Paper Sovereigns. Jeffrey Glover
The excessive (and deceptive) courtesy that fills Archer’s pages is replaced by mutually assured destruction and the paradoxically honest agreements that follow from it. Smith’s book concludes with a triumphant image: Powhatan and his underlings, cowed into submission, and ready to consent to the newcomers’ conditions. In place of diplomacy, Smith offers peace by other means.
Though it described the events of the colony’s early years, Smith’s bellicose volume answered to the needs of the colony’s governing council during a period of doubt about Jamestown’s survival. In publishing the book, Smith was not simply attempting to settle old scores. He was joining a debate about the colony’s future, and using Indian treaties to position himself as the most capable adventurer to return and lead Virginia. In this, he failed. The colony’s London directors were not anxious to entrust its fate to a figure associated with so much controversy, and Smith soon threw in his lot with New England explorers. However, his book was successful in another way. Smith’s attempt to reconcile warlike tactics with treaty justifications proved influential within the company, which had need of a way of making war look like peace. The company’s directors knew the English were not alone in Jamestown. Travelers and spies from other nations were also there, or possessed illicit access to the colony’s transatlantic correspondence, and they too had stories to tell about Native diplomacy.
Shows of Sovereignty: Zúñiga’s Correspondence
“I have been amused by the way they honour him,” Spanish ambassador Pedro de Zúñiga sardonically reported to Philip III in 1608. Zúñiga was describing the arrival in London of one of Powhatan’s sons, “a lad,” who had traveled there with Newport to confirm the crown’s friendship with Virginia Indians.107 Of the many signs of alliance exchanged between the Powhatans and English colonists, the boy was the most compelling in the eyes of European onlookers. Named Namontack, he was part of a diplomatic exchange that also included an English boy named Thomas Savage, who was sent to live with the Powhatans. The exchange had involved disingenuous statements on both sides. Powhatan had told Jamestown governors that Namontack was royalty, and they had told him the same thing about Savage.108 Both sides were comfortable with such fictions, however. Powhatan stood to gain from the presence of an English boy. He could learn the newcomers’ language and pry into their plans. And the Virginia Company was likewise eager to embrace Namontack. By introducing him in London as a foreign prince, they could show diplomats at court that Tsenacomoco was a sovereign nation and that its leaders could offer legal consent to English colonists. To this end, the company outfitted Namontack in copper jewelry and presented him to important stakeholders in English colonial endeavors. Yet as with the Jamestown governors’ diplomacy in the Chesapeake Bay, these diplomatic performances inspired controversy.109 For his part, Zúñiga believed none of it. In a letter, he characterizes the entire display as artifice, an act, and bristles at the pretension. “I hold it for surer that he must be a very ordinary person,” not a prince at all, Zúñiga concludes.110
The presentation of Namontack to London society restaged for a metropolitan audience the same kind of cross-cultural diplomatic rituals that were common in Virginia. It involved a familiar legal strategy: recognize the Indians as royalty so they can bestow legitimacy on the English. Usually, this legal strategy was publicized in writing. This time, however, it was embodied by a Powhatan ambassador, who would perform before James I what Powhatan and others had supposedly enacted before Newport. There were strategic advantages to such direct lobbying. If carried out successfully, Namontack’s presentation to the king could demonstrate the colony’s powerful coastal alliances for international onlookers at court. When Namontack arrived in London, for example, the ambassador from Venice, Zorzi Giustinian, noted it as a significant political visit, writing that “one of the chief inhabitants” of the New World had arrived “to treat with the King for some agreement about that navigation.”111 Yet Namontack’s appearance also involved considerable risk. By bringing the boy to London, the Virginia Company exposed him to the critical eyes of foreign ambassadors. Enemies watched, and they were skeptical of what they saw.
Native treaties were a precarious form of legal evidence; when they held, they could make the English appear powerful, but their potential collapse could call into question the legal standing of settlement ventures. I now seek to examine how Spanish diplomats scrutinized English treaties for evidence that might invalidate English claims. Spain, like other monarchies with New World interests, maintained surreptitious networks of correspondence through various overseas agents who spied on foreign governments and their colonial holdings. These networks included priests, exiles, disaffected English Catholics, and other travelers with an interest in New World projects. After the Anglo-Spanish War, the ranks of such “intelligencers,” as the English called them, increasingly came to include diplomats such as Zúñiga, who served officially as overseas representatives but unofficially as clearinghouses of rumors and reports. Zúñiga’s letters give some evidence of the kinds of information that came his way from Virginia. He cites depositions from English Catholics, intercepted copies of letters from the English traveler Francis Perkins, and Virginia Company ledgers, as well as his own first-hand observations of the behavior of Powhatan guests at diplomatic receptions in London. At one point, Zúñiga even claims to have a spy on the London Council itself.112 Here I will consider Zúñiga’s letters as a strategic account of Anglo-Powhatan treaties. Like the English authors whose texts he intercepted, Zúñiga had a vested interest in circulating a particular image of Anglo-Powhatan relations. His account of an Indian boy playing prince makes an argument about the conduct of New World diplomacy and about who rightfully owns Virginia. If the English stake possession on the recognition of Native kings, Zúñiga tries to rebuff English claims by denying the royalty of Powhatan’s ambassadors. Through this counter-narrative of Anglo-Indian ceremonies, Zúñiga asserts Spanish rights over the New World and the right of Philip III to destroy English outposts. Yet Zúñiga does not simply dismiss the legal strategy of the Virginia Company. He argues instead that the company’s various documents and legal rituals, including its treaties with Native people, are bits of theatrical artifice, designed only to disguise the colony’s true purpose as a staging ground for piracy against Spanish fleets. Zúñiga accepts the theoretical validity of Native treaties, but attempts to prove, through his own accounts of Anglo-Powhatan negotiations, that Jamestown has not resolved the question of Native consent.
The print publications of Smith and his allies were intended to be as public as possible. Indeed, Smith’s future involvement in English colonial ventures largely depended upon reaching potential supporters indirectly through the medium of print. Zúñiga’s correspondence, by contrast, was a covert affair. While Zúñiga sent regular dispatches to Philip III, he also composed secret letters. This secret correspondence with Philip III lasted from 1607 until Zúñiga’s final return in 1612. The letters touch on a number of issues of state, such as the readiness of the English navy and English intentions in the East Indies. They also touch on trivial matters such as gossip and scandals at court. Yet the question of the legality of the Virginia Colony is never far from Zúñiga’s concerns. From the beginning of his correspondence about the New World, Zúñiga depicts colonization itself as a kind of diplomatic intrigue, a show intended to conceal the English crown’s piratical intentions.
In the first letter to deal with Virginia at any length, written in January 1607 shortly after the departure of Newport’s first fleet, Zúñiga relays sinister intelligence about the colony, depicting settlement as part of an international conspiracy against Spanish claims. “After I informed your Majesty that the English were equipping some ships to send to Virginia,” Zúñiga writes, “the matter was held up a great deal, and now I learn that they have made an agreement, in great secrecy, for two ships to go there every month.… [and] they have agreed with the Rebels [the Dutch] to send what people they can.”113 In citing a conspiracy with “the Rebels,” Zúñiga is referring to the English alliance with the Dutch in the Eighty Years’ War against the Spanish. Throughout the war, the English crown financially supported the armies of Dutch states and sent English conscripts to help them in the fight against Spain. A number of figures in Virginia had been involved in these efforts, including John Smith.114 However, while the Anglo-Dutch alliance had been officially ratified in the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585), Zúñiga views it as a conspiracy, and portrays colonization