Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and The Start of a New Nation

“Indeed, the notion that English-speaking people would someday occupy and govern most of the North American continent would have seemed literally insane.”

An English empire that would span the globe was only an inkling of a notion in the early 17th century. At the time, the Spanish and Portuguese ruled the sea and commanded colonial power.

“Had not this violence and this injury been offer’d unto us by the Romans, we might yet have lived overgrown Satyrs, rude and untutor’d, wand’ring in the woods, dwelling in caves, and hunting for our dinners as the wild beasts in the forests for their prey.”

The Virginia Company’s instructions not to “offend” the local peoples contradict the very idea of colonization. This condescending attitude quickly gave way as Algonquins were far more attuned to their environment than the English.

“No one recorded what was said, but the likely flavor of it is captured by a later comment of Wingfield that ‘if he were in England, I would thinck scorn this man should be my companyon.’”

Class played an important role in the founding of Jamestown, with highborn investors such as Edward-Maria Wingfield actively undermining the only person who seemed to understand how to get by in the new world. John Smith was ignored on the basis of his class, not his merit.

“What the English did not recognize is that they were facing a tightly run, martially adept empire.”

Throughout this period of history, the English frequently underestimated the Algonquins, judging their numbers, knowledge, and abilities only by half-informed glances. In fact, Powhatan’s organizational and political power was great.

“The violence had vindicated Smith’s criticisms in the worst way. It was therefore only natural that Wingfield and unknown others wanted John Smith on the ships with Newport when he left for England.”

David A. Price frames John Smith as a romantic underdog, fighting unscrupulous and outdated class prejudice. It is worth noting, however, that Smith is given the same “underdog” treatment when interacting with the Algonquin—this position justifying his being the unsung architect of English settlement.

“True, half the colonists were not the sort to get their hands dirty, but even they must have understood that their bloodlines alone were not going to put food on the plate.”

The surrealism of Jamestown’s early years is compounded by the class makeup of the colonists, who were highborn but disinherited second sons unaccustomed to work. Many of them simply died rather than take precautions for basic provisions.

“Rather than amassing all the food he needed from one tribe, he bought smaller quantities here and there, then headed up the river for more, ‘lest they should perceive my too great want.’ Weakness in appearance, in Smith’s mind, was weakness in reality.”

In Price’s telling, Smith is nothing if not the consummate salesperson, running up the market for beads and tools, generating artificial scarcity, and performing hard-headed negotiations for corn and other necessities. This links him to ideologically American attributes as opposed to inherited English ones.

“Smith now owed Pocahontas his life. Before long, he would owe her his life several times over.”

Pocahontas is a figure given life via English narrators such as John Smith. As such, she often appears as an ally, a character, to the English, rather than a fully fleshed out human being. Parsing the reality of her life is the chief work of any of her biographers.

“Our gilded refiners with their gilded promises made all men their slaves in hopes of recompenses...There was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, refine gold, load gold.”

The purpose of colonization was to follow up on rumors of gold, such as that found in South America. The Starving Time of 1610 is due in part to the Virginia Company’s obsession with mineral wealth and its diversion of necessary work.

“Though there be fish in the sea, fowls in the air, and beasts in the woods, their bounds [territories] are so large, they so wilde, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them.”

Smith was a pragmatist who understood North America’s wealth being in land and commodities, not gold—leading to his negative assessment of fellow colonists as unsuited for farming and hunting.

“You see now that power resteth wholly in my selfe: you must obey this now for a law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by siknesse he shall be disabled), for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers…There are now no more counsellers to protect you…”

Smith was made a leader only after a string of failures on the council’s part. Though the Virginia Company would incorporate many of Smith’s ideas, they rushed to replace him with a highborn.

“He felt obliged to maintain, as he put it, ‘a continual and daily table’ in Jamestown ‘for gentlemen of fashion’—and then had to ask for his eldest brother to pay the bills.”

Under George Percy, the people of Jamestown nearly starved to death and abandoned the colony. In this passage, Percy is depicted as decadent and callous, a person unfit for leadership in a crisis.

“Percy berated Davis for ‘not regarding our wants and miseries at all,’ but the real lesson was that the Starving Time never had to happen. Even with all the colonists’ improvidence, Smith’s policy of dispersal would have gotten them through the winter.”

