Death in Jamestown

Fyndeinge of fyve hundrethe men we had onely Lefte aboutt sixty, The reste beinge either sterved throwe famin or Cutt of by the salvages.
George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon”

In early 1610, sixty English colonists remained from the previous year’s population of five hundred. After two years, the colony at Jamestown had not yet established itself as a viable settlement. Approximately 90% of the colonists to Virginia had died—killed by Indians, starved, fallen to disease—or run away and disappeared into the wilds of America. Conditions were so grim that the surviving remnant prepared four boats and set out to return to England. Some considered burning the small fort where they had suffered, but were persuaded that it might yet be occupied by others who would follow them. As they sailed downriver, they met Lord De La Ware’s ship loaded with supplies and more than three hundred additional colonists. They returned to Jamestown.

The colonists would continue to die. Each ship that arrived in Virginia brought more colonists and most died within two years. Of the many thousands who arrived year after year, perhaps 900 occupied Jamestown and the surrounding area in 1620 (Gately, 73). So many colonists died that an investigation by the Royal Council in 1624—the year that John Smith published his Generall Historie—asked, “What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?” (Morison, 54).

John Smith described the conditions in 1607. Food consisted of meager rations from the common store.

… halfe a pinte of Wheat, and as much Barly boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fryed some six and twenty weekes in the ships hold, contained as many wormes as graines
Smith, “Description,”

Hunger was aggravated by thirst. The colonists were reduced to drinking water from the river.

… when they [Captain Newport and the ships] departed, there remained neither Taverne, Beere-house, nor place of reliefe but the common kettell. … our drinke was water.
Smith, “Description”

George Percy noted the abysmal conditions of the water.

… our drinke cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.
Percy, “Observations”

Earlier in this paragraph, Percy gives us the earliest diagnosis of the maladies that would continue to devastate the Virginia colony for more than a decade.

Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine.
Percy, “Observations”

Flixes seems most likely a reference to dysentery, but what caused the fevers?


Malaria?

In A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen clearly identify one of the principal causes of death.

Disease also decimated the colony. Jamestown settlers were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance. Malaria, in particular, proved a dreaded killer, and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 17.

The identification of malaria as a principal malady killing the settlers is neither surprising nor original. The textbook I read in my first college course in early American history also identified malaria, which the authors linked to the poor choice of location for the settlement.

The town was located on marshy ground where mosquitoes flourished during the summer, and a hundred of the first settlers died from malaria.
Weinstein and Wilson, Freedom and Crisis, 63.

An article in The Pilgrim Newsletter published in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown continues this common assertion, “Malaria and other mosquito born illnesses were rampant in the colony” (Stacy, 17). School children at Jamestown Elementary School in Virginia incorporated this idea into a Rap song written as part of a school project.

Although the identification of malaria as a killer of colonists is not uncommon, Schweikart and Allen's add a new twist with their assertion that it was a “New World disease” against which the English lacked immunities. In contrast to this original idea, a statement from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reflects the current state of knowledge concerning malaria in the New World.

Plasmodium vivax stowed away with the English going to Jamestown, while P. falciparum rode along with slaves from Africa.
“Background History on Malaria”

P. vivax thrived in northern Europe for centuries, but it killed very few. P. falciparum is far more deadly. Indeed, it is one of the world's leading killers even today. If the English colonists succumbed to malaria, it came with them. But they were unlikely to succumb until a more virulent strain was brought in with imported servants from Africa. The first of these arrived in 1619 by which time the English population at Jamestown was growing and reasonably healthy.


If not Malaria?

The common assertion that malaria killed the Jamestown settlers rests on a weak foundation. In Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (2001), Margaret Humpheys suggests that the English colonists might have brought malaria with them. The strain of malaria they brought—P. vivax—was less virulent than that likely brought sometime after 1619 from Africa—P. falciparum. Humphreys earned a medical degree from Harvard as well as her Ph.D. in the history of science. Her qualifications for assessing the epidemiology of colonial Virginia would seem more than adequate. It thus comes as no surprise that her book is thorough and well argued, and offers only tentative conclusions in recognition of the absence of the sort of medical data required to make a definitive diagnosis.

