The Steeds made two decisions: they would in all things be loyal to England, and they would continue to hear Mass. Young Edmund spent the first six years of his life being indoctrinated into these twin principles; when he thought of his father he visualized a quiet gentleman who tended the affairs of his huge holdings and then prayed resolutely with whatever priest happened to pass by, for he was determined to hold on to his Catholic heritage. Edmund patterned himself after his father, and throughout England in these quiet years from 1581 through 1587 this type of sensible truce prevailed.
But in 1588 King Philip of Spain, seeking to regain the English throne he had once occupied as Mary’s husband, blasted all reasonable hopes held by families like the Steeds. He sent his conquering Armada up the Channel to invade England, destroy Protestantism and forcibly lead the captured land back to Rome. Stupid Englishmen, especially those who had lived abroad in exile, made stupid statements about the restoration of the Pope, and within the island other misguided idiots believed that as soon as Spanish troops set foot on English soil, Catholics of the realm would rise up to greet them and aid in the subjugation of their homeland.
From that summer day on which Drake and Hawkins and Howard routed the Spanish galleons off Plymouth and sent them to their graves in storms off the Hebrides, the fate of ordinary Catholics like the Steeds was sealed. The general populace knew them to be treasonous, the whole lot of them, and it was further believed that only a miracle had enabled the English to defend themselves against papal invasion and the restoration of the burnings which Queen Mary had sponsored during her brief and bloody reign.
The ostracism fell most heavily on young Edmund. At school he was a child who kept apart, and at Oxford one to be avoided. He could never hold public office; nor serve as a justice of the peace, like his forebears; nor testify in certain kinds of trials; nor marry into the good families; nor serve as an officer in either navy or army. He had to pay special taxes, and worst of all, was held in contempt by the countryside. The hearing of Mass became more difficult, for in the wake of the Armada fugitive priests were hunted down with extra severity. As the sixteenth century closed, a young Catholic could exist in England, but that was about all.
But in 1602, as Edmund reached his majority, Queen Elizabeth sickened, and in 1603 she died—bald, bewigged and uglier than sin. As prayers were being said for the salvation of her grand and murderous soul, Sir Fairleigh Steed assembled his family in the great hall at Queen’s Wenlock, where a fugitive priest read a Mass for the departed queen, asking the Steed family to forgive her for the wrongs she had done them. When all in the room had pledged allegiance to their new king, James VI of Scotland and I of England, a fervent prayer was uttered by Sir Fairleigh, asking that God make the new monarch more understanding than the old.
Nothing changed. Catholics continued to be excluded from government, and one of Edmund’s professors told him, “You should have been a don at Oxford, were you not a Catholic.” It was in this confusion that Edmund came down from the university with an immoral proposal which shocked his father: “I’m going to embrace the new faith.” Sir Fairleigh gasped, whereupon Edmund added, “Publicly. If this nation continues to place infirmities upon Catholics, I deem it permissible for me to deceive the nation. When I return to Oxford, I shall take the Oath of Conformity. From that day forth I shall be a public Protestant.”
“And inwardly?”
“As good a Catholic as ever. When you hold Mass, I shall attend.”
“Edmund, you undertake a grievous task.”
“I have no desire to have my guts torn out.”
“No man does, but sometimes it happens.”
“It won’t happen to me. I’ll play their filthy game.”
“Young men often think,” Sir Fairleigh said, “that they can play any game, if only they keep their hearts pure.”
“I intend trying,” Edmund said, and on the first anniversary of King James’ ascension he rode to Oxford and in public ceremony announced that he was forswearing Catholicism, affirming that he no longer owed any spiritual allegiance to either Pope or priests. He allowed a chaplain to administer the Oath of Conformity, and from that moment became an ostensible Protestant, to the delight of friends who had always wished him well. In fact, his conversion gave so much pleasure that he was offered preferments as an inducement to other Catholics to follow suit, and his professors reopened discussion of a post at the university.
In this manner Edmund Steed was lured back into the mainstream of English life. He worked for the government in London and was invited by his associates to their places in the country, where he met old gentlemen who in their youth had known Sir Devon, and one such man in Bucks told Edmund frankly that he hoped the time would come when Steed would join their family, seeing they had such a plethora of daughters.
But whenever he returned to the handsome old grange at Queen’s Wenlock, and the doors were closed, and night fell, and the fugitive priests from Douai materialized, he resumed his Catholic identity, trembling when the sacred host touched his tongue.
It was during such a visit, when the Mass had been especially significant, that he took his father out into the timeless orchards which had been planted personally by Good Queen Anne in 1387, and there under the gnarled trees told him, “Father, the burden is too great. I can’t dissemble. My soul is being torn apart.”
“I supposed it would be,” the wise old man said. “What do you propose?”
“A company’s being formed to establish a new settlement in America. I shall subscribe.”
