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Chapter 1

Heavy Heads: Crowning Kings in Early Virginia

On a placid morning in October 1608, Christopher Newport pushed off from the shore of the York River and pointed his boat toward Werowocomoco, the seat of the Powhatan chiefdom. It had been more than a year since his first journey inland, the one that had culminated in the great shout and the treaty with the river king. Since that time, much had happened. The English had traded with some Indians, fought with others, and established diplomatic relations with Powhatan, the paramount chief of the bay. Yet as Newport landed on the opposite shore of the river and his men began to unpack their barges, it immediately became clear that this was not a routine visit. Treading carefully so as not to lose their footing in the mud, they carried ashore a washbasin painted with the royal insignia of James I, a scarlet cloak made of wool, a decorative pitcher, an English bedstead, and finally a copper crown, burnished to a rosy shine.

A letter from London explained the purpose of this unusual cargo. On the king’s authority, it commanded Newport to recruit Powhatan into an alliance with the English crown. The plan included an elaborate protocol modeled on the ceremonies through which European lords created vassals, or feudal landholders.¹ Newport was to stage a ritual coronation of Powhatan, deputizing him as a local authority while confirming his subjection to James I. The washbasin, bedstead, and cloak signified English goodwill. The crown, bestowed on the Indian king in a ceremony, would confirm his agreement in the matter.²

On paper, the mission seemed simple enough: awe the chief with gifts and induce him to kneel and receive the crown. But what happened next became the subject of a debate that extended far beyond the Chesapeake Bay. According to a written account published by the Virginia Company, the joint-stock venture that financed settlement, the ceremony was a success.³ Powhatan, the “Emperour” of the Powhatans, stooped and “received voluntarilie a crowne and a scepter,” a gesture that “licensed” the English “to negotiate among them, and to possesse their countrie with them.”⁴ But other observers came forward to challenge this version of events. Soldiers and secretaries scribbled their own accounts of the crowning on notepaper. These, too, made their way to London, and were eventually published in a compilation of reports entitled The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1612). This book described the coronation as a botched affair. Powhatan had refused to recognize the subject status conferred by the crown, instead interpreting the ceremony as English recognition of his power. The all-important stoop had been coerced; the English had resorted to leaning on his shoulders to place the crown on his head. Worse yet, a cannon fusillade meant to commemorate the peace had frightened the Indians, scattering Powhatan’s entourage and leading to shouted accusations of an ambush. The ceremony had been a catastrophe.

Still other accounts circulated through international channels. Frances Magnel, an Irish laborer living in Jamestown, also witnessed or heard about the coronation. He traveled to Madrid, where he gave a deposition to an Irish Catholic archbishop, who translated it into Castilian and secretly conveyed it to the Spanish crown.⁵ If the Virginia Company cited the bow to confirm English rights to rule New World territory, the uncertain outcome of the ceremony called into question the very legality of the settlement. Pedro de Zúñiga, a Spanish ambassador, was “amused” that the English were treating Indians like princes. He fiercely disputed the claim that they could establish rightful possession through such ceremonies. The colonists, he wrote in a letter to Philip III, were merely using negotiations with Indians to give an appearance of legality to attempts to “carry on piracy” against Spanish ships.⁶ As reports spread, Powhatan’s response took on increasing significance for international agreements with Spain.

In Powhatan’s stoop to receive the crown, Christopher Newport found confirmation of English power in the New World. In the chief’s scowls and angry words, Newport’s rivals at home and abroad saw an exposure of English weakness, even a challenge to the legal basis of English settlement. Newport’s attempted crowning of Powhatan was one of many treaty ceremonies conducted between colonists and Powhatans during the early years of Virginia colonization. And like other such ceremonies, it had consequences well beyond the coast. The crowning inspired clashing reports, stories, and rumors that spread throughout the bay, the colonial Atlantic, and the channels of diplomatic communication that connected European crowns.⁷ The transmission of these stories across space and time reflected complex alliances and agendas. English, Spanish, Irish, and Native people all retold the story in different ways in order to advance competing visions of political order. As Powhatan and Newport faced off over the crown, they were acutely aware that it was only the first engagement in a longer struggle over the meaning of the ceremony, one waged through stories as well as rituals.

This chapter considers political negotiations between English and Powhatan peoples in early Virginia. It examines how treaty ceremonies involving Native leaders influenced European debates about territorial possession. Existing scholarly accounts have examined how English colonists used written treaties to give an appearance of legality to the theft of Native land. These accounts have argued that the English disregarded indigenous political systems and sought to impose written forms of political documentation on Native peoples. This chapter sets out to revise that picture. The English crown financed colonial ventures in order to acquire control of territory. This meant claiming Indian lands. But as I will show here, this did not mean rejecting Natives’ right to speak for themselves. Indeed, according to many early modern understandings of the law of nations, Christian princes could acquire control over territory through the creation of treaty agreements with pagans. In order to establish claims in this way, the English needed to capture the voluntary consent of Native people according to consensus ad idem, a legal criterion deriving from Roman law. Consensus ad idem required that treaties should represent a “meeting of the minds,” or voluntary agreement between parties. To this end, the English crown instructed colonists to “entreate” Native people and send home written accounts of Native alliances.⁸ On some occasions, these treaties were formatted like European-style articles of agreement, but more often they came in the form of narratives and letters describing ritual performances, such as orations, exchanges of gifts, or crowning ceremonies. By setting down these acts in writing, the English sought to show that Native people had given newcomers permission to settle on or near their land, or had transferred sovereignty to them altogether, making them masters of the coast.

This chapter describes how different ways of making treaties came to support conflicting assertions of ownership and power in the Chesapeake Bay. Most of the bay was controlled by Powhatan, a hereditary sachem. Born with the name Wahunsunacawh, Powhatan had inherited power over several tribes and conquered several others. At some point during his conquests, he had assumed the name Powhatan as a title recognizing his supreme authority. By using this title as his name, the English showed their respect for his power, yet there was also strategy behind their choice. In calling him Powhatan, the English conflated the chief with his people, known as the Powhatans, and authorized him to make treaties on their behalf. In reality, Powhatan’s territory, known as Tsenacomoco to the people who lived there, was a turbulent and divided world. Powhatan was closely allied with the tribes nearest to his seat at Werowocomoco, but was frequently at odds with those on the periphery of his holdings. These friendships and conflicts were mediated by complex and evolving practices for marking alliance and affiliation. Powhatans formed political agreements through exchanges of gifts, elaborate speeches, and ceremonial feasts. These bonds were often described as symbolic kinship alliances between fathers, brothers, and sons. Yet even as kinship metaphors suggested intimate links between peoples, they masked a violent reality. Powhatan frequently used force to compel tribute or labor from subjects, even destroying entire families or kin groups when it suited his purposes.⁹

When settlers first arrived in the Chesapeake Bay, they were usually compelled to negotiate on Powhatan terms. They listened to orations, feasted and danced with Powhatans, offered gifts of tribute, including English goods and animals, and even exchanged captives, giving Powhatan an English boy, Thomas Savage, in exchange for a Powhatan boy named Namontack.¹⁰ In this chapter, I will describe how such exchanges led to conflicting accounts of Native consent to treaties. I begin by reprising my discussion of Gabriel Archer’s “A relatyon of the Discovery of our River, from James Forte into the Maine” (1607). In the “Relatyon,” Archer, the official “Recorder” or secretary of the Virginia Colony, documents Jamestown’s first diplomatic negotiations with the Powhatans. Archer depicts the New World as a political order of monarchies, much like Europe, and in many ways his relation resembles European diplomatic writings. Archer describes how the English make treaties with the peoples they encounter, entering into alliances with sovereign kings. Yet there is one key difference. Archer reports that Native people make treaties through acts of tribute rather than signatures or vows. While language barriers separate the English and the Powhatans, he claims that coastal practices such as exchanging gifts or standing in the presence of authorities can express consent to treaty arrangements. By describing such protocols, Archer tries to show that the Indians have granted legitimacy to the English presence. The embassy culminates in Powhatan authorities crowning Newport, an act Archer interprets as Powhatan recognition of English power.

Archer’s account reflected many of the assumptions about pliant Indians that were common during the Elizabethan era. However, his narrative arrived in London with stories of mismanagement, starvation, and war. In response to these developments, the colony’s governing council in London installed new leadership and commanded the colonists to take a new approach to coastal diplomacy. Now, the colonists would bring war against Powhatan, while seeking to form alliances with tribes at the outskirts of his control. This shift in policy required a new set of legal justifications, as well as new models of diplomacy that could secure treaties at the edges of Tsenacomoco while the colonists waged war against Powhatan and his allies. Among the most prominent colonists to respond to these new imperatives was Captain John Smith, a former president of the colony. In two books published together, A Map of Virginia and The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1612), Smith attacks the diplomatic approach to Indian treaties publicized by Archer and puts forward his own model of treaty making. While Archer depicts the Powhatans peacefully consenting to the English presence with welcoming gestures and gifts, Smith’s books argue that the Indians’ outward shows of welcome have only given cover to acts of pillage and ambush. Adopting a skeptical attitude toward diplomacy, Smith argues that the Powhatans’ ceremonial gestures offer little access to their true intentions. Assembling his book from reports by soldiers, Smith argues for a political order based on violent threats and forced subjection rather than mutual recognition. Paradoxically, Smith portrays threats as a way of achieving the forms of voluntary agreement that straightforward diplomacy cannot.

