A Little Waste Ground

The tools went first. Spades and shovels walked out of the fort that April, and hatchets, and swords, in the hands of men who had come in to trade or to stand about and watch the English work. The man who took something one day came back the next and stood among the workers as before. Smith kept the store, and he counted what was gone against what the ships had landed. One man took two swords, and Smith got the council's consent to set him in the stocks, where he sat with his legs locked in the boards in front of the men he had robbed. The next day the same man came back with three others, all carrying wooden swords, and walked into the middle of the English at their work to take whatever came to hand. Smith told them to go. They flourished the wooden swords at him and held on to what they had. The first man swung at Smith, and Smith struck first. The other three came on at the blow, were met, and broke. Smith went after them with five or six shot and chased them off the island.

They were Paspaheghs, the people whose country held the island, and until that morning nobody at the fort had stood up to them. Within the hour they were back. Word had gone round, through other men still inside the palisade, that Smith meant to be revenged, and the Paspaheghs came without being sent for and went to work on the English fish weirs, wading in the cold river beside the men already at it, driving stakes into the mud in a line and weaving the brush between them to turn the fish into the pen. Three days later they asked, trembling, to be friends. From Nansemond, the country on the south side at the mouth of the James, about thirty miles off, the werowance sent back a hatchet his people had stolen when the English were there. The fort rewarded the messenger, as the custom was, and sent him home content.

On April 20 the men were felling trees and setting corn when the alarm went up. The days had turned warm, and the river ran full and brown with spring water. Axes stayed in the cuts, and men dropped the corn from their hands in the hills and ran for their arms, each of them expecting the assault of the year before. It was a sail on the river. The Phoenix, the First Supply's second ship, came up the James under Francis Nelson, her master, more than three months after Newport had come in without her. The fort had given her up for lost. Nelson had been beaten about by storms and contrary winds the whole way, and he had spared the provision in his hold. His men had been at sea since the autumn, on salt meat and biscuit, and they looked it. Her coming did "so ravish us with exceeding joy," Smith wrote, that the fort thought itself fitted with men and stores until the next supply. They brought her in close and made her fast to the trees on the bank. The new men came ashore pale and slow from the long passage into the smell of fresh-cut timber and the black ground of January's fire. Newport had been gone ten days.

The council's first resolve was a march. Smith and Scrivener were to take seventy men up past the falls and see what lay beyond them. For six or seven days Smith drilled the men in the woods, gentlemen and laborers together, with matchlocks that would not fire in rain and match that had to be kept burning all day, marching, skirmishing and firing among the trees, where the towns' burning kept the ground open under the trunks and a company could hold its order. They learned to load and fire by ranks and to move without bunching, and the volleys rolled off through the woods a long way. Then Nelson would not lend himself or his mariners unless the council bound itself to pay the ship's hire for every day they were gone. Others argued that the commission named no such design, and that discovery belonged to Newport alone. Martin, of the council, offered to go himself with six men. No argument moved it forward. Fifty men went back to felling trees and setting corn, and the rest kept the fort. From the beginning of May the Phoenix lay in the river, waiting on what Smith called "the triall of certain matters which for some cause I keepe private."

The volleys had been heard at Werowocomoco. Powhatan sent Thomas Savage, the boy Newport had given him as a son, down to the fort with men carrying many turkeys, a present for Scrivener and Smith, the birds trussed by the legs and slung in bunches. Word had reached Powhatan, as Smith understood it, that Smith meant to go up into his countries and destroy them, and the firing of Smith's drilled men carried to his own lodging and frightened his wives and children. Smith sent the boy back with an answer. The English meant no such thing; they would come to Powhatan only to look for stones to make hatchets, unless his men shot at them, and if they shot one arrow the English would destroy them. He asked Powhatan to send a guide. The boy came back a second time across the neck, and men carried in behind him his chest and the English clothes he had been given, and Powhatan asked for another boy in his place. Savage had watched the Chickahominies coming and going at Powhatan's in numbers, in secret council, and he suspected some mischief. Smith's letter settled it in four words: "The boy we keepe." Powhatan sent the guide, asked again for the boy or some other, and got neither.

