CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
By Charles Dudley Warner
CONTENTS
[ PREFACE ]
[ CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH ]
[ I. ]BIRTH AND TRAINING
[ II. ]FIGHTING IN HUNGARY
[ III. ]CAPTIVITY AND WANDERING
[ IV. ]FIRST ATTEMPTS IN VIRGINIA
[ V. ]FIRST PLANTING OF THE COLONY
[ VI. ]QUARRELS AND HARDSHIPS
[ VII. ]SMITH TO THE FRONT
[ VIII. ]THE FAMOUS CHICKAHOMINY VOYAGE
[ IX. ]SMITH'S WAY WITH THE INDIANS
[ X. ]DISCOVERY OF THE CHESAPEAKE
[ XI. ]SMITH'S PRESIDENCY AND PROWESS
[ XII. ]TRIALS OF THE SETTLEMENT
[ XIII. ]SMITH'S LAST DAYS IN VIRGINIA
[ XIV. ]THE COLONY WITHOUT SMITH
[ XV. ]NEW ENGLAND ADVENTURES
[ XVI. ]NEW ENGLAND'S TRIALS
[ XVII. ]WRITINGS-LATER YEARS
[ XVIII. ]DEATH AND CHARACTER
PREFACE
When I consented to prepare this volume for a series, which should deal with the notables of American history with some familiarity and disregard of historic gravity, I did not anticipate the seriousness of the task. But investigation of the subject showed me that while Captain John Smith would lend himself easily enough to the purely facetious treatment, there were historic problems worthy of a different handling, and that if the life of Smith was to be written, an effort should be made to state the truth, and to disentangle the career of the adventurer from the fables and misrepresentations that have clustered about it.
The extant biographies of Smith, and the portions of the history of Virginia that relate to him, all follow his own narrative, and accept his estimate of himself, and are little more than paraphrases of his story as told by himself. But within the last twenty years some new contemporary evidence has come to light, and special scholars have expended much critical research upon different portions of his career. The result of this modern investigation has been to discredit much of the romance gathered about Smith and Pocahontas, and a good deal to reduce his heroic proportions. A vague report of—these scholarly studies has gone abroad, but no effort has been made to tell the real story of Smith as a connected whole in the light of the new researches.
This volume is an effort to put in popular form the truth about Smith's adventures, and to estimate his exploits and character. For this purpose I have depended almost entirely upon original contemporary material, illumined as it now is by the labors of special editors. I believe that I have read everything that is attributed to his pen, and have compared his own accounts with other contemporary narratives, and I think I have omitted the perusal of little that could throw any light upon his life or character. For the early part of his career—before he came to Virginia—there is absolutely no authority except Smith himself; but when he emerges from romance into history, he can be followed and checked by contemporary evidence. If he was always and uniformly untrustworthy it would be less perplexing to follow him, but his liability to tell the truth when vanity or prejudice does not interfere is annoying to the careful student.
As far as possible I have endeavored to let the actors in these pages tell their own story, and I have quoted freely from Capt. Smith himself, because it is as a writer that he is to be judged no less than as an actor. His development of the Pocahontas legend has been carefully traced, and all the known facts about that Indian—or Indese, as some of the old chroniclers call the female North Americans—have been consecutively set forth in separate chapters. The book is not a history of early Virginia, nor of the times of Smith, but merely a study of his life and writings. If my estimate of the character of Smith is not that which his biographers have entertained, and differs from his own candid opinion, I can only plead that contemporary evidence and a collation of his own stories show that he was mistaken. I am not aware that there has been before any systematic effort to collate his different accounts of his exploits. If he had ever undertaken the task, he might have disturbed that serene opinion of himself which marks him as a man who realized his own ideals.
The works used in this study are, first, the writings of Smith, which are as follows:
“A True Relation,” etc., London, 1608.
“A Map of Virginia, Description and Appendix,” Oxford, 1612.
“A Description of New England,” etc., London, 1616.
“New England's Trials,” etc., London, 1620. Second edition, enlarged, 1622.
“The Generall Historie,” etc., London, 1624. Reissued, with date of title-page altered, in 1626, 1627, and twice in 1632.
“An Accidence: or, The Pathway to Experience,” etc., London, 1626.
“A Sea Grammar,” etc., London, 1627. Also editions in 1653 and 1699.
“The True Travels,” etc., London, 1630.
“Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England,” etc., London, 1631.
Other authorities are:
“The Historie of Travaile into Virginia,” etc., by William Strachey, Secretary of the colony 1609 to 1612. First printed for the Hakluyt Society, London, 1849.
“Newport's Relatyon,” 1607. Am. Ant. Soc., Vol. 4.
“Wingfield's Discourse,” etc., 1607. Am. Ant. Soc., Vol. 4.
“Purchas his Pilgrimage,” London, 1613.
“Purchas his Pilgrimes,” London, 1625-6.
“Ralph Hamor's True Discourse,” etc., London, 1615.
“Relation of Virginia,” by Henry Spelman, 1609. First printed by J. F. Hunnewell, London, 1872.
“History of the Virginia Company in London,” by Edward D. Neill, Albany, 1869.
“William Stith's History of Virginia,” 1753, has been consulted for the charters and letters-patent. The Pocahontas discussion has been followed in many magazine papers. I am greatly indebted to the scholarly labors of Charles Deane, LL.D., the accomplished editor of the “True Relation,” and other Virginia monographs. I wish also to acknowledge the courtesy of the librarians of the Astor, the Lenox, the New York Historical, Yale, and Cornell libraries, and of Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the custodian of the Brinley collection, and the kindness of Mr. S. L. M. Barlow of New York, who is ever ready to give students access to his rich “Americana.”
C. D. W. HARTFORD, June, 1881
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
I. BIRTH AND TRAINING
Fortunate is the hero who links his name romantically with that of a woman. A tender interest in his fame is assured. Still more fortunate is he if he is able to record his own achievements and give to them that form and color and importance which they assume in his own gallant consciousness. Captain John Smith, the first of an honored name, had this double good fortune.
We are indebted to him for the glowing picture of a knight-errant of the sixteenth century, moving with the port of a swash-buckler across the field of vision, wherever cities were to be taken and heads cracked in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and, in the language of one of his laureates—
“To see bright honor sparkled all in gore.”
But we are specially his debtor for adventures on our own continent, narrated with naivete and vigor by a pen as direct and clear-cutting as the sword with which he shaved off the heads of the Turks, and for one of the few romances that illumine our early history.
Captain John Smith understood his good fortune in being the recorder of his own deeds, and he preceded Lord Beaconsfield (in “Endymion”) in his appreciation of the value of the influence of women upon the career of a hero. In the dedication of his “General Historie” to Frances, Duchess of Richmond, he says:
“I have deeply hazarded myself in doing and suffering, and why should I sticke to hazard my reputation in recording? He that acteth two parts is the more borne withall if he come short, or fayle in one of them. Where shall we looke to finde a Julius Caesar whose atchievments shine as cleare in his owne Commentaries, as they did in the field? I confesse, my hand though able to wield a weapon among the Barbarous, yet well may tremble in handling a Pen among so many judicious; especially when I am so bold as to call so piercing and so glorious an Eye, as your Grace, to view these poore ragged lines. Yet my comfort is that heretofore honorable and vertuous Ladies, and comparable but amongst themselves, have offered me rescue and protection in my greatest dangers: even in forraine parts, I have felt reliefe from that sex. The beauteous Lady Tragabigzanda, when I was a slave to the Turks, did all she could to secure me. When I overcame the Bashaw of Nalbrits in Tartaria, the charitable Lady Callamata supplyed my necessities. In the utmost of my extremities, that blessed Pokahontas, the great King's daughter of Virginia, oft saved my life. When I escaped the cruelties of Pirats and most furious stormes, a long time alone in a small Boat at Sea, and driven ashore in France, the good Lady Chanoyes bountifully assisted me.”
It is stated in his “True Travels” that John Smith was born in Willoughby, in Lincolnshire. The year of his birth is not given, but it was probably in 1579, as it appears by the portrait prefixed to that work that he was aged 37 years in 1616. We are able to add also that the rector of the Willoughby Rectory, Alford, finds in the register an entry of the baptism of John, son of George Smith, under date of Jan. 9, 1579. His biographers, following his account, represent him as of ancient lineage: “His father actually descended from the ancient Smiths of Crudley in Lancashire, his mother from the Rickands at great Heck in Yorkshire;” but the circumstances of his boyhood would indicate that like many other men who have made themselves a name, his origin was humble. If it had been otherwise he would scarcely have been bound as an apprentice, nor had so much difficulty in his advancement. But the boy was born with a merry disposition, and in his earliest years was impatient for adventure. The desire to rove was doubtless increased by the nature of his native shire, which offered every inducement to the lad of spirit to leave it.
Lincolnshire is the most uninteresting part of all England. It is frequently water-logged till late in the summer: invisible a part of the year, when it emerges it is mostly a dreary flat. Willoughby is a considerable village in this shire, situated about three miles and a half southeastward from Alford. It stands just on the edge of the chalk hills whose drives gently slope down to the German Ocean, and the scenery around offers an unvarying expanse of flats. All the villages in this part of Lincolnshire exhibit the same character. The name ends in by, the Danish word for hamlet or small village, and we can measure the progress of the Danish invasion of England by the number of towns which have the terminal by, distinguished from the Saxon thorpe, which generally ends the name of villages in Yorkshire. The population may be said to be Danish light-haired and blue-eyed. Such was John Smith. The sea was the natural element of his neighbors, and John when a boy must have heard many stories of the sea and enticing adventures told by the sturdy mariners who were recruited from the neighborhood of Willoughby, and whose oars had often cloven the Baltic Sea.
Willoughby boasts some antiquity. Its church is a spacious structure, with a nave, north and south aisles, and a chancel, and a tower at the west end. In the floor is a stone with a Latin inscription, in black letter, round the verge, to the memory of one Gilbert West, who died in 1404. The church is dedicated to St. Helen. In the village the Wesleyan Methodists also have a place of worship. According to the parliamentary returns of 1825, the parish including the hamlet of Sloothby contained 108 houses and 514 inhabitants. All the churches in Lincolnshire indicate the existence of a much larger population who were in the habit of attending service than exists at present. Many of these now empty are of size sufficient to accommodate the entire population of several villages. Such a one is Willoughby, which unites in its church the adjacent village of Sloothby.
The stories of the sailors and the contiguity of the salt water had more influence on the boy's mind than the free, schools of Alford and Louth which he attended, and when he was about thirteen he sold his books and satchel and intended to run away to sea: but the death of his father stayed him. Both his parents being now dead, he was left with, he says, competent means; but his guardians regarding his estate more than himself, gave him full liberty and no money, so that he was forced to stay at home.
At the age of fifteen he was bound apprentice to Mr. Thomas S. Tendall of Lynn. The articles, however, did not bind him very fast, for as his master refused to send him to sea, John took leave of his master and did not see him again for eight years. These details exhibit in the boy the headstrong independence of the man.
At length he found means to attach himself to a young son of the great soldier, Lord Willoughby, who was going into France. The narrative is not clear, but it appears that upon reaching Orleans, in a month or so the services of John were found to be of no value, and he was sent back to his friends, who on his return generously gave him ten shillings (out of his own estate) to be rid of him. He is next heard of enjoying his liberty at Paris and making the acquaintance of a Scotchman named David Hume, who used his purse—ten shillings went a long ways in those days—and in return gave him letters of commendation to prefer him to King James. But the boy had a disinclination to go where he was sent. Reaching Rouen, and being nearly out of money, he dropped down the river to Havre de Grace, and began to learn to be a soldier.
Smith says not a word of the great war of the Leaguers and Henry IV., nor on which side he fought, nor is it probable that he cared. But he was doubtless on the side of Henry, as Havre was at this time in possession of that soldier. Our adventurer not only makes no reference to the great religious war, nor to the League, nor to Henry, but he does not tell who held Paris when he visited it. Apparently state affairs did not interest him. His reference to a “peace” helps us to fix the date of his first adventure in France. Henry published the Edict of Nantes at Paris, April 13, 1598, and on the 2d of May following, concluded the treaty of France with Philip II. at Vervins, which closed the Spanish pretensions in France. The Duc de Mercoeur (of whom we shall hear later as Smith's “Duke of Mercury” in Hungary), Duke of Lorraine, was allied with the Guises in the League, and had the design of holding Bretagne under Spanish protection. However, fortune was against him and he submitted to Henry in February, 1598, with no good grace. Looking about for an opportunity to distinguish himself, he offered his services to the Emperor Rudolph to fight the Turks, and it is said led an army of his French followers, numbering 15,000, in 1601, to Hungary, to raise the siege of Coniza, which was beleaguered by Ibrahim Pasha with 60,000 men.
Chance of fighting and pay failing in France by reason of the peace, he enrolled himself under the banner of one of the roving and fighting captains of the time, who sold their swords in the best market, and went over into the Low Countries, where he hacked and hewed away at his fellow-men, all in the way of business, for three or four years. At the end of that time he bethought himself that he had not delivered his letters to Scotland. He embarked at Aucusan for Leith, and seems to have been shipwrecked, and detained by illness in the “holy isle” in Northumberland, near Barwick. On his recovery he delivered his letters, and received kind treatment from the Scots; but as he had no money, which was needed to make his way as a courtier, he returned to Willoughby.
The family of Smith is so “ancient” that the historians of the county of Lincoln do not allude to it, and only devote a brief paragraph to the great John himself. Willoughby must have been a dull place to him after his adventures, but he says he was glutted with company, and retired into a woody pasture, surrounded by forests, a good ways from any town, and there built himself a pavilion of boughs—less substantial than the cabin of Thoreau at Walden Pond—and there he heroically slept in his clothes, studied Machiavelli's “Art of War,” read “Marcus Aurelius,” and exercised on his horse with lance and ring. This solitary conduct got him the name of a hermit, whose food was thought to be more of venison than anything else, but in fact his men kept him supplied with provisions. When John had indulged in this ostentatious seclusion for a time, he allowed himself to be drawn out of it by the charming discourse of a noble Italian named Theodore Palaloga, who just then was Rider to Henry, Earl of Lincoln, and went to stay with him at Tattershall. This was an ancient town, with a castle, which belonged to the Earls of Lincoln, and was situated on the River Bane, only fourteen miles from Boston, a name that at once establishes a connection between Smith's native county and our own country, for it is nearly as certain that St. Botolph founded a monastery at Boston, Lincoln, in the year 654, as it is that he founded a club afterwards in Boston, Massachusetts.
Whatever were the pleasures of Tattershall, they could not long content the restless Smith, who soon set out again for the Netherlands in search of adventures.
The life of Smith, as it is related by himself, reads like that of a belligerent tramp, but it was not uncommon in his day, nor is it in ours, whenever America produces soldiers of fortune who are ready, for a compensation, to take up the quarrels of Egyptians or Chinese, or go wherever there is fighting and booty. Smith could now handle arms and ride a horse, and longed to go against the Turks, whose anti-Christian contests filled his soul with lamentations; and besides he was tired of seeing Christians slaughter each other. Like most heroes, he had a vivid imagination that made him credulous, and in the Netherlands he fell into the toils of three French gallants, one of whom pretended to be a great lord, attended by his gentlemen, who persuaded him to accompany them to the “Duchess of Mercury,” whose lord was then a general of Rodolphus of Hungary, whose favor they could command. Embarking with these arrant cheats, the vessel reached the coast of Picardy, where his comrades contrived to take ashore their own baggage and Smith's trunk, containing his money and goodly apparel, leaving him on board. When the captain, who was in the plot, was enabled to land Smith the next day, the noble lords had disappeared with the luggage, and Smith, who had only a single piece of gold in his pocket, was obliged to sell his cloak to pay his passage.
Thus stripped, he roamed about Normandy in a forlorn condition, occasionally entertained by honorable persons who had heard of his misfortunes, and seeking always means of continuing his travels, wandering from port to port on the chance of embarking on a man-of-war. Once he was found in a forest near dead with grief and cold, and rescued by a rich farmer; shortly afterwards, in a grove in Brittany, he chanced upon one of the gallants who had robbed him, and the two out swords and fell to cutting. Smith had the satisfaction of wounding the rascal, and the inhabitants of a ruined tower near by, who witnessed the combat, were quite satisfied with the event.
Our hero then sought out the Earl of Ployer, who had been brought up in England during the French wars, by whom he was refurnished better than ever. After this streak of luck, he roamed about France, viewing the castles and strongholds, and at length embarked at Marseilles on a ship for Italy. Rough weather coming on, the vessel anchored under the lee of the little isle St. Mary, off Nice, in Savoy.
The passengers on board, among whom were many pilgrims bound for Rome, regarded Smith as a Jonah, cursed him for a Huguenot, swore that his nation were all pirates, railed against Queen Elizabeth, and declared that they never should have fair weather so long as he was on board. To end the dispute, they threw him into the sea. But God got him ashore on the little island, whose only inhabitants were goats and a few kine. The next day a couple of trading vessels anchored near, and he was taken off and so kindly used that he decided to cast in his fortune with them. Smith's discourse of his adventures so entertained the master of one of the vessels, who is described as “this noble Britaine, his neighbor, Captaine la Roche, of Saint Malo,” that the much-tossed wanderer was accepted as a friend. They sailed to the Gulf of Turin, to Alessandria, where they discharged freight, then up to Scanderoon, and coasting for some time among the Grecian islands, evidently in search of more freight, they at length came round to Cephalonia, and lay to for some days betwixt the isle of Corfu and the Cape of Otranto. Here it presently appeared what sort of freight the noble Britaine, Captain la Roche, was looking for.
An argosy of Venice hove in sight, and Captaine la Roche desired to speak to her. The reply was so “untoward” that a man was slain, whereupon the Britaine gave the argosy a broadside, and then his stem, and then other broadsides. A lively fight ensued, in which the Britaine lost fifteen men, and the argosy twenty, and then surrendered to save herself from sinking. The noble Britaine and John Smith then proceeded to rifle her. He says that “the Silkes, Velvets, Cloth of Gold, and Tissue, Pyasters, Chiqueenes, and Suitanies, which is gold and silver, they unloaded in four-and-twenty hours was wonderful, whereof having sufficient, and tired with toils, they cast her off with her company, with as much good merchandise as would have freighted another Britaine, that was but two hundred Tunnes, she four or five hundred.” Smith's share of this booty was modest. When the ship returned he was set ashore at “the Road of Antibo in Piamon,” “with five hundred chiqueenes [sequins] and a little box God sent him worth neere as much more.” He always devoutly acknowledged his dependence upon divine Providence, and took willingly what God sent him.
II. FIGHTING IN HUNGARY
Smith being thus “refurnished,” made the tour of Italy, satisfied himself with the rarities of Rome, where he saw Pope Clement the Eighth and many cardinals creep up the holy stairs, and with the fair city of Naples and the kingdom's nobility; and passing through the north he came into Styria, to the Court of Archduke Ferdinand; and, introduced by an Englishman and an Irish Jesuit to the notice of Baron Kisell, general of artillery, he obtained employment, and went to Vienna with Colonel Voldo, Earl of Meldritch, with whose regiment he was to serve.
He was now on the threshold of his long-desired campaign against the Turks. The arrival on the scene of this young man, who was scarcely out of his teens, was a shadow of disaster to the Turks. They had been carrying all before them. Rudolph II., Emperor of Germany, was a weak and irresolute character, and no match for the enterprising Sultan, Mahomet III., who was then conducting the invasion of Europe. The Emperor's brother, the Archduke Mathias, who was to succeed him, and Ferdinand, Duke of Styria, also to become Emperor of Germany, were much abler men, and maintained a good front against the Moslems in Lower Hungary, but the Turks all the time steadily advanced. They had long occupied Buda (Pesth), and had been in possession of the stronghold of Alba Regalis for some sixty years. Before Smith's advent they had captured the important city of Caniza, and just as he reached the ground they had besieged the town of Olumpagh, with two thousand men. But the addition to the armies of Germany, France, Styria, and Hungary of John Smith, “this English gentleman,” as he styles himself, put a new face on the war, and proved the ruin of the Turkish cause. The Bashaw of Buda was soon to feel the effect of this re-enforcement.
Caniza is a town in Lower Hungary, north of the River Drave, and just west of the Platen Sea, or Lake Balatin, as it is also called. Due north of Caniza a few miles, on a bend of the little River Raab (which empties into the Danube), and south of the town of Kerment, lay Smith's town of Olumpagh, which we are able to identify on a map of the period as Olimacum or Oberlymback. In this strong town the Turks had shut up the garrison under command of Governor Ebersbraught so closely that it was without intelligence or hope of succor.
In this strait, the ingenious John Smith, who was present in the reconnoitering army in the regiment of the Earl of Meldritch, came to the aid of Baron Kisell, the general of artillery, with a plan of communication with the besieged garrison. Fortunately Smith had made the acquaintance of Lord Ebersbraught at Gratza, in Styria, and had (he says) communicated to him a system of signaling a message by the use of torches. Smith seems to have elaborated this method of signals, and providentially explained it to Lord Ebersbraught, as if he had a presentiment of the latter's use of it. He divided the alphabet into two parts, from A to L and from M to Z. Letters were indicated and words spelled by the means of torches: “The first part, from A to L, is signified by showing and holding one linke so oft as there is letters from A to that letter you name; the other part, from M to Z, is mentioned by two lights in like manner. The end of a word is signifien by showing of three lights.”
