Savage Kingdom: Virginia and The Founding of English America

A canoe carrying eight Indians appeared on the river, and the English hailed them with one of the first words they had learned: ‘wingapoh’, which they understood to mean ‘good fellow’. The Indians approached, and ‘in conference by signs’, the English asked them for guidance on the river’s course. One of the Indians, apparently the leader of the group, stepped forward and offered to help. Archer was unable to discover his name, so dubbed him the ‘Kind Consort’.

Using his toe, the Kind Consort started to draw a map in the sand of the river bank. Archer stopped him, offering him a pen and paper, and showing how he could use it. Immediately understanding what he had to do, the Kind Consort began to draw, laying out for the delighted English ‘the whole river from the [Chesapeake] Bay to the end of it, so far as passage was for boats’. He indicated that, upstream of ‘Turkey Isle’, as Archer had dubbed their current location, lay another islet, and beyond that, a series of waterfalls, marking the end of the navigable river. A day’s march beyond the falls, the river divided in two, both branches coming from the mountains. This was the land of two other ‘kingdoms’. ‘Then, a great distance off,’ stood the mountains of ‘Quirank’, which, he whispered, had rocks containing veins of caquassan, understood to be the Indian word for red earth, which might signify the presence of copper or even gold. Furthermore, the Kind Consort confirmed that just beyond these mountains lay ‘that which we expected’, as Archer coyly put it in his journal, referring to the saltwater lake.

Anxious to proceed, Newport declined offers of hospitality from the Kind Consort, and sailed on. However, the Indian ‘with two women and another fellow of his own consort’ was anxious to track the English, and continued to follow them in the canoe, proffering dried oysters from a basket as they went. Eventually, the English found they could no longer resist, and, rendezvousing at a ‘point’ on the river bank, ‘bartered with them for most of their victuals’.

Two miles further up lay the first signs of the rockier world ahead, the shore being ‘full of great cobblestones and higher land’. Once again, the Kind Consort appeared, this time offering ‘sweet nuts like acorns (a very good fruit), wheat, beans, and mulberries sod [soaked] together’. Newport bought what he could, after which the Indian disappeared.

The following day, a further 5 miles on, the English landed, and ‘found our kind comrades [the Indians] again’, who escorted them to a town on the north bank of the river called Arrohateck. There they received their most opulent welcome yet. A feeling spread among the English that, as they proceeded west, they were closing in on the centre of Indian power.

‘King Arrohateck’, as Archer named the town’s weroance, honoured Newport by laying a reed mat across his shoulders and placing a crown of ‘deer’s hair dyed red’ upon his head. He offered the visitors ‘mulberries, sod wheat and beans, and he caused his women to make cakes for us’. He also volunteered some of his men as guides for the journey into the interior.

It was from King Arrohateck that the English first discovered that there was a ‘great king’, a supreme ruler or mamanatowick to whom all the chiefs around the river paid homage and tribute. His name was Powhatan. ‘Now as we sat merry banqueting with them, seeing their dances and taking tobacco,’ the chief’s warriors suddenly got to their feet, and formed a guard of honour for another guest, whom they welcomed with a ‘long shout’. This, the English thought, must be the mamanatowick Powhatan himself. It was in fact his son Parahunt, known as ‘Tanxpowhatan’ or ‘Little Powhatan’, the confusion arising because the town he ruled was also called Powhatan, perhaps because it was the mamanatowick’s birthplace.16

Noting that King Arrohateck had remained seated, the English guests did likewise, ‘our captain in the middest’. However, acknowledging the status of the new arrival, Newport offered ‘gifts of divers sorts, as penny knives, shears, bells, beads, glass toys, etc., more amply than before’. In gratitude for the generosity, ‘King Powhatan’ offered provisions and guides to escort the English to his town, further upriver. ‘Thus parting from “Arrohateck’s joy”,’ wrote Archer, brimming with optimism, ‘we found the people on either side the river stand in clusters all along, still proffering us victuals.’

A further 10 miles upstream, the river narrowed. On the northern bank rose the most striking landmark they had yet seen: a tall mound in the midst of fields full of wheat, beans, tobacco and other crops, intermingled. On top of the mound there was a collection of houses, which for the English had the appearance of the Indian capital. Archer called it ‘Powhatan’s Tower’.

