Letter to London Company

After reading Chapter 5, imagine you are John Smith.  Write a letter to the London Company reporting on your progress as the new leader of the Jamestown colony.  What early obstacles have you faced?  What successes have you had?  What problems have the London Company presented you with? Please be sure to include your relationship with other English colonists, your relationship with the Indians, and Pocahontas.  What do you think it will take to succeed in the new world? Use textual evidence throughout.

Get creative and show what you know from the reading.  Also, please use the first person voice. This assignment is due on Tuesday, October 4th.

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Dear London Company,

Although the Englishmen and I have picked not such a great piece of land, I have become very friendly with the Indians. There are a lot of marshy areas of land, which isn’t good because the mosquitoes get attracted to it. It is also hard to hunt because the forest is far away from the fort. There aren’t so many crops growing around us, but there is a harbor very close to the fort. We have very delicious oysters, they taste so fresh and they are so big! “The English men spent a few weeks exploring the Bay Area. They feasted on strawberries (“four times bigger and better than ours in England”), and oysters (“which were very large and delicate in taste”), and noticed grapevines (“in the bigness as a man’s thigh”). The oysters and mussels “lay on the ground as thick as stones: we opened some and found in many of them pearls.” (Pg. 26)

The Indians are very nice and I have met a beautiful princess named Pocahontas. She is as sweet as an angel and protects me if the Indians try to hurt me. “She is a bright eyes Indian princess who was about 12 years old when the settlers first came to Virginia.” (Pg. 29) Her father is the Powhatan, who is the ruler of all the Powhatan Indians. At first I don’t think that the Powhatan wasn’t very fond of me because I was an English settler, but we soon became friends.

Soon the Indians started calling me the Werowance of Jamestown! I came up with a motto  “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” (Pg. 30) I made this rule because a lot of the English men weren’t working as hard as they should have been, so since I was the chief I made this rule. I also knew that all the English men wanted and needed to eat, so this rule would make them work hard. London Company, you shouldn’t have payed the English men before the voyage!“ To make things worse, the London Company, which had paid for the voyage, showed poor sense. It gave all the colonists salaries and did not allow them to own property. No one had a reason to work hard, because the hard workers got the same pay as those who did nothing. “ (pg. 28) This has made them think that they don’t have to work  hard because they already got their pay. If you payed them when we came back from the voyage, they would have worked harder because they didn’t have their money yet.

Overall this voyage to the New World has been a success, and will write back to you on our achievements. I hope this letter has arrived to you safely and in good enough form to read clearly.

Yours Truly,

John Smith