A Little Waste Ground

The cape merchant took a lantern into the storehouse early in February and began to cast up what the colony had. The boats were in from the York, and their crews slept in the huts. His helpers rolled the casks out from the wall and tipped the baskets onto the floor. The corn was hard and dry, and its dust hung in the light. They measured the corn bushel by bushel in the lantern light, and he scored each bushel on a stick as it went into the heap. The 279 bushels from the Pamunkey voyage lay on top. Under them lay what the president had got from the towns in the autumn. Frost had come in under the eaves, and the men worked in their cloaks with their breath showing in the light. When the heap was measured, the cape merchant set the count against the mouths in the fort. It came out long. He went out into the gray morning with the stick in his hand. In the words of Smith's men, "finding sufficient till the next harvest, the feare of starving was abandoned."

The company was divided into tens and fifteens, or as the business of the day required, and each party went out under its own man. Four hours a day went in work. Some parties crossed the neck with axes to the woods. The snow had gone off the ground there and lay only in the hollows under the pines. Others dug in the hard ground inside the palisade, mended the huts the winter had broken, or fed the kettles at the edge of the trees. The parties came back at midday with their hands chapped and their shoes caked to the ankle with the mud of the neck. The bread was given out at the store door. Then the work stopped. The rest of the day belonged to the men, for games and pastimes, for sleeping against the south wall of a hut where the sun reached, and for talk at the fires. Men sat in the doorways in the afternoon sun and picked over their clothes for lice. Four hours was not much. Most of the company could not be brought to give even that. They came late to their parties and leaned on their tools, and drifted back to the huts when the man in charge turned his back. Gentlemen who had never worked for their bread stood about the woodpiles with their hands in their sleeves. The axes lay where they had been dropped. Before many weeks were out, the president had seen enough.

Smith called a general assembly. The drum went round the lanes between the huts, and the company came out and stood together on the open ground before the church: laborers and gentlemen, the tradesmen of the autumn's ships, the soldiers in their buff coats. The sick came out of the huts wrapped in their blankets and stood at the back. The smell of the sick came with them, and the men nearest them stood off. Captain Winne stood among them. The ground was trodden mud with a skin of frost on it. The wind came over the palisade off the river and set the men stamping. Smith spoke to them as countrymen. Their late miseries, he told them, ought to be enough to persuade every man to correct himself. Neither his own pains nor the purses of the adventurers in London would ever keep them in idleness and sloth. He did not mean all of them. Some there deserved honor and reward, better than the country yet had to give. But the greater part would have to be more industrious, or starve. Then he gave them his law.

"Howsoever you have bin heretofore tolerated by the authoritie of the Councell from that I have often commanded you: yet seeing nowe the authoritie resteth wholly in my selfe, you must obay this for a law, that he that will not worke, shall not eate, except by sicknesse he be disabled. For the labours of 30 or 40 honest and industrious men shall not bee consumed to maintaine 150 idle varlets."

He knew what they said of him in the huts. They thought his authority was a shadow, and that he dared not touch any man's life for fear of answering for it with his own. So the letters patents would be read to them every week, and the words would tell them otherwise. He wished them to keep the orders he had set down without contempt, "for there are now no more Councells to protect you, nor curbe my indeavours." Whoever offended could expect his punishment. The company heard him out with the wind in their faces. Then the drum let them go, and they went back to the huts, some of them laughing at it and some not. In the morning the parties went out at the usual hour.

He set up a table besides. It was a board in a public place, where every man's deserts were set down for the whole fort to see, to encourage the good and to shame the rest into mending. It stood where the whole company passed it going out to work, and the names on it were the names of the men they ate beside. Men going out to the woods in the morning stopped at it, and those who could read found their names for the others. Many grew industrious by it. More were brought to their work by punishment, for every man had his task set for the day, and the man over his party saw it done or reported him, and excuses did not serve. The president could not be deceived about who had worked and who had not. Still the stores leaked. Powder, shot, swords and tools went on going out of the fort through the Dutchmen's friends inside it, and though the loss could be found, the men who took it could not. All of this came in the weeks after the return. Francis had not yet been seen at the glasshouse.

