VI
Captain John Smith Takes to Trade
WHEN Captain John Smith arrived in America early in 1607 he was but freshly turned twenty-seven years of age. And he was in serious trouble—a prospect for the gibbet, in fact, because of alleged treason. On the voyage over he had plotted to supplant those in charge, or so it was charged by his enemies in the expedition.
But, when the sealed instructions from the London Company were opened that spring in Virginia, it was learned that John Smith himself was to be a member of the council in the government of the colony. In the end he had to be given his rightful position of authority at Jamestown where the colony was planted.
It had always been thus with young Smith. By just such amazing experiences he had succeeded in raising himself from the status of a poor tenant farmer’s son in Lincolnshire to that of soldier and “gentleman.”
Unfortunately, however, at this period in England’s history such social climbing, though countenanced and legitimate enough, had not quite come to be “accepted.” It provided fertile ground for the cultivation of jealous enemies.
Still, John Smith had probably packed more thrilling experiences and hairbreadth escapes into his life than anyone else in the realm. He had warred in far-off countries, engaged in sea fights and been forced to ship with Barbary pirates. An award of a coat of arms and the princely sum of fifteen hundred gold ducats had come to him from Transylvania where, like a knight of old, he cut off three Turks’ heads in single combat. He had escaped death from wounds on a middle-eastern battlefield, only to be enslaved by the Turks. This hard fate was mitigated somewhat by the favors of a high-born Turkish lady who acquired him as a slave. But then her brother mercilessly shackled him off to the land of the Tartars. From there, however, Smith succeeded in making a miraculous escape after killing his cruel master.
The fiction-like pattern was to be repeated over and over again in the new world. Captured by the Indians of Virginia, Smith saved himself from a tortured death by an ingenious oration and his flare for the dramatic. Later, in the nick of time, he won the love of the young Indian “princess,” Pocahontas, who rescued him from having his brains beaten out by her father, Powhatan. He escaped from this predicament only to find the living remnant of his distressed comrades in the fort at Jamestown again ready to hang him, this time for allegedly having gone over to the enemy. And so they would have done, if it had not been for the timely arrival of the admiral of the Virginia fleet, Captain Christopher Newport, returning from England with more colonists and stopgap supplies.
Delivered from the gallows once more, Captain Smith was subsequently to be asked to assume the highest office in the colony, that of president, because he was the only man with ingenuity enough to keep his comrades alive while enforcing discipline.
It was a poorly chosen group of colonists—these original Jamestown venturers. Fully half of them were gentlemen of sorts bent only on a quest for riches. A handful of craftsmen, a few boys and a brawling lot of seaport loafers and ex-soldiers who were indisposed to agriculture or any peaceful pursuits completed the ill-balanced company. They came to find gold and they expected to relieve the natives of it quickly, if not to scoop it up by the handful along the banks of Virginia’s rivers. Instead, they met with hostile Indians, killing diseases and famine.
Not more than one out of four who pioneered the settlement at Jamestown survived the first few months in America.
The joint-stock company that sent them out, backed by the patronage of King James I and headed by one of the greatest of England’s merchant adventurers, Sir Thomas Smith, only had the usual primary objectives in view—the discovery of mines and a northwest passage to Cathay. The instructions of the London Company, in fact, dwelt on these things, while saddling the colony with a communalistic form of government that encouraged idleness, bred suspicion and brought about deadly factional disputes. Malarial fevers, dysentery and typhoid laid many of the venturers low. Famine and attacks by the natives completed a grim toll of death.
While others remained behind the palisades of the fort, bemoaning their fate and dying helplessly to prove it, Captain Smith was on the rivers and in the forests laying the foundations of successful trade with the Indians and sizing up the country’s resources. Resolutely, he foraged among the natives for needed corn and other food. With a few men in a barge he explored and mapped the entire Chesapeake Bay and tidewater region, realistically recording Virginia’s natural resources with a view toward making the plantation self-supporting.
