WHRO Time Machine Video
3 Ships, 3 Stories: The Jamestown Experience
Special | 58m 11sVideo has Closed Captions
Experience Jamestown’s three ships and the stories of 1607.
Step into 1607 at Jamestown Festival Park, where history comes alive. Explore full-scale replicas of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, walk through James Fort and a Powhatan Indian village, and experience the three stories that shaped America’s first permanent English colony.
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Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
WHRO Time Machine Video is a local public television program presented by WHRO Public Media
WHRO Time Machine Video
3 Ships, 3 Stories: The Jamestown Experience
Special | 58m 11sVideo has Closed Captions
Step into 1607 at Jamestown Festival Park, where history comes alive. Explore full-scale replicas of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, walk through James Fort and a Powhatan Indian village, and experience the three stories that shaped America’s first permanent English colony.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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- Three ships, three stories, the Jamestown experience.
I'm Dick Daley of the WHL staff and I'd like to welcome you to join us today as we introduce you.
If you haven't been there before to the Jamestown Festival Park With us today are several people from the park, notably the director of education, Mr.
Joe Gutierrez.
And we're gonna be talking and showing you a lot about the park in which you can do there.
Joe, this is a very different kind of a museum than one would expect.
Could you tell us how it's different?
- Certainly, Dick, first of all, I wanna say thank you for working with us to produce this segment, to let the people know about the reality of the first English settlement, permanent English settlement in the new world.
Jamestown Festival Park is unique among many museums because not only does it have the traditional museum galleries, but we also have a vibrant living history program.
And that means as you walk out of traditional museum galleries, you'll run into a recreated palate in Indian Village and people dressed in costumes who can demonstrate the skills of a culture that has disappeared.
Essentially, you'll walk down to James Fort, which is a recreation of the first permanent settlement in the new world by the English.
And after you leave that, you go to see the three ships or reproductions of the three ships that brought the original colonist over.
And these ships are the appropriate size as far as we know they're exact duplicates of the original 1607 voyage vessels.
- Alright, if parents, our teachers, our children go to the park, then what they're gonna do is not just view, they're gonna be participants, - They will experience history, if you will.
Let me use that phrase, yes, as you see the Indian Village and you see people using a pump drill or demonstrating how to Flint nap or some of the other techniques that the Palin Indians used in a very successful and thriving culture that existed prior to the English first arriving in 1607.
In fact, that's why I think we've called this segment, three ships, three stories, the Jamestown experience because they really are separate stories.
The ships and the what life was like coming to the new world would fill many volumes in itself.
The struggle to survive in the wilderness by the original English settlers is a story.
And that one had some rough spots, some ups and downs, but when you come back, and they were already people living on the Virginia Peninsula when the first English settlers arrived and the Palin Indian culture was a thriving one.
- We'd like you to join us now for our first visit to Jamestown.
And that is the three ships.
Would you in particular take a look at the size of those ships?
And remember we're gonna be coming back and telling you how many people were on those ships.
- The colonists sailed to the new world in three ships.
The Susan constant Godspeed and discovery, the Susan Constant was commanded by Christopher Newport, who was the overall voyage commander.
The Godspeed was commanded by Bartholomew Gald and the discovery by Radcliffe.
The voyage lasted about four and a half months.
They left London December 20th, 1606 arrived the Chesapeake Bay, April 26th, 1607, and at Jamestown May 14th, 1607.
- Well good day.
You're sitting on the deck of the Susan Constant.
Susan Constant is the largest of three ships that came to Jamestown early in the year 1607.
Now the three ships we have here at the Jamestown Festival Park are full scale reproductions of the original three ships that sailed here.
So they were the actual size.
They brought 144 Englishmen, which is why this colony is so important because they were Englishmen aboard these ships.
And this was a first successful attempt by any Englishman to start a colony here in the new world.
Now your highest ranking semen on a ship were your three officers, the pilot, the master's mate, and the navigator.
And they all stayed in a cabin known as the roundhouse, which is here behind me.
You see many of the instruments that the pilot and the navigators use your brass instruments.
Your two brass instruments are called the quadrant and the astro lab, the wooden instrument that's in the shape of a cross is called a cross staff.
And those are all for, for finding the altitudes of celestial objects so you can find your latitude on earth.
And of course the navigator and pilot would have their charts and maps like you see there.
Also the long rope and the conical shape lead is for sounding finding how deep the water was and that was the prime duty of the pilot was to find out the depth of the water what was on the ocean floor and thereby find your position on the face of the earth.
Below them was a man called the bosen and his mates, the bosen took care of all the rigging, everything you see when you look up on a ship, the sails, the flags, the all the lines that was the boon's job.
The bosen and his mates and the cook stayed forward on a ship in a cabin called the four castle.
- What I'm preparing here is a fish chatter up in the four castle would be consisting of some onions, some salted fish beans, and a little ginger root and black pepper.
Now the cook aboard the ship would only be cooking with a fire when the ship was basically at rest.
Otherwise he'd be serving out the dried, salted, smoked and pickle foods that they would've already prepared.
Now the only problem with cooking aboard a ship is that you've got a fire and we have our fire contained in a cook box, a metal cook box, and the smoke from the fire runs right out the front of the castle there.
We don't have a flu above us, it'd just be another hole they'd have to cover up on board a ship during a storm.
Now other staples that crew members might be eating on the way over would be some hard attack as well as cheeses, rice, and like I was mentioning before, dried food, salted smoked and pickled foods.