General Kisell, inflamed by this strange invention, which Smith made plain to him, furnished him guides, who conducted him to a high mountain, seven miles distant from the town, where he flashed his torches and got a reply from the governor. Smith signaled that they would charge on the east of the town in the night, and at the alarum Ebersbraught was to sally forth. General Kisell doubted that he should be able to relieve the town by this means, as he had only ten thousand men; but Smith, whose fertile brain was now in full action, and who seems to have assumed charge of the campaign, hit upon a stratagem for the diversion and confusion of the Turks.
On the side of the town opposite the proposed point of attack lay the plain of Hysnaburg (Eisnaburg on Ortelius's map). Smith fastened two or three charred pieces of match to divers small lines of an hundred fathoms in length, armed with powder. Each line was tied to a stake at each end. After dusk these lines were set up on the plain, and being fired at the instant the alarm was given, they seemed to the Turks like so many rows of musketeers. While the Turks therefore prepared to repel a great army from that side, Kisell attacked with his ten thousand men, Ebersbraught sallied out and fell upon the Turks in the trenches, all the enemy on that side were slain or drowned, or put to flight. And while the Turks were busy routing Smith's sham musketeers, the Christians threw a couple of thousand troops into the town. Whereupon the Turks broke up the siege and retired to Caniza. For this exploit General Kisell received great honor at Kerment, and Smith was rewarded with the rank of captain, and the command of two hundred and fifty horsemen. From this time our hero must figure as Captain John Smith. The rank is not high, but he has made the title great, just as he has made the name of John Smith unique.
After this there were rumors of peace for these tormented countries; but the Turks, who did not yet appreciate the nature of this force, called John Smith, that had come into the world against them, did not intend peace, but went on levying soldiers and launching them into Hungary. To oppose these fresh invasions, Rudolph II., aided by the Christian princes, organized three armies: one led by the Archduke Mathias and his lieutenant, Duke Mercury, to defend Low Hungary; the second led by Ferdinand, the Archduke of Styria, and the Duke of Mantua, his lieutenant, to regain Caniza; the third by Gonzago, Governor of High Hungary, to join with Georgio Busca, to make an absolute conquest of Transylvania.
In pursuance of this plan, Duke Mercury, with an army of thirty thousand, whereof nearly ten thousand were French, besieged Stowell-Weisenberg, otherwise called Alba Regalis, a place so strong by art and nature that it was thought impregnable.
This stronghold, situated on the northeast of the Platen Sea, was, like Caniza and Oberlympack, one of the Turkish advanced posts, by means of which they pushed forward their operations from Buda on the Danube.
This noble friend of Smith, the Duke of Mercury, whom Haylyn styles Duke Mercurio, seems to have puzzled the biographers of Smith. In fact, the name of “Mercury” has given a mythological air to Smith's narration and aided to transfer it to the region of romance. He was, however, as we have seen, identical with a historical character of some importance, for the services he rendered to the Church of Rome, and a commander of some considerable skill. He is no other than Philip de Lorraine, Duc de Mercceur.'
[So far as I know, Dr. Edward Eggleston was the first to identify him. There is a sketch of him in the “Biographie Universelle,” and a life with an account of his exploits in Hungary, entitled: Histoire de Duc Mercoeur, par Bruseles de Montplain Champs, Cologne, 1689-97]
At the siege of Alba Regalis, the Turks gained several successes by night sallies, and, as usual, it was not till Smith came to the front with one of his ingenious devices that the fortune of war changed. The Earl Meldritch, in whose regiment Smith served, having heard from some Christians who escaped from the town at what place there were the greatest assemblies and throngs of people in the city, caused Captain Smith to put in practice his “fiery dragons.” These instruments of destruction are carefully described: “Having prepared fortie or fiftie round-bellied earthen pots, and filled them with hand Gunpowder, then covered them with Pitch, mingled with Brimstone and Turpentine, and quartering as many Musket-bullets, that hung together but only at the center of the division, stucke them round in the mixture about the pots, and covered them againe with the same mixture, over that a strong sear-cloth, then over all a goode thicknesse of Towze-match, well tempered with oyle of Linseed, Campheer, and powder of Brimstone, these he fitly placed in slings, graduated so neere as they could to the places of these assemblies.”
These missiles of Smith's invention were flung at midnight, when the alarum was given, and “it was a perfect sight to see the short flaming course of their flight in the air, but presently after their fall, the lamentable noise of the miserable slaughtered Turkes was most wonderful to heare.”
While Smith was amusing the Turks in this manner, the Earl Rosworme planned an attack on the opposite suburb, which was defended by a muddy lake, supposed to be impassable. Furnishing his men with bundles of sedge, which they threw before them as they advanced in the dark night, the lake was made passable, the suburb surprised, and the captured guns of the Turks were turned upon them in the city to which they had retreated. The army of the Bashaw was cut to pieces and he himself captured.
The Earl of Meldritch, having occupied the town, repaired the walls and the ruins of this famous city that had been in the possession of the Turks for some threescore years.
It is not our purpose to attempt to trace the meteoric course of Captain Smith in all his campaigns against the Turks, only to indicate the large part he took in these famous wars for the possession of Eastern Europe. The siege of Alba Regalis must have been about the year 1601—Smith never troubles himself with any dates—and while it was undecided, Mahomet III.—this was the prompt Sultan who made his position secure by putting to death nineteen of his brothers upon his accession—raised sixty thousand troops for its relief or its recovery. The Duc de Mercoeur went out to meet this army, and encountered it in the plains of Girke. In the first skirmishes the Earl Meldritch was very nearly cut off, although he made “his valour shine more bright than his armour, which seemed then painted with Turkish blood.” Smith himself was sore wounded and had his horse slain under him. The campaign, at first favorable to the Turks, was inconclusive, and towards winter the Bashaw retired to Buda. The Duc de Mercoeur then divided his army. The Earl of Rosworme was sent to assist the Archduke Ferdinand, who was besieging Caniza; the Earl of Meldritch, with six thousand men, was sent to assist Georgio Busca against the Transylvanians; and the Duc de Mercoeur set out for France to raise new forces. On his way he received great honor at Vienna, and staying overnight at Nuremberg, he was royally entertained by the Archdukes Mathias and Maximilian. The next morning after the feast—how it chanced is not known—he was found dead His brother-inlaw died two days afterwards, and the hearts of both, with much sorrow, were carried into France.
We now come to the most important event in the life of Smith before he became an adventurer in Virginia, an event which shows Smith's readiness to put in practice the chivalry which had in the old chronicles influenced his boyish imagination; and we approach it with the satisfaction of knowing that it loses nothing in Smith's narration.
It must be mentioned that Transylvania, which the Earl of Meldritch, accompanied by Captain Smith, set out to relieve, had long been in a disturbed condition, owing to internal dissensions, of which the Turks took advantage. Transylvania, in fact, was a Turkish dependence, and it gives us an idea of the far reach of the Moslem influence in Europe, that Stephen VI., vaivode of Transylvania, was, on the commendation of Sultan Armurath III., chosen King of Poland.
To go a little further back than the period of Smith's arrival, John II. of Transylvania was a champion of the Turk, and an enemy of Ferdinand and his successors. His successor, Stephen VI., surnamed Battori, or Bathor, was made vaivode by the Turks, and afterwards, as we have said, King of Poland. He was succeeded in 1575 by his brother Christopher Battori, who was the first to drop the title of vaivode and assume that of Prince of Transylvania. The son of Christopher, Sigismund Battori, shook off the Turkish bondage, defeated many of their armies, slew some of their pashas, and gained the title of the Scanderbeg of the times in which he lived. Not able to hold out, however, against so potent an adversary, he resigned his estate to the Emperor Rudolph II., and received in exchange the dukedoms of Oppelon and Ratibor in Silesia, with an annual pension of fifty thousand joachims. The pension not being well paid, Sigismund made another resignation of his principality to his cousin Andrew Battori, who had the ill luck to be slain within the year by the vaivode of Valentia. Thereupon Rudolph, Emperor and King of Hungary, was acknowledged Prince of Transylvania. But the Transylvania soldiers did not take kindly to a foreign prince, and behaved so unsoldierly that Sigismund was called back. But he was unable to settle himself in his dominions, and the second time he left his country in the power of Rudolph and retired to Prague, where, in 1615, he died unlamented.
It was during this last effort of Sigismund to regain his position that the Earl of Meldritch, accompanied by Smith, went to Transylvania, with the intention of assisting Georgio Busca, who was the commander of the Emperor's party. But finding Prince Sigismund in possession of the most territory and of the hearts of the people, the earl thought it best to assist the prince against the Turk, rather than Busca against the prince. Especially was he inclined to that side by the offer of free liberty of booty for his worn and unpaid troops, of what they could get possession of from the Turks.
This last consideration no doubt persuaded the troops that Sigismund had “so honest a cause.” The earl was born in Transylvania, and the Turks were then in possession of his father's country. In this distracted state of the land, the frontiers had garrisons among the mountains, some of which held for the emperor, some for the prince, and some for the Turk. The earl asked leave of the prince to make an attempt to regain his paternal estate. The prince, glad of such an ally, made him camp-master of his army, and gave him leave to plunder the Turks. Accordingly the earl began to make incursions of the frontiers into what Smith calls the Land of Zarkam—among rocky mountains, where were some Turks, some Tartars, but most Brandittoes, Renegadoes, and such like, which he forced into the Plains of Regall, where was a city of men and fortifications, strong in itself, and so environed with mountains that it had been impregnable in all these wars.
It must be confessed that the historians and the map-makers did not always attach the importance that Smith did to the battles in which he was conspicuous, and we do not find the Land of Zarkam or the city of Regall in the contemporary chronicles or atlases. But the region is sufficiently identified. On the River Maruch, or Morusus, was the town of Alba Julia, or Weisenberg, the residence of the vaivode or Prince of Transylvania. South of this capital was the town Millenberg, and southwest of this was a very strong fortress, commanding a narrow pass leading into Transylvania out of Hungary, probably where the River Maruct: broke through the mountains. We infer that it was this pass that the earl captured by a stratagem, and carrying his army through it, began the siege of Regall in the plain. “The earth no sooner put on her green habit,” says our knight-errant, “than the earl overspread her with his troops.” Regall occupied a strong fortress on a promontory and the Christians encamped on the plain before it.
In the conduct of this campaign, we pass at once into the age of chivalry, about which Smith had read so much. We cannot but recognize that this is his opportunity. His idle boyhood had been soaked in old romances, and he had set out in his youth to do what equally dreamy but less venturesome devourers of old chronicles were content to read about. Everything arranged itself as Smith would have had it. When the Christian army arrived, the Turks sallied out and gave it a lively welcome, which cost each side about fifteen hundred men. Meldritch had but eight thousand soldiers, but he was re-enforced by the arrival of nine thousand more, with six-and-twenty pieces of ordnance, under Lord Zachel Moyses, the general of the army, who took command of the whole.
After the first skirmish the Turks remained within their fortress, the guns of which commanded the plain, and the Christians spent a month in intrenching themselves and mounting their guns.
The Turks, who taught Europe the art of civilized war, behaved all this time in a courtly and chivalric manner, exchanging with the besiegers wordy compliments until such time as the latter were ready to begin. The Turks derided the slow progress of the works, inquired if their ordnance was in pawn, twitted them with growing fat for want of exercise, and expressed the fear that the Christians should depart without making an assault.
In order to make the time pass pleasantly, and exactly in accordance with the tales of chivalry which Smith had read, the Turkish Bashaw in the fortress sent out his challenge: “That to delight the ladies, who did long to see some courtlike pastime, the Lord Tubashaw did defy any captaine that had the command of a company, who durst combat with him for his head.”
This handsome offer to swap heads was accepted; lots were cast for the honor of meeting the lord, and, fortunately for us, the choice fell upon an ardent fighter of twenty-three years, named Captain John Smith. Nothing was wanting to give dignity to the spectacle. Truce was made; the ramparts of this fortress-city in the mountains (which we cannot find on the map) were “all beset with faire Dames and men in Armes”; the Christians were drawn up in battle array; and upon the theatre thus prepared the Turkish Bashaw, armed and mounted, entered with a flourish of hautboys; on his shoulders were fixed a pair of great wings, compacted of eagles' feathers within a ridge of silver richly garnished with gold and precious stones; before him was a janissary bearing his lance, and a janissary walked at each side leading his steed.
This gorgeous being Smith did not keep long waiting. Riding into the field with a flourish of trumpets, and only a simple page to bear his lance, Smith favored the Bashaw with a courteous salute, took position, charged at the signal, and before the Bashaw could say “Jack Robinson,” thrust his lance through the sight of his beaver, face, head and all, threw him dead to the ground, alighted, unbraced his helmet, and cut off his head. The whole affair was over so suddenly that as a pastime for ladies it must have been disappointing. The Turks came out and took the headless trunk, and Smith, according to the terms of the challenge, appropriated the head and presented it to General Moyses.
This ceremonious but still hasty procedure excited the rage of one Grualgo, the friend of the Bashaw, who sent a particular challenge to Smith to regain his friend's head or lose his own, together with his horse and armor. Our hero varied the combat this time. The two combatants shivered lances and then took to pistols; Smith received a mark upon the “placard,” but so wounded the Turk in his left arm that he was unable to rule his horse. Smith then unhorsed him, cut off his head, took possession of head, horse, and armor, but returned the rich apparel and the body to his friends in the most gentlemanly manner.
Captain Smith was perhaps too serious a knight to see the humor of these encounters, but he does not lack humor in describing them, and he adopted easily the witty courtesies of the code he was illustrating. After he had gathered two heads, and the siege still dragged, he became in turn the challenger, in phrase as courteously and grimly facetious as was permissible, thus:
“To delude time, Smith, with so many incontradictible perswading reasons, obtained leave that the Ladies might know he was not so much enamored of their servants' heads, but if any Turke of their ranke would come to the place of combat to redeem them, should have also his, upon like conditions, if he could winne it.”
This considerate invitation was accepted by a person whom Smith, with his usual contempt for names, calls “Bonny Mulgro.” It seems difficult to immortalize such an appellation, and it is a pity that we have not the real one of the third Turk whom Smith honored by killing. But Bonny Mulgro, as we must call the worthiest foe that Smith's prowess encountered, appeared upon the field. Smith understands working up a narration, and makes this combat long and doubtful. The challenged party, who had the choice of weapons, had marked the destructiveness of his opponent's lance, and elected, therefore, to fight with pistols and battle-axes. The pistols proved harmless, and then the battle-axes came in play, whose piercing bills made sometime the one, sometime the other, to have scarce sense to keep their saddles. Smith received such a blow that he lost his battle-axe, whereat the Turks on the ramparts set up a great shout. “The Turk prosecuted his advantage to the utmost of his power; yet the other, what by the readiness of his horse, and his judgment and dexterity in such a business, beyond all men's expectations, by God's assistance, not only avoided the Turke's violence, but having drawn his Faulchion, pierced the Turke so under the Culets throrow backe and body, that although he alighted from his horse, he stood not long ere he lost his head, as the rest had done.”
There is nothing better than this in all the tales of chivalry, and John Smith's depreciation of his inability to equal Caesar in describing his own exploits, in his dedicatory letter to the Duchess of Richmond, must be taken as an excess of modesty. We are prepared to hear that these beheadings gave such encouragement to the whole army that six thousand soldiers, with three led horses, each preceded by a soldier bearing a Turk's head on a lance, turned out as a guard to Smith and conducted him to the pavilion of the general, to whom he presented his trophies. General Moyses (occasionally Smith calls him Moses) took him in his arms and embraced him with much respect, and gave him a fair horse, richly furnished, a scimeter, and a belt worth three hundred ducats. And his colonel advanced him to the position of sergeant-major of his regiment. If any detail was wanting to round out and reward this knightly performance in strict accord with the old romances, it was supplied by the subsequent handsome conduct of Prince Sigismund.
When the Christians had mounted their guns and made a couple of breaches in the walls of Regall, General Moyses ordered an attack one dark night “by the light that proceeded from the murdering muskets and peace-making cannon.” The enemy were thus awaited, “whilst their slothful governor lay in a castle on top of a high mountain, and like a valiant prince asketh what's the matter, when horrour and death stood amazed at each other, to see who should prevail to make him victorious.” These descriptions show that Smith could handle the pen as well as the battleaxe, and distinguish him from the more vulgar fighters of his time. The assault succeeded, but at great cost of life. The Turks sent a flag of truce and desired a “composition,” but the earl, remembering the death of his father, continued to batter the town and when he took it put all the men in arms to the sword, and then set their heads upon stakes along the walls, the Turks having ornamented the walls with Christian heads when they captured the fortress. Although the town afforded much pillage, the loss of so many troops so mixed the sour with the sweet that General Moyses could only allay his grief by sacking three other towns, Veratis, Solmos, and Kapronka. Taking from these a couple of thousand prisoners, mostly women and children, Earl Moyses marched north to Weisenberg (Alba Julia), and camped near the palace of Prince Sigismund.
When Sigismund Battori came out to view his army he was made acquainted with the signal services of Smith at “Olumpagh, Stowell-Weisenberg, and Regall,” and rewarded him by conferring upon him, according to the law of—arms, a shield of arms with “three Turks' heads.” This was granted by a letter-patent, in Latin, which is dated at “Lipswick, in Misenland, December 9, 1603” It recites that Smith was taken captive by the Turks in Wallachia November 18, 1602; that he escaped and rejoined his fellow-soldiers. This patent, therefore, was not given at Alba Julia, nor until Prince Sigismund had finally left his country, and when the Emperor was, in fact, the Prince of Transylvania. Sigismund styles himself, by the grace of God, Duke of Transylvania, etc. Appended to this patent, as published in Smith's “True Travels,” is a certificate by William Segar, knight of the garter and principal king of arms of England, that he had seen this patent and had recorded a copy of it in the office of the Herald of Armes. This certificate is dated August 19, 1625, the year after the publication of the General Historie.
Smith says that Prince Sigismund also gave him his picture in gold, and granted him an annual pension of three hundred ducats. This promise of a pension was perhaps the most unsubstantial portion of his reward, for Sigismund himself became a pensioner shortly after the events last narrated.
The last mention of Sigismund by Smith is after his escape from captivity in Tartaria, when this mirror of virtues had abdicated. Smith visited him at “Lipswicke in Misenland,” and the Prince “gave him his Passe, intimating the service he had done, and the honors he had received, with fifteen hundred ducats of gold to repair his losses.” The “Passe” was doubtless the “Patent” before introduced, and we hear no word of the annual pension.
Affairs in Transylvania did not mend even after the capture of Regall, and of the three Turks' heads, and the destruction of so many villages. This fruitful and strong country was the prey of faction, and became little better than a desert under the ravages of the contending armies. The Emperor Rudolph at last determined to conquer the country for himself, and sent Busca again with a large army. Sigismund finding himself poorly supported, treated again with the Emperor and agreed to retire to Silicia on a pension. But the Earl Moyses, seeing no prospect of regaining his patrimony, and determining not to be under subjection to the Germans, led his troops against Busca, was defeated, and fled to join the Turks. Upon this desertion the Prince delivered up all he had to Busca and retired to Prague. Smith himself continued with the imperial party, in the regiment of Earl Meldritch. About this time the Sultan sent one Jeremy to be vaivode of Wallachia, whose tyranny caused the people to rise against him, and he fled into Moldavia. Busca proclaimed Lord Rodoll vaivode in his stead. But Jeremy assembled an army of forty thousand Turks, Tartars, and Moldavians, and retired into Wallachia. Smith took active part in Rodoll's campaign to recover Wallachia, and narrates the savage war that ensued. When the armies were encamped near each other at Raza and Argish, Rodoll cut off the heads of parties he captured going to the Turkish camp, and threw them into the enemy's trenches. Jeremy retorted by skinning alive the Christian parties he captured, hung their skins upon poles, and their carcasses and heads on stakes by them. In the first battle Rodoll was successful and established himself in Wallachia, but Jeremy rallied and began ravaging the country. Earl Meldritch was sent against him, but the Turks' force was much superior, and the Christians were caught in a trap. In order to reach Rodoll, who was at Rottenton, Meldritch with his small army was obliged to cut his way through the solid body of the enemy. A device of Smith's assisted him. He covered two or three hundred trunks—probably small branches of trees—with wild-fire. These fixed upon the heads of lances and set on fire when the troops charged in the night, so terrified the horses of the Turks that they fled in dismay. Meldritch was for a moment victorious, but when within three leagues of Rottenton he was overpowered by forty thousand Turks, and the last desperate fight followed, in which nearly all the friends of the Prince were slain, and Smith himself was left for dead on the field.
