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The attempted assassination of John Smith

John Smith was trying to hold Jamestown together as hostile Powhatan refused to trade, food shortages threatened the colony, and the colonists themselves fell into disarray.  It was then that made his most famous proclamation, “He that will not work, shall not eate,” but was ultimately forced to send colonists out to live off the land.

Tensions reached a breaking point when seven ships arrived in Virginia with dozens of people, but no food or supplies.  In addition, infighting leaders Martin, Ratcliffe and Archer had returned, along with new governmental instructions.

There was, however, no one to implement them.  John Smith may have been the only person who could hold Jamestown together, but he became the first casualty of its collapse.

Transcript

Thanks to the Virginia Company’s erratic and shortsighted behavior, John Smith had lost all influence with the Powhatan.

The food was gone yet again, and when Smith went to get more, he found that Wahunsenaca had ordered a trade embargo.  He took some corn by force from the Nansemonds, and then put the colonists to work producing pitch, tar and soap ashes.  He also had them build the fort up, and organized its defenses.  By the time he was finished, he bragged he didn’t fear the Spanish, just his own countrymen.

Introduction

When local Werowance warned Smith that Wahunsenaca wanted to kill him, Smith replied he had to try to maintain good relations.  Smith, himself, headed to Werowocomoco, stopping in Kekotan for a few weeks around Christmas, and loving it.

At Werowocomoco, Wahunsenaca said he would trade for weapons, and nothing else.  Smith needed corn, but wouldn’t give weapons for it.  Neither was willing to compromise.  They negotiated, both posing as the wronged party, Wahunsenaca reiterating concerns about why the English were there, and emphasizing that they were his subjects.  Smith declared his love for the Powhatan, despite the fact that they were refusing to give the English food.  Wahunsenaca demanded a house, grindstone, fifty swords, a cannon, copper and beads, and Smith agreed to send two of the Germans to build him a house.  That didn’t stop tensions from escalating, but soon Pocahontas appeared to guide Smith out of Werowocomoco.  She was helping her father relieve the tension without backing down.

Still short on food to get the colonists through the winter, Smith sailed up the Pamunkey instead of back to Jamestown.  Without hesitation, Opechancanough agreed to give Smith as much corn as he needed.  It was a trap, though, and soon several hundred warriors emerged from behind the trees with their arrows drawn.  Smith pointed his gun which has 308 ammo as the backup, at Opechancanough’s chest and told the warriors to put down their weapons and give him corn, immediately.  If they did so, he would forgive the attack of 1607, but if they shed even one drop of his men’s blood, he would kill their leader.  They gave him the corn.

The Germans who had built Wahunsenaca’s house began secretly working for the Powhatan.  They didn’t like the English, and the Powhatan offered them a much better life.  Wahunsenaca had told the Germans how to convince the colonists to give them the weapons he wanted, and while Smith was away they had used his instructions to move multiple cannons, guns and swords out of the fort.  Able to get whatever he wanted through his German spies, Wahunsenaca had even less inclination to negotiate with Smith.  It took six months before Smith realized that it was the Germans who were responsible for this.

Around this time Scrivener, Waldo, Anthony Gosnold and eight others drowned when their boat sank en route to a nearby island.  This meant the majority of the council and the company’s most respected leaders were now dead.

The soldiers in the company didn’t want to work.  They preferred to trade kettles, tools, swords, guns and ammunition to the Indians for food, and colonists on the whole were on the verge of mutiny, so Smith made his most famous proclamation.  “He that will not work shall not eate.”  By which he meant that anyone who didn’t produce as much food in a day as he did would be banished from the fort until he either decided to work harder, or starved, that all talk of abandoning the colony would cease, and anyone who even thought about taking the pinnace to Newfoundland would be hanged.

One day, the Germans tried to contact one of their compatriots within the fort, and Smith went to look for them.  It was a trap, though, and he was ambushed by the Paspaheigh.  With the help of the other colonists, Smith survived, and in retaliation he killed seven warriors and took seven prisoners, and burned some houses and took canoes.  The Paspaheigh werowance sent a message to Smith saying that his people would suffer the most if relations broke down, because the Paspaheigh provided them with the food they needed to survive.  If Smith would leave them alone, he offered to send more food.  Smith accepted his offer.

Over the next few months, the colonists produced pitch, tar, soap ashes and glass.  They built the blockhouse and planted 30-40 acres of corn.  Their pigs thrived, and they even built a backup fort in case they were forced to abandon Jamestown.