They landed, and walked up to the town, where they found the Powhatan and Arrohateck chiefs waiting for them. The English noticed that they now sat apart from their own people. The only other person with them was a man who appeared to be a counsellor, who sat beside Parahunt. Once again, food was offered, ‘but our best entertainment was [the] friendly welcome’. There followed a discussion by ‘words and signs’ during which King Powhatan explained that all the ‘kingdoms’ on the north bank of the rivers were cheisc, which the English understood to mean ‘all one with him’ or ‘under him’. But the Chesapeake people, who lived on the southerly shore of the bay, were the enemy ‘generally to all these kingdoms’. Archer showed the chief the scars on his hands, barely healed, which had been inflicted by these Indians when the English first landed, and ‘for which we vowed revenge, after their manner pointing to the sun’.

Parahunt now placed his own gown upon Newport’s shoulders, which the English understood to mean he was offering a ‘league of friendship’. Putting his hand on his heart, he said to Newport, ‘Wingapoh chemuze,’ Archer taking this to be the kindest of all salutations in the Indian language.

It was now late, and the English said they needed to return to their ship. They were sent on their way with six of Parahunt’s men, and the English left behind one of their own as a gesture of trust. Rather than return directly to the shallop, they rowed 3 miles up the river, where they found what the Indians had warned them of: a great cataract that was clearly impassable. Even this far inland, the river was still tidal, rising 4 foot between high and low tide, and suitable for vessels with a draft less than 6 foot. But beyond, the only way forward was on foot.

‘Having viewed this place between content and grief,’ Archer concluded, ‘we left it for this night, determining the next day to fit ourselves for a march by land.’

The guides who were with them were sent home, except one, called Navirans, who asked if he could sleep on board the shallop with the English. Newport agreed, a gesture of faith rewarded with the safe return of the Englishman left at Powhatan’s Tower, ‘who coming told us of his entertainment, how they had prepared mats for him to lie on, gave him store of victuals, and made as much [of] him as could be’. A close relationship developed between Navirans and the English, particularly with Archer. The Indian ‘had learned me so much of the language,’ Archer wrote, ‘and was so excellently ingenious in signing out his meaning, that I could make him understand me, and perceive him also well-nigh in anything’.

The following day, Whitsunday, 24 May, Newport decided to return some of the hospitality the English had received. His men built a fire on the shore, and they boiled two pieces of pork and some peas, the best that could be offered from their dwindling supplies. Newport invited the two chiefs to join him. Parahunt accepted, but Arrohateck excused himself on the grounds that he needed to return to his village.

As Arrohateck was about to leave, the convivial mood abruptly changed. An English mariner reported that two ‘bullet bags’ containing ‘shot and divers trucking toys’ had gone missing.

The chiefs acted quickly and decisively, ordering the immediate return of all stolen property. The speed with which the items reappeared was impressive evidence of the chiefs’ authority. Everything that had gone was now laid at Newport’s feet, including a knife the English had not even realized was missing. ‘So Captain Newport gave thanks to the kings and rewarded the thieves with the same toys they had stolen, but kept the bullets.’ Newport also warned that the custom in England was to punish theft with death.

Good relations apparently restored, the Powhatan weroance sat down to the feast, ‘and we fed familiarly’, Archer reported, ‘without sitting in his state as before’. The relaxed atmosphere was helped by quantities of beer, aqua vitae (spirits) and sack (Spanish white wine). Alcoholic drinks were not part of the local diet, and this first exposure to some potent European brews had an unusually strong effect on Newport’s guest. This might explain why the chief fell into such an uninhibited mood, talking about the copper, iron and other rich and rare commodities to be found in the mountains beyond the waterfalls.

As the merrymaking was drawing to a close, Newport said he wanted to embark on a three-day expedition further inland to see if he could find these commodities. The chief, perhaps prompted by a sobering word whispered in his ear, suddenly fell silent. He got up to leave, promising only that he would rendezvous with the English later that day at the foot of the falls.

In the afternoon, the English rowed upriver. They found the Powhatan chief sitting on a bank next to the lower reaches of the cascading water.

At this point, the nameless Kind Consort who had appeared to the English at Weyanock approached in a canoe, continuing his mysterious knack of reappearing at significant moments of the English exploration. He told Newport’s men to ‘make a shout’. They were unsure why, but they did as they were asked and cried out. They assumed it was to welcome King Powhatan, though it may have been to acknowledge some other power that inhabited the falls, or paquacowng, as the Indians apparently called them.17

Newport led a group across the rocks to talk to Parahunt. The expansiveness had evaporated. The chief ‘sought by all means to dissuade our captain from going any further’. It would be tedious travel, he claimed. Ahead lay the Monacan people, who were enemies, and liable to attack Powhatan guides if not the whole party, and even if they got past them, the Quirank mountains that lay beyond were difficult and dangerous, devoid of the food supplies they would need for a proper exploration. The Monacans ‘came down at the fall of the leaf’, he told Newport, and attacked his people’s villages. Newport offered five hundred English troops to fight alongside the Powhatan people upon the Monacans’ return, ‘which pleased the king much’.

To Archer’s surprise, Newport agreed not to proceed any further, ‘holding it much better to please the king, with whom and all of his command he had made so fair way, than to prosecute his own fancy or satisfy our requests’.

The weroance now departed, followed by all his men except Navirans, who accompanied the English to an ‘islet’ in the middle river, which stood before the falls. There, Newport announced that the river would henceforth be known as the James, and ordered the soldiers to erect a large cross, as they had done at Cape Henry. It bore the Latin inscription ‘Jacobus Rex. 1607’: King James 1607. As the cross rose into the sky, Navirans gave out a great cry. Newport was reassuring, explaining ‘that the two arms of the cross signified King Powhatan and himself, the fastening of it in the middest was their united league’. This explanation apparently ‘cheered Navirans not a little’.

The English prepared for their journey back down the river they had renamed the James, and Newport sent Navirans to invite ‘King Powhatan’ for a farewell meeting. The chief duly appeared with Navirans and his retinue on the river bank, and Newport rowed alone from the shallop to the shore, to present a gown and a hatchet as farewell gifts.

The mood had changed. The chief seemed angered by the appearance of the cross, casting its long evening shadow across the river’s sacred waters. Percy noted that the ‘savages’ now ‘murmured at our planting in the country’. Newport prompted Navirans to pass on the explanation that the cross symbolized peace. Parahunt appeared to be reassured, and, according to Navirans’s translation, rebuked his people: ‘Why should you be offended with them as long as they hurt you not, nor take anything away by force? They take but a little waste ground which doth you nor any of us any good.’18

With feelings of reassurance mixed with uncertainty, the English left and headed back for Jamestown. As night fell, they stopped at Arrohateck. The chief was ill, complaining that the ‘hot drinks’ the English had given him had made him sick. Newport confidently predicted that he would feel better in the morning, which was duly the case, and to celebrate his recovery, the chief ordered venison to be roasted for the visitors.

While they were there, some of the Arrohateck people offered to show the guests their homes and gardens. Passing among the houses, scattered around groves of tall trees, the English entered a world hidden from them by the diplomatic formalities experienced so far. This was the domain of women. While the men ‘fish, hunt, fowl, go to the wars’, the women kept the home and hearth, and tended the fields. They also raised and educated the children, shaved the men, foraged for fuel, chopped wood, spun flax, ground corn, baked bread, butchered meat, gathered medicinal herbs, healed the sick and mourned the dead, ‘which’, Smith observed, ‘is the cause that the women be very painful [i.e. burdened] and the men often idle’.

Being allowed to mingle with them provided the curious Englishmen with their first proper exposure to female company since leaving London. The effect was powerful. The women appeared natural and unaffected. They had ‘handsome limbs, slender arms, and pretty hands; and when they sing they have a delightful and pleasant tang in their voices’. They wore make-up to enhance their features rather than disguise their blemishes, and shared cosmetic tips and recipes freely, unlike the ‘great ladies’ of English society, who kept secret from one another ‘their oil of talcum or other painting white and red’. The Indian women wore clothes not to hide their age, but, as Captain Smith put it, to be ‘agreeable to their years’. Their bodies were not trussed, bustled and costumed, but flaunted. Their arms, thighs and breasts could be openly admired, being elaborately advertised with ‘cunningly embroidered’ tattoos. They were ‘voluptuous’, fully developed sexual beings, scantily dressed and approachable, yet retaining that feminine virtue most vaunted by European men, ‘modesty’. It was a combination that aroused the Englishmen’s imaginations and starved libidos.

