1607: ENGLISH DESPERADOS SOUGHT QUICK RICHES IN VIRGINIA SWAMPS
JAMESTOWN rose in the spring of 1607, when the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery pressed up the James River and anchored near a malarial swamp.
One hundred and four settlers disembarked—gentlemen, soldiers, laborers, a few artisans, and several boys indentured for service.
They hacked logs, raised a triangular palisade, and dug shallow wells that filled with brackish seep. Clouds of mosquitoes swirled above the mud. The men coughed, sweated, and stumbled through their first days in the Virginia heat.
Inside the half-finished walls, John Smith, the only practical and defense-conscious man among them, took over and insisted on discipline. He had honed his military skills as a pirate and a soldier of the Holy Roman Empire against the Muslim Turks, earning 500 gold pieces and the rank of Captain. The Colonists gladly let Smith organize them.
“Work or die,” he warned, “there is no other law in this place.”
CAPTAIN SMITH LOVED POCAHONTAS, POCAHONTAS FELT THE SAME WAY TOO ~Peggy Lee; historical & apocryphal threads
Beyond the clearing, emissaries of the POWHATAN CONFEDERACY watched. They were men from the Paspahegh and other towns not far from the river. They carried bows, wore deerskin leggings, shell beads, and copper-fringed mantles.
Not long after Smith’s warnings rang through the palisade, Powhatan scouts seized him during a foraging mission along the Chickahominy. They bound his arms with river-reed rope and led him through winter forest toward Werowocomoco, the great town where Wahunsenacawh (Chief Powhatan) held council.
Smith later wrote that he faced death that day, though Powhatan traditions describe the scene as a ritual of adoption, meant to test the stranger’s courage before deciding his fate. Our telling honors both versions.
In the longhouse, copper ornaments gleamed by the fire. Priests circled Smith, chanting. Powhatan elders spoke in measured tones, debating the intent of the pale-faced intruders who built walls in swamp country as if bracing for conquest.
Powhatan himself regarded Smith with steady appraisal.
“Does your people’s god demand all lands?” he asked through an interpreter.
Smith stiffened. “We seek only trade—and survival.”
The debate turned grim. Warriors pressed Smith to the earth, lifting clubs. Drums thudded. Smoke curled around the rafters.
At a signal from the Chief, warriors pressed Smith to the earth, lifting clubs. Drums thudded. Smoke curled around the rafters. Powhatan raised his arm and was about to lower it for a warrior to club Smith to death.
At the edge of the circle stood Pocahontas, a girl just ripening into a woman. She was Powhatan’s cherished daughter, known among her people for warmth, quick wit, and a fierce sense of justice. Whether compelled by compassion, political instinct, or ritual duty, she moved suddenly toward the center as the clubs poised above Smith’s head.
She threw herself across him.
“Nehh!—Stop. Do not strike,” she cried in Algonquian, arms spread over the Englishman’s chest.|
The warriors hesitated. A murmur rippled through the house.
Powhatan’s brows rose. “Daughter… why do you do this?”
Pocahontas lifted her chin. “Killing him brings only sorrow. Let him rise. Let him learn our ways, and let him bring no harm.”
Smith, stunned, looked up at her—this child who carried the authority of lineage and the courage of a seasoned warrior.
Powhatan paused a long moment before lowering his staff.
“So be it,” he declared. “If he survives the winter among us, he becomes a brother to our people.”
Smith later romanticized the scene; some English chroniclers turned it into a tale of forbidden love; modern historians warn that his account may be embellished, even symbolic. Yet the Powhatan version—ritual adoption rather than melodrama—carries its own dignity and depth.
In our retelling, the two truths meet: a moment when a young girl’s voice—real or ritual—stayed the blow, and when two worlds, briefly, touched something like partnership rather than domination.
When Smith returned to Jamestown weeks later, thin but alive, he told colonists, “The girl saved me.”
And across the river, Pocahontas told her playmates, “The Englishman is strange… but he listens.”
For a flicker of time, so brief it barely registered against the vast machinery of empire, compassion interrupted conquest.
Beyond the clearing, emissaries of the POWHATGAN CONFEDERACY watched—men from the Paspahegh and other towns not far from the river. They carried bows, wore deerskin leggings, shell beads, and copper-fringed mantles.
Powhatan’s priests warned the English were not simple visitors but agents of a power hungry for land—another arm of a distant dominator god who demanded obedience and hierarchy.
POWHATAN calculated carefully, offering corn at times, withholding it at others, weighing whether partnership or annihilation would best preserve his people.
1608–1609: FIRST HUNGER
By autumn, disease struck. Salt poisoning from the brackish wells hollowed the settlers’ faces. Fever shook them. Gentlemen who refused to labor collapsed first.
Smith enforced harsh punishments: men caught stealing rations were tied to posts; he locked others in makeshift stocks hammered from pine.
Late that winter, Powhatan’s messengers approached the gate carrying corn baskets. One leaned toward an English boy and murmured in Algonquian, “Eat with gratitude, or you will feed the earth.”
Still, mistrust festered.
Jamestown men imagined the nearby villages rich with supplies they believed they deserved.
Powhatan priests feared the English carried a creed tied to an invisible, wrathful Yahweh [He was either Anunnaki Commander Enlil or Marduk, masquerading as Enlil]—a foreign thunder-lord demanding subjugation.
During these fragile years, settlers sometimes slipped away to nearby towns. Some married into Powhatan families, accepted matrilineal kinship, learned to plant maize, and lived inside council houses patterned with reeds and carved poles. Their letters later spoke of generosity rarely found in the colony.
Winter 1609–1610: STARVING TIME WITHOUT SMITH
When Smith returned to England after a gunpowder injury, Jamestown collapsed. The winter of 1609–1610, later known as The Starving Time, reduced the population from almost 500 to just 60 survivors.
The snow fell relentlessly. Horses, dogs, and rats were eaten. Men staggered through the mud like specters. Some died at their posts along the palisade.
Powhatan warriors, angered by English raids, cut off access to surrounding villages. “Your hunger is not our burden,” they said when approached under truce, “you wanted dominion, not friendship.”
In the fort’s church, gaunt colonists knelt beneath the wooden cross, praying to the English God—an echo of the old Enlil-figure who demanded loyalty and obedience but offered little mercy.
When spring came, the survivors looked more like revenants than settlers.
1612–1622: TOBACCO, BONDAGE & THE NEW ORDER FOR JAMESTOWN
John Rolfe’s curing of West Indian tobacco in 1612 transformed Virginia. Colonists spread up and down the river. They demanded more labor, and ships brought them indentured servants—young men and women bound by four- to seven-year contracts. They arrived malnourished, often barefoot, wearing coarse wool or hemp. Many died before freedom.
And then, in 1619, the English ship White Lion sailed into the James with “20 and odd” Africans taken from a Portuguese slaver. Some were recorded as indentured, yet their lived reality began the shift toward racial slavery. Their agricultural knowledge—especially in riverine rice and tropical cultivation—deepened the colony’s wealth.
Planter elites, led by the governor, councilmen, and Anglican clergy, feared the mingling of these groups. A poor white servant and an African man might whisper in the fields, “We should be free together.” An indentured woman might barter food with Powhatan neighbors. These crossings threatened the rigid hierarchy the elites believed sanctioned by their thunder-god.
In Indian towns, English runaways found welcome. Some married Powhatan women and raised children who spoke Algonquian. They carried tobacco pipes carved with clan symbols and moved in partnership systems at odds with Jamestown’s harsh class structure.
1622: POWHATANS ATTACKED JAMETOWN
In March 1622, Opechancanough—Powhatan’s brother—launched a coordinated rising against expanding English farms. Nearly one-quarter of the colony’s population was killed. English reprisals were devastating. Villages were burned. Corn stores were destroyed. Children were taken captive.
