The Jamestown Experiment (7 page)

On May 29, the settlers were in the initial stages of building the fort when their enemy again began probing them for weaknesses and hampering the work. The Indians now feared the destructive
firepower of the English cannons, and so they did not approach within range of the cannons and musket. Still, about forty arrows landed around the fort, but none of the colonists were hurt.

After a day’s respite, the Indians harassed the English again. They silently approached the fort, “lurking in the thickets and long grass,” looking for an opportunity to pick off the settlers in a war of attrition rather than by frontal assault. Eustace Clovell imprudently straggled unarmed outside the fort and was hit by six arrows. Bleeding profusely, he ran back into the fort, crying “Arms! Arms!” before collapsing. Everyone grabbed their muskets, scanned the woods from the relative safety of the half-finished fort, and awaited the expected attack that never came. Eight days later Clovell died of his wounds, although he had saved other lives with his warning. Certainly, few settlers wished to leave the confines of the fort.
⁸⁵

The attacks persisted as the colonists grew weary from their constant vigilance and worry that they would be overrun. On June 1, the day after Clovell was gravely wounded, twenty Indians appeared (there were more in the woods) and “shot many arrows at random which fell short of our fort.” After the ineffective attack, the Indians melted back into the safety of the woods.
⁸⁶

Over the next two weeks several others were hit by arrows when they foolishly wandered away from the fort and were ambushed by the Indians. The nimble Indian warriors easily escaped and were never hit by English muskets. In one incident, on June 4, the Indians were hiding in the long grass when “a man of ours going out to do natural necessity [relieve himself], shot him in the head and through the clothes in two places but missed the skin.” A few days later, “Savages lay close among the weeds and long grass…shot Matthew Fitch in the breast somewhat dangerously.”
⁸⁷

Despite their instructions and a small bit of common sense, no one thought to cut down the grass surrounding the fort. Instead,
they stationed a few men in the woods to surprise the skulking enemy, and the guards managed to frighten off a few Indians. Yet the warriors still came to kill the settlers one by one.

Finally, after two weeks of almost continuous attacks and constant fear, an unarmed pair of Indians approached the fort. President Wingfield and Captain Newport went out to parley with them. They turned out to be friendly, having met the ships’ crews during their voyage up the James. They promised that the Indians were negotiating among themselves and that a greater peace would ensue. One of the Indians counseled the English with the sound, albeit rather obvious, advice to “cut down the long weeds round about the fort, and to proceed in our sawing.”
⁸⁸

With the Indian willingness to call off the attacks, and by acting on the sage advice of the visitors, the English lived peacefully over the next week. Nevertheless, they kept a vigilant watch, posting guards and setting a watch each night. But divisions amongst English leaders had begun to weaken the harmony of the colony— and its ability to repel the attacks.

In the midst of these terrifying episodes, the internal leadership problems of the colony reignited the flames of dissension. The leaders were again divided, after less than a month ashore. On June 6, the colonists began murmuring and complaining about “certain preposterous proceedings, and inconvenient courses.” They wrote out a petition and submitted it to the council for its consideration. The council read the petition on June 10, and Christopher Newport won over the fidelity and goodwill of the men with soothing words. Gabriel Archer wrote, “We confirmed a faithful love one to another, and in our hearts subscribed an obedience to our superiors this day.”
⁸⁹

Perhaps feeling magnanimous in the restoration of respect and amity, the council finally swore in John Smith as a member that
day. Smith had just won a judgment against Edward Wingfield for £200 because “many untruths were alleged against him, but being so apparently disproved begat a general hatred in the hearts of the company against such unjust commanders.” Smith put the money back into the common treasury. He credited Reverend Hunt with successfully exhorting the leaders and colonists to reconcile with one another.
⁹⁰

