A Little Waste Ground

Martin's men ate from the Nansemonds' fields in the last weeks of the summer. The corn stood in its hills along the creeks with the ears filling and the bean vines climbing the stalks. In the mornings the women went out to it with their baskets while the strangers sat in the shade of the houses and watched. The people there were paying the English their contribution, and they used Martin kindly. They brought bread of their own corn to his company, and fish from the weirs. The newcomers who had come off the ships in August ate their first Powhatan food sitting on mats outside houses of bent saplings, with the town's children standing just out of reach to look at them. Dogs ran among the houses, and in the still mornings the smoke of the cooking fires hung low over the creek. Some of Martin's men had been on this shore the autumn before, when Smith's barges took corn here by force, and they knew which creek ran to which town. The rest knew the country as a name and a direction. Martin was their captain. For three hours, not long before, he had been more than that.

The fort had been crowded that month, the newcomers camped in every corner of the palisade and the ships riding off the island with their crews ashore by day. Smith's year as president was nearly out when the companies went down the river and up it, and he had made Martin president in his place. Martin gave the office back "within 3 houres". He knew his own insufficiency, the Proceedings say, and the company's scorn, and the general conceit of his unworthiness. So the presidency went back to Smith, who still held the old commission and had nobody to hand it on to while the new one lay somewhere at sea with the missing flagship. Martin went down to the south shore with his companies. At Nansemond he was a guest again.

In the middle of that kindness Martin seized the king. He took "this poore naked king, with his monuments, houses, and the Ile he inhabited", and fortified himself there. The island lay in the creek with water on every side of it. On it stood the king's houses and his monuments, and now Martin's men among them with their muskets. They dug and cut and set up what posts they could find, in heat that brought the flies off the marsh in clouds. Their match stayed lit day and night. One watch stood at the water's edge and another stood over the king, who sat among his guards in his own house. Across the creek the town went on with its harvest in plain sight of the island, and canoes moved along the far bank at a distance a musket could not carry. The bread stopped coming. The men ate the biscuit and meal they had carried down from the fort as their share of the store, and drank from the creek.

The same pages put the seizure down to his "jealous feare and cowardize". Smith's men wrote Martin's part. By their account his fear showed so plainly from behind his new works that it gave the Nansemonds the courage to come at him, and they did. Arrows came in over the posts from the reeds and the water. The matchlocks answered into the smoke and the green, at men who did not stand still to be shot. Some of the English went down inside their own works with shafts in them, and the rest kept their heads below the posts. The Nansemonds killed his men. They took back their king. They went through their own fields and gathered the corn, ear by ear and basket by basket, and carried it off into the woods. From behind the posts the English watched the hills stripped to the stalks. The loaded baskets went off along the paths on the backs of the women who had brought them bread a few weeks before. They took "more then 1000 bushels of corne", and Martin never once came out to stop them.

He sent for help instead. His messenger went to the president, who was by then up at the falls with his own trouble, and "30 good shotte" were sent down to him from the island at once. At the fort the thirty were told off from the companies that had stayed behind, old soldiers and newcomers both. Each carried his musket, his powder and shot, and a coil of match over his shoulder. They went down to the boats on the ebb while the men left at the fort stood on the landing in the heat to see them off. The boats ran down past Hog Island and across the wide water to the south shore. It was a long day at the oars, with the sun coming off the river into their faces. The thirty reached the island with their muskets and their powder, and they did "just nothing" there. Before long they were on their way back to the fort, complaining of Martin's childishness, and Martin came back with them. The fort saw him step out of the boat at the landing without the men he had taken down. On the island the men he had left kept their match lit behind the posts, ate down what was left of their share, and watched the empty fields across the creek for a boat from the fort.

The president had gone up the river after West. Francis West had set his 120 down at the falls and started back to revisit the fort. Smith met him on the way, West coming down as Smith went up, and each went on. Above the fort the James narrowed between bluffs and swung in long bends, past the mouth of the Appamattucks' river and the towns on the high ground. The tide ran up it a long way before it gave out against the current. The ebb and the flood carried the boats in turn; at slack water the men rowed. At night they lay on the banks in their clothes, with a fire against the mosquitoes and a man awake by the boat. They ate fish taken at dusk and roasted on sticks. In the shallows above the last bends the water ran clear over stones, and the woods came down to it thick with oak and walnut and grapevines. Herons stood in the shallows, and turtles slid off the logs as the boats came by. Then the river broke white across a ledge of rock from bank to bank. Just below the broken water stood Powhatan's town at the falls, fifty or sixty miles above the fort by river, its houses in their fields on the high ground above the north bank. Two summers before, Newport's shallop had come up to these rocks, and Newport had given the werowance of Powhatan's town a hatchet. His people had murmured at the strangers' planting, and he had answered them.

West's company was not in the town. It was seated on low ground by the river, in a place "subject to the rivers inundation", and pressed on every side by inconveniences no company could live with long. The newcomers had put up huts of poles and boughs and old sail, with their chests and bedding on the bare earth. They cooked over open fires on ground that a freshet off the mountains would put under water. Mosquitoes came off the riverbank at dusk, and the men slept with their faces under their blankets in the heat. Their ship lay in the stream off the camp with the store aboard her, and the meal came ashore from her a boatload at a time. The gallants among them had been in Virginia only weeks. They had brought swords, fine shirts and ideas of gold, and few of them could set a snare or work a hoe. Behind them, inland above the falls, lay the country of the Monacans, Powhatan's enemies, and the men of the falls towns kept their bows close when they went out to hunt.

For remedy, Smith "sent presently to Powhatan, to sell him the place called Powhatan, promising to defend him against the Monacans". The message carried conditions. Powhatan and his people were to give up the fort and houses there, and all that country, "for a proportion of copper". Any of his people who stole were to be sent to the English to receive their punishment. And the houses were to pay: "That every house as a custome should pay him a bushell of corne for an inch square of copper, and a proportion of Pocones as a yearely tribute to King James for their protection, as a dutie". A custom in that sense was a tax. Whatever else the people could spare, they might barter as they saw fit. Copper was wealth on the rivers. Men wore it at the ear and the neck, and the werowances paid it up the chain of the chiefdom to Powhatan as tribute. Newport had bought Powhatan's corn with great coppers. Under Smith's conditions every house owed its bushel at a fixed price, and its tribute to a king across the sea. The messenger went off into the country with the terms. In the winter of 1608, at Werowocomoco, Powhatan had proclaimed the English his own people.

West's men would have none of it. They refused the place and the conditions together, and scorned Smith, his care and his authority with them. They did the worst they could to show it. Smith went ashore among them with five men. The ground between the huts was trodden bare and strewn with fish bones and the husks of corn from the falls people's hills. The camp came out to meet him from the fires and the huts: men in their shirts from the day's heat, newcomers in the good clothes they had brought from England, gallants with their swords on. He had the loudest of them taken and held, and for a while the five kept them. But there were 120 in the camp. The rest crowded in on the president and his handful across the trodden ground, more of them every minute, until he had to give way step by step and go back to the water. On the way he took one of their boats off the bank. He rowed out in it to the ship that lay in the stream with their provisions aboard, and took the ship as well. The mariners stood by him, and without them he would hardly have got off that bank. On the shore the company shouted after the boat. Some ran along the edge of the water as far as the rocks let them. Then they stood there with the river between them and their bread. His own men, writing afterward, could only marvel that he had dared it with five, among men so greedy of his blood.

The ones who paid for the quarrel came every day to the president with their baskets. They were the falls people, who had been bringing in their contribution of corn to him all along, and West's company had been living on them in other ways besides. The English stole their corn standing in the hills, robbed their gardens of squash and beans, beat them, broke into their houses, and kept some of them prisoner in the camp by the river. The people came down from the town in the mornings, men and women, past the huts of the men who had robbed them, with corn in their baskets and fish strung on cords. A man would point back up the hill to where the mats had been torn off his house. A woman would set down a basket with nothing in it. They bore it while they could, and then they came to the shore and said so: they "dailie complained to Captaine Smith he had brought them for protectors worst enimies then the Monocans themselves". For his sake they had endured it until then. They asked his pardon in advance, if from now on they defended themselves, since he would not correct his own men as they had long expected him to. In the end they went further. If he would lead them, they offered "to fight for him against them".

Smith spent nine days on West's men instead. He went back and forth between the ship and the bank. He talked to them by daylight among the huts and in the evenings with the fires going, and told them how far they had been abused by their own great hopes of seas and mines and commodities and victories, all of which they had brought out of England with their chests. The men he had taken stayed under guard. Parties still went out from the huts into the woods and the falls people's gardens, and came back with what they had found there. The newcomers lay in the shade through the worst of the afternoons and quarrelled at the fires at night. The gallants spoke of the South Sea and the mines beyond the mountains. The fish jumped in the pools below the rocks, and the corn in the falls people's fields went on ripening a few hundred yards away. At night the ship lay in the stream below the rocks with the provisions in her hold and the mariners asleep on deck in the heat. The camp's fires showed along the low ground, and the town's fires on the hill above it, and the water went on over the ledge all night. Each morning the people came down with their baskets and their complaints and went back up the hill with both. The men in the huts held to their hopes. On the ninth day he gave it up and set sail for the island in their ship.

The ship was hardly under way when the falls people came against the 120. They caught men straggling in the woods, gathering and hunting where they had always gathered and hunted, and killed them there. Many died in those woods. The prisoners in the camp slipped their keepers and were gone. The rest ran for their fort and barely reached it. The swords and cloaks of the dead went back to the towns, and the woods were quiet again. Inside the posts the survivors crouched with their matches lit and their faces to the trees, and counted the men who had not come in.

The ship had not gone a league when she ran aground. Richard Pott and William Phettiplace, two of Smith's men who were aboard her and later wrote this part of the Proceedings, were glad of it. The grounding gave the president one more chance to call the company to a parley. The mariners worked to get her off while a boat went back up the river to the camp. The president found them changed. Their fires had gone out, and few of them had slept since the attack. The men who came out to meet it had arrow wounds bound in strips of shirt. The assault had so astonished them that they submitted to his mercy on any terms he liked. He put "6 or 7 of the chiefe offenders" in irons on the spot. The rest he seated at Powhatan, in the town's own fort, which its people had built and walled with poles and the bark of trees, strong enough to have held off any attack in Virginia. There were "drie houses for lodgings, 300 acres of grounde readie to plant; and no place so strong, so pleasant and delightful in Virginia, for which we called it Nonsuch." The company carried its chests and bedding up from the low ground and in through the palisade. Inside, the houses stood with their mat walls rolled up for the air and the fire pits cold in their floors. Men who had slept on wet earth by the river lay that night under roofs of bark. From the hill they could see the water breaking white over the rocks below. Around them the fields ran off among the stumps, hilled and weeded by the falls people, with the falls people's corn standing in them.

Smith quieted the falls people next. He gave back to every one of them whatever West's men had taken, the corn and the pots and the mats and the rest, and he named new officers to command at Nonsuch. The officers set a watch at the opening in the palisade and told off men for the fields. The falls people came up the hill with their baskets as they had come down to the shore, and went away with their own things in their arms, mats rolled under one arm and pots on the hip. For a little while everyone at the falls was a friend. The president made ready to go.

At that moment West came back up the river. His boat came in under the rocks while the president's men were making ready their own, and he went up to the town to see the company he had brought there. He was good-natured, and he had pity for the men in irons, who had been his own company, and they used both. They talked him round, and with him the rest, back to their old hopes and their old quarrels. They had all their victuals in their hands again, and the powder and the arms and everything else the store had given them. They rose as high in their factions as they had stood before the parley. Smith could do nothing more with them. There he "left them to their fortunes", and they went back from the town to "the open aire at West Fort, abandoning Nonsuch".

Smith went down to the water with the few men who were going with him. The palisade stood on the hill behind him with none of West's company inside it, and the corn stood ripening in the three hundred acres. He took his place in the boat, and the oarsmen swung her bow downstream toward the fort.