American Death Trip (2) English and Natives
ANNETTE TELLS TALES Making Friends (or not) and Influencing People Via Death, in Early Virginia
Here's my second and final riff on Erik Seeman’s book Death in the New World, continued from Part 1:
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Death and the Lost Colony: Roanoke, and Roanoke II
Yes, I’ve written about Roanoke before, when Hoosen and I visited the site of the Lost Colony. Here's my take (exclusively for Nonnies):
Death? Historians cover everything. History is not that laundry list of facts and whatnot in high school curriculum. We can’t really understand the human present without understanding how we got here, and as early American historians will tell you, we can’t understand any of it if we exclude discussion of anything. Including death.
So, having done a Non-Boring History riff on the clashing yet strangely connected cultures of death, burial, and afterlife among the 17th century Huron people and French Jesuit missionaries up in Canada. it’s time to visit death in the English colonies in the early South, in what would become Virginia. Brits? Today is all about American Indians AND English people, who didn’t become magically American when they crossed the ocean. Dismissing them because they did is like declaring the people of the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Skye no longer British because they’re offshore.
Death in Groan-oke
The first underfunded English efforts to build an American colony, to compete with the much more powerful Spanish Empire, groaning with gold and silver from America, didn’t go too well. Actually, I think the word I’m looking for is “fiasco”. Roanoke Island, the site English explorers chose, is not even much of an island, honestly, separated only by a river from the rest of what was then called Virginia, and is now North Carolina.
The first Roanoke colony (1585) began with high hopes for finding gold in the bit of America the English had claimed without telling the Spanish they were present on what was, officially, Spanish territory. The English hunted for gold on Roanoke with the aid of two scientists on the team. Their experiments ended abruptly after an Irish soldier, with official encouragement by English colonial officials to do their dirty work, murdered local Native leader Wingina. The English then displayed Wingina’s head on a pike to impress the Indians, who were not impressed, and who, by the way, far outnumbered the English.
This brilliant bit of diplomacy was shortly followed by most of the colonists beating a hasty retreat to England, leaving behind a skeleton crew who would shortly become actual skeletons. Curtains down on Roanoke, Act 1. But I'm rushing things. Let's slow down, and back up.
Learning My Culture
While Roanoke (part 1, 1585) was the first English attempt at colonizing America, it wasn’t the first English encounter with the Roanoke Island Natives: An English exploratory expedition had arrived the previous year, 1584, to select the site for the colony. Things started well. The Roanoke Indians welcomed the sailors with open arms, served them a feast of fresh local foods, and even washed the Englishmen’s feet. The English were charmed.
Let’s be clear, though: The Indians of Roanoke were hospitable. They weren’t naive. Two Indian leaders, one of them named Manteo (after whom Andy Griffith’s favorite town, was named on Roanoke Island centuries later) volunteered to go back to England with the expedition. To repeat: These two men weren’t kidnapped. They offered to go with the English.
Why did they go?
The Roanoke Indians wanted to collect info on these pale aliens, and to learn their strange language. Once they landed in England, Manteo and his colleague lodged in Plymouth with Thomas Harriot, one of the scientists who would soon accompany the first Roanoke colonists. Thomas Harriot learned some of the Algonquian language from his two Indian lodgers, while they learned English from him.
When the first settlers landed in Roanoke Island in 1585, accompanied by the two bilingual Indians, Manteo suggested where to put the colony: Right next to a local village, so the Indians could keep a close eye on the newcomers. In other words, Roanoke wasn’t all a one-way deal of conquest and victimhood: From the start, the Indians were checking out the English as well as the other way round. And they were studying each others’ ways of death.
These studies continued once everyone was settled on Roanoke. Thomas Harriot and Roanoke artist John White studied the Indians closely, and made a serious effort to understand their culture. Then Harriot wrote about that culture, and especially about Indian deathways. Harriot and White weren’t modern anthropologists, who tend to be more self-aware of their own biases, but they were sympathetic. They tried to understand Indian death culture by comparing it with English traditions and beliefs. They quickly decided that the two cultures were conveniently similar, not least because they wanted to reassure an English audience that joining the colony would be a great move.
One example of Harriot’s observations: He described the Roanoke afterlife as remarkably like Heaven and Hell. He wasn’t lying: That’s how he understood what he was told. But there are many reasons why this might have been: Spanish Jesuit missionaries had been based about a hundred miles south of Roanoke (until they were killed in 1575), so they may have introduced influential Christian ideas that spread to the Roanoke Indians.
Since we rely on Harriot’s writing for much information we wouldn’t have otherwise, we can’t ignore his wishful thinking in making the Roanoke Indians sound cozily familiar. Harriot was not, let’s be clear, mocking anyone: He wrote down two stories he had heard of Indians dying, visiting the afterlife, and coming back to life after being buried, and he treated these tales with respect.
But maybe such stories weren’t the bizarre novelties they would be to us modern people? Didn’t the 16th century English also believe in the dead returning to the land of the living? Ghosts were commonly believed in among the English, even though they were definitely not part of Christian faith. The English also loved a good story about people being revived after hanging, or after burial. And, of course, so far as Christianity is concerned, there’s Jesus Christ’s resurrection.
Burying the Posh
Harriot, being a bit of an elitist, like most privileged Englishmen, did not pay attention to how ordinary Indians were buried, those who were not leaders. In some places in the eastern part of America, corpses of ordinary people were buried in the ground, while in others, they were first left to rot on scaffolds off the ground, and later buried as bones in an ossuary, just as Dr. Seeman described happening among the Huron people in Part 1 of this post.
