On the 10th of September, by the election of the Council and the
request of the company, Captain Smith received the letters-patent,
and became President. He stopped the building of Ratcliffe's
"palace," repaired the church and the storehouse, got ready the
buildings for the supply expected from England, reduced the fort to a
"five square form," set and trained the watch and exercised the
company every Saturday on a plain called Smithfield, to the amazement
of the on-looking Indians.
Captain Newport arrived with a new supply of seventy persons. Among
them were Captain Francis West, brother to Lord Delaware, Captain
Peter Winne, and Captain Peter Waldo, appointed on the Council, eight
Dutchmen and Poles, and Mistress Forest and Anne Burrows her maid,
the first white women in the colony.
Smith did not relish the arrival of Captain Newport nor the
instructions under which he returned. He came back commanded to
discover the country of Monacan (above the Falls) and to perform the
ceremony of coronation on the Emperor Powhatan.
How Newport got this private commission when he had returned to
England without a lump of gold, nor any certainty of the South Sea,
or one of the lost company sent out by Raleigh; and why he brought a
"fine peeced barge" which must be carried over unknown mountains
before it reached the South Sea, he could not understand. " As for
the coronation of Powhatan and his presents of basin and ewer, bed,
bedding, clothes, and such costly novelties, they had been much
better well spared than so ill spent, for we had his favor and better
for a plain piece of copper, till this stately kind of soliciting
made him so much overvalue himself that he respected us as much as
nothing at all." Smith evidently understood the situation much
better than the promoters in England; and we can quite excuse him in
his rage over the foolishness and greed of most of his companions.
There was little nonsense about Smith in action, though he need not
turn his hand on any man of that age as a boaster.
To send out Poles and Dutchmen to make pitch, tar, and glass would
have been well enough if the colony had been firmly established and
supplied with necessaries; and they might have sent two hundred
colonists instead of seventy, if they had ordered them to go to work
collecting provisions of the Indians for the winter, instead of
attempting this strange discovery of the South Sea, and wasting their
time on a more strange coronation. "Now was there no way," asks
Smith, "to make us miserable," but by direction from England to
perform this discovery and coronation, "to take that time, spend what
victuals we had, tire and starve our men, having no means to carry
victuals, ammunition, the hurt or the sick, but on their own backs?"
Smith seems to have protested against all this nonsense, but though
he was governor, the Council overruled him. Captain Newport decided
to take one hundred and twenty men, fearing to go with a less number
and journey to Werowocomoco to crown Powhatan. In order to save time
Smith offered to take a message to Powhatan, and induce him to come
to Jamestown and receive the honor and the presents. Accompanied by
only four men he crossed by land to Werowocomoco, passed the
Pamaunkee (York) River in a canoe, and sent for Powhatan, who was
thirty miles off. Meantime Pocahontas, who by his own account was a
mere child, and her women entertained Smith in the following manner:
"In a fayre plaine they made a fire, before which, sitting upon a
mat, suddenly amongst the woods was heard such a hydeous noise and
shreeking that the English betook themselves to their armes, and
seized upon two or three old men, by them supposing Powhatan with all
his power was come to surprise them. But presently Pocahontas came,
willing him to kill her if any hurt were intended, and the beholders,
which were men, women and children, satisfied the Captaine that there
was no such matter. Then presently they were presented with this
anticke: Thirty young women came naked out of the woods, only covered
behind and before with a few greene leaves, their bodies all painted,
some of one color, some of another, but all differing; their leader
had a fayre payre of Bucks hornes on her head, and an Otters skinne
at her girdle, and another at her arme, a quiver of arrows at her
backe, a bow and arrows in her hand; the next had in her hand a
sword, another a club, another a pot-sticke: all horned alike; the
rest every one with their several devises. These fiends with most
hellish shouts and cries, rushing from among the trees, cast
themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and dancing with most
excellent ill-varietie, oft falling into their infernal passions, and
solemnly again to sing and dance; having spent nearly an hour in this
Mascarado, as they entered,in like manner they departed.
"Having reaccommodated themselves, they solemnly invited him to their
lodgings, where he was no sooner within the house, but all these
Nymphs more tormented him than ever, with crowding, pressing, and
hanging about him, most tediously crying, 'Love you not me? Love you
not me?' This salutation ended, the feast was set, consisting of all
the Salvage dainties they could devise: some attending, others
singing and dancing about them: which mirth being ended, with fire
brands instead of torches they conducted him to his lodging."
The next day Powhatan arrived. Smith delivered up the Indian
Namontuck, who had just returned from a voyage to England--whither it
was suspected the Emperor wished him to go to spy out the weakness of
the English tribe--and repeated Father Newport's request that
Powhatan would come to Jamestown to receive the presents and join in
an expedition against his enemies, the Monacans.
Powhatan's reply was worthy of his imperial highness, and has been
copied ever since in the speeches of the lords of the soil to the
pale faces: "If your king has sent me present, I also am a king, and
this is my land: eight days I will stay 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 a bait; as for the Monacans, I can revenge my own
injuries."
