A Little Waste Ground

Smith came in from the woods with frost in the seams of his clothes and found the ship still lying at the trees. Her hold was half laden with what tar and boards the fort had made, and her crew were eating from the store while they waited for the rest. Scrivener, Waldo and Winne had kept the fort among them while he was gone, each to his own charge, and the kettles had smoked at the edge of the woods every day. The work had gone on. No provision had been got. The store was going down with the ship's company and the seventy newcomers drawing on it together, and the Monacan march had eaten what it carried and brought nothing home. Smith went down to the landing and put himself into his own barge. He left the council an order to send George Percy, the earl's son who had kept the list of the dead that first summer, after him in the next barge to reach the fort. He took two barges and twenty men. They pushed off into the James with the oars knocking in the thole pins and the men's breath showing over the water. The ship could wait.

The Chickahominy came into the James above the fort, out of the swamps where Smith had been taken the winter before. The barges turned into its mouth on the flood and worked up between banks of brown marsh grass, with cypress knees standing out of the shallows and the gum trees bare. Ducks got up off the water ahead of the oars in hundreds and settled again behind. The men rowed in their doublets and sat to the oars in turns, and those not rowing kept their pieces across their knees under the tarpaulin to keep the damp off the locks. The Chickahominies, the people of that river, kept their own councils. Their towns stood back from the water among fields where the harvest was in and the stalks lay broken over in the rows. Smoke went up from the roofs of the mat houses into a still sky. A year earlier Smith had bought corn on this river with copper, beads and hatchets. He had brought the same goods now.

The barges came in to a landing below one of the towns, and the men held up what they had brought. People came down to the shore to look at the boats, men with their bows and the hair on the left side of their heads knotted long, and women and children behind them on the bank. They looked at the copper and the beads and did not reach for them. They would not trade. They refused with as much scorn as they could put into it, in gestures the English could read, and they let the strangers see that they knew why the strangers had come. The men in the barges sat with their oars shipped and listened to it. Some of them had been at the fort through the first summer and had eaten the corn this river sold them. The English were hungry, and the river knew it.

Smith had a name for what he saw. He judged, as his men set it down, that "it was Powhatans pollicy to starve us". He told the Chickahominies he had come not so much for their corn as "to revenge his imprisonment, and the death of his men". The dead men were Jehu Robinson and Thomas Emry, killed in the swamps of this river when Opechancanough, Powhatan's brother and werowance of the Pamunkeys, came on Smith's party with two hundred men. The grievance was nearly a year old. The men in the barges blew on their match and checked their pans while he spoke, and the people on the bank could see the smoke at every man's hand. Then he put his men ashore. They came up the bank in a body and formed with their pieces ready to charge. The sergeants dressed the file along the top of the bank, and each man brought his piece up and blew his coal bright. Across the stubble the town's men stood among the houses with their bows in their hands, a long bowshot off. The Chickahominies ran. They went back through the stubble and into the woods behind their houses, and the English held the landing alone.

Before long they came back. Men walked out of the trees with nothing in their hands and came down to the English as messengers, and behind them people carried what the town had: corn, fish, fowl, whatever there was to give. They had come to make their peace. They talked a long time about their own wants, "their corne being that year bad". Those were the driest seven years in more than seven centuries. The people loaded the boats all the same. Baskets came down from the town on the backs of the women and were tipped into the bottoms of the barges, and the men in the boats spread the corn and trod it level to make room for more. The ears were small and many of them half filled. Fish went in on top, and the fowl were tied by their feet to the thwarts. When it was done there were a hundred bushels in Smith's boats.

Percy's barge came up the river soon after, with the council's men at the oars, and the town loaded it in the same manner. His men shipped their oars at the landing and took the baskets in over the side, and the corn rose in the barge until the rowers sat with it about their knees. The two crews lay that night by the landing with their fires on the bank and a watch on the boats. Men slept in their cloaks with their backs to the fires and their feet to the coals, and the sentries walked the bank and blew on their match and listened to the town settle in the dark across the fields. In the morning they pushed off downstream with the barges riding low. The threat had filled the boats. Within four or five days of setting out, they were back at the fort.

