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many springs’, and ‘a great marsh of 4 or 5 miles circuit, divided in 2 islands by the parting of the river, abounding with fish and fowl of all sorts’. Further on he discovered a series of villages, ‘at each place kindly used, especially at the last’, which was Mamanahunt, ‘being the heart of the country, where were assembled 200 people with such abundance of corn as having laded our barge as also I might have laded a ship’. Smith triumphantly set off back to Jamestown, his sojourn vindicated by seven hogsheads of food, equivalent to nearly fifty bushels, at least a week’s supply.

      The shallop arrived at Jamestown in the middle of the night. As it slipped through the water of the river towards the flickering beacon of the fort’s night watch, Smith noticed something odd. The pinnace, which should have used the high tide to sail upstream for the intended rendezvous, was marooned on a sandbank near the fort.²⁶

      The sun rose the following morning upon a settlement once more in the throes of mutiny. Having managed to ‘strengthen’ himself with the ship’s crew, Kendall had hijacked the pinnace, and set sail for Spain, in order to reveal to King Philip ‘all about this country and many plans of the English which he knew’. He was somehow prevented, incompetent navigation or the crew’s intervention driving the ship on to the mud.

      Kendall was removed from the pinnace, tried for mutiny, and sentenced to death by firing squad. In a desperate attempt to escape his punishment, he revealed what only a former Cecil agent would know: that the president, in whose name the sentence was passed, was not called Ratcliffe. He had been operating under an alias all the time. His real name was John Sicklemore.

      This revelation added yet a further layer of mystery to this heavily laminated individual. Sicklemore was a name much rarer than Ratcliffe, and he may have been forced to abandon it following some crime or indiscretion. In the State papers of the time, the only Sicklemore of note was a Catholic priest operating under the alias John Ward. As part of the Gunpowder Plot investigation, he was discovered to be conducting secret Masses in a series of households in Northumberland – curiously including a family named Ratcliffe. But that Sicklemore was thought to have escaped to the Continent.²⁷ Could a further change of identity somehow have transformed a papist agitator into a colonial adventurer?

      Speculation was pointless. The gravity of Kendall’s crimes made Ratcliffe’s name change seem a mere technicality, and Gabriel Archer, who had now emerged as the president’s most loyal lieutenant, had the legal training and natural cunning to circumvent pseudonymity. Under the Royal Council’s instructions, Ratcliffe could delegate his judicial powers to fellow councilior John Martin, whose name was his own. So it was Martin who condemned Kendall to death, and a few days later, the prisoner was led out of the fort and shot.²⁸

      These events once more threw the council into disarray, prompting further efforts to reinstate Wingfield, led by a group of ‘best sort of the gentlemen’. Wingfield refused to countenance the idea whilst Ratcliffe and Archer were still at large, and when efforts to arraign them failed, he attempted to commandeer the pinnace so he could sail to England and ‘acquaint our [Royal] Council there with our weakness’. Smith claims to have stopped him with rounds of musket and cannon fire, which forced him to ‘stay or sink in the river’.²⁹

      This all happened during November 1607. The onset of winter, which was colder than the English had expected after such a hot summer, brought an unexpected bounty of food. ‘The rivers became so covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowl, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them,’ reported Smith. It was such a cornucopia even the ‘Tuftaffaty humourists’ Martin, Ratcliffe, Wingfield and Percy, lost interest in returning to England.

      To take advantage of the sudden increase, and perhaps because the pinnace was not currently serviceable, Smith decided upon one further expedition up the Chickahominy in the shallop, this time with the intention of reaching its source. Smith still harboured hopes of discovering a navigable way to the South Sea, and wondered whether the Chickahominy might bypass the geological obstacle that blocked the James at the falls.

      He left on 10 December, taking with him Thomas Emry, Jehu Robinson, George Casson and three or four others.

      Sometime in late November or early December, as the warmth of autumn subsided into a bitterly cold winter, William White found himself in the midst of another outburst of activity, as the Quiyoughcohannock started packing mats, hides, weapons and supplies in preparation for an expedition.

      All the men, including White, and several of the women, set off with their luggage to the river, where they loaded up a fleet of long canoes. They were joined on the bank by the deposed Quiyoughcohannock Chief Pipisco, together with his ‘best-beloved’, the wife he had ‘stolen’ from Opechancanough. Under the relaxed terms of Pipisco’s exile, the couple was allowed to travel ‘in hunting time’.³⁰

      The entire troupe boarded the canoes, and set off down the James. Arriving at Paspahegh, they turned up the Chickahominy tributary, heading north-west, continuing forty or so miles upstream, the waterway becoming almost impassable beneath a canopy of low branches and fallen trees. Eventually, as the river course approached a series of cataracts, the fleet drew up on the northern bank and disembarked. Close by, in a woodland clearing, they set up a large encampment, comprising forty or so tents made of sapling branches covered with mats. They named the camp ‘Rassaweck’, which was to be their base for a series of hunting expeditions, the deer being more plentiful in this remote area of the forest, at the hem of the foothills leading into the great western mountain range.

      They were joined by people from villages near and far, and by Opechancanough. White observed the man dismissed by the English as a pompous fool being received at the camp as a great general, attended by twenty guards in the finest garb, brandishing swords made of bone edged with slivers of precious rock.

      Conditions in the camp were challenging. The cold was ‘extreme sharp’, and a freezing north-west wind whipped through the makeshift dwellings. The Indians seemed unaffected, claiming that their red body paint, made from the root pocone mixed with oil, made them impervious (this, not their natural complexion, was the reason they became known as ‘red’ Indians). To an Englishman, still clad in the summer clothes he had been wearing when he absconded, or wearing the scant Indian garments he had been forced to adopt since, thoughts might have started to stray to the warmth of a winter coat and even a settler’s cabin.³¹

      A week into December 1607, the mood in the camp suddenly became agitated. After a flurry of activity around Opechancanough’s tent, a group of warriors entered the camp, dragging with them a captive Englishman. White recognized him as George Casson, one of three Cassons, probably brothers, who had accompanied him on the journey from England.

      The man White now beheld was not the one who just a year ago had stood alongside him on the dockside at Deptford, awaiting departure to the New World. He was undernourished, badly injured and terrified for his life. For some reason, he had aroused fury in his captors. They violently jostled him towards the campfire, where Opechancanough awaited him.

      White was an obvious candidate to act as interpreter in the subsequent interrogation. Casson, it transpired, had been caught at Appocant, a village lower down the Chickahominy. The vessel used by the English for exploration had been found anchored there, with Casson left on board to guard it. He had been ‘enticed’ ashore by some women from the village, and then captured.³² The reaction of his captors suggested he might have attacked or even raped one of the women.

      Opechancanough was already aware that one of the English captains had entered his territory. This Otasantasuwak or one-who-wears-trousers had come into the Powhatan heartlands not with the stealth of an Indian, but like a lumbering pachyderm, crashing through the trees, scattering flocks of birds and

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