A Little Waste Ground

Smith had been three days ashore. The barge lay under the bank where it had come in, its tarpaulin off and the bay's salt dried white along the thwarts. Inside the palisade the air smelled of the marsh and of the sick. Men lay just inside the hut doors where they could get the breeze, and at midday the heat still rose off the mud with the flies in it. Scrivener, the councillor who had held the fort in Smith's absences, was on his feet again after his fever. The harvest he had gathered was in. The storehouse was another matter. Rain had come through its roof over the summer. The casks opened since the barge came in held meal caked hard and corn going sour. Ratcliffe, the second president, sat under guard as a prisoner for mutiny. His house in the woods stood unfinished.

On the tenth the company was called together to see the government change hands. Men came from the work and from the huts, the sick who could stand among them. Scrivener gave up the office he had held since late July. "The 10. of September 1608. by the election of the Councel, and request of the company, Captaine Smith received the letters patents, and tooke upon him the place of President". The letters patents were the king's commission, the paper that carried the colony's authority from London, and to receive them was to take the office they named. In July the sick men had begged him to take the same office, and he had put Scrivener into it instead. The same account adds that until now he would by no means accept it, though he was often pressed. The company that asked for him stood there in front of him, the company of the summer, thinner by its dead, with the sick still in the huts and the store spoiled. Wingfield, the first president, had been deposed in his tent a year before, in the same month. Ratcliffe, the second, was under guard a few yards off. Smith was the third.

He stopped the house in the woods first. Ratcliffe's building "staide, as a thing needlesse," and the axes that had gone out to it came back inside the palisade. Smith had the church repaired, the small church where the bell called the company to prayers morning and evening. He had the storehouse re-covered, the old roof stripped off and a new one laid and tied down against the next rain. The corn inside was turned out and gone through, the sound picked from the spoiled, and what could still be saved was spread on mats in the sun to dry. Men cleared ground and set posts for new buildings to house the supply the colony was expecting from England. When it would come, and how many it would bring, nobody at the fort could say. Mud for the walls came up from the river's edge in baskets, and reeds came in from the marsh in bundles on men's backs. The work went on through the heat of the day. At evening the cut hands stung in the river water.

Then he changed the fort itself. It was "reduced to the forme of this figure", and the figure was a drawing in the writers' manuscript that never reached the printer; in the printed book a query stands in the margin where it should have been. The three-cornered palisade of the first June came down in sections and went up again on the new line. Men dug the post holes with spades and mattocks, two to a hole. They stood the split logs upright and rammed the earth in around them with their heels and the butts of their pieces. The wood was green and heavy, and it bled sap onto the hands of the men who shouldered it. Those who carried it came back to the work with their shoulders rubbed raw through their shirts, and the holes nearest the river filled with water at the bottom whenever the tide was up. Between the posts they packed brush and clay where the logs stood apart. September went by in that work, the days still hot at noon and the nights beginning to turn cool off the river.

The watch went on a new order as well. At each setting of it the squadron going on duty was trained before it took its place at the wall. Every Saturday Smith turned the whole company out in a field prepared for the purpose. They came with matchlocks and calivers, pikes, swords and targets, the gentlemen in the same ranks as the carpenters and the laborers. A matchlock fired by a smoldering cord of saltpetered match, clamped in the cock and brought down into the pan when the trigger was pulled. A man had to keep his match alight, his powder dry and the burning end clear of his flask while he loaded, and rain put the whole thing out. In the field they learned to load and present and give fire on the word. The volleys went off together across the stubble. The smoke hung over the field in the still air and drifted toward the river. Between volleys the men blew on their match to keep the coal red and wiped the powder grime from their hands onto their breeches. A misfire left a man standing with his piece at his shoulder while the rank beside him reloaded. Some of them had never fired a piece in England. The sergeants called the motions until the slowest men had them.

The boats were trimmed for trade next. Men hauled them up on the bank at low water, drove oakum into the opened seams with mallets and paid them over with hot pitch, and stepped the masts again and bent on the sails, to go down the river for corn. It was the season for it, and the hulls smelled of tar for days. The towns had just gathered their harvest, and Smith's men held afterward that corn could have been got from them that autumn for five hundred. The boats went down the James and had not gone far when they met the second supply coming up on the flood. The boat crews hailed her and were hailed back from her waist. The news of England came across the water before anyone had set foot on a deck. The ship's business turned them around. They came back up the river in her company, and the trading waited.

