A Little Waste Ground

From Werowocomoco to the fort was twelve miles by the paths, a short winter day's walk for men in health. The four men Powhatan had sent home with Smith were in health and knew every path, and they spent the whole of the first of January on it without finishing. They set the baskets of bread down on the frozen ground at the creeks. They built up a fire at midday and sat by it, and they went on when it suited them and not before. Smith had no gun and no sword, and no way to hurry four men who were carrying his gown and his food. In the account he wrote that year, they "trifled away that day, and would not goe to our Forte by any perswasions". The light went early behind the bare trees. They lodged that night "in certaine olde hunting houses of Paspahegh," frames of bent saplings on the high ground above the river, their mats torn and half gone. The fort was an hour off.

It was Paspahegh ground all the way down to the water. The island lay in it, and the people whose houses these were had watched the English cut their first trees there in May. Their werowance had come to the English camp that month with a hundred armed men, and sent a deer, and sold Smith ten bushels of corn in the autumn. In December, in Opechancanough's camp, he had pressed for an attack on the fort while Smith sat a prisoner by the fire. The guides built their own fire in the middle of the floor and lay down beside it. Smith slept in his gown on the old mats, with the smoke going up through the gap in the roof and the frost coming in under the walls. Three weeks earlier he had sent a letter to the fort by three men on foot in that weather. Whether it had come he could not know.

He had gone up the Chickahominy in the second week of December as the colony's cape merchant, for corn and for the head of the river. He was coming back with a compass, a writing tablet and a promise made to Powhatan. The two men who had gone on with him in the canoe were dead, one found with twenty or thirty arrows in him and the other never seen again. The council he was coming back to had sat three that autumn: Ratcliffe as president, Martin, and Smith. With Smith gone it had sat as two, and Martin was sick. In September those three had carried a warrant into Wingfield's tent, and in two days the first president was out of his office and off the council. Smith's name was on that warrant. He knew the way it went.

The fort had kept its winter round without him. The watch went up on the bulwarks at dusk and came down cold at morning, and the bell rang the company to prayers under the old sail that still served for a church. What was left of the autumn's corn was in the store, Kecoughtan's bushels and Paspahegh's and the Chickahominy hogsheads, and it was doled out by the measure, boiled into a mess with whatever the river gave. The men who had come through August had come through it thin and stayed thin. Wood had to be cut on the mainland and carried in across the neck, and every man who went for it went armed. Ratcliffe kept the president's tent. Martin lay sick.

They set out in the dark, "ere Sunne rise," and reached the fort within the hour. The path came down off the high ground through oak and pine with the leaves frozen underfoot, and the guides went quickly now, as if the loads had grown lighter in the night. Then the woods opened on the marsh, and the neck ran out across it to the island, and the palisade stood up gray at the end of it with the river behind. Frost lay white on the marsh grass along the neck, and beyond the island the river was the color of pewter, with a skin of ice in the reeds at its edge. Smoke stood up inside the palisade from the cabins, posts and wattle under reed thatch, where men had died three and four in a night in August. The guns sat in the half-moon bulwarks at the three corners. Along one wall the burying ground ran in its line, the summer's graves settled and the autumn's still heaped. Men came out to the gate wrapped in whatever they owned that was warm, their breath smoking in the first light. Their doublets were out at the elbows and their shoes were tied on with cord. Some of them leaned on the posts to stand. Smith came up the path to them with Powhatan's four men behind him, and the four set their loads down on the frozen ground.

They crowded round him. He had been gone more than three weeks, long enough for a man who went up the Chickahominy in December to be counted with the dead, and here he was in his own doublet, with Powhatan's bread behind him. He had all of it to answer for at once, standing in the frost: the canoe, the barge, the three weeks, the men who were not with him. The two men who had gone on with him were dead, and he had been a prisoner, and he had sat at Powhatan's fire at Werowocomoco and eaten from his platters and come home under his guard. The bread the four men had carried was carried in through the gate. Some of the men at the gate had been eating boiled corn for a month, and they looked at the baskets before they looked at him.

