LITMIR.BIZ

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sun lifted behind them, crew and passengers began to gather on deck and squint over the ship’s bowsprit. Gradually, the low contours of a coastal plain became distinct, a dark line of trees sitting on the horizon like the pile of a carpet. A few hours later, Tyndall’s navigational methods were vindicated. Not only had they reached America, but they were facing ‘the very mouth of the Bay of Chesapeake’.²⁶

      In London, reports reached Robert Cecil that the secret of the Virginia venture was out. The Richard, the ship sent by the West Country group to reconnoitre northern Virginia, had been taken off the coast of Florida by a Spanish fleet. A storm had forced one of the Spanish ships to put in at Bordeaux, where its English captives were released on the orders of the French authorities. It was one of these men who had managed to make his way to London and break the bad news. Other members of the expedition, including the mission’s pilot John Stoneman, were less fortunate. They had been taken to Spain, where ‘rough’ interrogation awaited them.²⁷

      The Spanish at this time had only a hazy understanding of English plans. Around the time the Royal Charter had been issued, King Philip III’s ambassador to London, Don Pedro de Zuñiga, had heard of a plan to send ‘500 or 600 men, private individuals of this kingdom to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida’. He had also discovered that ten Indians were being kept in London, who were ‘teaching and training’ prospective settlers of ‘how good that country is for people to go there and inhabit it’.²⁸

      By 24 January, 1607, Zuñiga was still unaware of the Newport expedition, but had received garbled information that some sort of venture was under way. He wrote an urgent dispatch to Philip III reporting that the English ‘have made an agreement, in great secrecy, for two ships to go [to Virginia] every month until they land two thousand men’. He also noted that Dutch rebels were to be sent. There followed a brief but mostly accurate summary of James’s charter of the previous April, including a list of those appointed to the Royal Council. The charter itself was a public document, but the order appointing the Royal Council was not, indicating that Zuñiga had found a source close to the Privy Council.²⁹

      On 26 February, Zuñiga received a response to his previous dispatch. ‘You will report to me what the English are doing in the matter of Virginia – and if the plan progresses which they contemplated, of sending men there and ships,’ the King wrote, ‘and thereupon, it will be taken into consideration here, what steps had best be taken to prevent it.’ Over the following weeks, the traffic of intelligence intensified. In April, Zuñiga finally learned that the English had already sent three ships, but he believed the Richard to be one of them.

      On 7 May, a council of war assembled in Madrid to discuss the implications of the news. The danger, it was decided, was the proximity of the settlement to Spanish interests, since it lay, according to Zuñiga, ‘in 35 degrees above La Florida on the Coast’. Though this region of America ‘has not been discovered until now, nor is it known’, nevertheless it was ‘contained within the limits of the Crown of Castille’, in other words, Spanish territory. It was therefore concluded that ‘with all necessary force this plan of the English should be prevented’.³⁰

      While these discussions were under way in Madrid, news of the discovery of the Richard spread panic. If the Spanish found out what was going on, reprisals might ensue and all the hard-won benefits of peace would be lost. In such a fast-developing situation, it was decided that the Royal Council for Virginia was too cumbersome or too prone to infiltration. Its members were ‘dispersed by reason of their several habitations far remote the one from the other, and many of them in like manner far remote from Our City of London’. In response, a new order was published, creating two seperate councils, one for the ‘first’ or southern colony, the other for the ‘second’ or northern colony.³¹

      Meanwhile, Cecil considered the fate of the Virginia venture in the light of the Richard’s capture. Having discussed the matter with the King, he consulted the journal of the Somerset House Treaty negotiations, to see if it might cast any light on the diplomatic ramifications. His conclusion was that, although Virginia was ‘a place formerly discovered by us, and never possessed by Spain’, the Spanish commissioners had denied that this gave England the right to ‘trade’ there. With respect to the captured crew of the Richard, he advised the King that ‘it might be better to leave these prisoners to their inconveniences’, though steps should be taken to recover their ship, as it had been captured in international waters. As for those currently on their way ‘to a discovery of Virginia’, Cecil suggested that they ‘should be left unto the peril which they incur thereby’.³²

Part Two

       FIVE Tsenacomoco

      Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their Poets, who make and sing songs, both of their ancestors’ deeds and praises of their gods.

      PHILIP SIDNEY, Defence of Poesy¹

      THE AREA OF NORTH AMERICA known to the English as Virginia already had a name: Tsenacomoco. The people who lived there left no written record of their culture or history, which even in Thomas Jefferson’s time appeared, at least to Anglo-Americans, to be on the point of extinction. ‘Very little can now be discovered of the subsequent history of these tribes,’ Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. ‘They have lost their language,’ and several tribes had been forced to merge, reducing themselves ‘by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land’. The remnants ‘have more negro than Indian blood in them,’ he noted, anticipating a later practice of merging the two races, in an effort to extinguish any lingering traces of cultural identity.²

      All that remains which can be traced directly back to the time of the English incursion is what the English themselves wrote about Tsenacomoco. Several of the colonizers took extensive notes, some even tried to learn and analyse the language. What they found was by its nature transient and mutable. The very act of removing it from the realm of voices, songs, dances and dress and committing it to the permanence of paper must have meant that some of its dynamic qualities were lost, and are unrecoverable. But sufficient remains in the historical record to give a hint of what the Tsenacomoco world was like, at least as seen from the perspective of an English Otasantasuwak or ‘wearer of leg-coverings’ about to step in and destroy it.

      A hut stood between the flat sea and the high mountains. It belonged to a god of many shapes and many names. He was most often seen as a mighty Great Hare, and most usually called Ahone.³

      One day, Ahone stood at the door of his hut, and beheld the emptiness around. So he made a world according to his imaginings, without a fixed form: a world of water, shifting sand, soft mud, trackless forests and tangled vines. The earth contained no metal or rock, nor any hard thing.

      He populated the world with creatures. He made fish, which swam in the streams, and a great deer, which grazed in the woods and galloped across the meadows. But one creature he left tied up in a sack, which lay upon the floor of his hut.

      Four gods from surrounding worlds peered over the rim of Ahone’s, and gazed upon his creation. They were jealous of what he had done, and came to his hut armed with spears to destroy his work. They saw the sack, and they opened it. Men and women sprang out and scurried across the floor, and the four gods tried to catch and eat them. But Ahone returned to his hut and drove

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