The Starving Time

The woman carried the basket on her back, its strap across her forehead, and the basket was not hers. It belonged to a household of the Chickahominies, the people of the river that ran into the James above the fort, who kept their own councils. The corn stood dry on its stalks in the fields around their town. In the cool of the morning the women went down the rows breaking off the ears. She went down a row beside them. The ears went back over her shoulder into the basket. When it was full she carried it to the edge of the field, emptied it and came back. Other women had hilled this field in the spring. She had hilled fields of her own that spring, up the James on the north shore. Those hills were cut down now and trampled, and the town beside them was ash. She had come out of the woods with what she had on.

What she had on was a deerskin apron and a mantle against the night. She had no pot, no mats, no seed corn, no basket of her own. The household that took her in gave her a place on the sleeping platform along the wall of its house. It was a long low house, mats and bark laid over a frame of bent poles, with the fire in the middle of the floor and a hole in the roof for the smoke. She ate from the household's pot. The corn in it came out of the household's baskets, and the meat came in with the household's men. In the evenings she sat by the fire with the women and shelled corn into a basket, rubbing the ears between her hands. The children of the house watched her across the fire. In the mornings she went down to the creek with the other women for water and came back up the bank with the pot on her hip. She went into the woods with them for firewood and carried it home on her back. She worked where she was put. Their mothers did not send her away.

The harvest came in and was dried and stored. The women pounded corn in the wooden mortars at the house doors, the pestles going up and down in turns. She took a turn when one was given her. When the leaves had fallen the town went out to its hunting grounds, and she went with it, carrying a roll of mats on her back on the path. Every night there was a new house to raise, saplings bent and tied and the mats thrown over, and a new fire. The men went out each day and came back with deer. The women took off the skins, cut up the meat and dried what would not be eaten. The skins were pegged out and scraped. It was cold in the mat houses in the early morning, and she slept with her mantle drawn over her head. In the hard weeks ice stood at the edges of the creeks. The women broke it with sticks to fill their pots, and went farther every day for dry wood, and came back with it on their backs in the early dark. When the town came back from the hunting grounds the corn baskets in the houses were lower than they had been. The women measured it out by the handful into the pots.

In the spring the town came home to its fields. The men cut a ring of bark from the trees at the edge of the clearing, so they would die standing. Then they set fire to the brush, and the smoke lay along the river for days. The women followed with digging sticks. She knelt in the burned ground with them and made her holes and dropped the kernels in, and the beans beside them, and pushed the earth back with her hand. The shad came up the river in the same weeks, and the men built their weirs across the shallows and took them by the basket. The field she planted was not hers. She planted it to the end of the row.

Far to the north, beyond the York, the Potomac came down out of the woods into the bay, broad and brown between low shores. The boy who had run from Powhatan's men in the spring of 1610 had got to the Patawomeck country, and he stayed. Henry Spelman put the whole of it into one sentence later: "Wt this Kinge Patomecke I liued a year and more at a towne of his called Pasptanzie, untill such time as an worthy gentelman named Capt: Argall ariued". Passapatanzy, the Patawomeck town on a creek of the Potomac, was the king's.

Places to live were few in that country, and none of them large. The greatest of the Patawomecks' towns had not above twenty or thirty houses in it. Spelman found the comparison for the houses in an English kitchen: "Ther Biuldinge are made like an ouen wt a litell hole to cum in at But more spatius wt in hauinge a hole in the midest of ye house for smoke to goe out at". Inside, the light came from the fire and from the hole over it, and the walls curved up from the ground to the roof. The king's houses were broader and longer than the rest. From the door to the place where the king sat ran many dark windings and turnings. Spelman lived in the king's household, among his wives and children and the men who served him. He was still a boy, and he had no goods. What he had was his English.

