Pocahontas and John Rolfe arrived in England two years later, in June 1616, with their one-year-old son Thomas. They were accompanied by Pocahontas’s former captor Samuel Argall and an entourage of 12 Powhatans. The visit was welcomed by the Virginia Company as they hoped to recapture the imagination of a bored King James. The couple traveled by coach into London, a crowded city filled with commerce, pollution, and noise.

In the meantime, John Smith’s fame and success as an author compelled him to write new books about Virginia, if only to persuade the Virginia Company to send him back. Smith’s accounts were matter-of-fact, showing little bias for his former adversaries among the Powhatan, but testimonials from close associates increased his reputation. The Virginia Company sent Smith back twice to survey the coast of modern New England, far north of Jamestown. Attempts to start a new colony were interrupted by French pirates, who took Smith prisoner for months before he escaped. (Smith’s writing on the subject would inspire the future Pilgrims.) Though Smith did not meet with Pocahontas right away, he did write to Queen Anne on Pocahontas’s behalf, urging her and the stingy Virginia Company to receive the young woman as if she were royalty.

As a result, Pocahontas and her retinue were taken to many events and treated as visiting royalty, though often to the condescending amusement of the English highborn. A priest in the retinue, Tomocomo, sat for a recorded interview with a religious scholar named Samuel Purchas (Smith’s notes describe the interview as awkward). The retinue eventually met King James, but the decadent, indifferent man left little impression. Pocahontas and Smith reunited once, early in 1617.

Though Pocahontas preferred to stay in England, Rolfe planned to continue his tobacco business in Virginia. On the eve of their trip, Pocahontas and her son fell victim to an unnamed respiratory disease. Pocahontas died and was buried near Gravesend on March 21, 1617. Rolfe left his son with a local official and returned to Virginia. Though Thomas recovered and lived to adulthood, he never saw his father again.

After failing to curb the new colonists, Powhatan died in April 1618. New generations of colonists followed Rolfe’s lead in planting and selling tobacco. The only factors limiting the tobacco trade were agricultural limitations, restrictions favoring economic diversity, and King James’s vehement distaste for the product. Nevertheless, there was demand for the crop that alarmed the new governor of Virginia, Sir George Yeardley, who saw people planting tobacco instead of corn and other necessities. For his part, John Smith let it be known from afar that corn prices were the culprit, praising an unregulated market.

During Yeardley’s governorship, private property of 100 acres was dispensed to free men who worked the Virginia land, while those in indentured servitude (who had to pay off the cost of their transportation) were granted land only at the end of their service. In the meantime, a few wealthy investors and other highborn were given even larger plots. With this, came the rudiments of a fleeting representative government. No record of the General Assembly’s rules exists, but the Assembly was strongly influenced by Sir Edwin Sandys, the body’s effective chief officer. The body recognized the authority of the King and included only free landowners. They had ramshackle proceedings for land distribution and relations with Algonquins. It was the letter of the law to avoid “outrage” among the Algonquin inhabitants, but the insatiable increase in English-owned lands over Algonquin territory made it inevitable (192).

In 1619 (the same year in which property rights were granted and a proto-democratic legal body was formed), the first slave ship, the White Lion, arrived at Point Comfort in modern Hampton, Virginia. The White Lion’s 20 captives were taken from the hold of a Portuguese ship as spoils of a raid. The slaves likely came from Ndongo, decimated by inter-African warfare, which in turn led to the Spanish and Portuguese slave trade. The slave ships of the era had a horrific but poorly recorded casualty rate of around 50 percent during transit—and these were no different. The survivors were traded to Governor Yeardley for food.

The slaves were tasked with tobacco cultivation and harvesting. The first accounts of hereditary slavery known to modern scholars were written in the 1640s, the slaves’ status likely being similar to those of indentured servants. Among the newcomers, at least two men—John Gowen and Anthony Johnson—gained their freedom after a period of work. (Johnson became a wealthy planter in his own right, albeit with slaves.) Racial division was more present in English culture in regards to people of African descent than it was with local tribes. White residents were registered by surnames, while Black residents were often listed by the color of their skin.

In June 1620, King James replaced the democratically-minded Sir Edwin Sandys of the Virginia Company council with a representative named Henry Wriothseley. In late 1621, Governor Yeardley was replaced with Sir Francis Wyatt. Powhatan’s successor, his youngest brother Opechancanough, avowed continued peace with the English settlers while privately planning to reclaim the lands he lost.

