.
"in hast any one who hath bene more industrious or who hath had (Captain Geo. Percie excepted) greater experience amongst them, however misconstruction maye traduce here at home."
Smith overthrown. During the autumn of 1608 and the winter following Captain Smith was sole ruler of Jamestown, all the other councilors having gone; but the next spring there arrived five hundred new colonists inadequately provisioned, and under two of the old faction leaders who were Smith's mortal enemies. These were the visionary and turbulent Archer and his follower Ratcliffe. A. D. 1609. Smith got some of the newcomers to settle at Nansemond, and others took up their abode near the falls of the James River. 11 After much turmoil Smith was disabled by an accident, and his enemies contrived to have him sent home charged, among other things, with having "incensed" the Indians to assault the insubordinate settlers under West near the falls, and with having designed to wed Pocahontas in order to secure royal rights in Virginia as son-in-law to Powhatan.
His later years. He afterward explored the New England coast with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. What he published in his later years by way of advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of admirable good sense. With rare foresight he predicted the coming importance of the colonial trade and the part to be played by the American fisheries in promoting the greatness of England by "breeding mariners." He only of the men of his time suspected the imperial size and future greatness of North America. He urged that the colonies should not annoy "with large pilotage and such like dues" those who came to trade in their ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. This is a strange doctrine in an age when foreign trade seemed almost an evil, and false conceptions of economic principles were nearly universal. Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a wit whose pungency is delightful. In mental and physical hardihood, and in what may be called shiftiness, as well as in proneness to exaggeration and in boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical American pioneer – a forerunner of the daring and ready-witted men who have subdued a savage continent. 12
VIII
The famine of 1609-'10. Disaster of some sort could hardly have been avoided had Captain Smith been allowed to stay, but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and there was no hand strong enough to stay it. The unchecked hostility of the savages drove the outsettlers from Nansemond and the falls of the James. 13 The Indians found exercise for their devilish ingenuity in torturing those who fell into their hands alive, and outraging the dead. A. D. 1609, 1610. The brave but unwise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury by visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs of their chiefs. There was now no one who could carry on the difficult Indian trade. Ratcliffe, who had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell into an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's example in trading with Powhatan. He was tortured to death by the Indian women, and only fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. The brood hogs of the colony were all eaten, the dogs came next, and then the horses, which were to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their very hides. Rats, mice, and adders were relished when they were to be had, and fungi of various sorts were eaten with whatever else "would fill either mouth or belly." A. D. 1610. An Indian slain in an assault on the stockade was dug up after he had been three days buried, and eaten "by the poorer sort," their consuming hunger not being embarrassed by the restraints of gentility. From this horrible expedient it was but one step to the digging up of their own dead for food. Famine-crazed men even dogged the steps of those of their comrades who were not quite wasted, threatening to kill and devour them. Among these despairing and shiftless men there was but one man of resources. Daniel Tucker – let his later sins as tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven – bethought himself to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this small relief "did keep us from killing one another to eat," says Percy. He seems to have been the only man who bethought himself to do anything. Note 5. One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, slew his own wife and salted what he did not eat at once of her flesh, but he was put to death at the stake for this crime. Some, braving the savages, sought food in the woods and died while seeking it, and were eaten by those who found them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw themselves on the tender mercies of the Indians and were slain. To physical were added spiritual torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible into the fire, crying out in the market place that there was no God in heaven. Percy adds, with grim theological satisfaction characteristic of the time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very market place where he had blasphemed in his agony. The depopulated houses, and even the palisades so necessary for protection, were burned for firewood by the enfeebled people, and Jamestown came presently to look like the slumbering ruins of some ancient fortification. Tragicall Relation, 1623. Briefe Declaration, 1624, both in British Pub. Record Office. Percy's Trewe Relacyon, MS., Petworth House. Fortunately, the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had help been delayed a few days longer.
IX
The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610. Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, 1619, p.23. This ship became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ashore on the Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of swine." 14 Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what the islands afforded – live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and waterfowl salted – the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction. Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pinnaces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's provision to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown.
De la Warr's arrival, 1610. With all the formalities thought necessary at that time, De la Warr took possession of Jamestown, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead men's bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock of cattle, while the brave old Sir George Somers once more embarked for the Bermudas in the Patience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built wholly of the wood of that island without a particle of iron except one bolt in the keel. Smith's Oxford Tract, so called. In this boat he sailed up and down until he found again "the still vexed Bermoothes," where he hoped to secure provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was also sent to the Bermudas, but missed them, and went north to the fishing banks in search of food.
