favour much better, onlie for a poore peece of Copper, till this stately kinde of soliciting made him so much overvalue himselfe, that he respected us as much as nothing at all.”38 This is how John Smith describes the results of Christopher Newport’s diplomacy in The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, an account of the colony’s first years. While Archer describes Newport’s diplomatic achievements as the key to peace on the coast, Smith claims that this decorous approach to Powhatan has led to a different outcome: the chief loses all respect for the English, viewing them as subjects to his power. Though they might have placated him for the moment, Newport’s gifts, courtesy, and deference have only diminished the English. According to Smith, this loss of diplomatic standing has had dire consequences. While Powhatan and his many lieutenants nod and accept English gifts, they also plan ambushes and violent assaults on Jamestown. “[A]ll the woods were laid with Ambuscadoes to the number of 3 or 400 Salvages,” Smith continues, “commaunded to betray us, by Powhatans direction.”39 Far from sticking to the diplomatic script like Archer’s “Powatah,” Smith’s Powhatan embraces political tactics akin to those of Machiavelli’s Prince: cloying in official ceremonies, he is not hesitant to betray allies when it suits him.40
Like Archer before him, Smith writes about treaties in order to make an argument about New World possessions. He seeks to show how different models of diplomacy produce different kinds of political outcomes. But Smith’s portrayal of New World negotiation diverges sharply from Archer’s. Official ceremonies and staged meetings do little to create treaties or secure consent. The real struggles unfold outside the venues of official diplomacy, where promises are broken and peace betrayed. Inviting the English to parley, Powhatan plans in secret to murder them. However, in spite of Powhatan’s violent intentions, Smith and the other authors of the Proceedings do not abandon the legal strategy of asserting English rights through voluntary agreement. Instead, they describe a different way of accomplishing that end. Throughout the book, Smith launches ambushes of his own, “curb[ing]” the Indians’ “insolencies” and eventually bringing them back to the bargaining table where a stronger peace, one based on mutually assured destruction, takes hold.41 If the English are to wield authority in the New World, Smith suggests, they must set aside the “stately kinde of soliciting” for white-knuckle tactics that mirror the Indians’ own.42 An answering threat of force, rather than diplomatic politesse, wins the day.
Printed at Oxford, The Proceedings was pieced together from Smith’s own writings and from those of soldiers and secretaries who had accompanied him on trading voyages. The book was admittedly rough. Its editor, Thomas Abbay, apologized for the “false orthography or broken English” of its soldier authors.43 Yet the book also deviated from previous accounts of American diplomacy in another way. It depicted not civility, but threats; not friends, but enemies; not easy subjection, but rather the violent suppression of Indian revolt. Why did the book’s authors and editors, many of whom had a financial stake in the colony’s success, make public a story that departed so profoundly from the Jamestown leaders’ carefully cultivated image as benevolent ambassadors to Virginia Indians?
The answer to this question lies in a series of events that transpired after the events documented in Archer’s “Relatyon.” After the arrival of Archer’s letter, the Virginia Council of London received many reports that seemed to contradict his politic account of Indian diplomacy, and to suggest that Virginia was headed the way of Roanoke. The colony’s first presidents were deposed under a cloud of controversy, and its food stores proved inadequate, leading to mass starvation and reports of cannibalism.44 The ill-advised attempt to crown Powhatan did nothing to help diplomatic relations, and was followed by a bloody war between camps, known to historians as the First Anglo-Powhatan War.45 In response to such news, James I issued a second charter, giving more control to the colony’s investors in London. The colony’s governing council immediately appointed a new governor, Thomas West (3rd Baron De La Warr), and new deputies, George Percy, Sir Thomas Dale, and Sir Thomas Gates (the last of whom arrived in the colony after being shipwrecked on Bermuda).46 The council also instituted stricter laws in the hopes of restoring order and making the colony profitable. Finally, they implemented a new approach to diplomacy; rather than entreating Powhatan, the colonists would attack him, explaining themselves with the doctrine of just war, which held that it was lawful to make war against a sovereign who impeded natural commerce or committed acts of aggression against well-intentioned visitors. Claiming that “there is no trust to the fidelitie of humane beasts, except a man will make a league, with Lions, Beares, and Crocodiles,” a 1610 company publication stated that Powhatans had “violated the lawe of nations, and used our Ambassadors as Ammon did the servants of David,” making the Indian king a lawful target of war.47 However, despite this drastic change of plan, the Virginia Company did not abandon voluntary alliances as a way of possessing territory. Instead of offering treaties to Powhatan, they shifted their diplomatic efforts to the periphery of Tsenacomoco, hoping to turn Powhatan’s more restless subjects against him. “If you make freindeship with any of these nations, as you must doe,” their 1609 “Instructions” to Gates commanded, “Choose to doe it with those that are farthest from you and enemies unto [the Powhatans] amonge whom you dwell.”48 Armed with these justifications, and a new plan for making treaties beyond Powhatan’s territory, the colonists attacked and defeated their Paspahegh neighbors, Powhatan’s allies, and embarked upon diplomatic missions to the Patawomecks and other groups living on the periphery of Tsenacomoco.
The downturn in the colony’s fortunes was accompanied by hurried transatlantic correspondence, as various parties scrambled to show their cooperation with the new policy. While company leaders had initially wanted to keep the issue of Indian rights out of their direct correspondence with the Spanish, believing they would be no match for Spanish jurists schooled in the law of nations, the outbreak of war with the Powhatans brought the question of the colony’s legitimacy out into the open.49 John Smith was among the first to capitalize on the controversy over the colony’s legal standing. A disgraced former president of the colony, Smith had attended many of the early diplomatic conferences with Powhatan. Smith had also been in charge of trade relations with tribal polities. From 1607 until his departure from the colony in 1609, Smith conducted three food raids that were notable for their brutality.50 One observer compared Smith’s aggressive attempts to extort food from Indians to the violence that Spanish conquistadors had brought to the search for El Dorado a century earlier. “The Spanyard never more greedily desired gold then [Smith] victuall,” he wrote (partly inspired by Spanish narratives, Smith approvingly printed the statement in the Proceedings).51 Many Powhatan-affiliated groups responded to Smith in more than kind; on one voyage, Smith was kidnapped and held for several weeks before his release, a mercy he would later credit to the smitten pleading of Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas.52 Smith also claimed that Powhatan had adopted him as a symbolic son in treaty negotiations that occurred while Smith was in captivity.53 But while later the stuff of print romance, these incidents alarmed many in Jamestown, who feared not only for their lives but also for the precarious diplomatic arrangements on which their claims to possession depended. While the colony increasingly came to rely on the foodstuffs Smith acquired on his raids, some in colonial government accused him of being a “peace-breaker” whose violent tactics would undo Newport’s careful diplomacy and expose the colony to assault from Indians or Spanish fleets.54 Smith countered that the colony’s government was foolish to believe Powhatan’s commitment to peace. Smith’s embrace of warfare indirectly led to his departure. In late summer or early fall 1609, he was severely burned while experimenting with gunpowder aboard a barge, and his enemies in colonial government seized on his momentary incapacitation to ship him back to England.55
The dispute over Smith’s diplomatic tactics might have died in Virginia. However, the transatlantic controversy over the colony’s policies gave him a way of intervening from London. As a discredited and physically crippled leader of a venture that had failed to produce any return for its investors, Smith possessed little credibility among metropolitan councilors. But he did have one asset: his Indian papers and those of the soldiers who had accompanied him on trading
