Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (7 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
While a northwest passage to the East does exist, it requires sailing through far northern waters that are icebound much of the year, although global warming may be changing that, many scientists fear.
In 1578 and again in 1583, Humphrey Gilbert set sail with a group of colonists and Queen Elizabeth’s blessings. The first expedition accomplished little, and the second, after landing in Newfoundland, was lost in a storm, and Sir Humphrey with it.
But Gilbert’s half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh, as other historians spell it), the thirty-one-year-old favorite of Queen Elizabeth, inherited Gilbert’s royal patent and continued the quest. He dispatched ships to explore North America and named the land there Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth, “the virgin queen.” In 1585, he was behind a short-lived attempt to form a colony on Roanoke Island on present-day North Carolina’s Outer Banks. In 1586, Sir Francis Drake found the colonists hungry and ready to return to England. In the following year, Raleigh sent another group of 107 men, women, and children to Roanoke. It was an ill-planned and ill-fated expedition. The swampy island was inhospitable, and so were the local Indians. Supply ships, delayed by the attack of the Spanish Armada, failed to reach the colony in 1588, and when ships finally did arrive in 1590, the pioneers left by Raleigh had disappeared without a trace.
All that was found was some rusted debris and the word
croatoan
, the Indian name for the nearby island on which Cape Hatteras is located, carved on a tree. Over the years, there has been much speculation about what happened to the so-called Lost Colony, but its exact fate remains a mystery. Starvation and Indian raids probably killed off most of the unlucky colonists, with any survivors being adopted by the Indians, the descendants of whom still claim Raleigh’s colonists as their ancestral kin. In his book
Set Fair for Roanoke
, the historian David Beers Quinn produces a more interesting bit of historical detection. Quinn suggests that the Lost Colonists weren’t lost at all; instead, they made their way north toward Virginia, settled among peaceable Indians, and were surviving at nearly the time Jamestown was planted but were slaughtered in a massacre by Powhatan, an Indian chief whose name becomes prominent in the annals of Jamestown.
When and how did Jamestown get started?
It took another fifteen years and a new monarch in England to attempt colonization once again. But this time there would be a big difference: private enterprise had entered the picture. The costs of sponsoring a colony were too high for any individual, even royalty, to take on alone. In 1605, two groups of merchants, who had formed joint stock companies that combined the investments of small shareholders, petitioned King James I for the right to colonize Virginia. The first of these, the Virginia Company of London, was given a grant to southern Virginia; the second, the Plymouth Company, was granted northern Virginia. At this time, however, the name Virginia encompassed the entire North American continent from sea to sea. While these charters spoke loftily of spreading Christianity, the real goal remained the quest for treasure, and the charter spoke of the right to “dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper.”
On December 20, 1606, colonists—men and boys—left port aboard three ships,
Susan Constant
,
Goodspeed
, and
Discovery
, under Captain John Newport. During a miserable voyage, they were stranded and their supplies dwindled, and dozens died. They reached Chesapeake Bay in May 1607, and within a month, had constructed a triangle-shaped wooden fort and named it James Fort—only later Jamestown—the first permanent English settlement in the New World. In one of the most significant finds in recent archaeology, the site of James Fort was discovered in 1996.
Jamestown has been long celebrated as the “birthplace of America,” an outpost of heroic settlers braving the New World. Here again, rude facts intrude on the neat version of life in Jamestown that the schoolbooks gave us. While the difficulties faced by the first men of Jamestown were real—attacks by Algonquian Indians, rampant disease—many of the problems, including internal political rifts, were self-induced. The choice of location, for instance, was a bad one. Jamestown lay in the midst of a malarial swamp. The settlers had arrived too late to get crops planted. Many in the group were gentlemen unused to work, or their menservants, equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded by the harsh task of carving out a viable colony. In a few months, fifty-one of the party were dead; some of the survivors were deserting to the Indians whose land they had invaded. In the “starving time” of 1609–10, the Jamestown settlers were in even worse straits. Only 60 of the 500 colonists survived the period. Disease, famine brought on by drought, and continuing Indian attacks all took their toll. Crazed for food, some of the settlers were reduced to cannibalism, and one contemporary account tells of men “driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature abhorred,” raiding both English and Indian graves. In one extreme case, a man killed his wife as she slept and “fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head.”
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
J
OHN
S
MITH,
January 1608 (from Smith’s famed memoir in which he writes of himself in the third person):
Having feasted after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could laid hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death; whereat the emperor was contented he should live. . . . Two days after, Powhatan having disguised himself in the most fearfulest manner he could, caused Captain Smith to be brought forth to a great house in the woods, and there upon a mat by the fire to be left alone. Not long after, from behind a mat that divided the house, was made the most dolefulest noise he ever heard; then Powhatan, more like a devil than man, with some two hundreds more as black as himself, came unto him and told him now they were friends. . . .
Did Pocahontas really save John Smith’s life?
A new generation of American children, trotting off to school with Pocahontas lunch boxes, courtesy of Disney, think Pocahontas was an ecologically correct, buxom Indian maiden who fell in love with a hunky John Smith who had a voice just like Mel Gibson’s.
If you are a little bit older, this is how you may have learned it in school: Captain John Smith, the fearless leader of the Jamestown colony, was captured by Powhatan’s Indians. Powhatan’s real name was Wahunsonacock. But he was called Powhatan after his favorite village, which was near present-day Richmond, Virginia. Smith’s head was on a stone, ready to be bashed by an Indian war ax, when Pocahontas (a nickname loosely translated as “frisky”—her real name was Matowaka), the eleven-year-old daughter of Chief Powhatan, “took his head in her arms” and begged for Smith’s life. The basis for that legend is Smith’s own version of events, which he related in the third person in his memoirs, and he was not exactly an impartial witness to history. David Beers Quinn speculates that Smith learned of Powhatan’s massacre of the Lost Colonists from the chief himself, but kept this news secret in order to keep the peace with the Indians. This “execution” was actually an initiation ceremony in which Smith was received by the Indians.
One of those larger-than-life characters with mythic stature, Captain John Smith was an English adventurer whose life before Jamestown was an extraordinary one. As a soldier of fortune in the wars between the Holy Roman Empire and the Turks, he rose to captain’s rank and had supposedly been held prisoner by the Turkish Pasha and sold as a slave to a young, handsome woman. After escaping, he was rewarded for his services in the war and made a “gentleman.” He later became a Mediterranean privateer, returning to London in 1605 to join Bartholomew Gosnold in a new venture into Virginia.
While some large questions exist about Smith’s colorful past (documented largely in his own somewhat unreliable writings), there is no doubt that he was instrumental in saving Jamestown from an early extinction. When the Jamestown party fell on hard times, Smith became a virtual military dictator, instituting a brand of martial law that helped save the colony. He became an expert forager and was a successful Indian trader. Without the help of Powhatan’s Indians, who shared food with the Englishmen, showed them how to plant local corn and yams, and introduced them to the ways of the forest, the Jamestown colonists would have perished. Yet, in a pattern that would be repeated elsewhere, the settlers eventually turned on the Indians, and fighting between the groups was frequent and fierce. Once respected by the Indians, Smith became feared by them. Smith remained in Jamestown for only two years before setting off on a voyage of exploration that provided valuable maps of the American coast as far north as the “over-cold” lands called North Virginia. In 1614, he had sailed north hoping to get rich from whaling or finding gold. Finding neither, he set his crew to catching fish—once again the lowly cod. After exploring the inlets of the Chesapeake Bay, he also charted the coastline from Maine to Cape Cod and gave the land a new name—New England. Smith apparently also made a fortune in the cod he had caught and stored. He had also lured twenty-seven natives on to the ship and took them back to Europe to be sold as slaves in Spain.
But his mark on the colony was indelible. A hero of the American past? Yes, but, like most heroes, not without flaws.
After Smith’s departure, his supposed savior, Pocahontas, continued to play a role in the life of the colony. During the sporadic battles between settlers and Indians, Pocahontas, now seventeen years old, was kidnapped and held hostage by the colonists. While a prisoner, she caught the attention of the settler John Rolfe, who married the Indian princess, as one account put it, “for the good of the plantation,” cementing a temporary peace with the Indians. In 1615, Rolfe took the Indian princess and their son to London, where she was a sensation, even earning a royal audience. She also encountered John Smith, who had let her think that he was dead. Renamed Lady Rebecca after her baptism, she died of smallpox in England.
Besides this notable marriage, Rolfe’s other distinction was his role in the event that truly saved Jamestown and changed the course of American history. In 1612, he crossed native Virginia tobacco with seed from a milder Jamaican leaf, and Virginia had its first viable cash crop. London soon went tobacco mad, and in a very short space of time, tobacco was sown on every available square foot of plantable land in Virginia.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
P
OWHATAN
to John Smith, 1607:
Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? . . . In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig breaks, they all cry out “Here comes Captain Smith!” So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner.
What was the House of Burgesses?
Despite the tobacco profits, controlled in London by a monopoly, Jamestown limped along near extinction. Survival remained a day-to-day affair while political intrigues back in London reshaped the colony’s destiny. Virginia Company shareholders were angry that their investment was turning out to be a bust, and believed that the “Magazine,” a small group of Virginia Company members who exclusively supplied the colony’s provisions, were draining off profits. A series of reforms was instituted, the most important of which meant settlers could own their land, rather than just working for the company. And the arbitrary rule of the governor was replaced by English common law.
In 1619, new management was brought to the Virginia Company, and Governor Yeardley of Virginia summoned an elected legislative assembly—the House of Burgesses—which met in Jamestown that year. (A burgess is a person invested with all the privileges of a citizen, and comes from the same root as the French
bourgeois
.) Besides the governor, there were six councilors appointed by the governor, and two elected representatives from each private estate and two from each of the company’s four estates or tracts. (Landowning males over seventeen years old were eligible to vote.) Their first meeting was cut short by an onslaught of malaria and July heat. While any decisions they made required approval of the company in London, this was clearly the seed from which American representative government would grow.
The little assembly had a shaky beginning, from its initial malarial summer. In the first place, the House of Burgesses was not an instant solution to the serious problems still faced by the Jamestown settlers. Despite years of immigration to the new colony, Jamestown’s rate of attrition during those first years was horrific. Lured by the prospect of owning land, some 6,000 settlers had been transported to Virginia by 1624. However, a census that year showed only 1,277 colonists alive. A Royal Council asked, “What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?”
Many of them had starved. Others had died in fierce Indian fighting, including some 350 colonists who were killed in a 1622 massacre when the Indians, fearful at the disappearance of their lands, nearly pushed the colony back into the Chesapeake Bay. Responding to the troubles at Jamestown and the mismanagement of the colony, the king revoked the Virginia Company’s charter in 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony. Under the new royal governor, Thomas Wyatt, however, the House of Burgesses survived on an extralegal basis and would have much influence in the years ahead.