The welcome was nearly whole. Each man met him "with the truest signes of joy they could expresse," every one "except M. Archer, and some 2. or 3. of his." Gabriel Archer, wounded in both hands at Cape Henry on the first night in Virginia, had not been of the council when Smith went up the Chickahominy. He had been "sworne Counsellour" in Smith's absence, "though not with the consent of Captaine Martin." Ratcliffe was president still. Archer now sat beside him. Martin had not wanted him there.

The blame came with the welcome, and Smith put the whole of it into one sentence that year: "Great blame and imputation was laide upon mee by them, for the losse of our two men which the Indians slew: insomuch that they purposed to depose me." From inside the palisade the case was short. The cape merchant had taken the fort's men up a river in December, left the barge, gone on in a canoe with two of them, and come home more than three weeks later without them and without his own arms, escorted by men sent by the brother of the werowance whose people had killed them. He had brought back bread and a story. Powhatan had fed him, questioned him, given him his liberty, and offered the English a country on his own river, and the man who said so was the only Englishman who had been there. Wingfield had been put out in September over a chicken and a spoonful of beer. Now there were two dead men to set against Smith.

In 1624, in the Generall Historie, the purpose had become a trial. Smith wrote there that his enemies condemned him to die under a law out of Leviticus. In 1608 he had them meaning only to put him out. Both versions are his.

That night the watch went up on the bulwarks as it did every night, men in two coats where they had two, stamping on the frozen planking with their matchlocks leaned against the timbers beside them. Below them the cabins had gone dark one by one. The river ran black past the island, and the woods on the far shore were blacker. A man on the watch that winter listened to the tide in the reeds and the ice ticking along the bank, and to the coughing from the cabins, and to nothing else for hours. Then he saw a light on the water downstream, low, where no light had any business to be, and then a second above it.

The ship came up the river the same night. Christopher Newport, the fleet's captain, had sailed from the island in June and promised a supply within twenty weeks. He came back in nearly twenty-eight. A supply was the Company's word for a relief fleet, men and victuals and tools and orders sent out from London to keep a planted colony going until it could keep itself, and this one brought about a hundred men. The Phoenix, the supply's second ship, was not with him. The ship came in where the channel ran close under the bank, as the first three had in May, and lanterns moved on the water and voices carried across it in the cold, English voices the fort had not heard since summer, calling for a boat and a line. For Smith it came at the bottom of the day: "in the midst of my miseries, it pleased God to send Captaine Nuport," who, arriving the same night, "so tripled our joy as for a while these plots against me were deferred." The malice stayed, and Newport "in short time did plainly see" it.

The boats came in to the bank through the dark with men packed in them shoulder to shoulder, cramped and stiff from months in the hold, and the fort's men went down to meet them with torches of pitch pine and whatever news they had. The newcomers came ashore onto frozen mud in the middle of the night, to a fort they could not see beyond the torchlight, among men they could hear before they could make them out. What met them was the palisade, the smoke and the cold, and a company that had been looking down the river for them since autumn. The old company's joy was loud. The new men were taken up through the gate and found room by the fires.

The fort that took them in was small enough to count at the gate. Smith gave its number eight years later, in the letter to Queen Anne dated 1616, in the same sentence that brings him home from Powhatan's house:

"where I found about eight and thirtie miserable poore and sicke creatures, to keepe possession of all those large territories of Virginia; such was the weaknesse of this poore Commonwealth, as had the Salvages not fed us, we directly had starved."

About a hundred and five had come to stay in May. Wingfield, the first president, was among those left, a private man now, deposed by the council Smith sat on. Percy, the earl's son, was among them too, the man who had written down the dead by the day until his account stops in September. The rest were laborers and gentlemen and a few boys who had lived since August on barley and river water and the corn the towns had brought. Over the next days about a hundred more came off the ship in the boats, in new wool and whole shoes, with chests and bedding and the color of a London winter in their faces, and stood in the frost among men who could barely stand. There was not cabin room for them. The newcomers slept where they could, three and four to a hearth, and the old company showed them the ways of the place: where the water was drawn, where the watch stood, which stretch of the wall held the graves. Within the week some of them were sick.

Nothing in the place was built for the numbers it now held. The bell rang morning and evening and both companies stood under the old sail for prayers, new London wool beside what was left of the old company's. The new victuals came out of the casks, biscuit and meal and peas, and went into the same pots as the corn the towns had sold. At night they lay down together around the same hearths, the coughing of the old company in the dark beside the new men's sleep.

With Newport ashore the council was made over again. Matthew Scrivener, a councillor newly arrived with the supply, took his seat beside Martin and Smith, and Smith set the three of them down together as "called Counsellers." Smith left Archer out. The supply's goods came up the bank by boat and by hand over the following days, casks and bales hauled through the gate on rollers and on men's shoulders, and Smith as cape merchant had the keeping of them. Each cask was counted, marked and entered; the copper for the towns was weighed and put by. He stood over the work with his tablet in the cold and ticked the casks off one by one as they passed him. Smith would leave Virginia in 1609. The winter after he went came near to emptying the fort.

A newcomer five days ashore knew the fort by then as a few smells and a few faces: wet ash and wood smoke, the latrine ditch, the boiled corn, the men of the old company with their swollen legs and their quiet. He had a place by a hearth in a cabin he shared with men he had met on the ship, and his chest under the bench, and a blanket he had brought from home. He knew the bell and the watch and the way down to the water. The cry went up from somewhere along the row of roofs, and by the time he was out of the door the air over the cabins had gone brown.

Within five or six days of the ship's coming, "by a mischaunce our Fort was burned, and the most of our apparell, lodging and private provision." The thatch was reed, cut from the marsh and dried hard by the frost, and the cabins stood close inside the palisade, roof beside roof, with their fires burning day and night against the cold. Once one roof was alight the wind off the river carried it to the next. Men went down to the water with buckets and kettles and came back up the bank at a run, and the river was low and edged with ice. Others climbed onto the cabins nearest the fire and dragged the thatch down with pikes and hooks to break its road. It did no good. The roofs went first. The bedding went under them. The cloaks and spare shirts went. The private stores went, bought in London. The newcomers' chests went, a week off the ship. By the end of it the fort was a palisade with guns at its corners and ash inside.

The cold did the rest of it. January on the James was hard frost and wind off the water, and a man who had lost his cabin, his blanket and his second shirt slept on the burnt ground, or under a scrap of sail stretched against the palisade, or did not sleep. The ash froze at night and thawed to black mud at noon. The sick of the old company had no shelter left to be sick in. The newcomers had none to grow used to the country under, and they had come from an English winter into a Virginia one with nothing between them and it but what they had on. Smith set down the cost in a line:

"Many of our old men diseased, and of our new for want of lodging perished."

The line of graves along the wall grew again, dug now in frozen ground by men in the clothes they stood up in. In the mornings men raked through the ash where their cabins had been for whatever iron had come through it, a hinge, a pot, a handful of nails, the head of an axe with its helve burned away. They cooked in the open on fires built where the hearths had stood. The palisade had come through, and the guns, and the frost lay on everything inside them.

Then Powhatan's men began to come in from the woods. The watch saw them first, small and dark against the frost where the trees met the marsh at the far end of the neck, walking in single file with their loads, and called down to the burned ground that Powhatan's men were coming. The men below came out to look. They came across the neck in small parties with their loads on their backs, twelve miles overland from the York in the frost, and set them down at the burned gate: quarters of deer, and bread in baskets, and raccoon. They came "each weeke once or twice," and what they carried had been divided before it left Werowocomoco. Half was for Smith. Half was for Newport, whom Smith had called his father in Powhatan's house, and king of all the waters, and whom Powhatan had never seen: "halfe alwayes for my father whom he much desired to see, and halfe for me." The carriers rested a little by the fires that were left and started home for the York before the light went. The venison went onto those fires, in a fort that had nothing else to roast. The bread went to men who had crossed the ocean with the Company's victuals and lost their own in an afternoon. Smith took it in at the gate, the two halves set apart on the ground as they had come, and sent Newport's half to Newport.

Every load came with words, and the words were the same each time. Powhatan, Smith wrote, "so continually importuned by messengers and presents, that I would come to fetch the corne, and take the Countrie their King had given me."