Johnson had promised an “earthly paradise” that was “commendable and hopeful every way,” boasting an “air and climate most sweet and wholesome, much warmer than England, and very agreeable to our natures.” Granted, he admitted the existence of “wild and savage people” who “have no law but nature,” but these were, he assured the reader, “generally very loving and gentle” and would readily “be brought to good, and would fain embrace a better condition.” Above all, Johnson reinforced the message brought back from previous voyages, that the “land yieldeth naturally for the sustentation of man, abundance of fish, both scale and shelclass="underline" of land and water fowls, infinite store: of deer, kain and fallow, stags, coneys, and hares, with many fruits and roots good for meat.” There were, in addition, “valleys and plains streaming with sweet springs, like veins in a natural body.”7 In the midst of such abundance, who could possibly want for anything?
The answer was simple enough, even if the reasons behind it were harder to understand. Although the English settlers had arrived with every intention of benefitting themselves and perhaps, depending on the degree of their religious convictions, aiding the benighted natives, in fact Virginia challenged the underlying superiority on which those expectations were based. At first, even though all did not exactly go as planned in the way of friendly natives and profitable planting, actual starvation was headed off by the efforts of Captain John Smith, one of the colony’s original councilors appointed by the King. Smith not only secured the survival of the Jamestown colony in its first few precarious years, but gave America one of its most enduring founding legends. Smith's rescue by Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, furnished one of the earliest symbols of America’s multiracial, mestizo possibilities when Pocahontas (or Rebecca, as the English chose to name her) later married another of the Jamestown settlers, John Rolfe. Smith was able to force the colonists to work and negotiated with the Powhatan Confederacy for additional supplies. It was when he left Jamestown in the autumn of 1609 that the situation deteriorated. Smith left behind some 500 settlers in Jamestown. By the end of what became known as the “Starving Time,” the winter of 1609-10, there were sixty left.
As he later presented this horrific period in the colony's history, Smith himself had no doubts as to its cause. In his Generall Historie of
Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), Smith pretty much lifted, as he was prone to do, Hariot’s earlier observations about the English abroad, but the fact was that nothing about the early Jamestown settlement suggested that Hariot’s observation had been off the mark. Although he had earlier castigated the Algonquians for making “so small a benefit of their land, be it never so fertile,” Smith discovered that the English settlers were no better at planting and, as events were to prove, far worse at living off the land. As later recounted by one of the surviving settlers, the problems that beset Jamestown after Smith’s departure were caused by the colonists themselves. Finding themselves running out of food, their behavior turned desperate; so desperate indeed, that some of “the poorer sort” disinterred the corpse of a native and ate it. Another settler murdered his wife, “powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed, as he well deserved.” Whether “she was better roasted, boiled or carbonadoed, I know not,” the writer commented, “but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.” The events of the winter of 1609-10 were, as described, almost “too vile to say, and scarce to be believed,” but arose out of a “want of providence, industry and government, and not the barrenness and defect of the Country, as is generally supposed.”8
Both support from the peoples of the Powhatan Confederacy and the arrival of supplies from England in 1610 and 1611 ensured that such extremes were never again experienced at Jamestown, but the colony still struggled to thrive. Relations between the settlers themselves came to be directed through the imposition of military discipline in the form of the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, introduced by the governor, Lord De la Warr, and his deputy, Sir Thomas Gates. These prescribed death for a variety of crimes and misdemeanors, ranging from the simple theft of an ear of corn to blasphemy. Given how badly they treated each other, it is hardly surprising that the settlers' relationship with the Powhatan Confederacy took a turn for the worse after 1610. The story of early Virginia bore more than a passing similarity to the “Black Legend” of Spanish colonization in that respect, as in others. So far from a land full of natural promise, Virginia had turned out to be a deadly environment. It was one in which disease and sometimes hostile natives operated together, in a smaller-sale Chesapeake reverse version of the Columbian exchange, to undermine the Virginia Company's attempts to establish a lasting settlement, or rather a collection of mutually supporting settlements, in the New World. Although Smith and others believed that the difficulties had little to do with any “defect of the Countrie,” in fact they were, in part, environmental. Despite the instructions issued by the company to the original settlers in 1606 that they should not “plant in a low or moist place,” Jamestown was poorly sited for health, and especially deadly in the summer months. Yet the remarkable fact is that the high mortality rates, and the apparent inability of the colonists to extract sustenance, let alone wealth, from this land that had seemed to promise so much was not the end of England’s early version of the American dream; it was only the beginning.
Despite all evidence from Roanoke and, later, Jamestown to the contrary, the idea prevailed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that nature in the New World, if not unappreciated by its inhabitants, was certainly underexploited; that, in short, English settlers, as Hariot had suggested, could make more of it. The repercussions of this belief for the areas of English settlement were foreshadowed in a widely read work that was informed by Amerigo Vespucci's explorations at the start of the “age of discovery” - Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). More, like Hakluyt, was concerned at the social conditions of his own time, in particular the poverty and resultant social unrest. In More's imaginary and somewhat intimidating island utopia, removing the surplus population to some distant mainland colony was a matter of course. “Such colonies are governed by the Utopians,” the reader is advised, “but the natives allowed to join in if they want to. When this happens, natives and colonists soon combine to form a single community with a single way of life, to the great advantage of both parties.” If, however, “the natives won’t do as they’re told, they’re expelled from the area marked out for annexation.”’ Opposition to such exclusion, in More’s semi-fictional universe, would result in conflict. His Utopians “consider war perfectly justifiable, when one country denies another its natural right to derive nourishment from any soil which the original owners are not using themselves, but are merely holding on to as a worthless piece of property.”9
Nearly 200 years later, on the cusp of the eighteenth century, English intellectuals were still contemplating these moral and practical conundrums. When philosopher John Locke proposed, in The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), that “in the beginning all the world was America,” he did so in the context of his broader discussion of property and the nature of possession. It was labor, he argued, that both conferred value upon land and established the right to it. Without labor, land was worth nothing and, if unimproved by European standards, was simply open to all comers. “There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this,” he observed, “who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life.” Yet the first English settlers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had little interest in applying their labor to the New World, far less working alongside the indigenous population to create a new multiracial utopian society rich in the comforts of life. Their presence alone, in their minds, established a claim that they validated through their imaginary response to the New World and its peoples as approximating a state of nature. Following the initial forays into that world by explorers such as Columbus and potential settlers such as Grenville, it was, by the start of the seventeenth century, no longer the case that America was wholly an unknown land, terra incognita. Imagination, however, did transform it from an environment already populated into a blank canvass, a tabula rasa onto which a variety of European hopes and aspirations could be projected.