Benjamin Woolley - Savage Kingdom - Virginia and The Founding of English America

Newport had been hired over the heads of the Virginia Company by the Royal Council. He had no previous connection to the Virginia venture, but was certainly qualified for the job. A war hero who had lost his right arm fighting in the West Indies, his reputation reached as far as Spain, where he was known as ‘ un caballero muy principal ’, a very great knight. 16 In 1592, he had helped in the capture of the Portuguese carrack the Madre de Dios , the most magnificent prize of the Spanish war, estimated to be worth £150,000. 17 Since the signing of the Somerset House Peace Treaty, he had continued to tour the Spanish Main, but for peaceful purposes, undertaking trade missions on behalf of a number of London merchants. He had returned from one trip with two baby crocodiles, which he presented to the King.

Unlike the other leading members of the venture, Newport was not expected to make any sort of investment in the company, nor to stay in Virginia. He would be responsible for commanding the expeditionary fleet, and leading the initial reconnaissance of the territory. In return, he was to be given sole ownership of any discoveries he made, including deposits of minerals and precious metals. 18

Such terms caused widespread resentment, because the other men of rank who had volunteered to go, many at this late stage in the preparations, were far more exposed. They were expected to pay not only their own way, but to recruit from their own estates the servants and labourers who would make up the bulk of the settlement’s workforce. They were also expected to pay the costs of sending these workers to America, and maintaining them while they were there.

In return for this investment, they were not even to take personal possession of the land upon which they settled. Instead, they were to receive a share in the Virginia Company’s overall profits. Their fortunes therefore rested principally on the speedy discovery of some valuable commodity, such as gold, copper, spices or medical ingredients, rather than the long-term development of the colony.

As most of these gentlemen well knew, the odds were unfavourable. The pages of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations were filled with horror stories of foreign ventures ending in slaughter or ruin. Just this month, Hakluyt had received reports of yet another disaster. A base set up in Guyana by the English captain Charles Leigh had been deserted following a series of mutinies, and a supply ship sent to relieve him had been forced to abandon sixty-seven passengers on the island of St Lucia, where they had all died of starvation or at the hands of the natives. 19 Such were the risks faced by these planters. But then, in most cases, they were going not because of how much they had to gain, but how little they had to lose.

Despite his elevated status, George Percy was typical. Born on 4 September 1580, he was the sickly, epileptic runt of a litter of eight children fathered by Henry Percy, the eighth Earl of Northumberland. George’s family was renowned for its rebellions, which were being replayed every night on the London stage in Shakespeare’s history plays. Henry IV featured that ‘mad fellow of the north’ Henry Percy (the first Earl of Northumberland), and his son Harry Hotspur. ‘Zounds! I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy,’ says one character – a line written before the Gunpowder Plot, so acquiring uncomfortably prophetic force since the revelation that one of George’s kinsmen, Thomas Percy, was a ringleader. 20 George was no Hotspur. In fact, he was a disappointment to his family and peers. Someone whispered into King James’s ear just before he succeeded to the English throne that George was hated ‘damnably’ by his brother the Earl, and one official in the Earl’s household was moved to describe George’s infirmities as ‘grievous and tedious’. 21

George had received the conventional education for a man of his class: Eton College, Oxford University, and the Middle Temple, for legal training. When he was sixteen, his mother had died, leaving him an annuity of around £60 a year, paid by the Earl’s staff. This was enough for a comfortable though not lavish standard of living for those who could keep within their means. However, George insisted on extravagance. He had a compulsion for keeping an impressively aristocratic wardrobe and table, having no title or property of his own to demonstrate his elevated rank.

Then came the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. George was not implicated, but his elder brother and patron Henry, the current Earl of Northumberland, was found guilty of conspiracy, and committed to the Tower. Fined £30,000, Henry no longer felt in a position to support his aimless younger brother, so decided to send him to Virginia. As well as keeping him a safe distance from the political fray, the expedition also promised some alleviation of George’s epilepsy, for, as he would later write, ‘my fits here in England are more often, more long and more grievous, than I have felt them in other parts nearer the line [equator]’.

He had to pay a high price for a place in the venture. He was apparently forced to hand over his annuity to his brother, and to borrow £8 16 s from another adventurer to help cover his costs – a debt which he had still to repay years later. Meanwhile, his expenses were far from modest. He subsequently sent home requests to his brother for ‘diverse suits’ (£32 14 s 7 d ), knives (3 s ), books, paper, ink and wax (£1 14 s 9 d ), biscuits (£3 5 s ), cheese (8 s 2 d ), butter (£1 17 s ), soap, lights and starch (13 s 6 d ), storage chests (12 s ), assorted boxes (10 d ) and casks (6 s 2 d ). He even asked for a feather bed, complete with bolster, blankets and a covering of tapestry. 22

Percy was a name of French origin going back to the Norman invasion of England, breathed in the rarefied atmosphere of royal courts. In contrast, the name that was to become most closely associated with the Virginia story, and intimately linked to the legend of the Indian princess Pocahontas, carried a whiff of the Anglo-Saxon village forge: John Smith.

A wide, barely navigable ocean divided Smith’s world from Percy’s. Percy was the product of generations of aristocratic breeding and refinement; the stout, bearded Smith prided himself on being a self-made man. ‘Who can desire more content that hath small means, or but only his merit to advance his fortunes, than to tread and plant that ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life,’ Smith wrote. 23 Nevertheless, Smith had one thing in common with Percy: a feeling of social exclusion, of otherness, that made the prospect of starting afresh in the New World irresistible.

According to Smith’s vivid, if sometimes incoherent and unreliable autobiography, True Travels , he was ‘born in Willoughby in Lincolnshire’. His father was ‘anciently descended from the ancient Smiths of Crudley in Lancashire; his mother from the Rickards at Great Heck in Yorkshire’. He was christened with that most ordinary of names at Willoughby by Alford on 9 January 1580. The ceremony took place in the local parish church, which, like many others in a region of reclaimed marshland that could be treacherous to travel, was dedicated to St Helen, patron saint of travellers.

He described these as ‘poor beginnings’, so poor as to earn the scorn of his high-born adversaries. But he was not quite as humble as he sometimes claimed. His father, George, was among the better-off farmers in the region, owning the freehold of several acres of pasture in Great Carlton and property in the market town of Louth. He also leased fields off the local lord, Peregrine Bertie, Baron Willoughby of Eresby. Young John was brought up in a substantial farmhouse comprising a hall, three chambers, a ‘milkhouse’ and a ‘beasthouse’, and with several servants. 24