• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

All the while, Smith negotiated with Powhatan for food. He wanted to dribble out enough knives, hatchets, and iron pots to Tsenacomoco to get the necessary grain shipments but not enough to saturate the Indian demand for English goods. Complicating his task, English demand kept rising; two more convoys in the spring and fall of 1608 increased the number of mouths to about two hundred. Like any good businessman, Powhatan responded to the rising demand by raising maize prices; he asked for guns and swords, rather than hand tools. Smith refused, fearing the consequences of arming the Indians. Powhatan responded by cutting side deals for weapons with Jamestown residents who chafed at Smith’s autocratic rule. And he kept the pressure on Smith by allowing his men to pick off stragglers outside Jamestown.

Smith left for medical treatment in England in October 1609. Canny but clumsy, he had suffered terrible burns when he accidentally ignited a bag of gunpowder he’d fastened around his waist. For the tassantassas, his departure came at a specially bad time. Two months before, yet another convoy had arrived, carrying more than three hundred new colonists, among them another squad of Smith-hating gentlemen. They had persuaded the Virginia Company directors to depose him. Happily for Smith, the ship with the company’s written instructions—and his replacement as governor—had been delayed. Still, the scornful newcomers posed an immediate threat to Smith’s authority and, to Smith’s way of thinking, Jamestown itself. To get them out of his hair, he split up the new arrivals and dispatched them to seek food from several Tsenacomoco groups. This proved to be a mistake.

One party went to the Nansemond, who lived on an island off the opposite, southern bank of the James. When the group’s envoys to the Nansemond did not return on time, Percy wrote, the rest of the English “burned [the Indians’] houses, ransacked their temples, took down the corpses of their dead kings from off their tombs, and carried away their [funerary] pearls, copper and bracelets.” Smith was appalled. He had berated and bullied and blustered at the Indians, but he also believed that Jamestown should not massacre its food supply. But by then he was too badly injured to force the colonists to apologize.

The incident evidently convinced Powhatan that the tassantassas’ new leaders had abrogated the pact he had struck with Smith. That winter he struck back, directly and indirectly. On the first, direct track, native fighters cut down seventeen colonists who sought to ransack the village of Kecoughtan for food; killed another party of emaciated tassantassas in the forest (as a sign of “contempt and scorn,” the Indians left the bodies “with their mouths stopped full of bread [maize]”); wiped out a boatload of soldiers in an upstream outpost established by Smith; and slaughtered a contingent of thirty-three colonists who had been lured to Werowocomoco by promises of grain. The leader of this party, Percy reported, was killed in a fashion that was ghastly, inventive, and slow: “By women his flesh was scraped from his bones with mussel shells and, before his face, thrown into the fire.” In the next five years, natives slew as many as one out of every four colonists, Fausz estimated in a history of this “first Indian war.”

Powhatan’s indirect attack was more deadly still: he stopped sending food. His timing was excellent. Smith left before his official replacement as governor had arrived. His opponents in the colony chose as a temporary leader George Percy, the younger brother of the earl of Northumberland. While under attack, Smith had been unable to force the colonists to maintain Jamestown’s gardens or mend the fishing nets. The otiose Percy was even less successful at organizing the colonists—a lack of respect related, one assumes, to his practice of swanning around the muddy encampment in silk garters, gold-banded hats, and embroidered girdles. In consequence, the English had no stockpiled food when Powhatan cut off supplies. As Percy later admitted, they