value, Smith suggests that coastal politics demands a shrewder understanding of Native communication and a willingness to use violence.
From the beginning, the Proceedings draws a connection between Smith’s colonial feuds and his fight to subdue the frontier. On the voyage over, Smith is “restrained as a prisoner” when Newport accuses him of intending to “usurpe the governement.”82 From his position as a captive, Smith observes the suspiciously “kindly” visitations of the “Salvages,” and advises Newport to prepare for an attack. While Newport ignores him and instead pursues diplomatic outreach, Smith is soon proved right. When the discovery party begins to explore the area around the Jamestown fort, they find themselves “kindly intreated” by the Indians, just as Archer had reported in his “Relatyon.”83 Yet on their return, Smith writes, they find “17 men hurt, and a boy slaine by the Salvages.” In his report, Archer had attempted to dismiss this attack as an aberration, but the Proceedings hints instead at a causal connection between Newport’s diplomatic errand and the Indians’ sudden aggression. Embracing friendly diplomacy, Newport leaves the colony exposed. After this incident, Newport can no longer deny the Indians’ belligerence, and finally heeds Smith’s advice. “Hereupon,” Smith gloats, “the President was contented the Fort should be pallisadoed … for many were the assaults, and Ambuscadoes of the Salvages.”84
In the midst of these troubling events, Smith appears as the only figure who can subdue the Indians. After the intervention of the colony’s minister, Robert Hunt, Smith is unchained and “reconciled” with Newport. The Indians, violent before, immediately seek out a treaty agreement: “the good doctrine and exhortation of our preacher Mr. Hunt … caused Captaine Smith to be admitted of the Councell; the next day all receaved the Communion, the day following the Salvages voluntarily desired peace, and Captaine Newport returned for England with newes.”85 This narrative implies a causal link between Smith’s promotion to the council and the Indians’ willingness to make a treaty with the English. Smith’s hard-nosed approach, not Newport’s diplomacy, is the reason for the successful conclusion of any treaties.
While there is some overlap between the Proceedings and the events recounted in Archer’s “Relatyon,” the bulk of Smith’s books details what happens after Archer’s letter ends. The Proceedings charts, in troubling detail, the breakdown of Anglo-Powhatan diplomacy and the disintegration of peace, and it seeks to pin the blame on Newport and his negotiating strategies. While Smith criticizes many aspects of Virginia’s government, he attributes its woeful state of affairs primarily to the fact that Newport and his group have made too many concessions to Powhatan’s demands. “[T]hose at the fort so glutted the Salvages with their commodities,” the book complains, “as they [the colonists] became not regarded.”86 Smith did not invent this explanation for the colony’s trouble. The notion that the colonists lost political standing by paying tribute to the Powhatans was widely repeated, even appearing in the 1609 “Instructions” to Gates, which (without naming Newport) partly blamed trading policy for the high corn prices that had imperiled the food supply.87 The accusation probably had some truth to it. While gifts played a largely ceremonial role in European diplomatic negotiations, for the Powhatans, trade was crucial to determining political hierarchy. When the English arrived in the Chesapeake Bay, the Powhatans demanded gifts in exchange for corn and permission to settle. Jamestown leaders complied with these demands, and in writing described the Indians’ acceptance of goods as an acknowledgment of English power. This made the English look powerful under the law of nations, but according to Smith, it lowered them in Powhatan’s regard. In a description of Powhatan’s trading with Jamestown leaders, Smith illustrates the pitfalls of Newport’s approach: “being kindly received ashore” for a trading summit, “Powhatan strained himselfe to the uttermost of his greatnes to entertain us, with great shouts of Joy, orations of protestations, and the most plenty of victuall hee could provide to feast us.”88 After “3. or 4. daies” of “feasting dancing and trading,” Powhatan initiates official trade relations between Werowocomoco and Jamestown, beginning with a formal oration that suggests that coastal rather than English customs should govern negotiations. “Captain Newport,” he says, “it is not agreeable with my greatnes in this pedling manner to trade for trifles, and I esteeme you a great werowans, Therefore lay me down all your commodities togither, what I like I will take, and in recompence give you that I thinke fitting their value.”89 Powhatan dismisses English models of exchange as a “pedling” way to proceed. Instead, he flatteringly suggests that a great leader like Newport should trust the great chief to do the valuing himself. Powhatan’s words evoke what the anthropologist Marcel Mauss has described as a gift economy, in which extravagant exchange symbolizes power and recognition.90 Smith, however, does not believe that Powhatan’s gesture is reflective of any traditional Indian ways. He sees Powhatan’s oration as a ploy to raise prices and conquer the English. Smith warns Newport of the stratagem, whispering in his ear that the hidden intention behind Powhatan’s grandiose gesture is “but to cheat us.” To Smith’s horror, Newport falls for it anyway, caught up in the imperative to flatter Powhatan with gifts: “captaine Newport thinking to out brave this Salvage in ostentation of greatnes, & so to bewitch him with his bounty … [offered] to have what [Powhatan] listed.”91
At this moment, according to Smith, the colony teeters on the brink of disaster, standing to lose both financially and politically if the trading goes forward. As he did after the raid on Jamestown, however, Smith comes to the rescue, bringing to bear another approach to diplomacy, one more attuned to the subtlety of Powhatan’s maneuvers. “Smith … smothering his distast (to avoide the Salvages suspition) glaunced in the eies of Powhatan many Trifles who fixed his humour upon a few blew beads; A long time he importunatly desired them, but Smith seemed so much the more to affect them, so that ere we departed, for a pound or two of blew beads he brought over my king for 2 or 300 bushels of corne, yet parted good friends.”92 Here, then, is a radically different negotiating tactic. Rather than taking Powhatan’s words at face value, Smith reads Powhatan’s eyes to discover the true desire behind the façade—the shiny blue beads imported from English glassworks for use as currency. With the colonists’ blue beads glinting in Powhatan’s eyes, Smith moves to “affect them” himself, driving up their value despite their practical worthlessness to the English. Taken in by this ploy, Powhatan happily agrees to give up corn for beads, securing for the English a triumph of both trade and diplomacy.
While Archer construes Native actions as a transparent expression of political intentions, for Smith, words and gestures hide as much as they reveal. Smith’s account of glinting eyes and feinting gestures evoked broader debates in early modern England about the relationship between outward expression and inner intentions. While some scholastic authorities believed that gestures and facial expressions unwittingly revealed the truth of the heart, others saw them as possessing a capacity for artifice and deceit.93 In contrast to Archer’s model of diplomacy, which simply assumes the Indians are sincere, Smith points to a split between outward show and secret purpose.
Smith’s diplomacy of suspicion prevails during trade negotiations, preserving the peace and a precarious equality between parties. Yet by his own account, Smith’s approach also has limits, especially considering the ulterior goals behind Powhatan’s attempts to cheat the English. According to Smith, Powhatan is not only attempting to swindle the colonists at the bargaining table. He is also attempting to subjugate them, and this threat demands a different response. After the botched coronation, which repeats the lesson of the corn-trading episode, Powhatan secretly institutes an embargo against the English, forbidding other people from trading with them. His aim, as Smith later finds out, is to lure the colonists into an ambush disguised as a trading summit. Extending an invitation to trade, Powhatan offers to “loade [Smith’s] shippe with corne” in exchange for commodities and the help of Jamestown laborers in building an English-style house.94 As Smith travels to Werowocomoco, a “kind Salvage” named Weraskoyack tips off the already suspicious Smith about the chief’s true plans: “Captaine Smith,” he warns, “you shall finde Powhatan to use you