Meanwhile, the settlers spent the time busily preparing the ground for planting as well as reloading the ships for Newport’s return trip to England. They cut down trees and made clapboard to send to England as a viable indigenous local commodity to persuade investors to support the colony. Christopher Newport had been hired only to carry the colonists to Virginia and then return with word of how the colony fared and with proof of its riches. On Sunday, June 21, the men attended a Sabbath service. Later that afternoon, Newport dined ashore with the council and “invited many of us to supper as a farewell.” The dinner might have generated some levity among the leaders, perhaps allowing them to reflect on their accomplishments: they had sailed to the New World, conducted some exploration, found clues to great sources of wealth, established relations with the native peoples, planted food, built fortifications, and started building their colony. And they had accomplished this with relatively minimal loss of life. Despite the respite, tensions still simmered among them.
⁹¹

President Wingfield later reported that he had a private conversation with Newport a few days before the dinner. Obviously concerned about the discord, Newport asked Wingfield how well the government was settled on the eve of Newport’s departure. Wingfield was confident that he could govern the colony, but he suspected Bartholomew Gosnold and Gabriel Archer might foment trouble. The president believed Gosnold had a dangerous following
of loyal men; he viewed Archer as an ambitious character. Newport again addressed the men and believed he had “moved them with many entreaties to be mindful of their duties to his Majesty and the colony.” Newport believed he was leaving the colony in harmony when he departed.
⁹²

During the dinner, the members of the council also presumably conferred on the contents of a letter they were composing to the Virginia Council in London. After reflecting on the state of the colony and their accomplishments to date, and hoping that God would bless their future proceedings, they promoted the colony to the investors.

They reported that the easiest and richest commodity to find was sassafras roots, and they sent a shipment of more than two tons. The deep and navigable James River had great “sturgeon and other sweet fish as no man’s fortune hath ever possessed the like.” They sent home a “taste of clapboard” that the investors would have some idea of the bounty of trees in Virginia. Most tantalizingly, the council in Virginia warned that Spaniards must be prevented from laying their “ravenous hands upon these gold showing mountains.” Indeed, the Jamestown council sent a barrel of earth back, because they were told that it contained gold. They also asked for Newport’s speedy return with a relief expedition of supplies. The incessant Indian attacks and the friction within the council were not mentioned, because such news would discourage investment.
⁹³

On the morning of June 22, Christopher Newport promised the colonists that he would return within twenty weeks with supplies. He then sailed down the James River with a few dozen sailors aboard the
Susan Constant
and the
Godspeed.
The sight of the colony was quickly lost as the ships headed for the ocean. Newport had left the colony with provisions (although they were generally worm-ridden) in a land of bounty where they could fish, hunt, farm, pick berries,
and trade with the natives. He felt confident in the welfare and survival of the colony. He could not have foreseen just how disastrous the summer would be for the one hundred settlers left behind.

When Newport arrived in Plymouth at the end of July, he wrote Lord Salisbury praising Virginia for being “very rich in gold and copper.” The returning mariner promised to show the gold to Salisbury, the other lords, and the king “shortly.”
⁹⁴
One leading member of the company, Sir Walter Cope, also wrote to his friend Salisbury a few weeks later, after hearing of the colony’s supposed wealth. With biblical imagery, Cope wrote that many in Virginia were claiming, “Instead of milk we find pearl, and gold instead of honey.” The “barrel full of earth” that Newport had brought with him appeared to be solid gold, “a treasure endless proportioned by God.” But as soon as the next day, Cope wrote another letter bearing the bad news that the ore was worthless. It had seemed so much like gold that the “best experienced about [London]” tested it four times. In the end, “all turned to vapor.”
⁹⁵

The leaders and investors of the company were disappointed but undaunted. By August 17, Sir Thomas Smythe wrote to Salisbury that Newport intended to sail back to Virginia, resolved “never to see you[r] lordship before he bring with him [that] which he confidently believed he had brought before.” Smythe was already preparing two ships for Newport’s return voyage and hoped he would arrive in Jamestown by January with more than one hundred men and supplies for the colony.
⁹⁶

The Englishmen were not the only ones interested in the initial success of the colony. Their Spanish rivals watched events closely, especially the Spanish ambassador in London, Pedro de Zúñiga. At first, he calmly reported to King Philip III that, “Of the ships which went to Virginia, one has arrived at Plymouth, and…they do
not come too contented.” They had a few commodities, his spies informed him, but little of any real value.
⁹⁷
Within a month, as the preparations for Newport’s second voyage advanced, Zúñiga’s diplomatic posts became more urgent.

On September 22, Zúñiga pressed for an audience with King James and wrote his own king, predicting that James would claim that he had no direct responsibility for the actions of the merchants and members of the company. The ambassador directly advised his king to “root out this noxious plant while it is so easy.” So many were arranging to sail for Virginia that it was imperative “not to regard it lightly, because very soon they will have many people and it will be more difficult to get them out.”
⁹⁸
His pleas to his sovereign became more desperate because it was evident—to him—that the English were starting a base for piracy, since they took no women to plant a lasting colony and had found no great sources of wealth. “It will be a service to God and Your Majesty to expel those rogues from there, hanging them while so little [effort] is needed to make it possible.”
⁹⁹

Zúñiga must have been incredulous when he finally received Philip III’s reply. Rather than pledging to destroy the Protestant enemy, the Catholic king simply thanked the ambassador and told him to “report to me what you learn.” Philip ignored the frenetic advice of his hot-headed diplomat and instead waited to see how the English would fare.
¹⁰⁰
If he could have known the deadly conditions of the Jamestown colony that summer, the Spanish king would have been even less concerned than he appeared in his correspondence with his ambassador.

Chapter Five

I
f the settlers’ hopes were a bit dashed because they had not yet found mountains of gold, they were even more surprised that the land of milk and honey did not supply their basic necessities. The summer months did not provide the expected bounty of provisions. In fact, the summer proved a deadly killer that almost wiped out the colony and stressed the tensions among the leaders to the breaking point.

Since the men were no longer drinking from the casks of water and beer on the ships—even if stale—they drank directly from the James River. “Our drink cold water taken out of the river, which was at a flood very salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men,” noted one of the colonists.
¹⁰¹

Beginning in late July, salt poisoning, dysentery, and typhoid fever raged among the colonists. “Scarce ten amongst us could either go or well stand, such extreme weakness and sickness oppressed us,” John Smith wrote.
¹⁰²
By early August, the first men started dying. On August 6, John Asbie died of the “bloody flux” when dysentery
drained his bodily fluids. A few days later George Flowre perished from “the swelling,” or salt poisoning.
¹⁰³
Men started dropping everywhere during the following two weeks, with nearly a dozen more succumbing to fatal illnesses.

The feeble men were languishing from waterborne diseases. They groaned weakly and wept in despair in every corner of the fort—the cries were “most pitiful to hear.” The hardest heart was pricked to “hear the pitiful murmurings and out-cries of our sick men without relief every night and day for the space of six weeks, some departing out of the world, many times three or four in a night.” In the morning, those who had the strength to stand and do any labor (which were very few) would drag the bodies “like dogs to be buried.”
¹⁰⁴

Even one of the council members—Bartholomew Gosnold—died from disease. He was buried with honors, “having all the ordnance in the fort shot off with many volleys of small shot.” But his death contributed to the tension and confusion among the colony leaders. In the week after his death, another seven men perished, including gentlemen. The diseases did not respect social class, and no amount of family wealth or prestige could save the gentlemen adventurers in a distant land. As the dreadful heat of August gave way to a more temperate September, men continued to die.
¹⁰⁵

Disease was not the only cause of death; malnutrition killed the colonists too. Prior to their return voyage to England, the sailors had provided the settlers with biscuits and other foodstuffs. Now, the colonists were subsisting on only “a small can of barley sod in water to five men a day.”
¹⁰⁶
John Smith confirmed that the daily ration for each man was a half-pint each of wheat and barley, but the allotment “contained as many worms as grains, so that we might truly call it rather so much bran than corn.”
¹⁰⁷
The massive sturgeon and sea crabs in the river supplemented their diet and provided some relief from their hunger, but it was not enough to keep them alive. Half of
the colonists were dead by September 10, but within a few months they would be facing the arrival of winter with very few provisions, until Newport returned with the promised relief fleet. The tottering colony faced very dim prospects in its race against death.

The survival of the colony depended almost entirely upon the Wahunsonacocks’ goodwill and willingness to bring supplies of food to the settlement. The Indians did not launch any attacks, though they could easily have seized the fort and killed everyone inside. No longer could the colonists bring the guns of the
Susan Constant
and the
Godspeed
to bear in the defense of the settlement. Moreover, the Englishmen lacked the strength to man the fort and fire either muskets or cannons to impede any attack. Most of the men lay in their beds or on the ground, and the fort was left almost completely unguarded. “Thus we lived for the space of five months in this miserable distress, not having five able men to man our bulwarks upon any occasion,” George Percy wrote.
¹⁰⁸

In September, in fact, the Indians shared with the colonists the bounty they had harvested from the land. “It pleased God, after a while, to send those people which were our mortal enemies, to relieve us with victuals, as bread, corn, fish, and flesh in great plenty.” Many different Indian chiefs brought the English a “store of provision to our great comfort.” The feeble men sat up and thankfully ate the food and soon recovered their strength. Moreover, although the sturgeon in the river had retreated, a great abundance of waterfowl appeared on the river and were shot for food. It did not escape the notice of the settlers that they were vulnerable to an attack that never occurred and that “we [would have] all perished” if the Indians did not bring the food.
¹⁰⁹

All of the stresses within the leadership stretched to the breaking point as a result of the suffering and deaths, and they finally
exploded in an eruption of blame and mutual recrimination. In late August, the council accused fellow councilman George Kendall of fomenting discord between the council and the president. Kendall was arrested and taken aboard the pinnace, where he was kept under guard. He was subsequently released from his incarceration after a fortnight, but he was prohibited from bearing arms. The leadership also removed him from the council.
¹¹⁰

On September 10, council members John Ratcliffe, John Smith, and John Martin—all of whom were recovering from being “very sick and weak” and very nearly dying—summoned President Wingfield from his tent. They were accompanied by a few armed guards. Since only four or five dozen settlers were still alive, all of them stopped whatever they were doing and silently watched what ensued. Wingfield’s alleged despicable actions roused their “dead spirits” to confront the president and arrest him.
¹¹¹

The three councilors presented Wingfield with a “warrant signed by them to depose him of the presidency.” He was relieved of his duties as the president as well as on the council. He publicly and vehemently denied all the charges in a heated exchange with the three men. He then said that “they had eased him of a great deal of care and trouble.” The guards marched him to the pinnace, where he was imprisoned.

Smith explained that the charges against President Wingfield stemmed from the fact that he had hoarded food and did not open up the store of general provisions for the colonists throughout the summer, when they were dying in great numbers. “The sack [wine], aquavitae, and other preservatives for our health, being kept only in the president’s hands, for his own diet, and his few associates,” caused numerous deaths in the eyes of his enemies. Even Martin, Ratcliffe, and Smith claimed to be sickened by Wingfield’s policies. Smith charged that the colonists were adversely affected through the president’s “audacious command.”
¹¹²

Wingfield defended his actions, claiming that leadership sometimes required difficult decisions for the common good of the men under his command. He argued that the supplies of oil, vinegar, sack, and aquavitae were down to two gallons each, and he was saving the wine for the Communion table. The men had emptied all of their own private supplies, and now they wanted to “sup upon that little remnant” and any that they could “smell out.”
¹¹³

The council members had pestered the president for a “better allowance for themselves and some of the sick.” Wingfield refused, protesting that he could not be partial toward the gentlemen and that everyone should have “his portion according to their places.” If he had caved in to the demands, Wingfield asserted that he would have in a very short time “starved the whole company.”
¹¹⁴

Wingfield had felt pressure from several angles that tested his leadership abilities. His men were dying of disease, supplies of food were getting dangerously low, and a relief fleet would not arrive for months. The Indians were bringing food, but their grace might end at any time. Because of the deadly early-summer attacks, Wingfield would not let the Indians come into Jamestown and see how weak the colony was, and thereby invite an attack. Meanwhile, his main advisors and their allies were growing desperate and angry about the state of supplies, which they increasingly blamed on him. The struggles the colony faced under Wingfield’s administration came to a head when the president was formally accused of crimes and tried.

On September 11, the council summoned the prisoner before them, and Wingfield was put on trial. Gabriel Archer was made the official recorder for the colony. The council laid articles of impeachment against the president, and he was “thus displace out of the presidency and also of the council.” Ratcliffe delivered a speech to explain why Wingfield should be deposed from the presidency.
He testified that the president denied him “a chicken, a spoonful of beer, and served him with foul corn,” and he pulled some of the rotten grain out of a bag to present as evidence.
¹¹⁵

John Martin testified next, stating that Wingfield “slacked in the service of the colony.” The president, according to Martin, spent most of his time tending the roasting meat on his spit and the food in his oven while the company literally starved to death.
¹¹⁶

The prisoner was allowed to speak in his own defense and demanded a written copy of the articles against him, but his request was summarily refused. Wingfield denied the charges of hoarding food and drink. “I did always give every man his allowance faithfully,” he swore. He averred that he was ready to answer any man’s complaint against him. In his account of the trial, Wingfield noted that no one stood up to contest with him. He commented that Ratcliffe’s speech “savored well of a mutiny” and was “easily swallowed” by the council. As a result, the president was thrown back into his prison on the pinnace.
¹¹⁷
With Wingfield deposed, the council selected Ratcliffe as the new president.

Wingfield labeled his opponents a “triumvirate.” In his view, they sought to overthrow His Majesty’s government in Virginia and violate the lawful instructions of the Virginia Council. He named Gabriel Archer as one of the ringleaders who helped organize the intrigues that led to his overthrow.
¹¹⁸

On September 17, the justices of the court convened again and summoned Wingfield to answer more charges. Jehu Robinson testified that the former president told him that he was conspiring to take flight in the pinnace to Newfoundland “to escape these miseries.” Wingfield therefore stood accused of plotting to desert the settlement to a probable death for his own well-being.
¹¹⁹

Wingfield entreated Ratcliffe, Archer, and the council to take him to England. He wanted justice in the mother country, because
the government of Jamestown and its laws were so unjust that he had no desire “to live under them any longer.” Their triumvirate was not governed by the rule of law, but rather ignored the instructions of the Virginia Council in London. He was also determined to go to England to “acquaint the council there with our weakness.” The leaders of the colony ignored his pleas and kept him locked up on the pinnace. With the miscarriages of justice, the removal of rivals on the council, and growing factionalism, the leadership was at war with one another. The entrepreneurial mission of the colonists was lost temporarily in the chaos.
¹²⁰

A more fundamental problem in governing the colony was that the settlers had no voice in the selection of their governors. The Virginia Council appointed the leaders of the colony based upon their presumed abilities as gentlemen. Wingfield proved that social status was not an indicator of ability to lead in the nascent colony. Indeed, the gentlemen remained locked in a struggle for power, and the commoners could do little but witness the spectacle and suffer the consequences.

During the fall, the situation in Jamestown remained dire. Ratcliffe and Martin, Smith related, “being little beloved, of weak judgment in dangers and less industry in peace,” were poor leaders with little vision for the colony beyond their own political ambitions. The settlers were completely dependent upon the Indians for food, and the pair did nothing to remedy the fact that the colony was down to only eighteen days of rations. The weak and discontented men lived in misery and spent their time grumbling and muttering about their condition rather than acting to save themselves. They had no houses to cover them, their tents were rotted, and their cabins were unfinished.
¹²¹