Harriot and White didn’t much care what happened to the remains of people they saw as riff-raff. They were, however, very interested in how the Indian elite were sent off, and how they were first laid to rest in “tombs”, platformed structures that raised bodies off the ground. First, the corpse was skinned, its flesh stripped off, and the innards removed. Then the bones were wrapped in deerskin, and finally, in a touch that maybe makes us weenie modern people cringe just a a little, especially if we saw Silence of the Lambs, the dead person’s skin was replaced around the remains, before they were laid on the platform with the other elite corpses.
You would think this process would also freak out a couple of 16th century Englishmen. But no! They were too busy being excited that the Roanoke Indians were sophisticated enough to distinguish between leaders and riff-raff, even in death. Just like the English!
And honestly? Gussying up corpses to look a bit lifelike was also an elite English thing. Here’s how:
Royal bodies in England in in the Middle Ages had their innards removed, and were then embalmed for prolonged public display during the elaborate death rituals that followed. Over the centuries, the multi-day rituals gradually grew longer, and if you think 21st century Brits have put all this sort of ceremony firmly in the rearview mirror, I remind you now of all the pomp and pageantry surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Then, the latest innovation was Princess Anne, the Queen’s daughter, becoming the first princess to join with her princely brothers in standing vigil over the coffin, and while apparently dressed as Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.
The thing is, as royal death rituals became a more and more extended affair, medieval embalming just wasn’t up to the task. Royal corpses started to decompose before all the ceremonies were over, which was a bit awkward. So, by the 16th century, an effigy, basically a waxwork, of the royal stiff was wheeled out for public display.
One well-documented example of how this worked? The death rituals around Queen Elizabeth I. She died in 1603, and her sealed coffin was on display for a month. Servants even served Her Deceased Majesty three meals a day. I assume the food was then discreetly taken away untouched, but that no flunky had to sneak out in the night like Santa Claus and make it look like the deceased Queen had helped herself to the goodies, but hey, Royal life has seen stranger things.
Finally, for the funeral procession, a fully fake Elizabeth was placed on top of the coffin to represent the decaying real thing inside. The fake corpse was made from wood and wax, because (as we still see at Madame Tussaud’s various Tourist Trapperies) wax gives a lifelike appearance to its hands and face. In case you wanted to build a vacation around seeing how Fake Elizabeth looked, you can still see that very same effigy of Elizabeth I: It’s on display in Westminster Abbey.
As Dr. Seeman notes in his book, “If the English had possessed Carolina Algonquian technology, would they have mummified their monarchs’ remains for the funeral procession?” As Brits say, there’s no answer to that. Seeman adds, “The Indian treatment of royal corpses was . . . closer to their [the English’s] own worldview than to ours.”
Even so, there were massive cultural differences between 16th century Englishmen and Roanoke Indians, and these differences help us understand why the English colony at Roanoke didn’t end too well. One of these differences was that Englishmen were always looking for a solid return on their colonial investment although, in fairness, what they did wasn’t always about money. Okay, yes, mostly it was, but they liked to please God while they raked in the loot.
Even Thomas Harriot, a scientist with a scientist’s curiosity, constantly talked in his writings about potential profits, but not the profits we might assume, in gold. As Dr. Seeman observes, “[Harriot] portrayed the Roanoke Indians as yet another crop to be harvested, this one for Jesus Christ.” Just like the later French Jesuits, Harriot’s #1 goal was conversions.
Yes, Harriot actually did missionary work among the Roanoke Indians himself, with mixed results. He preached about God and showed the Bible to his Indian neighbors, but despite his protest that the book itself had no magical powers, many of his audience were keen to touch and hold it. We shouldn’t be surprised: I can think of loads of examples of holy books, Bibles included, being considered good luck.
At first, this belief among Indians in the magical powers of print helped Harriot spread his message of the superiority of English religion. So did the fact that the English on Roanoke mostly didn’t die from the diseases they had brought, while their Indian neighbors did: This made the English seem superhuman, supported by an encouraging Christian God.
This was impressive. However, the Roanoke Indians were not so impressed when they realized that the English were completely useless at the most basic of human responsibilities: Feeding themselves. The Indians Had Questions. Even in spring, their English neighbors were still mooching off them for cornmeal and fish. Fish! I mean, that’s embarrassing. What Englishman was completely incapable of fishing? The English lived on an island. Surrounded by (checks map) water. Even as a preschooler, before fish stocks were sent into a nosedive, I, Annette, caught fish in Scotland, and, after my dad cut them open, I gutted them myself. The first Roanoke settlers were truly pathetic, and the Indians thought so, too.
The Indians now questioned the superiority of the English God who would let His people starve.
Ensenore, a Roanoke Indian, had some answers for everyone, however. He was an elder of the Roanoke Indian elite, and he was pro-English. Just as Harriot and White had been studying the Indians, Ensenore had been studying the English and their deathways. He gave a speech to his people in which he explained his carefully-considered theory that the English were already dead, which was why they seemed immune to disease. This made them powerful and scary.
Colonizing English Zombies! I mean, that’s not unreasonable on the face of the evidence. Following Ensenore’s speech, the Roanoke Indians agreed to keep supporting the English. Seeman doesn’t suggest that this alliance was based on a fear of Englishmen eating their brains, but I think we should be told.
And then Ensenore died, and the political winds shifted with new leadership. Wingina, who now had strongest influence among the Roanoke people, saw things differently. It was time, Wingina decided, to get rid of these alien leeches. He needed to launch a surprise attack on the English.
To be successful, Wingina needed to keep it secret that he was assembling an army of warriors from the surrounding area to get ready for the attack. To disguise his plan, he summoned a gathering in honor of the late Ensenore. And guess what? His plan worked.