Anglo-Powhatan alliances were not just a subject of controversy in English colonial government. A number of England’s rivals spied on Jamestown and its negotiations with surrounding groups. Among the most vocal was Pedro de Zúñiga, Spanish ambassador to James I during the early years of the Jamestown settlement. In his letters, Zúñiga attacks the legality of English settlement by exposing what he believes is the fraudulent nature of Powhatan treaty ceremonies. In secret correspondence with the Spanish crown, he points to intercepted reports of Powhatan resistance as evidence that Jamestown is an illegal settlement and should be destroyed.

Parties with many different agendas told stories about Powhatan diplomacy. Standing behind all of them, however, were the words and gestures of the Powhatans themselves. While Europeans framed Native ceremonies for their own ends, Powhatan likewise told stories about his interactions with the English, which were occasionally recorded by English observers. In the concluding section of the chapter, I will consider what colonial records can tell us about Powhatan’s intentions.

Alliance and Discovery: Archer’s “Relatyon”

“[Pawatah] (very well understanding by the wordes and signes we made; the significatyon of our meaning) moved of his owne accord a leauge of fryndship with us.”¹¹ Gabriel Archer’s “Relatyon” culminates with “the greate kyng Powatah” (Archer’s spelling of Powhatan) spontaneously offering a treaty alliance to Jamestown leaders.¹² The moment dramatizes the great king’s consent to the English presence. But Archer also seems worried that his version of events might not be believed on the other side of the Atlantic. Archer’s narrative is interspersed with parenthetical asides that translate the Indian’s words into English and assure the reader that he means what he says. The scene concludes with a final act of tribute that provides added proof of his sincerity: “for concluding therof, [Pawatah] gave [Newport] his gowne, put it on his back himselfe, and laying his hand on his breast saying Wingapoh Chemuze (the most kynde wordes of salutatyon that may be) he satt downe.”¹³ If doubts about the “understanding” between Newport and the king remain, the gift of the gown, complete with dramatic embrace, surely removes them. Hand on his heart, the king makes plain his love for the English in his own language, helpfully translated by Archer. Who could be skeptical, even thousands of miles away?

The moment is a surprising conclusion for a document identified, in a neat secretary hand at the top of its first page, as the story of a “discovery.” Narratives of discovery were a common product of state-sponsored explorations of uncharted territory in the New World, Africa, and the Far East. Spanish and Portuguese settlers published discoveries to make claims to land unexplored by other Europeans. English travelers in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras imitated this literary tradition, circulating their own accounts of the discovery of the North Atlantic coast.¹⁴ But Archer departs from the conventions of the genre in a significant way. While the James River is not controlled by any Christian prince, it is far from empty. Indeed, Virginia is under the jurisdiction of a figure identified, familiarly enough, as a king. And while Archer describes river peoples as “Salvages,” he finds their king sitting in state and conducting diplomacy in much the same manner as the Christian princes of Europe.¹⁵ Archer’s “Relatyon” reveals a land that is both awaiting discovery and lively with the politics of its inhabitants.

Dispatched to London on a supply ship returning from Jamestown in 1607, Archer’s “Relatyon” was the first account of the Virginia Colony’s diplomatic interactions with the Powhatan peoples. The handwritten narrative tells the story of the settlers’ exploration of the James River and Christopher Newport’s early diplomatic triumphs among the chiefs of Tsenacomoco. Like many colonial dispatches, the “Relatyon” was composed with an international audience in mind. In many ways, it resembles prior Spanish narratives of the possession of Hispaniola and Florida. Archer tells how Newport discovers new lands and claims them by planting a cross in the name of James I, a ritual borrowed from accounts of earlier explorers. Yet in staking a claim to Virginia, the “Relatyon” does more than merely imitate earlier accounts. Most of the text is devoted to chronicling the diplomatic interactions between the English and the indigenous kings that rule the rivers. Far from denying the jurisdiction of these figures, Archer depicts them as legitimate leaders, holding territory and exercising sovereignty over loyal subjects. Their most important acts, however, involve their acceptance of the foreigners. The riverbank kings extend a formal welcome to the English, granting them recognition as a political power in the bay.

Virginia colonists sailed to the New World with a great deal of anxiety about their legal status. While James I had asserted the right of the crown to annex New World territory, and had given the Virginia Company a grant to the Chesapeake Bay, both the crown and its colonial proprietors were fearfully conscious of Spain’s continuing claims to land north of Florida.¹⁶ They could look to the massacre at Fort Caroline, a French Huguenot outpost destroyed by Spanish raiders, for evidence of the fate that might await Jamestown colonists if Philip III decided to assert Spanish claims.¹⁷ The English had many ways of defending colonies from the Spanish, such as building forts or hiding settlements from view. Yet writing was also an important mode of defense. The crown viewed written reports as a central part of the public defense of New World rights. It was up to colonists to complete the crown’s claims by taking possession of land and sending home “relations” or reports of their activities. English colonists used many kinds of writing to document their possession of New World territory. They described the construction of fortifications, the tilling of fields, and the extension of fences, hedgerows, and other ways of marking English property.¹⁸ However, much of the territory in the Chesapeake claim was densely populated by indigenous people. Claiming this land demanded a different legal strategy—the assertion of treaty rights. The company’s instructions to the colonists made clear how this transatlantic relay of treaty documents would work. The colonists would “entreate those salvages in those parts,” bringing them to “God” and “Obedience,” and would likewise “Send a perfect relation by Captain Newport of all that is Done” on the first returning supply ship.¹⁹

The company’s appointment of Gabriel Archer as secretary was one part of the plan for carrying out this directive. Archer possessed considerable expertise in writing and law, having studied at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn. Before arriving in Virginia, Archer tested his education widely, accompanying Bartholomew Gosnold on a transatlantic voyage in 1602 and penning a report on the results of the expedition.²⁰ Archer sailed to Virginia on the first fleet of ships under the command of Newport. After the party’s arrival in the Chesapeake Bay, he recorded many of the colony’s official proceedings, but devoted the majority of his writing to settlers’ interactions with coastal Native groups. While the company had known Indians would be nearby, “entreat[ing]” surrounding leaders turned out to be a far more complicated venture than the colony’s meager instructions had anticipated. Hostile groups immediately approached the first landing party, and on May 21, 1607, Christopher Newport led a discovery and diplomatic outreach up the James River with the hopes of establishing a peaceful rapport. Over the course of the exploration, the party encountered several smaller werowances, or leaders, affiliated with Powhatan. They exchanged goods and friendly words with those who came forward to greet them, giving them penny knives, scissors, bells, beads, and toys. Despite the English provenance of the gifts, the exchanges were largely conducted on Native terms. The Powhatans viewed these items as desirable not because they were easily dazzled by shiny things, as some observers would later conclude, but because foreign objects had value in the tributary networks that tied together the chiefdom.²¹ The embassy culminated in the meeting with the great Indian king. Afterward, Newport planted a cross inscribed with the name of James I, much to the confusion of his Indian guide.²²

From the English point of view, Newport’s discovery accomplished a number of things. It signified the peaceful intentions of the English (at least in the short term), offering some measure of protection against the numerically superior Powhatans. It opened trading routes, which would be crucial to the colony’s survival. Yet the discovery was also an act of possession. By describing the journey in writing, the colony’s governors intended to announce the crown’s rights to the area, and to show that the Indians were not going to interfere.

As the colony’s chief recorder, Archer accompanied Newport on the discovery. Archer’s “Relatyon,” sent to London with Newport, was one of the first official reports on the colony’s progress. Based on Archer’s records, it is clear he took notes as the party went along. The “Relatyon” is organized by date, and includes information on weather and the distance the party traveled each day.²³ Archer describes how Newport claims the river for the English crown by planting a cross and performing other acts of possession. However, Archer also combines the genre of the discovery with the story of the peaceful conclusion of a treaty with the king who rules the river. Archer’s text details the words, gestures, and gifts exchanged between sovereign parties and enumerates the binding agreements that result. Like the planting of the cross, these agreements support English possession by suggesting that Newport’s claims will not be troubled by Native challenges.

The “Relatyon” moves chronologically, charting the party’s progress up the James River. Along the way, they treaty with indigenous leaders of increasingly impressive rank. After departing from Jamestown, Newport and his party arrive at the first great Indian “kyngdome,” which Archer calls “Wynauk.” The people respond to the English arrival with “rejoycing.”²⁴ The next day, a canoe approaches. Its passengers happily greet the English, and one of them, quickly taking to Archer’s pen and paper, offers to draw a map of the river and its kingdoms. The people bring mulberries, acorns, wheat, and beans to sustain the party on their travels. These preliminary acts of diplomacy lead to the narrative’s first encounter with a political leader. Journeying past several poor cottages, Newport and his men find a figure clothed in savage garb but also immediately recognizable as a king in state. “We found here a Wiroans (for so they call their kynges),” Archer writes, “who satt upon a matt of Reedes, with his people about him.” “[H]is name is Arahatec,” Archer goes on, “the Country Arahatecoh.”²⁵ The image is exotic, hearkening to sixteenth-century texts of Near Eastern exploration, which depicted sultans sitting in lavish surrounds.²⁶ But Archer’s description of Arahatec’s body also fixes the moment in a framework familiar to European readers. In audiences with diplomats, kings frequently retained a sitting or relaxed posture while subjects stood arrayed at attention. This was especially the case in diplomatic proceedings. While the mat is an exotic touch, Arahatec’s posture makes him the equivalent of a European king receiving visitors. Archer’s description authorizes the king to offer a treaty to the English. Greeting the newcomers to his kingdom, Arahatec “cause[s] [a mat] to be layd for Captain Newport” and immediately bestows upon Newport “his Crowne which was of Deares hayre dyed re[d].”²⁷ While the English used copper crowns to deputize lesser authorities, Archer emphasizes that Arahatec gives Newport his own crown, thereby placing the English captain in the position of a superior.

