And so one day passed into another, until White began to notice this idyll’s fragilities. In recent years, hunting had been bad. For reasons that mystified the Indians, the deer population in the vast woodlands surrounding the river was dwindling. As supply continued to shrink, demand was becoming desperate, if only to fulfil an annual tribute demanded by the mamanatowick Powhatan. Adding to the pressure was concern about a continuing lack of rain. The village store of corn and beans was running low, but the plants in the fields were not yet a foot high, suffering from the second year of a drought more extreme than even the elders could recall.9
The Quiyoughcohannock weroance Chaopock was also concerned about the amount of loot rival chiefs across the river were extracting from the starving English. The blue beads, copper and glittering minerals being offered in an ever greater multitude were valuable as symbols of chiefly power, and good substitutes for venison as tributes to offer Powhatan. The circumstances that had led to Chaopock’s promotion to chief made him sensitive about matters of status, and going to the English with his begging basket would be demeaning. But, with so many of his fellow weroances proving so greedy for the interlopers’ wares, Chaopock felt he had no choice but to go downriver to see what he could get. He went sometime in the summer, and returned a few days later, showing off a bright red waistcoat presented to him by the English weroance, Wingfield.10
Then the English were forgotten, as the village became preoccupied with internal matters. White had no idea what was going on, but frantic preparations signalled an important and rare event. The first sign that it was taking place was the appearance of community leaders in heavy make-up. ‘The people were so painted that a painter with his pencil could not have done better,’ White noted. ‘Some of them were black like devils, with horns and loose hair, some of divers colours.’
One day, White awoke to find the town deserted. Probing the surrounding woodland, he discovered the entire community congregating in a clearing, preparing for some grand event. There followed two days of frantic dancing, intensifying the mood of anticipation. The horned satyrs, carrying tree branches in their hands, danced in a quarter-of-a-mile circle around the village fire, one group moving in the opposite direction to the other, both emitting a ‘hellish noise’ when they met. The branches were then thrown to the ground, and the satyrs ‘ran clapping their hands into a tree’, from which they would tear another branch. Anyone who lagged behind was beaten by Chaopock’s personal guard with a ‘bastinado’ or cudgel made of tightly packed reeds. ‘Thus they made themselves scarce able to go or stand.’
On the third day, fourteen strong boys aged ten to fifteen years, painted white from head to foot, were led into the village’s central arena. For the rest of the morning, the adults danced around them, shaking rattles. In the afternoon, women arrived with dry wood, mats, skins and moss. White, with a growing sense of foreboding, noted that they had also brought funerary goods used in the preparation of corpses. The women then began a terrible wailing.
The boys were led to the foot of a tree, where they were made to sit, watched by warriors brandishing bastinados. Presently, a guard formed up into two lines facing each other, creating a path leading from where the boys were sitting to another tree. Five young men dressed as priests were allowed to fetch the boys one by one, and lead them along the path. As they went, the guards subjected them to a hail of blows, forcing the priests to shield the boys with their naked bodies, ‘to their great smart’. Once all fourteen boys had been transferred from the foot of one tree to another, this ritualized abduction was repeated, then repeated a third time. Finally, the pummelling ceased, and the guards tore down the last tree under which the boys had been seated, and decorated themselves with its dismembered branches and twigs.
White could not make out what had happened to the boys in the midst of the mêlée, and it was at this point in the proceedings that he was asked to leave. Later, however, he glimpsed them again, somewhere near the torn tree. They were ‘cast on a heap in a valley as dead’. His shock was compounded by Chief Chaopock, standing ‘in the midst’ of them, summoning his warriors to bring wood to build a great pyre, ‘set like a steeple’. White was convinced that these were preliminaries to sacrificing the children ‘to the devil, whom they call Kewase [Okeus], who, as they report, sucks their blood’.11
Later that day, everyone returned to their houses, as if nothing had happened. Okeus’s work with the Quiyoughcohannock was evidently done, and the frenzied, gruesome mood that had gripped the town was allowed to subside. The smoke of the smouldering town fire carried the wanton spirit away from the houses, through the trees and out on to the river, where it turned towards the bay, following the smell of fresh blood.
On 6 August 1609, a Jamestown settler named John Asbie succumbed to ‘the bloody flux’. His death marked the start of a month of mortality in the English fort.
Sickness and desertion were already rife. Supplies were all but spent. There was nothing left to drink, and in the absence of a working well, the men were forced to use the river, ‘which was at a flood very salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men’.12
Rations from the ‘common kettle’ were ‘half a pint of wheat and as much barley boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fried some 26 weeks in the ship’s hold’. This put pressure on other sources of sustenance, including Wingfield’s flock of chickens. Only three survived to peck at the hard ground between the frail tents, when they were not being chased by ravenous labourers.13
Responsibility for this sorry state of affairs has traditionally been laid at the feet of the English class system. Unlike the hard-working, clean-living Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in 1620, the ‘gentlemen’ who made up such a large proportion of Jamestown’s population have been portrayed as work-shy fops and dandies who ‘were used to social strata but not to discipline’, and who preferred the ‘narcissistic contemplation of heredity’ to getting their hands dirty.14
In fact, most of the gentlemen of Jamestown had military backgrounds, and, while some hated the idea of heavy manual labour, they by no means saw themselves as due a life of ease.
Captain John Smith was himself a gentleman, and proud to be called so, advertising in his autobiography that the title had been endorsed by no less a figure than the King of Poland.15 Most of the others similarly classified had less heredity to contemplate than even Smith. He, at least, had a ‘competent means’ from his father and the patronage of a prominent member of the English nobility. Many had lived hard lives on the battlefields of the Low Countries, France and Ireland, or on the edge of destitution. Some were quite poor, the family of one military captain, for example, boasting an estate worth just twenty shillings.16 Perhaps one or two were feckless opportunists who preferred to rely on their charm and wits rather than honest toil to make a living. But their behaviour was a consequence of the relative lack of social privilege, not an excess of it. Similarly, they had not crossed the Atlantic and put themselves in the predicament in which they now found themselves because life at home had been so easy, but because it had been so hard.
Smith’s peers, particularly the squabbling council members, may have contributed to the settlement’s first crisis, but even he acknowledged that the damage they caused was collateral. The origin of Jamestown’s woes, at least in these early stages of settlement, lay in the simple lack of food. Calculations for provisioning the expedition had inevitably erred on the side of stinginess, with enough to cover a two-month crossing, and six more months in America while a planting of crops ripened, the fort was built, and trade relations with the Indians were established. According to this timetable, a harvest would be ready by the time the supplies started to run out, which could supplement,