1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (13 page)

One thousand percent! And all that was needed was sun, water, and soil! The sums skyrocketed if farmers could afford servants—laborers’ annual pay was about £2, but they could grow £100 or even £200 of tobacco in that time. In an object demonstration of the power of economic order to focus the human mind, the
tassantassas
whom John Smith had to order into their fields at gunpoint now became intent on wringing tobacco from the soil. Newcomers poured in, grabbed some land, and planted
N. tabacum.
English-style farms spread like rumors up and down the James and York rivers. So many colonists poured in that the company realized they could not be controlled entirely from across the ocean and created an elected council to resolve disputes—the first representative body in colonial North America. Its opening session lasted from July 30 to August 4, 1619.

Barely three weeks later a Dutch pirate ship landed at Jamestown. In its hold was “20. and odd Negroes”—slaves taken by the pirates from a Portuguese slave ship destined for Mexico. (About thirty more showed up in another ship a few days later.) In their hurry to extract tobacco profits, the
tassantassas
had been clamoring for more workers. The Africans had arrived at harvest time. Without a second thought colonists bought the Africans in exchange for the food the pirates needed for the return trip to Europe. Legally speaking, the “20. and odd” Africans may not have been slaves—their status is unclear. Nevertheless, they were not volunteers; their purchase was a landmark in the road to slavery. Within weeks of each other, Jamestown had inaugurated two of the future United States’ most long-lasting institutions: representative democracy and chattel slavery.

Not that the colonists paid attention to these landmarks—they were too busy exporting Virginia leaf. Obsessed by tobacco, some of the leadership complained, the colonists let Jamestown fall once again into ruin: “the Church down, the Palizado’s [walls] broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the store-house they used for the Church; the market-place, and streets and all other spare places planted with Tobacco.” Massive celebratory drunkenness was common; incoming ships brought liquor and profitably transformed themselves into floating temporary taverns. Dale was forced to issue an order to Virginia’s planters: grow food crops, too, or forfeit your tobacco to the colonial government. Few paid attention.

Alas, the boom came too late for the Virginia Company. Shipping colonists across the Atlantic only to have them die had exhausted its start-up capital. Company officers persuaded London’s powerful clergy that helping Jamestown find more investors was the duty of all English Christians. Sunday after Sunday, ministers urged their parishioners to buy shares in the Virginia Company. “Goe forward,” Rev. William Crashaw urged potential “noble and worthy Adventurers,” some of whom sat in the pews of his Temple Church, one of the nation’s most influential houses of worship. If England did not seize its opportunity in Virginia, Crashaw predicted, future generations would ask, “
Why was there such a pri[z]e put into the hands of fooles who had not hearts to take it?
” (Emphasis in original.)

The tactic worked. Ministers enticed more than seven hundred individuals and companies to put at least £25,000 into the Virginia Company.
⁴
(By contrast, historians believe that fewer than a dozen men were the original backers of the company and that they put in no more than several hundred pounds.) The new sum was enough to send over hundreds of colonists, Rolfe and Dale among them, who eagerly grew tobacco. But even the rush of tobacco profits could not offset the debts from the company’s years of losses. The Virginia Company was again running out of money on March 22, 1622, when Opechancanough attacked.

Early that morning Indians slipped into European settlements, knocking on doors and asking to be let in. Most were familiar visitors. They came unarmed. Many accepted a meal or a drink. Then they seized whatever implement came to hand—kitchen knife, heavy stewpot, the colonists’ own guns—and killed everyone in the house. The assault was brutal, widespread, and well planned. So swift were the blows that many colonists died without knowing they were under attack. Entire families fell. Houses burned across what had been Tsenacomoco. At the last minute several Indians told English friends about the attack, providing enough warning to let Jamestown gather its defenses. Nonetheless the attackers killed at least 325 people.

The aftermath claimed as many as seven hundred more. Because the attack disrupted spring planting, the
tassantassas
grew even less maize than usual. Meanwhile, the company tried to rebuild Jamestown by sending over more than a thousand new colonists. Incredibly, they were sent with no food supplies. Actually, not so incredibly—ship captains were paid by the person transported, so they overloaded their vessels with passengers, carrying as little unprofitable food as possible. The luckless, scurvy-ridden souls aboard were dumped ashore, where they were forced to eat “barks of trees, or moulds [soil] of the Ground. Again colonists scrabbled in rags over handfuls of maize. It was a second “starving time.” By spring the survivors were so debilitated, colony treasurer George Sandys wrote, “
the lyveing
[were]
hardlie able to bury the dead.”
(Emphasis in original.) Altogether about two out of every three Europeans in Virginia died that year.
⁵

Although this image is confused in many ways—note the neatly walled fortress in the distance, so utterly unlike Jamestown or any Powhatan settlement—something of the shock caused by the Powhatan attack on Virginia in 1622 was captured in this engraving by the German artist Matthäus Merian. (
Photo credit 2.8
)

By any measure, Opechancanough was in a commanding position. His forces now more numerous and better supplied than the enemy, they raided English settlements at will. Jamestown’s governing council confessed that the colonists couldn’t successfully mount a reprisal, “by reasone of theire swyftnes of foote, and advantages of the woodes, to which uppon all our assaultes they retyre.” Opechancanough predicted in the summer of 1623 that “before the end of two Moones there should not be an Englishman in all their Countries.”

Just as he foresaw, the Virginia Company did not survive. Horrified by the attack, James I created an investigatory commission, which issued a damning report. The company’s parliamentary support vanished. Management fought desperately to retain the king’s favor. Its investors had sunk into Virginia as much as £200,000, a vast sum at the time. As long as the firm existed the money potentially could be recouped. If James revoked the company charter, it would be beyond recovery. Nevertheless he revoked the charter on May 24, 1624. “Any responsible monarch would have been obliged to stop the reckless shipment of his subjects to their deaths,” wrote Morgan, the historian. The wonder was that the king had not done so earlier. Opechancanough had defeated the Virginia Company.

But victory over the company did not mean victory for the Indians. Opechancanough did not launch a final, killing assault, pushing the foreigners into the sea. Indeed, a second coordinated attack didn’t take place for
twenty-two years
, when it was far too late. The reason for his hesitation will never be known with certainty, because English accounts provide the great majority of historical records, and the hostilities ensured that the
tassantassas
lost what little view they had into native life. But one possible answer is that Opechancanough had lost Tsenacomoco before his troops fanned out into English homes. By growing tobacco, the English had transformed the landscape into something unrecognizable.

Indians had traditionally raised tobacco, but only in small amounts. The colonists, by contrast, covered big areas with stands of
N. tabacum
. Neither natives nor newcomers understood the environmental impact of planting it on a massive scale. Tobacco is a sponge for nitrogen and potassium. Because the entire plant is removed from the soil, harvesting and exporting tobacco was like taking those nutrients from the earth and putting them on ships. “Tobacco has an almost unique ability to suck the life out of soil,” said Leanne DuBois, the agricultural extension agent in James City County, Jamestown’s county. “In this area, where the soils can be pretty fragile, it can ruin the land in a couple of years.” Constantly wearing out fields, the colonists had to keep moving to new land.

In Tsenacomoco, one recalls, families traditionally farmed their plots for a few years and then let them go fallow when yields declined. The unplanted land became common hunting or foraging grounds until needed again for farms. Because the fallow lands had already been cleared, the foreigners could readily move in and plant tobacco on them. Unlike the Powhatan, the English didn’t let their tobacco fields regenerate after they were depleted. Instead, they turned them into maize fields, and then pasture for cattle and horses. Rather than cycling the land between farm and forest, in other words, the foreigners used it continuously—permanently keeping prime farmland and forage land away from the people of Tsenacomoco, pushing the Indians farther and farther away from the shore as they did.

In a decade or two the English had grabbed most of the land cleared by Indians. They moved into the forest, as the environmental historian John R. Wennersten wrote, “using slash-and-burn techniques that had not been seen in Europe for centuries.” They felled great numbers of trees, and lavishly used the fallen timber. Farmers marked their property with “worm” fences—zigzag constructions of six to ten interlocking rails—that Wennersten estimates consumed 6,500 long, thick timbers for every mile of fence. Other wood was converted into pitch, tar, turpentine, and wooden planks. The plentiful leftovers were exported, in the form of barrels, casks, kegs, and hogsheads, to timber-starved England. “They have an unconquerable aversion to trees,” one eighteenth-century visitor dryly observed. “Not one is spared.”

Subject to annual burning, native woodlands had been both open, in that people could freely move around, and closed, in that the canopy of big trees sheltered the land from the impact of rainfall. Taking down the forest exposed the soil. Colonists’ ploughs increased its vulnerability. Nutrients dissolved in spring rains and washed into the sea. The exposed soil dried out more quickly and hardened faster, losing its ability to absorb spring rains; the volume and speed of runoff increased, raising river volume. By the late seventeenth century disastrous floods were common. So much soil had washed into the rivers that they became difficult to navigate.

Tobacco from South America was far from the only biological import. The English brought along all the other species they were accustomed to finding on farms: pigs, goats, cattle, and horses. At first the imported animals didn’t fare well, not least because they were eaten by starving colonists. But during the peace after Pocahontas’s marriage, they multiplied. Colonists quickly lost control of them. Indians woke up to find free-range cows and horses romping through their fields, trampling the harvest. If they killed the beasts, gun-waving colonists demanded payment. Animal numbers boomed for decades.

The worst may have been the pigs. By 1619, one colonist reported, there were “an infinite number of Swine, broken out into the woods.” Smart, strong, and constantly hungry, they ate nuts, fruits, and maize, turning up the marshy soil with their shovel-like noses in search of edible roots. One of these was tuckahoe, the tuber Indians relied upon when their maize harvests failed. Pigs turned out to like tuckahoe—a lot. Traveling through the area in the eighteenth century, the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm found that pigs were “very greedy” for the tubers, “and grow very fat by feeding on them.” In places “frequented by hogs,” he argued, tuckahoe “must have been extirpated.” The people of Tsenacomoco found themselves competing for their food supply with packs of feral pigs.