A Little Waste Ground

Past midnight on his third night of watch, a laborer lay on the bare ground at the foot of the palisade with his caliver across his knees and his match smoldering in its coil beside him. The posts at his back had dried out over the summer and the pitch on them had gone hard, but they still smelled of pine where the bark had come away. He wore the wool doublet and breeches he had come ashore in, and both were damp through with dew and his own sweat. His shoes had gone soft at the seams from the marsh, and he had cut the leather at the heel where it rubbed. Mosquitoes came at his neck and wrists in a thin steady whine, and he had long since stopped slapping at them. He had stood at the ward all the day before, in the sun at the gate, and he would stand there again when the sun came up. Between the two he lay here. A second man of the watch lay a few yards along the wall with his face to the posts, and had not sat up since the change.

His day's food had been his share of one can. The cooks boiled barley from the ship's store in a kettle of water at the fire by the storehouse, and each mess of five men got a small can of it for the day, carried off to their own corner and eaten with spoons from the one pot. The barley had been in the hold since December. There were weevils in it, black specks in the gray that floated up when the water boiled, and the cooks had stopped skimming them off. The laborer's mess had sat in the shade of their cabin at noon and passed the can round, a spoonful each and then again, until the spoons scraped. One of the five had taken the can, looked into it, and handed it on. He had the flux, and what he ate went through him within the hour. He got the same fifth part of the can as the man who had stood at the gate all morning, and as the men inside the cabins who could no longer stand at all.

The water was worse than the food. The laborer had drunk at dusk from the bucket by the gate, filled at the riverbank below the fort, and his mouth was dry again within the hour, and the dryness had kept him awake since. The river at the island was not one water but two. On the flood the tide came up from the bay forty miles below and pushed salt ahead of it, so that the men who drank at high water were drinking something close to the sea, and grew thirstier the more they drank. On the ebb the river ran back out and left the shallows by the bank standing warm and still under a green scum, and the filth of the fort went into those shallows from the bank. The colonists had come in May, when the river ran high and fresh from the spring rains and they had drunk from it in their cupped hands. In August it had sunk and slowed. They drank it salt at the flood and foul at the ebb, from the same bank, in buckets and kettles and the brims of their hats. The flux came out of the shallows, the bloody flux that was dysentery, and so did the burning fevers that were typhoid. The salt dried out whatever the flux left.

The flux was in him now. It had started two days before as a cramp low in the belly that came and went, and tonight it was coming oftener. When it came he got to his knees, and then to his feet with one hand on the posts, and walked bent over to the corner of the bulwark where the watch went to ease themselves. His legs shook under him on the way back. He lay down again in the same place, in the hollow his body had already made in the dirt, and pulled the caliver back across his knees. The match had burned down an inch while he was gone. He blew on it until it glowed. If the woods came alive tonight, as they had in May, he had that one shot and then the long business of loading again, and the man along the wall had none.

The woods made no sound but the insects. Beyond the palisade the ground ran open for a bowshot to the trees, and the trees stood black against a sky with no moon in it. In June men going out to cut timber or fetch water had been shot from cover at the edge of that ground, and for a week the alarms had gone up by day and night. Since then the woods had been quiet. The sounds came from behind him instead. The cabins stood in crooked rows inside the walls now, low huts of posts and wattle thatched with reeds from the marsh, put up through the hot weeks of July in place of the sails the men had slept under since May. From inside them, from every quarter of the fort, came the groaning of the sick. It rose and fell. A man in the cabin nearest the gate called for water, over and over, in the same flat voice.

"Water. For God's love, water."

Nobody brought it. Further off a man was praying aloud, and somewhere near the storehouse another was weeping in the high broken way of someone who had stopped knowing he did it. The laborer knew most of the voices. He had come over with them in December, lain beside them on the deck in the Downs, drunk with them in the islands. The cabin by the storehouse had been loud since dark. A while before the sky began to lighten over the river, it went quiet, and he lay and listened to it being quiet, and did not get up.

When the light came gray over the water the relief came along the wall, two men with their match lit, walking slowly. The laborer got up by the posts. The man further along the wall was helped to his feet and stood bent over, and they went in together toward the cabins. By then the burials had begun. Two men came out of the cabin by the storehouse with a third between them, holding him under the arms, with his bare heels drawing two lines in the dust behind. They took him past the laborer toward the burying ground along the wall, where others were already standing with mattocks and a shovel. Before prayers there was another. At the fire by the storehouse the cooks were setting the kettle on for the day's barley.

The burying ground had been open since the first deaths of the summer, and by August it ran in a line of low turned mounds along the wall. Under the leaf mold the island was sand, and the mattocks went into it easily. The men who dug there had little left in their arms. They stopped often to lean on the handles. The holes they made in August were shallower than the ones they had made in June. A body went in wrapped in whatever the man had slept in, a blanket or a length of old sailcloth, and the earth went back over it with the shovel and the flat of a mattock, and somebody said the words if a gentleman was standing by to say them. The graves had neither stone nor board. The diggers found the last grave by the fresh sand and opened the next one beside it. Back inside, the mess that had lost him shared out his things among them: a knife, a spoon, a shirt, his shoes if they were better than their own. The next day the can went round four men instead of five.

Percy had begun his list on the sixth of August. Day by day he set down the date, the name, and what the man had died of, in the same few words each time, and that summer the entries came in faster than the days. On the sixth of August John Asbie died of the bloody flux. On the ninth George Flowre died of the swelling. On the tenth William Bruster, gentleman, died "of a wound given by the Savages, and was buried the eleventh day." On the fourteenth Francis Midwinter and Edward Moris, a corporal, died suddenly, men who had been on their feet and then were not. On the nineteenth Drue Piggase, gentleman, was dead. Between those names were others, on the fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth, two in a day and then one and then two again, so that the column ran on without a gap. He wrote the gentlemen and the laborers into the same column, the corporal beside the man with no trade, each with a day and a cause.

He made the entries in the mornings, after the burials, when there was no longer any doubt about who had gone out by the gate. The ink he had carried from England had thickened in the heat, and the paper took the damp of the cabin at night and dried in the day with a wave through it. Flies walked on the page while he wrote. Most mornings the same handful of men came back in from the burying ground with sand on their knees and their hands, and most mornings there was a name to add, or two, sometimes a gentleman he had eaten beside at the great cabin's table on the voyage, sometimes a laborer he knew only by his face at the kettle. He wrote them all in the same hand.

The list was the plainest thing he wrote that summer, and around it he put down the watch and the ration exactly as the laborer had lived them: "Wee watched every three nights, lying on the bare cold ground, what weather soever came, [and] warded all the next day, which brought our men to bee most feeble wretches. Our food was but a small Can of Barlie sod in water, to five men a day, our drinke cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men."

On the twenty-second of August Bartholomew Gosnold died. Gosnold, captain of the Godspeed, was one of the seven the box had named to the council in April, a man the Company had trusted with a ship and a seat. Percy set his entry apart from the others by its length. Gosnold was "one of our Councell", and he "was honourably buried, having all the Ordnance in the Fort shot off, with many vollies of small shot." The grave was dug by men from the same cabins that had been carrying out their own dead every morning that week. They carried him out with his cloak over him, more men to the weight than it needed, and let him down into the sand on ropes. The company stood round in what ranks it could make, gentlemen in front in their cloaks and laborers behind, some of them held up by the men beside them, and the prayers for the dead were said over the open ground. Then the gunners on the bulwarks touched off the pieces, all four or five of them, one after another, and the crash went out across the river and came back off the woods on the far shore. The smoke rolled down off the bulwarks over the heads of the company and hung in the still air. The musketeers fired their volleys after it, ragged and slow, priming and blowing on the match between each, and fired again. Powder that the fort kept against the bowmen in the woods went into the August sky for the captain of the Godspeed. Birds went up off the marsh at the first gun and wheeled over the river until the firing stopped. The smell of powder lay over the graves for the rest of the morning, and when the diggers had filled the hole the company went back in through the gate to the cabins, where the sick had lain through it all and heard the guns.

The others went into the ground with no guns at all. Percy put down how:

"some departing out of the World, many times three or foure in a night; in the morning, their bodies trailed out of their Cabines like Dogges to be buried."

The same bulwarks that fired for Gosnold were the ones the watch could no longer keep. In Percy's words they lived through those months "not having five able men to man our Bulwarkes upon any occasion." A fort built in June to stand off the hundreds who had come out of the woods in May stood with its guns mounted and loaded and hardly anyone fit to fire them. In the afternoons the guard on the bulwarks sat with their backs against the gun carriages because they could not stand a whole watch through, and gentlemen who had never stood a sentry's turn in their lives took the laborers' places on the wall when the laborers were in the cabins. From the bulwark over the river a sentry could see the open ground to the woods, the marsh, the empty channel where the ships had ridden, and nothing moving on any of it. The bowmen did not come. Percy gave the credit to Providence, and to nothing in the fort: "If it had not pleased God to have put a terrour in the Savages hearts, we had all perished", being, as he said, in so weak an estate.

The groaning the laborer heard went on, by Percy's reckoning, "every night and day, for the space of sixe weekes," in every corner of the fort, "most pittifull to heare." He had no word for it but pity, and he said that if there were any conscience in men it would make their hearts bleed to hear it. There was no relief to give. The surgeon had his instruments, and nothing in his chest for the flux but rest and broth, and there was no broth. Men who had been strong at the oars in May lay in the cabins too weak to turn over, with the flies on them. The surgeon bled the fevered, as surgeons did, and the bleeding took what strength they had left. Those who could still walk carried water to those who could not, the same salt or slimed water out of the same buckets, until they could not walk either. The bell rang for prayers morning and evening and the company went to them, fewer each time, under the sail that still served for a church.

Smith had sat on the council since June. When he came to write the summer down for the pamphlet he sent home the next year, he gave it a single clause: "God (being angrie with us) plagued us with such famin and sicknes, that the living were scarce able to bury the dead". He named nobody. Percy named them.

Famine was the word they both used, and Percy used it exactly. When he set down what had killed the men in his list, he put the diseases first and the hunger last: "Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine." The flux and the fevers came out of the river, but they came into men who had been living since June on a fifth part of a can of boiled barley a day, standing at the ward in the sun, lying out every third night on the ground. Men with flesh on them lived through the flux. These men had none left. The barley did not keep them, and the water undid what the barley kept. Under the diseases Percy named, the cause was the can. The same can went round the messes every day through August, a little less in it as the store ran down. On the twenty-sixth Kenelme Throgmortine died. Percy wrote him in, and the dead from the twenty-fourth, and the twenty-seventh, and the twenty-eighth. Among the entries he put his own sentence for what it came to, as plainly as a date: "There were never Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia."

September came in hot. Newport had left food for thirteen or fourteen weeks, and the weeks were nearly out. The barley in the store was down to the last casks, and the cooks measured it into the kettle by the handful. At noon the messes came up to the fire with their cans, fewer messes than in July and fewer men in each, and stood in the heat while the cans were filled. Some of the men who came for them came for two or three, carrying back the shares of others who lay in the cabins and could not get up, and some of those shares went uneaten and were eaten by the men who carried them. Men who could still walk went down to the bank at low water to feel in the mud for crabs, and came back with a few, and boiled them in the barley water. The supply he had promised within twenty weeks was not due until late in the autumn. On the river the tide came and went over the shallows, salt and then foul. Across the water the corn stood ripening in the Paspahegh fields, and in the towns up and down the river the women were watching it fill out on the stalk. None of it had come to the fort. On the fourth of September Thomas Jacob, a sergeant, died, and was carried out to the ground by the wall where the others lay. On the fifth there died Benjamin Beast, and Percy wrote down his name.