Savage Kingdom: Virginia and The Founding of English America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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