Newport, the fleet's captain, brought the ship up to the island and moored her to the trees. He had been gone since April. Her hold gave up its freight onto the bank over the following days: casks and chests and tools, and things nobody at the fort had asked for, a bed and a basin and ewer for a king, a copper crown in its box, and the sections of a barge built to come apart. Her people came down onto the bank in the clothes they had worn for weeks at sea, with bundles handed down after them. The men of the fort left their work and stood about to watch them come. Among them were two women. "Mistresse Forest and Anne Buras her maide, 8. Dutchmen and Poles, with divers to the number of 70. persons." They were "the first gentlewoman and woman servant that arrived in our Colony."

Mistress Forest came ashore in a gentlewoman's gown and petticoats, and her hems took up the mud of the bank at the first step. Anne Buras, her maid, came behind her with what her mistress needed close to hand. A maid's work went on wherever her mistress was: the linen, the water, the fire, the bed made up at night. The men watching had not seen an Englishwoman since they left England. Some of them had been living more than a year among men only, in huts of wattle and reed, with their own shirts to wash and their own pots to boil. No house in the fort had been built with a woman in mind, and none had a door that shut on anything but men. The two women walked up from the landing into that. Outside the wall were the summer's graves, the earth on the newest of them still raw. Inside, the new buildings Smith had set up for the supply stood half roofed. Seventy more people were on the island.

For the newcomers the first nights were the fort's nights. They lay where room could be found, in the half-roofed buildings and in huts beside men who had lived through the summer, and the mosquitoes came up off the marsh at dusk and found them as they had found everyone else. Their bread came out of the same store, from casks the rain had been into, and their water came out of the same river, still brackish from the summer. Some of them had been sick on the voyage and came ashore weak. The old hands showed them where to dip the water, and told them to drink it on the ebb. A laborer who had shipped for Virginia on the strength of what was said about it in London lay on a mat in the dark and listened to the coughing in the next hut. Out on the wall the watch changed at midnight. He had been brought to make pitch and clapboard and glass for the ship's return lading. None of it had been begun.

The eight foreigners came off with their tools and talked among themselves in their own tongues, Dutch and Polish spoken on the bank for the first time. They had been hired by the Company to make pitch and tar, glass, mills and soap-ashes, the potash that soapmakers in England bought to boil with their fat. They looked along the river at the pines with a tradesman's eye. Virginia had pine for the pitch, sand for the glass, and hardwood without end for the ashes, and these were the men who knew how to turn them into something the Company could sell. Namontack came off the ship as well. He had gone to England in April as Powhatan's man, in place of the boy Powhatan had been given, and he came back to his own river in English company. Newport had brought presents for Powhatan to go with him.

The presents came with orders. The Company wanted Powhatan crowned. It had sent the furniture of a king for him: a basin and ewer, a bed, clothes, a scarlet cloak, and a crown, to make the paramount chief of the rivers a king under King James. Newport himself carried a private commission "not to returne without a lumpe of gold, a certainty of the south sea, or one of the lost company of Sir Walter Rawley". The lost company were the settlers Raleigh's men had left on Roanoke Island, south of the bay, a generation before, and never found again. For the South Sea Newport had brought the barge built in pieces. The "5. pieced barge" was to be carried in sections over the mountains and put together on the far side, where the salt water was supposed to begin. How far the mountains ran, nobody at the fort knew.

Against all of it stood the store. The Company had sent the craftsmen "and seaventy more without victuall, to worke," Smith's men wrote, "though then we were 130 that wanted for our selves." The ship had come in with mouths and tools and a bed for a king. What provision she could spare was Newport's to give. In January, by Smith's count, there had been 38 alive at the fort. The rain had already been at what the fort held.

The council grew with the ship. Two of the newcomers, Captain Waldo and Captain Winne, were added to it, old soldiers and gentlemen of courage, newly arrived and ignorant of the business. Ratcliffe "was also permitted to have his voice," prisoner or not, and Scrivener was eager to see strange countries. "So that although Smith was President, yet the Councell had the authoritie, and ruled it as they listed." Ratcliffe came to the board from under his guard. This was Newport's third coming to the river, and the newcomers at the board had crossed in his ship.

Smith set out his objections at the board. The ship had to go home laden with pitch and tar, wainscot and clapboard, glass and soap-ashes, and the men who could make them were about to be marched off into the country. There was no provision to be had to live on while they were gone, and what the fort held would be eaten before the ship sailed. Newport answered that he would fill the pinnace with corn going and coming back, fill her again at Werowocomoco, and spare a great proportion of victual from his ship. He said that Smith's objections were only devices to hinder the journey so that Smith could make it himself. He said too that "the crueltie Smith had used to the Salvages in his absence" might set the towns against them. Smith's men, telling it, made Newport alone the author of these projects. It is Smith's side of the quarrel. The council voted with Newport.

The works stopped where they stood. Posts lay along the unfinished line where the diggers had let them fall, and the reed bundles cut for new roofs lay drying in the sun. The new line of the fort, the half-roofed buildings, the boats trimmed for corn were all left as they were. A hundred and twenty chosen men were told off to be Newport's guard on the march, and they began to make ready, scouring their pieces and drawing powder and match from the store. On Saturday the field stayed empty. The president had the letters patents and one voice at the board.

Smith found the one errand left to him. The crowning would eat up time the colony needed for trade, and Newport had made the towns out to be dangerous. Smith offered to carry the Company's message to Powhatan himself, to ask him to come down to the fort and receive his presents there. He took four men with him, Captain Waldo and three others, and went overland toward Werowocomoco, Powhatan's town on the York. Smith had last gone overland between the two places in the January he walked home from Werowocomoco with Powhatan's guides. The country they walked through was Powhatan's own. The fields along the way were stripped of their corn, the stalks still standing. The houses of bent poles and mats stood among them with smoke coming up through the roofs. People at their autumn work straightened and watched five Englishmen go by with their pieces on their shoulders. The leaves were turning, and the paths were hard after the summer. Woodsmoke hung low in the hollows where the towns were, and deer went off through the open woods ahead of them, where the people had burned out the undergrowth. At the river they crossed in the people's canoes, sitting low in the dugouts with their arms across their knees. Powhatan was not there. He was thirty miles off, and messengers went to fetch him. The five Englishmen stayed in his town to wait, among houses where the new corn hung drying under the roofs and the women were pounding meal in the mortars outside the doors.

While they waited, Powhatan's women entertained Smith. In an open field, before a fire, with the people of the town looking on, about thirty young women came out of the trees painted white and red and black, their leader in a pair of stag's horns, and sang and danced in a ring about the fire for most of an hour, and then went back into the woods. Afterward they fed him in their lodging: fruit in baskets, fish and flesh on wooden platters, beans and peas, some serving and others singing and dancing about the mats. When it was over they lit him to his lodging with firebrands.

The next day Powhatan came. He came in among his own men, the old paramount chief Smith had last seen here at the end of the winter, and sat to hear the English with his chief men about him on the mats. Smith gave him the message of the presents the English king had sent him, and gave him back Namontack, the man Newport had taken to England in the spring. Namontack stood before his chief again with London behind him. Smith asked Powhatan to come to his father Newport to accept the presents, and to settle their revenge together against the Monacans, the people above the falls who were Powhatan's enemies. Powhatan answered him.

"If your king have sent me presents, I also am a king, and this my land. 8 daies I will stay to receave them. Your father is to come to me, not I to him, nor yet to your fort, neither will I bite at such a baite. As for the Monacans, I can revenge my owne injuries, and as for Atquanuchuck, where you say your brother was slain, it is a contrary way from those parts you suppose it. But for any salt water beyond the mountaines, the relations you have had from my people are false."

Then he "began to draw plots upon the ground", the rivers and the countries of all those regions, laid out in the earth before Smith as he spoke of them. At the fort the barge in five pieces lay ready to be carried over the mountains. They talked a good while longer, each giving the other every courtesy. Namontack stayed behind in his own country, among his own people. Smith crossed the York again with his four men and went back through the woods to the fort "with this answer."