Spanish Colonization Literature, Powhatan Geographies, and English Perceptions of Tsenacommacah/Virginia

Abstract

IN 1612 VIRGINIA COLONIST WILLIAM STRACHEY EXPLAINED THAT HIS Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania depicted in greatest detail that part of the Virginia Company's claims where the English had concentrated their colonizing activities. This area, as Strachey described it, was roughly contiguous with the severall territoryes and provinces which are in chief commaunded by their great king Powhatan, ... comprehended under the denomynation of Tsenacommacoh, of which we may the more by experyence speak being the place wherein our abode and habitation hath now well neere sixe yeares consisted. Ten years later Englishman John Martin wrote, That parte of Virginia wthin wch wee are seated and fitt to be settled on for many hundred yeares: Is wthin the Territories of [Powhatan's successor] Opichakano, ... whoe Comaundeth from the Southermost parte of the first [the James] River to the Southermost parte of the fourth River called Patomeck.... In longitude it extendeth to [the] Monakins Countrie ... west and west and by North.... The two writers used very similar boundaries to demarcate the English colony: the James River, the Atlantic Ocean, the fall line, and (in Martin's case) the Potomac River. (1) Neither the official extent of the Virginia Company's claims nor the actual reach of English settlement, however, explains Martin's and Strachey's descriptions of Virginia's boundaries. The colony's second charter in 1609 granted the Virginia Company land two hundred miles north and south of Point Comfort, and from sea to sea. Virginia's English population occupied only a small section of the James River when Strachey wrote, and more of the James and some of the Eastern Shore when Martin wrote. (2) A half century later the extent of Virginia's population, its dependence on tobacco cultivation and export via Chesapeake waterways, and the establishment of Maryland north of the Potomac would suggest these borders for the English colony, but the 1612 English population of about 500 and the 1622 population of just over 1,200 were not nearly enough to require the area encompassed by Strachey's and Martin's descriptions. (3) The explanation for such English perceptions of the Chesapeake's geography lies, rather, in their readings of Spanish colonization literature, which led some English promoters and colonists to see Virginia in terms of the political, economic, and cultural geographies of the native people they encountered there, the Powhatans. Virginia Company officials and English Virginians understood their colonization project within an American context, for which the Spanish provided the most relevant model--the appropriation and transformation of indigenous political and economic structures to serve the process of colonization. The English realized that colonization by appropriation was not uniquely American (and looked to ancient as well as more recent examples), but they studied the Spanish experience as the most applicable because they believed the specifics of American environments and populations to be comparable. Since Englishmen's readings of Spanish histories taught them that Indian political and economic geographies mattered to Euro-American colonies, early colonists and Virginia Company officials paid careful attention to Powhatan politics and economy. Indeed, their hopes of appropriating indigenous imperial structures encouraged them to overinterpret Tsenacommacah's potential to benefit them. Thus, in part because they hoped to follow Spanish successes, Powhatan Tsenacommacah--and English colonists' correct and incorrect perceptions of it--shaped the way Englishmen approached the Chesapeake during Virginia's first several decades. (4) Thus, through the early 1620s many English Virginians understood colonization to be the process of appropriating Powhatan's paramount chiefdom, Tsenacommacah, an already defined part of English Virginians' New World. (5) Specifically, Spanish models influenced the sequence of English settlement, encouraging the English to center their efforts first on conquering Tsenacommacah's core and to see Virginia's de facto borders as synonymous with their understanding of Tsenacommacah's extent. …