Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and The Start of a New Nation

King James’s England was not the colonial maritime powerhouse it would become in the next three centuries. King James is considered one of the most influential English kings, having ordered the translation of the Bible into the common English tongue. Under his rule, literary giants such as William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson flourished. Perhaps his most important contribution to English history, however, was his sponsorship of Jamestown. Despite the importance of this venture, Price depicts James as unengaged, so unkempt when Pocahontas and her entourage met him that they scarcely believed he was the king of anything.

Mineral wealth (such as that which enriched the Spanish further south) was what drove the Virginia Company’s investors and many of its first settlers. It became clear that such riches did not exist in Virginia, but this didn’t deter the settlers; fool’s gold was sent to London for analysis. This emphasis on fruitless mining pained John Smith, who allegedly complained “to see all necessary business neglected, to fraught such a drunken ship with so much gilded durt” (77).

The search nearly destroyed the colony, who spent 1608 digging and panning for pyrite instead of planting for harvest. The following period of starvation comprised eating shoe-leather and cannibalism.

Traditional notions of labor are upended in Price’s narrative of Virginian colonization. The adventure was populated by disinherited second-born heirs to estates and titles, who sought easy land and wealth to fund their lifestyles. Rather than make their wishes come true, the highborn refused to work and North American society reshaped itself according to their needs—providing free land where there was none and free labor. The belligerence of these men formed the essence of capitalist endeavor, in which capital to invest (in this case, land) is invented for the few society deems worthy, and then cheap labor is provided for them to make good on their investment. The “morality” of a hard day’s work and Smith’s ethos that “those who will not work will not eate” would come much later, but only for the poor and enslaved (108).

While the Spanish don’t make many appearances in the story of the Jamestown colony, their presence looms over the venture from the beginning. The Spanish conquest of South America was astonishing in its genocidal effectiveness, involving both brutal warfare and disease. In the long century between Christopher Columbus’s voyages and the first English settlement in North America, the Aztecs of modern Mexico were reduced to about 10% of their previous thriving population. The English response to this genocide was contradictory. They went to North America in search of gold on Algonquin land; yet, this theft was accompanied by the Virginia Company’s instructions to “have great care not to offend the naturals” (31). This idea of theft and displacement with a false front of (condescending) gentility continues to define economic liberalism. Though the English lived in fear of Spanish ships, their approach to colonization would prove the more brutal, long-lasting, and profitable method.