The Jamestown Experiment (22 page)

With the Indians seemingly subdued, De La Warr felt confident enough to send a company of men up to the falls to continue the “search for minerals and to make further proof of the iron mines.” When they reached the Appomattocs, the English went
ashore to fill their barrels with fresh water and were lured to a feast. “Forgetting the subtleties” of the Indians, the “greedy fools” accepted the invitation and went into the homes. Choosing a time in which the English least suspected an attack, the Appomattocs “did fall upon them, slew many, and wounded all the rest, who within two days after also died.” Only Thomas Dowse, a drummer boy, survived the ambush. He fled to the ship and hid behind the rudder as he managed to sail off.
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Undaunted by the Indian retaliation, Lord De La Warr’s military commander, Capt. Edward Brewster, led a force to the falls to “proceed in the search for minerals” and “attend there for my lord’s coming,” because De La Warr intended to inhabit the fort his brother, Francis West, had built. Throughout the autumn and early winter the garrison had several encounters with the Indians, and “some of his men being slain, among the rest his [nephew] Captain William West.” The Indians shouted cries of victory through the woods that the men in the fort could hear. Nevertheless, De La Warr went to live at this fort for a few months, but eventually he would have to abandon the fort as well as the search for wealth.
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George Percy was left in charge of the government at Jamestown in the governor’s absence. The Paspaheghs appeared at the settlement to test the defenses, thinking they might surprise the garrison. Percy responded by capturing their chief, Wowinchopunck. The colonists surrounded him, and then several Paspahegh warriors appeared out of the woods and fired a hail of arrows. The “stout Indian lived and was carried away” after suffering several sword wounds.
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The violence on both sides persisted, although the English settlers were gaining the upper hand. They suffered some deadly attacks and were driven from the falls, but the situation was a far cry from the days of the starving time when the colonists were surrounded in Jamestown. Moreover, new leaders were coming
who would continue the expansionary policies of the colonists and overcome the remaining Indian resistance.

Interim governor Thomas Gates left Jamestown in July 1610, soon after surrendering his commission to Lord De La Warr. Gates returned to England with a letter to the Virginia Company. In the letter, the council in Jamestown summarized recent events for the company and detailed the misery of the settlers during the starving time and the unexpected arrival of Gates and Somers. The council explained and defended their unavoidable decision to abandon Jamestown and the reversal of this decision by Lord De La Warr.

The council rendered its collective judgment that the blame for the difficulties of the colony should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the colonists themselves. The land, they stated unequivocally, was bountiful, and “no country yieldeth goodlier corn or more manifold increase.” It abounded with grapes, and English seeds easily grew there, “no sooner put into the ground than to prosper as speedily and after the same quality as in England.” Any contrary news claiming the poverty of the land was only rumor and scandalous lies.
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The lesson that the gentlemen adventurers took away from their challenges over the past few months was that their absolute authority was responsible for saving the colony. “I beseech ye, further to make inference that since it hath been well thought on by ye to provide for the government by changing the authority into an absolute command…of a noble and well-instructed lieutenant, of an industrious admiral, and other knights and gentlemen, and officers, each in their several place of quality and employment, if the other two, as I have said, be taken into due account valued as the sinews of this action, without which it cannot possible have any fair subsisting.” Rather than giving the individual colonists greater incentive and initiative to work harder for their success, the gentlemen believed that the settlers were lazy
commoners who must be herded like swine and commanded by their lordly masters to work for the common good.
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The Virginia Company used Gates’s celebrated return to London in the late summer of 1610 in its public relations campaign to promote the national mission of the Jamestown colony. The company published promotional literature that interpreted the disaster of the wreck of the
Sea Venture
and the successes of Lord De La Warr’s leadership as the core of the narrative of the providential protection of England’s national mission to settle America. Downplaying the struggles to survive, particularly the starving time, the company instead publicized the notion that “God will not let us fall. Let England know our willingness, for that our work is good. We hope to plant a nation where none before hath stood.” Attacking any “scandal, false reports, or any opposition,” the company again advertised Virginia as the land of milk and honey, promising that the rapidly growing colony would reward every investor with great profits.
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George Yeardley, a future governor, had to admit that the fleet of ships that carried Gates back to England imported nothing valuable from Virginia. “At this present I am little or nothing better furnished with any matter of value, either for discovery of mines or ought else worth your knowledge.” Yeardley still hoped that the fertile land would reap a bounty of commodities of “pitch and tar, soap-ashes, wood, iron, etc.” After several years of futile searching, the company would instruct the governor to continue the search for silver and gold for which it now had “probable intelligence” about its location. Finally, the march to the west to hunt for precious metals would include another voyage of discovery for “finding out the South Sea.”
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Yet even as the company publicized its efforts to keep its current investors and attract new ones, the settlers faced not only a war with
the Indians but summer diseases. During the summer of 1610, as many as one-third of the colonists perished from salt poisoning, dysentery, and typhoid. Many of those who died were the unseasoned new settlers who had been castaways from the
Sea Venture
or with Lord De La Warr’s relief expedition. The governor himself was suffering from a chronic health problem, although no one blamed it on his “idleness” as they would for the common settlers.

Back in London in November 1610, the company followed up its attempt at damage control to reassure investors that the bad news from Virginia was nothing but rumors. It published
A True and Sincere Declaration
to “wash away those spots which foul mouths, to justify their own disloyalty, have cast upon so fruitful, so fertile, and so excellent a country.” Throughout all of the colony’s problems, “Never had any people more just cause to cast themselves at the footstool of God, and to reverence his mercy than our distressed colony!” Besides divine providence, the colony was well governed by trusted gentlemen like Gates and De La Warr. Finally, the land was bountiful and essential to England’s national security, because American forests would supply masts and planks for the ships of the navy.
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Lord De La Warr wintered upriver at the fort at the falls, but his illness did not abate but worsened. In late March 1611, the governor and fifty of his men sailed for Nevis in the West Indies for the “recovery of his health” at the baths there. He delegated his authority to George Percy, the former president, to rule in his absence. Lord De La Warr’s ship, however, met with contrary winds and was forced to return to England.
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Because of his premature and unanticipated return, he felt honor bound to defend himself against those who “spare not to censure me in point of duty.” He recovered from his infirmity and claimed as a gentleman adventurer that “far from shrinking or giving over this
honorable enterprise as that I am willing and ready to lay all I am worth upon the adventure of the action, rather than so honorable a work should fail, and to return with all the convenient expedition I may.”
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De La Warr defended his leadership in departing by informing the company that he had left two hundred colonists generally in good health and well provisioned with ten months’ of food. The settlers had built three forts while he had been in Virginia. The country “is wonderful fertile and very rich, and makes good whatsoever heretofore hath been reported of it.” No mention was made of the Indian war or of the unremitting difficulties encountered by the colonists.
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Chapter Fifteen

A
s the sickly Lord De La Warr arrived in England to the consternation of the Virginia Company, the company was preparing yet another supply expedition to Jamestown with hundreds of additional settlers. Sir Thomas Dale was appointed to serve as the marshal of Virginia and commanded three hundred settlers, brought provisions for a year, and transported cattle for livestock to feed the colonists.

The national mission of the expedition remained unchanged. Indeed, the Virginia Company reiterated their grand vision for the colony to keep its investors and maintain public support: “The eyes of all Europe are looking upon our endeavors to spread the Gospel among the heathen people of Virginia, to plant our English nation there, and to settle at in those parts which may be peculiar to our nation, so that we may thereby be secured from being eaten out of all profits of trade, by our more industrious neighbors.” The search for profits, imperial competition, national glory, and Christian evangelization were all there. The instructions could as well have been written for the first voyage in 1606.
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Nor did Thomas Dale differ from the other gentlemen adventurers who first settled the colony, such as John Smith. Dale served in the Netherlands against the Spanish and was made a captain. He subsequently commanded troops in the colonization of Ireland in the 1590s and then returned to the Netherlands. In 1606, King James knighted Dale. He was a well-heeled and connected gentleman who was acquainted with the likes of Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Southampton. The Virginia Company appointed Dale marshal of the colony in order to institute a rigorous system of martial discipline.

The chosen model of harsh punishments, a regular work routine, and tight organization based upon the belief that law and order would save the lives of the slothful commoners remained unaltered, despite the string of failures since 1607. The members of the company dogmatically resisted any fundamental changes in how the colony was organized. They would settle Virginia through sheer force of will, but the sinkhole would continue to drain thousands of pounds of provisions as well as the lives of hundreds of settlers.

In mid-March 1611, Dale’s fleet, commanded by the inestimable Christopher Newport, sailed from England and endured the shipboard fevers of the passage across the Atlantic. By May 12, four years after the first settlers had espied land, Dale entered the Chesapeake and was greeted by the garrison at Point Comfort. His first task was to repossess Forts Henry, Charles, and Algernon. He sailed up the James to repair the palisades and buildings and plant corn, because of his instructions to “search further up[river] for a convenient new seat to raise a principal town” away from unhealthy Jamestown. He planned to take two hundred men and build a new town near the falls and then relegate Jamestown to be one of many forts with a garrison of “some fifty men with a sufficient commander” around Virginia.
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On Sunday, May 19, with the work progressing at the forts, Dale disembarked at Jamestown and attended Anglican services with the rest of the colony. George Percy formally surrendered his commission, and Thomas Dale had his read aloud. He informed the colonists that Thomas Gates would be following him in a few months with hundreds of new settlers.

When Dale made his inspection of the capital, he was disgusted by what he saw. He found “no corn set, some few seeds put into a private garden or two.” The church and the storehouses were falling down. The men had to repair the storehouse for powder and munitions as well as dig a new well.
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Dale was appalled by the new settlers, judging them “such disordered persons, so profane, so riotous, so full of mutiny and treasonable intendments—as I am well to witness in a parcel of 300 which I brought with me, of which well may I say not many give testimony beside their names that they are Christians.” He wrote that their “diseased and crazed bodies…render them so desperate of recovery as of 300 not threescore may be called forth or employed upon any labor or service.” They were of course laid low by the usual summer diseases that wracked their bodies and claimed many lives. But Dale believed the source of their illness was in their disobedient and slothful natures.
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Dale instituted the draconian “laws divine, moral, and martial” to regulate almost every aspect of the lives of the colonists and provided harsh punishments for those who violated them. Punishments for those who did not attend church services twice a day were to have their food allowance taken away, be whipped, or, for repeat offenders, be put in chains in the galley for six months. Fornicators would be whipped three times a week for a month and were required to ask for public forgiveness from the congregation. Anyone who criticized the government three times would be put
to death, as would those who robbed the common “store of any commodities therein.”
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Dale put the men and women to work under a strict regime, since they seemed more inclined to spend their days “bowling in the streets” rather than repairing their homes, which were “ready to fall upon their heads.” They prepared the planks and other materials for the new capital. His “strict and severe” laws were instituted because “it was no mean trouble to him to reduce his people so timely to good order, being of so ill a condition…for more deserved death in those days.”
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Dale and other gentlemen adventurers uncovered plots to run away to the Indians or the Spanish and meted out severe punishments. “Some he appointed to be hanged, some burned, some to be broken upon wheels, others to be staked, and some to be shot to death.” Others who attempted to steal from the common storehouse he ordered “bound fast unto trees and so starved them to death.”
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If the deaths were “more severe than usual in England,” the leaders opined, “there was just cause for it.” The lowly commoners were “sensible only of the body’s torment, the fear of a cruel, painful, and unusual death more restrains them than death itself.”
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Dale extended and systematized the authoritarian regime of his predecessors, enforcing very strict laws to govern the colony.

After setting the colonists right in working for the common good and planning the geographical organization of the settlements around Virginia, Dale had to advance the security of the colony against its enemies. The forts along the Chesapeake would defend against Spanish incursions into the rivers, and Dale now sought to eliminate the Indian threat once and for all. His plan was to subdue the great werowance, Wahunsonacock, and his peoples, so that the English would be the true masters of their colonial territory and the native peoples their subjects.

Dale said, “By the several plantations and seats which I would make I should so overmaster the subtle, mischievous great Powhatan [Wahunsonacock] that I should leave him either no room in his country to harbor in or draw him to a firm association with ourselves.” The Powhatans and their subjects had a choice: submit to the English or be driven from their traditional lands.
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To these ends, the marshal employed several strategies. First, he forbade “all manner of trading with the Indians lest our commodities should grow every day with them more vile and cheap by their plenty.”
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He also ordered that many of the Indians “who used to come to our fort at Jamestown bringing victuals with them [be] apprehended and executed as a terror for the rest,” because they were suspected of spying on the fort and relating intelligence about its weaknesses.
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Dale then planned an expedition against the Nansemonds at the mouth of the James to ensure control of the river by eliminating the final threat there. They had many encounters “by land and water.”
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Dale, Francis West, and John Martin outfitted their men with a complement of arms and armor. The technological superiority of the English and the European way of war were evident as Dale’s men sailed toward their enemy and unleashed a terrifying onslaught.
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Although the Indians managed to wound a couple of men with arrows, including West in the thigh and Martin in the arm, they were clearly outmatched. The English killed and wounded many Indians who “not being acquainted nor accustomed to encounter with men in armor, much wondered thereat, especially that they did not see any of our men fall as they had done in other conflicts.”
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In the view of the English, the perplexed Indians relied upon their traditional “exorcisms, conjurations, and charms…necromantic spells and incantations” to call upon their gods to douse their enemy’s gunpowder with rain. It did not avail them, as the Englishmen, with relative impunity, “cut down their corn, burned their houses, and,
besides those which they had slain, brought some of them prisoners to our fort.” Dale conducted additional “invasions and excursions upon the savages, [and] had many conflicts with them.”
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An increasingly beleaguered Wahunsonacock sent Dale a warning that he would kill the English in “a strange manner” if he persisted in his expansionist policies toward the falls. Dale knew he had the advantage and would not be intimidated by an enemy he considered a pagan savage with inferior weapons. He was reportedly “very merry at this message” and sneered at his enemy’s inability to resist the English attacks. It seemed to him as if Wahunsonacock was choosing annihilation.
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Dale sought to eliminate other threats to Jamestown when a Spanish ship appeared off the coast of Virginia.

In late June, a Spanish caravel entered the Chesapeake Bay and anchored within sight of Fort Algernon at Point Comfort, though the captain wisely kept it out of range of English guns. Dozens of English soldiers armed themselves for battle against the hated enemy that they believed had finally decided to attack the Jamestown colony. They waited tensely for the Spanish to act.

The Spanish commander, Don Diego de Molina, had been dispatched on this reconnaissance mission from Lisbon to provide King Philip III with an assessment of the state of the colony and clues to English intentions. Molina ordered a sloop be lowered and boarded it with his second in command, Marco Antonio Perez, an English pilot employed by the Spanish, Francisco Lembry, and ten armed men. As they neared the land, the Spanish spied sixty or seventy armed English soldiers waiting near the fort. Molina recognized that he was outmatched, should a violent confrontation erupt, and chose a diplomatic approach. He ordered the master to remain behind in the sloop with the men and went ashore with just Perez and Lembry.

Things did not turn out as well as Molina had wished as the English “took the three, deprived them of their arms, [and] carried them to the fort.” An hour later, some twenty Englishmen attempted to lure the Spanish ashore to take them prisoner as well, but the master refused to take the bait and demanded the return of his commander. A Spaniard went ashore to discover the fate of Molina and the others but was surrounded by armored men leveling their arquebusses at him.
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Soon a smaller group of English soldiers went to speak with the Spanish, and a pilot, John Clark, asked to speak with the master onboard the sloop. The Spanish seized him and took him prisoner. The two sides began negotiating the release of their respective hostages. Tensions escalated as the Spanish approached the shore again, facing twenty English musketeers. The Spanish master threatened that unless the English decided “to surrender Don Diego and his companions, that he would fight [them].” The English retorted “with great anger that they might go to the devil.”
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The Spanish caravel headed out to sea with Clark while the English retained Molina (both were held for years). Dale feared that the consequences of the encounter could prove disastrous for the colony. The Spanish had gathered a great deal of intelligence about the English position, he feared. “What may be the danger of this unto us who are here so few, so weak, and unfortified, since they have by this means sufficiently instructed themselves concerning our just height and seat; and know the ready way unto us both by this discoverer and by the help likewise of our own pilot,” he could only guess. It did not bode well for the future. He suspected that the caravel may have been a point ship for a massive Spanish fleet to attack the colony. The English would soon find out.
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