The Colonial Stage: Risk and Promise in John Smith's Virginia

Early in 1609, with Jamestown on the verge of starvation and relations with the Powhatan Indians deteriorating, John Smith led his men on a desperate, often violent canvass for food. After extracting corn from Powhatan at gunpoint, Smith's party sought out the ruler's brother, Opechancanough. Surrounded by 700 warriors (he claims), Smith evened the odds by seizing the Indian leader, who begged for release. That "unpardonable affront" (Rountree 50) to warrior honor was followed by a full-throated harangue:

I see you Pamaunkies the great desire you have to cut my throat; and my long suffering your injuries, have inboldened you to this presumption. The cause I have foreborne your insolencies, is the promise I made you (before the God I serve) to be your friend, till you give me just cause to bee your enimie. If I keepe this vow, my God will keepe me, you cannot hurt me; if I breake it he will destroie me.

(1:253)

Like God's minister, Smith vows not to "cease revenge" if he is spurned, but also vows to restrain himself to honor those Indians who "ke[pt their] promise" (253) by saving him from certain death at Rasawrack. Hence he bares his breast, daring them to kill him. So masterful is the performance that the Indians throw down their weapons and trade.

Such performances have dominated critical discussion of John Smith for more than a century. The long argument over Smith's veracity, extending from Henry Adams and Alexander Brown to Bradford Smith, Laura Polanyi Striker, and Philip Barbour, was often shadowed by the same self-righteous sense of theater that Smith puts on display. To Adams, he indulges in "stage" business (30); to Bradford Smith, he is a "funny and pitiable" Falstaff (304). To J. A. Leo Lemay he is a "legendary character" who enacts, quite simply, the "American dream" (5). Postcolonial critiques of Smith preserve this performative emphasis. In Peter Hulme's analysis, the Pocohontas episode "perform[s]" the romance of conquest as surely as Shakespeare's Tempest stages the suppression of natives (Colonial 160). So, too, Smith's swaggering dominance of the Pamunkeys has been read as a staging of imperial grandeur. His "smug assurance" in the face of native resistance, Bruce Smith observes, magnifies the "epic gravity" of the colony itself, and "serve[s] as a defense against the Indians' frightening otherness" (513–14). In these exchanges, the savages merely magnify Smith's stature. They are the bit players in his excellent adventure.

But certain elements of these scenes subtly challenge Smith's will to power. As both Myra Jehlen and David Read have noted, those readings of Smith that stress authoritarian command overlook the essential element of uncertainty that marks his early texts—the "competing rationales" for New World activity that clash (in Read's words) "like ships torn from their moorings in a storm" (443). Smith's encounter with Opechancanough underscores that uncertainty through ambiguities of promise and performance. He is hurt by his hosts' failure to keep their promise of aid, and only the sanctity of his own vows has so far restrained him. "You promised to fraught my ship ere I departed, and so you shall," he shouts, "or I meane to load her with your dead carkases; yet if as friends you wil come and trade, I once more promise not to trouble you, except you give me that first occasion" (1:253). But what is the status of a promise that cannot be enforced? Smith knows that if he exterminates his hosts he will extract even less corn from other tribes in Powhatan's confederacy. He also knows that past vows of friendship have been rendered meaningless by Powhatan's evident decision to starve the English out (Fausz 19). Invoking sacred promises, in these circumstances, only highlights the limitations on Smith's power.

A further problem involves the audience for these threats and promises. Even if Smith had mastered enough Algonquian to make the speech intelligible, it is unlikely that warriors would have given him rapt attention. His real audience, of...