This was the lofty potentate whom Smith, by his way of management,
could have tickled out of his senses with a glass bead, and who would
infinitely have preferred a big shining copper kettle to the
misplaced honor intended to be thrust upon him, but the offer of
which puffed him up beyond the reach of negotiation. Smith returned
with his message. Newport despatched the presents round by water a
hundred miles, and the Captains, with fifty soldiers, went over land
to Werowocomoco, where occurred the ridiculous ceremony of the
coronation, which Smith describes with much humor. "The next day,"
he says, "was appointed for the coronation. Then the presents were
brought him, his bason and ewer, bed and furniture set up, his
scarlet cloke and apparel, with much adoe put on him, being persuaded
by Namontuck they would not hurt him. But a foule trouble there was
to make him kneel to receive his Crown; he not knowing the majesty
nor wearing of a Crown, nor bending of the knee, endured so many
persuasions, examples and instructions as tyred them all. At last by
bearing hard on his shoulders, he a little stooped, and three having
the crown in their hands put it on his head, when by the warning of a
pistoll the boats were prepared with such a volley of shot that the
king start up in a horrible feare, till he saw all was well. Then
remembering himself to congratulate their kindness he gave his old
shoes and his mantell to Captain Newport!"
The Monacan expedition the King discouraged, and refused to furnish
for it either guides or men. Besides his old shoes, the crowned
monarch charitably gave Newport a little heap of corn, only seven or
eight bushels, and with this little result the absurd expedition
returned to Jamestown.
Shortly after Captain Newport with a chosen company of one hundred
and twenty men (leaving eighty with President Smith in the fort) and
accompanied by Captain Waldo, Lieutenant Percy, Captain Winne, Mr.
West, and Mr. Scrivener, who was eager for adventure, set off for the
discovery of Monacan. The expedition, as Smith predicted, was
fruitless: the Indians deceived them and refused to trade, and the
company got back to Jamestown, half of them sick, all grumbling, and
worn out with toil, famine, and discontent.
Smith at once set the whole colony to work, some to make glass, tar,
pitch, and soap-ashes, and others he conducted five miles down the
river to learn to fell trees and make clapboards. In this company
were a couple of gallants, lately come over, Gabriel Beadle and John
Russell, proper gentlemen, but unused to hardships, whom Smith has
immortalized by his novel cure of their profanity. They took gayly
to the rough life, and entered into the attack on the forest so
pleasantly that in a week they were masters of chopping: "making it
their delight to hear the trees thunder as they fell, but the axes so
often blistered their tender fingers that many times every third blow
had a loud othe to drown the echo; for remedie of which sinne the
President devised how to have every man's othes numbered, and at
night for every othe to have a Canne of water powred downe his
sleeve, with which every offender was so washed (himself and all),
that a man would scarce hear an othe in a weake." In the clearing of
our country since, this excellent plan has fallen into desuetude, for
want of any pious Captain Smith in the logging camps.
These gentlemen, says Smith, did not spend their time in wood-logging
like hirelings, but entered into it with such spirit that thirty of
them would accomplish more than a hundred of the sort that had to be
driven to work; yet, he sagaciously adds, "twenty good workmen had
been better than them all."
Returning to the fort, Smith, as usual, found the time consumed and
no provisions got, and Newport's ship lying idle at a great charge.
With Percy he set out on an expedition for corn to the Chickahominy,
which the insolent Indians, knowing their want, would not supply.
Perceiving that it was Powhatan's policy to starve them (as if it was
the business of the Indians to support all the European vagabonds and
adventurers who came to dispossess them of their country), Smith gave
out that he came not so much for corn as to revenge his imprisonment
and the death of his men murdered by the Indians, and proceeded to
make war. This high-handed treatment made the savages sue for peace,
and furnish, although they complained of want themselves, owing to a
bad harvest, a hundred bushels of corn.
This supply contented the company, who feared nothing so much as
starving, and yet, says Smith, so envied him that they would rather
hazard starving than have him get reputation by his vigorous conduct.
There is no contemporary account of that period except this which
Smith indited. He says that Newport and Ratcliffe conspired not only
to depose him but to keep him out of the fort; since being President
they could not control his movements, but that their horns were much
too short to effect it.
At this time in the "old Taverne," as Smith calls the fort, everybody
who had money or goods made all he could by trade; soldiers, sailors,
and savages were agreed to barter, and there was more care to
maintain their damnable and private trade than to provide the things
necessary for the colony. In a few weeks the whites had bartered
away nearly all the axes, chisels, hoes, and picks, and what powder,
shot, and pikeheads they could steal, in exchange for furs, baskets,
young beasts and such like commodities. Though the supply of furs
was scanty in Virginia, one master confessed he had got in one voyage
by this private trade what he sold in England for thirty pounds.
"These are the Saint-seeming Worthies of Virginia," indignantly
exclaims the President, "that have, notwithstanding all this, meate,
drinke, and wages." But now they began to get weary of the country,
their trade being prevented. "The loss, scorn, and misery was the
poor officers, gentlemen and careless governors, who were bought and
sold." The adventurers were cheated, and all their actions
overthrown by false information and unwise directions.
Master Scrivener was sent with the barges and pinnace to
Werowocomoco, where by the aid of Namontuck he procured a little
corn, though the savages were more ready to fight than to trade. At
length Newport's ship was loaded with clapboards, pitch, tar, glass,
frankincense (?) and soapashes, and despatched to England. About two
hundred men were left in the colony. With Newport, Smith sent his
famous letter to the Treasurer and Council in England. It is so good
a specimen of Smith's ability with the pen, reveals so well his
sagacity and knowledge of what a colony needed, and exposes so
clearly the ill-management of the London promoters, and the condition
of the colony, that we copy it entire. It appears by this letter
that Smith's " Map of Virginia," and his description of the country
and its people, which were not published till 1612, were sent by this
opportunity. Captain Newport sailed for England late in the autumn
of 1608. The letter reads: