Scores of immigrants participated in this tidewater fur trade, including a great many who had the advantage of a knowledge of the Algonquin tongue because of having cohabited with the savages. Some of the latter were no more than villainous runaways, cautiously returning from sanctuary with the natives to share the profits of the boom in pelts. Others, such as Robert Poole and Henry Spelman, had been left with the Indians as hostages when they were youths, very much in the same manner as Thomas Savage. Like him, they too had learned the dialects and habits of various tribes, acted as spies for the English colonists and then, later, were useful as interpreters.
Robert Poole traded professionally for the joint-stock, making voyages in the company’s pinnace and rendering his accountings to the colony’s treasurer at Jamestown. But he and Thomas Savage also obtained commissions through members of the council and, renting shallops from more prosperous colonists for voyages to the villages of the Indians, did very well for themselves in this way. Probably neither of them traded for pelts as extensively however as did Henry Spelman who eventually managed to get financial backing in England and ships of his own.
Young Spelman was the incorrigible scion of a distinguished English family. According to his own testimony he had been sent out to Virginia in 1609 at fourteen years of age because of “beinge in displeasure of my fryndes and desirous to see other countries.” Captain John Smith left him with Powhatan’s people, no doubt as the best way to get rid of him. Henry Spelman was not as popular with the natives as Thomas Savage, except perhaps with the Indian maidens. In fact he appears to have escaped with his life only because of the intervention of Pocahontas who, continuing her interest in white men after the affair with Captain John Smith, succeeded eventually to marrying an Englishman named John Rolfe.
Spelman’s entire career in the colony was one of manifold and dangerous deceit. As a youth living with the Indians, he was accused of treacherously laying a death trap for some of his fellow Englishmen at Jamestown. Later, when he was employed as an official interpreter for the colony, his tenure in office was cut short after he was tried by the House of Burgesses and degraded from his rank for inciting Opechancanough, the new Powhatan, against the English governor.
In 1622, when Opechancanough finally loosed his stored-up hatred against the English, killing some three hundred fifty men, women and children along the James River in a surprise massacre, Henry Spelman and a trading partner, Captain Raleigh Croshaw, were bartering in the Potomac. Opechancanough conspired with Chief Japazaws of the Patowomecks to have the traders murdered. But the Patowomeck king double-crossed the Powhatan. Instead of killing the Englishmen, he entered into an alliance with them, permitting them to build a fortified trading post on his lands.
All the evidence would indicate that Japazaws was a very wily politician. He liked English kettles and knives as much as some of his red neighbors disliked him, and he never did get around to knuckling under to Opechancanough. No doubt the fort was a smart move on his part. In any event, because of Japazaws’ need for white friends with guns Captains Spelman and Croshaw escaped death.
Henry Spelman was not so fortunate the following year however. On a trading voyage farther up the Potomac River, at the later site of Washington, D. C., he was killed by the Anacostan Indians after being captured in an ambush along with Henry Fleet and some other traders and servants. Just a few days before his death Spelman had betrayed a warrior who hazarded warning him of his own intended murder. It appears he even witnessed the agony of the red man’s tortured execution. Then, by some sort of final justice, he died at the hands of the same savages to whom he had given over the kindly warrior.
Aqua vitae may have had something to do with this murderous episode, for, like the French and the Dutch before them and like the English who were to follow in New England, some traders in Virginia taught the savages to drink strong waters as a means of extracting a richer profit during barter. And what a frightful chance they took!
Emotionally volatile and capricious by nature, the red man was even more unpredictable of course when he was under the influence of liquor. He might lose his trading sense to the advantage of the white men who purposely plied him with aqua vitae during the feasting that always preceded barter, but when he realized he had been cheated he was apt to reach for another jug and his tomahawk at the same time. No doubt many a trader suffered a slow and bestial death while looking into the bloodshot eyes of savages galled by stomach fires that he himself had kindled.
Henry Fleet, who had been captured with Spelman, managed the predicament in which he found himself with more skill than his friend, indeed with some foresight. While no one in the colony heard from him in over four years, and all thought he was dead, Fleet not only contrived to escape execution by the savages, but spent his captivity to real advantage. By the time he was finally released he had learned enough about the Algonquin language and had become sufficiently fraternal with his captors to engage in a profitable trade in skins with them. Then, returning to London, where he had excellent family connections, he acquired financial backing from William Cloberry and other well-known merchants there. Afterward, as Captain Henry Fleet, he traded in the Chesapeake for some years in his own ships and later played a significant role in the genesis of the war between the Virginians and Lord Baltimore over the fur trade.