Though implausibly free of any friction, Archer’s narrative corresponds in some particulars to what contemporary anthropologists have reconstructed of coastal diplomacy. As Helen C. Rountree has shown in her account of Powhatan foreign policy, the Powhatans used mats, crowns, and smoking as diplomatic implements.²⁸ Smoking and sitting was a way of “breaking the ice,” or defusing tension before important negotiations. Given how numerically weak the English were, Arahatec likely understood the exchange as confirming Powhatan authority.

The treaty offer from Arahatec is only a prelude to an encounter with a more powerful king, whom Archer calls “Pawatah.” The “Pawatah” the party encountered was not, in fact, the paramount chief Powhatan. It was instead his son, Parahunt, whom Newport and Archer misidentified as Powhatan.²⁹ As Newport and his party banquet and smoke with Arahatec, they are interrupted by “Newes … that the greate kyng Powatah was come.” As in his description of Arahatec’s riverside court, Archer carefully choreographs the king’s appearance. When the great chief appears, Archer writes, “[the Indians] all rose of their mattes (save the kyng Arahatec); separated themselves aparte in fashion of a Guard, and with a long shout they saluted him.” Arahatec’s subjects recognize his authority, standing on his arrival and shouting, while Arahatec remains seated, preserving his status as a king. For their part, the newcomers follow this protocol. The English, Archer writes, “saluted [the great king] with silence sitting still on our mattes, our Captaine in the myddest.”³⁰ Like Arahatec, Newport sits in the middle of his subjects, marking him as a sovereign in the presence of other princely powers. But crucially missing in the English response is the spontaneous standing that had accompanied the chief’s welcome by Arahatec’s subjects. The English remain seated, identifying them as superiors to the Indians. Through an intricate rendering of gesture and posture during treaty negotiations, Archer divides Natives into subjects and kings, while the English, seated confidently on their mats, collectively embody the crown and its power.

Soliciting a treaty agreement from the more powerful sachem proves tricky. While Arahatec gives Newport his crown, no such act of welcome is forthcoming from the paramount Indian. Indeed, far from accepting English power, the king issues a mandate, commanding the English to travel no farther. Intimidated, Newport backs down. That Archer would portray an Indian leader giving commands to Newport—and Newport obeying them—is somewhat surprising, given his concern with establishing the legal rights of the English crown. Indeed, the moment is difficult to explain if one assumes that English colonial writers always selectively edited Native treaties to suit their agenda. Archer’s intended audience was thousands of miles away, and he could have omitted the incident altogether. That he did not do so sheds light on the role that Native diplomacy played in transatlantic correspondence. As I will detail later in this chapter, the first Jamestown government was composed of figures with many different agendas. Even before the discovery of the river, the colony’s government had seen considerable controversy. Newport had detained John Smith on the charge of attempting to usurp the company’s authority, releasing him a short while later. Archer was well aware that Smith or others might challenge his account. It was therefore imperative to compose treaty narratives that could withstand the scrutiny of hostile readers. This meant acknowledging diplomatic setbacks while putting them in the best possible light. Archer deals with the embarrassment of Newport’s defeat by portraying it as an act of reasonable diplomacy rather than a concession to Native power. After the English are commanded to halt their explorations, Archer writes, “our Captayne out of his Discretyon (though we would faine have seene further, yea and himselfe as Desirous also) Checkt his intentyon and retorned to his boate; as holding it much better to please the kyng (with whome and all of his Comaund he had made so faire Way) then to prosecute his owne fancye.”³¹ Newport backs down because he wants to preserve his diplomatic progress. He concedes the demand, not out of obedience to the king, Archer is clear, but rather to preserve the “faire Way” he has made with the king and the lesser sachems who have been impressed by English courtesy. In this way, Archer tries to turn the setback into a success.

Still, the moment leaves Archer in a difficult position. Far from welcoming the English, the king pushes them around. At this moment in the text, Archer alters his strategy. Instead of describing a diplomatic parley between political principals, as he does in the case of Arahatec’s meeting with Newport, Archer asserts English sovereignty by describing how Newport plants a cross at the falls of the river, claiming the territory for the crown. Given that Newport performed this ceremony at least twice, and that the cross was engraved with the name of the king, it seems likely that the colonists brought these crosses with them from England. Planting crosses on islands or at other inland portals was a common way in which Europeans advertised claims to other Christians³² (see Figure 1). In planting the cross, Newport recoups some of the face he lost when he conceded to the king’s wishes to travel no farther. The moment is a dramatic expression of English power, made even bolder by its disregard for Parahunt’s previous order to the party. Yet Archer does not depict the cross as a unilateral assertion of English power. Instead, it is a means for getting Parahunt’s consent to the English presence, and, from the English point of view, establishing possession under the law of nations. Archer writes, “upon one of the little Ilettes at the mouth of the falls [Newport] sett up a Crosse with this inscriptyon Jacobus Rex. 1607. and his owne name belowe: At the erecting hereof we prayed for our kyng and our owne prosperous succes in this his Actyon, and proclaymed him kyng, with a greate showte.”³³ While the act is in some sense a riposte to the Indian king, and an assertion of English power in the face of diplomatic defeat, Archer is also careful to frame it, at least to the Indians, as a confirmation of their voluntary alliance with the English. “The kyng Pawatah was now gone,” he writes, “and all the Salvages likewise save Navirans [an Indian guide], who seeing us set up a Crosse with such a shoute, began to admire; but our Captayne told him that the two Armes of the Crosse signifyed kyng Powatah and himselfe [Newport], the fastening of it in the myddest was their united Leaug, and the shoute the reverence he dyd to Pawatah. which cheered Navirans not a litle.”³⁴ While the English shout their own subjection to the cross, Navirans can only “admire.” Archer uses the word “admire” in the early modern sense of the word, meaning to display shock or surprise in the face of a visual spectacle or sensory experience.³⁵ Navirans’s spellbound stare is interrupted by Newport, who translates the meaning of the cross into the terms of the earlier alliance. This explanation is a shrewd legal sleight of hand. The Indian king recognizes no subordination. He views any friendship as implying English subjection to him, or at the very least an unsteady equality. But by telling Navirans that the cross represents a league, Archer symbolically subordinates the coastal alliance to the power of the English king. Newport and the Powhatan chief are united in alliance, but this league of friendship is quite literally framed by the overarching sovereignty of the crown. Newport never directly explains this treaty to the king, relying instead on Navirans to relay it to him and secure his consent to it: “sending Navirans up to [the king], he came downe to the water syde, where he went a shore single unto him, presented him with a hatchet, and staying but till Navirans had tolde (as we trewly perceived) the meaning of our setting up the Crosse, which we found Dyd exceedingly rejoyce him.”³⁶ Here, then, is the big prize: the acquiescence of the great king to the power of the crown, as demonstrated by his rejoicing response to the cross. The king affirms the alliance, welcoming the English as neighbors and providing proof of their safe possession of the territory under the law of nations.

Figure 1. Theodor de Bry’s engraving of Columbus claiming the island of Guanahani, from Theodor de Bry, Americae Pars Quarta (1594). The image portrays explorers raising a cross while Columbus accepts gifts from the island’s indigenous inhabitants. English explorers imitated such rituals by combining Christian acts of possession with Native treaties. Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

The moment satisfies the legal requirement for consensus ad idem; the king understands the meaning of the cross and agrees to the alliance represented by it. However, Archer’s account of the moment seems slightly troubled. He emphasizes the faithfulness of English witnesses to the scene. The English “trewly perceived” that Navirans had accurately explained it. Archer’s insistence on the truth of English perceptions seems a tad defensive, as if he anticipates that others might challenge this account, and he wants to assert his own credibility and the integrity of the treaty. Archer had good reason for this wariness. After Newport’s party returned home, Jamestown was attacked. Archer’s “Relatyon” closes with another appearance by an Indian guide, who blames the attack on some enemy Indians and helpfully reaffirms the alliance described in the preceding pages.³⁷ But Archer was right to suspect that his glowing account of alliances would not be enough to quiet criticism. There were other people in Jamestown with pen and paper, and they would have other stories to tell about the great kings of the river.

