Chesapeake (9 page)

Pentaquod’s two sons were now developing into responsible young adults, and Tciblento was an eight-year-old marvel, not so tall as her brothers but much quicker in mastering the lessons her father taught. She had begun to wear her long black hair in braids and had a saucy way of cocking her head when listening to elders. Her father delighted in his children, and it was partly because of wanting to be with them more that he summoned the tribe for his farewell oration:

Uneasiness followed this announcement, for the little people realized that without his towering guidance they might revert to the old days of
fear and flight. The Nanticokes would learn that he was no longer leading the tribe and might conclude that continuing the peace was not in their interest, but the tall Susquehannock was insistent. Then he gave his reasons:

‘Who will be our werowance?’ they asked, and he told them that they should select a young man who could serve them for two generations, and when they protested that they had never chosen their leader before, he allowed his eyes to wander over the frightened crowd. They came to rest on Matapank, who had stood beside him in battle, and when the villagers realized that Pentaquod had indicated his choice, they shouted, ‘Matapank!’ and were gratified.

Pentaquod believed that once he announced his decision to leave, he should do so in a hurry, for if he lingered, he would detract from the importance of the new werowance. Accordingly, he gave Matapank an intensive series of instructions, until that somber day when he joined him in a canoe and paddled downriver past the island to the margin of the bay. There, as the canoe drifted idly, he handed over the hidden burden of leadership. ‘You’ve heard of the time when the Great Canoe came into these waters.’ The new werowance nodded. ‘What you haven’t heard is that when it moved along the shore Orapak, who was a boy then, and his grandfather, who was the werowance, crept behind trees and spied upon the people in the canoe.’

Matapank pursed his lips; he knew the traditions of his tribe, but of such an adventure he had not heard. ‘What did they see?’

‘The people in the canoe had fair skins, not like us, and they had different bodies.’

‘In what way?’

‘They glistened. When the sun struck their bodies, they glistened.’ Pentaquod allowed this information to sink in, then added, ‘And the Great Canoe moved without paddlers.’

This was frightening. Values beyond comprehension were involved, and the young leader could make nothing of them. Then Pentaquod added his last intelligence: ‘One day that canoe will return, and we shall
be dealing with people entirely different … white skins … glistening bodies.’

Matapank had been eager to take on the responsibilities of leadership, but these new factors evoked apprehension. ‘When they come, will you help me?’

‘They may not come in my lifetime,’ Pentaquod said.

‘I think they will,’ the young man replied.

‘Why?’

‘Long ago I dreamed that I would be the werowance. It happened. And at the same time I dreamed that others came to the river, neither Nanticokes nor Susquehannocks. And they will come.’

Pentaquod liked this response. The leader of a tribe should be one who has visions of the future, who can adjust his thinking to developments which he knows to be inevitable. In his case he had known from the start that peace with the Nanticokes was possible, and his every act as werowance had led in that direction. He had also known that his pitiful little tribe could never defeat the Susquehannocks, and he had kept them from making that fatal effort.

‘You are ready to lead,’ he told Matapank as they allowed the canoe to drift, and when they reached shore he handed the new leader a cherished talisman, which he had kept hidden for this moment: the copper disk long worn by the werowance of this tribe. Then he promised, ‘If the strange ones return while I am alive, I will help.’

That day he and his family left the village. Putting aside his three turkey feathers, he led his family to a pair of sturdy canoes, one burned from oak, one from pine, and together they paddled west past the marshes and around the white cliffs into a beautiful small river. When they had penetrated for some distance, they came to a secondary stream leading inland, and when they had gone up this short way it bifurcated, forming within its arms the small peninsula he had noticed long ago.

Tree-covered, it projected south, to be warmed by the sun in winter. There were no marshes in which mosquitoes could breed, but enough deep salt water to produce oysters and crabs. In the forest there would be deer, and on all the waters geese. It was as fine a setting as the Choptank provided, a refuge with visible security and never-ending beauty. From the point on which Pentaquod and his sons erected their three wigwams the family could look down a broad perspective of the stream to the river and the distant pine trees lining the invisible Choptank.

Here Pentaquod spent the two happiest years of his life, 1605 and 1606 in the western calendar. He was older now and slightly stooped; his great broad face was deeply etched from years of leadership, and his hair was white. But he felt young, for his oldest son had left the refuge one summer’s day to paddle back to the village, and when he returned he
brought with him the sister of Matapank, the werowance, and soon Pentaquod had a grandson, longer and sturdier than the usual Choptank baby. ‘He’s to be a fine hunter!’ Pentaquod predicted, and before the child could crawl the grandfather was making arrows for him.

But in the next year a canoe came rushing up the creek, and even before it reached land the breathless paddlers shouted in a mixture of confusion and fear, ‘Pentaquod! The Great Canoe has come!’

He was forty-nine that year of 1607, a man who had earned repose, but when this long-anticipated information reverberated through the forest, he did what he had always known he must eventually do: he put on his turkey feathers, told his family to pack and ordered them to follow as soon as possible. Almost eagerly, like a young buck bursting into a new meadow, his antlers ready, he jumped into the messengers’ canoe and headed back to the village. It was as if he had consciously retired from leadership two years before in order to husband his strength and purify his understandings for the profound tests that lay ahead; he was prepared.

But as the canoe left the small stream to enter the river which would take him to his new responsibilities, he looked back with sorrow and longing at the peninsula which he had transformed. He would not see it again, and he knew this, for with the arrival of the Great Canoe not only would his paradise be lost, but that of all the Choptanks.

ON A COLD, BLUSTERY DAY IN MID-DECEMBER
1606 Captain John Smith, a short, choleric, opinionated little man with a beard and a fiery temper, assembled seven daring gentlemen on a dock in the Blackwall section of London and addressed them in crisp terms: ‘I have brought you to inspect the vessels in which we shall conquer Virginia.’ And he showed them the three small ships that would carry them to the New World, calling off their names:
‘Susan Constant,
one hundred tons.
Godspeed,
forty tons. The little pinnace
Discovery,
twenty tons. And down here, at the end, the object of our meeting this day.’

And he showed them, riding on the Thames at the foot of the dock, a small double-ended, single-masted open shallop twenty-three feet long with eight ominous oars. ‘You, Edmund Steed, jump in,’ Smith commanded, and a fair young man of twenty-five, dressed in the clothes of a scholar, obeyed. Soon all seven were aboard manning their oars while Captain Smith, barely five feet tall, stood approvingly on the dock, watching the little craft adjust to the weight.

‘Sturdy vessel!’ he cried, snapping his words as if issuing a command. Then, drawing himself to maximum height, he saluted the boat.

He was twenty-six that winter—difficult, vain, unbearably ambitious. He had, by his account, already survived dangers that would have destroyed an ordinary man: mercenary in the most brutal years of the German wars, heroic defender of Christianity when the Muhammadans invaded Hungary, captured slave immured in a Turkish dungeon, foot-traveler to Muscovy and Madrid. And now he surveyed his fleet on the eve of his finest adventure: the establishment of a new colony, the subjugation of a new world.

‘We’re off!’ he shouted as he jumped into the shallop. Grabbing the
eighth oar, he began rowing with an energy that shamed the others, and soon they were moving briskly down the Thames. When they passed the three larger ships Smith yelled, ‘Mister Steed, have you handled sail?’

‘That I have not, sir,’ the scholar replied, at which Smith bellowed, ‘Then stand clear as Mister Momford runs it up.’ And a gentleman who had knowledge of boats manipulated the sheets so that a fore-and-aft sail climbed the mast. With it in place, the shallop moved so smartly that rowing was no longer required.

‘Ship the oars!’ Smith ordered, but since the gentlemen were unfamiliar with this command, confusion resulted. ‘Bring in the oars!’ Smith roared, and they were shipped, as he had wanted.

When the brief trip was completed, with the shallop safely in dock, Smith surprised his crew by ordering them to haul the little craft ashore, after which he handed Steed and Momford buckets of paint and brushes, instructing them to number every board used in construction of the boat. ‘Each is to have its proper number, at four different spots, indicating its relation to every other board that touches it.’

When this curious task was completed he summoned carpenters, who dismantled the boat, knocking out nails and wooden wedges until only piles of timber lay on the dock. These he ordered tied in lots and carried aboard the
Susan Constant,
where they were stowed below decks, and when all was secure, Smith led Steed to the edge of the hold in which they could see the bundled spars.

‘An idea of mine,’ he said. ‘Conceived while imprisoned in a Turkish harem,’ and once more he saluted the boat which would play so crucial a role in establishing the Virginia Colony.

Because of his arrogance and vile temper, Captain Smith fared poorly in Jamestown. Thrown in jail for attempted mutiny, captured by Indians, near death at the hands of Powhatan, and actually led to the gibbet to be hanged for insubordination, he was saved by a last-minute revelation. Cocksure and prescient, he survived travail, gave the colony the iron leadership it required, and found time to pursue his major preoccupation: the exploration of the Chesapeake. ‘This is a noble sea,’ he told his men at night, after the day’s work ended. ‘Calm and hospitable, majestic in size. Its potential cannot be imagined.’

He had already mounted two preliminary explorations and was encouraged by what he had found: broad rivers, innumerable harbors, a plenitude of fish and crabs, and meadows yearning to be cultivated. But his two preconceived targets had eluded him: he had not found a passage to India, he had not uncovered the gold and silver which were known to exist somewhere along the shores of the Chesapeake.

‘Infuriating,’ he growled one July day in 1608. ‘Three years ago I heard
the facts for myself. The leaders of the expedition were busy securing permissions in London, so a noble lord and I attended a play, very little substance and I was about to leave, for I do not waste my time idly. But destiny tugged my sleeve and kept me … for a purpose. An actor in this play strode to the edge of the stage and orated directly at me, none other. He spoke of Virginia and told me what I should find here. Silver more common than copper. Kitchen pans and bedroom pots made of pure gold. Rubies and diamonds in the streets. Children gathering pearls along the streams. The riches are here, if only we can find them.’

On Saturday, August 9, he outlined his plan: ‘The gold lies, I am convinced, in towns hidden along the eastern shore of the bay, and there we shall explore most carefully. The passage to India probably starts from the northern tip, so after we have found our gold we shall probe north to identify the passage, then return to Jamestown with our profit.’

The men agreed that this was prudent strategy, and on Sunday all sixteen—seven gentlemen, eight sailors and Captain Smith—attended church, where long prayers were uttered, and on the morning of August 11 he marched his crew to the banks of the James, where he addressed them in solemn tones: ‘We shall be gone thirty days, and at the end you will wish it had been ninety.’ He then ordered his fifteen hands into the reassembled shallop, directed them to take up their oars, and stood like Alexander the Great in the bow of the boat, looking for new horizons.

Among the gentleman rowers Edmund Steed, who had not participated in Smith’s two earlier explorations, had been selected for a particular purpose. Smith had not been entirely pleased with the narrative reports of his first journeys; they had been geographically accurate but had paid insufficient attention to his moral and heroic qualities. This time he was determined that his accomplishments be presented with proper flourishes.

Steed came from an ancient Devon family and was a graduate of Oxford. He wrote well, was familiar with classical allusions and showed a proper respect for the captain. Both on the
Susan Constant
and ashore at Jamestown he attracted attention, and Smith now assured him, ‘I seek only an accurate account of what occurs during our exploration. Strict attention to where we sail and special detail when we move ashore.’ He paused as Mister Momford prepared to break out the sail, then added confidentially, ‘And it would be prudent if you paid attention to the words and heroic deeds of the commander.’