unto a land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing’ were used to support a moral as well as commercial crusade to Virginia, where the English were being called to minister to ‘a nation that never heard of Christ’. In time the Church would move from seeing these people, in 1584, as the most ‘kind and loving people’ in the world, to the view held in 1609 by the Reverend Richard Crakanthorpe, that they were ‘heathen barbarians and brutish people’ in desperate need of conversion. John Smith shared the sentiment but not the vitriol, writing in his 1608 A True Relation, that the aim remained: ‘to the high Glory of God, to the erecting of true religion among infidels, to the overthrow of superstition and idolatry, to the winning of many thousands of wandering sheep unto Christ’s fold, who now, and until now, have strayed in the unknown paths of Paganism, Idolatry and superstition’.
In response to this call, lip-service missionary work was employed to the advantage of investors. In 1616, following the arrival of Pocahontas in England, travelling under her converted name of Rebecca, the alien wife of Abraham, King James ordered the archbishops of Canterbury and York to organize a collection throughout the kingdom to raise money for an initiative to educate ‘the children of the barbarians’. This aim was manifest through the setting aside of 10,000 acres of ‘College Lands’ near Henricus, on the upper James River, where a school for instruction in English and Christianity would be built. A priest, the Reverend George Thorpe, a highly connected Company investor, was sent out to take charge of this project, for which, by 1620, over £3,000 had been raised. Progress was slow, in part due to the fact that Amerindian mums did not want to send their children to boarding school, but mainly because the by now almost bankrupt Virginia Company was reluctant to part with its windfall delivered from the collection plates of English congregations. The list of Amerindians converted by 1630 would not take long to recite. As well as Princess Rebecca Rolfe they included Manteo, who had been persuaded to go to England with Amadas in 1584 and had returned, twice, as an interpreter and go-between, earning an elevated status which was confirmed by his baptism at Croatoan in August 1586, at which time he was invested as Lord of Roanoke. No such conversion or award was made of Squanto, who played a similar role to that of Manteo, with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Indeed, so distrustful of Christianity was the local sachem, (tribal leader) Massasoit, that he stipulated that future land sales would only be agreed if the English ceased attempting to convert his people.
Scripture was not only available to justify belligerence and to Bible-bash the natives; it could also be used to punish one’s own people. The most notable example of this, during the period of invasion, was when John Smith, having been released from captivity by the Powhatans, because of Pocahontas’s dramatic intervention to prevent his execution, returned to Jamestown on 2 January 1608, but without his companions, Thomas Emery and Jehu Robinson, whom the Amerindians had killed. He was immediately seized by his enemies on the council, tried, and sentenced to death for allowing their slaughter, with the words from Leviticus 24:17, ‘he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death’, providing a justification for this crass illegal act that was not possible under English law. Smith, who seemed to have made a lifetime habit of being timely ripped from the jaws of death was, on this occasion, saved by the arrival of Captain Newport, who saw through the folly and vindictiveness of the council’s behaviour.
Smith himself, who does not give the appearance of being a biblical scholar, was well able to resort to scripture when it was apposite so to do. Thus his most famous adage, ‘He that will not work shall not eat’, was a direct transposition from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, with the added advantage that it conferred upon Smith the enormous and unquestionable authority of Saint Paul: ‘For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.’
Biblical teaching had a major influence on what was a most important aspect of colonial life: the settlers’ relationship with the native women. Naturally, for the sake of good neighbourliness casual liaisons with these ladies was forbidden, while rape was punishable by death. However, on occasions the English, such as Amadas and Smith, were entertained lovingly, and in the case of the latter most suggestively, by ladies whose physical attributes were neither unpleasant nor well hidden. Yet, no sexual link seems to have been made across the racial divide, although the settlers were, for the most part, young unattached males many miles and months from home. Virginia was thus no Tahiti, where Captain Cook’s sex-starved sailors could be well satiated in exchange for a six-inch nail. The only explanation for this enforced abstinence must be biblical teaching. Ezra 9, for example, taught that it was an abomination for the people of Israel dwelling among other nationals to ‘have taken of their daughters for themselves and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands’. So bad was this transgression that Ezra had to call the people together so that they could admit that they had ‘trespassed against our God’ in this matter and separate themselves from these ‘strange wives’. That was mild compared with the orders given by Moses in Numbers 31, in which he castigated the Israeli host for making captives – that is taking into slavery – the Midianite women and children, having slain their men folk. Moses demanded that they ‘kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him’. This is a direct contrast to the Amerindian tradition by which captured women and children were integrated into the tribe to compensate for those lost through warfare and disease.
More justification for separate development of the new world was found in the continuation of Deuteronomy 7 quoted above: ‘Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.’
In 1969 the English band Blue Mink released the song ‘Melting Pot’, which included the lyrics:
What we need is a great big melting pot,
Big enough to hold the world and all it’s got,
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more,
Turn out coffee-coloured children by the score.
It was a song which affirmed the oneness of mankind in the face of the enduring doctrine of racial discrimination and separation and the fear of miscegenation, the sexual relationship of people of mixed races. In the twentieth century this was seen as a black-and-white affair, but in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century greater Virginia the same condemnation, biblically supported, was very much in evidence to prevent close relationships between, mainly, white men and Amerindian women. For these settlers no dusky Ruth would snuggle down beside a white Boaz among the alien corn. Until John Rolfe, that is. His marriage to Pocahontas is as memorable for its uniqueness as for its romance. If any evidence is needed on how a biblical conscience could make hypocritical cowards of those who would court ‘strange women’, then Rolfe’s letter to Governor Dale requesting permission to marry the princess provides, in paragraph after paragraph of sickening sycophancy, proof enough, as when he wrote:
To you therefore (most noble Sir) the patron and Father of us in this country do I utter the effects of this settled and long continued affection (which hath made a mighty war in my meditations) and here I do truly relate, to what issue this dangerous combat is come unto, wherein I have not only examined, but thoroughly tried and pared my thoughts even to the quick, before I could fit wholesome and apt applications to cure so dangerous an ulcer. I never failed to offer my daily and faithful prayers to God, for his sacred and holy assistance. I forgot not to set before mine eyes the frailty of mankind, his proneness to evil, his indulgence of wicked thoughts, with many other imperfections wherein man is daily ensnared, and oftentimes overthrown, and then compared to my present estate. Nor was I ignorant of the heavy displeasure which almighty God conceived against the sons of Levi and Israel for marrying strange wives, nor of the inconveniences which may thereby arise, with other the like good motions which made me look about warily and with good circumspection, into the grounds and principal agitations, which thus should provoke me to be in love with one whose education hath been rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant
