Landfall: April 26th, 1607. After eighteen weeks at sea, the captain of the Susan Constant, Sir Christopher Newport, saw the land that he and his crew had been commissioned to settle in behalf of the investors of the Virginia Company in London. The task to which they and those on their sister ships, the Godspeed and the Discovery, had looked forward probably seemed not a little dreadful. Spanish, Dutch, and French merchant ships were actively competing for resources from Florida, already settled by the Spanish, to Nouvelle France in what is now Nova Scotia and the northern coast of Maine. English settlements on the North Atlantic coast had not prospered. Sir Walter Ralegh's colony at Roanoke had vanished without a trace. The Spanish, notwithstanding the peace negotiated by James I with Philip II and concluded in 1604, continued to challenge the English presence in the North Atlantic. It was inevitable that the two nations should continue to be rivals on both sea and land; each hoped to dominate the traffic to, trade with, and colonization of the peoples of the Americas.
A year before the Jamestown landfall, on April 10, 1606, the Company had issued Letters Patent to the men charged with managing its Virginian investment, a grandiose swath of this new world: “lying and being all along the sea Coastes betweene fower and Thirtie degrees of northerly latitude from the equinoctiall lyne and Five and Fortie degrees of the same latitude…and the Ilandes thereunto adiacente.”1 Many perhaps understood these terms were deserved, considering that the first duty of the settlers was to ensure the salvation of the natives of Virginia by the “propagating of the Christian religion to suche people as yet live in darkenesse and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worshippe,” and to bring them “to humane civilitie and to a settled and quiet govermente.” As time would show, however, it was trade that was really uppermost in the minds of the company's investors—trade and gold, and indeed their complementary roles. The settlers were to mine for metal but also to mint coin with which to buy goods and raw materials from the natives. Other provisions of these Letters, now known as the first Charter, guaranteed the settlers the civil status they would have had as English subjects at home: they were allowed a right of self-defense, “all the liberties, Franchises, and Immunities” due English subjects, and the land they secured for themselves was to be held in “free and Common Soccage onelie and not in Capite.” In other words, Virginia was not to support a feudal society. By November of that year, the London Council of the Virginia Company, assigned the supervision of the enterprise at Jamestown, had issued a specific set of “Instructions…by way of Advice” which further specified what the prospective colonists should do. They were to settle where the “natural people of the Country” were; they were to “find out a Safe port in the Entrance of some navigable River”; to get “Country [that is, native] Corn” before “the naturals” could perceive that the settlers “meant to plant among them.” Finally, the settlers were not to “advertise the killing of any of [their] men that the Country people may know it if they perceive they are but Common men.”2
What actually happened to the settlers that first year is recorded in the various accounts by such men as John Smith, Gabriel Archer, and George Percy, and represented in part in the essays in this collection. What they thought they were doing, the contexts in which they placed their mission in order to give it a historical character and dimension, and the justification they sought for it in law, both civil and natural, are questions whose answers can help us today to place Jamestown in the large currents of cultural history. Commentary charged with the freight of religious, political, and social opinion, references to settings and contexts that rendered novelty more or less strange, and accounts of how the land was cleared, farmed, and made productive—these are the discourses that will help us learn how the experience of Jamestown was understood by those who lived it.
The North Atlantic was both a place and a concept. The place, the vast ocean separating Europe and the New World, was in the process of being mapped, its shorelines surveyed, its waters charted. The scene of competitive privateering during the reign of Elizabeth, it was increasingly recognized as a nexus of trade between distant peoples after England's peace with Spain in 1604. The concept, formulated following the discoveries of Columbus and the Papal Donation of Alexander VI (1493) which gave the better part of the New World to the Spanish and Portuguese, was shocking in itself, challenging as it did the ancient assumption that the world and its various peoples had been demarcated and identified in scripture. Jesus had told his apostles: “ye shall be witnesses to me…unto the uttermost part of the earth.”3 Probably few in Newport's company reflected on how their mission might fit into a larger scheme of things, ordered by a Providence presumed to favor Protestant and especially English enterprise, and dominated by a progress of imperium or rule—the imposition of civility on barbarous peoples, always to the west of a center of authority and prosperity. But such a scheme was much in evidence in the work of those who wrote epic and history. Accounts of westering conquest included those produced by the Spanish in Peru, Mexico, and the Caribbean; by the Ottomans in Africa; and even those pursued inconclusively by the English in Ireland. Rome, of course, provided the ultimate model.
Rome was both the beneficiary of the first and mythical exportation of rule or translatio imperii, and the legendary origin of all other later historical migrations that went west to the British Isles, east to Asia Minor, north to Europe, and south to Africa. The cultural meaning of such translation was brilliantly recorded in Virgil's Aeneid, the master text for Europeans seeking to justify their imperial legacies and future conquests. Important for those who made the voyage from Troy to Rome, and for their later imitators, was that such translations entailed both a remembering and a forgetting: Aeneas succeeded in bringing his household gods from Troy but he lost his father Anchises before he reached Latium. Nor could the new Troy replicate the old. Aeneas knew not to settle in Buthrotum, the diminutive replica of Troy founded by Helenus and Andromache in the Aegean. The translation Virgil proposed demanded an action less memorial and more creative. Aeneas and his Trojans were to cull from the past the seeds with which the alien ground of Latium could be made to produce its own particular growth in the future.4
English historians were fascinated by the origin of their own people as an event in the history of such imperial translation: William Camden asserted that the Romans under Julius Caesar colonized the barbarous Britons. Reflecting on England's status as a civilized nation, Samuel Purchas scribbled in the margins of his edition of Purchas Pilgrims, in which he had published William Strachey's “A True Reportory of a Wreck”: “The Roman swords were the best teachers of civility to this and other countries near us.”5 And in 1609, William Strachey, imagining that he was on his way to extending English imperium, saw himself as a second Aeneas, sailing up the James River “as Virgil writeth Aeneas did, arriving in the region of Italy called Latium, upon the banks of the River Tiber.”6 On Virgil's account, the splendor illuminating the Trojan invaders as they navigated the Tiber excited the wonder of the natural world: “the waves wonder; the woods…wonder” (mirantur et undae/Miratur nemus).7 The English at Jamestown were not so obviously celebrated; as we shall see, the land they settled and the people they dispossessed responded to them in quite different ways.
Actual encounters between the English colonists and their native counterparts revealed the contradictions between mythic expectations on the one hand and lived experience on the other: the land is ours, it is theirs; the land is wilderness, it is worked and made productive; food is from nature and seasonal, it is from labor and cultural. Recourse to these figures was linked to English claims to rights to colonize: if the land in Virginia was uncultivated (or, in the language of the time, “waste”), its people could be categorized as uncivil and their property possessed. To sustain such claims to a right to colonize required a certain blindness, however: it was clear to all colonists that the natives of Virginia were fully possessed of their land and were organized as a people in a civil order. The land they worked was highly productive; it was clearly the object of agricultural endeavor. Awareness of these contradictions forced the processes of translation to yield to those of invention.
During the first years in the settlement at Jamestown, relations between the colonists and Indians stood at a kind of equilibrium. The English sought to make subjects or “vassals” of the Powhatans, while the Indians believed they could make the English their tribal allies, governed by English leaders or werowances who would remain subject to Powhatan. These mutually illusory visions of coexistence lasted until the Indians devastated Jamestown in 1622; at that point, the English assumed a more aggressive role under the leadership of Sir Ralph Lane, and became committed to pushing the Indians west, and to claiming and clearing more Indian land.