- Now a semen or a sailor was very different from a landsman to a landsman.
If it rains or storms, they go inside to a landsman.
When the sun sets and it gets dark, they go inside and go to bed.
But it's not that way on the sea.
On the sea, the ships are sailing constantly 24 hours a day.
You can't just say, Hey, let's park our ship in the middle of the Atlantic and everyone go to bed till tomorrow morning.
It's just not going to work.
The ships are moving constantly moving forward, moving up and down in every which way.
Therefore you need someone watching the ships constantly manning the ships constantly.
And of course, since no single sailor can stay awake 24 hours a day at the first day of the voyage, they would divide the crew into two halves.
Each half was called a watch.
And every four hours those watches would change hands.
So for four hours, one half the crew would run the ship for another four hours, the other half of the crew would run the ship that way.
The ship was always manned.
You have to realize if you were a sailor and the year 1607, you would never get more than four hours of sleep at a time without being interrupted.
So you were not only working in shifts, but you were sleeping in shifts.
- Lord remain.
- And the cargo hold is where they kept all their cargo and supplies, not to mention their animals.
They brought goats, pigs and chickens with them, small livestock.
So you can imagine after four and a half month voyage, the the aroma down there alone would be enough to make it quite uncomfortable.
Of course there were other animals aboard ships.
There were rats and mice and crawling bugs and vermin.
And it was also required on English ships at this time by law to have cats, ships, cats, all these ships would've had at least one or more cats.
Now these ships were brought over here to bring settlers and the colony was based on a profit motive, an economic motive was their main motive for colonization.
Therefore, these ships served as a lifeline bringing supplies to these settlers and then it served as cargo ships, taking supplies, taking goods, taking the natural resources from this area back to England for profit.
If these ships weren't here all the time, there would be a starvation occurring, lack of supplies.
The English settlers here weren't always at friendly terms with the Indians.
So there wasn't always a constant assured supply of food from the Indian population.
And you had the have these ships coming back and forth, back and forth as a constant lifeline, the umbilical cord, let's say, to this colony.
- Now as Joe said, when you visit the festival park, you just don't walk around looking at things.
You actually go on board the ships and you're gonna be able to talk to a number of people, quite expert in those ships and how the people traveled on those ships.
Joe, we've brought an interpreter with us, right?
- Yes sir, we have.
- So why don't you introduce them and we'll find out a little bit more about those ships.
- Okay, well this is Homer Lanier who's one of our interpret interpretive specialists on the ships and Homer, one of the things that came up that we wanted to talk about today was the actual number of people on board these three vessels when they came to the new world in 1607.
- Well, oftentimes when we read different history books or different little booklets about Jamestown and this voyage to Virginia with these three ships, we see a lot of different numbers for the actual number of people that came here.
Now, most of the time you'll see 104 men and boys written as the number of people that settled Jamestown.
And that's correct.
It was 104 men and boys that settled Jamestown.
But we've kind of left something out, we have to go back 'cause at the beginning of their voyage in December of 1606 when they left England, there were actually 144 men and boys on board these three ships together.
What we've done, we've left out the 39 sailors that were on board as well and they're kind of important to - The program.
I have a hu, they - Certainly are.
We've even left out the one man who died on the way across there was one colonist who died on an island they had stopped at in the Caribbean.
His name was Edward Brooks and he died from heat stroke on an island.
So it was actually 105 colonists that set out coming here to Virginia along with 39 sailors avoid the ships as - Well.
Well now you mentioned that one person died on the way and he died of heat exhaustion, but it was not on the voyage itself.
It was, he was stopped.
What was the voyage like in 1607?
If we are, if you were trying to explain to Dick and I what it would've been like for us to traverse the Atlantic, what what kind of an experience would we have had?
- Well first of all, when most folks come aboard our ships today, they are very overcome by the lack of space on board these three vessels.
When they look down below decks at where the, the settlers on the way to Virginia State, they find there's only about four and a half feet of headroom for these passengers when they're sleeping below and their beds are nothing more than straw filled mattresses that they would lay down on and cover up with a blanket.
It's very cramped up aboard these ships and we're overcome by that today.
But we have to keep in mind though is that these people we're expecting to have very cramped and crowded conditions aboard ship on the way across and they did.
It was very smelly down below decks.
First of all, you're surrounded with all all the things you need to settle a colony here in North America.
All your foods, tools, weapons, furniture, clothing and pigs, chickens and goats.
Also down below decks.
And let's not leave out all the mice and rats and lice and cockroaches and things like that are, that are on board.
So you can't stand up and run around.
You can't go running all over the decks of the ship whenever you feel like it because you would get out in the way of the crew members when they're trying to sail the ship across the ocean.
So what you find most of the time is your passengers stay down below, but they do get outside in the decks to get a little fresh air and a little exercise when the weather will permit and when the crew isn't too busy but very cramped up down there.
Your bathroom facilities down below these Englishmen didn't bath on the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
There are no showers or bathtubs aboard these ships.
Unfortunately, even their, their toilet facilities are simply a bucket or a chamber pot, which they would use and be passed up and dumped overboard along the vessel.
How long was the trip long?
Well the voyage took four months and 24 days, four months and 24 days.
They left England on December the 19th, 1606 and they actually wound up at Jamestown coming as shore there on May 14th, 1607.
So from start to finish it is four months and 24 days.
