap in peace’. If any Indians ignored this command, he would, he pledged, ‘make wars upon them with us’. ‘This message fell out true,’ Wingfield later observed, ‘for both those weroances have ever since remained in peace and trade with us.’ It was soon after this that Wingfield had been approached by the Quiyoughcohannock chief Chaopock, promising peace and offering food supplies in the autumn, for which Wingfield offered him his red waistcoat, knowing English clothes to be among the possessions most prized by the Indians.

However, peace with the Indians did not yield the hoped-for influx of food. Skirmishes continued with the Paspahegh, and a high level of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding made trading difficult with more distant towns.

By August, each man was receiving fewer than five hundred calories in his daily ration, and the result was a lethal combination of rampant disease and seething discontent. Rumours began to spread that some of the gentlemen, in particular the suspiciously healthy Wingfield, were hoarding private supplies. There was talk of the council hiding a stash of oil and alcoholic drink, and of the councillors’ ‘privates’ or favourites getting preferential treatment. One of the gentlemen, Jehu (or John) Robinson, was accused by Wingfield of plotting to seize the shallop and escape with associates to Newfoundland.

As the death toll began to rise, it became clear that social status provided little protection. Percy kept a doleful muster of the dead for those summer months, and it makes solemn reading: John Asbie, the first casualty, was followed two days later by George Flower, gentleman, who died ‘of the swelling’. Next was William Brewster, ‘of a wound given by the savages’, who was buried on 11 August.

August 14 was one of the worst days. Francis Midwinter, gentleman, and Edward Morris, ‘corporal’, died ‘suddenly’, and Jerome Alicock, the settlement’s standard-bearer, was dispatched by a ‘wound’. A skeleton with a bullet-shattered shin was dug up at Jamestown nearly four hundred years later, raising speculation that it may have been Alicock. Another candidate is the following day’s casualty: Stephen Calthorp, the man who had been accused of instigating the ‘intended and confessed mutiny’ involving Captain Smith.²⁰

Over the following three days, four more settlers died, including John Martin, son of councilman John Martin senior. Martin senior had been confined to his tent for some time, his various ailments making him too weak to leave his sickbed. But bitterness over the death of his child stirred him into action, and he accused Wingfield of ‘defrauding’ his son of the rations he needed to survive.

A day later, Drew Pickhouse, an impoverished former Sussex MP, followed the others into a makeshift grave. He had hoped to find good fortune abroad, having lost his estate at home following a legal dispute with a local aristocrat. He had left behind a wife and eleven children, presumably in rented accommodation. They would not learn of his and their fate for another eleven months.²¹

A two-day respite did not prepare the settlers for the most distressing death of all: that of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold on 22 August, after three weeks of illness. Just before Newport had taken his leave of the settlement to return to England, President Wingfield had confided that he feared only two rivals taking over the presidency, that ‘ambitious spirit’ Archer, who ‘would if he could’, and Gosnold, who was so ‘strong with friends and followers’ he ‘could if he would’. Now he could not, depriving the settlers of the one man who seemed to command the confidence and respect that might lead them out of their troubles and miseries.

The next day, flocks of birds burst into the air as the boom of Jamestown’s huge culverins saluted Gosnold’s burial. He was interred with full military honours in a grave next to the river. A week later, Thomas Studley, the ‘cape merchant’ responsible for trade with the Indians, followed him.

The gloom lifted briefly when a ‘boy’, one of the ‘renegades’, was returned by the Paspahegh chief, with ‘the first assurance of his peace with us’. But it was not enough to prevent the council’s long-expected disintegration.

Under the stress of malnutrition, surviving council members began to argue violently with one another, as the conviction formed that there was a saboteur in their midst. All the suspicions and sectarianism that they had thought they had left behind them, suddenly and violently erupted in the midst of their misery.