The Paspahegh werowance sat in his fetters through the days that followed the fight in the river, and the men set to guard him grew used to him. They grew careless. One day the place where he sat was empty, and he was gone, fetters and all. Captain Winne went after him with men from the fort. They went out over the neck at a trot with their pieces on their shoulders, blowing on their match as they ran, past the glasshouse and into the trees. Beyond it the woods were bare and gray, the leaves of last year rotting underfoot. Among the trunks the Paspaheghs came out in troops to stop him. The English fired by volleys and reloaded on their knees behind the trees, ramming and priming with cold fingers. Each volley crashed through the bare trees and left the smoke hanging low under the branches. The answer came back in flights of arrows that hissed into the leaves around them and stood quivering in the bark. Winne could not get through. He brought his men back to the fort with their powder spent and the werowance still out in his own country.

Smith heard of it on his way back to the fort, and on the way he took two men prisoner. He brought them in at the gate with their arms bound behind them. Their names were Kemps and Kinsock, and Smith's men called them "the two most exact villaines in the countrie." They knew where the werowance had gone, and they were ready to lead the English to him. That night Captain Winne went out again with fifty chosen men and the two prisoners for guides, to take the werowance back and revenge the injury. The guides would have brought him to it. They "would have betraied both their king and kindred for a peece of copper", and Smith had given Winne his directions. Winne did not follow them, and did not take the guides' advice. Kemps and Kinsock sat between soldiers and told them which way the werowance had gone. The boats lay off the Paspahegh shore in the dark. Frost settled on the men's cloaks, and the ends of their match glowed red along the gunwales. They could hear dogs in the towns, and the water knocking under the planking, and once a canoe going by in the dark. The men sat with their hands under their arms and waited for an order. The night went by in waiting. Nothing was done in it.

At sunrise the Paspaheghs came down to the water and dared him to come ashore and fight. For a good while both sides shot at each other. The English knelt to fire over the gunwales, and the boats rocked under them at each discharge. The Paspaheghs shot from the bank, and their arrows dropped short into the river while the shot went off into the trees. The shots came back off the far shore in the still air of the morning. Nobody at the fort heard of anyone hurt on either side. Before they left, Winne's men took two canoes off the shore and set fire to the king's house. The mats of its walls went up in a roar, and the frame stood black in the flames behind them as they rowed away. They came home with the canoes in tow.

The president did not like what the morning had taught the Paspaheghs. Bravado of that kind, left alone, would only encourage them, and he went out himself to try his own conclusions. His men killed six or seven and took as many prisoner. His men went through the towns, took brands from the hearths, and burned the houses one after another while the people ran for the woods. They broke up the fishing weirs, the fences of stakes and woven reed that the towns set across the shallows for the spring runs of fish, and loaded them into the boats with the canoes they took, and "planted them at James Towne for his owne use." The boats came back to the fort low in the water, with the stakes and the rolls of reed fencing piled across the thwarts. The weirs went into the river below the fort, and English hands drew the fish out of them. Smith meant to go on until he had revenged himself on everyone who had injured him. He had not finished.

His road up the river toward the Chickahominies, the people of the Chickahominy, who kept their own councils, took him past Paspahegh. The Paspaheghs did their best to draw him into ambushes along the bank. Smith kept on up the channel without turning in, and the men at the oars watched the woods. When the Paspaheghs saw that he meant to pass their country without a glance, they came out of the trees and showed themselves in their bravest manner, painted and armed, to try their courage against his. He could not leave that alone, and his men let fly. Then they turned in to the shore. Before Smith could land, the men on the bank knew who was in them, and they "threw downe their armes and desired peace."

The bows lay on the ground at the water's edge, and the men stood behind them with empty hands. A quarter of an hour before they had been ready to fight. Now they waited on the bank to see what the president would do, and the oars hung dripping over the water. Their orator came forward, a stout young man named Ocanindge. Behind him among the others stood the werowance who had got away from the fort in his irons. The river ran high and brown with the end of the winter, and the marsh grass along the bank was greening at the roots. A heron got up off the shallows and flapped away downriver. The men on the bank wore their hair as their warriors did, the right side shaved and the left grown long and knotted, and their faces were painted for the fight. The bows of the barges grounded on the mud, and the English sat in them with their pieces across their knees. Ocanindge spoke from the bank to the boats. Smith's men thought his speech worth remembering, and set down what he said:

"Captaine Smith, my master is here present in this company, thinking it Captaine Win, and not you; and of him, hee intended to have beene revenged, having never offended him." ... "the fishes swim, the fowles flie, and the very beastes strive to escape the snare and live: then blame not him being a man. Hee would entreat you remember your being a prisoner, what paines he tooke to save your life." ... "you have revenged it with our too great losse." ... "For we can plant any where, though with more labour; and we know you cannot live if you want our harvest and that reliefe wee bring you. If you promise us peace, we will beleeve you; if you proceed in reveng, we will abandon the Countrie."

The English heard him through with the river moving under them and the bows lying in the mud before them. Smith gave them his answer from the boat. He promised them peace "till they did us injury, upon condition they should bring in provision." The Paspaheghs took up their bows again. Both sides parted good friends, and the English pushed off from the mud and went back down the river toward the fort. On the bank the werowance stood among his own people. His country lay around him with its houses burned and its weirs gone. Planting time was coming, and the fields had to be cleared and hilled and sown. The peace would let them do it.

At the fort a complaint was waiting. The Chickahominies had gone on trading all this while and seemed friends, and under cover of the trade they had been the only thieves. Among the things gone from the fort was a pistol. The thief had fled. Two young men were taken in his place, two brothers known to be his confederates, tall and well made, and brought in. To get the pistol back, Smith put one of them in the dungeon. The other he sent out to fetch it, with twelve hours to come back with it, or his brother would hang. He went out at the gate at a run and into the dusk across the neck. The night came down cold over the island. The dungeon was a dark, close place with earth for its floor and no window, and the brother in it had nothing on but what he had been taken in. Outside the door the watch changed on the walls.

"Yet the President pittying the poore naked Salvage in the dungeon, sent him victuall and some charcole for fire. Ere midnight his brother returned with the pistoll: but the poore Salvage in the dungeon was so smothered with the smoke he had made, and so pittiously burnt that wee found him dead."

When the guard opened the door, the smoke rolled out into the lantern light. The charcoal had burned down to a red heap in the corner, and the prisoner lay beside it with his skin blistered, still and black with soot. They carried him out and laid him on the ground, and men came out of the huts in their shirts to look. The other brother stood over the body with the pistol given up. He wept and cried out so bitterly that the president, to quiet him, told him that if they would steal no more, he would make his brother alive again. Smith had little hope of it. The men in the fort worked over the body with what they had, rubbing aquavitae and vinegar into him and forcing it between his lips, chafing his hands and his chest. The fire was built up beside him, and the men took turns at the work through the small hours. After a time he breathed. He came back to life. But he was so drunk with the spirits and so frightened that he seemed out of his mind, understanding nothing he said or heard. The living brother grieved over that as bitterly as he had grieved over the death. Smith promised to cure that too, if the two of them would behave themselves afterward, and had the man laid by a fire to sleep. The brother sat up with him through what was left of the night.

By morning the ground around the fire had gone white with frost, and the man woke in his right senses, sat up, and knew his brother. His burns were dressed, and each brother was given a piece of copper. They went home across the neck so well content that the story ran ahead of them through the towns. It was told everywhere "for a miracle, that Captaine Smith could make a man alive that is dead." Smith had promised it blind.

This and many other such "pretty accidents" amazed and frightened Powhatan and all his people. From every quarter messengers came down the paths to the neck with presents on their backs and offers of peace, and the guard at the gate passed them in. The path across the neck was seldom empty. Things stolen months before came back to the fort, carried in by men from the towns, things the English had never asked after and had not missed. After that, when one of Powhatan's people was taken stealing, Powhatan and the man's own people sent him back to the fort to take his punishment there. Smith's men set down how it ended: "all the countrie became absolutely as free for us, as for themselves."