But we have to remember they made quite a few stops in the way over.
Sure When they left England in December, they spent almost six weeks sitting in the English channel waiting for winds from the proper direction to come and below them towards the Canary Islands.
Now once they reach the canaries, they make a stop there to take on fresh foods and fresh water before sailing to the, to the Caribbean once again to take on fresh foods and fresh water before proceeding all the way to Virginia.
- There are a million stories that we could really talk about and those of you who visit the Jamestown Festival Park, when you go on the board these ships, you'll have a chance to talk to people like Homer and find out hundreds of other fascinating details and exciting adventures that these people had.
I don't know if they called them adventures exactly, but the very, very difficult time it was to cross the Atlantic at that time.
- The next segment of tape we're going to look at, we'll explore the James Ford or the settlement that the original 1607 and colonists built in the new world.
And we'll be looking at the food, the housing, and even the defensive measures which which the colonists used to protect themselves from the Indians.
- The ships arrived on May 14th, 1607 and they sit about building the fort wall that took five weeks of course then the ships went home.
You look at the fort, you realize what it is.
Kings James' Fort is primarily a military base.
That's what they brought 25 cannons with them as well as all their armor and military implements.
You have the church, the guardhouse for the soldiers and the storage house for all your supplies right in the middle around a central courtyard.
Along that on the streets.
Next the walls, you have all the living space for the people who live and work here you have houses for the gentlemen, houses for the workers, and houses for craftsmen, even - Accommodations for laborers in the new world weren't much, but then the laborers probably not leaving much behind at home, sleeping their beds, mattresses probably gonna be sharing it with one other person and you may have as many as 10 or 12 people in these cramped quarters depending on how many people are in the fort eating the same food as everyone else.
The way you're preparing it differs a bit and the way it's served.
No fine pottery, no fine silverware from England.
What you're probably looking at, wooden trenches, wooden trenches, wooden bowls, wooden spoons, things that are easily made, easily used here in Virginia.
Laborers like everyone else need to be protected and the laborer is gonna have an gonna have armor.
But armor for the laborer is not the finest stuff.
Chain mail perhaps 200 years old.
Things that are simply no longer useful and no longer used back in England sent over to protect those in the new world Roof.
Not too different from the one back home, although perhaps a little more rudely done thatched.
But since we're not planning on living in this house for the rest of our lives, not thatched to last so long, may keep the rain off for a few years.
Walls waddle and do pretty similar to what laborer may have lived in back home in England.
- Life's not too bad, of course the house is rather rough, not what we're used to being gentlemen over here and it is ungodly hot, but if you bring things with you, you can make life bearable.
Cut the best in glassware and wine.
Pewter, pewter spoons, fine linens for the table, the best in armor, the best in weapons, even golf clubs and golf balls to amuse ourselves with.
Of course you play tennis whenever possible, at least practice.
If you can bring your mind servant to do most of the work for you, though you live upstairs and cooking, eat down below, but life could be worse.
- This is the guardhouse, this is the soldier's quarters and it's a place where you'd come to receive your weapons and your armor.
Over here are your muskets and calibers.
A caliber is a light version of the musket.
You'd receive your armor and your weapons.
Here's your armor.
This is one type of armor the colonists used.
It's called a breastplate, backplate and helmet.
The breastplate is your standard European military equipment, but it has some disadvantages.
Here in Virginia it's hot.
It's not all that heavy.
It only weighs about 11 and a half pounds, but it is hot.
And to the musket, it makes it very awkward for you to properly seat the musket against your shoulder.
So we use a different kind of armor.
A soldier here in Jamestown may have to endure a veritable reign of Indian arrows with flint tips.
Very dangerous.
We have to protect the soldier while he reloads his musket.
And for that purpose, this armor, although effective, does harms us when we go to use the musket.
So instead we use what they call light armors.
This is called a shirt of chain mail.
This would be worn all by itself just over your ordinary clothing.
If your chain mill shirt doesn't cover your legs, a type of armor would be called quilted bases such as these.
You also notice I'm wearing a whole coat of quilted armor.
The way the quilted armor works is the Indian arrow head is very jagged.
It's got a very sharp edge, but it's jagged.
When the arrow strikes the quilting, it rips through the first layer of canvas and then it strikes the cotton wool, which we've packed inside this armor that cotton wool tangles around the sharp but rather ragged edge of the flint, thus dulling it so that virtually none of the arrowhead comes on the other side.
The one drawback of this type of armor, as you can imagine on a day in August, this is hot.
At least it doesn't weigh as much as the chain mail.
The last piece of equipment I wear is my helmet.
As you see, I've lined it with leather.
This makes it a little bit cooler to wear, but soldiers would carry their helmet by a thong and loop it on their belt so their where head would not get so hot.
And I'll finish off trying this one on.
And as you can see, it offers good protection to your head.
The brim is worn low to protect your temples in the top of your head.
- Remember?
So no matter what arm you're carrying, whether it be a musket, a pistol, a pike, you'll always need your sword becoming close to hand to hand combat with the Indians or the Spaniards.
You best know how to use it properly until you attack him.
In an armor, if go round that hit a man here, this is musket proof.
It won't go through here.
You gotta go around that into the hips, abdomen, around the armpits, into the lungs, into the heart.
Cut down the throat, go the Adam's apple, cut across the face where it's exposed.
Cut the man's leg out from under him.
