The Starving Time

George Percy, an earl's eighth son, lay in a house inside the fort in the middle of an October afternoon and listened to the colony go about its business without him. He had come up this river with the first ships, and in the first summer he had written down the dead by the day. Now he was its president, and he could not stand. Through the walls of the house came the noise of the place: an axe at the woodpile, a dog barking at the gate, men calling to each other across the market place, the bar of the storehouse door lifted and dropped. The fort was a triangle of split logs on a marshy island in the James, a bulwark at each corner and a gate toward the water, and from his bed he knew each sound by where it came from. In other autumns the paths from the neck of the island had brought in men from the towns with corn in baskets and venison on poles. Since the ships sailed they had brought in no corn. The paths ran empty into the trees.

The man who had held the office before him, John Smith, had gone down the river in those ships in the first days of the month, carried aboard burned and unable to stand himself. He left behind him what his men's inventory called "490 and odde persons", on the island and at the outposts, with the boats and the guns on the bulwarks and the casks in the store. The colony was alone with the winter coming. Its people slept two and three to a bed of rushes in the huts along the palisade, and the newcomers of the summer fleet, who had landed in August in the clothes they stood up in, still slept in tents. Frost came on the marsh grass at night and burned off in the mornings. Wood smoke lay over the island in the evenings. The towns sent no corn.

The office Percy held had been made in London three years before. A president was the head of the council under the Company's first charter, chosen yearly by the councillors from among themselves, and he governed with their advice and could be voted out by them. It was a small authority over a quarrelsome table. A new commission had been drawn since, putting a single governor over the colony in place of president and council, and it had sailed with the summer fleet. It was on Bermuda now, with the people of the Sea Venture, the fleet's flagship, which had gone ashore there in July. The fort did not know where it was, or whether it was anywhere at all. So the old office stood. Percy held it from his bed.

How he came to hold it he set down himself, many years later, in a relation he wrote to answer the book Smith had published in 1624. Smith had called him too sick to go or stand; Percy did not dispute the sickness. He wrote it this way: "The place of govermentt beinge voyde the thre busy instrumentts in the plantacyon p[ro]fered the same unto me the wch att firste I refused in Regard of my Sicknes. Butt by their inportunetie p[ro]miseinge to undergoe the Chefeste offices and Burthen of govermentt for me untill I weare Recovered att lenghte I accepted thereof and then was Smithe presently sentt for England." Percy did not call them his friends. He called them instruments, and busy ones. He was answering a charge.

The three were in the fort and out of it that month, doing what they had promised. Gabriel Archer and John Martin, of the old council, went about the island under arms with their followers behind them, at the store door in the mornings and at the gate in the evenings, and gave the orders the president could not get up to give. Martin had come in from the Nansemond country without his boats and with nearly half his men gone. The third of them, John Ratcliffe, the former president, whose right name was Sicklemore, had a command of his own. Percy put the order that gave it to him into his own account in a sentence: "After I had bene presydentt some fowertene dayes I sentt Capte: Rattliefe to pointe Comforte for to Buylde A foarte there." That was the fishing, Percy explained, and the watch on the coast. Men came to his door with news of all of it. He heard it lying down.

Nights were longer than the days by then. The watch was set at dusk and the gate barred, and the voices on the bulwarks called to each other at the turn of each glass, faint and then near and then faint again as the rounds went by the house. The fires in the huts burned down to coals and men lay close around them. Wind came off the river through the gaps in the daub, and the cold settled into the floors. In the house where the president lay a servant kept the fire up and came when he called. In the dark the sickness that kept him to his bed did what it did to a man at night, so that he slept and woke and slept. Before light the first men were up and moving, coughing in the cold, and the woodpile began again. The day's orders were given by men on their feet.

