Cold Open

It’s September 10th, 1608, in the small English colony of Jamestown, Virginia.

29-year-old John Smith trudges through the muddy streets of the tiny settlement. Jamestown is perched on the edge of a wide river. Laid out in the shape of a triangle, with a gun position at each corner, its handful of hastily built thatched huts and houses squat behind high wooden walls.

John has just spent seven weeks out in the wilderness that lies beyond these walls. He set out looking for gold and a passageway to the Pacific Ocean, but he found neither. And if that wasn’t disappointment enough, what he discovered in Jamestown on his return has him shocked and horrified.

John is one of just over a hundred colonists who left England almost two years ago. Most of the first settlers have since died though, but newcomers from home have bolstered their numbers, and John still hopes the colony can be a success. But only if changes are made.

Right now, the streets are almost empty. Men peer out of the dark and cramped houses as John passes, their faces pinched with hunger. There’s an unmistakable smell of death and disease in the air.

So, John strides into the largest building in the settlement. In this low-ceilinged room, choked with smoke from an open fire, a group of exhausted, pale men sit around a table. This is Jamestown’s council. And it needs a new leader.

The settlement is in danger of collapsing. John is exhausted from his weeks on the trail. But he’s not the type to give up. As he peers around the room at the listless men who are supposed to be in charge, he begins to think that amid all the chaos he’s seen in Jamestown, there may also be an opportunity.

John Smith stands in front of the council and makes his case to be Jamestown’s new leader. He is a divisive figure in the colony. He calls himself a soldier and an explorer. To many though, he’s little more than a pirate. He’s arrogant, brash and egotistical. But now the men of Jamestown have no other choice, realizing that if they are to save their settlement - and their lives - they’ll have to put their trust in a man many of them despise. The future of the fledgling colony and the entire history of North America will turn on the decision made by these settlers to make John Smith their new president on September 10th, 1608.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is September 10th, 1608: John Smith Saves Jamestown.

Act One

It’s April 26th, 1607, on the shores of Virginia, a year and a half before John Smith becomes president of Jamestown.

Stumbling onto land after five harrowing months at sea, John and a hundred other colonists have finally arrived in North America. All the men are tired and hungry after their long voyage from England. But John is in a worse state than anyone else.

He’s spent weeks imprisoned in the hold of their ship. He is now starving and stinking, and the skin of his wrists has been scraped raw by the crude wooden handcuffs placed on him. Any joy John feels about having finally reached the New World is tempered by dread because some of his shipmates want him publicly executed.

During the voyage across the Atlantic, John openly challenged the captain’s decisions. He tried to convince his shipmates he would make a better leader and fearing a mutiny, the ship’s captain placed John under arrest and he spent the rest of the voyage in the brig.

Now everyone’s safely on dry land, John is facing the possibility of death by hanging. But when the colonists unseal their official orders from the colony’s sponsor, the Virginia Company back in England, they find a surprise. The rich businessmen who are paying for the trip have chosen John Smith to sit on the town council.

The colonists don’t want to anger their sponsors, so they spare John’s life and set him free. But they don’t allow him a seat on the town council - they’re still too wary of his ambitions. John, though, is just relieved to be alive. And now, he has a whole new continent to explore - and to plunder.

John and his other colonists are not fleeing religious persecution in England, like the pilgrims that will come later. They’re here to make money hoping that their colony will find gold or perhaps even the theorized passage to the Pacific Ocean and China that Christopher Columbus searched for more than a hundred years prior.

John Smith has experience surviving in unfamiliar territory, so he is one of the men who leads the expeditions mapping the area and searching for treasure. Meanwhile, other colonists get to work building their new home. They choose a site on a marshy peninsula by the river which they think will be easy to defend. They named the settlement Jamestown, after the King of England, James I. Then they cut down trees for lumber to make shelter. They gather berries, hunt foxes and beavers, make nets to fish in the river, and till the soil to plant corn.

But over the next few months, the colonists’ food supply begins to dwindle. And by the fall of 1607, the men of Jamestown are facing the prospect of a long, hard winter on rations of just a handful of raw grain a day. John Smith, however, isn’t going to accept death by starvation. They’ve already encountered local Native Americans so John knows people can survive here. He just has to find a way to get his hands on food.

John decides a show of strength is the best approach. He leads his men on a raid on a nearby Kikotan village. The colonists shoot their muskets and smash religious idols, terrifying the inhabitants enough that they agree to trade with the Englishmen. They hand over huge piles of corn, turkey, and venison, in return for some pieces of copper, hatchets, and beads from the colonists.

John then returns to hungry Jamestown a hero. More trading expeditions follow over the months to come, keeping the colonists alive amid the deepening chill of winter. But then in December 1607, John makes a mistake. He stumbles into the wrong tribe’s territory and is captured. He’s brought before Paramount Chief Powhatan, who rules over an empire of 30 tribes in the region.

The confrontation is a tense one. Powhatan is wary of the newcomers in his lands. But he's heard all about the deadly weapons they carry and wants some for his warriors. For his part, John hopes Powhatan can supply them with desperately needed food. But he has no intention of handing over their weapons, and he doesn’t want Powhatan realizing how weak the English settlers truly are. It’s a subtle game of bluffs and John thinks the meeting is going well, until Powhatan shouts a sudden order to his warriors. The men grab John and force his head onto a stone slab. The warriors then begin singing and dancing, wielding their war clubs. It’s a ritual John doesn’t understand, but he fears he knows how it will end - with his brains smashed out on the rock.

But just when the ceremony seems to be reaching a deadly crescendo, a girl appears. It’s Powhatan’s favorite daughter, 11-year-old Pocahontas. She interrupts the ceremony and seemingly saves John’s life. Soon afterward, Paramount Chief Powhatan declares that he will be the protector of the Englishmen in these lands - but for a price.

He offers to free John in exchange for two of the Englishmen’s cannons. John quickly agrees to the deal and is escorted back to Jamestown by a dozen of Powhatan’s men. There, with a smile, he tells the warriors they are free to take the cannons - if they can lift them. But the twelve men aren’t strong enough to carry a 1000-pound cannon away with them. And now that John is back in Jamestown, the Native American warriors are outnumbered. So, instead of the cannons he promised, he sends the men back to Powhatan with a few worthless trinkets - and a lesson: John Smith is not a man to be underestimated and not one to be trusted either.

John’s encounter with Paramount Chief Powhatan will help cement his image in the colony as a shrewd negotiator with local tribes. Soon, the time will come for Jamestown to choose a new leader, and John Smith will step forward. No longer will he be just a pirate, or a soldier, or even an explorer. Next, he will become President.

Act Two

It’s late September 1608, in Jamestown, nine months after Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life.

John Smith, the new president of the colony, takes a stroll through the struggling settlement that is now his responsibility to rule. With dismay, he notices the dilapidated church, the leaky storehouse that has ruined their supplies - and the settlers who have done little to fix any of it. John's frustrated with his fellow colonists. Many come from respected families back in England and seem to think themselves too good for hard work. As John himself puts it, “the labors of 30 or 40 industrious and honest men should not be consumed to maintain 150 idle loiterers.”

So, John decides to do something about it. One of his first official edicts is that those who do not work, do not eat. Many of the colonists are unhappy with John’s harsh new law. They thought coming to the New World would make them rich. But instead, all they’ve found is sickness and starvation. Now, they’re being forced to become farmers.

Still, John is able to convince most of them that there’s no other option - it’s either help out or die out.

Despite John’s best efforts, though, as winter progresses, the colony remains desperately short on food. Again and again, the English settlers look to the local tribes for help. Paramount Chief Powhatan hasn’t forgotten the trick John played on him with the cannons, though. So now, he hopes to exploit the Englishmen’s hunger to play a trick of his own.

In January 1609, John and about 15 of his men travel up the frozen river to Powhatan territory in order to trade for much-needed food, but this time they’re walking into a trap. Paramount Chief Powhatan plans to drag out the negotiations and then kill the Englishmen in their sleep. Then he’ll be able to take their powerful muskets for himself. John Smith is saved once again however by the intervention of the young Pocahontas. She risks her life to warn him of the ambush. And with the Englishmen on guard and their powerful weapons ready, Powhatan doesn’t dare move against them. Reluctantly, he agrees to a deal to supply the English colony with more food.

So, John Smith returns to Jamestown once again, with boats laden with baskets of corn. But it still won’t be enough to last the winter. To avoid starvation, John is forced to barter for supplies again. And increasingly he has to use strong-arm tactics to get his way. But he knows that threatening the local population is a short-term solution at best. Every time he does it, John may keep starvation away for another week or two. But he also makes the locals less willing to trade with them in the future.

If Jamestown is to survive, it will need to stand on its own two feet. So, as winter turns to spring, John begins to feel more hopeful. Perhaps now the worst is behind them. And under his leadership, in 1609, the settlement’s walls are extended and its defenses improved. Twenty new homes are built, and the church is repaired. A new well is dug to provide fresh drinking water and 40 acres of surrounding land are cleared for farming. John is still not popular among the citizens of Jamestown. But his controversial edict of “those who do not work, do not eat” seems to be having the desired effect.

That progress is soon put in jeopardy though, from an unlikely source - too many colonists. In August 1609, John Smith is surprised to see more than a half dozen English ships appear on the horizon. It’s a resupply fleet from the Virginia Company. And at first, John is delighted. The ships must carry vast quantities of desperately needed supplies. But they are also carrying 300 new colonists direct from London. All at once, Jamestown’s population has almost tripled and John is furious. He has no idea how he is supposed to feed or house all these newcomers. And he soon discovers that the fresh colonists are not used to the sheer amount of hard work it takes just to survive out here.

John hopes he can make these city folk into hardy colonists before winter comes round again. But unfortunately, his tenure as president will soon be cut short, and the English colony clinging to the edge of the New World will spiral into the darkest chapter of its history so far.

Act Three

It’s September 1609, on the James River in Virginia, a year after John Smith was elected colony president.

It’s the middle of the night, and John is asleep in a canoe anchored a few miles upriver from Jamestown. He and a few other colonists are returning home after some unsuccessful negotiations with a local tribe for food, and they’ve stopped here to rest before continuing their journey in the morning.

But the moonlit quiet of the night is interrupted by an explosion. John’s eyes snap open to find his boat and his legs engulfed in flames. He quickly jumps to his feet and throws himself into the river. The cold water douses the flames and saves John’s life - but not before his legs have been badly burned. The combination of shock and pain causes John to pass out in the water, and, by the time his companions pull him out of the river, John is half-drowned as well as half-burned.

The cause of the explosion was a spark igniting a bag of gunpowder. But no one can say where that spark could have come from, on a boat in the middle of the river. As he’s carried home the next day, John eyes his companions with suspicion. He believes one of them has tried to murder him - though whether it was on the orders of a rival in Jamestown or a Native American tribe, he can’t say.

And although John Smith survives the explosion, his injuries are so bad that he cannot continue as President of Jamestown. A month after this mysterious explosion, John leaves the colony for England to recuperate. His misfortune in the canoe proves a blessing in disguise for him, though, because the winter of 1609 is the hardest yet for the people who stay behind in Jamestown.

It becomes known as “The Starving Time.” Hunger and sickness stalk the colony. And in their desperation, some settlers even resort to cannibalism. By the spring, fewer than 60 of them are still alive out of an earlier population of over 400. It seems that despite John Smith’s best efforts, the colony of Jamestown will fail.

But the settlers somehow, manage to cling on. And eventually, the colony does become a success. The young Pocahontas, kidnapped by the English, uses her knowledge of agriculture to teach the colonists how to farm a crop they can finally sell at a huge profit back in England - tobacco.

And it’s tobacco that helps make Jamestown a success and paves the way for the further colonization of North America. But it would never have been possible without the determination, cunning and ruthless opportunism of John Smith who led the colony through some of its darkest times after he was elected president on September 10th, 1608.

Outro

Next on History Daily. September 11th, 1973. Chile’s democratically elected president is deposed in a coup, ushering in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammed Shahzaib.

Sound design by Gabriel Gould.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Jack O’Brien.

Edited by Dorian Merina.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.