A Little Waste Ground

The river ran low at the end of the summer, brown and warm between banks of oak and gum, and the boat came down it on the current with the oarsmen pulling easy. Smith lay asleep in the bottom of her. He had spent nine days at the falls with West's men, gone down in the ship and been brought back by her grounding, and come away at last with nothing settled behind him. The provision ship had gone on down to the fort two days before, with the stores. That left the boat. She carried the handful of men who went with him, their chests and bedding laid along the boards, and a space between the chests for the president. He slept there in his clothes, with a rolled cloak under his head and his doublet open at the throat against the heat. Flies came off the banks and walked on the oarsmen's necks, and the men slapped at them between strokes. Slung at his hip, where a soldier carried it, was the bag that held his powder.

Loose powder went into the charge of every piece in that boat, and every man who carried a piece kept it the same way, in a bag or a flask, close to his hand. The match went with it. His own bag was leather, greased against the wet, its neck drawn shut with a thong, and it had ridden at his hip through every parley at the falls. West's men had robbed and beaten the falls people that month, and the falls people had come out of the woods at West's men within sight of the ship; on that water no company let its match go out. A cord smoldered somewhere in the boat, then, a few feet from the powder, as one did in every boat the colony owned. The men who had charge of it had been at the falls as long as he had, through the parleys and the nights on the hill. Their eyes were red with it. The president was asleep.

His men put what happened next into a single sentence:

"Sleeping in his boat, for the ship was returned 2 daies before, accidentallie one fired his powder bag; which tore his flesh from his bodie and thighes 9. or 10. inches square, in a most pittifull manner: but to quench the tormenting fire, frying him in his cloaths, he leaped over board into the deepe river, where ere they could recover him, he was neere drownd."

The flash came off his hip with a flat crack and a gout of white smoke that rolled back over the stern and hung on the water. Burning powder drove into his clothes. The blast had torn him open across the body and down both thighs, and the wool of his breeches and the linen under it caught and went on burning into the wounds. He came up off the boards out of sleep and into the fire. The boat filled with the stink of powder and singed wool and hair, and under it the smell of meat. An oar went over the gunwale and trailed. The men nearest him had nothing to put on it, and nothing to put it out with but the river, and the river was over the side. The cloth burned on. Then he was over the side himself. The smoke of the flash drifted off downstream over the place where he had gone in.

The James took him in deep water. His clothes filled and dragged him down. The boat ran on with the current. The oarsmen backed water, shouting. Men leaned out over the gunwale and reached. The brown water showed nothing. They caught him at last by his clothes. He was nearly drowned.

They hauled him in over the side with the river pouring out of his clothes and laid him on the boards where he had been asleep. The cloth was gone from the burn in places and stuck to it in others. Across his body and down his thighs the flesh was torn away nine or ten inches square, raw, already weeping, with river water standing in it and the edges blackened where the cloth had burned into them. Hands pulled the wet doublet off him and held his head clear of the bilge. The men had a little drinking water in a cask and nothing else. They tried to ease the rest of the cloth off him. Where it had burned into the flesh it would not come, and they let it be. A surgeon carried salve, lint and oil. There was no surgeon in the boat. He was "without either Chirurgeon or chirurgery", with neither a surgeon nor a surgeon's skill, and in that state he had the rest of the way down to go. Every stroke of the oars moved the boat, and every movement of the boat reached the burn. He was awake.

The oarsmen pulled for the fort. They rigged a cloth over him on two upended oars against the glare, and the flies found him under it. One of the men sat by him with a bailer and poured river water over the burn, and the water ran down off him into the bilge and was bailed out again. The banks went by, the mouths of creeks, a cleared field, the smoke of a town back from the water. People came down to the shore to look at the boat and went up again. Below the bends the tide came up the river to meet them and set against the bow, and the oarsmen leaned into it and changed places on the thwarts when their arms gave out. He could not be moved off the burn to ease it. The boards under him were wet and hard, and the heat came off the water into his face. Late in the day a wind got up against them and raised a short chop, and spray came in over the bow and onto the cloth.

Dark came down on the river with the fort still a long way off. The oarsmen kept on by the pale band of water between the black banks, and the man in the bow watched for snags and called them back over his shoulder. The air cooled. Mosquitoes came off the marsh and settled on the burn faster than the bailer could wash them away. Here and there a fire showed through the trees on the bank and went behind them again. The current was slack now and the tide against them, and the stroke slowed. When the keel touched a shoal the whole boat shuddered, and the shudder went through the man on the boards. They pushed off with the oars and went on. In the end the fort came round the last bend, with the ships lying off it.

The island was crowded that September. The ships of the summer's fleet lay at their moorings off the bank, and the people who had come in them in August had filled the huts and spilled out into tents and lean-tos along the palisade. Smoke from their fires hung over the roofs. Men came running down to the landing when the boat touched, and they lifted the president out on a board, with a sheet laid loosely over the burn, and carried him up through the gate. The board went past the storehouse and the church and the houses the company had put up in the spring, through people who stood back to let it by, and in at the door of his own house. They put him to bed. From the bed he gave his orders: everything in the fort was to be made ready "for peace or warres", to get provision. It was all he could do. He was "unable to stand, and neare bereft of his senses by reason of his torment".

Martin, Ratcliffe and Archer were in the fort, "being to have their trials". They had come in with the fleet in August, railing against him before they had seen his face, and he had meant to bring them to judgment. Ratcliffe had been president once and been put out of it. Archer had tried to unseat him in the winter of the fire. Martin had held the presidency this summer for three hours and given it back. His men wrote that it was guilt that moved them now, and fear of what the trials would give them. They saw the president on his bed, unable to stand and hardly in his senses, and they "plotted to have murdered him in his bed." Night in the fort was never quiet that autumn. The watch called from the bulwarks, the newcomers talked late at their fires, and the sick coughed in the tents along the wall. In the president's house a light burned low by the bed. The house was small, and the fort was full of men who owed him nothing. A pistol would do it. The man who was to fire it was one of two: Dyer, whom Smith had punished in the spring as an old enemy, or Coe, who stood with Dyer in the plot. The pistol was loaded and in the man's hand, but "his hart did faile him, that should have given fire to that mercilesse pistol." The shot was not fired.

Finding that course would not serve, they took another. They "joined togither to usurp the governement, thereby to escape their punishment, and excuse themselves by accusing him." Word of it came to the bed. So did his old soldiers, the men who had followed him in the barges and through the towns in the hungry winter, and they crowded into the house with their swords on and their hats in their hands. They had marched and starved and traded with him for a year. They stood round the bed in the small room, close enough to smell the burn. They asked him for one thing: leave to take off the heads of any who would resist his command. Outside the door the fort went about its business, and the men they meant were somewhere in it. He would not give them leave. He sent for the masters of the ships instead. The masters came up from the river in their sea clothes, smelling of tar and salt, and stood at the foot of the bed while he took order with them for his own passage home to England. They talked of water and wood aboard, of the holds stowed and the crews ready. The masters had their sailing day. He had his berth.

His reasons were plain enough. There was no surgeon in the fort to cure his hurt, and none of a surgeon's stores, and the ships were to sail the next day. The commission he held was in the air, his "commission to be suppressed, he knew not why; himselfe and souldiers to be rewarded, he knew not how; and a new commission graunted, they knew not to whom". The not knowing had made every faction bold. His wounds were so grievous, and his torment so cruel, that few around him expected him to live. He could not do the work the autumn needed doing, to win back what the factions had lost, to put the factions down, and to range the country for provision, and he knew that his own presence counted in that work as much as his orders did. He could give orders from a bed. He could not go.

He went "presently abord", meaning to name governors for the fort from the ship and to deal with the mutineers and the men who had stood with them. His soldiers carried him out of the house on the board he had come in on, through the gate and down the bank to the landing, with the sheet over him against the flies. They handed him down into a ship's boat and rowed him out. At the ship's side the sailors lowered a line, and with hands under him and the line under his arms they got him up over the rail and down to a place between decks, where the planking smelled of tar and bilge. They laid him on his back. Overhead men walked the deck, and through the open ports came the sound of the fort across the water.

Ashore, the men he meant to deal with moved first. With Smith gone from the fort, they went to Percy and "perswaded Master Persie to stay, and be their President". The business took "lesse then an howre". He had asked leave in August to go home to England, and it had been granted; his passage lay in the same ships that held the president. He stayed. When the company understood that Smith was leaving them, and saw the others walking the fort under arms and calling themselves presidents and councillors, men who had worked under Smith began to court the new commanders.

The commission was still in the ship. The new commanders "bent all their wits to get him resigne them his commission", and their messages went out to the ship in boats and came back with his answers. A man would come down the ladder between decks with the new commanders' demand, stand over the boards where the president lay, say it, and go back up with the reply. Smith's men set down how he met them: "Who, after many salt and bitter repulses, that their confusion should not be attributed to him (for leaving the country without government and authority), having taken order to bee free from danger of their malice, he was not unwilling they should steale it from him, but never consented to deliver it to any." Demand followed demand. The boats went to and fro across the water. The ships did not sail the next day.

They lay in the river three weeks more, their holds stowed and their water casks full. The crews fished over the side and mended what wanted mending, and watched the boats come and go from the bank. Smith's enemies held them there until they could "perfit some colourable complaints aganst Captaine Smith." In the fort the examinations began. The council sat at a table in one of the houses, with ink and sand and a stack of paper, and the work went on day after day. The witnesses came in one at a time and stood with their caps in their hands while the oath was put to them, and a clerk wrote down what they swore, and they signed under it or made their marks. Some could write their names. More could not, and the clerk wrote the name for them and they put a cross beside it. Beyond the door the next man waited his turn in the sun. The quill scratched. When a sheet was full the clerk sanded it and laid it on the rest. The papers grew into a pile at his elbow and then into another. The witnesses were the men Smith had ruled for a year:

"Now all those Smith had either whipped, punished, or any way disgraced, had free power and liberty to say or sweare any thing; and from a whole armefull of their examinations this was concluded."

The mutineers at the falls swore that he had set the falls people on them because he would not avenge their losses, they being 120 and he five men and himself, and they proved it by the oath of a man he had often whipped for perjury and pilfering. The Dutchmen he had ordered stabbed for their treacheries swore that he had sent to poison them with "rats baine." The council's own complaint was that he would not submit himself to "their stolne authoritie." Others complained that he would not let them rest in the fort, but drove them out to the oyster banks to live or starve, as he lived himself. The council told men who had nothing to say what to swear. Whatever he had once said in jest or in a temper was fitted with an oath and laid on the pile. Men got their passes home by promising to say much against him in England.

Coe and Dyer, the two who "should have murdered him", did well out of it. They were favored for swearing "they heard one say, he heard Powhatan say, that he heard a man say, if the king would not send that corne he had, he should not long enjoy his copper crowne, nor those robes he had sent him". The crown was the copper one Newport had set on Powhatan's head the autumn before, and the scarlet cloak had come with it. Beside the oath his men set their own answer: "The truth was, Smith had no such ingins as the King demanded, nor Powhatan any corne." The engines were tools. Powhatan had wanted them, and the fort had none to give.

Of the whole armful, "not past 8 or 9 could say much", and those only circumstances that everyone in the fort knew to be false: so Pott and Phettiplace wrote, and they said plainly that they had written it "in his behalfe". The charges come through his friends.

Out in the river the ship rode at her cable through the three weeks, and the president lay between decks with the burn open under the linen. He could not stand. The heat came down through the deck planks in the afternoons, and at night the tide turned the ship slowly on her cable, and the lantern swung. The ship's company went about its work over his head, the pump and the blocks and the boats coming and going from the bank. Across the water, in the fort, the oaths went on, one man after another with his hand on the book. Twice a day two of his own men came down the ladder with water. They lifted him by the shoulders and the knees, turned him on the boards, and laid him down again.