A Little Waste Ground

George Percy came ashore in Virginia in the afternoon, on legs that still kept the roll of the ship. He was the Earl of Northumberland's eighth son, a gentleman with a sword at his hip, and since the Thames he had been keeping an account of the voyage. The beach was soft sand, dry on top and wet a hand's depth down. Past it the ground rose in low hills of sand bound with coarse grass, and past the hills stood pine woods with meadow opening between them. Some of the gentlemen had put on back-and-breast for the landing, steel plates strapped front and back over the doublet, and they were sweating before they reached the first rise. The men around them walked slowly and stopped often. Months of biscuit and salt meat had loosened their gums and slowed them, and a short climb in the sand left them blowing. The boats lay drawn up behind them at the water's edge. Percy went up into the trees.

The country was in its spring. The oaks were coming into small leaf, the pines gave off resin in the warmth, and the grass in the open places stood green and wet to the shin. Water ran through the woods in clear channels over sand, cold enough to make the teeth ache, and men lay on their bellies to drink it after weeks of water from casks that had gone flat and green. Birds went up out of the meadows ahead of them and settled again behind. The ground underfoot was soft with pine needles, and it held still, which after the months at sea was its own pleasure. Percy put the afternoon into one sentence. The landing party had found "faire meddowes and goodly tall Trees, with such Fresh-waters running through the woods, as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof."

They went only a little way. Men four months off a ship could not go far, and the afternoon was already turning. In the meadows the grass was starred with small flowers, and narrow paths ran through it into the pines, trodden bare and hard, with no one on them. The gentlemen followed the paths a short distance and came back into the open. They pulled up handfuls of grass and smelled them. They broke open pine cones and turned over stones in the streams. A few of the soldiers stood at the edge of the trees with their muskets grounded and their matches lit, watching the woods while the others walked. The woods gave them birdsong and wind in the pine tops. Nothing else moved.

They had seen the land at about four that morning, a low line darker than the sea, and they had entered the bay the same day. The bay was the Chesapeake, the great water that the rivers of the country ran into, and its mouth lay between two capes. The southern cape, where Percy walked, was sand hills and pine and meadow. Out on the water the ships rode at anchor with their sails furled, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the small Discovery. About 105 of the people aboard them had come to stay. Roughly half were gentlemen, men of family who had never worked a field in their lives. The rest were laborers and carpenters, a blacksmith, a bricklayer, a mason, a tailor, a barber, a surgeon, soldiers and boys. They had brought tools, seed, armor, muskets, pikes and a great deal of paper. Nobody aboard knew yet who was to govern them.

That question had been sealed up in London. The Virginia Company of London, the merchants' company chartered in April 1606 to plant the colony and take a return from it, had sent the three ships down the Thames on December 20 of that year. Christopher Newport, the fleet's captain, sailed in the Susan Constant. Bartholomew Gosnold, who had sailed to New England in 1602, commanded the Godspeed. John Ratcliffe had the Discovery, a pinnace small enough to work in shoal water. Contrary winds held them for weeks in the Downs, the anchorage off the coast of Kent, where they could see England and could not leave it. At last they ran south by the Canaries and then west to the West Indies, watering and hunting in the islands, and up the coast to the capes. From the Canaries on, the fleet carried a prisoner.

His name was John Smith, a soldier of about twenty-seven who had fought the Turks in Hungary, and said so. He was held under restraint on a charge of planning mutiny, and he crossed the Atlantic under it and came into the bay under it. What the charge was survives in two places. Samuel Purchas, the editor who printed Percy's account in 1625, set a note in his margin beside it: "Captaine Smith was suspected for a supposed Mutinie, though never no such matter." The other version is Smith's own, published in 1624 in his history of the colony. Some of the chief men aboard, in his telling, had "fained he intended to usurp the government, murther the Councell, and make himselfe King." Purchas had not been on the voyage. Smith was the man accused. The accusers left no account.

The light went early under the pines. By the time the landing party turned back toward the beach the woods were dark at their roots, and the open ground showed pale between the trunks. They came down out of the trees in a loose string, gentlemen in doublets and breeches stiff with salt, sailors in shoes the sea had half rotted, a few with muskets on their shoulders and the rest with swords. A matchlock musket fired only when a burning cord of saltpetered match was snapped down into the pan, and after a long afternoon in the woods the match had burned short or gone out on most of them. Relighting it took a flint, a steel, dry tinder and time. Their shadows had gone into the general dusk. The boats were where they had been left, nosed up on the sand, and the water had come in around their sterns. The first men were climbing over the gunwales when the shapes came over the hills.

Percy set it down in one sentence: "there came the Savages creeping upon all foure, from the Hills, like Beares, with their Bowes in their mouthes, charged us very desperately in the faces, hurt Captaine Gabrill Archer in both his hands, and a sayler in two places of the body very dangerous."

The arrows came in low and flat out of the dusk, with a sound like a stick whipped through grass, and they stood in the sand and in the wet planking of the boats. Men who had been half aboard dropped back into the shallows and crouched behind the hulls. Others ran for the boats and fell over the oars. One of the sailors kept shouting for match, for anyone's match, and somebody near him had a cord still smoldering and blew on it until it glowed and touched it to his neighbor's. Gabriel Archer, a gentleman of the company, was hit in both hands. A sailor near him was hurt in two places in the body. The English fired what they could fire, the pieces that were primed and the matches that were still alight, and each shot went up into the dark slope with a flat bang and a gout of white smoke that hung in the still air. The bowmen loosed until their arrows were spent. They felt the shot, as Percy put it, and went back into the woods with a great noise. The noise went off among the trees and stopped.

Nobody on the beach had seen a face. They had seen shoulders and bows, low on the ground, coming fast down the sand hills, and then the dark. How many there had been, or what town they came from, or why they had waited for the boats, the English could not tell. The English pushed off at once. The boats pulled out to the ships through black water, the oars clattering, with the two wounded men laid in the bottom boards and the rest rowing as hard as they could manage after a day ashore. Arrows were still stuck in the gunwales. Behind them the hills were quiet.

Aboard, the surgeon had his work. An arrow wound in the hand was a wound in a gentleman's grip on sword and pen, and the sailor's wounds were in the body, where a surgeon could do little but draw the head, clean, bind and wait. The decks were crowded and wet. Men who had spent the afternoon in meadows stood in the waist with their muskets loaded now, the matches lit, and watched the dark shore. Lanterns burned at the sterns and threw short tracks on the water. The tide made against the hulls. Below, in the dark between decks, men lay down in their clothes with their swords beside them and listened to the shore, which gave back frogs and the run of small water and once, far off, something that was a voice or a bird. The sailor with the wounds in his body breathed loudly and the men around him moved away to let him have the air. Nobody undressed. The first visit to the country had been answered within hours of the first step on it, and the English did not know by whom.

That night the box was opened. The Company had sent the government of the colony across the ocean sealed up, and for four months at sea and in the islands it had stayed sealed. Newport commanded the fleet at sea. Who would govern the plantation ashore, who would hold its stores, who would choose the ground and punish the disorderly, was written on a paper that no one in the fleet had read. The box held the Company's orders and a list. The list named a council of seven, the body that was to govern Virginia, and the seven were to choose a president from among themselves. Until they did, the colony had a council and no head. The papers were read by lantern light, among men who had been shot at an hour or two before.

The cabin was low and close. It smelled of tallow and wet wool and of the powder smoke the men had carried aboard in their clothes, and the lantern swung a little on its hook with the ship. The gentlemen stood or sat wherever there was room, some still in the steel they had marched in, their boots leaving sand on the boards. Overhead the watch walked the deck, and every few minutes a voice called across the water to the next ship and was answered. The seal was broken and the papers lifted out and unfolded. There were orders, and there was a list. The list was short.

The names were Edward Maria Wingfield, Bartholomew Gosnold, Christopher Newport, John Smith, John Ratcliffe, John Martin and George Kendall. Wingfield was a gentleman of the company. Martin and Kendall were gentlemen too, with no command at sea. Gosnold and Ratcliffe had their ships. Newport had his fleet, and the fleet was to go home once the colony was planted. Smith had a charge of mutiny against him. The list had been written in London, months before anyone knew who would quarrel with whom between the Downs and the capes. It named the prisoner with the rest.

Smith was not admitted. He stayed under restraint, a councillor on paper and a prisoner in fact, and the other six took up the government without him. The charge against him had not been tried. He had been neither sworn nor excused, and the Company that had named him was an ocean away and would hear none of it for months. Seven names had been meant to govern, and the six who could act were now the men he would have to answer to. He was still answering the charge in print seventeen years later, which says enough about how he took that night. Restraint aboard a ship that size meant living where one was put, among casks and cables in the half-dark below, fed when the others were fed, with a guard who changed at the bells and could not be argued with. The bay was a hatchway's breadth of light by day and the creak of the cables by night. The council did not swear him until the tenth of June.

The next morning the carpenters began to build up the shallop, the open boat for rowing and sailing in water too shallow for the ships. Before they began, the arrows were worked out of the boats' planking and passed from hand to hand. The shafts were reed, light and straight, fletched with split feathers, and the heads were sharpened stone bound on with sinew. A man could hold three of them in one fist and hardly feel the weight. Hammers went all day on the beach under a guard. The gentlemen and soldiers marched up into the land, this time with their matches lit and their armor on, keeping together in the open and spreading out where the pines thinned. They went eight miles inland through pine and meadow and marsh edge, over sand that dragged at every step, with the sun on the steel. Sweat ran under the plates and the leather straps rubbed the skin raw at the shoulder. Where the pines opened onto marsh the ground went soft and black and sucked at their shoes, and they went around it. At every thicket the men in front stopped and the men behind bunched up on them. In all that march they could not see one of the people who had come over the hills. They came instead on a place where a great fire had been made, still burning, with oysters newly roasting in it. The people at the fire had seen them coming and fled away toward the higher ground, leaving many of the oysters in the coals. The English raked the shells out with sticks and ate them. Percy found them very large and delicate in taste.

On the twenty-eighth they launched the shallop. The captain and some of the gentlemen went in her and explored up the bay, and Percy went with them. They found a river running into the land on the south side and went into it, and found it too shoal for any boat to swim. Farther up the bay they put ashore on a plain plot of ground with neither bush nor tree on it, five miles about by Percy's reckoning. There was nothing on it but a canoe. It had been made out of one whole tree, burned and scraped hollow, and the inside still showed the black of the fire that had eaten it out. The gentlemen walked its length and back. When they measured it by the rule it was five and forty feet long. The ground around it was covered with mussels and oysters, lying as thick as stones in a plowed field. They opened some and found pearls in many of them.

The shallop's party marched on three or four miles into the woods, toward great smokes they could see rising above the trees. When they reached them they found that the people had been burning down the grass. The English could not tell why. Percy thought it was either to make a planting ground there or to give signals to bring their forces together and offer battle. They went on carefully through good ground full of flowers of many kinds and colors, and trees as fine as any he had seen, cedar and cypress among them. A little farther they came into a patch full of strawberries, four times bigger and better than the English kind, and men knelt and ate them by the handful. They saw no town all that march, and no person.

Toward night they stood back toward the ships, sounding as they went. The lead came up from shallow water for a great way out, and the soundings put them out of all hope of taking the ships any higher in that part of the bay. They rowed over to a point of land across the water, and there the lead found a channel: six fathoms, then eight, ten and twelve. A fathom was six feet, and that depth would float any ship in the fleet close under the shore. The men in the boat took good comfort from it, and they named the place Cape Comfort. They came back to the ships in the dark with their hands stained from the strawberries.

On the twenty-ninth they set up a cross. The carpenters cut two pine poles and squared them with adzes on the beach, and pinned the crosspiece to the upright with wooden pegs driven through augered holes, while a guard with lit match stood on the nearest sand hill and watched the trees. The wood was green and heavy and smelled of sap. It took a dozen men to carry it up from the water. They raised it at the cape at the mouth of the bay, on the sand above the tideline, and dug the hole for it deep enough to hold against the wind off the water. Men leaned on the upright to settle it while others packed the sand back around the foot and stamped it down. They named that place Cape Henry. Below it the ships lay at anchor in the bay, the shallop rode at her painter, and the wounded lay below decks. Archer was hurt in both hands. Smith was still a prisoner. Behind the cross the pines ran back into the country, toward the meadows and the clear water and the plain with the canoe on it. To the English the people of that country were still a fire left burning, a column of smoke, and shapes coming over the hills in the dark.