The instances of early cooperation, which so conspicuously favored the English settlers in the long run, tell us much about the settlers' frame of mind at the outset of colonization. Their dependence on the Indians was remarkable. The Indian guide Navirans, introducing the settlers to the region, showed them its physical features; gifts were exchanged; rituals were performed, supposedly in order to confer ownership, tribal identity, and to institute mutual friendships.8 Powhatan, the chief of the local tribes, wearing a “great payre of buckes hornes fastened to hys forehead not knowinge what esteem we make of men so marked,” came to discuss matters with Captain Newport; the English, doubtless reading their own meanings in the figure, must have laughed among themselves.9
Indications of cultural difference were evident from the outset. Smith's account of the Indians' reaction to the gift of his compass to Opechancanough, Powhatan's half-brother, features Smith's wit and implies Indian gullibility. The instrument is extravagantly played up. Smith represents it as a means not only to measure and navigate the globe, but also to reveal “the diversitie of Nations, varietie of complexions, and how we were to them Antipodes.” By comparison with Smith's world-embracing compass, which he declares made the Indians admire him “more then they did their owne Quiyouckosucks” or demigods, the map Powhatan later drew on Virginian soil to indicate the extent of Indian lands seems both futile and pathetic.10 As Smith reports, Powhatan intended and probably believed that his map would show Smith the extent of the Powhatan empire and convince him that the English had no rights to it. Created on the occasion of his “coronation,” Powhatan's map detailed the extent of his lands and those of other tribes, setting practically no westward limits to them. In Smith's words, Powhatan denied that there was “any salt water beyond the mountains,” and to illustrate his title, “he began to draw plots upon the ground (according to his discourse) of all those Regions.”11 But Powhatan's map was fixed in the soil in which it was drawn; it was uncommunicable in other than local terms. Its status meant that Wahunsonocock's dominium would never gain formal recognition in London.
As an expression of an ideology, the business of translation imitated the terms of its foundational myth; traffic went in one direction only, from east to west. In reality, Virginia proved inhospitable to some of its colonists, and in the first years of settlement many returned to England. From time to time, they brought a few Indians with them. The fate and influence of the Indians so transported from west to east fashion a sad history, one characterized by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and betrayal.
Jamestown's Indians went to England because Powhatan wanted to learn more about the English and to be represented in London. John Smith's account of the visit in 1616 of Tomocomo or Uttamattomakin, Powhatan's brother-in-law, reveals the futility of Powhatan's enterprise. Coming from Plymouth to London, Tomocomo was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people he saw en route (he gave up counting them), and also at “the sight of so much Corne & Trees.” He must have recognized then that this wealth in people and resources could fuel a prodigious engine of conquest. Soon also he must have realized that his people were already undone by English disdain for their ways and their status. The usual marks of favor were withheld from him. He told Smith that while Smith had given Powhatan a token of respect and friendship from James I, “a white dog, which Powhatan fed as himselfe,” Tomocomo, Powhatan's envoy to James I, had been given “nothing”—”and I am better than your white Dog.”12 Tomocomo's complaint seems to come to this: while Powhatan had elevated the king's gift to a level of dignity comparable to his own, the king had ignored Powhatan's dignitary as he might have any casual stray. Had Pocahontas not died in 1617 after one brief year in England as the wife of John Rolfe, relations between the two people might have been more auspicious; conversion and even intermarriage seem to have been in view. The Spanish had predicated much of their colonizing efforts on intermarriage between Spanish and Indian. But events on the ground in Jamestown already pointed to a different outcome.
John Smith's important Map of Virginia (1624) conveys how such events on the ground could be represented. Like most maps of the period, it shows a territory as the technical expertise invested in the calculation of latitude and longitude could render it: divided by a grid. Upon this grid is superimposed yet a second representation of space, this time according to a succession of bird's eye views showing such topographical features as mountains and forests. Finally, embellished by representations of historical moments, Smith's map is also a kind of narrative. Smith's captivity and the huge Indian warrior depicted on the margins of the map point to the map-maker's belief in the eventual triumph of the English colony: Smith survived; in time, the Indian was forced west. This was powerful propaganda.
A comparable literariness, though of a more conventional kind, is apparent in Richard Frethorne's letter, which reports other kinds of events on the ground. True, what the letter says to us and to the naïve reader generally may not be all it was intended to say to those to whom it was sent. Long read as a cry for help, Frethorne's letter to his mother and father in England details the hardship that he encountered routinely as he traveled from the plantation to the port of Jamestown and back. But the letter was perhaps also a factor in a conflict between two rival factions within the Virginia Company, one led by Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton, and a second led by Henry Rich, Earl of Warwick. At issue was the management of the company itself. Eventually, Warwick triumphed. It's important to recognize that Frethorne was not the usual sort of Jamestown servant: he was literate, could write, and despite his admitted destitution, had pen, paper, and ink at hand. None of these conditions suggests that he had parents who would have packed him off to servitude in Virginia. But even assuming he was no more than a factor for the interests of the Warwick party, he paints a telling picture of Jamestown. To investors, the colony seemed a source of immense wealth; to those who labored to secure this wealth, it could well have appeared as a pit of privation.
The settlement of the English at Jamestown was a relatively minor event in the larger picture of global rivalries; retrospectively, it has acquired meanings that were not at all contemplated in 1607. Competition for resources remained a European affair, much of it centered on the Mediterranean and involving the powers invested in the Ottoman Empire as well as in Morocco. The Channel and the Irish Sea continued to demarcate zones of endeavor. English ships took English “undertakers” to their plantations in Ireland to subdue both the natives and those of the Old English who resisted the rule from London. Farther afield the English vied with the Dutch for what John Smith would call “the contemptible Trade of Fish” in the waters off the northern portions of “Virginia,” and contended with the French for furs and timber in the regions around the St. Lawrence. England's chief preoccupation during this period was with Spain.
It was the hope of finding gold that most closely identified English ambitions with those of their Spanish competitors. The lure of a quick return on their Virginia investment appears never to have been far from English imaginations. A letter from the Council in Virginia to the Council for Virginia in London, dated June 22, 1607, begs for help “least that all devouringe Spaniard lay his ravenous hands upon theas gold showing mountains, which if we be so enhabled he shall never dare to think on.”13 This gold was utterly chimerical (or alchemical), of course; on August 12, Sir Walter Cope wrote to Lord Salisbury that he expected the local ore to yield “2000 at the Least in the Tonn” (110), but on the very next day, playing the role of Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon as it were, he confessed that this local ore could not “return…so much as Copper…. In the ende all turned to vapore.”14 John Smith, ever the realist, deplored these efforts. His description of colonists' grubbing for gold in 1607 illustrates his contempt for their preoccupations: “there was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold, such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the sands least they should by their art make gold of his bones.” Smith derisively reports that Newport's “drunken” ship was loaded with supposed ore, in fact “so much guilded durt.”15
Smith was fascinated by Spanish colonialism. In this respect, he differed from most of his compatriots, for whom Hispanophobia was almost instinctive. The so-called Black Legend, featured in most explanations of Spain's dominance in Mexico and the Caribbean regions to which English adventurers traveled regularly, went unchallenged by its counterpart, a “white legend” asserting the providential nature of Spain's American conquests to redeem the heathen. English and more generally Protestant condemnation of Spain gained considerable leverage through the immensely popular translation of Bartholome de Las Casas's De regia potestate, 1554 (as The Spanish Colonie, 1583), which outlined Spain's mistreatment of the Indians in the Caribbean in an effort to change Spanish colonial policy in that region. To the English, however, it appeared to justify the plans for conversion proposed earlier by Hakluyt and others. By 1610, in its polemical “A True Declaration of the estate of the colony in Virginia,” the Council of Virginia was able to invoke the Spanish example with a deep irony: “Let the divines of Salamanca discuss that question how the possessor of the West Indies first destroyed and then instructed,” in other words, a dead native is not a candidate for conversion.16 By contrast, once having expressed their pious purposes, the English saw themselves as converting the natives to and by trade: as had Hakluyt stated, they sought to “civilize through exchange.”
Against these prevailing notions of Spanish duplicity Smith was in a sense a holdout. Admiring Spain's dexterous use of resources deployed across the vastness of the North and South Atlantic, he entertained twinned reactions to her conquests. His contribution to this discourse is the very clarity of his descriptions of English behavior, which lets us see that the English resembled the Spanish in both their aspirations and their practices. Were the English to have settled in Mexico and the Spanish to have remained in Virginia, Smith states that their fates would have been exchanged: the English would have “done as much as by their examples might bee expected from us,” that is, gained as much as had the Spanish by following Spanish tactics.17 Smith may well have envied the Spanish conquest; in any case, he does not seem to have felt much scorn for the means by which they had achieved it.