“I understand,” Sir Fairleigh said. He did not press him on how he would survive in a distant land without the consoling reassurances of this grange and these memories, for he was certain that Edmund had weighed his losses. What was important was that his son get back on solid footing, the kind the Steeds had always preferred. “I suppose you’ll quit the Protestant masquerade?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Why not now?”
“Because I must first get to America. The company won’t welcome Catholics.”
“Don’t delay too long, Edmund. Dissembling corrodes.”
“I intend placing myself in a position where it’s no longer necessary.”
The old knight did not want to see his youngest son quit England, and especially he did not want him to end his association with the grange, for the strength of the Steeds had always been their reliance on the land: the furrows and the hunting and the birth of lambs. He knew how desperately Edmund would long for these pastures and orchards when he pined in a savage land, but if leaving would help clarify his soul, he must leave.
“I won’t see you again, Father.”
“You sail so soon?”
“Within the month, they say.”
They neither embraced nor shook hands; excessive display was not the way of the Steeds, but when he said farewell in the vaulted doorway built so many years ago, the old man shivered. “These have not been good years for Catholics,” he said. “Of late I’ve been seeing Sir Latimer’s head on that pike. That’s the end of all of us, I’m afraid.” They looked at each other and parted.
Few of mankind’s memorable adventures started more poorly than the English settlement of Virginia. During the last days of December 1606 the company to which Edmund Steed had subscribed piled 105 courageous emigrants onto the three small ships and set sail for the New World, expecting to make landfall within five weeks.
Off the coast, but still in sight of England, they were becalmed for six agonizing weeks. The wind would not rise and there was nothing the infuriated captains could do; ominously, the leaders of the expedition watched the would-be settlers consume much of the food intended to see them through the first months of the experiment. It was not until May 14 that the ships unloaded at a swampy island in the James River, grandiloquently named Jamestown, as if it were an operating city.
Lack of food, miasma! land, confusion in leadership, hostility from Indians and rampaging epidem
ics beset the newcomers, so that when the dreadful summer ended, only thirty-eight of the original group still lived. That these could survive the winter seemed doubtful.
The behavior of the Indians who populated the western shore of the Chesapeake bewildered the settlers: for six weeks the redskins would be amiable, bringing to the stockade food which saved the lives of the remnant; for the next six weeks they would kill any settler who stepped outside. It was difficult for the Englishmen to accept such irrational behavior, and most came to fear and hate the Indian.
Edmund Steed did neither. His contact with red men led him to believe that they were much like other humans, capable of trust and desirable as neighbors. He felt at ease traveling amongst them, so that when Captain Smith launched his serious exploration of the Chesapeake, seeking the gold and silver known to exist there, it was natural for Steed to participate, and his contacts with the peaceful Indians of the eastern shore confirmed his attitudes.
But in November 1608 he accompanied Smith on an expedition up the James River which had horrifying results. It was an exploration to ascertain what kind of land lay beyond the confluence of the Chickahominy, and after the little band left their canoes, Steed marched at the rear with the carpenter George Landen, and his easy experiences with the Choptanks lulled him into carelessness. Farther and farther the two stragglers fell behind, and when they were totally detached, a band of howling savages overwhelmed them. A hideous orgy followed,, with warriors jabbing pointed sticks at their faces, stopping just short of the eyes. Then, as Steed would later report:
The women of the tribe descended upon us, pushed the braves their brothers away, and lashed us to stakes set into the ground. With much dancing and glee they attended to Landon first, using sharp oyster shells to cut off all his fingers, one knuckle at a time. While he was screaming so loud that he drowned out the exulting cries of the women, they knelt down and sawed away his toes in the same protracted manner. This done, they started at his scalp, and moving slowly downward, ripped off his living skin. While he was still alive they piled brush about his stake and set it afire. When their dancing ended they came at me with their shells, but Captain Smith and his men had doubled back to find us and came upon the scene in time to save me.
Later, a group of heavily laden supply ships arrived from London under the leadership of Captain John Ratcliffe, who had served as captain aboard the tiny pinnace Discovery during the original voyage of 1607 and who had later held the presidency of the council. Since he was well informed on affairs in Virginia, he was sent with a body of soldiers to negotiate with Chief Powhatan for more land, but that insidious Indian lured the Englishmen with promises, set upon them nefariously and slew most. They kept Ratcliffe, Steed and one other alive for special tortures, and once again the Oxford student was rescued to report the horrible incident:
With our dead lying about us, we were tied naked to stakes, before which hot fires were set, and when we were toasted near to death women attacked poor Ratcliffe and with shells scraped away all the flesh on his left arm up to the shoulder, tossing the bits into the fire. They did the same with his right arm and then his right leg, whereupon he died.
When such evidence was endlessly repeated, Edmund Steed lost all trust in Indians. He came to see them as crafty, cruel, lazy and uncivilized, and it was a prudent white man who anticipated their perfidy. Now when trading parties ascended the James to deal with Powhatan, Steed remained apart, between two soldiers, ready to discharge his musket straight at the heart of any savage who threatened a treacherous move.