You gotta know what you're doing.
Anybody can hack with a blade, but to use it properly, that takes drill.
So let's go through it on your guard.
First one's down here, this hip ready lunge.
One lunge not bad.
Number two is over here.
Lunge two, lunge not bad.
Cut three.
Cut three.
Cut.
Lunge four.
Lunge lunch.
Five.
Lunch.
Cut six.
Cut.
Cut.
Seven.
Cut.
Cut.
Eight.
Cut.
Not bad, sir.
Carry your sword - Against.
In order to protect ourselves against the swarms of savages that are here in the new world, we have to rely on fairly heavy ordinance to keep ourselves secure.
We defend the fort, not with walls, but with firepower.
It's a weapon like this.
We'll deliver a charge of case shot that is about 50 lead balls about this big.
They'll carry 250 yards in any man that's caught by such a charge.
There'll be very little left of him when he's, when we're done with him.
This weapon keeps us secure while inside the fort.
But when we go outside the fort, we have to be prepared to meet them with another weapon entirely.
This is the match lock caliber.
This weapon, although it is somewhat awkward to use and many of the soldiers in Europe don't use it very well here, we have to get the best possible use of this weapon.
This weapon will carry up to 400 yards, but it's not accurate at that range.
At 30 yards.
However, it's quite accurate.
A man sized target being fired at at 30 yards is a dead man.
If we're fighting against the Indians, as we so often do and they're fighting shooting arrows at us from the brush, we sometimes, instead of using a single ball, use a whole handful of small, what we would call fuck shot.
Now lemme show you how this weapon is used.
This is the slow match, a burning piece of knighted cord, essentially linen cord treated with chemicals.
It burns very hot.
In order to fire this weapon, I first have to prime the pad, place a small amount of powder in the pan, shut the pan and blow off the loose grains of powder.
I then cast about the piece as it is called, and then pour my main powder charge down the barrel.
Next comes the shot, which I won't be using.
This weapon is now ready to fire.
All I have to do is cock the match and pull on this the sear bar.
When this low match strikes the powder, the result will be firing the weapon.
Have a cab - Pick up your peace and all your peace cut your match.
What is that?
Go peace.
Deb Fire.
- When the first settlers came here in 1607, it wasn't real important that they were actually learning or one to plant crops simply for the fact that they had brought their food stuffs with them.
And when they brought those food things with them, they really had enough of those products to last them for quite a while.
But around 16, nine and 1610, when things started to get a little bit bad for the colonists here, it was real important that they learned how to start living off the land.
You have to remember that when the first men and boys came over here, they were pretty much gentlemen.
They really didn't know how to do things that were necessary for their own survival.
So a lot of the times they were having problems with the Indians here it was the Indians that actually taught them how to farm the land different than the way they were doing it back home in England.
Now corn has a kind of interesting background.
It was not until the Indians in 16 0 9, 2 of them that were captured were then showing the white man here or the settlers how to actually plant the corn in the, in the fields outside the fort.
Now when they were actually planting those fields crops in England, and that was known as broadcasting.
Broadcasting seeds was a main way of throwing seeds across.
In instead of putting things in furrows, they were actually throwing and broadcasting these seeds.
And it didn't matter where they landed because all the, all the seeds would actually take root and start to to grow.
But however they tried that here, for some reason it just didn't want to work.
So as a result, the Indians saw this problem and taught them how to plant their food and their crops in hills.
Such things were the tobacco that was being grown as well as the corn and also different types of of peas and beans.
- I'm sure that you noticed in that video field trip that you saw all men there in the Fort Joe.
Is it that only men came there for a long period of time?
Did women ever come to the fort?
- Well, they certainly did.
And I'd like to introduce to you Sharon Walls, one of the interpreters from James Ford.
And Sharon, why don't you explain to us a little bit about when women did come to Jamestown, - Women were coming in Jamestown all about two years after the first settlers came.
And on our records show that even though there are a substantial number of women other than the two that we designate as being in the fort, we pretty much pick up on the two that we know of.
One coming over whose name was Lucy Forest and Lucy brought with her her maids servant Annie Burris.
And Annie Burris is the one that we can trace on in history for about 30 years.
She's actually one of the original ancients.
And we pretty much show how lucid, or excuse me, how Annie and her family lived in the 17th century in James Ford.
- What would cause the women to come over?
It seems so dangerous.
- Well pretty much just meeting up with family members that they had already come before them.
And then two with the prospect of possibly meeting a husband that was already had already come over and, and you know, pretty much settled in the new world.
But it wasn't until about 1619 that actually ships of women were coming over to substantiate the fort and pretty much help out with the new population of things - In Europe.
A lot of times the women used to help when people get ill or got a sickness.
Did they serve that purpose in the Jamestown - Force?
Very much so.
Very much so.
It was a part of their, their upbringing, a part of their life.
It was not really unusual for even the, the smallest child to know what herb was growing in an herb garden, what herb to make into a medicine or which one to use in culinary practices or to put on the table.
- So the medicine actually was, was kind of a herbology type medicine.
- Very, very much so.
- If in other words, if I came to you and had a stomach ache, you would give me an herb?
- Pretty much.
So I have a few herbs with me right now and the ones that I do have, they're a little wilted because they've been sitting around a little bit.
But what we have are tanzi.
And Tanzi was a real interesting herb in the 17th century.
Tanzi had 101 uses, it was known as one of the original screwing herbs, which meant that you could get rid of ants and different types of bugs in your house.
