1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann Page B

obvious solution—digging a well—was not tried for more than two years. It was of little help. Chesapeake Bay is the remains of a huge, 35-million-year-old meteor crater. The impact-fractured rock at the mouth of the bay lets in the sea, contaminating the groundwater with salt. Few Indian groups lived in the saltwater wedge, presumably for just that reason. Jamestown was bordered and undergirded by bad water. That bad water, the geographer Carville V. Earle argued, led to “typhoid, dysentery, and perhaps salt poisoning.” By January 1608, eight months after landfall, only thirty-eight English were left alive.
    Paradoxically, the colony’s desperation was its salvation; Powhatan apparently couldn’t bring himself to regard the starving tassantassas as a threat. Certain that he could oust the English at any time, he allowed them to occupy their not-so-valuable real estate as long as they provided valuable trade goods: guns, axes, knives, mirrors, glass beads, and copper sheets, the last of which the Indians prized much as Europeans prized gold ingots. After abducting John Smith, this “subtle old fox,” as Percy called him, learned enough from his captive to conclude that the profit from trade with the tassantassas tomorrow was worth giving them grain today. He sent the foreigner back to Jamestown in January 1608 with enough maize to keep his few remaining companions alive for a while. From Powhatan’s point of view, it was a good bet, suggests Rountree, the anthropologist of Tsenacomoco. If the English tried to overstay their welcome, he could simply withhold their food, and the invasion would implode on its own. (“Confidence borne of ignorance,” the University of Missouri historian J. Frederick Fausz has noted, characterized the initial attitudes of both English and Indians toward each other.)
    After his return from captivity, John Smith took charge of Jamestown. Because he controlled food negotiations with Powhatan, the colony’s men of consequence swallowed their displeasure. In any case they could hardly point to a record of success. That spring Smith ordered the survivors to plant crops (they would rather have looked for gold) and rebuild the colony fort (they had accidentally burned it down). He himself continued to explore Chesapeake Bay, persuading himself there was a “good hope” that it stretched to the Pacific.
    All the while, Smith negotiated with Powhatan for food. He wanted to dribble out enough knives, hatchets, and iron pots to Tsenacomoco to get the necessary grain shipments but not enough to saturate the Indian demand for English goods. Complicating his task, English demand kept rising; two more convoys in the spring and fall of 1608 increased the number of mouths to about two hundred. Like any good businessman, Powhatan responded to the rising demand by raising maize prices; he asked for guns and swords, rather than hand tools. Smith refused, fearing the consequences of arming the Indians. Powhatan responded by cutting side deals for weapons with Jamestown residents who chafed at Smith’s autocratic rule. And he kept the pressure on Smith by allowing his men to pick off stragglers outside Jamestown.
    Smith left for medical treatment in England in October 1609. Canny but clumsy, he had suffered terrible burns when he accidentally ignited a bag of gunpowder he’d fastened around his waist. For the tassantassas , his departure came at a specially bad time. Two months before, yet another convoy had arrived, carrying more than three hundred new colonists, among them another squad of Smith-hating gentlemen. They had persuaded the Virginia Company directors to depose him. Happily for Smith, the ship with the company’s written instructions—and his replacement as governor—had been delayed. Still, the scornful newcomers posed an immediate threat to Smith’s authority and, to Smith’s way of thinking, Jamestown itself. To get them out of his hair, he split up the new arrivals and dispatched