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

Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and The Start of a New Nation (2003) is a narrative history of the English’s founding of Jamestown in 1606 written by David A. Price. Price is a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other American publications. In his retelling of the story, Price seeks to puncture some of the romantic mythology surrounding the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas, while placing their lives in the historical context of the English and Algonquin cultures that formed their characters. This guide refers to the 2003 Vintage Books edition of the text.

Summary

In December 1606, The Virginia Company of London sent three ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—to settle the North American continent. They named the new settlement Jamestown, after their king. Their purpose was to emulate the Spanish in finding and mining mineral wealth. But to the Algonquin tribes native to the land they themselves knew as Tsenacommacah, the region was already home to a rich empire headed by a man named Powhatan.

Historically, the best-known member of the English colony was a man named John Smith. Unlike the highborn leaders of the expedition (with whom he frequently clashed), Smith had a peasant father and military experience. He fought in the Netherlands and Hungary; he was taken prisoner and forced into indentured servitude before escaping. He proved a capable and resourceful leader of the new colony, engaging in tough-minded diplomacy with Powhatan and other Algonquin tribes and instituting practical measures for survival. Nevertheless, his class put him in conflict with highborn investors; his stint as leader was brief and unrewarded by the Virginia Company. Smith soon returned to England, acknowledged as an author but not as a leader.

The Algonquin people, who inhabited most of the East Coast and much of modern Canada and the American Midwest, formed dozens of different tribes—some of which lived harmoniously with one another, and others in a state of conflict. The Algonquin knew the land well; they thrived on corn, beans, and squash, as well as practical hunting and fishing which intermingled seamlessly with their culture. The vast tract of coastal land that the English called Virginia was ruled by Powhatan, who ran a strong martial and economic empire. Of the English, John Smith was the first to recognize Powhatan’s authority. He stressed the necessity of living in harmony with Powhatan if the English were to survive in North America. For Powhatan’s part, he sought to destabilize and weaken the English settlement, seeing their ever-growing numbers as a threat. According to Smith’s own retelling, he was condemned to execution by Powhatan. Pocahontas, Powhatan’s precocious 10-year-old daughter, successfully pleaded for Smith’s life. In legend, this moment was a romantic story of cross-cultural triumph. In reality, John Smith and Pocahontas’s first meeting was just one of many attritional skirmishes in the decades-long diplomatic dance between the English and the Algonquin.

A young Pocahontas continued to show interest in English culture, visiting Jamestown to play with the settlement’s youngest inhabitants. As she grew older, she learned English and, during a brief period of captivity, adopted the Christian faith. This made her a model to evangelists in the settlement. She later married a tobacco merchant named John Rolfe and returned to England with him in 1616. However, London was ripe with disease, and Pocahontas died of respiratory failure within a year.

The early years of the Jamestown settlement were marked by starvation and incompetence in leadership, the inhabitants’ dreams of getting rich through mineral wealth and returning to London being dashed. No such mineral wealth existed in Virginia. As a result, the ill-prepared Jamestown settlers were nearly routed in 1609. The settlement only managed to recover by incorporating practical hunting, gathering, and agricultural techniques—and by seeing the wealth of North America not in minerals but in commodities. England kept sending inhabitants, and by the 1620s, Jamestown’s growth seemed exponential. Opechancanough, Powhatan’s successor, soon realized that the English posed a threat not only to his own empire, but to the entire continent. In 1622, he attempted a final stand against the English. The result amounted to total war, one in which civilians and soldiers alike were massacred without discrimination. At first, these atrocities were committed equally on both sides. The book concludes at the point in which the war transforms into centuries of systematic genocide against the Algonquin.