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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe Boost Mobile is now sending experts nationwide to deliver and set up customers new phones.
- [00:39]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Wait, we're going on tour?
- [00:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We're delivering and setting up customers phones.
- [00:42]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
It's not a tour, not with that attitude.
- [00:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Introducing store to door switch and get a new device with expert setup and delivery.
- [00:48]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Delivery available for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com we
- [00:51]
Commercial Narrator
all prefer things a certain way. Like like groceries. If you want groceries just how you like them, you gotta try Instacart. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences upfront, helping guide their choices. Because when it comes to groceries, the details matter. Instacart get groceries just how you like. Carter's has your family covered for every summer first first steps, first swim lesson or first sleepover. Our clothes help kids and parents have their best summer ever. Thanks to comfy design and easy dressing details, generations of families have trusted our must haves for babies, toddlers and kids designed to shine season after season. Visit Carters.com to shop the latest styles or find a Carter's store near you.
- [01:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. The story of the Stuarts in America is one of ambition, survival and conflict. A struggling colony on the edge of collapse, powerful indigenous groups defending their homelands, investors in London chasing profits across the Atlantic, and a new royal dynasty seeking to extend English power far beyond its shores. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, he inherited a kingdom eager to compete with the great empires of Spain and France. Across the 17th century, English colonies in North America would grow from fragile outposts into permanent settlements, laying foundations that would shape the future of the Atlantic world. All this month on Not Just the Tudors, we are exploring the story of Britain's encounters with and presence in America in the run up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which was signed, of course, on the 4th of July, 1776. Joining me once again is Peter C. Mancour. In the last episode, Professor Mancor and I discussed how Elizabethan explorers journeyed westward in search of land, influence and advantage. Today, we'll look at the creation of the Virginia Company and the founding of Jamestown. We'll encounter figures such as Captain John Smith, whose leadership helped save the struggling colony, and Powhatan and other indigenous leaders whose diplomacy and resistance proved decisive in the contest for Virginia. But this is not simply a story of exploration and settlement. It's also a story of cultural encounters, religious ambition, imperial rivalry and violence. The English arrived hoping to build profitable Protestant colonies. Yet they found themselves dependent on native peoples for survival while competing with rival European powers and confronting challenges they scarcely understood. How did the Stuart colonies become a testing ground for ideas about empire, governance, faith and commerce? And how did the decisions made during this formative period have lasting consequences for America and Britain alike? I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Peter, welcome back onto the podcast. It's a delight to talk to you again.
- [04:42]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Well, thank you, Susanna. I'm delighted to be back speaking with you.
- [04:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's set the scene, picking up perhaps where we left off. What's the state of English America when the Stuart dynasty came to the English throne in 1603?
- [04:57]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Well, at that moment, English interest in North America has increased. It's increased through a series of news about explorers, explorations that started in the 1580s, which led to the doomed colony of Roanoke and then more explorers in the 1590s. And so at the turn of the new century, there is, I think you would say, growing interest within England about North America, but still no sustained commitment. Nothing on the part of the English that would rival what the Spanish had been doing or the Portuguese had been doing in the Americas. And so I think there was growing interest and I think also growing anxiety. Anxiety about news about the wealth going to the continent, anxiety about the possible spread of Catholicism within the Americas, which the English would very much like to stop, but not enough anxiety to really prompt major colonization efforts. I mean, those are sort of just looming. So this is the same moment when joint stock companies are bringing new goods to England. There are more and more people in the mercantile community making investments. And so things seem to be coming together. And as I sort of talk about in my book, Part of what's happening is there's more information circulating, especially through printed books. And as that information grows, then I think it helps spark more interest. And on that front, the most sort of important thing that's happened was the publication between 1598 and 1600 of the expanded version of Richard Hackl's Principled Navigations, now in three substantial volumes, the third volume devoted to the Americas. And so I think anyone who had, who had some interest in the Americas now could see in front of them what was there. And more important, because of the way that Hakluyt organized his materials, he could see that English people have, in fact, a very important experience going abroad. And so these things sort of, I think, create a new moment at the dawn of the new century.
- [07:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So that new moment, is that really this sense of a shift from exploration to colonization as the goal of interactions and presence in the New World? And if so, what are the motivations behind this?
- [07:28]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
I think when we look back on it, I mean, that's such a great question. I think when we look back on it, there is certainly, you know, as a historian of early America, at some point I do need to sort of, you know, shift in my thinking or how I talk about it, from an era of exploration to an era of colonization. At this moment, though, in the early. The first years of the 17th century, that era of exploration is still going on. So at the same year that the English would arrive in Jamestown was the first year that Henry Hudson started his explorations. So the age of exploring is still going on, still attracting a lot of news and would continue to. But it's also a point where there is a dawning recognition that it's good to know what's out there, what explorers have found. And explorers often would lay claim to new territory, a model that Columbus had pioneered in 1492. But there was also a sense, okay, now it's time to move further. Right. I think that the legacy of Roanoke lingered. I think there was certainly knowledge of what could have been. I mean, the great book that comes out of Roanoke, Thomas Hart's Brief and True Report of the Newfoundland of Virginia, has a whole section on merchantable, what he calls merchantable commodities. So I think that though explorations are going on, there is a sense that it's time for colonization and colonization not only to extract resources, but. But colonization as the English particularly pursued, colonization as the way of solving domestic problems, that is finding an outlet for these young, unemployed or underemployed men and putting them to use somewhere. That would be Useful for the realm. I think these two strands, or maybe three strands, exploring for the sake of bringing glory and expanding the realm of the discovery of new commodities to enrich people and the need to sort of solve a domestic problem. These come really together powerfully in the first decade of the 17th century.
- [09:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned the creation of joint stock companies as well. One of those in 1606 is the Virginia Company. Why was that established?
- [09:51]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Well, the Virginia Company was established as a way to pool resources to fund the creation of an actual colony. There are actually other colonies being formed at the same time. But the Virginia Company, which becomes arguably the most important, certainly for early Virginia, is the sense that there is this place that the English can survive, but there is also an unwillingness on the part of the Crown, on the part of the state, to fund colonization. And so a group of merchants in port cities, London, the most important, but also in Plymouth and Bristol and other places, begin to sort of say, okay, let us use our resources to pay for ships, to get young men, boys and men to come over and to sort of advance the interest of the state. They do it. They form the company because they think there are great profits to be had. But I also think it's important for us, and I think sometimes historians downplay this. I also think they really do see themselves as agents of, well, at that point of the king, you know, and we are going out and they are going to do good things. They're not just in it for the money. They're in it for this sort of larger package, this larger group of things that they can do in which glory, God, profit really do sort of blend together. And I think that they see that as companies are going to other parts of the world, it is time now to really have a company dedicated to North America.
- [11:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we get the founding and near collapse of Jamestown in 1607. What were conditions like for settlers?
- [11:40]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Oh, conditions were very, very bad for those English colonists who went over. They go to a place, you know, the modern Chesapeake Bay. They go up the river that's now the James. They go to a place that on their maps, looks like an ideal place to colonize. Part of the reason for colonization is this ongoing competition with Spain. And so they wanted to establish an American base where they would be able to raid Spanish ships. And in their sort of imagination, they would attack Spanish ships. They would be successful at this, and then they would sort of turn around and they would go. And they would go up the Chesapeake, and then they would go up what becomes the James river, and so they put Jamestown at a place which they thought was defensible. So if they did this successfully, this maneuver, if they had established a colony, got out to sea, found the Spanish as they're returning back to Europe, you know, laden with the treasures from Mexico or New Spain, right, they would rob them and come back in. And so if you look at the maps, as they understood them, they not only go up the James, but they go up the James, and they go around this little point in the James, and there they build a fort, and their fort where they aim their cannons out to the river. Now, the river is very broad there, but what they're less knowledge about is that the river is also very shallow there, especially in the summertime. And the James and the other rivers that flow into Chesapeake Bay are a mix of fresh water from runoff from the mountains, from the winter snows when they melt, and salt water. And so, depending on the time of day, the salt water from the sea comes in with the tide, mixes with the fresh, and then goes back out. And for much of the year, that's fine. People could learn how to live. But the Jamestown colonists arrive in the summertime. And in the summertime, the level of the James goes down. And as the tides bring salt water back and forth, it deposits salt into the water. And the English at that point really don't know how to find fresh water other than taking it from the James. And so that water is not particularly healthy. As they look around and they're sort of scrambling and they're trying to, you know, how are we going to negotiate with the local people, the palatans, or how are they going to get along? They are also trying to set up this camp, this what would become a fort. And they continue to drink water out of the James. Well, because of the. Where the James is, because of that hook in the river that I mentioned, there's sort of this local feature of the environment that the salt gets trapped there. And as the water level recedes in the summertime and the people in the colony not only take their fresh water from the river, but dump their waste into the river, the river doesn't have an ability to flush waste out so that it can be fresh to drink. And so even as they're there in those first couple summers and they're drinking the water, they start to suffer from these terrible diseases from dysentery and typhoid, as well as this phenomenon. So as salt poisoning, which on its own doesn't kill, but it weakens, it makes people angry. And so these so these men, these boys, you know, just afflicted with, you know, these terrible fevers and diarrhea and just they're dehydrated and they're angry and. And at the same time they're trying to have negotiations with the people that live there. And, you know, you can sort of imagine, and we don't have the best documentation those early years, what the natives are thinking, but you could just imagine the Palatins looking at these English and in somewhat, perhaps sense, perhaps feeling sorry for them. And so the palatans, you know, help in many ways in those first things to help the English sort of stay there, because the palatans see a possible advantage of having the English as new neighbors. And we can talk more about that. But the specific question is they land and set up in a place which is maybe not the worst place they could have found, but certainly among the worst places they could found. Because if you plot where you're going to live based on a map that you have in London that says, okay, here's a place to hide on a river, and you don't know the local conditions there, you can sort of see that that led to. Well, we know that it led to a disaster. And so these men and boys, especially in the summertime, are just dying. I mean, it is terrible those first couple years and that mortality would go on for several years, would go on through the 16 teens. You know, they would just not really understand how the environment worked. Eventually, for reasons we may talk about, they disperse, they find fresher water, they survive. But the beginning is a nightmare.