Kidnapping Your Brothers: Ambush and Alliance in John Smith’s Proceedings

“For we had his favour much better, onlie for a poore peece of Copper, till this stately kinde of soliciting made him so much overvalue himselfe, that he respected us as much as nothing at all.”³⁸ This is how John Smith describes the results of Christopher Newport’s diplomacy in The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, an account of the colony’s first years. While Archer describes Newport’s diplomatic achievements as the key to peace on the coast, Smith claims that this decorous approach to Powhatan has led to a different outcome: the chief loses all respect for the English, viewing them as subjects to his power. Though they might have placated him for the moment, Newport’s gifts, courtesy, and deference have only diminished the English. According to Smith, this loss of diplomatic standing has had dire consequences. While Powhatan and his many lieutenants nod and accept English gifts, they also plan ambushes and violent assaults on Jamestown. “[A]ll the woods were laid with Ambuscadoes to the number of 3 or 400 Salvages,” Smith continues, “commaunded to betray us, by Powhatans direction.”³⁹ Far from sticking to the diplomatic script like Archer’s “Powatah,” Smith’s Powhatan embraces political tactics akin to those of Machiavelli’s Prince: cloying in official ceremonies, he is not hesitant to betray allies when it suits him.⁴⁰

Like Archer before him, Smith writes about treaties in order to make an argument about New World possessions. He seeks to show how different models of diplomacy produce different kinds of political outcomes. But Smith’s portrayal of New World negotiation diverges sharply from Archer’s. Official ceremonies and staged meetings do little to create treaties or secure consent. The real struggles unfold outside the venues of official diplomacy, where promises are broken and peace betrayed. Inviting the English to parley, Powhatan plans in secret to murder them. However, in spite of Powhatan’s violent intentions, Smith and the other authors of the Proceedings do not abandon the legal strategy of asserting English rights through voluntary agreement. Instead, they describe a different way of accomplishing that end. Throughout the book, Smith launches ambushes of his own, “curb[ing]” the Indians’ “insolencies” and eventually bringing them back to the bargaining table where a stronger peace, one based on mutually assured destruction, takes hold.⁴¹ If the English are to wield authority in the New World, Smith suggests, they must set aside the “stately kinde of soliciting” for white-knuckle tactics that mirror the Indians’ own.⁴² 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 interest in publishing his work, Smith found a sympathetic ear in Sir Edward Seymour, the earl of Hertford and an investor in the colony. With Seymour’s financial support, Smith began to assemble maps, notes, and other materials that would support his account of the colony’s first years. Crucial to Smith’s efforts was the arrival from Jamestown of Richard Pots, the clerk of the Virginia colony’s governing council during Smith’s presidency. Pots brought with him a host of letters, narratives, and sketches from Smith’s supporters. With the help of William Symonds, an Oxford graduate and Anglican preacher, Smith arranged the materials into separate volumes, A Map of Virginia, containing an engraved map of Tsenacomoco by the artist William Hole, along with a “a description of the countrey” by Smith himself, and The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, a report on the colony’s Indian diplomacy “written out of the writings” of “diligent observers.”⁶⁰ Both books trace the problems in the colony’s government to its leaders’ overly ceremonious approach to Indian diplomacy. The two volumes might be read as working together, with Smith’s Map and description laying out the political landscape of Tsenacomoco, and the Proceedings showing just how badly Newport, Archer, and the colony’s first governors have misjudged the Indians’ intentions. Yet for all of its condemnation of the Powhatans and their tactics, the books suggest a surprising solution to the colony’s diplomatic dilemma. While the Indians are depicted as violent peace breakers, Smith claims that it is only by abandoning diplomacy themselves that the colony’s governors can restore calm.

Like Archer’s “Relatyon,” Smith’s Map conceives of Virginia Indians as an autonomous kingdom. The book is divided into several parts, including a list of phrases in English and Algonquian, a map of Tsenacomoco, and Smith’s descriptions of the Virginia landscape and the government and religion of the Indians. The centerpiece of the book, and the section that has received the most attention from scholars, is the map, which is bound into the book as a foldout page (see Figure 2). In many ways, the map dominates the volume, in terms of both its massive size and its level of detail. It is bewilderingly complete, containing hundreds of place-names in transliterated Algonquian. Many of these are identified by a key in the upper right-hand corner as “Kings howses,” or seats of government. Indeed, the map presents the New World as virtually swarming with Native power, with around two dozen separate locations marked as seats of indigenous kings. Taken in at a glance, the map suggests Native dominance of American geography.

The map leaves no uncertainty about who commands this kingdom. Powhatan is depicted sitting in “state” in an inset in the upper left-hand corner, with the word “Powhatans” snaking downward across the rivers and their many polities. In the opposite corner stands a figure identified as one of the “Sasquesahanugh,” a group of neighboring Indians to the north. The corner detail of Powhatan in state was adapted from Theodor de Bry’s The Tombe of their Werowans or Cheiff Lordes (1588).⁶¹ The appropriation of an image of a tomb to depict Powhatan hints at some of the arguments that will appear later in the book. While Powhatan clearly reigns supreme, he is also boxed in, surrounded by plumes of smoke and crowded by underlings. His figure stands in stark contrast to that of the Susquehannock, who stands astride the landscape itself and is described on the map as representing “a Gyant like people.”⁶² The suggestion, conveyed in visual form, is that Powhatan operates behind closed doors. While he controls the landscape, he does so from a covert position, not through the kind of open or transparent diplomacy that would inspire trust.

Figure 2. Foldout map from John Smith’s A Map of Virginia (1612). Smith’s map depicts a New World dominated by Powhatan power. Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

Smith’s “Description,” which follows the foldout, delves into the smoke-shadowed workings of Powhatan’s government. Smith begins conventionally enough, sketching out the landscape and discoursing on the natural commodities that make Virginia a profitable site for settlement. But this promotional language soon shifts into a discourse on the Indians and their “manner of … governement.” Smith uses the language of political economy when describing the Indians. “The forme of their Common wealth is a monarchicall governement,” he states, “one as Emperour ruleth over many kings or governours.” And though barbaric, Powhatan is similar to an expansion-minded European prince. “Their chiefe ruler is called Powhatan, and taketh his name of the principall place of dwelling called Powhatan,” Smith writes. Like his European counterparts, Powhatan has several claims to power. “Some countries he hath which have been his ancestors, and came unto him by inheritance.” Others, however, “have beene his severall conquests.” Smith depicts all of these holdings, inherited or conquered, as a peaceful realm, subject to the sovereignty of Powhatan. “Although the countrie people be very barbarous, yet have they amongst them such governement, as that their Magistrats for good commanding, and their people for du subjection, and obeying, excell many places that would be counted very civill.”⁶³ While the people may be unusual in appearance, in their government they more resemble Europeans than savages.

While Powhatan’s kingdom appears orderly, however, there is a darker reality just below the surface. What holds this commonwealth together, Smith reports, is fear of Powhatan’s tyranny. Here, the Powhatan of the smoky room makes his appearance. “It is strange to see with what great feare and adoration all these people doe obay this Powhatan,” Smith writes. “What he commandeth they dare not disobey in the least thing.”⁶⁴ Powhatan is depicted imposing severe penalties on disloyal subjects, executing them or expelling them from his lands. Smith does not describe these exercises of power because he is concerned for Powhatan’s victims. Rather, he is interested in their implications for English conquest. While Powhatan’s terrifying command creates domestic order, it leads to a volatile political situation abroad. Smith’s description of Powhatan’s foreign affairs includes a catalogue of the “many enimies” that encircle his empire.⁶⁵ This observation aligns Smith’s own views with the strategy recently expressed in the “Instructions” to Gates. The suggestion, subtly conveyed, is that the English can undermine Powhatan by making treaties with tribes that oppose him.

While war is the order of the day among the Powhatans, the reality of New World combat differs radically from what European readers might expect. War is not separate from diplomacy, but is itself a diplomatic tactic, a way of pressuring other parties for favorable terms. When engaging with foreign leaders, Smith continues, the Powhatans do not hesitate to employ “Stratagems, trecheries, or surprisals.”⁶⁶ Most prominent is a military tactic Smith calls “Ambuscado.” Ambuscado, or ambush, was not a Powhatan word or concept. In early modern military theory, the term described the use of surprise or deception to gain a military advantage. Smith likely encountered the concept during his military training in the Netherlands, where he had served before traveling to Virginia. In The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres (1598), Robert Barrett defined “Ambuscado” as “a Spanish word” that “signifieth any troupe or company of soldiers either foot or horse, lodged secretly in some covert, as in woods, hollow wayes, behind bankes, or such like.” It could also mean “to entrappe the enemy secretly attending his comming.”⁶⁷ Many authorities depicted ambuscado as a violation of natural law.⁶⁸ The term was frequently associated with the military tactics of Turks and Ottomans.⁶⁹ It was also associated with the Irish, who were viewed by Elizabethan military commanders as unfair fighters.⁷⁰ In his Map, Smith employs the concept in a similar way. Powhatan’s acts of ambush stand in violation of the laws of war and expose the Native king to lawful conquest by invaders. But Smith also adapts the concept of ambuscado to his own purposes. Powhatan’s lawless acts encourage his subjects to make alliances with the colonists, and give the English legal clearance to launch ambushes of their own.

According to Smith, ambush is universal in Virginia. Americans are virtually built for surprise attack. “They are very strong, of an able body and full of agilitie,” he writes, “able to endure to lie in the woods under a tree by the fire, in the worst of winter, or in the weedes and grasse, in Ambuscado in the Sommer.”⁷¹ Ambushing is not only part of war, however. It is also a tactic Powhatan uses to surprise ostensible allies at treaty negotiations. Smith relates a cautionary tale of Powhatan’s willingness to launch surprise attacks against friends: “In the yeare 1608, [Powhatan] surprised the people of Payankatank his neare neighbours and subjects. The occasion was to us unknowne, but the manner was thus. First he sent diverse of his men as to lodge amongst them that night, then the Ambuscadoes invironed al their houses, & at the houre appointed, they all fell to the spoile, 24 men they slewe.” These are not the kindly Indians described by Archer. They visit Payankatank on a diplomatic errand, yet when night falls, Powhatan takes advantage of his hosts’ hospitality to slay them and take their land. At his next parley with the English, Powhatan brandishes his grisly spoils to gain an advantage at the bargaining table. “The lockes of haire with their skinnes he hanged on a line unto two trees,” Smith writes. “And thus he made ostentation of as great a triumph at Werowocomoco, shewing them to the E[n] glish men that then came unto him at his appointment, they expecting provision, he to betray them, supposed to halfe counquer them by this spectacle.”⁷² Collecting scalps at one meeting, Powhatan brandishes them at the next, using his conquest of one neighbor to try and cow another into submission.

