A Little Waste Ground

The pardons went out of the fort in William Volda's keeping. He was a Switzer by birth, and that summer Smith sent him over the neck and up the paths toward Powhatan's country "with pardons and promises to regaine them": the Dutchmen who had gone over to Powhatan in the winter, and one more English runaway who had followed them. He passed the blockhouse on the neck with the president's leave and went on into the woods alone. The paths were hard and dry under the trees. In the towns he passed the corn stood high in the hills, still green, with the tassels coming, and the women were out among it with their hoes in the early part of the day, before the heat. The Dutchmen had been gone half a year, supplying Powhatan with arms. Francis, the one who had come back to the glasshouse in disguise, still sat in irons inside the palisade. The other two were fifty miles off with Powhatan. A pardon from the president, carried by a man of their own trade and tongue, was the best the fort could offer them. Volda carried it to them and stayed.

What he gave them was everything they asked for. He told them how the fort stood and brought them whatever they needed to act on it. Since the winter the Dutchmen had looked to the sea for their deliverance. They "expected the Spanyard", and meant to do him good service when he came. The summer had opened a door sooner. The want had scattered the company down the river to the oyster banks, out to Point Comfort, up to the falls and into the towns, and the fort was thinner than it had been since the first year. They went to Powhatan with a plan. If he would lend them his forces, they would "destroie our hogs, fire our towne, and betraie our Pinnas", and bring most of the English companies under his service and subjection besides. They had talked it over with men inside the fort. The discontented there were many, and many had agreed.

Two of them would not go on with it. Thomas Dowse and Thomas Mallard went to the president of their own accord and told him the whole of it. Smith did his best to keep it quiet. He told the two of them to stay in the plot and go on as before, and he set ambushes. They were to bring the Dutchmen and Powhatan's men down the paths to the neck, where Smith's men would be lying in the woods on both sides, and few of those who came were meant to get back off the peninsula alive. For some days the fort went about its business on top of the secret. The gatherers brought in their daily loads under the president's order, and the boats went out to the weirs at the turn of each tide. The two informers went to and fro on the paths and came back with news, and only the president knew what they were carrying.

The ground for the ambush was the neck itself. The path from the mainland came down through oak and pine to the narrow strip where the island began, with marsh on one hand and the river on the other, and a party coming along it could walk nowhere but where the path went. The woods stood thick to its edges. Smith's men were picked for it and shown their places in the brush, where men could lie on their bellies behind a fallen trunk and see the path without being seen from it. In the heat the woods were full of flies and the smell of the marsh, and the men who went out to learn the ground came back with their shirts dark at the back and their legs scratched to the knee. A matchlock in an ambush had to be kept alight without showing, and the soldiers knew how: the coal of the match cupped in the hand, the cord coiled short, the smoke let out low among the leaves. The blockhouse garrison went on taking the Powhatans' trade at the neck as it always had, and the paths went on carrying baskets and game.

Then the rumor got out, and the company would not wait. Men came to the president in a body and pressed him to cut off the Dutchmen at once. Some offered to go and cut their throats in front of Powhatan himself. Smith chose two. Richard Wiffin, the gentleman who had carried word alone across the snow to Smith at Pamunkey in the winter, and Jeffrey Abbot were sent "to stab or shoot them." They went up through the woods in the heat, with their pieces and their swords, to where the Dutchmen were. When they found them, the Dutchmen had excuses ready. They blamed Volda, believing it was he who had given their plan away, and talked fast. "Abbot would not; yet Wiffin would", seeing it all for deceit. One was willing and one was not. The business went no further than that.

Powhatan sent his own word after them. His messengers came down the paths to the fort and told Captain Smith that "it was not his fault to detaine them", that he would not hinder the president's men in doing what the president commanded, and that he did not and would not keep the Dutchmen or anyone else to give the president offense. He gave no order to hand them over. The message left them where they were, fifty miles off. Volda came and went between the two sides and kept his place in both, and the fort still took him for its own man.

