Savage Kingdom: Virginia and The Founding of English America

However, even this idyll could not cure every sickness. There was another outbreak of faction fighting, perhaps prompted by Newport’s decision to release Smith from the ship’s brig and allow him to fraternize with the other men. It seems that he now fell out with some of his former associates, who reported him to Newport. The upshot was, according to Smith, that Newport, fearing a loss of authority, ordered the construction of a ‘pair of gallows’ on the beach. But ‘Captain Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them’, so he was returned to the ship. No other reference to this curious incident survives, and whatever the details, the result was a hasty departure. The ships cast off on 3 April, with water and food supplies still depleted, despite the plenitude that the island had offered.25

The fleet sailed past the neighbouring islands of St Kitts, St Eustatius and Saba before anchoring among the Virgin Isles, ‘in an excellent bay able to harbour a hundred ships’. A landing party managed to catch enough fish and turtles to feed the fleet for a further three days, but there was no fresh water to be found anywhere on the island.

Passing Puerto Rico, they reached the tiny island of Mona on 7 April. By now, the drinking water in the ships’ tanks ‘did smell so vilely that none of our men was able to endure it’. A group of sailors managed to find a fresh water supply on the island, and set about filling up barrels to transport back to the ships. Meanwhile, a landing party marched for 6 miles in search of food. They managed to kill two wild boar and an iguana, ‘in fashion of a serpent and speckled like a toad under the belly’, but the path proved ‘so troublesome and vile, going upon the sharp rocks’, and the tropical heat so intense, that several men fainted. According to Percy, the adipose fat of Edward Brookes ‘melted within him by the great heat and drought of the country. We were not able to relieve him nor ourselves, so he died in that great extremity’, the first casualty of the expedition.

The fleet remained at anchor for two days, while a group took a launch to a nearby rocky islet called Monito, some 3 leagues (9 or so miles) away. They had difficulty finding a landing point along the island’s cliff-lined coast, and even more trouble climbing up the ‘terrible sharp stones’ to open land. However, they were rewarded with the discovery of a fertile plain, ‘full of goodly grass and abundance of fowls of all kinds’. White seabirds dived overhead ‘as drops of hail’ and made such a noise ‘we were not able to hear one another speak’. ‘Furthermore, we were not able to set our feet on the ground but either on fowls or eggs, which lay so thick in the grass,’ and within three hours they had filled their boat, ‘to our great refreshing’.

With new supplies of water and food safely loaded, the fleet set off, and on 10 April left the West Indies, heading north for Florida. Four days later, they crossed the Tropic of Cancer, the northerly limit of the tropics.

The following morning, Newport started to take soundings, in the hope of finding the North American continental shelf.

The use of soundings was the old-fashioned method of navigation. A lead weight smeared in tallow and attached to a line knotted at intervals of a fathom was dropped overboard to measure the depth of the sea. When it was hauled up, particles embedded in the tallow were used to tell what sort of seabed lay beneath.

In familiar waters, such as the English Channel, soundings were effective, as a combination of depth measurement and seabed material (‘small shingles’, ‘white stones like broken awls’, ‘big stones rugged and black’) helped to build up a profile of the sea floor that could locate the ship to within a few nautical miles of its position, even when the shore was over the horizon. However, the ocean beneath the fleet’s current position was too deep to sound, leaving Newport with no option but to keep sailing.

They continued north-west for ten days, carried over 1,000 miles by the Gulf Stream. Further soundings were taken, but to no avail. By 21 April, Newport had to accept that he was lost. This was probably the moment that Robert Tyndall suggested he try the mathematically based ‘new navigation’ techniques to plot their position. English mariners, apparently including the crew of the Susan Constant, were suspicious of such methods, considering them hocus-pocus. The prevailing attitude was summed up in Eastward Hoe, when Sir Petronel Flash uses ‘the elevation of the pole’ and ‘the altitude and latitude of the climate’ (garbled descriptions of the relevant techniques) to mistake the Isle of Dogs on the Thames for France.

