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Dear Virginians,

I thought many might be interested in this book review on the earliest days in the Old Dominion. Distant relatives (Tucker) were there.

St. George Tucker Ranson

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'Love and Hate in Jamestown': The Machiavelli of Colonial America

October 19, 2003
 By CALEB CRAIN





"English America was a corporation before it was a
country,'' David A. Price explains in his solid and
engaging new history of Jamestown, the first
English-speaking colony in North America that managed to
survive. Since Price was a business reporter before he
turned historian, a reader might expect him to expatiate on
how capitalism shaped Jamestown and on the inspiring
business model chosen by the Virginia Company, which raised
the money to start it.

The expectation would be disappointed. Price does take
advantage of his background: he calculates, for example,
that in the initial public offering, a share in the
Virginia Company cost between $2,500 and $2,850 in 2001
dollars. But by and large, the business angle on Jamestown
doesn't offer much of a view. Colonists were supposed to
repay investors by shipping back to England gold and other
precious metals and by navigating a water route to the
Pacific -- profit centers that happened not to exist. As
for management technique, the company forbade its American
employees to relay any bad news. It advised colonists to
''have great care not to offend the naturals'' -- that is,
the Native Americans -- and not to let them figure out that
17th-century English guns were louder than they were
accurate. In other words, wishful thinking seems to have
been its core business. As the company's most volubly
disgruntled employee, John Smith, complained many years
later when he had safely returned to England, ''the Company
here thinke all the world was Oatmeale there.''

Price focuses instead on the human story of Jamestown,
nearly mythic in its resonances, and he interprets it not
with market economics but with political philosophy -- in
particular, the subfield devoted to negotiations with
people who would prefer you dead. At the dawn of the 17th
century, the English forswore the brutal tactics of the
Spanish, who plundered and enslaved Indians. The Indians
did not therefore love the English, however.

If the colonists had landed among disorganized or
indecisive tribes, the inhospitality might not have
mattered. But Jamestown was located in Tsenacommacah, the
empire of Chief Powhatan, a ruthless military leader and
brilliant diplomatist who presided over more than two dozen
tribes. When captured, feckless colonists were very
gradually disjointed and skinned with mussel shells, while
they themselves watched, until they expired and were burned
at the stake.

In short, the English had landed in the sort of delicate,
high-stakes, multicultural imbroglio that is best handled
by an arrogant, contumacious, know-it-all bully.
Fortunately, in addition to a number of well-connected
gentlemen, the Virginia Company had appointed to the
colony's ruling council John Smith, a commoner who had read
Machiavelli in his youth, self-consciously, and had fought
the Ottoman Turks as a free lance in Eastern Europe.

One by one, the upper-class councilors failed to lead
Jamestown to safety, let alone prosperity. The first
president declined to fortify the colony, because he was
afraid the local tribes would find it insulting. After they
attacked, a palisade was built, but then the colonists
mysteriously stopped working. Price speculates that they
lost heart, because they had come to America with no
purpose higher than moneymaking and it had become evident
that Virginia would make none of them rich.

Smith simply thought they were spoiled. ''They would rather
starve and rot with idleness,'' he wrote, ''then be
perswaded to do anything for their owne reliefe without
constraint.'' Malnutrition aggravated disease, and many
died. Finally Smith took charge of building houses,
ordering the colonists around and, most important, trading
with the Indians for food.

Remembering his Machiavelli, he always negotiated from a
position of strength. When he first approached the
neighboring Kecoughtans, they saw no need to pay a high
price for his metal goods, because they thought the English
were starving and desperate. Smith changed their minds; he
would later tell two stories about how he did it. According
to the first, he bluffed. He offered to sell at prices that
were as scornfully high as the Kecoughtans' were scornfully
low, and he handed out gifts to the tribe's children. The
Kecoughtans decided he wasn't desperate after all, and the
next day Smith was able to bring 16 bushels of corn back to
Jamestown. Smith's second version did not feature such
subtle psychology. In that account, Smith merely ''let fly
his muskets, ran his boat on shore, whereat they all fled
into the woods.'' In the scuffle that followed, the English
seized an idol sacred to the Kecoughtans, who filled his
boat with wild game and bread to ransom it.

