A Little Waste Ground

The bed went down to the boats in pieces. Its posts and rails had crossed the ocean in the ship's hold, and now they went out again wrapped in sailcloth and lashed in the bottoms of the barges. The basin and the ewer followed in a chest packed with straw, and after them came the clothes, with the scarlet cloak folded on top of the pile. The copper crown went in its box. Men carried it all down the bank on their shoulders and handed it in over the gunwales, and the rowers stowed it forward where the spray would not reach. Newport sent the presents round by water, which was "neare 100 miles". The way ran down the James to the bay, along the shore, and up the York to Powhatan's landing. That meant days at the oars and nights in open boats, with the wind off the bay turning cold after dark and the men sleeping in their cloaks under the thwarts. The presents went the long way.

Newport went by land, "but 12 miles," with fifty shot. They crossed the neck in the morning with their pieces on their shoulders and their match smoldering at their belts. Then they took the path north through the woods. It was the path Smith had walked to carry the invitation and walked again to bring back the refusal. The cornfields along it stood in stubble, and the leaves were coming down in the wind onto ground still hard from the summer. In the towns people left their mortars and their drying racks to watch fifty Englishmen go by in a column, the sergeants calling the pace at the back. Squirrels ran off through the oaks ahead of them, and the men's shoes, mended and remended since England, gave at the seams on the roots. At the York the party was met by "3 barges" to carry them over, and the shot went across a boatload at a time, standing their pieces upright and holding their match clear of the water. Werowocomoco lay beyond the far bank.

The town took them in. The fifty came up from the landing into the long houses and the smoke, and the people stood back to let a column of armed strangers through the lanes between the mat walls. Women went on pounding corn in the mortars by the doors and looked up at each man as he passed. The English were shown where to lie, and they stacked their pieces and kept a few matches burning and a man awake beside them through the night. The boats with the presents were still somewhere out on the water. Newport waited for them in Powhatan's town with his escort around him and the river at his back. In the spring a prisoner at the fort had told of a plan to wait until Newport came back with Namontack. Newport had come back, and Namontack with him.

The boats came in at last to the landing below the town, their crews stiff from the oars and their faces burned by the wind off the bay. Salt had dried white on the sailcloth over the bed. The rowers handed the chests up onto the bank, and men of the escort shouldered them and carried them up into the town with a crowd of children running alongside. The presents came up from the shore in a procession nobody had planned. Men who had been joiners and carpenters in England fitted the bed together in Powhatan's town, post into rail, and tied its hangings on, curtains and a coverlet of English cloth. They set the basin and the ewer out beside it. The town's people stood in the doorways of the mat houses to watch, the women with their work still in their hands and the children pushing forward between them. Dogs nosed at the straw that had come out of the chest. The carpenters worked with mallets and pegs, kneeling on the mats, and a sailor held the canopy frame up while they fitted the last rail under it. The curtains were shaken out of their folds and hung on their rings. A bed of that kind had legs and a roof and walls of cloth, and it stood a long way off the ground. Everything about it was meant for a king. It had been built in London and shipped out to be set up here.

Powhatan sat among his chief men, an old man in a robe of skins in a town full of strangers. He had seen the English come and go for a year and a half, had fed them through a winter and taken one of their boys as a son. Now the cloak was brought to him. It was English broadcloth dyed scarlet, heavy and long, and with it came the rest of the apparel the Company had sent. They meant to put it on him. He would not have it at first. The English held up the cloak and the coat and showed him how they went, and he sat and let them stand there holding them. It went on him only after a long business of coaxing and handling. Namontack was the one who brought him to it. He had lived among the English since the spring, had gone with them to their own country and come back in their ship, and he told his chief in their own language that the clothes would do him no hurt. At last Powhatan let them dress him. They put his arms into the sleeves and drew the coat close and fastened it, English hands at the old man's chest and shoulders, while his chief men watched from the mats. The scarlet hung to the ground around him. The cloak went on over his own skins.

Then came the crown. Newport took it out of its box, and the English meant Powhatan to kneel for it. In England a subject knelt to his king, and a man took honor from a king's hand on his knee, and Newport stood in Werowocomoco as King James's deputy. The fifty shot were drawn up behind him in their ranks. Down at the shore the men in the barges had their pieces loaded and their match lit, waiting on a signal. The town's people crowded in as close as they dared, and the smell of their fires and of the river mud came in on the wind. Powhatan sat in his scarlet cloak among his chief men. Smith's men wrote down what came next.

"But a fowle trouble there was to make him kneele to receave his crowne. He, neither knowing the majestie nor meaning of a Crowne, nor bending of the knee, indured so many perswasions, examples, and instructions, as tired them all. At last, by leaning hard on his shoulders, he a little stooped, and Newport put the Crowne on his head; when, by the warning of a pistoll, the boates were prepared with such a volly of shot, that the king start up in a horrible feare, till he saw all was well. Then remembring himselfe, to congratulate their kindnesse, he gave his old shoes and his mantle to Captain Newport."

The volley came up from the river all at once, a ragged crash off the water that set the town's dogs howling and sent the children back behind the women. Powhatan was on his feet in the scarlet cloak with the copper on his head before the echo came back off the trees. Around him the English stood in their ranks. Down at the shore the men in the barges were already at their pouches, reloading, and the fifty behind Newport had not moved. He looked from one to the other. It took him only a moment. The children came out again from behind the women, and the dogs went quiet one by one. The copper crown sat on his head above the scarlet. His chief men had not moved from the mats. He sat down again among his men.

Then he gave. He took off the shoes he had been wearing, soft deerskin worn to the shape of his feet, and his mantle, and gave them to Newport. Newport stood among the fifty shot of his escort with an old man's shoes in his hands. The bed stayed behind in the town with its curtains and its coverlet, and so did the basin and the ewer, and so did the cloak, on Powhatan. Newport had the shoes and the mantle carried down to the barges.

The talk afterward turned to the Monacans, and Powhatan saw where Newport meant to go. He "laboured to divert his resolution, refusing to lend him either men or guides more then Namontack." Newport would go up the river to the falls and into the Monacans' country with no guide but the one man Powhatan allowed him and none of Powhatan's warriors at his side. There were more courtesies on both sides before the English left. And "in requitall of his presents, he presented Newport with a heape of wheat eares, that might contain 7 or 8 bushels."

The ears went down to the barges in baskets on the backs of the town's women. They were tipped into the bottoms of the boats in a heap, husks and all, where the bed had lain on the way out. The fifty shot crossed the York again and took the path home through the woods, with Newport carrying an old man's shoes. The English came back to the fort with the corn. The ship lay at the trees with her hold half empty and her people eating from the store. Newport made ready to go up to the falls and over into the Monacans' country with all the rest of the council and 120 chosen men. He left the president at the fort "with 80. (such as they were) to relade the shippe." The boats went up the James on the flood, loaded with men, powder and provision, and the oars took them round the first bend above the island. The fort was quieter with them gone.

The eighty Smith kept were the sick, the newly landed, the tradesmen and whoever else was left. With them he was to fill a ship with the things the Company had sent the strangers to make. Kettles went on fires at the edge of the woods. Men split pine knots and stacked them in pits to sweat out the tar, and the smoke hung in the trees by the river. It blackened the hands of everyone who worked it. The Dutchmen and the Poles knew the trade, and the English learned it from them by watching and doing what they were shown. Others felled oaks along the bank and rived them into boards with wedges and mauls. The boards had to be stacked to dry and then carried down to the ship. The cooper had to make casks before the tar could go into them. Hardwood went into other fires for the soap-ashes, and the ash was raked out cold and shoveled into casks. Men came off the work at dusk with their eyes red from the smoke and their clothes stinking of tar. Some of them were newcomers who had been sick since the voyage and could work only half a day. Some were gentlemen who had never boiled anything in their lives. The president was at the fort among them, with a ship to fill and a store to feed them from, and the store had to feed the men upriver when they came back. The men ate their bread and went back to the kettles.

Newport's men went up the river to the falls, where he had set up a cross in the first May and given the werowance of Powhatan's town a hatchet. From there they went on by land into the Monacans' country. The ground rose away from the river in long hills, with rock coming through in the stream beds and the woods more open than on the low ground by the bay. They marched "some forty myles in 2 daies and a halfe," carrying their own food and powder on their backs and sleeping on the ground with the match kept alight through the night. They found two towns of the Monacans, the people "neither using us well nor ill". The English took one of their petty werowances for their own safety and "lead him bound" to show them the way, a cord on his wrists and a soldier holding the end. He walked among them with his hands tied, past fields his own people worked. In the towns the Monacans watched the English go by and did not come near. At night the English lay in a ring with their pieces beside them and the bound man in the middle, and the sentries blew on their match to keep it red. Then they came back down the same path they had gone up.

On the way back they searched for mines. They dug where the ground looked likely and built fires and heated what they dug, and the man who worked it was William Callicut, a refiner the Company had sent for the purpose. He crouched over his fire with his bellows while the soldiers stood about and waited. The earth went into the crucible red and came out black, and he picked through the slag with a knife point in the last of the light. Out of the crust of earth they brought him, he "perswaded us to beleeve he extracted some smal quantitie of silver". His word was the only assay. With that they turned for home.

At the falls they looked for corn. The fields by the town stood in stubble, and the harvest was in. "Trade they would not, and find their corn we could not, for they had hid it in the woods". The English went back down the river with the boats riding light. They came into the fort "halfe sicke, all complaining and tired with toile famine and discontent". Men came up the bank and sat down where they stood, with their shoes worn through and their powder spent on nothing. Some had to be helped up the bank by the men who had stayed. They had carried their own victual up the country and had eaten it. They brought none back. In the fort the eighty had been eating from the same store the whole time they were gone.

Smith put the men to work as soon as they landed. Some went to the kettles and the tar pits, some to the boards, some to the soap-ashes, and the council had the oversight of the fort. Thirty he took himself, five miles from the fort into the woods, to make clapboard, cut down trees and lie out at night with no roof but the branches. Among them were Gabriel Beadle and John Russell, two gentlemen of the new supply. Neither had swung an axe for his living. They made their camp under the trees with brush shelters and a fire, and slept in their clothes on boughs laid over the leaves. In the mornings the frost was on the blankets. The men worked in pairs at the big oaks, one on each side of the trunk, chopping the notch and then the back cut until the tree leaned and cracked and went over with a noise that shook the ground. Then the trunk had to be sawn into lengths and the lengths split with wedges into staves and boards, and the boards stacked with sticks between them to let the air through. The axes blistered their hands in the first days, and the blisters broke and blistered again. As often as every third blow, somebody swore. Smith had every man's oaths counted through the day. At night, for every oath, the offender had "a can of water powred downe his sleeve." The tally was kept by the fire. When the day's felling was done and the men came in with their axes over their shoulders, each man's count was called out, and a can was dipped full from the creek and poured in at his cuff while he held his arm up. The water ran down inside his shirt to the elbow and the armpit and into his breeches. The nights in the woods were cold by then. Gentlemen sat steaming by the fire with their shirts drying on them. The oaths grew fewer.

The work at the fort went on without them, and the store went down by the cask. The letter Smith wrote the Company that season was an angry one. He wanted the men in London to know what kind of colonists they were sending. He asked them to send carpenters and farmers, men who could build and dig and plant, instead of more gentlemen. Out at the camp, two gentlemen of the last supply had been felling oaks with their sleeves wet through. The Company had sent a bed, a basin, an ewer and a scarlet cloak, a crown in a box and a barge in five pieces, a refiner and eight foreigners to make glass and pitch. It had sent seventy people to a fort that had not had enough for those already in it. It had sent orders for a crowning and a march, and the men to make the lading had been taken off to walk to the Monacans and back. Smith folded the letter and sealed it for London. When Newport sailed for England, the letter went with him in the ship.

Newport went home with what lading the fort had made, the tar and the pitch, the boards and the soap-ashes, and with the shoes and the mantle of a king. He carried nothing else his commission had asked for. Behind him the fort ate from a store the summer's rain had already been into, and the seventy he had brought ate from it too. The cold came on over the marsh. At the falls the corn was still in the woods, where the people had hidden it.