Nevertheless, traditional methods had failed, so it was time for Tyndall to bring out his cross-staff or astrolabe, and plot a position. Measuring the angle between the horizon and the midday sun, he announced that they had reached 37 degrees north of the Equator, believed to be the latitude of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. All they now had to do was to use the ship’s compass to head due west, and they would eventually reach their destination. The guffaws of sceptical deck-hands probably filled the ships’ sails.

That evening, the fleet was hit by a ‘vehement tempest, which lasted all the night with winds, rain, and thunders in a terrible manner’. Concerned that the coast was nearby, and the ships might be driven on to the shore, Newport ordered the passengers into the hulls, where they were told they would be safest if the ships collided with rocks or the seabed. They emerged the following morning into the calm, and gazed upon an unbroken horizon. A lead was dropped, to see whether they had yet reached the coastal shallows, but the ocean floor was still beyond the line’s 100-fathom reach. Food and water supplies were once again running low. The unpredictable weather threatened another battering. The need to find a safe harbour intensified.

For three days, they aimlessly sounded the seas, doubtful of Tyndall’s assurances that their destination lay just beyond the western horizon. Unease developed into panic, and on 25 April, John Ratcliffe, captain of the pinnace, proposed that the fleet head back to England, in the hope that the Westerlies would get them there before supplies gave out.

Then, at four in the morning of 26 April 1607, as the faintest gleam of dawn crept across the placid ocean, the night watch of the Susan Constant picked out a disturbance on the western horizon. As the sun lifted behind them, crew and passengers began to gather on deck and squint over the ship’s bowsprit. Gradually, the low contours of a coastal plain became distinct, a dark line of trees sitting on the horizon like the pile of a carpet. A few hours later, Tyndall’s navigational methods were vindicated. Not only had they reached America, but they were facing ‘the very mouth of the Bay of Chesapeake’.26

In London, reports reached Robert Cecil that the secret of the Virginia venture was out. The Richard, the ship sent by the West Country group to reconnoitre northern Virginia, had been taken off the coast of Florida by a Spanish fleet. A storm had forced one of the Spanish ships to put in at Bordeaux, where its English captives were released on the orders of the French authorities. It was one of these men who had managed to make his way to London and break the bad news. Other members of the expedition, including the mission’s pilot John Stoneman, were less fortunate. They had been taken to Spain, where ‘rough’ interrogation awaited them.27

The Spanish at this time had only a hazy understanding of English plans. Around the time the Royal Charter had been issued, King Philip III’s ambassador to London, Don Pedro de Zuñiga, had heard of a plan to send ‘500 or 600 men, private individuals of this kingdom to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida’. He had also discovered that ten Indians were being kept in London, who were ‘teaching and training’ prospective settlers of ‘how good that country is for people to go there and inhabit it’.28

By 24 January, 1607, Zuñiga was still unaware of the Newport expedition, but had received garbled information that some sort of venture was under way. He wrote an urgent dispatch to Philip III reporting that the English ‘have made an agreement, in great secrecy, for two ships to go [to Virginia] every month until they land two thousand men’. He also noted that Dutch rebels were to be sent. There followed a brief but mostly accurate summary of James’s charter of the previous April, including a list of those appointed to the Royal Council. The charter itself was a public document, but the order appointing the Royal Council was not, indicating that Zuñiga had found a source close to the Privy Council.29

On 26 February, Zuñiga received a response to his previous dispatch. ‘You will report to me what the English are doing in the matter of Virginia – and if the plan progresses which they contemplated, of sending men there and ships,’ the King wrote, ‘and thereupon, it will be taken into consideration here, what steps had best be taken to prevent it.’ Over the following weeks, the traffic of intelligence intensified. In April, Zuñiga finally learned that the English had already sent three ships, but he believed the Richard to be one of them.