Also the, the flower was often ground down for medicinal purposes as far as stomach aches or worms in children.
Now the one that I do have here that would help you in your stomach ache Joe, would be the lage and the love, which was often used medicinally.
It was often put in soups and stews as well because it was used as a pepper and like we would use pepper today.
But basically to get rid of those upset stomach aches and the pains and all that was pretty much the cause of rebelliousness at the table.
- And we can still see a lot of these herbs used in herb teas - Very much so, very - So.
And natural food stores.
- Oh sure.
And we have, we grow quite a bit of them over in the physics garden at James Ford.
A lot of them that we do have would be some things like chamomile, which we're familiar with today in today's market or even different types of mint teas.
So they're all being grown pretty much the way they were in the 17th century in the Ford as well.
- Well now Sharon, one of the things that crossed my mind when you were talking about adding some of the herbs to food.
How was food preserved in the 17th century in this place?
I mean they had some problems with food and starvation at James Ford.
- They did.
In fact, when they were first coming over from England, what they were really, really taking or bringing with them were the different types of meats that they had preserved back home.
Also, the pickles were very, very important and different types of potted meats and vegetables.
But you have to remember that when they did come over it was barren land.
There was any, really nothing that the settlers could actually come into or walk into.
And as far as food stores or food, you know, supplies.
So it was quite essential that they brought with them the different types of foods that they were going to be consuming.
The way of preserving meat, and I'm showing this right here, this is a, that I actually butchered out last fall in the fort.
And basically what you're doing is you're cutting meat off of an animal and the types of meat that were being brought over, the animals that were brought over of course were the chickens and the goats and the pigs.
And this of course being a pig was butchered.
And what I did is after I completely took it off the carcass of the animal, I rubbed it down with salt.
It remained in a salt tub for about 10 weeks after that.
Then I pulled that out of the salt tub, washed it off, rubbed it down with black pepper.
This ham is still good after a year of hanging around in James Fort with all the dust.
But it is still very, very good, very, very tasty and will last almost probably indefinitely 10 to 15, 20 years as long as it's not cut into.
So this is a typical practice of preserving meat, preserving vegetables in the 17th century and quite appropriate to the time and probably just as good today's by today's standards as it was back in the 17th century.
- This might also begin to lead us into the third part of our story, Joe and our third video field trip.
- Yes.
Well the next segment we're going to be looking at is on the Palin Indian Village, the recreated Palin Indian Village at the Jamestown Festival Park.
And we'll be exploring a little bit about the food and the way they get grew food and gathered food as well as their culture and their technology.
So why don't we take a look at that - Weo and welcome to our Pean Indian village.
The Peans were a chiefdom of 32 tribes of Algonquin speaking people who were living on the Virginia coastal plane.
When the English settled Jamestown Island in 1607, they were all under control of a man named Wahoo Cock.
He tells John Smith to just call him Pean and he is a man who brought this chiefdom together primarily through warfare wear or at least through intimidation.
Now these 32 tribes are an agricultural people.
They depend primarily on their diet for things that the women are growing in the garden.
Corn, beans, squash, potatoes, sunflowers, melons, things of that nature would've made up the staple of their dietary needs.
The men are doing a great deal of fishing during the summer months and then in the winter they're hunting for deer, bear, bobcats, raccoons, possums, and all sorts of other animals, not just for the meat but also for the use of the hides.
- Spring was a very important time for the men 'cause they were very busy fishing.
In the springtime we have fish swimming into the freshwater rivers to lay their eggs.
Several methods that they used for fishing was, first of all, they used a long spear spearing the fish from their dugout canoes.
You can see the spear is a forked piece of wood with barbs on the end to hold the fish onto the spear so they don't slip off.
Another method that they used that was very important was the large trap fish trap cone shaped trap.
The these would be laid out in the rivers on the bottoms of the rivers and the fish would swim into the traps where they would get stuck.
They can't get out very easily.
More fish swim in behind them and when the trap is full, they would pull the trap out and empty it, put it back in and wait for more fish to come along.
One other method of of fishing was using a net.
There were two types of nets that the, that the Paan Indians used.
One was a circular throwing net net that would be weighted down with stones and then tossed out so it would spread out and and capture the fish that way.
Another type of net was the gill net, which is stretched out across the river, and as the fish would swim into the nets, they would get stuck in the holes in between, in between the nets and can't get them, get themselves out, their gills get caught and they can't get out.
The nets are made from a type of cordage that's made from plant fibers, bark, cattail leaves, other types of plants make excellent materials to make cordage.
The way that's done is the bark is, is pounded up, soaked in water and then stripped off and the strips that are taken off are then put together and twisted to make a very strong, very fine cordage.
Another method that the Indians used, aside from the spears and traps and nets was just the plain old hook and line.
They made their hooks out of deer bones, out of the tow bone of a deer.
Actually this is one type of a fish hook that they used very similar to what we used today.
- The palatan women and their daughters spent a great deal of the year in the gardens from early spring when the land is first turned and the first seeds are planted until late fall when the last harvest of corn is brought in.
Much of the women's daytime activities take place right out here.
The colonists tell us that the palatan grew anywhere from one to one and a half acres of land for every person who lived in a village.
And when you consider that some Indian villages had as many as three and 400 people living in them, well there's a lot of work to be done here.
I have some of the tools that the Paan women would use when they were preparing their land.
These don't look exactly like the gardening tools we use today, but believe me, they work just as well.
This is made out of a stick of wood for a handle, and if you recognize this, it's a bone from the shoulder of a deer.
It's tied onto the stick with strips of raw hide, which are made from the skin of the deer that the men were out hunting in the wintertime.
This tool is made from the antlers of the deer and it makes a wonderful rake in weeder when you're working in the garden.
It also is tied on with the raw hide strips from the deer.
Here we have a conch shell, which would've been traded into this area from other tribes and it makes an excellent hoe for digging up the ground and next to it we have a bone that's been made into a pick for digging up the very hard ground, especially in dry weather like we have in the summer.
Today, you can see this really does the job.
- Okay, the Pean Indians method of starting fires before the English arrived was using the friction method and starting by rubbing, basically rubbing two sticks together.
But they used a tool called a bow drill.
It's just a bent wood piece of wood with a piece of leather stretched between both ends, a spindle and the fireboard, which has notches cut in it and a hole in it for the the powdered wood to fall down onto a material called tender, which is just plant fibers split up into shreds.
- Now the relationship between the Paan Indians and the Jamestown settlers does not start off on the best foot.
Not two weeks after the English arrive.
They're attacked by somewhere between two and 300 pean warriors.
The Indians are unsuccessful in this attempt to wipe out the intruders though because the Jamestown settlers bring firearms to Virginia.
And the main weapon that the peans use is the bow and arrow or the war club.
- What I'm doing right here is called Flint napping.
Flint Napping is how the Indians made their arrows, knives, scrapers to work, deer hides cutting tools to butcher deer and other animals.
Most of their tools were made from stone.
You start out with what's called a core, a large cobble made of different types of materials.
This is quartzite.
They also used flint chart obsidian, jasper and quartz.
They're all a type of rock that breaks in a very special way.
It's hard, but it's brittle so it breaks easily.
But the hardness allows you to to make many types of stone tools out of it.
What I was doing is called percussion flaking, taking a large hammer stone and striking flakes off of the core.
These flakes are what will be made into the arrowheads and knives and scrapers and things like that.
Many different types of tools were being made from the from the flakes.
Large flakes like this, I'll go and use either a smaller hammer stone or a piece of deer antler that I use for a striking tool.
And I have to be careful.
I don't cut myself at this stage because it's very sharp using a piece of leather to protect myself.
Use the antler to strike smaller flakes off.
I also have to be careful I don't hit myself in the leg.
Now these small flakes, very tiny flakes like this and a little bit larger are what we actually use for cutting.
I can give you an example of how that works right here.
Just this is just a flake that I cut off.
You can see how sharp it is.
It's cutting this, this piece of buck skin just like a razor.
- Despite the hostilities trade with the English does develop, the Englishmen at Jamestown are in desperate need of food supplies.
Their grain that arrives from England is often spoiled and they're not having too much luck planting their own crops.
So they depend on trade with the Indians in order to survive.
Now the pean have many things they'd like to get from the English among them are metal tools, copper items, glass, and many different types of beads and assorted other trinkets.
These are more than willingly traded by the colonists.
And this trade relationship continues even when years of battle and strife are going on.
One of the most peaceful times between the Paan and the Englishman who's following the marriage, Pocahontas daughter of Wahoo cock to an Englishman named John Rolfe.
Shortly after their marriage, the young Rolfe family visit England and it's there that Pocahontas takes ill and died.
She is buried in England.
Her husband returns to Virginia to continue his tobacco work and it is in Virginia that he dies just a few months before the uprising of the paan chiefdom against the English intruders.
Waun cock is long dead.
An pic can canoe.
His brother has come to power, and upon the killing of an Indian priest that the English called jack of the feathers pic can canoe retaliates by killing what is estimated to be one third of the total English population that was here.
One of the things that surprised the colonists on their arrival in Virginia was the fact that paan women did most of the heavy LA heavy labor in the village.
And this included house building.
The house behind me here is put together the way the Paan women would've built their homes and it's based on an actual archeological find.
Over in Virginia Beach, we have a stain that remains in the earth from a house that actually stood in the 17th century, and we followed the pattern of that stain in order to recreate this building.
All of the wood that's used in our house frame is white oak saplings.
These would be the one area where the men would help the women in cutting down the trees.
And after that, it was all up to the women and children.
They would first debark the trees removing all of the bark from the limbs so that bugs or moisture didn't get up under the bark and eat away at the wood or cause it to rod.
And then they're formed up into a shape of an arch on a jig laid out on the ground so that the arch can be lashed together nice and firmly before it's put into the post holes which were dug in the ground with fire hardened sticks.
Then the next thing to do once all the arches are up, is just begin to lash the horizontals to the frame.
Cordage made out of poplar bark or even raw hide strips made from deer skin were used for lashing together.
What we're working on here is actually lashing the horizontal poles to the uprights.
We're doing this with the rope that's made out of the poplar bark and we wanna be sure that this has lashed on very, very tightly because these are the rungs that we'll use as a ladder to climb up the building and finish putting the roof on.
Now the matting has already been woven by the women and the daughters.
It's made out of reeds and grasses that they'd cut out of the marsh areas along the river and they've spent most of the winter months probably when it was too cold to be outside, sitting indoors and weaving the mats.
The matting is sewn on with cordage, much the same as the way the building is lashed together and with several layers of it and matting that's woven water tight.
