Читать книгу Savage Kingdom: Virginia and The Founding of English America - Benjamin Woolley - Страница 13

IN THE LIST OF SETTLERS who went to Virginia on the first voyage, William White is described as a ‘labourer’. This did not necessarily mean he was humbly born, as the term was used in passenger lists to identify those brought at another’s expense, such as sons brought by their fathers, or servants brought by their masters.¹

However, nearly all the labourers have one feature in common: very little is known about them. The only trace of biographical information relating to William White is a marginal note by George Percy describing him as a ‘made man’, a phrase used to refer to someone of low social standing who has unexpectedly come into a fortune, an arriviste or parvenu.²

Percy’s snooty assessment of this social inferior probably arose from White’s decision, soon after Newport’s fleet had first sailed up the James, to jump ship and join the Indians. He was one of several ‘renegades’ who understandably found the prospect of life with the Indians preferable to the dangers and depredations of the English camp.³

The renegades were rarely mentioned in official records or letters home. Their very existence was not officially recognized until 1612, when a regulation was introduced making it a capital offence to live without permission in the town of ‘any savage weroance’.⁴ The conspiracy of silence arose out of a combination of envy and resentment. When they slipped from the settlement, the renegades entered into the feverish imaginations of those left behind. They became voices from beyond the veil of trees and vines, taunting the settlers for putting up with such hardships, ridiculing English assumptions of cultural and technological superiority, beckoning their former comrades to drop their tools, and wander through the woods into the alluring Indian embrace.

White had somehow fallen into that embrace. He ended up ten miles upstream of Jamestown, at the town of Quiyoughcohannock, visited by the English during their first reconnaissance of the river. It sat on a high bluff overlooking the James (modern Claremont, Virginia). Its name meant ‘priest of the river’, and it served as the religious centre for those living along the banks. This may have been why its people were so curious about the English and their religion, and why they welcomed the nervous, bewildered interloper who had come among them.⁵

White would have been placed in the care of one of the senior women of the village, probably Oholasc, the stately queen of the Quiyoughcohannock, the most ‘handsome a savage woman as I have seen’, an English admirer noted. She was raising a son named Tatacoope, whose father was believed to be the mamanatowick Powhatan. Tatacoope was heir to the village chief, Pepiscuminah, or ‘Pipisco’, as the English called him. But Pipisco was in disgrace, having ‘stolen away’ one of Opechancanough’s wives. For this impertinence, he had been exiled to a nearby settlement, ‘with some few people about him’, including the offending woman. As a result, Chaopock, who was Pipisco’s brother from the neighbouring village of Chawopo, had been made acting weroance until Tatacoope came of age.⁶

Life for White in the court of this great queen would have been comfortable, at least compared to the conditions being endured at Jamestown. Just being part of a rhythm of daily life was a relief, particularly among such positive people. White noted that before dawn, the men and women, together with children older than ten years, would leave their beds and run down to the river. There they would bathe and wash, and await the sun’s arrival sitting on the bank, within a circle of dried tobacco leaves, such was their delight in the coming of a new day.⁷

After these daily ablutions, mothers would set out the breakfast, and summon their youngest boys to come to them with their toy bows and arrows. Only when they had managed to shoot a piece of moss tossed into the air could they tuck into a meal typically comprising boiled beans, fresh fish and corn bread, garnished with venison if the hunting was good. Older boys then went off with their fathers, to learn how to weave weirs and nets to catch fish, or to stalk game and butcher carcasses.⁸

And so one day passed into another, until White began to notice this idyll’s fragilities. In recent years, hunting had been bad. For reasons that mystified the Indians, the deer population in the vast woodlands surrounding the river was dwindling. As supply continued to shrink, demand was becoming desperate, if only to fulfil an annual tribute demanded by the mamanatowick Powhatan. Adding to the pressure was concern about a continuing lack of rain. The village store of corn and beans was running low, but the plants in the fields were not yet a foot high, suffering from the second year of a drought more extreme than even the elders could recall.⁹

The Quiyoughcohannock weroance Chaopock was also concerned about the amount of loot rival chiefs across the river were extracting from the starving English. The blue beads, copper and glittering minerals being offered in an ever greater multitude were valuable as symbols of chiefly power, and good substitutes for venison as tributes to offer Powhatan. The circumstances that had led to Chaopock’s promotion to chief made him sensitive about matters of status, and going to the English with his begging basket would be demeaning. But, with so many of his fellow weroances proving so greedy for the interlopers’ wares, Chaopock felt he had no choice but to go downriver to see what he could get. He went sometime in the summer, and returned a few days later, showing off a bright red waistcoat presented to him by the English weroance, Wingfield.¹⁰

Then the English were forgotten, as the village became preoccupied with internal matters. White had no idea what was going on, but frantic preparations signalled an important and rare event. The first sign that it was taking place was the appearance of community leaders in heavy make-up. ‘The people were so painted that a painter with his pencil could not have done better,’ White noted. ‘Some of them were black like devils, with horns and loose hair, some of divers colours.’