On 7 May, a council of war assembled in Madrid to discuss the implications of the news. The danger, it was decided, was the proximity of the settlement to Spanish interests, since it lay, according to Zuñiga, ‘in 35 degrees above La Florida on the Coast’. Though this region of America ‘has not been discovered until now, nor is it known’, nevertheless it was ‘contained within the limits of the Crown of Castille’, in other words, Spanish territory. It was therefore concluded that ‘with all necessary force this plan of the English should be prevented’.30

While these discussions were under way in Madrid, news of the discovery of the Richard spread panic. If the Spanish found out what was going on, reprisals might ensue and all the hard-won benefits of peace would be lost. In such a fast-developing situation, it was decided that the Royal Council for Virginia was too cumbersome or too prone to infiltration. Its members were ‘dispersed by reason of their several habitations far remote the one from the other, and many of them in like manner far remote from Our City of London’. In response, a new order was published, creating two seperate councils, one for the ‘first’ or southern colony, the other for the ‘second’ or northern colony.31

Meanwhile, Cecil considered the fate of the Virginia venture in the light of the Richard’s capture. Having discussed the matter with the King, he consulted the journal of the Somerset House Treaty negotiations, to see if it might cast any light on the diplomatic ramifications. His conclusion was that, although Virginia was ‘a place formerly discovered by us, and never possessed by Spain’, the Spanish commissioners had denied that this gave England the right to ‘trade’ there. With respect to the captured crew of the Richard, he advised the King that ‘it might be better to leave these prisoners to their inconveniences’, though steps should be taken to recover their ship, as it had been captured in international waters. As for those currently on their way ‘to a discovery of Virginia’, Cecil suggested that they ‘should be left unto the peril which they incur thereby’.32

Part Two

FIVE Tsenacomoco

Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their Poets, who make and sing songs, both of their ancestors’ deeds and praises of their gods.

PHILIP SIDNEY, Defence of Poesy1

THE AREA OF NORTH AMERICA known to the English as Virginia already had a name: Tsenacomoco. The people who lived there left no written record of their culture or history, which even in Thomas Jefferson’s time appeared, at least to Anglo-Americans, to be on the point of extinction. ‘Very little can now be discovered of the subsequent history of these tribes,’ Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. ‘They have lost their language,’ and several tribes had been forced to merge, reducing themselves ‘by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land’. The remnants ‘have more negro than Indian blood in them,’ he noted, anticipating a later practice of merging the two races, in an effort to extinguish any lingering traces of cultural identity.2

All that remains which can be traced directly back to the time of the English incursion is what the English themselves wrote about Tsenacomoco. Several of the colonizers took extensive notes, some even tried to learn and analyse the language. What they found was by its nature transient and mutable. The very act of removing it from the realm of voices, songs, dances and dress and committing it to the permanence of paper must have meant that some of its dynamic qualities were lost, and are unrecoverable. But sufficient remains in the historical record to give a hint of what the Tsenacomoco world was like, at least as seen from the perspective of an English Otasantasuwak or ‘wearer of leg-coverings’ about to step in and destroy it.

A hut stood between the flat sea and the high mountains. It belonged to a god of many shapes and many names. He was most often seen as a mighty Great Hare, and most usually called Ahone.3

One day, Ahone stood at the door of his hut, and beheld the emptiness around. So he made a world according to his imaginings, without a fixed form: a world of water, shifting sand, soft mud, trackless forests and tangled vines. The earth contained no metal or rock, nor any hard thing.

He populated the world with creatures. He made fish, which swam in the streams, and a great deer, which grazed in the woods and galloped across the meadows. But one creature he left tied up in a sack, which lay upon the floor of his hut.

Four gods from surrounding worlds peered over the rim of Ahone’s, and gazed upon his creation. They were jealous of what he had done, and came to his hut armed with spears to destroy his work. They saw the sack, and they opened it. Men and women sprang out and scurried across the floor, and the four gods tried to catch and eat them. But Ahone returned to his hut and drove those cannibal spirits away.

Hungry and vengeful, the four gods went into the forests of Ahone’s creation, and stalked the great deer. They found him grazing quietly in a grove. As they lay in the undergrowth, one of them dressed his arm in the fashion of the neck and head of another deer, and held it above the foliage to catch the great deer’s attention. Seeing a companion, the deer did not run.

In this way the four gods caught the great deer and slaughtered him. They butchered and ate the meat, sinews, offal and bones, devouring everything except the hide, which they left at the door of Ahone’s hut.