Throughout A Map, Smith laments the “terrible crueltie” of such acts.⁷³ However, Smith also sees the violent nature of Virginia diplomacy as offering an opportunity for the English conquerors, if only the colonial government will abandon any pretense of recognizing Powhatan and instead seek out alliances with his enemies. Of the effect of Powhatan’s reign of diplomatic terror, Smith writes, “The Sasquesahanocks, the Tockwoughes are continually tormented by [the Powhatans]: of whose crueltie, they generally complained, and very importunate they were with Captaine Smith and his company to free them from these tormentors.” The Indians flee into the arms of the English, “offer[ing] food, conduct, assistance, & continuall subjection.” However, the colony’s official policy stands in Smith’s way. Clinging to an older model of diplomacy, the Jamestown governors “would not thinke it fit to spare [Smith] 40 men,” Smith complains.⁷⁴ Nevertheless, Smith soldiers on, enjoying a partial triumph. “I lost but 7 or 8 men,” Smith writes at the close of A Map, “yet subjected the Savages to our desired obedience, and receaved contribution from 35 of their kings, to protect and assist the[m] against any that should assalt them, in which order they continued true & faithful, and as subjects to his Majestie, so long after as I did govern there, untill I left the Country.”⁷⁵ Powhatan’s tactics, though awful to behold, give the English an unlikely diplomatic opening. While he intimidates the newcomers, he also alienates his own subjects, pushing them into the arms of the newcomers. With only a small number of men, Smith forms the lasting league that has so eluded Newport, making the Indians “true & faithful” friends of the English, at least until Smith’s untimely departure.

In the Proceedings, Smith offers a more detailed account of his treaty-making strategy. The book picks up where its companion volume leaves off, describing “how [the Indians] have revolted, the Countrie lost, and againe replanted, and the businesses hath succeeded from time to time.”⁷⁶ The Proceedings might be described as offering a narrative accompaniment to the Map’s ethnographic portrayal of Powhatan’s warlike ways. Powhatan is again a villain. However, as sinister as he is, he is not the book’s true target. The book is instead an indictment of the colony’s government during its first years. It blames the colony’s problems on Newport’s diplomatic approach to Powhatan, arguing that Newport’s overly solicitous diplomacy has led to the colony’s collapse and the subjection of its leaders to an emboldened Powhatan. In place of this failed policy, Smith presents a model of treaty making based around retaliatory ambushes and kidnappings, which he claims will induce the Powhatans to treaty in good faith.

In choosing to title the book the Proceedings, Smith and the editors identified their volume with a familiar generic tradition. The English crown printed proceedings of Parliament and other bodies in order to legitimize its own actions and publicize the business of English government to international readers.⁷⁷ Aristocratic houses, joint-stock companies, and churches also published accounts of their proceedings in order to raise funds or inspire supporters or adherents.⁷⁸ Proceedings were often a compilation of different genres, such as speeches, accounts of battles, official documents, and other scribal forms. Often, published proceedings offered an apology for apparent mismanagement of government affairs. Thomas Digges’s A Breife and true report of the Proceedings of the Earle of Leycester (1590), for example, described the battle for the town of Sluce in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), in an attempt to show that Sir Robert Dudley “was not in anie fault for the losse of that towne.”⁷⁹ While military leaders or other interest groups often explained their conduct to the king in relations or letters, printed proceedings offered a means of publicizing political business for readers at home and abroad.

Like Digges’s book, The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia is concerned with apologizing for overseas failure. As the preface announces, “Long hath the world longed, but to be truely satisfied what Virginia is, with the truth of those proceedings, from whence hath flowne so manie reports of worth, & yet few good effects of the charge, which hath caused suspition in many well willers.”⁸⁰ The book includes dramatic renderings of a number of government rituals, such as speeches, meetings, coronations, and depositions. It also includes “the Salvages discourses, orations and relations of the Bordering neighbors, and how they became subject to the English.” However, these political performances are not cast into the stately forms of Archer’s “Relatyon.” The volume presents, not official documentation of treaty negotiations, but rather accounts by “diligent observers, that were residents in Virginia.”⁸¹ The book might be described as an exposé of colonial government. While Archer views Anglo-Powhatan diplomatic rituals as producing political amity in a transparent and verifiable way, the Proceedings seeks to expose the failure of official diplomacy. Rather than taking Indian words and gestures at face value, Smith suggests that coastal politics demands a shrewder understanding of Native communication and a willingness to use violence.

From the beginning, the Proceedings draws a connection between Smith’s colonial feuds and his fight to subdue the frontier. On the voyage over, Smith is “restrained as a prisoner” when Newport accuses him of intending to “usurpe the governement.”⁸² From his position as a captive, Smith observes the suspiciously “kindly” visitations of the “Salvages,” and advises Newport to prepare for an attack. While Newport ignores him and instead pursues diplomatic outreach, Smith is soon proved right. When the discovery party begins to explore the area around the Jamestown fort, they find themselves “kindly intreated” by the Indians, just as Archer had reported in his “Relatyon.”⁸³ Yet on their return, Smith writes, they find “17 men hurt, and a boy slaine by the Salvages.” In his report, Archer had attempted to dismiss this attack as an aberration, but the Proceedings hints instead at a causal connection between Newport’s diplomatic errand and the Indians’ sudden aggression. Embracing friendly diplomacy, Newport leaves the colony exposed. After this incident, Newport can no longer deny the Indians’ belligerence, and finally heeds Smith’s advice. “Hereupon,” Smith gloats, “the President was contented the Fort should be pallisadoed … for many were the assaults, and Ambuscadoes of the Salvages.”⁸⁴

In the midst of these troubling events, Smith appears as the only figure who can subdue the Indians. After the intervention of the colony’s minister, Robert Hunt, Smith is unchained and “reconciled” with Newport. The Indians, violent before, immediately seek out a treaty agreement: “the good doctrine and exhortation of our preacher Mr. Hunt … caused Captaine Smith to be admitted of the Councell; the next day all receaved the Communion, the day following the Salvages voluntarily desired peace, and Captaine Newport returned for England with newes.”⁸⁵ This narrative implies a causal link between Smith’s promotion to the council and the Indians’ willingness to make a treaty with the English. Smith’s hard-nosed approach, not Newport’s diplomacy, is the reason for the successful conclusion of any treaties.

While there is some overlap between the Proceedings and the events recounted in Archer’s “Relatyon,” the bulk of Smith’s books details what happens after Archer’s letter ends. The Proceedings charts, in troubling detail, the breakdown of Anglo-Powhatan diplomacy and the disintegration of peace, and it seeks to pin the blame on Newport and his negotiating strategies. While Smith criticizes many aspects of Virginia’s government, he attributes its woeful state of affairs primarily to the fact that Newport and his group have made too many concessions to Powhatan’s demands. “[T]hose at the fort so glutted the Salvages with their commodities,” the book complains, “as they [the colonists] became not regarded.”⁸⁶ Smith did not invent this explanation for the colony’s trouble. The notion that the colonists lost political standing by paying tribute to the Powhatans was widely repeated, even appearing in the 1609 “Instructions” to Gates, which (without naming Newport) partly blamed trading policy for the high corn prices that had imperiled the food supply.⁸⁷ The accusation probably had some truth to it. While gifts played a largely ceremonial role in European diplomatic negotiations, for the Powhatans, trade was crucial to determining political hierarchy. When the English arrived in the Chesapeake Bay, the Powhatans demanded gifts in exchange for corn and permission to settle. Jamestown leaders complied with these demands, and in writing described the Indians’ acceptance of goods as an acknowledgment of English power. This made the English look powerful under the law of nations, but according to Smith, it lowered them in Powhatan’s regard. In a description of Powhatan’s trading with Jamestown leaders, Smith illustrates the pitfalls of Newport’s approach: “being kindly received ashore” for a trading summit, “Powhatan strained himselfe to the uttermost of his greatnes to entertain us, with great shouts of Joy, orations of protestations, and the most plenty of victuall hee could provide to feast us.”⁸⁸ After “3. or 4. daies” of “feasting dancing and trading,” Powhatan initiates official trade relations between Werowocomoco and Jamestown, beginning with a formal oration that suggests that coastal rather than English customs should govern negotiations. “Captain Newport,” he says, “it is not agreeable with my greatnes in this pedling manner to trade for trifles, and I esteeme you a great werowans, Therefore lay me down all your commodities togither, what I like I will take, and in recompence give you that I thinke fitting their value.”⁸⁹ Powhatan dismisses English models of exchange as a “pedling” way to proceed. Instead, he flatteringly suggests that a great leader like Newport should trust the great chief to do the valuing himself. Powhatan’s words evoke what the anthropologist Marcel Mauss has described as a gift economy, in which extravagant exchange symbolizes power and recognition.⁹⁰ Smith, however, does not believe that Powhatan’s gesture is reflective of any traditional Indian ways. He sees Powhatan’s oration as a ploy to raise prices and conquer the English. Smith warns Newport of the stratagem, whispering in his ear that the hidden intention behind Powhatan’s grandiose gesture is “but to cheat us.” To Smith’s horror, Newport falls for it anyway, caught up in the imperative to flatter Powhatan with gifts: “captaine Newport thinking to out brave this Salvage in ostentation of greatnes, & so to bewitch him with his bounty … [offered] to have what [Powhatan] listed.”⁹¹

At this moment, according to Smith, the colony teeters on the brink of disaster, standing to lose both financially and politically if the trading goes forward. As he did after the raid on Jamestown, however, Smith comes to the rescue, bringing to bear another approach to diplomacy, one more attuned to the subtlety of Powhatan’s maneuvers. “Smith … smothering his distast (to avoide the Salvages suspition) glaunced in the eies of Powhatan many Trifles who fixed his humour upon a few blew beads; A long time he importunatly desired them, but Smith seemed so much the more to affect them, so that ere we departed, for a pound or two of blew beads he brought over my king for 2 or 300 bushels of corne, yet parted good friends.”⁹² Here, then, is a radically different negotiating tactic. Rather than taking Powhatan’s words at face value, Smith reads Powhatan’s eyes to discover the true desire behind the façade—the shiny blue beads imported from English glassworks for use as currency. With the colonists’ blue beads glinting in Powhatan’s eyes, Smith moves to “affect them” himself, driving up their value despite their practical worthlessness to the English. Taken in by this ploy, Powhatan happily agrees to give up corn for beads, securing for the English a triumph of both trade and diplomacy.

