Hungry, wet, and weary, a small group of English men rowed into the Carolina Sounds in the summer of 1584. They had arrived less than a month earlier, sent to explore the region and make contact with its native population. After a few tentative encounters with Carolina Algonquians, the English party decided to leave the safety of their ships and set out for the village of Roanoke.

As they watched the English approach, Roanoke’s Algonquian inhabitants displayed the same mixture of curiosity and apprehension as their approaching guests. Most of the small group standing on shore were women, who had...

One of the earliest and most weighty decisions facing the backers of England’s early colonies was choosing a leader, and most writers on the subject were in agreement on the fundamentals. Richard Eburne, for example, wrote that “Governours and Leaders of the rest” should be chosen from “men of Name and Note.” In other words, leaders were expected to be men whose “power and authoritie, greatnesse and gravitie, purse and presence” supported their claim to lead. The circularity of Eburne’s reasoning—that “authoritie” and “greatnesse” qualified a man for positions that conferred precisely these qualities—derived from assumptions widely shared...

Whitaker’s account of Lord De La Warre’s arrival in the Chesapeake borders on the providential, and his description of De La Warre’s installation as Jamestown’s governor on the magical. Nevertheless, when he wrote of Virginia’s colonists that “never wanting government, they never wanted bread, for him that would take paines and do his dutie,” Whitaker drew on fairly ordinary assumptions. Leaders like De La Warre in England or (especially) in the Americas were expected to inspire the commons to diligent labor, and a leader’s authority rested on his ability to punish idlers and feed the diligent when they could not...

In An Encouragement to Colonies (1624) Sir William Alexander both mocked the dreams of a life without labor inspired by early Bermuda and praised the more pragmatic leadership of Rene de Laudonnière, who led the French settlement at Fort Caroline in Florida. Alexander especially valued Laudonnière’s efforts to find information “concerning the Savages, what their force was, what relation they had one to another, where they were friends or foes, how their pleasures were placed, and by what accounts they reckoned their gaines or losses.” This sort of information about his Indian neighbors’ diplomatic and economic relationships, their linked desires...

English leaders like William Bradford consistently sought signs that their Indian counterparts had understood and accepted their claims to (at least) commensurate status. Since exchanges were so frequent and conveyed such rich meanings, they were one of the most important sites for such negotiations in the early period. And since both sides recognized that the relationship between English and Indians was not only represented but subtly reshaped in the shared language of exchange, leading figures on both sides struggled to make often contradictory claims.

As part of these struggles, exchanges of food could convey many meanings, even conflicting meanings, simultaneously....

In 1611, George Percy, the son of a nobleman and sometime deputy governor of the Jamestown settlement, wrote a letter asking his brother, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, to send food. Claiming that “the place which I hold in this Colonie … cannot be defraied with smale expence,” Percy wrote that his reputation depended on his ability “to keep a continuall and dayly Table for Gentlemen of fashion aboute me.” It is a striking comment to make barely a year after the end of Jamestown’s “starving time,” when by Percy’s own account English settlers resorted to cannibalism to survive. Presenting...

Formal meals are, as one scholar of the subject has called them, “a fundamental instrument and theater of political relations,” but the distinction between playwright, players, and audience in this particular theater was not always clear. English leaders like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, John Winthrop, and Edward Maria Wingfield recognized that they could not always hope to stage a successful performance at meals even when they hosted their own countrymen. To offer a meal was the most direct way to express rich meanings, whether distinctions of status and precedence or a desire for peaceful relations with an important visitor. But one...

In the 1660s, John Winthrop Jr. carefully but pointedly refuted the great sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard’s claims that maize was “a Graine not so pleasant or fitt to be Eaten by mankind,” being “hard of Digestion” and yielding “little or no Nourishment.” Winthrop noted that “there had beene yet no certaine proofe or experience” with maize in Gerard’s time, but by the 1660s, it had been “found by much Experience” to be “wholesome and pleasant for Food of which great Variety may be made out of it.¹

Winthrop’s remarks signaled a decisive shift from the Atlantic world of his father....