On this bloody field over thirty thousand lay headless, armless, legless, all cut and mangled, who gave knowledge to the world how dear the Turk paid for his conquest of Transylvania and Wallachia—a conquest that might have been averted if the three Christian armies had been joined against the “cruel devouring Turk.” Among the slain were many Englishmen, adventurers like the valiant Captain whom Smith names, men who “left there their bodies in testimony of their minds.” And there, “Smith among the slaughtered dead bodies, and many a gasping soule with toils and wounds lay groaning among the rest, till being found by the Pillagers he was able to live, and perceiving by his armor and habit, his ransome might be better than his death, they led him prisoner with many others.” The captives were taken to Axopolis and all sold as slaves. Smith was bought by Bashaw Bogall, who forwarded him by way of Adrianople to Constantinople, to be a slave to his mistress. So chained by the necks in gangs of twenty they marched to the city of Constantine, where Smith was delivered over to the mistress of the Bashaw, the young Charatza Tragabigzanda.
III. CAPTIVITY AND WANDERING
Our hero never stirs without encountering a romantic adventure. Noble ladies nearly always take pity on good-looking captains, and Smith was far from ill-favored. The charming Charatza delighted to talk with her slave, for she could speak Italian, and would feign herself too sick to go to the bath, or to accompany the other women when they went to weep over the graves, as their custom is once a week, in order to stay at home to hear from Smith how it was that Bogall took him prisoner, as the Bashaw had written her, and whether Smith was a Bohemian lord conquered by the Bashaw's own hand, whose ransom could adorn her with the glory of her lover's conquests. Great must have been her disgust with Bogall when she heard that he had not captured this handsome prisoner, but had bought him in the slave-market at Axopolis. Her compassion for her slave increased, and the hero thought he saw in her eyes a tender interest. But she had no use for such a slave, and fearing her mother would sell him, she sent him to her brother, the Tymor Bashaw of Nalbrits in the country of Cambria, a province of Tartaria (wherever that may be). If all had gone on as Smith believed the kind lady intended, he might have been a great Bashaw and a mighty man in the Ottoman Empire, and we might never have heard of Pocahontas. In sending him to her brother, it was her intention, for she told him so, that he should only sojourn in Nalbrits long enough to learn the language, and what it was to be a Turk, till time made her master of herself. Smith himself does not dissent from this plan to metamorphose him into a Turk and the husband of the beautiful Charatza Tragabigzanda. He had no doubt that he was commended to the kindest treatment by her brother; but Tymor “diverted all this to the worst of cruelty.” Within an hour of his arrival, he was stripped naked, his head and face shaved as smooth as his hand, a ring of iron, with a long stake bowed like a sickle, riveted to his neck, and he was scantily clad in goat's skin. There were many other slaves, but Smith being the last, was treated like a dog, and made the slave of slaves.
The geographer is not able to follow Captain Smith to Nalbrits. Perhaps Smith himself would have been puzzled to make a map of his own career after he left Varna and passed the Black Sea and came through the straits of Niger into the Sea Disbacca, by some called the Lake Moetis, and then sailed some days up the River Bruapo to Cambria, and two days more to Nalbrits, where the Tyrnor resided.
Smith wrote his travels in London nearly thirty years after, and it is difficult to say how much is the result of his own observation and how much he appropriated from preceding romances. The Cambrians may have been the Cossacks, but his description of their habits and also those of the “Crym-Tartars” belongs to the marvels of Mandeville and other wide-eyed travelers. Smith fared very badly with the Tymor. The Tymor and his friends ate pillaw; they esteemed “samboyses” and “musselbits” “great dainties, and yet,” exclaims Smith, “but round pies, full of all sorts of flesh they can get, chopped with variety of herbs.” Their best drink was “coffa” and sherbet, which is only honey and water. The common victual of the others was the entrails of horses and “ulgries” (goats?) cut up and boiled in a caldron with “cuskus,” a preparation made from grain. This was served in great bowls set in the ground, and when the other prisoners had raked it thoroughly with their foul fists the remainder was given to the Christians. The same dish of entrails used to be served not many years ago in Upper Egypt as a royal dish to entertain a distinguished guest.
It might entertain but it would too long detain us to repeat Smith's information, probably all secondhand, about this barbarous region. We must confine ourselves to the fortunes of our hero. All his hope of deliverance from thraldom was in the love of Tragabigzanda, whom he firmly believed was ignorant of his bad usage. But she made no sign. Providence at length opened a way for his escape. He was employed in thrashing in a field more than a league from the Tymor's home. The Bashaw used to come to visit his slave there, and beat, spurn, and revile him. One day Smith, unable to control himself under these insults, rushed upon the Tymor, and beat out his brains with a thrashing bat—“for they had no flails,” he explains—put on the dead man's clothes, hid the body in the straw, filled a knapsack with corn, mounted his horse and rode away into the unknown desert, where he wandered many days before he found a way out. If we may believe Smith this wilderness was more civilized in one respect than some parts of our own land, for on all the crossings of the roads were guide-boards. After traveling sixteen days on the road that leads to Muscova, Smith reached a Muscovite garrison on the River Don. The governor knocked off the iron from his neck and used him so kindly that he thought himself now risen from the dead. With his usual good fortune there was a lady to take interest in him—“the good Lady Callamata largely supplied all his wants.”
After Smith had his purse filled by Sigismund he made a thorough tour of Europe, and passed into Spain, where being satisfied, as he says, with Europe and Asia, and understanding that there were wars in Barbary, this restless adventurer passed on into Morocco with several comrades on a French man-of-war. His observations on and tales about North Africa are so evidently taken from the books of other travelers that they add little to our knowledge of his career. For some reason he found no fighting going on worth his while. But good fortune attended his return. He sailed in a man-of-war with Captain Merham. They made a few unimportant captures, and at length fell in with two Spanish men-of-war, which gave Smith the sort of entertainment he most coveted. A sort of running fight, sometimes at close quarters, and with many boardings and repulses, lasted for a couple of days and nights, when having battered each other thoroughly and lost many men, the pirates of both nations separated and went cruising, no doubt, for more profitable game. Our wanderer returned to his native land, seasoned and disciplined for the part he was to play in the New World. As Smith had traveled all over Europe and sojourned in Morocco, besides sailing the high seas, since he visited Prince Sigismund in December, 1603, it was probably in the year 1605 that he reached England. He had arrived at the manly age of twenty-six years, and was ready to play a man's part in the wonderful drama of discovery and adventure upon which the Britons were then engaged.
IV. FIRST ATTEMPTS IN VIRGINIA
John Smith has not chosen to tell us anything of his life during the interim—perhaps not more than a year and a half—between his return from Morocco and his setting sail for Virginia. Nor do his contemporaries throw any light upon this period of his life.
One would like to know whether he went down to Willoughby and had a reckoning with his guardians; whether he found any relations or friends of his boyhood; whether any portion of his estate remained of that “competent means” which he says he inherited, but which does not seem to have been available in his career. From the time when he set out for France in his fifteenth year, with the exception of a short sojourn in Willoughby seven or eight years after, he lived by his wits and by the strong hand. His purse was now and then replenished by a lucky windfall, which enabled him to extend his travels and seek more adventures. This is the impression that his own story makes upon the reader in a narrative that is characterized by the boastfulness and exaggeration of the times, and not fuller of the marvelous than most others of that period.
The London to which Smith returned was the London of Shakespeare. We should be thankful for one glimpse of him in this interesting town. Did he frequent the theatre? Did he perhaps see Shakespeare himself at the Globe? Did he loaf in the coffee-houses, and spin the fine thread of his adventures to the idlers and gallants who resorted to them? If he dropped in at any theatre of an afternoon he was quite likely to hear some allusion to Virginia, for the plays of the hour were full of chaff, not always of the choicest, about the attractions of the Virgin-land, whose gold was as plentiful as copper in England; where the prisoners were fettered in gold, and the dripping-pans were made of it; and where—an unheard-of thing—you might become an alderman without having been a scavenger.
Was Smith an indulger in that new medicine for all ills, tobacco? Alas! we know nothing of his habits or his company. He was a man of piety according to his lights, and it is probable that he may have had the then rising prejudice against theatres. After his return from Virginia he and his exploits were the subject of many a stage play and spectacle, but whether his vanity was more flattered by this mark of notoriety than his piety was offended we do not know. There is certainly no sort of evidence that he engaged in the common dissipation of the town, nor gave himself up to those pleasures which a man rescued from the hardships of captivity in Tartaria might be expected to seek. Mr. Stith says that it was the testimony of his fellow soldiers and adventurers that “they never knew a soldier, before him, so free from those military vices of wine, tobacco, debts, dice, and oathes.”
But of one thing we may be certain: he was seeking adventure according to his nature, and eager for any heroic employment; and it goes without saying that he entered into the great excitement of the day—adventure in America. Elizabeth was dead. James had just come to the throne, and Raleigh, to whom Elizabeth had granted an extensive patent of Virginia, was in the Tower. The attempts to make any permanent lodgment in the countries of Virginia had failed. But at the date of Smith's advent Captain Bartholomew Gosnold had returned from a voyage undertaken in 1602 under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, and announced that he had discovered a direct passage westward to the new continent, all the former voyagers having gone by the way of the West Indies. The effect of this announcement in London, accompanied as it was with Gosnold's report of the fruitfulness of the coast of New England which he explored, was something like that made upon New York by the discovery of gold in California in 1849. The route by the West Indies, with its incidents of disease and delay, was now replaced by the direct course opened by Gosnold, and the London Exchange, which has always been quick to scent any profit in trade, shared the excitement of the distinguished soldiers and sailors who were ready to embrace any chance of adventure that offered.
It is said that Captain Gosnold spent several years in vain, after his return, in soliciting his friends and acquaintances to join him in settling this fertile land he had explored; and that at length he prevailed upon Captain John Smith, Mr. Edward Maria Wingfield, the Rev. Mr. Robert Hunt, and others, to join him. This is the first appearance of the name of Captain John Smith in connection with Virginia. Probably his life in London had been as idle as unprofitable, and his purse needed replenishing. Here was a way open to the most honorable, exciting, and profitable employment. That its mere profit would have attracted him we do not believe; but its danger, uncertainty, and chance of distinction would irresistibly appeal to him. The distinct object of the projectors was to establish a colony in Virginia. This proved too great an undertaking for private persons. After many vain projects the scheme was commended to several of the nobility, gentry, and merchants, who came into it heartily, and the memorable expedition of 1606 was organized.
The patent under which this colonization was undertaken was obtained from King James by the solicitation of Richard Hakluyt and others. Smith's name does not appear in it, nor does that of Gosnold nor of Captain Newport. Richard Hakluyt, then clerk prebendary of Westminster, had from the first taken great interest in the project. He was chaplain of the English colony in Paris when Sir Francis Drake was fitting out his expedition to America, and was eager to further it. By his diligent study he became the best English geographer of his time; he was the historiographer of the East India Company, and the best informed man in England concerning the races, climates, and productions of all parts of the globe. It was at Hakluyt's suggestion that two vessels were sent out from Plymouth in 1603 to verify Gosnold's report of his new short route. A further verification of the feasibility of this route was made by Captain George Weymouth, who was sent out in 1605 by the Earl of Southampton.
The letters-patent of King James, dated April 10, 1606, licensed the planting of two colonies in the territories of America commonly called Virginia. The corporators named in the first colony were Sir Thos. Gates, Sir George Somers, knights, and Richard Hakluyt and Edward Maria Wingfield, adventurers, of the city of London. They were permitted to settle anywhere in territory between the 34th and 41st degrees of latitude.
The corporators named in the second colony were Thomas Hankam, Raleigh Gilbert, William Parker, and George Popham, representing Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth, and the west counties, who were authorized to make a settlement anywhere between the 38th and 48th degrees of latitude.
The—letters commended and generously accepted this noble work of colonization, “which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of all true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the infidels and savages living in those parts to human civility and to a settled and quiet government.” The conversion of the Indians was as prominent an object in all these early adventures, English or Spanish, as the relief of the Christians has been in all the Russian campaigns against the Turks in our day.
Before following the fortunes of this Virginia colony of 1606, to which John Smith was attached, it is necessary to glance briefly at the previous attempt to make settlements in this portion of America.
Although the English had a claim upon America, based upon the discovery of Newfoundland and of the coast of the continent from the 38th to the 68th north parallel by Sebastian Cabot in 1497, they took no further advantage of it than to send out a few fishing vessels, until Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a noted and skillful seaman, took out letters-patent for discovery, bearing date the 11th of January, 1578. Gilbert was the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh and thirteen years his senior. The brothers were associated in the enterprise of 1579, which had for its main object the possession of Newfoundland. It is commonly said, and in this the biographical dictionaries follow one another, that Raleigh accompanied his brother on this voyage of 1579 and went with him to Newfoundland. The fact is that Gilbert did not reach Newfoundland on that voyage, and it is open to doubt if Raleigh started with him. In April, 1579, when Gilbert took active steps under the charter of 1578, diplomatic difficulties arose, growing out of Elizabeth's policy with the Spaniards, and when Gilbert's ships were ready to sail he was stopped by an order from the council. Little is known of this unsuccessful attempt of Gilbert's. He did, after many delays, put to sea, and one of his contemporaries, John Hooker, the antiquarian, says that Raleigh was one of the assured friends that accompanied him. But he was shortly after driven back, probably from an encounter with the Spaniards, and returned with the loss of a tall ship.
Raleigh had no sooner made good his footing at the court of Elizabeth than he joined Sir Humphrey in a new adventure. But the Queen peremptorily retained Raleigh at court, to prevent his incurring the risks of any “dangerous sea-fights.” To prevent Gilbert from embarking on this new voyage seems to have been the device of the council rather than the Queen, for she assured Gilbert of her good wishes, and desired him, on his departure, to give his picture to Raleigh for her, and she contributed to the large sums raised to meet expenses “an anchor guarded by a lady,” which the sailor was to wear at his breast. Raleigh risked L 2,000 in the venture, and equipped a ship which bore his name, but which had ill luck. An infectious fever broke out among the crew, and the “Ark Raleigh” returned to Plymouth. Sir Humphrey wrote to his brother admiral, Sir George Peckham, indignantly of this desertion, the reason for which he did not know, and then proceeded on his voyage with his four remaining ships. This was on the 11th of January, 1583. The expedition was so far successful that Gilbert took formal possession of Newfoundland for the Queen. But a fatality attended his further explorations: the gallant admiral went down at sea in a storm off our coast, with his crew, heroic and full of Christian faith to the last, uttering, it is reported, this courageous consolation to his comrades at the last moment: “Be of good heart, my friends. We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.”
In September, 1583, a surviving ship brought news of the disaster to Falmouth. Raleigh was not discouraged. Within six months of this loss he had on foot another enterprise. His brother's patent had expired. On the 25th of March, 1584, he obtained from Elizabeth a new charter with larger powers, incorporating himself, Adrian Gilbert, brother of Sir Humphrey, and John Davys, under the title of “The College of the Fellowship for the Discovery of the Northwest Passage.” But Raleigh's object was colonization. Within a few days after his charter was issued he despatched two captains, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, who in July of that year took possession of the island of Roanoke.
The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is intimately associated with Carolina and Virginia, and it is the popular impression that he personally assisted in the discovery of the one and the settlement of the other. But there is no more foundation for the belief that he ever visited the territory of Virginia, of which he was styled governor, than that he accompanied Sir Humphrey Gilbert to Newfoundland. An allusion by William Strachey, in his “Historie of Travaile into Virginia,” hastily read, may have misled some writers. He speaks of an expedition southward, “to some parts of Chawonock and the Mangoangs, to search them there left by Sir Walter Raleigh.” But his further sketch of the various prior expeditions shows that he meant to speak of settlers left by Sir Ralph Lane and other agents of Raleigh in colonization. Sir Walter Raleigh never saw any portion of the coast of the United States.
In 1592 he planned an attack upon the Spanish possessions of Panama, but his plans were frustrated. His only personal expedition to the New World was that to Guana in 1595.
The expedition of Captain Amadas and Captain Barlow is described by Captain Smith in his compilation called the “General Historie,” and by Mr. Strachey. They set sail April 27, 1584, from the Thames. On the 2d of July they fell with the coast of Florida in shoal water, “where they felt a most delicate sweet smell,” but saw no land. Presently land appeared, which they took to be the continent, and coasted along to the northward a hundred and thirty miles before finding a harbor. Entering the first opening, they landed on what proved to be the Island of Roanoke. The landing-place was sandy and low, but so productive of grapes or vines overrunning everything, that the very surge of the sea sometimes overflowed them. The tallest and reddest cedars in the world grew there, with pines, cypresses, and other trees, and in the woods plenty of deer, conies, and fowls in incredible abundance.
After a few days the natives came off in boats to visit them, proper people and civil in their behavior, bringing with them the King's brother, Granganameo (Quangimino, says Strachey). The name of the King was Winginia, and of the country Wingandacoa. The name of this King might have suggested that of Virginia as the title of the new possession, but for the superior claim of the Virgin Queen. Granganameo was a friendly savage who liked to trade. The first thing he took a fancy was a pewter dish, and he made a hole through it and hung it about his neck for a breastplate. The liberal Christians sold it to him for the low price of twenty deer-skins, worth twenty crowns, and they also let him have a copper kettle for fifty skins. They drove a lively traffic with the savages for much of such “truck,” and the chief came on board and ate and drank merrily with the strangers. His wife and children, short of stature but well-formed and bashful, also paid them a visit. She wore a long coat of leather, with a piece of leather about her loins, around her forehead a band of white coral, and from her ears bracelets of pearls of the bigness of great peas hung down to her middle. The other women wore pendants of copper, as did the children, five or six in an ear. The boats of these savages were hollowed trunks of trees. Nothing could exceed the kindness and trustfulness the Indians exhibited towards their visitors. They kept them supplied with game and fruits, and when a party made an expedition inland to the residence of Granganameo, his wife (her husband being absent) came running to the river to welcome them; took them to her house and set them before a great fire; took off their clothes and washed them; removed the stockings of some and washed their feet in warm water; set plenty of victual, venison and fish and fruits, before them, and took pains to see all things well ordered for their comfort. “More love they could not express to entertain us.” It is noted that these savages drank wine while the grape lasted. The visitors returned all this kindness with suspicion.
They insisted upon retiring to their boats at night instead of lodging in the house, and the good woman, much grieved at their jealousy, sent down to them their half-cooked supper, pots and all, and mats to cover them from the rain in the night, and caused several of her men and thirty women to sit all night on the shore over against them. “A more kind, loving people cannot be,” say the voyagers.
In September the expedition returned to England, taking specimens of the wealth of the country, and some of the pearls as big as peas, and two natives, Wanchese and Manteo. The “lord proprietary” obtained the Queen's permission to name the new lands “Virginia,” in her honor, and he had a new seal of his arms cut, with the legend, Propria insignia Walteri Ralegh, militis, Domini et Gubernatoris Virginia.
The enticing reports brought back of the fertility of this land, and the amiability of its pearl-decked inhabitants, determined Raleigh at once to establish a colony there, in the hope of the ultimate salvation of the “poor seduced infidell” who wore the pearls. A fleet of seven vessels, with one hundred householders, and many things necessary to begin a new state, departed from Plymouth in April, 1585. Sir Richard Grenville had command of the expedition, and Mr. Ralph Lane was made governor of the colony, with Philip Amadas for his deputy. Among the distinguished men who accompanied them were Thomas Hariot, the mathematician, and Thomas Cavendish, the naval discoverer. The expedition encountered as many fatalities as those that befell Sir Humphrey Gilbert; and Sir Richard was destined also to an early and memorable death. But the new colony suffered more from its own imprudence and want of harmony than from natural causes.
In August, Grenville left Ralph Lane in charge of the colony and returned to England, capturing a Spanish ship on the way. The colonists pushed discoveries in various directions, but soon found themselves involved in quarrels with the Indians, whose conduct was less friendly than formerly, a change partly due to the greed of the whites. In June, when Lane was in fear of a conspiracy which he had discovered against the life of the colony, and it was short of supplies, Sir Francis Drake appeared off Roanoke, returning homeward with his fleet from the sacking of St. Domingo, Carthagena, and St. Augustine. Lane, without waiting for succor from England, persuaded Drake to take him and all the colony back home. Meantime Raleigh, knowing that the colony would probably need aid, was preparing a fleet of three well appointed ships to accompany Sir Richard Grenville, and an “advice ship,” plentifully freighted, to send in advance to give intelligence of his coming. Great was Grenville's chagrin, when he reached Hatorask, to find that the advice boat had arrived, and finding no colony, had departed again for England. However, he established fifteen men (“fifty,” says the “General Historie”) on the island, provisioned for two years, and then returned home.
[Sir Richard Grenville in 1591 was vice-admiral of a fleet, under command of Lord Thomas Howard, at the Azores, sent against a Spanish Plate-fleet. Six English vessels were suddenly opposed by a Spanish convoy of 53 ships of war. Left behind his comrades, in embarking from an island, opposed by five galleons, he maintained a terrible fight for fifteen hours, his vessel all cut to pieces, and his men nearly all slain. He died uttering aloud these words: “Here dies Sir Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, fighting for his country, queen, religion, and honor.”]
Mr. Ralph Lane's colony was splendidly fitted out, much better furnished than the one that Newport, Wingfield, and Gosnold conducted to the River James in 1607; but it needed a man at the head of it. If the governor had possessed Smith's pluck, he would have held on till the arrival of Grenville.