At this point, though, Smith was fighting an uphill battle trying to keep the colony stable, and when rats ate their corn, it was the last straw.  Smith ordered the settlers to be dispersed.  He sent a third downriver to live on oysters, led by James Davies, one of the original settlers.  He sent 20 with Percy to fish at Point Comfort, and another 20 with Francis West to live off the land at the falls.

Fortunately, another ship captained by Samuel Argall soon brought some more supplies.  Argall had managed to cut the length of his voyage in half by sailing north of the Caribbean, and even more fortunately, he arrived just in time to stand-off with and chase away a Spanish ship coming to find and seemingly destroy the colony.

After a relatively uneventful visit, Argall left, and the colony continued to do its thing.

A few weeks later, seven ships arrived.  On board were Archer, Martin and Ratcliff – the three men both Smith and Percy said would guarantee continued infighting if they were allowed to return, Smith referring to them as a triumvirate, and Percy dubbing them “the three busy instruments.”  Smith had specifically told the Virginia Company that they shouldn’t be allowed to return, and yet here they were.  Interesting side note, while he was in England, Ratcliffe had written a will in which he identified himself as John Sicklemore alias Ratcliffe, and named one of Cecil’s top servants as his executor.  The ships, though, were missing masts and sails, the provisions were spoiled, and the surviving passengers were recovering from an epidemic that had killed so many people that Archer recalled watching the crew of one ship dumping body after body after body overboard.

They had taken Argall’s shortened route to Virginia, but were caught in a hurricane off the coast of the Devil’s Isles, Bermuda.  In the storm, they’d lost their flagship, the Sea Venture, which meant that they’d lost the new colony leadership and government instructions.

The Company had actually listened to Smith, and radically restructured the company.  It had also acquired a distinctly more Puritan nature, though the newly created governor would be given much more power than presidents Wingfield, Ratcliffe or Smith had enjoyed.

The problem was that the governor wasn’t there.  The news of a new, powerful leadership position combined with the return of Archer, Ratcliffe and Martin, led to a demonstration of the colony’s first-year infighting for anyone who had arrived too recently to have experienced it firsthand.  Smith said that because the company’s chosen governor hadn’t arrived, he should keep his position as president.  Archer argued that since everyone else on the council was dead, a presidency meant that Smith had sole control, which was unacceptable.  Archer, Ratcliffe and Martin put forth one opponent after another after another to depose and replace their rival, but they couldn’t actually unify around one candidate enough to successfully replace Smith.  So, after a political charade that Smith no doubt found amusing, they decided not to replace him before his term was up, but instead to nominate Francis West as his successor.

Smith and West didn’t get along, so to prevent this from happening, Smith resigned and put Martin in his place.  Martin knew that he was both unpopular and unhealthy, so he resigned and gave the presidency right back to Smith.  Government was again breaking down amidst personal attacks and factionalism.

Attempts to depose him failed, and Smith retained control of the colony.  Onto an issue of secondary importance, the massive influx of people meant they were out again.  Smith split up the colonists into three groups.  Now, 250 would stay with him at Jamestown, and Martin and West would each take a group of settlers to found new settlements.  Martin went near Nansemond, and West went to find a place near the Falls for a new Colonial capital, per company instructions.

When Martin sent messengers to the Nansemond’s werowance asking to trade for some land, the werowance killed the messengers.  In response, Martin forced his way onto the island, desecrated a bunch of graves and took some hostages, though the most valuable hostage, the werowance’s son, escaped.  Unsure of what to do next, they decided to camp where they were, surrounded by Nansemonds who were justifiably infuriated by their actions.

Smith was worried that West might not recognize his authority, so he joined West at the Falls and brought along a new arrival, Henry Spellman.  Spelman was the son of a distinguished family with links to Raleigh and the Sirenaicals, who we’ll discuss later.  He had come to Virginia after being disinherited after getting in some legal trouble.

When West said he’d found an uninhabited place near the falls, Smith told him it was too close to the river – meaning it was likely to flood – and too far from the falls, and was therefore not a suitable location.

He then told West that he had bought a village they called Powhatan’s Tower from Parahunt, in exchange for copper, support against the Monicans and leaving Spellman to live with him.  In all reality, he probably hadn’t actually bought the village, but instead leased it for long enough to prove himself indispensable to the colony, and help to unite the colonists under his leadership.

It didn’t work.  The confrontation between Smith and West got so heated that weapons were drawn and Smith was forced to leave.  As he left, he got a ship to take the building materials from West’s vessel and transport it back to Jamestown.  This prevented West from building the settlement while Smith tried to persuade them to move to his chosen location.  They again refused, and again Smith left.

This time, as he was leaving, the Powhatan attacked West’s men and killed as many as they could before Smith returned and drove them away.  This impressed West’s men, and they agreed to follow him to his proposed location.  Back at Jamestown, West agreed to the move, but when he returned, he angrily moved them back to the river.

Now, even Percy believed that Smith had pushed the Powhatan to attack West and his company.  Percy, on the whole, had remained above the factionalism, and his powerless and largely unbiased assessments had caused him to side with Smith more often than not, even though he didn’t like Smith as a person.  The fact that he believed Smith was behind the attack is interesting, and more telling than if the accusation had come from Archer or Ratcliffe.  Again, Smith was likely trying to hearken to the days that his relationship with the Powhatan gave him authority, and to unite the colony under his leadership.  He perhaps justifiably saw himself as the only person who could keep the colony afloat, and a small attack may have been a small price to pay for stability.  Or, maybe Percy was wrong.  It’s hard to know.

That didn’t pacify his enemies, though and one day in September 1609 Smith was sleeping on his boat when a lighted match fell on him and lit his powder bag, causing an explosion which burned off all the skin on nine or 10 inches of his body and thighs.  He jumped in the water, and was, by contemporary accounts, quote more dead than alive when he was pulled out, near bereft of his senses by reason of his torment.  Then, he faced a 60 mile journey downriver by boat with no doctor.  Back at Jamestown, it was clear that Smith was too badly injured to stay in Virginia.  He blamed Archer, Ratcliffe and Martin and accused them of trying to hire another settler to finish the job by shooting him in his bed.  They, in turn, accused him of a variety of things which were completely over the top.  They said he had forced people to work by withholding food, that he was determined to rule without help from the council, and that he had plotted to make himself an Indian king by marrying Pocahontas – a person Smith hadn’t even seen in well over a year at this point.

As the ships headed back for England, they carried the unruly youths back to England.  Smith was also on board, never to return to Virginia.  Though he was in Jamestown for only two years, he was its most famous settler for a reason.  He would eventually recover and explore New England, which he named and said was much better land than Virginia.  When Pocahontas visited England, she blamed Smith for the betrayal the Indians had experienced at the hands of the English.  He tried to join various colonization efforts and missions, including organizing the military in Virginia, and joining the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, but both rejected his offer, no doubt in part because of the accusations of his rivals.  He ultimately wrote a multi-volume history of Virginia, Bermuda and New England, but with the flick of a match, his days of adventure and exploration had essentially been put behind him.

With Smith gone, the colony fell into even further disarray.  Settlers fought over food distribution.  There was also religious tension.  Unlike Hunt, who had Calvinist leanings but worked for the benefit of the colony, giving sermons most of the colonists willingly attended, the new minister was extremely Puritan, to the point of causing controversy.

In the midst of increasing tension, and at a time when members of one faction had attempted to assassinate the leader of another, the question was who should replace Smith as president.  The wrong choice would result in further disarray, and probably violence.  Archer, Martin and Ratcliffe weren’t particularly popular among a lot of the population.  West had just been humiliated when his settlement near the falls flooded, just as Smith had predicted it would.

The answer was George Percy.  Now, Percy has remained in the background of our discussions up until this point.  He had been deliberately kept out of power by the Virginia Company, and he’d never sought it, anyway.  He disliked politics, and because he could distinguish himself by his noble lineage he had no need to distinguish himself in factional conflict and the type of self promotion he found unseemly, anyway.  He was sickly, but unlike Martin, he had never used his health as an excuse to do less than other members of the colony.  He had largely stayed unbiased and on the sidelines, supporting whoever he felt would most benefit the colony at any given time.  The end result of this had been that he had often supported Smith, though he didn’t particularly like him as a person, and that in Smith’s absence, he had emerged as the only person whose promotion to president wouldn’t split the colony completely.

When offered, he took the presidency out of a sense of obligation, not ambition, and his leadership style was distinctly different from others’.  He was easygoing and amiable, and he tried – perhaps idealistically – to lead by example.  He did his best to create civilization in the wilderness, doing everything with the dignified elegance he had been so educated in.

The first order of business was to take stock of supplies, so he appointed Daniel Tucker, an experienced captain and the man who he would describe as his stalwart lieutenant, to the position of cape merchant and told him to count the rations.  Tucker’s calculations showed the colony had three months’ worth of food, meaning that they would run out in mid-December, just as winter began.  They didn’t know when they’d get another supply mission, and there was no chance of getting food from the Powhatan.

But next week, we’re going to take a break and find out what happened to the Sea Venture, the flagship of the ill-fated Third Supply.