What I’d like to talk about is some of the things that have kept me interested in the Jamestown story and that I find unique about it and why I think it has a larger significance than just being an amazing adventure story, although it is that too. The first of these is the crucial role of the corporate nature of the colony, both for better and for worse. The Jamestown settlement, as many of you may already know, was a corporate venture. The Virginia Company was a public company chartered in 1606. It sold shares to a small circle of investors that year and then had a public stock offering, a la Google, a couple of years after that. It wasn’t inevitable that this would be the case. At that time there were many forms of economic organization. You have of course, the crown and its projects. You have the trade guilds in England. You have small proprietorships. You still had remnants of the feudal estate in England. The Spanish settlement, of the Spanish new world, was largely a government operation under the crown and its military. It’s significant I think that this English exploration of the new world coincides with the dawn of the Joint Stock Company in Britain, what we call the corporation. The Virginia Company isn’t the first of these. The Muscovy Company, which was chartered in 1955, fifty years earlier, traded with the Russian crown. But Jamestown is really the first, great, large-scale corporate project and it’s easy to see why.

If you don’t have the crown’s involvement, apart from King James’ signature on the company’s charter, you need someway to bring together capital for a project that is far beyond the means of any one patron, no matter how rich. These ocean voyages of thousands of miles were many times the scale of any of the local trading groups within Europe. Hundreds of people, of course, had to be provisioned and sent over. What was in it for the investors was very much the same as what’s in it for stockholders today. The Virginia Company investors were hoping that there would be silver and gold to be found, essentially, on the ground. That there be gold and silver mines within easy reach. Riches would be sent back home. In addition, there was hope of something else. There was hope that there be a river route through North America from east, the Chesapeake Bay, to west, the Pacific Ocean and then of course onward to the orient. So you would have a monopoly on that prized trade route to Asia. Of course this shows how very little was known about the interior of the North American continent at that time. As a matter of fact, European maps of the New World at this time, which relied on Spanish explorers for details of the west coast, actually show California as an island. So a lot of the resources that the colonists could have spent on hunting, planting, becoming self-sufficient, are spent instead exploring up river and asking the natives what was around the next bend in the river. That’s where the money was, or so they thought. That’s American corporate life in the early 1600’s.

I think a lot of the debates and tensions that you saw within the Virginia Company in London and in Jamestown are the ones that we see in companies today. The factions. The office politics. The personality conflicts. And on a broader level, even though the company was dissolved in 1624, I think the very major role of the company in Virginia life in those early years foreshadowed the importance of private enterprise and the importance of the corporation as an economic form in America in 2005. Another of the forces that I found interesting in this story is that of social stratification. We all know that Britain at this time, is an intensely class conscious society. What’s easy to lose sight of is that this class structure had practical implications. As nearly as one can determine the first President of the colony, Edward-Maria Wingfield, got his job through kinship ties with major investors – through friendship, nepotism, having also been a major investor in the company himself. He had a modest amount of military service under his belt in the Netherlands, but he came out of that experience still a gentleman who had no particular skills, no experience with frontier survival or anything of the sort. He comes over to Virginia with servants – servants plural. When you read his writings, he comes across as this very haughty character. And you just wonder to yourself, why would they ever imagine in London that this was the guy to lead those hundred and five or so people on the frontier. The Virginia Company did have hopes of peaceful relations with the natives of Virginia, but the reality was that the last group of colonists who had been sent over twenty years earlier, the Roanoke colonists had disappeared without a trace. So why invest leadership in someone like Wingfield? I think the answer to that is, that’s just the way they looked at the world. To be of high birth was itself a qualification for leadership.

