A Little Waste Ground

The house went up on the rise above the York in the first days of January, among the long houses of Powhatan's town. Its frame was sawn timber, squared and pegged, as carpenters framed houses in Holland and in Kent. The builders had come overland from the fort by the path through the woods, with axes, saws and augers on their backs, to have it ready against the president's coming. They felled oaks behind the town and dragged the logs in over the frozen ground. The work went slowly in the short days. Frost stiffened the men's fingers on the saw handles, and the iron of the augers burned cold through their gloves, and every morning they had to knock the rime off the timbers before they could mark them. The town's people came out to watch the sills laid and the first posts raised on them, and the children crowded the saw pit until they were sent off. Smoke from the mat houses drifted across the frame on the cold air. The builders ate from Powhatan's store, bread and venison and fowl, more than any man at the fort had eaten since the autumn. Powhatan had asked for an English house. Smith had his own use for it. In his reckoning there was no better castle in the country from which to take its owner.

The boats had left the fort on the twenty-ninth of December, six and forty men victualled for three or four days. Smith went in the barge. Percy went in the pinnace with the larger part of the company. The first night they lay at Warraskoyack, the town on the south shore of the James below the fort, and its werowance gave them provision enough. The boats came in under the bank at dusk with the men stiff from the oars, and he had them up into his houses to the fires, where his people brought bread and the English stood their pieces against the mat walls to dry. He did his best to turn Smith from going on to Powhatan. When he saw he could not, he gave him advice to take with him: "trust him not," he said, for "hee hath sent for you only to cut your throats." Smith thanked him. Then, to try his love, he asked him for guides to Chowanoke, the country to the south, to carry a present to its king. In the morning Michael Sicklemore, a gentleman who had been in the barge on both bay voyages, went off into the woods with two guides and directions to search for Raleigh's lost company and for silk grass. Smith left Samuel Collier, his page, with the werowance "to learne the language." The boats went on down the river without them.

Next night they reached Kecoughtan, the town at the river's mouth, and the weather shut them in. Wind and rain came in off the bay, then frost and snow, and for six or seven days nobody could put out. The boats lay hauled up on the shore with snow drifting into them, and the men went down twice a day to bail them and look at the sky. They kept their Christmas there among the Kecoughtans, on oysters and fish, flesh and wild fowl and good bread, and fires in the dry, warm, smoky houses better than any they had sat by in England. The men had never been merrier. After Kecoughtan there were no more houses. They lay three and four nights together on open shore under the trees, wrapped in whatever they had, with a good fire going and the bay black beyond it. Smith and two of his men killed a hundred and forty-eight fowl in three shots, and that night every man ate. At Kiskiack, on the York, the frost held them three or four days more. The people there were proud with them, and Smith quartered his men in their houses and made them give what the English wanted. There were twelve in the barge with him.

On the twelfth of January they came to Werowocomoco. The river there was "frozen neare halfe a mile from the shore." The pinnace anchored out in open water beyond the ice. Smith had the barge's crew break a way through the ice with oars and poles, and they got so far in that the ebb left the barge sitting on the shoals with the town still a long way off across the mud. To stay in the barge was to freeze in it. Smith went over the side first, and the men followed him, and they marched to the shore "middle deepe" through the frozen ooze, more than a bowshot, breaking the skin of ice with their thighs. Their pieces went over their heads. People from the town came down to the bank to watch them come. When the tide lifted the barge, two or three men took her back to the pinnace, where the crew were melting salt ice in the kettles for water. John Russell had come ashore with them, though he was sick and heavy and nobody could persuade him to stay behind. The march broke him. The others worked over him on the bank a long while before any life came back into his body.

The company went up from the water in clothes that stiffened as the wind got at them. They took the first houses they came to at the edge of the town, built up the fires inside, and hung their stockings and breeches in the smoke while they sat in their shirts and blankets. Men rubbed their legs and could not feel the rubbing. Their matches had to be dried before they would hold fire. Then they sent to Powhatan for food. He sent them plenty, bread and turkeys and venison. His men brought it down through the town before dark, the birds slung by the legs from poles, and the English ate by their fires with their pieces within reach.

The next day Smith went up to him through the town with his guard. Powhatan's long house stood at the town's heart, its fire burning down the middle, his chief men sitting on mats along the walls and Powhatan himself at the far end, propped on his mats. Smith's men stood in the doorway with their pieces, their match lit, letting the cold in behind them. Powhatan feasted them in his ordinary manner, with more food than they could eat, and then he asked when they would be gone. He had not sent for them, he said. He had no corn, and his people had less, but for forty swords he would find them forty bushels. Smith pointed to the men standing there who had brought him Powhatan's message and his conditions, and asked how he came to be so forgetful. The old man ended it with a laugh. He asked to see their goods, and liked none of them. He wanted guns and swords. He valued a basket of corn above a basket of copper, saying "he could eate his corne, but not his copper."

Smith answered him at length. He told him he had had other ways to get his provision and had let them all go, believing Powhatan's promises. He had sent him men for his building and neglected his own. Powhatan had kept his people's corn to himself and forbidden them to trade, and now meant to wait until the English starved. As for swords and guns, Smith had told him long ago he had none to spare, and the ones he had would keep him from want. Even so he would not steal from him, nor break their friendship, unless Powhatan forced him to it. The king heard him out. He promised that he and his country would spare what they could, and that within two days they should have it. Then he gave the reason he had been slow. Many told him the English came not for trade but to invade his people and take his country, and his people dared not bring corn to men so armed. Let them leave their weapons aboard, he said, for they were all friends, and Powhatans for ever. They talked in that way the whole day, and that night the English lay in the king's own houses.

On the fourteenth Powhatan went to look at his building. He walked out to the frame with his chief men about him and looked over what the builders had raised. The Dutchmen among the builders had seen his plenty and the fort's want, and his preparations to surprise the English, and to win his favor they "revealed to him as much as they knew" of the colony's state and plans. Smith had sent one of them ahead as his spy, trusting him above any man, and could not be certain what that man had done "till neare halfe a yeare after." That morning the trading went on. A copper kettle went along the mats from hand to hand until it reached Powhatan, who turned it in the light of the fire. It bought corn out of the king, and Smith, seeing how much Powhatan wanted it, valued it far higher and said he would take as much again next year, or else the country of the Monacans. Powhatan, "exceeding liberall of that hee had not, yeelded him Monacan." Both sides seemed content. The fire had burned down between them, and the chief men along the walls sat without moving. Then the old man spoke to Smith of peace and war.

He began with himself. He was old, and had seen "the death of all my people thrice," and nobody living of those three generations but himself, and he knew the difference between peace and war better than any man in his country. He would die before long. His brothers would come after him one by one, Opechancanough among them, and his sisters and their daughters after them, and he wished them Smith's love, no less than his own love for Smith. Then he came to what his people were saying.

"this brute from Nansamund, that you are come to destroy my Countrie, so much affrighteth all my people, as they dare not visit you. What will it availe you to take that perforce, you may quietly have with love, or to destroy them that provide you food? What can you get by war, when we can hide our provision and flie to the woodes, whereby you must famish, by wronging us your friends?"

He asked why the English were so jealous of his love when his people came unarmed and fed them with what they could get only by their own labor. Then he set out his own life against the other one.

"Think you I am so simple not to knowe it is better to eate good meate, lie well, and sleepe quietly with my women and children, laugh, and be merrie with you, have copper, hatchets, or what I want being your friend; then bee forced to flie from al, to lie cold in the woods, feed upon acorns roots and such trash, and be so hunted by you that I can neither rest eat nor sleepe, but my tired men must watch, and if a twig but breake, everie one crie, there comes Captaine Smith"

He asked them to come again as friends, without their guns and swords, and every year his trade would furnish them with corn. Smith had his answer ready. The English would not starve for want of what he hid, he said, and wore their arms as other men wore clothes, and had a rule for finding food beyond Powhatan's knowledge. They talked on until they began to trade. The king saw that his will would not be taken for law, that the guard would not be sent off and the men would not lay down their arms. He sighed, and spoke once more. He had used no werowance as kindly as Smith, and had the least kindness back from him. Newport had given him swords, copper, clothes, a bed and tools, and sent away his guns when Powhatan asked him. "Captain Newport you call father, and so you call me: but I see, for all us both, you will doe what you list," he said, and Newport and he alike must work to content him.

Smith moved now. He got Powhatan's people to break the ice so that his barge could come in for him and the corn, and he sent word for his men to come ashore and seize the king. He had to keep the old man talking and unsuspecting "till his men landed." Powhatan was doing the same with him. Each man was stalling the other. Smith gave him this, standing in the house, with his men somewhere out on the ice: "as I have but one God, I honour but one king: and I live not here as your subject, but as your friend," he said, a friend to please him with what he could. He called Powhatan father in earnest, he said, and tomorrow he would leave his arms and trust to his promise.

Smith sat on by the fire, talking, while down at the shore Powhatan's people worked at the ice with poles and hatchets to open the channel he had asked for. The king's own men were ready before his. While the ice was breaking, "his luggage, women and children fledde." He left "2 or 3 of his women talking with the Captaine" so that nothing would look amiss, and he slipped out of the house. His men came in as quietly and beset it. They came up between the houses with their bows strung, more of them every moment, until they stood thick about the doors. Word of it reached Smith at once. He went out "with his Pistol, Sword and Target." The men around the house scattered before him. Some ran one way and some another. He came through without a wound. He reached his guard outside. Eight men stood there with him.

Excuses followed him across the town. Powhatan sent him "a greate bracelet and a chaine of pearle" by an "ancient Orator," who made the king's case to the English in the cold. He stood in the trodden snow before Smith's eight with the gift held out, and the English kept their match lit while he spoke. The werowance had gone for fear of the guns, the orator said. The men Smith had seen had been sent to guard the corn from thieving once the ice was open. If any had been hurt it was by mistake, and Powhatan was still his friend. Now the ice was broken, and the English should send their corn away, and their arms too if they wanted his company, for the arms frightened his people. Out on the river a barge was coming in from the pinnace with more men.

Smith had baskets found for his men to carry the corn. Powhatan's men offered to guard the English arms while the English carried. A great many of them came, big men and well armed. Smith's men cocked their matches against them, and at that and a few words the Powhatans laid their bows and arrows down beside the English guard and carried the corn down to the water on their own backs. They went down the frozen path to the shore in a long file, bent under the baskets, with the English along the way holding their smoking match. Some of the bearers went in to their knees through the broken ice at the edge to reach her. There the corn was tipped into the barge and the empty baskets went back up for more. Their breath hung over the line in the cold. They did it fast.

Then the ebb left the barge aground again, and the whole company had to wait on the shore for the midnight tide, with the corn heaped in the stranded barge under a sail. The English built fires on the bank and sat out the first half of that night by them in great mirth, as if they had never suspected anything or meant anything themselves. Out beyond the light the river ticked and cracked as the ice moved on the turn of the tide. Men kept their pieces across their knees and their match alight, and some slept sitting up. At midnight the water came up under the barge and carried them out to the pinnace.

The account of those three days, set down by men who were there, does not name Pocahontas, Powhatan's daughter. She appears instead in the last pages of the 1612 book, inside a parenthesis, where the book answers a charge that Smith had meant to marry her and so "have made himselfe a king." She was, it said, "at most not past 13 or 14 yeares of age," and she often came to the fort with what she could get for him. It added that "when her father intended to have surprized him, shee by stealth in the darke night came through the wild woods and told him of it." The spring before, Smith's own pamphlet had called her a child of ten. The aside gives no month and no town. Then the parenthesis closes, and the book goes back to the other charges against him.

Smith left a Dutchman at Werowocomoco to go on with the house. He left Brinton, one of the soldiers from the pinnace, with his piece "to kil fowle for Powhatan," as the king's messengers had urgently asked. He gave his men there directions to please the old man in everything they could, so that the English would find him friendly when they came back from Pamunkey. In the morning frost whitened the sawn timber, and thin ice had closed again over the channel the barge had broken. The frame stood on its rise above the river with no roof on it. Brinton went down to the marsh with his piece. The Dutchman went on with the house.