Mothers breast-fed their babies, a practice that English women of all but the poorest classes avoided, favouring the use of wet-nurses. They also loved their children ‘very dearly’, but were tough as well as tender, making them ‘hardy’ by washing them in the river even on the coldest mornings, and ‘tanning’ their skins with ointment until ‘no weather will hurt them’. Their houses, Smith observed, were as ‘warm as stoves, but very smoky’, due to the fire in the centre of the floor, which vented through a simple hole in the roof. It being summertime, the mats covering the walls may have been rolled up to let in the air, but the women continued to tend the fire, as, ‘if at any time it goes out, they take it for an evil sign’.

A set of simple bedsteads was the only recognizable domestic furniture to be found inside an Indian house. They were made of short posts stuck into the ground, with ‘hurdles’ or frames made with sticks and reeds placed on top to act as the mattress. There was a bed for each member of the family, upon which they would sleep ‘heads and points’, head to feet, in a circle around the fire. Mats acted as bedlinen, and, while they slept, the perpetual smoke, which darkened their skins but did not sting their eyes, kept away mosquitoes and fumigated clothes.19

While he was being shown around one of the huts, an Indian woman took Archer’s hand and pressed the leaves of a herb into his wounded palm. The plant was wisakon, he was told (the word was in fact a general term for medicinal herb). It looked to him like liverwort or bloodwort, two well-known medicinal herbs used in England. He was also shown a root which contained the poison that had laced the arrowheads.

The visitors watched the women bake rolls and cakes, and a demonstration of ‘the growing of their corn and the manner of setting it’. The fields, just a few hundred foot square, were more like gardens, cleared by burning sections of the surrounding woodland. The soil was neither cultivated (the Indians had no draft animals or tilling equipment) nor manured, producing, in the opinion of Smith the farmer’s son, ‘so small a benefit of their land’. He was sure the most basic English agricultural techniques would multiply the yields.20

Finally, the chief took the English into what Archer dubbed the ‘Mulberry Shade’, a hunting lodge set apart from the village, where King Arrohateck laid on a meal of ‘land turtle’ while his men went into the surrounding woods to see if they could catch a deer. The chief also asked for a demonstration of English firearms. Newport duly ordered ‘a gentleman discharge his piece soldier-like before [King Arrohateck], at which noise he started, stop’d his ears, and express’d much fear, so likewise all about him’.

There was also an incident, confusingly documented, which enabled the two nations to compare their methods of summary discipline. Navirans drew attention to one of Arrohateck’s people who, as Archer put it, ‘press’d into our boat too violently upon a man of ours’. Newport, ‘misconstruing the matter, sent for his own man, bound him to a tree before King Arrohateck, and with a cudgel soundly beat him’. The chief intervened, saying one of his men was responsible for the ‘injury’. He went over to the culprit, who tried to run away. The chief set off in pursuit, running ‘so swiftly as I assure myself he might give any of our company 6 score in 12’ (i.e. beat them ten times over). The offender was brought back, and the rest of the king’s retinue brandished cudgels and sticks ‘as if they had beaten him extremely’. Archer does not mention if the punishment was actually executed, or only threatened.

These violent proceedings did not dampen the convivial mood, but seemed to draw the two leaders, Newport and King Arrohateck, closer together. As the day drew to an end, Newport presented the chief with a red waistcoat as a farewell gift, ‘which highly pleased him’. The English boarded their shallop and cast off, the Arrohateck men saluting them with two hearty shouts as they pulled away from the shore.

That night, they anchored near Appamattuck, home of those ‘most warlike’ people Newport had visited while reconnoitring the site of the English settlement. The following day, they went ashore and were led by Navirans through fields newly planted with corn to a ‘bower’ of mulberry trees. They sat down to await the Appamattuck chief, but were instead surprised by the regal approach of a ‘fat, lusty, manly woman’ clothed in deerskin, covered in copper jewellery, including a crown, and attended by a retinue of women ‘adorned much like herself, save they wanted the copper’. This, the English decided, must be a queen, as she was treated with the same reverence as the Powhatan and Arrohateck chiefs, ‘yea, rather with more majesty’. Her name, though they did not yet know it, was Opussoquonuske.21

The English, struggling to readjust their assumption that Indian royalty must be exclusively male, were anxious to discover her role. She explained that she was a chief under the authority of Powhatan, ‘as the rest are’, but the visitors noted that ‘within herself’ she was ‘as great authority as any of her neighbour weroances’, if not greater. For two hours the English gazed upon this Indian Elizabeth, while feasting on the ‘accustomed cakes, tobacco, and welcome’. They offered to demonstrate their weapons, and Archer noted that, when a musket was fired, ‘she showed not near the like fear as Arrohateck’. Newport then decided they should leave for the final leg of their expedition.

