Kecoughtan Christmas feast. Don Hulick portrays Smith. The others, from left: Anthony Fortune, Christopher Jones, Lindsey fortune, Monique Jones, Carson Hudson. Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation“We were never more merry,” Capt. John Smith related, “nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-Foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England, than in the dry smoaky houses of Kecoughtan.”
Smith’s rambling account of the hospitality he and his crew were shown by the Kecoughtan Indians – at a place we now know as Hampton – is considered the first written account of Christmas by English settlers in America.
It wasn’t because Smith and his crew in the winter of 1608 chose that spot – about where the Veterans Administration hospital now sits – but because they found themselves stuck there.
There followed days of what was apparently non-stop gluttony, ironically begun as a rescue mission for starving colonists.
According to Dennis Montgomery, an editor for the Journal of Colonial Williamsburg, Smith and 46 men set out from Jamestown with a boat and barge on a falling tide and made it as far as Warraskoyack, an Indian enclave on the Pagan River near modern-day Smithfield.
They had intended to round Point Comfort, sail up the Chesapeake to the York River and make their way to Chief Powhatan’s Werowocomoco stronghold. But the following morning a nor’easter began to blow – right from their intended direction. But the undaunted Smith and a much smaller company, now some 12 men, started out anyway and made it as far as Kecoughtan before the now-raging winter storm forced them to seek shelter.
It should more accurately be considered the first New Year’s Eve celebration because the journey actually began on about Dec. 29, but the English, with their customary Twelfth Night tradition, stretched Christmas into the new year. Smith’s narration says the foul weather forced them to “keep Christmas” among the “salvages.”
But if you wondered where the first English Christmas in America was actually observed you might conclude it was Norfolk. That’s because a contingent of Sir Walter Raleigh’s would-be settlers on Roanoke Island had made their way north and spent the winter of 1584-85 in the vicinity of the eventual port city.
Certainly they would have observed Christmas, but the pity is they mentioned not a word of it in their report of the sojourn. They didn’t stay, retreating back to Roanoke and setting sail for England.
So Hampton gets the bragging rights, if you can call it that. It doesn’t have a very nice ending.
The place where Smith and his band feasted was once home to the thriving and independent Kecoughtans. They were blessed with abundant resources, from wild game and plants to crabs, oysters and fish. They also grew several varieties of vegetables, including corn, beans and squash, on thousands of riverbank acres. “Kecoughtan is an ample and faire country indeed, an admirable portion of land comparatively high, wholesome and fruitful,” wrote English observer William Strachey.
The Kecoughtans ranged throughout the lower peninsula, hunting and fishing in areas they well knew. Their houses were like garden arbors, with rows of saplings bent over and lashed together at the top to make a barrel-shaped roof, then covered with bark or mats made from reeds.
These weren’t exactly the same natives who greeted the English colonists when Smith and his storm-weary bunch arrived. Chief Powhatan had recently subdued them and sent one of his sons to run things. But they were still a thriving, if no longer independent, tribe.
Just two years later, the English attacked and either killed or drove off the Kecoughtans, taking over their garden plots and setting up the beginnings of a town and a series of forts. The town was called Kecoughtan at first, but the victors considered it a heathen name and changed it to Elizabeth City and eventually Hampton.
It isn’t clear whether Smith’s successors were ever quite so merry.