Some days later a man snatched an axe and dropped it again with Scrivener's men close behind him. Four or five days after that, Smith and Scrivener were a little way outside the fort among the young corn. The corn had been set in hills, as the towns set theirs, and the blades stood a hand high with the dead stumps of the felled trees standing among them. The woods began at the field's edge. Two men came out of the field with cudgels, newly painted, and circled Smith "as though they would have clubed me like a hare." Smith knew their feigned love toward him, he wrote, was "not without a deadly hatred." He called to Scrivener, and the two of them walked back toward the palisade. The two painted men followed with friendly words, asking for some of their own men, whom they said they wanted to beat. Inside they found a Paspahegh man who lived among the English and whom the English took for a spy, and made to beat him. Smith told them to leave him be. They offered to begin with Smith instead, and two more, painted the same way, came in at the fort's other side. Smith had the gates shut and the four taken. Ratcliffe, the president, and the council remembered that the men of the first assault had come in just so, and ordered the four held to see what followed. In the same hour the English seized eight more and put them in with the four ("Eight more we ceazed"). An hour after that, three or four strangers came to the gate fitted out with arrows, skins and shooting gloves, looked about them, and went off fast. The English did not like the way they went.

The next morning one man came, and then another, to speak for the prisoners. Smith told them to bring home every spade, shovel, sword and tool their people had stolen, or the prisoners would hang the next day. The answer came back as news. Two Englishmen ranging in the woods beyond the neck, out of call of the fort, had been taken, and these, the Paspaheghs said, should redeem "their owne 16. or 18." They brought the offer to the fort's own gate. To Smith it was braving, and he wanted it answered in kind. Smith and the men with him asked Ratcliffe and Martin to sally that afternoon, to show what the fort dared do, and to man the barge that night and burn the towns and spoil what they could. It did not come to that. The two Englishmen were brought to the fort and handed over freely. Ratcliffe let one prisoner go. The rest were marched under guard to morning and evening prayers in the small church inside the palisade, among English soldiers standing in their armor with their pieces, the prayers read over their heads in a language they did not know. They had laughed at what the fort dared do. Now the English watched them shake.

In February, at Werowocomoco, Powhatan had proclaimed Smith a werowance of Powhatan and told his people to count the English his own. Now the council concluded that Smith should terrify the prisoners with some torture, to learn what they meant. The prisoners had spent the night in the fort under guard, and in the morning one of them was taken out through the gate, down the bank and aboard the Phoenix. The ship lay moored to the trees with her hatches open for the cedar, and she smelled of tar and bilge and three months of weather. Sailors put his back to the mainmast and passed the line round him and the mast together until he could move nothing but his head. Then, as Smith told it, "presenting sixe Muskets with match in the cockes, forced him to desire life."

Six men stood a few paces off on the deck with their pieces levelled at his chest. Each musket's match was a cord of saltpetered hemp, lit at one end and clamped in the lock above the pan, and the smoke of six of them drifted across the deck between the musketeers and the mast. A man under them did not need the language to know what one pull on a trigger did. Smith put his questions in what words of their language he had, and in signs. The man could not answer them. One of his companions, he said, sat in the council of Paspahegh and could. Smith had him unbound and taken off out of sight, where the other prisoner could not see what had become of him, and had the second man brought forward. In England the rack stretched a man by the wrists and ankles until he talked, and it was kept for traitors.

"I affrighted the other, first with the rack, then with Muskets; which seeing, he desired me to stay, and hee would confesse."

Scrivener came "To this execution," and heard it. The Paspaheghs, the Chickahominies, the Pamunkeys, Kiskiack and two towns more had all been hunting together on the December day Smith was taken. The Paspaheghs and Chickahominies had meant to fall on the English at their work and carry off the tools. Powhatan and all his people would seem friends until Newport came back with Namontack, and then, at a great feast, seize Newport and his men, and lay the like traps for the rest. It came out under the muskets. Smith and Scrivener examined Macanoe, the counsellor of Paspahegh, each in turn, and he told them the same: that his people and the Chickahominies hated the English and meant them harm, who the men were that took Smith, who had stolen the tools and swords, and that Powhatan received what was stolen. Then the English fired volleys of shot inside the palisade, so that each prisoner, held apart from the rest and hearing the guns, would think the others had been killed. Smith had suspected the trap for the tools already, and the chief cause was the turkeys and the boy, four days before the prisoners were taken. Martin, for his part, still spoke for Powhatan's true meaning, and "most confidently pleaded" it at the council.

Rawhunt came down to the fort with a child. They came across the neck from the mainland with men behind them carrying the present, a deer slung from a pole and bread. Powhatan had sent him, his "most trustie messenger, called Rawhunt," a man Smith thought "as much exceeding in deformitie of person; but of a subtill wit and crafty understanding." Rawhunt spoke at length, with much preamble before he came to his errand, and the men of the fort stood round to hear what they could not understand. Powhatan loved and respected Smith, he said, and so that Smith should never doubt his kindness he had sent the child he most esteemed to see him. He asked that the boy might come back to Powhatan, "which he loved exceedingly." The child was Pocahontas, Powhatan's daughter, and she stood in the fort among the people who held her father's men.

"Powhatan understanding we detained certaine Salvages, sent his Daughter, a child of tenne yeares old: which, not only for feature, countenance, and proportion, much exceedeth any of the rest of his people: but for wit and spirit, the only Nonpariel of his Country."

The prisoners had been in the fort three days by then, sleeping under guard, fed from the English pot and walked to prayers morning and evening. They were inside the same palisade with her, and the English who had taken them stood about with their arms. The child had been sent to ask for them. She was painted and marked as the girls of the towns were, small among men in steel caps and back-and-breast. Smith watched her through that time. "His litle Daughter hee had taught this lesson also, not taking notice at all of the Indeans that had beene prisoners three daies, till that morning that she saw their fathers and friends come quietly, and in good tearmes to entreate their libertie." A message came from Opechancanough as well, asking that for his sake the English release two who were his friends. With it, for a token, came his shooting glove and his bracer, the leather guard on the forearm against the bowstring. They were the same he had offered Smith once before in token of peace, the time he drew apart from his men for a long while and asked to speak with him. The fathers and friends walked in at the gate among the English as easily as they had ever come to trade, without suspicion or fear, and begged for their men. Then they went out again, and the prisoners stayed under guard.

That afternoon the guard brought the prisoners to the church again, as before, between the men in arms. The bell rang, and the company stood for prayer with the prisoners in the middle of it. The English said their prayers to the end, and then, "after prayer, gave them to Pocahuntas, the Kings Daughter, in regard of her fathers kindnesse in sending her." The English fed them, as they had all the time they were held, handed back their bows and arrows and whatever else had been taken off them, and sent them out of the gate and across the neck toward the trees. Pocahontas was "requited with such trifles as contented her," so that she could tell her people how kindly the English had used the Paspaheghs. The boy stayed at the fort.

The next day the English thought they smelled an ambush and could not find it. Two days after, a Paspahegh man came to the fort with a glistering mineral stone and made signs that there were rocks of it in plenty. Smith went by water with a dozen men to dig some, the man to guide them, though he suspected a trick to get copper out of the English, or an ambush to draw them into. Two miles on, the man began to falter in his story. Smith put in and took him ashore. The men climbed out with their spades over the side into the mud of the bank, and the guide led them from place to place along the shore and up toward the woods and back to the water, and no rocks of the stone appeared anywhere they went. The tide went on running while they walked. Smith showed him the copper he had been promised if the rocks were found. For his scoffing, Smith gave him twenty lashes with a rope. Then he gave him back his bow and arrows, told him to shoot if he dared, and let him go.

Most of the sick were up again by then, and the council would not keep the ship longer. They set the men to felling cedar to freight her home, so the Company's adventurers would have something for their money. The red logs were sawn to length, rolled down the bank and swayed up into the Phoenix's hold, and the fort smelled of cedar for days. Martin, sick much of the year, was going home in her. So was Smith's long letter, folded and sealed, bound for London, where it was printed that August. It had the swamp in it, and the bed of mats, and the feast, and Powhatan's promise of liberty within four days. It had the mainmast and the rack. Powhatan's daughter came into it at the fort that spring, with a deer and bread, sent to fetch the prisoners home. It ended on the colony as Smith wished it read in London, its men in good health, "all our men wel contented, free from mutinies, in love one with another, and as we hope in a continuall peace with the Indians". The men who were staying came down to the bank to see her go, in clothes the fire had left them. On June 2 Nelson cast off from the trees and took the Phoenix down the James on the ebb with the cedar, with Martin, and with the letter.