One day, White awoke to find the town deserted. Probing the surrounding woodland, he discovered the entire community congregating in a clearing, preparing for some grand event. There followed two days of frantic dancing, intensifying the mood of anticipation. The horned satyrs, carrying tree branches in their hands, danced in a quarter-of-a-mile circle around the village fire, one group moving in the opposite direction to the other, both emitting a ‘hellish noise’ when they met. The branches were then thrown to the ground, and the satyrs ‘ran clapping their hands into a tree’, from which they would tear another branch. Anyone who lagged behind was beaten by Chaopock’s personal guard with a ‘bastinado’ or cudgel made of tightly packed reeds. ‘Thus they made themselves scarce able to go or stand.’

On the third day, fourteen strong boys aged ten to fifteen years, painted white from head to foot, were led into the village’s central arena. For the rest of the morning, the adults danced around them, shaking rattles. In the afternoon, women arrived with dry wood, mats, skins and moss. White, with a growing sense of foreboding, noted that they had also brought funerary goods used in the preparation of corpses. The women then began a terrible wailing.

The boys were led to the foot of a tree, where they were made to sit, watched by warriors brandishing bastinados. Presently, a guard formed up into two lines facing each other, creating a path leading from where the boys were sitting to another tree. Five young men dressed as priests were allowed to fetch the boys one by one, and lead them along the path. As they went, the guards subjected them to a hail of blows, forcing the priests to shield the boys with their naked bodies, ‘to their great smart’. Once all fourteen boys had been transferred from the foot of one tree to another, this ritualized abduction was repeated, then repeated a third time. Finally, the pummelling ceased, and the guards tore down the last tree under which the boys had been seated, and decorated themselves with its dismembered branches and twigs.

White could not make out what had happened to the boys in the midst of the mêlée, and it was at this point in the proceedings that he was asked to leave. Later, however, he glimpsed them again, somewhere near the torn tree. They were ‘cast on a heap in a valley as dead’. His shock was compounded by Chief Chaopock, standing ‘in the midst’ of them, summoning his warriors to bring wood to build a great pyre, ‘set like a steeple’. White was convinced that these were preliminaries to sacrificing the children ‘to the devil, whom they call Kewase [Okeus], who, as they report, sucks their blood’.¹¹

Later that day, everyone returned to their houses, as if nothing had happened. Okeus’s work with the Quiyoughcohannock was evidently done, and the frenzied, gruesome mood that had gripped the town was allowed to subside. The smoke of the smouldering town fire carried the wanton spirit away from the houses, through the trees and out on to the river, where it turned towards the bay, following the smell of fresh blood.

On 6 August 1609, a Jamestown settler named John Asbie succumbed to ‘the bloody flux’. His death marked the start of a month of mortality in the English fort.

Sickness and desertion were already rife. Supplies were all but spent. There was nothing left to drink, and in the absence of a working well, the men were forced to use the river, ‘which was at a flood very salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men’.¹²

Rations from the ‘common kettle’ were ‘half a pint of wheat and as much barley boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fried some 26 weeks in the ship’s hold’. This put pressure on other sources of sustenance, including Wingfield’s flock of chickens. Only three survived to peck at the hard ground between the frail tents, when they were not being chased by ravenous labourers.¹³

Responsibility for this sorry state of affairs has traditionally been laid at the feet of the English class system. Unlike the hard-working, clean-living Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in 1620, the ‘gentlemen’ who made up such a large proportion of Jamestown’s population have been portrayed as work-shy fops and dandies who ‘were used to social strata but not to discipline’, and who preferred the ‘narcissistic contemplation of heredity’ to getting their hands dirty.¹⁴

In fact, most of the gentlemen of Jamestown had military backgrounds, and, while some hated the idea of heavy manual labour, they by no means saw themselves as due a life of ease.

Captain John Smith was himself a gentleman, and proud to be called so, advertising in his autobiography that the title had been endorsed by no less a figure than the King of Poland.¹⁵ Most of the others similarly classified had less heredity to contemplate than even Smith. He, at least, had a ‘competent means’ from his father and the patronage of a prominent member of the English nobility. Many had lived hard lives on the battlefields of the Low Countries, France and Ireland, or on the edge of destitution. Some were quite poor, the family of one military captain, for example, boasting an estate worth just twenty shillings.¹⁶ Perhaps one or two were feckless opportunists who preferred to rely on their charm and wits rather than honest toil to make a living. But their behaviour was a consequence of the relative lack of social privilege, not an excess of it. Similarly, they had not crossed the Atlantic and put themselves in the predicament in which they now found themselves because life at home had been so easy, but because it had been so hard.

Smith’s peers, particularly the squabbling council members, may have contributed to the settlement’s first crisis, but even he acknowledged that the damage they caused was collateral. The origin of Jamestown’s woes, at least in these early stages of settlement, lay in the simple lack of food. Calculations for provisioning the expedition had inevitably erred on the side of stinginess, with enough to cover a two-month crossing, and six more months in America while a planting of crops ripened, the fort was built, and trade relations with the Indians were established. According to this timetable, a harvest would be ready by the time the supplies started to run out, which could supplement, and ultimately replace, food bought from the Indians.¹⁷ Unfortunately, the crossing had taken not two months but five. This triggered a cascade of problems: by the time they arrived, the planting season had been all but missed, so there was no hope of a proper harvest in August; the crews of the Susan Constant and the Godspeed, who were due to return to England, had run out of their own supplies, so had to be fed out of the settlement’s store while Newport reconnoitreed the river. This left the settlers fewer than twelve weeks to acclimatize to their new surroundings and become self-sufficient.¹⁸

Both at the time and since, critics have wondered why they could not live off Virginia’s natural resources, given the abundance apparently at their disposal. Smith, Archer, Percy and countless successors boasted about the fat vines and fruitful trees, the nuts and berries, the deer running through the forest and the rodents scampering in the undergrowth, the sturgeon in the river and the oysters on the shore. Could that not feed a hundred or so men, in the middle of summer? The Indians’ own experience demonstrates otherwise. Hunting, fishing and scavenging, which they performed with astonishing efficiency, provided only a third of their daily needs, averaged out over the year; the other two thirds coming from their staple crop of cultivated corn and beans. The English, being in an alien environment, were bound to rely on a staple crop to provide a much higher proportion of their diet – four fifths at least, which meant finding between one and two tons of corn every week, just to survive.¹⁹

Back in June, there had been hopes that the Indians would make up the deficit. A messenger had arrived at the fort, claiming to be an emissary of the ‘Great Powhatan’. The mamanatowick wanted peace with the English, and ‘desired greatly’ their friendship. Furthermore, he had commanded all attacks on the fort to cease, so that the English ‘should sow and reap in peace’. If any Indians ignored this command, he would, he pledged, ‘make wars upon them with us’. ‘This message fell out true,’ Wingfield later observed, ‘for both those weroances have ever since remained in peace and trade with us.’ It was soon after this that Wingfield had been approached by the Quiyoughcohannock chief Chaopock, promising peace and offering food supplies in the autumn, for which Wingfield offered him his red waistcoat, knowing English clothes to be among the possessions most prized by the Indians.

However, peace with the Indians did not yield the hoped-for influx of food. Skirmishes continued with the Paspahegh, and a high level of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding made trading difficult with more distant towns.

By August, each man was receiving fewer than five hundred calories in his daily ration, and the result was a lethal combination of rampant disease and seething discontent. Rumours began to spread that some of the gentlemen, in particular the suspiciously healthy Wingfield, were hoarding private supplies. There was talk of the council hiding a stash of oil and alcoholic drink, and of the councillors’ ‘privates’ or favourites getting preferential treatment. One of the gentlemen, Jehu (or John) Robinson, was accused by Wingfield of plotting to seize the shallop and escape with associates to Newfoundland.

As the death toll began to rise, it became clear that social status provided little protection. Percy kept a doleful muster of the dead for those summer months, and it makes solemn reading: John Asbie, the first casualty, was followed two days later by George Flower, gentleman, who died ‘of the swelling’. Next was William Brewster, ‘of a wound given by the savages’, who was buried on 11 August.

August 14 was one of the worst days. Francis Midwinter, gentleman, and Edward Morris, ‘corporal’, died ‘suddenly’, and Jerome Alicock, the settlement’s standard-bearer, was dispatched by a ‘wound’. A skeleton with a bullet-shattered shin was dug up at Jamestown nearly four hundred years later, raising speculation that it may have been Alicock. Another candidate is the following day’s casualty: Stephen Calthorp, the man who had been accused of instigating the ‘intended and confessed mutiny’ involving Captain Smith.²⁰

Over the following three days, four more settlers died, including John Martin, son of councilman John Martin senior. Martin senior had been confined to his tent for some time, his various ailments making him too weak to leave his sickbed. But bitterness over the death of his child stirred him into action, and he accused Wingfield of ‘defrauding’ his son of the rations he needed to survive.

A day later, Drew Pickhouse, an impoverished former Sussex MP, followed the others into a makeshift grave. He had hoped to find good fortune abroad, having lost his estate at home following a legal dispute with a local aristocrat. He had left behind a wife and eleven children, presumably in rented accommodation. They would not learn of his and their fate for another eleven months.²¹

A two-day respite did not prepare the settlers for the most distressing death of all: that of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold on 22 August, after three weeks of illness. Just before Newport had taken his leave of the settlement to return to England, President Wingfield had confided that he feared only two rivals taking over the presidency, that ‘ambitious spirit’ Archer, who ‘would if he could’, and Gosnold, who was so ‘strong with friends and followers’ he ‘could if he would’. Now he could not, depriving the settlers of the one man who seemed to command the confidence and respect that might lead them out of their troubles and miseries.

