Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Daniel K. Richter and Kathleen M. Brown, Series Editors

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Envisioning an English Empire

Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World

EDITED BY ROBERT APPELBAUM AND JOHN WOOD SWEET

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Envisioning an English empire : Jamestown and the making of the North Atlantic world / edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet.

p. cm.—(Early American studies)

ISBN 0-8122-3853-2 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8122-1903-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Smith, John, 1580–1631. 2. Jamestown (Va.)—History. 3. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History—17th century. I. Appelbaum, Robert, 1952–. II. Sweet, John Wood, 1966–. III. Series

F234.J3 J3255    2005

973.2'1—dc22

2004058847

Contents

Foreword

Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Introduction: Sea Changes

John Wood Sweet

Part I. Reading Encounters

1. The Conquest of Eden: Possession and Dominion in Early Virginia

James Horn

2. Powhatans Abroad: Virginia Indians in England

Alden T. Vaughan

3. John Smith Maps Virginia: Knowledge, Rhetoric, and Politics

Lisa Blansett

4. The Politics of Pathos: Richard Frethorne's Letters Home

Emily Rose

Part II. The World Stage

5. The Specter of Spain in John Smith's Colonial Writing

Eric Griffin

6. The White Othello: Turkey and Virginia in John Smith's True Travels

Pompa Banerjee

7. England, Morocco, and Global Geopolitical Upheaval

Susan Iwanisziw

8. Irish Colonies and the Americas

Andrew Hadfield

Part III. American Metamorphosis

9. Hunger in Early Virginia: Indians and English Facing Off over Excess, Want, and Need

Robert Appelbaum

10. Between Plain Wilderness and Goodly Corn Fields: Representing Land Use in Early Virginia

Jess Edwards

11. Settling with Slavery: Human Bondage in the Early Anglo-Atlantic World

Michael J. Guasco

12. We All Smoke Here: Behn's The Widdow Ranter and the Invention of American Identity

Peter C. Herman

Conclusion: Jamestown and Its North Atlantic World

Constance Jordan

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Map 1. The North Atlantic World: principal trade routes, ca. 1630. Sources: Meinig, The Shaping of America, map 8; Gleach, Powhatan's World, fig. 1; Kwamelna-Poh et al., African History in Maps, map 6.

Map 2. Powhatan territory and the Virginia colony, 1607–1652. Sources: Gleach, Powhatan's World, fig. 2; Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers, 1611, 1622, 1652; Billings, The Old Dominion.

Map 3. The Mediterranean world, ca. 1612. Sources: Pitcher, Historical Geography, map 23; Kwamena-Poh et al., African History in Maps, map 6.

Map 4. Great Britain: principal English and Scottish plantations in Ireland, 1556–1700. Source: Canny, Origins of Empire, maps 6.1, 6.2.

Foreword

KAREN ORDAHL KUPPERMAN

In recent decades, study of Jamestown became stuck in a narrow focus on the events of the early colony. Conflict between its larger-than-life leaders and the fate of its less-than-worthy rank and file took center stage and the questions of which leader was right or whether anyone was telling the truth loomed large. But a larger context is needed now. The history of Jamestown and the beginnings of English settlement in America is better served when we view it in an Atlantic frame. It is better served, too, when we take advantage of the renewed focus on the early colonial period current among many disciplines, and bring together literary specialists, historians, and archaeologists to pool knowledge and perspectives.

Rather than isolating Jamestown's founding as the beginning of American history, the Atlantic perspective provides a more realistic context for English thinking about overseas ventures. It aims to understand the place of colonies as contemporaries did. The first question then becomes Why 1607? American enterprises must be set first within European history, and for the English they began within the great opposition to Roman Catholic Spain as the ultimate other. Pacification of Roman Catholic Ireland through colonization was an old theme, and England's safety was the principal concern there. Richard Hakluyt, the great Elizabethan promoter of American ventures, spread the Black Legend of Spanish rapaciousness supported and excused by Rome. Ralegh's failed colony of Roanoke, first conceptualized as part of that resistance to Spain, preceded Jamestown, as did the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in Florida, whose settlement in the 1560s was the true beginning of permanent European settlement within the future United States.

The Old Atlantic World contained many others, and many English in America had had previous experience in Europe and the Mediterranean. The earliest plantations in all regions were led and to a great extent populated by men who had served in the armies of the religious wars in Europe; Virginia colony secretary John Pory praised that university of warre, the low Countries.¹ Others, like the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth colony, had lived in exile there.

