Near here in mid-August 1608 a similar boat steered by Capt. John Smith was attacked by the Rappahannock tribe. “It was right around here,” Haile said, easing the nose of his boat toward the sandy cliffs. “Smith’s description of the river is good enough to say it happened nearby; most likely in the narrows at Carter’s Wharf” just upriver. Here’s how the incident—one of the more contentious encounters between Smith and his crew and Indians—is described in Haile’s book “Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony” (RoundHouse), which includes Smith’s 1624 account: As we passed by Pisacack, Matchopeak, and Mecuppom, three towns situated upon high white clay clifts—the other side all a low plain [marsh], and the river there but narrow—thirty or forty of the Rapahanocks had so accommodated themselves with branches as we took them for little bushes growing among the sedge, still seeing their arrows strike the [boat] and dropped in the river, whereas Mosco fell flat in the boat on his face, crying THE RAPAHANOCKS! Mosco was an Indian befriended by Smith weeks earlier on the Potomac River. Mosco guided the party up the Rappahannock, often getting out of the boat and running along the shore. “It was a good place for an ambush,” Haile says, “whether they were shooting from the cliff side or the marsh side of the river.” Along with Mosco’s help, the Englishmen on the boat also had shields fashioned by the Massawomecks set up around the deck, which helped deflect the shower of arrows. Smith and his men fired a volley of shot, and the Rappahannocks fled. The previous day, a crew member, Anas Todkill, narrowly escaped with his life when the Rappahannocks lured Smith’s boat into a narrow tributary—probably Mount Landing Creek—near Tappahannock. An unknown number of Rappahannocks were killed; Smith, “after much wrangling with that peevish nation,” didn’t hang around long enough to find out how many. Haile, an experienced sailor, says Smith’s craft—known at the time as a barge—would have been, say, 30 feet long, with oars and sail. “It was lightly constructed with two masts of 15, 20 feet, carrying a lug sail like the one on my boat.” There was no ballast or centerboard, he adds, which means that Smith’s crew of 12 probably did a lot of rowing. A centerboard—a retractable keel—allows a boat to sail against the wind. With the wind at their backs, he says, the barge easily could have covered 30 to 50 miles a day. “But he was stopping and staying in these Indian towns, getting acquainted, mixing in local affairs,” Haile said. Smith’s second voyage of exploration left Jamestown on July 24 and returned on Sept. 7. Exactly where he stopped is still open to speculation, despite his journals and his amazingly detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. In his “General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles,” Smith reports dozens of Indian towns along the Rappahannock, mostly on the north side. “Sometimes it’s hard to pin down exactly where he is, because he says he spent three or four days in this place or that. I would say he was in the Rap-pahannock from mid-August to late August—two and a half weeks,” Haile said.
HISTORICAL TREASURES Hal Wiggins, an environmental scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Fredericksburg, has visited nearly a dozen Indian sites on the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers since 1993. Some he’s found in connection with his job with the corps; others by paddling his Old Town canoe through miles of fly-filled marshes, pursuing a personal passion for American Indian history. One day recently, he paddled with three companions into Lancaster Creek, near Morattico in Lancaster county. Except for the occasional house and pier, the creek probably looks much the way it did when Smith stopped nearby.
Growing in the headwaters are edible plants, including an Indian staple: arrow arum. The plant, which looks much like pickerel weed, has a foul-smelling root that was beaten into a mush to make a bread-like staple known as tuckahoe. Indians also would have eaten berries, mayapples, fruits such as blackberries, mulberries and persimmons, even acorns. Corn had been cultivated along the river for centuries. Succotash, for example, is a New England Algonquin word for what local tribes called “pansaromanans.” “We’re constantly looking for evidence of Indian sites within a permit area” when a landowner applies for a corps permit for something like a dock, marina, or a boat ramp, Wiggins said. “If you’re going to have a permit, you have to ensure you’re not destroying a native settlement.” Last year, Wiggins was exploring a Rappahannock marsh in the vicinity of a dot on Smith’s map. “What I found, inadvertently, was about six human remains.” The Virginia Department of Historic Resources determined that the bones were part of an Indian burial plot. Also found was evidence of a palisaded village. “You can’t walk that field without finding pockets full of artifacts,” he said of the tract, which is on private land. He won’t reveal its location, for fear of relic hunters. “It’s of interest to the state and they would like to engage the landowner,” Wiggins said. According to Michael J. Klein, archae-ologist and principal investigator for the Mary Washington College Center for Historic Preservation, the Rappahannock was teeming with Algonquian villages. In a paper on Smith’s map that Klein and colleague Martin D. Gallivan presented at the Society for American Archaeology meeting last year in New Orleans, they noted: “Most striking is the concentration of villages along the north side of the [river]”
BOUNTY OF THE LAND
Though Smith didn’t know where he was going, he wasn’t sailing blind; he was familiar with Algonquian languages, which had been known to the English since their first encounters with Indians at the Roanoke colonies in the Carolinas during the 1580s. Haile has a pretty good hunch about what Smith and his men were doing when they got out of the barge. “They were looking for precious metals—there was always someone along who knew something about that. Otherwise, it was just a case of wanting to know how many bends there were in the river before it gave out,” Haile said. Food was another priority item. And, nearly two centuries before explorers Lewis and Clark, Smith was looking for a passage to the Pacific. “They were under the impression that the Pacific might not be far away,” Haile said of Smith’s backers in London. “There were several maps of the period that indicated deep waters on the other side” of Virginia’s mountains. Haile, 59, has been a student of early Virginia history for decades. A map of the Rappahannock runs the length of one hallway in his house in the Essex County hamlet of Champlain overlooking the creek. Haile’s book “England in America, The Chesapeake Bay from Jamestown to St. Mary’s City, 1607–1634” (RoundHouse) overlays Smith’s map on an 1850–1950 bay shoreline, with details about Indian villages and the earliest European settlements in Virginia and Maryland. The river, and the high cliffs and marsh, are visible from Haile’s upstairs window. Haile built the house himself; he’s also an accomplished flute player and a serious poet. “I’m a native here. For anybody with a love of history, the Capt. Smith story is fascinating,” Haile said. Haile suggests that Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement, has unfairly taken a back seat in Colonial history, with hardly a paragraph in school books. “The history of the [Jamestown] colony is much maligned. Some awful things happened, but wonderful things happened there too: epic bravery and determination. The common man was about to have his day in the world and I believe that day dawned first at Jamestown.” | ||||||||
