Among the people that came to Virginia in 1609, two years after the
colony was planted, was a boy named Henry Spelman. He was the son of a
well-known man. He had been a bad and troublesome boy in England, and
his family sent him to Virginia, thinking that he might be better in
the new country. At least his friends thought he would not trouble
them so much when he was so far away.
Many hundreds of people came at the same time that Henry Spelman did.
Captain John Smith was then governor of the little colony. He was
puzzled to know how to feed all these people. As many of them were
troublesome, he was still more puzzled to know how to govern them.
In order not to have so many to feed, he sent some of them to live
among the Indians here and there. A chief called Little Powhatan asked
Smith to send some of his men to live with him. The Indians wanted to
get the white men to live among them, so as to learn to make the
things that the white men had. Captain Smith agreed to give the boy
Henry Spelman to Little Powhatan, if the chief would give him a place
to plant a new settlement.
Spelman staid awhile with the chief, and then he went back to the
English at Jamestown.
But when he came to Jamestown he was sorry that he had not staid among
the Indians. Captain John Smith had gone home to England. George Percy
was now governor of the English. They had very little food to eat, and
Spelman began to be afraid that he might starve to death with the rest
of them. Powhatan--not Little Powhatan, but the great Powhatan, who
was chief over all the other chiefs in the neighborhood--sent a white
man who was living with him to carry some deer meat to Jamestown. When
it came time for this white man to go back, he asked that some of his
countrymen might go to the Indian country with him. The governor sent
Spelman, who was glad enough to go to the Indians again, because they
had plenty of food to eat.
Three weeks after this, Powhatan sent Henry Spelman back to Jamestown
to say to the English, that if they would come to his country, and
bring him some copper, he would give them some corn for it. The
Indians at this time had no iron, and what little copper they had they
bought from other Indians, who probably got it from the copper mines
far away on Lake Superior.
The English greatly needed corn, so they took a boat and went up to
the Indian country with copper, in order to buy corn. They quarreled
with the Indians about the measurement of the corn. The Indians hid
themselves near the water, and, while the white men were carrying the
corn on their vessel, the Indians killed some of them. About this
time, seeing that the white men were so hungry, the Indians began to
hope that they would be able to drive them all out of the country.
Powhatan saved Spelman from being killed by the Indians; but, now that
the Indians were at war with the white men, who were shut up in
Jamestown without food, they wished to kill all the white people in
the country.
Spelman and a Dutchman, who also lived with Powhatan, began to be
afraid that he would not protect them any longer. So, when a chief of
the Potomac Indians visited Powhatan, and asked the Dutchman and the
boy to go to his country, they left Powhatan and went back with them.
Powhatan sent messengers after them, who killed the Dutchman. Henry
Spelman ran away into the woods. Powhatan's men followed him, but the
Potomacs got hold of Powhatan's men, and held them back until Spelman
could get away. The boy managed at last to get to the country of the
Potomac Indians.
It was very lucky for Spelman that he was among the Indians at this
time. Nearly all the white people in Jamestown were killed, or died of
hunger. Spelman lived among the Indians for years. During this time
more people came from England, and settled at Jamestown. A ship from
Jamestown came up into the Potomac River to trade. The captain of the
ship bought Spelman from the Indians. He was now a young man, and, as
he could speak both the Indian language and the English, he was very
useful in carrying on trade between the white men and the Indians.
At the time that Henry Spelman first went among the Indians, they had
no iron tools except a very few that they had bought of the white
people. They had no guns, nor knives, nor hatchets. They had no hoes
nor axes. They made their tools out of hard wood, shells, stones, deer
horns, and other such things. They had not yet bought blankets from
the white men, but made their clothes mostly out of the skins of
animals.
The Indians could not learn much about the white man's arts from
Spelman, because he did not know much. Besides, he had no iron of
which to make tools. He learned to make arrows of cane such as we use
for fishing rods. He also learned to point his arrows with the spur of
a wild turkey, or a piece of stone. These arrow points he stuck into
the arrow with a kind of glue. But he first had to learn how to make
his glue out of deers' horns. Before he could make any of the tools,
he had to make himself a knife, as the Indians did. Having no iron,
the blade of his knife was made out of a beaver's tooth, which is very
sharp, and will cut wood. He set this tooth in the end of a stick. You
see how hard it was for an Indian to get tools. He had to learn to
make one tool in order to use that in making another tool.
One of the principal things that an Indian had to do was to make a
canoe; for, as the Indians had no horses, they could travel only by
water, unless they went afoot. Canoes were the only boats they had.
They had to make canoes without any of the tools that white men use.
Let us explain this by a story about Henry and an Indian boy. The
things in the story may not have happened just as they are told, but
the account of how things are made by the Indians is all true.