Savage Kingdom: Virginia and The Founding of English America - Benjamin Woolley

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formalities dispensed with, Zuñiga got straight to the point. King Philip, he said, considered it ‘against good friendship and brotherliness’ for English subjects ‘to dare to want to settle Virginia, since it is a part of the Indies belonging to Castile, and that this boldness could have inconvenient results’. ‘Inconvenient’ was the diplomatic word for deadly. Spain, he was suggesting, was prepared to go to war over the issue.

      James affected insouciance, claiming ‘he was not informed as to the details of what was going on, so far as the voyages to Virginia were concerned’. He had ‘never known’ Philip ‘had a right to it [Virginia], for it was a region very far from where the Spaniards had settled’. Nevertheless, he did not want the matter to become a point of contention between him and Spain. The settlers, he said, ‘went at their own risk, and if they were caught there, there could be no complaint if they were punished’. In other words, if Spain chose to attack the colony, there would be no English reprisals.

      Zuñiga was not satisfied; at least, not according to the version of the conversation he reported to Philip. The whole enterprise was, the ambassador told James, a ‘shabby deceit, for the land is very sterile, and consequently there can be no other object in that place than that it seems good for piracy’. James was inclined to agree. He too had heard ‘that the land was unproductive, and that those who thought to find great riches there were deceived’. He also thought that the sort of people who had gone there were ‘terrible’.

      There followed a discussion on other matters, including Irish affairs and the indiscipline of James’s English Parliament, a body which they agreed had become a ‘poblacho’ (dump). Zuñiga then prepared to take his leave. Thanking the King for his time, he urged him again to find a remedy ‘for the Virginia affair’ as soon as possible. James said he would ‘look into the matter’, and promised that the Privy Council would give Zuñiga ‘satisfaction’.14

      Over the following few days, Zuñiga sent several messages to the Privy Council at ‘Moptoncurt’ (his Spaniolated rendering of Hampton Court), urging decisive action. Cecil eventually agreed on a meeting to finalize matters. Having studied the relevant treaties, Cecil (according to Zuñiga) agreed that the English ‘cannot go to Virginia’. Furthermore, he accepted that ‘if something bad happens to them, let it be their fault’.

      With typical inscrutability, Cecil simultaneously told Smythe he wanted ‘a speedy dispatch of the ship intended to be sent to Virginia’.15 This instruction, together with Newport’s decision to rejoin the expedition, energized frantic efforts to equip and man two ships hired for the purpose, the John & Francis, and the Phoenix, both 250 tons.

      As always, the expedition was desperately underfunded. To provide the settlers with cloth to keep them warm through the winter, Sir Thomas Smythe was reduced to buying moth-eaten samples left over from a previous East India Company voyage.16

      By the beginning of October 1607, Newport was ready to sail. Smythe had managed to gather more than one hundred new settlers, including six tailors or cloth workers to look for opportunities for textile manufacturing, two apothecaries to find medicinal ingredients such as herbs, rare earths and animal parts, two goldsmiths and two refiners, to ensure more reliable tests of ore samples. A physician, a surgeon, a tobacco-pipe maker, a perfumer and a white greyhound made up the complement.17

      The two ships sailed from the port of Gravesend, east of London, on 8 October. They stopped off at Plymouth to await favourable winds, and two weeks later set out into the Atlantic.18

       EIGHT Bloody Flux

      IN THE LIST OF SETTLERS who went to Virginia on the first voyage, William White is described as a ‘labourer’. This did not necessarily mean he was humbly born, as the term was used in passenger lists to identify those brought at another’s expense, such as sons brought by their fathers, or servants brought by their masters.1

      However, nearly all the labourers have one feature in common: very little is known about them. The only trace of biographical information relating to William White is a marginal note by George Percy describing him as a ‘made man’, a phrase used to refer to someone of low social standing who has unexpectedly come into a fortune, an arriviste or parvenu.2

      Percy’s snooty assessment of this social inferior probably arose from White’s decision, soon after Newport’s fleet had first sailed up the James, to jump ship and join the Indians. He was one of several ‘renegades’ who understandably found the prospect of life with the Indians preferable to the dangers and depredations of the English camp.3

      The renegades were rarely mentioned in official records or letters home. Their very existence was not officially recognized until 1612, when a regulation was introduced making it a capital offence to live without permission in the town of ‘any savage weroance’.4 The conspiracy of silence arose out of a combination of envy and resentment. When they slipped from the settlement, the renegades entered into the feverish imaginations of those left behind. They became voices from beyond the veil of trees and vines, taunting the settlers for putting up with such hardships, ridiculing English assumptions of cultural and technological superiority, beckoning their former comrades to drop their tools, and wander through the woods into the alluring Indian embrace.

      White had somehow fallen into that embrace. He ended up ten miles upstream of Jamestown, at the town of Quiyoughcohannock, visited by the English during their first reconnaissance of the river. It sat on a high bluff overlooking the James (modern Claremont, Virginia). Its name meant ‘priest of the river’, and it served as the religious centre for those living along the banks. This may have been why its people were so curious about the English and their religion, and why they welcomed the nervous, bewildered interloper who had come among them.5

      White would have been placed in the care of one of the senior women of the village, probably Oholasc, the stately queen of the Quiyoughcohannock, the most ‘handsome a savage woman as I have seen’, an English admirer noted. She was raising a son named Tatacoope, whose father was believed to be the mamanatowick Powhatan. Tatacoope was heir to the village chief, Pepiscuminah, or ‘Pipisco’, as the English called him. But Pipisco was in disgrace, having ‘stolen away’ one of Opechancanough’s wives. For this impertinence, he had been exiled to a nearby settlement, ‘with some few people about him’, including the offending woman. As a result, Chaopock, who was Pipisco’s brother from the neighbouring village of Chawopo, had been made acting weroance until Tatacoope came of age.6

      Life for White in the court of this great queen would have been comfortable, at least compared to the conditions being endured at Jamestown. Just being part of a rhythm of daily life was a relief, particularly among such positive people. White noted that before dawn, the men and women, together with children older than ten years, would leave their beds and run down to the river. There they would bathe and wash, and await the sun’s arrival sitting on the bank, within a circle of dried tobacco leaves, such was their delight in the coming of a new day.7

      After these daily ablutions, mothers would set out the breakfast, and summon their youngest boys to come to them with their toy bows and arrows. Only when they had managed to shoot a piece of moss tossed into the air could they tuck into a meal typically comprising boiled beans, fresh fish and corn bread, garnished with venison if the hunting was good. Older

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