A 1608 Christmas in Virginia

WASHINGTON Four hundred years ago this month, the most powerful man in Virginia, Chief Powhatan, invited Capt. John Smith to his village for a proverbial word of prayer.

As the military and political leader of the nascent British Empire in America, Smith had been terrorizing the native James River peoples with a vicious form of gunboat diplomacy. He forced them to hand over corn, venison, and other staples or risk the murder of their villagers and the torching of their homes.

Powhatan, chief of the 14,000 or so native people of eastern Virginia, wanted to put a stop to it.

En route to Werewocomoco, the great chief's village by the present-day York River, Smith and his party journeyed downstream from Jamestown in weather so cold, he wrote, ice covered the James River half a mile from the shore.

Nearing the mouth of the James, the freezing settlers put in at a place called Kecoughtan, after the indigenous tribe that lived there.

Descendents of the Algonquin people who wandered down over the millennia through the great Susquehanna River Valley, the Kecoughtan were riverine folk who thrived catching giant sturgeon and gathering clams the size of man's hand in the fertile tidal reaches near the Chesapeake Bay.

No strangers to Smith's assertive ways, the Kecoughtan had been attacked by him the previous year, fleeing their village under fire before returning with boatloads of deer, turkey, ducks, and cornbread to appease the bellicose settlers.

WHETHER OUT of fear for their lives, hope for a more peaceful future, or under direct orders from Powhatan, the Kecoughtan put past conflict behind them in December 1608. They welcomed Smith's expeditionary force and invited the English to spend Christmas in their cozy lodges, where the tassantassas -- or trespassers -- were treated as honored guests.

"We were never more merry," Smith later wrote, "nor fed on more plenty of good oysters, fish, flesh, wild fowl, and good bread, nor never had better fires in England, than in the dry, smoky houses of Kecoughtan."

The visit to Werowocomoco didn't go quite so well.

"I know the difference of peace and war better than any in my country," Powhatan told Smith, appealing for a shift to peace.

An aging warhorse in the twilight of life, Powhatan had staked his power and prestige on the notion that Smith might bring the tassantassas to heel, might help them to grasp the natural order of things in Tsenacomoco, the Indians' name for eastern Virginia -- and that somehow the English and the native people might learn to live together, even transform themselves from adversaries to allies.

What followed was an oration as historic as it was tragically doomed. It descended into a kind of eulogy for the hopes the old chief seems to have buried that day, the belief that he might have reached an accommodation with Smith to provide Powhatan with copper, hatchets, and glassy blue beads, "and every year our friendly trade will furnish you with corn."

If that was the proud warrior's offer of a lasting Pax Powhatania, Smith rejected it out of hand, falling back instead on insults and threats.

"Powhatan, you must know, as I have but one God, I honor but one king, and I live here not as your subject, but as your friend, to pleasure you with what I can," Smith said, the brassy outsider arrogantly placing himself on par with the man who had spent most of his lifetime knitting together the tribes and villages of Tsenacomoco. "For your riches," Smith falsely boasted, "we have no use. We shall not so unadvisedly starve."

THE FOLLOWING September, badly burned in a near-lethal gunpowder blast, Smith left Virginia to return to London. Of the 500 colonists he left behind at Jamestown, all but 60 were dead within eight months, victims of Indian attack, famine, or disease.

In the summer of 1610, Virginia Gov. Thomas Gates attacked the Kecoughtan, ran them off their ancestral lands, and built a pair of forts along the strategic riverside stretch later named Elizabeth City, after the daughter of King James.

As for Smith, he would spend his later years writing letters to the royal court in a vain attempt to seek a return passage to his beloved Virginia, which he never set eyes on again. And on wintry nights, when the winds blew chilly over the restless Thames, the aging explorer looked back wistfully over the greatest adventure of his life, the opportunities seized and lost, dreaming each Christmas of the merry feasts he once knew in the dry smoky lodges of Kecoughtan.
Bob Deans, a national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, is the author of "The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James." Contact him at Bobdeans@coxnews.com.