Kendall was the first to be accused. It somehow emerged that he was a spy who had consorted with Sir William Stanley, a renegade English captain who had switched to the Spanish side in the Low Countries campaign. Kendall’s remonstrations that he had been working undercover for Cecil, and revelations that there were others on the council who were doing the same, were not enough to save him from being arrested for such ‘heinous matters’.²²

Kendall’s incarceration failed to produce an improvement in conditions, and the hungry eye of suspicion began to glance around the remaining council members. It came to rest on the plump form of President Wingfield, who seemed to be surviving the privations of recent weeks suspiciously well. His regular refusal to attend Robert Hunt’s alfresco services also raised doubts about his religious loyalties. The other three active members of the council, John Ratcliffe, John Smith and John Martin, voted for him to be removed from the council. His replacement as president, Ratcliffe, then arrested him for a list of crimes against the colony carefully tabulated by Gabriel Archer, who was still smarting at his own exclusion from the council. Wingfield was swiftly tried, and confined to the pinnace following the inevitable sentence of guilt.

But with each allegation, the paranoia intensified rather than diminished, and now a wave of rumours about Ratcliffe spread through the camp. Old questions about his unexpected selection as a commander of the fleet, and nomination to the council, began to take on a new significance. Who was this man who had so skilfully manoeuvred himself into such a powerful position? Where did he come from? Was he the Ratcliffe who, like Kendall, had acted as a spy in the Low Countries, penetrating, or perhaps being a member of, a powerful Catholic cell? Or was he the Ratcliffe who had been imprisoned in the Tower alongside Guy Fawkes following the Gunpowder Plot? Or the Ratcliffe who was a close friend of Cecil’s cryptographer and secretary Richard Percival?²³

Kendall, who in the chaos of the camp had manage to get access to other members of the council, had his own scurrilous answers to such questions, and by sharing them, hardened speculation that it was Ratcliffe who, all along, was the source of their sorrows.

A group of men, Percy and Smith among them, began to agitate for Ratcliffe’s removal. They proposed that the blacksmith James Read, who had access to the pinnace to maintain the metal fittings, approach Wingfield to see if he would back a plot to restore him to the presidency.

Ratcliffe learned of these intrigues, and gave Read a public thrashing for his ‘misdemeanour’. The smith, a qualified craftsman rather than a manual worker, considered someone of his status deserved more respectful treatment, and ‘offered’ to strike the president with his sledgehammer in return.

Once again, the rotting canvas of the settlement’s tents became the walls of a makeshift courtroom, and the stump of a tree the judge’s bench, as Read was tried for mutiny. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Permanent gallows were among the many fixtures of a settled community that the company still lacked, so a rope was tied to the branch of a tree and a ladder propped against the trunk, to be kicked away once the noose was around the neck of the condemned. When it came to carrying out the sentence, the blacksmith was naturally ‘very obstinate’, and put up a fight. Finally, he was forced up the ladder, where ‘he saw no other way but death with him’, and became ‘penitent’. He begged for a word with Ratcliffe regarding a private matter.

Ratcliffe granted his request, and the smith revealed to him details of Kendall’s involvement in a plot to restore Wingfield. Ratcliffe granted Read a pardon, and, for reasons yet to be disclosed to the rest of the company, ordered Kendall’s immediate arrest and confinement aboard the pinnace, alongside Wingfield.

In the midst of this turmoil, Smith replaced the late Thomas Studley as cape merchant. In his view, this put him in charge of dealing with the Indians, and eager to escape the broils tearing the company apart, he set off on a number of expeditions up the James, to trade for fresh supplies. Even Wingfield was impressed with the captain’s vigour and dedication to the task, which at this time of direst need ‘relieved the colony well’.

Smith faced formidable obstacles. Few men were in a fit state to accompany him, they were all inadequately equipped, none was proficient in the local language, and Smith lacked the skills of a mariner to sail the shallop. But, ever willing to confront overwhelming difficulties with confident resolve, he set off downriver, heading for Kecoughtan, at the mouth of the James.

His reception by the people of Kecoughtan was very different from the one received by Newport when the fleet first arrived. As his boat approached the shore, Smith claimed he was ‘scorned’ like a ‘famished man’, the Indians offering him ‘in derision … a handful of corn, a piece of bread for their swords and muskets, and suchlike proportions also for their apparel’. In typically boisterous style, Smith drove the boat on to the beach, and ordered his men to ‘let fly’ their muskets, even though he knew this was ‘contrary to his commission,’ as set out in the Royal Council’s instructions. The Kecoughtans melted away into the woods.

Smith headed towards the village, passing what he claimed to be ‘great heaps of corn’, recently harvested from the surrounding fields. Then he heard a ‘most hideous noise’. Sixty or seventy villagers, ‘some black, some red, some white, some parti-coloured, came in a square order, singing and dancing out of the woods’. They carried before them what Smith saw as a diabolical doll ‘which was an idol made of skins stuffed with moss, all painted and hung with chains and copper’. Smith thought it was Okeus, the most powerful god of the Powhatan pantheon, who another English observer noted could look ‘into all men’s actions and, examining the same according to the severe scale of justice, punisheth them with sicknesses, beats them, and strikes their ripe corn with blastings, storms, and thunderclaps, stirs up war, and makes their women false unto them’.²⁴ If it was Okeus, his appearance in such a manner, before the Otasantasuwak, the wearer of leg coverings, was unprecedented. This god, the English were later told, had prophesied their coming to Virginia, and his appearance now must have been designed to stage a momentous confrontation: to frighten the invaders off, perhaps, or possibly the opposite: to lure them in, integrate them into the Powhatan world, to see what havoc they would wreak.

Smith at this moment had little interest in spiritual speculations, and ordered his men to attack the oncoming parade ‘with their muskets loaden with pistol shot’ until ‘down fell their god, and divers lay sprawling on the ground’. Smith snatched the idol, and the Indians disappeared into the woods. Presently, a priest approached offering peace for the return of the okee. Smith told them if six of them came unarmed and loaded his boat, he would ‘not only be their friend, but restore them their okee, and give them beads, copper’. This the Kecoughtans did, according to Smith, loading his boat with venison, turkeys, wildfowl and corn, while ‘singing and dancing in sign of friendship’.²⁵

Smith set off back for Jamestown, congratulating himself that his more robust approach to Indian relations was already paying dividends. En route, he stopped off at Warraskoyack, a few miles upstream of Kecoughtan, on the opposite bank of the river. There he managed to extract some more corn, a total, he claimed, of thirty bushels, getting on for a ton.

Back at the fort, he distributed the corn, but found that the thanks and appreciation he felt he deserved were muffled by the ravenous stuffing of mouths.

In any case, this was no long-term solution. Thirty bushels of corn would feed forty or so men for four or five days. With barely two weeks’ worth of food left of the store brought from England, a more drastic solution was called for.

According to Smith, Ratcliffe suggested that he take the pinnace back to England ‘to procure a supply’. Memories were still fresh of Ratcliffe’s proposal that the fleet return home even as it was on the threshold of Chesapeake Bay, and to Smith this new idea suggested some darker design, perhaps to deprive the colony of its only means of escape. After the inevitable bout of violent argument, it was agreed that instead the pinnace and shallop should be taken upriver to the falls, in the hope that sufficient supplies could be extracted, violently or otherwise, from the Indian villages sitting among those fertile lands. ‘Lots were cast’ to decide who would command the expedition, and the lots somehow contrived to make the obvious selection of Smith.

The mariners set about rigging the pinnace, an operation that would take a few days, as the ship’s masts and sails had been stowed in the fort to prevent it being taken. Meanwhile, Smith continued his search for food. He set off in the shallop for Quiyoughcohannock. He found the village abandoned, except for ‘certain women and children who fled from their houses’. ‘Corn they had plenty,’ Smith observed, but he had no commission to ‘spoil’ or loot, so he left the village unmolested. On the return journey to Jamestown, he visited Paspahegh. With the English settlement now so firmly entrenched on their land, relations with these people were still bad. Smith described them as ‘churlish and treacherous’, and accused them of trying to steal English weapons as he traded for ten bushels of corn.

The pinnace was now ready for the expedition to the falls, and, arranging to rendezvous with the ship by the next tide at Point Weanock, Smith set off in the shallop to explore the Chickahominy, the tributary of the James.

He left Jamestown on the morning of 9 November, and reached Paspahegh, at the confluence of the James and Chickahominy, that afternoon. The tide was low, so the captain and his company of eight or so men waited at the Indian village. As evening approached, an Indian from one of the villages along the Chickahominy came to Paspahegh and offered to guide the English up the river. The Paspaheghans ‘grudged thereat’. Smith, observing an opportunity to snub his ungrateful hosts, accepted the invitation. By the light of the moon, he took the shallop up the Chickahominy, reaching Menascosic, his guide’s village, by midnight. ‘The next morning,’ Smith records, ‘I went up to the town and showed them what copper and hatchets they should have for corn, each family seeking to give me most content.’