The next day, flocks of birds burst into the air as the boom of Jamestown’s huge culverins saluted Gosnold’s burial. He was interred with full military honours in a grave next to the river. A week later, Thomas Studley, the ‘cape merchant’ responsible for trade with the Indians, followed him.

The gloom lifted briefly when a ‘boy’, one of the ‘renegades’, was returned by the Paspahegh chief, with ‘the first assurance of his peace with us’. But it was not enough to prevent the council’s long-expected disintegration.

Under the stress of malnutrition, surviving council members began to argue violently with one another, as the conviction formed that there was a saboteur in their midst. All the suspicions and sectarianism that they had thought they had left behind them, suddenly and violently erupted in the midst of their misery.

Kendall was the first to be accused. It somehow emerged that he was a spy who had consorted with Sir William Stanley, a renegade English captain who had switched to the Spanish side in the Low Countries campaign. Kendall’s remonstrations that he had been working undercover for Cecil, and revelations that there were others on the council who were doing the same, were not enough to save him from being arrested for such ‘heinous matters’.²²

Kendall’s incarceration failed to produce an improvement in conditions, and the hungry eye of suspicion began to glance around the remaining council members. It came to rest on the plump form of President Wingfield, who seemed to be surviving the privations of recent weeks suspiciously well. His regular refusal to attend Robert Hunt’s alfresco services also raised doubts about his religious loyalties. The other three active members of the council, John Ratcliffe, John Smith and John Martin, voted for him to be removed from the council. His replacement as president, Ratcliffe, then arrested him for a list of crimes against the colony carefully tabulated by Gabriel Archer, who was still smarting at his own exclusion from the council. Wingfield was swiftly tried, and confined to the pinnace following the inevitable sentence of guilt.

But with each allegation, the paranoia intensified rather than diminished, and now a wave of rumours about Ratcliffe spread through the camp. Old questions about his unexpected selection as a commander of the fleet, and nomination to the council, began to take on a new significance. Who was this man who had so skilfully manoeuvred himself into such a powerful position? Where did he come from? Was he the Ratcliffe who, like Kendall, had acted as a spy in the Low Countries, penetrating, or perhaps being a member of, a powerful Catholic cell? Or was he the Ratcliffe who had been imprisoned in the Tower alongside Guy Fawkes following the Gunpowder Plot? Or the Ratcliffe who was a close friend of Cecil’s cryptographer and secretary Richard Percival?²³

Kendall, who in the chaos of the camp had manage to get access to other members of the council, had his own scurrilous answers to such questions, and by sharing them, hardened speculation that it was Ratcliffe who, all along, was the source of their sorrows.

A group of men, Percy and Smith among them, began to agitate for Ratcliffe’s removal. They proposed that the blacksmith James Read, who had access to the pinnace to maintain the metal fittings, approach Wingfield to see if he would back a plot to restore him to the presidency.

Ratcliffe learned of these intrigues, and gave Read a public thrashing for his ‘misdemeanour’. The smith, a qualified craftsman rather than a manual worker, considered someone of his status deserved more respectful treatment, and ‘offered’ to strike the president with his sledgehammer in return.

Once again, the rotting canvas of the settlement’s tents became the walls of a makeshift courtroom, and the stump of a tree the judge’s bench, as Read was tried for mutiny. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Permanent gallows were among the many fixtures of a settled community that the company still lacked, so a rope was tied to the branch of a tree and a ladder propped against the trunk, to be kicked away once the noose was around the neck of the condemned. When it came to carrying out the sentence, the blacksmith was naturally ‘very obstinate’, and put up a fight. Finally, he was forced up the ladder, where ‘he saw no other way but death with him’, and became ‘penitent’. He begged for a word with Ratcliffe regarding a private matter.

Ratcliffe granted his request, and the smith revealed to him details of Kendall’s involvement in a plot to restore Wingfield. Ratcliffe granted Read a pardon, and, for reasons yet to be disclosed to the rest of the company, ordered Kendall’s immediate arrest and confinement aboard the pinnace, alongside Wingfield.

In the midst of this turmoil, Smith replaced the late Thomas Studley as cape merchant. In his view, this put him in charge of dealing with the Indians, and eager to escape the broils tearing the company apart, he set off on a number of expeditions up the James, to trade for fresh supplies. Even Wingfield was impressed with the captain’s vigour and dedication to the task, which at this time of direst need ‘relieved the colony well’.

Smith faced formidable obstacles. Few men were in a fit state to accompany him, they were all inadequately equipped, none was proficient in the local language, and Smith lacked the skills of a mariner to sail the shallop. But, ever willing to confront overwhelming difficulties with confident resolve, he set off downriver, heading for Kecoughtan, at the mouth of the James.

