7
“DAMN YOUR SOULS! MAKE TOBACCO!”
When Christopher Newport finally returned to Jamestown in the fall of 1608 on the Mary and Margaret, he found that beneficial changes had been made. John Smith had been elected President, and he had put everyone, including gentlemen, to work repairing the storehouses and enlarging the fort. He had even overseen the planting and harvesting of a small but successful corn crop, which they harvested and stored in casks. However, when they had need of it, they found that rain had gotten into the casks and ruined it. What was more, most of the provisions from the previous supply ship, Phoenix, had been consumed. Worst of all, Newport had now brought seventy new settlers with him, including the first two women to arrive at Jamestown—and no food. Once again, the little colony was in crisis and on the verge of collapse.
Newport also brought with him orders from the Virginia Company Partners to bring Powhatan under control by officially crowning him as a subject king under the lordship of His Majesty, James I. As added inducements to get Powhatan to accept his subordinate position, the English were to give him a copper crown, a few scarlet robes, a washbasin and pitcher, and, best of all, a truly king-sized bed.
John Smith protested to Newport that crowning Powhatan would inflate his self-importance to the point that he would be impossible to deal with. Besides, the whole thing was a waste of good working time. Why didn’t they just give Powhatan his presents and forget this coronation business? But Newport had his orders, and orders were orders.
The Captain did send Smith to Powhatan, to invite him to come to Jamestown and there receive presents from the King of England. The sachem reacted with indignation: “If your King has sent me presents, I also am a King, and this is my land: eight days I will stay to receive them. Your Father is to come to me, not I to him, nor yet to your fort.” In the face of that outburst Smith felt it best not to tell Powhatan about the plans to crown him.
No one does coronations better than the English, who by 1608 had been doing them for a very long time. All must be done properly and in good order, which meant that the subject had to kneel to receive his or her crown.
Powhatan had put on his bright new red robe and was quite ready to let the English do whatever it was they were going to do, until they brought up the matter of kneeling. Though he understood nothing of the protocol of English royal coronations, he understood all too well what kneeling in front of someone meant. It was a sign of submission, and he was not about to do it.
“A foul trouble there was to make him kneel to receive his crown,” wrote Smith, “he neither knowing the majesty nor meaning of a crown, nor bending of the knee, endured so many persuasions, examples, and instructions, as tired them all.”
Finally, Smith and Newport decided that “the laying on of hands” was called for. “At last by leaning hard on his shoulders, he a little stooped, and three [men] having the crown in their hands put it on his head.” When the deed was done, a signal pistol was fired, and the boats fired a loud salute from their cannons, which caused Powhatan to “start up in a horrible fear, till he saw all was well.”1 The English threw their hats in the air and shouted, “Long live the King!” Thus ended the first and only coronation to take place on North American soil.
The new vassal King responded with a small gift of seven or eight bushels of wheat, and Newport was able to buy an equal amount in the Indian village, but the English were heading back to Jamestown with only several days’ worth of food for the colony.
In London the Partners had given Christopher Newport another order: he was to find or bring back word of “any of them sent by Sir Walter Raleigh”—the lost colonists of Roanoke. To his credit, Smith had set out on three separate exploring expeditions in 1608 to try to discover the fate of Raleigh’s 1587 expedition, but he had returned with nothing but intriguing rumors.* Far southwest of Jamestown, one Indian chief and two English settlers were told that at a village called Pakerikanick there were “four men clothed” that had come from Roanoke, but they broke off their search. Smith kept hearing from the Indians about a tribe southwest of Chesapeake Bay whose people had houses built with stone walls and one story above another, “so taught them by those English.”2
To Smith, there was a challenge far more critical than discovering the fate of the lost colonists. He had around two hundred mouths to feed now, each needing a pint of grain per day, which meant he had to find about twenty-two bushels every week. As fall turned into winter, trade with the Indians dried up because they were now demanding English weapons in exchange for their corn. It seems likely that the sailors from the Mary and Margaret were offering swords to the Indians for food.
The situation became desperate when they realized that there was not even enough food in the colony to provision the Mary and Margaret for the voyage home. Finally, just before Christmas, Smith took forty-six men with him in the pinnace to force Powhatan to resume trading, even if he had to capture the sachem to do it.