Humphreys leaves Schweikart and Allen’s novel allegation in shambles: there is no credible reason to believe that malaria was a New World disease. She also offers good reasons to doubt their commonplace assertion that malaria was the cause of the fevers about which Percy and Smith wrote.

The Jamestown settlers came from England, including parts of England where vivax malaria was common. They certainly could have brought it with them. But one would not expect such a nonvirgin population, however malnourished, to experience a major outbreak of vivax malaria with that level of mortality.
Humphreys, Malaria, 24.

Humpreys suggests that the level of mortality is more consistent with typhoid fever than malaria. Typhoid fever had been put forth as an explanation in the work of Wyndham Blanton in the first half of the twentieth century and by Carville Earle in the second half of the century. Earle notes that the parasites Salmonella typhi and Endamoeba histolytica were present in the “slime and filth” that Percy observed in the water.

Ironically, most of them died needlessly, for on at least two occasions, Virginians understood the nexus between site and mortality, and they eliminated that link through the preventative medicine of settlement dispersal only to have their costly insights overturned by company agents freshly arrived in Virginia.
Earle, “Pioneers of Providence,” 482.

Of course, settlement dispersal rendered the colonists more vulnerable to Indian attack. It was bad enough that the English were economically dependent upon the Natives for many of their provisions, whether through trade or abundant theft. The Indians frequently found cause for hostilities—Percy mentions for example an accidental shooting of a Native when a “pistoll suddenly fyered and shotte the salvage” (Nicholls). Moreover, archaeological excavations and “tree-ring analysis of cypress trees” suggest that the Natives were already suffering scarcity of crops due to a severe drought during the years 1606-1612 (Sheler). The additional burden of feeding the helpless English during hard times did not bode well for peaceful relations.


Plausible Deniability

Schweikart and Allen’s statement that malaria killed the Virginia colonists could be true, but more than likely it is false. Their original claim would merit consideration if they offered some evidence in support. The most convincing scholarship available when they were writing their book suggests an alternate hypothesis that seems more likely. They ignore Humpreys' text. Perhaps the belief that malaria killed the colonists should go the way of Smith’s alleged rescue at the hands of an eleven year old Indian child—a useful myth that is probably false but cannot be proven false beyond all doubts.

Their identification of malaria as a New World disease, on the other hand, is absurd. Even so, they do not state unequivocally that it was. The transition from “New World diseases” to “[m]alaria, in particular” in the next sentence certainly implies that malaria was a New World disease, but they do not list it among those “diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe” several pages earlier (Stripes). The relationship between the two sentences could be a misleading non sequitur conferring plausible deniability. It could be clever politics; it could be incompetent editing.


Citations

“Background Information on Malaria.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. http://www.jhsph.edu/Malaria/Malaria_Background.html. Accessed 4 February 2008.

Earle, Carville. “Pioneers of Providence: The Anglo-American Experience, 1492-1792.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992), 478-499.

Gately, Iain. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Humpheys, Margaret. Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Nicholls, Mark. “George Percy's ‘Trewe Relacyon’: A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement.” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 113, no. 3 (2005), 212-275.

Percy, George. “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1685-1690.

Schweikart, Larry. “Why It’s Time for A Patriot’s History of the United States.” History News Network. http://hnn.us/articles/9536.html. 31 January 2005.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror, updated ed. New York: Sentinal, 2007.

Sheler, Jeffrey L. “Rethinking Jamestown.” Smithsonian 35 (October 2005), 48-54.

Stacy, Ann Hooper. “Jamestowne 1607 in Celebration of its 400th Anniversary.” The Pilgrim Newsletter 91, no. 2 (2007), 16-19.

Stripes, James. “Larry Schweikart’s Claim.” Patriots and Peoples. http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/01/larry-schweikarts-claim.html. 30 January 2008.

Smith, John. “The Description of Virginia by Captaine John Smith.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1691-1704.

Weinstein, Allen, and R. Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis: An American History 2nd ed. New York, Random House, 1978.

The True Story of Pocahontas

Smith and Pocahontas

In 1624 Captain John Smith published an account that he was rescued by Pocahontas from a death planned by her father, Wahunsonacock—the Powhatan Chief. The alleged rescue occurred when Smith was a prisoner of the Powhatans in the winter of 1607-1608, and Smith first mentioned it in a letter to Queen Anne in 1616. Smith's story has been embraced and accepted, contextualized, and disputed.

The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves.
Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Electronic Edition
Text also available at Eyewitness to History

The story was generally accepted until challenged in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Deane and Henry Adams; this challenge appeared most prominently in the North American Review, January 1867. More recently, the Powhatan Renape Nation has challenged “The Pocahontas Myth” and its revision in the 1995 Disney film.

Others have accepted the story, but accuse Smith of misunderstanding the nature of a formal ritual in which Pocahontas played a role prescribed for her. This ritual view is advocated by some scholars, such as Michael J. Puglisi, “Capt. John Smith, Pocahontas and a Clash of Cultures: A Case for the Ethnohistorical Perspective,” The History Teacher (November 1991), 97-103. This view was mentioned by David Silverman in December 2006 in an interview for the NOVA program “Pocahontas Revealed.”

Others have suggested plagiarism: Smith’s account bears a strong similarity to an alleged 1528 rescue of Juan Ortiz by Ulele, daughter of the Ucita chief Hirrihugua, a perspective mentioned in Pocahontas film critiques in the New York Times. I have propagated this view in my classrooms, in an article concerned with Russell Means as an actorvist, and previously in Patriots and Peoples.

Others have defended the credibility of Smith’s story, especially J.A. Leo Lemay in Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (1992). A Stanford graduate student in engineering posted a summary of this book, which was also reviewed favorably in The William and Mary Quarterly (October 1995) by Robert S. Tilton. Tilton notes that Lemay fails to address Helen C. Rountree’s argument that “that a young girl would not have had the power to stop an execution and that we have too little knowledge of Powhatan adoption rituals to make a strong case for this popular interpretation of Smith's narrative” (Tilton, 715). Tilton’s Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (1994) examines how stories about Pocahontas have been reframed to fit a variety of agendas.

Oral History

In The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History (2007), Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” dispute Smith’s account from the perspective of oral history. They cite Smith’s statement in A True Relation (1608) of “Weramocomoco … assuring mee his friendship, and my libertie within foure days” (American Journeys Collection, 48).

Why would the Powhatan want to kill a person they were initiating to be a werowance? By Smith’s own admission, Wahunsenaca gave Smith his word that Smith would be released in four days. Smith’s fears were either a figment of his own imagination or an embellishment to dramatize his narrative.
Custalow and Daniel, True Story of Pocahontas, 19.

Children would not have been present in such a ritual conducted by quiakros (priests), they argue. Once Smith was initiated as a werowance, the entire English colony was considered part of the Powhatan society and subordinate to Chief Powhatan Wahunsenaca. The English, of course, quickly came to view the Powhatans as subordinate to their rule, although it would be several years before they were able to survive in the nascent colony.

There are many fresh perspectives and surprising revelations in The True Story of Pocahontas that challenge conventional understanding of colonial Virginia. The authors assert that John Rolfe, the second husband of Pocahontas, likely was not the biological father of Pocahontas’s son Thomas Rolfe. They speculate that Thomas Dale probably was the biological father, and that he raped Pocahontas. They observe inconsistencies in the long-standing belief that Pocahontas died of tuberculosis, offering a plausible scenario in which she was poisoned at the onset of a return journey to Virginia.

In The True Story of Pocahontas, the young Indian girl is presented as a symbol of peace, riding on the front of canoes visiting the English at Jamestown so the English would understand that the Indians had come without hostile intent. Her marriage to John Rolfe aided him and the colony because it motivated the quiakros to share their knowledge of the curing of tobacco with the aspiring planter. Rolfe had planted West Indian tobacco, which was milder (and thus more suitable for recreational smoking) than the native Virginia tobacco, but it was not yet good enough to compete with Spanish leaf. Learning from the Powhatans how to cure and process his tobacco improved the quality. The economic success of his tobacco assured the continuation of the colony’s financial backing, and thus its success. Pocahontas saved the colony, but not the way Smith describes.

