1607, their numbers were small and their skills few. Recognizing their vul-
nerability, the Virginia Company of London instructed them to “keep aloof
and not to show that they were merely human.” Otherwise, the company
warned, the Indians “will make many adventures upon you.” In contrast to
the whites, the native population was numerous. The first society with
whom the colonists came into contact numbered about 13,000, whereas at
one point the population of Jamestown dipped to less than 100. After the
Pilgrims in Plymouth had suffered through their first winter, “scarce fifty
remained” of the original 102; their Indian neighbors numbered at least
10,000. In Carolina, colonists were even fewer in comparison with the
Indian inhabitants. Yet the shrewder of the Indian leaders realized that the
few Europeans they saw represented not only a more technologically
advanced but probably a much more numerous civilization. Captain John
Smith relates how Powhatan attempted to find out what the odds were.
When Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas, renamed Lady Rebecca, went
to London with her new English husband, John Rolfe, in 1616, Powhatan
used the occasion to send along with her a man by the name of Uttama-
tomakkin. As Smith wrote,
This favage...was one of Powhatan’sCouncil, and was, amongft them,
held to be an underftanding fellow. The King fent him, as they fay, pur-
pofely to number the people here, and to inform him well what we were
and what was our ftate. Arriving at Plymouth,according to his directions,
he got a long ftick, whereon by notches he did think to have kept the
number of all the men he could fee, but he quickly wearied of that tafk.In England, people were too numerous to be counted; soon they would be
innumerable in the New World as well.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, 17,000 colonists had arrived
in Massachusetts; settlers in what became Connecticut reached 10,000;
Plymouth, where the Pilgrims were established, reached a population of
5,000; Rhode Island, 5,000; Virginia in 1670, 40,000; and Maryland,
20,000. The number of white colonists was almost doubling every twenty-
five years. Meanwhile, Indian societies declined drastically. The Spaniards
first brought diseases, and Sir Francis Drake’s crews brought what appears
Whites, Indians, and Land 189