Ahone did not grieve. He picked up the pelt, scraped the skin and sprinkled the hairs across the world, and where each hair fell, a deer sprang up. Then he returned to his hut to fetch his sack, and emptied it over the world, one man and one woman for each country. And so the world took its first beginning of mankind.4

The people of each country enjoyed Ahone’s bounties, and they multiplied. They called their world Tsenacomoco, because they lived together, so many of them in the land between the sea and the mountains.5

The sun rose white as pearl from the sea each morning, and fell copper red into the mountains at night. The plants yielded berries for the summertime, nuts in the autumn, and roots for the cold winters. The streams and rivers gave up fish, and the shores of the great bay they called Chesapeake, the shellfish water, because of the abundant crabs and oysters. The woodlands stretched from the feet of the mountains where rivers tumbled their waters into Tsenacomoco to the shores of the bay, and were full of deer and turkeys.6 And so every person lived each with the other, in all the corners of the land and creeks of the river, in every grove and every mere, which Ahone had given to each and all of them.

Then, when the mountains had grown, the world cooled and became hard.7 The Great Hare Ahone left, and Okeus, a scowling warrior, came. The right side of his head was shaven, and from the left side grew a long knot of hair, which draped over his shoulder.8 Around his neck dangled magic tokens, white pearls of the sea and red copper of the mountains. The love and devotion of Ahone was chased from the hearts of the people of Tsenacomoco and replaced by fear and awe. They stopped dawdling in the forests and treading the waters, and huddled at their hearths. Their world that once stretched from the sea to the mountains was confined to the glow of their fires.

Now, what Ahone had once freely given they had to make for themselves. To replace the forest canopy they had slept beneath, they wove sapling branches, thatched with leaves, or hides when the hunting was good. For woodland groves and clearings, they burnt undergrowth and slashed trees. For berries and seeds once harvested wild, they planted beans and corn in the winter to fetch from their gardens in summer. For fish once speared in the running waters, they built ingenious weirs to catch them.

The face of Okeus stared at them from the darkness of the forest, goading them to come to him, threatening them if they did. He made them fearful and brave, adoring the things that hurt them beyond their prevention, such as the fire, flood, lightning and thunder.9

To make each of their spirits strong, the people of the Tsenacomoco mingled them together with hectic dances around the fire, upon which they cooked great feasts. And this excited Okeus.

And he divided the men from the women. The men he made to face him. To mask their fear, they dressed themselves as he did, and wore their hair as he wore his, with a long black lock on the left side hanging down. They no longer ran with the single deer, but like Okeus himself, they used fires and noise to make whole herds flee to their archers, who would stand in a half-circle to receive them, like a great maw with arrows for teeth. The women watched the home, tending the gardens and the children, keeping the fire alight for the return of the men with their meat.

Then one spring day, as the mountains opened their bowels and emptied them into the rivers, a hunter found pieces of crystal scattered in the tinctured waters.10 In the subtle world of Tsenacomoco, nothing so hard or sharp had ever been touched. The hunter took one of his arrows, and where a turkey spur or sliver of bone had once been its tip, used a fleck of the crystal, which he fixed with antler glue and bound with the sinew of a deer. When he fired the arrow at a tree, it pierced the wood like muscle. Like everlasting teeth, it never lost its edge.

Men now yearned for these hard, shiny things, which gave those who possessed them the power called manitu. Manitu was not like the deer in the forest or the fish of the sea; it did not die or decay, nor was it replenished with the flying of the geese or the return of the leaf. Manitu did not grow old. It was not washed away by the water or worn away by use. It could be given, taken, hoarded, seized, stolen, and those who had more were lords over those who had less. And so in time he who had most was made chief, and called weroance, to whom the rest must give any precious things they had, and tribute of venison, corn or counsel, so they might live under his protection and benefaction.11

Some weroances rich in manitu built circles of wood around their villages, so the people were protected. But they could not move freely any more. Other weroances built long huts in the forest, for their secret receptions with Okeus. The special men, the quiyoughcosucks, who painted their bodies black and red in the colours of Okeus, would talk to the god in a dark vault at one end of the hut, where only the quiyoughcosucks and not even the weroances could go.

Okeus grinned at the attention given to him, and he craved more. He taunted the weroances at their desire for manitu. He goaded each to prove that he was the great one. But to become the great one, each needed more of the hard things foreign to Tsenacomoco that bestowed manitu. So one had to fight the other, to take the things in their possession, or to protect their own. The time of war followed.

The noise of battle brought people from other worlds. The Monacans came from the mountains and stood where the rivers fall. They did not speak with the same tongue nor did they know Okeus. They lived as the people of Ahone once lived, moving freely through the woods and the seasons, having no abode but the forest. For each Monacan man had all the glittering stone from the rivers and red copper from the mountains he needed, and so his own manitu.12 They came to the place called Powhatan, the place where the river falls. There, the weroance bought with corn and hides all the blue crystal and red copper the Monacans had.13

Then, within the memory of men, the Otasantasuwak, the ones who wear trousers, came across the sea upon great swans.14 They were ghosts, very pale, weak and bony. Many had beards and whiskers, and they spoke a strange language, though some old men thought they had heard these voices before.

The Otasantasuwak carried sticks which could spit fire, but not with the accuracy or speed of an arrow. The fire sticks were fed with a seed that would not grow in the ground. They could not in their heavy clothes run through the forests, or move stealthily, or hunt down the stag. They had no means of sustaining themselves, but believed they lived by the bread given to them by their quiyoughcosucks, who chanted to their god using a leather pouch stuffed with leaves of white and black markings. They had crystal and copper, some of better quality than that of the Monacans, and piles of rock which lay in the gizzards of their great swans. They gave places their names, and their names places, and once these were chosen, the names stayed the same, even as everything changed.

In these dangerous times, a villager of Powhatan, Wahunsunacock, grew great in stature from these wars and encounters, and came to be chief of weroances, the mamanatowick, with power to save Tsenacomoco in these troubled times.15

Wahunsunacock understood the people of other worlds, who called him Powhatan after the place of his origin that lay at the heart of his power. From them, he got more precious things than were had by any other weroance. The touch of the Otasantasuwak became deadly to any who approached them, unless they were by him permitted, be they people in his power, or other people jealous of him.

Under this rule, he fetched copper from the Monacans.16 From beyond the swamp, in the land of a wise chief impotent in his limbs, he fetched pearls of the purest white, unlike the grains gathered from the Tsenocomoco shores, which were the colour and hardness of rotten teeth.17

It is said Wahunsunacock had received secret knowledge from the Otasantasuwak of more precious and strange things than any that had ever been known, for which he had prepared the great temple in Tsenocomoco, at the branch of a river atop a red sandy hill among the woods, in a place called Uttamussack.

Wahunsunacock had placed there seven grave men who were the quiyoughcosucks. Their chief was dressed in regalia of a stuffed snake and weasel skins, a cloak and a crown of feathers. Wahunsunacock set these priests over the things he had won, and the bones of his forefathers, and a great rock, which they planted in the ground.18

At Uttamussack, Okeus was called and in a mighty rage made it known to Wahunsunacock’s priests that from the great bay a people would arise who would overthrow the mamanatowick. So Wahunsunacock declared that the people of the Chesapeake, who lived on an opposite shore of the bay that took their name, were his mortal enemies, for they had been touched by the Otasantasuwak, and so he made them extinct.

But Okeus spoke again. He said Wahunsunacock might overthrow and dishearten attempters and such strangers as should invade his territories or labour to settle amongst his people. He would do this twice, and their tribute of copper, crystal and other precious things that were due to him would make his power even greater. But of a third attempting, these people would defeat him, and he would fall unto their subjection and under their conquest.19 Then would white clouds of those ghosts blow across the great sea and blank out the sun, and the soft mud would dry, and the trees and plants turn to stone, and all that was supple would become hard, and all the sounds and songs of the Tsenacomoco would become trapped in the black marks upon white leaves.