15 Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety characteristic of that age the deserted little church was enlarged and reoccupied and daily decorated with Virginia wild flowers. De la Warr's government, 1610. All the bitter experience of the first three years had not taught the true method of settling a new country. 16 The colony was still but a camp of men without families, and the old common stock system was retained. To escape from the anarchy which resulted from a system that sank the interest of the individual in that of the community, it had been needful to arm De la Warr with the sharp sword of martial law. British Museum, MS. 21,993, ff. 174, 178. Instr. to Gates and De la Warr. Some of the instructions
Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treatment, as he asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been matter of dispute. Both accounts are correct, as is shown by the testimony of an important manuscript at Petworth House, in Surrey, which I was allowed to examine by the courtesy of Lord Leconsfield. It is from the pen of George Percy, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen to succeed Smith on his departure from the colony. It is not the narrative from which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The title is "A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of momente wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas Gates was shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my depture ovtt of the country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a quarto of forty-one pages. Percy was a man of courage, but his own narrative in this little book shows that he had no qualification for the office of governor except the rank of his family. His ill health is made an excuse for his inefficiency, but Dale's letter of May 25, 1611, shows that even the horrible events of Percy's first government had not taught him to plant corn when again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's boastfulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the unruly settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to attack them, is supported by Percy; and a very different charge, that he stirred up the Indians to assassinate West himself, appears at a later time in Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears abundant internal evidence of the writer's mental inability to speak the truth. Percy himself relates that the Indians were already hostile to West's party, and that they had wounded and killed some of West's men in resentment of their wanton outrages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with the signatures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the affair. "Bloody-mindedness" seems not to have been a trait of Smith. But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was already impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any cost could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. Such a course would not have done much violence to the notions of the time, and would have found precedents in the various plots against the lives of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. It is quite probable, however, that there is no truth in the story. The violent hatred of the factions will account for the suspicion.
Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and was printed in London in 1608. In 1612 he published what is commonly referred to as the Oxford Tract. Its proper title is very long. The first part of it is as follows: "Map of Virginia, with a description of the Covntry, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. Written by Captain Smyth, sometime Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the proceedings of those colonies since their first departure from England," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken from the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, and to have been edited by W. S. – that is, the Reverend Dr. Symonds. The Generall Historie was first proposed in a well-considered and rather elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meeting of the Virginia Company, April 12, 1621, while the new patent which was to be submitted to Parliament was under discussion. He suggested the writing of a history to preserve the memory of the worthies of Virginia, dead and living, and gave it as his opinion that no Spanish settlement of the same age afforded matter more interesting. "Which worthy speech," says the record, "had of the whole court a very great applause as spoken freely to a speciall purpose, and therefore thought fitt to be considered and put in practice in his due time. And for which also Mr. Smyth as preferring allwaies mocions of speciall consequence was exceedingly commended." MS. Records of the Virginia Company, i, 197-200. A first edition of the Generall Historie appeared in 1624, the last two editions in 1632. The book is a compilation of Smith's earlier works, somewhat expanded, not to say inflated. The later portions are mostly made up from the official and
Many years ago, before I had had an opportunity to examine and compare all his writings, I rashly printed a brief argument in favor of the trustworthiness of Captain John Smith and the credibility of the Pocahontas story. I believe no person of critical judgment can make a thorough comparison of Smith's successive books without being convinced of the ineradicable tendency of his mind to romance in narrating adventure, especially his own adventure. Even his style where his vanity speaks loses something of its native directness and force. His practical writings on navigation and on the proper conduct of colonization, and his descriptions of the country and the savages, are plain, direct, and lucid. His speeches in the Virginia Company appear to have been exceedingly wise, and to have impressed his hearers. Note, for example, his proposals (Records, i, 197) that colonial governors should be liable to trial in England; his proposal to reduce the fee for sending a child to Virginia from five pounds to five marks, the cost of apprenticing to a trade (i, 174); and his preference for a governor well paid to one working "for love" (February 4, 1623). His personal morals were probably unexceptionable. One of his associates certifies to his freedom from tobacco, wines, dice, debts, and oaths. But a comparison between the statements made in the Oxford Tract and those in the Generall Historie leaves upon the mind of the critic a distinct impression of the very processes by which his adventures were exaggerated in his own memory as time elapsed. The three or four hundred savages on the Potomac (Oxford Tract, p. 32, a sufficiently marvelous story) rise to three or four thousand in the Generall Historie. Pocahontas becomes the central figure in incidents as told in 1624 in which she had no place in 1612. There is but one allusion to Pocahontas in the entire Oxford Tract (p. 103), and that has to do with the charge that Smith intended to marry her. A just and witty judgment of Captain Smith was made almost in his own time by Thomas Fuller. He says: "Such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men beyond belief, to some beyond truth. Yet we have two witnesses to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them… However, moderate men must allow Captain Smith to have been very instrumental in settling the plantation in Virginia, whereof he was Governor, as also admiral of New England." Fuller's Worthies, edition of 1840, i, 276. Those who desire to see an ingenious and learned defense of Captain Smith, particularly in the matter of the Pocahontas story, will find it in an address by Mr. William Wirt Henry, published by the Virginia Historical Society. Prof. Arber's discussion of the subject in his edition of Smith's Works is sentimental rather than critical. Compare Deane's Wingfield for the other side. Unnecessary heat has characterized some of the debates about John Smith. History pitched in a shrill polemical key is not instructive and is something less than amusing. These debates center themselves on the Pocahontas story, which is of little historical importance except as it involves the trustworthiness of Smith's narrative.
The conduct of Captain Smith in the Virginia colony will be better understood if we appreciate the character of his principal opponent, Gabriel Archer. Archer's return to Virginia in 1609 and his agency in overthrowing Captain Smith are alluded to apparently in a passage in the New Life of Virginea, 1612, "In which distemper that envious man stept in, sowing plentifull tares in the hearts of all," etc. One of Archer's schemes seems to have been to establish a parliament and a complicated government at the beginning. Purchas and Strachey both take sides against Archer in his controversy with Smith. Purchas, iv, p. 1749, Oxford Tract, 22. Wingfield warned Newport of the danger of disturbance from Archer, who was "troubled with an ambitious spirit." Wingfield's Discourse, 77, 94, 95. Wingfield also says, "In all their disorders was Mr. Archer a ringleader." He adds that Ratcliffe "did wear no other eies or eares than grew on Mr. Archer's head." For a bibliographical account of Smith's works the reader is referred to the valuable notes in Mr. Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii,
A Trewe Relacyon, etc., at Petworth House, as above. The Indians in sheer wantonness scraped out the brains of their dead victims with mussel shells. Percy seems to have retaliated in a way to exasperate without disabling the savages. He "burned their hawses, Ransacked their Temples, tooke downe the corpses off their deade Kings from off their Toambes [that is, the scaffold on which their well-dried remains were deposited], and caryed away their pearles, caps, and bracelets wherewith they doe decore their Kings fvneralls." (For this sacred house thus desecrated by Percy the Indians had such reverence that none but priests and chiefs were allowed to enter, and the Indians never ventured to pass it without casting some offering of tobacco, wampum, copper, or puccoon root into the water. – Strachey, 90.) When Percy had captured a chief's wife and children, the soldiers in revengeful wantonness, according to Percy's account, threw the children out of the boat and shot them in the water. The inefficient Percy was able to save the life of the "queen" or chief's wife with difficulty. West and Ratcliffe, who had overthrown Smith, are accused by Percy of unnecessary cruelty to the savages. West sailed away in the ship, leaving Jamestown to its fate. Ratcliffe was put to death with exquisite tortures. There is no doubt some truth, as there is certainly jealousy, in Percy's charge that Captain Smith was "an ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow, attempting to take all men's authorities from them," but he was neither weak, like Percy and Ratcliffe, nor visionary, like the gold-hunting Martin and the doctrinary and demagogical Archer, nor treacherous and cruel, like West. With all his faults he only was master of the situation in these early years. Percy admits that the lawful authority was that of Smith. The history of the government of Percy and his supporters seems to justify Smith's refusal to share his lawful power with incompetent factionaries.
So far the State Papers, but Percy, in his A Trewe Relacyon, adds that he caused the man to be tortured till he confessed, and he relates repulsive details of the crime. The effrontery of an official publication went so far as to deny (True Declaration, 1610), on the authority of Sir Thomas Gates, this fact so circumstantially and abundantly attested. In Peckard's Life of Ferrar, p. 158, a petition from the Virginia colony to the king is preserved in which occur these words: "To tell how great things many of us have suffered through hunger alone would be as incredible as horrible for us to repeat to your sacred ears."
The beauty of the wood of certain American trees had already been noted. The communion table in Jamestown in De la Warr's time was made of black walnut. The pews were of cedar, and there were "fair, broad windows," with shutters of cedar, "to shut and open as the weather shall occasion," but there appears to have been no glass. Window glass was little used at that time, and there probably was not a glazed window in the colony. The pulpit was of cedar, and the font was "hewen hollow like a canoa." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1755.
Some families appear to have gone to Virginia with De la Warr. The purpose to send families of wives and children and servants is expressed in A True Declaration, which was dated 1610, but, as Mr. Alexander Brown points out, issued in December, 1609.