Savage Kingdom: Virginia and The Founding of English America

(#litres_trial_promo) Casas wrote of conquistadors eviscerating seventy or eighty women and young girls, of little native boys being fed to hunting dogs, even of Indian coolies being decapitated after they had performed their duties, to save the bother of having to unlock the clasps around their necks. Such reports had been enthusiastically picked up by Protestant propagandists in France, Holland and England as evidence of the Catholic brutality that had produced the Florida Massacre and now threatened to overwhelm the Low Countries. Hakluyt referred to them on several occasions, quoting Casas’s estimate that Spanish actions in the Americas had ‘rooted out above fifteen million of reasonable creatures’.

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Reassured by the rewards of exercising their higher moral standards, the English continued their tour of the Caribbean. As they pulled away from Dominica, Percy was transfixed by the sight of a whale being chased by a swordfish and a thresher, a kind of shark identifiable by the enormously extended upper lobe of its tail, which it uses to thrash its prey. ‘We might see the thresher with his flail lay on the monstrous blows, which was strange to behold. In the end these two fishes brought the whale to her end,’ he observed.

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On the morning of 27 March, they arrived at Guadeloupe. A landing party explored up to the foot of the 5,000-foot-high active volcano La Grande Soufrière (the big, sulphurous one), and found a pool of scalding hot water. Newport used it to boil up a joint of salted pork, which was ready to eat after half an hour. They returned to their ships and sailed on for a further 90 miles, in the afternoon reaching the island of Nevis. Here, Newport decided to allow the entire company ashore to make a concerted effort to gather supplies, as the ships’ stores were still disturbingly low.

A company of men armed with muskets marched into the densely wooded interior, catching glimpses as they went of the cloud-capped central peak, over 3,000 foot high. Not far inland they found another hot spring, much cooler than the one on Guadeloupe. For the first time in nearly two months, they enjoyed a relaxing soak, as the sun set in a calm Caribbean sea.

‘Finding this place to be so convenient for our men to avoid diseases, which will breed in so long a voyage, we encamped ourselves on this isle six days, and spent none of our ship’s victual,’ wrote Percy. Instead, they lived off rabbits, birds, fish and fruit plucked from the trees, their peace barely disturbed by an occasional glimpse of the locals, who as soon as they were spotted ‘ran swiftly through the woods to the mountain tops’. They lost themselves in the forests, slashing through the undergrowth with hatchets and swords, until they came among ‘the goodliest tall trees growing so thick about the garden as though they had been set by art, which made us marvel very much to see it’. They saw shrubs with huge tufts of cotton wool bursting from their seed pods, gum trees, and a sort of wild fig, the sap of which made the men ‘near mad with pain’, forcing them to rush back to the hot spring for relief. They also found the source of a stream at the foot of the mountain. After drinking its sweet, clear water, ‘distilling from many rocks’, the men ‘were well cured in two or three days’ of all their ship-borne ailments.

However, even this idyll could not cure every sickness. There was another outbreak of faction fighting, perhaps prompted by Newport’s decision to release Smith from the ship’s brig and allow him to fraternize with the other men. It seems that he now fell out with some of his former associates, who reported him to Newport. The upshot was, according to Smith, that Newport, fearing a loss of authority, ordered the construction of a ‘pair of gallows’ on the beach. But ‘Captain Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them’, so he was returned to the ship. No other reference to this curious incident survives, and whatever the details, the result was a hasty departure. The ships cast off on 3 April, with water and food supplies still depleted, despite the plenitude that the island had offered.

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The fleet sailed past the neighbouring islands of St Kitts, St Eustatius and Saba before anchoring among the Virgin Isles, ‘in an excellent bay able to harbour a hundred ships’. A landing party managed to catch enough fish and turtles to feed the fleet for a further three days, but there was no fresh water to be found anywhere on the island.

Passing Puerto Rico, they reached the tiny island of Mona on 7 April. By now, the drinking water in the ships’ tanks ‘did smell so vilely that none of our men was able to endure it’. A group of sailors managed to find a fresh water supply on the island, and set about filling up barrels to transport back to the ships. Meanwhile, a landing party marched for 6 miles in search of food. They managed to kill two wild boar and an iguana, ‘in fashion of a serpent and speckled like a toad under the belly’, but the path proved ‘so troublesome and vile, going upon the sharp rocks’, and the tropical heat so intense, that several men fainted. According to Percy, the adipose fat of Edward Brookes ‘melted within him by the great heat and drought of the country. We were not able to relieve him nor ourselves, so he died in that great extremity’, the first casualty of the expedition.

The fleet remained at anchor for two days, while a group took a launch to a nearby rocky islet called Monito, some 3 leagues (9 or so miles) away. They had difficulty finding a landing point along the island’s cliff-lined coast, and even more trouble climbing up the ‘terrible sharp stones’ to open land. However, they were rewarded with the discovery of a fertile plain, ‘full of goodly grass and abundance of fowls of all kinds’. White seabirds dived overhead ‘as drops of hail’ and made such a noise ‘we were not able to hear one another speak’. ‘Furthermore, we were not able to set our feet on the ground but either on fowls or eggs, which lay so thick in the grass,’ and within three hours they had filled their boat, ‘to our great refreshing’.

With new supplies of water and food safely loaded, the fleet set off, and on 10 April left the West Indies, heading north for Florida. Four days later, they crossed the Tropic of Cancer, the northerly limit of the tropics.

The following morning, Newport started to take soundings, in the hope of finding the North American continental shelf.

The use of soundings was the old-fashioned method of navigation. A lead weight smeared in tallow and attached to a line knotted at intervals of a fathom was dropped overboard to measure the depth of the sea. When it was hauled up, particles embedded in the tallow were used to tell what sort of seabed lay beneath.

In familiar waters, such as the English Channel, soundings were effective, as a combination of depth measurement and seabed material (‘small shingles’, ‘white stones like broken awls’, ‘big stones rugged and black’) helped to build up a profile of the sea floor that could locate the ship to within a few nautical miles of its position, even when the shore was over the horizon. However, the ocean beneath the fleet’s current position was too deep to sound, leaving Newport with no option but to keep sailing.

They continued north-west for ten days, carried over 1,000 miles by the Gulf Stream. Further soundings were taken, but to no avail. By 21 April, Newport had to accept that he was lost. This was probably the moment that Robert Tyndall suggested he try the mathematically based ‘new navigation’ techniques to plot their position. English mariners, apparently including the crew of the Susan Constant, were suspicious of such methods, considering them hocus-pocus. The prevailing attitude was summed up in Eastward Hoe, when Sir Petronel Flash uses ‘the elevation of the pole’ and ‘the altitude and latitude of the climate’ (garbled descriptions of the relevant techniques) to mistake the Isle of Dogs on the Thames for France.

Nevertheless, traditional methods had failed, so it was time for Tyndall to bring out his cross-staff or astrolabe, and plot a position. Measuring the angle between the horizon and the midday sun, he announced that they had reached 37 degrees north of the Equator, believed to be the latitude of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. All they now had to do was to use the ship’s compass to head due west, and they would eventually reach their destination. The guffaws of sceptical deck-hands probably filled the ships’ sails.

That evening, the fleet was hit by a ‘vehement tempest, which lasted all the night with winds, rain, and thunders in a terrible manner’. Concerned that the coast was nearby, and the ships might be driven on to the shore, Newport ordered the passengers into the hulls, where they were told they would be safest if the ships collided with rocks or the seabed. They emerged the following morning into the calm, and gazed upon an unbroken horizon. A lead was dropped, to see whether they had yet reached the coastal shallows, but the ocean floor was still beyond the line’s 100-fathom reach. Food and water supplies were once again running low. The unpredictable weather threatened another battering. The need to find a safe harbour intensified.

For three days, they aimlessly sounded the seas, doubtful of Tyndall’s assurances that their destination lay just beyond the western horizon. Unease developed into panic, and on 25 April, John Ratcliffe, captain of the pinnace, proposed that the fleet head back to England, in the hope that the Westerlies would get them there before supplies gave out.

Then, at four in the morning of 26 April 1607, as the faintest gleam of dawn crept across the placid ocean, the night watch of the Susan Constant picked out a disturbance on the western horizon. As the sun lifted behind them, crew and passengers began to gather on deck and squint over the ship’s bowsprit. Gradually, the low contours of a coastal plain became distinct, a dark line of trees sitting on the horizon like the pile of a carpet. A few hours later, Tyndall’s navigational methods were vindicated. Not only had they reached America, but they were facing ‘the very mouth of the Bay of Chesapeake’.

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In London, reports reached Robert Cecil that the secret of the Virginia venture was out. The Richard, the ship sent by the West Country group to reconnoitre northern Virginia, had been taken off the coast of Florida by a Spanish fleet. A storm had forced one of the Spanish ships to put in at Bordeaux, where its English captives were released on the orders of the French authorities. It was one of these men who had managed to make his way to London and break the bad news. Other members of the expedition, including the mission’s pilot John Stoneman, were less fortunate. They had been taken to Spain, where ‘rough’ interrogation awaited them.

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The Spanish at this time had only a hazy understanding of English plans. Around the time the Royal Charter had been issued, King Philip III’s ambassador to London, Don Pedro de Zuñiga, had heard of a plan to send ‘500 or 600 men, private individuals of this kingdom to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida’. He had also discovered that ten Indians were being kept in London, who were ‘teaching and training’ prospective settlers of ‘how good that country is for people to go there and inhabit it’.

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By 24 January, 1607, Zuñiga was still unaware of the Newport expedition, but had received garbled information that some sort of venture was under way. He wrote an urgent dispatch to Philip III reporting that the English ‘have made an agreement, in great secrecy, for two ships to go [to Virginia] every month until they land two thousand men’. He also noted that Dutch rebels were to be sent. There followed a brief but mostly accurate summary of James’s charter of the previous April, including a list of those appointed to the Royal Council. The charter itself was a public document, but the order appointing the Royal Council was not, indicating that Zuñiga had found a source close to the Privy Council.

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On 26 February, Zuñiga received a response to his previous dispatch. ‘You will report to me what the English are doing in the matter of Virginia – and if the plan progresses which they contemplated, of sending men there and ships,’ the King wrote, ‘and thereupon, it will be taken into consideration here, what steps had best be taken to prevent it.’ Over the following weeks, the traffic of intelligence intensified. In April, Zuñiga finally learned that the English had already sent three ships, but he believed the Richard to be one of them.

On 7 May, a council of war assembled in Madrid to discuss the implications of the news. The danger, it was decided, was the proximity of the settlement to Spanish interests, since it lay, according to Zuñiga, ‘in 35 degrees above La Florida on the Coast’. Though this region of America ‘has not been discovered until now, nor is it known’, nevertheless it was ‘contained within the limits of the Crown of Castille’, in other words, Spanish territory. It was therefore concluded that ‘with all necessary force this plan of the English should be prevented’.

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While these discussions were under way in Madrid, news of the discovery of the Richard spread panic. If the Spanish found out what was going on, reprisals might ensue and all the hard-won benefits of peace would be lost. In such a fast-developing situation, it was decided that the Royal Council for Virginia was too cumbersome or too prone to infiltration. Its members were ‘dispersed by reason of their several habitations far remote the one from the other, and many of them in like manner far remote from Our City of London’. In response, a new order was published, creating two seperate councils, one for the ‘first’ or southern colony, the other for the ‘second’ or northern colony.

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Meanwhile, Cecil considered the fate of the Virginia venture in the light of the Richard’s capture. Having discussed the matter with the King, he consulted the journal of the Somerset House Treaty negotiations, to see if it might cast any light on the diplomatic ramifications. His conclusion was that, although Virginia was ‘a place formerly discovered by us, and never possessed by Spain’, the Spanish commissioners had denied that this gave England the right to ‘trade’ there. With respect to the captured crew of the Richard, he advised the King that ‘it might be better to leave these prisoners to their inconveniences’, though steps should be taken to recover their ship, as it had been captured in international waters. As for those currently on their way ‘to a discovery of Virginia’, Cecil suggested that they ‘should be left unto the peril which they incur thereby’.

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Part Two (#ulink_7e4d1b3d-f6df-58a8-b664-8d154578acce)

FIVE Tsenacomoco (#ulink_1ceb05e2-a8d8-5706-90a8-7054b0668f14)

Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their Poets, who make and sing songs, both of their ancestors’ deeds and praises of their gods.

PHILIP SIDNEY, Defence of Poesy

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THE AREA OF NORTH AMERICA known to the English as Virginia already had a name: Tsenacomoco. The people who lived there left no written record of their culture or history, which even in Thomas Jefferson’s time appeared, at least to Anglo-Americans, to be on the point of extinction. ‘Very little can now be discovered of the subsequent history of these tribes,’ Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. ‘They have lost their language,’ and several tribes had been forced to merge, reducing themselves ‘by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land’. The remnants ‘have more negro than Indian blood in them,’ he noted, anticipating a later practice of merging the two races, in an effort to extinguish any lingering traces of cultural identity.

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All that remains which can be traced directly back to the time of the English incursion is what the English themselves wrote about Tsenacomoco. Several of the colonizers took extensive notes, some even tried to learn and analyse the language. What they found was by its nature transient and mutable. The very act of removing it from the realm of voices, songs, dances and dress and committing it to the permanence of paper must have meant that some of its dynamic qualities were lost, and are unrecoverable. But sufficient remains in the historical record to give a hint of what the Tsenacomoco world was like, at least as seen from the perspective of an English Otasantasuwak or ‘wearer of leg-coverings’ about to step in and destroy it.

A hut stood between the flat sea and the high mountains. It belonged to a god of many shapes and many names. He was most often seen as a mighty Great Hare, and most usually called Ahone.

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One day, Ahone stood at the door of his hut, and beheld the emptiness around. So he made a world according to his imaginings, without a fixed form: a world of water, shifting sand, soft mud, trackless forests and tangled vines. The earth contained no metal or rock, nor any hard thing.

He populated the world with creatures. He made fish, which swam in the streams, and a great deer, which grazed in the woods and galloped across the meadows. But one creature he left tied up in a sack, which lay upon the floor of his hut.

Four gods from surrounding worlds peered over the rim of Ahone’s, and gazed upon his creation. They were jealous of what he had done, and came to his hut armed with spears to destroy his work. They saw the sack, and they opened it. Men and women sprang out and scurried across the floor, and the four gods tried to catch and eat them. But Ahone returned to his hut and drove those cannibal spirits away.

Hungry and vengeful, the four gods went into the forests of Ahone’s creation, and stalked the great deer. They found him grazing quietly in a grove. As they lay in the undergrowth, one of them dressed his arm in the fashion of the neck and head of another deer, and held it above the foliage to catch the great deer’s attention. Seeing a companion, the deer did not run.

In this way the four gods caught the great deer and slaughtered him. They butchered and ate the meat, sinews, offal and bones, devouring everything except the hide, which they left at the door of Ahone’s hut.