His reception by the people of Kecoughtan was very different from the one received by Newport when the fleet first arrived. As his boat approached the shore, Smith claimed he was ‘scorned’ like a ‘famished man’, the Indians offering him ‘in derision … a handful of corn, a piece of bread for their swords and muskets, and suchlike proportions also for their apparel’. In typically boisterous style, Smith drove the boat on to the beach, and ordered his men to ‘let fly’ their muskets, even though he knew this was ‘contrary to his commission,’ as set out in the Royal Council’s instructions. The Kecoughtans melted away into the woods.

Smith headed towards the village, passing what he claimed to be ‘great heaps of corn’, recently harvested from the surrounding fields. Then he heard a ‘most hideous noise’. Sixty or seventy villagers, ‘some black, some red, some white, some parti-coloured, came in a square order, singing and dancing out of the woods’. They carried before them what Smith saw as a diabolical doll ‘which was an idol made of skins stuffed with moss, all painted and hung with chains and copper’. Smith thought it was Okeus, the most powerful god of the Powhatan pantheon, who another English observer noted could look ‘into all men’s actions and, examining the same according to the severe scale of justice, punisheth them with sicknesses, beats them, and strikes their ripe corn with blastings, storms, and thunderclaps, stirs up war, and makes their women false unto them’.²⁴ If it was Okeus, his appearance in such a manner, before the Otasantasuwak, the wearer of leg coverings, was unprecedented. This god, the English were later told, had prophesied their coming to Virginia, and his appearance now must have been designed to stage a momentous confrontation: to frighten the invaders off, perhaps, or possibly the opposite: to lure them in, integrate them into the Powhatan world, to see what havoc they would wreak.

Smith at this moment had little interest in spiritual speculations, and ordered his men to attack the oncoming parade ‘with their muskets loaden with pistol shot’ until ‘down fell their god, and divers lay sprawling on the ground’. Smith snatched the idol, and the Indians disappeared into the woods. Presently, a priest approached offering peace for the return of the okee. Smith told them if six of them came unarmed and loaded his boat, he would ‘not only be their friend, but restore them their okee, and give them beads, copper’. This the Kecoughtans did, according to Smith, loading his boat with venison, turkeys, wildfowl and corn, while ‘singing and dancing in sign of friendship’.²⁵

Smith set off back for Jamestown, congratulating himself that his more robust approach to Indian relations was already paying dividends. En route, he stopped off at Warraskoyack, a few miles upstream of Kecoughtan, on the opposite bank of the river. There he managed to extract some more corn, a total, he claimed, of thirty bushels, getting on for a ton.

Back at the fort, he distributed the corn, but found that the thanks and appreciation he felt he deserved were muffled by the ravenous stuffing of mouths.

In any case, this was no long-term solution. Thirty bushels of corn would feed forty or so men for four or five days. With barely two weeks’ worth of food left of the store brought from England, a more drastic solution was called for.

According to Smith, Ratcliffe suggested that he take the pinnace back to England ‘to procure a supply’. Memories were still fresh of Ratcliffe’s proposal that the fleet return home even as it was on the threshold of Chesapeake Bay, and to Smith this new idea suggested some darker design, perhaps to deprive the colony of its only means of escape. After the inevitable bout of violent argument, it was agreed that instead the pinnace and shallop should be taken upriver to the falls, in the hope that sufficient supplies could be extracted, violently or otherwise, from the Indian villages sitting among those fertile lands. ‘Lots were cast’ to decide who would command the expedition, and the lots somehow contrived to make the obvious selection of Smith.

The mariners set about rigging the pinnace, an operation that would take a few days, as the ship’s masts and sails had been stowed in the fort to prevent it being taken. Meanwhile, Smith continued his search for food. He set off in the shallop for Quiyoughcohannock. He found the village abandoned, except for ‘certain women and children who fled from their houses’. ‘Corn they had plenty,’ Smith observed, but he had no commission to ‘spoil’ or loot, so he left the village unmolested. On the return journey to Jamestown, he visited Paspahegh. With the English settlement now so firmly entrenched on their land, relations with these people were still bad. Smith described them as ‘churlish and treacherous’, and accused them of trying to steal English weapons as he traded for ten bushels of corn.

The pinnace was now ready for the expedition to the falls, and, arranging to rendezvous with the ship by the next tide at Point Weanock, Smith set off in the shallop to explore the Chickahominy, the tributary of the James.

He left Jamestown on the morning of 9 November, and reached Paspahegh, at the confluence of the James and Chickahominy, that afternoon. The tide was low, so the captain and his company of eight or so men waited at the Indian village. As evening approached, an Indian from one of the villages along the Chickahominy came to Paspahegh and offered to guide the English up the river. The Paspaheghans ‘grudged thereat’. Smith, observing an opportunity to snub his ungrateful hosts, accepted the invitation. By the light of the moon, he took the shallop up the Chickahominy, reaching Menascosic, his guide’s village, by midnight. ‘The next morning,’ Smith records, ‘I went up to the town and showed them what copper and hatchets they should have for corn, each family seeking to give me most content.’

According to Smith, the people of Menascosic would have sold him all the corn he wanted, but ‘lest they should perceive my too great want’, he refused further offers, and continued upriver looking for other people to trade with, passing along the way a grove of plane trees ‘watered with many springs’, and ‘a great marsh of 4 or 5 miles circuit, divided in 2 islands by the parting of the river, abounding with fish and fowl of all sorts’. Further on he discovered a series of villages, ‘at each place kindly used, especially at the last’, which was Mamanahunt, ‘being the heart of the country, where were assembled 200 people with such abundance of corn as having laded our barge as also I might have laded a ship’. Smith triumphantly set off back to Jamestown, his sojourn vindicated by seven hogsheads of food, equivalent to nearly fifty bushels, at least a week’s supply.

The shallop arrived at Jamestown in the middle of the night. As it slipped through the water of the river towards the flickering beacon of the fort’s night watch, Smith noticed something odd. The pinnace, which should have used the high tide to sail upstream for the intended rendezvous, was marooned on a sandbank near the fort.²⁶

The sun rose the following morning upon a settlement once more in the throes of mutiny. Having managed to ‘strengthen’ himself with the ship’s crew, Kendall had hijacked the pinnace, and set sail for Spain, in order to reveal to King Philip ‘all about this country and many plans of the English which he knew’. He was somehow prevented, incompetent navigation or the crew’s intervention driving the ship on to the mud.

Kendall was removed from the pinnace, tried for mutiny, and sentenced to death by firing squad. In a desperate attempt to escape his punishment, he revealed what only a former Cecil agent would know: that the president, in whose name the sentence was passed, was not called Ratcliffe. He had been operating under an alias all the time. His real name was John Sicklemore.

This revelation added yet a further layer of mystery to this heavily laminated individual. Sicklemore was a name much rarer than Ratcliffe, and he may have been forced to abandon it following some crime or indiscretion. In the State papers of the time, the only Sicklemore of note was a Catholic priest operating under the alias John Ward. As part of the Gunpowder Plot investigation, he was discovered to be conducting secret Masses in a series of households in Northumberland – curiously including a family named Ratcliffe. But that Sicklemore was thought to have escaped to the Continent.²⁷ Could a further change of identity somehow have transformed a papist agitator into a colonial adventurer?

Speculation was pointless. The gravity of Kendall’s crimes made Ratcliffe’s name change seem a mere technicality, and Gabriel Archer, who had now emerged as the president’s most loyal lieutenant, had the legal training and natural cunning to circumvent pseudonymity. Under the Royal Council’s instructions, Ratcliffe could delegate his judicial powers to fellow councilior John Martin, whose name was his own. So it was Martin who condemned Kendall to death, and a few days later, the prisoner was led out of the fort and shot.²⁸

These events once more threw the council into disarray, prompting further efforts to reinstate Wingfield, led by a group of ‘best sort of the gentlemen’. Wingfield refused to countenance the idea whilst Ratcliffe and Archer were still at large, and when efforts to arraign them failed, he attempted to commandeer the pinnace so he could sail to England and ‘acquaint our [Royal] Council there with our weakness’. Smith claims to have stopped him with rounds of musket and cannon fire, which forced him to ‘stay or sink in the river’.²⁹

This all happened during November 1607. The onset of winter, which was colder than the English had expected after such a hot summer, brought an unexpected bounty of food. ‘The rivers became so covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowl, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them,’ reported Smith. It was such a cornucopia even the ‘Tuftaffaty humourists’ Martin, Ratcliffe, Wingfield and Percy, lost interest in returning to England.

To take advantage of the sudden increase, and perhaps because the pinnace was not currently serviceable, Smith decided upon one further expedition up the Chickahominy in the shallop, this time with the intention of reaching its source. Smith still harboured hopes of discovering a navigable way to the South Sea, and wondered whether the Chickahominy might bypass the geological obstacle that blocked the James at the falls.

He left on 10 December, taking with him Thomas Emry, Jehu Robinson, George Casson and three or four others.

Sometime in late November or early December, as the warmth of autumn subsided into a bitterly cold winter, William White found himself in the midst of another outburst of activity, as the Quiyoughcohannock started packing mats, hides, weapons and supplies in preparation for an expedition.

