Captain John Smith at Jamestown

Some men cross an ocean to plant a colony and find, instead, that they have walked into another country's ceremony. The new world is not new; it is governed, peopled, ritualised. The English soldier who steps off the shallop at the river-bend has read his Caesar and his Machiavelli, and believes he knows the shape of a court and the shape of an execution. He does not yet know that the shape can be borrowed by a meaning he has never been taught, and that the man who survives the borrowing will spend the rest of his life telling the story in the only grammar he possesses, which is the grammar of soldiery and rescue.

THE LINCOLNSHIRE SOLDIER

John Smith of Willoughby in Lincolnshire is twenty-seven years old and has already buried two lives. The yeoman's son, schooled at Louth, apprenticed unwillingly to a King's Lynn merchant, breaks for the Low Countries at fifteen and serves in the Dutch Revolt. He fights for the Habsburgs against the Ottomans in Transylvania and Hungary in 1601 and 1602, is decorated for the single-combat killings of three Ottoman cavalry officers, is wounded and enslaved at Rotenturm, and escapes from Crimean captivity across the Black Sea and through North Africa. By the time he ships with the Virginia Company in December 1606 he carries the habits of a man who has been a prisoner before and intends not to be again: the soldier's attention to ground, to numbers, to the small distances between a guard's hand and a guard's weapon.

The Jamestown peninsula is settled in May 1607. By autumn, dysentery and brackish water have killed the colony down by half. Smith, one of seven councillors named in the sealed instructions, is the surviving councillor of the original board. The colony of fifty-four men he leaves behind on the tenth of December stands at thirty-eight by his own count. The expedition up the Chickahominy is for corn. Without corn, the peninsula does not see the spring.

THE CHICKAHIMINY AMBUSH

The river narrows as it bends inland. Opechancanough, brother of the paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, has set his warriors at the bend with the patience of a man who has watched the English for months. Two of Smith's companions are killed on the bank. Smith is taken alive, on express order, and walked for five weeks through three successive Powhatan towns, fed well, displayed, questioned. He notes the count of warriors at each town. He notes the cleanliness of the longhouses and the carriage of the women. He keeps, in his head, the small inventory of a captive who intends to be a witness afterwards.

Werowocomoco sits on the north bank of the Pamunkey, a town of arched houses and palisaded yards in the cleared land above the river. Smith is brought here in late December. He has been a captive thirty-five days. The midwinter light off the tidewater is pale and low. He is washed; women bring him a feast he cannot eat alone, and then take it away; a long conference of priests circles him for three days, drawing rings of cornmeal on the ground. The forms are unfamiliar. The forms are not, to his soldier's eye, the forms of an execution.

THE TWO STONES

Then, on a winter afternoon whose date no one wrote down, the forms become legible to him. Two flat stones are brought into the centre of Powhatan's longhouse and laid end to end. He is brought forward bound at the wrists with bark rope and pressed down so that his head rests on one stone and his shoulders on the other. Wahunsenacawh sits on a raised platform of woven mats at the east end of the house, in a cloak of raccoon skins, in his late sixties, surrounded by his wives and his counsellors. About forty warriors stand at the walls with clubs. The procedure of the Powhatan, by the report of other captives, is the club-stroke to the skull at the chief's nod.

The stone is cold against the side of his face. The bark rope has cut his wrists in two places. The smell of woodsmoke, of bear-grease, of the dried fish racked along the rafters. He is, by the plain reading of what he sees, several minutes from death. The colony at Jamestown is forty-five miles south down the river system. The colony at this hour cannot survive the winter without the corn-trade his foraging was meant to open. If the club falls in this house, the peninsula is lost inside six weeks: he has counted the rations and he has counted the men and he knows the arithmetic. He has been, in Hungary, in this position once before, the position of a man whose breathing has been measured by another man's hand. He had thought then, and thinks now, that the soldier's duty in such a minute is to keep the eye open and the count accurate, so that whatever survives the minute survives with the count intact. He hears Wahunsenacawh speak; he does not understand the words; he understands the cadence, which is the cadence of a sentence being passed. The chief raises his hand. By the form, the hand is the signal.

And then a child is across the floor before the hand falls. Ten or eleven years old, the daughter of the chief, called Matoaka in her own house and Pocahontas to strangers, takes his head in her arms and lays her own head upon his on the stone. The warriors do not move. Wahunsenacawh does not move. The longhouse holds its breath, and Smith holds his, and the chief lowers his hand by degrees and speaks a sentence in another cadence. He is lifted to a sitting position on the two stones. He is told, through the interpreter who has stood at the wall through the five weeks, that he is from this hour the adopted son of Wahunsenacawh and the brother of the girl, and that the forty villages of Capahowsick are offered him as a territory, against the tribute of two cannon and a grindstone from Jamestown.

He does not, in this minute or in the years immediately afterwards, understand what he has walked through. The ceremony, by the ethnohistorical reading of Helen Rountree and Camilla Townsend, was not an execution averted but an adoption performed: the symbolic death of the initiate on the stones, the intervention of the chief's female relative in the canonical role of rescuer, the reincorporation as kin under a new father. The Powhatan have, in the only language they have, taken the English captain into the kinship system of the confederacy. Smith, in the only language he has, has been rescued from a killing by a girl. The two readings are not the same reading. The grammar in which the soldier will tell the story for the rest of his life is the grammar of the rescue, because it is the grammar he was given.

THE RETURN TO JAMESTOWN

He is released to Jamestown in early January 1608, escorted south by Powhatan's men, who collect, in due course, the demonstration that the cannon are heavier than the English have promised they are. He finds the colony at thirty-eight survivors and dropping. He governs it through the spring on the strength of the corn that now comes upriver under the new kinship, and on the strength of a discipline that earns him the line, recorded in his own Generall Historie, that he that will not worke shall not eate. The colony does not die in 1608. The trade with the Powhatan holds, in fits and reversals, until a gunpowder bag ignites in his lap on the river in the autumn of 1609 and burns him so badly that he is put aboard a ship for England in October and never returns to Virginia.

THE TELLING, SIXTEEN YEARS LATE

The first account he writes, the True Relation of 1608, written within the year of the events and printed at London by John Tappe, does not contain the girl on the stones. He records the captivity, the long audience with Wahunsenacawh, the release. He does not record the rescue. The rescue first appears in print in 1624, in the Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, sixteen years after the longhouse and seven years after the girl herself has died at Gravesend on the Thames, baptised Rebecca, married to the planter John Rolfe, mother of a son, twenty-one years old at her death on the return passage from her London visit. The 1624 telling is the telling that survives. Whether the intervention happened as he writes it, whether it happened as a ritual he did not understand, whether the older man writing in his London lodging has braided two memories into one for the colony's sake and the dead girl's sake, is the question the ethnohistorians have asked and answered in their fashion. The longhouse keeps its own counsel.

THE LONDON LODGING

He publishes the Map of Virginia in 1612, the Description of New England in 1616 (which fixes that name on the coastline the Plymouth settlers will reach in 1620), and the Generall Historie in 1624. He never marries. He dies at his lodging in London on the twenty-first of June 1631, fifty-one years old, and is buried in the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the parish whose bells were rung on the eve of executions at the Tower across the river. The brass plaque set in the south aisle carries the epitaph he composed for himself: here lies one conquered, that hath conquered Kings, subdued large territories, and done things which to the world impossible would seem, but that the truth is held in more esteem.

A ceremony in one language is an execution in another, and the man who walks out of the longhouse carries the wrong word for what was done to him, and tells the story in the wrong word for the rest of his life, and the wrong word becomes the founding sentence of an English-speaking continent. The brass plaque is mounted at shoulder height on the south aisle wall, dark with three centuries of London soot, and the letters of the epitaph have been rubbed bright by the fingers of strangers who came looking for their own name.