Chesapeake (16 page)

As the canoes approached his undefended bateau his heart beat with hammers; if the Indians wished, they could sink the boat and leave him powerless. They passed it by and came to the rock landing he had fashioned. The man with the cleft chin jumped out first, and led the way for the chief, who seemed even larger as he came on this crucial visit.

When the giant was about to reach the hut, Steed rose, extended both hands, palms up to prove that they were empty. The Indian studied them, extended his own, and looked for a place to sit. Steed beckoned him inside, and for more than an hour they talked. Neither knew a word of the other’s speech, but they spoke of deer, which were plentiful, and of oysters, which were good when dried, and of the woven wall Steed had built. The Indian considered it commendable and showed his followers that he could not penetrate its close weaving with his finger. They were unusually interested in his tools, and he showed them the axes with their sharp edges. He took down one of his guns and laboriously explained its loading and preparation. Having done this, he led the tall Indian outside and waited till some doves flew by; taking extra precautions and holding his breath so as to steady the gun, he fired. A dove fell not far from the chief, who sent the man with the cleft chin to fetch it.

‘How did such a thing happen?’ he asked in pantomime, and Steed explained. But remarkable as the gun was, it was the bateau that tantalized the giant chief and he asked if he might inspect it. The visit had proceeded so amicably that Steed was ready to believe that these Indians were exactly as they had been before: they were not infected by the wars of the Potomacs. So he took the tall chief to where the bateau was moored, and four of the Indians climbed aboard. They wanted to know
how the sail, which lay in the bottom of the boat, operated, and what the oval leeboards were; they were perplexed by the length of the oars, but always they came back to the sail. Then began a mysterious operation, repeated many times: the chief touched the sail, then touched Steed’s face, and the Englishman could make nothing of the gestures. But finally it dawned upon him that what the Indian was comparing was the whiteness of the sail and the face.

‘Yes,’ Steed said. ‘A sail is always white.’ And he hauled it up the mast and showed the Indians how to lift the anchor, and when a breeze came the boat and its five passengers moved down the creek.

Seeing their chieftain being spirited away alarmed the Indians on shore and they launched a great clatter, which the chief silenced with a gesture. He then studied the sail’s whiteness, and Steed saw that he was weeping from some deep and powerful remembrance.

When Steed was satisfied that friendly relations were possible, he indicated that he wanted to pay the tribe for the land he was occupying, so a formal procession was arranged—the bateau carrying Steed and the tall chieftain, followed by the four canoes—and it went upriver to the village of Patamoke, where the young werowance was informed of all that had occurred on the island. A deed was drawn up, dated 10 October 1611, and signed by Steed, who showed the werowance how to make his mark. The tall chief did likewise, as did the little fellow with the cleft chin. When this was completed he handed the werowance one ax, one hatchet, such cloth as he could spare and seven nails. He had traded a fair portion of his worldly wealth for an island the Indians not only did not need, but had never used.

And when the paper was folded, and the long clay pipes were smoked, he did more. By sign language he promised them that when trade was established he would give them additional gifts, and he insisted upon this because the pact had brought him slightly more than four thousand acres, half on the island, half on the facing shore, and some of it the choicest land along the river. By this treaty, his immediate problems of existence were also relieved, for he received an unlimited supply of vegetables, and he could sleep at night untroubled.

But what galvanized his imagination was something he saw as he was about to leave: in the corner of the long house lay a bundle of beaver pelts, and when he asked where they had come from, the werowance pointed generally to the south, indicating that in the marshy lands across the river there was an endless supply of beaver.

Then Steed knew what he must do: he must convince the Indians to bring him many pelts against future trading privileges; he would deliver the furs to Jamestown, where ships from England would barter for them.
The result would be a constant flow of axes, cloth, guns and nails, with a generous profit to him on all transactions. His ancestors in England, dating back to the thirteenth century, would have been mortified to think that Steed was about to engage in trade—that was forbidden a gentleman—but Edmund rationalized that none of them had tried to settle virgin acreage. He would make himself the best trader in the colony.

But like Captain Smith on the banks of the York, he failed to spot the commodity which would form the true basis of his wealth. As he stowed the beaver pelts in his bateau he did not notice that in an opposite corner of the long house the werowance had another treasure, a pile of the best tobacco leaves. The English gentlemen who emigrated to the New World did not learn rapidly; they were amazingly delinquent in acquiring the skills that mattered, like fertilizing corn with dead fish or living off oysters when meat was unavailable, but when they did finally learn something, they clung to it desperately and made it better: Edmund Steed had learned how to accumulate beaver pelts.

But there was one question the Choptanks did not answer for him, the one that would perplex every European settlement in the New World: where would the men who fought the wilderness find women? Each nation solved this vital problem according to its traditions. In Canada the French forerunners were already taking Indian brides. In Mexico to the south, where a flourishing civilization had developed, Spaniards had adopted two solutions: some married Aztecs, some sent home for childhood acquaintances. In Brazil the Portuguese, finding jungle Indians incompatible, chose black women who had been imported as slaves from Africa. And in Virginia the stiff-lipped Englishmen did nothing until such time as shiploads of properly assembled London women could be delivered by artful ships’ captains, who sold the ladies off for payment of their passage money, plus an undisclosed profit.

Edmund Steed, now thirty-two, would never have thought of taking into his hut an Indian girl. An English gentleman married an English gentlewoman, preferably of one’s own county and religion, and if none came along, the gentleman might wait till he was thirty-five or even forty. Steed thought that when he delivered his beaver pelts to Jamestown it would be about time to consider buying a bride, but until then he was content to live alone.

Not really content, not really alone. The tall chief, having observed his loneliness, waited for a day when he and Steed bargained in broken words for a pile of pelts, and when a trade was concluded and the lesser Indians had left, he uttered a low call. From behind reeds at the end of the wigwam a seventeen-year-old girl appeared, wearing soft brown deerskin and cockleshells in her hair. Steed recognized her as the child he had seen on that first trip to the Choptank, and he even recalled her name, Tciblento, although at their first meeting he had misspelled it.

‘She is to accompany you to the island,’ the white-haired chief said. ‘She has been saved for this moment.’

The beautiful girl kept her gaze downcast and would not look at her father’s guest, but her eagerness to visit the island was apparent. Steed blushed and rejected the offer with prolonged attention to protocol: he was honored; she was lovely; the chief’s friendship meant everything. And something in the way he spoke conveyed to the waiting girl the fact that he was rejecting her, and her slim shoulders drooped like the petals of a flower left in the sun.

Her father would not accept this decision; in agitated words he explained that his two sons were married to Choptank maidens, but that he had always hoped Tciblento might mate with a Susquehannock worthy of her. But this had not happened. He ended with his eyes close to Steed’s, pleading with him to accept this child, and when the Oxford man indicated by manner, if not by words, that never could he marry an Indian, the old man said, ‘I bided my time and trusted that when the Great Canoe came …’

‘What is the Great Canoe?’ Steed asked.

‘It came a long time ago, and we knew it would return. We waited.’ He formed a sail with his fingers.

‘You mean our ship?’

‘Yes, we knew you were coming.’ He would say no more, but he did persist in the matter of his daughter. ‘She is a good girl. She cooks, traps beaver, knows where the oysters and crabs are.’

Steed was embarrassed. For a chief to be peddling his daughter was undignified, and for an Englishman to accept would be repugnant. Firmly he said, ‘No. She cannot come.’ The girl did not weep or run away; she stared at Steed with her great dark eyes as if to say, ‘Sir, what an error you make.’

Pentaquod, his self-respect shattered by what was happening, felt that he must show the Englishman the character of a Susquehannock warrior. Summoning the man with the cleft chin, he ordered him to designate two Choptank men to accompany Steed back to the island and there to make their homes, helping him in all things. Each of the men brought a woman and built a wigwam, so that Devon was properly settled.

But this was no solution for Steed—he still lacked a wife, and when the time approached in 1614 for him to load his bateau with beaver pelts and return to Jamestown, he felt a growing sense of excitement. He thought: One of the ships coming to trade would surely bring a cargo of women. Perhaps he would find one whose passage money he could pay. But a moment’s reflection warned him that if any women had arrived, they would have been picked off by the local settlers; his chances of finding a wife would not be good. He therefore drafted a letter to his father, not even knowing if Sir Fairleigh was still alive:

Folding the letter neatly, he tucked it among the beaver pelts, cast off the bateau, and with his two Indian braves as crew set out for Jamestown.

It was a long and peaceful sail, during which he was able for the first time to savor the Chesapeake and see it for the glorious body of water it was, without the pressure of exploration or flight. He lay back with the tiller tucked under one knee, his only obligation being to advise the Indians when he wished to come about; they loved this operation when the boom swung, and the sail filled from the opposite quarter, and the leeboards were shifted. It was a game which never palled, this trick of sailing into the wind, making it do what you commanded. Sometimes they asked Steed to allow them to supervise the maneuver, and one of them would take the tiller, and watch the wind and the sail, and cry in a loud voice, ‘Prepare to come about! Hard alee!’ and the other would swing the boom and work the lines. Then both would smile.

So long as the course remained down the Chesapeake, Steed felt no unusual emotion, but once the boat breasted the headland of the James and started tacking upriver, he became tense, for here some of the great days of his life had been spent: his defense of Captain Smith when the mob had wanted to hang him; his escape from the murderous Indians who had flayed his partner; his magical survival of the starving time, when eighteen of his closest associates had perished; and most memorable of all, the sense of having helped launch a little colony in a new land.

It wasn’t so small a colony now; large ships were arriving from England with all the trading goods the early colonists had longed for, and where once there had been only men protecting themselves within a stockade, there were now women joining them to build families which occupied separate homes.

As his bateau pulled up to the wharf, now a sturdy affair projecting well into the river, Steed was captivated by the sight of the women; he had seen no Englishwomen for many years and had almost forgotten the grace with which they moved, the fall of their heavy skirts and the way they tied bits of cloth about their throats. They were like magic to him,
a reminder of all he had surrendered in fleeing to his island, and he was filled with that hungriness which would determine all he would do on this trip.

There was a ship in the river, the
Victorious
out of Bristol, and its captain, Henry Hackett, was excited when he saw the bundles of beaver pelts. ‘I’ll take all of them you bring, Steed,’ he growled. ‘And what’s that aft, sassafras root? I’ll take all of it, too.’ It was much prized for distillations and the making of infusions to lower fevers. But Hackett’s chief delight were the two small tubs in which Steed had stored his salted sturgeon eggs.

‘Caviar!’ the captain shouted. ‘I’d take twenty tubs. Fish eggs is in great demand in London. They turn rancid quick but they’re worth the risk.’

In return for this strange collection of goods, Captain Hackett offered Steed a choice of axes, saws, nails, dried beans, salted pork, a compass, folds of writing paper, ink and a dozen books bound in leather. He chose only after the most careful calculations, as he had done when a boy being offered lollies at the grange, and when he was through, the captain said, ‘You should have been here to choose two weeks ago.’

‘What extra had you then?’

‘Brides.’

‘Women? English women?’

‘And a few Dutch. With your credit you could have bought yourself a beauty.’

‘Will you be bringing more?’

‘That I will.’

‘Will you deliver my letter, then, to my father?’ He rummaged among the beaver pelts and produced the carefully composed message, and when he handed it to the captain he explained, ‘I’m asking my father to pick me out a bride and send her here in your ship.’