A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest Read Online Free PDF Page A

do live but like deer in herds.” Any opposition must be Catholic in origin, Symonds said. “Certainly our objector was hatched of some Popish egg.”
    Robert Johnson also answered detractors who saw the Virginia colonists as trespassers. “As for supplanting the savages, we have no such intent,” he wrote. “Our intrusion into their possessions shall tend to their great good and no way to their hurt, unless as unbridled beasts they procure it to themselves.” Johnson claimed that descendants of the Powhatans would thank the English for the gift of the European way of life. “Their children when they come to be saved will bless the day when first their fathers saw your faces,” he told potential colonists. The message hinted at ominous consequences if the inhabitants of the New World resisted the imposition of a foreign culture.
    Another commentator, Richard Hakluyt, used the metaphor of an artisan creating a fine work to explain how the voyagers would respond if the Powhatans refused to cooperate. “To handle them gently while gentle courses may be found to serve, it will be without comparison the best,” Hakluyt wrote. “But if gentle polishing will not serve, the one shall not want hammerers and rough masons enough, I mean our old soldiers trained up in the Netherlands, to square and prepare them to our preachers’ hands.” Symonds also endorsed the use of guns and armor if the gifts of Christianity and Western civilization were not readily accepted. To argue otherwise, he said, was to argue that a parent should be denied the option of corporal punishment.
    For as much ink as was devoted to the glory of converting the Powhatans, that element of the discussion had little practical application for most of the men and women who made the decision to go to the New World. They only paid true heed to the economic argument, the contention that riches were to be found and anyone with a stake in the enterprise would share in the wealth. To be sure, in the two years since the founding of Jamestown there had been plenty who dismissed the idea that Virginia held treasure, the most vocal being those who had no intention of ever leaving England. The critics did their speaking on street corners and in coffeehouses, however, rather than in printed pamphlets.
    Virtually the only criticism that made it into print was the satire of the playwrights of London who regularly parodied the Virginia expeditions. Ben Jonson’s 1605 Eastward Hoe lampooned the expectations of those preparing to go to Virginia. The character of Seagull echoed the wildest hopes of the Jamestown colonists. “Gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us, and for as much red copper as I can bring I’ll have thrice the weight in gold,” he said. “Why, man, all their dripping pans and their chamber pots are pure gold, and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather ’em by the seashore to hang on their children’s coats and stick in their caps.” Ironically, as plays like Eastward Hoe parodied dreams of Virginia treasure, they also raised the expectations of potential colonists. In a plague-ravaged city with little economic opportunity, the promise of the overseas expedition seemed an even better bet with the subtle nudgings of the stage players. Every one of the voyagers who rode the rowboats to the vessels of the Third Supply during the last weekend in port had heard the condemnations of the critics and the parodies of the wags. They had simply chosen to consider them in the best possible light.
     
    William Strachey was one of the few colonists whose interest in the Powhatans was a major reason for voyaging to Virginia. His views about the need to impose Christianity upon them were just as vehement, but his real interest lay in recording details about the indigenous culture of the people he met. Strachey