All the men, including White, and several of the women, set off with their luggage to the river, where they loaded up a fleet of long canoes. They were joined on the bank by the deposed Quiyoughcohannock Chief Pipisco, together with his ‘best-beloved’, the wife he had ‘stolen’ from Opechancanough. Under the relaxed terms of Pipisco’s exile, the couple was allowed to travel ‘in hunting time’.³⁰

The entire troupe boarded the canoes, and set off down the James. Arriving at Paspahegh, they turned up the Chickahominy tributary, heading north-west, continuing forty or so miles upstream, the waterway becoming almost impassable beneath a canopy of low branches and fallen trees. Eventually, as the river course approached a series of cataracts, the fleet drew up on the northern bank and disembarked. Close by, in a woodland clearing, they set up a large encampment, comprising forty or so tents made of sapling branches covered with mats. They named the camp ‘Rassaweck’, which was to be their base for a series of hunting expeditions, the deer being more plentiful in this remote area of the forest, at the hem of the foothills leading into the great western mountain range.

They were joined by people from villages near and far, and by Opechancanough. White observed the man dismissed by the English as a pompous fool being received at the camp as a great general, attended by twenty guards in the finest garb, brandishing swords made of bone edged with slivers of precious rock.

Conditions in the camp were challenging. The cold was ‘extreme sharp’, and a freezing north-west wind whipped through the makeshift dwellings. The Indians seemed unaffected, claiming that their red body paint, made from the root pocone mixed with oil, made them impervious (this, not their natural complexion, was the reason they became known as ‘red’ Indians). To an Englishman, still clad in the summer clothes he had been wearing when he absconded, or wearing the scant Indian garments he had been forced to adopt since, thoughts might have started to stray to the warmth of a winter coat and even a settler’s cabin.³¹

A week into December 1607, the mood in the camp suddenly became agitated. After a flurry of activity around Opechancanough’s tent, a group of warriors entered the camp, dragging with them a captive Englishman. White recognized him as George Casson, one of three Cassons, probably brothers, who had accompanied him on the journey from England.

The man White now beheld was not the one who just a year ago had stood alongside him on the dockside at Deptford, awaiting departure to the New World. He was undernourished, badly injured and terrified for his life. For some reason, he had aroused fury in his captors. They violently jostled him towards the campfire, where Opechancanough awaited him.

White was an obvious candidate to act as interpreter in the subsequent interrogation. Casson, it transpired, had been caught at Appocant, a village lower down the Chickahominy. The vessel used by the English for exploration had been found anchored there, with Casson left on board to guard it. He had been ‘enticed’ ashore by some women from the village, and then captured.³² The reaction of his captors suggested he might have attacked or even raped one of the women.

Opechancanough was already aware that one of the English captains had entered his territory. This Otasantasuwak or one-who-wears-trousers had come into the Powhatan heartlands not with the stealth of an Indian, but like a lumbering pachyderm, crashing through the trees, scattering flocks of birds and herds of woodland creatures before him. The same man had already engaged in several raids up the James and Chickahominy for food, Quiyoughcohannock being among the targets.³³

Casson had little more to add, other than pathetic appeals for clemency, and the name of the captain: John Smith. This information extracted, he was stripped of his clothes until he stood naked before the gathering assembly of men, women and children, his front frozen by the winter chill, his back heated by the crackling fire. Two wooden stakes were driven into the ground either side of him, to which his ankles and wrists were bound.

Opechancanough continued to interrogate the terrified captive about this captain’s intentions. A warrior or priest then approached, brandishing mussel shells and reeds. Using the edges of the shells as blades, and the reeds as cheese-wires, the executioner systematically set about cutting through the flesh and sinews of Casson’s joints, stretched out between the staves. As each of his limbs was removed, it was cast upon the fire, until only his head and trunk were left, writhing helplessly on the blood-soaked ground.

Turning the torso over, so Casson faced the ground, the executioner carefully cut a slit around the neck, then slipped a mussel shell beneath the skin. He proceeded to ease off the scalp, and, turning the body back over again, gently unpeeled Casson’s face from the skull. He then slit open Casson’s abdomen, and pulled out his stomach and bowels, which steamed in the cold winter air. Casson’s remains then joined the rest of his body to burn on the fire, until only his dried bones were left, which, according to White, were gathered up and deposited in a ‘by-room’ in one of the tents.³⁴

The punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered was well-known in Europe, being reserved as retribution for the worst crimes against the monarch. The Indian equivalent was, if anything, more refined in its brutal theatricality. It was not the usual form of capital punishment (murderers were beaten to death with sticks, thieves knocked on the head), and there are only two instances of its use recorded in Virginia. It may have been reserved for foreigners, or for particular crimes, or, in the case of Casson, to be witnessed by an outsider – a lurid warning to share with his countrymen when, in terror, he ran back to them.³⁵

White trekked or canoed the difficult twenty-five miles from Rassaweck to Jamestown, and staggered into the fort to find not the refuge he would have hoped for, but a midden of disease and destitution. The council was too weak to discipline the young man. Instead he was debriefed, in the hope that his experience of life with the Indians would reveal their motives and intentions. The terrifying finale of Casson’s torture and execution demonstrated that such hopes were in vain.