By 1621, more than 1,200 colonists lived in Virginia. Foreseeing problems with the Algonquin people related to this growth, the Virginia Company set aside money for a special colony and school near Henricus with which to indoctrinate tribe members in the value of private property and Christianity. The special colony was headed by a newcomer named George Thorpe. Thorpe learned about Virginian culture from a servant, one of the 12 Powhatans who accompanied Pocahontas to London. This limited point of view led him to believe that the locals should be treated with “Christian kindness” (202). He built an English-style house for Opechancanough within the bounds of the colony, allowed the Algonquin people to freely explore, and attempted to persuade the Algonquin leader to send young Algonquin boys to live in the colony and learn the culture. Opechancanough refused this last offer.

Opechancanough planned to poison the colony with hemlock but had to put this plan aside after rumor of it spread. In early spring of 1622, an altercation between an Algonquin named Namattanew and an Englishman named Morgan brought hostilities into the open. On March 22, Opechancanough used guerilla tactics and subterfuge to bring English colonists out in the open, arriving unarmed and then using the colonists’ own tools to attack them. Only Jamestown was sufficiently forewarned to rebuff the attack. As many as 400 English died, including Thorpe’s servant, who was killed as a traitor.

News of the attack did not reach England until July, at which point the Virginia Company investors immediately reversed their policy of non-violence. They put into writing a public declaration of war. Several public commentators who once condemned the genocidal practices by the Spanish now praised them. Even religious scholar Samuel Purchas, who acknowledged the sin of land theft, agreed. John Smith offered to head a military force to repel Opechancanough and his men, but his plan was rejected as being too expensive. Rather, the Virginia Company flooded the English colony with gunpowder, and King James himself sent thousands of weapons and protective armor.

Governor Wyatt ordered that the plantations be abandoned, consolidating survivors behind protective barriers in and near Jamestown. Beginning in June, armed men left the protection of Jamestown in organized patrols to pillage and destroy nearby villages. The loss of workers and warfare left little to harvest by autumn. Over the winter, starvation and disease took far more English lives than the initial massacre. In spite of the widely reported massacre, the Virginia Company continued to find new colonists, due in part to active propaganda disavowing potential dangers. Throughout 1622-1623, these newcomers were met with continual starvation and bloodshed.

Opechancanough sought peace in early 1623. For his efforts, the English gave him a barrel of poisoned wine which killed 200 of his people. Governor Wyatt recognized March 22 as a holiday of “thanksgiving,” not of peace with the Algonquins, but defiance against them. Soon after, King James took control of the Virginia Company, making Jamestown a colony of the government and setting the stage for English colonization across the world. English numbers continued to swell; by 1632, 10 years after the massacre, there were 3,200 English living in Virginia. By 1644, the English captured and killed the elderly Opechancanough.

Throughout the first decades of the 17th century, John Smith proposed colonization to smaller companies and representatives of the King—emphasizing the harvesting of simple commodities as a way to make profit. He continued to deemphasize gold mining. Though his reasoning was careful and prophetic of future colonization in North America, his proposals went ignored or unrewarded. He lived off of modest profits from his published works.

In 1620, when Smith was in his forties, Separatist Pilgrims sought a more restrictive way of life than that of England or Holland, and planned a trip to New England. They were familiar with Smith’s work and used it as a guide; yet, they rejected his offer to accompany them. Perhaps as a result, they landed far from their destination and instead landed on Plymouth Rock.

Smith continued to offer commentary on Virginia’s situation. He published his rejected proposals as open letters as well as a reaction to the March 22 attack by urging further colonization and realism in negotiating with Algonquins—including calls for increased militarism. Throughout 1623-1624, Smith worked on his Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles. It was written in four parts and was accompanied by edifying verse commentary, which was common for non-fiction at the time. Smith wrote an autobiography and several books on sailing and farming until his death in 1631 at the age of 51; the last of these was Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Any Where.

From these books, unusually candid in assessing English readiness and failure, modern scholars have a trove of information with which to recreate Smith’s time. In David A. Price’s interpretation, these works reflect a classic American sense of independence, commerce, and personal ambition over and above communal (and especially authoritarian) values. Subsequent histories of the English colonization of America would cite John Smith as a central figure not only in English history, but American history. Several American founders such as John Marshall and Noah Webster cited him as an inspiration.