Powhatan was on guard and somewhat hostile, undoubtedly having been warned of Smith’s intentions by two carpenters who had run away from Jamestown’s troubles to live with the Indians. The wily old chief and Smith, both suspicious of each other, began a classic cat-and-mouse game.
The chief claimed that he had no corn to spare in trade. Then he indicated that he would swap a basket of corn for one full of copper. Finally, he upped the ante by refusing to trade corn for anything except guns and swords.
When Smith curtly replied that he would do nothing of the sort, Powhatan let it drop that he knew that Smith intended to attack him, but the chief claimed that on his part he wanted no war with the English. Then he added some words of wisdom: “Captain Smith, having seen the death of all my people thrice, and not anyone living of those three generations but myself, I know the difference between peace and war better than any in my country. . . . Think you I am so simple as not to know it is better to eat good meat, lie well, and sleep quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merry with you, have copper, hatchets or what I want, being your friend, than be forced to fly from all, lie cold in the woods, feed upon acorns, roots, and such trash, and be so hunted by you that I can neither rest, eat, or sleep?”
Powhatan continued: “Let this, therefore, assure you of our love, and every year our friendly trade shall furnish you with corn—and now, also, if you would come in friendly manner and not thus, with your guns and swords as if to invade your foes . . . if you intend to be friendly as you say, send [away] your arms that I may believe you, for you see the love I bear you doth cause me thus nakedly to forget myself.”3
Smith was not about to render himself and his men defenseless in Powhatan’s village. He countered with the offer that he and his bodyguard of eight would come ashore from the pinnace the next day, unarmed. In the meantime, he arranged for a secret signal, at which his main force would suddenly swarm ashore and take Powhatan. But the canny chief was on to him and slipped away just as Smith attempted to spring his trap. Then it was all Smith and his men could do to extricate themselves from the midst of several hundred angry warriors and flee back to the pinnace, which was stuck in the low-tide mud of the river.
Powhatan was now through playing games with Smith, and he angrily determined to send his warriors to kill the captain and all his men before daylight. Once again, however, God intervened. William Simons writes: “The eternal and all-seeing God did prevent [Powhatan], and by a strange means. For Pocahontas, his dearest jewel and daughter, in that dark night came through the irksome woods, and told our Captain [that food] should be sent to us by and by; but Powhatan and all the power he could make, would after come and kill us. . . . Therefore if we would live she wished us presently to be gone . . . with the tears running down her cheeks, she said . . . [that] if Powhatan should know it, she were but dead, and so she ran away by her self as she had come.”4
Sure enough, in less than an hour about ten of Powhatan’s best warriors came with food. Smith shrewdly made the Indians taste every portion before he and his men ate, and then he sent them back to their chief. Throughout the night other Indians kept coming to check on them, but as soon as the tide was high enough to float the pinnace off the mud, Smith slipped downriver to safety.
Back in Jamestown, Smith still had no solution to the food problem. So, he launched attacks on the Paspahegh and the Chickahominy Indians—burning their dwellings, killing some and capturing others, and always taking their food supplies to feed the colony. From such raids Smith gathered enough provisions to finally outfit the Mary and Margaret for the voyage home to England, and Newport departed just after Christmas.
For a few winter months Jamestown’s fortunes seemed to revive. Smith, now the sole authority, enforced a strict daily work schedule, and the settlers began to produce. In three months they made pitch, tar, glass, and soap to send back to England with the next ship; they also dug a well, built about twenty houses, repaired the church, made weirs and nets for fishing, built a blockhouse on the neck, and actually dug and planted thirty to forty acres.
Optimism began to rise. Did they not have 279 casks of plundered corn still in the storehouse? Maybe things were finally starting to work out for Jamestown.
It was not to be.
When it came time to think about planting a new corn crop, they went to check on their supply and found that the rats that plagued their settlement had gotten into it, and rain had finished off most of what the rats had not consumed. Staring at the soggy and putrid mess inside the casks, they realized the scope of the disaster: they had no food at all.
Drastic measures were called for. Half of the company went down to the oyster banks at the mouth of the river to attempt to live on shellfish. Another party went upriver, hoping to survive on wild berries and acorns. Still others went down to Point Comfort to fish. Typically, the fishing party could not agree on where to cast their nets, and so they never did. A number of settlers simply ran away to Powhatan, who allowed them to stay, as long as they worked for their food. Of those who did not desert to the Indians, many managed to stay alive by stealing from each other—implements, kettles, even guns—and trading them to the Indians for a capful of corn.