Second to Spain in the English consciousness of lands beyond their shores was Ireland. Did English attempts to colonize Ireland shape English experiments in settling Jamestown? Certainly numbers of parallels can be made: the imposition of Protestantism upon a population whether Catholic or heathen; the construction of fortresses to protect colonial populations from the natives, whether Irish or Indian; and the investment in plantations by joint-stock companies. That to English eyes neither Irish nor Indian practiced the true faith went without saying: at times, both peoples were condemned for being cannibals. Resistance to English settlements, disputes over English appropriation of land and how it was planted, and fear of what was perceived as native nomadism argued for the presence of garrison-like structures in each of these regions. Finally, both Irish and Virginian colonies were supposed to yield profits to investors. Thus, despite English reliance on humanist texts for legitimation of their colonizing efforts (notably the works of Herodotus, Livy, and Tacitus), England could be said to have served a practical and quite specific apprenticeship in the arts and strategy of colonization between 1565 and 1576, when their initial efforts to occupy Ireland in behalf of the crown occurred.
Yet these parallels are also fault lines illustrating how the two colonies differed. First and perhaps foremost: it was not clear that the Indians were not an autonomous people. Robert Gray's question and its answer are worth reconsidering. In 1609 in a treatise entitled A Good Speed to Virginia, he asks: “by what right or warrant we can enter into the lands of savages, take away their rightful inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their places, being unwronged or unprovoked by them?” His answer was that the English disturbed no rights because the Indians had “offered” their land to English colonists “on reasonable conditions.”18 What these “conditions” were he does not say; had they entailed a transfer of sovereignty, they would have been recognized in a treaty. William Symonds asked a similar question: “The country [Virginia] they say is possessed by owners that rule and govern it in their owne right; then with what conscience and equitie can we offer to thrust them with violence out of their inheritances?” His answer also elides legality: Scripture, he declares, justifies conquest by the sword;19 and England is overcrowded and needs room for her people.20 By contrast, English assertions that Ireland was an extension of their rule, although unsupported by the law of nations, at least had the patina of age; almost time out of mind, the English had declared that the Irish lacked civility and were not a sovereign people.
Of course, civility, with its foundation in the institutions of commerce and religion, was not considered to be a property of Europeans only. Neither Morocco in north Africa nor the Ottoman empire in the eastern Mediterranean was considered in the same light as the Irish and the Indians. England and Morocco behaved toward each other as cultural equals, their differences in appearance, modes of dress, familial relations, and practices of servitude notwithstanding. By contrast, the Ottoman empire earned another kind of English respect by overtly threatening English interests. Turkish conquests were regarded as fearsome; as Fynes Morison claimed, they were “the present Terrour of the World.” John Smith's The True Travels, an account of his military service for the Hapsburgs well before his voyage to Virginia but included in The General Historie as a kind of afterword, is designed in part to remind readers of the confluence of trade and culture between Europe, the New World, and the near East. But more particularly, its purpose is rhetorical. Smith's high and deliberate style, his elaborate diction replete with figures and images reminiscent of the epics of Ariosto and Tasso, removes The True Travels from the sphere and concerns of history and places it in the genre of romance. Its treatment of the beloved enemy, especially the lady Tragabigzanda who returned Smith's affections and helped him escape, tropes on the ambiguous careers of such infidel heroines as Ludovico Ariosto's Marfisa in the Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Clorinda in the Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). By the bravura colors of his self-portrait as a Christian knight combating retrograde heathen, the John Smith of The True Travels eclipses altogether his representation in The General Historie, which shows him managing the practical affairs of daily life essential for the welfare of the colony. Whether the later text casts its account of earlier events in light of those that were to follow is, of course, pure speculation. But Smith's troubled view of miscegenation in The True Travels may reflect his attitude toward relations between English and Indian, especially after the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe had no sequels. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, the language of alterity emphasized comparisons of Indians with “the wild Irish,” whom Turks and Africans were also said to resemble.
