December 1607 - John Smith Killed by Powhatan Warriors

While hunting during the early winter for the struggling colony of Jamestown, English adventurer John Smith was captured by a band of Powhatan Native Americans led by Opechancanough. He was considered the “prince” by English standards as the younger brother of the principal chief, Wahunsonacock. Unable to communicate, the Powhatans brought him to their hunters’ camp as a compelled guest. They planned to take him on to Topahanocke, the Rappahannock capital, to determine whether he was among the same mysterious travelers from the sea who had attacked some years earlier.

Smith was well familiar with being imprisoned. He had been wounded battling the Tartars in Eastern Europe, captured, and sold into slavery among the Ottomans. His long escape through Crimea and Lithuania gave him extensive experience that encouraged his new employers, the London Company, to hire him on the expedition to found a colony in Virginia. Smith had been mutinous on the voyage against leaders he felt ill-suited and was arrested and set to be executed until sealed orders were opened to name Smith a colony leader himself. Smith proved effective, if unpopular, with his order “he that will not work shall not eat.”

Opechancanough brought shamans to work with Smith, hoping to find a way to communicate. Smith became startled by the ritual and, one night, attempted to slip away. The warriors killed him during the escape attempt. According to legend, it was Opechancanough’s keen-eyed niece, Pocahontas, who spotted the escaping John Smith and cried out to bring the warriors after him.

Without Smith’s tyrannical rule, the Jamestown colony collapsed. That winter, many of the colonists fled to live among native camps, bartering for their survival. Attempts to restart the colony brought five hundred new settlers in May of 1609, followed by another 300 in August, all sent by the London Company with little preparations for supplies other than to replant the long-unattended fields. The colonists again died readily, and Jamestown II was permanently abandoned after the Third Supply fleet was devastated by a hurricane in 1610.

Costly disasters disgusted investors in the London Company, who had envisioned plans of setting up a client state enslaving the Powhatans and mandating Anglicanism among them. New attempts to colonize on the mainland also faltered, leading England to turn its attention to Bermuda instead, where part of the Third Supply had been shipwrecked during the hurricane. There, settler John Rolfe attempted to establish his tobacco plantation using the sweeter brand of southern-growing Spanish seeds.

England finally found its industry in the New World with plantations, but land was scarce on the islands. Rolfe became determined to find more land, dedicating years of his life through the 1620s in establishing trade relations with the Powhatans. Though they refused to allow Englishmen to colonize again after a wave of plagues were tied to English contact, they were happy to trade for manufactured goods. Rolfe and Opechancanough developed a new system of native-owned plantations producing as much tobacco as English ships could handle, establishing a trade route that made what was once called Virginia the focal point of the local economy.

Rich with trade and armed with European weapons, the Powhatan Confederacy grew to become the major nation-state of North America’s eastern coast. Seeking land for further plantations, the Powhatans expanded west and southward while the wealth from trade brought them to absorb tribes north all the way to Prince Edward Island. Agreements with the English kept settlers out of the area, prompting England to focus on grabbing land from the French and Spanish on the largely undefended northwest shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The Powhatans proved to be firm allies with the English, though they became encircled by the British Empire in the 1700s after France gave away its claims to Louisiana and Canada in treaties following lost wars.

Powhatan continued as the economic focus of North America, spending much of the 1800s covertly funding resistance and independence movements to the other tribal nations. Tensions with the British rose during the era, but ultimately Britain turned its attention toward Africa and Asia for new, more profitable colonies based on trade rather than attempts at settlement.

 

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In reality, John Smith was not killed by the Powhatan tribe. In fact, the details of the incident itself are highly questionable as Smith was well known for being a larger-than-life storyteller, claiming his life had been spared because Pocahontas had fallen in love with him. The Powhatans determined Smith and the other settlers to be a different nation than the attackers (likely Spanish), but the Powhatan-English relations would later falter with wars through the 1600s. Smith refused to let Jamestown fail through 1609. Settlers came to replace those who had died, and Smith returned to England after a gunpowder accident. He became a vocal advocate for colonization and traveled on an expedition scouting north of Jamestown in a region he dubbed “New England.” Rolfe’s sweet tobacco plantation helped Jamestown become a profitable venture, sparking decades of warfare with the Powhatan as more and more settlers flocked to Virginia.