Lane did not distinguish himself in the conduct of this governorship, but he nevertheless gained immortality. For he is credited with first bringing into England that valuable medicinal weeds called tobacco, which Sir Walter Raleigh made fashionable, not in its capacity to drive “rheums” out of the body, but as a soother, when burned in the bowl of a pipe and drawn through the stem in smoke, of the melancholy spirit.
The honor of introducing tobacco at this date is so large that it has been shared by three persons—Sir Francis Drake, who brought Mr. Lane home; Mr. Lane, who carried the precious result of his sojourn in America; and Sir Walter Raleigh, who commended it to the use of the ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court.
But this was by no means its first appearance in Europe. It was already known in Spain, in France, and in Italy, and no doubt had begun to make its way in the Orient. In the early part of the century the Spaniards had discovered its virtues. It is stated by John Neander, in his “Tobaco Logia,” published in Leyden in 1626, that Tobaco took its name from a province in Yucatan, conquered by Fernando Cortez in 1519. The name Nicotiana he derives from D. Johanne Nicotino Nemansensi, of the council of Francis II., who first introduced the plant into France. At the date of this volume (1626) tobacco was in general use all over Europe and in the East. Pictures are given of the Persian water pipes, and descriptions of the mode of preparing it for use. There are reports and traditions of a very ancient use of tobacco in Persia and in China, as well as in India, but we are convinced that the substance supposed to be tobacco, and to be referred to as such by many writers, and described as “intoxicating,” was really India hemp, or some plant very different from the tobacco of the New World. At any rate there is evidence that in the Turkish Empire as late as 1616 tobacco was still somewhat a novelty, and the smoking of it was regarded as vile, and a habit only of the low. The late Hekekian Bey, foreign minister of old Mahomet Ali, possessed an ancient Turkish MS which related an occurrence at Smyrna about the year 1610, namely, the punishment of some sailors for the use of tobacco, which showed that it was a novelty and accounted a low vice at that time. The testimony of the trustworthy George Sandys, an English traveler into Turkey, Egypt, and Syria in 1610 (afterwards, 1621, treasurer of the colony in Virginia), is to the same effect as given in his “Relation,” published in London in 1621. In his minute description of the people and manners of Constantinople, after speaking of opium, which makes the Turks “giddy-headed” and “turbulent dreamers,” he says: “But perhaps for the self-same cause they delight in Tobacco: which they take through reedes that have joyned with them great heads of wood to containe it, I doubt not but lately taught them as brought them by the English; and were it not sometimes lookt into (for Morat Bassa [Murad III.?] not long since commanded a pipe to be thrust through the nose of a Turke, and to be led in derision through the Citie), no question but it would prove a principal commodity. Nevertheless they will take it in corners; and are so ignorant therein, that that which in England is not saleable, doth passe here among them for most excellent.”
Mr. Stith (“History of Virginia,” 1746) gives Raleigh credit for the introduction of the pipe into good society, but he cautiously says, “We are not informed whether the queen made use of it herself: but it is certain she gave great countenance to it as a vegetable of singular strength and power, which might therefore prove of benefit to mankind, and advantage to the nation.” Mr. Thomas Hariot, in his observations on the colony at Roanoke, says that the natives esteemed their tobacco, of which plenty was found, their “chief physicke.”
It should be noted, as against the claim of Lane, that Stowe in his “Annales” (1615) says: “Tobacco was first brought and made known in England by Sir John Hawkins, about the year 1565, but not used by Englishmen in many years after, though at this time commonly used by most men and many women.” In a side-note to the edition of 1631 we read: “Sir Walter Raleigh was the first that brought tobacco in use, when all men wondered what it meant.” It was first commended for its medicinal virtues. Harrison's “Chronologie,” under date of 1573, says: “In these daies the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herbe called 'Tabaco' by an instrument formed like a little ladell, whereby it passeth from the mouth into the hed and stomach, is gretlie taken-up and used in England, against Rewmes and some other diseases ingendred in the longes and inward partes, and not without effect.” But Barnaby Rich, in “The Honestie of this Age,” 1614, disagrees with Harrison about its benefit: “They say it is good for a cold, for a pose, for rewmes, for aches, for dropsies, and for all manner of diseases proceeding of moyst humours; but I cannot see but that those that do take it fastest are as much (or more) subject to all these infirmities (yea, and to the poxe itself) as those that have nothing at all to do with it.” He learns that 7,000 shops in London live by the trade of tobacco-selling, and calculates that there is paid for it L 399,375 a year, “all spent in smoake.” Every base groom must have his pipe with his pot of ale; it “is vendible in every taverne, inne, and ale-house; and as for apothecaries shops, grosers shops, chandlers shops, they are (almost) never without company that, from morning till night, are still taking of tobacco.” Numbers of houses and shops had no other trade to live by. The wrath of King James was probably never cooled against tobacco, but the expression of it was somewhat tempered when he perceived what a source of revenue it became.
The savages of North America gave early evidence of the possession of imaginative minds, of rare power of invention, and of an amiable desire to make satisfactory replies to the inquiries of their visitors. They generally told their questioners what they wanted to know, if they could ascertain what sort of information would please them. If they had known the taste of the sixteenth century for the marvelous they could not have responded more fitly to suit it. They filled Mr. Lane and Mr. Hariot full of tales of a wonderful copper mine on the River Maratock (Roanoke), where the metal was dipped out of the stream in great bowls. The colonists had great hopes of this river, which Mr. Hariot thought flowed out of the Gulf of Mexico, or very near the South Sea. The Indians also conveyed to the mind of this sagacious observer the notion that they had a very respectably developed religion; that they believed in one chief god who existed from all eternity, and who made many gods of less degree; that for mankind a woman was first created, who by one of the gods brought forth children; that they believed in the immortality of the soul, and that for good works a soul will be conveyed to bliss in the tabernacles of the gods, and for bad deeds to pokogusso, a great pit in the furthest part of the world, where the sun sets, and where they burn continually. The Indians knew this because two men lately dead had revived and come back to tell them of the other world. These stories, and many others of like kind, the Indians told of themselves, and they further pleased Mr. Hariot by kissing his Bible and rubbing it all over their bodies, notwithstanding he told them there was no virtue in the material book itself, only in its doctrines. We must do Mr. Hariot the justice to say, however, that he had some little suspicion of the “subtiltie” of the weroances (chiefs) and the priests.
Raleigh was not easily discouraged; he was determined to plant his colony, and to send relief to the handful of men that Grenville had left on Roanoke Island. In May, 1587, he sent out three ships and a hundred and fifty householders, under command of Mr. John White, who was appointed Governor of the colony, with twelve assistants as a Council, who were incorporated under the name of “The Governor and Assistants of the City of Ralegh in Virginia,” with instructions to change their settlement to Chesapeake Bay. The expedition found there no one of the colony (whether it was fifty or fifteen the writers disagree), nothing but the bones of one man where the plantation had been; the houses were unhurt, but overgrown with weeds, and the fort was defaced. Captain Stafford, with twenty men, went to Croatan to seek the lost colonists. He heard that the fifty had been set upon by three hundred Indians, and, after a sharp skirmish and the loss of one man, had taken boats and gone to a small island near Hatorask, and afterwards had departed no one knew whither.
Mr. White sent a band to take revenge upon the Indians who were suspected of their murder through treachery, which was guided by Mateo, the friendly Indian, who had returned with the expedition from England. By a mistake they attacked a friendly tribe. In August of this year Mateo was Christianized, and baptized under the title of Lord of Roanoke and Dassomonpeake, as a reward for his fidelity. The same month Elinor, the daughter of the Govemor, the wife of Ananias Dare, gave birth to a daughter, the first white child born in this part of the continent, who was named Virginia.
Before long a dispute arose between the Governor and his Council as to the proper person to return to England for supplies. White himself was finally prevailed upon to go, and he departed, leaving about a hundred settlers on one of the islands of Hatorask to form a plantation.
The Spanish invasion and the Armada distracted the attention of Europe about this time, and the hope of plunder from Spanish vessels was more attractive than the colonization of America. It was not until 1590 that Raleigh was able to despatch vessels to the relief of the Hatorask colony, and then it was too late. White did, indeed, start out from Biddeford in April, 1588, with two vessels, but the temptation to chase prizes was too strong for him, and he went on a cruise of his own, and left the colony to its destruction.
In March, 1589-90, Mr. White was again sent out, with three ships, from Plymouth, and reached the coast in August. Sailing by Croatan they went to Hatorask, where they descried a smoke in the place they had left the colony in 1587. Going ashore next day, they found no man, nor sign that any had been there lately. Preparing to go to Roanoke next day, a boat was upset and Captain Spicer and six of the crew were drowned. This accident so discouraged the sailors that they could hardly be persuaded to enter on the search for the colony. At last two boats, with nineteen men, set out for Hatorask, and landed at that part of Roanoke where the colony had been left. When White left the colony three years before, the men had talked of going fifty miles into the mainland, and had agreed to leave some sign of their departure. The searchers found not a man of the colony; their houses were taken down, and a strong palisade had been built. All about were relics of goods that had been buried and dug up again and scattered, and on a post was carved the name “CROATAN.” This signal, which was accompanied by no sign of distress, gave White hope that he should find his comrades at Croatan. But one mischance or another happening, his provisions being short, the expedition decided to run down to the West Indies and “refresh” (chiefly with a little Spanish plunder), and return in the spring and seek their countrymen; but instead they sailed for England and never went to Croatan. The men of the abandoned colonies were never again heard of. Years after, in 1602, Raleigh bought a bark and sent it, under the charge of Samuel Mace, a mariner who had been twice to Virginia, to go in search of the survivors of White's colony. Mace spent a month lounging about the Hatorask coast and trading with the natives, but did not land on Croatan, or at any place where the lost colony might be expected to be found; but having taken on board some sassafras, which at that time brought a good price in England, and some other barks which were supposed to be valuable, he basely shirked the errand on which he was hired to go, and took himself and his spicy woods home.
The “Lost Colony” of White is one of the romances of the New World. Governor White no doubt had the feelings of a parent, but he did not allow them to interfere with his more public duties to go in search of Spanish prizes. If the lost colony had gone to Croatan, it was probable that Ananias Dare and his wife, the Governor's daughter, and the little Virginia Dare, were with them. But White, as we have seen, had such confidence in Providence that he left his dear relatives to its care, and made no attempt to visit Croatan.
Stith says that Raleigh sent five several times to search for the lost, but the searchers returned with only idle reports and frivolous allegations. Tradition, however, has been busy with the fate of these deserted colonists. One of the unsupported conjectures is that the colonists amalgamated with the tribe of Hatteras Indians, and Indian tradition and the physical characteristics of the tribe are said to confirm this idea. But the sporadic birth of children with white skins (albinos) among black or copper-colored races that have had no intercourse with white people, and the occurrence of light hair and blue eyes among the native races of America and of New Guinea, are facts so well attested that no theory of amalgamation can be sustained by such rare physical manifestations. According to Captain John Smith, who wrote of Captain Newport's explorations in 1608, there were no tidings of the waifs, for, says Smith, Newport returned “without a lump of gold, a certainty of the South Sea, or one of the lost company sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh.”
In his voyage of discovery up the Chickahominy, Smith seem; to have inquired about this lost colony of King Paspahegh, for he says, “what he knew of the dominions he spared not to acquaint me with, as of certaine men cloathed at a place called Ocanahonan, cloathcd like me.”
[Among these Hatteras Indians Captain Amadas, in 1584, saw children with chestnut-colored hair.]
We come somewhat nearer to this matter in the “Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia,” published from the manuscript by the Hakluyt Society in 1849, in which it is intimated that seven of these deserted colonists were afterwards rescued. Strachey is a first-rate authority for what he saw. He arrived in Virginia in 1610 and remained there two years, as secretary of the colony, and was a man of importance. His “Historie” was probably written between 1612 and 1616. In the first portion of it, which is descriptive of the territory of Virginia, is this important passage: “At Peccarecamek and Ochanahoen, by the relation of Machumps, the people have houses built with stone walls, and one story above another, so taught them by those English who escaped the slaughter of Roanoke. At what time this our colony, under the conduct of Captain Newport, landed within the Chesapeake Bay, where the people breed up tame turkies about their houses, and take apes in the mountains, and where, at Ritanoe, the Weroance Eyanaco, preserved seven of the English alive—four men, two boys, and one young maid (who escaped [that is from Roanoke] and fled up the river of Chanoke), to beat his copper, of which he hath certain mines at the said Ritanoe, as also at Pamawauk are said to be store of salt stones.”
This, it will be observed, is on the testimony of Machumps. This pleasing story is not mentioned in Captain Newport's “Discoveries” (May, 1607). Machumps, who was the brother of Winganuske, one of the many wives of Powhatan, had been in England. He was evidently a lively Indian. Strachey had heard him repeat the “Indian grace,” a sort of incantation before meat, at the table of Sir Thomas Dale. If he did not differ from his red brothers he had a powerful imagination, and was ready to please the whites with any sort of a marvelous tale. Newport himself does not appear to have seen any of the “apes taken in the mountains.” If this story is to be accepted as true we have to think of Virginia Dare as growing up to be a woman of twenty years, perhaps as other white maidens have been, Indianized and the wife of a native. But the story rests only upon a romancing Indian. It is possible that Strachey knew more of the matter than he relates, for in his history he speaks again of those betrayed people, “of whose end you shall hereafter read in this decade.” But the possessed information is lost, for it is not found in the remainder of this “decade” of his writing, which is imperfect. Another reference in Strachey is more obscure than the first. He is speaking of the merciful intention of King James towards the Virginia savages, and that he does not intend to root out the natives as the Spaniards did in Hispaniola, but by degrees to change their barbarous nature, and inform them of the true God and the way to Salvation, and that his Majesty will even spare Powhatan himself. But, he says, it is the intention to make “the common people likewise to understand, how that his Majesty has been acquainted that the men, women, and children of the first plantation of Roanoke were by practice of Powhatan (he himself persuaded thereunto by his priests) miserably slaughtered, without any offense given him either by the first planted (who twenty and odd years had peaceably lived intermixed with those savages, and were out of his territory) or by those who are now come to inhabit some parts of his distant lands,” etc.
Strachey of course means the second plantation and not the first, which, according to the weight of authority, consisted of only fifteen men and no women.
In George Percy's Discourse concerning Captain Newport's exploration of the River James in 1607 (printed in Purchas's “Pilgrims”) is this sentence: “At Port Cotage, in our voyage up the river, we saw a savage boy, about the age of ten years, which had a head of hair of a perfect yellow, and reasonably white skin, which is a miracle amongst all savages.” Mr. Neill, in his “History of the Virginia Company,” says that this boy “was no doubt the offspring of the colonists left at Roanoke by White, of whom four men, two boys, and one young maid had been preserved from slaughter by an Indian Chief.” Under the circumstances, “no doubt” is a very strong expression for a historian to use.
This belief in the sometime survival of the Roanoke colonists, and their amalgamation with the Indians, lingered long in colonial gossip. Lawson, in his History, published in London in 1718, mentions a tradition among the Hatteras Indians, “that several of their ancestors were white people and could talk from a book; the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being among these Indians and no others.”
But the myth of Virginia Dare stands no chance beside that of Pocahontas.
V. FIRST PLANTING OF THE COLONY
The way was now prepared for the advent of Captain John Smith in Virginia. It is true that we cannot give him his own title of its discoverer, but the plantation had been practically abandoned, all the colonies had ended in disaster, all the governors and captains had lacked the gift of perseverance or had been early drawn into other adventures, wholly disposed, in the language of Captain John White, “to seek after purchase and spoils,” and but for the energy and persistence of Captain Smith the expedition of 1606 might have had no better fate. It needed a man of tenacious will to hold a colony together in one spot long enough to give it root. Captain Smith was that man, and if we find him glorying in his exploits, and repeating upon single big Indians the personal prowess that distinguished him in Transylvania and in the mythical Nalbrits, we have only to transfer our sympathy from the Turks to the Sasquesahanocks if the sense of his heroism becomes oppressive.
Upon the return of Samuel Mace, mariner, who was sent out in 1602 to search for White's lost colony, all Raleigh's interest in the Virginia colony had, by his attainder, escheated to the crown. But he never gave up his faith in Virginia: neither the failure of nine several expeditions nor twelve years imprisonment shook it. On the eve of his fall he had written, “I shall yet live to see it an English nation:” and he lived to see his prediction come true.
The first or Virginian colony, chartered with the Plymouth colony in April, 1606, was at last organized by the appointment of Sir Thomas Smith, the 'Chief of Raleigh's assignees, a wealthy London merchant, who had been ambassador to Persia, and was then, or shortly after, governor of the East India Company, treasurer and president of the meetings of the council in London; and by the assignment of the transportation of the colony to Captain Christopher Newport, a mariner of experience in voyages to the West Indies and in plundering the Spaniards, who had the power to appoint different captains and mariners, and the sole charge of the voyage. No local councilors were named for Virginia, but to Captain Newport, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, and Captain John Ratcliffe were delivered sealed instructions, to be opened within twenty-four hours after their arrival in Virginia, wherein would be found the names of the persons designated for the Council.
This colony, which was accompanied by the prayers and hopes of London, left the Thames December 19, 1606, in three vessels—the Susan Constant, one hundred tons, Captain Newport, with seventy-one persons; the God-Speed, forty tons, Captain Gosnold, with fifty-two persons; and a pinnace of twenty tons, the Discovery, Captain Ratcliffe, with twenty persons. The Mercure Francais, Paris, 1619, says some of the passengers were women and children, but there is no other mention of women. Of the persons embarked, one hundred and five were planters, the rest crews. Among the planters were Edward Maria Wingfield, Captain John Smith, Captain John Martin, Captain Gabriel Archer, Captain George Kendall, Mr. Robert Hunt, preacher, and Mr. George Percie, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, subsequently governor for a brief period, and one of the writers from whom Purchas compiled. Most of the planters were shipped as gentlemen, but there were four carpenters, twelve laborers, a blacksmith, a sailor, a barber, a bricklayer, a mason, a tailor, a drummer, and a chirurgeon.
The composition of the colony shows a serious purpose of settlement, since the trades were mostly represented, but there were too many gentlemen to make it a working colony. And, indeed, the gentlemen, like the promoters of the enterprise in London, were probably more solicitous of discovering a passage to the South Sea, as the way to increase riches, than of making a state. They were instructed to explore every navigable river they might find, and to follow the main branches, which would probably lead them in one direction to the East Indies or South Sea, and in the other to the Northwest Passage. And they were forcibly reminded that the way to prosper was to be of one mind, for their own and their country's good.
This last advice did not last the expedition out of sight of land. They sailed from Blackwell, December 19, 1606, but were kept six weeks on the coast of England by contrary winds. A crew of saints cabined in those little caravels and tossed about on that coast for six weeks would scarcely keep in good humor. Besides, the position of the captains and leaders was not yet defined. Factious quarrels broke out immediately, and the expedition would likely have broken up but for the wise conduct and pious exhortations of Mr. Robert Hunt, the preacher. This faithful man was so ill and weak that it was thought he could not recover, yet notwithstanding the stormy weather, the factions on board, and although his home was almost in sight, only twelve miles across the Downs, he refused to quit the ship. He was unmoved, says Smith, either by the weather or by “the scandalous imputations (of some few little better than atheists, of the greatest rank amongst us).” With “the water of his patience” and “his godly exhortations” he quenched the flames of envy and dissension.
They took the old route by the West Indies. George Percy notes that on the 12th of February they saw a blazing star, and presently a storm. They watered at the Canaries, traded with savages at San Domingo, and spent three weeks refreshing themselves among the islands. The quarrels revived before they reached the Canaries, and there Captain Smith was seized and put in close confinement for thirteen weeks.
We get little light from contemporary writers on this quarrel. Smith does not mention the arrest in his “True Relation,” but in his “General Historie,” writing of the time when they had been six weeks in Virginia, he says: “Now Captain Smith who all this time from their departure from the Canaries was restrained as a prisoner upon the scandalous suggestion of some of the chiefs (envying his repute) who fancied he intended to usurp the government, murder the Council, and make himself King, that his confedcrates were dispersed in all three ships, and that divers of his confederates that revealed it, would affirm it, for this he was committed a prisoner; thirteen weeks he remained thus suspected, and by that time they should return they pretended out of their commiserations, to refer him to the Council in England to receive a check, rather than by particulating his designs make him so odious to the world, as to touch his life, or utterly overthrow his reputation. But he so much scorned their charity and publically defied the uttermost of their cruelty, he wisely prevented their policies, though he could not suppress their envies, yet so well he demeaned himself in this business, as all the company did see his innocency, and his adversaries' malice, and those suborned to accuse him accused his accusers of subornation; many untruths were alleged against him; but being apparently disproved, begot a general hatred in the hearts of the company against such unjust Commanders, that the President was adjudged to give him L 200, so that all he had was seized upon, in part of satisfaction, which Smith presently returned to the store for the general use of the colony.”—
Neither in Newport's “Relatyon” nor in Mr. Wingfield's “Discourse” is the arrest mentioned, nor does Strachey speak of it.
