John Knight in 1606 while exploring for gold and silver mines. Ice and
mutiny stopped Weymouth. Knight simply disappeared ashore one day.
Not long after the turn of the century Captain Charles Leigh led a
daring expedition to South America in an attempt to establish a base
of operations in what is now French Guiana. Only a remnant survived a
massacre by the natives in 1605 to straggle back to England.
The coast of North America from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia also
came in for more investigation at this time. Bartholomew Gilbert, son
of Sir Humphrey, was sent out by James I in 1603. He visited the
Chesapeake Bay area, possibly hoping to find survivors of the Roanoke
colony, only to be killed himself by Indians when he landed with a
shore party.
Others explored in the vicinity of Cape Cod and northward, Bartholomew
Gosnold, going out to that coast in 1602, and Martin Pring in 1603.
They found no mines, but they took back to England quantities of
cedar, sassafras and furs. Gosnold’s cargo of pelts obtained from the
Buzzard’s Bay area included beaver, marten, otter, “Wild-cat skinnes
very large and deepe furre,” seal, deer, black fox, rabbit and “other
beasts skinnes to us unknowen.”
Pring was more interested in sassafras trees, but he later wrote
that the furs of certain wild beasts in those parts “being hereafter
purchased by exchange may yield no smal gaine to us. Since as we are
certainly informed, the Frenchmen brought from Canada the value of
thirtie thousand Crownes in the yeare 1604. Almost in Bevers and Otters
skinnes only.”
A great deal of sassafras was cut and stowed aboard their ships by
these two captains. Sassafras brought fancy prices at the time as
a cure for the French pox as well as a specific for certain other
diseases. But such windfall importations glutted the London and Bristol
markets, seriously depressing the price.
Both Gosnold and Pring brought back the usual tales about a passage to
the South Sea and the fertility of the land. So Captain George Weymouth
went over in 1605, visiting the Maine coast where he explored for
colonization sites. He also drove a good though hazardous trade for
pelts. In one instance, “for knives, glasses, combes and other trifles
to the valew of foure or five shillings, we had 40 good Beavers skins,
Otters skins, Sables, and other small skins which we knewe not how to
call.”
These were the interlopers who had alarmed the French traders then
settled in the Bay of Fundy. Before Weymouth left Maine, Champlain was
making his own exploration southward along the coast as far as Cape
Cod. He learned enough to decide that all the English ventures had been
failures. They had discovered no mines, no passage, and, although they
had made a temporary camp or two, no colony was yet planted. Obviously,
the Frenchman surmised, the English had found nothing of great value
to the south or they would be trying to occupy that coast. Champlain
turned back, convinced that the best prospects lay in the valley of the
St. Lawrence.
But then, late in 1606, three small ships put down the Thames, bound
for America. Aboard, in addition to the crews, were a hundred or more
men committed to colonizing an English plantation in the vicinity
of Chesapeake Bay. One of these was Captain John Smith, soldier and
adventurer extraordinary--and, fortunately, a forthright man who spoke
his mind.
VI
_Captain John Smith Takes to Trade_
When Captain John Smith arrived in America early in 1607 he was but
freshly turned twenty-seven years of age. And he was in serious
trouble--a prospect for the gibbet, in fact, because of alleged
treason. On the voyage over he had plotted to supplant those in charge,
or so it was charged by his enemies in the expedition.
But, when the sealed instructions from the London Company were opened
that spring in Virginia, it was learned that John Smith himself was
to be a member of the council in the government of the colony. In the
end he had to be given his rightful position of authority at Jamestown
where the colony was planted.
It had always been thus with young Smith. By just such amazing
experiences he had succeeded in raising himself from the status of
a poor tenant farmer’s son in Lincolnshire to that of soldier and
“gentleman.”
Unfortunately, however, at this period in England’s history such social
climbing, though countenanced and legitimate enough, had not quite come
to be “accepted.” It provided fertile ground for the cultivation of
jealous enemies.
Still, John Smith had probably packed more thrilling experiences and
hairbreadth escapes into his life than anyone else in the realm.