While Archer construes Native actions as a transparent expression of political intentions, for Smith, words and gestures hide as much as they reveal. Smith’s account of glinting eyes and feinting gestures evoked broader debates in early modern England about the relationship between outward expression and inner intentions. While some scholastic authorities believed that gestures and facial expressions unwittingly revealed the truth of the heart, others saw them as possessing a capacity for artifice and deceit.⁹³ In contrast to Archer’s model of diplomacy, which simply assumes the Indians are sincere, Smith points to a split between outward show and secret purpose.

Smith’s diplomacy of suspicion prevails during trade negotiations, preserving the peace and a precarious equality between parties. Yet by his own account, Smith’s approach also has limits, especially considering the ulterior goals behind Powhatan’s attempts to cheat the English. According to Smith, Powhatan is not only attempting to swindle the colonists at the bargaining table. He is also attempting to subjugate them, and this threat demands a different response. After the botched coronation, which repeats the lesson of the corn-trading episode, Powhatan secretly institutes an embargo against the English, forbidding other people from trading with them. His aim, as Smith later finds out, is to lure the colonists into an ambush disguised as a trading summit. Extending an invitation to trade, Powhatan offers to “loade [Smith’s] shippe with corne” in exchange for commodities and the help of Jamestown laborers in building an English-style house.⁹⁴ As Smith travels to Werowocomoco, a “kind Salvage” named Weraskoyack tips off the already suspicious Smith about the chief’s true plans: “Captaine Smith,” he warns, “you shall finde Powhatan to use you kindly, but trust him not, and bee sure hee have no opportunitie to seaze on your armes, for hee hath sent for you only to cut your throats.”⁹⁵ As Weraskoyack makes clear, Powhatan aims to treat the English like the people of Payankatank; his diplomatic overtures conceal intentions to kill or enslave them.

In response to this bit of frightening intelligence, Smith suggests that the English ambush the chief themselves before he can put his plans into motion. Over the protests of others, Smith assembles a company of English soldiers disguised as laborers and travels to Pamaunke, the proposed site of the house. What follows in the Proceedings is an intricate account of an openly hostile series of negotiations that constantly threaten to dissolve into outright violence. Smith again uses gestural interpretation and facial reading to divine Powhatan’s true intentions. However, he also openly embraces violence as a negotiating tactic that will restore order and bring about treaty agreement. Powhatan begins the entertainment with the same invitation to open giving he had extended to Newport. Addressing Smith from inside his old house, he declares, “Captaine Newport gave me swords, copper, cloths, a bed, tooles, or what I desired, ever taking what I offered him, and would send awaie his gunnes when I intreated him.” At this moment, Powhatan’s real desires are exposed to all who know how to read him. The gift he truly wants is not found in any precious object—it is, menacingly, the disarmament of the colonists. Rather than allowing himself to be led to his death by this bit of deception, Smith responds to Powhatan’s offer with an ambush of his own: “Smith seeing this Salvage but trifled the time to cut his throat … gave order for his men to come ashore, to have surprised the king, with whom also [Smith] but trifled the time till his men landed.”⁹⁶ Smith sees through Powhatan’s friendly overtures, and, maintaining decorum, signals to his men to make ready for attack. Yet English victory is not yet in hand. When Powhatan discovers Smith’s countermove, he keeps up the façade, sending his wives to make small talk with Smith and slipping out the back while his men encircle the house. This leaves Smith in a bind; while each party has been planning murder behind smiles, Powhatan’s men get to the house first.

Smith’s response to this predicament dramatizes his central solution to the problem of forming treaties during wartime—a solution he enacts again and again in the latter part of the Proceedings. When Smith realizes that Powhatan’s plan has been sprung into motion before his own, he recovers the initiative by storming out of the house “with his Pistol, Sword & Target” while the Indian men flee in every direction. This abrupt move has an immediately pacifying effect. After Smith’s wild display, the Indians immediately “dissemble” their treacherous intentions and send Smith “a greate bracelet, and a chaine of pearle,” valuable diplomatic gifts recognizing Smith’s power.⁹⁷ More important from Smith’s point of view, they satisfy his demands for corn, offering him as much as he can carry back to Jamestown. This violent rapprochement is not a perfect solution. After conceding to Smith’s demands, the Indians suggest again that the soldiers put their guns down to carry the baskets to the barges. However, the English threateningly cock their weapons, frightening the Indians back into submission. “[T]he verie sight of cocking our matches against them,” Smith writes,” caused them to leave their bowes & arrows to our gard, and beare downe our corne on their own backes.”⁹⁸ While Powhatan had planned to trick the English into putting their weapons down so he could cut their throats, Smith’s violent bluffing compels the Indians to load their corn on English barges. The flow of tributary goods is reversed, and with it, the relation of authority.

Smith is well aware that this strategy poses a legal problem. The colony’s international legitimacy hinged in part upon voluntary treaties. Smith’s actions more resemble those of the Spanish conquistadors of the Black Legend—the very image many metropolitan supporters of colonization wanted to avoid. Later in the narrative, Smith seeks to distinguish his own brand of violence from that of the Spanish and to show that his actions are consistent with the legal strategy of proving possession through treaties. After sacking Werowocomoco, Smith heads upriver toward the kingdom of the sachem Opechancanough, Powhatan’s brother. The king greets them with the “strained cheerefulnes” Smith believes is typical of Powhatan diplomacy, and Smith finds himself in the familiar position of a target of ambush, with “6. Or 700. of well appointed Indians [having] invironed the house and beset the fields.”⁹⁹ This time, however, Smith’s thoughts concern not his immediate danger but rather the question of how an international audience will react when news of his violent entanglements finds its way across the Atlantic. Smith delivers a “speech to his company” on the international legal predicament in which they have found themselves. “Worthy countrymen,” he says, “were the mischiefes of my seeming friends [the colony’s governing council], no more then the danger of these enemies, I little cared, were they as many more, if you dare do, but as I. But this is my torment, that if I escape them, our malicious councell with their open mouthed minions, will make mee such a peace-breaker (in their opinions) in England, as wil break my neck”¹⁰⁰ Even before violence is joined, Smith is acutely conscious that the moment will be recounted in transatlantic correspondence. Indeed, his “greater torment” is not the sting of Indian arrows but rather the knowledge that he will be drowned out in transatlantic space by the “open mouthed minions” who dominate the colony’s correspondence with the London Council. If Smith takes Opechancanough’s friendly overtures at face value, as Newport did, the party will be massacred, clinging to their stately diplomatic protocols while the Indians fall upon them. Yet if Smith fights his way out, he will be construed as a “peace-breaker” and hanged for treason.

As in the earlier escape from ambush, Smith’s solution is found in an abrupt and violent violation of diplomatic courtesy—this time, the kidnapping of Opechancanough. Smith “snatche[s] the king by his vambrace [or armor] in the midst of his men, with his pistoll ready bent against his brest: thus he [leads] the trembling king, (neare dead with feare) amongst all his people, who delivering the Captaine his bow and arrowes, all his men were easily intreated to cast downe their armes.”¹⁰¹ Like the previous outburst among Powhatan’s men, this sudden and unpredictable gesture leads to an improbably swift resolution of the colony’s diplomatic problems. After Smith releases Opechancanough into the custody of the terrified Powhatan retinue, “The rest of the day [is] spent with much kindnesse.… And what soever we gave them, they seemed well contented with it.”¹⁰² Though the kidnapping is a violation of the terms of the old peace, it intimidates the Indians into embracing a new one, based on their willing acceptance of English demands. And though Smith breaks the peace by laying hands on Opechancanough, his actions create peaceful subjection without spilling any blood.

