Chesapeake (11 page)

Steed was about to say that he had never seen people less hostile, Indian or not, but he deemed it wiser to keep his silence. Passing the pages over to the captain, he held the lantern so that Smith could edit them, and after a while he was handed this:

When Steed read this dumbfounding report he did not know where to begin. It was all true, and at the same time totally false. He skipped the part about the naming of Devon Island; Captain Smith commanded, and until he confirmed a name, it had not been given. He was also willing to ignore Smith’s claims that the Indians had been hostile; to one so often the victim of Indian guile they might have seemed so. And he was even content to have the giant warrior with the three turkey feathers appear stupid, because the others were. He thought, with some accuracy: Smith hated the clever Choptank because the Indian was so very tall and he so very short. He wanted him to be stupid.

But it did gall the Oxford student to have Smith quoting Machiavelli to inspire his men. ‘I heard no Machiavel,’ he said cautiously.

‘The Indians were pressing, and I had not the time.’

Steed made no response, and Smith continued, ‘If a captain leads his men into strange waters against a strange enemy, it is wise for him to think of Machiavel.’ At this, Steed stared at the bottom boards, barely discernible in the darkness, but Smith was not content with acquiescence; he required positive acceptance. With a firm thumb he raised the younger man’s face until stars gleamed upon it and their eyes were level. ‘Tell me, Mister Steed, why would I have got into the canoe almost alone, and ventured into the enemy camp? Men and iron obtain food. It is never the other way around.’

In the dark night the two men glared at each other, with Steed determined to resist the blandishments of his captain. Smith, sensing this, lifted the young man’s head higher and said, ‘I insist that you make one more change in the part I have not yet improved.’

‘Is this a command?’

‘It is. In your account of our departure with the Indians, I want you to write that you volunteered, most gallantly.’

‘But you commanded me to go.’

‘If I had not, you would have volunteered, because you, like me, are a man of iron.’

Steed made no reply, and Smith moved forward in the shallop, but soon he was back with another emendation. ‘Mister Steed, at the moment when I meet the Indian with the turkey feathers, must you emphasize
the fact that he is so tall and I so short?’ This time Steed said, ‘My description was ungracious, and I will gladly change it.’

Still Smith was not through. Much later he awakened Steed with this suggestion: ‘I think you should add that Captain Smith was so struck by the giant size of the Indian general that he felt sure the man could not be a Choptank but was probably a Susquehannock.’

Steed could not get back to sleep, and while the shallop rode easily on the waters of Choptank River he alternated between looking at the silhouette of the island he had named—soft and gentle in the night—and the dozing figure of his commander. Smith was an enigma, willing to make any alteration in the personal record of the trip, yet insanely determined to be accurate whenever geography was involved. At the entrance to every river he took repeated bearings. Constantly he consulted his compass, asking others to check him. He never entered into the log the height of a tree or the distance to shore without finding confirmation in the estimates of others, and with mapping he was meticulous. If he described the dress of a Choptank, he did so accurately.

He was restless in his sleep, and toward dawn came back to tell Steed, ‘I think you can write that we shall not find gold or silver. That dream was vain.’ He spoke these words with such obvious sorrow that Steed shared his heartache, but with the breaking of the sun the little commander was all energy as he shouted to the men, ‘Well, to the westward passage.’ And he sped the shallop north to his next disappointment.

He was a severe leader. One evening, as he assembled his company at the mouth of the Susquehanna, he whispered to Steed, ‘I want you to write with special care what I do and say this night.’ He then ordered the gentlemen to stand in one group, the sailors in another, and from the latter he commanded Robert Small to stand forth. When the man had done so he said harshly, ‘Lift your right arm,’ and when the arm was aloft, Smith stood on the fallen trunk of a tree and with a large goblet poured down the man’s arm a large draft of cold water. ‘Refill the goblet,’ he told Steed, and when this was done he ordered the sailor to raise his left arm, whereupon he emptied the water down that sleeve.

‘Tell the assembly what you did to warrant this punishment,’ Smith snapped.

‘I used an oath, sir.’

‘You spoke God’s name in anger?’

‘I did, sir. I had caught a large fish and he escaped.’

‘Return to ranks, Small.’ The little captain then wheeled to address the entire company. ‘If I demand that you conduct yourselves carefully, I have done the same. I have never drunk spirits, nor diced, nor gamed, nor smoked, nor uttered an oath, nor dallied with women, nor in any way diminished myself. I am a soldier, and I hold myself always to be one. If you sail with me, you do not dice or drink or utter oaths.’

That night, when the writing had been completed to Smith’s satisfaction, he asked Steed, ‘Do you propose becoming a soldier, too?’

‘I have not the stomach for it, sir.’

‘Some don’t. What do you intend?’

‘Devon Island is much in my mind. I think to settle there when this trip is done.’

‘You have no patent. No permission.’

‘It would be well, Captain, if the men at Jamestown thought less about patents and permissions.’

To a military man this was an unpalatable doctrine. A soldier identified his king or general, then served him; patents and proper orders and permissions were the lifeblood of the profession. But he could not expect Steed to understand; in this young scholar there was something devious, something hidden that Smith had not yet probed, and he was not surprised at the stated plans.

