A Little Waste Ground

On the twenty-sixth of May the company's arms were packed in dry-vats, the baskets and packing cases the stores had come over in, and the men were setting corn. Twelve days of felling had opened ground at the upper end of the island, and the planting went in outside the works, between the stumps, where the earth had been broken with mattocks and the cut roots still showed white in it. The planters worked in their shirts, with their doublets thrown over the brush piles and their hats pushed back. They made the holes with a stick, dropped the seed, and heeled the earth over it, and the rows ran crooked round the stumps, which would not come out of the ground. The fort begun on the fourteenth was still a scratched line on the ground, a few posts set upright, and cut brush laid in the gaps where the timber had not yet come in from the woods. Flies came off the marsh in the heat. Newport had been gone five days up the river with the shallop and twenty-two men, Smith and Percy among them, and the ships lay at the bank below the clearing with their sailors aboard. Wingfield had been president for twelve days.

The camp had settled into the shape of its work by then. The cooks kept a fire going by the stores, and the smoke went up straight in the windless air. The carpenters were at the timber stacks with adzes, squaring the posts for the wall that was not built yet. Under the sails where the men slept, the sick and the idle lay out of the sun. Boats went to and fro between the bank and the ships, and the sailors aboard the pinnace had their hatches open to the heat, with a boy among them at some job on deck. The gentlemen's back-and-breast armor, the steel caps, the calivers and the store of match were in the baskets with the rest, because nobody wore iron to plant corn in May. A dozen voices carried across the clearing, and the knock of the adzes, and the creak of a boat's oars at the bank. Beyond the last stumps the woods stood green and close, oak and pine with the undergrowth thick between them, a long bowshot from the nearest row.

The bowmen came out of those trees while the planting was going on, hundreds of them, and the first arrows were in the air before the men in the rows had straightened their backs. They came with their heads shaved on the right and knotted on the left, painted for war, and the cry they raised went up all along the edge of the woods at once. The planters dropped their sticks and ran for the works. Behind them the attackers came on through the stumps, shooting as they ran, close enough that the English coming in and the men chasing them were nearly one crowd. An arrow took one of the runners in the back of the thigh and he went down in the furrow and crawled. Others were hit in the arm and the shoulder and kept running with the shafts standing out of them. At the dry-vats men tore at the cords and dragged out swords, calivers and bandoliers in a tangle, and the musketeers went shouting for fire to light their match. Arrows came over the brush and stood in the turned earth, in the piled timber, in the sides of the baskets, and in men.

Those who had a weapon in hand stood in the gaps of the unfinished line and fought there, with the planters crowding in behind them. There were not many of them. The gaps were wider than the men who held them, and the brush laid between the posts would stop nothing that walked. Gentlemen who had never planted a row in their lives stood in their shirtsleeves with drawn swords, and beside them laborers swung the mattocks they had carried in from the field. A caliver went off at last, and then another, the flash and the bang and the white smoke rolling out over the stumps. Wingfield was out among them. A shot went clean through his beard and left him standing. Most of the council were in it with him. Arrows reached the boats at the bank and the pinnace beyond them, and on the pinnace's deck the boy was struck and fell. The arrows made a short hard sound going into wood, and a softer one going into a man.

On the river the ships answered. The sailors ran out the guns and fired over the clearing into the edge of the woods, and the crash of the ordnance went across the water and came back off the far shore. Shot tore through the branches and brought them down on the men under them. Musket fire went out from the decks and from the works, slow and ragged, a shot and then a long gap while each man rammed and primed and blew on his match. The smoke lay low over the stumps in the still air and stank of powder. The bowmen held their ground at the tree line a while longer, shooting into the fort and at the ships, and then drew back into the woods and were gone. The firing stopped. In the quiet the frogs started again in the marsh.

A boy lay dead in the pinnace. Most of the council were hurt. Hurt men sat among the stumps holding their arms. Others lay where they had fallen in the rows. The baskets stood open and half emptied in the dirt. The new corn was trodden flat. One boy dead, and the hurt not yet counted.

The surgeon worked under the sails through the rest of the day, kneeling in the trodden grass with his case open beside him, cutting out arrowheads and binding the holes with linen, while the men who could stand held the men who could not. The boy's body was brought up from the pinnace and laid apart under a sail. The corn was left where it lay. When the light went, every man who could hold a weapon kept it by him, and the watch along the brush and the posts was doubled, with the match lit and burning down in the dark and fires kept up on the open ground so that nothing could cross it unseen. Out in the woods it was black and full of sounds. The men on watch listened to the frogs and the owls and the breaking of sticks, and could not tell one from another, and nothing came out of the woods before morning.

On that night the shallop was still upriver, with the men asleep on the thwarts under the tarpaulin and the watch keeping its match alight in the bow. They came down to the island the next day, the twenty-seventh. The river party had been six days on the water, up to the falls and the cross at the head of the river, then down again past the town below the falls, and the men at the oars had made good time with the current under them. As the boat came round toward the bank they could see the ships where they had left them, and the clearing, and the smoke of the cooking fires. Then they could see what lay in the clearing. The timber stacks were stuck with arrows. Wounded men lay under the sails at the edge of the camp, and the corn ground was a mess of feet. Men came down to the water to meet the boat before it touched, all talking at once, some with their arms in slings and their shirts stiff with dried blood, pointing back at the trees. Smith set the day down the next year as it reached the shallop at the bank:

"400. Indians the day before had assalted the fort, and supprised it, had not God (beyond al their expectations) by meanes of the shippes, at whom they shot with their Ordinances and Muskets, caused them to retire, they had entred the fort with our own men, which were then busied in setting Corne".

Four hundred was the figure he heard at the bank. Smith had not seen it. The fort he describes was a fort only by intention, a line the attackers would have come through behind the running planters, and the ships had stopped them at the gap. In the same lines he counted the cost: "most of the Counsel was hurt, a boy slaine in the Pinnas, and thirteene or fourteene more hurt." Another account from the voyage counts eleven hurt, one of whom died after. Of the other side's losses the English knew only what the other side later told them, that "three were slain and divers hurt." The shallop's men climbed out among the people who had been there, Percy with them, and stood in the trodden corn among the stuck arrows and the open baskets.

The men who had fought walked them over it. Here the planters had been when the cry went up, there the first of them had fallen, here the line had held at the gap with the brush pulled half down and the posts scored by arrowheads. The river party unloaded the shallop, their own arms and their tarpaulin and what was left of their food, and carried it up past the sails where the wounded lay. Some of the hurt were sitting up and talking. Others lay still with their dressings gone brown in the heat, and the flies came to them whatever the men did. The pinnace rode at the bank with the arrows pulled from her planking and the holes showing pale in the wood. That evening the whole company ate together inside the half-made line, the men back from the falls and the men who had held the gap, with the watch doubled again and every weapon out of its basket.

The palisade went up after that, and fast. The men cut posts in the woods across the clearing and dragged them in, trimmed them, split the bigger ones, and set them upright in a trench shoulder to shoulder, with the earth rammed back round their feet. Every party that went to the trees went with musketeers standing over it, their match lit and smoking, and the axemen worked with their eyes on the shadows between the trunks. The attackers had not gone far. For about a week there were alarms by day and by night, a shout from the watch, men running to the line with whatever they had, a few arrows out of the dark that hit nothing, and then nothing more. Men who went outside the works were shot from cover, at the creek, in the woods, in the long grass at the edge of the marsh. The laborers dug in their shirts in the heat with the sweat running into their eyes, and when an alarm came they dropped the spades and took up calivers, and when it passed they took up the spades. Hands that had blistered on the axes in the first week split open on the spade handles in the second. The ground was sand and clay under a skin of roots, and the spades rang on old stumps and stuck in the clay where the trench ran down toward the wet. Men stood in it to the knee and threw the earth up behind them, and the posts went in after them as they moved along. The trench was lined with posts a few yards at a time.

At night the alarms were worse. The watch lay along the new posts and the old brush, listening, and the men off watch slept in their clothes with their swords to hand under the sails. A sentry would hear something in the grass beyond the fires and call out, and the whole camp came up off the ground at once, men stumbling into each other in the dark, feeling for their weapons, blowing on their match to get it glowing. Sometimes an arrow came in. Sometimes nothing did, and after a while the men lay down again and did not sleep. In the morning they went back to the trench with their eyes red and their backs stiff from the ground, ate their biscuit standing, and picked up the spades where they had dropped them. The work went on through the second week of June, a few yards of wall at a time, with the guns of the ships trained over the clearing and the woods always in front of the diggers. The fort rose in the days after the attack, out of a trench the attack had made them dig.

On the tenth of June Smith was sworn of the council. It was more than six weeks since the box had been opened at Cape Henry and his name read out in it, and in all that time the men named beside him had kept him out of it. He had come ashore under the charge laid against him at sea, gone up the river with Newport, and come back to find the camp bloodied, and now he took the oath and sat down among those same men, most of them still nursing their wounds. There were seven of them again, as the Company had written. The work on the palisade went on outside while the oath was taken, and the sound of the mauls on the posts came in through the canvas. From that day he had a voice in what the colony did, and a vote, and a share in the blame for whatever it did next. The council he joined had just been caught in its own field with its weapons in baskets. The shovels did not stop for him.

By the fifteenth the walls were up. The fort stood on the island in the shape of a triangle, with a bulwark at each corner built out round like a half moon, so that guns mounted in them could fire along the face of each wall and no man could come up against the posts without being seen and shot at from the side. Percy, who had been in the shallop the day the attack came, set the work down when it was done:

"The fifteenth of June we had built and finished our Fort, which was triangle wise, having three Bulwarkes, at every corner, like a halfe Moone, and foure or five pieces of Artillerie mounted in them."

Inside the walls they had made themselves "sufficiently strong for these Savages." The corn had come up too, the English corn, put into the ground that spring. It "sprang a mans height from the ground," and the fields of it stood green beyond the stakes in the June heat, where three weeks before the planters had been running for their lives through the rows. The new posts still wept pitch in the sun, and the bulwarks smelled of cut pine and rammed wet earth. In the evenings men walked the inside of the wall and put their hands to the timber, and looked along it to the next corner, and went to their places. The days went back to watch and ward. Guards stood on the bulwarks by day and the watch was set at night, and the men who had dug the trench now ate their ration inside it, sat in its shade at noon, and slept under the sails within its walls. The marsh smelled of rot in the heat and the mosquitoes came up off it at dusk. Newport's ships were taking on water for home.

The day before the ships sailed, a single man came to the gate, and the guards on the bulwark watched him all the way in across the open ground. He came on past the corn and the stumps to a wall of posts that had not stood there a month before, with guns looking down at him from the corners. Men came to the gate to meet him with their match lit, and the talk went on in signs and the few words each side had of the other's tongue. He was a messenger from the Pamunkey werowance, whose country lay up the next great river to the north, the York. Smith knew him. He had met them on the river voyage, and Smith wrote the visit into his account in one sentence: "The day before the Ships departure, the King of Pamaunke sent the Indian that had met us before in our discoverie, to assure us peace; our fort being then palisadoed round, and all our men in good health and comfort." The messenger went home the way he had come.

On Monday, the twenty-second of June, in the morning, Newport took the ships down the river for England, and left behind him "provision for 13. or 14 weeks." The company was called to prayers first, as on every morning, under the sail that served them for a church, and then went down to the water. The sailors had brought the last water casks aboard the evening before. At the bank the colonists stood in a crowd along the edge of the water, gentlemen at the front and laborers behind, the hurt among them with their arms bound up. On the decks the sailors were at the capstans and in the rigging, calling to one another in the short shouts of their trade, and the men ashore who had come out with them in December watched them work. The cables came in from the trees where they had been made fast since May. The sails filled, and the hulls swung off from the bank into the channel, and the ebb took them away downriver toward the bay and the sea. Percy wrote down what they were left with:

"Captaine Newport being gone for England, leaving us (one hundred and foure persons) verie bare and scantie of victualls, furthermore in warres and in danger of the Savages, we hoped after a supply which Captaine Newport promised within twentie weekes."

The ships grew small on the wide water and went out of sight round the bend below the island. Nothing moved on the river after them but the current and the birds over the marsh. The food in the store would last into September. On the bank the hundred and four turned from the river, the gentlemen and the laborers, the carpenters and the boys, and the men with half-healed arrow wounds. The watch went up onto the bulwarks with their match lit. The rest filed back in through the gate of the fort, and the gate was shut behind them.