A Little Waste Ground

The arms of the colony lay at the fort, and in the middle of January the fort was Captain Winne's. Of the council that had sat there in December, he was the one man left, an old soldier who had come in with the ships in the autumn. Snow lay along the palisade and in the lanes between the huts, and the river was iced at its edges. The men who had stayed behind cut wood on the neck and dragged it back over the frozen ground, stood their watches on the walls, and drew their bread from a store the boats had gone out to fill. Smoke from the huts went flat across the island. Water froze in the buckets overnight, and men slept in their clothes and woke stiff. In the storehouse the swords stood in racks and the powder sat in its barrels under the eaves. Winne had the keeping of all of it. The president was somewhere up the York.

As soon as Smith's boats had sailed from Werowocomoco, Powhatan came back to his town and sent two of the builders down to the fort. They were Adam and Francis, "2. stout Dutch men", two of the Company's craftsmen. They came overland through the frost and in at the gate, and told Winne that all was well. They said "Captaine Smith had use for their armes", so they had left them with him and needed new ones, and Winne gave them new arms. They had come, they told him, for some special tools and a change of clothes. Under that cover they drew six or seven of the men at the fort into their plan, "such expert theefes" that they soon had a great many swords, pike-heads, pieces, shot and powder out of the stores. Men from the towns waited close at hand to carry it all away. The next day the two Dutchmen went back to Werowocomoco and nobody stopped them. Their confederates stayed behind to follow, and to send on whatever they could in the meantime. For that service the Dutchmen were to live with Powhatan "as his chiefe affected", the favorites of his house, free of the miseries coming to the colony.

The president was days away by water, and the two men came in his name. They were his own builders, sent to Powhatan's town on his own orders. The pieces came up out of the chests in the storehouse with flasks of powder and coils of match, and the Dutchmen took them and turned them over in their hands like men who knew the trade. Among themselves they talked in Dutch. Their English was thin, and Winne had none of their tongue. Afterward the stores were short in ways that were hard to see: a pike-head gone from a bundle, a keg lighter than its mark, a gap in the rack where a sword had stood. At night the confederates carried things out past the watch to the woods on the neck, where men from the towns took them up and went off with them through the snow. Winne had armed the two Dutchmen himself.

At Werowocomoco the house frame stood half built in the snow. Powhatan had asked the English for that house in December, and the president had sent the builders to raise it for him. Powhatan kept the third Dutchman as a pledge for the others. His diligence had already furnished Powhatan three hundred hatchets, and the others had brought him fifty swords, eight pieces and eight pikes. Brinton, the soldier Smith had left there to kill fowl for the king, watched the Dutchmen fitting weapons into the hands of Powhatan's men. So did one of the English builders. They tried to slip away to the fort together. Powhatan's people caught them.

Powhatan had threatened his men at Pamunkey with death if they did not find some means to kill Captain Smith. Opechancanough's people appointed a day for the whole country to come and trade unarmed. They had no stomach for it, "hating fighting almost as ill as hanging", but they were under orders. The next morning "the fieldes appeared covered with people, and baskets to tempt us ashore." Smith meant to stay aboard. The pinnace and the barges lay out on the river with frost white on their thwarts. Nothing would be brought down while he stayed on the water, and the people on the bank would not come near the sight of a gun. Some of them began to drift off with their baskets toward the woods.

Smith would not lose the corn. He hid men in the pinnace and the barges, lying down behind the gunwales with their matches lit and their pieces loaded, and went ashore with only three armed men: Percy, John Russell and one other gentleman. A few more went with him unarmed, to take in whatever was brought. The bank stood at his back like the wall of a trench, a few steps of frozen mud down to the boats. Before him the Pamunkeys came out across the open ground in crowds, and he drew them on toward his hidden men. He would not go up to the king's house again. So the king came down to him, with two or three hundred men spread "in the forme of two halfe-moons", the horns curving in toward the river. In the middle walked some twenty men and many women loaded with great painted baskets.

In the pinnace the hidden men lay on the boards among the coils of cable, with the cold coming up through their clothes. They could see nothing but the sky and the gunwale over their heads. Each man kept his match alive in a cupped hand and blew on it when it dulled. The barges were lower in the water and colder, and the men in them lay with their knees drawn up and their pieces on their chests. Up on the bank the president had three men with him who could fire. They had come through the house the day before. The men in the boats waited for his voice.

The four Englishmen stood on the frozen ground with their pieces up. Their breath smoked. As the half-moons closed in, the women and children broke and ran back across the stubble, baskets and all. The men stayed in their lines. They had the fields beset as they had been told to, and the thing was as good as done, but their own fear held them. They trembled so that they were "scarse able to nock their arrowes." Percy stood at his shoulder. Smith watched the horns come on until they were inside the range of the boats. Then he gave the word. The hidden men rose up out of the pinnace and the barges with their pieces leveled, and Smith stepped back to the bank. The Pamunkeys did not wait for the volley. They ran for the woods with the half-moons coming apart behind them, and the field emptied in a few minutes.

That night Smith sent Crashaw and another gentleman to the fort in a barge. On the way, midway between Werowocomoco and the island, they met four or five of the Dutchmen's confederates going to Powhatan. It was open country under snow, and there was nowhere on the path to hide: four or five men of the fort, walking the wrong way, face to face with two gentlemen of the president's company. The confederates, to clear themselves of any suspicion of running to the towns, turned round and went back to the fort, and stayed there. At Pamunkey the people had heard the barge go off in the dark, and they were badly frightened. Smith had threatened their towns, their houses, their boats and their canoes, and they took the barge for a message sent for more men. The next day the king sent Smith a chain of pearl to turn him from his purpose and keep his men away. He promised that his people would load the English ship, though they went short themselves, and bring the corn aboard so there could be no suspicion. Five or six days later they came in from every part of the country within ten or twelve miles. The frost was hard and the snow lay deep. They carried the provision down to the river "on their naked backes." They came in lines along the paths to the shore, men and women bent under baskets and under skins of corn tied at the neck, their legs bare in the snow. At the water they set the loads down, and the English carried them out to the boats and poured them into the hold. The bearers went back up the paths for more. The pinnace settled lower by the day.

In the companions' telling there was poison too: the president and some others with him were made sick by a present of food, and the sickness passed. A young man named Wecuttanow, a son of the chief next in power to Powhatan, knew he was suspected of bringing it. He came with forty or fifty chosen companions to a town where Smith had only a few men about him, and he walked up and down before the English as though he expected a fight. Smith beat him in the midst of his own men and "spurned him like a dogge". Wecuttanow's companions fled into the woods. The townsmen loaded the barge at once, to be rid of the English. They made excuse after excuse for Wecuttanow, and said that if Smith would show them the man who had brought the poison they would hand him over to be punished as the English pleased. The companions set down their answer to anyone who thought the stir too great:

"Men maie thinke it strange there should be this stir for a little corne: but had it been gold with more ease wee might have got it; and had it wanted, the whole colonie had starved."

The boats went on up the two rivers that made the York, to the towns along them. There were still people in those towns, and some corn under the floors of their houses, though not much. The English searched the towns. They went into the houses with their match lit and lifted the mats and looked in the pits where the corn was kept. Most of the pits were nearly bare. The people gave up what little they had, with "such complaints and tears from women and children" that a man would have been too cruel to be a Christian who was not moved by them. A few pages on, the same writers asked who had ever brought so many kings and nations to obedience and tribute "with so little bloud shed".

Coming down the York, Smith meant to try Powhatan once more and surprise him and his provision as he had planned in December. Off Werowocomoco he put Richard Wiffin and another gentleman ashore to scout the way. They walked up through the snow to the town and found it empty of everything that mattered. The new house stood with its roof unfinished. The Dutchmen, "those damned Dutchman" in the companions' book, had made Powhatan abandon his new house and Werowocomoco, and carry off all his corn and provision. The people who were left had been turned so far against the English that the two gentlemen hardly got back to the boats alive. Smith saw there was nothing to be had. He held on down the river for the fort.

They came home early in February, six weeks out. Their own reckoning of the journey was short: it had "kept 40 men 6. weekes" "for 25l of copper, 50l of Iron and beads". Every man had a month's provision for his reward, and no man had been allowed to trade for himself. At the island the sacks came up out of the boats on men's shoulders and went into the storehouse, and the cape merchant took them in and measured them. It came to 279 bushels of corn.

The next part of the companions' book carried its own heading:

"How the Salvages became subject to the English."

The stealing at the fort went on that spring. The Dutchmen's confederates were careful, and powder, shot, swords and tools kept disappearing out of the stores. The fort could count what was gone but could not find who had taken it. At Werowocomoco and beyond, the Dutchmen took in what came and taught Powhatan's people how to use it. But the rest of their company did not come after them as they had expected. To find out why, they sent Francis back, "disguised Salvage like", to the glasshouse. It was the glass furnace the Company had wanted, built that season in the woods near a mile from the fort, on the mainland at the end of the neck. It stood in a clearing cut out of the pines, a low house with its furnace at one end and cordwood stacked along the walls to dry. A path ran from it back through the woods to the neck, worn by the men going to and from the fort. The woods on either side were thick enough to hide a company. It was "the randavus for all their unsuspected villany". The Dutchmen had asked Powhatan for forty men to lie in ambush there for Captain Smith.

Smith heard that a Dutchman was at the glasshouse and sent men to take him. They went out across the neck with their matches lit and found the place empty of him. To cut him off before he could get back to Powhatan, Smith sent twenty shot after him. They went off into the trees in a long file, toward Powhatan's country. Then he started back from the glasshouse alone. He had no piece with him, only his falchion, a short broadsword, at his side. The path ran down through the bare woods toward the neck and the river, over ground soft with the thaw and black with last year's leaves. Somewhere off among the trees were twenty of his own men with their matches lit, and forty of Powhatan's.

On the path he met the Paspahegh werowance, the chief whose country had held the island when the English came. He had come to the camp in the first May with a hundred armed men, and sent them a deer. To Smith's men he was "a most strong stout Salvage". He tried to talk Smith into the woods where the ambush lay, and Smith would not go. The werowance saw that the Englishman had no gun, only the sword, and tried to shoot him. Smith closed with him before he could shoot. They grappled on the path, and the werowance held Smith's arm so that he could not get the falchion out. Then he dragged him toward the water.

The river in that season ran cold and brown with the thaw. Both men went in in their clothes. Smith's wool filled and dragged at him. He had no weapon in his hand. The werowance was the stronger man. The fort was across the neck. Smith's men set down the rest in a single sentence:

he "perforce bore him into the river to have drowned him. Long they struggled in the water, from whence the king perceiving two of the Poles upon the sandes, would have fled: but the President held him by the haire and throat til the Poles came in."

The Poles came down the sand at a run in their working clothes, two of the foreign craftsmen, and waded out into the river and took him. "Then seeing howe pittifully the poore Salvage begged his life, they conducted him prisoner to the fort." The three of them brought him up the path and across the neck, wet to the skin, with the president walking behind in his streaming clothes. The wind off the river cut through the wet wool. Men came out of the huts as they came in at the gate. The prisoner was the chief whose country the fort stood on. Now he stood in the middle of it with the river running off him.

Before long Francis was brought in as well. He had his story ready, and told it in what English he had while the fort's men stood about and listened. For want of a common language, he said, Winne had not rightly understood what the two Dutchmen told him at the gate in January. As for their dealings with Powhatan, they had been forced to supply him with arms to save their own lives. He complained bitterly that Powhatan had kept them against their will. He himself had escaped at the hazard of his life, and had never meant to go back; he had only "walked in the woods to gather walenuts." The tale convinced nobody. Smith had him put in irons, and the smith closed them on his ankles in the same fort he had robbed.

The Paspahegh werowance went into fetters as well. Smith meant to trade his life for the Dutchmen. The werowance did his best for it. Every day his messengers went off through the woods to Powhatan, and every day the answer came back the same: the Dutchmen would not return, Powhatan was not keeping them, and his people could not carry them fifty miles on their backs. Every day the werowance's wives and children and people came to the fort to see him. They came across the neck past the glasshouse with presents, and the guard let them in at the gate. They brought him bread and venison and whatever else the towns could spare at the end of a hungry winter. His people put much trust in the president's promise. He sat in his fetters with the baskets around him, and gave the presents away as fast as they came, to make his peace.