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Subject: Origin of the Melungeons - 1619, Part 5
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:55:07 EDT
This article begins the second chapter in the two chapters to be sent. The
second group of footnotes begins with this article.
"Origin of the Melungeons - 1619, Part 5
by Tim Hashaw
all rights reserved.
John Rolfe's Secret
Gov. George Yeardley held a warrant to seize the pirate, the Treasurer as
soon as she appeared in Virginia. The warrant came straight from the top; from
Edwin Sandys, president of the Virginia Company shareholders in London even
though the majority of shareholders were ignorant of the warrant and would have
rightly censored Sandys for violating due process against an Englishman and an
earl at that. Sandys bears a share of responsibility for the impending fate
of the Virginia Company. The company president had no civil, royal or military
commission to investigate a British subject for piracy even though the piracy
rumors were quite true, and absolutely no right to seize a private English
ship.
Sandys exceeded his authority. However, Robert Rich couldn't do much about
it because he was breaking the law also.
The James River
Point Comfort on Chesapeake Bay at the time was a checkpoint as well as a
port for Elizabeth City. The James River was quite capable of handling ships of
140-160 tons. Early 17th century accounts abound of English and Dutch cargo
ships of that size sailing up the James to the many tobacco plantations lining
both of her banks. Samuel Matthews who would eventually own the White Lion
Africans had one such plantation. Dutch trader David Pietersz de Vries visited
the Matthews plantation at Blank Point in 1633. "We sailed up the river
(James) eight miles, to Blank Point, and found there thirty-six large ships--all
of them English ships of twenty, to twenty- four guns--for the purpose of
loading with tobacco." 1 The Dutch mile was three times that of the English.
The Treasurer sailed into the Chesapeake three days behind the White Lion,
completely ignorant of the hostile administrative changes that had taken place
in the Virginia colony. Her arrival would likely have been just a few days
before September 1rst. Following the standard procedure, Capt. Elfrith anchored
the Treasurer at Point Comfort, then sent a boat ashore to his friend Capt.
William Tucker seeking permission to join the White Lion upriver in Jamestown
and trade his share of the Africans. Tucker, as custom, forwarded the request
by messenger upriver to Jamestown for the governor's assent. But the
Treasurer never followed the White Lion beyond Point Comfort for there began the
conspiracy to cover-up the connection between the Treasurer's piracy and her owner
Lord Rich.
Capt. Tucker, according to John Rolfe, sent word of the Treasurer's arrival
to Jamestown. Upon receiving Tucker's message, Gov. Yeardley appointed three
men "to go down to him, to desire him to come up to James City." The three
men delegated to escort the Treasurer up to Jamestown were the commander of the
Governor's guard Lt. William Pierce, Capt. John Rolfe himself, and the
recently arrived merchant-ship owner William Ewens.
According to John Rolfe, he and the others in the governor's delegation
immediately set out from Jamestown to carry out the governor's order, but,
according to Rolfe, they did not arrive at Point Comfort in time to arrest Capt.
Elfrith, for, "before we got down he had set sail and was gone out of the Bay. The
occasion hereof happened by the unfriendly dealing of the Inhabitants of
Kecnoughtan."
Friend or foe?
Strangely, all of the men sent by Gov. Yeardley to apprehend the Treasurer
were notably allies of former governor Samuel Argall and Lord Rich who owned the
Treasurer. Not only had Argall originally appointed Lt. William Pierce as
leader of the militia, but colony Recorder Capt. Rolfe and Point Comfort
commander Capt. William Tucker also had prominent roles in his administration.
Argall had made them and himself quite rich by selling tobacco directly to England
without taking the Company investors' cut out of their profits.
William Ewens who accompanied Rolfe and Pierce was a London merchant who had
arrived in Virginia five months earlier to set up his plantation. He soon won
a coveted Company license to freight goods to Virginia. Ewens, master of the
ships George and Charles also carried sensitive letters between the earl of
Warwick and his allies in Jamestown.2
Rolfe claims that before he, Pierce and Ewens could reach Point Comfort 40
miles away to deliver Gov. Yeardley's summons, the Treasurer after an arduous
voyage of ten months abruptly and mysteriously headed back to sea with a
starving crew of 60 soldiers and a cargo of some 30 Africans. Only the harshest
reception could have made English sailors with tongues black with thirst leave an
English port. Yet, nothing in Rolfe's letter explains exactly why the
settlers at Point Comfort had been "unfriendly" to the Treasurer.