Within Jamestown, ministers declared the attack a punishment from their god, demanding ever stricter laws. Stocks, whipping posts, and jail cells filled. Drunkenness was punished by public shaming or iron collars. Miscegenation—especially between Africans and Europeans—was increasingly criminalized as a threat to order.
Royal commissioners eventually arrived from England to survey conditions. They rode from farm to fort, taking statements about mortality, labor shortages, and the constant fear that poor Europeans, Africans, and Indians might unite into a force able to overturn planter domination.
One whispered to another, “If they ever join hands, the whole venture collapses.”
1640–1676: CLASS WAR IN VIRGINIA
By the mid-1600s, tobacco profits enriched a small elite: the governor, councilors, merchants, and the largest planters along the James. Below them toiled indentured servants, free poor whites, enslaved Africans, and an underclass of multiracial families living near the edges of Indian territory.
Spanish slavers sometimes prowled the coast. Survivors of raids reported being seized onto ships bound for New Spain.
Jamestown officials built new watchtowers and trained militia patrols, whose ranks mixed poor whites with Africans forced into arms. They labored together, slept in the same blockhouses, and whispered about the injustice they shared.
In the 1660s, Virginia passed laws declaring that a child’s status followed the mother. This ignored the identity of the father, whether English or a slave. This rule cemented hereditary slavery. Planters believed this blocked White laborers from allying with the Slaves.
Friendships between slaves and White laborers formed in fields and fishing camps anyhow. A Powhatan fisherman might murmur to an African laborer, “The river belongs to all who drink from it.” An indentured Englishman might answer, “Then why are we bound?”
These alliances terrified the governor.
1676: BACON’S REBELLION
When Bacon’s Rebellion erupted in 1676, poor whites, some Africans, and some frontier families joined the war against the ruling elite. Though the rebellion ultimately failed, it showed how close the colony came to overturning the domination hierarchy imposed from London—an echo of an older cosmic pattern the settlers carried: the Enlilite belief that order required obedience, punishment, and rigid ranks.
CONCLUSION
Jamestown began in hope, nearly died in hunger, rose on tobacco, and hardened into a racial caste society designed to prevent alliances across class and color. Its leaders feared nothing more than the unity of Africans, Indians, indentured Europeans, and the poor. Fear of the underclasses uniting to defeat the oligarchs shaped Virginia’s laws, violence, and the emerging institution of slavery.
The Anglican clergy enforced the Anunnaki pattern of domination and justified it as god-given. Dominator dictation–inherited from ancient kings and enforced in Virginia through stocks, collars, crosses, and guns–stifled cooperation of the underlasses most of the time.
Yet beneath that pattern flickered the stubborn human drive for partnership—visible whenever a servant married into a Powhatan clan, when Africans and whites fled together, or when the poor looked at one another and asked, “Why not freedom for all of us?”
REFERENCES
1. Korengold, James. Jamestown: The First Permanent English Colony (video). 2015. History Channel.
2. Horn, James. A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. 2005. Basic Books.
3. Horn, James. 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy. 2018. Basic Books.
4. Kelso, William M. Jamestown, the Buried Truth. 2006. University of Virginia Press.
5. Kelso, William M. The Archaeology of Early Virginia: Settlement and Society. 2012. University of Virginia Press.
6. Price, David A. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. 2003. Alfred A. Knopf.
7. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Jamestown Project. 2007. Harvard University Press.
8. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. 2005. University of Virginia Press.
9. Rountree, Helen C. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. 1989. University of Oklahoma Press.
10. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. 1975. W. W. Norton.
11. Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. 1998. University of North Carolina Press.
12. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. 1980. Harper & Row.
13. Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. 2004. University of Pennsylvania Press.
14. Billings, Warren M. Jamestown and the Founding of the Nation. 2007. Virginia Historical Society.
15. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. 2001. Harvard University Press.
16. Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. 1975. University of North Carolina Press.
17. Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. 2001. Viking Press.
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