Chesapeake (19 page)

‘We want the werowance to marry us.’

‘You never bothered before.’

‘I was afraid she’d run away.’

‘I, too,’ the old chief said, and as he spoke his eyes wandered to Tciblento, who had been listening to the conversation, and he wondered why it was that this man had been unable to find in his daughter the wife he needed. A most perplexing matter, for in his first glimpse of Meg Shipton he had known that Steed must not marry her; she was swift and darting like the black duck and no man could catch her. The new one would be strong and stable, like Onk-or the goose, a good wife but lacking in fire. And all the time there stood Tciblento, the finest woman this river had produced, or ever would produce, and he had found no way to convince Steed of this truth. It was indeed perplexing, as if the Englishman had a film over his eyes which prevented him from seeing the excellence of an Indian.

Nevertheless, Pentaquod arranged a stately wedding, beneath tall oak trees inland from the river, and all members of the tribe assembled in tribute to a man they had grown to trust. The shaman chanted blessings and midwives predicted that the union would be fruitful. Crabs and fish and beaver pelts were laid before the gods, who, properly propitiated, could be trusted to give their protection to this marriage. Four children from the tribe brought flowers for Mistress Keene to stand upon and four boys handed Steed a long pipe and an arrow tipped with eagle feathers.

Then Pentaquod spoke in words that Martha could not understand. He referred to himself and Steed as two strangers who had come to this tribe, and who had found happiness and good lives along this river. He pointed out that both he and Steed had taken alien women to be their brides and that often such things worked well, as had been proved in his case. He then said that when a man goes to a new place, and takes a new bride, he associates himself forever with the fortunes of that place, and
is obligated to defend it in war and guide it in peace. Steed had proved that he was the good neighbor. The Indians working on Devon Island had assured him that Steed’s wife would be a good neighbor, too, and he blessed them both for coming to this river.

Steed had tears in his eyes when the old man finished, and so did Tciblento, who appreciated with terrible intensity the appropriateness of what her father had said. While the werowance was conducting the ceremony she had tried, desperately she tried, to keep her dark eyes away from Steed, but in the end she could not. Looking at him with a longing that consumed her, she asked that question which has no answer: Why? Why?

When the bateau delivered the couple back to the island, Martha said, ‘The little Indian girl with the braids … the one with the dark eyes … she’s in love with you, Edmund.’

‘Tciblento? She’s Pentaquod’s daughter.’

‘Why didn’t you marry her … to begin with?’

‘An Indian!’

Martha never mentioned the matter again, but later, when Tciblento offered to visit the island to help instruct her in Indian ways, she politely refused, and sometimes whole months would pass without the Steeds’ seeing Tciblento, but one day in 1619 Pentaquod himself came to Devon to inform the settlers that his daughter was to be married, and he would be pleased if they would attend the ceremony. They did, and Martha saw that the Indian girl, now twenty-three and beautiful in her dress of deerskin adorned with beaver and porcupine quills, stood close to tears throughout the ritual. It was Martha’s judgment that the young brave she was marrying amounted to little and she doubted that he would ever inherit the title of werowance.

In these years the Steeds paid Pentaquod and the Choptanks substantial sums for any new land they occupied. They now owned 2,160 acres on Devon Island, the exact extent having been calculated by Martha, with the aid of careful measurements made by her husband. Only a few were under cultivation, but they also had title to another 2,488 acres on the mainland. None of this had yet been cleared; it was Steed’s intention to burn down the trees as soon as he had trained enough Indians to tend the fields, from which he would send increasing boatloads of corn to Jamestown.

It was in 1626 that Steed’s fortunes took a radical turn, after which the clearing of additional acres became an urgent necessity. In December of that year he had guided his bateau back to Jamestown with a heavy cargo of corn, beaver, sassafras and caviar, and as he was unloading onto a two-masted ship from London, he found that a crude river boat from
somewhere up the James was unloading on the opposite side of the trader. It was Simon Janney, and the cargo he was hefting about with the aid of ropes was new to Steed.

‘What are those great bales?’ he asked.

‘The stinking weed,’ Janney replied.

‘Tobacco? Is there profit in tobacco?’

‘The surest,’ Janney said.

‘Where’s your farm?’

‘Far upstream.’

A silence, then, ‘Is Meg with you?’

‘Never.’

More silence, then, ‘What happened to her?’

Janney did not care to answer this. ‘If you have cleared land, Steed, you should consider tobacco. Difficult to grow but easy to sell.’

‘I spend my acres on corn.’

‘Switch to tobacco, You’ll never regret.’

‘And where’s Meg?’

Janney kicked at one of the bales, then confessed, ‘Two hours after she climbed out of her canoe at Jamestown she met a man looking for a wife. Before nightfall he had paid me her transit money and as soon as proper he married her. She lives in one of the new houses on the riverbank.’

Steed saw her once. She carried a parasol and wore a large straw hat edged with gold ribbon, her blond hair peeking out provocatively to glisten in the sun. She walked with a light step and seemed to be smiling to herself, even before she spotted her former husband, as Steed insisted upon calling himself. When she saw that it was Steed of Devon beside the road, she nodded gravely, smiled slightly, as if unable to control her inward laughter, and passed on. Her husband, men at the wharf told Steed, was a man of growing importance in the colony.

But it was Simon Janney who made the lasting impression during this 1626 trip, for when both Steed’s boat and his own were unloaded he led the islander to a tavern, where they talked seriously for a long time. ‘If you have good land at the ready, Edmund, you should plant tobacco instantly. I have more seed than I need, and I’d be prepared to bring it to Devon to get you started, providing you’d share profits with me.’

‘You said difficult to grow. How difficult?’

‘Many pitfalls. You must watch the land it doesn’t grow musty. Nor get too much heat. And it’s best if you have a shed for drying, but even if you do, you must turn the leaves.’

They spent that night discussing the cultivation of this delicate plant, and toward morning Janney convinced Steed to take the gamble. ‘I’d not bother you, Steed, if I had land of my own available, but the Indians are fractious. My wife and I have not been able to clear—’

‘What wife?’

‘Captain Hackett brought her over. One hundred and thirty-seven of them. All disposed of within two days. Mine’s scrawny but she can work.’

Mrs. Janney had been a serving girl in London, made pregnant by the master, who fell sobbing in his wife’s arms with the lament: ‘She tempted me, that one.’ She had been hauled into court by the clergy and condemned for a harlot; when her child was stillborn everyone involved deemed it best that she be sent to Virginia, so her mistress paid her passage with Captain Hackett.

He, of course, conveniently forgot that her passage had been paid and offered her for sale upon arrival, a gaunt, gawky thing, meriting her husband’s description of
scrawny.
She had excited no bidding in the early stages of the auction, for she was certainly not a prime prospect, but this did not deter Hackett. ‘Someone’s bound to want you,’ he kept assuring her. ‘Women are at a premium … any women.’ And even when she and two other ungainly scarecrows stood alone at the end of the line, the captain was still confident that he would uncover some ill-favored planter who would need her.

Simon Janney was that man. Once bitterly disappointed in this game, he haggled with Hackett over price, and when a bargain was reached he took her west. This time he encountered no problem in holding his woman; for her, he represented a final haven.

Steed remained longer in Jamestown than he had intended, because Janney insisted that he sail far up the James to inspect the tobacco fields, and when they landed at the rickety wharf and he saw the foul conditions in which Janney lived, he appreciated Meg’s decision to run away.

‘This is Bess,’ Janney said as Steed entered his hovel. He saw an emaciated woman in a torn dress. Her teeth were bad and her hair unkempt. But when she and her husband took him out to inspect their fields he found all things neat and trimmed, and he understood their strategy: fields first. ‘These are handsome acres, Simon,’ he said. ‘Do they yield good tobacco?’

‘They do. And if I could trust the Indians to help, I’d clear those beyond the trees.’

‘Help may be a long time coming,’ Steed said, thinking of how peaceful the Choptanks were and how dangerous the Potomacs.

‘There’s talk of bringing in more blacks from Africa,’ Janney said. ‘But even then us little planters would be at the far end of the barrel. We’d see none of them.’

‘You must have help to clear this country,’ Steed agreed. He then watched as Janney unriddled the mysteries of growing tobacco, the cultivation of the fields, the processing of the leaf. Steed had never smoked tobacco and was most doubtful that the fad would be permanent, but when he was told of the earnings Janney had made on his
small fields, his cupidity was aroused. ‘Could I do the same on my big ones?’ he asked.

‘Better! I studied your fields when I went to fetch Meg.’ This mournful recollection slowed his enthusiasm, so on a more subdued level he argued, ‘Steed, with your fields and your Indians you could treble what I earn.’

They reached an agreement whereby Janney would collect as much tobacco seed as possible, then follow Steed to Devon, where he would show the Indians how to grow what he called ‘the stinking weed.’ When he arrived, Steed and his wife talked Pentaquod into lending them six additional Choptanks to till the fields and tend the delicate plants. They also built along the shore a pair of long sheds for drying the leaf, and Janney taught them how to construct oaken hogsheads. A substantial industry developed on Devon, and when the crop was harvested and cured, the great hogsheads were rolled down to the wharf where Captain Hackett docked his
Victorious.

Custom already required that Virginians, as colonists, send their precious tobacco only to the mother country, and only in English ships. This meant that Captain Hackett and his storm-racked
Victorious
exercised a monopoly which paid the colonists meagerly and the factors in London well. Even so, when shiploads of trade goods began pouring back into Devon, delighting the Indians along the Choptank, Steed realized that he was on his way to building a fortune.

He was goaded to even greater profits by Janney, who pointed out that since Steed could use Indians, he really must develop the copious lands he owned on the north bank. So in 1631 Steed assembled a work force of himself, Janney and seven new Indians to clear massive fields across the channel, the agreement being as before: Janney would return to Jamestown once the fields were prepared and come back with tobacco seed, sharing in whatever profits were realized.

All through the winter and spring, fires smoked the sky as Indians knelt about the trunks of towering oaks and loblolly pine, girdling them and forcing them to die. On fields where the trunks had been earlier burned, ropes were attached to upper branches, now dead, and the forest sentinels were pulled down. Then Steed and Janney would wait for a rainy day, when danger of fire spreading out of control was at a minimum, and on such days they would light vast conflagrations to burn away the fallen trees, for which they could devise no use. For weeks the sky over the Choptank would be black with smoke and the men even blacker with soot.

‘We’re making our fortunes!’ Janney exulted. ‘And when we’ve finished here, we’ll transport these Indians across the bay and burn off some new forests I’ve spotted along the Rappahannock.’

‘Would you leave your farm on the James?’

‘For me it’s been an unfortunate river.’

‘Why not come here? Take up land along the Choptank?’

‘Oh no!’ Janney said without hesitation. ‘The center of life will always be over there.’ And no argument could persuade him to quit the western shore, where the great fortunes would be gathered, the lasting reputations forged.

Captain John Smith had become a garrulous old man who bored his London cronies with rambling tales of Hungary and Virginia. It was not until many years after his flight from the colony and the death of the Indian princess Pocahontas that he revealed that when Chief Powhatan had spared him from the chopping block, it was only because the lovely princess had thrown herself across his, Smith’s, prostrate body. ‘She loved me,’ he confided, ‘desperately she loved me.’

‘Then why did she marry Rolfe and not you?’ asked a man who had known Pocahontas when she visited the English court.

‘Marry!’ Smith snorted. ‘An English captain dally with an Indian maid? Let alone marry her! That’s for lesser men like young Rolfe.’

He was dismayed when travelers from Virginia informed him that Edmund Steed, with whom he had served at Jamestown, had finally disclosed his true colors and stood forth as a Catholic. ‘A Papist?’ he repeated several times, shaking his head incredulously.

Then his mind cleared and he remembered his adventures with this gallant young man. ‘He came close to death, that one. They were cutting the flesh off poor Ratcliffe, inch by inch, and the poor fellow died. No regrets from me. He’d voted at Nevis to have me hanged, but I stormed back in time to save young Steed.’ It hadn’t happened that way. Smith had been long gone before Ratcliffe died.

‘I was with him in the sickness, too. Steed, that is, not Ratcliffe. In one tent seven of us dead with the flux, except that I fought back. Steed shared his last food with me.’