He had warred in far-off countries, engaged in sea fights and been
forced to ship with Barbary pirates. An award of a coat of arms and
the princely sum of fifteen hundred gold ducats had come to him from
Transylvania where, like a knight of old, he cut off three Turks’ heads
in single combat. He had escaped death from wounds on a middle-eastern
battlefield, only to be enslaved by the Turks. This hard fate was
mitigated somewhat by the favors of a high-born Turkish lady who
acquired him as a slave. But then her brother mercilessly shackled him
off to the land of the Tartars. From there, however, Smith succeeded
in making a miraculous escape after killing his cruel master.
The fiction-like pattern was to be repeated over and over again in the
new world. Captured by the Indians of Virginia, Smith saved himself
from a tortured death by an ingenious oration and his flare for the
dramatic. Later, in the nick of time, he won the love of the young
Indian “princess,” Pocahontas, who rescued him from having his brains
beaten out by her father, Powhatan. He escaped from this predicament
only to find the living remnant of his distressed comrades in the fort
at Jamestown again ready to hang him, this time for allegedly having
gone over to the enemy. And so they would have done, if it had not been
for the timely arrival of the admiral of the Virginia fleet, Captain
Christopher Newport, returning from England with more colonists and
stopgap supplies.
Delivered from the gallows once more, Captain Smith was subsequently to
be asked to assume the highest office in the colony, that of president,
because he was the only man with ingenuity enough to keep his comrades
alive while enforcing discipline.
It was a poorly chosen group of colonists--these original Jamestown
venturers. Fully half of them were gentlemen of sorts bent only on a
quest for riches. A handful of craftsmen, a few boys and a brawling lot
of seaport loafers and ex-soldiers who were indisposed to agriculture
or any peaceful pursuits completed the ill-balanced company. They came
to find gold and they expected to relieve the natives of it quickly, if
not to scoop it up by the handful along the banks of Virginia’s rivers.
Instead, they met with hostile Indians, killing diseases and famine.
Not more than one out of four who pioneered the settlement at Jamestown
survived the first few months in America.
The joint-stock company that sent them out, backed by the patronage of
King James I and headed by one of the greatest of England’s merchant
adventurers, Sir Thomas Smith, only had the usual primary objectives
in view--the discovery of mines and a northwest passage to Cathay. The
instructions of the London Company, in fact, dwelt on these things,
while saddling the colony with a communalistic form of government that
encouraged idleness, bred suspicion and brought about deadly factional
disputes. Malarial fevers, dysentery and typhoid laid many of the
venturers low. Famine and attacks by the natives completed a grim toll
of death.
While others remained behind the palisades of the fort, bemoaning their
fate and dying helplessly to prove it, Captain Smith was on the rivers
and in the forests laying the foundations of successful trade with the
Indians and sizing up the country’s resources. Resolutely, he foraged
among the natives for needed corn and other food. With a few men in a
barge he explored and mapped the entire Chesapeake Bay and tidewater
region, realistically recording Virginia’s natural resources with a
view toward making the plantation self-supporting.
And when he assumed the stewardship of the colony in the fall of 1608,
following two presidents who had failed miserably, John Smith, the
soldier of fortune, truly became John Smith, the colonizer. To do this,
under communalism, he had to become a virtual dictator. But his rule
was as honest and as ingenious as it was arbitrary. These qualities
of leadership coupled with his understanding of the true nature of
Virginia’s resources and of the need for a firm foundation of trade
relations with the natives saved the plantation from extinction. The
colony on the James River became the first permanent English settlement
in America.
For that matter, it was the British Empire’s first permanent colonial
settlement anywhere in the world.
The tidewater Indians with whom Smith had to deal mostly belonged
to a group of Algonquian tribes known as the Powhatan Confederacy.
Ruling this confederacy was a tyrannous old chief, himself called
Powhatan, who was held in considerable awe by his subjects. From each
of the tribes under his domination Powhatan demanded an annual tribute
consisting mainly of beads and skins and bits of the decorative copper
that was so scarce in his kingdom.
