1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (10 page)

• How Smith served in a Transylvanian army, battling “some Turks, some Tartars, but most Bandittoes, Rennagadoes, and such like.”
  
• How he slew three Turkish aristocrats in single combat before raucous crowds.
  
• How he was captured and sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire, where “a great ring of iron” was “rivetted about his necke.”
  
• How he seized the chance to “beat out [his master’s] braines” with a farm implement and fled in the man’s clothes to Russia, France, and Morocco.
  
• How in Morocco he joined another band of pirates, preying on Spanish vessels off West Africa.
  
• How he returned to England and promptly joined the Virginia expedition. He was just twenty-six.
  

Skeptics have been scoffing at this buckle and swash since 1662, when one noted that the sole record of Smith’s adventures is his own writing: “it soundeth much to the dimunition of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.” Other writers cheered him as a quintessential American: the original self-made man. During the Civil War, Smith’s link with Virginia turned him into a symbol of the Confederate South. Northerners naturally tried to belittle him; after writing an article that highlighted inconsistencies in
True Travels
, historian Henry Adams, a fervent Unionist, crowed that he had executed a “rear attack on the Virginia aristocracy.” The cruelest blow came in 1890, when a Hungarian-speaking researcher charged that the people and places in Smith’s adventures were fictional. Smith, for instance, said he deployed his “excellent stratagem” at a place called “Olumpagh.” No town named Olumpagh existed in the region. QED: Smith was a fraud. In the 1950s a second Hungarian-speaking researcher, Laura Polyani Striker, counterattacked. Smith’s places, she said,
were
real—the previous researcher had been misled by Smith’s atrocious spelling. Olumpagh, for example, was Lendava, in Slovenia, known to Hungarians in those days as “Al Limbach.” Such places being unknown in England, Striker argued, Smith indeed must have visited them.

Short, stocky, and homely, John Smith had a formidable chestnut beard that startled native people when they encountered it. He was evidently aware of his unprepossessing appearance: this author’s portrait from his 1624 autobiography was accompanied by a doggerel poem, likely penned by Smith, claiming that his interior excellence more than made up for his less than handsome exterior. (
Photo credit 2.3
)

No historians doubt that Smith was at Jamestown. Nor do they dispute that this scrappy, self-confident man befriended Pocahontas, obtained desperately needed food from Powhatan, saved the colony from extinction, and constantly annoyed the colony’s leaders, all of whom were his social betters. At the time, English class distinctions were rigid to a degree that is hard now to comprehend; Smith, never one to display deference, so quickly angered Jamestown’s gentry that during the voyage from England they threw him in the brig on vague charges. Historians also accept that after landing in Virginia Smith led the search through Chesapeake Bay for a passage to China. But scholarly eyebrows rise in disbelief about what Smith claims happened in December 1607 during one of those expeditions.

Intending to explore the headwaters of the Chickahominy River, Smith went off in a canoe with two Indian guides and two English companions. They ran into a hunting party led by Opechancanough (oh-pee-CHAN-can-oh), Powhatan’s younger brother, who was vocally anti-immigrant. He wanted no illegal aliens in Tsenacomoco. During the inevitable skirmish the Indians killed Smith’s companions; Smith fell into a swamp and was captured. Opechancanough brought the adventurer to his brother’s capital, Werowocomoco. In the most famous version of the story—the one published in
True Travels
—Smith approached Powhatan through a gauntlet: “two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all of their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds.” The king gave him a public feast. Then, Smith wrote, Powhatan decided to kill him on the spot, in the banquet hall. Executioners “being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter,” then perhaps eleven years old, suddenly rushed out and cradled Smith’s head in her arms “to save him from death.” Fondly indulging his daughter’s crush, Powhatan commuted Smith’s sentence and returned him to Jamestown, where the girl “brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els[e] for all this had starved with hunger.”

Countless romantic novels have been spawned by Smith’s tale, but most researchers believe it to be untrue. In his debunking, Henry Adams pointed out that the earliest account of the rescue dates from 1624, in the boastful autobiography Smith published just before the boastful
True Travels
. But Smith also wrote about his abduction in 1608, a few months after it happened, in a report not intended for public view, and said not a word about being saved by a love-smitten Indian maiden. Smith clearly relished the image of infatuated women coming to his rescue—in
True Travels
, it happens no less than four times. More damning still, no anthropologist or historian has found any suggestion that the Powhatan ever held feasts for prisoners of war before executing them. Nor were children like Pocahontas admitted to official dinners—they were in the kitchen, washing dishes. “None of the story fits the culture,” the anthropologist Helen Rountree told me. “Big meals are for honored guests, not criminals to be executed.” In her view, the feast suggests the Indians regarded Smith as a potential treasure trove of data about the foreign invaders. “It’s hard to see them killing an intelligence asset,” she said.

John Smith’s tale of rescue from execution by the “Indian princess” Pocahontas has proven irresistible to generations of artists, despite historians’ disbelief in its veracity. In this 1870 engraving, Pocahontas resembles an opera star, the Powhatan have been given tipi homes like those in the West, and the venue has been transplanted to a hilly and almost treeless expanse unlike anything in coastal Virginia. (
Photo credit 2.4
)

Historians dislike the Pocahontas-rescue story for another, deeper reason. By pumping up the romance and fanfaronade, it draws attention from what the English were actually trying to accomplish in Virginia—and what happened to Tsenacomoco when they arrived. Brave adventurers like Smith were integral to Jamestown, but the colony was primarily an economic venture. And for all the danger and conflict, its fate was decided less, in the end, by the clash of arms than by impersonal ecological forces—the Columbian Exchange—that nobody in Virginia was then equipped to understand.