- [17:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So is it fundamentally that location, that environment, which is why the town comes so close to collapse?
- [17:11]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Well, it's environment and combined with their attitudes, it's hard for me 400 years on to sort of, you know, I don't want to disparage these people, but I think you read the documents, a certain amount of arrogance that they presumed that they would succeed. They presumed that success was going to come quickly because that's what the documents had sort of suggested. You make it there, it's going to be healthy. And the people who'd gone to the Outer Banks, which are described in Harriet's book, they don't suffer from these problems. There's just no reason to assume that they assume they're going to succeed. Well, when you arrive in a new place, when they arrived, I should say in a new place, place they thought they were. That the local people would sort of embrace them. And so they treated them not as sort of in a way that in retrospect, they might have that, you know, we are supplicants coming to you, we need your help. They instead said, we claim this territory, you know, through the right of discovery as the English understood it at the time, and it's sort of ours. Well, that's not exactly a great posture for dealing with people who you still can't really communicate with very well. They're learning more and more about each other, but communication is still difficult at this moment. And so when you combine the environmental problems with sort of the political or sort of psychological motivations, I think you can sort of see how this will lead to problems. And those problems came on powerfully in those first years of the colony.
- [18:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How important was Captain John Smith, now quite a famous man, to the survival of Jamestown?
- [18:57]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
So Smith is a really interesting character. You know, interesting is such a vague word, but I mean, Smith is an endlessly fascinating character because there's the Smith sort of who was in Jamestown not for a very long time, and then he goes back after not getting along with other colonists, some of whom try to kill him, it seems at one point. But he goes home. And he is one of the great fabulists of the moment where he just keeps telling his story and telling his story. And in telling his story it's these sort of self aggrandizing stories where in the documentary record that we have, it's all because of him, right? He's the one who sort of saves the day, even though by his own admission there's a moment where he is taken captive and says that he is rescued by the daughter of this head man, daughter of the person that the English call Paladin, whose name was Wahun Sonakah or Wahun Sonicaq, and who daughter is Pocahontas or one of her names, Pocahontas name she's known by. So we have this curious phenomenon where Smith sort of comes in, sees problems, rises up, says, okay, I have this military experience, I know how to do things. I'm going to go deal with Watts. Undercock gets himself captured, then believes he's about to be executed. Claims later, after the fact that that Pocahontas, who's probably 10 or 11 years old, saves him, and this is supposed to tell us something about him. And then he, in his own mind, sort of helps establish these better relations. Well, those relations would of course break down. There'd be a war that would come soon after. But at the same time, at that moment, I mean, really, in some ways the most famous moment of Smith's Time in Virginia is this moment that he's taken captive and it becomes blown up in American myth. Right. You know, you can go look at the Disney movie Pocahontas in which Smith is the center of the story. Well, you know, Smith believed that Mohun Tzedakah was going to execute him. And it seems far more likely, as other scholars have pointed out, far more likely than what was going on was that Wahunsenaca saw the English as another possible tributary tribe to him. He had spent a generation building up a political powerhouse, this confederacy of 30 or so tribes that are somehow loyal to him. One of the English said that had a hundred wives. He disperses them into these towns. The children he has with these women become his emissaries in these towns. And he's created this whole network that predates the arrival of the English. I think the more reasonable thing, as other scholars have said, is that moment when he is taken captive. London Tsonechalach isn't going to kill him. He is putting him through a ritual adoption to symbolize that the English are, in his mind, well, to be another tributary tribe. That is, they are to acknowledge Wahunsa Khan as the paramount leader of this area and basically to do what he says. And if they do, they'll trade with them and they'll have good relations and everyone will be able to survive. One of the fascinating material objects that comes from this time period is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and it's called Palatin's Mantle. It's on the first floor in the Ashmolean. And we don't know exactly what it is, although scholars have stipulated, and I think this is a reasonable scenario, that there's a figure at the center of it and then surrounded by a series of things. That's a deer skin sewn together with then shells to make these little circles around it. There's deer and a man. And some people have interpreted that, and I think plausibly so, as a representation of the Palatin Confederacy while in Suncock, possibly at the center of it. And these are these dependent tribes, these subsidiary tributary tribes that are around them. It's one of these moments that's sort of like, wow, that's an amazing thing for us to visualize. Indigenous structures of power absent as before colonists got there. But we don't exactly know, you know, what it means, but it is there to be seen. It's an amazing artifact of this moment.
