A Little Waste Ground

Twenty miles above the barge the Chickahominy still kept its depth, but fallen trees lay across it at every bend, and the canoe had to be worked around their crowns. Smith had left the barge with seven men at the last town on the river, under orders that none of them go ashore until he came back. Two men of the river, hired with the canoe, knelt in it and paddled. Behind them sat Jehu Robinson and Thomas Emry, the two Englishmen he had brought, with their muskets and a coil of match. It was the second week of December. The marsh grass stood dead along the banks, the water ran cold and quick under the hull, and every breath showed. He had come to find the river's head, and to carry home something worth sending to the merchants in London. He had also come to answer what he called "the malicious judges of my actions at home". The river narrowed. He went on.

Where the bank rose a little they put in to boil their food. The guides scraped the leaves off a patch of ground and got a fire going with wood from the drift, and the kettle went on with water and meal. Robinson and Emry sat to it with their backs to the river, their breeches wet from the canoe, blowing on their hands. The smoke from the fire went up thin and straight in the still air. Smith took one of the guides into the woods with him to look at the soil and cut across the river's windings. He left the other at the fire with Robinson and Emry, their matches lit, under orders to fire a piece at the first sight of anyone in the trees. Within a quarter of an hour he heard a loud cry behind him and a hollowing of voices, and no shot. He seized the guide, bound the man's arm to his own wrist with a garter, and held his pistol ready to be revenged on him. The guide told him to run, and seemed to know nothing of what had happened. They were still arguing when an arrow struck Smith in the right thigh and did no harm. Two bowmen were drawing on him in the trees, and he fired his French pistol at them. Three or four more came on. He loaded and fired again, keeping the guide in front of him for a shield, and the arrows fell short.

Then the woods filled. Opechancanough, Powhatan's brother and werowance of the Pamunkeys, came through the trees with two hundred men, every bow drawn. In June a messenger from this werowance had come to the fort to speak of peace. Now the men around Smith laid their bows on the ground and loosed none of them. The guide went between the two sides and talked, and told them Smith was the captain. Smith asked to go back to his canoe. They asked for his arms, and said the rest of his men were dead; him alone they meant to keep. Backing toward the river with his eyes on the bowmen, he stepped into a quagmire and stuck fast, and the guide who tried to pull him out stuck with him. The mud was near freezing and held him to the thighs. He threw his arms away. Until he did, none of them came near him.

They drew him out and brought him before Opechancanough, the mud heavy in his breeches and his shoes full of it, shaking so that his teeth knocked. Smith reached into his clothes for his compass, and gave it to Opechancanough. "I presented him with a compasse diall, describing by my best meanes the use therof: whereat he so amazedly admired, as he suffered me to proceed in a discourse of the roundnes of the earth, the course of the sunne, moone, starres and plannets." The needle swung under its glass and could not be touched. The werowance answered the lecture with kind words and bread. Then he took Smith down to where the canoe lay. Robinson lay beside it, "slaine, with 20 or 30. arrowes in him." Of Emry there was no sign.

The march went through woods full of smoke. Late in the year whole towns left their fields for the hunting grounds, and the men drove deer by fire: they ringed a stretch of woods where the deer lay up with many fires, stood between the fires with their bows, and sent others in to drive the animals toward them, so that the deer, running from the flames, ran onto the arrows. That was why two hundred armed men had been in the swamp in December, and why the smoke hung in the trees on every side. Smith understood the fires for a hunt. At every halt he still expected to be killed.

Rasawrack, the hunting camp near the place where he had been taken, lay within six miles. Its houses were "onely made as arbors and covered with mats", built to be taken down and carried. The women and children came out to meet the column. Opechancanough walked in the middle of twenty bowmen, with a sword and a gun carried before him, and Smith walked between two more bowmen with the rest filing behind through the trees, each man with his bow and a handful of arrows and a painted quiver at his back. A sergeant ran each flank, one always toward the front and the other toward the rear. The camp smelled of smoke and hides and meat drying on racks, and dogs ran out barking at the stranger. There the men cast themselves into a ring and danced, and then went off to their lodgings, and Smith was led to his.

For supper Smith had a quarter of venison and about ten pounds of bread, and what he left was carried after him. Each morning three women brought him three great platters of fine bread, with more venison than ten men could have eaten. Eight men guarded him at all hours. They gave him back his gown, the points and garters that fastened his clothes, his compass and his writing tablet. Three or four days after the capture, seven men with rattles came into the house where he lay at ten in the morning and sang about the fire. They ringed the fire with a circle of meal, and at the end of each song laid down two or three grains of wheat, a foot or two out, until they had made a half circle of six or seven hundred; then two or three more circles beyond it, a hand's breadth apart, with little sticks laid between the grains. One of them wore a great skin, with the skins of weasels hung round his head and a crown of feathers, and cast cakes of deer suet and tobacco into the fire. They sang until six in the evening. Smith set the ceremony beside the feeding and was afraid: they fed him so fat, he wrote, "that I much doubted they intended to have sacrificed mee".

Opechancanough wanted to know about the English ships and how they sailed the seas, about the earth and the sky and the English God, and told Smith what he knew of the country in return. There was talk in the camp of assaulting the fort, pressed by the Paspahegh werowance. Smith asked to send a letter there, so the fort would know he was well treated and not take revenge for his death. Opechancanough agreed, and sent three men with it, "in such weather as in reason were unpossible by any naked to be indured." They went out of the camp in deerskin mantles and little else, over ground white with frost, toward a fort where the last strangers to come out of the woods had been met with matches lit. In the letter and in his talk Smith described the fort's guns, the mines laid in the fields, and the revenge Newport would take when he came back. The talk of an assault stopped.

The day after the letter, a man came to Smith's lodging "with his sword, to have slaine me". The guard stopped him, and he tried again with a bow. Opechancanough came and explained it. One of the men Smith had shot in the swamp was dying of the wound, and another was dead; this was the dead man's father. To keep Smith out of his reach, Opechancanough took him away north to the Pamunkey country and the rivers beyond, from one hunting town to the next. In every country there stood a house of Powhatan's, the great chief Smith still believed lived at the falls, where the English had set up their cross in May. They came back to Rasawrack, bundled the mats, marched two days, and crossed a river as broad as the Thames. They took him farther still, north to a town on the Rappahannock. A ship had come into those rivers the year before; its people had been feasted, and its captain had killed the werowance there and carried off some of his people, and "they supposed I were hee." That captain had been a tall man, and the short soldier in front of them was used kindly and taken away the next day. Christmas fell somewhere on those paths. The next night he lodged at a hunting town of Powhatan's, and the next day they brought him in to Werowocomoco.

The corn for the feast was ground before light. The woman who pounded it worked in the cooking houses at the edge of the town, with a log mortar between her knees and a pestle as long as her arm, and the frost lay white on the mats outside the doorway. Her hands were cracked from the cold and from the water. The meal went into the bread with a little water and was patted flat and buried in the ashes, and the venison hung in joints over the fires, dripping fat into the coals. Smoke filled the roof and went out at the hole in the top and the cracks between the bark, and the inside of the house was warm only near the fire, and only on the side facing it. Since the stranger had been brought in there had been more bread to make than on an ordinary day, and more meat to watch, and the platters went out loaded to the long house and came back emptied. Children squatted by the fire for the scraps. When the woman went out with a load of bread she saw him once among the men across the open ground, short, with a beard on his face like an animal's pelt, in a long gown. Then she went back to the mortar. The fire under the venison needed wood, and the bread for the evening was not yet in the ashes.

Werowocomoco was Powhatan's chief town, on the north bank of the York, twelve miles overland from the fort. Its houses stood among bare fields above the water, with smoke coming out of every roof, and the people had come out of them to see the stranger walked in among his guard. The long house was the biggest of them. Smith ducked in at its door out of the frost into heat and smoke that stung his eyes, and it took him a moment to see down the length of it. A fire burned in the middle of the floor, and the faces on either side of it were all turned toward him. Powhatan (Wahunsenacah), the old paramount chief, lay at the far end, on "a Bedstead a foote high, upon tenne or twelve Mattes, richly hung with manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and covered with a great Covering of Rahaughcums", a robe of raccoon skins. A woman sat at his head and another at his feet. Along both sides of the fire his chief men sat on mats on the ground, "tenne in a ranke", and behind them as many young women, each with a great chain of white beads over her shoulders and her head painted red. The old man received him "with such a grave and Majesticall countenance, as drave me into admiration to see such state in a naked Salvage".

Tsenacommacah was his: the country of more than thirty peoples from the falls of the rivers down to the bay, whose werowances paid him in corn, skins, copper and beads. Opechancanough was one of them, and so was the Paspahegh werowance whose country held the island. The hunting towns Smith had been walked through were Powhatan's, and so were the houses in every country they had crossed. Smith had been led around the edge of the chiefdom for most of his captivity before he was brought to its center.

Powhatan welcomed him with good words and great platters of food, and assured him of his friendship and of his liberty within four days. He had taken delight in Opechancanough's account of the compass and the talk of the sun and the stars, and he questioned Smith on it often. He asked why the English had come. Smith told him they had been "in fight with the Spaniards our enemie, beeing overpowred, neare put to retreat, and by extreame weather put to this shore". He said they had been shot at when they landed at the bay and kindly used at Kecoughtan and Paspahegh; that their pinnace was leaking and they were staying only to mend her, until Captain Newport, his father, came to take them away. Asked why he had gone so far up the river in his boat, he said he wanted to reach the salt water on the other side of the land, and to revenge a child of his father's, killed by the Monacans. Powhatan told him in turn of the countries beyond the falls, of a salt water some days' journey off where the waves broke among stones, of a fierce nation on that sea that ate men, and of people beyond them in short coats with sleeves to the elbow, who passed that way in ships like the English ones. The fire was built up while they talked, and the food kept coming. The old man spoke of every people under him and every country past them with pride, as parts of one great dominion, and named them freely. Smith answered with the kingdoms of Europe, King James and his ships past counting, the noise of trumpets, and Newport, whom he named the king of all the waters. At this greatness, in Smith's telling, Powhatan wondered and was not a little afraid.

Then Powhatan made him an offer. "He desired mee to forsake Paspahegh, and to live with him upon his River, a Countrie called Capa Howasicke. Hee promised to give me Corne, Venison, or what I wanted to feede us: Hatchets and Copper wee should make him, and none should disturbe us." Smith "promised to performe". In his 1608 pamphlet the visit ends there, with the promise, the food, and the guides sent to take him home. Nobody in it lifts a club.

The pamphlet was printed in London that year from his long letter, and it was not printed whole. Its editor said so in the preface: "somewhat more was by him written, which being as I thought (fit to be private) I would not adventure to make it publicke." The 1608 pamphlet was cut. Its silence proves nothing.

The rescue appears in print in 1624, sixteen years after the capture of December 1607, in Smith's own Generall Historie. It appears there twice. The first is a letter to Queen Anne, dated 1616, which survives only as Smith printed it in that book. In it he wrote of Pocahontas (Amonute, also called Matoaka), Powhatan's daughter: "at the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her owne braines to save mine; and not onely that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to James towne". The letter has no stones in it and no clubs. It puts his stay at "After some six weeks fatting amongst those Salvage Courtiers". He had been gone a little over three weeks. The second is the third book of the same history, where the stones and the clubs first appear and the scene is full: more than two hundred courtiers, Powhatan on a seat like a bedstead in his robe of raccoon skins with the tails hanging, a young woman of sixteen or eighteen on either side of him, a queen bringing water for his hands and another a bunch of feathers to dry them, a long consultation. Then "two great stones were brought before Powhatan." As many as could lay hands on Smith dragged him to them and laid his head on them, men "being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines," and Pocahontas, the king's dearest daughter, took his head in her arms and laid her own upon it. The people in that long house left no account of the day.

On the first of January, Powhatan sent him home with four men: one to carry his gown and knapsack behind him, two loaded with bread, and one to go with him. The path ran south from the York through bare woods, over ground frozen hard in the ruts and soft where the sun reached it, twelve miles to the James. The guides went at their own pace and stopped when they liked, and the bread rode on their backs in baskets. Smith walked in his doublet with his hands in his sleeves. He had his compass and his tablet again, and Powhatan's friendship, and his own promise to bring the English to live on Powhatan's river. He had none of his arms. Both Englishmen who had gone into the swamp with him were dead, and he was the one coming home.