This gathering of Indian warriors to mourn Ensenore made sense to English leader Ralph Lane. Lane decided that this was simply the Indians’ version of the old English death custom of “month’s mind”. Month’s Mind was an old-fashioned English tradition that had declined as England moved from Catholic to Protestant.
Lane would have remembered the tradition from his childhood, when England was still culturally Catholic. A “month’s mind” was a Catholic commemoration of a death, a bit like a Jewish Yahrzeit (which marks the annual anniversary of a loved one’s death), only observed a month after a death rather than a year. So, of course, Lane decided, that’s why 1,500 Indian warriors had gathered! They were assembling to give the late Ensenore proper respect! They were marking a month’s mind!
Yeah, nah. Wingina’s goal in assembling his fighting force was to murder Ralph Lane, Thomas Harriot, and all the other English leaders in the middle of the night, and then wipe out the rest of the English.
The plan was foiled, however, when a young Indian man spilled the beans. That’s how Wingina literally ended up as a head on a pole, as described earlier.
Since the Indians didn’t seem too pleased at this turn of events, this seemed like a good time for the English of the first Roanoke colony to go home, leaving a small crew at the Fort. This skeleton staff were apparently killed soon after, as the English discovered when the second Roanoke colony arrived and found skeletal remains.
This second attempt at a colony was led by John White, yes, the artist, who maybe wasn’t the wisest choice for leadership. Despite Manteo’s continued aid and advice, the second Roanoke colony could not feed itself, either. John White left for England to round up more supplies. But by the time his ship landed in England, the nation was at war (Spain attacked in 1588).
This unexpected turn of events prevented White’s quick return. By the time the relief party turned up on Roanoke, the colonists had disappeared. Indian sources suggest that some of the English may have joined the Indian population of North Carolina, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that, not least the fact that life with the Indians was a lot less work, exploitation, and stress. Plus, Dr. Seeman points out, this likelihood raises some very interesting questions about how deathways change: “Imagine one of these Lost Colonists, an ordinary soldier, marrying an Indian woman. They have a daughter who dies in infancy. How do they bury her?”
Think about that. Because right there, that’s just one story of America that the more vocal members of the public might find instructive, if I might say so: While arguing about what separates people of different cultures, they've not noticed how Americans have, increasingly, blended together in a shared understanding of the world, even as they go on about differences.
Jamestown: Dead on Arrival
Haven’t I written about Jamestown before? Absolutely I have: There are so many ways to approach every subject in academic history, and they all throw light. Here’s an example from NBH:
The first permanent English Colony in Jamestown, Virginia, north of Roanoke, started with a lot of English deaths, as we shall see. It almost ended badly, when a whole lot more deaths happened. That’s because, when the Powhatan Indians finally got fed up with the greedy, mooching English, just like the Roanoke Indians before them, they, too, planned an attack. This time, in 1622 Virginia, the English were not tipped off, and the attack happened, a massive surprise to English people who'd convinced themselves that the Indians were perfectly content to see their lands invaded and colonized. Hundreds died.
This disaster, Erik Seeman says, led to the landscape of the Virginia colony being “sanctified”, or made holy, by English bodies and blood.
While Indians saw the burial grounds of all ancestors as holy places, the English only applied that view to the resting places of people killed in war or similar, and they brought that view to America. Think, Seeman says, of Civil War battlegrounds, or Ground Zero, the Manhattan site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, where thousands of Americans died on 9/11. These places have an aura of shrine, because, actually, they are shrines. In fact, while I’m on the subject, K12 (school) history education in the US is also all about shrines, teaching young people to worship the past and certain people in it, rather than to understand how complicated a place the past and its people can be, just like the present. But I digress.
In the years following the 1622 attack on England’s Virginia colony, English writers processed the meaning of these deaths. Among those writers was Samuel Purchas, #1 fan of English colonies in America. In his view, the presence of English bones marked English possession of the land. Let me repeat that: The bodies of murdered Englishmen and women, according to Purchas, now gave the English all rights to the Indians’ land, and justified their shoving out the Natives. His interpretation went right along with what the English actually did in the aftermath of this disaster.
But we’re ahead of the story. First, let’s go back to the arrival of the English in Virginia, in their new colony of Jamestown, and take a look at deathways.
Jamestown’s Beginning
John Smith was only in Virginia for two years, but he made a lasting impact. While Americans like to get misty-eyed about the Mayflower and Plymouth, understanding modern America is much better done by looking at another origin story, the one to the South, in Jamestown (Virginia), the one starring John Smith.
John Smith, son of a merchant from Lincolnshire, England, educated and savvy, was a soldier, a mercenary, and a guy you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley. He had read Thomas Harriot’s accounts from Roanoke, and, like Harriot, and like the Jesuit Catholic missionaries of New France (Canada), Smith understood how deathways could mark a good starting point for understanding other cultures.
Unlike Harriot and the Jesuits, however, Smith couldn’t care less about converting Indians to Christianity. His goal in learning about Indian culture was to use his knowledge to get power over Virginia’s indigenous people. His understanding of what had gone wrong in Roanoke, as Dr. Seeman notes, helped the English survive in early Jamestown, and also set the tone for common American beliefs: The settlers could not survive by mooching food from the Indians, Smith insisted. They had to exercise personal responsibility. As he famously said, “He who will not work shall not eat,” which, unlike modern-day people who are fond of droning on about personal responsibility, Smith applied to the elite at least as much as to the poor: He especially scorned lazy “gentlemen.”
