A Little Waste Ground

"The second of June 1608. Smith left the fort, to performe his discoverie." The line opens the account two of the men in the boat wrote afterward: Walter Russell, the doctor, and Anas Todkill, a soldier. The sentence just above it says what his going would cost the fort. The president's spending had gone deep into the store. While Smith was at the fort, he and Scrivener had kept Ratcliffe to the same ration as everyone else. With Smith gone, the president would have his way over Scrivener, and the corn and the summer's labor would go where the president pleased. Smith went anyway. He was to find out what the country held in furs, metals and nations, and whether the bay ran on without end. He took fourteen men in "an open barge of two tunnes burthen", a boat rowed and sailed, with a tarpaulin for its only roof. They stowed casks of water under the thwarts, bread in bags, meal in a cask, their muskets and match wrapped against the spray. Six of the men were gentlemen. The rest were soldiers and tradesmen: a fishmonger, a fisher, and James Read, the blacksmith who had saved himself on the ladder by naming Kendall. The barge went down the James in company with the Phoenix, and at Cape Henry they parted. The ship stood out to sea for England. The barge turned north into the bay.

They crossed first to the Eastern Shore, the long low country on the far side of the water. Two men stood on the cape there with long poles headed with bone, like javelins, and called out to know who the strangers were and what they wanted. After a good deal of talk they pointed the barge on to Accomac, where their werowance lived. The Accomacs, the people of the Eastern Shore across the bay, received them kindly. Smith's men set down their werowance as "the comliest proper civill Salvage wee incountred". His country was a fertile clay, planted and pleasant, the corn knee-high in the June fields around houses of bent poles and mats like those on the James. His people "spake the language of Powhatan". In it they gave the English the bay, its islands and its rivers, and the barge's men listened with great pleasure, sitting on mats in the werowance's house with food set before them. Every river the English meant to discover already had a name. They were on the far side of the bay from Werowocomoco, and still among people who understood Powhatan's speech.

North of Accomac the weather turned. A gust of wind and rain, with thunder and lightning, caught them making for a group of islands in the middle of the bay. They came through it with difficulty, on water that ran like an ocean's. The islands had no people and no fresh water. They named them after the doctor and went on looking. The next eastern channel brought them into a river farther up that shore, where the people came at them in a fury and then, with songs and dancing, made friends. The English went through their houses looking for water and filled three casks with what they found there, which was little better than mud. It came up brown and warm, and the men drank it through their teeth. They dug in the ground and searched for two days. By the end of it "wee would have refused two barricoes of gold for one of that puddle water of Wighcocomoco." Farther up the shore they found a pond of fresh water so hot they took it for a bath. Then, crossing from the main to another string of islands, the wind rose again with thunder and rain and took the foremast over the side. The waves broke into the barge faster than the men could bail. They lay two days on bare islands they named Limbo, for the weather, and mended the foresail "with our shirts".

By the twelfth day the men were done with it. They rowed in shifts when the wind failed and slept in the open boat with their knees drawn up. Their bread was so spoiled with wet that it had rotted. They ate it anyway. At the setting out some of the gentlemen had feared only that their captain would hurry home. Now they pressed him every day to turn back. Smith answered them, in the words the crew kept:

"Gentlemen, if you would remember the memorable historie of Sir Ralfe Lane, how his company importuned him to proceed in the discoverie of Morattico, alleaging, they had yet a dog, that being boyled with Saxafras leaves, would richly feed them in their returnes; what shame would it be for you (that have beene so suspitious of my tendernesse) to force me returne with a months provision, scarce able to say where we have bin, nor yet heard of that wee were sent to seeke. You cannot say but I have shared with you of the worst is past; and for what is to come, of lodging, diet, or whatsoever, I am contented you allot the worst part to my selfe. As for your feares, that I will lose my selfe in these unknowne large waters, or be swallowed up in some stormie gust, abandon those childish feares, for worse then is past cannot happen, and there is as much danger to returne, as to proceed forward. Regaine therefore your old spirits; for returne I wil not, (if God assist me) til I have seene the Massawomekes, found Patawomeck, or the head of this great water you conceit to be endlesse."

Lane had led the first English colony on that coast, at Roanoke, more than twenty years before, and his men had begged to go on with a dog left to boil. Smith's men were offered the comparison. Then the wind went against them for three or four days, and three or four of the men fell very sick. On their complaints the barge turned back after all. The bay was still ten miles wide.

