Mapping the Gift Path: Exchange and Rivalry in John Smith's A True Relation

In 1614 John Smith returned with two ships to northern Virginia with the intent to hunt for whale, test for the presence of copper and gold mines, and, if nothing else worked out, gather fish and furs (Barbour 305-19; Smith, Complete Works 2: 401-2; Vaughan 15-17). Six months later he was already back in Plymouth with a sketch-map of the area he had explored, suffcient information for planting a new colony, and a full cargo of peltry—enough to back up his reputation for knowing how to deal profitably with the indigenous inhabitants. In his first published work, A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia ... (Smith, Complete Works 1: 23-97), Smith himself presented this know-how as the diplomacy of kindness, with he and Powhatan being accountable for the gift path between Werowocomoco and James Fort. To jump-start his New England venture, Smith set down in print what he evidently perceived as an exemplary and practical strategy. As he explains in A Description of New England ... (1616), first, he will count on his "acquaintance" with a great "Lord" like Dohannida; then he will establish "credit" with the rest of the natives; subsequently, he will join "that trade" network that exists among them and their allies; and finally, he will live in Dohannida's village, among his people (1: 351).

As his late New England strategy suggests, in dreaming of a role for himself in the American hemisphere, Smith continued to vaunt the same essential skills that had made him such a crucial figure in the first year or so of the Virginia colony: namely, those of cartographer, trader, soldier, and above all self-taught master of the gift economy as practiced among the first peoples of North America. All of these skills inform his autobiographical letter of 1608. Todate, however, Smith scholars have ignored the fact that the captain's famous report is not simply a narrative but a narrative- cum-map. The two were meant to form one argument. In this light, the letter's plot of events actually serves to reveal structural space rather than collapse it. Events and spatial topology determine, without being reduced to, each other. In order to underscore the homology between text and territory, we need only acknowledge the special prominence that the narrative gives its two major sites, James Fort and Werowocomoco. In this respect, the map is truly edifying. It encourages the reader to see Smith not only generically, as a major player in the Tidewater theater, but also as one embedded in a number of quite different space-scopes—trading, reconnaissance, soldiering, and gift diplomacy. ¹ In particular, it is Smith's explicit interest in cartographic positioning that forms the basis of my reevaluation of his complex self-fashioning and his involvement in the gift mode. The argument of this essay, therefore, will bring together Smith's interest in narrative, territory, and the cultural capital of kindness. The three are intimately related.

The Jamestown colony's fortunes turned around when Smith was named "Cape Marchant" (Complete Works 1: 35), or food supplier, in late August of 1607. In those first years trade with the neighboring villages along the Powhatan (James) and Pamunkey (York) Rivers was a complex diplomatic affair in which economic exchange was still completely embedded in social relations. In other words, the notion of exchange and credit within the Powhatan Confederacy was more culturally rich than it was within Europe's money economies. As Smith makes clear in A Description of New England, trade means first of all establishing friendly ties with the chiefs and kings of those newly mapped territories. ² In thecontext of the general economy of the Chesapeake Bay area, much of which was under Powhatan's influence before and after Smith's presence in Jamestown, credit was measured...