He ate as the household ate. At a meal they sat on mats around the house, the men by themselves and the women by themselves. The women brought every one a dish of meat, for the better sort never ate together out of one dish. Each ate what he wanted of what was given him and looked for no second course. Then he set his dish down beside him and murmured certain words to himself, like a grace, giving thanks. Whatever was left the women gathered up and kept for the next meal or gave to the poorer sort. The king looked like any other chief man of the country. When he came to one of their houses they presented him with copper, beads or victual and showed him much reverence. The common men pulled the hair from their faces as fast as it grew and cut it short on the right side of the head, so it would not catch in the bowstring. On the left side they let it grow into a long lock hanging down the shoulder.

Copper bought wives in that country, and beads. The suitor went to the woman's father or her kin to settle the price. When it was agreed the two families met and made good cheer. On the day, her parents brought her between them to the man's house. His father or chief friend measured a long string of beads against the length of his arms, broke it over the joined hands of the two and gave it to her father. He that had most copper and beads could have most wives. The king had more than one.

The king kept more than one house, and at times he went away to visit another king. On one of those journeys he left Spelman behind at one of his houses at Passapatanzy, with two of his wives. When he had gone, one of them decided to visit her father. Her name was Paupauwiske. Her father lived a long day's journey from the place. She told the English boy to come with her and carry her child in his arms the whole way. Spelman refused. She struck him three or four blows. He was not willing to bear much of that, and he went at her and pulled her down and gave her some blows back. The other wife saw it. The two of them fell on him together and beat him until he thought they had lamed him.

When the king came home, Spelman told him in front of both women how they had used him. The king did not wait. He took up a couwascohocan, "a kind of paringe Iron", and struck at one of the women with such violence that she went down on the ground as if dead. Spelman saw her fall and ran. He went out of the house and into a neighbor's, "for feare of ye Kings displeasuer", and stayed there. The woman came to herself after a time and somewhat eased the king's anger. He learned from his brother where the boy had hidden. That night he sent the boy his young child to quiet, "for none could quiet him so well as my selfe", and Spelman held the child in the neighbor's house. The neighbor's fire burned low in the middle of the floor, and the household lay along the walls on their mats. The boy took the child by the fire and quieted him. About midnight the king sent for the child again. Spelman stayed the night in the neighbor's house.

The king was up early the next morning and came to the house himself. Spelman was loath to see him. But the king was kind instead of angry. He asked the boy how he did, and whether he had been afraid of him the night before, because he had run away and hidden. Spelman, made a little bolder by the king's speeches, asked him how his queen was. The king answered that all was well and that the boy should come home with him, "tellinge me he loued me, and none should hurt me." Spelman went with him, unwillingly. When he came into the house the queen "looked but discontentedly" on him. He went on trusting the king's promise and cared the less for anybody else's frowns. He knew what the promise rested on. The king made the more of him, Spelman wrote, "in hope I should healpe him to sum copper", if the English ever came into those parts. Spelman had promised him often that they would.

Around him the year went on. In the spring the Patawomecks set their corn on ground about the houses. Where the ground was wooded they cut the great trees down about half a yard above the earth. The smaller ones they burned at the root, pulling off much of the bark to make them dry. Among the stumps they made their holes. Before the English brought them spades and shovels they made the holes with a crooked piece of wood scraped on both sides into the shape of a gardener's paring iron. Into each hole went "4 or 5 curnels of ther wheat and 2 beanes like french beanes". As the corn grew up, its stalk as big as a cane reed, the beans ran up on it like hops on poles. At the gathering the women picked the ears into hand baskets and emptied them into bigger baskets, some of bark, some of hemp, some of the corn's own straw. They spread the ears on mats in the sun a good thickness deep. Each night they made a great pile of them and covered it over with mats against the dew. When the corn was weathered they stored it in the houses. They rubbed it out between their hands as it was wanted, into a basket so big it took up the best part of a house. That was the women's work.

The men hunted for skins in the winter and dressed them in the summer. When the town went out to hunt, the women went ahead to a place appointed and built houses for the men to lie in that night. As the men went farther on, the women went before them with their mats again. The drive itself was a crowd's work. At the place chosen "they meett sum 2 or 300 togither and hauinge ther bowes and arrows and euery one wt a fier sticke in ther hand they besett a great thikett round about". When the ring was made, every man set fire to the rank grass in front of him. The deer fled from the fire, and the men came in little by little behind it until the game was penned in a narrow room. They shot the deer with their bows at their pleasure. They took the skins, which they wanted most, and some of the flesh for food.

In the houses people fell sick, and some died. The priest came to the sick. He laid the sick man on a mat on the ground, with a bowl of water and a rattle beside him. He knelt by the sick man and took up water in his hand and sucked it into his mouth and spouted it out over his own arms and breast. Then he shook the rattle with one hand and beat his breast with the other, making a great noise. He rose very gently, one leg and then the other, as if loath to wake the sick man. He went round him shaking the rattle softly over his body, stroked the grieved parts and sprinkled him and murmured over him. A wound he gashed with a little flint, sucked, and dressed with a beaten root. The dead were wrapped in mats and laid on a scaffold three or four yards high, and the kin wept under it. Then some of them flung beads among the poorer people gathered there. The crowd scrambled for them so hard that some broke arms and legs in the press. After that there was meat at the dead man's house, and the rest of the day went in singing and dancing.

At feasts there was dancing in a round, a man and then a woman all the way through, with one man in the middle with a pipe and a rattle. The women and the young boys played at football, with goals much like English ones, and never fought or pulled each other down. The men played with a little ball, dropping it from the hand and striking it with the top of the foot, and whoever struck it farthest won.

Spelman had supposed such people lived without laws, and gave them little thought, until he saw men put to death and asked why. In his time among the Patawomecks he saw five executed. Four died for the murder of a child: the mother, two others who had done it with her, and a fourth who had passed by and kept silent for a bribe. The fifth had robbed a traveler of copper and beads. To steal a neighbor's corn or copper was death in that country, and so, if he was taken in the act, was lying with another man's wife.

In his time there he saw the Patawomecks fight. The Massomecks, a people who came against them by water, were brought into the Patawomeck country in canoes made in the form of a hog's trough, only more hollowed in. The two sides met in a marsh full of reed. On both sides the men scattered themselves a little distance apart and stole forward softly, squatting down and peering through the reed for a man to shoot at. When an arrow hurt a man so that he could not run, his enemies made haste to him and knocked him on the head. They had no drums or trumpets. Each side gathered its men with its own howling, so different that either could be told from the other at a distance. Those who killed most of their enemies were held the chiefest men among them. There was no great slaughter. The Massomecks shot away most of their arrows, ran short of food and were glad to draw off.

The English came back to the river with Argall. He was the captain who had sailed for Bermuda with Somers in June of 1610 and missed the islands. Smith's book of 1624 has him forced back to the fort, and the lord governor sending him to the Potomac to trade for corn. Francis West had loaded corn in that river once before. Argall's ship came up past the creeks to Nacotchtank, the town up the Potomac where she lay when he heard the news. He learned there that there was "an english boy named Harry" in the country. Argall wanted to hear more and came up the river. The king heard he was coming and sent Spelman to him.

Spelman went down to the water and out to the ship in a canoe, after a year and more among the Patawomecks. She lay at anchor in the river with her yards bare, and the smell of tar and wet rope came off her across the water. Her men were in canvas and wool, with caps on their heads, and some of them were down in the waist of the ship among the casks and the bales of trade goods. The guns stood on their carriages along the rail, and the ship's boat lay alongside with its oars shipped. He spoke with Argall and went back ashore to the king, and then he brought the king out to the ship himself. On the deck "capt: Argoll gaue the Kinge copper for me", and the king took it. Spelman stayed aboard. The promise, in his words, was "by Capt: Argoll Bountifully performed."

The trade did not end with him. The Patawomecks had corn in their houses, and the English had copper and iron in the ship. Smith's book says that by the boy's acquaintance "they fraughted his ship with Corne", and Argall carried it back down the bay to the fort. The Patawomecks brought it down to the creek in their great baskets and loaded their canoes and paddled out. Argall's men leaned over the side and took the baskets as they came up. The corn went down into the ship's hold, basket after basket, and the empty baskets went back down into the canoes.