I can hardly imagine a more brilliant mise en scène; the forest in its gorgeous autumnal splendour, the brightly painted, party-coloured young girls with deer's antlers on their dusky brows, the fitful footlights of a blazing fire, the shimmering curtain of smoke! The audience seated in picturesque groups on the mats of reeds fill in the picture.
Smith was coldly received by the emperor, nor was the latter softened by the promise of presents, the invitation to Jamestown, and the return of Namontack. He curtly replied: "If your King have sent me presents, I also am a King, and this is my land. 8 days will I stay to receive them. Your father is to come to me, not I to him; nor yet to your fort: neither will I bite at such a bate. As for the Monacans, I can revenge my owne injuries; as for the place where you say your brother was slain, it is a contrary way from those parts you suppose it. As to any salt water beyond the mountains, the relations you have from my people are false."[47]
This was decisive and squarely to the point; so Newport sent the presents by water, and he, with fifty of the best shot, went himself by land and awaited the arrival of the barge.
"The newly crowned potentate started with terror."
All things ready, a day was fixed for the coronation. The basin and ewer were presented, the bedstead set up (probably a great four-poster), and the scarlet cloak with much ado put upon the emperor, "being persuaded by Namontack they would do him no hurt." But kneel to receive the crown his Majesty would not. He positively refused to bend his knee. Finally, by leaning hard on his shoulders, he was made to stoop a little, and Newport hastily clapped the crown on his head, when at the signal of a pistol shot, the boats fired such a volley that the newly crowned potentate started with terror, and could with difficulty be reassured. Regaining his wonted serenity, he gravely presented his old shoes and his mantle of raccoon skins trimmed with raccoon tails to Captain Newport. After some complimental kindness on both sides, he also presented Newport with a heap of wheat ears, that might when winnowed yield seven or eight bushels; wherewith the coronation party returned to the fort. There the consensus of opinion may be briefly stated: "As for the Coronation of Pawhatan, and his presents, they had been better spared than so ill spent. This stately kind of soliciting made him so much overvalue himselfe that he respected us as nothing at all." It was an absurd piece of folly on the part of "the wisest fool in Christendom."
This was the only order of the company that Newport was able to carry out. He travelled far in the Monacan country, where the "Stoics of the woods" received him in an impassive, noncommittal manner. He hunted up and down for Raleigh's men, for gold, for the South Sea. He found none of these things, and so, having no greater treasures than pitch, tar, glass, and soap ashes wherewith to satisfy the Company for its outlay of two thousand pounds, he was fain to sail away, leaving behind none to regret him.
The colony had suffered much from the presence of the two ships. The sailors, as usual, consumed a large part of the supplies, and they also engaged in an illicit traffic with the Indians and men "of the baser sort" in the colony.
The latter traded "chisels, hatchets, pickaxes, and mattocks with the sailors for butter, cheese, beefe, porke, aqua vitæ, beere, bisket, and oatmeale." Out of three hundred hatchets, not twenty could be found when the ship sailed. And these implements, so much coveted by the Indians, had been traded again with them for "furres, baskets, muscaneekes [?] and young beasts." One mariner boasted that he had collected enough furs to sell for thirty pounds, having paid, probably, a hatchet for them. The young beasts were great curiosities in England. The Earl of Southampton in a letter to the Earl of Salisbury wrote in 1609:—