The matter was unsettled when a ship came up the river. She was a sturgeon fisher, under Captain Samuel Argall, her master, sent out from England "to fish for Sturgion, with a ship well furnished with wine and bisket". She had not come to relieve anyone. Her men meant to take fish in the river and carry them home. The company crowded the bank when her boat came in, and the smell of her hold came ashore with her people: tar and bilge water, and under it bread. The company had lived since spring on fish, roots and the country's game. The fort was in no state to refuse her cargo: "we tooke it at a price". Smith left her master enough victual to carry his ship back to England. The casks were rolled up the bank and into the store, and for the first time since the rats were found in the corn the store had biscuit in it.

Argall's men went about their own business in the river. They worked their nets in the channel below the fort, where the great fish lay that summer, and hauled them in over the side, and the fort's men watched from the bank as the gray backs came up thrashing into the boats. The fort had lived on the same fish all summer, dried on racks and pounded into bread. The Londoners had come across the whole ocean to take them. Her people came ashore in the evenings and sat at the fort's fires with the company, and the company asked them for news of England. Argall's ship lay at her anchor through the days that followed, taking in fish.

The ships came after her. The blockhouse on Hog Island had been built to give warning of shipping, and Smith's scouts brought him word of a fleet in the river, standing up from the bay. Seven sail. He had been told of no supply. He took them for Spaniards. In the winter of 1607 he had told Powhatan that the English had come ashore in flight from the Spaniards. Now, "supposing them Spaniards," his men wrote, he ordered his affairs to meet them, and the company little feared their coming or the fight. The men left at the fort were turned out with their pieces. Match was lit and coiled, the gunners stood by the ordnance in the bulwarks, and the boats were drawn up under the bank. The towns that had fed the fort since spring offered help. The Powhatans were not "unwilling to aide and assist us with their best power."

It took the fleet the better part of a day to come up. The men at the palisade stood in the sun with their pieces and watched the river below the island, where the reach opened toward Hog Island and the bay, and for a long while there was nothing on it. Some of them had stood in the half-built fort on the same ground two years before, when the attackers came through the corn, and they knew what an attack looked like from inside. The gunners had sponged their pieces and laid the shot ready beside them. Cooks kept the fires going. The sick lay in the huts and listened to the drum. Then the topsails showed over the trees at the bend, one and then another, until there were seven of them, coming slowly against the current on what wind there was. The men counted them aloud as they came.

They were English. The ships worked up past the island through the heat of the afternoon, their sails hanging slack between the puffs of wind off the water, and the red cross showed at their mastheads as they came on. They came to anchor in the channel off the fort, where the ships of every supply had lain, and the men at the palisade put up their pieces. Boats came ashore loaded to the gunwales. They carried men in good clothes and men in poor ones, boys, chests and bundles and casks. Most of them had not stood on land since England. They came up the bank on legs that had not walked on a floor that kept still in weeks, and stood looking at the huts. The fort's people stood and looked back at them. Their own clothes had been burned in the fire of the first winter and patched and worn through since. They were brown from the summer and thin from the spring, and some of them were barefoot. There were more strangers on the landing that afternoon than the fort had seen in all the time since it was built.

The landing went on for days. The ships' boats came and went between the anchorage and the bank from morning to dark, and the landing filled with chests, barrels, rolls of bedding, coops, tools and arms, faster than anyone could find room for them. Newcomers walked the lanes of the fort in twos and threes and looked into the church and the storehouse and the well, and asked where the gold was, and where the towns were, and whether the Powhatans would come. Their fires were everywhere at night, in the lanes, under the palisade, along the bank, and the smoke of them hung over the island in the still air. Among the faces in the boats the men of the first ships found three they knew.

The newcomers told the fort what had been done in London. The Company had altered the government. Nine ships and about 500 people had sailed in May under a new charter. A small ketch had been lost on the way in a hurricane. The flagship was the Sea Venture, and in her were Sir Thomas Gates, who carried the new commission, and Sir George Somers with him, with 150 people, "their bils of loading with al manner of directions", and most of the fleet's provision. She had not come in. The seven ships had lost her at sea and had not seen her since. Nobody on the bank could say whether she was afloat. She had been wrecked on Bermuda in late July.

"With the other 7, as Captaines, arived Ratliffe (whose right name was Sickelmore), Martin, and Archer" ... "so railing and exclaiming against Captaine Smith, that they mortally hated him ere ever they see his face." The three were men of the first council. Ratcliffe, the second president, had been deposed in the summer of 1608 and sent home to England a prisoner the winter after. Archer, wounded in both hands on the first night at Cape Henry, had gone home in Newport's ship in the spring of 1608, and Martin, of the old council, in the Phoenix that June. Now they came back up the same bank, "graced by the title of Captaines of the passengers", with the ships' companies behind them. The line about their hatred belongs to Smith's men. They wrote it for him, after the event. But the three had been troublesome all the way across, and they came ashore with followers.

The newcomers had heard of the president before they met him, and what they had heard came from his enemies. Among them were "unruly gallants packed thether by their friends to escape il destinies", men their families had wanted out of England, and they had come expecting a new government. They were told it was on its way in the missing ship. The Company in London had already put an end to Smith's presidency. It had put the paper that said so in the Sea Venture, and the Sea Venture had not come. Smith held the old commission, and the old commission was the only authority in Virginia that could be laid on a table. The captains could tell the company what the new one said. They could not show it.

The quarrel was fought out in the open, in the lanes and at the fires and on the ground before the church where Smith had given the company his law in the winter. The captains came with their passengers around them, and the old company stood with the president, and the two sides talked across each other. Some said the old government was ended in London and Smith was president of nothing. Others answered that until Gates came there was no other. Men who had been in Virginia a week argued the country with men who had buried half their friends in it. The gallants had arms and time, and nothing in the fort had been arranged for them. An order given in the morning was countermanded by noon, and by evening nobody knew whose order stood.

They tried every form of rule in turn, and each lasted until its makers tired of it. Some days they would have one man govern and the next day another. Smith's men set down how it went: "to day the old commission, to morrow the new, the next day by neither. In fine, they would rule all or ruine all." The fort now had several hundred more mouths in it and around it, with most of their provision in the missing flagship, and the corn in the towns' fields was not yet in. The newcomers would not answer to the president. The old company would not answer to the newcomers' captains. The new men found room where they could, under sails stretched between the huts and against the palisade, and drew their rations from a store that had been short since spring.

Smith held to the commission he had. His men wrote that he "would willingly have left all" and gone home to England, seeing the men who wanted to rule and his own authority changed under him without warning. But as the weeks went on there was small hope that the new commission would ever arrive, and he would not let the factions run any further. He took the chief of the troublemakers and had them "laid by the heeles", in irons, until he had leisure to deal with them. In the spring the fort's fetters had held Kemps in the new ground. Now they held Englishmen.

To take away the occasions of more trouble, he broke up the crowd. George Percy, the earl's son, asked leave to go home to England, and had his "request granted, to returne for England". Francis West, with 120 men, was to go up the river and plant at the falls. Martin, with nearly as many, was to go down to Nansemond, the country on the south side at the mouth of the James, where Smith had taken corn by force the autumn before. Each party was to carry its due proportion of the provisions, according to its numbers.

West had been to the falls once already that summer, with men sent out to live on what the country gave, and they had come back with a few berries and acorns. This time he was to stay. The men told off for his party went through what they owned and made it into bundles: a shirt, a blanket, a knife, a spoon, whatever the fire and the summer had left them, and the newcomers their chests. The old hands among them knew the river to the falls and the towns along it, and what the woods there would and would not give a man who did not know how to hunt them. The newcomers knew the river as a name. Martin's men made ready the same way for the south shore. For two days the fort was full of the noise of men packing, and of arguments over who was to go and who to stay.

The store was opened and the shares counted out on the ground before the storehouse, in piles that the men of each party watched being made: meal and biscuit, powder and match and shot, axes and spades and kettles. Men carried them down to the boats on the ebb and stowed them under the thwarts. West's men went aboard first. Among them were gallants who had been in Virginia only weeks and had never seen the falls or a Powhatan town. Martin, who had been sick for much of the first year inside these walls, went down to his own boats with his company, a captain again. The tide turned. West's boats pulled out into the channel and swung upriver toward the falls, the men bending to the oars against the current, and Martin's went the other way, down past the ships at anchor, toward the bay and the towns on the south shore. The newcomers who were staying stood on the landing until both parties were out of sight, and then went back in through the gate.