A Little Waste Ground

By the sixth of September the common store held almost nothing a sick man could be given. Edward Maria Wingfield, the president, had the store in his charge, and the charge Smith would later lay against him was that he kept its sack and aquavitae, the sweet wine and the brandy, for his own table. His own account gives the store as it stood that week: oil, vinegar, sack and aquavitae "all spent, saueing twoe gallons of each: the sack reserued for the Comunion Table". The rest he put by against whatever extremity came next. The casks stood in a storehouse thatched with reed like the cabins, and the place smelled of lees and wet timber. Men who could still walk found reasons to pass its door. "Lord, how they then longed for to supp up that litle remnant," he wrote of them, for they had emptied "all their owne bottles and all other that they could smell out." Two gallons of brandy stood between the fort and its next emergency. He kept them.

The barley was going the same way. Newport had left provision for thirteen or fourteen weeks when he sailed in June, and the weeks were nearly run; the supply he had promised within twenty would not be due before November. The cooks scraped the bottoms of the casks for the can that went to each mess of five, and the weevils came up with the grain. Across the water the corn in the Paspahegh fields stood tasseled and heavy in the heat. Since June the gate had seen none of the people who worked them. The men on the bulwarks watched the far shore by day and the channel by night, and saw nothing on either. The fort waited, and ate its barley.

George Kendall was under guard by then. He had been one of the seven names read out of the Company's box at Cape Henry, and since Gosnold's death the council could hardly agree on anything because of him. Kendall had been put off the council and committed to prison, for that he did "practize to sowe discord betweene the President and Councell." Of the seven, Gosnold lay under the sand along the wall and Newport was somewhere on the Atlantic with the ships. Ratcliffe, who had brought the Discovery over, had been very sick since August. Martin, sick through most of the summer, could barely stand. Smith had been ill and was mending. Four men were left to govern, and one of them held the store.

The corn came while the store stood at its two gallons. The sentry on the bulwark saw the carriers first, men coming out of the trees on the mainland side with loads on their backs, and his shout sent everyone who could stand to the palisade with matches lit. The last men to come out of those woods in numbers had come with bows. These came to the gate and set down baskets: maize bread, flat and heavy and baked in the ashes; ears of corn with the husks still green; fish; venison. The corn was soft. Pressed with a thumbnail, a kernel ran milk. In Smith's pamphlet it came "ere it was halfe ripe," brought "when we rather expected when they would destroy us". The carriers wore deerskin mantles against the morning and had the right side of the head shaved, the left grown long and knotted, as the men at Kecoughtan had worn it in April. They set the loads down, made their signs, and went back into the trees, and came again on other days with more. Inside the gate the smell of the bread went through the cabins. The sick, who had chewed nothing solid in a fortnight, sat in the sand with ears of green corn and ate the kernels raw, milk running into their beards. The fort had sent nobody to ask.

George Percy had spent a month setting down the dead by the day, and now he watched the living eat. Men who had lain a week in the cabins were propped against the posts and fed corn boiled soft, with bread broken into the broth. The barley stayed in its cask. In August he had put the fort's survival down to a terror God sent into those people's hearts; in September the same people came to the gate with bread. Within days some of them were walking down to the river and back, slowly, a hand on the wall. Percy gave the thing a sentence that kept his own word for the givers: "It pleased God, after a while, to send those people which were our mortall enemies to releeve us with victuals, as Bread, Corne, Fish, and Flesh in great plentie, which was the setting up of our feeble men, otherwise wee had all perished." Werowances came in person too, so that the fort was "frequented by divers Kings in the Countrie, bringing us store of provision to our great comfort". Percy and Smith, writing apart, set down nearly the same thing, down to the enemies.

The corn in those baskets had gone into the ground in May, in hills like the Paspahegh fields across the water, while the English were felling trees on the island. Picked in September it was a month short of hard corn, the kind that kept. Every basket carried to the gate was a basket the towns would not have in the cold months, when whole towns went out to the hunting camps and lived on what they had put by. The towns sent it anyway, and kept sending. In June, bowmen in those woods had shot at the English from cover. In September the English ate the women's bread at the gate.

The strength came back slowly, and the quarrel came back with it. On the tenth of September three of the council crossed the fort to the president's tent: Ratcliffe and Martin, both still weak, and Smith, sworn of the council since June. Wingfield set down what they brought. They "came to the President's tennt with a warrant, subscribed vnder their handes, to depose the President". The tent was canvas over poles, close in the afternoon heat, with sand underfoot and flies at the flap. In Smith's reckoning, "about the tenth of September there was about 46. of our men dead". The paper carried three hands. In April, when the Company's box was opened at Cape Henry, the council had kept Smith out of the seat the box gave him and held him a prisoner; Wingfield had been chosen president in May while Smith was still under restraint. Now Smith stood in the president's tent with his own name under a warrant. Wingfield made them no fight. He told them he was at their pleasure, and that they might dispose of him as they would, without more stir. He had been president since the fourteenth of May.

The next day they tried him. Percy's sentence for it is as flat as a clerk's: "The eleventh day, there was certaine Articles laid against Master Wingfield which was then President; thereupon he was not only displaced out of his President ship, but also from being of the Councell." The articles were small things. Ratcliffe's grievance was that the president had denied him "a penny whitle, a chickyn, a spoonfull of beere, and serued him wth foule corne". Wingfield's answers survive in the defense he wrote the next year, still angry. To the chicken he answered that "I had by my owne huswiferie bred aboue 37," most of them from his own birds. Of all of them, he wrote, he did not see three alive by the time he left Virginia. The feasting he laid at Smith's door: Smith had spread a rumor in the colony "that I did feast myself and my seruants out of the comon stoare". He answered the rumor with a squirrel. "I never had but one squirell roasted", and part of that had gone to Ratcliffe, then sick, and the squirrel itself had been a present. He added that he "did never heate a flesh pott but when the comon pot was so used likewise." Then he went after Smith, and wrote that it had been proved to Smith's face that he "begged in Ireland, like a rogue, wthout a lycence."

Smith, who hated him, put his own side in print the next summer: the sack and aquavitae, "being kept onely in the Presidents hands, for his owne diet, and his few associates." Wingfield counted the same stores as two gallons each, the sack kept back for the communion table. Neither man was a fair witness. Along the wall the graves ran in their line, shallow and unmarked, while the council argued over a chicken and a spoonful of beer. Wingfield lost his seat on the council with the presidency. He had come out at the head of the colony, and he stayed on in it as a private gentleman under the men who had signed the warrant. Ratcliffe was chosen president in his place.

The nights were turning cold on the river, though the days still sweated. On the eighteenth of September, Percy wrote, "died one Ellis Kinistone, which was starved to death with cold", which in the English of 1607 meant only that the cold killed him. The men slept where they had slept all summer, in huts of wattle and reed, in their clothes, under whatever blanket or old sail they owned. Smith gave the lodgings one sentence: "As yet we had no houses to cover us, our Tents were rotten and our Cabbins worse then nought." Wool doublets that had been too hot in August were damp through by morning. The fires in the cabins smoked and gave little heat. Shoes had rotted in the marsh.

William White had lived for a time in the towns, and he told the fort what he had seen there at the start of each day. Before they ate or drank, men, women and children over ten years old ran down into the river and washed a good while, until the sun came up. Then they strewed tobacco on the water or the land, "honouring the Sunne as their God", and did the same again when it set. Percy's account, as it was printed, ends there, on the people across the water going into the river at first light.

Thomas Studley, the colony's first cape merchant, had died on the twenty-eighth of August. The cape merchant kept the store and ran the trade, and with Ratcliffe and Martin both too sick to do it, the office fell to Smith. He took it with no good opinion of the men he had to feed, who were, as he saw them, in such despair that they "would rather starve and rot with idlenes" than lift a hand without being made to. The corn from the towns was eaten faster than it came, and fewer baskets came to the gate each week. With about eighteen days' victuals left in the store, he took the shallop down the river to Kecoughtan to trade for corn and try the water for fish.

The shallop went down on the ebb, under a sail patched in the summer, past the island's marsh and the long reaches where the river widened toward the bay. The water turned salt and choppy. The weather blew hard at the river's mouth and the nets stayed dry. At Kecoughtan the people looked at the boat and the thin men in it and judged the English near famished. They offered little pieces of bread and small handfuls of beans or wheat for a hatchet or a piece of copper. Smith answered in the same coin, offering them trifles back for their handfuls, and gave freely to the children. He called it cold comfort. He anchored before the town for the night with the shallop riding to the wind. The town stood on a plain of three acres between two arms of the water, eighteen houses of mats and bark with the cookfires going. In the morning the town wanted his copper as much as he wanted their corn. He went up to the houses with four men carrying muskets, the town as unsure of his intent as he was of theirs, and traded for fish, oysters, bread and deer. With twenty men, he wrote, he might have filled a ship with their corn. He came away with sixteen bushels. On the way home two canoes from a town on the south shore came alongside and asked him back to their town, and he reached the fort with near thirty.

By the time the leaves came down the store was nearly bare again. After much argument the council resolved to send the pinnace and the barge up the river to trade, and cast lots for who should go, and the lot fell to Smith. While the pinnace was rigging he took the barge across to Topohanack, a town on the south shore, and found the houses quiet and only women and children there, who ran from their houses until he coaxed them back. They dared not trade. He wrote of the place that "corne they had plenty, and to spoile I had no commission". Coming home by Paspahegh he loaded ten or twelve bushels there, and his men saw hands going for their muskets and swords by stealth. The English stood to their guard, and the Paspaheghs looked ready to fall on them. All along that shore men came out of the woods with corn to sell and then dogged the barge from place to place. It was night, and the fort was in no state for a war. He turned for home with ten bushels and the Paspaheghs following along the shore in the dark.

On the ninth of November he set out with eight men in the barge for the Chickahominy, the river that ran into the James above the fort, through swamps. The Chickahominies, its people, kept their own councils. In the bay at Paspahegh that afternoon a man of their country hailed the barge and offered to take him up to his town, and the Paspaheghs on the shore grudged it. They went by moonlight, the guide in the bow, the oars dipping quietly, the marsh black on either hand and smelling of mud and rotted reed. The cold came up off the water and into the men's knees. At midnight the guide brought them under his town; in the morning Smith went up to it. It stood a quarter of a mile from the river on high ground, thirty or forty houses, with springs running out of the hillside and falling straight down into the water, and a great marsh across the river full of fish and fowl. He laid out copper and hatchets, and every family pressed corn on him. A hundred people at the least waited by the river with baskets. He bought what he liked, and then, so they should not see how badly he needed it, went higher up the river to the other towns. At Mamanahunt, which he called the heart of the country, two hundred people stood among more corn than the barge could hold. He came down on the ebb and was at the fort by midnight, and in the morning he unloaded seven hogsheads, the great casks, into the store.

He went back the next morning. On the second day Mamanahunt was ready for him with three or four hundred baskets, little and great, and the barge sat low before it left. At his going the people asked to hear the guns. His men fired from the middle of the river, and the echo came back off the wooded banks like a peal of ordnance. The canoes followed the barge downstream, the people in them handing over whatever they had rather than take it home. At the fort he unloaded seven or eight hogsheads more. The store had Indian corn in it by the cask.

With corn in the store, the fort found time to quarrel again. Ratcliffe, as president, had cause to rebuke James Read, the blacksmith, who gave him foul words for it and offered to strike him with his tools. A jury condemned Read to hang. Hanging in the fort meant a ladder, the rope about the neck, and a push from the rungs, and the company stood round in the cold to see it done. Read stood obstinate on the ladder, looking for a rescue that did not come, and then, "before he was turned of the lather," asked to speak with the president in private. To Ratcliffe he named George Kendall as the head of a mutiny. Read came down off the ladder alive. Kendall, already put off the council, went before a jury in his turn and was condemned. At the judgment he told the court that the president's right name was Sicklemore, not Ratcliffe, and so he had no authority to pronounce it. Martin pronounced it instead. Kendall was "shott to death for a mutiny."

The seven names in the box had come to this. Gosnold lay by the wall. Newport was in England or at sea. Wingfield was off the council. Kendall was dead. Ratcliffe was president. Three of the seven still sat.

"This conspiracy appeased," Smith wrote, and he took the barge up the Chickahominy a third time. The river ran colder now under a November sky, and the marsh grass along it had gone brown. His men rowed with their hands wrapped against the wet, and the frost lay on the thwarts in the mornings until the sun was well up. He went past the towns of the first voyages to others he had not seen, and found corn in all of them, and less of it in each. He loaded the barge all the same, and brought it down the river to the fort.