In the wake of the founding of the Levant Company and the entrance of English merchants into eastern trades, many American venturers had traveled in the rich east and some, like George Sandys, who later became the Virginia Company's treasurer in Virginia, had published books about their experiences. Sandys's best-selling account appeared as A Relation of a Journey Begun An: Dom: 1610. Foure Bookes Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Ægypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote parts of Italy and Ilands adjoyning (London, 1615), and it went through many editions; facing the title page was a portrait of the author identifying him as George Sandes Poet & Traveller. John Smith was one who had not only lived within the Ottoman Empire, but had been by his own account enslaved there as a war captive. Others had been captured by and ransomed from the feared Barbary pirates of North Africa. So bold had these pirates become that a few English were even seized from villages on the west coast of England. What this means is that when English writers compared American Indian clothing or rituals to Irish habits or Muslim worship and beliefs, they were both showing their own sophistication and conveying an understanding that their readers would recognize.

Some transatlantic voyagers had also had experience or knowledge of African regions south of the area they called Barbary. John Pory, who reported on the first meeting of the Virginia Assembly in 1619 as colony secretary, had earlier published his translation and adaptation of the history of Africa written by the man we know as Leo Africanus with Pory's additions from other sources. Pory wrote on his title page that the main part of the book was written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie.² A few English ships had ventured to the coast of West Africa and seen the early shape of the trade in enslaved Africans.

All this prior experience shaped the mental context of colonization; the texts from American experience were often written by people who had known other societies and cultural contexts in the Old World, and had in many cases been exposed to more advanced and opulent societies than their own. The date 1607 grew out of English history, in policy changes in the aftermath of the end of the Tudor regime at the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of the Stuarts with James I in 1603. It also signaled a new level of both competence and economic organization that made it possible for England to compete for the first time on the Atlantic stage. Expertise came in part from experience abroad. Competence was not complete, however, and the English colonies all imported experts from continental Europe—mineralogists, glassmakers, textile specialists. Every colony was also dependent on American Indian knowledge and largess. By 1619 and possibly before, Virginia had residents who had come directly from Africa.³ Thus every venture was Atlantic in both background and personnel.

The Indian polities that allowed English settlement also had an Atlantic context. Although their trade networks centered on the great internal waterways in the American continent, the coastal Algonquians had repeated experience of European ships throughout the sixteenth century. They also had direct knowledge of Europe through voyagers such as Squanto from New England and Paquiquineo, the Virginia Pamunkey man usually known to us by his Spanish name Don Luís de Velasco, who had lived in Europe. Some American groups actively sought roles in the Atlantic trades and initiated Europeans into the possibilities they saw. Before such crops as tobacco were established, most of the trades were conducted in Indian-produced commodities.

Considering Jamestown in an Atlantic frame allows us to transcend particular issues and to examine the colony's course in something like the way contemporaries would have done. Instead of viewing Jamestown as an isolated point in history, an Atlantic approach also leads us to acknowledge the virtually simultaneous foundation of Quebec and Santa Fe and to understand the widespread renewed commitment in Europe to an American presence as the seventeenth century opened. Jamestown's Atlantic context involved contact and exchange between and among colonies all along the coast, and national differences in Europe did not dictate relationships in America.

The enterprise of viewing Jamestown in an Atlantic frame is immeasurably enhanced by new interest in American enterprises possessed by literary scholars, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and art historians. For historians the application of the techniques of textual analysis employed by students of literature to the texts of encounter and colonization has been wholly beneficial. The range of questions we ask of those texts, and how we contextualize them, has been extended immeasurably.

Changing views of Captain John Smith's story of his own life offer a good example of the transformative effect of new techniques from a variety of disciplines. Earlier models of textual analysis, applied by historians in the nineteenth century, had led to the charge that Smith lied when he wrote of his captivity and rescue by Pocahontas, seeking to cash in on her celebrity when she was in London. Scholars focused on internal consistency between Smith's various works, and he failed that test. More recently, work emanating from a whole host of disciplines has led to reconsideration of Smith's story. The earliest and most surprising of these reconsiderations came from students of early modern Transylvania and Hungary, who found Smith's description of his service there before he went to Virginia, told in his autobiographical The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (London, 1630), to be a valuable and accurate resource for their studies in a source-poor field.⁴ Having participated in the fight of Protestant Dutch seeking freedom from the Roman Catholic Spanish Hapsburgs, Smith had gone on to serve in the Hapsburg armies resisting Ottoman encroachment on eastern Europe. He wrote that he was desirous to see more of the world, and trie his fortune against the Turkes, both lamenting and repenting to have seene so many Christians slaughter one another.⁵

Ethnohistorians and archaeologists have also contributed perspectives that make us understand Smith and other writers in a new light, one that appreciates their achievement. For example, all early English observers wrote that American Indian polities were hierarchically organized with a hereditary elite and strong chiefs. Such reports have often been dismissed as the myopic reports of culture-bound English who were unable to understand societies very different from their own. But archaeologists are now finding burials and other remains that confirm the accuracy of those early observations; hereditary elites apparently did exist broadly across indigenous American polities.⁶ And ethnohistorians have argued that the event in which Smith believed Pocahontas had saved his life may have been an induction or adoption into Powhatan society, a symbolic death and rebirth such as young men went through as they reached adulthood. Shortly after the ceremony Powhatan told Smith that he would henceforth regard him as a son, and Pocahontas called him father when they met in England, perhaps indicating their understanding of his new status.⁷

Archaeologists working with environmental scientists have also given us a new understanding of the most fundamental context of the creation of the Atlantic world. The extreme cold of the Little Ice Age, including the very cold winter of 1607–8, conditioned the experience of all colonization and sea-borne ventures. Evidence of a period of sustained cold throughout the northern hemisphere from reports, pictures, and other proxy evidence has now been confirmed by detailed analysis of ocean and lake bed cores.⁸ Very recent work in dendrochronology has also demonstrated that the Chesapeake region was in the throes of unprecedented drought conditions when the English arrived. All this new evidence makes us see the developing relationship between newcomers and Americans, especially the effect of the colonists' insistent demands for food, very differently. Historians have admired the cleverness of Powhatan and his ability to outwit the English in bargaining. Powhatan, this subtil Salvage, exasperated Smith, valuing a basket of corne more pretious then a basket of copper, saying he could eate his corne, but not his copper. Smith also wrote that Men maie thinke it strange there should be this stir for a little corne, but had it been gold with more ease we might have got it. Our new knowledge of the extreme drought conditions places these statements in a completely different light; Powhatan was not merely sparring with colonial leaders but protecting his people's meager food supplies in a time of great stress.⁹

At the same time literary studies allow us to go beyond the simple truth/ falsehood dichotomy in reading Smith's biography. We can now understand how Smith was fashioning a self in his literary works, as he presented his own exploits and his analysis of the colonial scene. Smith's great work, the Generall Historie, was published in 1624, ten years after his last trip to America, and his autobiography, The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, was published in 1630 in the last year of his life. The early seventeenth-century London literary world saw many dramas, poems, and prose works in which English venturers faced exotic foes and some experienced captivity and even forced conversion. Some, such as The famous historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley (London, 1605) or Richard Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turke: or, The Tragicall Lives and Deaths of the Two Famous Pyrates, Ward and Dansiker (London, 1612) took off from the published life stories of actual people, English and Fleming, who became renegades. Philip Massinger's very popular The Renegado, or The Gentleman of Venice (1624) featured a Turkish princess named Donusa whose slave named Carazie was an English eunuch; Carazie told his mistress that he was made lighter by two stone weight, at least, to be fit to serve you! John Fletcher's The Island Princess, written in 1620–21, was set in the Moluccas and the hero, a Portuguese venturer, resisted forced conversion to Islam so steadfastly that his princess was won for Christianity, as was Donusa in The Renegado.¹⁰

As Jean Howard points out, many of these plays center on men who, like Smith and unlike Othello, were not born to elite heroic roles, but who took on such leading roles in novel exotic locations. The new Atlantic scene made possible a kind of advancement unavailable at home. Smith first wrote of his rescue by Pocahontas in 1624, and he told the story of his early life and his exploits in eastern Europe culminating in captivity in the Ottoman Empire in 1630. Like Carazie in The Renegado, he was the slave of a noble woman in Constantinople; he wrote that he made his violent escape when he was sent to be trained as a janissary. Rather than assuming that he simply made up these stories, an interpretation made much less plausible by recent research on the background of these events, it seems reasonable to argue that Smith saw the dramatic possibilities in his own story and presented those remembered events from decades earlier in a form that would draw the attention of the world he then inhabited.

All the disciplines whose research makes possible a renewed interest in the texts of the early modern Atlantic have in common the seriousness with which they take their sources and the generators of those sources. The first requirement for all of us is to examine the sources fully and carefully rather than to mine them for pithy quotes. The second is, having placed the sources under the microscope, to open them out and place them in the broadest possible context. Scholars must try to know as much as the creators of their sources knew and must try not to make easy assumptions about their motivations, justifications, and evasions. We must seek first to comprehend the choices they made and the institutions they created as contemporaries understood them rather than in terms of their meanings to later generations. The result of such interdisciplinarity is a far richer picture of the past—and one that contemporaries might recognize.

Introduction

Sea Changes

JOHN WOOD SWEET

One of the stranger exports of early Virginia was a new English translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, published in London in 1626.¹ It was the work of the colony's erstwhile treasurer, George Sandys, who insisted in his preface that he did it in his spare time, presumably by candlelight.² Sandys had come to Virginia with an ambitious vision of the colony's future: he was to oversee its transformation from a disorderly, tobacco-crazed outpost into a stable, populous, and productive extension of the mother country. Perhaps his time was better spent in this work of scholarship and poetry: it is a fine translation, still in print almost four hundred years later. In any case, during his tenure the affairs of the Virginia colony were transformed by a series of disasters that he could probably have done little to control. Early in the morning of March 22, 1622, only six months after he arrived, the colony was nearly wiped out by a well-coordinated attack of an alliance of local natives that simultaneously slaughtered settlers at their outposts along Chesapeake Bay and the James River. In the months to come, many of the survivors who regrouped at Jamestown—and hundreds of new settlers sent to fortify the colony—died of disease and starvation. The Virginia Company of London, the joint-stock company that sponsored the colossally expensive venture, already weakened by disputes over the colony's future, faced bankruptcy. And Parliament launched an investigation that threatened the company with the loss of its royal charter.

So perhaps we should not blame Sandys, thousands of miles from home, in this crude, beleaguered colony, for being a bit obsessed with Ovid and the heritage of classical civility he represented—looking back to the celebrated legacy of the Roman empire, which had reshaped the world around the Mediterranean, as the English ventured into a dangerous, enticing New World that was then taking shape around the shores of the Atlantic. Perhaps he identified with Ovid, who had been sent by Augustus away from Rome and into exile in a remote province. And perhaps, in his enthusiasm for the English venture in Virginia, Sandys missed some of Ovid's ironic tone and his running critique of Roman imperialism.³ In any case, it would be wrong to dismiss Sandys's interest in the legacy of the Roman empire as an escapist fantasy. For many English political leaders and promoters of overseas colonization, an idealized view of ancient Rome helped them envision—and justify—what they wanted to do in America.

Nowadays, we often imagine that the Virginia settlers were motivated almost exclusively by a drive for profit, but—as we are reminded by Sandys's obsession with Ovid, by conflicts within the company, and by crucial role played by the region's natives—the visions of those involved in the Virginia venture were actually much more complicated, ambitious, and contested. The purpose of this volume is to better understand the various visions that shaped early Virginia—and, more broadly, to rethink our basic assumptions about the relationships between ideas and actions, between ideology and interests, between events and the contexts that gave them meaning.

The idea for this collaboration grew out of a set of discussions at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Jamestown in the Atlantic World sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and directed by Karen Ordahl Kupperman.⁴ Robert Appelbaum and I emerged from those discussions convinced that we need to redraw the map of the early Atlantic world in two basic ways. In recent years, scholars have begun to recognize that European colonies in North America can be better understood in terms of an emerging Atlantic world; but we felt that Anglo-American historians need to remember that this world included Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as Africa and the Americas. Consequently, we sought out experts in who could help us understand the networks, alliances, and rivalries that encompassed not only England and the Powhatan chiefdom, but also Spain, France, the West Indies, Ireland, Morocco, and Turkey. In addition, we were convinced that Jamestown should be understood not simply as a historical event in the customary sense, but also as a literary phenomenon. For it was largely by way of the written word that participants defined their positions in this emerging world. Bringing together the perspectives of both historians and literary scholars, this collection attempts to understand thought and action in Jamestown and the emerging North Atlantic world by exploring a wide range of surviving texts—the books adventurers read, the manuscripts they left behind, the printed works they produced—and reading them as both historical records and literary productions.

The texts that document early Virginia reveal a complex, dynamic world—a world of relationships transformed by wide-ranging and rapidly expanding economic networks, and a world largely defined by representations intended to explain, to understand, and to deceive. The early settlers and leaders of the venture, it becomes clear, were motivated by religious, nationalistic, and intellectual—as well as economic—ambitions. Native leaders evaluated the benefits of tolerating these interlopers and the risks of openly opposing them within the context of their own complex calculations about building alliances, projecting authority, and controlling trade. Powhatan, the paramount chief who dominated the region, had interests to protect not just in the area immediately around Jamestown but also across a territory that encompassed much of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and in trading routes that extended hundreds of miles into the interior of the continent.⁵ Similarly, English promoters of overseas colonies had much wider horizons than is often assumed. They thought of the colonial venture in broad international contexts: in terms of rivalry with Spain, the ongoing fight between Christendom and the Turks, complex diplomacy with North Africans, and renewed efforts to colonize Ireland. Ultimately the original expectations of native peoples, settlers, and other interested parties were overrun by experiences both predictable and unforeseen. Intentionally or not, they all participated in the creation of a new Atlantic World that transformed life in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. New networks of trade, cultural exchange, and political power confronted peoples on both sides of the Atlantic with new possibilities, changing how they could think about themselves, the relationships they could establish with others, and the kinds of futures they could envision.

Back in 1607, when the first Jamestown settlers landed on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, their crude outpost survived because nobody saw it as worth the trouble of wiping out. Partly that's because they lied about their intentions. Shortly after the settlers arrived, Powhatan, the leader of a regional paramount chiefdom, had them brought before him and demanded to know why they had come into his country. The settlers explained that they had only landed temporarily to repair ships damaged by Spanish aggression and bad weather. At least that is the story Capt. John Smith told in a narrative of the colony's first year that was published in London as A True Relation…(1609).⁶ The formal instructions the colonists brought with them—in a sealed box, not to be opened until after they arrived—made it clear that the settlement was intended from the start to be permanent, populous, and profitable. The adventurers were to establish an English colony in the Americas that would set the stage for a challenge to Spain's Catholic empire. They were to win over the local natives, preferably by reducing them to civility and converting them to Christianity. And they were to make the entire enterprise pay not just by serving as a base for piratical raids on the Spanish treasure fleets but by finding gold, by discovering other merchantable commodities, or by locating the westerly route to the trading centers of Asia that Columbus had set out to find over a century earlier.⁷

This initial vision of the Virginia venture was wildly unrealistic: indeed, the early adventurers may have deceived themselves more than they fooled anyone in Powhatan's chiefdom. The views of the local natives were shaped by years of experience managing occasional European interlopers. For decades, the Chesapeake had been visited by mariners from Portugal, Spain, France, and England—who generally looked around, traded a bit, and left—without seeing much reason to return. Officials of the Spanish empire, masters of the Caribbean and Central America, had been keeping an eye on North America. Largely to prevent other European powers from establishing a foothold in Florida that might allow them to disrupt the flow of silver and gold from the Gulf of Mexico, the Spanish had established the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States at San Augustín, Florida, in 1565. Several years later, in 1570, they went so far as to sponsor a Jesuit outpost on the shores of the Chesapeake. They brought with them a local Indian, usually known by his Spanish name, Don Luis de Velasco. He had spent the previous decade traveling widely in the Caribbean colonies and in Europe after being taken from his homeland by a party of Spanish explorers. In returning Don Luis home, the missionaries hoped he would teach his people the Castilian language, Spanish customs, and the Catholic faith. Instead, he promptly moved away from the mission, rejoined his multiple wives, and resumed his native customs. Predictably, the Jesuits objected. In any case, the conflict of cultures was soon settled when local natives effectively wiped the mission out. This was enough to discourage the Spanish, who found little of inherent interest in these cold climes and mainly sought to serve notice to the French, who were exploring the northern regions of the St. Lawrence riverway.⁸

In the wake of the Spanish came the English, who in the 1580s sought to establish a foothold on the North American seaboard between Spanish possessions to the south and French claims to the north. The Roanoke venture, like a number of other English settlements attempted further north in subsequent decades, failed without much help from the local natives. In fact, the outpost survived as long as it did only to the extent that the local natives furnished them with food and military protection. The tiny band of settlers left there in 1587 to hold the fort were not so much lost as they were abandoned when the Spanish Armada of 1588 prevented Sir Walter Ralegh from sending them supplies and a new complement of settlers. Some of the settlers abandoned there may have made their way up to Chesapeake Bay and made new lives for themselves living among the local Natives—though the Jamestown settlers never succeeded in tracking them down.⁹ While these European interlopers could be troublesome, they also offered local natives potential benefits: they arrived with attractive trade goods, they had different technology and know-how that might be exploited, and they might be recruited as allies in local and regional struggles for power. In any case, none of these colonial ventures could have left the local natives with the impression that these Europeans posed much of a threat…at that point.

Looking back on the early years of the Virginia venture, some four hundred years after the fact, our own vision is inevitably distorted. Incomplete sources, a welter of historical associations, and the limits of our own imaginations inevitably cloud and color our views. Some historians of the United States have seen Jamestown as the origin of representative government, republican ideals, and widespread economic opportunity in America. Others have seen it as the origin of the Old South's plantation system—with the conquest and dispossession of native peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the hegemony of a small elite of planters at its center. British historians tend to see Jamestown at the origins of England's overseas empire, which in subsequent centuries reached global dimensions. Until recently literary scholars tended to overlook events in Jamestown, since they viewed such historical phenomena as, at best, tangential to the great works of art they studied. Nowadays, literary scholars influenced by postcolonial theory often see the literature relating to events in Jamestown as an early symptom of England's grand imperialist project. But in its early years, Jamestown was none of these things—neither irrelevant nor the center of metropolitan attention. The English were not pioneers in the Atlantic: they were latecomers, following in the wake of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, and the Dutch. The settlement at Jamestown—however puffed up its prospects were in contemporary propaganda—was for its first two decades disastrously disappointing: most of the settlers who went there quickly died, most of the money invested in the venture was lost, and the colony itself was soon overshadowed by England's expanding Atlantic interests.

Nonetheless, Jamestown offers a particularly revealing window into the dynamic social and cultural world of which it was a part and into the developing interconnections that made the Atlantic into a new world of its own. The large number of texts published about Jamestown in its early years is in part a reflection of the nature of the enterprise itself: as a private joint-stock company, the colony had to attract investments. So, instead of simply bending the ears of a few at court, the Virginia Company had to rally interest from a much wider range of merchants, gentry, and large numbers of people with more modest means. In addition, because Jamestown involved such huge investments and because it came so early in the history of English overseas ventures, it attracted the interest of those at the center of power at the English court, including James I himself, as well as the most brilliant of England's literary figures, such as William Shakespeare. Jamestown thus provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex phenomenon that constitutes the theme of this volume: the envisioning of English empire.

When Robert Appelbaum and I first began our own exploration of the texts and contexts of Jamestown and the making of the North Atlantic World, we thought there would be a sharp divide between literary scholars and historians. And to some extent that expectation has been borne out. Historians tend to place more emphasis on trying to determine what actually happened and why. Literary scholars tend to be more interested in complexities of language and meaning within texts in order to reflect upon what happened in terms of broader ideological impulses and imaginative interpretations. But, generally, we found that we shared common concerns and faced common problems: the representations of the colonial experience that are to be found in the historical records and texts of the experiment are multisided, and the texts that we must interpret are complex and often contradictory. George Sandys, for instance, left several different kinds of documentation, including not only his translation of Ovid but also reams of business correspondence, and together these texts leave us with a complex image of the man: laboring in practical ways to transform the colony's economy, to fulfill a specific vision of its future, while laboring to translate an ancient text of a classical empire with ambiguous parallels to his own adventures. We must read the texts critically, carefully, and at times suspiciously in order to understand either what happened or what it meant.

In the years after 1607, as the early English adventurers and the natives of the Chesapeake region assessed their prospects, they inevitably looked in three directions at once: they looked inward to their own societies and immediate ambitions, they looked outward to others, and they looked forward in time. This three-part perspective has been followed in the organization of this volume. We begin, in Reading Encounters, by looking inward, examining the conditions of the initial encounters between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatans and the relations of both with those in power in London. Then, in The World Stage, we look outward, and explore the broad international contexts that gave meaning and defined the horizons of the English in this period—relations with Spain, with the Turks, with North Africa, and with Ireland. Finally, in American Metamorphosis, we turn to the ways in which the visions of both settlers and Natives were transformed over time by their experiences. We consider colonial conflicts and exchanges over cultures of food, new ideologies of property and slavery, and changing perceptions of colonial identity at the time of Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670s. What results is a multidisciplinary and multifaceted view of the Jamestown experience as a whole, from the early plans and ideological inventions that would feed into the enterprise, to the eventual perception that, for better or worse, what had begun as a military outpost had ended up as the starting point for a new kind of society.

Reading Encounters

It would be wrong to say that Captain John Smith simply made up the famous story about how he was rescued from the wrath of Powhatan by the intercession of his fair daughter Pocahontas. Certainly, there are grounds for suspicion: after a relatively short stint at Jamestown, early Virginia's most celebrated adventurer spent of the rest of his career writing about his adventures, analyzing the development of the colony, and giving advice to other Anglo-American adventurers. And the stories he told about his time in Virginia evolved over time. The Pocahontas story does not appear in the history of the colony he published in 1612, after he was ousted from his position of leadership by his fellow settlers, survived an attempted assassination, and decided to returned to England. In fact, he first alluded to Pocahontas as his savior only ten years later, after she—renamed Rebecca, reborn as a Christian, and married to John Rolfe—had traveled to London and made a sensation at the royal court.¹⁰ Was Smith trying to rehabilitate his tarnished reputation by claiming the sensational Indian princess as the agent of salvation God sent him? No doubt. But the problem is not that simple. Smith was as much a man of letters as a man of action—and in his narratives of events it is often difficult to separate his efforts to turn stories to his own ends from his (perhaps unconscious) efforts to understand himself and his place in the new world he helped to create.

The short, stout, pugnacious Captain Smith may well have given the first group of colonists their best leadership and the authorities of the Virginia Company the best practical advice they ever received, and his accounts of his experience in Virginia may even be the most accurate and penetrating of all the True Reports that were written at the time. But when he talked about himself his mind was filled with visions of chivalry, exoticism, amorous adventurism, and romantic self-inflation. Indeed, if we are to follow his many autobiographical writings, it appears that Pocahontas was not the first fair maiden to rescue him—she was, at best, the third. The fanciful vision Smith projected of himself and his adventures abroad was as much a part of who he was and how he envisioned the colonial enterprise as his hard-nosed, militant practicality. Yet, in any case, Smith's understanding—and shifting representations—of the incident is only one part of the story of what actually happened. As Native American historians have recently demonstrated, Smith seems to have entirely misunderstood how Powhatan and Pocahontas viewed the incident. Very likely, this brash interloper was never slated for execution. Rather, his near-death experience was part of a ritual of adoption intended to bring him within Powhatan's fold—and under Powhatan's authority.¹¹

As the Jamestown adventurers and the Natives of coastal Virginia came together, their interactions were profoundly shaped by their perceptions and representations of themselves and each other. Looking back on these events, we face twin challenges: How did these groups read each other? And, how can we can read them through the incomplete, inconsistent, and otherwise invented texts they left behind? Sources here are largely narratives, reports, and letters home. The task of discovering what actually happened and what it meant is not easy. Documents of various kinds are limited: it is not always obvious when we as readers should be skeptical, when credulous, or when we should put aside questions of literal meaning and should focus instead on a text's rhetorical strategies or tone, or follow its allusions and explore its intellectual contexts. Always, our preconceptions shape what we are inclined to believe: for generations historians assumed that early travelers were exaggerating when they talked about seeing wondrously large fish and shellfish in the waters off North America. But modern biologists suggest that in fact before Europeans began overfishing the Atlantic seaboard, the inhabitants of the oceans really were both more numerous—and much larger.¹² Whether focusing on organizers of the Virginia venture, local rulers like Powhatan, or English indentured servants, the essays address the same basic questions: How did each envision their interactions with each other? How did these expectations shape their experiences? What were the causes and circumstances of their visions of the encounter? What were the consequences? The answers are sometimes surprising.

Literally envisioning the lay of the land around them—both physically and politically—was a major challenge for the early Jamestown settlers, a challenge Lisa Blansett explores in John Smith Maps Virginia. Soon after setting up a fortified outpost on a scrubby, low-lying peninsula in a brackish section of the James River, Captain John Smith undertook an ambitious expedition to chart the lay of the land and its inhabitants. Traveling mostly in small boats, they covered almost two thousand miles in subsequent months, following the bay's lacy coastline and meandering rivers—generally stopping when the land began to rise toward the Appalachian mountains and they hit whitewater. For Atlantic-oriented settlers, this fall line would prove an enduring geographic marker dividing the flat, coastal tidewater that could be reached by boats and the hilly piedmont that required arduous trekking overland. Smith's ability to organize what he learned into a visual map of the landscape rested on his mastery of specific technologies and techniques, which he associated with the superiority of European culture. In a complex interplay of the powers of representation, the ability to envision a landscape according to certain conventions allowed Europeans to project ownership of it, to imagine mastery of it. Yet, as Blansett emphasizes, Smith was less in control than he liked to imagine. At each stop along the way, Smith relied upon information from the locals—when he wasn't fighting with them—about who they were, what their relationships were to other natives, and what else lay out of sight. In the end, Smith's elaborate, influential Map of Virginia (1612) is not just a sign of the triumph of European technology surveying new dominions, as Smith liked to think, but a record of the ineluctable interconnectedness of colonizer and colonized.

How, then, did the early settlers and the natives of the region envision their relationships with each other? During his various exploratory excursions, Smith learned that the all the land surrounding the site where the Jamestown adventurers had settled was controlled by a paramount chiefdom under the authority of Powhatan. Despite the rosy predictions of early colonial promoters that the local natives would flock to the settlers and willingly work for them, embrace English civility, and convert to Christianity, the early settlers found that once on the ground conflict, domination, and ultimately conquest were never far from their minds. Thinking perhaps of the model of the Spanish conquistadors, who had achieved stunning military victories by turning subject peoples against powerful native empires, the early settlers looked for local tribes who might rebel against Powhatan—or for groups outside his mantle who might be recruited as allies. Powhatan, the early Virginians learned, held a firm grip on the region. The Indian emperor, for his part, was curious about these English interlopers, their goals, and the land they had left behind. In Powhatans Abroad, Alden Vaughan reminds us that when Powhatan and his people looked east to better understand the English interlopers, they were not simply passive spectators. Indeed, a number of Powhatan Indians traveled to England. They left home with widely different expectations and had very different experiences abroad. Some were dispatched by colonists to serve as novelty acts for English entertainment and to help the Virginia Company raise money and attract settlers. More significantly, others were sent by Powhatan on missions of diplomacy and reconnaissance. For a time, Powhatan was able to sustain the hope that he might, by developing new machineries of intelligence and diplomacy, foster mutually beneficial relations with the English and develop a truly bicultural society.

Conflict between the two parties often seems to have been inevitable, since the English settlers came with the intention of taking possession of expanding swaths of Indian land, a determination that even disastrous setbacks and steadfast resistance failed to dampen. Although the settlers were vastly outnumbered and relied upon the natives for much of their sustenance, their behavior was often quite bellicose. Indeed, they often attempted to subdue the much more powerful native population by strategically employing terror tactics. On several occasions settlers used brutal violence against natives they were able to capture (generally women and children) in efforts to terrorize those too powerful or skilled to fight directly. Yet, as James Horn emphasizes in The Conquest of Eden, the conflicts in this period between the region's Natives and the English were not simply about land. Both the natives and the English had the tools and traditions of conciliation for resolving disputes over territory and, in any case, the first tip of land the English chose for themselves was a scrubby peninsula that the local natives had little use for. Rather, what the English and Natives competed over primarily was their rival world views and ambitions. If the English thought of absorbing the natives into an English polity governed by a British monarch, James I, and operated as a Christian nation, the region's natives thought of absorbing the English into their own great political system, presided over by the paramount chieftain Powhatan, and operated according to their own customs and beliefs.

If relations with the region's inhabitants turned out less rosy than predicted by early promoters of the Virginia venture, the effort to make the colony survive—much less turn a profit—turned out to be much more difficult than anyone initially envisioned. In addition to intermittent warfare, the colony was plagued by persistent disease, starvation, and poor discipline. And nowhere did the settlers find gold or any other source of easy wealth. Smith, licking his wounds back in England, wrote accounts of the colony's difficult early years that, although clearly exaggerated, have been extraordinarily influential in shaping historical understandings of early Virginia. With withering sarcasm, Smith laid the blame mainly on the settlers the company initially sent to Jamestown: idle gentlemen who disdained honest work and lazy rabble obsessed with the lure for quick, easy wealth. There was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold, Smith complained. Having met with only ingratitude after all his efforts to keep the colonists focused on housing, defending, and, above all, feeding themselves, Smith could not resist pointing out that all these gold-seekers ever found was guilded durt.¹³

By the end of Jamestown's difficult first decade, many of those involved in the venture had lost faith in the original vision of the colony and were divided over plans for its future. Colonists on the ground had recently begun growing West Indian tobacco and were scrambling to take advantage of Virginia's first really marketable source of profit. This set in motion a tumultuous grab for land and control of labor within the colony. But nobody in London liked this outcome. One group of aristocratic investors wanted to give up on trying to grow or discover wealth, and use the colony instead as a base for piratical raids on the Spanish treasure fleets. Another group of merchants wanted to create a more mixed and diverse economy—making the colony more like England. In a portentous grab for power, the faction headed by Sir Edwin Sandys (George's elder brother) took over control of the company in 1619. Sir Edwin was determined to make the colony work as a mixed economy and sent over thousands of settlers, his younger brother to manage its affairs on the ground, and instructions to build iron works, grow silk, manufacture glass, and so on. Despite the obvious obstacles, this vision may have met with more success than historians often recognize.¹⁴ In part, the 1622 attack can be seen as a result of Opechancanough's (Powhatan's successor) realization that the colony was growing rapidly and would sooner or later threaten his people's way of life.

In the aftermath of this attack, the colony faced a harrowing year—the surviving colonists waged a brutal war and many of those who did not die fighting fell sick or succumbed to malnutrition. And, in London, the Virginia Company faced a flood of bad publicity. One attempt to reassure prospective settlers was a strikingly upbeat broadside published in London, which was attributed to an unnamed colonist and dated March 1623. No longer, the broadside argued, were settlers hamstrung by misguided meekness toward the region's natives. Instead, they were bent on vengeance. Among those now taking up arms was the colony's treasurer-translator, George Sandys:

Stout Master George Sands upon a night

did bravely venture forth

And mong'st the Savage murtherers,

did form a deed of worth.

For finding many by a fire,

to death their lives they pay:

Set fire to a Town of theirs,

and bravely came away.

This brutal military campaign had forced the region's surviving natives to flee. Virginia would grow prosperous as the deer and turkey multiplied and corn grew, as iron and lumber works were reestablished, as forts were completed protecting the colony from naval attacks from foreign powers, and as women arrived to grace the overwhelmingly male settlement. Without a trace of irony, the bloodthirsty broadside concluded that there was now reason to hope that "faire Virginia" would now prove plentifull by peace.¹⁵

Meanwhile, a dramatically different vision of the struggling colony came from the pen of a young settler named Richard Frethorne in the form of a private letter written in the spring of 1623 to his parents back home in England—the subject of Emily Rose's essay, The Politics of Pathos. Nowadays, this letter is one of the most widely read accounts of early Virginia. It is commonly assigned classroom reading, soliciting our sympathy across the centuries—a fascinating and gruesome record of the life of an indentured servant living near Jamestown in the aftermath of the 1622 war. The letter is powerful and pessimistic: Frethorne tells his parents that he is miserable, sick, and starving. Virginia is nothing like he expected. He begs his parents to arrange for him to return home—or at least to send him some food. This, of course, is the opposite of the image those in control of the company wanted to project. Yet, as Rose reveals, it was music to the ears of those opposing the company's current management. This letter was never simply a naive, heartfelt letter home by an ordinary settler: it