Scrivener came in from Point Comfort, the point at the mouth of the James opposite Kecoughtan, to find the president fitting out again. He had been sent with the barges and the pinnace to Werowocomoco and had found the people in Powhatan's town "more ready to fight then trade". He kept such a watch that whatever they planned came to nothing. Through Namontack, Powhatan's man, he got "3. or 4. hogsheads of corne" and as much red paint. Newport had gone down the river meanwhile with his trials of pitch, tar, glass and soap-ashes and what clapboard the fort could make, and had met Scrivener at Point Comfort. From there the ship stood out for England, with the shoes and the mantle aboard and Smith's letter, "leaving us in all 200". The hogsheads from Werowocomoco would not go far among two hundred people.

Fear of famine took hold of the whole fort. Smith fitted out for Nansemond, the country on the south side at the mouth of the James, and took Captain Winne and Scrivener with him. The barges went down the river past Hog Island, where the hogs were kept seven miles below the fort, and crossed to the south shore where the James widened toward the bay. The wind came hard and wet off the open water. Spray broke over the bows and soaked the men forward, and they bailed with their hats and with the cans they drank from. On the far side the Nansemond river opened among low banks of marsh and pine. The barges went up it on the tide past fishing weirs of stakes and woven reeds, with the cold coming off the marsh and the oarsmen's hands raw on the looms. Smoke stood over the towns before the towns came in sight. At the first landing the barges came in under the houses and the English held up their copper and their beads. Men came down to the water's edge and talked across it, and more stood back by the houses and watched the boats.

The people there would not trade either. They put the English off a long time, "excusing themselves to bee so commanded by Powhatan". The Nansemonds paid their tribute to Powhatan like the other towns of the rivers. Each morning the English came in to the landing with their copper, and each morning the answer was the same. They lay in their boats at night on the river with frost forming on the oars and the tarpaulins stiff over them, and ate from the little they had carried. Across the water they could hear the town at its evening work, the mortars going and the dogs and the voices, and smell the smoke of the fires where the corn was cooking. Winne had been in the country only since the autumn. Scrivener had been there since the January the fort burned. Every day the boats lay empty at the landing.

Then the English stopped asking. They went up into the town with their pieces and their match lit and began on the corn. The storehouses stood among the dwellings, and the corn lay inside in baskets and in heaps on the mats. Men came out of the houses with baskets on their shoulders and carried them down toward the boats, and the people stood in their doorways and watched their own winter going down to the water. Women called to one another across the lanes. The English worked quickly, with a guard at the head of each lane and the match smoking in their fingers, and none of the town's men put an arrow to a string. That was enough. In the words of Smith's men, "we were constrained to begin with them perforce, and then they would rather sell us some, then wee should take all." The Nansemonds sold. Men of the town came down to the landing and made signs over the baskets, and the English laid out copper on a mat at the water's edge. The trade began where the taking stopped. More baskets came down after the first, until the boats lay low and heavy at the landing and the English stopped to count what they had. They loaded "100 bushels" and "parted friends". Powhatan's command had held for a long time. It had not held against matchlocks in the town.

The barges went back down the Nansemond and across the mouth of the James and up the long reach to the fort, rowing against the ebb through a day of sleet. Men were half frozen at the oars when they came in under the trees. The corn went up into the storehouse in baskets and was measured in. That same season the fort held a wedding. John Laydon was a laborer. Anne Buras had come out with the Second Supply as maid to Mistress Forest, and she and her mistress were the only Englishwomen in the country. Close to two hundred people lived in the fort and around it, soldiers and gentlemen, tradesmen and boys, Dutchmen and Poles. Laydon was marrying the maid.

The church stood inside the palisade, mended in the autumn by Smith's order, with its roof of reeds and its walls of rough timber and its benches of split logs. Snow had come in the night, and the yard between the huts was trodden to mud by the time the company went across it. They crowded in, as many as it would hold, and the rest stood outside the door in the cold with their hands under their arms. Inside it smelled of smoke and wet wool and of the river mud the men had carried in on their shoes. The light came in gray through the doorway. Men who had not seen an English wedding since they left home stood with their hats in their hands. Some of them had buried friends from that church since the spring. The bride and the groom stood at the front, in clothes washed and brushed as well as clothes could be in that place.

The words were read from the prayer book in the old order, the same words that were read in every parish church in England. The two of them answered, and their hands were joined, and they were married. Outside, the men at the door heard the answers through the wall and passed them back to those behind, and the ones at the back stamped their feet on the frozen mud and waited for the company to come out. The company went out again into the snow. Then the men went back to the woodpiles and the kettles. Smith's men later put the day into their book in a single line: "there was a marriage between John Laydon and Anne Burrowes, being the first marriage we had in Virginia." Across the yard the Nansemond corn lay in the storehouse with the Chickahominy corn and the hogsheads from Werowocomoco. Two hundred people were eating it.

The president did not stay long at the fort. He fitted out two barges for himself and Captain Waldo and went up the James again for corn. The towns on that stretch of the river lay empty when the barges came in. Where the barges first put in, the men went up with their pieces ready and found the fires out and the doorways open, and the mats gone from the frames of the houses. Dogs had gone with the people. A cold pot lay on its side by a hearth, and in the fields the stubble had been gleaned to the ground. The men stood about in the empty lanes with their pieces and listened to the woods. Nothing moved in them. At every landing it was the same, and the English found "neither corne nor Salvage, but all fled (being jealous of our intents)". Only among the Appamattucks, the people of the Appomattox, did they find anyone, and there they found little. Whatever corn there was the English divided equally between themselves and the town, and gave copper for their half. Percy and Scrivener went out in their turn. They came back with nothing.

Winter set in on the fort. Every morning the men came to the storehouse door with their cans and their bags and stood in the cold to have the day's corn measured out to them, and went off to grind it between stones and boil it. The store went down by the basket now, and the men who measured it out could see the bottom of the casks. Smith judged that this putting off was no way to live through a winter. He resolved, with Waldo, to surprise Powhatan himself "and al his provision". Waldo was a soldier Smith knew to be sure in time of need. Winne and Scrivener were against it. They had their own reasons and did what they could to hinder the plan, and Smith would not be hindered. Then came an invitation from Werowocomoco. Powhatan asked Smith to come to him. If the English would send him men to build him a house, and bring him "a grinstone, 50. swords, some peeces, a cock and a hen, with copper and beads", he would load their ship with corn.

The president knew the old man's devices. He took up the offer at once. He sent three of the Dutchmen and two Englishmen to Werowocomoco to begin the house, since the fort had no victual to keep such men at work and nothing else for them to do. The Dutchmen were among the eight craftsmen the Company had sent to make glass and pitch. Now they went off with their tools, in the hard frost, to build an English house in Powhatan's town. They carried axes and saws and adzes, and what food the store could give them for the journey, which was not much. Smith sent them, in his men's words, "knowing there needed no better castel then that house, to surprize Powhatan". He ordered Waldo to follow and second him if need required. Scrivener he left in charge of the fort.

Volunteers had to be found. The fort knew how Scrivener had fared at Werowocomoco and called the voyage desperate, and some of the men Smith named found reasons to stay behind. They knew Smith would not come home with empty boats, whatever it cost. In the end he had the pinnace, two barges and "six and forty men", all of whom had offered themselves. The frost had come hard by then. Ice skinned the shallows along the island in the mornings, and the marsh stood white to the tree line. The men loaded powder and shot and the little victual the store could spare. They stowed copper and beads in chests for trading and coiled the match dry under the tarpaulins. Gunners went over the pinnace's pieces and wormed the barrels. The barges were bailed and their oars laid along the thwarts.

On the twenty-ninth of December the president set out for Werowocomoco. The company came down to the landing in the cold to watch the boats go, wrapped in whatever they had, with the frozen mud of the bank cracking under their feet. The six and forty went down into the boats with their pieces and their bedding, and took their places on the thwarts and along the pinnace's deck. The men in the barges took up their oars. Thin ice clinked along the planking as the boats moved. The pinnace hauled off from the trees, and the barges pulled out after her into the channel, and the oars began to move together. Smoke from the fort's fires lay low over the island behind them. The pinnace and the two barges went down the James on the ebb, bound for the bay and the long way round to Powhatan's town.