Smith, like Harriot, was fascinated by Indian deathways. Unlike Harriot, to repeat, he wanted to use this info against the Indians. And, as it happened, the leader of the Powhatan confederacy, known to the English as Powhatan, saw things much the same way as Smith. Powhatan was learning as much as he could about English deathways, and using that info to his advantage. But there were unintended consequences, too. Dr. Seeman notes that, later in the 17th century, the knowledge Powhatan had acquired and shared meant that English deathways had now partly blended into local Indian culture.
The English chose to settle on what they called Jamestown Island, alongside the James River, which they also named for King James I, in a massive bit of sucking up. They chose this place for its access to water and the coast, and as somewhere they could hide from the Spanish, because, according to the Spanish, all of North America belonged to them and to nobody else, and them being short-staffed didn't mean other Europeans could just walk in and take over.
Good for defense it may have been, but Jamestown was not inhabited by Indians for good reason. The English had arrived in spring, By summer, Jamestown Island was basically a mosquito-filled swamp, and the James River salty and slow-moving. When people pooped in the river (which the English did), the river did not flush everything away. Nasty things bred in the water. How to Die, Lesson 1: Build your town in a malarial swamp served by dysentery soup.
The English didn’t bring enough food (oh, what a shock) so, just as at Roanoke, the local Indians supplied them. This wasn’t just Powhatan being generous: He knew about Europeans, and how they could bring interesting goods, and serve as well-equipped military allies. A few basketloads of corn and beans seemed a small price to pay.
Before you wonder, Jamestown was not just a re-run of Roanoke. In Roanoke, Dr. Seeman points out, things were pretty healthy. Only four out of 108 English colonists died in their first year. Thanks to the cesspool in which the Jamestown colonists had settled themselves, forty-six died out of just 105 Englishmen in only the first four months. John Smith blamed this disaster on God’s displeasure against the English colonists for being nasty to, um, John Smith.
Englishmen were not equal in death any more than they had been in life: Bartholomew Gosnold, expedition leader from an elite family, was buried with full honors, including a gun salute, and (if the beardy archaeologists have this right) with a six-foot long pike as a sign of his military status. Other Englishmen might not have been properly buried at all—John Smith’s account is a bit vague on whether it was hard to bury the colonists who died like flies, or whether the survivors just sort of gave up on doing proper English burials.
While the early English colonists at Jamestown died from dysentery, typhoid, and other ailments caused by drinking from the contaminated shallows of the James River, the Powhatan Indians (who knew better than to drink that stuff) were dying from diseases the English had brought.
The Tale of the Children
One day, a group of Jamestown colonists were in a mood to explore this new-to-them land. So they popped over to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and there they met with the werowance (local Indian leader), a lesser member of the Powhatan Confederacy who was flattered to meet his new neighbors. He told them an odd story of parents who had dug up the bodies of their recently deceased kids, which was not normal practice, he said. Stranger still, the children looked unchanged from life. The parents had summoned others to see this strange sight. Everyone who saw the bodies then died.
The werowance’s point was likely that violating normal death customs leads to disaster. Just as John Smith had blamed his fellow Jamestown colonists for invoking God’s displeasure, the werowance believed that the gods’ anger had been provoked by the bereaved parents.
Meanwhile, how weird was it if, indeed, the parents had dug up their children’s bodies from the ground? For an explanation, Dr. Seeman turns to historians’ frenemies, the beardy archaeologists. Their info is unexpectedly cool, and, for once, doesn’t involve clay fragments at all. Ok, it does, but the clay pots in this story weren't made by people.
When Old World disease came to the Americas, it stormed a massive population that had been largely separated from the rest of humanity for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples had no resistance to diseases like smallpox and measles, ailments to which Europeans, Africans, and Asians had developed at least some resistance. Estimates of how many American Indians died vary, but they are all at least 90% of the population or higher.
Waves of disease struck again and again, devastating entire Indian villages, and destroying or at least violently disrupting cultures that had long developed to adapt people to the areas in which they lived. In southern Virginia, in the early 17th century but before Jamestown, survivors of the latest epidemic had straggled together to regroup under the leadership of a strongman named Powhatan.
The Powhatan Confederacy’s deathways distinguished between the elite and ordinary people. This had not always been true. Deathways among Native peoples had varied, but what had been typical of them all, for thousands of years, was that people were buried alike regardless of status. Archaeological evidence suggests that the most typical burial was like those we saw in Huronia in Part 1: The bones of ten to twenty bodies were buried together, after first being allowed to decompose on scaffolds.
But, Dr. Seeman suggests, maybe not all Native peoples in the region traditionally decomposed bodies on scaffolds? Maybe their corpses were allowed to decompose in the ground first, and then reburied as bones in ossuaries? If that were the case, then, by such a local tradition, the parents digging up the bodies of their children, intending to rebury them in ossuaries, would have been perfectly normal.
But the archeologists argue this was NOT normal. And they have an unexpected ally in showing why scaffolds, not in-ground interment, were the first form of burial among the Natives of Virginia.
And the archaeologists’ evidence comes, as usual, from clay pots, but, for once, not clay pots made by people. These pots were made by the little mud dauber wasp. These tiny solitary wasps build tiny homes that look like upside-down clay pots about the size of a marble. They build anywhere that gives them a little shelter: “Under the eaves of a house,” Dr. Seeman writes, “hidden beneath a rocky ledge, or, it turns out, inside a decomposed human head.”
Yeah. Lovely.
So the archeologists found mud dauber nests inside skulls from ossuaries they dug up in Virginia. Voila! These people first decomposed their dead on scaffolds, not underground. Aren’t you glad you know that now? This will make a great conversation topic at any social club you’ve been considering quitting in style.