Historians traditionally favor written documents as evidence and may have difficulty accepting many parts of the narrative in The True Story of Pocahontas. The authority of the oral stories presented rests in the claim that following the war of 1644-1646, the Mattaponi concealed Powhatan quiakros from the English. Among the Mattaponi, the sacred history was maintained for nearly four centuries. The Mattaponi was one of six principles tribes forming the Powhatan nation.

Note regarding spelling: The name Wahunsenaca / Wahunsonacock is also spelled Wahunsenacawh. I make the effort to preserve the spelling employed in each source in my discussion of that source. John Smith used Wahunsonacock; Custalow and Daniel spell Chief Powhatan’s name Wahunsenaca. The name Powhatan also is used in many historical sources and studies, including by Smith, as the name of Pocahontas's father. It is better understood as a title than as a proper name.

Superior European Technology

Colonial Firearms

Assertions of European technological superiority appeal to our common sense. We know that guns are better than bows and arrows, and when we read some of the primary sources from the colonial era we encounter numerous references to the enthusiasm of American indigenes for firearms. Indians wanted guns, Europeans needed gold or furs or food—exchanges were made.

As he became the first European to sail around the island on the west coast of North America that now bears his name, Captain George Vancouver found several groups of Native that had acquired firearms before they had seen a European. Certainly his observations support the notion that guns were valued by North American Indians.

In the afternoon [17 July 1792] we were visited by two canoes, having a musket, with all necessary appurtenances in each. … it would appear that the inhabitants of this particular part are amply provided with these formidable weapons.”
George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, vol. 2 (1801), 264

The guns Vancouver saw, as well as those he had available for trade were far superior to those available in the sixteenth century, but not yet as good as those about which Ulysses S. Grant would complain more than seventy years later. Writing in his memoirs about the capture of Vicksburg, Grant wrote:

The small-arms of the enemy were far superior to the bulk of ours. Up to this time our troops at the West had been limited to the old United States flint-lock muskets changed into percussion, or the Belgian musket imported early in the war—almost as dangerous to the person firing it as to the one aimed at—and a few new and imported arms.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Library of America, 1990), 384

Virginia 1607

Our common sense understanding of the superiority of European firearms runs so deep that most of us experience no cognitive dissonance when we watch scenes such as my favorite from Disney’s Pocahontas (1995). John Smith is under a waterfall when he first encounters the voluptuous Indian maiden. As she sneaks up on him as a panther might, he slowly turns and points his matchlock. The tension is broken before he fires the weapon, and this resolution benefits him because the open flame required by his gun would have been extinguished as quickly as it was lit.

Smith lacked Diamond matches that he could strike on his denim, and also lacked the denim. Nor was Smith in possession of a Zippo with its patented protection from the elements. Even if he managed to light the wick which the serpentine (the lock) delivers to the flash pan, it would not continue burning under such moist conditions. If Smith’s protection had depended upon his firearm, and Pocahontas had been hostile, he would have died a long time before he could write and repeatedly revise his Generall Historie of Virginia (1630) that spawned the misreadings and fabrications which in turn facilitated the myths propagated by the Disney cartoon.

Smith published The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1606-1612) in 1612 and The Generall History of Virginia, the Somer Iles, and New England in 1623. The former lacks his story of the rescue by Pocahontas, which first appears in the latter. Pocahontas died in 1617. There also is good reason to believe that Smith had read an almost identical story of the experience of Juan Ortiz who had come to Florida in 1528 in search of the missing Panfilo de Narváez. His story of rescue by an Indian maiden—Ulele was her name—whose father was prepared to roast him over a fire was published in accounts of the De Soto expedition. See chapter IX of the account of The Gentleman of Elvas.

Smith might have used a more expensive wheelock, which would not require an open flame but would still fail under a waterfall. Wheelocks had been available since the mid-sixteenth century, but never became as popular with soldiers as the matchlock. A good discussion of seventeenth century British weapons is available at the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project. The world’s library offers many other sources of reliable information regarding seventeenth century firearms, including the story of a project of replica manufacturing and a newspaper story (PDF) concerned with the film The New World (2005), another Smith-Pocahontas saga.

Correction (14 Dec 2007): My brother phoned to take issue with some inaccuracies in my initial description of the mechanism of Captain Smith's firearm. I have corrected these errors.


Florida 1528

In their failed attempt to conquer the land Juan Ponce de León had named Flowery Easter (Pascua Florida), the men under the command of Panfilo de Narváez were nearly helpless against the arrows of the Indians. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca was the highest ranking survivor of this failure. In his La Relación, first published in 1542, he recalled those traumatic days of 1528:

Good armor did no good against arrows in this skirmish. There were men who swore they had seen two red oaks, each the thickness of a man’s calf, pierced from side to side by arrows this day; which is no wonder when you consider the power and skill the Indians can deliver them with. I myself saw an arrow buried half a foot in a poplar trunk.
Cabeza de Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, trans. and ed. by Cyclone Covey (1998), 42

Despite its collapsed chronology, the 1991 film Cabeza de Vaca by Nicolás Echevarría captures this scene well. One moment the Spanish are cutting their way through the flora and the next they are being cut to pieces by a rain of arrows coming in fast and thick. They flee, although a great many are killed.


Mexico 1519-1521

Before his death in the failed effort to conquer Florida, Narváez had failed in another enterprise. With orders reminiscent of those given much later to Charles Marlow (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) and Captain Willard (Francis Ford Cuppola, Apocalypse Now) to go after the renegade Kurtz, Narváez was ordered to capture or kill Hernando Cortés, who had disobeyed orders. This part of the story of the conquest of Tenochtitlán is obscured in Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History. They tell us that Spanish military technology—guns and tactics—“made any single Spanish soldier the equal of several poorly armed natives” (7). They tell us that Narváez’s “force of 600, including cooks, colonists, and women” was able to “overcome native Mexican armies outnumbering them two, three, and even ten times at any particular time” (7). They do not tell us that Cortés was able to overcome Narváez with a smaller army, nor do they tell us why he did so. In any case, the reinforcements from the captured army of Narváez and their Tlaxcalan allies returned to Tenochtitlán where they suffered astounding defeat on Noche Triste (melancholy night), returned a third time and laid seige , and finally overcame the great Aztec empire.

Mexico was born as Cortés put himself in place of Montezuma and his heirs in the now destroyed city.


Wars of the Iroquois 1648-1652

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois all but destroyed the Huron, their traditional enemies. Many historians that have narrated these events have attributed the Iroquois success to the so-called 400 guns of the Mohawks, which allegedly they had acquired through trade with the Dutch. Brian J. Given investigated these claims, and published his findings in “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis (1988).

Given notes, “[t]he premise that the European harquebuses of the seventeenth century were vastly superior to aboriginal projectile weapons is pervasive in the literature” (3). In his examination of these claims he set up field tests firing at a target measuring 2’ x 6,’ finding 50 to 75 yards the maximum range at which it could be hit when stationary “under ideal conditions” (10). In his summary of the bow vs. seventeenth century firearms, he points out the native bow had six times the rate of fire, could be reloaded while crouching (extremely difficult to do with a muzzle loaded firearm), and had an effective range of at least 100 yards. The bow could penetrate armour, and was accurate.

Bows never blow up and seldom misfire; the musket does both. A 20 to 50 percent misfire rate is usual in good weather under field conditions. In the lightest of rains the flint-lock becomes virtually useless, where the performance of the bow is little affected.
Brian J. Given, “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” 10

A New Thesis

In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann offers a cogent summary of what he had learned from reading various secondary accounts of colonization. Mann states:

It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.
Mann, 1491, 63.

The terms inferior and superior do not apply. Indeed, they cloud our judgment. The exchanges that began on Watling Island in 1492 and continued to be initiated again and again for more than three centuries were complex exchanges. Each side found itself attracted to or repulsed by cultural elements and technologies of the Other; each side was transformed through the encounter.