"These? Why these are not for sale, your Highness. Blue beads are very
rare. You can dye red and brown ones with berries, but these are
imported, and their value high as the blue sky whence descends their
radiance."
"How much?" plugged Powhatan. "I foolishly indulged one girl with your
life. Now probably another must have your foolish bauble."
"I'll let you know tomorrow. I had not thought of parting with them."
By morning, Smith was having Indians load his boat with two hundred
bushels of corn.
Newport was ever for conciliating the chief, and when Powhatan sent him
twenty turkeys saying to send twenty swords back by bearers, he
complied. Not so John Smith, when Newport was gone. This time the
turkeys were kept, but the swords also--in English scabbards.
Powhatan was so riled when the swords were not forthcoming, that he told
his men to get them by hook or crook. When Smith caught them pilfering
he flogged them and imprisoned them. Powhatan now tried diplomacy,
knowing how indebted Smith would feel to "Pocahontas, his dearest
daughter." He sent her down to Jamestown to persuade him to release the
prisoners. He asked Smith "to excuse him of the injuries done by some
rash untoward captains, his subjects, desiring their liberties for this
time with the assurance of his love forever." Smith delivered them to
Pocahontas, "for whose sake only he feigned to have saved their lives
and gave them their liberty."
Pocahontas, with her gay capers, amused all Jamestown enormously. If
this had been a clown's act upon a London stage, or a traveling circus
in the English countryside, it could not have put the discouraged colony
into such a gale.
When Newport returned he brought back an idea of King James, of which
Smith thought little. If they softened Powhatan up with civilized
luxuries, they could handle him more easily. Therefore he should be
crowned at Jamestown. Grudgingly, Smith went to see the hardy old
monarch about it. He found him not "at home." Like a haughty host,
perhaps, thought Smith. But when he saw what an elaborate entertainment
Pocahontas had gotten up for him, he decided that no slight was
intended.
She, a child raised in a heathen sensual court, arranged a show for him
and his four men at which Smith was astonished. Powhatan's warriors, she
knew, would have been enchanted by the dance number put on by older
girls to amuse the strangers. Pocahontas had heard her people wonder how
it was that the English came without women, stayed a long time and yet
got on without them. Their pale women must have been too timid to come
along, and they must be lonesome and bored without feminine allure
around. Thirty girls wearing nothing but green leafy aprons pranced out
of the woods, their bodies painted in various colors. Some wore antler's
horns on their heads, and all were brandishing crude weapons that were
less frightening than their wild contortions and fiendish yells. At
first the men grabbed their own weapons in alert defense. The Englishmen
were embarrassed by the brazen savage scene, and more so when the
dancers ran to the woods to change to regular garb, for they now wound
their arms about blushing necks, murmuring torridly "Lovest thou me?
Lovest thou me?" "These nymphs the more tormented him than ever with
crowding and pressing, hanging upon him, most tediously crying 'love you
me,'" it was reported.
Pocahontas herself would have liked to ask John Smith that, for she knew
that the welling adoration she had for him was growing faster than
herself, and was something she would not put aside with childish
fancies. She was sorry he was not pleased with today's entertainment,
even when great platters of food were set before his men, and they were
led to their rest by torches. He had business on his mind and looked
relieved when Powhatan showed up in the morning.
"Your highness, our king across the seas lives in such grandeur as you
can scarcely imagine. Newport tells me he was so troubled to find out
that you did not have the sort of luxuries that befit a great werowance
like yourself, that he sent back fine gifts for you."
"What then should a king have that I have not?"
"He wears a crown. A king is quite a fellow."
"Indeed. You speak the truth there. That is quite so."
"Come down to Jamestown and be crowned. We will be friends, and fight
our common enemies the Monacans."
Powhatan looked him down cooly. "If your king has sent me presents, I
also am a king and this is my land. Eight days will I stay here to
receive them. Your father is to come to me, not I to him, nor yet to
your fort. Neither will I bite at such bait. As for the Monacans, I can
revenge my own injuries."
There was no course left for Newport and Smith but to trudge twelve
miles over land, while they sent the cumbersome presents by water. First
they proffered the red suit and cloak which Powhatan tried on
grudgingly. He knew that he could strut, even in incongruous rigging.
His row of women admired him, putting him in an amiable mood.
"What is this ewer and basin for?"
"Ablutions, Majesty."