Even so, more than half their number perished, including good Mr. Hunt. His death meant they were now bereft of perhaps the major source of spiritual solace among them. He was sorely missed.
Just when all appeared hopeless, in July a small, well-provisioned ship arrived. Although Captain Samuel Argall’s food supplies had been intended for trade with the Indians, he was gracious enough to let Smith take them for the starving settlers. They were reprieved—for the moment.
Captain Argall was the bearer of important tidings: the London merchants had reorganized the Virginia enterprise and had obtained a new charter from the King, creating a Royal Council that would hereafter appoint a governor for the colony. The Council had already chosen Baron De La Warr to be Governor, but because he was unable to go to Virginia immediately, they had sent a large fleet of nine ships under the sea command of Admiral George Somers, with Sir Thomas Gates to take over as interim Governor at Jamestown until De La Warr could come.
Argall said that Gates and Somers had sailed for Virginia in May of 1609 in the flagship Sea Venture, about the time Smith had sent starving men down to the oyster beds. Woefully overcrowded with some five hundred passengers, including women and children, with typical Virginia “luck,” the ships sailed straight into the teeth of a hurricane in the area now known as the Bermuda Triangle.
The fleet was scattered all over the Atlantic. One ship went down; another returned to England. As for the flagship, after three days of incessant storm, she had ten feet of water in her hold, and her pumps were giving out. Just as she about to founder, out of the darkness loomed the darker silhouette of the land known as Devil’s Island. (“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” wrote William Shakespeare of the still-vexed Bermoothes in The Tempest, the play inspired by this episode). In truth, Bermuda was “supposed to be enchanted and inhabited with witches and devils,” wrote Somers, and “so wondrous dangerous of rocks” that none could approach it without “unspeakable hazard of shipwreck.”5
Miraculously the Sea Venture was not smashed to pieces on the barrier reef but found itself wedged between two large coral formations—with the tide going out. The ship itself might not be salvageable, but everything aboard her, including her rigging and her timbers, would be. She was offloaded with comparative ease and then dismantled. Thus, under Gates and Somers, all 150 on board were forced by an “act of God” to spend an exceedingly pleasant nine-month sojourn on a lush, uninhabited island that seemed more like paradise than hell.
In the event of a hurricane, the fleet had specific standing orders: no matter how scattered, all ships were to rendezvous at Bermuda. Had the eight surviving vessels simply followed orders, they, too, would have been abundantly blessed. Their passengers would have rapidly recovered from the plague-like disease that had spread through a number of the ships, and all would have proceeded to Jamestown with holds filled with fresh victuals, to replace those that had been ruined by the storms. They would have saved the colony then and there.
However, the sea captains chose the easier way. Continuing westward, they limped up and down the Atlantic seaboard, until six of the ships finally found their way to Jamestown in August of 1609, about a month after Argall’s arrival.
But they had brought four hundred passengers. Sick, helpless, and starving, they now joined the survivors who who had consumed Argall’s provisions and were once again out of food. The famished newcomers rushed ashore and ran through the cornfields, stripping the stalks bare of the still-green ears—ensuring that in the coming fall as many would die of despair as of disease.
When Smith found out that he was to be replaced but that his replacement was presumed lost at sea, he continued to exert his authority as best he could. But it soon became apparent that the new arrivals were “many unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill destinies.” They quickly divided into squabbling factions that caused untold confusion and disorder.
Smith again sent groups of settlers in three different directions to survive on their own. One of the groups, about a hundred men under Captain David West, were sent upriver to the falls of the James to build a fort, but they ended up attacking Indians and stealing their corn. When Smith went to check on them, he found that the Indians had retaliated, killing about half of the English. The surviving Englishmen refused to obey Smith’s order to move to a village he had bought from one of Powhatan’s sons.
In disgust the acting Governor headed back downriver to Jamestown. On the way, a spark fell into his powder bag, and the resulting flash burn ripped open a huge ten-inch patch on his thigh. He jumped into the river to put out the fire, but the wound was so severe that it could only be properly treated back in England. And so, the man who could rightly be called the first Virginian was on his way home in early October.
When the ship bearing Smith returned from Virginia, it brought more bad news about the colony. Now the Partners were in a panic. As sincerely as possible they would declare their original intent and publish their version of what had happened in the colony. Hurriedly they drafted A True and Sincere Declaration and rushed it into print. They made a point of repeating that their “principal and main ends were first to preach and baptize into Christian religion, and by propagation of the Gospel, to recover out of the arms of the Devil, a number of poor and miserable souls, wrapped up unto death in almost invincible ignorance. . . . and to add our mite to the treasury of Heaven.”6
“What a wonderful missionary endeavor!” might be the response of anyone who knew nothing of what had actually transpired in Virginia. “What a noble aspiration!”
But for anyone who knew anything of what had actually happened there, the more likely response was: “What colossal hypocrisy!”
John Smith would later render strong judgment on paper, wondering how “such wise men could so torment themselves and us with strange absurdities and impossibilities, making Religion their color, when all their aim was nothing but present profit. . . . so doting on mines of gold and the South Sea [i.e., finding a Northwest Passage through to the Pacific], that all the world could not have devised better courses to bring us to ruin, than they did themselves.”7
Within two years, the company would be reduced to raising funds by lottery and a direct-mail campaign to mayors of small towns, urging them to invest from their municipal treasuries.
As the afternoons grew shorter and colder that fall, the corn-raiding parties had finally succeeded in alienating every last tribe up and down the James. And now they and the foragers, root-grubbers, berry-pickers, and mussel-diggers all straggled back into Jamestown. There was nowhere else to go. And with the frost having killed the mosquitoes, Jamestown was not much worse than any other place. While it was perpetually damp and marshy underfoot, at least it provided shelter from the winter winds and snow.
The Virginia Colony now entered the darkest period of its history—the time that would come to be known as “the starving time.” The settlers had been hungry before—famished, in fact—and many had died of malnutrition. But never had it been this bad. All the livestock had been consumed—hogs, sheep, goats, chickens, and a few horses that had come over on the most recent ships. Next went the dogs and cats, the rats that had destroyed their corn, and field mice and snakes. The hunger continued unabated and became ravaging. The settlers dug up the roots of trees and shrubs, and they ate every bit of shoe leather on the plantation as well as leather book covers, straps, and fittings. It was not enough; the colonists grew so weak that many, having earlier traded their coats and blankets for corn, froze to death in their beds. And the hunger raged on.
At this point, George Percy, who succeeded Smith as the interim Governor when the latter returned to England, recorded that a number of the settlers dug up the fresher corpses, cut them into stew meat and boiled them. There was apparently one instance of a person hurrying another into stew-meat phase rather than waiting for nature to take its course. This settler became “unhinged,” killed his wife, and salted her body. He had already begun to partake of it, when he was caught red-handed, as it were. He was summarily executed.8
Deliverance finally came in late May of 1610—and was labeled as such. While Percy was checking on the men he had sent to Point Comfort, sails were spotted in the bay. It was the good ship Deliverance and her sister ship, Patience, both miraculously built on Bermuda from local wood and the fittings of the Sea Venture.
But when Gates and Somers disembarked at Jamestown, they were horrified to be greeted by 60 shambling stick figures, moaning, “We are starved! We are starved!” Were these all that were left of the 438 that had been here the previous August?
They “found the palisades torn down, the ports open, the gates off the hinges, and empty houses [which owners’ death had taken from them] rent up and burnt, rather than the dwellers [stepping] into the woods a stones cast off from them to fetch other firewood.”9
They rang the church bell, and everyone came to the church to hear a “zealous and sorrowful prayer” from Richard Buck, the successor chaplain to Robert Hunt. But not even Buck’s prayers brought forth any answers to Jamestown’s condition. Gates tried his best to find a workable solution, asking advice of Somers and Percy and others, but they soon realized that the situation was truly hopeless. They had little hope of even keeping alive the new people they had brought with them, for they had assumed there would be plenty to eat at Jamestown and had not stowed on board much more food than was needed for the voyage from Bermuda.
Nor was any help available from the Indians. Powhatan had forbidden his people to trade with the settlers, and the other tribes had been so alienated by Smith’s raids that they were now attacking boats on the river and any settlers who straggled out of the fort. Just before Gates’s arrival, a boatload of colonists had been killed, and days later two other men had been killed near the fort.