Smith was right to believe that the moment would find an audience in London and beyond. After The Proceedings was published, the kidnapping acquired some degree of folk prominence among readers in Europe. It was engraved by Robert Vaughan, and Smith later printed the engraving in his heavily embellished The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) (see Figure 3). The image hearkened back to stories of Spanish conquistadors kidnapping Indian kings.¹⁰³ However, in the Proceedings, Smith carefully severs it from any association with lethal force. He is a conquistador without the killing. Indeed, Smith invites readers to compare his own narrative to those of Spanish conquest, emphasizing his ability to do without bloodshed what Spanish conquerors had carried out with great violence. “[P]eruse the Spanish Decades, the relations of M. Hacklut,” he directs readers “and tell mee how many ever with such smal meanes, as a barge of 2 Tunnes; sometimes with 7. 8. 9, or but at most 15 men did ever discover so many faire and navigable rivers; subject so many severall kings, people, and nations, to obedience, & contribution with so little bloud shed.”¹⁰⁴ Smith’s conquests are comparable in scope to those of the Spanish, yet they involve none of the actual bloodletting that (according to English propagandists) had made Spanish conquest unlawful.

Figure 3. Robert Vaughan’s engraving of John Smith kidnapping Opechancanough, from John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

When words fail to guarantee peaceful intentions, the threat of violence paradoxically creates the calm political order that diplomacy cannot. In the wake of the disasters brought on by Newport’s stately overtures to Powhatan, Smith’s confrontational tactics pacify the Indians. But if Archer is worried about the credibility of Native words and gestures for international readers, Smith faces a problem of his own. If violence, or the threat of violence, inspires agreement, how are readers to know that such agreement is any more sincere than the false promises that led to violence in the first place? Smith’s model of treaty making seems to lead to an infinite regress, with broken promises begetting only more violence. Smith addresses this problem in a culminating chapter entitled “How the Salvages became subject to the English.” The chapter describes how Smith unravels a Dutch conspiracy against Jamestown while simultaneously bringing Indians to treaty through threats. The ultimate effect of violence, in Smith’s account, is not simply to produce fearful acquiescence, but rather to inspire the kind of credible promises necessary for consensus ad idem. After discovering the betrayal of the English by the Dutch and their Indian co-conspirators, Smith explodes into action with typical decisiveness. He “burn[s] their houses, [takes] their boats … and … resolve[s] not to cease till he had revenged himselfe upon al that had injured him.” As in previous encounters, the Indians “thr[ow] downe their armes and desir[e] peace” in the face of Smith’s hectic peace-breaking.¹⁰⁵ This time, however, the concession leads to a treaty that satisfies the criteria of consensus ad idem. An Indian orator named Ocanindge steps forward to deliver what the narrative calls a “worthie discourse.” Ocanindge notes Smith’s destructive intentions. “[W]e perceive & well knowe you intend to destroy us,” he says. But Ocanindge also turns the tables, reminding Smith that the Indians can destroy the English as well: “we can plant any where … and we know you cannot live if you want our harvest.” This threat leads to an offer of truce backed up not by ceremonial gestures, such as the exchange of gifts, but rather by a recognition of the mutually assured destruction the two camps can visit upon one another: “if you promise us peace we will beleeve you, if you proceed in reveng, we will abandon the Countrie,” Ocanindge declares. Smith is impressed by this geopolitical reasoning, and the English and Indians come to an agreement: “Upon these tearmes the President promised them peace, till they did us injurie, upon condition they should bring in provision, so all departed good friends.”¹⁰⁶ Smith will agree not to destroy the Indians (and, by implication, himself) if the Indians will continue to bring the English provisions. A treaty at last.

In practice, the compelled promise that ends the Proceedings seems little different from the acts of extortion Smith carried out earlier. But here extortion is formalized by a verbal agreement that has real force. The two parties promise each other, and this time, because of the threat that lurks behind their words, the promise is real. As well as compelling submission, violence ironically produces the truth in speech necessary for treaties. Smith and Ocanindge can trust each other because they are not bound by superficial norms of engagement that would provide a ceremonial cover for deception. 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 as an extension of a broader, global plot against the Spanish. “The justification they advance is that this King [James I] has given them licence and letters patent for planting their religion there, provided they do not plunder anyone, under pain of losing his protection if they do not obey,” Zúñiga writes.¹¹⁵ While James has widely publicized his rights and dominion in Virginia, Zúñiga views the crown’s legal justifications as mere propaganda intended to conceal sinister motives.

Zúñiga’s fear that the New World could be a site of conspiratorial alliance is reflective of the kind of paranoia that characterized correspondence from both English and Spanish spies. As Garrett Mattingly has shown in his account of early modern diplomacy, Protestant and Catholic diplomats depicted themselves as soldiers in a global war for religious and national supremacy.¹¹⁶ Zúñiga reads the colony’s accounts of Powhatan negotiations with the same kind of conspiratorial eye, viewing Indian treaties as a maneuver in a worldwide struggle. In a letter dated March 15, 1609, he describes intercepting the colony’s correspondence about Indian affairs and collecting information as to its real meaning. “I have also seen a letter written by a gentleman who is there in Virginia to a friend of his who is an acquaintance of mine, and he showed it to me,” Zúñiga reports. “It says that he will find out from Captain Newport, the bearer, just what is going on there.… He says also that they have deceived the King of that region [Powhatan] with an English boy whom they gave him, saying that he is the son of this King [James I], and he [Powhatan] makes much of him.”¹¹⁷ The letter was most likely a report that detailed the first meeting between Newport and Powhatan. The “English boy” was undoubtedly Thomas Savage.¹¹⁸ Zúñiga characterizes the whole exchange as a kind of geopolitical charade, a deceptive performance designed to make the Virginia Colony appear legitimate. Like the colony’s patents and legal documents, the exchange of boys gives an appearance of legality to a conspiracy against Spanish interests.

Zúñiga likewise portrays Namontack’s appearance in court as an act staged for international benefit. In a letter dated June 26, 1608, he describes Namontack’s debut in London society. “This Newport brought a lad who they say is the son of an emperor of those lands and they have coached him that when he sees the King he is not to take off his hat, and other things of this sort.”¹¹⁹ The English, Zúñiga concludes, are pretending that Namontack is a prince so they can cite treaties as evidence of their own possession. But Zúñiga also reveals what he believes to be the artifice behind such a strategy—the colonists have coached Namontack to decline to doff his hat before the king. In describing this gesture, Zúñiga was referencing hat honor, an important diplomatic protocol in early modern courts. Like bowing before the king, doffing one’s hat was a way of showing submission. Loyal subjects were expected to take off their hats in the presence of kings, or even before an empty throne.¹²⁰ However, princes sometimes made a distinction between domestic subjects and visitors. Throughout his reign, James I insisted that foreign dignitaries keep their hats on as a way of recognizing their status as representatives of foreign powers. In 1614, the Russian secretary Alexis Ziuzin reported to Tsar Mikhail I that James had refused to allow Russian ambassadors to take off their hats in his presence. “King James said to the ambassadors that they should put on their hats, and he reminded them about it twice and three times, and by his royal word he strongly insisted on it.”¹²¹ In coaching Namontack to keep his hat on in the presence of the king, the company presents him as a visiting ambassador from a foreign power. Namontack’s hat, safe on his head, elevates him to the same status as European ambassadors. There is certainly a tragic irony here. By coaching Namontack to keep his hat on, the company seeks to give him the authority to welcome the English to his land.¹²² They give him rights so he can give them up. But this is not Zúñiga’s criticism. He does not attack the company out of respect for Namontack or Powhatan sovereignty. Instead, he claims that the wearing of the hat is a mere show intended to deceive onlookers into believing Jamestown has formed alliances with Powhatan leaders. In couching his criticism in this way, Zúñiga stops short of denying Native sovereignty or dominion outright. He does not comment on whether real Indian kings should keep their hats on. He claims instead that Namontack himself is something less than a prince and therefore not qualified to make a treaty.

Zúñiga’s silence on the true nature of Native sovereignty had a certain advantage. While the Spanish crown denied the rights of Native kings on the basis of their supposed heresy or lack of intellectual faculties, the Spanish also gained occasional diplomatic advantage from recognizing Native rights and employing arguments like those advanced by the English crown. In a letter of March 15, 1609, Zúñiga takes a page from the English book, voicing his concern for Powhatan welfare: “I understand that once they have fortified themselves well, they will manage to destroy that King [Powhatan] and the savages, so as to take possession of everything.”¹²³ While the English frequently criticized what they believed to be the lawless violence of Spanish conquest, here, Zúñiga ironically applies the same criticism to the English, portraying them as violent conquerors bent on seizing land. Zúñiga’s remark illustrates the provisional nature of colonial arguments over Native rights. While the English frequently borrowed from Spanish texts in order to construct hybrid legal arguments, this traffic could occasionally run in the other direction, with Spanish diplomats adopting English frameworks. As the balance of power shifted, so did legal positions about Native rights.

According to Zúñiga, the farcical nature of the crowning of Powhatan boys undercuts the legal rationale of the English crown. Amusing though they may be, such performances provide a cover for mayhem, with the English plotting the murder of their Indian neighbors just as they plan assaults on Spain. With the same letter that describes the English conspiracy against Powhatan, Zúñiga encloses a map that shows English settlements and fortifications.¹²⁴ Though the English crown has offered legal rationales for this expansion, Zúñiga warns that the English conquerors are threatening to engulf New Spain after they finish with the Indians. He offers the official recommendation that the colony should meet the same fate as the French Huguenot settlement at Fort Caroline, which had been destroyed by Spanish agents: “Your Majesty should command that this be summarily stopped,” Zúñiga urges darkly.¹²⁵

Though Zúñiga pleads for Philip III to act, his letters implicitly concede the English colonists’ position on treaties. Unlike the Spanish ambassadors who negotiated the Treaty of London, Zúñiga does not deny the Powhatans’ standing. Rather, he seeks to prove that the English have staged treaty agreements and coached Native people into supplying words and gestures that establish English possession. The English are pacifying coastal people with offers of treaty only to spring violence on them later. By pulling back the curtain on Anglo-Powhatan treaty negotiations, Zúñiga seeks to furnish the Spanish crown with legal arguments for razing Jamestown. Philip III did not act on Zúñiga’s recommendations. Zúñiga was replaced by Alonso Velasco in 1610, but returned in 1612 in a failed attempt to arrange a royal marriage. Given Zúñiga’s interest in the protocol of hat honor and its meaning for diplomacy, his departure from London was accompanied by an irony. While Zúñiga was crossing Holborn Bridge, he doffed his hat to an approaching cavalier, who snatched it away and galloped off, much to the amusement of onlookers.¹²⁶ While the colony struggled during its early years, they no longer had Zúñiga to worry about.