And just as curious, records show that Pierce, Ewens, and William Tucker,
three of the four men who allegedly failed to stop the Treasurer that day, all
mysteriously had Africans working on their plantations soon after the ship
vanished; Africans obtained from an unidentified source. The fourth man, the
narrator Rolfe, was related to one of the three and therefore stood to inherit one
of those Africans.
Records reveal that William Ewens (Evans) owned the African John Geaween and
three other Africans, all of whom worked on his Virginia plantation. Two
weeks after the White Lion and the Treasurer arrived in the Chesapeake with their
African prisoners, the planter William Ewens filed a patent for land in the
Tappahannah settlement next door to Samuel Matthews; the planter who would
eventually possess the Africans of the White Lion. In fact, Matthews' son-in-law
Peter Montague (married Cicely Matthews) was named in a land deal with
William Evans according to the Virginia Land Registry Office: "1648--Peter Montegue,
headright, re patent by William Ewan, Merchant, of 1400 acres in James City
County 8 Jul 1648."
Rolfe's second companion on the trip from Jamestown to Point Comfort that day
was Lt. William Pierce. Following the death of Pocahontas two years earlier,
John Rolfe took another wife, Jane; the daughter of his neighbor, William
Pierce. Gov. Argall appointed William Pierce to command the Governor's Guard in
1618.
Shortly after the Treasurer fled Virginia in late August of 1619, Lt. William
Pierce was recorded as having in his household a black woman with the
Spanish-sounding name of "Angelo" or "Angela." A 1624 Virginia census stated that
this black woman came to Virginia at some unknown earlier time on the ship
Treasurer! 3
Because the Treasurer was described a few months after her 1619 arrival in
Virginia as rotting in a Bermuda creek bed never to return to the sea, there is
no question that the African woman Angelo was among the captured Africans who
Capt. Elfrith brought to Virginia on the Treasurer in 1619.
But, John Rolfe neglected to mention in his January 1620 letter to Edwin
Sandys that his father-in-law purchased a slave from a corsair that Sandys was
investigating for piracy.
This accounts for the three men sent by Gov. Yeardley to arrest the
Treasurer. But what of the man who Rolfe described as being "unfriendly" to Capt.
Elfrith at Point Comfort? Through his brother-in-law Maurice Thompson, Capt.
William Tucker was then and afterward closely allied with Rich and Argall and had
no cause to be "unfriendly" to the captain of their jointly-owned vessel.
And soon after the Treasurer fled from Virginia, Capt. Tucker, like Pierce
and Ewens, unexplainably had Africans. Two Angolans with the Spanish sounding
names of Antoney and Isabell, toiled on the Elizabeth City plantation of Point
Comfort commander Capt. William Tucker.4
How then could Rolfe claim that the commander of Point Comfort refused to
trade with the captain of the renegade ship" upon any terms."
Rolfe makes no mention in his letter as to how his father-in-law and two
other men acquired Africans from the Treasurer. He states flat out that the
Treasurer did no business with the colonists and that the only Africans to arrive
in Virginia at the latter end of August 1619 were "20 and odd" blacks purchased
by Yeardley and Piersey from the so-called "Dutch" man o war.
John Rolfe's version of the African arrivals is further contested. In his
letter to the Company president, Rolfe said the Dutch ship brought "20 and odd"
Africans. A year later when he contributed to John Smith's book, Rolfe
rounded that number off to "20" Africans. However, a Virginia census for March
1619-March 1620 recently discovered in the Ferrar Papers counts not "20 and odd"
but 30 and odd Africans in Virginia for that fiscal year; 32 Africans to be
precise; 15 males and 17 females.5
The number adds up to a dozen more Africans than those reported arriving on
the White Lion by the colony's official Recorder, John Rolfe. These additional
undisclosed Africans had to have arrived on either the White Lion or the
Treasurer because several years would pass before another ship brought Africans to
Virginia.
It appears that these four allies of Lord Rich and former governor Argall
purchased Africans from either the White Lion, or the ship they were supposed to
arrest; the ship they claimed had escaped them; the ship owned by Rich and
Argall; the fugitive pirate vessel, the Treasurer.
The Treasurer's crew required food and water and apparently some unknown
Virginia planter traded them provisions. This was likely Point Comfort Commander,
William Tucker. When the Treasurer arrived in Bermuda a few weeks later in
mid September, one eyewitness, John Dutton reported that she brought with her
Africans and two chests filled with grain. Where did the grain come from?
When the Treasurer arrived at Point Comfort at the latter end of August, John
Rolfe described Capt. Elfrith as desperately "in great want of victuals,
wherewith they would not receive him nor his Company upon any termes." The pirate
found the food he needed somewhere between Rolfe's letter and Bermuda two weeks
later...and William Tucker soon had two new Africans working on his plantation.
And John Rolfe failed to mention it in his letter to Edwin Sandys.
Gov. Yeardley in another letter to Edwin Sandys complained after his earlier
arrival in Virginia in April of that year that his efforts to investigate
Samuel Argall's past misdeeds and reform the colony were being deliberately
thwarted by a group of unidentified settlers suspected of being partners in the
former governor's alleged crimes. "I make shift so well as I can to wade through
being in many things by argument opposed by those by who I should be
strengthened, the reasons indeed being that they themselves, some of them, have been
partakers in Argall's actions. The rest having formerly by his persuasion sett
their hands to untruthes…care not if the whole public (the colony) be
overthrown… And plainly appears by Testimony upon oath that Argall hath wrought
craftily and dishonestly in all his proceedings and they won with the love of his
good Liquor and fair protestations to be joined to set their hands to that which
they cannot now choose but in their hearts condemn." 6
Gov. Yeardley's accusation against "those by who I should be strengthened"
meant other colony officers; employees and holdovers from the Argall
administration; Lt. Pierce, Capt. Rolfe, Capt. Tucker, and Secretary John Pory. The
piracy operation had collapsed, but Argall still had his supporters in Virginia.
They were the very men Gov. George Yeardley sent to arrest Elfrith and the
Treasurer; men who owed commissions and contracts to their patron Argall;
business partners whose fortunes were threatened by an investigation of the
Treasurer!
Because the White Lion was a witness and participant in the capture of the
Spanish slaver, John Rolfe likely deliberately withheld the true identity of the
African Mayflower to protect Argall and Lord Rich from the investigation into
the Treasurer's piracy.
As the Recorder of the colony it was John Rolfe's job to document each
arriving ship by name, captain, nationality, cargo, date of arrival and date of
departure and report these details to the Company in London. But Rolfe either
omitted or obscured these details concerning the White Lion. He didn't record
the ship's name. He didn't give the captain's full name. He didn't list the
ship's homeport. He didn't record the dates when the White Lion arrived and
departed. He gave only a generic count of her African cargo and he misidentified
her as being "Dutch."
If Sandys' spies wanted to question the crew of the White Lion for evidence
against the Treasurer in the Bautista affair they would be looking for a
phantom ship that came from nowhere and then disappeared into the mists of the
Chesapeake as mysteriously as Sir Raleigh's colonists had disappeared from Roanoke
32 years earlier.
The widower of Pocahontas and other leading colonists apparently deliberately
concealed key details of the arrival of America's first Africans in order to
cover up the piracy operation Lord Rich and Samuel Argall had set up in
Jamestown; a busted scheme that at that moment had Daniel Elfrith fleeing the shadow
of a hangman's noose, Samuel Argall hiring attorneys and fighting duels and
Lord Rich threatening to tear the Virginia Company apart in order to avoid a
date with the executioner's axe.
There was cause for the conspirators to worry. In the same year Rich and
Argall first set up the anti-Spanish pirate scheme in Virginia, King James had
sent the extremely popular national hero Sir Walter Raleigh to the chopping
block for violating his treaty with Spain.
Raleigh's exploits paled in comparison to those of Lord Rich. The Puritan
earl of Warwick however ran a tighter organization than did Raleigh.
But why would John Rolfe in particular risk his own neck by covering up an
act of piracy in which he was not apparently directly involved?
...to be continued.
Tim Hashaw
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