His hands were quite clean, but he rinsed them to show that he could use
such fixings. If a European peddler had been opening his bag, the chief
could not have looked more dubious about purchases.
At last they approached with the crown.
"Please kneel, sire."
Indeed he would not an inch, not so much as a notch on a stick. Stiff as
a stalk he stood, but every inch a ruler, defiant in the passing wind.
Smith had already observed that he had never seen such majesty in any
creature.
"It is customary for our monarchs to kneel. They are in a great church.
A man of God anoints them."
"Your O'Kee?"
"His minister. It is not at all humiliating."
"Captain Smith's God?"
"Not mine alone. All believers, sire."
"I am not a believer."
"Will you kneel, sire?"
"A king kneels to none."
They must grin and bear it, so did both. As Smith described it: "At last
by leaning hard on his shoulders he a little stooped, and Newport put
the crown on his head."
It was awry, and more so as a pistol shot succeeded by a volley from the
ship, made Powhatan spring up in an unkingly panic. "What is that?"
"A salute of honor to a king just crowned or born."
"I don't like it. I was born before any of you, if not crowned," he
muttered grumpily, settling back on his throne. As a last disdainful
thrust, he handed over his discarded cloak and moccasins. "Perhaps your
king might like these." His eyes added: "To show how we dress up over
here." Smith caught it.
On April tenth, 1608 Newport took away the mighty fallen Wingfield and
the rebuked Archer. Ten days later Captain Nelson arrived with one
hundred and two colonists and sufficient provisions for those on hand as
well as for his own passengers. On his return trip he took off John
Martin, a veteran colonist, who had cooled lately to Smith's blustering
personality.
Smith got his punishment from nature as well as from people. In June he
was bitten by a stingray fish while he was spearing it. He was so beside
himself with pain that he jumped into the water to cool his agony. His
companions were pessimistically preparing his grave without reckoning on
his vitality. In a short while he had recovered not only his nerve but
even his appetite, and by supper time he was eating that very fish and
chuckling about it.
Usually, it was the others who were down, and he who had the situation
entirely in hand. He made sure that the Indians always supposed that all
was well whether it was or not. When the others on the boat were
prostrate with illness, he covered them with a tarpaulin. Then, for the
wily deception of the red enemy along the shores, he contrived a clever
ruse. He stuck his mens' hats up on sticks like scarecrows, and he
fastened the oars along the boat so that the intimidated Indians kept at
a cautious and unobservant distance.
When he got back, he found that his own prestige in Jamestown was
increasing inversely as that of Ratcliffe tottered. Ratcliffe's position
as President had so gone to his head that he was having a palace built
for himself. Smith stopped it in mid-air when he came back and heard
other colonists hoot at their leader's silly pretensions.
When he returned on September seventh he found Jamestown the worse for
his absence as well as for wear. At long last he was made President, on
the tenth. He resented the London Company's complaints of the sorely
tried colonists. The Company had threatened that if Newport did not
bring back sufficient cargo this fall to pay his two thousand pounds of
expenses that it would abandon the colony. In hot haste, Smith
dispatched a scathing reply, and this fortified his gathering and
overdue popularity. He stood in with the Indians better than others did,
and he believed in friendly and adroit relations with them when
possible. Leadership brought out his prime qualities: his zest for
adventure, his hardihood for physical trials, and his bravery to the
arrow's point. He believed in discipline and hard work, and calling to
mind the strict habits of his school days, he made the sloven and surly
bachelors walk-a-chalk. If they swore, water was dashed down their
sleeves. They must brush their clothes, wash their hands, sing psalms
daily--and like it! He thought this discordant group needed harmony as
well as guidance every rousing morning. Mindful of God, the church was
repaired; mindful of Mammon, too, the storehouse was covered. Early
Virginia was more Puritan than it pretended. Smith also had the fort
increased by three acres and had a pentagon made of it. He had men
getting cedar, walnut and clapboard for buildings.
Newport brought in the second supply in October 1608, and with it many
changes. Two women were among the passengers--Mrs. Forrest and her maid,
Anne Burras. When the latter became the bride of John Laydon, colonists
saw their first recorded marriage on this side of the world.
That October the harvest had not been plentiful so they were cheered by
the prospect of a new business venture. They had sent word that they had
the proper ingredients on hand with which to start a new glass works:
tar, pitch and soap-ashes. Accordingly eight Dutchmen and Poles, who
were skilled in the craft, were among the passengers. The Glass House
soon took its bright stand, like a jewel in the wilderness, about a mile
down the forest from James Fort. Within two months glass was shipped
back, although not very profitably.
Another bright and futile dream bedazzled the lazier colonists--gold.
Smith, having given up the search, was disgusted with men who would do
nothing but "dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, and load gold," and he
scolded them soundly for sending the gilded dirt to England in April
where it was properly dismissed as mica. "For the country was to them a
misery, a ruin, a death, a hell, and their own reports here, and their
own actions according."
Smith and Newport were told by their credulous patrons to hunt up the
lost colonists of Roanoke, for lost brothers, like lost sheep, should be
reclaimed. Powhatan had told Smith of white men who were attired like
himself and who were now abiding in Ocanahawan, so Smith had already
recorded that on his map. Captain Newport now made an expedition to
Panawick, a village beyond Roanoke Island, but his Indian guide led him
astray. In December of 1608 Smith led another expedition and sent Master
Sicklemore and two guides to seek the lost colonists, but Indians merely
showed them some crosses and letters on the bark of trees.
While Newport and Ratcliffe returned to England at the end of December,
Smith enjoyed a Christmas holiday with the Indians near Kecoughtan
without envy of English Yule Logs, plum puddings and traditional
celebrations. He entered into the native merriment heartily. Here was
shining snow, frost and cedar, as well as delicious oysters, fish, flesh
and wild fowl. He declared that he "never had better fires in England
than in the dry, smoky houses of Kecoughtan." Smith knew however that
Powhatan was becoming envious of the English way of life if he was not,
so he was on his way with fourteen men to build a house for the Emperor.
Powhatan had wanted to gird himself with more and more English
trappings, and he requested a cock, a hen and a grindstone. How about a
coach-and-four, such as he heard their king had? Most of all he had
wanted an English house, for nothing less than sheltering walls could
keep off the threat of guns, of which he was so afraid.
Smith already had some German house builders on hand. Instead of having
them build a house for himself, he, the great white father, turned them
over to the great red father. It was not such a sacrifice, for Smith
knew himself to be a born wanderer on the face of the earth. He could do
without his own roof, as without his own woman, more easily than could
most men. Tragabigzanda, his Turkish angel who had left him in her
brother's keeping for a while, had been wasting her pains. Likewise, if
young Pocahontas here had designs upon him, she must give them up before
hero-worship developed into something too mature and possessive. He was
his own man and that of no woman alive.
Smith was embarrassed not so much by indebtedness to the Indian maid as
by apprehension of her adoration. His best gratitude to her who had
saved his life would be to leave her hers without involving it. What
irony that she, like most women, appreciated him too much, while men,
who would do better than women to follow him, appreciated him too
little! The time was coming when he should move on to new worlds to
conquer, for he and his men here could never see eye to eye.
Much less could he and Powhatan. Powhatan, he admitted, had talked to
him with simple eloquence: "Think you I am simple not to know it is
better to eat good meat, lie well and sleep quietly with my women and
children, laugh and be merry with you, have copper, hatchets, or what I
want, be your friend; than be forced to fly from all, to lie cold in the
woods, feed upon acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted by you
that I can neither rest, eat, nor sleep, but my tired man must watch and
if a twig but break every one cry: 'There comes Captain Smith.' Then
must I fly I know not whither, and thus with miserable fear end my
miserable life?"... "What no guns, no swords? The copper hatchets you
made are of no use to me and my people. We can eat our corn, but not
your copper."
Smith reminded him that he had sent the Germans to build a house.
Powhatan said, "If you are such friends of ours, why do you not lay down
your arms in our presence? That is our custom."
Smith stuck to his guns. Then he changed the subject. How would Powhatan
like a kettle which spewed steam out of its snout? Powhatan did bite at
such bait after all.
Not having secured as much corn from Powhatan as he had hoped, Smith
now decided to tackle Opechancanough. He challenged the Indian to
individual combat, being well aware that the old chief had been
impressed with the three Turk's heads on his shield. Cringingly he
offered to heap up all the corn demanded. Smith now snatched him by his
long lock, and then appropriated bow and arrow. "You promised to freight
my ship ere I departed, and so you shall; or I mean to load her with
your dead carcasses." Before he left there, he held his pistol at the
chief's breast, and led him meekly among his own forces, making him fill
his bark with twenty tons of corn.
Still, it was not by parrying words with Powhatan, nor weapons with his
brother, that he secured essential food, but by the loving mercy of
Pocahontas. That frail and loyal bond between them saved the colonists.
She had seemed like the goddess of the maize, bearing corn to them.
With braver mercy still, she stole through the woods at night to tell
Smith of the plot which her father was contriving with the aid of the
treacherous foreigners whom he had sent to build a house for Powhatan.
Powhatan was about to have a gala feast spread for Smith and his men,
but in the morning when they slept stupidly after too much food and
drink, Powhatan's men would descend upon them and kill.
Smith, now prepared, made the bearers of Powhatan's treacherous bounty
taste every dish before he did, and again he escaped, guarding his
appetite and his life.
Between February and May of 1609 a well was dug, forty acres were
cleared and planted in corn, the church was covered, and twenty new
cabins were erected. A blockhouse was built at the isthmus, and a new
fort was reared opposite Jamestown. Food was still scarce, however, and
rats consumed most of the corn crop. Believing that it was best to keep
in with the Indians, Smith induced some Englishmen to live with the
natives. Desperately he sent others to the oyster banks to prevent
starvation, but the queer diet was unhealthy, and made the skin peel
from their bodies.
News of these dire conditions got to London and alienated the Company
to Smith, whose enemies had talked effectively against him. The
stockholders were already displeased with the lack of profit from
Virginia, so they decided to appoint their treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith,
as absentee President. Little did London care if the bitter colonists
saucily wished him astride the mare which they had boiling in a stew,
and if they saluted their fancy with impudent glee: "Sir Thomas!" The
Company decided to dispatch Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers,
followed by Lord Delaware who would get everything under control in
Jamestown.
When Captain Samuel Argall, the privateer, turned up in July with
letters from the Company criticizing Smith and telling of the third
supply to be brought by Lord Delaware, Smith was embittered. A month
later four ships of the supply came in early bearing--of all
people--Smith's former enemies: Ratcliffe, Archer and Martin, all
captains now. The _Sea Venture_ and other ships had not been heard from,
but Smith had had enough and he was hurt by lack of confidence in his
command. He was thinking of returning to England anyhow before his
enemies sped him on his way. An accident made up his mind for him.
While he was napping in the afternoon a keg of gunpowder exploded and
set him on fire. Distracted with agony he jumped into the water to cool
the burns. Much of his flesh was torn from his body and thighs. A
hundred miles stretched between him and Jamestown, and thousands more to
London, but there only he could get proper doctoring. Fortunately a ship
was just leaving Jamestown which could and would take him on. Percy was
the only one who could be persuaded to take his place, for even his
enemies did not want it at this dubious stage.
Smith claimed that the colony now had three ships and seven boats, and
many desirable commodities. There were provisions for ten weeks for the
four hundred and ninety people, besides twenty-four pieces of ordnances,
three hundred muskets, firelocks, shot, powder and match and swords. One
hundred soldiers could speak the Indian language. There were six mares,
horses, five hundred swine, hams, chickens, goats and sheep. He had
done his best, and it was no poor best. His friends agreed eloquently:
"He made justice his first guide and experience his second, ever hating
baseness, sloth, pride and indignity more than any dangers, that never
allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him, that upon no
danger would send them where he would not lead them himself, that never
see us want what he had or either could by any means get us, that would
rather want than borrow, or starve than not pay, that loved action more
than words, and hated falsehood and covetousness worse than death, whose
adventures were our lives, and whose loss our deaths."
So Smith was out of sight, and for most out of mind. Such word of him as
got to the Indians was that he was dead. Powhatan, who had feared and
hated him when he was around, now defended him. "My daughter, you see
how treacherous the white men are. The foolish palefaces have killed the
best man whom they had."
Without Smith, the remaining whites fared worse with the Indians.
Ratcliffe and others were slaughtered, and Archer died. The "Starving
Time" which had set in during Smith's office was worse than at any
period. An oatmeal thief had a bodkin thrust through his tongue. The
most cruel man of all had chopped up his wife and salted the parts,
consuming some, before he was caught and executed. Only sixty of five
hundred people survived.
There was no way for them to know that the chief relief ship the _Sea
Venture_ had been tossed about at sea, and wrecked on the Bermuda
shores, by a terrible storm. Shakespeare, on hearing of it, wrote his
play the _Tempest_, moved by the drama of the storm, and the strange
lull afterward on the balmy isles.