Early in June they added up all the supplies and concluded that they had only enough food left to give everyone two cakes a day for sixteen days. That did it. Gates and the other leaders decided that the only thing to do was to abandon Jamestown and make for Newfoundland, in hopes of finding English fishing boats. Perhaps they could reprovision there and transfer some of their passengers onto ships that would eventually be returning to England.
When they announced their decision to the survivors, a ragged cheer went up, and on June 7, to the beat of a drum, everybody got on the ships. It was all Gates and Somers could do to keep them from putting the torch to Jamestown as a parting gesture. After a farewell volley of small shot, they slipped downriver on the outgoing tide.
A day later they were lying at anchor off an island near the river’s mouth when they saw a longboat coming up toward them from Point Comfort. This turned out to be, of all people, Lord De La Warr. When word had reached England of the apparent loss at sea of Gates and Somers, he had hurried to Virginia to become her Governor.
Now he gave his first command: all shall turn about and head directly back to Jamestown.
As soon as De La Warr set foot on that desolate, death-ridden piece of land, he knelt and gave thanks to God for bringing them safely there in time to save all lives.
This extraordinary coincidence of timing was viewed by the English as an act of divine providence. “If God had not sent Sir Thomas Gates from the Bermudas,” exclaimed William Simons, “within four days they would have all been [dead from starvation]. If God had not directed the heart of that worthy Knight to save the fort from fire . . . if they had set sail sooner . . . this was the arm of the Lord of Hosts!”10
Back in London, the Company, always quick to capitalize on any opportunity, declared, “It is the arm of the Lord of Hosts, who would have his people pass through the Red Sea and the wilderness, and then possess the land of Canaan.” This was from their most recent tract, A True Declaration (which was published after A True and Sincere Declaration had been soundly discredited).11
Clearly God had moved to preserve Virginia after human beings had abandoned her. And while more ministers were beginning to draw the analogy of a new Promised Land, none had quite the temerity to suggest that the mixed bag of convicts, down-at-the-heels gentlemen, professional soldiers without a war, and slum orphans were a new chosen people. Certainly they did not regard themselves as such—chosen for hell on earth, might be more in line with how they viewed it.
What about the timing of De La Warr’s arrival? There are few instances in America’s early history where God’s intervention seems more apparent. Why had He propped up such a losing venture—one in which people were so resolutely bent on doing it their own way without seeking any help or guidance from Him?
Several possibilities come to mind. From the beginning of Europe’s colonization of the New World, it seemed that God had intended it to be settled by those who consciously put Him at the center of their corporate life. Had Jamestown finally been abandoned, it would have been unlikely that the Partners could have rallied enough support to try again. Perhaps the continent might even have been ceded by default to the French and the Spanish, neither of whose governments were committed to following the Christlike example of their selfless missionaries.
The Virginia Colony had to survive and be maintained right where it was. Had it not been there, the Pilgrims might have gone to South America, as they nearly did. Instead, they sailed under the Virginia Company charter, and, as we will see, it was only after they had been blocked by winds off Cape Cod for the better part of three days that they concluded that it was apparently God’s will for them to start a new plantation. The Pilgrims—and the Puritans who followed them eight years later—provided a more vital perspective on how to approach God and live for Him than did the Jamestown settlers.
De La Warr proved to be more ruthless and assertive than Smith ever thought of being. First, he put the colony on a work schedule: from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00, and from 2:00 till 4:00 p.m. After each shift they would gather in church to pray, and only after that would they eat. This did not include the gentlemen, who were nonetheless expected to give counsel.12
Next, he put Virginia under martial law. Blasphemy or speaking “against the known articles of the Christian faith,” or privately trading with the Indians, or any kind of theft at all—all of these and more were made capital offenses.
As for the Indians, he took the opposite approach of Raleigh, who had inveighed against mistreating the local inhabitants. Outdoing John Smith at his worst, De La Warr sent war parties against the nearest tribes, burning their houses and taking their Queen and her children captive. Then he had the captives murdered.
Apparently, the contradiction between honoring the Christian faith by outlawing blasphemy and totally violating it by murdering Indians never occurred to anyone. In John Smith’s collection of writings on early Virginia history there is a paragraph describing the atrocities, and in the very next paragraph there is a sentence that reads: “Their daily invocating of the Name of God being thus expressed; why should not the rich harvest of our hopes be seasonably expected?”13 Apparently God was expected to bless people who deliberately killed women and children, so long as they prayed.