Like La Isabela, Jamestown was intended as a trading post, a midway point from which England could seize its share of the China trade. But whereas La Isabela was largely sponsored and controlled by the Spanish monarchy, Jamestown was the creation of private enterprise: a consortium of politically connected venture capitalists known as the Virginia Company. The difference was anything but absolute: Spanish merchants hoped to enrich themselves at La Isabela, and the political ramifications of Jamestown preoccupied the English government. But Jamestown was closer to the capitalist ventures meant in today’s discussions of globalization.

The Virginia Company came into existence because English sovereigns—Queen Elizabeth I and her successor, James I—wanted the benefits of trade and conquest but couldn’t pay for them. The state had been pushed so deeply into debt by war (in Elizabeth’s case) and profligacy (in James’s case) that it could not afford to send ships to the Americas. Nor could it borrow the necessary cash. From moneylenders’ point of view, the monarchy was a bad credit risk—it could, and all too often did, assert its prerogative to repudiate its debts. In consequence, they charged it ruinously high interest rates. True, kings and queens had the power to force loans from their subjects, a practice that for obvious reasons was deeply unpopular. But was the certainty of incurring discontent worth the gamble of an American colony?

Elizabeth and James came to the same conclusion: no.

As La Isabela showed, colonization was inherently risky. The English faced the additional danger that most of the Americas already had been claimed by Spain. Hostility between the two nations was intense; indeed, Pope Pius V had practically ordered Catholic monarchs like Spain’s Philip II to take up “Weapons of Justice” against Protestant England. (“There is no place at all left for Excuse, Defence, or Evasion,” the pope fulminated. Queen Elizabeth, “Slave of Wickedness,” had to be overthrown.) Spain sent a fleet to invade England in 1588, England a fleet to invade Spain in the following year. Both attacks failed, in part because of violent weather—a manifestation, perhaps, of the Little Ice Age. Ultimately Elizabeth relied upon a more successful tactic: sponsoring what is remembered in England as “privateering” and in Spain as “terrorism.” She authorized English ships to loot any Spanish ships or colonies they came across. After Elizabeth died in 1603, James I ratcheted down tensions. But he knew that installing English colonies in North America would rekindle the conflict. Spain had already planted more than a dozen small colonies and missions on the Atlantic Coast, one of them just miles away from Jamestown’s future location (it had failed). The empire would not look favorably on an intrusion into its domain. If that weren’t enough, France, too, had claimed North America, setting down five colonies and missions of its own.

Still, the monarchy was unwilling to cede the Americas to the competition. In a kind of white paper to Elizabeth, the influential cleric and writer Richard Hakluyt argued that Christian rulers had a sacred duty to save the souls of “those wretched people”—that is, Indians. “The people of America crye out unto us,” he said, to “bringe unto them the gladd tidings of the gospell.” Spain, he noted, had already converted “many millions of infidells.” And what had been Spain’s reward for this deed? God had “open[ed] the bottomles treasures of his riches,” letting England’s hated adversary acquire vast stores of silver, which in turn had let it open trade with China. Hakluyt pointed out that Spain, formerly a “poore and barren nation,” was now so rich that, incredibly, its seamen had almost stopped being thieves. England, by sad contrast, was “moste infamous” for its “outeragious, common, and daily piracies.”

And there was opportunity in North America, or so it was thought. Between 1577 and 1580 Sir Francis Drake, England’s best-known privateer/ terrorist, went on a round-the-world tour, sacking Spain’s silver fleet along the way. During this trip he stopped on the west coast of the United States. Exactly what he did there is not known because almost all of the expedition’s records have disappeared. But something Drake saw convinced many powerful Londoners that a watery channel cut across North America—it was possible to sail
through
the United States. If so, the Americas could only be a few hundred miles wide. After that short trip one would be on the Pacific shore, ready to sail to China.

Elizabeth and James were wary but persuaded. Unwilling to pay the high interest rates moneylenders charged poor credit risks, though, the sovereigns delegated colonization to an entity that could independently support it: a joint-stock company. An ancestor to the modern corporation, joint-stock companies consisted of groups of wealthy people who pooled their resources to fund a commercial enterprise, being repaid by shares of the proceeds. By working with other investors, members of the company can limit their participation in an uncertain enterprise to a small part of the total sum. If a colony failed, the total loss would be huge but the loss to each individual investor would be tolerable—painful, to be sure, but not disastrous.

As the economic historian Douglass C. North has argued, the joint-stock company was more than a novel means of making money; it was one of many institutional arrangements European societies were developing to mobilize resources efficiently. (North shared the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, largely for working out these ideas.) These institutional arrangements secured property rights (necessary because people will not risk investing if they believe that their gains can be taken away); opened markets (necessary to prevent entrenched interests from stifling innovation); and strengthened democratic governance (necessary to check rulers’ excesses). All permitted trade and commerce to be independent, which led to research and investment becoming routine—a constant activity that people could profit from with little state interference. “What counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity,” wrote the Harvard economist David S. Landes. In his classic
Wealth and Poverty of Nations
(1999), Landes argued that Europe had developed ways of organizing people and resources—private joint-stock companies, for instance—that fostered and rewarded individual initiative, which in turn promoted these virtues. Other places did not develop them. The result of these innovations, North argued, was economic growth so robust that it led to “a new and unique phenomenon”: the ascension of European societies to world power.