And when he assumed the stewardship of the colony in the fall of 1608, following two presidents who had failed miserably, John Smith, the soldier of fortune, truly became John Smith, the colonizer. To do this, under communalism, he had to become a virtual dictator. But his rule was as honest and as ingenious as it was arbitrary. These qualities of leadership coupled with his understanding of the true nature of Virginia’s resources and of the need for a firm foundation of trade relations with the natives saved the plantation from extinction. The colony on the James River became the first permanent English settlement in America.
For that matter, it was the British Empire’s first permanent colonial settlement anywhere in the world.
The tidewater Indians with whom Smith had to deal mostly belonged to a group of Algonquian tribes known as the Powhatan Confederacy. Ruling this confederacy was a tyrannous old chief, himself called Powhatan, who was held in considerable awe by his subjects. From each of the tribes under his domination Powhatan demanded an annual tribute consisting mainly of beads and skins and bits of the decorative copper that was so scarce in his kingdom.
Beads were used by the Indians not only for adornment but as a form of currency. As Captain Smith observed, they were the cause of “as much dissention among the Salvages as gold and silver amongst the Christians.” Their manufacture by the natives did indeed call for a high degree of skill, each bead being cut individually from shell, then polished and drilled with crude stone tools. When strung together in belts or arm’s length ropes they were known universally among the Algonquin nations of the eastern seaboard as wampum.
In Virginia wampum strings of white beads made from cockle shell were called roanoke, whereas strings of beads cut from conch shell, dark purple in color, were called peake. Generally speaking the latter were worth ten times as much as the former. The natives used their wampum, or shell money, in barter among themselves to such an extent that the white men found it very convenient as a means of promoting their own fur trade. Often they would trade their wares with a rich tribe for wampum, and then exchange this shell money with a less prosperous tribe for furs.
The collecting of skins for taxes, or tribute, was of course a device older than history. The Romans employed it to collect taxes from barbarian subjects; so did the pharaohs of prehistoric Egypt in gathering tribute from the upper Nile valley. Powhatan could demand pelts in some variety. A contemporary chronicler among the first settlers at Jamestown noted that within the great chief’s kingdom the forests and streams abounded with bears, foxes, otters, beavers, muskrats and “Deere both Red and Fallow.”
The skins of these animals were the tidewater Indians’ most necessary and useful commodity next to food. Mainly they were necessary as clothing in winter, but they were also used as adornment by chiefs and priests, and for many ceremonial purposes. They were utilized, too, as closures and decorations for the Indians’ long-houses. And soft hide leather, such as buckskin, came in for a variety of aboriginal hunting and household requirements, as well as for garments and footwear.
Actually Powhatan’s common subjects often went quite naked, except for skins worn much like aprons. However, when it was cold, they wore matchcores—an Indian word for garments of fur which was later turned into “match-coats” by the English.
At his first meeting with Powhatan, Smith found the old savage blanketed with a matchcore of raccoon skins. One of the priests was “disguised with a great Skinne, his head hung round with little Skinnes of Weasels and other vermine.” Many of the better sort of savages, such as werowances and chief men, affected mantles of carefully dressed deerskin, some painted and embossed with white beads or bits of copper. Others who were opulent had matchcores made from squirrel, beaver, muskrat and otter, the last being held in highest esteem.
Women wore fur blankets of beaver and otter, or tastefully fringed and embroidered skin skirts, appropriate to the season. Children usually went naked, although marriageable maidens, twelve to fifteen, modestly covered their loins at least. Pocahontas herself is referred to on one occasion as being girdled with soft otter skins.
About most of the great Bay of the Chesapeake, on his expeditions, Captain Smith found “Wilde Cats ... Martins, Powlecats, weessels and Minkes.” When he explored the Eastern Shore he discovered it to be thickly inhabited by “Otters, Beavers, Martins, Luswarts and sables.” Truly, the tidewater literally swarmed with fur bearers.
In the northernmost reaches of the bay Smith managed to trade with the giant Susquehannocks. “Their attire,” he recorded, “is the skinnes of beares and Woolves, some have Cassacks made of Beares heades and skinnes that a man’s necke goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the beare fastened to his shoulders behind, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, and at the end of the nose hung a Beares Pawe: the halfe sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of Beares and the armes through the mouth, with pawes hanging at their noses. One had the head of a Woolfe hanging in a chaine for a Jewell.”
These majestic savages came from the banks of the Susquehanna River, the headwaters of which reached to the territory of the Five Nations in the lake country of French Canada. As castoff relatives of the Iroquois, the Susquehannocks lived in palisaded forts along the river where they were subjected to constant raiding by their bloodthirsty kinsmen. Hoping to make allies of men with fire guns, they presented Captain Smith with many fine gifts in trade, including bearskins and robes of various furs sewn together. Most significantly, however, they had with them French hatchets, knives and pieces of iron and brass which they said they had acquired in trade from tribes who bartered directly with white men on the River of Canada.
This news, gained by Smith in 1608, about the encroachments of French trade on the “back-side of Virginia” probably did more than anything else to awaken Englishmen to their own fur trading possibilities in America. Everyone knew that the French were driving a highly profitable trade with the savages up the valley of the St. Lawrence. What hadn’t been known was how deep they had penetrated into the new continent, or the direction taken.
In English minds Virginia stretched northward by land or sea to the 45th parallel at least, even though French charters presumed to encompass territory as far south as 40°. In less than five years English guns would rout French Jesuits and traders attempting a settlement at Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine, and an expedition from Jamestown would destroy the older plantations of the French fur merchants at St. Croix and Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy itself. Within that length of time the Virginians would be well rooted and competitive as a result of their own good trade in furs, a trade that would expand rapidly in the Chesapeake tidewater.
But for the time being, in view of their critical problems of existence, there was little they could do about either the fur trade or the Frenchmen, except to nurse their jealousy. It was natural enough that they were envious of French successes, especially as the hoped-for mines in Virginia seemed to be retreating farther and farther into the hinterland and the prospects of finding a passage to the other sea in the Chesapeake area were diminishing daily. However, staying alive was their immediate problem.
Already Captain Smith had spoken out strongly against the fruitless search for gold—“guilded dirt,” he called it contemptuously. As president he would not permit the supply ships to be cargoed with more of the worthless yellow soil or mica-tinctured dirt that they had been ferrying back to England. And, although he still thought there was the probability of a passage farther north or possibly a short overland route between rivers to the other salt sea, he frankly admitted that his own exploration had been entirely unrewarding in this respect.
No English explorer before John Smith had dared to be so honest. And Smith went even farther.
Now he had courageously despatched a very blunt note to his employers, the merchant adventurers of the company in London, telling them the truth about their El Dorado. It was a note that must have startled those comfortable gentlemen right out of their starched ruffs. Certainly it was disillusioning to gold-hungry investors already so heavily committed. But by its very forthrightness it was also soberingly effective, for the merchants promptly took John Smith’s advice, even though they didn’t thank him for his seeming impertinence.
There might be iron in Virginia, Smith had written in effect, but there was no gold, and neither was there any immediate prospect of the discovery there of a short route to Cathay and India. However, a profitable plantation could be cultivated by earnest husbandry and the realistic development of the country’s natural resources for trade. Agricultural products, furs, timber, naval stores, iron and possibly other products of local industries could eventually be shipped home in exchange for English woolens and coarse cloths.
In the meantime of course the president had his hands full just foraging for food enough to keep his charges alive. While people were dying of famine, company profits of any kind had to wait—even those to be gained from organized fur trading for which there was considerable pressure from the natives. The red men were always much more interested in trading their furs than their food. They never raised more of the latter than was needed for their own minimum requirements. Smith had to resort to stratagem and even to a kind of military commerce on more than one occasion to separate them from their corn.
So the Indians, with their pelts to barter, turned to the sailors who manned the transport ships, and the mariners readily accommodated them. These hands knew how to turn a quick profit in the golden fleece. They learned first, when the fishing fleets began crossing the oceans, to Newfoundland and elsewhere—and later, when English ships took to the seas to trade with other nations. As far back as 1560 merchants in England were complaining to their factors in Russia about the sailors’ aptitude for smuggling furs.
“Foxe skins, white, blacke, and russet will be vendible here,” they wrote. “The last yere you sent none; but there were mariners that bought many. If any mariners doe buy any trifling furres or other commodities, we will they shall be registered in our pursers bookes, to the intent we may know what they be.”
In Virginia the mariners not only entered into direct negotiations with the natives, by swapping goods over the side of a ship with savages in canoes or by stealing ashore for a dangerous rendezvous, but they carried on barter through colonists who secretly assumed the roles of factors in return for favors from the home-bound mariners. One mariner, according to Captain Smith, confessed to having obtained enough pelts in this manner on one voyage to net him thirty pounds sterling at home. That was a tidy sum for an ordinary sailor to acquire in those days, legitimately or otherwise.
It was bad enough that the colonists abetted the sailors’ enterprise. Inflation invariably resulted when the settlers traded individually with the natives. But worst of all, in most cases the supplies being bartered had been pilfered by the sailors from company stores aboard ship.
Smith railed against this “damnable and private trade,” when the colony was in such desperate need for food, and even for the very articles sold to the Indians. He recognized the profits to be made from the fur trade, as he well proved both in Virginia and later in New England. In this particular instance it was just that corn came first.
John Smith’s tenure in Virginia ended in the fall of 1609 when he was seriously wounded by an accidental gunpowder explosion. He was invalided home to England. But not before his enemies had taken advantage of his agonized prostration to plot his murder. This treachery was thwarted by Smith’s usual fortune in such crises, the plot being discovered and exposed in the nick of time to save his life.
In the meantime, however, the thoroughly aroused merchants in London had reorganized the company, taking a more realistic approach to the problems of colonization as John Smith suggested, and had appointed an influential governor with fuller authority to rule their plantation. The new governor’s advance representatives had already been dispatched to depose the outspoken young president who was so critical of the company’s policies.
But Captain Smith’s task in Virginia was completed. Through his efforts, almost singlehanded, the English at last had a beachhead on the American continent.
Settlers came now in great numbers—traders, merchants and farmers. The communalistic plan under which the colony had been governed by the company was abandoned, and a venturer to Virginia was given an opportunity to share in the profits of his labor. He could acquire land of his own, through bondage if necessary, something he had little chance of ever doing in England. And he could establish a family; many women now immigrated to reinforce further the first two brave females who arrived in 1608.
Meanwhile, as John Smith’s historic beachhead was expanded, the fur trade continued to set the usual pattern of exploration, trade and settlement.
Mariners with an experienced eye for marketable pelts came to Virginia in increasing numbers—hardy, courageous men who were prepared to take incredible risks in the pursuit of beaver, otter, bear and the big Virginia muskrat. By 1620 there were nearly one hundred fur traders operating in and about the Chesapeake Bay, according to an official of the colony. They plied their shallops and pinnaces up unexplored tidewater streams and rivers to find the villages of the unpredictable savages, hazarding their very lives to learn the ways and language of the aborigines, and to trade with them. They established wilderness trading posts, building palisaded forts which later came to be occupied by merchants and farmers and became permanent settlements.
These fur traders found the profits attractive enough to offset the dangers—not only those posed by their early contacts with the red men but those threatened by rival Englishmen during much of the seventeenth century.
At times rival traders proved much more dangerous than the aborigines. The Englishmen were to fight among themselves, often with piratical and bloody fury, over the fur trade of the Chesapeake tidewater and for possession of the Susquehanna and Potomac River routes to the lush lake country of the north where the Frenchmen bartered for pelts.
But while the Englishmen were thus engaged among themselves on the backside of Virginia some foreign traders moved in as their neighbors on the coast, first on the Hudson and then on the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers. These were the Dutchmen, who forthwith enjoyed a most profitable commerce in pelts with the natives and began settling themselves in complete possession of all those parts of “Virginia.”