of violence paradoxically creates the calm political order that diplomacy cannot. In the wake of the disasters brought on by Newport’s stately overtures to Powhatan, Smith’s confrontational tactics pacify the Indians. But if Archer is worried about the credibility of Native words and gestures for international readers, Smith faces a problem of his own. If violence, or the threat of violence, inspires agreement, how are readers to know that such agreement is any more sincere than the false promises that led to violence in the first place? Smith’s model of treaty making seems to lead to an infinite regress, with broken promises begetting only more violence. Smith addresses this problem in a culminating chapter entitled “How the Salvages became subject to the English.” The chapter describes how Smith unravels a Dutch conspiracy against Jamestown while simultaneously bringing Indians to treaty through threats. The ultimate effect of violence, in Smith’s account, is not simply to produce fearful acquiescence, but rather to inspire the kind of credible promises necessary for consensus ad idem. After discovering the betrayal of the English by the Dutch and their Indian co-conspirators, Smith explodes into action with typical decisiveness. He “burn[s] their houses, [takes] their boats … and … resolve[s] not to cease till he had revenged himselfe upon al that had injured him.” As in previous encounters, the Indians “thr[ow] downe their armes and desir[e] peace” in the face of Smith’s hectic peace-breaking.105 This time, however, the concession leads to a treaty that satisfies the criteria of consensus ad idem. An Indian orator named Ocanindge steps forward to deliver what the narrative calls a “worthie discourse.” Ocanindge notes Smith’s destructive intentions. “[W]e perceive & well knowe you intend to destroy us,” he says. But Ocanindge also turns the tables, reminding Smith that the Indians can destroy the English as well: “we can plant any where … and we know you cannot live if you want our harvest.” This threat leads to an offer of truce backed up not by ceremonial gestures, such as the exchange of gifts, but rather by a recognition of the mutually assured destruction the two camps can visit upon one another: “if you promise us peace we will beleeve you, if you proceed in reveng, we will abandon the Countrie,” Ocanindge declares. Smith is impressed by this geopolitical reasoning, and the English and Indians come to an agreement: “Upon these tearmes the President promised them peace, till they did us injurie, upon condition they should bring in provision, so all departed good friends.”106 Smith will agree not to destroy the Indians (and, by implication, himself) if the Indians will continue to bring the English provisions. A treaty at last.
In practice, the compelled promise that ends the Proceedings seems little different from the acts of extortion Smith carried out earlier. But here extortion is formalized by a verbal agreement that has real force. The two parties promise each other, and this time, because of the threat that lurks behind their words, the promise is real. As well as compelling submission, violence ironically produces the truth in speech necessary for treaties. Smith and Ocanindge can trust each other because they are not bound by superficial norms of engagement that would provide a ceremonial cover for deception. The excessive (and deceptive) courtesy that fills Archer’s pages is replaced by mutually assured destruction and the paradoxically honest agreements that follow from it. Smith’s book concludes with a triumphant image: Powhatan and his underlings, cowed into submission, and ready to consent to the newcomers’ conditions. In place of diplomacy, Smith offers peace by other means.
Though it described the events of the colony’s early years, Smith’s bellicose volume answered to the needs of the colony’s governing council during a period of doubt about Jamestown’s survival. In publishing the book, Smith was not simply attempting to settle old scores. He was joining a debate about the colony’s future, and using Indian treaties to position himself as the most capable adventurer to return and lead Virginia. In this, he failed. The colony’s London directors were not anxious to entrust its fate to a figure associated with so much controversy, and Smith soon threw in his lot with New England explorers. However, his book was successful in another way. Smith’s attempt to reconcile warlike tactics with treaty justifications proved influential within the company, which had need of a way of making war look like peace. The company’s directors knew the English were not alone in Jamestown. Travelers and spies from other nations were also there, or possessed illicit access to the colony’s transatlantic correspondence, and they too had stories to tell about Native diplomacy.
Shows of Sovereignty: Zúñiga’s Correspondence
“I have been amused by the way they honour him,” Spanish ambassador Pedro de Zúñiga sardonically reported to Philip III in 1608. Zúñiga was describing the arrival in London of one of Powhatan’s sons, “a lad,” who had traveled there with Newport to confirm the crown’s friendship with Virginia Indians.107 Of the many signs of alliance exchanged between the Powhatans and English colonists, the boy was the most compelling in the eyes of European onlookers. Named Namontack, he was part of a diplomatic exchange that also included an English boy named Thomas Savage, who was sent to live with the Powhatans. The exchange had involved disingenuous statements on both sides. Powhatan had told Jamestown governors that Namontack was royalty, and they had told him the same thing about Savage.108 Both sides were comfortable with such fictions, however. Powhatan stood to gain from the presence of an English boy. He could learn the newcomers’ language and pry into their plans. And the Virginia Company was likewise eager to embrace Namontack. By introducing him in London as a foreign prince, they could show diplomats at court that Tsenacomoco was a sovereign nation and that its leaders could offer legal consent to English colonists. To this end, the company outfitted Namontack in copper jewelry and presented him to important stakeholders in English colonial endeavors. Yet as with the Jamestown governors’ diplomacy in the Chesapeake Bay, these diplomatic performances inspired controversy.109 For his part, Zúñiga believed none of it. In a letter, he characterizes the entire display as artifice, an act, and bristles at the pretension. “I hold it for surer that he must be a very ordinary person,” not a prince at all, Zúñiga concludes.110
The presentation of Namontack to London society restaged for a metropolitan audience the same kind of cross-cultural diplomatic rituals that were common in Virginia. It involved a familiar legal strategy: recognize the Indians as royalty so they can bestow legitimacy on the English. Usually, this legal strategy was publicized in writing. This time, however, it was embodied by a Powhatan ambassador, who would perform before James I what Powhatan and others had supposedly enacted before Newport. There were strategic advantages to such direct lobbying. If carried out successfully, Namontack’s presentation to the king could demonstrate the colony’s powerful coastal alliances for international onlookers at court. When Namontack arrived in London, for example, the ambassador from Venice, Zorzi Giustinian, noted it as a significant political visit, writing that “one of the chief inhabitants” of the New World had arrived “to treat with the King for some agreement about that navigation.”111 Yet Namontack’s appearance also involved considerable risk. By bringing the boy to London, the Virginia Company exposed him to the critical eyes of foreign ambassadors. Enemies watched, and they were skeptical of what they saw.
Native treaties were a precarious form of legal evidence; when they held, they could make the English appear powerful, but their potential collapse could call into question the legal standing of settlement ventures. I now seek to examine how Spanish diplomats scrutinized English treaties for evidence that might invalidate English claims. Spain, like other monarchies with New World interests, maintained surreptitious networks of correspondence through various overseas agents who spied on foreign governments and their colonial holdings. These networks included priests, exiles, disaffected English Catholics, and other travelers with an interest in New World projects. After the Anglo-Spanish War, the ranks of such “intelligencers,” as the English called them, increasingly came to include diplomats such as Zúñiga, who served officially as overseas representatives but unofficially as clearinghouses of rumors and reports. Zúñiga’s letters give some evidence of the kinds of information that came his way from Virginia. He cites depositions from English Catholics, intercepted copies of letters from the English traveler Francis Perkins, and Virginia Company ledgers, as well as his own first-hand observations of the behavior of Powhatan guests at diplomatic receptions in London. At one point,