Price adopts the first version and doesn't mention the
second. I bet he made the right choice, and dispensing with
the grounds for his decision makes for a cleaner tale, but
Smith contradicts himself so often that historians used to
write him off as a chronic liar, and Price might have said
a bit more about the hazards he navigated, here and
elsewhere, in taking Smith at his word.

Smith's word is the only evidence for the most famous
episode of his life. In December 1607, still hoping to find
a passage to the West Coast, he undertook to survey the
Chickahominy River and was captured by one of Powhatan's
brothers. He was brought before the emperor and invited to
wash his hands and eat. Then he was dragged to two large
stones, on which his head was laid. Powhatan's men stood
''ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines,'' Smith
later recalled, but before they could strike, ''Pocahontas
the Kings dearest daughter . . . got his head in her armes,
and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.''

Almost all scholars nowadays think Smith was telling the
truth about the incident, but many think that he
misunderstood what he experienced and that the threat of
death was symbolic only, part of a ritual of adoption.
Price trusts Smith's judgment. He points out that Smith was
the best student of Algonquian language and culture that
the English had and would have ample opportunity afterward
to correct his first impression if it turned out to have
been mistaken.

Knowledge was a valuable weapon to Smith, because he and
Powhatan threatened, deceived, provoked and double-crossed
each other constantly. Price reduces the dizzying series of
feints and blows to a vigorous, straightforward tale. While
Smith was in charge (he finally became president himself in
September 1608), the conflict between Indians and English
resembles that between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner --
astonishingly little blood is spilled, considering the
extreme situations into which they maneuver each other.
Smith took to heart the Machiavellian precept that it is
better to be feared than loved. ''The alternative to
intimidation was not love and friendship,'' Price explains;
''it was open war -- which the English, in 1608, would have
lost to the last man.''

Management, however, did not appreciate Smith's
achievement. Nor had he won friends in high places by his
edict to the gentry of Jamestown that ''he that will not
worke shall not eate.'' He was cashiered in September 1609.
Almost as soon as he sailed out of Chesapeake Bay,
relations with the tribes went from Coyote versus Road
Runner to Freddy versus Jason: no one previously knew that
so much gore was possible. The English attitude toward the
Indians abruptly soured. Soon the colonists were using fife
and drum to lure them into lethal ambushes and ordering the
execution of captive women and children.

In later life Smith became a publicist for North America.
He returned to the continent only once, to map the
coastline of New England, and the second half of Price's
book is concerned largely with the history of
Indian-English relations in Virginia after he left,
including the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe, the
Englishman who at last figured out what would make Virginia
profitable -- tobacco. In 1614 the company brought
Pocahontas on a publicity tour to England, where she caught
a pulmonary infection, which the coal dust in London's air
rendered fatal. The colony that she helped to save
survived, but not as a business. James I, who liked neither
tobacco nor the republican politics of the company's
C.E.O., dissolved its charter in 1624.

In a late chapter, ''March 22, 1622: Skyfall,'' Price
recounts how Powhatan's brother devised the massacre of
between a quarter and a third of the English colonists in
Virginia on a single day. (The chapter title and Price's
tone bring 9/11 to mind.) When Smith heard about the
massacre, he volunteered to lead an army that would drive
the Indians back. The Virginia Company didn't take up his
offer, but it probably wouldn't have helped if they had. By
then Smith's understanding of the Indians had coarsened, in
step with his country's.



Caleb Crain is the author of ''American Sympathy: Men,
Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/books/review/19CRAINT.html?ex=1067702016&ei=1&en=d5b6ce346d81a3d7


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