- [23:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I wonder how religion factors in the minds of these Stuart colonists. How does Protestantism influence both their settlement policies? And their relations with the native peoples.
- [24:01]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
So that is an excellent and somewhat complicated questions. So I would follow a line of historians through the Tudor period into the Stuart period, you know, who really see that Elizabeth's actions, especially in Ireland, do show a serious commitment to link conquest with religious conversion, to sort of say, okay, we embrace Protestantism. It is really the one true faith. And it is the true faith for the people who are going over to North America. And that faith has two enemies in the way that these English thought about it. Rome and Catholicism, a species, a type of Christianity, that it's rejects that this is the truer version and what the English would see as the lack of Christianity among native peoples. And so the English who go to Jamestown, like the English would go to other colonies in eastern North America in the 17th century, have this sort of dual religious burden on them. They believe that. That their faith is not only the proper faith, but it's so obviously true that other people, native peoples, once they hear about it, will be drawn to it. Though we don't think about early Virginia as a religious mission. Right. You know, in the American historical mindset, we sort of say that's what happens in New England. That's what happens with those people we call Pilgrims and Puritans. Well, religious conversion was just as important, phrased differently, but just as important for the people that go to Virginia. And we can see that in the actions of people. So we know that they have compulsory attendance at the church that they create there from the start. And to go back to Pocahontas, who becomes in many ways the most famous native person, you know, of the 17th century, at least to Europeans, you know, she's this face and she. Whatever, you know, she's this person they know. When she. To skip ahead from Smith a little bit. When she. In the mid 16 teens, she's taken captive in a war and then. And then redeemed, she marries an English colonist named John Rolfe. Rolfe, in his writings talks about that marriage, you know, as religious work, as godly work. So he takes seriously. Yes, you know, he's forming an alliance in some sense with. With Mahon Sonderk's daughter. And I think he is generally in love with her, and I think she's in love with him. There are people who dispute that, but I don't think we have enough evidence to know either way. But I assume their relationship was sincere. But in his way, he wrote about it. It's also part of this larger mission. We are going to need to find ways to Spread our faith. What's fascinating about it is that the English, unlike the Spanish, do not typically in the early 17th century, look to form relationships with indigenous women in eastern North America. So Rolf is sort of suggesting a way forward, but I think he is also, in the way that he talks about his relationship with her, he is giving us a clue that religious conversion is as important to at least some of these colonists as material gain or political glory. I think this is very important and I think it's because of this larger sort of triangulated world that they live in. Not only is Catholicism in Rome a danger, but they are hyper aware when they get to Virginia in the early 17th century that there are Catholic missionaries working to their north with the French colonization, attempted colonization of the St. Lawrence Valley, and to their south with the constant, the ongoing Spanish colonization of what, modern day Florida and into the Caribbean and Mexico. They're aware and I think they really think, you know, if they don't do something, if they don't create sort of a Protestant bulwark there, if they don't do something, Catholicism is going to spread through the continent and that's going to then just create more problems for the English as it goes forward. So one of the things I wanted to do in my book and in when I talk about what my work is about is to say let's get beyond this idea that English go to New England for religious reasons and English go to the Chesapeake for economic reasons. Those colonies have different trajectories, but at the heart, religion was still important to the people that go to the Chesapeake.
- [29:25]
Commercial Narrator
We all prefer things a certain way, like groceries. If you want groceries just how you like them, you gotta try Instacart. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences upfront, helping guide their choices. Because when it comes to groceries, the details matter. Instacart get groceries just how you like.
- [29:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Boost Mobile is now sending experts nationwide to deliver and set up customers new phones.
- [29:52]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Wait, we're going on tour?
- [29:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We're delivering and setting up customers phones.
- [29:55]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
It's not a tour, not with that attitude.
- [29:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Introducing store to door switch and get a new device with expert setup and delivery.
- [30:01]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Delivery available for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com Carter's
- [30:05]
Commercial Narrator
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- [30:35]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Are you looking for the perfect podcast to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?
- [30:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, look no further than the award winning After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddy Pelling and me, Anthony Delaney.
- [30:50]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
We are historians and love all things
- [30:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
gloomy and macabre, from Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore. Feel transported back in time on After Dark, out every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. And guess what?
- [31:06]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
We're Also now on YouTube After Dark, a podcast from history.
- [31:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now one thing that's quite striking in the way the English approach colonization that differs from the Spanish is how they deal with families and society. So why was sending women and building English families so important?
- [31:45]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
So that is a great question, and I don't think it has a particularly obvious answer. I think there is a sort of a deep historical motivation for it which goes back to the centuries earlier experience that the English had in Ireland in the 12th century, experience of sending men over to conquer with the presumption that their culture would be superior and that native Irish people would embrace it and come on. And instead the English experience, as the English experiences understood in the 16th and 17th century about what happened earlier, the experience is if you send men over, they're going to intermarry into these communities and rather than our culture becoming dominant, are these emissaries of us are going to be integrated into it? I think that legacy is out there. I think that in the English experience in Ireland in the 16th century, when the English send migrants, send women as well as men over, there is a different idea. And the idea is that we need to recreate, we need to move parts of English society across, in that case, the Irish Sea, but then ultimately across the Atlantic Ocean, because that is the surest way to create a foundation for the society that we want to create. And so I think as soon as the English find Jamestown and decide they're going to stay, which is really in many ways the most remarkable decision that they make in the early 17th century, they decide to stay in this place where diseases are destroying their bodies and where they have very tense relations with the people who are there, nonetheless, they begin to recruit. The Virginia Company begins to recruit young women and girls to go over. They're outnumbered by men in the early years of the colony to maybe by as much as 6 to 1. Most of the women that go over. Go over as indentured servants, like most of the men go over as indentured servants. These women become to these men very desirable. And once the terms of their service are over, they, you know, immediately marry in. And men, Englishmen are desperate to marry these women. And so we see this phenomenon in early Virginia, as other historians have pointed out. You know, we see this phenomenon of sort of serial marriage that is not because people are getting divorced, but because if these men should die, women very quickly remarry. The fact that the English very quickly, that is, in the early years of colonization, decide that they have to send women over or want to encourage women to go over and recruit them. And we're talking about people who are very young. I mean, these are teenagers. We're talking about. Often we're talking about people in England. We're saying, let's sort of transport, you know, orphans and people have no other support, and we'll sign them up for indentured servants contracts, and let's make sure they're women as well as men in there. And I don't think there is a positive answer to this, but I think it was the legacy of the Irish experience and the experimentation of colonization in parts of Ireland by moving women as well as men in. That then is in the air, and it feeds this moment. So they see having English women there as crucial. They know that the Spanish have gone in another direction. But one of the things that they reject, they reject so many things about the Spanish. They reject their adherence to Rome. They reject X, Y, and Z. They also sort of disparage these relations that people have that the Spanish have. And so I think they think, okay, we, the English, in this mindset, we are going to move our society over. We're going to move it in groups of people who will come over. Yes, there are more men than women, right? Maybe someday that would equalize. It would actually equalize in New England, but not so much in the Chesapeake. Because that was the stable model. Because at the end of the day, the English, as they wrote about in the early 17th century and have been writing about since the foundation, was the building block of the society, right? The family was really. You needed a strong family in their patriarchal mindset, a powerful father, husband figure, a wife who they would hope would be obedient to him, and then children and as many as possible to colonize this place. I think they really did think that was a model. I think that was a model they derived from reading texts in England, and they thought it would work. It's not that it didn't work right. It just took time for it to work.
- [36:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In order to attract people to come to Virginia, the Virginia colony had to create an image about what it was like. How were the colonies presented to people back in England? And was there an element of deception about that?
- [37:06]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Well, there was certainly an element of exaggeration. You know, there was certainly a sense, you know, that there is great wealth to be found, that colonization is not difficult, and that I think after the first couple of years of Jamestown, now things happen in early Jamestown which are very difficult and very challenging. There's a war that breaks out in 1609 that would last to 1614 when the English got to the other side of that war. The timing is amazing because this is right around the time John Rolfe, the same man who marries Polka Hondas, is experimenting with West Indian tobacco seeds and realize that the strain of tobacco is very desirable. And so you begin to see this sort of boom in tobacco that starts in the teens and then would continue and become the economic salvation. Now, among the people that don't like that, of course, is the case king. You know, the king's very first public statement in terms of a pamphlet to the English people, when he takes stone, is the counterblast to tobacco, in which he says, tobacco is a terrible thing. So you have, by the 16 teens, this curious circumstance where the king is very happy to have colonized, have his people colonizing eastern North America. That is great for all sorts of reasons, but their economy is based on a product that he really doesn't like at all. But tobacco is very popular, and people coming back from Virginia, those who survived, are saying, there's great wealth to be found here. I mean, at some point, there's parodies about this. Oh, you know, go to Virginia. You'll make your fortune. And then your people are just mocking the insane. Exaggerations are circularly swirling, as I imagine, you know, in London and in other cities. But tobacco does generate real wealth. I mean, for those who manage to survive and can figure out a way to grow more and more tobacco, that is a great business to be in in the 16 teens. And though the king doesn't like it, there is at the same time a belief that tobacco is healthy. Europeans talk about since the 16th century that tobacco has all these benefits for human society. You know, it's not necessarily by smoking it. They would make sort of poultices of it. They would lay it on the body. There's whole tracts from the 16th century say, this is the Great new medicine of our time, and the English like it. And so there's a proliferation in the early in these years of images of people smoking tobacco and enjoying it. And it becomes sort of the foundation of this economy. Well, it takes some time, and it's hard to sort of look back because we collapse a lot of this in time. It takes some time, but by the late teens, into the 20s and then beyond, if we look beyond, we begin to see people really solidify what would become great fortunes. I mean, they would eventually create these substantial and very profitable plantations of which tobacco was the basis of the economy in those early years. That's sort of the dream of the future. Here's this plant. This plant may be good for us. We really enjoy smoking it, and we can sell it. I mean, there's just this rapid expansion of the number of people selling tobacco within England. So it feeds this dream, right? So if you have this idea that if you sacrifice and you make it across the ocean, you survive, you can, in this dream, become wealthy. Now, that dream turns out to be false for many people, but not for everyone. And the stories of those success is what a lot of people wrote about in their letters and in pamphlets. And so it feeds this idea. The people like Hakluyt were right. The future, or all future, is over there.
- [41:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One of the obstacles, as it were, to that future was the relationships that the Stuart colonists had with the native peoples. What sort of tactics were the English using to try to dominate the indigenous people, and how did they justify and conduct their campaigns against them?
- [41:40]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
So this is where, you know, to answer that question, you know, sort of takes us into really different mentalities. And so I think for us, for me, you know, historian of, you know, European expansion, I can see, okay, that the English following other Europeans lay claim to this territory following the doctrine of discovery. They lay a claim to any land that doesn't have a Christian prince in it, that they're the first Europeans. So they, on some sense, think they own whatever own is. And in an English sense, once someone claims territory, the land could be parceled out as it had been in England. And there was an idea that individuals and families owned land. One of the differences that they're now meeting peoples who have very different conceptions of what property is. There's not the same sort of individual title to land in Powhatan society as there is in English society of the same time. And so the Palatans, like other Ayonkian speaking peoples in eastern North America and other native peoples across eastern North America it's not that they didn't have a sense of property. It's that just not have a sense of property in land. And so people or communities laid claim to what they produced. So if they cleared land and planted crops there, which they did very successfully, those were theirs. Right? That was their thing. They didn't really think about whether they owned the underlying land. It wasn't really an issue because it wasn't part of the culture. So the English arrive with this claim, and it's institutionalized. It's sort of visible in their paper. We own. We lay claim to this territory. They would have negotiations. They met. You know, the leaders of the colony would meet with Powhatan and say, okay, how are we going to get along? We would like to be here. And he would say, yes. And they came away from those meetings with different ideas. The English came away with, we bought this land. And the Powhatans came away with, we're letting you live on this land. That's sort of a perfect recipe for conflict. Now, it turns out that the first war sort of happened so early that it's not so explicitly about land and conflicts over land. That's what the second war would be about, that first war. So they're trying to get there. So they're in 1607. And you can just imagine the misunderstandings that are going back and forth across this cultural barrier. People simply don't understand each other. And so the colonists would write, we have these documents that the Palatins are mingling around them. So at the same time, you have the English building this fort. You know, at Jamestown, there are native peoples walking in and out of it the whole time. Right. I mean, they don't see this as. Why would you. You know, it's not yours. It's, you know, it still is Palatin territory. You know, that was sort of how we Paladins understood the agreement with you English. So there's a lot of people going back and forth, and you can just see there's a lot of tension. These men aren't feeling well. They are unable to feed themselves, so they're relying on the palatans in the fritzers for food. That thing I mentioned earlier about salt poisoning is making them irritable and angry. So we know that they're fighting. We have this in the records. And you could just see these skirmishes go back and forth. And so the English get there in 1607, and the first war breaks out two years later. And that war goes from 1609 to 1640. And the English used tactics in that war which were devastating. They burned fields, they burned houses. They have superiority in weaponry. I mean, the English do have guns that the Paladins lack at this point. And so the English see this as, oh, it's another field for conquest. And so it's so hard to sort of recreate sort of, you know, sort of the fibers of everyday life. Why would you go to war against the people whose food you need, you know, to survive? Why would you burn their fields? Because you're trying to, what, starve them out when they could just as easily starve you. Right. I mean, so part of it, it's hard to understand. So, you know, what we call this war is not, I think, like a modern war. I think it's a series of skirmishes. Yes, there is hostility. There's absolute violence, and the violence is terrible. And it goes on in this sort of heightened level of tension. And then the English take Pocahontas captive in 1613, and in the negotiations for her release in the following year, they sort of say, okay, it's time to end the hostilities. And there the principal figure is Wahunsenaq, who basically says, okay, this is over. I agree that my daughter can marry one of your guys, John Rolfe. And he sees this as an alliance and providing political stability. And we know this because another English colonist goes to Walton Sonicok and says, I'd like to marry one of your other daughters. And he says, no. He says, basically, one at a time, you know, let's see what happens with Pocahontas maybe down the road. So Walton Tanacock really understands, you know, in some ways, relations between families at a high level that are similar to European understandings of forming alliances through marriages. And he's saying he is controlling it. And so there is this war. So the war comes to an end, and then there's a period of peace. And then. And this is where things go back to your question about land. This is the moment, the mid-16 teens, when the English are deciding that tobacco is their future. And one of the things about tobacco is the tobacco exhausts nutrients in soil very quickly. So if you decide you're going to have a farm and tobacco is going to be your major crop, you are going to need within relatively short amount of period time to have other land. And over the course of the 16 teens, as the tobacco economy becomes more established, as there's still this ambiguity about what land ownership means, English colonists finishing up their terms of service, right, They've gone. They've been servants for Four or five years, they get a little bit of a package. Then they get seeds, maybe they get an animal, they get a little money, they go to some, they go and try to create new farms. Women who've survived their servitude marry these men who've survived their servitude. Well, they are just planting and planting and planting. Eventually, Pocahontas was gone, Wahunsenakok dies, and this tobacco economy is still growing. And it's that the English sort of relentless expansion for their own thing, which they think again, they're justified in doing. Eventually, other palatans with different ideas about politics than the English have basically say stop. And that leads to the more devastating war, which is the war that begins in 1622. So at the base of that, and the reason that war is, I would argue, more significant than the first, is because that war is a conflict over land and a conflict over who is going to control these fertile lands in the Chesapeake.
- [50:02]
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- [50:32]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
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- [50:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, look no further than the award winning After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddy Pelling and me, Anthony Delaney.
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Professor Peter C. Mancour
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [51:03]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from history hit.
- [51:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Two years after that war broke out. We see the transition from the Virginia Company's corporate rule to a royal colony. This is a turning point. What prompted this change and what did it mean for governance in America?
- [51:41]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
So the war, it's hard for us to understand, to appreciate the significance of what happens in 1622. The company is still in charge, right? They're running things and their agents in London are basically saying, look, we've solved some of these early problems. The population, the English colonial population is growing. Their ships are going more frequently back and forth. There's more tobacco coming in. I mean, the company can make an argument that we know what to do to create this. This colony. Then March 22, 1622, happens, and a war chief named. We typically pronounce opechan kanu. We don't. It's spelled many ways. We're not positive about the pronunciation. But opechan canoe leads an uprising on this day. And on that day, he and his allies swoop in, and they kill about a quarter of the colonial population. And not only is this a dramatic fact that the English claim to be completely surprised, they don't understand where this came from immediately. This generates within England, within however long it takes for information to get across a pamphlet by Edward Waterhouse which labels this a barbarous massacre. And in that pamphlet, there's a. It goes for 7, 8, 9 pages, a list of every person killed by the palatans, One after another after another, page after page, right? The psychological effect of reading that, I think was overpowering the English then still under the company, the English then launch a series of reprisals. No, this is unacceptable behavior. You know, we are going to stop this. In the midst of this war, a year into this war in which both sides have been taken captives, and the palatins have some captives, an English captain, you know, in Jamestown, goes to free some captives to deal with the paladins. He's going to redeem these people. So they take a ship up the river, what's now the york river, and they go up into pamunkey territory where they think they're going to see opechan canoe. They're not positive, but that was the rumor, and they're going to redeem these captives. And at this moment, which I think is one of the decisive moments in all of English colonial history in north America, they get the captives off, and then the English say, okay, let's toast the end of the war, right? And so if it's unclear what's said one to another, but they pull out a container of fortified wine sack, and they have a drink, and then they hand another container to the natives. Opechan canoe does not, in fact, seem to be there to hand this well that contains poison in it. And per our understanding from colonial records, The English poisoned 200 of the paladins. We don't know if they died, right? But they're poisoned. And then they, according to witnesses, go back later that day, and they shoot and decapitate scalp 50 people, right? And bring back literally the parts of their heads, right, you know, as war trophies, as punishment as what? Define it as you will. When news of this. This incident of poisoning reaches London, it creates panic. The people in the Virginia Company are at this point aware that there is an emerging sense of the laws of war. And one of the things not allowed explicitly is you can't poison your enemies. So English people, like other Europeans, knew about poison. Poison was something used as a device on the Shakespearean stage. Poison is something that other people do. Sort of people who are after us. Maybe they're Italians and they'll poison people, or they're Catholics and they'll poison people. But it's not something that the English would do. The English are going to abide by these kind of emerging laws of war and, you know, which are being codified in England in which poison is ruled out. And so the company goes into, you know, almost sort of, you know, sort of panic mode to say, okay, what happened, you know, at that incident, you know, in Pamunkey territory? And they try to downplay it, and, you know, and they sort of downplay it, you know, in a. In it becomes sort of a confession. Where they start off, you know, well, we would never poison people. We know that's wrong. And then, you know, point two would be, well, maybe, you know, our people took poison along just in case, but they wouldn't have distributed. And then it goes, well, maybe they distributed it, you know, to some, but it couldn't be 200. And it probably didn't kill them. And we didn't go and shoot 50 people. We only killed nine people or whatever, you know, the number in the document. That's their defense. So basically admitting that they did this. The king is very upset when news of this spreads. There's already been words about how poorly the colonists are being treated by the Company in Virginia, these rumors had swirled. So at the same time that the rumors were about the great wealth to be made, there's also rumors about the squalor that they're living in and very detailed reports about the deprivations, not the terror, the nightmare of living as a colonist in early Virginia. So those reports are there. Now. There's the story of the poisoning. Now the king hears about it, and the king basically says, okay, enough. We have to dissolve the colony. It's going to become a royal colony. And to go back to that poisoning story, the person the king believes is responsible for the poisoning, the apothecary of Jamestown, he is banned from a leadership role in the new colony. So he. The king refers to this man, his name is John Potts, as quote, unquote, the poisoner of the savages. And he does not say it in A positive way. He says that this is the kind of person who cannot be involved in governance. I have lost my faith in you. Now it's going to be a royal colony. And so it becomes a royal colony. And you know, the king. So the people in Virginia, the people on the ground in Virginia, are consumed with what's going on there. The people in England, the directors of the company by the early 1620s realize there are other English colonists in eastern North America. Right. They have gone to colonize, you know, New Plymouth. This sort of religious group is up there. There's going to be competition. There's going to be, you know, where does our colony stop and yours begin? They have a lot of sort of anxiety. And then the king has a sort of bigger view, or the king's advisors maybe is a better way of putting it. And he says, okay, now we're going to go forward. So you see this reorganization now, I will say on the ground in Virginia, that war which began in 1622 in is still going. It would go into the early 1630s before there finally sort of a final resolution. And even though the colony at that point is a royal colony, in 1644 there's another war, the Third Anglo Palatin War. And at this point Opiechenkanu is still around. He's rumored to be 100 years old. He is taken captive in that third war. He's eventually killed by the English during that war. And this is seen as sort of a mark of really of shame for the people that, that killed this hundred year old man. I mention this because the shift in the governance of the colony from the company to the Crown doesn't have an enormous impact on what's going on in Virginia itself. That the trajectory, the relations that the English have with the Powhatans sort of stay on their own natural course. The tobacco economy continues to grow, migration increases. You know, maybe the royal colony is a bit more successful at recruitment than the company had been. But in many ways it's a philosophical change. And it is important because it shows now the king willing to do what Elizabeth wouldn't do.
- [60:49]
Commercial Narrator
Right?
- [60:49]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
It puts the power of the state behind a specific colony as opposed to leaving in the hands of investors. So in that sense, it's an important turning point, without question, but an important turning point, you know, sort of organizationally in England does not necessarily mean the same thing in Virginia where as I say, I think there's more continuity than not.
- [61:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you for introducing us to these first decades of the Stuart colonists in America and taking us to this point, albeit maybe not changing things on the ground, but where there is this clear sense that the state is now going to be behind this project, that colonization is on the agenda for the Stuart monarchs as we go on further into the 17th century. Maybe we'll have a chance to pick up that conversation another time. But for those who want to know more about it, your book the Contested Continent the Struggle for North America circa 1000-1680 is out now in the United States, coming soon to the uk. Pre orders are available. And it's been an immense pleasure to talk with you again, Professor Peter Simanco.
- [62:02]
Professor Peter C. Mancour
Well, thank you, Susanna. I mean, this is a great honor for me to get to speak with someone just so deeply knowledgeable about this time period. And thank you so much.
- [62:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [62:51]
Commercial Narrator
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