Then you have a nice cozy home to move into in just a matter of time.
Right now you're inside of a ya haken or power tan longhouse.
This is where an extended family would live.
An extended family means that rather than just mom, dad, and the children, you'd also have grandparents, cousins, maybe even aunts and uncles living in the same household.
The English colonists tell us that a yagen would have anywhere from six to 20 family members all living together.
Now in our houses today, we have different rooms for different activities.
We have a room to cook in, we have a room to eat in, we have a room to bathe in, and we even have a room to sleep in.
An Indian home is simply a place to sleep and seek shelter from bad weather.
And there's plenty of space in a house like this for that.
All of your cooking and other activities take place outside.
What I've been doing is scraping down a deer skin.
I'm softening it with a sandstone, sort of like solid sandpaper.
And this'll help us to make it nice and soft so we can lay it out on the beds as well as on the ground for a family of a dozen or more people to lie down and sleep.
Although hostilities between the two cultures had ceased disease continued to take its toll on the pean tribes diseases.
Such a smallpox and influenza probably killed more pean than any of the warring that they had with the English ever had.
There are descendants of the Paitan tribes living in Virginia today, and they are the naman, the Rappahannock, the chick hominy, the mattai and the poon.
- I'm looking, I'm looking for feathered headdresses and tepees.
That's what I oftentimes think about Indians.
Where were they?
- Well, Dick, I think we need to check a little history here and to do, to help us do that, we have Abigail Schumann, our interpretive supervisor from the Indian Village.
How you doing, Abby?
- Great.
- What about this Western Plains headdress and these types of things that people tend to associate with the Indians?
- Well, those are the typical symbols that you think of and that's probably due to a lot of Western movies that we all grew up on.
Like you say, you look for teepees, you look for headdresses, you look for women with the papoose, strapp to their back.
But that culture is a traveling hunting culture.
And the Paan Indians are sedentary.
They stay in one place and they farm the land most of the year.
Well, speaking of the papoose on the back, this is a cradleboard.
And when people come into the village, they think they finally found something they can identify with.
This is what the women carried the babies on their backs with.
But if you take a look, this is a very heavy piece of bark and it wouldn't be very comfortable to strap to your back.
Instead, it's more of a, a high chair, if you will swaddle the infant down in there.
And when the woman's working out in the garden, she can prop the cradleboard up against the fence or a tree nearby and the baby's out of harm's way and she can keep her eye on them.
- Well now Abby, another question I have is who were these people?
What tribes were there?
Are they still in any existence today?
- Well, in the 17th century when the in English arrived at Jamestown, there is estimated there were 32 tribes, 32 were named by John Smith and his writings today, there are actually seven tribes that survive.
Those are the Naman and Hanock, the Mattapan, which are actually two separate tribes, the Mattai and the Eastern Mattapan or the upper Mattapan, and then the Eastern Chi hominy and the Chi hominy tribe.
- Well, now with those, with this costume that you have on, is this a good reflection of what a pal Indian lady might have worn?
- Well, yes and no.
I can show you my costume a little closer.
It's based on drawings that were done in the 1580s by a man here on the East coast named John White.
And it's one of the few drawings he had of a woman in a garment that hang from both shoulders.
It was fringed at the top and the bottom.
And that's what I based this dress on.
You might notice also my pocket here.
Pockets weren't sewn into clothing, but were hung along a belt on the waist and that's where you would carry all your needed items.
- It looks like an animal.
- Well it's, it's a squirrel skin, actually.
Nothing goes to waste.
The meat would be eaten and then the skins are made into clothing and adornment.
Now this is a little more typical of what men and women would wear and well, that one just might fit you, Jack.
- Well, I'll have to try it on - Later.
- The Indian culture was one that was fairly sophisticated, even though they didn't have electricity and therefore they didn't have motors.
There seemed to be a lot of sophistication because the Indians utilized that which was available to them.
Could you show me a couple of examples of, of how the Indians applied technology, but using the equipment and materials that was available - To them?
I like the way you put that, that they did have a technology, although it wasn't the metal technology that the Europeans were so accustomed to, and this is really my favorite way of showing this, this strange looking contraption at first is called the pump drill and it will drill holes through wood shell and bone.
And these are the items that the pean needed to drill in.
And you can see how that works a stone bit on the end.
And it's not quite as quick as a metal bit would be, but it gets the job done.
- So we're looking at the black and decker drill of this time period.
- Basically you are, it really does work well.
- And of course the to the Indians, the the time was what they had and it took them as long as it needed to take.
Exactly.
But the point was it accomplished the task.
- The technology suited their purposes.
Yes.
One thing that people don't take into account when they see how long this type of thing takes to accomplish is that you don't have an eight hour job that you have to come home for and then get this done.
This is your daily routine, this is your work.
- One of the things I'd like to do is to call the other two interpreters up because you know here I wonder what people would've learned from each other.
In other words, we had the, the settlers come in, we have the Indians, and now people are joining together.
Did when the settlers first came in, there was no fort obviously.
Did they live in the ships?
And how do you, how did the Indians greet them?
- Well, the colonists, when they first arrive here, simply live in in hovels and lean tos and tents that they construct from the old sail canvas and extra canvas they'd brought with them from England.
While they're starting to get their settlement set up, they're actually just kind of wilderness living to begin with right off the bat.
- Well, Abby, what did the Indians think of when they saw all of a sudden appear these ships and these people that are - Well, you have to keep in mind it's not the very first time that the Indians here have had any contact with Europeans.
Explorers and missionaries had been in this area in this century proceeding the Jamestown settlement, but they probably thought the English were a little bizarre for the fact that the men went outside in hot summer weather wearing armor.
The homes they built were very complicated, took a lot more labor than a home needed to take.
So I'm sure their impressions were, - But, but then we noticed the Ford is built fortunately designees conflict.
When and why did conflict begin?
- Conflict starts pretty early on.
Within two weeks of the arrival of the English before the for is put up, they're attacked by somewhere between two and 300 power 10 warriors.
And that conflict continues on and off pretty much through the first seven years of the South.
- Sharon, do, do the settlers learn anything from the Indians?
Did the English gain anything from them?
- Quite a bit of technology as far as farming went back home in England.
They were having a tendency of broadcasting a lot of their seeds such as old corn and, and different types of wheat products and grains and fibers.
The thing with trying to plant that next to the river where they landed in the 17th century, it was the tendency of always washing away when it rained very, very heavily.
And Virginia had lots and lots of bad storms.
So as a result, by kidnapping some Indians and bringing them to the fort and letting those Indians show them how to plant different types of, of corn and crops, it was, it started a new generation of crops and foods that was very, very advantageous to the settlers.
- Let's reverse that for a second.
You said in some cases the Indians were cap captured or, or came over or whatever.
Did any of the white settlers find it attractive to go to the Indians?
- Some of the, some of the colonists we do and do read about in John Smith's writings actually ran away from the settlement to live with the Indians because they believed that maybe in the long run they would have a better opportunity at living a longer life simply because of the Indians adapt of their very adapt growing food.
And they have nice warm homes and a lot of your Dutch immigrants and German immigrants that come to Jamestown are giving people like John Smith fits because they run away to live with the Indians and these colonists have to start passing laws eventually over time, outlawing colonists running away to live with the Indians.
- I see.
So that that's, that was the case of sometimes we hear about white Indians - Perhaps.
So over time, I think although some of these people run away to live with the Indians, they don't give up their give up their way of life.
They don't shed their typical garment European garments in favor of Indian garments.
- They don't, they just take an Indian wife or just happen to live with the Indians - Perhaps.
So maybe in the long time.
I see.
In the long - Run, yes.
What about tobacco?
That seemed to be an important crop that for both of them, - Sharon, did the colonists grow the tobacco that the Indians grew or, - Well, it would've been very, very similar.
They, there was a time when there was really nothing that they really knew.
Did you know, they didn't know how to grow.
The tobacco itself was a gift from the Indians as well as the corn.
But the thing about the tobacco had a tendency, it was just such a strong fibers material that it wasn't readily accepted by the English.
And so it wasn't until John Roth experimented with different types of Spanish seeds, the tobacco Oh, that's when that came up.
That it came - Up.
Alright.
We could, obviously, we could continue with this kind of discussion for another three hours and you could see the many kinds of resources that are gonna be available to you if you're able to visit Jamestown.
So I'd like to take just a second to talk over with Joe, the educational resources that are available at Jamestown Festival Park teachers, whether and parents, whether they live in Virginia or outside of Virginia.
Sure.
How could they get in touch with you?
- Well, it's very simple, Dick.
First of all, we do have some print materials designed to help teachers utilize this program effectively.
And those materials or other information on educational programs are available just by merely calling us.
And you wanna contact the education department at the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation.
And the address is po drawer JF Williamsburg, Virginia.
And if you'd rather call, call the education department at eight oh four, which is area code 2 5 3 4 9 3 9, and we can send you some information on our educational programs.
If you're coming to the festival park, we'd love to work with you.
Or even if you're not, we've got some materials that you can use in your classroom, wherever you are.
- And do you have a very close relationship with the Department of Education in Virginia, don't you?
- Yes, we do.
We work hand in glove with the Department of Education.
In fact, we're gonna be doing some special things with them next fall.
- That's, that's very good.
When a teacher, let's say, wanted to do a specialized unit with - You - And they're studying Indians or they're studying 1607 in the landing of Jamestown, do you, would you integrate a with the teacher a curriculum?
- Oh yes.
Well, actually we have six programs right now that we offer that are designed to reinforce the curriculum.
Now they're based upon the standards of learning for Virginia, but we find that the standards of learning are very similar throughout the nation.
So you can come and you can work in a special program utilizing the resources of the Indian Village one utilizing the resources of the fort, and we'll be having a few on the ships next year.
So we already offer programs that are hands-on, experiential in nature, designed to reinforce key points we've been talking about today, the culture of the Indians, the technology, what food was like in the James Ford.
So the kids get to actually make things and do things.
And we believe that by engaging in 17th century activities, that they will have a deeper understanding of our history - And they actually can carry some of the thing, these things back with them and do activities in their own - Classroom.
Oh yes.
We ask the unit so that we have available, and again, all a person has to do is contact us and they can have those materials.
- Yeah, that's fascinating.
One of the things that I, I hope you've learned from this program today is that you have an extraordinary resource right on hand And I can't thank our friends enough for joining us, Homer and Sharon and Abby, and certainly Joe for joining us.
I hope you found this program of interest.
We know you will have if you get in touch with these folks.
We look forward to having you join our interpreters at Jamestown at your earliest convenience, and thank you for joining us today.
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