Point Comfort was a hook of sand at the mouth of the river, where the James came out between low shores into the bay and the water went from brown to gray. Ratcliffe's company worked there through the end of the autumn with spades and mattocks and felling axes, and the wind came straight across the point off the open water and did not drop at night. They cut posts in the pines behind the beach, trimmed them, and dragged them down over the dunes on ropes, two men to a post and a third behind with a lever where the sand was soft. Along the line pegged out for it they threw up a bank of sand and turf, set the posts upright along the top of it with their butts in a trench, and rammed the earth back around them. Sand got into everything: the food, the bedding, the priming of the muskets, the cuts on their hands that would not close. They slept in shelters of boards and sailcloth inside the half-built wall, out of the worst of the wind, and the fires burned all night in pits scooped out of the sand. The wall went up a few posts a day. Their hands split from the cold and the rope.

The point had what the island did not. At low water the flats beyond it stood out of the river, ribbed and shining, and the men went down onto them with baskets, their sleeves rolled, and came back with oysters prised off the beds and crabs taken by hand in the shallows. Fish came up past the point on every tide, and a net drawn across the shallows in the evening came in with something in it. They roasted the oysters in the coals until the shells gaped and ate them standing, burning their fingers, and boiled the crabs in a kettle hung over the fire pit. The smell of it went out over the water with the smoke. Up the river the store was measured into cans. Here the men could walk down to the tide line and fill their hats. The island was forty miles away.

The other half of Percy's reason was the bay itself. From the top of the bank a sail could be seen a long way out, and the men on watch at the point spent their turns with their backs to the work, looking at the water for ships from England with supplies, or ships from Spain. Gulls worked the flats below them. The far shore lay along the horizon in a low line of haze, and the swell came in under it and broke on the outer side of the point all day. On a clear afternoon late in the season the watch called down that there was a sail. The men on the bank straightened up and shaded their eyes. What came in round the point was small: a pinnace under one sail, with her boat towing astern.

Captain James Davis came ashore from her with about sixteen men. They came up the beach with their arms and their bedding on their shoulders, and the men of the point came down off the bank to meet them and to ask what news they had and what they had brought. The newcomers had a boat of their own to fish from, and sixteen were enough to man a wall and a watch and a boat. Davis and his company joined the work. They put their backs to the posts beside Ratcliffe's men, and the line of the palisade closed along the bank, facing the channel and the bay. By the time the cold had settled in for the winter there was a fort on the point, a ditch and a bank and a wall with men inside it. Its fires could be seen from the water at night.

Percy named it. He could not go down to see it, but the naming was his to give, and he gave it the name of his family. He wrote that he had done it "for the honnor of Your Lordshipps name and howse", and he called it "Algernowns Foarte", for Algernon, the old name of the Percys. The earls of Northumberland were great lords in the north of England, and their eighth son lay on a bed in a house of split timber, giving their name to a bank of sand. Up the river the cans still went to the store door every morning.

Algernon's Fort stood within sight of Kecoughtan, the town of the Kecoughtans at the river's mouth. They did not come to the point to trade. The towns all along the river had shut themselves off at about the time Smith went down it, and the men of the outlying companies had come in with the story of what that meant: boats lost, men killed in the woods and in the creeks. Powhatan (Wahunsenacah), the paramount chief of the towns along the rivers, to whom the chief of every town from the falls to the bay, its werowance, owed corn and skins, had gone from his old seat at Werowocomoco the winter before with all his provision. He was at Orapax now, a great way off in the woods, and he had sent no corn since the ships left. The corn of the harvest was in his storehouses and in the towns' storehouses. It stayed where it was.

In the fort the store went down by the measure. The door opened at first light with the frost still white on the roofs, and the line was already at it: men in their cloaks and Monmouth caps with their cans in their hands, stamping their feet, their breath going up in the cold. Inside, the cape merchant's men stood at the casks with a light and a tally stick and let out each man's share, and the cans went back across the market place to the huts and the fires. The storehouse was the colony's one granary: the common stock of meal and corn and peas, the ships' leavings, the summer's harvest off the acres the company had dug, kept behind a barred door under a guard who stood there day and night. Men in the line looked past the guard into the dark of the building as they came up to the door. The casks stood in rows against the back wall. They could be counted from the door, and men counted them. The president lay in his house. The store had been reckoned at ten weeks.

There was one other way to get corn, and it was the way Smith had used for two winters. The colony had boats and copper, and the towns had corn, and a boat full of armed men could come to a town on the water and offer the one for the other, and if the town would not trade, take it. Smith's men, writing up the colony's proceedings three years later, gave the decision a single clause: "But ere all was consumed, Mr West and Ratliffe, each with a pinnace, and 30 or 40 men wel appointed, sought abroad to trade". Ratcliffe took one pinnace toward Powhatan's country. Francis West, the brother of Lord De La Warr, took the other from the island.

West had been back in the fort only a few weeks himself. He had come in from the falls of the James with what was left of his hundred and twenty, without his boats, his men footsore and torn from the woods, and he had sat down at the fires with the rest. Now he was going out again. The pinnace lay at the landing below the gate, a small, light vessel of the fleet that could be worked by sail or by oar, her mast stepped and her sweeps laid along the thwarts. Men carried the trade down to her on their shoulders: the copper cut into pieces, the strings of blue and white beads, the hatchets and knives, the things the towns had always taken. They carried down powder and shot and match, and a cask of water, and the measure of meal the store could spare for the voyage. A pinnace was a cramped thing for thirty or forty men in late autumn. They would sleep on her deck in their cloaks, or ashore by fires where the shore was safe. The men at the landing knew the shores were not safe.

They loaded on the flood and waited for the ebb. The tide in that river ran hard, and a boat going down with it could make in an afternoon what would take a day of rowing against it. The voyage waited on the water, and the men waited with it, sitting on the casks at the landing or along the bank with their muskets across their knees. The gate stood open behind them. People came down from the fort to see the boat go: the men of the companies who were staying, the newcomers of the summer, a few of the women of the fleet with shawls over their heads, boys sent down on errands who stayed to watch. Gulls sat on the water off the landing and rose and settled again. On the bank above, a man of the watch walked the bulwark with his musket and looked down at them and then back at the woods. The ebb began to run.

The men going were the best the fort had. A trading company needed men who could row against a tide all day, stand a watch at night with a lit match, and fire a musket at a tree line and hit it. The island did not hold so many of those that it could send two companies away without feeling it. The men staying watched them go aboard. The gentlemen of the voyage went down the bank in their buff coats and their swords, and the soldiers behind them with their muskets shouldered and their bandoliers clicking, and the sailors went aboard first and took the sweeps. Men going on the voyage had friends who were staying, and they shook hands at the water's edge. A man on the bank called after one of them to bring him back a deer. The man in the boat said he would bring him two.

The sailors cast off the lines and pushed her off the landing with the sweeps, and she swung out into the stream stern first while the men aboard found places for themselves among the casks and the bundles of trade. The coxswain at the stern called the stroke. The sweeps went out on either side and came forward and dipped, unevenly at first and then together, and the pinnace gathered way and turned her head downriver. Water ran off the blades and dripped from them in lines on the backstroke. The men on the bank watched her go out past the end of the island, and some of them walked along the shore under the palisade to keep her in sight a little longer. The rest went back in through the gate.

Percy heard the boat go from his bed. He could not see much of the river from the house, only a piece of sky over the palisade through the open shutter. But he heard the sweeps go into the water together and the voices of the men at the landing, and he heard the voices stop. The gentlemen who walked the fort under arms came back up from the landing and went about the afternoon's business. The councillors had promised to bear the burden of government for him until he was recovered. This was the burden. Two pinnaces and the pick of the colony's fighting men were going out to buy corn from towns that had not sold it since the ships left, from a chief who had sold them none. Percy had given the order or let it be given. He could do nothing about it now from where he lay.

The pinnace went down the James on the ebb, her sweeps working until she had the channel, and then her sail went up and filled. Downriver of the island the shores were woods to the water's edge on both sides, the oaks gone brown, the marsh grass along the banks gone the color of straw. The men at the sweeps rested on them and let the wind take her. The watch on the bulwark followed the sail until it went round the first bend below the island, and then there was only the river, wide and brown and empty, running down toward Point Comfort and the bay. Beyond the bay were the rivers that came down from Powhatan's country, and somewhere up one of them was Ratcliffe in the other boat. The watch on the bulwark turned and looked the other way, at the paths.