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.
English joint-stock companies were not immediately successful. The first was created in 1553. Fifty-three years later, when the Virginia Company received its charter, England had just ten. Three of these ventures were created to plant colonies in the Americas. (A fourth American project used a similar risk-sharing arrangement, but was not formalized as a joint-stock company.) Every one of these American enterprises had failed. Soberingly, the attempt, in the 1580s, to take over Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, resulted in great expense—three costly voyages across the Atlantic—and the total obliteration of the colony.3
Despite this dismal record, the Virginia Company believed it worth trying again. At its inception, the company consisted of two investor groups, one in Plymouth and one in London. The Plymouth group focused on what is now New England, and quickly launched
a colony on the coast of Maine. It disintegrated within months, and the Plymouth investors threw in the towel. The London group set its sights on Chesapeake Bay and in practice took over the entire venture. Its ships set sail from London on December 20, 1606.
Although Roanoke had been wiped out by its Indian neighbors, the Virginia Company directors reserved their fears for distant Spain. They ordered the colonists—their employees, in today’s terms—to reduce the chance of detection by Spanish ships by locating the colony at least “a hundred miles” from the ocean. The instructions didn’t mention that this location might already be inhabited. True, the directors viewed conflict with the Indians as unavoidable. But they viewed the conflict as a problem mainly because they feared Indians would “guide and assist any nation that shall come to invade you.” That is, they worried about Tsenacomoco not because they feared its citizens would attack the English but because they feared it would help Spain attack the English. For this reason, the directors told the colonists to take “Great Care not to Offend the naturals”—naturals being a then-common term for native people.
Jamestown was the result. All the good upriver land was already occupied by Indian villages. As a result, the newcomers—tassantassas (strangers), the Indians called them—ended up selecting the most upstream uninhabited ground they could find. Their new home was fifty miles from the mouth of the James. It was a peninsula near a bend in the river, at a place where the current cut so close to the shore that ships could be moored to the trees.
Unfortunately for the tassantassas, no Indians lived on the peninsula because it was not a good place to live. The English were like the last people moving into a subdivision—they ended up with the least desirable property. The site was boggy and mosquito ridden. Colonists could get water from the James, but it was not always potable. During the late summer, the river falls as much as fifteen feet. No longer pushed back by the flow of freshwater, the salty water of the estuary spreads upstream, stopping right around Jamestown. Because the colonists had arrived in the midst of a multiyear drought, the summer flow was especially feeble and the concentration of saltwater especially high. The saltwater boundary traps sediments and organic wastes from upstream, which meant that the English were drinking the foulest water in the James—“full of slime and filth,” complained Percy, the future colony president. The obvious solution—digging a well—was not tried for more than two years. It was of little help. Chesapeake Bay is the remains of a huge, 35-million-year-old meteor crater. The impact-fractured rock at the mouth of the bay lets in the sea, contaminating the groundwater with salt. Few Indian groups lived in the saltwater wedge, presumably for just that reason. Jamestown was bordered and undergirded by bad water. That bad water, the geographer Carville V. Earle argued, led to “typhoid, dysentery, and perhaps salt poisoning.” By January 1608, eight months after landfall, only thirty-eight English were left alive.
Paradoxically, the colony’s desperation was its salvation; Powhatan apparently couldn’t bring himself to regard the starving tassantassas as a threat. Certain that he could oust the English at any time, he allowed them to occupy their not-so-valuable real estate as long as they provided valuable trade goods: guns, axes, knives, mirrors, glass beads, and copper sheets, the last of which the Indians prized much as Europeans prized gold ingots. After abducting John Smith, this “subtle old fox,” as Percy called him, learned enough from his captive to conclude that the profit from trade with the tassantassas tomorrow was worth giving them grain today. He sent the foreigner back to Jamestown in January 1608 with enough maize to keep his few remaining companions alive for a while. From Powhatan’s point of view, it was a good bet, suggests Rountree, the anthropologist of Tsenacomoco. If the English tried to overstay their welcome, he could simply withhold their food, and the invasion would implode on its own. (“Confidence borne of ignorance,” the University of Missouri historian J. Frederick Fausz has noted, characterized the initial attitudes of both English and Indians toward each other.)
After his return from captivity, John Smith took charge of Jamestown. Because he controlled food negotiations with Powhatan, the colony’s men of consequence swallowed their displeasure. In any case they could hardly point to a record of success. That spring Smith ordered the survivors to plant crops (they would rather have looked for gold) and rebuild the colony fort (they had accidentally burned it down). He himself continued to explore Chesapeake Bay, persuading himself there was a “good hope” that it stretched to the Pacific.
