A Little Waste Ground

Opechancanough feasted them first. The boats came up the York to his country in two or three days from Werowocomoco. For as many days again the werowance of the Pamunkeys kept the English in food and mirth, and let the talk run on anything but corn. His people carried bread and venison down to the shore in the frost. Fires burned in the long houses all day against the cold. The English sat at them in their wet wool until it steamed, and went back to the boats at night with their bellies full. The river lay iced along both banks, and every morning the barges had to be broken out of the night's skin before anyone could land. Smith had come for corn and had a hold to fill. The pinnace swung at her anchor with her hatches shut on what Werowocomoco had given. At last Opechancanough named a day for the trade.

The forty-six had been in open boats since the end of December, three weeks of frost and snow with no roof but a sail. Their hands were split from the oars and the cold, and most of them had not been dry since Kecoughtan. Here the York divided. Opechancanough's towns lay along the necks of land between the two rivers that made it, their fields stubbled and white, the woods kept open by burning. Smoke stood up from the towns in the still air. Canoes lay drawn up and turned over on the banks, frozen to the mud. The English were fed better at Pamunkey than they had been fed at the fort since the summer, and they knew whose corn it was. They had seen how the last town had answered them. At night the pinnace lay out beyond the ice with her guns loaded. The men in the barges slept in their clothes, with their pieces under the sail beside them.

On the appointed day Smith went up from the river to Opechancanough's house with fifteen men. George Percy went with him, and John Russell, and a gentleman named Crashaw, and a dozen others of the forty-six. The house stood near a quarter of a mile from the water, up a path through fields the frost had turned to iron. They found nothing in it but a lame man and a boy. Every house around it had been emptied, mats and pots and baskets gone, the hearths dead and white with old ash. The lame man sat where he had been left. The boy watched the English come in with their pieces and their smoking match and did not run. The English waited in the cold rooms.

Before long the king came. He was the man who had taken Smith in the swamp of the Chickahominy thirteen months before, with two hundred men behind him. He had listened to Smith talk of the roundness of the earth over a compass. Now he came in at his own door to a cold house full of armed strangers. After him came a number of his people loaded with bows and arrows. Those were the goods. They were poor things for a starving company, and they were priced as if they were copper.

Smith spoke to him plainly. The great love Opechancanough professed with his tongue, he said, seemed mere deceit by his actions. Last year he had freighted the English ship, and now he had invited Smith to starve. He knew Smith's want, and Smith knew his plenty, and by some means Smith must have part. It was fit for kings to keep their promise. Then he laid out his commodities and told the king to take his choice. He would make fair bargains for the rest of the people. Opechancanough seemed to take the offer kindly. He sold them what his people had brought, and promised that the next day more of his people would come, better provided. The English went down to the boats that night with a little corn. That was enough to keep them there.

In the morning Smith left the barges and the pinnace in the charge of one of his gentlemen. He marched up again with his old fifteen. The ground rang under their boots. Snow lay in the furrows. The men went up the path in file with their match lit and their pieces on their shoulders. At the king's house they found four or five men newly come with great baskets. Then the king arrived and held them in talk with a strained cheerfulness, telling them what pains he had taken to keep his promise. The English stood about the fire with their pieces and listened through the few words they shared. Every so often one of them looked at the baskets.

Each man kept his match lit at both ends and a spare coil inside his doublet, out of the damp. The cord burned badly in that cold. Whoever's match went out had only a club in his hands until he could take fire from the next man's. Through the long talk they blew on the coals in turn and kept their pans shut against the drip from the roof. The baskets stood by the door.

John Russell came in from outside with the news. They were all betrayed, he said: "at least 6. or 700." of well-armed men had surrounded the house and beset the fields. It was a frightened man's figure. Opechancanough could not follow the English, but he guessed what Russell had said. The English watched his fear give him away. Some of the fifteen looked at one another and at the door. The house was mats on bent poles. One knife could open its wall in a breath. Through the gaps in the mats they could see movement at the edge of the woods, and the stubble of the near field had men in it. The river was a quarter of a mile behind them. The boats were farther still.

Smith turned to his own men. His companions printed what he said in 1612. He cared little for these enemies, were they as many again, if his men would only do as he did. His torment was the other danger. If he came out of this alive, "our malicious councell, with their open-mouthed minions, will make mee such a peace-breaker (in their opinions) in England, as wil break my neck."

He went through the choices aloud. If they seized the king they could not hold him and defend themselves. If each man killed his man and so went on through the house, the rest would fly. Then the English would have the bodies and no corn, and starve. Their fury was the least of it, he said. Alone, he had once made two or three hundred of them bargain for his life, and "we are now 16 and they but 700. at the most". If it came to fighting, "let us fight like men, and not die like sheep". But first he would try to bring it to terms, so that if they fought they fought for something. At the fort, the council was three men: Scrivener, Captain Winne and Captain Waldo.

There was no time to argue it. Every man vowed to do whatever he attempted, or die. Smith went back to the king and told him he saw his plot to murder him and did not fear it. So far, he said, neither side had done harm except by its leader's orders. Then he offered him the island in the river. Each would go to it as naked as the other, with his weapons, and "the conqueror, of us two, shalbe Lord and Master over all our men." If the king did not like that, he could draw all his men into the field, and take time to fetch more, so long as every one of them brought a basket of corn. Against all of it Smith would stake the value in copper. He had only fifteen men, he said, and the winner would take all.

Opechancanough stood among fifty or sixty of his chief men, and he answered with a present. His people begged the Englishman to come to the door and receive it. Outside the door the present was guarded by "at the least 200 men". Thirty more lay behind a great tree that had fallen across the ground, using it as a barricade, each with an arrow nocked. Smith told some of his men to go out and see what kind of deceit this was, and to take the present in. They would not go. Others offered, and he would not let them. He set Percy and another gentleman to hold the house and two more to keep the door.

The light in the doorway was white with snow glare, and the chief men stood between him and it in their skin mantles, close enough to touch. Their bows were strung. The English at his back had their pieces up and their match blown red. The house had gone quiet. Then, in a rage, he went through them and "snatched the king by his vambrace, in the midst of his men, with his pistoll ready bent against his brest. Thus he led the trembling king, neare dead with feare, amongst all his people". The vambrace was the bracer on the king's forearm, the kind of leather guard he had once sent to the fort as a token for two prisoners.

Smith brought him out through the door into the snow, the pistol at his breast and the bracer in his fist. He walked him along the front of the house, where the two hundred could see them both. For a moment the whole field stood still. Opechancanough handed Smith his bow and his arrows. At that his men were easily persuaded to lay down their own arms. None of them had dreamed that any man would dare to use their king so. Bows went down on the frozen ground in heaps, and the men behind the fallen tree came out from it with their hands empty. The king, to get himself loose, gave his presents in earnest.

Smith had the whole multitude come up close without their weapons. Then he spoke to the Pamunkeys. They wanted to cut his throat, he said, and his long patience had made them bold. He had borne with them only because of his promise, before the God he served, to be their friend until they gave him cause to be their enemy. If they shot one arrow to shed one drop of English blood, he would have his revenge. So too if one of them stole the least of the beads and copper he now spurned before him with his foot. He would not stop while he could find one of their nation who would not deny the name of Pamunkey.

Then he reminded them of the swamp: "I am not now at Rasseneac halfe drownd with mire, where you tooke me prisoner". He meant Rasawrack, the hunting camp by the swamp where the werowance's men had brought him in the winter before. Yet even so, he said, he loved them for keeping their word then and sparing his life, and their denials half persuaded him he was mistaken now. "But if I be the marke you aime at, here I stand, shoote hee that dare." They had promised to freight his ship before he left, and so they would, or he would load her with their dead bodies. If they would come as friends and trade, he would not trouble them again unless they gave the first cause.

The bows went away. Men, women and children came in from the fields and the woods with their goods, and the house filled with baskets and the smell of parched corn and cold bodies. Corn came in baskets and in skins tied at the neck. The English poured it into their own sacks by the fire, and copper and beads went back across the mats the other way, piece by piece, under Smith's eye. For two or three hours they crowded round Smith so close and so long that he was worn out. He went to lie down, leaving two of his gentlemen to take in what was brought.

Outside the light was going early, as it did in that month. One of the Pamunkeys saw that he was fast asleep and that the English guard had wandered off about the house. Forty or fifty of their best men started in at the door, each with an English sword in his hand. Two or three hundred more pressed behind them to follow. The swords were long and heavy in their hands, and the doorway was too low for the press of them. The noise and the rush of them shook the house on its poles and woke him. Half dazed, he took up his sword and target. Crashaw and some others charged with him, and the Pamunkeys went back out of the door faster than they had come in. Then the king and his old men came with a long speech to excuse it. The rest of the day passed in kindness. The people brought their best provision again, and took whatever the English gave them, and seemed content.

By then Scrivener had been dead more than a week. Smith had left him in charge at the fort, with Captain Waldo under orders to be ready to follow and second the president if he sent for help. Scrivener was against the plan to take Powhatan. Nine days after Smith's boats went down the river, he set out on business of his own, meaning to cross the president's design.

The fort that January was short of everything but cold. At the fort the garrison kept the watch on the frozen palisade, cut its wood, and ate from a store that the boats had gone out to fill. Smoke from the huts lay flat across the island under the wind. Scrivener would visit Hog Island, where the hogs were kept, and he took Waldo with him, though Waldo's orders were to stay ready. Anthony Gosnold went too, a gentleman who shared his surname with the captain buried in the first August, and eight others.

They went down to the landing in the depth of that frozen time. The wind came over the marshes and cut across the river, and the spray froze on the gunwales where it struck. The skiff was much overloaded, and in that gale she would scarcely have lived if she had been empty. Scrivener would not be talked out of it, though "Waldo and 100 others doubted as it hapned." The men in her sat low, with the water a hand's breadth under the rail. The skiff put off from the ice at the shore with eleven men aboard. Men on the bank watched her pull out into the chop, low and slow, until the spray and the gray of the river took her out of sight.

"so violent was the wind (that extreame frozen time) that the boat sunke; but where, or how, none doth knowe, for they were all drowned." The skiff went out into the gale and never came to the island. Scrivener drowned in the James. Waldo drowned with him. Anthony Gosnold drowned. Eight others went down in the same boat. Eleven men had been in the boat. "The Salvages were the first that found their bodies". The finding, the 1612 book says, encouraged them all the more in their designs.

Somebody had to tell the president. The journey was offered round the fort and refused by all, until Richard Wiffin, one of the gentlemen at the fort, said he would make it alone. He went overland in the frost, by paths through woods where the snow lay deep in the hollows. Every creek had to be crossed on ice, or waded where it ran open. His feet went numb in his shoes by the first noon, and at night there was no fire unless a town gave him one. Sometimes he went by a town and sometimes through one, a lone Englishman with a sword and a pack, and the people watched him go. He met many dangers and difficulties on the way.

Wherever he passed he saw the towns making ready. Men sat at the fires straightening arrow shafts and binding on the heads, and strung bows hung from the house poles. He lodged one night with Powhatan himself and saw there "such preparation for warre" that he was sure some mischief was meant. He had walked into the house of the man the president had gone out to surprise, alone, carrying the news of Scrivener and Waldo. He bought his road with "extraordinarie bribes" and much trouble, and in "three daies travell" he came to Pamunkey. He came in with three days of frost on him and found the company in the midst of these turmoils.

He gave the news to Smith. Of the three men Smith had left at the fort as his council, Winne alone was alive. The president's men were at the fires about the king's house, eating the Pamunkeys' provision, with their match lit and their pieces against the walls. They had come through the morning's trap together, all sixteen. The talk at the fires was of the pistol and the bracer and the swords at the door. None of them knew. Crashaw was among them, and Percy, and John Russell, who had brought the first warning. Smith swore Wiffin to keep it from the rest. Then, the 1612 book says, "dissembling his sorrow with the best countenance he could," he went on with the day. The baskets came in and the copper went out, and he stood over the trade until the light failed. When the night came on, he went down through the frozen fields and aboard with all his company.