John Smith comes to the situation from a very different perspective. He is low born. He grows up on a tenant farm. He tries to better himself and his position through military service in central Europe and the Netherlands. He is captured on the battlefield by the Turks. He is held in slavery. He manages to kill the master of the farm where he is being held captive and escapes back to England. So he’s got this facility for dealing with other cultures. For surviving by his wits through his presence of mind. The scrapes that John Smith gets involved in in Virginia are simply amazing. Now and then writers express skepticism about them, assuming that he must have just made them all up, but when you look at the sources, it is most often not coming from his mouth, it’s coming from other colonists who are remembering the times when he saved their lives. Very early on, there is a tremendous antagonism between John Smith on the one hand and the gentlemen leaders of the colony on the other. He basically has no respect for his betters. He doesn’t see any reason why they deserve deference just because they have bluer blood. And this is a tension that continues throughout his tenure in Jamestown. And here we have the first meaningful pushing back against the class system of Europe and of Britain in particular, right here in North America. Today, Americans typically embrace at least the idea of class mobility, of nomocracy, but we look at it as a matter of fairness and we look at it through the principle of fairness. Four hundred years ago in Virginia, it was really more of a matter of survival, of life and death. Not just the life and death of individual people, but the extinction of the colony versus its survival. It’s only when John Smith winds up taking control of things that the colony gets back on its feet and has a chance to continue.

The third issue in Jamestown that I find especially interesting is the complex relationship between the English and the natives. It really defines traditional ways of looking at relationships between European explorers or colonists and native peoples. This is an area where the pendulum has really swung back and forth within historical writing, both within the academy and in popular historical writing. We have a classical view that holds the European exploration to be this glorious enterprise that is burdened by unreasonable savages. Now the pendulum swung back in modern times to a view that essentially has the Europeans as the savages coming in and doing terrible things to the natives. Sort of two black and white stories; it’s just a question of who is in which position and I think in these very early years of Jamestown, you have a much more complex situation which is what makes it intriguing. Throughout the history of America, the normal assumption that we tend to have today when we are looking at relationships between the Europeans and their descendants and the native tribes, is that the Europeans were out for conquest. But in these first years, there really isn’t any tension to dispossess the natives through aggression when the English first come over. That is something that emerges later. The colonists came to a territory held, as we know, by Chief Powhatan, who is himself a very in-depth military leader. He inherited six tribes from his father. Through conquest, he expanded his holdings to twenty-two tribes. By the time the English arrive, he controls nearly all of Eastern Virginia, roughly speaking, everything east of I-95 today. And the English come over with a very optimistic view of what their relationship with the natives is going to be. They want to come settle some waste ground as they call it, ground that no one else was living on. Establish relations with the natives based on trade and then in the long-term they hoped, the natives will see the superiority, as they saw, of the English way of life and would be led to become like the English themselves. So the English settled. Over John Smith’s objections, President Wingfield refuses to let anyone build fortifications. He feels that if you build a wall or a fort or anything of the sort, it’s going to cause offense to the natives of the area. The guns are kept in the shipping crates. This proves to not be a good idea. The natives with perfectly understandable reason are suspicious of these newcomers and their intentions, see them as intruders, and there are attacks – violent attacks early on. And so finally, by circumstance, after some early loses, Wingfield is forced to allow the construction of some basic fortifications.

Chief Powhatan had some enemies himself. The truth is that you cannot talk coherently about “the natives” as a unified whole because there were distinct groups of native tribes with distinct interests. Powhatan feared the Monacans to the west and the Massivewarnots to the north; his mortal enemies. People today often wonder why Powhatan didn’t simply kill all of the English colonists in the early years when he had the chance. It isn’t just fear of the English guns. It was Powhatan’s calculation that he might be able to use the English to sway the balance of power, with their guns, their swords, their metal tools he would have an advantage over his native enemies. So he is constantly testing the English man’s abilities and their intention. Here I think is where John Smith makes some very important contributions having dealt with other cultures during his military service and his captivity. He knew, much more than anybody else, the importance of keeping the other side off guard where as there is a pride on part of many of the English and perhaps false feelings of security about the power of their weapons. Smith basically believes in winning through intimidation so there is this period that last for some years with the sides sort of circling around each other assessing their intentions with periodic skirmishes until the famous marriage of Pochantas in 1614 and the peace that comes with that. And in this peace, you see the pendulum of history swinging, even back then. This peace breeds a sense of security in English settlers, which leads to rapid expansion of the settlements, sort of like suburban sprawl that we see today. The Jamestown settlement gradually approaches further and further along the banks of the James River and into the countryside. Powhatan’s successor, Opechancanough, is alarmed by what he sees here. That in turn, leads to the peace being very abruptly broken on March 22, 1622. Native men come to the different areas of the colony, as usual, on this spring morning carrying no weapons of any kind, as to arose suspicion. Then in unison, attack the colonists with their own tools. This tragically ushers in the period of a largely vengeful attitude towards the Native Americans that continues for centuries afterward. The view of the natives as meriting distrust and death.

So this is the world in which the colonist survival story took place. They were here to make money. They’re constrained by a worldview that prizes lineage to a great extent over individual effectiveness. And they have a desire at the start to do right by the natives but without any belief that they had much to learn from the natives and without much awareness of the natives’ resentments. Each of these conditions increases the odds against the colony’s survival. But the colony does survive as we know. By any logic, it should have been destroyed by disease and starvation or by attacks from the natives or by attacks from the Spanish. There is incredible suffering, hunger to the point of cannibalism during one winter, torture. One young man writes home that the people around him would as he puts it, “give up any of their limbs to be back home in England”. The reasons the colony survived are many, not the least of which is pure luck. Now one of the reasons I think the colony did survive is John Smith. That was certainly the view of Jamestown during the revolutionary era, the founding era. If you fast-forward two hundred years and look at the writings of the great Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, you’ll find that although they disagreed about a lot of things, heatedly about a lot of things, one thing that they both agreed on was their enthusiasm for John Smith. If you look at John Marshall’s life of George Washington, he takes a long detour to talk about the pragmatism and the incredible presence of mind of John Smith and essentially portrays him as the first true American. On that note, I thought I might wrap up just by reading very briefly from the book from a couple of passages in which John Smith figures prominently. In this first passage, we are joining John Smith after he has been captured. It’s late 1607, December of 1607. He’s being marched around the Virginia countryside by his captors, being taken to different tribes where he’s interrogated, looked at. And this incident I think is a good illustration of the gamesmanship that’s going on on both sides.

"At a village called Metapecue, a brother of Powhatan named Quicatar invited Smith to feast at his house. Quicatar was not long at revealing his agenda as he asked Smith to shoot his pistol at a target. Forty bowmen looked on to guard against Smith’s escaping. It seemed like an innocuous request on its face until Smith noticed the targets at distance. He judged it to be 120 feet or so away, roughly the accurate range of the natives’ bows and arrows. That was the game. Quicatar wanted to know whether the Englishmen’s guns could shoot as far and as well as their own weapons. Smith knew the answer was negative. The target was far too far away for him to hit reliably. He covertly broke the cock of his expensive French built firearm and reported in regretful tones that it wasn’t working. The limitations of the colonists’ guns, as he saw, had to be kept from the natives at all costs."

This next passage, the episode takes place in July of 1608, the following summer. Smith and some men have been exploring the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay area and now they have a chance to relax after six or seven weeks; they have a chance to relax, or so they think.

"In mid July as Smith was about to lead them back into Jamestown, he elected to take a brief detour up the Rappahannock. With the eve of the tide their barge ran aground never the river’s mouth so they men opted to wile away some time. There were plentiful fish in the shallow water and Smith made a game of catching them by skewing them on a sword. The rest of the men followed suit with satisfying results. “Thus we took in one hour more than we can eat in a day”, several of the voyagers recalled. After several hundred miles of sailing and rowing, after dozens of encounters with unfamiliar native tribes, some of them violently unwelcoming the grounding of the barge had opened up an occasion for simple fun. Here Smith took a stab at a strange looking creature. Flat and angulating, which onlookers found hard to describe. “Much in the fashion of a thornback, but with a long tail like a riding rod. It has a poison sting of two or three inches long like a saw on each side. They didn’t know it, Smith had caught a stingray. One of the variety that is found in the Chesapeake Bay. The stingray defended itself by whipping around its black tail, which finally connected with Smith’s forearm and plunged in almost an inch and a half. Smith screamed. No blood nor wound was seen, but a little blue spot. But the torment was instantly so extreme. The stingray’s venom was working. Dr. Russell, a physician who is with the explorative party hastened to apply a precious oil of unknown description, but Smith’s hand, arm, and shoulder swelled frighteningly. As his agony continued for several hours, Smith asked his men to dig a grave for him on a nearby island. This they did and with much sorrow, prepared for his funeral, but the grave was not to be filled. Russell’s ointment or perhaps Smith’s own robust constitution unexpectedly overcame the effects of the poison. As Smith’s pain receded, he addressed the situation with typical pugnacity, by eating the stingray for supper."