Beads were used by the Indians not only for adornment but as a form
of currency. As Captain Smith observed, they were the cause of “as
much dissention among the Salvages as gold and silver amongst the
Christians.” Their manufacture by the natives did indeed call for a
high degree of skill, each bead being cut individually from shell,
then polished and drilled with crude stone tools. When strung together
in belts or arm’s length ropes they were known universally among the
Algonquin nations of the eastern seaboard as wampum.
In Virginia wampum strings of white beads made from cockle shell were
called roanoke, whereas strings of beads cut from conch shell, dark
purple in color, were called peake. Generally speaking the latter were
worth ten times as much as the former. The natives used their wampum,
or shell money, in barter among themselves to such an extent that the
white men found it very convenient as a means of promoting their own
fur trade. Often they would trade their wares with a rich tribe for
wampum, and then exchange this shell money with a less prosperous tribe
for furs.
The collecting of skins for taxes, or tribute, was of course a
device older than history. The Romans employed it to collect taxes
from barbarian subjects; so did the pharaohs of prehistoric Egypt in
gathering tribute from the upper Nile valley. Powhatan could demand
pelts in some variety. A contemporary chronicler among the first
settlers at Jamestown noted that within the great chief’s kingdom
the forests and streams abounded with bears, foxes, otters, beavers,
muskrats and “Deere both Red and Fallow.”
The skins of these animals were the tidewater Indians’ most necessary
and useful commodity next to food. Mainly they were necessary as
clothing in winter, but they were also used as adornment by chiefs and
priests, and for many ceremonial purposes. They were utilized, too, as
closures and decorations for the Indians’ long-houses. And soft hide
leather, such as buckskin, came in for a variety of aboriginal hunting
and household requirements, as well as for garments and footwear.
Actually Powhatan’s common subjects often went quite naked, except
for skins worn much like aprons. However, when it was cold, they wore
_matchcores_--an Indian word for garments of fur which was later turned
into “match-coats” by the English.
At his first meeting with Powhatan, Smith found the old savage
blanketed with a _matchcore_ of raccoon skins. One of the priests was
“disguised with a great Skinne, his head hung round with little Skinnes
of Weasels and other vermine.” Many of the better sort of savages, such
as werowances and chief men, affected mantles of carefully dressed
deerskin, some painted and embossed with white beads or bits of copper.
Others who were opulent had _matchcores_ made from squirrel, beaver,
muskrat and otter, the last being held in highest esteem.
Women wore fur blankets of beaver and otter, or tastefully fringed and
embroidered skin skirts, appropriate to the season. Children usually
went naked, although marriageable maidens, twelve to fifteen, modestly
covered their loins at least. Pocahontas herself is referred to on one
occasion as being girdled with soft otter skins.
About most of the great Bay of the Chesapeake, on his expeditions,
Captain Smith found “Wilde Cats ... Martins, Powlecats, weessels and
Minkes.” When he explored the Eastern Shore he discovered it to be
thickly inhabited by “Otters, Beavers, Martins, Luswarts and sables.”
Truly, the tidewater literally swarmed with fur bearers.
In the northernmost reaches of the bay Smith managed to trade with the
giant Susquehannocks. “Their attire,” he recorded, “is the skinnes
of beares and Woolves, some have Cassacks made of Beares heades and
skinnes that a man’s necke goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares
of the beare fastened to his shoulders behind, the nose and teeth
hanging downe his breast, and at the end of the nose hung a Beares
Pawe: the halfe sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of
Beares and the armes through the mouth, with pawes hanging at their
noses. One had the head of a Woolfe hanging in a chaine for a Jewell.”
These majestic savages came from the banks of the Susquehanna River,
the headwaters of which reached to the territory of the Five Nations
in the lake country of French Canada. As castoff relatives of the
Iroquois, the Susquehannocks lived in palisaded forts along the river
where they were subjected to constant raiding by their bloodthirsty
kinsmen. Hoping to make allies of men with fire guns, they presented
Captain Smith with many fine gifts in trade, including bearskins and
robes of various furs sewn together. Most significantly, however, they
had with them French hatchets, knives and pieces of iron and brass
which they said they had acquired in trade from tribes who bartered
directly with white men on the River of Canada.
This news, gained by Smith in 1608, about the encroachments of French
trade on the “back-side of Virginia” probably did more than anything
else to awaken Englishmen to their own fur trading possibilities in
America. Everyone knew that the French were driving a highly profitable
trade with the savages up the valley of the St. Lawrence. What hadn’t
been known was how deep they had penetrated into the new continent, or
the direction taken.
In English minds Virginia stretched northward by land or sea to the
45th parallel at least, even though French charters presumed to
encompass territory as far south as 40°. In less than five years
English guns would rout French Jesuits and traders attempting a
settlement at Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine, and an
expedition from Jamestown would destroy the older plantations of the
French fur merchants at St. Croix and Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy
itself. Within that length of time the Virginians would be well rooted
and competitive as a result of their own good trade in furs, a trade
that would expand rapidly in the Chesapeake tidewater.
But for the time being, in view of their critical problems of
existence, there was little they could do about either the fur trade or
the Frenchmen, except to nurse their jealousy. It was natural enough
that they were envious of French successes, especially as the hoped-for
mines in Virginia seemed to be retreating farther and farther into the
hinterland and the prospects of finding a passage to the other sea in
the Chesapeake area were diminishing daily. However, staying alive was
their immediate problem.
Already Captain Smith had spoken out strongly against the fruitless
search for gold--“guilded dirt,” he called it contemptuously. As
president he would not permit the supply ships to be cargoed with more
of the worthless yellow soil or mica-tinctured dirt that they had been
ferrying back to England. And, although he still thought there was the
probability of a passage farther north or possibly a short overland
route between rivers to the other salt sea, he frankly admitted that
his own exploration had been entirely unrewarding in this respect.
No English explorer before John Smith had dared to be so honest. And
Smith went even farther.
Now he had courageously despatched a very blunt note to his employers,
the merchant adventurers of the company in London, telling them the
truth about their El Dorado. It was a note that must have startled
those comfortable gentlemen right out of their starched ruffs.
Certainly it was disillusioning to gold-hungry investors already
so heavily committed. But by its very forthrightness it was also
soberingly effective, for the merchants promptly took John Smith’s
advice, even though they didn’t thank him for his seeming impertinence.
There might be iron in Virginia, Smith had written in effect, but
there was no gold, and neither was there any immediate prospect of
the discovery there of a short route to Cathay and India. However, a
profitable plantation could be cultivated by earnest husbandry and the
realistic development of the country’s natural resources for trade.
Agricultural products, furs, timber, naval stores, iron and possibly
other products of local industries could eventually be shipped home in
exchange for English woolens and coarse cloths.
In the meantime of course the president had his hands full just
foraging for food enough to keep his charges alive. While people were
dying of famine, company profits of any kind had to wait--even those to
be gained from organized fur trading for which there was considerable
pressure from the natives. The red men were always much more interested
in trading their furs than their food. They never raised more of the
latter than was needed for their own minimum requirements. Smith had
to resort to stratagem and even to a kind of military commerce on more
than one occasion to separate them from their corn.
So the Indians, with their pelts to barter, turned to the sailors who
manned the transport ships, and the mariners readily accommodated them.
These hands knew how to turn a quick profit in the golden fleece. They
learned first, when the fishing fleets began crossing the oceans, to
Newfoundland and elsewhere--and later, when English ships took to the
seas to trade with other nations. As far back as 1560 merchants in
England were complaining to their factors in Russia about the sailors’
aptitude for smuggling furs.
“Foxe skins, white, blacke, and russet will be vendible here,” they
wrote. “The last yere you sent none; but there were mariners that
bought many. If any mariners doe buy any trifling furres or other
commodities, we will they shall be registered in our pursers bookes, to
the intent we may know what they be.”
In Virginia the mariners not only entered into direct negotiations with
the natives, by swapping goods over the side of a ship with savages
in canoes or by stealing ashore for a dangerous rendezvous, but they
carried on barter through colonists who secretly assumed the roles of
factors in return for favors from the home-bound mariners. One mariner,
according to Captain Smith, confessed to having obtained enough pelts
in this manner on one voyage to net him thirty pounds sterling at home.
