American History Hit - Jamestown

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

In late April 1607, three ships carrying a hundred men and boys arrived in Chesapeake Bay, having set sail from London four months earlier. They travelled up a river and created what became the first English settlement in North America. Benjamin Woolley tells Don about the many struggles that the people of Jamestown would face in the years to come.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is the summer of 2012 in historic Jamestown, Virginia. Archaeologists have just discovered human remains.

Among them, a 400-year-old skull of a teenage girl that proves something only written about in historical accounts and until now thought of as myth by many. The marks on the skull convince forensic anthropologists that the girl was dismembered and eaten by other people. Cannibalism had definitely occurred in the Jamestown colony during what was called the starving time in the winter of 1609, 1610. Colonists had first arrived there two years prior, creating the first English settlement in North America.

By the autumn of 1609, they were under siege from Native Americans and didn't have enough food to last the winter. First, they ate their horses, then dogs, cats, rats, mice, and snakes. Some ate the leather of their shoes. How many of the growing numbers of dead were cannibalized? is unknown, but the girl was almost certainly not the only victim. By the time relief arrived, after six months of siege and starvation, the colony was almost wiped out. Only 60 of the original 300 settlers had survived. Hello, thanks for tuning us in. I'm Don Wildman and welcome to American History Hit. In 1607, just over 100 English men and boys arrived in the new world,

having set sail from Blackwall London in three ships and made their successful crossing, of the Atlantic in about four months. With first landfall on April 26, 1607, they went on to explore a wide outlet of the Chesapeake Bay, a river they named in honor of their reigning sovereign back home, James I. A few weeks later, on May 14th, they chose the site of their settlement on a swampy remote peninsula of land 40 miles up river, where they would build a fort and call it James Town. Four centuries ago, Jamestown was carved out of Virginia Wilderness. Maybe hacked out is the better term for it. This was two years before Henry Hudson journeyed up the river one day named for him,

some 20 years before the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod, and 75 years before William Penn strode onto the shores of a future Philadelphia. Jamestown was the first, the first English settlement on the North American mainland, and the struggles they faced were so arduous, it's a miracle it all worked out. And here to explain this historical unlikelyhood is, Benjamin Woolley, an award-winning writer, broadcaster, scholar, whose book Savage Kingdom, published some years ago, shown a new light on a dim and dusty subject many Americans take for granted if they haven't forgotten about it altogether. Greetings, Benjamin. Welcome to American History Hit. Nice to have you. Hello. Hey, 1607, we're at the tail end of the famous age of discovery, the age of exploration, generally defined as happening in the 15th and 16th centuries when the preeminent European sea-going powers, Spain, Portugal, French,

all cross the oceans, claiming land and feasting on the riches of a new world. But England was late to this game. Why so? England, bluntly, was a bit of a backwater then. It was, I mean, its prominence in the history books can be exaggerated a bit before this period. This is when it starts to get real purchase as a international power. It was certainly within the European theatre of power. And it didn't have the resources and it didn't have the expertise until this particular period.

It's called sometimes the English Renaissance, in part because it was the time when a number of things came together. You know, Shakespeare came together with another figure I wrote about called John Dee, who was a sort of important scientific figure involved in the whole venture, together with Philip Sidney, a poet warrior. All these sorts of figures started to coalesce around a new set of ideas. One of those ideas was to try and catch up with the other European nations and develop what John Dee christened a British empire. to act as this kind of counterbalance to Spain, which was the dominant power at the time.

I just think it's worth mentioning to anyone who's sort of foggy on this period. Columbus is 1492. Ponce de Leon discovers Florida in 1513, Cortez, 1520, Magellan, same time. There are so many expeditions and conquests throughout the 1500s. But aside from Cabot back in the 1490s, who I was surprised to learn, I didn't know this, was actually Italian, Giovanni Cabato. You know, he wasn't even an Englishman. Wasn't that the Tudors were just not interested in this? I mean, Queen Elizabeth I first, for example.

I think that Elizabeth, who was the last of the Tudors, had too much else on her plate. I mean, not least in the Armada battling with Spain. And I don't think there were the resources to do this kind of thing. However, there were undocumented attempts by English people, probably some Scots and Welsh and Irish to cross the Atlantic. but their stories have disappeared basically. They're not documented. We know by implication there was at least one journey across the Atlantic from England in the very early 1600s, 1602, 1603, something like that.

Raleigh, of course, had been across in the 1580s and he was the one who kind of broke, Sir Walter Raleigh, that is. He was the one who broke the mould and set this spirit of adventure, if you want to call it, that going in England. but his efforts were unsuccessful. As indeed the attempts by the first who went over in 60106-607, that first expedition, that looked like it was going to go the way of all the others and fall apart, really, from its very first stages.

James I ascends to the English throne in 1603, and he succeeds Queen Elizabeth I. He's the first king of all of England, Scotland and Ireland. He kind of invents the United Kingdom. How much does this moment in English history have to do with the fact that they're about to do this new settlement. That's a really good question, and to which it is really difficult to come up with an answer. Ironically, he doesn't set up the United Kingdom because various political forces actually

prevent him from uniting his crowns, the Crown of Scotland and the Crown of England. And it's also strange. I mean, now the United Kingdom is being really quite tested in terms of the unity of the kingdoms that James tried to establish. It's always been a complicated relationship. It did to a certain extent have an impact, though, on this idea of a single Protestant set of kingdoms that would be able to counterbalance the power of Catholic Spain. And this idea of a British Empire, which was a Protestant power that would counterbalance Spain,

was something that helped push this venture forward. However, it's big, however, James didn't want it to happen because he wanted to try and reach settlement with Spain. So all these early expeditions had to be done in the most tentative fashion because they threatened to upset James's foreign policy, basically. It's quite a muddled picture. It was being driven, as it were, from below. James, in a way, didn't want anything to do with it. I mean, he definitely wanted to put space between him and these adventures, but they promised to bring in some revenue. He was desperate for money.

He needed it very, very badly. And so he didn't stop it happening. He certainly didn't publicly encourage it. But there was this welter of interest in exploration and money making. They see the Dutch do it. They're seeing the Spanish do it. They just thought it's our time to try and do it too. Is the sense of this, I mean, this is the Virginia company, the London company, otherwise known as,

and this is basically an investor corporation that comes together to sponsor and support, and support this expedition, this settlement in the new world. Was this typical of all of these kinds of expeditions? I have this idea that at first it was more of a royal imperative, and then business sort of takes over. Well, in the Raleigh phase, so this is in the late 1500s, it's very much an aristocratic adventure, which is he gets a royal charter to go out and ends up in North Carolina.

It doesn't work out for him. The Virginia Company was in a sense the thing that made the day difference. So it was able to draw on growing wealth in the city of London among the merchant classes in London. And this is what tipped the balance towards something that was sustainable economically and in terms of recruitment, all those factors. And the inspiration behind it actually was largely the Dutch. The Dutch really invented this idea of a company where people, not aristocratic people, relatively wealthy merchants, would band together, put their capital into buying a ship and recruiting some people and some expertise, crucially, and trying to set up

new trade routes. So this is specifically to get to Virginia. Tell me what Virginia was in those days. Extremely vague. So the word was coined by Raleigh as a reference to Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, and it was specifically done like that in order to, I suppose, encourage her enthusiasm for the venture. But it stuck. And it basically meant all of North America to start off with. It sort of began to become a more clearly defined and clearly mapped terrain around the Chesapeake Bay in subsequent years. So it didn't have clear borders when they set out. They knew they were going to try this adventurer by going slightly north of where Raleigh had gone,

in other words to Chesapeake Bay. That was their intention, the earliest of the people who went out there. and what the sort of limits to Virginia were, though, was a matter more of imagination than maps. How had they claimed so much of the Eastern Seaboard? So, in fact, this goes back to John D, the subject of another of a biography. There were various ways that people justified colonization at this time, the way the Spanish, for example, did so. I mean, one of the main ways was that you had right by conquest, just by simply militarily overwhelmed it. And there was an element of that in the thinking of those who went over to Virginia. But

you used a term earlier on about it being a wilderness. It was seen as an uncivilised place, basically as an uninhabited place that was ripe for the picking. But Dee came up with this further justification that actually King Arthur, believe it or not, who's a legendary English king had gone over there, or somebody on his behalf had gone over there to claim it for the British in medieval times. And there were other kings who supposedly had sent over adventures. And there were sort of little hints of evidence that were found in the rather sparse archives that were kept at the time. So that was, I suppose you would say, a trumped-up part of the justification that was used for the colonization adventure. But aside from the Dutch later on with New York, I'm not aware of any other

powers vying for this part of the world where I would have thought the Spanish would come, you know, knocking at the door there. It would make perfect sense. It's right. right smack on the big coast of that new continent? Well, they did come knocking at the door. So they had spies in London at the time, and they knew surprisingly good details. In fact, some of the best materials that I had to use to tell the early story of the Virginia Company, because the first volume of its papers have gone missing. So there's a whole volume of paper about the very earliest days of the Virginia Company adventure,

if you like. It's Spanish sources that quite often give us the most accurate information of what was going on, because Spanish spies were doing such a good job. So they threatened James Town on a number of occasions in various ways. But because of the geopolitics, if you like, of what was going on in Europe at the time and hopes in Spain that may be some kind of reproshmore or some sort of even alliance could be drawn up between Britain and Spain, they didn't want to upset the possibility of that happening. And the period when they didn't want that to happen coincide.

with these first incursions into North America. So it was sort of oddly protected by what were then seen as much bigger geopolitical issues going on in Europe. So tell me about the major figures involved in this Virginia company. Who's in charge and how are they going to do this? Well, that's what's so wonderful about it. No one seems to be in charge and they didn't know how to do it. It was a very motley crew who set off, including sort of the big names of people like John Smith. There's some fascinating, shady figures.

There's a chap called Ratcliffe, another one called Sicklemore. There seem to be people who might be spies working for the Spanish. There's even a potential but tangential link between the first lot who went out there and the gunpowder plot, which was this plot two years into James's reign when a group of plotters tried to plot the houses of Parliament when James was sitting there. If it had been successful, it would have not only wiped out James, but it would have wiped out the entire English elite. So that didn't happen, but there's a suggestive link even with that.

So there were a very odd lot. And what sent them out there, because of the absence of very precise records of what was going on at the time, is unclear. They almost disappeared without notice. So, for example, the first three ships that you mentioned, there's no official notice of that happening at all. It's a private, secret mission that's being. undertaken as a sort of exploratory mission into this, what was for them, in navigational terms, unknown region of the Western world. So it's not something where the figures involved were in any sense the best people to do the job or even capable of doing the job. And that became

absolutely obvious the moment they landed and tried to set up the first settlement. The three ships are called the Susan Constant, the discovery and the Godspeed. It must have been the thing to do three ships on these expeditions, right? Captain by Christopher Newport, a name I love, Bartholomew Gossnald, and John Ratcliffe. Newport was the overall commander, as I understand it. That's at least what you find on Wikipedia. Yes, he's the Admiral. The voyage was a fairly smooth one, I imagine, since you read nothing about it, but maybe that's because there's no records. They would have been in fear, I imagine, of the fate, of sharing the fate of the lost colony of Roanoke. How much did people know about that at this time? The thing is, I suppose, there was divided motives.

weren't all going over there for the same reason. One of the reasons given was to find the lost colonists. That was explicitly discussed as a reason for going over, right? To try and recover not only a little bit of dignity after that farcical earlier expedition that Raleigh was involved in. But, I mean, Galsnold was a particularly fascinating figure. He seems to have said some politically difficult remarks about James I, as many were doing at that time.

Part of the reason he was probably on that chip was because he had ruined any hopes of any advancement in England after some remarks he gave apparently when he was having supper in the Isle of White Little Island just off the south coast of England. And John Smith, his involvement at the very early stage is sort of mystifying. He claimed to be an experienced travel and he wrote later a very dubious autobiography talking about adventures he'd been on before Virginia and New England. He's the chap who named New England, New England.

So Newport was more of a, he had the naval experience to undertake this. And he was, in a sense, the most serious of the leading candidates. But it turned out he wasn't able to keep the whole thing together. Of course, he's remembered in Virginia now because of Newport News, which is on the Chesapeake Bay, isn't it? And it's a huge naval base. I understand why the leadership would go. I mean, they all basically had chairs in the,

company. But who are the colonists? How did they find them? Do they just post up a bill in town and say, come, one and all? Yeah, I wish I could give you a really good answer to that. Unfortunately, I can't because of this issue of the lack of records about this first expedition. But what one can deduce is that there were some who were probably desperate people they found in London, who they needed just to fill the ships. They couldn't advertise this. Later, there were big advertising campaigns effectively to try and lure people to go to Virginia. They couldn't do that because this was effectively being done in secret. There was a lot of second sons. A lot of people who came from quite good gentlemanly background. So they weren't aristocrats. They were the sort of second

sons who had no hope of inheriting anything. So they didn't have much to lose and a great deal to gain if this had worked. It'd be fascinating to look at the history of American colonization as being a whole bunch of second sons and people disinherited people who had no other choice in life if they're going to get rich. The geography of this story is really fascinating and central, I know. I mean, the big headline of all these explorations that they were looking for a northwest passage, we're past that point right now. The Chesapeake Bay, however, is very interesting to the English. Why do they choose this, aside from the fact that it's one big piece of water? They knew enough to know that they were big rivers that went off Chesapeake Bay heading west.

And by English standards, they are enormous rivers. I mean, in England, we had nothing. like the James River, which is probably in terms of sort of continental scale of rivers in America, south and north, not by any stretch the largest, but if you looked at that river as an Englishman at that time, you would think this is the most enormous thing you've ever seen. So there was hope that it would go through, it would bypass the need for a northwest passage and go all the way through to China. That old idea of finding a passage to the riches of the far east through America, they thought there's just a possibility that the mouth of the James, if you carried on far enough, would lead you to the other side of the continent. Of course not. They ran into the falls at

what is now called Richmond pretty soon. So they realized that wasn't going to happen. But there was a hope one of the other rivers might be the river that would take them through. Interesting. So they were still entertaining that notion of making their way to India and the spices and all the rest of that was still part of the draw. In the meantime, they're focusing on what they can accomplish right here and now. And that's the resources that are available they know, tremendous amounts of timber, for one thing, which is scarce now in England, as well as minerals, right? They think they're going to find the gold that the Spanish have been finding down in South America. Yes. Well, the Spanish hadn't really been finding. I mean, they found silver mostly, but it was gold. It was the prospect of gold. And on one of one of the Spanish, of the expeditions, they dug up tons and tons of it, used it as ballast in one of the ships. The shits would have rocks inside them to act as ballast, but they removed those, replace them with this rock that they thought might contain gold, sent it back to England an enormous cost. There was an enormous smelting operation set up on a hill near Greenwich, which is a place just off the Thames. Attempts were made to get the gold, and of course nothing

emerged, which was one of the many economic catastrophes that the early phases of the Virginia colonization suffered. In fact, there's a wall out in that direction at a place called Deptford off the Thames where you can go and see the remnants of that. All they ended up with was a wall built at this stuff. Well, and they weren't wrong. I mean, there's a gold rush in Georgia and then further west, and that's really what drives the American explorations later on down the road, so they weren't completely wrongheaded in this thought. True. That's a good point. It hadn't occurred to Absolutely. But of course, they didn't get anywhere near Georgia, so they weren't going to enjoy that benefit. I'll be right back after this short break with more from Benjamin Woolley.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And this month on not just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders and brutal crimes. Was it a quarrel, or was the brilliant playwright Christopher Marl actually murdered in that Deptford Inn? Was Amy Dudley, wife of Elizabeth I'm first favourite Robert, pushed down a flight of stairs to her death? Were the Gies, that great French family, actually bloodthirsty murderers, who secured their power through ruthlessness and violence? And what's the truth about the Hungarian noblewoman who allegedly killed hundreds of young women? Join me, but not on an empty stomach, for not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's talk about where they do land. The first place they come to turns out to be a bit dangerous and they go looking for safer shores. Talk to me through that choice of sight. There's been this extraordinary archaeological project that has recovered a lot of the first place they planted to use the word they used, which became known as Jamestown or James City for a while. And they chose it because, for the very practical reason, they could tie their ships up to the trees. So when you're going up a river, you need to be able to get your supplies and so on off the ships onto shore in order to start building whatever kind of settlement you're going to be able to build. You can't obviously do that if there's shallow banks.

You can't get the ships close enough and you'd have to have so many journeys using rowboats that it would be too difficult. They found they could tie their ships up because of the bend in the river left at sort of deep enough channel. So that's quite a rare thing to find in a place that hasn't been developed. up to the harbour. So that was why they chose that island that they were on. And also they thought an island would give them some kind of security because they knew that there were Native Americans in the area. So while they worked out what kind of relations they would have with these people,

would they be friendly, would they be hostile? An island was a good position to just establish as theirs while they started to see what lay around them. One of the first things, incidentally, they found was an abandoned picnic where that's where they discovered what we now called the barbecue. Almost the first thing that came out of that expedition was the discovery to Europe of the barbecue. There you go. If you take nothing else away from this show, it's the source of barbecue. Let's talk about the Native American tribe that was there. Poetan, am I pronouncing that correctly? Well, who knows? Trouble is, of course. You have no way of knowing how it would have been pronounced at the time. The internet told me, I know exactly how it's spelled.

Oh, right, okay. How do they know anything about this tribe? That's the amazing thing. When these colonists come, there's no scouting, there's no diplomatic mission. They arrive on this land that belongs to someone else for centuries, and suddenly they have to assume that they're welcome, which they often are not. So did the Poetans welcome these guys, or how did they see them as trading partners? The English did have information about other attempts by Spaniards, among others, to land in the American. and about the relations they had with the people who lived there when they landed through a series of works by somebody called Richard Hacklett and another chap who was Hacklett's pupil.

So they had that as a kind of model for what might happen and they used that as their guide. They weren't intending to make a conquest, as it were, of this place, not in a sort of formal way. They wanted to set up a cross at the Falls to try and claim the land for Christendom, but they certainly weren't planning to attack the locals and dispossess them of their land. That wasn't their approach. They tried to make initial approaches and had a very difficult time of it because nobody understood what was going on. For the reason that you just spelled out, they couldn't speak the local language. They knew very little about local customs.

And over the weeks, a very uneasy relationship started to develop because there was stuff that the English had brought with them that the Indians were interested. in, particularly objects made of iron and things like that, which was very scarce in that area. There were also materials that the locals had, principally food. If you don't know it particularly, you can't live off a locality like that, not a group of a hundred or so people, without relying on others who use cultivation and hunting skills and so on in order to provide food. So basically they were reliant on the local Indians. It wasn't one tribe.

It was in fact itself a kind of empire. It's sometimes called the Powhatan or Powhatan Empire. But there was this Supreme Chief who the English first thought was called Powerton, but he probably had other names, who was famously the father of Pocahontas, who additionally might have had other names. That was one of the things actually that most befuddled the English. People who lived there seemed to have so many different names,

and they couldn't work out how that happened. Food will become a major theme in this story. They arrive in late spring. They're basically setting up their first community in May, which is way late in the season to be planting any crops or really cultivating any sort of supply that's going to harvest in the fall. This is going to play out very poorly for them. Yes. Well, I mean, they brought along some supplies, but clearly not enough.

They hadn't intended to get there in May. They had intended to get there several months before, but they've been waylaid. Too late to really plant anything. In any case, they didn't have the means to clear the forest, plow the fields and so on. It wasn't really practical that they were going to do that. The idea was that there was going to be a supply, as they called it. In other words, there was going to be another expedition which would provide them with food. It was delayed to.

And that set a pattern that was going to go on for at least another decade. So they were constantly short of food. It culminated in what was called the starving time when the colony was all but wiped out. Not least because it was a difficult time for the local Indians as well, for the Powhatan people. Recently, some really interesting scientific research has shown that the climate was changing at that time in that area. And everybody was having a really hard time of sustaining sufficient crops in order to feed themselves, let alone 100 or so Europeans who turn up on the shore. This is going to have a lot to do with their destiny.

It both creates a lot of tension with the Native American tribes there because they are going to rely on them, both for advice and also food supplies. But it also structures the experience over these years, these supply trips that come over. This is kind of the system of things. You planted yourself in this wilderness, and then one of those ships or two of those ships, in this case, head back to England and thus begins this series of supply voyages that bring more food and more colonists. This was a big problem because in the following year, the first ship doesn't come back

until January, I believe. January of 1608. You can imagine now nine months or so have gone by. These first hundred people are suffering like nobody's business, both from low food supplies. Who knows about the weather? Mosquitoes, they've chosen a horrible place to live, and they're having hostile actions with the local tribes. And so they wait nine months for this group to come back with. And what do they bring? More colonists. A hundred and twenty more colonists. So, yes, there's food, but there's double the population now, and that's going to set up all kinds of challenges. Yes, it does, and it's partly the result of a complete lack of communication. So obviously, the fastest type of communication you're going to have is some sort of written

record that's sent back with the ships when they go back to England. That takes several months. By which stage preparations should have been underway and kind of chaotically are in order to provide what they call the supply. and the first supply, as you say, really too late to keep them on a sustainable trajectory, the expectation was by that stage they would have been able to establish relations with the Indians sufficient to keep themselves going and feed some more settlers, as they would have seen them, who could have then provided labour to clear more land and so on in a sort of virtuous circle,

but it proved to be completely the opposite. It was a vicious circle of decline and hunger, not to trivialise it, but these early stages, the whole tenor of what was going on was sort of established by anger. People were really hungry, and when people are really hungry, they get really angry. And it just led to a spiral down into worsening relations with the Indians who had their own problems, but were obviously in a much better position to defend their welfare. As I said, it nearly wiped the whole colony out. And it would have gone, but for this miraculous arrival,

of a supply, just as the final survivors of this terrible era called the starving time, are about to leave the colony and abandon it. Yeah, the starving time gets as bad as forcing cannibalism. I mean, this is the worst. They've found archaeological evidence that proves that this had happened. One can only imagine the chaos of that community. The entirety of it would have broken down at this point. And that's an incredibly interesting episode.

One of those supply ships comes over, maybe it's the third one I can't remember, but it has upon it Lord Delawar, who later gets a state named after him and a river. That expedition is grounded in Bermuda, and they're stuck there for a long period of time many months until they can build new ships that they finally take to the James Town, to James River. And those ships are what the colonists who are escaping the starving times run into. It's a day of providence for them. God has delivered these new ships to them. Yes, not to be underestimated that.

I think this idea that there was a sort of godly support for this enterprise was confirmed by that. So it's an extraordinary thing. This was the biggest attempt to try and provide proper supplies, proper leadership vitally for the colony, and really establish a footing. It by now has royal backing of a sort, not entirely fulsome, but it has official backing. It has ways of raising revenue. they start to look into things like lotteries to raise money. They start to recruit in a slightly more systematic manner

and they send off this third supply with a lot more behind it, essentially, gets caught in a hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic. The flagship is blown off course and ends up shipwrecked in Bermuda. It's the story that, in fact, probably inspired Shakespeare's play The Tempest. And some make it across or slowly make it across, but there's an extraordinary story of taking the timbers, spending a year basically all but,

taking the timbers of the wreck ship and building two small ships and then taking them onwards onto Virginia. And it's that that kind of saves the day, you could say. I mean, it depends on your perspective, obviously. I don't know how the Native Americans would have seen it at the time. But it's that that turns this into something that starts to look like a credible enterprise. eyes. We need to talk about the love story. Pocahohannas and John Rolf. Movies have been made. What's the truth? What's the fiction? And what was the purpose of the marriage? Well, it's difficult to say whether or not it was a love match between these two. So John Rolf was the chap who actually essentially

commercially saved the Virginia venture because he was the one who managed to get hold of some Spanish tobacco, which is growing in South America, and planted in Virginia. And that was transformative because this has produced a cash crop, basically, that they could send back. And as part of that promotion, the Virginia company wanted a big batch of tobacco to be sent back from Virginia and for them to show off and start to market and start to make some real money. Rolf, who was this extremely accomplished farmer, basically, as well as entrepreneur, he developed a connection with the daughter of this imperial ruler of the area. known as Powerton. It seems like she was kidnapped during one of the altercations with the Indians

and taken back to Jamestown and held hostage. Earlier than that, she was allegedly, although most people think this is not really credible, involved in saving John Smith's life. So this leader figure, John Smith, went on an expedition all the way around the Chesapeake to various Native American or Indian settlements. And he was allegedly taken. and captive by Powhatan and was about to have his brains bashed out when Pocahontas saved him. It's difficult to imagine

that that's actually what happened and John Smith has a record of telling those kinds of stories. He sort of reverses the romantic idea of the damsel in distress. It's the damsels that save him. He told a similar story but when he was in the Middle East.

Anyway, she ends up in Jamestown exactly how they treated her, what her status was, is unclear. A Stockholm syndrome. Maybe. Who knows because it's not clearly documented what actually went on. But the result is she apparently converted to Christianity. She took the name Rebecca. She married in a Christian ceremony, this local merchant farmer, John Rolf. And they had a child. And she was to lead a delegation of Indians and English back to London. So Pocahontas, and John Rolfe, this apparent reconciliation of these two groups of people, set off in 1617 on an

expedition back to London. And she was welcomed as a princess, effectively. There's a famous picture of her, which depicts her as this kind of princess figure. The Virginia company were desperate to sort of promote her. She stayed in a famous English London pub, where people would come visit her and gorp at her, I suppose. More consequential. Eventually, she was introduced to James at a court mask, which is the highest accolade that a foreign dignitary could be given. So she was welcomed as a princess. By this stage, they'd had a child. The story ends very sadly. She gets ill while they're about to set off back to North America, and she dies while their ship is still on the River Thames, and appropriately, she's taken to

Gravesend, a place that's not too far from Greenwich, and there she expires. So whether or not it's a love story is very difficult to tell. They had a child who carried on living in England. John Rolfe went back to America and continued his career. He never talked about it. He never wrote about it in ways that would tell us what their relationship was like. She certainly didn't have a relationship with John Smith, which was one of the sort of earlier versions of the story, if you like, that tended to be told. Yes, I remember that from fifth grade. Of course, not exactly the Disney version of events. I'm going a hope that they felt fond for each other at least. I just want to make it clear that she was considered an extremely important figure.

She came with one of her father's lieutenants to England. He didn't approve of what the English were like. He didn't like London at all. He wanted to get home as quickly as possible. She was an extraordinary woman who played a remarkable role in trying to negotiate, if you like, a way of using this new connection between North America and Europe. productively, I think she saw it in sort of positive terms. And with her death, died hopes that it could

happen in that way. There is another element of something unfortunate to discuss, which is that the first African slaves arrive in the Americas at the colony of Jamestown. They are the first. I mean, the New York Times ran a series of interesting, important, but controversial articles about those first Africans to arrive in North America and whether they were the first enslaved Africans. Well, they were definitely enslaved. So there's some brilliant scholarship around how these unfortunates ended up on a Spanish ship being shipped off to modern Venezuela, if you like, as slaves. There was wars underway in Africa, as of course they were in Europe at the time, two. Some people who'd be captured as slaves, probably not by Europeans, but by Africans,

been sold to Portuguese slave traders, shipped across the Atlantic, basically a pirate ship. Flying under Dutch colours attacked the Spanish ship carrying the slaves, took some of them off that ship, went on to Jamestown and sold them for some money to the people of Jamestown. Where it gets complicated is whether or not they were then treated as chattel slaves. You get into the history of this at your peril to a certain extent, particularly speaking as a white Englishman. So I can't say what their status was. But what I know, know is that some of them went on to become planters as they came to be known, people who were their own land, who could own property and so on, which obviously slaves can't do. Some of them,

at least did. Some of them ended up on the local council or connected to the local council. Their fates were not those of slaves who would come across subsequently much later. And I think that you need a sort of nuanced view of what was going on at this time. I think there was a hard shift in attitude to this whole issue, which came later. But I think at the time, at that early time, these were not enslaved Africans who were put to work in fields, if you like, cultivating tobacco. I don't think they had quite that role. And what's more, quite a few of the people who are brought over from Europe, not just from England, from across Europe, were so-called indentured in some way, who were themselves under servitude. Essentially, you're insolvary. Essentially, you're

enslaved, you have to spend up to seven years working off the cost of your passage across the Atlantic. You had very few rights, and it was only after that period that you were freed, as they call it. And it looks like at least some of those Africans who arrived as part of that expedition were ultimately freed in some way. Whether or not they were slaves beforehand is where the questions lie. At some point, things stabilize, like 1624 onward. Yes, I mean, from my point of view, what happens is that basically there's what the English called the Indian Massacre, and that basically prompts a decision that the colonists would come to militarily dominate the area. They've sort of shed blood for that land, and they feel, okay, we're going to really take it over and dominate the

area. So that's, for me, the turning point, 1623. The colony itself continues on until about 1699. Hugely eventful times with lots of ups and downs along the way. Yet by some hook or crook, They managed to create a lasting community that is actually called the capital of Virginia colony. I am skipping over tons of story here, but I just want people to understand that this is the source of the Virginia capital that eventually becomes Williamsburg, which is only some 25 miles away from that location. It is the roots that are put down by the Jamestown colonists against all the odds that make this settlement grow. It's an incredible story that is one of the more complex episodes of America. history, as we have just now proven. Thank you very much, Benjamin, for the clarity that you've given. Let me read a little biography of you to close things out. You have offered books like the

bestseller of the Queen's juror, the Life and Magic of John D., Heel thyself, the story of Nicholas Cole Pepper, a new and great book called The King's Assassin, which is being developed for television, am I right? Yeah, yes. It's being filmed as we speak. Excellent. I can't wait to see it. Thank you so much, Benjamin, for joining us. We'll see you again. Thank you very much, Don. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.