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: