A Little Waste Ground

The corn came in small that autumn. In the towns along the James the women went down the rows with baskets on their backs and broke the ears from the stalks, and the ears came away short and light in the hand, many of them filled only partway up the cob. The stalks stood no higher than a woman's shoulder. They had yellowed early in the summer's heat, and the dry leaves rattled when the wind went through them. Between the hills the ground had gone pale and cracked, and the creeks that ran down to the river showed their mud a long way below the marks of other years. The beans that climbed the stalks had given little, and the squash lay small in the furrows. Children carried the full baskets up to the houses, where the ears were spread on mats and on frames of poles to dry, and the old women sat among them husking with their fingers. Whatever came in from the fields had to last the winter and the spring until the next corn was green. It had been a dry year after dry years. The baskets were light.

Two autumns before, people of these towns had carried corn to the island before it was half ripe, to men who had been waiting for them to come with bows. The fort had eaten that corn and lived. Since then the English had come for it every season in their boats, with copper and beads and hatchets, and in the hard winter with their match lit. The corn had gone down to the water in baskets either way, traded or taken. This harvest went into the towns' own storehouses behind the houses, in baskets set on mats off the ground. The women covered them against the rain and weighted the covers with poles. Smoke from the fires hung low over the roofs in the evenings, and the dogs lay in the dust by the doors. Hunters came in from the woods with deer across their shoulders, for the hunting season was coming on. Soon whole towns would leave their fields for the hunting grounds, as they did every year when the corn was in.

Part of every town's harvest was not the town's to eat. Each werowance owed Powhatan a share of what his people grew, as he owed him skins and copper and beads, and the paramount chief's storehouses filled each autumn from the towns. The baskets for him were set apart from the rest. In the evenings the families ate the new corn roasted in the ear at their own fires, and the green husks smoked in the coals, and the children gnawed the cobs. The ears were small enough that a man ate three where he would have eaten one. The old women counted the baskets against the months to come. The count came out short.

Down at the island the ships were making ready for sea. They had lain in the river three weeks past the day they were to sail, while the council in the fort finished with its witnesses. Now the papers were done. The men who had sworn the armful of examinations went aboard with their passes, to say in England what they had promised to say. The masters took in the last of their wood and water. Boats went to and fro between the bank and the ships all day with casks and bundles and sea chests, and men who were going home went down the bank with letters for others who were staying. Those who were staying stood along the water and watched. Among them were Smith's old soldiers, the men who had offered him the heads of his enemies and been refused. They had no part in any of it now. At night the ships' lanterns showed in a row off the trees, and the sound of the cables working came across the water to the watch on the bulwarks. On the last evening the masters came ashore to take their leave, and they stood about with the council by the storehouse in their sea clothes while the light went off the river. The chest of examinations had gone down to the landing that afternoon on two men's shoulders, past the store and the church and the house where Smith had lain, and it was in the great cabin of one of the ships now, under the master's hand. The witnesses slept aboard that night. Then the wind came round fair.

About October 4, 1609, they weighed. The sailors put their chests to the capstan bars and walked them round, and the cables came in dripping through the hawse with the river mud on them. The anchors broke out and rose under the bows trailing weed. Topsails dropped from the yards and filled. The ebb took the hulls and swung them, one after another, until their heads pointed down the river, and they went away from the island on the tide with the people on the bank growing small behind them. Some of the people waved hats. Some went back up through the gate before the last ship cleared the point. On the bulwarks the gunners stood by the pieces and did not fire them.

Smith was aboard. He lay where he had lain for three weeks, between decks on his back, and he could not stand. He had come into this river two years and five months before, a prisoner under restraint, and the council had kept him from its seat until June. He had been president a year and some weeks. He went down the James now in the half dark below the deck, with the hull working round him and the river running along the planks a few inches from his head. The burn was still open under the linen. Light came down the hatchway in a square and moved on the boards as the ship swung through the bends. Above him the ship's company went about its business, the bosun's call and the feet on the deck and the creak of the blocks, and none of it was his to order. The ship stank of tar and bilge and the river.

The river carried them past Hog Island, the island about seven miles below the fort where the colony kept its hogs, and the men at the blockhouse there came down to the shore to see the ships go by. Below it the James widened into long reaches between low wooded shores, the water going brown to gray as it met the salt. The Nansemond country lay off to the south, where Martin's company was still camped on its island. On the north shore stood Kecoughtan, the town at the river's mouth, where the English had been feasted on mats in the first spring and had kept a Christmas in the warm smoky houses. Then Point Comfort, and the open water of the bay, where the ships began to lift to a swell. Between decks the motion changed. The hull rose and settled and rose again, and loose gear slid on the planks and fetched up against the timbers, and the water came along the side with a longer sound than the river's. Men lay sick in their berths around him, and the lanterns swung on their hooks. The ships stood across toward the capes. They passed Cape Henry, the southern cape, where the first landing party had gone ashore among the sand hills and the pines in April of 1607 and set up a cross. The ships cleared the capes and stood out to sea. Behind them the coast went down into the water.

His companions put his going into their book in a sentence. They printed it in 1612, for him and against his enemies, and after it they set down what he had left behind him in Virginia, a muster of the colony he was carried out of:

"whose adventures were our lives, and whose losse our deathes. Leaving us thus, with 3 ships, 7 boates, commodities ready to trade, the harvest newly gathered, 10 weekes provision in the store, 490 and odde persons, 24 peeces of ordinances, 300 muskets".

It was a list that could be walked. The three ships lay at their moorings off the bank, kept back for the colony's use when the rest went home, their crews idle on deck and their boats tied astern. The seven boats were drawn up on the shore below the gate or swung at the landing, the barges with their oars stowed along the thwarts and their tarpaulins rolled. The commodities were in the storehouse in chests and casks: copper cut into pieces, strings of beads, hatchets and knives, the things the towns had always taken in trade. The harvest newly gathered was the corn off the 30 or 40 acres the company had dug and planted in the spring, where Kemps in his fetters had shown them how a field in that country was ordered, and whatever else the summer had brought in. It lay in the store with the meal and the ships' leavings. The 24 pieces of ordnance stood on the bulwarks and in the blockhouses, black iron on wooden carriages, with shot heaped beside them and the touchholes covered against the dew. The 300 muskets were racked in the store or carried on men's shoulders through the fort, their match coiled at their belts. And there were the people, 490 and odd, in the huts and the houses and the tents along the palisade, at the fires and the well and the landing, waiting at the store door in the mornings. The cape merchant's men went through the store that week with a light and a tally stick, cask by cask, and what they counted was ten weeks of food for everyone on the island. Outside the storehouse the fort did its own sums. From the bulwark the huts and the tents and the fires could be counted, and the casks were all in one place.

About two hundred of them had been on the island in the spring, with a store the rats had spoiled, living on oysters and roots and out among the towns; most of the rest, and much of what the list counted, had come up the river in the seven ships in August. The ship that had carried most of the fleet's provision lay wrecked on Bermuda. The fort had never held so many people.

When the ships had gone, the colony began to come apart at its edges. Ratcliffe took a company down from the fort to settle Point Comfort, at the river's mouth. Then the outlying companies came in. Martin and West came back to the fort "having lost their boates, and neere halfe their men amongst the Salvages", Martin from the Nansemond country and West from the falls. The fort saw them come in a few days apart. The men were footsore and filthy, their clothes torn by the woods, some of them hurt and leaning on the men beside them, and they came in through the gate with their arms and little else. Their friends in the fort went along the lines looking for faces. Nearly half the faces were not there. West, the good-natured man whose men had talked him round at the falls, came in at the head of what was left of his hundred and twenty. Martin brought in what was left of his own company from the island in the Nansemond creek, where in the last weeks of the summer he had seized the king and fortified himself among the king's houses. Neither had a boat left to bring them. The men who had come home sat down by the fires and were given water. Men asked them about friends by name and were told where they had been seen last: at a creek, on a path, in a field by the water. The fort heard the reason from them. In the words of Smith's men, "the Salvages no sooner understood of Captaine Smiths losse, but they all revolted, and did murder and spoile all they could incounter."

After that the fort kept close. The newcomers had landed in August into a country where a man could walk to the next town and sleep there, where men of the fort had lived in the towns that spring and come back fed. Now every man of the fort slept inside the palisade. Men who went out over the neck to cut wood or look to the hogs went in companies, with their match lit and a guard posted at the edge of the trees, and they came back before dusk. The gate was shut early, and the watch on the bulwarks was doubled and kept awake. The towns that had traded at the gate stopped coming to it. No canoes came down the river with corn, and no messengers came out of the woods with baskets on their backs.

The Paspaheghs had made their peace with Smith in the spring, after their orator Ocanindge stood up before him and said they could plant anywhere, and the English could not live without their harvest. It had held until Smith left. Now the Paspahegh fields across the water lay harvested and bare, the stalks broken down in the hills, and the people who had once walked in at the gate kept away from it. Powhatan sent no messengers either. He had gone from Werowocomoco in the winter, at the Dutchmen's urging, with all his corn and provision, and he came no nearer now.

Smith had printed a short list of words and sentences in the Powhatans' language in his description of the country in 1612, for Englishmen who would have to make themselves understood in it. Among the sentences, just after "I am verie hungrie? what shall I eate?", came this exchange:

"where dwels Powwhatan. ... Now he dwels a great way hence at orapaks. ... You lie, he staide ever at werowocomoco."

Orapax lay a great way hence. The corn of the chiefdom lay in the storehouses of its towns, under mats, in a dry year. None of it came down to the fort that autumn.

The fort turned in on its store. Martin's men and West's men had carried their own provision out with them in August, and they came back with none of it. The rest had eaten what they had. Now the whole colony was "constrained to live only of that which Smith had only for his owne company, for the rest had consumed their proportions." The store opened in the mornings and the messes came up to its door one after another, gentlemen and laborers and the men from the falls, with their cans and their kettles, and the cape merchant's men measured the corn out to them under guard. The measure was struck level with a stick. Men stood in the line and watched the stick. In the evenings the smoke of the fires lay over the island, and the newcomers sat around them in the clothes they had landed in, which were thin for the season.

Who governed all this was another matter. Smith's men set the fort's state down in one line: "And now have we 20 Presidents with all their appurtenances; for Mr Persie was so sicke he could not goe nor stand." Percy was president. He had been persuaded to it in less than an hour with Smith's ship still in the river, and he had given up his own passage home to take it. He lay in one of the houses of the fort and could not rise from his bed, while Martin and Archer and the others walked the fort under arms with their followers behind them and gave their orders, and Ratcliffe gave his own at Point Comfort. A fire burned in the hearth of the room, and a servant kept it and brought him what there was to eat from the store, the same corn by the same measure. The window was a shutter on leather hinges, and in the day it stood open on the fort, the roofs and the palisade and a piece of the sky over the river. Through it in the mornings came the sound of the store door and the voices in the line. The men who brought him word came in at the door with the cold on their clothes, said what they had to say, and went out again. He could not go to the store to see the corn measured, or to the bulwarks to look down the river, or to the gate where the towns had once come in with baskets. He was the eighth son of an earl, and he had been in Virginia from the first morning. In the first August, at this fort, he had written down the dead by the day.

The days shortened. Frost lay on the marsh grass in the early mornings and was gone by the time the watch changed. Leaves came down off the oaks across the water and lay on the river and went out with the ebb. In the fort the men from the outlying companies found places where they could, in the huts beside the men who had lived through the spring and the summer, two and three to a bed of rushes, and the newcomers who had slept in tents since August began to feel the nights through the canvas. The storehouse door was barred at dusk and opened at first light. Each morning the cans came up to it and went away with their measure, and each morning there was less behind the door. Outside the gate the paths to the towns ran away empty into the woods. The president lay in his bed with the fort going on around him. On the day the ships sailed, the store had held ten weeks.