On June 16 they came to the Potomac, the great river north of the Rappahannock, nine miles broad. The sick had mended, and the men were willing to row. For thirty miles up it they saw nobody. Then two guides led them up a small creek, narrow enough that the oars nearly touched the reeds. The woods on both banks filled with men, "3 or 400" by the barge's count, painted and grimed and shouting. Smith made ready to fight. The English fired across the water, and the balls skipped on the surface while the noise came back off the woods. The bows went down. Hostages were exchanged, and one of the soldiers walked six miles up into the woods to the werowance's town. The people of the creek used the English kindly after that. They told them they had been ordered to betray them "by Powhatans direction, and hee so directed from the discontents of James towne." It was hearsay, and convenient hearsay. Smith's crew believed it. At every first meeting Smith kept one order. He asked the people for their bows and arrows, their swords, mantles or furs, "with some childe for hostage". By how they took the demand, he judged whether they meant harm. Some towns up the river met them as the creek had. Others did their best to please them. The bottom of the barge filled with bows and skins.

The glittering metal the people of the Potomac traded, which Newport had tested and called half silver, was found a few miles inland and proved worth nothing. In places the fish lay so thick in the water, their heads above it, that the men tried to scoop them up with a frying pan. The pan was no use for it.

With the food nearly gone, Smith turned the barge for the Rappahannock, the river where his captors had led him the winter before. At its entrance the ebb set the barge aground on a run of shoals. The water drained off the sand in the June sun and left fish lurking in the weed. Smith went over the side with his sword and began pinning them to the bottom with the point. He set everyone to it. The men splashed across the flats in their breeches, stabbing. In an hour they had taken more than they could eat. Smith pulled one off his blade without knowing what he held, a flat fish like a skate with a long tail, and on the tail a sting two or three inches long,

"which shee strooke an inch and halfe into the wrist of his arme. The which, in 4. houres, had so extreamly swolne his hand, arme, shoulder, and part of his body, as we al with much sorrow concluded his funerall, and prepared his grave in an Ile hard by (as himselfe appointed), which then wee called Stingeray Ile, after the name of the fish. Yet by the helpe of a precious oile, Doctour Russel applyed, ere night his tormenting paine was so wel asswaged that he eate the fish to his supper"

The tide came back while the arm swelled and lifted the barge off the shoal. The morning's catch went soft in the bilge under the summer sun. The island lay a short row off, low and sandy, grown over with scrub. The men who had been spearing fish an hour before took the spades over and dug where their captain told them, a man's length in the sand. They came back wet to the knees, with nothing to do but wait. The barge carried no surgeon. It carried no instruments. It carried Russell and a little oil, the only medicine aboard, and the doctor worked it into the wrist and up the arm while the afternoon went on. Toward evening the pain eased. The fish that had struck him was cleaned and laid over a fire, and Smith ate it. With no surgeon nearer than the fort, they made sail at once, passing the mouths of the Piankatank and the York.

Next day they came to Kecoughtan, the town at the mouth of the James on its north shore. Its people came down to see the barge in. They found the captain with his arm still swollen, another man bloody from a broken shin, and the boat heaped with bows, arrows, swords, targets, mantles and furs. Nothing the English said would persuade them it was not plunder. They kept asking who the English had fought. The English told them, as a great secret, that they had beaten the Massawomecks, the raiders from the north, and taken all this from them. The story "went faster up the river then our barge." On July 20, at a town on the river below the fort, the men dressed the barge in painted streamers and devices. Then they came up the river looking enough like a "Spanish frigot" to alarm the fort. They landed the next day, July 21.

The fort they came back to was sick. The men of the First Supply lay ill in the huts with the flies thick over them. The rest were lame or bruised. All of them were complaining of the president. Ratcliffe had spent the store riotously, they said, and brought them all to this misery building "an unnecessarie pallas in the woodes", a great house for himself out among the trees. The barge's news quieted them. Its men told of rivers, towns and furs. The people of the bay, they said, held that it ran on toward the South Sea. Men who had not walked as far as the river in a week came down to hear it. They sat against the palisade in the shade while the barge's crew talked, burned dark from the summer on the water, some of their shirts gone into the foresail at Limbo. Their price was "that Ratliffe should be deposed, and that captaine Smith would take upon him the governement." It was done, and Smith, holding the government, handed it on. He put "Mr Scrivener, his deare friend, in the Presidencie", though Scrivener lay ill with a fever, and named honest officers to help him. Then he opened what Ratcliffe's circle had laid by for themselves and shared it out equally. In that heat, with men too weak to work, he left orders that they live at ease. Within days he was back in the barge.

He went out again with twelve men. Of these, Todkill, Richard Fetherstone, a gentleman, and Michael Sicklemore, another gentleman, had been in the barge since June. Nathaniel Powell, new to the barge, joined Todkill as the writer of the voyage. Contrary winds held them at Kecoughtan for two or three days. The werowance feasted them, and his people, believing the barge was off to take revenge on the Massawomecks, offered to come along. The English fired two or three rockets one evening, and the people decided there was nothing they could not do. The first night out they anchored at Stingray Isle. Within two days the newcomers aboard, every one of them men of the First Supply, were sick nearly to death, and only five men including Smith could stand.

Near the head of the bay seven or eight canoes of Massawomecks came out at them. The sick lay in the heat and the smell of the bilge, and the five who could stand worked the sail. They shut the sick under the tarpaulin, set their hats on sticks along the side of the barge to look like more men, and sailed straight at them. The canoes ran for the shore and waited there, watching. At last two men came out unarmed and were given a bell each. They brought the rest aboard with venison, bear's meat, fish, bows, arrows, clubs, targets and bearskins, and showed fresh wounds from a war with the Tockwoghs. In the River Tockwogh, near the bay's head, a fleet of armed boats surrounded the barge, and one man in it spoke the language of Powhatan. He talked his people into parley. When they saw the Massawomeck weapons in the barge, the English told the Kecoughtan story again, that they had taken them by force. The Tockwoghs brought them into their palisaded town and spread mats for them. They had hatchets, knives and pieces of iron and brass, from the Susquehannocks, a tall people at the head of the bay. They lived two days' journey up a river too full of rocks for the barge.

The interpreter went up with another who spoke the Susquehannocks' tongue, and the barge waited at Tockwogh, its sick lying in the shade of the town's mats. Three or four days later sixty of them came down, very large men, carrying venison, tobacco pipes, baskets, targets, bows and arrows. Five of their werowances came aboard the barge to cross the bay to Tockwogh, leaving their canoes because the wind was too high to risk them. They sat down among the sick men under the tarpaulin's edge, tall men in skins in a boat crowded with English. The barge kept prayers every day, with a psalm, and the Susquehannocks watched the English pray. When it was done they talked a long while among themselves. Then they held up their hands to the sun and sang, embraced Smith and began to do the same to him, and went on to the end of the song though he rebuked them. One of them made an oration. They covered Smith with a great painted bearskin. Another hung a chain of white beads, six or seven pounds of them, around his neck. They laid eighteen mantles of sewn skins at his feet, stroking his neck with their hands "for his creation to be their governour". They promised him food and men and whatever they had if he would stay and defend them against the Massawomecks. The English promised to come back the next year. These were people who knew "no more of the territories of Powhatan then his name, and he as little of them."

The barge worked south through the late-summer rivers. On the Patuxent the people were the most civil the English met. The English promised them, as they had promised the Potomac towns, to take revenge for them on the Massawomecks the next year. On the Rappahannock there was wrangling before there was trade. Toward the head of that river Fetherstone, one of the sick, died. He had been in the barge since the second of June, through the bad water and the storms and the shoal where they dug the grave for Smith. They carried him ashore in a cove they named Fetherstone's Bay and buried him "in the night, with a volly of shot". The flashes showed the trees for an instant over the water, and the sound went off up the river and came back from the far bank. The rest, crowded and wet and badly fed, recovered. Crossing back over the bay in a calm, they were caught in the dark by a sudden storm of thunder and rain. Half the men bailed while the barge ran before the wind. They found the land by the lightning, kept off the shore by it, and came in at Point Comfort.

They "arived safe at James Towne, the 7 of September, 1608." The barge came in under the bank where the Phoenix had lain moored to the trees in June. Scrivener, president in Ratcliffe's place, was well again, and by his diligence the harvest was in. Of the men they had left in July they found "many dead, some sicke". Powell and Todkill, setting it down, left the voyage's worth to the reader rather than be tedious, they said, "or partiall being a partie." Ratcliffe, who had sent the barge out as president in June, was "the late President prisoner for muteny". The rain had got into the storehouse, and much of the provision was spoiled.