The stylistic difference between The True Travels and The General Historie raises the central question posed of westward enterprise: what to take to the new country; what to leave behind in the old. In this case, Smith's decision is pointed though perhaps also unintentional and even unconscious. Untranslated were to remain the textured memories of the Europe of romance, of combat with an infidel alien to the East, a peril at least as old as that posed by the Persians to the Hellenes in Herodotus's Histories. Smith's emplotment allows us to see how the English in Virginia thought they might plan for and enjoy a particular dispensation: the West was to move west, to recast all human history in another mode, while the East was to remain fixed in an antique and memorialized world. It may not be an exaggeration to say that Smith's account of his travels created an alien East in order better to evoke a familiar West.
Europeans adventuring in the North Atlantic and certainly the English settling along the shores of Virginia doubtless clung to the belief that the cultural traffic they engaged in was chiefly one way, from east to west. To discern a traffic in the opposite direction and gauge the impact of Indian culture on the settlers in Jamestown requires careful reading between the lines, more particularly because the lines that have survived are almost all by English hands. Reports of how the settlers negotiated the most basic needs, food, shelter, property, labor, and a social order, illustrate how the English in Virginia fashioned a way of life that became progressively more independent of Old World habits and practices. Their differences may be attributed to those factors in the new environment that impinged on the consciousness of settlers.
The first accounts of Virginia reported such an abundance of food to be had for the mere gathering of it that hunger and starvation must have been unimaginable. Prints decorating John Smith's Map of Virginia show him dwarfed by his Indian counterparts—an indication that they were better fed than he.21 In time, of course, seasons of plenty were matched by seasons of dearth, and while the English marveled at the Indians' huge appetites when food was readily available, they were awed by the Indians' toleration of hunger when food was scarce. In any case, however, the English imposed a cultural interpretation upon Indian practices. Indians ate what was at hand; their diet was strictly seasonal. By contrast, the English ate regularly. Unlike Indian fare, the fruits of the English table were transseasonal and its consumption, largely independent of climatic differences in nature, was determined for the most part by factors indicating their civility: the feasts and fasts of the liturgical year, the vestigial pagan holidays associated with the solstices, and the particular rituals of family life: birth, marriage, and death. To be oblivious to the strictures enforced and privileges allowed by the Christian calendar, as were the Indians, meant also to be characteristically intemperate, unpredictable, and dangerous. Such an account of Indian diet finally supported English claims to property rights in the New World. Interested in pursuing argument for possession from “waste,” the English overlooked the methodical nature of Indian agriculture, their treatment of forest and shoreland, and the extent to which the Indians lived not from nature but as careful developers of her resources.
Evidence in the early version of John Smith's Map of Virginia (1612) reveals how the colonists at Jamestown regarded the land they claimed and sought to occupy. Their reasons were as we have already stated: land that was “waste firm” in Hakluyt's terms, or, as Smith would say later a “plaine wildernesse,” was proof that it was in no one's possession. Denoting an emptiness yet to be filled by human art, these terms hark back to the ancient legal doctrine of res nullius, or a thing which is void and therefore able to be possessed and rightfully claimed by one who demonstrates that he is using it. Uncultivated land could be regarded as no more than common property in the sense that Locke would later define: it was God's gift to the human race as a whole.22 Early reports of Indian reaction to English planting suggest that the English feared that they might be seen as appropriating Indian property: “The people used our men [the English] well until they found they began to plant & fortefye. Then they fell to skirmishing & kylled 3 of our people.”23 The belief in possession by cultivation or use could produce very self-serving claims, as it did in George Percy's Observations, dated 1608 but describing events in 1607: “The savages murmured at our planting in the countrie, whereupon this Werowance (of Paspahegh) made answere againe very wisely of a Savage, why should you bee 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.”24 While we may doubt that the werowance said any such thing, his words could have been understood to justify English appropriation of Indian land. The anonymous writer of “A Description of the River and Country” summed up the situation: “the commodities of this country, what they are in Esse, is not much to be regarded, the inhabitantes having no comerce with any nation, no respect of profitt, neither is there scarce that we call meum et tuum among them save only the kinges know their owne teritoryes & the people their severall gardens.”25 In other words, a claim to possess property in land is dependent on its being used, a notion that English apologists for colonial expansion invoked from Hakluyt on. Colonial argument coupled the doctrine of use, as in acts or cultivation, which conferred possession or dominium, with a commitment to promoting a universal civility, which promised rule or imperium. The doctrine implied that if there was no evidence of Indian use or cultivation or, more probably, if it could be plausibly ignored, English claims to possession might be pursued without qualification. Rule or imperium tended to follow from possession or dominium.