About 1629, Smith, in writing a description of the Isle of Mevis (Nevis) in his “Travels and Adventures,” says: “In this little [isle] of Mevis, more than twenty years agone, I have remained a good time together, to wod and water—and refresh my men.” It is characteristic of Smith's vivid imagination, in regard to his own exploits, that he should speak of an expedition in which he had no command, and was even a prisoner, in this style: “I remained,” and “my men.” He goes on: “Such factions here we had as commonly attend such voyages, and a pair of gallows was made, but Captaine Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them; but not any one of the inventors but their lives by justice fell into his power, to determine of at his pleasure, whom with much mercy he favored, that most basely and unjustly would have betrayed him.” And it is true that Smith, although a great romancer, was often magnanimous, as vain men are apt to be.
King James's elaborate lack of good sense had sent the expedition to sea with the names of the Council sealed up in a box, not to be opened till it reached its destination. Consequently there was no recognized authority. Smith was a young man of about twenty-eight, vain and no doubt somewhat “bumptious,” and it is easy to believe that Wingfield and the others who felt his superior force and realized his experience, honestly suspected him of designs against the expedition. He was the ablest man on board, and no doubt was aware of it. That he was not only a born commander of men, but had the interest of the colony at heart, time was to show.
The voyagers disported themselves among the luxuries of the West Indies. At Guadaloupe they found a bath so hot that they boiled their pork in it as well as over the fire. At the Island of Monaca they took from the bushes with their hands near two hogsheads full of birds in three or four hours. These, it is useless to say, were probably not the “barnacle geese” which the nautical travelers used to find, and picture growing upon bushes and dropping from the eggs, when they were ripe, full-fledged into the water. The beasts were fearless of men. Wild birds and natives had to learn the whites before they feared them.
“In Mevis, Mona, and the Virgin Isles,” says the “General Historie,” “we spent some time, where with a lothsome beast like a crocodile, called a gwayn [guana], tortoises, pellicans, parrots, and fishes, we feasted daily.”
Thence they made sail-in search of Virginia, but the mariners lost their reckoning for three days and made no land; the crews were discomfited, and Captain Ratcliffe, of the pinnace, wanted to up helm and return to England. But a violent storm, which obliged them “to hull all night,” drove them to the port desired. On the 26th of April they saw a bit of land none of them had ever seen before. This, the first land they descried, they named Cape Henry, in honor of the Prince of Wales; as the opposite cape was called Cape Charles, for the Duke of York, afterwards Charles I. Within these capes they found one of the most pleasant places in the world, majestic navigable rivers, beautiful mountains, hills, and plains, and a fruitful and delightsome land.
Mr. George Percy was ravished at the sight of the fair meadows and goodly tall trees. As much to his taste were the large and delicate oysters, which the natives roasted, and in which were found many pearls. The ground was covered with fine and beautiful strawberries, four times bigger than those in England.
Masters Wingfield, Newport, and Gosnold., with thirty men, went ashore on Cape Henry, where they were suddenly set upon by savages, who came creeping upon all-fours over the hills, like bears, with their bows in their hands; Captain Archer was hurt in both hands, and a sailor dangerously wounded in two places on his body. It was a bad omen.
The night of their arrival they anchored at Point Comfort, now Fortress Monroe; the box was opened and the orders read, which constituted Edward Maria Wingfield, Bartholomew Gosnold, John Smith, Christopher Newport, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and George Kendall the Council, with power to choose a President for a year. Until the 13th of May they were slowly exploring the River Powhatan, now the James, seeking a place for the settlement. They selected a peninsula on the north side of the river, forty miles from its mouth, where there was good anchorage, and which could be readily fortified. This settlement was Jamestown. The Council was then sworn in, and Mr. Wingfield selected President. Smith being under arrest was not sworn in of the Council, and an oration was made setting forth the reason for his exclusion.
When they had pitched upon a site for the fort, every man set to work, some to build the fort, others to pitch the tents, fell trees and make clapboards to reload the ships, others to make gardens and nets. The fort was in the form of a triangle with a half-moon at each corner, intended to mount four or five guns.
President Wingfield appears to have taken soldierly precautions, but Smith was not at all pleased with him from the first. He says “the President's overweening jealousy would admit of no exercise at arms, or fortifications but the boughs of trees cast together in the form of a half-moon by the extraordinary pains and diligence of Captain Kendall.” He also says there was contention between Captain Wingfield and Captain Gosnold about the site of the city.
The landing was made at Jamestown on the 14th of May, according to Percy. Previous to that considerable explorations were made. On the 18th of April they launched a shallop, which they built the day before, and “discovered up the bay.” They discovered a river on the south side running into the mainland, on the banks of which were good stores of mussels and oysters, goodly trees, flowers of all colors, and strawberries. Returning to their ships and finding the water shallow, they rowed over to a point of land, where they found from six to twelve fathoms of water, which put them in good comfort, therefore they named that part of the land Cape Comfort. On the 29th they set up a cross on Chesapeake Bay, on Cape Henry, and the next day coasted to the Indian town of Kecoughton, now Hampton, where they were kindly entertained. When they first came to land the savages made a doleful noise, laying their paws to the ground and scratching the earth with their nails. This ceremony, which was taken to be a kind of idolatry, ended, mats were brought from the houses, whereon the guests were seated, and given to eat bread made of maize, and tobacco to smoke. The savages also entertained them with dancing and singing and antic tricks and grimaces. They were naked except a covering of skins about the loins, and many were painted in black and red, with artificial knots of lovely colors, beautiful and pleasing to the eye. The 4th of May they were entertained by the chief of Paspika, who favored them with a long oration, making a foul noise and vehement in action, the purport of which they did not catch. The savages were full of hospitality. The next day the weroance, or chief, of Rapahanna sent a messenger to invite them to his seat. His majesty received them in as modest a proud fashion as if he had been a prince of a civil government. His body was painted in crimson and his face in blue, and he wore a chain of beads about his neck and in his ears bracelets of pearls and a bird's claw. The 8th of May they went up the river to the country Apomatica, where the natives received them in hostile array, the chief, with bow and arrows in one hand, and a pipe of tobacco in the other, offering them war or peace.
These savages were as stout and able as any heathen or Christians in the world. Mr. Percy said they bore their years well. He saw among the Pamunkeys a savage reported to be 160, years old, whose eyes were sunk in his head, his teeth gone his hair all gray, and quite a big beard, white as snow; he was a lusty savage, and could travel as fast as anybody.
The Indians soon began to be troublesome in their visits to the plantations, skulking about all night, hanging around the fort by day, bringing sometimes presents of deer, but given to theft of small articles, and showing jealousy of the occupation. They murmured, says Percy, at our planting in their country. But worse than the disposition of the savages was the petty quarreling in the colony itself.
In obedience to the orders to explore for the South Sea, on the 22d of May, Newport, Percy, Smith, Archer, and twenty others were sent in the shallop to explore the Powhatan, or James River.
Passing by divers small habitations, and through a land abounding in trees, flowers, and small fruits, a river full of fish, and of sturgeon such as the world beside has none, they came on the 24th, having passed the town of Powhatan, to the head of the river, the Falls, where they set up the cross and proclaimed King James of England.
Smith says in his “General Historie” they reached Powhatan on the 26th. But Captain Newport's “Relatyon” agrees with Percy's, and with, Smith's “True Relation.” Captain Newport, says Percy, permitted no one to visit Powhatan except himself.
Captain Newport's narration of the exploration of the James is interesting, being the first account we have of this historic river. At the junction of the Appomattox and the James, at a place he calls Wynauk, the natives welcomed them with rejoicing and entertained them with dances. The Kingdom of Wynauk was full of pearl-mussels. The king of this tribe was at war with the King of Paspahegh. Sixteen miles above this point, at an inlet, perhaps Turkey Point, they were met by eight savages in a canoe, one of whom was intelligent enough to lay out the whole course of the river, from Chesapeake Bay to its source, with a pen and paper which they showed him how to use. These Indians kept them company for some time, meeting them here and there with presents of strawberries, mulberries, bread, and fish, for which they received pins, needles, and beads. They spent one night at Poore Cottage (the Port Cotage of Percy, where he saw the white boy), probably now Haxall. Five miles above they went ashore near the now famous Dutch Gap, where King Arahatic gave them a roasted deer, and caused his women to bake cakes for them. This king gave Newport his crown, which was of deer's hair dyed red. He was a subject of the great King Powhatan. While they sat making merry with the savages, feasting and taking tobacco and seeing the dances, Powhatan himself appeared and was received with great show of honor, all rising from their seats except King Arahatic, and shouting loudly. To Powhatan ample presents were made of penny-knives, shears, and toys, and he invited them to visit him at one of his seats called Powhatan, which was within a mile of the Falls, where now stands the city of Richmond. All along the shore the inhabitants stood in clusters, offering food to the strangers. The habitation of Powhatan was situated on a high hill by the water side, with a meadow at its foot where was grown wheat, beans, tobacco, peas, pompions, flax, and hemp.
Powhatan served the whites with the best he had, and best of all with a friendly welcome and with interesting discourse of the country. They made a league of friendship. The next day he gave them six men as guides to the falls above, and they left with him one man as a hostage.
On Sunday, the 24th of May, having returned to Powhatan's seat, they made a feast for him of pork, cooked with peas, and the Captain and King ate familiarly together; “he eat very freshly of our meats, dranck of our beere, aquavite, and sack.” Under the influence of this sack and aquavite the King was very communicative about the interior of the country, and promised to guide them to the mines of iron and copper; but the wary chief seems to have thought better of it when he got sober, and put them off with the difficulties and dangers of the way.
On one of the islets below the Falls, Captain Newport set up a cross with the inscription “Jacobus, Rex, 1607,” and his own name beneath, and James was proclaimed King with a great shout. Powhatan was displeased with their importunity to go further up the river, and departed with all the Indians, except the friendly Navirans, who had accompanied them from Arahatic. Navirans greatly admired the cross, but Newport hit upon an explanation of its meaning that should dispel the suspicions of Powhatan. He told him that the two arms of the cross signified King Powhatan and himself, the fastening of it in the middle was their united league, and the shout was the reverence he did to Powhatan. This explanation being made to Powhatan greatly contented him, and he came on board and gave them the kindest farewell when they dropped down the river. At Arahatic they found the King had provided victuals for them, but, says Newport, “the King told us that he was very sick and not able to sit up long with us.” The inability of the noble red man to sit up was no doubt due to too much Christian sack and aquavite, for on “Monday he came to the water side, and we went ashore with him again. He told us that our hot drinks, he thought, caused him grief, but that he was well again, and we were very welcome.”
It seems, therefore, that to Captain Newport, who was a good sailor in his day, and has left his name in Virginia in Newport News, must be given the distinction of first planting the cross in Virginia, with a lie, and watering it, with aquavite.
They dropped down the river to a place called Mulberry Shade, where the King killed a deer and prepared for them another feast, at which they had rolls and cakes made of wheat. “This the women make and are very cleanly about it. We had parched meal, excellent good, sodd [cooked] beans, which eat as sweet as filbert kernels, in a manner, strawberries; and mulberries were shaken off the tree, dropping on our heads as we sat. He made ready a land turtle, which we ate; and showed that he was heartily rejoiced in our company.” Such was the amiable disposition of the natives before they discovered the purpose of the whites to dispossess them of their territory. That night they stayed at a place called “Kynd Woman's Care,” where the people offered them abundant victual and craved nothing in return.
Next day they went ashore at a place Newport calls Queen Apumatuc's Bower. This Queen, who owed allegiance to Powhatan, had much land under cultivation, and dwelt in state on a pretty hill. This ancient representative of woman's rights in Virginia did honor to her sex. She came to meet the strangers in a show as majestical as that of Powhatan himself: “She had an usher before her, who brought her to the matt prepared under a faire mulberry-tree; where she sat down by herself, with a stayed countenance. She would permitt none to stand or sitt neare her. She is a fatt, lustie, manly woman. She had much copper about her neck, a coronet of copper upon her hed. She had long, black haire, which hanged loose down her back to her myddle; which only part was covered with a deare's skyn, and ells all naked. She had her women attending her, adorned much like herself (except they wanted the copper). Here we had our accustomed eates, tobacco, and welcome. Our Captaine presented her with guyfts liberally, whereupon shee cheered somewhat her countenance, and requested him to shoote off a piece; whereat (we noted) she showed not near the like feare as Arahatic, though he be a goodly man.”
The company was received with the same hospitality by King Pamunkey, whose land was believed to be rich in copper and pearls. The copper was so flexible that Captain Newport bent a piece of it the thickness of his finger as if it had been lead. The natives were unwilling to part with it. The King had about his neck a string of pearls as big as peas, which would have been worth three or four hundred pounds, if the pearls had been taken from the mussels as they should have been.
Arriving on their route at Weanock, some twenty miles above the fort, they were minded to visit Paspahegh and another chief Jamestown lay in the territory of Paspahegh—but suspicious signs among the natives made them apprehend trouble at the fort, and they hastened thither to find their suspicions verified. The day before, May 26th, the colony had been attacked by two hundred Indians (four hundred, Smith says), who were only beaten off when they had nearly entered the fort, by the use of the artillery. The Indians made a valiant fight for an hour; eleven white men were wounded, of whom one died afterwards, and a boy was killed on the pinnace. This loss was concealed from the Indians, who for some time seem to have believed that the whites could not be hurt. Four of the Council were hurt in this fight, and President Wingfield, who showed himself a valiant gentleman, had a shot through his beard. They killed eleven of the Indians, but their comrades lugged them away on their backs and buried them in the woods with a great noise. For several days alarms and attacks continued, and four or five men were cruelly wounded, and one gentleman, Mr. Eustace Cloville, died from the effects of five arrows in his body.
Upon this hostility, says Smith, the President was contented the fort should be palisaded, and the ordnance mounted, and the men armed and exercised. The fortification went on, but the attacks continued, and it was unsafe for any to venture beyond the fort.
Dissatisfaction arose evidently with President Wingfield's management. Captain Newport says: “There being among the gentlemen and all the company a murmur and grudge against certain proceedings and inconvenient courses [Newport] put up a petition to the Council for reformation.” The Council heeded this petition, and urged to amity by Captain Newport, the company vowed faithful love to each other and obedience to the superiors. On the 10th of June, Captain Smith was sworn of the Council. In his “General Historie,” not published till 1624, he says: “Many were the mischiefs that daily sprung from their ignorant (yet ambitious) spirits; but the good doctrine and exhortation of our preacher Mr. Hunt, reconciled them and caused Captain Smith to be admitted to the Council.” The next day they all partook of the holy communion.
In order to understand this quarrel, which was not by any means appeased by this truce, and to determine Captain Smith's responsibility for it, it is necessary to examine all the witnesses. Smith is unrestrained in his expression of his contempt for Wingfield. But in the diary of Wingfield we find no accusation against Smith at this date. Wingfield says that Captain Newport before he departed asked him how he thought himself settled in the government, and that he replied “that no disturbance could endanger him or the colony, but it must be wrought either by Captain Gosnold or Mr. Archer, for the one was strong with friends and followers and could if he would; and the other was troubled with an ambitious spirit and would if he could.”
The writer of Newport's “Relatyon” describes the Virginia savages as a very strong and lusty race, and swift warriors. “Their skin is tawny; not so borne, but with dyeing and painting themselves, in which they delight greatly.” That the Indians were born white was, as we shall see hereafter, a common belief among the first settlers in Virginia and New England. Percy notes a distinction between maids and married women: “The maids shave close the fore part and sides of their heads, and leave it long behind, where it is tied up and hangs down to the hips. The married women wear their hair all of a length, but tied behind as that of maids is. And the women scratch on their bodies and limbs, with a sharp iron, pictures of fowls, fish, and beasts, and rub into the 'drawings' lively colors which dry into the flesh and are permanent.” The “Relatyon” says the people are witty and ingenious and allows them many good qualities, but makes this exception: “The people steal anything comes near them; yea, are so practiced in this art, that looking in our face, they would with their foot, between their toes, convey a chisel, knife, percer, or any indifferent light thing, which having once conveyed, they hold it an injury to take the same from them. They are naturally given to treachery; howbeit we could not find it in our travel up the river, but rather a most kind and loving people.”
VI. QUARRELS AND HARDSHIPS
On Sunday, June 21st, they took the communion lovingly together. That evening Captain Newport gave a farewell supper on board his vessel. The 22d he sailed in the Susan Constant for England, carrying specimens of the woods and minerals, and made the short passage of five weeks. Dudley Carleton, in a letter to John Chamberlain dated Aug. 18, 1607, writes “that Captain Newport has arrived without gold or silver, and that the adventurers, cumbered by the presence of the natives, have fortified themselves at a place called Jamestown.” The colony left numbered one hundred and four.
The good harmony of the colony did not last. There were other reasons why the settlement was unprosperous. The supply of wholesome provisions was inadequate. The situation of the town near the Chickahominy swamps was not conducive to health, and although Powhatan had sent to make peace with them, and they also made a league of amity with the chiefs Paspahegh and Tapahanagh, they evidently had little freedom of movement beyond sight of their guns. Percy says they were very bare and scant of victuals, and in wars and dangers with the savages.
Smith says in his “True Relation,” which was written on the spot, and is much less embittered than his “General Historie,” that they were in good health and content when Newport departed, but this did not long continue, for President Wingfield and Captain Gosnold, with the most of the Council, were so discontented with each other that nothing was done with discretion, and no business transacted with wisdom. This he charges upon the “hard-dealing of the President,” the rest of the Council being diversely affected through his audacious command. “Captain Martin, though honest, was weak and sick; Smith was in disgrace through the malice of others; and God sent famine and sickness, so that the living were scarce able to bury the dead. Our want of sufficient good food, and continual watching, four or five each night, at three bulwarks, being the chief cause; only of sturgeon we had great store, whereon we would so greedily surfeit, as it cost many their lives; the sack, Aquavite, and other preservations of our health being kept in the President's hands, for his own diet and his few associates.”
In his “General Historie,” written many years later, Smith enlarges this indictment with some touches of humor characteristic of him. He says:
“Being thus left to our fortunes, it fortuned that within ten days scarce ten amongst us could either go, or well stand, such extreme weakness and sicknes oppressed us. And thereat none need marvaile if they consider the cause and reason, which was this: whilst the ships stayed, our allowance was somewhat bettered, by a daily proportion of Bisket, which the sailors would pilfer to sell, give, or exchange with us for money, Saxefras, furres, or love. But when they departed, there remained neither taverne, beere-house, nor place of reliefe, but the common Kettell. Had we beene as free from all sinnes as gluttony, and drunkennesse, we might have been canonized for Saints. But our President would never have been admitted, for ingrissing to his private, Oatmeale, Sacke, Oyle, Aquavitz, Beef, Egges, or what not, but the Kettell: that indeed he allowed equally to be distributed, and that was half a pint of wheat, and as much barley boyled with water for a man a day, and this being fryed some twenty-six weeks in the ship's hold, contained as many wormes as graines; so that we might truly call it rather so much bran than corrne, our drinke was water, our lodgings Castles in the ayre; with this lodging and dyet, our extreme toile in bearing and planting Pallisadoes, so strained and bruised us, and our continual labour in the extremitie of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us miserable in our native countrey, or any other place in the world.”
Affairs grew worse. The sufferings of this colony in the summer equaled that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in the winter and spring. Before September forty-one were buried, says Wingfield; fifty, says Smith in one statement, and forty-six in another; Percy gives a list of twenty-four who died in August and September. Late in August Wingfield said, “Sickness had not now left us seven able men in our town.” “As yet,” writes Smith in September, “we had no houses to cover us, our tents were rotten, and our cabins worse than nought.”
Percy gives a doleful picture of the wretchedness of the colony: “Our men were destroyed with cruel sickness, as swellings, fluxes, burning-fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of mere famine.... We watched every three nights, lying on the cold bare ground what weather soever came, worked all the next day, which brought our men to be most feeble wretches, our food was but a small can of barley, sod in water to five men a day, our drink but cold water taken out of the river, which was at the flood very salt, at a low tide full of shrimp and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men. Thus we lived for the space of five months in this miserable distress, but having five able men to man our bulwarks upon any occasion. If it had not pleased God to put a terror in the savage hearts, we had all perished by those wild and cruel Pagans, being in that weak state as we were: our men night and day groaning in every corner of the fort, most pitiful to hear. If there were any conscience in men, it would make their hearts to bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without relief, every night and day, for the space of six weeks: some departing out of the world; many times three or four in a night; in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins, like dogs, to be buried. In this sort did I see the mortality of divers of our people.”
A severe loss to the colony was the death on the 22d of August of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, one of the Council, a brave and adventurous mariner, and, says Wingfield, a “worthy and religious gentleman.” He was honorably buried, “having all the ordnance in the fort shot off with many volleys of small shot.” If the Indians had known that those volleys signified the mortality of their comrades, the colony would no doubt have been cut off entirely. It is a melancholy picture, this disheartened and half-famished band of men quarreling among themselves; the occupation of the half-dozen able men was nursing the sick and digging graves. We anticipate here by saying, on the authority of a contemporary manuscript in the State Paper office, that when Captain Newport arrived with the first supply in January, 1608, “he found the colony consisting of no more than forty persons; of those, ten only able men.”
After the death of Gosnold, Captain Kendall was deposed from the Council and put in prison for sowing discord between the President and Council, says Wingfield; for heinous matters which were proved against him, says Percy; for “divers reasons,” says Smith, who sympathized with his dislike of Wingfield. The colony was in very low estate at this time, and was only saved from famine by the providential good-will of the Indians, who brought them corn half ripe, and presently meat and fruit in abundance.
On the 7th of September the chief Paspahegh gave a token of peace by returning a white boy who had run away from camp, and other runaways were returned by other chiefs, who reported that they had been well used in their absence. By these returns Mr. Wingfield was convinced that the Indians were not cannibals, as Smith believed.
On the 10th of September Mr. Wingfield was deposed from the presidency and the Council, and Captain John Ratcliffe was elected President. Concerning the deposition there has been much dispute; but the accounts of it by Captain Smith and his friends, so long accepted as the truth, must be modified by Mr. Wingfield's “Discourse of Virginia,” more recently come to light, which is, in a sense, a defense of his conduct.
In his “True Relation” Captain Smith is content to say that “Captain Wingfield, having ordered the affairs in such sort that he was hated of them all, in which respect he was with one accord deposed from the presidency.”
In the “General Historie” the charges against him, which we have already quoted, are extended, and a new one is added, that is, a purpose of deserting the colony in the pinnace: “the rest seeing the President's projects to escape these miseries in our pinnace by flight (who all this time had neither felt want nor sickness), so moved our dead spirits we deposed him.”
In the scarcity of food and the deplorable sickness and death, it was inevitable that extreme dissatisfaction should be felt with the responsible head. Wingfield was accused of keeping the best of the supplies to himself. The commonalty may have believed this. Smith himself must have known that the supplies were limited, but have been willing to take advantage of this charge to depose the President, who was clearly in many ways incompetent for his trying position. It appears by Mr. Wingfield's statement that the supply left with the colony was very scant, a store that would only last thirteen weeks and a half, and prudence in the distribution of it, in the uncertainty of Newport's return, was a necessity. Whether Wingfield used the delicacies himself is a question which cannot be settled. In his defense, in all we read of him, except that written by Smith and his friends, he seems to be a temperate and just man, little qualified to control the bold spirits about him.
As early as July, “in his sickness time, the President did easily fortell his own deposing from his command,” so much did he differ from the Council in the management of the colony. Under date of September 7th he says that the Council demanded a larger allowance for themselves and for some of the sick, their favorites, which he declined to give without their warrants as councilors. Captain Martin of the Council was till then ignorant that only store for thirteen and a half weeks was in the hands of the Cape Merchant, or treasurer, who was at that time Mr. Thomas Studley. Upon a representation to the Council of the lowness of the stores, and the length of time that must elapse before the harvest of grain, they declined to enlarge the allowance, and even ordered that every meal of fish or flesh should excuse the allowance of porridge. Mr. Wingfield goes on to say: “Nor was the common store of oyle, vinegar, sack, and aquavite all spent, saving two gallons of each: the sack reserved for the Communion table, the rest for such extremities as might fall upon us, which the President had only made known to Captain Gosnold; of which course he liked well. The vessels wear, therefore, boonged upp. When Mr. Gosnold was dead, the President did acquaint the rest of the Council with the said remnant; but, Lord, how they then longed for to supp up that little remnant: for they had now emptied all their own bottles, and all other that they could smell out.”
Shortly after this the Council again importuned the President for some better allowance for themselves and for the sick. He protested his impartiality, showed them that if the portions were distributed according to their request the colony would soon starve; he still offered to deliver what they pleased on their warrants, but would not himself take the responsibility of distributing all the stores, and when he divined the reason of their impatience he besought them to bestow the presidency among themselves, and he would be content to obey as a private. Meantime the Indians were bringing in supplies of corn and meat, the men were so improved in health that thirty were able to work, and provision for three weeks' bread was laid up.
Nevertheless, says Mr. Wingfield, the Council had fully plotted to depose him. Of the original seven there remained, besides Mr. Wingfield, only three in the Council. Newport was in England, Gosnold was dead, and Kendall deposed. Mr. Wingfield charged that the three—Ratcliffe, Smith, and Martin—forsook the instructions of his Majesty, and set up a Triumvirate. At any rate, Wingfield was forcibly deposed from the Council on the 10th of September. If the object had been merely to depose him, there was an easier way, for Wingfield was ready to resign. But it appears, by subsequent proceedings, that they wished to fasten upon him the charge of embezzlement, the responsibility of the sufferings of the colony, and to mulct him in fines. He was arrested, and confined on the pinnace. Mr. Ratcliffe was made President.
On the 11th of September Mr. Wingfield was brought before the Council sitting as a court, and heard the charges against him. They were, as Mr. Wingfield says, mostly frivolous trifles. According to his report they were these:
First, Mister President [Radcliffe] said that I had denied him a penny whitle, a chicken, a spoonful of beer, and served him with foul corn; and with that pulled some grain out of a bag, showing it to the company.
Then starts up Mr. Smith and said that I had told him plainly how he lied; and that I said, though we were equal here, yet if we were in England, he [I] would think scorn his man should be my companion.
Mr. Martin followed with: “He reported that I do slack the service in the colony, and do nothing but tend my pot, spit, and oven; but he hath starved my son, and denied him a spoonful of beer. I have friends in England shall be revenged on him, if ever he come in London.”
Voluminous charges were read against Mr. Wingfield by Mr. Archer, who had been made by the Council, Recorder of Virginia, the author, according to Wingfield, of three several mutinies, as “always hatching of some mutiny in my time.”
Mr. Percy sent him word in his prison that witnesses were hired to testify against him by bribes of cakes and by threats. If Mr. Percy, who was a volunteer in this expedition, and a man of high character, did send this information, it shows that he sympathized with him, and this is an important piece of testimony to his good character.
Wingfield saw no way of escape from the malice of his accusers, whose purpose he suspected was to fine him fivefold for all the supplies whose disposition he could not account for in writing: but he was finally allowed to appeal to the King for mercy, and recommitted to the pinnace. In regard to the charge of embezzlement, Mr. Wingfield admitted that it was impossible to render a full account: he had no bill of items from the Cape Merchant when he received the stores, he had used the stores for trade and gifts with the Indians; Captain Newport had done the same in his expedition, without giving any memorandum. Yet he averred that he never expended the value of these penny whittles [small pocket-knives] to his private use.
There was a mutinous and riotous spirit on shore, and the Council professed to think Wingfield's life was in danger. He says: “In all these disorders was Mr. Archer a ringleader.” Meantime the Indians continued to bring in supplies, and the Council traded up and down the river for corn, and for this energy Mr. Wingfield gives credit to “Mr. Smith especially,” “which relieved the colony well.” To the report that was brought him that he was charged with starving the colony, he replies with some natural heat and a little show of petulance, that may be taken as an evidence of weakness, as well as of sincerity, and exhibiting the undignified nature of all this squabbling:
“I did alwaises give every man his allowance faithfully, both of corne, oyle, aquivite, etc., as was by the counsell proportioned: neyther was it bettered after my tyme, untill, towards th' end of March, a bisket was allowed to every working man for his breakfast, by means of the provision brought us by Captn. Newport: as will appeare hereafter. It is further said, I did much banquit and ryot. I never had but one squirrel roasted; whereof I gave part to Mr. Ratcliffe then sick: yet was that squirrel given me. I did never heate a flesh pott but when the comon pott was so used likewise. Yet how often Mr. President's and the Counsellors' spitts have night and daye bene endaungered to break their backes-so, laden with swanns, geese, ducks, etc.! how many times their flesh potts have swelled, many hungrie eies did behold, to their great longing: and what great theeves and theeving thear hath been in the comon stoare since my tyme, I doubt not but is already made knowne to his Majesty's Councell for Virginia.”
Poor Wingfield was not left at ease in his confinement. On the 17th he was brought ashore to answer the charge of Jehu [John?] Robinson that he had with Robinson and others intended to run away with the pinnace to Newfoundland; and the charge by Mr. Smith that he had accused Smith of intending mutiny. To the first accuser the jury awarded one hundred pounds, and to the other two hundred pounds damages, for slander. “Seeing their law so speedy and cheap,” Mr. Wingfield thought he would try to recover a copper kettle he had lent Mr. Crofts, worth half its weight in gold. But Crofts swore that Wingfield had given it to him, and he lost his kettle: “I told Mr. President I had not known the like law, and prayed they would be more sparing of law till we had more witt or wealthe.” Another day they obtained from Wingfield the key to his coffers, and took all his accounts, note-books, and “owne proper goods,” which he could never recover. Thus was I made good prize on all sides.
During one of Smith's absences on the river President Ratcliffe did beat James Read, the blacksmith. Wingfield says the Council were continually beating the men for their own pleasure. Read struck back.
For this he was condemned to be hanged; but “before he turned of the lather,” he desired to speak privately with the President, and thereupon accused Mr. Kendall—who had been released from the pinnace when Wingfield was sent aboard—of mutiny. Read escaped. Kendall was convicted of mutiny and shot to death. In arrest of judgment he objected that the President had no authority to pronounce judgment because his name was Sicklemore and not Ratcliffe. This was true, and Mr. Martin pronounced the sentence. In his “True Relation,” Smith agrees with this statement of the death of Kendall, and says that he was tried by a jury. It illustrates the general looseness of the “General Historie,” written and compiled many years afterwards, that this transaction there appears as follows: “Wingfield and Kendall being in disgrace, seeing all things at random in the absence of Smith, the company's dislike of their President's weakness, and their small love to Martin's never-mending sickness, strengthened themselves with the sailors and other confederates to regain their power, control, and authority, or at least such meanes aboard the pinnace (being fitted to sail as Smith had appointed for trade) to alter her course and to goe for England. Smith unexpectedly returning had the plot discovered to him, much trouble he had to prevent it, till with store of sakre and musket-shot he forced them to stay or sink in the river, which action cost the life of Captain Kendall.”
In a following sentence he says: “The President [Ratcliffe] and Captain Archer not long after intended also to have abandoned the country, which project also was curbed and suppressed by Smith.” Smith was always suppressing attempts at flight, according to his own story, unconfirmed by any other writers. He had before accused President Wingfield of a design to escape in the pinnace.
Communications were evidently exchanged with Mr. Wingfield on the pinnace, and the President was evidently ill at ease about him. One day he was summoned ashore, but declined to go, and requested an interview with ten gentlemen. To those who came off to him he said that he had determined to go to England to make known the weakness of the colony, that he could not live under the laws and usurpations of the Triumvirate; however, if the President and Mr. Archer would go, he was willing to stay and take his fortune with the colony, or he would contribute one hundred pounds towards taking the colony home. “They did like none of my proffers, but made divers shott at uss in the pynnasse.” Thereupon he went ashore and had a conference.
On the 10th of December Captain Smith departed on his famous expedition up the Chickahominy, during which the alleged Pocahontas episode occurred. Mr. Wingfield's condensed account of this journey and captivity we shall refer to hereafter. In Smith's absence President Ratcliffe, contrary to his oath, swore Mr. Archer one of the Council; and Archer was no sooner settled in authority than he sought to take Smith's life. The enmity of this man must be regarded as a long credit mark to Smith. Archer had him indicted upon a chapter in Leviticus (they all wore a garb of piety) for the death of two men who were killed by the Indians on his expedition. “He had had his trials the same daie of his retourne,” says Wingfield, “and I believe his hanging the same, or the next daie, so speedy is our law there. But it pleased God to send Captain Newport unto us the same evening, to our unspeakable comfort; whose arrivall saved Mr. Smyth's leif and mine, because he took me out of the pynnasse, and gave me leave to lyve in the towne. Also by his comyng was prevented a parliament, which the newe counsailor, Mr. Recorder, intended thear to summon.”
Captain Newport's arrival was indeed opportune. He was the only one of the Council whose character and authority seem to have been generally respected, the only one who could restore any sort of harmony and curb the factious humors of the other leaders. Smith should have all credit for his energy in procuring supplies, for his sagacity in dealing with the Indians, for better sense than most of the other colonists exhibited, and for more fidelity to the objects of the plantation than most of them; but where ability to rule is claimed for him, at this juncture we can but contrast the deference shown by all to Newport with the want of it given to Smith. Newport's presence at once quelled all the uneasy spirits.
Newport's arrival, says Wingfield, “saved Mr Smith's life and mine.” Smith's account of the episode is substantially the same. In his “True Relation” he says on his return to the fort “each man with truest signs of joy they could express welcomed me, except Mr. Archer, and some two or three of his, who was then in my absence sworn councilor, though not with the consent of Captain Martin; great blame and imputation was laid upon me by them for the loss of our two men which the Indians slew: insomuch that they purposed to depose me, but in the midst of my miseries, it pleased God to send Captain Newport, who arriving there the same night, so tripled our joy, as for a while those plots against me were deferred, though with much malice against me, which Captain Newport in short time did plainly see.” In his “Map of Virginia,” the Oxford tract of 1612, Smith does not allude to this; but in the “General Historie” it had assumed a different aspect in his mind, for at the time of writing that he was the irresistible hero, and remembered himself as always nearly omnipotent in Virginia. Therefore, instead of expressions of gratitude to Newport we read this: “Now in Jamestown they were all in combustion, the strongest preparing once more to run away with the pinnace; which with the hazard of his life, with Sakre, falcon and musket shot, Smith forced now the third time to stay or sink. Some no better than they should be, had plotted to put him to death by the Levitical law, for the lives of Robinson and Emry, pretending that the fault was his, that led them to their ends; but he quickly took such order with such Lawyers, that he laid them by the heels till he sent some of them prisoners to England.”
Clearly Captain Smith had no authority to send anybody prisoner to England. When Newport returned, April 10th, Wingfield and Archer went with him. Wingfield no doubt desired to return. Archer was so insolent, seditious, and libelous that he only escaped the halter by the interposition of Newport. The colony was willing to spare both these men, and probably Newport it was who decided they should go. As one of the Council, Smith would undoubtedly favor their going. He says in the “General Historie”: “We not having any use of parliaments, plaises, petitions, admirals, recorders, interpreters, chronologers, courts of plea, or justices of peace, sent Master Wingfield and Captain Archer home with him, that had engrossed all those titles, to seek some better place of employment.” Mr. Wingfield never returned. Captain Archer returned in 1609, with the expedition of Gates and Somers, as master of one of the ships.
Newport had arrived with the first supply on the 8th of January, 1608. The day before, according to Wingfield, a fire occurred which destroyed nearly all the town, with the clothing and provisions. According to Smith, who is probably correct in this, the fire did not occur till five or six days after the arrival of the ship. The date is uncertain, and some doubt is also thrown upon the date of the arrival of the ship. It was on the day of Smith's return from captivity: and that captivity lasted about four weeks if the return was January 8th, for he started on the expedition December 10th. Smith subsequently speaks of his captivity lasting six or seven weeks.
In his “General Historie” Smith says the fire happened after the return of the expedition of Newport, Smith, and Scrivener to the Pamunkey: “Good Master Hunt, our Preacher, lost all his library, and all he had but the clothes on his back; yet none ever heard him repine at his loss.” This excellent and devoted man is the only one of these first pioneers of whom everybody speaks well, and he deserved all affection and respect.
One of the first labors of Newport was to erect a suitable church. Services had been held under many disadvantages, which Smith depicts in his “Advertisements for Unexperienced Planters,” published in London in 1631:
“When I first went to Virginia, I well remember, we did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to three or foure trees to shadow us from the Sunne, our walls were rales of wood, our seats unhewed trees, till we cut plankes, our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighboring trees, in foule weather we shifted into an old rotten tent, for we had few better, and this came by the way of adventure for me; this was our Church, till we built a homely thing like a barne, set upon Cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge and earth, so was also the walls: the best of our houses of the like curiosity, but the most part farre much worse workmanship, that could neither well defend wind nor raine, yet we had daily Common Prayer morning and evening, every day two Sermons, and every three moneths the holy Communion, till our Minister died, [Robert Hunt] but our Prayers daily, with an Homily on Sundaies.”
It is due to Mr. Wingfield, who is about to disappear from Virginia, that something more in his defense against the charges of Smith and the others should be given. It is not possible now to say how the suspicion of his religious soundness arose, but there seems to have been a notion that he had papal tendencies. His grandfather, Sir Richard Wingfield, was buried in Toledo, Spain. His father, Thomas Maria Wingfield, was christened by Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole. These facts perhaps gave rise to the suspicion. He answers them with some dignity and simplicity, and with a little querulousness:
“It is noised that I combyned with the Spanniards to the distruccion of the Collony; that I ame an atheist, because I carryed not a Bible with me, and because I did forbid the preacher to preache; that I affected a kingdome; that I did hide of the comon provision in the ground.
“I confesse I have alwayes admyred any noble vertue and prowesse, as well in the Spanniards (as in other nations): but naturally I have alwayes distrusted and disliked their neighborhoode. I sorted many bookes in my house, to be sent up to me at my goeing to Virginia; amongst them a Bible. They were sent up in a trunk to London, with divers fruite, conserves, and preserves, which I did sett in Mr. Crofts his house in Ratcliff. In my beeing at Virginia, I did understand my trunk was thear broken up, much lost, my sweetmeates eaten at his table, some of my bookes which I missed to be seene in his hands: and whether amongst them my Bible was so ymbeasiled or mislayed by my servants, and not sent me, I knowe not as yet.
“Two or three Sunday mornings, the Indians gave us allarums at our towne. By that tymes they weare answered, the place about us well discovered, and our devyne service ended, the daie was farr spent. The preacher did aske me if it were my pleasure to have a sermon: hee said hee was prepared for it. I made answere, that our men were weary and hungry, and that he did see the time of the daie farr past (for at other tymes bee never made such question, but, the service finished he began his sermon); and that, if it pleased him, wee would spare him till some other tyme. I never failed to take such noates by wrighting out of his doctrine as my capacity could comprehend, unless some raynie day hindred my endeavor. My mynde never swelled with such ympossible mountebank humors as could make me affect any other kingdome than the kingdom of heaven.
“As truly as God liveth, I gave an ould man, then the keeper of the private store, 2 glasses with sallet oyle which I brought with me out of England for my private stoare, and willed him to bury it in the ground, for that I feared the great heate would spoile it. Whatsoever was more, I did never consent unto or know of it, and as truly was it protested unto me, that all the remaynder before mencioned of the oyle, wyne, &c., which the President receyved of me when I was deposed they themselves poored into their owne bellyes.
“To the President's and Counsell's objections I saie that I doe knowe curtesey and civility became a governor. No penny whittle was asked me, but a knife, whereof I have none to spare The Indyans had long before stoallen my knife. Of chickins I never did eat but one, and that in my sicknes. Mr. Ratcliff had before that time tasted Of 4 or 5. I had by my owne huswiferie bred above 37, and the most part of them my owne poultrye; of all which, at my comyng awaie, I did not see three living. I never denyed him (or any other) beare, when I had it. The corne was of the same which we all lived upon.
“Mr. Smyth, in the time of our hungar, had spread a rumor in the Collony, that I did feast myself and my servants out of the comon stoare, with entent (as I gathered) to have stirred the discontented company against me. I told him privately, in Mr. Gosnold's tent, that indeede I had caused half a pint of pease to be sodden with a peese of pork, of my own provision, for a poore old man, which in a sicknes (whereof he died) he much desired; and said, that if out of his malice he had given it out otherwise, that hee did tell a leye. It was proved to his face, that he begged in Ireland like a rogue, without a lycence. To such I would not my nam should be a companyon.”
The explanation about the Bible as a part of his baggage is a little far-fetched, and it is evident that that book was not his daily companion. Whether John Smith habitually carried one about with him we are not informed. The whole passage quoted gives us a curious picture of the mind and of the habits of the time. This allusion to John Smith's begging is the only reference we can find to his having been in Ireland. If he was there it must have been in that interim in his own narrative between his return from Morocco and his going to Virginia. He was likely enough to seek adventure there, as the hangers-on of the court in Raleigh's day occasionally did, and perhaps nothing occurred during his visit there that he cared to celebrate. If he went to Ireland he probably got in straits there, for that was his usual luck.
Whatever is the truth about Mr. Wingfield's inefficiency and embezzlement of corn meal, Communion sack, and penny whittles, his enemies had no respect for each other or concord among themselves. It is Wingfield's testimony that Ratcliffe said he would not have been deposed if he had visited Ratcliffe during his sickness. Smith said that Wingfield would not have been deposed except for Archer; that the charges against him were frivolous. Yet, says Wingfield, “I do believe him the first and only practiser in these practices,” and he attributed Smith's hostility to the fact that “his name was mentioned in the intended and confessed mutiny by Galthrop.” Noother reference is made to this mutiny. Galthrop was one of those who died in the previous August.
One of the best re-enforcements of the first supply was Matthew Scrivener, who was appointed one of the Council. He was a sensible man, and he and Smith worked together in harmony for some time. They were intent upon building up the colony. Everybody else in the camp was crazy about the prospect of gold: there was, says Smith, “no talk, no hope, no work, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold, such a bruit of gold that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the sands, lest they should by their art make gold of his bones.” He charges that Newport delayed his return to England on account of this gold fever, in order to load his vessel (which remained fourteen weeks when it might have sailed in fourteen days) with gold-dust. Captain Martin seconded Newport in this; Smith protested against it; he thought Newport was no refiner, and it did torment him “to see all necessary business neglected, to fraught such a drunken ship with so much gilded durt.” This was the famous load of gold that proved to be iron pyrites.