The story doesn’t end there, though, because, as ever, things change. By the time the English arrived, the massive devastation of disease had already happened, the Powhatan Confederacy had been formed, and ossuary burials were increasingly no longer the norm for the bodies of ordinary Indians.
John Smith was among the Englishmen at Jamestown who, unlike Harriot in Roanoke earlier, were interested in the burials of non-elite Indians. He noted that common people were buried directly in the ground.
The Powhatan elite, meanwhile, were buried in scaffold temples. A corpse was gutted, then dried out on a scaffold. It was soon surrounded by grave offerings like tobacco pipes, tobacco, and favorite jewelry, and then, once the bones were dried, the whole lot, grave goods and all, was bundled up, wrapped in an animal skin, sewed up, and moved into a temple. There, an idol kept watch over these VIDs (Very Important Dead).
Unlike other Algonquian Indians in the Carolinas, Powhatan bodies were not mummified, but the bones just wrapped willy-nilly. So nothing needed to be done to keep the bodies looking something like they did in life. Powhatan Indians may have later transferred the bones of the elite to ossuaries in the ground, Seeman tells us, but the evidence isn’t enough to be sure, not without something in documents. Take that, beardy archaeologists! Hey, I could only be so nice to you for so long.
Bottom line? There’s no evidence among Native people in either Carolina or Virginia that it was normal for them to dig up bodies that had first been buried in the ground. Normal for archaeologists, maybe. But not Natives. That is why the werowance, the Native leader on the Eastern Shore, told his English visitors he was appalled by the parents’ actions, why he believed the gods had punished everyone involved with death, and why he thought this story was weirdly entertaining enough to tell to his English visitors.
The Englishmen agreed with the werowance that it was revolting to dig up the dead. By the early 17th century, England was a thoroughly Protestant country, having dumped Catholicism. Digging up bones in overcrowded cemeteries and placing them in ossuaries was no longer a thing in England. Such practices reminded them of their present Catholic enemies, like Spain.
Digging up corpses was now reserved by the English as part of an increasingly brutal system of punishments in England, especially for people considered traitors. An example: Years later, in 1660, two years after anti-Royal Oliver Cromwell, leader of the short-lived English republic, died from natural causes, the returning Stuart King Charles II was eager to make the point that he did not appreciate Cromwell’s support for the beheading of his father, Charles I. Charles II now ordered Cromwell’s body dug up, hanged by the neck in London, beheaded, and buried under the gallows. That would teach him a lesson!
This digging up of a body was not, as you might guess, normal in 17th century England. That, in fact, was the point.
So digging up children’s bodies from the ground was a very strange thing to do. On that, the werowance and the English agreed. This chat gave the English in Virginia some feeling of common ground with these Indians, and, Dr. Seeman writes, “colonists continued to use death as a means of communicating with their Indian neighbors.”
English Not-so-Supermen
John Smith presented himself to the Powhatan Indians as a man who could help others cheat death. On one occasion, he actually succeeded in reviving the apparently dead: He used brandy and vinegar to revive an Indian man who appeared to have died.
The Powhatan Indians were impressed by John Smith’s magical talent for resurrecting the dead. But not for long. That’s because, as Dr. Seeman puts it, “ . . . the newcomers excelled in making living men dead.”
A drought in summer, 1609, two years after Jamestown started, led Powhatan Indians to call on the English to pray to the English god for rain, not least because the drought suggested that their own gods were punishing them. Unfortunately, not only did God not bring rain for the Indians, but the English had turned out to be useless at supporting themselves: They couldn’t get the hang of growing corn.
John Smith sent many of his men out of Jamestown in teams, with orders to go fend for themselves. This they interpreted as mooching food from the Indians. One group from Jamestown demanded Nansemond Indians give them an island for a home. The Nansemonds, who, like many Indian bands, were only reluctantly part of Powhatan’s confederacy, refused to give the island to the Englishmen. The Englishmen took up residence on the island anyway, as squatters. Unfortunately, this particular island was home not only to the Nansemond Indians’ houses, but also to their burial temples.
The Nansemond Indians attacked the English on the island. When the English learned that two of their messengers had been murdered, they took revenge. They did this not only by burning down the Indians’ homes, but desecrating the corpses in the temples, dragging them off platforms, and stealing the grave goods while they were at it. I'm not sure how they expected this to work out well.
Holy War and the End of Welfare
Desecrating Indian graves was not, to put it mildly, a wise thing for the English to do. Now the entire Powhatan Confederacy declared war on the English, what Dr. Seeman cleverly calls Holy War. This long drawn-out conflict, from 1609-14, killed more than 200 Indians and 300 Englishmen, up to a quarter of the Jamestown colonists.
One feature of the war? The Indians desecrated English bodies (not just dead ones) in revenge. One group of dead Englishmen was discovered with mouths stuffed full of cornbread, in the spirit of “Got enough to eat now, English boy?”
Not shockingly, the Powhatans now cut off welfare to the English, closing the food banks. In a bit of bad timing, John Smith, badly injured by exploding gunpowder, left Jamestown, returning to England to recover. Left behind in charge was the hapless George Percy, an upper-class twit (son of the Earl of Northumberland) who couldn’t persuade the Indians to sell him corn on any terms.
Result? The winter of 1609-10 would become known to the English as the Starving Time, and for good reason. Nearly half the Jamestown colonists starved to death. Reduced to eating their dogs, and hunting for snakes to eat, the Englishmen grew increasingly desperate. It’s all a bit Monty Python, at least it is until we stop and really think about it. It’s easy and lazy to hate on an entire group. Please note that many of these English people were poor, and had been scooped off London’s streets and shipped to America. Now, far from family and home, they were reduced to cannibalism, a horrid taboo in English culture. They dug up the corpses of other colonists, and of an Indian, and ate them. These were, to emphasize, the acts of men whom Smith called “the poorer sort”, which makes me wonder now if the Jamestown elite had a secret emergency food supply for the leaders. One desperate man killed his pregnant wife, butchered her, and salted her remains to preserve the meat. When this was discovered, the outraged Percy had him hanged.
