Pocahontas - Love and hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the heart of a new nation

Table of Contents

Acclaim for David A. Prices

LOVE AND HATE IN JAMESTOWN

Not only intellectually palatable, but also a juicy feast of compelling storytelling.... Love and Hate in Jamestown deserves an honored spot in any history buffs library. Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Greed, arrogance, intrigue, valor, stupidity, suspense, and cataclysmic tragedy.... Price interweaves all these elements with a graceful, reportorial style that never forgets the humanity of the individuals involved. The Orlando Sentinel

The most historically correct and stylistically elegant rendering of John Smith and Pocahontas that I have ever read. Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers

The story David Price tells so lucidly is far more compelling than the popular tale.... A splendid book. The Christian Science Monitor

John Smith... is scrupulously brought to life.... Price has re-created a figure to whom this nation owes a debt. The Dallas Morning News

The Jamestown story is splendidly realized.... Firmly grounded in original sources, particularly Smiths own vivid records, and in later scholarship. Detroit Free Press

A superb narrative of the founding of the first colony.The New York Sun

[Price] has perused literally all existing records, letters, articles, manuscripts, shipping accounts, slavery files, and other accounts to bring us the real story of the complex first years of the colony.... A valuable study. The Decatur Daily

In Prices research, both Smith and Pocahontas emerge as full, compelling characters. Washington City Paper

[An] admirable new history.... A fine book, one that personifies the virtues I esteem in a work of popular history: clarity, intelligence, grace, novelty, and brevity. David L. Beck, San Jose Mercury News

[An] impeccably researched and very able retelling.... The intersection of the Jamestown story with the careers of Smith and Pocahontas makes a fascinating narrative, and Price has done it full justice.The Independent (London)

Price puts the first settlement back where it belongs: at the center of the American story.... Beautifully written and an authentic page-turner. National Review Online

Maps

The Voyage of the Susan Constant, the Godspeed,
and the Discovery 16061607 14

Chief Powhatans World 1607 37

PROLOGUE

In the year 1606, on a Roman tennis court, the artist Caravaggio killed an opponent after an argument over a foul call. A middle-aged mathematician named Galileo Galilei, who had not yet built his first telescope, published a book of observations about the recent appearance of a supernova in the sky. Japans first shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa, had recently begun his rule. The Dutch painter Rembrandt was born. In Oxford, Cambridge, and Canterbury, forty-seven scholars appointed by the king were laboring over a new translation of the Scriptures, which would come to be known as the King James Bible. A new play called Macbeth opened in London. And in late December, in Londons River Thames, three small ships were anchored, awaiting a voyage across the Atlantic.

Those three shipsthe Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discoverywent on to change the course of history. After a series of fruitless attempts by the English to create an outpost in North America, the voyagers of 1606 finally broke through. The colony that they established at Jamestown would open the way for later English settlements up and down the East Coast, and eventually for the United States itself.

The Jamestown colony was an entrepreneurial effort, organized and financed by the Virginia Company of London, a start-up venture chartered eight months earlier; its business model was to extract profits from the gold, silver, and other riches supposedly to be found in that region of North America. Also, because no one yet knew the extent of the North American continent, the company expected to find a trade route by river through Virginia to the Pacific. (Religious conversion of the natives was a distant third objective.) The enterprise was a joint-stock company, its equity held by a limited circle of investors. In a little over two years, the Virginia Company would have its initial public stock offering at twelve pounds, ten shillings a share. English America was a corporation before it was a country.

Few of the investors were actually on the three ships, fortunately for them. The colonys ultimate success would come at a fearsome price: disease, hunger, and hostile natives left behind a toll of misery and death. Most of the 105 or so adventurers who went on the ships would be dead within months, and that was only the first wave of mortality to hit the colony.

Its amazing the settlement survived at all. The alien territory of Virginia would have been a challenge to the best of explorers. But the 1606 expedition, by and large, was not made up of the best, or for that matter the brightest. Half of the colonists aboard the three ships were gentlemenupper-class indolents who, as events unfolded, literally would not work to save their own lives. (The true meaning of the word gentleman in those days is suggested by the 1605 George Chapman farce Eastward Ho, involving adventurers making ready for a voyage to Virginia; one character instructs another, Do nothing; be like a gentleman, be idle; the curse of man is labor.) Worse, the gentlemen of Jamestown comprised most of the colonys leaders, who came to revile and plot against one another as the sick and the starving were dropping dead around them.

The survival of the small English outpost was thanks mostly to two extraordinary people, one a commoner and one a royal. The commoner was Captain John Smith, a former soldier with an impatient nature and a total lack of respect for his social bettersor anyone else who hadnt proven himself through his merits. The royal was Pocahontas, the beautiful, headstrong daughter of the most powerful chief in Virginia.

The names of John Smith and Pocahontas have by now passed into American legend. Like the Jamestown story as a whole, their stories have been told over the generations with varying degrees of accuracy. The imaginative 1995 Walt Disney Co. movie, for example, endowed Pocahontas with a Barbie-doll figure, dressed her in a deerskin from Victorias Secret, and made her Smiths love interest. Or, as Peggy Lee sang,

Captain Smith and Pocahontas
Had a very mad affair
When her daddy tried to kill him
She said, Daddy, oh dont you dare
He gives me fever with his kisses
Fever when he holds me tight
Fever, Im his missus
Oh Daddy, wont you treat him right.1

Trouble is, Smith and Pocahontas were never romantically involved. That isnt surprising; when Smith was in Virginia, Pocahontas was a girl of eleven or so. The real Pocahontas was a child of privilege in her societythat is, the Powhatan Empirewho was curious about the English newcomers, befriended Smith, and gave him and the rest of the English crucial assistance. Years later, looking back on her contributions, Smith would recall that her compassionate pitiful [pitying] heart... gave me much cause to respect her. 2 He credited her with saving the colony. The English in Virginia, for their part, chose a strange way to repay her: after Smith left the colony, they kidnapped her and held her hostage for ransom from her father, Chief Powhatan. Yet during that time, she came to embrace English ways, married a thoroughly lovestruck Englishman named John Rolfe, and lived out the rest of her short life in his country.