As his faith in Indians diminished, his trust in Captain Smith grew. He saw him as the only savior of the colony, a man of petty foibles and ramrod rectitude. When the little captain announced that he must quit the colony to ensure a more faithful chain of supplies from London, swearing vociferously that he was not abandoning the settlers but would return, Steed foresaw that once safe in England he would become caught up in a hundred fascinating schemes involving dukes and foreign princes and wars in Muscovy.
“I shall not see you again, Captain,” Steed said mournfully as Smith stood on the dock, surrounded by packets of arrows he was taking back to England for display.
“You’ll survive. Remember, you’re one of the men of iron.”
“I meant ... you’ll not return.”
“Me! This bay is blood to me. It courses through my veins.” He said much more, and in the end drew himself to maximum height, saluted the little colony he had kept alive, and was seen no more in Virginia.
On the day he sailed down the river, the testing time began, those starving weeks and months of autumn 1609 and winter 1610. When Smith left, the expanding colony contained 507 members; six terrible months later only 61 remained. Of this foodless, heatless catastrophe Steed reported to the managers in London:
All who might lead are dead. The doctor and the carpenters and all who worked to keep the town functioning, they are dead. Even as I write the room is cluttered with bodies, for we no longer have any to bury them. We have neither a bean nor a biscuit, and I shudder to inform you that some, beyond the point of desperation, have taken to digging up the bodies of those already dead and endeavoring to eat them, and from doing this, some have gone mad and cast themselves into the river and died. And if we who are able to move seek to leave the fort to find food, the lurking Indians slay us.
It was a time of such gnawing horror that those few who survived sought ever after to erase it from their memory, and yet it was the foundation of fact on which the great colony of Virginia was erected.
On May 23, 1610, when the spring breezes made starvation even more monstrous, a man who had crawled to the river to die set up a howling, and when Steed went to him he saw that the man was pointing downstream where two rescue ships hove into view, and when they moved to shore Steed saw that their names were Patience and Deliverance.
It was during the following spring, in 1611, when the colony was stabilized, that Steed decided to quit Jamestown and start a new life on that hospitable island he had scouted with Captain Smith three summers earlier. During all the trials which beset him in Virginia, he had kept alive his vision of that island with the tall trees and abundant fish, and even when it seemed that the Indian women must hack him to pieces, or that starvation would evaporate him before the day ended, he could visualize that island and imagine himself living quietly there.
He could even recall the Indians he and Captain Smith had met along the river, especially the giant chief, and he wanted desperately to believe that they were different from the mercurial and untrustworthy tribes under Powhatan. He had no evidence to support this hope, but he had seen those gentle Choptank Indians, and it was not unreasonable to hope that they were different.
The driving force which impelled him to leave Jamestown was one which his ancestors would have understood: Sir Devon with his simplistic sense of right and wrong; bumbling, stumbling Sir Latimer willing to be torn apart for his faith; hesitant Sir Fairleigh trying to be both a good Catholic and a loyal Englishman—they would have comprehended when he said, “I am strangled with duplicity. I must live where I can stand forth as an honest Catholic.”
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.” It was known, of course, that Steed’s grandfather, Sir Latimer, had been drawn and quartered for his treasonous adherence to Rome, but it was also known that young Steed had abjured that poisonous faith; besides, on various occasions he had proved his valor, and that counted.
Edmund Steed could have continued his masquerade as a false Protestant, and his offspring, when he had them, could certainly have been counted among the first families of Virginia, but the tricky double
ness of his position—Protestant by day, Catholic by night—was more than he could sustain. He was indeed sick of dissembling and determined to put an end to it. For a Catholic, there was no future in the Virginia settlement, so he would go elsewhere.
He was not forthright in offering his reasons for moving to the eastern shore. “I want to go where the oystering is better,” he said lamely. “Trade with the Indians who live across the bay could be profitable to Virginia.” One after another he paraded his spurious reasons, and in the end the governors of the colony granted him permission—“It will be to our advantage to have an outpost firmly located on the eastern shore.”
So in May 1611 he rose each day before dawn to hack out the planks required for the boat he had in mind. Samuel Dwight, a ship’s carpenter on one of the rescue ships, gave Steed some rule-of-thumb advice.
“For these shallow waters make her flat-bottomed. Also, it’s easier for them as doesn’t know to build a keel. One mast is all a man alone can handle, and it a short one. Pointed bow for probing, transom stern for stability. And leeboards to hold her into the wind.”
“What are leeboards?” Steed inquired.
“When you’ve finished putting her together, I’ll instruct you.”
It took Steed four weeks, with spasmodic help from Mr. Dwight, to build his small craft. It was only fifteen feet long, but it was sturdy, and if the uneven finishing of the planks allowed water to flow in at a rate that would soon sink her, stout caulking would cure that. It was launched on the last day of June, and when it swayed on the placid waters of the James, Steed asked his carpenter, “What type of boat is it?” and the newcomer replied, “Bateau,” and he demonstrated how the leeboards must be attached.