- Historic Sites Of Raleigh And The First Plantation The
Elizabethans and America: Part II -- The fate of the Virginia
Colony rested on the endurance of adventurers, the financing of
London merchants, and the favor of a courtier with his demanding
spinster Queen. June 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 4 That winter the
colonists had enough novelties, excitements, dangers,
consolations, to last them a lifetime. They kept Christmas in
bad weather, “among the savages, where we were never more merry,
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.” Relations with the Indians
had all the complexity of contacts between races at very
different levels of civilization, by turns friendly and
hostile—or rather, the same emotions in the same breast, so that
a sharp lookout had to be kept all the time. The company at home
insisted on the coronation of Powhatan, the leading chief of the
area, against Smith’s better judgme