Seriously ill with scurvy most of the time he was at the colony, De La Warr finally departed for England in March of 1611, less than a year after he arrived. More than two hundred settlers, nearly half those alive when he landed, had perished during his governorship. Of those who survived, fifty-five gentlemen took the occasion to leave Jamestown with him.
De La Warr’s replacement, Sir Thomas Dale was, if possible, even harsher than his predecessor. A tough, hardnosed war captain, Dale enforced extreme martial discipline, taking pages from a harsh military code used with mercenaries in Europe. It was now a hanging offense to be heard speaking against authority, as it was to be absent from the daily church services three times without an excuse. For lesser offenses, Dale and his sergeants-at-arms carried bastinadoes, short sticks with which they administered corporal punishment as needed.
While his measures may have been draconian, they did produce results. Gradually order emerged from chaos, and conditions began to improve. Bricks were made, and houses built with them. A barn was constructed, and a dock was built in the river. A new village, Henrico, was started.
It now became obvious that some sort of long-term product was needed that could pay for the Virginia Company’s supply ships and put the colony on a firm financial footing.
Young John Rolfe found the solution. He had sailed for Virginia on the Sea Venture, and when it was wrecked on the coast of Bermuda, Rolfe was fortunate enough to rescue his sea chest, which contained some small seeds of tobacco. These seeds were from the Spanish New World, which grew a strain of tobacco far superior to the tobacco native to Virginia.
Shortly after arriving at Jamestown, Rolfe planted his seeds, and by 1612 he was able to send a small amount of leaves to London for examination. The response was ecstatic, and soon many of the settlers were growing enough tobacco to enable them to buy clothes and household goods. Jamestown was developing a growing tobacco industry. Virginia had its first cash crop—and typical of the irony that shrouded the settlement, the colony’s future would be secured by an addictive weed that would eventually claim countless thousands of lives.
As for relations with the Indians, little had changed. Dale had brought with him some rusty Elizabethan armor from the Tower of London, which couldn’t stop musket balls but was more than enough protection against Indian arrows. Thus clad, he and his men attacked the Nansemond tribe, killing many and destroying their settlement. Though the Indians around Henrico were creating problems by shooting arrows into the palisade, most of the small surrounding tribes had either been decimated by the English attacks or pacified through trade—except for Powhatan and his people.
What Dale needed was a trump card, and he got one. His men captured Pocahontas, who was now a flashing-eyed beauty of eighteen. Dale let Powhatan know that he had Pocahontas and that he would exchange her for the eight settlers and all the English weapons Powhatan was holding. Powhatan stalled for time. For months they heard nothing from him.
Finally, Dale got tired of waiting, and he set out upriver for Powhatan’s village with 150 men and Pocahontas. Along the way they found 400 armed warriors who challenged them to a fight, but Pocahontas came ashore and defused the situation. Hurt by her father’s delays in redeeming her, she sent a message to her father through her brothers that if he loved her, he would give the English back their men and their weapons, and that unless he did, she would stay with the English.
At this point, Dale realized that he had a unique chance to negotiate peace, so he sent John Rolfe and Master Sparkes to Powhatan. After Rolfe left, Dale opened a letter from him and was utterly astonished. He read that the young man had fallen hopelessly in love with Pocahontas and that during the talks with Powhatan he would be asking the chief’s permission to marry her. Rolfe asked Dale’s blessing in the letter because he had been afraid to ask him about it face-to-face.
His motives could hardly be higher, he went on to assure Dale, for he was “striving for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, . . . and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ an unbelieving creature, namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have for a long time been so entangled and enthralled in so delicate a labyrinth. . . . But almighty God, who never faileth His who truly invoke His name, hath opened the gate.”14
The effect of the letter was like a ray of sunlight bursting through an ominous overcast, as if God Himself might finally be smiling on the misfortune-dogged Virginia Colony. Both Dale and Powhatan were bemused by the prospect of a wedding uniting their peoples.
The sachem may have seriously been considering the annihilation of the English settlers, once and for all. But he knew that he could never permanently rid himself of them. There were simply too many, coming on too many ships. Even if most died, there were now whole fleets coming, bringing hundreds at a time. And besides, the young man seemed truly smitten with his daughter and was likely to provide well for her.