Soon after, members of Smith’s party somehow made their way back to the fort with news that they had lost contact not only with several members of their company, but Smith himself, who had disappeared further upriver in a canoe. A search party was sent soon after to discover Smith’s fate, and returned with the corpses of Emry and Robinson, the latter found with as many as thirty arrows in his body. Of Smith, there was no sign. The settlers must have feared – and some of them hoped – for the worst.

At around the same time, Ratcliffe appointed Gabriel Archer to the council. He did this without John Martin’s consent, and despite howls of protest coming from Wingfield’s cabin in the pinnace.

The winter had by now set in with a vengeance, the onset, research has subsequently revealed, of a ‘Little Ice Age’ that plunged the northern hemisphere into one of the coldest spells for centuries. In London, one of the Thames’s rare ‘frost fairs’ was in progress, the river freezing over so firmly that innumerable booths were soon to be found ‘standing upon the ice, as fruitsellers, victuallers, that sold beer and wine, shoe makers and a barber’s tent’.³⁶ Virginia was on the same latitude as southern Spain, and the English had assumed the climate would be similarly Mediterranean. Now they were learning otherwise, and as they endured the bitter night frosts in their drafty tents, and snow flurries during the day, most assumed Smith must have died of exposure, if he had not been tortured and killed by the Indians.³⁷

One particularly cold day, when the ground was encrusted by a thick hoar frost and snow danced in the air, three lightly clad warriors stepped nimbly out of the forest and approached the fort. Guards chased them off, but as night fell, they returned, and were discovered to be carrying a piece of paper torn from a notebook. It bore a message from Smith.

The note revealed that Opechancanough, the chief Archer had dismissed as a fool at ‘Pamunkey’s Palace’, had taken him prisoner. Smith wrote that he had been offered ‘life, liberty, land and women’ if he provided information on Jamestown’s defensive weaknesses, which must mean that a full-scale attack on the fort was being planned. He ordered the soldiers to let off some of the field artillery, to demonstrate to the messengers the strength of English arms.

The message also listed a series of articles which the messengers were to take back with them. They had been told before their departure what had been asked for, so were intrigued to see these very items produced, as though Smith ‘could either divine or the paper could speak’.³⁸

As Ratcliffe, Martin, Percy and the others watched the messengers run back into the forest, the camp was seized by a sense of common purpose. A thorough review of defences was ordered. A gruelling roster was drawn up for the watch, each man bearing arms to serve once every three days, watching all night ‘lying on the bare cold ground, what weather soever came’, and all the following day, ‘which brought our men to be most feeble wretches’. Smith’s expeditions up the Chickahominy, one or two undertaken by Martin, and the abundance of fish and waterfowl had eased the food situation, allowing some further reinforcement of the fort’s defences, as well as the construction of a few huts and common buildings.

On 2 January 1608, a company of warriors came out from the woods, two carrying baskets, another a coat and a knapsack, another walking alongside an Englishman. Even in the gloomy dawn of a January morning, guards could tell from the stocky frame and bushy beard that the Englishman was John Smith, and that the men around him were not captors, but an escort.³⁹

Smith marched into the fort and immediately ordered the guard to fetch a millstone and two demi-culverins for the Indians to take home. Puzzled at what on the face of it was a violation of the instruction preventing the Indians having access to English arms, they duly produced the items, and Smith was able to amuse himself as the Indians struggled to lift the stone and five tons of cannon. Once they had given up, he ordered that the culverins be charged and loaded with stones. They were fired into a nearby copse of trees ‘loaded with icicles’, and the ‘ice and branches came so tumbling down that the poor savages ran away half dead with fear’.

Smith’s dramatic reappearance provoked a mixed response. ‘Each man with the truest signs of joy they could express welcomed me,’ was Smith’s recollection, ‘except Master Archer and some 2 or 3 of his [friends].’ Archer, exercising his questionable powers as a councillor, called for Smith’s arrest ‘for the lives of Robinson and Emry’, the two men killed by the Indians while accompanying Smith into the upper reaches of the Chickahominy.⁴⁰

Archer insisted that Smith be tried for the charges ‘upon a chapter in Leviticus’. This curious choice of legal device hints that Smith, who had returned full of excited talk of pagan rites, comely queens and Indian embraces, was suspected of some sexual impropriety with his captors, which provided a pretext for avenging the death of his two companions.⁴¹

Whatever the purpose behind the charges, they resulted in Smith being tried the day of his return. He was pronounced guilty, and in sentencing denied even the dignity of a soldier’s death before a firing squad. The rope was once more flung over the tree branch, the ladder once more propped up against the trunk. ‘But it pleased God,’ wrote Wingfield, ‘to send Captain Newport unto us the same evening, to our unspeakable comforts; whose arrival saved Master Smith’s life.’