That was a tidy sum for an ordinary sailor to acquire in those days,
legitimately or otherwise.
It was bad enough that the colonists abetted the sailors’ enterprise.
Inflation invariably resulted when the settlers traded individually
with the natives. But worst of all, in most cases the supplies being
bartered had been pilfered by the sailors from company stores aboard
ship.
Smith railed against this “damnable and private trade,” when the colony
was in such desperate need for food, and even for the very articles
sold to the Indians. He recognized the profits to be made from the fur
trade, as he well proved both in Virginia and later in New England. In
this particular instance it was just that corn came first.
John Smith’s tenure in Virginia ended in the fall of 1609 when he
was seriously wounded by an accidental gunpowder explosion. He was
invalided home to England. But not before his enemies had taken
advantage of his agonized prostration to plot his murder. This
treachery was thwarted by Smith’s usual fortune in such crises, the
plot being discovered and exposed in the nick of time to save his life.
In the meantime, however, the thoroughly aroused merchants in London
had reorganized the company, taking a more realistic approach to the
problems of colonization as John Smith suggested, and had appointed an
influential governor with fuller authority to rule their plantation.
The new governor’s advance representatives had already been dispatched
to depose the outspoken young president who was so critical of the
company’s policies.
But Captain Smith’s task in Virginia was completed. Through his
efforts, almost singlehanded, the English at last had a beachhead on
the American continent.
Settlers came now in great numbers--traders, merchants and farmers.
The communalistic plan under which the colony had been governed by
the company was abandoned, and a venturer to Virginia was given an
opportunity to share in the profits of his labor. He could acquire
land of his own, through bondage if necessary, something he had little
chance of ever doing in England. And he could establish a family; many
women now immigrated to reinforce further the first two brave females
who arrived in 1608.
Meanwhile, as John Smith’s historic beachhead was expanded, the fur
trade continued to set the usual pattern of exploration, trade and
settlement.
Mariners with an experienced eye for marketable pelts came to Virginia
in increasing numbers--hardy, courageous men who were prepared to take
incredible risks in the pursuit of beaver, otter, bear and the big
Virginia muskrat. By 1620 there were nearly one hundred fur traders
operating in and about the Chesapeake Bay, according to an official
of the colony. They plied their shallops and pinnaces up unexplored
tidewater streams and rivers to find the villages of the unpredictable
savages, hazarding their very lives to learn the ways and language of
the aborigines, and to trade with them. They established wilderness
trading posts, building palisaded forts which later came to be occupied
by merchants and farmers and became permanent settlements.
These fur traders found the profits attractive enough to offset the
dangers--not only those posed by their early contacts with the red men
but those threatened by rival Englishmen during much of the seventeenth
century.
At times rival traders proved much more dangerous than the aborigines.
The Englishmen were to fight among themselves, often with piratical and
bloody fury, over the fur trade of the Chesapeake tidewater and for
possession of the Susquehanna and Potomac River routes to the lush lake
country of the north where the Frenchmen bartered for pelts.
But while the Englishmen were thus engaged among themselves on the
backside of Virginia some foreign traders moved in as their neighbors
on the coast, first on the Hudson and then on the Connecticut and
Delaware Rivers. These were the Dutchmen, who forthwith enjoyed a
most profitable commerce in pelts with the natives and began settling
themselves in complete possession of all those parts of “Virginia.”
VII
_The Dutch Profit by a Mutiny_
In the late summer of 1609 a Dutch ship, the _Half Moon_, was cruising
the coasts of America. It had an English master. The merchants of the
Dutch East India Company had engaged the Englishman, Captain Henry
Hudson, to search for a northeastern passage to China over the frozen
top of the world. Instead, he sailed their ship west.
A mutiny compelled him to change his course, or so he later claimed. It
seems that his twenty-man crew, mostly Dutch, had been accustomed to
warmer seas. They refused to brave the northern cold.