A Little Waste Ground

Kemps worked in irons. The fetters on his ankles let him take a short step and no longer one. He went down the new ground that way through the spring mornings, with Kinsock a few rows off and an English guard at the edge of the field with his piece across his knees. He was one of the two men Smith had brought in bound after the Paspahegh werowance broke out of the fort, and the two had been kept in fetters ever since. They worked every day. Kemps showed the company how a field in that country was ordered: the earth raised in hills a long pace apart, four or five grains of corn set in each, beans put in beside them to climb the stalks, the ground between left for the hoe. The English had set corn before, in the first May, with their arms packed in baskets. Now a prisoner taught them how to plant it. Between them that spring they dug and planted 30 or 40 acres. The soil was black and soft where the old trees had been girdled and burned. The corn came up green in the hills by the time the dogwood was done.

The rest of the island was busy around the two men in fetters. After the peace with the Paspaheghs nobody came out of the woods with a bow. The company went about its business in a quiet it had not known since the first summer. Men at the kilns in the woods boiled pine into pitch and tar, and burned wood down for soap ashes. In three months they had 3 or 4 last. A last of pitch or tar was fourteen barrels, and the barrels stood in a row by the landing with the smell of resin over them. At the glasshouse on the mainland the furnace produced a trial of glass. Inside the fort a party dug a well and struck sweet water, which the fort had been without since it was built. For two years they had drunk the river, salt at the flood and foul at the ebb.

Carpenters put up some 20 houses and re-covered the church. Men knotted nets and drove new weirs in the shallows. At the neck, where the island met the mainland, they built a blockhouse and kept a garrison in it, to take the Powhatans' trade there and to stop the thieving that went both ways. Nobody passed or repassed it, Powhatan or English, without the president's order. Three sows had been landed. In a year they increased to 60 and odd pigs. Near 500 chickens raised themselves in the lanes and the brush without being given any food at all. The hogs went down the river to Hog Island, the island seven miles below the fort. A second blockhouse went up there with a garrison of its own, to give warning of any ship coming in from the bay. The men on Hog Island had time between watches. They split clapboard and wainscot, and felled trees and squared them, against the ships' coming.

The last work of the spring was a fort for a retreat. The company chose a high hill near a convenient river, very hard to take and easy to hold. Men carried tools up its sides and began to cut the ditch and raise the walls. Ere it was half finished the work stopped. A party went to the cashed corn, the corn laid by in the winter, to take out the next issue. They found it half rotten. The baskets had sweated in the warm weather and the grain at the bottom had gone to a black paste that stank when they broke it. Men lifted the baskets out one by one and carried them into the light, and each one was lighter than it should have been. The smell followed the baskets out into the lane. What was not rotten the rats had eaten. There were many thousands of them, "increased first from the ships", and they had tunneled through the store, leaving husks and droppings and a dust of meal that rose when the men turned it. In February the cape merchant had counted the store and found enough to last until harvest. By the start of summer they did not know how to keep the little they had.

There was "nothing in the countrie but what nature afforded." The towns around the fort could not make up the difference. A Powhatan town's corn was planted in April and May and not gathered until late summer, and by spring its people had little to spare from the year before. The fields Kemps had taught them to plant were green and months from bearing. The company could not feed its prisoners, so it let them go. The smith knocked the fetters off Kemps and Kinsock at the forge. The two of them stood in the lane rubbing the raw places on their ankles while the company told them they were free, "for want of victuall". The 1612 book, written by Smith's own men, says the two had been so well used "that they little desired it." They went home anyway, out through the blockhouse on the neck and along the path into the woods, walking at a full stride for the first time since the winter. Within days the country sent its answer. For 16 days the people brought game across the neck to the blockhouse, squirrels strung by the tails, turkeys with their heads hanging, deer slung on poles between two men. The garrison let them through. The cooks skinned and jointed at the fires until their arms were bloody to the elbow, and the smoke of roasting meat hung over the huts at night. On the leanest of those days the count was "(when least) 100 a daie of squirrils, Turkies, Deare, and other wilde beastes."

Sixteen days of venison did not make a harvest. The want of corn ended all the company's works, because finding food was now work enough for every man in it. Smith sent the company out to live where food was, and scattered it along the river.

"60 or 80 with Ensigne Laxon were sent downe the river to live upon oysters: and 20 with lieftenant Percie to trie for fishing at point Comfort, but in 6 weekes, they would not agree once to cast out their net."

Laxon's people went down to the oyster banks in the brackish reaches, where the beds came up out of the water at the ebb. At low water the banks ran out gray and glistening a long way from the shore. They waded out in the mud with knives and baskets, opened oysters on the shore and ate them raw, or roasted them in the coals until the shells sprang. The heaps of shells grew by their fires. The tide came back twice a day and covered the beds again. Their shirts and breeches never dried, their hands were cut across the palms from the shell edges. The wind off the bay came up the river every afternoon and blew the smoke along the beach into their faces. They lived by its hours.

Percy's twenty went farther, to Point Comfort, the point at the mouth of the James opposite Kecoughtan. This was George Percy, the earl's son, keeper of the list of the dead in the first summer and one of the two gentlemen holding the house at Pamunkey in January. Point Comfort was sand and scrub and open water, with the whole bay running in past it and the fish moving in the channel off the beach. Gulls worked the shallows at the turn of every tide. The men built their fires in the lee of the dunes, and at night they could see nothing seaward but the dark and hear nothing but the surf. The twenty had a net. In six weeks they did not put it into the water once. What they ate in those six weeks, and why the net stayed dry on the sand, the book does not say. It gives the six weeks and the net and leaves Percy's name beside them.

As many again went the other way, up the river with Francis West, "brother to the Lord De-la-Ware", to the falls at the head of the river, where the first river party had set its cross two years before. The river there broke white over a long stair of rocks, and the noise of it carried through the woods for miles. The woods were full of game for men who knew how to take it. West's men did not. They spent their days going through the oaks with their eyes on the ground, turning over the leaves for last year's mast, and the acorns they found were bitter until they were boiled. They came back with "a fewe berries and acornes".

The fort kept the rest, and the sick. What remained in the store was shared out, every one an equal proportion. Until then some 30 or 40 men had fed all the others. They went on doing it. There was more sturgeon in the river that summer than dogs and men could eat. The great fish came up out of the bay to spawn and lay in the channel off the island, some of them longer than the men who went out to take them. The boats came back low in the water with their gray backs showing over the gunwales. The industrious cut the flesh in strips and hung it on racks over slow fires. Flies came in clouds to the racks and the guts thrown down the bank. They dried the flesh, pounded it, mixed it with the roe and with sorrel and other herbs, and made bread of it and good meat. Others went into the marshes for roots and came back with "as much Tockwough roots in a day as would make them bread a weeke." They were digging up the tubers that Powhatan women dug every spring, and baking them as the women did. Those who would gather lived well enough on fish and berries and roots. Of the whole company, some 150 would not gather at all unless they were forced to it.

The Powhatans often brought wild fruits to trade. Some in the fort wanted to pay with everything the fort had: the kettles, the hoes, the tools and the iron, and then swords and pieces, and at last the very ordnance and the houses, if it would let them sit idle. Smith would not sell to those "distracted lubberly gluttons", who would have given the whole fort to the Powhatans for a summer's eating. What they wanted most was a basket of corn they heard of at Powhatan's, fifty miles from the fort. Smith bought near half of it to quiet them. For the other half they would have sold their souls, though it would not have fed them a week.

The talk did not stop. Men came to Smith with complaints and suggestions and devices, and all of them ran toward one end, to make the want a reason to abandon the country and go home. For a while want forced him to bear it. Then he found out who was behind it. It was a man named Dyer, "a most craftie knave, and his ancient maligner", and Smith punished him. With the rest he argued the case in front of the company, in the open ground of the fort under the summer sun. The sick were brought to the doors of the huts to hear it. The men stood with their hats in their hands or on their heads as they pleased, sunburned and thin, some of them still smelling of the oyster banks and the fish racks. The president stood before them with nobody left on the council to stand beside him.

He called them "Fellow souldiers". He said he had not thought any of them so false as to spread it, or so many so simple as to believe it, that he meant to starve them. Nor had Powhatan corn even for himself, he said, and if Smith knew where corn was to be had he would get it. He said he had not thought any of them so malicious as he now saw a great many were, and that he would do his best even for his worst enemy all the same. They should "dreame no longer of this vaine hope from Powhatan". He would force them out of their idleness and punish any man who railed. By the hazard of his own life he had saved theirs more than once, he said, when their own wills would have starved them. He swore by the God that made him that since hunger could not make them gather for themselves, they would gather for themselves and for the sick as well. "As yet I never had more from the store then the worst of you," he told them, and he would divide what private provision he had among the sick before their eyes. Then he gave the order.

"And this Salvage trash you so scornfully repine at, being put in your mouthes, your stomacks can digest it; and therefore I will take a course you shall provide it. The sicke shal not starve, but equally share of all our labours; and every one that gathereth not every day as much as I doe, the next daie, shall be set beyond the river, and for ever bee banished from the fort: and live there or starve."

Beyond the river was the south shore, with the woods coming down to the water and no fort and no store. Many murmured that the order was very cruel. The next morning men who had not stooped for a root all summer went out over the neck with baskets and digging sticks. They came back at evening with their loads held where the president could see them. It made most of them bestir themselves, and the book's tally for the season is that "of 200 men (except they were drowned), there died not past 7 or 8." The threat had done the work. Captain Winne, who had taken the night boats against the Paspahegh shore after the werowance's escape, was not among the 7 or 8. "As for Captaine Win and Mr Ley, they died ere this want happened". They were buried before the corn was opened.

Others went out of the fort altogether and lived with the Powhatans.

"Many were billitted among the Salvages, whereby we knewe all their passages, fieldes, and habitations; how to gather and use their fruits as well as themselves."

They were treated so well that some of the soldiers ran away to find Kemps, their old prisoner, carrying things they had stolen from the fort and promising that his people could take revenge on Smith with their help. By the book's account Kemps was glad of the chance to show his love for the English. He made sport of the runaways instead. He showed his countrymen, by them, how he had been used, and fed them by the law he had lived under in irons, "who would not worke must not eat", until they were nearly starved. All the while he threatened to beat them to death. They had come to his town expecting to be feasted as guests. They found themselves set to carry wood and water and dig, with a man who had worn English fetters standing over them and telling his neighbors how it had been. They could not get away from him until he brought them back to the fort himself, thin and frightened. Smith gave Kemps what contented him and punished the runaways. Many others who had meant to follow them stayed at home and worked.

Other men came back to the fort from farther off. Michael Sicklemore, whom Smith had sent south to Chowanoke with two guides at the turn of the year, came back from the country below the James. He had gone to look for Raleigh's lost company, the settlers left on Roanoke more than twenty years before, and he "found little hope and lesse certainetie" of them. Nathaniel Powell and Anas Todkill, the two writers of the second bay voyage, were taken by the Quiyoughcohanocks, the people on the south shore of the James, to the Mangoages, farther south and inland, to search there. Nothing could be learned of the lost company there "but they were all dead." The Quiyoughcohanock king had always been the friendliest of the werowances to the English, and all through those weeks he often sent Smith presents "to praie to his God for raine, or his corne would perish; for his Gods were angrie all this time."

The men in the towns lived the summer as the towns lived it. They slept in houses of bent saplings under mats and ate from the same pots as the families who kept them. In the mornings they went out with the women to the fields and with the men to the weirs. They learned which path ran to which town and where it crossed the creeks, which fields belonged to which households, when the berries came in along the woods' edges and which roots could be eaten and how they had to be cooked first. At night they sat at the fires while the talk went on in a language most of them could follow only in pieces, and some began to answer in it. Some of them had never handled a hoe in England, and they learned to use one here from women who laughed at the way they held it. They watched the corn in the hills rise toward the tassel and waited for it like everyone else. Down the river, on Hog Island, the clapboard and wainscot the garrison had cut lay stacked by the water, against the ships' coming.