Paper Sovereigns. Jeffrey Glover
An answering threat of force, rather than diplomatic politesse, wins the day.
Printed at Oxford, The Proceedings was pieced together from Smith’s own writings and from those of soldiers and secretaries who had accompanied him on trading voyages. The book was admittedly rough. Its editor, Thomas Abbay, apologized for the “false orthography or broken English” of its soldier authors.43 Yet the book also deviated from previous accounts of American diplomacy in another way. It depicted not civility, but threats; not friends, but enemies; not easy subjection, but rather the violent suppression of Indian revolt. Why did the book’s authors and editors, many of whom had a financial stake in the colony’s success, make public a story that departed so profoundly from the Jamestown leaders’ carefully cultivated image as benevolent ambassadors to Virginia Indians?
The answer to this question lies in a series of events that transpired after the events documented in Archer’s “Relatyon.” After the arrival of Archer’s letter, the Virginia Council of London received many reports that seemed to contradict his politic account of Indian diplomacy, and to suggest that Virginia was headed the way of Roanoke. The colony’s first presidents were deposed under a cloud of controversy, and its food stores proved inadequate, leading to mass starvation and reports of cannibalism.44 The ill-advised attempt to crown Powhatan did nothing to help diplomatic relations, and was followed by a bloody war between camps, known to historians as the First Anglo-Powhatan War.45 In response to such news, James I issued a second charter, giving more control to the colony’s investors in London. The colony’s governing council immediately appointed a new governor, Thomas West (3rd Baron De La Warr), and new deputies, George Percy, Sir Thomas Dale, and Sir Thomas Gates (the last of whom arrived in the colony after being shipwrecked on Bermuda).46 The council also instituted stricter laws in the hopes of restoring order and making the colony profitable. Finally, they implemented a new approach to diplomacy; rather than entreating Powhatan, the colonists would attack him, explaining themselves with the doctrine of just war, which held that it was lawful to make war against a sovereign who impeded natural commerce or committed acts of aggression against well-intentioned visitors. Claiming that “there is no trust to the fidelitie of humane beasts, except a man will make a league, with Lions, Beares, and Crocodiles,” a 1610 company publication stated that Powhatans had “violated the lawe of nations, and used our Ambassadors as Ammon did the servants of David,” making the Indian king a lawful target of war.47 However, despite this drastic change of plan, the Virginia Company did not abandon voluntary alliances as a way of possessing territory. Instead of offering treaties to Powhatan, they shifted their diplomatic efforts to the periphery of Tsenacomoco, hoping to turn Powhatan’s more restless subjects against him. “If you make freindeship with any of these nations, as you must doe,” their 1609 “Instructions” to Gates commanded, “Choose to doe it with those that are farthest from you and enemies unto [the Powhatans] amonge whom you dwell.”48 Armed with these justifications, and a new plan for making treaties beyond Powhatan’s territory, the colonists attacked and defeated their Paspahegh neighbors, Powhatan’s allies, and embarked upon diplomatic missions to the Patawomecks and other groups living on the periphery of Tsenacomoco.
The downturn in the colony’s fortunes was accompanied by hurried transatlantic correspondence, as various parties scrambled to show their cooperation with the new policy. While company leaders had initially wanted to keep the issue of Indian rights out of their direct correspondence with the Spanish, believing they would be no match for Spanish jurists schooled in the law of nations, the outbreak of war with the Powhatans brought the question of the colony’s legitimacy out into the open.49 John Smith was among the first to capitalize on the controversy over the colony’s legal standing. A disgraced former president of the colony, Smith had attended many of the early diplomatic conferences with Powhatan. Smith had also been in charge of trade relations with tribal polities. From 1607 until his departure from the colony in 1609, Smith conducted three food raids that were notable for their brutality.50 One observer compared Smith’s aggressive attempts to extort food from Indians to the violence that Spanish conquistadors had brought to the search for El Dorado a century earlier. “The Spanyard never more greedily desired gold then [Smith] victuall,” he wrote (partly inspired by Spanish narratives, Smith approvingly printed the statement in the Proceedings).51 Many Powhatan-affiliated groups responded to Smith in more than kind; on one voyage, Smith was kidnapped and held for several weeks before his release, a mercy he would later credit to the smitten pleading of Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas.52 Smith also claimed that Powhatan had adopted him as a symbolic son in treaty negotiations that occurred while Smith was in captivity.53 But while later the stuff of print romance, these incidents alarmed many in Jamestown, who feared not only for their lives but also for the precarious diplomatic arrangements on which their claims to possession depended. While the colony increasingly came to rely on the foodstuffs Smith acquired on his raids, some in colonial government accused him of being a “peace-breaker” whose violent tactics would undo Newport’s careful diplomacy and expose the colony to assault from Indians or Spanish fleets.54 Smith countered that the colony’s government was foolish to believe Powhatan’s commitment to peace. Smith’s embrace of warfare indirectly led to his departure. In late summer or early fall 1609, he was severely burned while experimenting with gunpowder aboard a barge, and his enemies in colonial government seized on his momentary incapacitation to ship him back to England.55
The dispute over Smith’s diplomatic tactics might have died in Virginia. However, the transatlantic controversy over the colony’s policies gave him a way of intervening from London. As a discredited and physically crippled leader of a venture that had failed to produce any return for its investors, Smith possessed little credibility among metropolitan councilors. But he did have one asset: his Indian papers and those of the soldiers who had accompanied him on trading missions. Like Smith’s negotiating tactics themselves, these documents skirted the edges of legality; the company charter included statutes forbidding the shipment of unauthorized writing across the Atlantic.56 As the colony’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, however, letters, reports, and narratives by various pens began to find their way to London. This flow of ink and information presented the colony with a public relations problem. Few of the letters reflected the kinds of glowing descriptions that Archer and others had sent home during the colony’s first years. One way the company responded was by censoring or editing damaging reports. Indeed, a critical letter by Smith himself was heavily redacted and published anonymously under the title A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia (1608).57 The company also printed a series of reports, tracts, and sermons that reassured investors of its eventual prosperity.58
While the company saw increased transatlantic correspondence as a threat, Smith saw it as an opportunity for rejoining the debate about Virginia’s future, only this time from a position much closer to the center of power. In 1612, Smith brought into print A Map of Virginia and The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia on the press at Oxford. Smith’s choice of print as a medium reflected his marginal position in colonial politics. Councilors were occupied with the new government, and were not particularly interested in Smith’s perspective. Yet by printing his work, Smith ensured that a wide variety of people, from potential investors to European diplomats, would read it. The books defend Smith’s reputation, and blame his opponents for the colony’s collapse. However, in making his case, both volumes largely sidestep colonial squabbles. Smith directs his attention instead to the colony’s diplomatic relations with the Powhatans. The books document how Powhatan takes advantage of Newport’s diplomatic gullibility in order to drive up corn prices, ambush the colony’s traders, and subject Jamestown to Powhatan authority. The only solution to the problems in Virginia, Smith suggests, is to wage war against the Powhatan chiefdom. Crucially, however, Smith avoids depicting actual violence. He suggests instead that ambushes, threats, and bullying will persuade the Indians to acquiesce, leading to a peace that Newport’s “stately kinde of soliciting” has failed to achieve.
The story of how Smith’s two books found their way to the press at Oxford offers a vivid illustration of how cross-cultural negotiations in America could create political opportunities in London.59 While the company had no