The passage to India was not found. The upper end of the bay petered out in a succession of flats and marshes on which the shallop repeatedly grounded, and on the fifth time that sailors swam out with the anchor so that the boat could be kedged, Captain Smith snapped, ‘Mister Steed, tonight you can write that the passage does not exist … not for us.’ Never again would he speak of that lost dream.

The exploration ended curiously. As the shallop drifted homeward down the western shore, Steed kept a fishing line astern, and of a sudden it was taken by a fish so large that he could not pull it in, and as he played the creature, Captain Smith reached into the water to help and was struck furiously in the wrist by the tail of a massive stingray.

Brushing the fish away, he looked at his arm and watched it begin to swell. Within moments it became immense—larger than his thigh—and the fingers began to turn purple. The pain was intense, so hurtful that he had to bite upon a piece of wood, and at the end of ninety minutes, when the arm grew darker in color and the pain unbearable, the little captain said to Steed and the surgeon, ‘I am about to die. Dig me a grave from which I can see the bay.’ And a group of sailors dug a grave and Smith marched to it, sitting himself at one end with his feet dangling inside.

As he sat there, saying nothing, contemplating the end of his adventures, the pain began to subside and the dreadful purple coloring left his arm, and when it became apparent that he would not die, nor lose the arm, he recovered his spirits and asked, ‘Did we land the fish?’

‘We did,’ Steed said.

‘Good. I will eat it for my supper.’ It was fried and he ate it.

In the closing hours of this disappointing voyage Steed had to acknowledge that he had developed a positive affection for his captain. Smith stood a good four inches shorter than he and weighed fifteen
pounds less, but he was pure energy, pure dedication to soldiering, and if he constructed entries to make himself seem braver than he had been, this was not ordinary falsification, because if events had demanded heroism, he would have provided it. Steed thought: Smith’s trouble is with words. He demands that they convey what might have been.

The last river they visited was the York, and even though the weary sailors were approaching home, they complained bitterly of the food, the rain from which they had no protection, the insects. ‘Thunderation!’ Smith exploded. ‘I could build a new Jerusalem on this bay if only I could find seventeen men unafraid of mosquitoes.’

Disconsolately he walked with Steed along the riverbank until they were hot and weary; then he fell onto a pile of drying leaves and confessed the failure of his grand designs. ‘I sought brocaded cloths and found Indians wearing matted bark. I sought gold and was rewarded with marshy weeds. This bay has riches, but I was not destined to find them.’

As he spoke his hand restlessly stroked the leaves upon which he sat—tobacco, brought down the York by Indians for shipment to London. In years to come, bundles and bales and whole shiploads of this weed would move down the rivers of Virginia and Maryland, producing more gold and brocade than even Captain Smith had dreamed of.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW EDMUND STEED; GENTLEMAN
, happened to accompany Captain John Smith on his exploration of the Chesapeake in 1608, it is necessary to go back more than a hundred years.

As the fifteenth century ended, every soul in England was Catholic, which was understandable, since there were no other Christian religions in existence at that time and it was debated whether the few Jews in the realm had souls. King Henry VII, having wrested his throne from the infamous Richard III, ruled with the blessing of the Pope, to whom he willingly accorded both spiritual and temporal allegiance. After years of disturbance the country was at peace, the great monasteries housed clerics of power, and good Englishmen were content to be good Catholics. Martin Luther, who would later challenge this happy somnolence, was then fifteen years old and studying with enthusiasm to be a Catholic priest.

Englishmen had been happy, therefore, when in 1489 King Henry announced the formal engagement of his three-year-old son Arthur to the four-year-old Catherine of Spain, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the most Catholic of majesties. This promised union of insignificant England with powerful Spain was a joyous occasion promising many benefits to the smaller island kingdom.

Twelve years later, when Catherine actually landed in England, she was seen to be a kindly, quiet, well-bred princess who promised to bring love and loyalty to the throne. Young Arthur was enchanted by his first sight of her, and married her gladly in October 1501, with representatives of the Pope lending official approval to this happy union of two Catholic kingdoms. It was an auspicious start to the new century.

Unfortunately, Arthur, heir to the throne of England, proved sickly, and in March 1502 he died. His widow, to the disappointment of all, was not pregnant.

This left King Henry VII with a nice dynastic problem: if he allowed Princess Catherine to escape England and return to Spain, he would forfeit whatever advantages might have accrued to a Spanish wedding; but there was no practical excuse for keeping her as a kind of hostage in London to ensure the good behavior of the Spanish monarchs.

Clever advisors, of which England seemed always to have an abundant supply, pointed out that the king had one justifiable way of preventing Catherine from slipping back to Spain: ‘Marry her to dead Arthur’s brother.’ It was a capital idea, except that Henry, the brother, was only eleven years old, six years younger than his proposed bride.

And besides, no sooner had this diplomatic marriage been proposed than thoughtful clerics dismissed it, for it was contrary to church law. Thundered one divine, ‘Leviticus twenty, verse twenty-one clarifies the matter for all time,’ and he quoted the monitory verse in his own rude translation into English: