A Little Waste Ground

The corn went into the ground in hills. In the middle of May a woman of the Paspaheghs was working her family's field on the mainland near the neck, where the planted ground ran down to the edge of the marsh. She heaped each hill with a digging stick and her hands, pressed four or five kernels into the top, and set beans beside them to climb the stalks when the stalks came up. The squash went in between the hills. The field had been burned over before the planting, and the ash came up gray on her legs to the knee. Girls carried water up from the creek in clay pots, and the older women walked the rows behind them and looked at the work. Across the water lay the island, and below it in the shallows stood her people's fish weirs, lines of stakes driven into the mud and woven with brush, which the fish swam into on the flood. The work had to be done before the heat came on. She bent to the next hill.

Strangers had come to the island that week. Three ships lay along its shore so close that their cables ran to the trees, and their masts stood higher than the pines behind them. From the field she could watch the men on the island all day. They wore cloth from the neck to the ankle in the warm weather, and some of them wore shells of metal on their chests that caught the sun when they turned. Boats went back and forth between the ships and the bank without stopping. The strangers were cutting down the trees. She heard the axes going, then the split and the long rush of a pine coming down, then a shout, then the axes again on the fallen trunk. By the end of the week there was open ground at the upper end of the island where the woods had been, with pale stumps standing in it and men digging between the stumps. The smoke of their fires went up all day.

On their first night there, about midnight, some of her people had gone close to the island in canoes. A great shouting broke out among the strangers, and the canoes came back across the dark water fast. A few days later two men of rank went over by daylight, dressed for it, with crowns of dyed hair on their heads, carrying the werowance's word that he would come to the island and be merry with the strangers over a fat deer. The island lay inside Paspahegh country. The people's chief town had lately moved about ten miles upriver to better ground, but the families near the neck still farmed this shore and fished this water, and the strangers' ships lay over the water where they fished. The planting would not wait for any of it.

The strangers had been two weeks on the river before they chose the island. On the last day of April the ships worked up from Cape Henry to Cape Comfort, and five men were seen running along the shore. The captain had the shallop manned and rowed in, calling to them with signs of friendship, and they held off, wary, until he laid his hand on his heart. Then they put down their bows and arrows, came boldly to the water's edge, and made signs for the English to follow them to their town. Percy went with the boat. The town was Kecoughtan, at the mouth of the James on its north shore, and its people swam a creek ahead of the shallop to show the way. On the far side more of them were waiting.

When the English came ashore, the people made "a dolefull noise," laying their faces to the ground and scratching at the earth with their nails. The English stood and waited it out, and took it for idolatry. When the ceremony was over the people went into their houses, brought out mats, and spread them on the ground. Their chief men sat down together in a rank, and the common people carried out what food they had, with bread made from maize. The guests could not eat standing; they had to sit, and they sat down on a mat facing their hosts with their swords across their knees. After the bread came tobacco, smoked in a pipe of baked earth shaped like an English pipe but far bigger, its bowl joined to a fitting of fine copper. The pipe went down the rank and back. Its smoke hung over the mats in the still air.

Then the people danced in welcome. One man stood in the middle singing and beating one hand against the other, and the rest went round him, shouting and stamping on the ground and making faces. Percy watched their feet. Every foot came down with every other in a single stroke, while each man's hands, head, face and body went a way of its own. It went on for half an hour. When it was over the captain gave them beads and other small jewels. The men's hair was shaved close on the right side of the head with a shell and grown long on the left, tied up in a knot and stuck with feathers, and some wore birds' legs hung through their ears. Some had painted their bodies black and some red, in patterns of many colors. To Percy's eye they went more bravely than the people of the West Indies.

Four days later, on the fourth of May, the boats came to the Paspahegh werowance, chief of the country along the north side of the river. A werowance was the chief of a town or a district, and could be a man or a woman. The Paspaheghs gave them much welcome. An old man stood and made a long oration, loud and full of vehement action, and the English heard all of it and understood almost none. While they were there another chief came across the James from the south shore in his canoe, the werowance Percy called "of Rapahanna." He did not like finding the strangers with the Paspaheghs, and he wanted them at his own town instead. The captain was unwilling. The day was nearly spent, and the English went back to the ships for the night.

The next morning his messenger came out to fetch them. The English gave the man trifles, which pleased him, and manned the shallop with muskets and shields, and the messenger guided them across. The werowance came down to the waterside with all his train behind him, men Percy thought "as goodly men as any I have seene of Savages or Christians." He walked in front of them playing on a flute made of a reed. On his head he wore a crown of deer's hair dyed red and worked into the shape of a rose, fastened about his knot of hair, with a great plate of copper on the other side of his head and two long feathers rising from the crown like a pair of horns. His body was painted crimson all over. His face was painted blue and sprinkled with something that glittered, which the English took for silver ore. Bracelets of pearl hung from his ears, and through each ear went a bird's claw set with copper or gold. He had his mat spread on the ground and sat down on it with great majesty and took a pipe of tobacco, his people standing round him, and through all of it he kept his face grave, without a smile. When he had rested he rose and made signs for them to follow.

He went first. The English and his people followed him up a steep hill by fine paths through the woods, past springs running out of the high ground, and through wide cornfields on the slopes. The young corn stood in its hills on either side of the path. At the top of the hill was his town, and there he entertained them with every courtesy. The werowance asked nothing of them that Percy could see. He had wanted them at his town, and they had come.

Three days after that, upriver in the country of the Appamattucks, the people of the Appomattox, the English were met another way. Many armed men came down to the landing with bows and arrows, and with swords on their backs edged with sharp stones and pieces of iron. One of their chief men stood out in front of them, cross-legged, with an arrow ready in his bow in one hand and a pipe of tobacco in the other, and boldly demanded what the strangers were doing there and told them to be gone. The English made signs of peace until the signs were understood. Then they were let land in quiet. In the space of a week they had been feasted, competed for and warned off.

On the twelfth they went back down to the ships and looked at a point of land downriver that seemed made to settle on. The soil was good and the timber excellent. Wild vines as thick as a man's thigh ran up into the tops of the trees, and the men found turkey nests full of eggs and birds with crimson wings. The whole company was content to settle there. But the ships could not ride near that shore. The next day, the thirteenth, they came some eight miles on to a place in Paspahegh country where the channel ran so close under the land that the ships were moored to the trees in six fathoms of water. It was a low island of woods and marsh about forty miles up from the bay, joined to the mainland by a narrow neck.

Deep water under the bank was what the point had lacked. A ship moored to the bank could be unloaded straight onto the land, with none of the slow work of ferrying stores through shallows in the boats, and her guns would lie over the camp from the river. With the neck the only way in by land, a few men could hold it against many. The ships could also be away on the next ebb if they had to go. The island's edges were low and wet, and marsh lay behind it. The ground was Paspahegh ground.

On the fourteenth they landed every man. Some were set to work on the fortification and others to watch and ward, and the council chose Wingfield to be its president. Smith had been named to the council on the Company's list and was still not admitted to it, so he had no part in the choosing. That night canoes came close to the quarter, an alarm went up, and the canoes went away. The werowance's messengers followed by daylight, with his promise of a deer. The men slept on the ground under old sails, with the guard changing through the night and the frogs loud in the marsh.

He came on the eighteenth, with a hundred armed men round him in a guard, their bows and arrows in their hands. The English had been four days at work. The clearing was full of stumps and cut brush, raw timber lay in piles where the axes had dropped it, and the ground by the water was trodden to mud where the boats came in. The men on watch stood with their match lit, and the laborers had come in from the trees with their axes and their hands blistered from four days of felling. The air smelled of sap and turned earth. Flies came off the marsh in the heat, and the gentlemen in their wool doublets sweated where they stood. Percy thought the Paspaheghs had come "to execute their villany," and were waiting for the chance. The werowance made great signs to the English to lay their arms away. They would not trust him that far. Then he made signs that he would give them as much land as they would desire to take.

His men were in a throng among the English by then, inside the works and among the stumps. One of them took a hatchet from one of the company. The Englishman saw him do it, took it back from him by force, and struck him over the arm. Another of the werowance's men came at the Englishman with a wooden sword. All round the clearing the English took up their arms. The werowance saw it and went suddenly away with all his company, in great anger. The offer of land went with him.

Two days later he sent forty of his men to the quarter with a deer. They wanted to lie in the fort that night, and the English would not have them, for fear of treachery. One of the gentlemen had a target, a round shield he trusted to turn a light shot, and he set it up against a tree and asked one of the visitors to shoot at it. The man took an arrow from his back, drew it hard in his bow, and shot the target "a foote thorow, or better," which was strange to the English, because a pistol could not pierce that target. They set up a steel target next. He shot again, and his arrow burst all to pieces. He pulled out another arrow and bit it in his teeth, and went away in a great rage. Percy wrote the visit up afterward in one line:

"Pasphia was as good as his word; for hee sent Venison, but the Sawse came within a few dayes after."

On the twenty-first, Newport took the shallop up the river to find its head, with Smith and Percy in the party, twenty-two men by Smith's count. Smith was still not sworn of the council. The men sat close on the thwarts with their arms between their feet and a tarpaulin rolled at the stern for the rain, and they rowed when the wind failed and sailed when it served. Above the island the river ran between the finest woods they had yet seen, beech and oak, cedar and cypress, walnut and sassafras, with wild vines hanging in great clusters from the branches and meadows opening along the banks. Sturgeon rolled in the channel. In the evenings deer came down to drink at the edge of the water. The river ebbed and flowed, Percy reckoned, a hundred and sixty miles. Its water ran fresh and brown under the bow. That spring Percy watched the women of the country make bread. They pounded the corn into flour, worked it with hot water into a paste, shaped it into balls and cakes, and boiled them in a pot of seething water, then laid them on a smooth stone to harden as well as in an oven. The women did that work and the rest of the heavy work besides, and the men, as Percy saw it, took their pleasure in hunting and in war.

The falls came on the twenty-fourth, fifty or sixty miles above the island, where the river came down over a long reach of rocks and no boat could go higher. There they set up a cross at the head of the river and named it Kings River, Percy's name for it, and proclaimed James King of England to have the most right unto it. The noise of the falls was in their ears the whole time, a steady roar over the rocks that the men had to raise their voices against. When the cross stood they shipped the men again and turned back downstream for the fort.

Below the falls, on the way down, they came to Powhatan's town, the town from which the great chief of all these rivers took his name. Its houses of mats and bark stood back from the water among their fields. Newport went ashore, "suffering none to goe with him." The rest stayed in the shallop. Percy sat in the boat with the others while the oarsmen held her off the bank against the current and the musketeers kept their match burning, and they watched Newport walk up from the water toward the houses with a hatchet to give. People came down to the bank to look at the boat, men with the right side of the head shaved and the left knotted high, children at their legs, and behind them smoke from the cooking fires going up among the houses. The roar of the falls came down the river behind the shallop, fainter here, steady as weather. The current pulled at her, and the oarsmen held her where she was, their backs to the town. What was said up among the houses did not carry to the boat. The men waited.

Newport presented the werowance of Powhatan's town, the chief who held the place below the falls, with the hatchet. He took it joyfully and was well pleased with it. His people were less pleased. They "murmured at our planting in the Countrie," and the werowance turned and answered them. Newport brought the answer back down to the boat, and Percy set it down as it reached him:

"Why should you bee offended with them as long as they hurt you not, nor take any thing away by force. They take but a litle waste ground, which doth you nor any of us any good."

To Percy the werowance had answered "very wisely of a Savage." The town was divided over them. The strangers had been argued over before they knew there was an argument, between people who murmured at the planting and a chief who told them to let it be. He had set the terms in the same breath as the defense: no hurt done, and nothing taken by force. By his reckoning the island was ground that did nobody any good. Six days before, on that island, an Englishman had taken a hatchet back by force from a Paspahegh and struck him over the arm.

Newport came back down to the boat. The werowance kept the hatchet. The shallop put off from the bank and swung into the current, and the oarsmen bent to it, and the town fell away behind them above the water. Fifty or sixty miles below, on the island, the men left behind were at work among the stumps on the fort they had begun on the fourteenth, in the Paspaheghs' country. The walls were not yet up.