According to Smith, the people of Menascosic would have sold him all the corn he wanted, but ‘lest they should perceive my too great want’, he refused further offers, and continued upriver looking for other people to trade with, passing along the way a grove of plane trees ‘watered with many springs’, and ‘a great marsh of 4 or 5 miles circuit, divided in 2 islands by the parting of the river, abounding with fish and fowl of all sorts’. Further on he discovered a series of villages, ‘at each place kindly used, especially at the last’, which was Mamanahunt, ‘being the heart of the country, where were assembled 200 people with such abundance of corn as having laded our barge as also I might have laded a ship’. Smith triumphantly set off back to Jamestown, his sojourn vindicated by seven hogsheads of food, equivalent to nearly fifty bushels, at least a week’s supply.

The shallop arrived at Jamestown in the middle of the night. As it slipped through the water of the river towards the flickering beacon of the fort’s night watch, Smith noticed something odd. The pinnace, which should have used the high tide to sail upstream for the intended rendezvous, was marooned on a sandbank near the fort.²⁶

The sun rose the following morning upon a settlement once more in the throes of mutiny. Having managed to ‘strengthen’ himself with the ship’s crew, Kendall had hijacked the pinnace, and set sail for Spain, in order to reveal to King Philip ‘all about this country and many plans of the English which he knew’. He was somehow prevented, incompetent navigation or the crew’s intervention driving the ship on to the mud.

Kendall was removed from the pinnace, tried for mutiny, and sentenced to death by firing squad. In a desperate attempt to escape his punishment, he revealed what only a former Cecil agent would know: that the president, in whose name the sentence was passed, was not called Ratcliffe. He had been operating under an alias all the time. His real name was John Sicklemore.

This revelation added yet a further layer of mystery to this heavily laminated individual. Sicklemore was a name much rarer than Ratcliffe, and he may have been forced to abandon it following some crime or indiscretion. In the State papers of the time, the only Sicklemore of note was a Catholic priest operating under the alias John Ward. As part of the Gunpowder Plot investigation, he was discovered to be conducting secret Masses in a series of households in Northumberland – curiously including a family named Ratcliffe. But that Sicklemore was thought to have escaped to the Continent.²⁷ Could a further change of identity somehow have transformed a papist agitator into a colonial adventurer?

Speculation was pointless. The gravity of Kendall’s crimes made Ratcliffe’s name change seem a mere technicality, and Gabriel Archer, who had now emerged as the president’s most loyal lieutenant, had the legal training and natural cunning to circumvent pseudonymity. Under the Royal Council’s instructions, Ratcliffe could delegate his judicial powers to fellow councilior John Martin, whose name was his own. So it was Martin who condemned Kendall to death, and a few days later, the prisoner was led out of the fort and shot.²⁸

These events once more threw the council into disarray, prompting further efforts to reinstate Wingfield, led by a group of ‘best sort of the gentlemen’. Wingfield refused to countenance the idea whilst Ratcliffe and Archer were still at large, and when efforts to arraign them failed, he attempted to commandeer the pinnace so he could sail to England and ‘acquaint our [Royal] Council there with our weakness’. Smith claims to have stopped him with rounds of musket and cannon fire, which forced him to ‘stay or sink in the river’.²⁹

This all happened during November 1607. The onset of winter, which was colder than the English had expected after such a hot summer, brought an unexpected bounty of food. ‘The rivers became so covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowl, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them,’ reported Smith. It was such a cornucopia even the ‘Tuftaffaty humourists’ Martin, Ratcliffe, Wingfield and Percy, lost interest in returning to England.

To take advantage of the sudden increase, and perhaps because the pinnace was not currently serviceable, Smith decided upon one further expedition up the Chickahominy in the shallop, this time with the intention of reaching its source. Smith still harboured hopes of discovering a navigable way to the South Sea, and wondered whether the Chickahominy might bypass the geological obstacle that blocked the James at the falls.

He left on 10 December, taking with him Thomas Emry, Jehu Robinson, George Casson and three or four others.

Sometime in late November or early December, as the warmth of autumn subsided into a bitterly cold winter, William White found himself in the midst of another outburst of activity, as the Quiyoughcohannock started packing mats, hides, weapons and supplies in preparation for an expedition.

All the men, including White, and several of the women, set off with their luggage to the river, where they loaded up a fleet of long canoes. They were joined on the bank by the deposed Quiyoughcohannock Chief Pipisco, together with his ‘best-beloved’, the wife he had ‘stolen’ from Opechancanough. Under the relaxed terms of Pipisco’s exile, the couple was allowed to travel ‘in hunting time’.³⁰

The entire troupe boarded the canoes, and set off down the James. Arriving at Paspahegh, they turned up the Chickahominy tributary, heading north-west, continuing forty or so miles upstream, the waterway becoming almost impassable beneath a canopy of low branches and fallen trees. Eventually, as the river course approached a series of cataracts, the fleet drew up on the northern bank and disembarked. Close by, in a woodland clearing, they set up a large encampment, comprising forty or so tents made of sapling branches covered with mats. They named the camp ‘Rassaweck’, which was to be their base for a series of hunting expeditions, the deer being more plentiful in this remote area of the forest, at the hem of the foothills leading into the great western mountain range.

They were joined by people from villages near and far, and by Opechancanough. White observed the man dismissed by the English as a pompous fool being received at the camp as a great general, attended by twenty guards in the finest garb, brandishing swords made of bone edged with slivers of precious rock.

Conditions in the camp were challenging. The cold was ‘extreme sharp’, and a freezing north-west wind whipped through the makeshift dwellings. The Indians seemed unaffected, claiming that their red body paint, made from the root pocone mixed with oil, made them impervious (this, not their natural complexion, was the reason they became known as ‘red’ Indians). To an Englishman, still clad in the summer clothes he had been wearing when he absconded, or wearing the scant Indian garments he had been forced to adopt since, thoughts might have started to stray to the warmth of a winter coat and even a settler’s cabin.³¹

A week into December 1607, the mood in the camp suddenly became agitated. After a flurry of activity around Opechancanough’s tent, a group of warriors entered the camp, dragging with them a captive Englishman. White recognized him as George Casson, one of three Cassons, probably brothers, who had accompanied him on the journey from England.

The man White now beheld was not the one who just a year ago had stood alongside him on the dockside at Deptford, awaiting departure to the New World. He was undernourished, badly injured and terrified for his life. For some reason, he had aroused fury in his captors. They violently jostled him towards the campfire, where Opechancanough awaited him.

White was an obvious candidate to act as interpreter in the subsequent interrogation. Casson, it transpired, had been caught at Appocant, a village lower down the Chickahominy. The vessel used by the English for exploration had been found anchored there, with Casson left on board to guard it. He had been ‘enticed’ ashore by some women from the village, and then captured.³² The reaction of his captors suggested he might have attacked or even raped one of the women.

Opechancanough was already aware that one of the English captains had entered his territory. This Otasantasuwak or one-who-wears-trousers had come into the Powhatan heartlands not with the stealth of an Indian, but like a lumbering pachyderm, crashing through the trees, scattering flocks of birds and herds of woodland creatures before him. The same man had already engaged in several raids up the James and Chickahominy for food, Quiyoughcohannock being among the targets.³³

Casson had little more to add, other than pathetic appeals for clemency, and the name of the captain: John Smith. This information extracted, he was stripped of his clothes until he stood naked before the gathering assembly of men, women and children, his front frozen by the winter chill, his back heated by the crackling fire. Two wooden stakes were driven into the ground either side of him, to which his ankles and wrists were bound.

Opechancanough continued to interrogate the terrified captive about this captain’s intentions. A warrior or priest then approached, brandishing mussel shells and reeds. Using the edges of the shells as blades, and the reeds as cheese-wires, the executioner systematically set about cutting through the flesh and sinews of Casson’s joints, stretched out between the staves. As each of his limbs was removed, it was cast upon the fire, until only his head and trunk were left, writhing helplessly on the blood-soaked ground.

