Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

And so, in the middle of the Chesapeake, Pentaquod, the Susquehannock who was tired of war, turned his log canoe not to the turbulent western shore, as he had intended, but to the quieter eastern shore, and that simple choice made all the difference.

As the fifteenth century ended, every soul in England was Catholic, which was understandable, since there were no other Christian religions in existence at that time and it was debated whether the few Jews in the realm had souls. King Henry VII, having wrested his throne from the infamous Richard III, ruled with the blessing of the Pope, to whom he willingly accorded both spiritual and temporal allegiance. After years of disturbance the country was at peace, the great monasteries housed clerics of power, and good Englishmen were content to be good Catholics. Martin Luther, who would later challenge this happy somnolence, was then fifteen years old and studying with enthusiasm to be a Catholic priest.

Jamestown was far too preoccupied with mere survival to worry much about the forms of religion; it was not flamboyantly anti-Catholic, but that was because the leaders of the settlement could not imagine that any of their flock were Catholic. With them it was always “Good Queen Bess for whom Virginia was named” and “Faithful King James, a reliable man even though his mother was that Catholic whore, Mary of Scotland.”

With all this food, he reflected, why did we starve in Jamestown? But as soon as he posed the question he knew the answer: Because the Virginia Indians were hostile and would not allow us to hunt or fish. And he wondered how long his muskets and bullets would defend him if the Choptank Indians turned hostile.