Observing the Algonquin, Smith quickly learned that they maintained small groups in specialized territories, never depleting one area or attempting to maintain large groups off the land. Percy did the opposite, often to spite Smith.

“The formidable challenges still facing the colony—achieving peace with Powhatan or victory over him, for one, and keeping the investors happy, for another—would not have to be dealt with under the shadow of imminent extinction.”

The English’s singular advantage was in a population willing to restock Jamestown with more and more bodies, bodies valued as they would be in a crowded London marketplace. Neither investors nor workers mourned death and suffering due to their own incompetence. Colonists came and died at a cruel but stabilizing rate.

“As a ruler, Dale is sometimes described as a martinet. It would be more accurate to say he was a martinet’s ideal of a martinet.”

Sir Thomas Dale represents a “third way” of political organization after Wingfield and Percy’s highborn incompetence and Smith’s revolutionary pragmatism. Dale ruled colonists with an iron fist, an efficient eye—this paving the way for codified, legal seizure of land.

“In considering the attractiveness of English culture, flawed as it was, she had to look only as far as the case of her own mother: having attained the status of royalty as one of Powhatan’s wives, she had been cast aside as soon as Powhatan was born. It was nothing personal; it was simply the way of Powhatan society.”

In discussing Algonquin culture in regards to women, Pocahontas seemingly had ample reason to convert to Christianity and take an English husband. However, little mention is made of the rights and privileges afforded to non-royal women of either culture, or how they compared to each other.

“There have been too many of his men and mine killed, and by my occasion there shall never be more...for I am old now and would gladly end my days in peace. So as if the English offer me injury, my country is large enough; I will remove myself farther from you. Thus much I hope will satisfy my brother.”

From the English perspective, Powhatan proved an effective military strategist, negotiator, and leader. His final words, however, underestimated the English capacity for growth, leaving his successors a very difficult path to tread.

“‘All must die,’ she reminded him as her life slipped away. ‘Tis enough that the child liveth.’”

Pocahontas died at the age of 20 or 21, within a year of living in London (due to an unnamed respiratory disease endemic to Europe but not Virginia). Modern scholars only have the word of Pocahontas’s English observers regarding her preference to stay in a foreign land in spite of her illness.

“Indeed, if a native man had been allowed to witness the proceedings of Ensign Harrison’s offense, he would have found them a strange juxtaposition. The assemblymen were intent on suppressing any ‘outrages’ against the natives, but they were doing so as representatives of cities, boroughs, and plantations of territory the natives had once considered their own.”

Democracy is often meticulously limited when attached to the profit of elite actors. In the early days of colonization, this meant having a body of self-appointed electors vote on issues surrounding land that belonged to absent parties and those with no voting power at all.

“The colonists conveyed the Africans’ bitter social position, if not their legal status: colonial officials were already describing the Africans the same way they cataloged commodities.”

Price describes slavery as a race-neutral proposition until people of African descent were brought to North American shores in 1619. In this passage, he acknowledges that the terror of slavery transformed from a disorderly rite of war and debt into something foundational, systematic, and explicitly racial. Slaves were marked on censuses by their color, without the addition of surnames.

“He avowed that he wanted no part in disrupting the peace. ‘The sky,’ he told them, ‘should sooner fall.’”

Much of English-Algonquin relations was defined by lies and half-truths. As the English grew stronger, diplomacy was shed in favor of open war.

“In his hour of victory, Opechancanough had set in motion nothing less than the inexorable destruction of his own people.”

Price’s use of “inexorable” should come with a healthy dose of skepticism. The change described in this passage—from being disingenuous about one’s plans to supplanting a people from their land, to enacting plans through genocide—is not an “inexorable” process, but rather a change in tactics. The result in either case would have meant Algonquin destruction and English triumph.

“The council then repeated its admonition to pursue unstinting warfare; ‘a sharp revenge upon the bloody miscreants...even to the measure that they intended against us, the rooting them out for being longer a people upon the face of the Earth.’”

The same propaganda that convinced the first two decades of settlers of the peace and harmony to be found among the Algonquin very effortlessly and quickly turned the next two decades of settlers toward warfare. By the 1640s, the leadership and economy of the Algonquin people were all but destroyed.