In speaking of the exploration of the James River as far as the Falls by Newport, Smith, and Percy, we have followed the statements of Percy and the writer of Newport's discovery that they saw the great Powhatan. There is much doubt of this. Smith in his “True Relation” does not say so; in his voyage up the Chickahominy he seems to have seen Powhatan for the first time; and Wingfield speaks of Powhatan, on Smith's return from that voyage, as one “of whom before we had no knowledge.” It is conjectured that the one seen at Powhatan's seat near the Falls was a son of the “Emperor.” It was partly the exaggeration of the times to magnify discoveries, and partly English love of high titles, that attributed such titles as princes, emperors, and kings to the half-naked barbarians and petty chiefs of Virginia.
In all the accounts of the colony at this period, no mention is made of women, and it is not probable that any went over with the first colonists. The character of the men was not high. Many of them were “gentlemen” adventurers, turbulent spirits, who would not work, who were much better fitted for piratical maraudings than the labor of founding a state. The historian must agree with the impression conveyed by Smith, that it was poor material out of which to make a colony.
VII. SMITH TO THE FRONT
It is now time to turn to Smith's personal adventures among the Indians during this period. Almost our only authority is Smith himself, or such presumed writings of his companions as he edited or rewrote. Strachey and others testify to his energy in procuring supplies for the colony, and his success in dealing with the Indians, and it seems likely that the colony would have famished but for his exertions. Whatever suspicion attaches to Smith's relation of his own exploits, it must never be forgotten that he was a man of extraordinary executive ability, and had many good qualities to offset his vanity and impatience of restraint.
After the departure of Wingfield, Captain Smith was constrained to act as Cape Merchant; the leaders were sick or discontented, the rest were in despair, and would rather starve and rot than do anything for their own relief, and the Indian trade was decreasing. Under these circumstances, Smith says in his “True Relation,” “I was sent to the mouth of the river, to Kegquoughtan [now Hampton], an Indian Towne, to trade for corn, and try the river for fish.” The Indians, thinking them near famished, tantalized them with offers of little bits of bread in exchange for a hatchet or a piece of copper, and Smith offered trifles in return. The next day the Indians were anxious to trade. Smith sent men up to their town, a display of force was made by firing four guns, and the Indians kindly traded, giving fish, oysters, bread, and deer. The town contained eighteen houses, and heaps of grain. Smith obtained fifteen bushels of it, and on his homeward way he met two canoes with Indians, whom he accompanied to their villages on the south side of the river, and got from them fifteen bushels more.
This incident is expanded in the “General Historie.” After the lapse of fifteen years Smith is able to remember more details, and to conceive himself as the one efficient man who had charge of everything outside the fort, and to represent his dealings with the Indians in a much more heroic and summary manner. He was not sent on the expedition, but went of his own motion. The account opens in this way: “The new President [Ratcliffe] and Martin, being little beloved, of weake judgement in dangers, and loose industrie in peace, committed the management of all things abroad to Captain Smith; who by his own example, good words, and fair promises, set some to mow, others to binde thatch, some to builde houses, others to thatch them, himselfe always bearing the greatest taske for his own share, so that in short time he provided most of them with lodgings, neglecting any for himselfe. This done, seeing the Salvage superfluities beginne to decrease (with some of his workmen) shipped himself in the Shallop to search the country for trade.”
In this narration, when the Indians trifled with Smith he fired a volley at them, ran his boat ashore, and pursued them fleeing towards their village, where were great heaps of corn that he could with difficulty restrain his soldiers [six or seven] from taking. The Indians then assaulted them with a hideous noise: “Sixty or seventy of them, some black, some red, some white, some particoloured, came in a square order, singing and dancing out of the woods, with their Okee (which is an Idol made of skinnes, stuffed with mosse, and painted and hung with chains and copper) borne before them; and in this manner being well armed with clubs, targets, bowes and arrowes, they charged the English that so kindly received them with their muskets loaden with pistol shot, that down fell their God, and divers lay sprawling on the ground; the rest fled againe to the woods, and ere long sent men of their Quiyoughkasoucks [conjurors] to offer peace and redeeme the Okee.” Good feeling was restored, and the savages brought the English “venison, turkies, wild fowl, bread all that they had, singing and dancing in sign of friendship till they departed.” This fantastical account is much more readable than the former bare narration.
The supplies which Smith brought gave great comfort to the despairing colony, which was by this time reasonably fitted with houses. But it was not long before they again ran short of food. In his first narrative Smith says there were some motions made for the President and Captain Arthur to go over to England and procure a supply, but it was with much ado concluded that the pinnace and the barge should go up the river to Powhatan to trade for corn, and the lot fell to Smith to command the expedition. In his “General Historie” a little different complexion is put upon this. On his return, Smith says, he suppressed an attempt to run away with the pinnace to England. He represents that what food “he carefully provided the rest carelessly spent,” and there is probably much truth in his charges that the settlers were idle and improvident. He says also that they were in continual broils at this time. It is in the fall of 1607, just before his famous voyage up the Chickahominy, on which he departed December 10th—that he writes: “The President and Captain Arthur intended not long after to have abandoned the country, which project was curbed and suppressed by Smith. The Spaniard never more greedily desired gold than he victual, nor his soldiers more to abandon the country than he to keep it. But finding plenty of corn in the river of Chickahomania, where hundreds of salvages in divers places stood with baskets expecting his coming, and now the winter approaching, the rivers became covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes, that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowls, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them, so that none of our Tuftaffaty humorists desired to go to England.”
While the Chickahominy expedition was preparing, Smith made a voyage to Popohanock or Quiyoughcohanock, as it is called on his map, a town on the south side of the river, above Jamestown. Here the women and children fled from their homes and the natives refused to trade. They had plenty of corn, but Smith says he had no commission to spoil them. On his return he called at Paspahegh, a town on the north side of the James, and on the map placed higher than Popohanock, but evidently nearer to Jamestown, as he visited it on his return. He obtained ten bushels of corn of the churlish and treacherous natives, who closely watched and dogged the expedition.
Everything was now ready for the journey to Powhatan. Smith had the barge and eight men for trading and discovery, and the pinnace was to follow to take the supplies at convenient landings. On the 9th of November he set out in the barge to explore the Chickahominy, which is described as emptying into the James at Paspahegh, eight miles above the fort. The pinnace was to ascend the river twenty miles to Point Weanock, and to await Smith there. All the month of November Smith toiled up and down the Chickahominy, discovering and visiting many villages, finding the natives kindly disposed and eager to trade, and possessing abundance of corn. Notwithstanding this abundance, many were still mutinous. At this time occurred the President's quarrel with the blacksmith, who, for assaulting the President, was condemned to death, and released on disclosing a conspiracy of which Captain Kendall was principal; and the latter was executed in his place. Smith returned from a third voyage to the Chickahominy with more supplies, only to find the matter of sending the pinnace to England still debated.
This project, by the help of Captain Martin, he again quieted and at last set forward on his famous voyage into the country of Powhatan and Pocahontas.
VIII. THE FAMOUS CHICKAHOMINY VOYAGE
We now enter upon the most interesting episode in the life of the gallant captain, more thrilling and not less romantic than the captivity in Turkey and the tale of the faithful love of the fair young mistress Charatza Tragabigzanda.
Although the conduct of the lovely Charatza in despatching Smith to her cruel brother in Nalbrits, where he led the life of a dog, was never explained, he never lost faith in her. His loyalty to women was equal to his admiration of them, and it was bestowed without regard to race or complexion. Nor is there any evidence that the dusky Pocahontas, who is about to appear, displaced in his heart the image of the too partial Tragabigzanda. In regard to women, as to his own exploits, seen in the light of memory, Smith possessed a creative imagination. He did not create Pocahontas, as perhaps he may have created the beautiful mistress of Bashaw Bogall, but he invested her with a romantic interest which forms a lovely halo about his own memory.
As this voyage up the Chickahominy is more fruitful in its consequences than Jason's voyage to Colchis; as it exhibits the energy, daring, invention, and various accomplishments of Captain Smith, as warrior, negotiator, poet, and narrator; as it describes Smith's first and only captivity among the Indians; and as it was during this absence of four weeks from Jamestown, if ever, that Pocahontas interposed to prevent the beating out of Smith's brains with a club, I shall insert the account of it in full, both Smith's own varying relations of it, and such contemporary notices of it as now come to light. It is necessary here to present several accounts, just as they stand, and in the order in which they were written, that the reader may see for himself how the story of Pocahontas grew to its final proportions. The real life of Pocahontas will form the subject of another chapter.
The first of these accounts is taken from “The True Relation,” written by Captain John Smith, composed in Virginia, the earliest published work relating to the James River Colony. It covers a period of a little more than thirteen months, from the arrival at Cape Henry on April 26, 1607, to the return of Captain Nelson in the Phoenix, June 2, 1608. The manuscript was probably taken home by Captain Nelson, and it was published in London in 1608. Whether it was intended for publication is doubtful; but at that time all news of the venture in Virginia was eagerly sought, and a narrative of this importance would naturally speedily get into print.
In the several copies of it extant there are variations in the titlepage, which was changed while the edition was being printed. In some the name of Thomas Watson is given as the author, in others “A Gentleman of the Colony,” and an apology appears signed “T. H.,” for the want of knowledge or inadvertence of attributing it to any one except Captain Smith.
There is no doubt that Smith was its author. He was still in Virginia when it was printed, and the printers made sad work of parts of his manuscript. The question has been raised, in view of the entire omission of the name of Pocahontas in connection with this voyage and captivity, whether the manuscript was not cut by those who published it. The reason given for excision is that the promoters of the Virginia scheme were anxious that nothing should appear to discourage capitalists, or to deter emigrants, and that this story of the hostility and cruelty of Powhatan, only averted by the tender mercy of his daughter, would have an unfortunate effect. The answer to this is that the hostility was exhibited by the captivity and the intimation that Smith was being fatted to be eaten, and this was permitted to stand. It is wholly improbable that an incident so romantic, so appealing to the imagination, in an age when wonder-tales were eagerly welcomed, and which exhibited such tender pity in the breast of a savage maiden, and such paternal clemency in a savage chief, would have been omitted. It was calculated to lend a lively interest to the narration, and would be invaluable as an advertisement of the adventure.
[For a full bibliographical discussion of this point the reader is referred to the reprint of “The True Relation,” by Charles Deane, Esq., Boston, 1864, the preface and notes to which are a masterpiece of critical analysis.]
That some portions of “The True Relation” were omitted is possible. There is internal evidence of this in the abrupt manner in which it opens, and in the absence of allusions to the discords during the voyage and on the arrival. Captain Smith was not the man to pass over such questions in silence, as his subsequent caustic letter sent home to the Governor and Council of Virginia shows. And it is probable enough that the London promoters would cut out from the “Relation” complaints and evidence of the seditions and helpless state of the colony. The narration of the captivity is consistent as it stands, and wholly inconsistent with the Pocahontas episode.
We extract from the narrative after Smith's departure from Apocant, the highest town inhabited, between thirty and forty miles up the river, and below Orapaks, one of Powhatan's seats, which also appears on his map. He writes:
“Ten miles higher I discovered with the barge; in the midway a great tree hindered my passage, which I cut in two: heere the river became narrower, 8, 9 or 10 foote at a high water, and 6 or 7 at a lowe: the stream exceeding swift, and the bottom hard channell, the ground most part a low plaine, sandy soyle, this occasioned me to suppose it might issue from some lake or some broad ford, for it could not be far to the head, but rather then I would endanger the barge, yet to have beene able to resolve this doubt, and to discharge the imputating malicious tungs, that halfe suspected I durst not for so long delaying, some of the company, as desirous as myself, we resolved to hier a canow, and returne with the barge to Apocant, there to leave the barge secure, and put ourselves upon the adventure: the country onely a vast and wilde wilderness, and but only that Towne: within three or foure mile we hired a canow, and 2 Indians to row us ye next day a fowling: having made such provision for the barge as was needfull, I left her there to ride, with expresse charge not any to go ashore til my returne. Though some wise men may condemn this too bould attempt of too much indiscretion, yet if they well consider the friendship of the Indians, in conducting me, the desolatenes of the country, the probabilitie of some lacke, and the malicious judges of my actions at home, as also to have some matters of worth to incourage our adventurers in england, might well have caused any honest minde to have done the like, as wel for his own discharge as for the publike good: having 2 Indians for my guide and 2 of our own company, I set forward, leaving 7 in the barge; having discovered 20 miles further in this desart, the river stil kept his depth and bredth, but much more combred with trees; here we went ashore (being some 12 miles higher than ye barge had bene) to refresh our selves, during the boyling of our vituals: one of the Indians I tooke with me, to see the nature of the soile, and to cross the boughts of the river, the other Indian I left with M. Robbinson and Thomas Emry, with their matches light and order to discharge a peece, for my retreat at the first sight of any Indian, but within a quarter of an houre I heard a loud cry, and a hollowing of Indians, but no warning peece, supposing them surprised, and that the Indians had betraid us, presently I seazed him and bound his arme fast to my hand in a garter, with my pistoll ready bent to be revenged on him: he advised me to fly and seemed ignorant of what was done, but as we went discoursing, I was struck with an arrow on the right thigh, but without harme: upon this occasion I espied 2 Indians drawing their bowes, which I prevented in discharging a french pistoll: by that I had charged again 3 or 4 more did the 'like, for the first fell downe and fled: at my discharge they did the like, my hinde I made my barricade, who offered not to strive, 20 or 30 arrowes were shot at me but short, 3 or 4 times I had discharged my pistoll ere the king of Pamauck called Opeckakenough with 200 men, environed me, each drawing their bowe, which done they laid them upon the ground, yet without shot, my hinde treated betwixt them and me of conditions of peace, he discovered me to be the captaine, my request was to retire to ye boate, they demanded my armes, the rest they saide were slaine, onely me they would reserve: the Indian importuned me not to shoot. In retiring being in the midst of a low quagmire, and minding them more than my steps, I stept fast into the quagmire, and also the Indian in drawing me forth: thus surprised, I resolved to trie their mercies, my armes I caste from me, till which none durst approch me: being ceazed on me, they drew me out and led me to the King, I presented him with a compasse diall, describing by my best meanes the use thereof, whereat he so amazedly admired, as he suffered me to proceed in a discourse of the roundnes of the earth, the course of the sunne, moone, starres and plannets, with kinde speeches and bread he requited me, conducting me where the canow lay and John Robinson slaine, with 20 or 30 arrowes in him. Emry I saw not, I perceived by the abundance of fires all over the woods, at each place I expected when they would execute me, yet they used me with what kindnes they could: approaching their Towne which was within 6 miles where I was taken, onely made as arbors and covered with mats, which they remove as occasion requires: all the women and children, being advertised of this accident came forth to meet, the King well guarded with 20 bow men 5 flanck and rear and each flanck before him a sword and a peece, and after him the like, then a bowman, then I on each hand a boweman, the rest in file in the reare, which reare led forth amongst the trees in a bishion, eache his bowe and a handfull of arrowes, a quiver at his back grimly painted: on eache flanck a sargeant, the one running alwaiss towards the front the other towards the reare, each a true pace and in exceeding good order, this being a good time continued, they caste themselves in a ring with a daunce, and so eache man departed to his lodging, the captain conducting me to his lodging, a quarter of Venison and some ten pound of bread I had for supper, what I left was reserved for me, and sent with me to my lodging: each morning three women presented me three great platters of fine bread, more venison than ten men could devour I had, my gowne, points and garters, my compas and a tablet they gave me again, though 8 ordinarily guarded me, I wanted not what they could devise to content me: and still our longer acquaintance increased our better affection: much they threatened to assault our forte as they were solicited by the King of Paspahegh, who shewed at our fort great signs of sorrow for this mischance: the King took great delight in understanding the manner of our ships and sayling the seas, the earth and skies and of our God: what he knew of the dominions he spared not to acquaint me with, as of certaine men cloathed at a place called Ocanahonun, cloathed like me, the course of our river, and that within 4 or 5 daies journey of the falles, was a great turning of salt water: I desired he would send a messenger to Paspahegh, with a letter I would write, by which they should understand, how kindly they used me, and that I was well, lest they should revenge my death; this he granted and sent three men, in such weather, as in reason were unpossible, by any naked to be indured: their cruell mindes towards the fort I had deverted, in describing the ordinance and the mines in the fields, as also the revenge Captain Newport would take of them at his returne, their intent, I incerted the fort, the people of Ocanahomm and the back sea, this report they after found divers Indians that confirmed: the next day after my letter, came a salvage to my lodging, with his sword to have slaine me, but being by my guard intercepted, with a bowe and arrow he offred to have effected his purpose: the cause I knew not, till the King understanding thereof came and told me of a man a dying wounded with my pistoll: he tould me also of another I had slayne, yet the most concealed they had any hurte: this was the father of him I had slayne, whose fury to prevent, the King presently conducted me to another kingdome, upon the top of the next northerly river, called Youghtanan, having feasted me, he further led me to another branch of the river called Mattapament, to two other hunting townes they led me, and to each of these Countries, a house of the great Emperor of Pewhakan, whom as yet I supposed to be at the Fals, to him I tolde him I must goe, and so returne to Paspahegh, after this foure or five dayes march we returned to Rasawrack, the first towne they brought me too, where binding the mats in bundles, they marched two dayes journey and crossed the River of Youghtanan, where it was as broad as Thames: so conducting me too a place called Menapacute in Pamunke, where ye King inhabited; the next day another King of that nation called Kekataugh, having received some kindness of me at the Fort, kindly invited me to feast at his house, the people from all places flocked to see me, each shewing to content me. By this the great King hath foure or five houses, each containing fourscore or an hundred foote in length, pleasantly seated upon an high sandy hill, from whence you may see westerly a goodly low country, the river before the which his crooked course causeth many great Marshes of exceeding good ground. An hundred houses, and many large plaines are here together inhabited, more abundance of fish and fowle, and a pleasanter seat cannot be imagined: the King with fortie bowmen to guard me, intreated me to discharge my Pistoll, which they there presented me with a mark at six score to strike therewith but to spoil the practice I broke the cocke, whereat they were much discontented though a chaunce supposed. From hence this kind King conducted me to a place called Topahanocke, a kingdome upon another river northward; the cause of this was, that the yeare before, a shippe had beene in the River of Pamunke, who having been kindly entertained by Powhatan their Emperour, they returned thence, and discovered the River of Topahanocke, where being received with like kindnesse, yet he slue the King, and tooke of his people, and they supposed I were bee, but the people reported him a great man that was Captaine, and using mee kindly, the next day we departed. This River of Topahanock, seemeth in breadth not much lesse than that we dwell upon. At the mouth of the River is a Countrey called Cuttata women, upwards is Marraugh tacum Tapohanock, Apparnatuck, and Nantaugs tacum, at Topmanahocks, the head issuing from many Mountains, the next night I lodged at a hunting town of Powhatam's, and the next day arrived at Waranacomoco upon the river of Parnauncke, where the great king is resident: by the way we passed by the top of another little river, which is betwixt the two called Payankatank. The most of this country though Desert, yet exceeding fertil, good timber, most hils and in dales, in each valley a cristall spring.
“Arriving at Weramacomoco, their Emperour, proudly lying upon a Bedstead a foote high upon tenne or twelve Mattes, richly hung with manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and covered with a great covering of Rahaughcums: At heade sat a woman, at his feete another, on each side sitting upon a Matte upon the ground were raunged his chiefe men on each side the fire, tenne in a ranke and behinde them as many yong women, each a great Chaine of white Beades over their shoulders: their heades painted in redde and with such a grave and Majeslicall countenance, as drove me into admiration to see such state in a naked Salvage, bee kindlv welcomed me with good wordes, and great Platters of sundrie victuals, asiuring mee his friendship and my libertie within foure dayes, bee much delighted in Opechan Conough's relation of what I had described to him, and oft examined me upon the same. Hee asked me the cause of our comming, I tolde him being in fight with the Spaniards our enemie, being over powred, neare put to retreat, and by extreme weather put to this shore, where landing at Chesipiack, the people shot us, but at Kequoughtan they kindly used us, wee by signes demaunded fresh water, they described us up the River was all fresh water, at Paspahegh, also they kindly used us, our Pinnasse being leake wee were inforced to stay to mend her, till Captain Newport my father came to conduct us away. He demaunded why we went further with our Boate, I tolde him, in that I would have occasion to talke of the backe Sea, that on the other side the maine, where was salt water, my father had a childe slaine, which we supposed Monocan his enemie, whose death we intended to revenge. After good deliberation, hee began to describe me the countreys beyond the Falles, with many of the rest, confirming what not only Opechancanoyes, and an Indian which had been prisoner to Pewhatan had before tolde mee, but some called it five days, some sixe, some eight, where the sayde water dashed amongst many stones and rocks, each storme which caused oft tymes the heade of the River to bee brackish: Anchanachuck he described to bee the people that had slaine my brother, whose death hee would revenge. Hee described also upon the same Sea, a mighty nation called Pocoughtronack, a fierce nation that did eate men and warred with the people of Moyaoncer, and Pataromerke, Nations upon the toppe of the heade of the Bay, under his territories, where the yeare before they had slain an hundred, he signified their crownes were shaven, long haire in the necke, tied on a knot, Swords like Pollaxes.
