The Pocahontas-John Smith Story Part 3

Smith diverted him with presents, but the Indian kept his disdainful manner.

"Captain Newport, it is not agreeable with my greatness in this paltry manner to trade for trifles and I esteem you a great chief. Therefore, lay down all your commodities together, and what I like I will take."

Smith artfully toyed with a string of blue beads. Their gleam would draw a brighter one in the eyes of Powhatan's young favorite.

The indulgent old man sighed "How much?"

"These? Why these are not for sale, your Highness. Blue beads are very rare. You can dye red and brown ones with berries, but these are imported, and their value high as the blue sky whence descends their radiance."

"How much?" plugged Powhatan. "I foolishly indulged one girl with your life. Now probably another must have your foolish bauble."

"I'll let you know tomorrow. I had not thought of parting with them."

By morning, Smith was having Indians load his boat with two hundred bushels of corn.

Newport was ever for conciliating the chief, and when Powhatan sent him twenty turkeys saying to send twenty swords back by bearers, he complied. Not so John Smith, when Newport was gone. This time the turkeys were kept, but the swords also--in English scabbards.

Powhatan was so riled when the swords were not forthcoming, that he told his men to get them by hook or crook. When Smith caught them pilfering he flogged them and imprisoned them. Powhatan now tried diplomacy, knowing how indebted Smith would feel to "Pocahontas, his dearest daughter." He sent her down to Jamestown to persuade him to release the prisoners. He asked Smith "to excuse him of the injuries done by some rash untoward captains, his subjects, desiring their liberties for this time with the a.s.surance of his love forever." Smith delivered them to Pocahontas, "for whose sake only he feigned to have saved their lives and gave them their liberty."

Pocahontas, with her gay capers, amused all Jamestown enormously. If this had been a clown's act upon a London stage, or a traveling circus in the English countryside, it could not have put the discouraged colony into such a gale.

When Newport returned he brought back an idea of King James, of which Smith thought little. If they softened Powhatan up with civilized luxuries, they could handle him more easily. Therefore he should be crowned at Jamestown. Grudgingly, Smith went to see the hardy old monarch about it. He found him not "at home." Like a haughty host, perhaps, thought Smith. But when he saw what an elaborate entertainment Pocahontas had gotten up for him, he decided that no slight was intended.

She, a child raised in a heathen sensual court, arranged a show for him and his four men at which Smith was astonished. Powhatan's warriors, she knew, would have been enchanted by the dance number put on by older girls to amuse the strangers. Pocahontas had heard her people wonder how it was that the English came without women, stayed a long time and yet got on without them. Their pale women must have been too timid to come along, and they must be lonesome and bored without feminine allure around. Thirty girls wearing nothing but green leafy ap.r.o.ns pranced out of the woods, their bodies painted in various colors. Some wore antler's horns on their heads, and all were brandishing crude weapons that were less frightening than their wild contortions and fiendish yells. At first the men grabbed their own weapons in alert defense. The Englishmen were embarra.s.sed by the brazen savage scene, and more so when the dancers ran to the woods to change to regular garb, for they now wound their arms about blushing necks, murmuring torridly "Lovest thou me?

Lovest thou me?" "These nymphs the more tormented him than ever with crowding and pressing, hanging upon him, most tediously crying 'love you me,'" it was reported.

Pocahontas herself would have liked to ask John Smith that, for she knew that the welling adoration she had for him was growing faster than herself, and was something she would not put aside with childish fancies. She was sorry he was not pleased with today's entertainment, even when great platters of food were set before his men, and they were led to their rest by torches. He had business on his mind and looked relieved when Powhatan showed up in the morning.

"Your highness, our king across the seas lives in such grandeur as you can scarcely imagine. Newport tells me he was so troubled to find out that you did not have the sort of luxuries that befit a great werowance like yourself, that he sent back fine gifts for you."

"What then should a king have that I have not?"

"He wears a crown. A king is quite a fellow."

"Indeed. You speak the truth there. That is quite so."

"Come down to Jamestown and be crowned. We will be friends, and fight our common enemies the Monacans."

Powhatan looked him down cooly. "If your king has sent me presents, I also am a king and this is my land. Eight days will I stay here to receive them. Your father is to come to me, not I to him, nor yet to your fort. Neither will I bite at such bait. As for the Monacans, I can revenge my own injuries."

There was no course left for Newport and Smith but to trudge twelve miles over land, while they sent the c.u.mbersome presents by water. First they proffered the red suit and cloak which Powhatan tried on grudgingly. He knew that he could strut, even in incongruous rigging.

His row of women admired him, putting him in an amiable mood.

"What is this ewer and basin for?"

"Ablutions, Majesty."

His hands were quite clean, but he rinsed them to show that he could use such fixings. If a European peddler had been opening his bag, the chief could not have looked more dubious about purchases.

At last they approached with the crown.

"Please kneel, sire."

Indeed he would not an inch, not so much as a notch on a stick. Stiff as a stalk he stood, but every inch a ruler, defiant in the pa.s.sing wind.

Smith had already observed that he had never seen such majesty in any creature.

"It is customary for our monarchs to kneel. They are in a great church.

A man of G.o.d anoints them."

"Your O'Kee?"

"His minister. It is not at all humiliating."

"Captain Smith's G.o.d?"

"Not mine alone. All believers, sire."

"I am not a believer."

"Will you kneel, sire?"

"A king kneels to none."

They must grin and bear it, so did both. As Smith described it: "At last by leaning hard on his shoulders he a little stooped, and Newport put the crown on his head."

It was awry, and more so as a pistol shot succeeded by a volley from the ship, made Powhatan spring up in an unkingly panic. "What is that?"

"A salute of honor to a king just crowned or born."

"I don't like it. I was born before any of you, if not crowned," he muttered grumpily, settling back on his throne. As a last disdainful thrust, he handed over his discarded cloak and moccasins. "Perhaps your king might like these." His eyes added: "To show how we dress up over here." Smith caught it.

On April tenth, 1608 Newport took away the mighty fallen Wingfield and the rebuked Archer. Ten days later Captain Nelson arrived with one hundred and two colonists and sufficient provisions for those on hand as well as for his own pa.s.sengers. On his return trip he took off John Martin, a veteran colonist, who had cooled lately to Smith's bl.u.s.tering personality.

Smith got his punishment from nature as well as from people. In June he was bitten by a stingray fish while he was spearing it. He was so beside himself with pain that he jumped into the water to cool his agony. His companions were pessimistically preparing his grave without reckoning on his vitality. In a short while he had recovered not only his nerve but even his appet.i.te, and by supper time he was eating that very fish and chuckling about it.

Usually, it was the others who were down, and he who had the situation entirely in hand. He made sure that the Indians always supposed that all was well whether it was or not. When the others on the boat were prostrate with illness, he covered them with a tarpaulin. Then, for the wily deception of the red enemy along the sh.o.r.es, he contrived a clever ruse. He stuck his mens' hats up on sticks like scarecrows, and he fastened the oars along the boat so that the intimidated Indians kept at a cautious and un.o.bservant distance.

When he got back, he found that his own prestige in Jamestown was increasing inversely as that of Ratcliffe tottered. Ratcliffe's position as President had so gone to his head that he was having a palace built for himself. Smith stopped it in mid-air when he came back and heard other colonists hoot at their leader's silly pretensions.

When he returned on September seventh he found Jamestown the worse for his absence as well as for wear. At long last he was made President, on the tenth. He resented the London Company's complaints of the sorely tried colonists. The Company had threatened that if Newport did not bring back sufficient cargo this fall to pay his two thousand pounds of expenses that it would abandon the colony. In hot haste, Smith dispatched a scathing reply, and this fortified his gathering and overdue popularity. He stood in with the Indians better than others did, and he believed in friendly and adroit relations with them when possible. Leadership brought out his prime qualities: his zest for adventure, his hardihood for physical trials, and his bravery to the arrow's point. He believed in discipline and hard work, and calling to mind the strict habits of his school days, he made the sloven and surly bachelors walk-a-chalk. If they swore, water was dashed down their sleeves. They must brush their clothes, wash their hands, sing psalms daily--and like it! He thought this discordant group needed harmony as well as guidance every rousing morning. Mindful of G.o.d, the church was repaired; mindful of Mammon, too, the storehouse was covered. Early Virginia was more Puritan than it pretended. Smith also had the fort increased by three acres and had a pentagon made of it. He had men getting cedar, walnut and clapboard for buildings.

Newport brought in the second supply in October 1608, and with it many changes. Two women were among the pa.s.sengers--Mrs. Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras. When the latter became the bride of John Laydon, colonists saw their first recorded marriage on this side of the world.

That October the harvest had not been plentiful so they were cheered by the prospect of a new business venture. They had sent word that they had the proper ingredients on hand with which to start a new gla.s.s works: tar, pitch and soap-ashes. Accordingly eight Dutchmen and Poles, who were skilled in the craft, were among the pa.s.sengers. The Gla.s.s House soon took its bright stand, like a jewel in the wilderness, about a mile down the forest from James Fort. Within two months gla.s.s was shipped back, although not very profitably.

Another bright and futile dream bedazzled the lazier colonists--gold.

Smith, having given up the search, was disgusted with men who would do nothing but "dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, and load gold," and he scolded them soundly for sending the gilded dirt to England in April where it was properly dismissed as mica. "For the country was to them a misery, a ruin, a death, a h.e.l.l, and their own reports here, and their own actions according."