Improving a “waste” was not, of course, a concept exclusively relevant to English arguments for possession of land in Virginia. It accounted for much of the reasoning supporting enclosures in England from the early sixteenth century on. It meant that the common rights to land that had been honored time out of mind could be superseded by the civil rights owed to one who was using what had been a “waste.” This reasoning allowed the law governing possession of land in England an easy translation to Virginia.
But the process also reflected a tortured perception: the kinds of use to which common land was usually put—as a locale for grazing cattle, fishing, hunting, gathering food and fuel—had to be considered “non-uses” in order for the land to be characterized as “waste.” With the exception of grazing, such “non-uses” were regular features of Indian economy; thus they could be adduced as evidence supporting English freehold rights. What could not be assimilated into the category of “waste” was the land the Indians farmed. Their agriculture was a demonstrable fact, perhaps the more arresting because the first colonists had depended so utterly on Indian corn for their very livelihood.
The issue of Indian status with respect to their English counterparts, especially with respect to what work each people did, was not easily resolved. It became complicated by the arrival of Africans, called “Negroes,” in Jamestown in 1619, two years after Tomocomo had told Smith of his humiliation in London. Virginia was to become a site in which peoples from three continents were to gather, to live and work. By what human calculus were they to be distinguished?
The determination of status inevitably involved acknowledging kinds of difference, of gender and also of rank, which was registered in terms of authority and subordination. The epithet “slave” was used across social categories to denote conditions of abuse, and its actual reference could vary quite broadly depending upon contexts. Wives could complain of being slaves to exacting husbands; in 1610, some members of the Commons declared that the king's impositions had made them slaves; and prisoners of war, like Smith, could write of their enslavement by the enemy. Men and boys who arrived in Virginia as indentured servants were bought and sold for a term of service; and servants throughout the colony could declare that their treatment had been like that of a slave, meaning simply that it was very bad. These conditions, however horrible, were unlike those that obtained later, when men, women, and children became chattels to be traded in labor markets.
Sir Thomas More's model of a society which permitted slavery, described in his fictive state of Utopia, proved prescriptive in one important respect: in Utopia, slavery was neither permanent nor heritable, but rather a punishment for crime. Sir Thomas Dale's Lawes Divine, Morali and Martial, 1611, which sentenced criminals to terms of slavery, follows More's model; Virginians convicted even of petty crimes risked servitude in the “Gallies.”26 Ideology supporting a racialized slavery became apparent in Virginia after the Indian attack on Jamestown in 1622, when the Virginia Company condemned the Indians as the “cursed race of Cham” and implicitly invoked the notion of slavery as it appears in scripture.27 The position of Africans in this period was ambiguous: they were bought and sold like indentured servants; they were freed only by an act of manumission like slaves.
The rather muddled history of slavery and the dominance of indentured servitude in early Virginia becomes especially interesting in light of the professions of liberty that were coming to characterize English political discourse. In England, those who could claim “freedom” were typically property holders; those who had no means of supporting themselves other than the labor they could sell were considered “unfree.” As property was generally inherited, “freedom” remained a privilege of a recognizable class, typically “gentle.” In Virginia, where very considerable real property could be acquired quickly, a new and hybrid class of “free” person was created: in that sense, American freedom was from its inception different from anything in England. Free Virginians routinely performed some kind of work; they acted as their own stewards, bailiffs, and overseers on the plantations they owned. The English gentleman Hazard, a prominent character in Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter, is prospectively very un-American: he aspires to getting property through marriage with a Virginian widow, yet he asserts that he does no work and the audience presumes he will not want to change his ways once a married man.
The Widdow Ranter returns us to the questions that began this introduction and which find restatement in many of the essays in this collection: in what ways do Jamestown and nearby settlements express a vision of life that embraces new and different vistas from those found in the English landscape? By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Virginian culture had severed its most important connections to English ways, practices, and attitudes. Socially it expressed an egalitarianism created by the circumstances in which Virginians lived: unlike Hazard, Virginians worked; like Ranter, they smoked. Distinctions as to rank and status existed, but they tended to express differences created in the New World rather than inherited in England. By dramatizing the rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon, Behn provides some of the terms by which we can assess an American identity in seventeenth-century Virginia.
Bacon's grounds for rebellion were twofold, but what they implied set them strangely at odds. Bacon asserted that the governor of the colony, William Berkeley, was unfit to rule, first, because he and his cohorts were disreputable (an argument from natural law and an elitist view of class); and second, because they had misspent the property and resources of those they had been appointed to govern and preserve (an argument from positive law and the liberties of the subject).28 Behn follows history in sending Bacon to defeat, but her interpretation of events gives his demise and his cause a fascinating twist. She represents Bacon as a chivalric hero, his Indian ally Cavarnio as an illicitly deposed monarch, and their rebellion as sympathetic. She does not illustrate it as a cause to which right adheres; on her account, Bacon is a rebel, however noble, and Berkeley is to retain the power and authority of governor appointed to his post by the crown despite his vulgarity. Behn's vision of the alignment of social and political power in Virginia shows a degradation of legitimacy and the office of governor. It also shows that this degradation is not much minded, that the people so governed follow prudent policy, connive at malfeasance, and are generally genial citizens who look forward to wealth and gains in social rank.
Can one assume that Behn, a professed royalist, would have sympathized with Bacon's open criticism of the governor's party, and like Bacon, deplored the “sudden Rise” of those of “vile extractions”?29 Can one guess that she also deplored Bacon's rebelliousness, evoking, as it did, memories of Cromwell? Finally, can one imagine that such disparate attitudes might cohere in a comprehensive acceptance of a new American style in which abuse by the higher powers is tolerated because it is hedged by apparently endless abundance and opportunity? So it would seem. If Behn is critical of her Americans, she mitigates much of her scorn: if unscrupulous, they are amiable; if ill-informed, they are open-minded; if keen to exploit ignorance of American ways, they are hospitable to strangers. Behn constructs the tragedies of Bacon and Cavernio so that they can be subsumed in the cheerfully comic effects of Ranter and her friends, to whom she sees that the future in Virginia belongs.
The editors of this volume have suggested that a vision of the Jamestown enterprise is implied by George Sandys's preoccupation with Ovid's Metamorphoses. On this account, the colony is featured as the site of a succession of sea-changes, if not random then at least continuous. Absent from this vision is, of course, what Strachey had responded to in the first years of the colony's settlement: Virgil's massively constructed sense of purpose, his concretization of a vast mythical history, his promise of a beneficent future for the new world he illustrated. From Ovid and Sandys we get a different and arguably paler vision. Less determined and positive, it outlines the terms not of translation but of endless change. It obscures the idea of a westward and civilizing movement (from Troy to Rome, from London to Jamestown) and rather attests to the fragility of civilization itself, always already old even as it is created anew. “There are always new things” (nova sunt semper) the poet declares, but in reality they are the things of the past: Time's “whole round of motion is gone through again (and again)” (fitque, quod haut fuerat, momentaque cuncta novantur).30 We tend to read these words and the final book of the Metamorphoses in which they appear as Ovid's repudiation of epic. Correctly, I think. But we need to consider that Sandys may have understood them as paradox, as referring the familiar kind of novelty created by the new world English. Aware of what had gone and wary of what was to come, he saw that the world to which his fellows were committed was neither new nor old but both at once.