Spring 1610 arrived, and starvation eased, but war continued, and the dead were a particular target: The English, for example, burned down the burial temples of the Chickahominy Indians, another group who were members of the Powhatan Confederacy.
Only the marriage of Englishman John Rolfe to Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas called a halt to the desecration and bloodshed of warfare. This marriage gave the English a questionable “happy ever after” confidence that everything would be hunky-dory from now on.
So Englishmen took over more land to plant their new and exciting agricultural export product that John Rolfe had helped to develop from varieties successfully bred by the Indians: Drugs tobacco drugs. Instantly rich from a literally addictive product, the English now saw the Indians not as allies and benefactors or even as enemies, but as trade partners and cheap labor. In other words, their attitudes toward Natives hadn’t really changed.
Tobacco Booms on Powhatan Land
Meanwhile, of course, the Powhatans’ attitudes toward the English had soured big time. They were not at all happy watching the English invaders take over their vital hunting and fishing areas, while claiming that the Indians didn’t “use” the land that the English turned into tobacco fields.
The land grab expanded. To encourage more Englishmen to come from overcrowded England to this boomtown with a desperate labor shortage, the colony offered free land, a hundred acres per person, plus an extra fifty acre grant to each colonists (existing and new) who paid for someone else too poor to afford the voyage to Virginia, to work in the tobacco fields.
Soon, there was English settlement up and down the James River, which now served the English as a tobacco export superhighway to the Atlantic ocean. The Powhatan Indians, however, could no longer use the land and river as they had always done, to fish, farm, hunt, and travel.
The English did have something to offer the Indians in return, though! They offered Christianity, plus lessons in how to be English. Unlike the French Jesuits we met in Part 1, who wanted Indians to become Christian but not French, English missionaries had every intention of turning the Indians into Englishmen as well as Christians.
The Virginia Company of London, the corporation which had set up and tried to profit from the Virginia colony, now gave a land grant of 10,000 acres of Powhatan land to grow tobacco, and generate money to build and run a future college for Indians. In 1620, former Member of Parliament George Thorp arrived from England to supervise the development of this land, and the building of the college.
Misguided and patronizing though he might have been, George Thorp genuinely cared about the Indians’ welfare, and he was strongly critical of the English colonists’ disrespectful and cruel treatment of them. When English mastiffs (the pit bulls of their day) scared Indians (as they would scare anyone sensible), Thorp ordered all the dogs killed before Indian witnesses.
The Powhatan Indians, meanwhile, were now under new leadership. Powhatan had died. His brother, Opechancanough, was now in charge, and he was not as soft as Powhatan had been on the issue of the English. In 1620, a werowance of Indians on Virginia’s Eastern Shore (maybe the same man who told the story of the parents digging up their children) tipped off the English that Opechancanough was planning an attack. He was gathering warriors together, supposedly for the disinterment and reburial of Powhatan’s bones, but really to attack the English.
In other words, Opechancanough was using the same tactic as the Roanoke Indians had: Using a funeral as a cover for gathering his troops. Now the plan had been rumbled, Opechancanough backed down, and the English, in smug mode, went back to thinking that everything was a-ok between them and the Powhatans. They could not have been more wrong.
Less than two years later, in early March, 1622, a new crisis seemed to rear its head. Nemattanew, a Powhatan Indian suspected of the murder of an English colonist, was shot by an angry colonist in a bit of vigilante justice.
A dying Nemattanew asked the English not to reveal to his fellow Indians that he had died by gunfire, and to bury him in the English cemetery. Likely, Dr. Seeman says, he was too embarrassed to admit the truth to his people, having boasted of being immune to English bullets. Opechancanough (or his PR guy?) now assured the English that he saw Nemattanew’s death “as a tragic and isolated accident.” This wasn’t true. Nemattanew’s killing was the last straw for the Powhatans.
Days later, on March 22, 1622, the Powhatan Indians launched a massive surprise attack on the English colony, killing about 330 English colonists, more than a quarter of the total. Some Indians ate breakfasts with English families, and then murdered them with their own weapons and household tools. One Englishman found by archaeologists was apparently whacked across the head with a garden spade (US shovel) in a murder worthy of Agatha Christie. He was also scalped, a deliberate mutilation of a corpse.
Scalping wasn’t the only desecration of English corpses that day. One English family was butchered to pieces, and the father’s head removed, to the horror of the English. The desecration of corpses that the English had initiated in Virginia now became a central point of anger and conflict.
According to English writers, the corpse to receive the worst treatment that day in 1622 was of former MP and Christian college founder George Thorp, who refused to leave his home when he heard of the attack, believing the Indians would not harm him. His servant, not so convinced, ran like hell, and returned to find his master’s dead body. Thorp may have been tortured before death, and his body was so badly mutilated, English writers refused to record details that their readers could never unsee. The anger against Thorp was nothing to do with his actions or motivations: It was because he wanted to replace Powhatan gods, Powhatan culture, with English beliefs and practices.
The 1622 attack so terrified the English that they rushed to bury their dead, civilians all, without proper Christian ceremony, throwing them into hastily-dug shallow graves without even wrapping them in winding sheets. The man killed with his own garden spade was found with his arm thrown behind his buttock, where it had fallen as he was tossed into the grave.