Powhatan’s bow, Ocanindge’s speech, Namontack’s refusal to remove his hat: colonists and diplomats recounted such words and acts in writing in order to support claims to territory. Debates about who had rights to the coast involved competing representations of Powhatan consent. None of the Europeans I have written about so far cared about recognizing the Powhatans in a way consistent with modern understandings of international law. Their letters and reports were entirely strategic, part of a violent struggle over land. The English and their rivals needed the bow, the chiefly oration, and the donning of the hat as support for their claims. But what of Powhatan himself? Somewhere, behind all the letters and printed pages, were the words and gestures that formed the basis for so many conflicting stories. Why did the Powhatan leader agree to make treaties with the English? Europeans made so much of their treaties with him, but what did he do with the objects he received from the newcomers? Can the writings of the colonizers provide an answer to that question?

Crowns and Manitou: Treaty Objects in Powhatan Politics

Powhatans and English people made treaties in many ways, offering promises, exchanging gifts, and even resorting to violence to compel agreement. While some of these practices were unfamiliar to Europeans, it was easy for them to imagine analogies between Powhatan acts of tribute and their own rituals. The English shouted their respect for sovereigns, and bowed in the presence of princes, just as the Powhatans seemed to do. However, coastal diplomacy was different from its European counterpart in at least one significant way. While European politics involved many kinds of performances (not to mention a heated traffic in rumors), Europeans nevertheless viewed writing as the most powerful and permanent way of expressing political agreement. To many historians, this fact has seemed to leave Native people at a disadvantage when it comes to treaty negotiations. And there is much truth to this claim. While the speeches of Powhatan and other Indians fill the pages of Smith’s books, Powhatan could not read those books or respond to them. But as I will suggest now, this does not mean that he was a passive participant in the debates about territory and sovereignty that occupied Europeans. Nor does it mean that he was necessarily a victim of English treaties.

As I have argued so far, the English did not just establish possession by citing European legal authorities. They also looked to Native acts of consent, which could come in many forms. The English solicited some sign of agreement and then framed it in a way that supported their claims. For them, treaties were primarily about words, gestures, or other acts that showed agreement. As Smith’s Proceedings shows, however, for the Powhatans, treaties were primarily about acquiring trade goods, such as beads, metal tools, textiles, and decorative items. While the English recorded treaties in writing, the Powhatans symbolized them in objects.

To modern-day readers, these treaty objects have lost much of their legibility. Colonists like Archer cared about Powhatan expressions only to the extent that they confirmed particular visions of English power. They generally omitted any description of what treaties meant to Native people. Smith, for example, portrayed Powhatan as desiring blue beads purely out of a mindless fascination with decorative objects and a treacherous desire to conquer the English. But there are many accounts of treaties from travelers who did not have the interest in law or diplomacy that animated Archer, Smith, or Zúñiga. Ironically, these observers may tell us something about Powhatan precisely because they saw no need to frame his words according to legal imperatives.

One such observer is Henry Spelman, an English interpreter who lived at Tsenacomoco from 1609 to 1611. On his return to England, Spelman drafted a narrative of his time among the Powhatans. An unimportant person from the perspective of the Virginia Colony’s government, Spelman was not present at the coronation in October 1608. However, when he arrived home he produced a written report that describes Powhatan’s incorporation of an English crown into tribal ceremonies. Spelman’s narrative certainly has its own kinds of bias. For example, he goes to great lengths to show that he has retained his Englishness while living among the Indians, whom he depicts as savage. However, though Spelman renders the Powhatans exotic in order to emphasize his difference from them, his account sheds light on the way they may have viewed the English crown and other objects they acquired during the course of treaty negotiations.

There are two mentions of a crown in Spelman’s narrative. Early on, in a section entitled “Of ther servis to their gods,” Spelman describes the brandishing of an English crown and bedstead in a religious display. “As with the great Pawetan,” Spelman writes, “he hath an Image called Cakeres which most comonly standeth at Yaughtawnoone [in one of the Kinges houses] or at Oropikes in a house for that purpose and with him are sett all the Kings goods and presents that are sent him, as the Cornne. But the beades or Crowne or Bedd which the Kinge of England sent him are in the gods house at Oropikes, and in their houses are all the Kinge ancesters and kindred commonly buried.”¹²⁷ Spelman identifies the “Crowne” and “Bedd” as diplomatic presents from “the Kinge of England.” Powhatan keeps the items in a structure at Oropikes that is used to house an image or representation of a god and as a grave for his ancestors. In a section entitled “The manor of settinge ther corne with the gatheringe and Dressing,” Spelman describes the ceremonial use of these items during the planting of corn:

let me not altogither forgett the settinge of the Kings corne for which a day is apoynted wherin great part of the cuntry people meete who with such diligence worketh as for the most part all the Kinges corne is sett on a daye After which setting the Kinge takes the croune which the Kinge of England sent him beinge brought him by tow men, and setts it on his heade which dunn the people goeth about the corne in maner backwardes for they going before, and the king followinge ther faces are always toward the Kinge exspectinge when he should flinge sum beades amonge them which his custum is at that time to doe makinge thos which had wrought to scramble for them But to sume he favors he bids thos that carry his Beades to call such and such unto him unto whome he giveth beads into ther hande and this is the greatest curtesey he doth his people, when his corne is ripe the cuntry people cums to him againe and gathers drys and rubbes out all his corne for him, which is layd in howses apoynted for that purpose.¹²⁸

Unlike Archer or Smith, Spelman is not interested in the implications of the crown for treaties, or questions of consent. He notes its status as a gift from James I, but he describes its use in a corn-planting ritual that involves only Powhatan and his subjects. The description corroborates his view that the Powhatans are strange and barbaric savages who practice occult pagan ceremonies. But his focus is different from that of more powerful correspondents, and a different picture of Powhatan emerges. Spelman takes us beyond the spaces of cross-cultural diplomacy, and finds Powhatan using European objects to confirm his power over his own people.

In an account of power struggles in Tsenocomoco during the early years of colonization, James D. Rice has described Powhatan motives for collecting European objects. According to Rice, the foreign origins of chiefs were central to religious cosmology and political order, and collecting and deploying objects from different places was one way werowances consolidated and displayed power. As Rice puts it, “Chiefly lineages emphasized their foreign origins in order to demonstrate that they were part of a universal spiritual order rather than local parvenus.”¹²⁹ If what Spelman writes is true, Powhatan and his subjects did not understand the concept of a foreign nation in the same way as Europeans. The crown does not simply represent the recognition of an external power, the way a diplomatic gift in Europe might. Rather, it is a key source of Powhatan’s own authority to demand the planting of corn from his subjects and to reward his favorites with gifts of beads. He incorporates the crown into his own story of coming to power. His might and command of resources flows from the object and the spiritual trajectory it represents.

Spelman’s story suggests that for Powhatan the crowning ceremony was only partly about reaching a settlement with the newcomers. Because of the importance of a distant lineage to his own power, he looked to the newcomers and their trade goods as a way of maintaining authority over his own subjects. Though this authority was spiritual in nature, it had political uses. While the exact nature of the ceremony and its meaning to Powhatan and his subjects may never be known, it should be remembered that, among the Powhatans as among the English, the significance of a ritual was never entirely predetermined by religion or custom. There is sometimes a tendency to view Natives as traditional, while thinking of colonists as modern. But like the English, who used natural law texts to stake land claims, Powhatan manipulated manitou and its embodiment in English goods to control his own subjects. That he used English material goods in these ceremonies may have suggested to his subjects that he had the crisis of English arrival under control, and that channels for distributing food and goods would continue to function reliably as long as he was in power.¹³⁰ He may have been suggesting that the arrival of the newcomers had made him more, not less, powerful, and that a new kind of political order was emerging from his triumph over them.

Though many Europeans were keenly interested in Powhatan’s foreign policy, Spelman is one of the few to mention these ceremonies. One reason for their absence in other records may be that Powhatan did not want any of the more powerful newcomers to see them. One of the first things Powhatan did when he met the newcomers was to try and figure out who was in charge. Then he acted accordingly, receiving them according to their rank. But the corn ceremony was intended to confirm Powhatan’s own power, not to recognize that of others. And as a person without any real standing, Spelman was ironically in a position to observe and report things that major power players could not. Another reason Europeans may not have recorded such rituals was that they troubled claims of English possession. The incorporation of a crown into Powhatan ceremonies suggests continued Powhatan independence and sovereignty. It may also suggest control over the newcomers.¹³¹ Spelman, however, was not particularly concerned with questions of international law or possession. This left him in a position to record things higher-ranking English people either did not understand or did not want to publicize.