On Dale’s part, he had to choose whether to bless this union or upbraid Rolfe for acting independently, outside of his authority. For once, he chose the happier way—and what had begun as a showdown in a contest of wills now brightened like blossoming wildflowers. There was going to be a wedding—the first in Virginia between a white man and an Indian bride.
Powhatan declined to attend in person (he did not trust the colonists that far), but he sent his brother to give his daughter away and a number of braves to act as an honor guard. It was the first time in several years that the Indians and the colonists were able to completely relax in one another’s presence.
Richard Buck performed the ceremony on April 5, 1614, and thanks to Powhatan’s generosity, it was a glorious feasting affair and an occasion for much rejoicing by both English and Indians. It boded well, and it marked the beginning of things going much better for Jamestown.
Soon afterward, John and Pocahontas—now called by her Christian name, Rebecca—went to England. The Partners were, of course, delighted at the newfound peace between the natives and the settlers, and they sought to exploit it for the favorable publicity value it might have.
It had much. Rebecca became the belle of London society. Dowagers and doyennes found her innocence thoroughly charming, and everyone was taken with her wit, good looks, and humility. Sir Walter Raleigh had just been released from the Tower of London, and it was John Rolfe’s great delight to report to him that Virginia now had 351 men, women, and children living in six settlements, plus 144 cattle, 216 goats, and plenty of chickens. The colony was finally on the verge of being self-sufficient.
Rebecca was as taken with London as the city was with her. She had no desire to return to America, but because she and John were the only guarantee of lasting peace between their peoples, a great deal of pressure was brought to bear on them to do so.
Before they could depart, however, pneumonia struck her down and killed her. Grief-stricken, John Rolfe returned to Virginia alone.
As for Virginia’s spiritual condition, by 1622 there were more than twelve hundred souls in ten widely scattered plantations, and to serve this flock there were exactly three ordained ministers. The contrast between the worldly and the spiritual was never more candidly spelled out than in an exchange between James Blair, President of the soon-to-be-founded College of William & Mary, and England’s Attorney General, Edward Seymour, to whom he had to apply for a charter granted by King William and Queen Mary. Seymour thought the college was a waste of time and good money, and he said so in no uncertain terms. Whereupon Blair pointed out that the colonists of Virginia had souls that needed to be saved.
“Souls?” replied Seymour. “Damn your souls! Make tobacco!”15
Tobacco may have been the means, but God was the agent who preserved Virginia and who, in spite of everything, gave her yet another chance. In 1619 every one of the nonindentured men of the colony had been given at least a hundred acres of his own. In England the Company had finally collapsed and sold out its interest to ten Adventurers. They, in turn, established a system of independent rule, whereby two representatives (burgesses) from each of the ten plantations would meet to make laws and discuss mutual problems.
It was more than a new beginning for Virginia; it was the first self-governing representative assembly in North America, more than a century and a half before the fledgling United States would go to war to secure this privilege.
But Virginia was still Virginia. Of all the places they could have chosen to meet in the middle of summer, including Williamsburg, where the House of Burgesses would one day be established, they chose Jamestown. Within a week, two of the burgesses had died, and the other eighteen were sick.
Why had so much gone so wrong in Virginia when their publicly stated motives back in England had been so right? (And so convincing that even the Partners themselves were beginning to believe them?)
In an age when the leaders all acknowledged God’s existence and thereby considered themselves good Christians, hardly any were living the life to which Christ calls all of us in His Gospel. Even among ministers who were extolling the need for taking the Christian faith to the heathen of undiscovered lands, hardly any were actually prepared to go there themselves.
The settlement at Jamestown had been undertaken with nominal Anglican belief in God. That might have sufficed under pleasant circumstances, but life at Jamestown proved far from pleasant. It would have taken a much deeper reliance on God to successfully bring the settlers through the horrendous ordeals they faced. God was there, and He did answer their prayers when they were accompanied with a sincere desire to amend one’s life. But that attitude seemed to be in short supply in the early years at Jamestown.
Eventually God had mercy on them all, despite the fact that in 1619, when they bought twenty African indentured servants from a Dutch trader, they had introduced slavery to the North American continent.
The next group to come across the Atlantic to America had a different perspective. From hard experience, they knew that God must be at the center of their lives, or their life together would surely founder. He was the only One in whom they could put their whole trust. But if they did, He would see them through.
*For further information on the fate of the lost colony of Roanoke, see Appendix One.