Invading America. David Childs
were neither unpleasant nor well hidden. Yet, no sexual link seems to have been made across the racial divide, although the settlers were, for the most part, young unattached males many miles and months from home. Virginia was thus no Tahiti, where Captain Cook’s sex-starved sailors could be well satiated in exchange for a six-inch nail. The only explanation for this enforced abstinence must be biblical teaching. Ezra 9, for example, taught that it was an abomination for the people of Israel dwelling among other nationals to ‘have taken of their daughters for themselves and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands’. So bad was this transgression that Ezra had to call the people together so that they could admit that they had ‘trespassed against our God’ in this matter and separate themselves from these ‘strange wives’. That was mild compared with the orders given by Moses in Numbers 31, in which he castigated the Israeli host for making captives – that is taking into slavery – the Midianite women and children, having slain their men folk. Moses demanded that they ‘kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him’. This is a direct contrast to the Amerindian tradition by which captured women and children were integrated into the tribe to compensate for those lost through warfare and disease.
More justification for separate development of the new world was found in the continuation of Deuteronomy 7 quoted above: ‘Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.’
In 1969 the English band Blue Mink released the song ‘Melting Pot’, which included the lyrics:
What we need is a great big melting pot,
Big enough to hold the world and all it’s got,
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more,
Turn out coffee-coloured children by the score.
It was a song which affirmed the oneness of mankind in the face of the enduring doctrine of racial discrimination and separation and the fear of miscegenation, the sexual relationship of people of mixed races. In the twentieth century this was seen as a black-and-white affair, but in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century greater Virginia the same condemnation, biblically supported, was very much in evidence to prevent close relationships between, mainly, white men and Amerindian women. For these settlers no dusky Ruth would snuggle down beside a white Boaz among the alien corn. Until John Rolfe, that is. His marriage to Pocahontas is as memorable for its uniqueness as for its romance. If any evidence is needed on how a biblical conscience could make hypocritical cowards of those who would court ‘strange women’, then Rolfe’s letter to Governor Dale requesting permission to marry the princess provides, in paragraph after paragraph of sickening sycophancy, proof enough, as when he wrote:
To you therefore (most noble Sir) the patron and Father of us in this country do I utter the effects of this settled and long continued affection (which hath made a mighty war in my meditations) and here I do truly relate, to what issue this dangerous combat is come unto, wherein I have not only examined, but thoroughly tried and pared my thoughts even to the quick, before I could fit wholesome and apt applications to cure so dangerous an ulcer. I never failed to offer my daily and faithful prayers to God, for his sacred and holy assistance. I forgot not to set before mine eyes the frailty of mankind, his proneness to evil, his indulgence of wicked thoughts, with many other imperfections wherein man is daily ensnared, and oftentimes overthrown, and then compared to my present estate. Nor was I ignorant of the heavy displeasure which almighty God conceived against the sons of Levi and Israel for marrying strange wives, nor of the inconveniences which may thereby arise, with other the like good motions which made me look about warily and with good circumspection, into the grounds and principal agitations, which thus should provoke me to be in love with one whose education hath been rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all nurture from myself, that oftentimes with fear and trembling, I have ended my private controversy with this: surely these are wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in man’s destruction; and so with fervent prayers to be ever preserved from such diabolical assaults (as I took those to be) I have taken some rest.
When the twice-widowed Rolfe penned his letter to Dale he must have worded it in a way that he knew his stern boss would both appreciate and understand. The whole purpose of the plea was to ask for special exemption from the strict moral biblical code that both men must have known well.
Even more sickening was the attempt, a little later, by the married Dale to procure Pocahontas’s younger sister, a child of eleven, for his own bed. So upright was Dale himself that he dispatched Ralph Hamor to Powhatan, her father, to act as his pimp. Centuries later it is difficult to find any part of the following extract in the procuring bid that does not stick in the throat. Hamor told Chief Powhatan that Dale had sent him there as his suitor for the girl:
for this purpose . . . to entreat you by that brotherly friendship you make profession of to permit her to return with me unto him, partly for the desire which himself hath, and partly for the desire her sister [Pocahontas] hath to see her, of whom, if fame hath not been prodigal, as likely enough it hath not, your brother by your favour would gladly make his nearest companion, wife, and bedfellow . . .
The most famous of the kidnapped natives, Pocahontas suffered the fate of many of her countrymen, dying in England without seeing her native land again. (National Maritime Museum)
Waterfalls cut short every expedition up the rivers of the Chesapeake aimed at seeking a passage from sea to sea. Only Henry Hudson, in reaching Albany high up the river that bears his name, made a significant voyage into the interior.
Mourts Relation, 1622. Even the separatists, convinced of the rightness of their actions in moving to their New Jerusalem, felt it necessary to include in their account a defence of the lawfulness of their actions.
That Powhatan did not drive Hamor away, or worse, says much for his composure. What he did do was report that his daughter was already engaged, that no additional dowry would affect that arrangement and that he loved his daughter too much to let her go, saying, ‘I hold it not a brotherly part of your King to desire to bereave me of two of my children at once.’ Thus was the possibility of marriage alliances between two people, who could have intermingled and lived together, prevented by biblical law and one man’s lust.
The propagandists have long been regarded as successful encouragers of western planting, yet these dreamers and schemers never convinced sufficient of their countrymen to ensure that the invasion gained the support essential for its success. In neither the plays, prose, poetry, parliamentary, nor Privy Council reports that have survived from the period is there sufficient reference to the new world to indicate that England, as a nation, was ready to embark on what would one day be its voyage to a global empire.
After more than a century of propaganda the outcome was close to failure. Following the 1622 massacre on the James River, Nathaniel Butler, homeward bound, via Jamestown, from his three-year governorship of Bermuda, berated the maladministration of the Virginia Company and the appalling casualty rate sustained during the invasion. Butler was of the opinion that, of the ‘not fewer than ten thousand souls transported thither, there are not, through aforementioned abuses and neglects, above two thousand of them at present to be found alive . . . instead of a Plantation, it will shortly get the name of a slaughter house.’ Against this loss of life Butler thought that the 347 killed in the massacre represented an insignificant number. The Company issued a refutation that damned itself in its defence, and it was left to writers such as Smith and Purchas to continue the ultimately correct propaganda, ‘shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdom from American English Plantations and especially those of Virginia and Summer Islands’.