Made In America - Bill Bryson [19]
At least he was spared the messy end that awaited many of those who survived him. On Good Friday, 1622, during a period of amity between the colonists and native Americans, the Indian chief Opechancanough sent delegations of his tribes to the newly planted Virginia settlements of Kecoughtan, Henricus (also called Henrico or Henricopolis) and Charles City and their neighbouring farms. It was presented as a goodwill visit – some of the Indians even ‘sate down at Breakfast’, as one appalled colonial wrote afterwards – but upon a given signal, the Indians seized whatever implements happened to come to hand and murdered every man, woman and child they could catch, 350 in all, or about a third of Virginia’s total population.25
Twenty-two years later, in 1644, the same chief did the same thing, killing about the same number of people. But by this time the 350 deaths represented less than a twentieth of Virginia’s English inhabitants, and Opechancanough’s incursion was more a brutal annoyance than a catastrophe. Something clearly had changed in the interim. What it was can be summed up in a single word: tobacco. To the Indians of Virginia this agreeable plant was not tobacco, but uppówoc. Tobacco was a Spanish word, taken from the Arabic tabāq, signifying any euphoria-inducing herb. The first mention of tobacco in English was in 1565 after a visit by John Hawkins to a short-lived French outpost in Florida. With a trace of bemusement, and an uncertain mastery of the expository sentence, he reported that the French had ‘a kind of herb dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup on the end, with fire, doe suck through the cane the smoke thereof’.26 Despite Hawkins’s apparent dubiousness about just how much pleasure this sort of thing could bring, he carried some tobacco back to England with him, where it quickly caught on in a big way. At first the practice was called ‘drinking’ it, before it occurred to anyone that smoking might be a more apt term. Wonderful powers were ascribed to it. Tobacco was believed to be both a potent aphrodisiac and a marvellously versatile medicine, which ‘purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body’.27 Before long, it was all the rage and people simply couldn’t get enough of it.
The Jamestown colonists began planting it in the second decade of the seventeenth century and found to their joy that it grew nearly as well as poison ivy. Suddenly fortunes were to be made in Virginia. People began to flock to the colony in numbers the Indians couldn’t cope with. Virginia’s future was secure, and almost entirely because of an addictive plant.
In the mean time, the persecution of Puritans in Britain made New England a much less lonely spot. During the years 1629-40, 80,000 Puritans fled the Old World for the New. Only some 20,000 went to New England. A similar number settled in the Caribbean, in places like Barbados and St Kitts. Some formed a new, and now almost wholly forgotten, colony on Old Providence Island along Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. The West Indies were for a long time the most populous part of the New World. By 1700 Barbados had almost a third more English-speaking inhabitants than Virginia and more than twice as many as New York. None the less, enough Britons settled in Massachusetts to secure its future beyond doubt. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it had a population of 80,000. Its wealth, too, had an unseemly side. As early as 1643, just twenty-two years after the Pilgrim Fathers first planted their feet on American soil with a view to making the world a better, more godly place, New England entrepreneurs were busily engaged in an enterprise that would make them very rich indeed: the slave trade.
Such was the outflow of immigrants in the seventeenth century that by 1700 the British government had grown alarmed by the exodus of sturdy, industrious people and effectively cut off the