Colonists fled for their lives, leaving crops untended to wither and die. Hundreds more English people starved to death that winter. Dr. Seeman, writing less than a decade after the destruction of 2001, calls March 22, 1622 “Virginia’s September 11”. Note this: historians are people of our times. That’s why history, not the facts, but the interpretation of the facts, must be rewritten, again and again, to remain useful. By far the best history is written by professional historians who care very, very much about facts, not profits from book sales.
Writing in the years after 9/11, the trauma was still strong for Americans, and historians were no exception. September 11, 2001 became “Patriot Day”. Centuries earlier in Virginia, March 22 had been designated a holiday, a time to contemplate and mourn the deaths of 1622. And just as Americans demanded revenge in 2001 (which strangely turned into an attack on Iraq, while even at the time, it was clear that 9/11 was nothing to do with Iraq), the English of 1622 demanded revenge against Indians, any Indians.
The Powhatans’ burial temples were again attacked.
Sacred Lands
One common feature of American Indian cultures has always been a strong attachment to the land, and to the burial sites of ancestors. The English in Virginia had come to understand this. That’s why destroying Indian graves became part of the English strategy to completely remove Natives from the land.
The 17th century English also held a belief in the sanctity of their own burial grounds, and they passed that belief down in America, especially where the bodies of soldiers and civilians killed in war were concerned. Here in America, Dr. Seeman says, the idea of cemeteries as sanctified places has remained a major part of American culture.
This part of English culture persists in America, even though the English back in England (this is my observation, not Seeman’s) have generally taken a different direction in the centuries since. Cremations and scattering of ashes and a willingness to bury bodies on top of earlier burials have all happened in Britain. Americans sometimes take offense when they see me walk across graves, but generally speaking that’s no biggie in England. Listen to the language around US military cemeteries and battlefields, and you’ll also note something absent in the UK: Civil War cemeteries and Ground Zero in New York are often described as “hallowed ground”, and that’s not an expression I’ve heard applied to secular sites in the UK.
From 1622 on, the English now saw the places where the victims of the March attack were buried as sacred ground, which, they decided, gave them (the English) rights to the land. So the English now claimed Virginia as theirs and theirs alone. Step #1 of making that claim real was killing the Powhatan Indians.
The shrinking Indian population became increasingly isolated and divided on little bits of land, while the English colony of Virginia expanded, and wealthy individual Englishmen claimed more and more land for tobacco and settlement. Mostly, the English in Virginia settled not in communities as people did in England and New England (Massachusetts and company), but spread across the landscape, far from neighbors, to maximize their lands and profits.
Reclaiming a Savage Land
English authorities in Virginia, meanwhile, wanted to rein in what they saw as the anarchy of their “get rich quick” colony. Hoping to avoid the economy relying entirely on tobacco, they promoted other products. To better manage the people, they divided the colony into parishes, for local government, and built churches, with the goal of more closely supervising and taming these remote Englishmen.
The powers-that-be had been shocked by the unseemly quick burials of Englishmen, not only those killed in March, 1622, but others who died more peacefully, like a man buried with such speed, he still had a spoon and a tobacco pipe tucked in his pockets. One woman was buried, not in a coffin, but in an old shipping crate, a bit like being laid to rest in an Amazon box.
The Virginia colony and local government leaders saw all this sort of thing leading down the primrose path to savagery. They passed laws requiring every parish to have a cemetery, so Englishmen wouldn’t be laid to rest in tobacco fields. The thing is, Virginia parishes were much larger than their English counterparts, making it a big pain to cart a body all the way to the burial ground, so quietly burying people on private land became normal, and you can see the evidence all across rural America.
There were other reasons why English authorities worried about burials on private land: It was too easy for an indentured servant or African slave to be murdered and buried far from prying eyes. The Virginia authorities sensed a shift toward anarchy, a growing indifference to human life and, more importantly, toward order and authority. So they expanded the number of public cemeteries, and required that at least three neighbors be given a good look at each corpse to make sure nothing fishy had happened. “Thus,” Dr. Seeman writes, “did the violent context of life in Virginia shape attitudes toward burial.”
However, the arrival of English clergymen in Virginia in ever-larger numbers made Virginia death practices more and more like those of England. So did the fact that the emerging Virginia elite, people making fortunes from tobacco, wanted to be buried properly, like elite Englishmen in England, in the floor of the church itself. The practice of a feast after the funeral also crossed the Atlantic to Virginia, and rich 17th century Virginians went in style, setting aside in their wills lots of tobacco (used as currency) to pay for a big party after their funerals. Plus Virginian Englishmen, needing to hunt, having land to do it in, and fearful of Indian attack, owned more guns than the English, according to Dr. Seeman. They liked to shoot them in the air at funerals.
Afraid that the sound of gunfire might provoke panic among a jittery population still traumatized by 1622, the Virginia government tried to ban this practice. But they had to make an exception for funerals, because local custom was so strong. Another difference in Virginia was that everyone got a coffin (YOU get a coffin, and YOU get a coffin!) That’s because wood was cheap in heavily forested Virginia, unlike in England, where there had been a shortage of trees for centuries, and only the rich were buried in a box. In Virginia, everyone got buried in a coffin (except the poor woman above who was interred in a shipping crate because, I guess, nobody could be arsed to build her one).
Dying in early Virginia was also different from dying in England, even if you died peacefully in your bed. That’s because most people in early Virginia—rich, indentured, or enslaved— migrated as single folk, without families. They lived on plantations that were far from each other. Community was weak. Many people died alone, some unattended at all. In these times of disintegrating community, this really got my attention.
The Indians: Still Here, But Changing
And the Indians of early Virginia? They didn’t vanish after 1622. They didn’t become English. Most didn’t become Christian. However, they blended traditional death practices with new ways borrowed from English Christianity. Here’s the great example Dr, Seeman gives.
The Weyanock people had belonged to the Powhatan Confederacy, and lived on the James River. Now that the Confederacy was dead, the Weyanocks went their own way. But moving south to get away from the threat of English violence also brought them in conflict with other Indian bands. The Wyanocks’ werowance was killed in battle with other Natives, and the Weyanocks asked the English for asylum. The Weyonock settlement at that time included an English-style house, apple orchard, and fort. The werowance’s name was Geoffrey. Yet Geoffrey the werowance was buried by being wrapped in animal skins and mats, and placed on a scaffold.
Some parts of Indian culture (especially around death) did not change so quickly, then. But they did change. Indians in Virginia now included European trade goods in burials (as we saw happening in Huronia in part 1). By 1709, Indians in some parts of neighboring North Carolina wrapped corpses in wool blankets they bought from the English.
And these changes weren’t just in material things or in practices. By the early 18th century, Indian beliefs had also changed. Non-Christian Indians in eastern Virginia, who had formerly envisioned the afterlife as a pleasant place for the elite (nobody else got an afterlife) , now began to believe in two afterlives, and that everyone went to one or the other, just like the Christian heaven and hell. Their new heaven, it seemed, was full of comely young women eager to make the men happy, which doesn’t sound much like how most women would like to spend eternity. Those Indians who went to the new Indian version of hell, it seemed, not only burned, but were tortured by demons who appeared as old women. Okay, that might be more satisfying for the women.
Clearly, Indians and English in Virginia influenced each others’ deathways. Now, however, something else was happening. Enslaved Africans, who had begun arriving in 1619, were still only about 5% of the Virginia population by 1670, By 1700, however, they were 28% of the population and growing. Africans brought their own ideas, including about deathways, and the government of Virginia feared their growing presence. But to read that story, and so many others, you will need to read Dr. Erik Seeman’s book, Death in the New World. You can buy it, or your public library can help you get a copy through interlibrary loan. I recommend it. Details below.
Annette’s Aside: How Erik Seeman Made Annette’s Name
Dr. Erik Seeman is a pleasant bloke with a fine sense of humor and a strange interest in death. I remember him reminding me about 25 years ago to keep a lookout for death-related documents when I was in the archives. This book is why, and it was published in 2010.
But I had met Dr. Seeman years before, and I got a call one day in my office at Georgia Southern University, in about 1997. It was Erik, ringing me from the frozen wastes of Buffalo, NY: He teaches at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).
“Annette, I'm putting together a panel on religion for the AHA (American Historical Association) meeting in Seattle next year,” he said. “I want you to give a paper, and talk about your missionaries.”
To explain, my doctoral dissertation was on the struggles of Church of England missionaries in 18th century British America. So, sounds good, I thought. But then he says, “The panel’s going to be on Indians and Africans. So can you talk about your missionaries and Africans?”
My heart sank. I'd read the thousands of letters that the ministers wrote back to London, and kept track of every mention I found of Africans, but … “Erik, what the missionaries said about Africans wouldn't fill much more than a sheet of paper . . . “
“Ah, that’s interesting in and of itself,” he cried. And in my memory, he now hung up on me, which I'm actually sure he didn't do, because he is nice, but that’s what I remember, probably because I was panicking
Never mind. I owe Erik Seeman a lot. That impossible challenge became a conference paper for Erik’s panel. That got me invited to Cambridge University to talk about women in my work (another panic moment, but that worked out, too). It then became an article in a scholarly journal, and to attract the attention of scholars.
Two years after I fled Georgia Southern, and academia, my star piece on Africans and Anglican missionaries in early South Carolina was chosen for a prestigious textbook aimed at advanced undergraduate history classes. It was one of only three examples included of historians’ best work in early American religious history. Only then did I start to realize my little article was being cited widely in scholarship, and taught in the classes of several big-name scholars. A historian asked me if I would now return to university work on the basis of the attention my work was getting? That possibility just filled me with dread, so I thought better of it.
In short, that article became the most significant work in my modest, okay, tiny body of scholarly publications. It was a very big deal for me. It made me the one-hit wonder that I remain as an academic historian. And for that, I have Erik Seeman to thank.
Okay, enough of that schmaltz. Even then, I knew Erik had this weird obsession with death. Glad it worked out into this marvelous book.
For a whole generation now, too many readers have been indifferent about how professional writers of all kinds manage to keep a roof over their heads. Newsflash: We now have a crisis among journalists, academics, and every kind of writer. Now, we’re down to the wire: The Hollywood writers’ strike was the tip of the iceberg.
If you want good writing to still be around in the future, if you want young people to train as journalists and historians, then you must support the writers you enjoy—not just the handful of millionaire celebs.
Some readers can’t afford even $6 a month. But, dammit, most can, and it’s time to be blunt about that. If you’re on a fixed income or struggling, I get that. If not, and you don’t think twice before buying a $5 coffee but hesitate to support a writer with $5, then kindly reflect on how that reflects on you. Now do your bit, if not for NBH, than for other writers you enjoy. This is not a drill.
An incredible article, loaded as my Grandmother’s fruit cakes were, with all sorts of
Incredible tidbits. (“Stupid I-phone”!). Cut me off! Always been fascinated with English History during that period; always senced a link to it. Particularly fascinated by Elizabeth I and Mr. Walsingham; her advisor. I seemingly recognize an image of myself in an antique bronze mirror, in him. Wonderful writing! Couldn’t stop! Now I must go mow the bloody yard! Pffffttt! (One of my cats taught me that “expression!” Wonderful reading!