All the while, Smith negotiated with Powhatan for food. He wanted to dribble out enough knives, hatchets, and iron pots to Tsenacomoco to get the necessary grain shipments but not enough to saturate the Indian demand for English goods. Complicating his task, English demand kept rising; two more convoys in the spring and fall of 1608 increased the number of mouths to about two hundred. Like any good businessman, Powhatan responded to the rising demand by raising maize prices; he asked for guns and swords, rather than hand tools. Smith refused, fearing the consequences of arming the Indians. Powhatan responded by cutting side deals for weapons with Jamestown residents who chafed at Smith’s autocratic rule. And he kept the pressure on Smith by allowing his men to pick off stragglers outside Jamestown.
Smith left for medical treatment in England in October 1609. Canny but clumsy, he had suffered terrible burns when he accidentally ignited a bag of gunpowder he’d fastened around his waist. For the tassantassas, his departure came at a specially bad time. Two months before, yet another convoy had arrived, carrying more than three hundred new colonists, among them another squad of Smith-hating gentlemen. They had persuaded the Virginia Company directors to depose him. Happily for Smith, the ship with the company’s written instructions—and his replacement as governor—had been delayed. Still, the scornful newcomers posed an immediate threat to Smith’s authority and, to Smith’s way of thinking, Jamestown itself. To get them out of his hair, he split up the new arrivals and dispatched them to seek food from several Tsenacomoco groups. This proved to be a mistake.
One party went to the Nansemond, who lived on an island off the opposite, southern bank of the James. When the group’s envoys to the Nansemond did not return on time, Percy wrote, the rest of the English “burned [the Indians’] houses, ransacked their temples, took down the corpses of their dead kings from off their tombs, and carried away their [funerary] pearls, copper and bracelets.” Smith was appalled. He had berated and bullied and blustered at the Indians, but he also believed that Jamestown should not massacre its food supply. But by then he was too badly injured to force the colonists to apologize.
The incident evidently convinced Powhatan that the tassantassas’ new leaders had abrogated the pact he had struck with Smith. That winter he struck back, directly and indirectly. On the first, direct track, native fighters cut down seventeen colonists who sought to ransack the village of Kecoughtan for food; killed another party of emaciated tassantassas in the forest (as a sign of “contempt and scorn,” the Indians left the bodies “with their mouths stopped full of bread [maize]”); wiped out a boatload of soldiers in an upstream outpost established by Smith; and slaughtered a contingent of thirty-three colonists who had been lured to Werowocomoco by promises of grain. The leader of this party, Percy reported, was killed in a fashion that was ghastly, inventive, and slow: “By women his flesh was scraped from his bones with mussel shells and, before his face, thrown into the fire.” In the next five years, natives slew as many as one out of every four colonists, Fausz estimated in a history of this “first Indian war.”
Powhatan’s indirect attack was more deadly still: he stopped sending food. His timing was excellent. Smith left before his official replacement as governor had arrived. His opponents in the colony chose as a temporary leader George Percy, the younger brother of the earl of Northumberland. While under attack, Smith had been unable to force the colonists to maintain Jamestown’s gardens or mend the fishing nets. The otiose Percy was even less successful at organizing the colonists—
a lack of respect related, one assumes, to his practice of swanning around the muddy encampment in silk garters, gold-banded hats, and embroidered girdles. In consequence, the English had no stockpiled food when Powhatan cut off supplies. As Percy later admitted, they were reduced to eating “dogs, cats, rats and mice,” as well as the starch for their Elizabethan ruffs, which could be cooked into a kind of porridge. With famine “ghastly and pale in every face,” some colonists stirred themselves to “dig up dead corpse[s] out of graves and to eat them.” One man murdered his pregnant wife and “salted her for his food.” By spring, only about sixty people had survived what was called the “starving time.”
On some level the colony’s plight is baffling. Chesapeake Bay was and is one of the hemisphere’s great fisheries. Replete with pike, carp, mullet, crab, bass, flounder, turtle, and eel, this long, shallow estuary was so biologically productive that John Smith joked about being able to catch dinner in the frying pan used to cook it. The Atlantic sturgeon that swam in the James grew big enough, one colonist reported, that native boys could loop vines around their tails and be pulled underwater. (I didn’t believe this until an archaeologist at Jamestown told me he had uncovered bones from a sturgeon that may have been fourteen feet long.) Oysters grew in such numbers that one mound of discarded shells from native feasts covered nearly thirty acres.