Navirans led them 5 miles downstream, and persuaded them to put in for one final meeting. The location, he said, was ‘one of King Pamunkey’s houses’, a structure that may have been a hunting lodge, or even specially constructed for the occasion, as the Pamunkey homeland lay 20 miles away, along the banks of a river neighbouring the James. The English seemed unaware that such encounters were now being carefully orchestrated, nor did they realize the importance of the man they were about to meet. He was Opechancanough, whose name meant ‘man of a white (immaculate) soul’. Later described as possessing a ‘large stature, noble presence, and extraordinary parts’, he was said by some to be Powhatan’s brother, but by others to have come from ‘a great way from the south-west … from the Spanish Indians, somewhere near Mexico’. In his forties at the time of this first encounter, he acted as the military chief of Tsenacomoco, the Indian name for the Powhatan empire. He had come to meet the English to assess their intentions and strength.22

After the magnificent Queen Appamattuck, Archer found ‘King Pamunkey’ a ridiculous figure, ‘so set [upon] striving to be stately as to our seeming he became a fool’. He claimed to come from a ‘rich land of copper and pearl’, and showed off a pearl necklace and a sample of copper ‘the thickness of a shilling’ which Archer managed to bend round his finger ‘as if it had been lead’. Affecting nonchalance at this information, the English asked what other commodities his land offered. The king obligingly boasted it was also ‘full of deer’ though added that ‘so also is most of all the kingdoms’.

Archer called the venue for the encounter with Opechancanough ‘Pamunkey’s Palace’, mocking the king’s extravagant claims, and ignoring Navirans’s hints that the name was inappropriate.

Continuing their journey home, they spent the night at the ‘low meadow point’ where they had anchored the first night of the expedition, 18 miles away from the settlement. The following morning, they went ashore with Navirans. They encountered a hunting party of ten or twelve Indians who were camping on the shore, and Navirans arranged for them to go fishing for the English. ‘They brought us in a short space a good store,’ Archer noted, who accounted them ‘good friends’.

Then, without warning or explanation, Navirans ‘took some conceit’ of the English, and refused to go any further with them. ‘This grieved our captain very deeply,’ Archer observed, ‘for the loving kindness of this fellow was such as he trusted himself with us out of his own country.’ By now, Newport imagined that he had managed to establish a rapport with the Indians, that his diplomacy had been embraced, his honourable intentions accepted, the superiority of his weaponry acknowledged and admired. Navirans’s sudden change of heart punctured this presumption. Newport ordered the shallop’s immediate return to Jamestown, ‘fearing some disastrous hap at our fort’.

They arrived back on 27 May, to find the settlement in chaos. It transpired that the day before, two hundred Indian warriors had mounted a sustained attack. Following his meeting with Newport, Opechancanough had evidently decided the English presence must be eliminated, before it became permanent.

At the time of the attack, the settlers had been planting corn in the newly cleared fields. Most of their weapons were still packed in ‘dryfats’, waterproof storage casks, so they only had a few pistols and swords to defend themselves. As the ranks of Indian warriors descended upon them, they had been forced to run for cover, to few finding shelter behind the island’s single defensive bulwark. Led by President Wingfield, all five council members apparently put up a fight with hand weapons, but were forced to retreat. In the ensuing skirmish, which ‘endured hot about an hour’, one boy was slain and as many as seventeen labourers wounded. Every single member of the council sustained injuries, except Wingfield, who had a miraculous escape from an arrow which passed through his beard. According to later reports, the entire company would have been slain, had not the sailors loaded one of the ships’ cannons with a ‘crossbar’ (round shot with a spike embedded in it), and fired it towards the Indian position. The projectile had hit a tree, bringing down one of its branches, which apparently fell among the attacking Indians and ‘caused them to retire’.23