Turning the torso over, so Casson faced the ground, the executioner carefully cut a slit around the neck, then slipped a mussel shell beneath the skin. He proceeded to ease off the scalp, and, turning the body back over again, gently unpeeled Casson’s face from the skull. He then slit open Casson’s abdomen, and pulled out his stomach and bowels, which steamed in the cold winter air. Casson’s remains then joined the rest of his body to burn on the fire, until only his dried bones were left, which, according to White, were gathered up and deposited in a ‘by-room’ in one of the tents.³⁴

The punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered was well-known in Europe, being reserved as retribution for the worst crimes against the monarch. The Indian equivalent was, if anything, more refined in its brutal theatricality. It was not the usual form of capital punishment (murderers were beaten to death with sticks, thieves knocked on the head), and there are only two instances of its use recorded in Virginia. It may have been reserved for foreigners, or for particular crimes, or, in the case of Casson, to be witnessed by an outsider – a lurid warning to share with his countrymen when, in terror, he ran back to them.³⁵

White trekked or canoed the difficult twenty-five miles from Rassaweck to Jamestown, and staggered into the fort to find not the refuge he would have hoped for, but a midden of disease and destitution. The council was too weak to discipline the young man. Instead he was debriefed, in the hope that his experience of life with the Indians would reveal their motives and intentions. The terrifying finale of Casson’s torture and execution demonstrated that such hopes were in vain.

Soon after, members of Smith’s party somehow made their way back to the fort with news that they had lost contact not only with several members of their company, but Smith himself, who had disappeared further upriver in a canoe. A search party was sent soon after to discover Smith’s fate, and returned with the corpses of Emry and Robinson, the latter found with as many as thirty arrows in his body. Of Smith, there was no sign. The settlers must have feared – and some of them hoped – for the worst.

At around the same time, Ratcliffe appointed Gabriel Archer to the council. He did this without John Martin’s consent, and despite howls of protest coming from Wingfield’s cabin in the pinnace.

The winter had by now set in with a vengeance, the onset, research has subsequently revealed, of a ‘Little Ice Age’ that plunged the northern hemisphere into one of the coldest spells for centuries. In London, one of the Thames’s rare ‘frost fairs’ was in progress, the river freezing over so firmly that innumerable booths were soon to be found ‘standing upon the ice, as fruitsellers, victuallers, that sold beer and wine, shoe makers and a barber’s tent’.³⁶ Virginia was on the same latitude as southern Spain, and the English had assumed the climate would be similarly Mediterranean. Now they were learning otherwise, and as they endured the bitter night frosts in their drafty tents, and snow flurries during the day, most assumed Smith must have died of exposure, if he had not been tortured and killed by the Indians.³⁷

One particularly cold day, when the ground was encrusted by a thick hoar frost and snow danced in the air, three lightly clad warriors stepped nimbly out of the forest and approached the fort. Guards chased them off, but as night fell, they returned, and were discovered to be carrying a piece of paper torn from a notebook. It bore a message from Smith.

The note revealed that Opechancanough, the chief Archer had dismissed as a fool at ‘Pamunkey’s Palace’, had taken him prisoner. Smith wrote that he had been offered ‘life, liberty, land and women’ if he provided information on Jamestown’s defensive weaknesses, which must mean that a full-scale attack on the fort was being planned. He ordered the soldiers to let off some of the field artillery, to demonstrate to the messengers the strength of English arms.

The message also listed a series of articles which the messengers were to take back with them. They had been told before their departure what had been asked for, so were intrigued to see these very items produced, as though Smith ‘could either divine or the paper could speak’.³⁸

As Ratcliffe, Martin, Percy and the others watched the messengers run back into the forest, the camp was seized by a sense of common purpose. A thorough review of defences was ordered. A gruelling roster was drawn up for the watch, each man bearing arms to serve once every three days, watching all night ‘lying on the bare cold ground, what weather soever came’, and all the following day, ‘which brought our men to be most feeble wretches’. Smith’s expeditions up the Chickahominy, one or two undertaken by Martin, and the abundance of fish and waterfowl had eased the food situation, allowing some further reinforcement of the fort’s defences, as well as the construction of a few huts and common buildings.

On 2 January 1608, a company of warriors came out from the woods, two carrying baskets, another a coat and a knapsack, another walking alongside an Englishman. Even in the gloomy dawn of a January morning, guards could tell from the stocky frame and bushy beard that the Englishman was John Smith, and that the men around him were not captors, but an escort.³⁹

Smith marched into the fort and immediately ordered the guard to fetch a millstone and two demi-culverins for the Indians to take home. Puzzled at what on the face of it was a violation of the instruction preventing the Indians having access to English arms, they duly produced the items, and Smith was able to amuse himself as the Indians struggled to lift the stone and five tons of cannon. Once they had given up, he ordered that the culverins be charged and loaded with stones. They were fired into a nearby copse of trees ‘loaded with icicles’, and the ‘ice and branches came so tumbling down that the poor savages ran away half dead with fear’.

Smith’s dramatic reappearance provoked a mixed response. ‘Each man with the truest signs of joy they could express welcomed me,’ was Smith’s recollection, ‘except Master Archer and some 2 or 3 of his [friends].’ Archer, exercising his questionable powers as a councillor, called for Smith’s arrest ‘for the lives of Robinson and Emry’, the two men killed by the Indians while accompanying Smith into the upper reaches of the Chickahominy.⁴⁰

Archer insisted that Smith be tried for the charges ‘upon a chapter in Leviticus’. This curious choice of legal device hints that Smith, who had returned full of excited talk of pagan rites, comely queens and Indian embraces, was suspected of some sexual impropriety with his captors, which provided a pretext for avenging the death of his two companions.⁴¹

Whatever the purpose behind the charges, they resulted in Smith being tried the day of his return. He was pronounced guilty, and in sentencing denied even the dignity of a soldier’s death before a firing squad. The rope was once more flung over the tree branch, the ladder once more propped up against the trunk. ‘But it pleased God,’ wrote Wingfield, ‘to send Captain Newport unto us the same evening, to our unspeakable comforts; whose arrival saved Master Smith’s life.’

NINE True Relations

NEWPORT’S ‘GOOD TALL SHIP’ the John & Francis arrived at Jamestown on 2 January 1608. The crossing had taken three months, a stop at Dominica providing a chance to supplement the stores brought from England with a variety of more exotic goods, such as potatoes, bananas and pineapple, plus some parrots, to entertain the settlers, if not to feed them. Though the arrival of so many more mouths to feed must have aroused some apprehension, the belated fulfilment of Newport’s promise to return was met with relief and delight, spoiled only by the news that the consort vessel the Phoenix, under the mastership of Captain Francis Nelson, had gone missing in fog just 30 or so miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake.¹

As soon as he was ashore, the admiral set about re-establishing his authority. As well as halting Smith’s execution, he released Wingfield from the pinnace, and stopped Archer calling a ‘parliament’, an assembly of all the settlers, which he may have tried to summon in a final attempt to overthrow Smith. Newport confirmed Smith’s membership of the council, but stripped him of the office of cape merchant, that job being given to one of the new arrivals, John Taverner. Smith no doubt resented the demotion, not least because it weakened his claim to being in charge of relations with the Indians.

Another newcomer, Matthew Scrivener, ‘a very wise, understanding gentleman’, was sworn in as a new councillor. John Martin was put in charge of recovering the correct sample of gold-bearing earth to take back to England. Percy, meanwhile, remained on the sidelines. Despite the council’s lack of numbers, he was still discounted from office.²

Newport also took swift steps to improve the lot of the long-suffering settlers. He commanded his crew to set about building a ‘fair storehouse’ for the bounties brought from England, a ‘stove’ or warm room to provide respite from the cold, and a proper church, no doubt to the delight of the neglected chaplain Hunt.

The relief was short-lived. On 7 January, a fire swept through the fort, which destroyed all but three of the existing buildings, together with the palisades, ammunition, clothes, food supplies and Preacher Hunt’s library of books. One of the new settlers, Francis Perkins, ‘gentleman’, who had arrived with his son, also Francis, ‘labourer’, was distraught to discover that all their possessions had perished, except for a mattress, which had yet to be unloaded from the ship. Meanwhile, President Ratcliffe was badly hurt in a shooting accident, his pistol blowing up as he attempted to fire it. It ‘split his hand’, leaving him with injuries that would take months to heal.³

After such a setback, the settlers needed a distraction from their woes, and Smith readily supplied it, by telling them the extraordinary ‘relation’ of his capture by the Indians, and his meeting with the great Powhatan. It was a story that only he could tell. But it would revive their ‘dead spirits’, he promised, as well as capture imaginations for generations to come.

Captain Smith’s Relation of his being Taken Prisoner by the Indians, how they Conjured Him, Powhatan entertained Him, would have slain him, and how his daughter saved his life

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