“Beyond them he described people with short Coates, and Sleeves to the Elbowes, that passed that way in Shippes like ours. Many Kingdomes hee described mee to the heade of the Bay, which seemed to bee a mightie River, issuing from mightie mountaines, betwixt the two seas; the people clothed at Ocamahowan. He also confirmed, and the Southerly Countries also, as the rest, that reported us to be within a day and a halfe of Mangoge, two dayes of Chawwonock, 6 from Roonock, to the South part of the backe sea: he described a countrie called Anone, where they have abundance of Brasse, and houses walled as ours. I requited his discourse, seeing what pride he had in his great and spacious Dominions, seeing that all hee knewe were under his Territories.
“In describing to him the territories of Europe which was subject to our great King whose subject I was, the innumerable multitude of his ships, I gave him to understand the noyse of Trumpets and terrible manner of fighting were under Captain Newport my father, whom I intituled the Meworames which they call King of all the waters, at his greatnesse bee admired and not a little feared; he desired mee to forsake Paspahegh, and to live with him upon his River, a countrie called Capa Howasicke; he promised to give me corne, venison, or what I wanted to feede us, Hatchets and Copper wee should make him, and none should disturbe us. This request I promised to performe: and thus having with all the kindnes hee could devise, sought to content me, he sent me home with 4 men, one that usually carried my Gonne and Knapsacke after me, two other loded with bread, and one to accompanie me.”
The next extract in regard to this voyage is from President Wingfield's “Discourse of Virginia,” which appears partly in the form of a diary, but was probably drawn up or at least finished shortly after Wingfield's return to London in May, 1608. He was in Jamestown when Smith returned from his captivity, and would be likely to allude to the romantic story of Pocahontas if Smith had told it on his escape. We quote:
“Decem.—The 10th of December, Mr. Smyth went up the ryver of the Chechohomynies to trade for corne; he was desirous to see the heade of that river; and, when it was not passible with the shallop, he hired a cannow and an Indian to carry him up further. The river the higher grew worse and worse. Then hee went on shoare with his guide, and left Robinson and Emmery, and twoe of our Men, in the cannow; which were presently slayne by the Indians, Pamaonke's men, and hee himself taken prysoner, and, by the means of his guide, his lief was saved; and Pamaonche, haveing him prisoner, carryed him to his neybors wyroances, to see if any of them knew him for one of those which had bene, some two or three eeres before us, in a river amongst them Northward, and taken awaie some Indians from them by force. At last he brought him to the great Powaton (of whome before wee had no knowledg), who sent him home to our towne the 8th of January.”
The next contemporary document to which we have occasion to refer is Smith's Letter to the Treasurer and Council of Virginia in England, written in Virginia after the arrival of Newport there in September, 1608, and probably sent home by him near the close of that year. In this there is no occasion for a reference to Powhatan or his daughter, but he says in it: “I have sent you this Mappe of the Bay and Rivers, with an annexed Relation of the Countryes and Nations that inhabit them as you may see at large.” This is doubtless the “Map of Virginia,” with a description of the country, published some two or three years after Smith's return to England, at Oxford, 1612. It is a description of the country and people, and contains little narrative. But with this was published, as an appendix, an account of the proceedings of the Virginia colonists from 1606 to 1612, taken out of the writings of Thomas Studley and several others who had been residents in Virginia. These several discourses were carefully edited by William Symonds, a doctor of divinity and a man of learning and repute, evidently at the request of Smith. To the end of the volume Dr. Symonds appends a note addressed to Smith, saying: “I return you the fruit of my labors, as Mr. Cranshaw requested me, which I bestowed in reading the discourses and hearing the relations of such as have walked and observed the land of Virginia with you.” These narratives by Smith's companions, which he made a part of his Oxford book, and which passed under his eye and had his approval, are uniformly not only friendly to him, but eulogistic of him, and probably omit no incident known to the writers which would do him honor or add interest to him as a knight of romance. Nor does it seem probable that Smith himself would have omitted to mention the dramatic scene of the prevented execution if it had occurred to him. If there had been a reason in the minds of others in 1608 why it should not appear in the “True Relation,” that reason did not exist for Smith at this time, when the discords and discouragements of the colony were fully known. And by this time the young girl Pocahontas had become well known to the colonists at Jamestown. The account of this Chickahominy voyage given in this volume, published in 1612, is signed by Thomas Studley, and is as follows:
“The next voyage he proceeded so farre that with much labour by cutting of trees in sunder he made his passage, but when his Barge could passe no farther, he left her in a broad bay out of danger of shot, commanding none should go ashore till his returne; himselfe with 2 English and two Salvages went up higher in a Canowe, but he was not long absent, but his men went ashore, whose want of government gave both occasion and opportunity to the Salvages to surprise one George Casson, and much failed not to have cut of the boat and all the rest. Smith little dreaming of that accident, being got to the marshes at the river's head, 20 miles in the desert, had his 2 men slaine (as is supposed) sleeping by the Canowe, whilst himselfe by fowling sought them victual, who finding he was beset by 200 Salvages, 2 of them he slew, stil defending himselfe with the aid of a Salvage his guid (whome bee bound to his arme and used as his buckler), till at last slipping into a bogmire they tooke him prisoner: when this news came to the fort much was their sorrow for his losse, fewe expecting what ensued. A month those Barbarians kept him prisoner, many strange triumphs and conjurations they made of him, yet he so demeaned himselfe amongst them, as he not only diverted them from surprising the Fort, but procured his own liberty, and got himselfe and his company such estimation amongst them, that those Salvages admired him as a demi-God. So returning safe to the Fort, once more staied the pinnas her flight for England, which til his returne could not set saile, so extreme was the weather and so great the frost.”
The first allusion to the salvation of Captain Smith by Pocahontas occurs in a letter or “little booke” which he wrote to Queen Anne in 1616, about the time of the arrival in England of the Indian Princess, who was then called the Lady Rebecca, and was wife of John Rolfe, by whom she had a son, who accompanied them. Pocahontas had by this time become a person of some importance. Her friendship had been of substantial service to the colony. Smith had acknowledged this in his “True Relation,” where he referred to her as the “nonpareil” of Virginia. He was kind-hearted and naturally magnanimous, and would take some pains to do the Indian convert a favor, even to the invention of an incident that would make her attractive. To be sure, he was vain as well as inventive, and here was an opportunity to attract the attention of his sovereign and increase his own importance by connecting his name with hers in a romantic manner. Still, we believe that the main motive that dictated this epistle was kindness to Pocahontas. The sentence that refers to her heroic act is this: “After some six weeks [he was absent only four weeks] fatting amongst those Salvage Countries, at the minute of my execution she hazarded the beating out of her own braines to save mine, and not only that, but so prevailed with her father [of whom he says, in a previous paragraph, 'I received from this great Salvage exceeding great courtesie], that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”
This guarded allusion to the rescue stood for all known account of it, except a brief reference to it in his “New England's Trials” of 1622, until the appearance of Smith's “General Historie” in London, 1624. In the first edition of “New England's Trials,” 1620, there is no reference to it. In the enlarged edition of 1622, Smith gives a new version to his capture, as resulting from “the folly of them that fled,” and says: “God made Pocahontas, the King's daughter the means to deliver me.”
The “General Historie” was compiled—as was the custom in making up such books at the time from a great variety of sources. Such parts of it as are not written by Smith—and these constitute a considerable portion of the history—bear marks here and there of his touch. It begins with his description of Virginia, which appeared in the Oxford tract of 1612; following this are the several narratives by his comrades, which formed the appendix of that tract. The one that concerns us here is that already quoted, signed Thomas Studley. It is reproduced here as “written by Thomas Studley, the first Cape Merchant in Virginia, Robert Fenton, Edward Harrington, and I. S.” [John Smith]. It is, however, considerably extended, and into it is interjected a detailed account of the captivity and the story of the stones, the clubs, and the saved brains.
It is worthy of special note that the “True Relation” is not incorporated in the “General Historie.” This is the more remarkable because it was an original statement, written when the occurrences it describes were fresh, and is much more in detail regarding many things that happened during the period it covered than the narratives that Smith uses in the “General Historie.” It was his habit to use over and over again his own publications. Was this discarded because it contradicted the Pocahontas story—because that story could not be fitted into it as it could be into the Studley relation?
It should be added, also, that Purchas printed an abstract of the Oxford tract in his “Pilgrimage,” in 1613, from material furnished him by Smith. The Oxford tract was also republished by Purchas in his “Pilgrimes,” extended by new matter in manuscript supplied by Smith. The “Pilgrimes” did not appear till 1625, a year after the “General Historie,” but was in preparation long before. The Pocahontas legend appears in the “Pilgrimes,” but not in the earlier “Pilgrimage.”
We have before had occasion to remark that Smith's memory had the peculiarity of growing stronger and more minute in details the further he was removed in point of time from any event he describes. The revamped narrative is worth quoting in full for other reasons. It exhibits Smith's skill as a writer and his capacity for rising into poetic moods. This is the story from the “General Historie”:
“The next voyage hee proceeded so farre that with much labour by cutting of trees in sunder he made his passage, but when his Barge could pass no farther, he left her in a broad bay out of danger of shot, commanding none should goe ashore till his return: himselfe with two English and two Salvages went up higher in a Canowe, but he was not long absent, but his men went ashore, whose want of government, gave both occasion and opportunity to the Salvages to surprise one George Cassen, whom they slew, and much failed not to have cut of the boat and all the rest. Smith little dreaming of that accident, being got to the marshes at the river's head, twentie myles in the desert, had his two men slaine (as is supposed) sleeping by the Canowe, whilst himselfe by fowling sought them victuall, who finding he was beset with 200 Salvages, two of them hee slew, still defending himself with the ayd of a Salvage his guide, whom he bound to his arme with his garters, and used him as a buckler, yet he was shot in his thigh a little, and had many arrowes stucke in his cloathes but no great hurt, till at last they tooke him prisoner. When this newes came to Jamestowne, much was their sorrow for his losse, fewe expecting what ensued. Sixe or seven weekes those Barbarians kept him prisoner, many strange triumphes and conjurations they made of him, yet hee so demeaned himselfe amongst them, as he not onely diverted them from surprising the Fort, but procured his owne libertie, and got himself and his company such estimation amongst them, that those Salvages admired him more than their owne Quiyouckosucks. The manner how they used and delivered him, is as followeth.
“The Salvages having drawne from George Cassen whether Captaine Smith was gone, prosecuting that opportunity they followed him with 300 bowmen, conducted by the King of Pamaunkee, who in divisions searching the turnings of the river, found Robinson and Entry by the fireside, those they shot full of arrowes and slew. Then finding the Captaine as is said, that used the Salvage that was his guide as his shield (three of them being slaine and divers others so gauld) all the rest would not come neere him. Thinking thus to have returned to his boat, regarding them, as he marched, more then his way, slipped up to the middle in an oasie creeke and his Salvage with him, yet durst they not come to him till being neere dead with cold, he threw away his armes. Then according to their composition they drew him forth and led him to the fire, where his men were slaine. Diligently they chafed his benumbed limbs. He demanding for their Captaine, they shewed him Opechankanough, King of Pamaunkee, to whom he gave a round Ivory double compass Dyall. Much they marvailed at the playing of the Fly and Needle, which they could see so plainly, and yet not touch it, because of the glass that covered them. But when he demonstrated by that Globe-like Jewell, the roundnesse of the earth and skies, the spheare of the Sunne, Moone, and Starres, and how the Sunne did chase the night round about the world continually: the greatnesse of the Land and Sea, the diversitie of Nations, varietie of Complexions, and how we were to them Antipodes, and many other such like matters, they all stood as amazed with admiration. Notwithstanding within an houre after they tyed him to a tree, and as many as could stand about him prepared to shoot him, but the King holding up the Compass in his hand, they all laid downe their Bowes and Arrowes, and in a triumphant manner led him to Orapaks, where he was after their manner kindly feasted and well used.
“Their order in conducting him was thus: Drawing themselves all in fyle, the King in the middest had all their Peeces and Swords borne before him. Captaine Smith was led after him by three great Salvages, holding him fast by each arme: and on each side six went in fyle with their arrowes nocked. But arriving at the Towne (which was but onely thirtie or fortie hunting houses made of Mats, which they remove as they please, as we our tents) all the women and children staring to behold him, the souldiers first all in file performe the forme of a Bissom so well as could be: and on each flanke, officers as Serieants to see them keepe their orders. A good time they continued this exercise, and then cast themselves in a ring, dauncing in such severall Postures, and singing and yelling out such hellish notes and screeches: being strangely painted, every one his quiver of arrowes, and at his backe a club: on his arme a Fox or an Otters skinne, or some such matter for his vambrace: their heads and shoulders painted red, with oyle and Pocones mingled together, which Scarlet like colour made an exceeding handsome shew, his Bow in his hand, and the skinne of a Bird with her wings abroad dryed, tyed on his head, a peece of copper, a white shell, a long feather, with a small rattle growing at the tayles of their snaks tyed to it, or some such like toy. All this time Smith and the King stood in the middest guarded, as before is said, and after three dances they all departed. Smith they conducted to a long house, where thirtie or fortie tall fellowes did guard him, and ere long more bread and venison were brought him then would have served twentie men. I thinke his stomacke at that time was not very good; what he left they put in baskets and tyed over his head. About midnight they set the meat again before him, all this time not one of them would eat a bit with him, till the next morning they brought him as much more, and then did they eate all the old, and reserved the new as they had done the other, which made him think they would fat him to eat him. Yet in this desperate estate to defend him from the cold, one Maocassater brought him his gowne, in requitall of some beads and toyes Smith had given him at his first arrival in Firginia.
“Two days a man would have slaine him (but that the guard prevented it) for the death of his sonne, to whom they conducted him to recover the poore man then breathing his last. Smith told them that at James towne he had a water would doe it if they would let him fetch it, but they would not permit that: but made all the preparations they could to assault James towne, craving his advice, and for recompence he should have life, libertie, land, and women. In part of a Table booke he writ his mind to them at the Fort, what was intended, how they should follow that direction to affright the messengers, and without fayle send him such things as he writ for. And an Inventory with them. The difficultie and danger he told the Salvaves, of the Mines, great gunnes, and other Engins, exceedingly affrighted them, yet according to his request they went to James towne in as bitter weather as could be of frost and snow, and within three days returned with an answer.
“But when they came to James towne, seeing men sally out as he had told them they would, they fled: yet in the night they came again to the same place where he had told them they should receive an answer, and such things as he had promised them, which they found accordingly, and with which they returned with no small expedition, to the wonder of them all that heard it, that he could either divine or the paper could speake. Then they led him to the Youthtanunds, the Mattapanients, the Payankatanks, the Nantaughtacunds and Onawmanients, upon the rivers of Rapahanock and Patawomek, over all those rivers and backe againe by divers other severall Nations, to the King's habitation at Pamaunkee, where they entertained him with most strange and fearefull conjurations;
'As if neare led to hell,
Amongst the Devils to dwell.'
“Not long after, early in a morning, a great fire was made in a long house, and a mat spread on the one side as on the other; on the one they caused him to sit, and all the guard went out of the house, and presently came skipping in a great grim fellow, all painted over with coale mingled with oyle; and many Snakes and Wesels skins stuffed with mosse, and all their tayles tyed together, so as they met on the crowne of his head in a tassell; and round about the tassell was a Coronet of feathers, the skins hanging round about his head, backe, and shoulders, and in a manner covered his face; with a hellish voyce and a rattle in his hand. With most strange gestures and passions he began his invocation, and environed the fire with a circle of meale; which done three more such like devils came rushing in with the like antique tricks, painted halfe blacke, halfe red: but all their eyes were painted white, and some red stroakes like Mutchato's along their cheekes: round about him those fiends daunced a pretty while, and then came in three more as ugly as the rest; with red eyes and stroakes over their blacke faces, at last they all sat downe right against him; three of them on the one hand of the chiefe Priest, and three on the other. Then all with their rattles began a song, which ended, the chiefe Priest layd downe five wheat cornes: then strayning his arms and hands with such violence that he sweat, and his veynes swelled, he began a short Oration: at the conclusion they all gave a short groane; and then layd downe three graines more. After that began their song againe, and then another Oration, ever laying down so many cornes as before, til they had twice incirculed the fire; that done they tooke a bunch of little stickes prepared for that purpose, continuing still their devotion, and at the end of every song and Oration they layd downe a sticke betwixt the divisions of Corne. Til night, neither he nor they did either eate or drinke, and then they feasted merrily, and with the best provisions they could make. Three dayes they used this Ceremony: the meaning whereof they told him was to know if he intended them well or no. The circle of meale signified their Country, the circles of corne the bounds of the Sea, and the stickes his Country. They imagined the world to be flat and round, like a trencher, and they in the middest. After this they brought him a bagge of gunpowder, which they carefully preserved till the next spring, to plant as they did their corne, because they would be acquainted with the nature of that seede. Opitchapam, the King's brother, invited him to his house, where with many platters of bread, foule, and wild beasts, as did environ him, he bid him wellcome: but not any of them would eate a bit with him, but put up all the remainder in Baskets. At his returne to Opechancanoughs, all the King's women and their children flocked about him for their parts, as a due by Custome, to be merry with such fragments.
“But his waking mind in hydeous dreames did oft see wondrous shapes Of bodies strange, and huge in growth, and of stupendious makes.”
“At last they brought him to Meronocomoco, where was Powhatan their Emperor. Here more than two hundred of those grim Courtiers stood wondering at him, as he had beene a monster, till Powhatan and his trayne had put themselves in their greatest braveries. Before a fire upon a seat like a bedstead, he sat covered with a great robe, made of Rarowcun skinnes and all the tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of sixteen or eighteen years, and along on each side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds; but everyone with something: and a great chayne of white beads about their necks. At his entrance before the King, all the people gave a great shout. The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, instead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him 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 layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines. Pocahontas, the King's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper: for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves. For the King himselfe will make his owne robes, shooes, bowes, arrowes, pots, plant, hunt, or doe any thing so well as the rest.
'They say he bore a pleasant shew,
But sure his heart was sad
For who can pleasant be, and rest,
That lives in feare and dread.
And having life suspected, doth
If still suspected lead.'
“Two days after, Powhatan having disguised himselfe in the most fearfullest manner he could, caused Capt. 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 behinde a mat that divided the house, was made the most dolefullest noyse he ever heard: then Powhatan more like a devill than a man with some two hundred more as blacke as himseffe, came unto him and told him now they were friends, and presently he should goe to James town, to send him two great gunnes, and a gryndstone, for which he would give him the country of Capahowojick, and for ever esteeme him as his sonn Nantaquoud. So to James towne with 12 guides Powhatan sent him. That night they quartered in the woods, he still expecting (as he had done all this long time of his imprisonment) every houre to be put to one death or other; for all their feasting. But almightie God (by his divine providence) had mollified the hearts of those sterne Barbarians with compassion. The next morning betimes they came to the Fort, where Smith having used the salvages with what kindnesse he could, he shewed Rawhunt, Powhatan's trusty servant, two demiculverings and a millstone to carry Powhatan; they found them somewhat too heavie; but when they did see him discharge them, being loaded with stones, among the boughs of a great tree loaded with Isickles, the yce and branches came so tumbling downe, that the poore Salvages ran away halfe dead with feare. But at last we regained some conference with them and gave them such toys: and sent to Powhatan, his women, and children such presents, and gave them in generall full content. Now in James Towne they were all in combustion, the strongest preparing once more to run away with the Pinnace; which with the hazard of his life, with Sakre falcon and musketshot, Smith forced now the third time to stay or sinke. Some no better then they should be had plotted with the President, the next day to have put him to death by the Leviticall law, for the lives of Robinson and Emry, pretending the fault was his that had led them to their ends; but he quickly tooke such order with such Lawyers, that he layed them by the heeles till he sent some of them prisoners for England. Now ever once in four or five dayes, Pocahontas with her attendants, brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els for all this had starved with hunger.
'Thus from numbe death our good God sent reliefe,
The sweete asswager of all other griefe.'
“His relation of the plenty he had scene, especially at Werawocomoco, and of the state and bountie of Powhatan (which till that time was unknowne), so revived their dead spirits (especially the love of Pocahontas) as all men's feare was abandoned.”
We should like to think original, in the above, the fine passage, in which Smith, by means of a simple compass dial, demonstrated the roundness of the earth, and skies, the sphere of the sun, moon, and stars, and how the sun did chase the night round about the world continually; the greatness of the land and sea, the diversity of nations, variety of complexions, and how we were to them antipodes, so that the Indians stood amazed with admiration.
Captain Smith up to his middle in a Chickahominy swamp, discoursing on these high themes to a Pamunkey Indian, of whose language Smith was wholly ignorant, and who did not understand a word of English, is much more heroic, considering the adverse circumstances, and appeals more to the imagination, than the long-haired Iopas singing the song of Atlas, at the banquet given to AEneas, where Trojans and Tyrians drained the flowing bumpers while Dido drank long draughts of love. Did Smith, when he was in the neighborhood of Carthage pick up some such literal translations of the song of Atlas' as this: