The Settlement of Virginia 33is not certain, but there is little doubt that without his
direction, the colony would have perished in the early
days. However, he stayed in Virginia only two years.
Lacking intelligent leaders and faced with appalling
hardships, the Jamestown colonists failed to develop
a sufficient sense of common purpose. Each year
they died in wholesale lots from disease, starvation
(there were even some cases of cannibalism among
the desperate survivors), Indian attack, and, above all,
ignorance and folly.
What saved the colonists was the gradual realiza-
tion that they must produce their own food—cattle
raising was especially important—and the cultivation
of tobacco, which flourished there and could be sold
profitably in England. Once the settlers discovered
tobacco, no amount of company pressure could keep
them at wasteful tasks like looking for gold. The
“restraint of plantinge Tobacco,” one company official
commented, “is a thinge so distastefull to them that
they will with no patience indure to heare of it.”
John Rolfe, who is also famous
for marrying Pocahontas, introduced
West Indian tobacco—much milder
than the local “weed” and thus more
valuable—in 1612. With money
earned from the sale of tobacco, the
colonists could buy the manufactured
articles they could not produce in a
raw new country; this freed them from
dependence on outside subsidies. It
did not mean profit for the London
Company, however, for by the time
tobacco caught on, the surviving orig-
inal colonists had served their seven
years and were no longer hired hands.
To attract more settlers, the company
had permitted first tenancy and then
outright ownership of farms. Thus the
profits of tobacco went largely to the
planters, not to the “adventurers”
who had organized the colony.
The colonists erred grievously in
mistreating the Powhatan Indians. It
is quite likely that the settlement
would not have survived if the
Powhatan Indians had not given the
colonists food in the first hard win-
ters, taught them the ways of the for-
est, introduced them to valuable new
crops such as corn and yams, and
showed them how to clear dense tim-
ber by girdling the trees and burning
them down after they were dead. The
settlers accepted Indian aid, then took
whatever else they wanted by force.
English barbarities rivaled those of the Spaniards.
In 1610, for example, George Percy (an English
officer), when ordered to punish a Powhatan chief for
insolence, proudly described how his men marched
into an Indian town, seized some of the natives, “putt
some fiftene or sixtene to the Sworde” and cut off their
heads. Then he ordered his men to burn the houses
and crops. When the expedition returned to its boats,
his men complained that Percy had spared an Indian
“quene and her Children.” Percy relented, and threw
the children overboard “shoteinge owtt their Braynes
in the water.” His men insisted that he burn the queen
alive, but Percy, less cruel, stabbed her to death.
The Indians did not submit meekly to such treat-
ment. They proved brave, skillful, and ferocious fight-
ers once they understood that their very existence was
at stake. When Powhatan Chief Openchancanough
concluded that the English lust for land was inex-
haustible, he made plans to wipe them out. To put the
Virginians at ease, he sent presents of food toThis 1616 portrait depicts Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, the foremost chief of coastal
Virginia. The colonists, in a dispute with Powhatan, took her hostage in 1613 and kept her in
Jamestown. The next year she converted to Anglicanism, took the name “Lady Rebecca,” and
married John Rolfe, an alliance that helped defuse tensions between colonists and Indians. In
1616 the couple came to England with their infant son, where “Lady Rebecca” was received by
King James I. She became celebrated as the “belle sauvage.” She was the most prominent
exemplar of those “intermediaries” who readily crossed the porous boundaries between
colonist and Indian cultures.