The Starving Time

The cattle in the colony came through that winter on grass. Snow lay over most of the ground, and the season was sharp, and the kine, the colony's cows, lived on what they could nose out from under it and on nothing else. By spring many of them were heavy with calf. Their milk went to the sick, as physic as much as food. Ground near the fort was sown for roots that winter, and the roots carried people through the worst of the cold. A few vines were set in here and there, and they took. The lord governor had ordered the roots sown. He was sick the whole winter through.

De La Warr had been ill almost from the day he landed. The ague came first, and his physician, Doctor Laurence Bohun, brought him out of it by bleeding him, a basin at the bedside and a cut in the arm. He got a little strength back. Within three weeks he was down again. In his own account it was "a relapse into the former disease, which with much more violence held me more than a moneth", and when it let him go he could barely sit up. It was the end of summer, hot and close, with the marsh breathing fever over the palisade and flies at every doorway. He kept to his bed, with the guard in his livery at the door. The colony's business came to him there, and orders went out from the bed to the captains of fifty. For the rest of his time in the country he was never well.

The business of that autumn was war, and the discipline of men who did not want to stay. Not long after Percy came back from Paspahegh, Argall went out with a commission like his against the Warraskoyacks. They had heard what happened at Paspahegh and were gone before he landed, every one of them, so he cut down their corn and burned their houses and came back to the fort. Men began to be seen about the palisade at odd hours, watching it. Some of them were taken. The lord governor had the hand of one of them cut off and sent him back to the others, as a warning to the rest.

Some of the colony's own men worked at the iron mines the Company hoped would pay for the colony. They were set to digging the red stone and carrying it, in cold water and mud, under overseers. A few of them made a plan to take a bark, a small vessel, and sail away in her. The plan was found out before they could try it. The lord governor chose one of them, for an example, to die under martial law, and the colony was called out by the drum to watch. They stood in their companies in the cold, gentlemen to one side, laborers in their rows. The condemned man was brought out with his hands bound in front of him. The gallows stood ready, two posts and a crossbeam with a ladder set against it. His sentence was read out to the ranks, and a minister prayed with him. Then he was taken up the ladder with the rope around his neck, and the hangman turned him off. With the swing and weight of his body the rope broke, and he fell to the ground.

He lay there in the dirt under the gallows with the broken end around his neck. Hangings did not usually go that way, in England or anywhere else. In regard of the accident the lord governor pardoned him. The pardon came too late to help. The jerk of the rope and the fall had done their work inside him, and within two days he was dead.

The lord governor wanted minerals more than iron, and he wanted to search for them up the river toward the falls. He sent divers men up in a bark, with tools and arms and their victuals, to begin. They went up under sail when the wind served and at the oars when it did not, past banks where the leaves were turning and the cut cornstalks stood in the fields. The river narrowed as they went. On the way they passed the Appamattucks' town, where the Appomattox came into the James. Its houses stood above the water among their fields, with the smoke of the cooking fires going up through the roofs and dogs running along the shore. Some of the townsmen called to them from the shore to come in. The bark needed water, and the town had it, so they put in to fill their casks. They ran the bark against the bank and rolled the empty casks up to the spring. The townsmen were friendly. They asked the Englishmen up to their houses to feast, and the Englishmen went up from the boat. In the houses, when the guests were inside and eating, the Appamattucks fell on them. Divers were killed where they sat. The rest got out wounded, and every one of the wounded was dead within two days.

One man reached the boat whole. He was the taborer who had played and danced on the sand at Kecoughtan in the summer, to draw the Kecoughtans out of their houses for Gates. He came out of the houses running and went down the bank for the bark with men behind him, and got aboard. The arrows came after him. He used the bark's rudder as a shield, holding it between himself and the bank, and the arrows went into the wood. Then he sculled the bark off from the bank, little by little, until he was out of their reach. It was the same pipe and drum. Five Kecoughtans had died the day it played.

After that the lord governor went up himself. He sent Brewster ahead with a body of men to wait for him at the falls, and Brewster fought his way up, with skirmishes along both banks. The lord governor followed shortly after. He left Percy behind with "the Chardge and Comawnd" of the fort. At the falls, with winter coming on, he had a fort built on an island among the corn ground, for defense and for shelter, and gave it his own name. He meant to winter there and to search for minerals when the spring came. Percy had the island again. He did not have the title.

The Paspahegh werowance came to the colony's blockhouse that winter. The blockhouse was an outpost of the fort, a squared timber house loopholed for muskets, with a small guard kept in it night and day. The werowance was the chief whose town Percy had burned in August. His wife and his children had been killed in August, on the river and in the woods below the fort. Now he came up openly with a small troop of his men, "in sheowe", as if on some business of peace, and stood off from the blockhouse in plain view. He wore a mantle of skins against the cold, with copper at his ears, his hair cut short on the right side for the bowstring and grown long on the left. His men stood about him with their bows. Percy took it for a trick. He believed the werowance meant, by some policy, to surprise the blockhouse itself or to cut off some of the men in it. Word of it came to Percy in the fort, and he gave his order at once. The werowance was to be taken alive.

He sent his ensign, the officer who carried his colors, with a party of men. The men went out in their jacks and morions with their matches lit. The cold had stiffened the mud along the water. They came near to where the werowance stood, on the end of a bank above the river, with his men about him in their mantles. Then one of them, a gentleman of the fort, stepped up close, took hold of the werowance with both hands, and shouted the watchword for the rest to come and help him.

The werowance's troop was larger than it had looked. Men who had not been seen before stood up out of the brush and the reeds and began shooting, freely, into the English party. The werowance fought the hands that held him. He was a strong man and he struggled hard, turning and pulling toward the bank, and the gentleman could not keep his grip and fight at the same time. The ensign saw there was small hope of bringing him in alive. He drew his sword and ran him through the body, and drew it out, and ran him through again. Blood came down the werowance's mantle onto the frozen mud. The werowance did not fall. His own men got to him and took him away, carrying him off on a frame of poles while the arrows covered them. He was still alive when they went into the woods. Close by, a lieutenant named Puttocke, who commanded at the blockhouse, closed with one of the Paspaheghs hand to fist, and they wrestled in the mud. Puttocke got his poniard out and stabbed the man to death.

The falls were a long reach of broken water where the James came down over rock, loud in every season and louder in a wet one. The new fort stood on its island above them, a palisade of logs around huts of planks and bark. Everything the garrison ate came up from the island fort by boat, and in winter the boats came seldom. The men lived on what came and on what they could shoot. The flux went through the huts as it went through the lord governor. At the falls, all that winter, his people had sickness and scarcity both. There were fights with the people of the country. Some of his men were killed, and among them was a kinsman of his, a captain. Brewster narrowly escaped. The lord governor grew so sick there that he gave up the plan and came back down to the island, where his sickness did not abate but got worse:

"the Flux surprised me, and kept me many daies: then the Crampe assaulted my weak body, with strong paines; and afterwards the Gout"

The gout was an old trouble. He had suffered it in England. In the cold house at the island it fastened on him so hard that he could not stir from the bed or move about at all. Lying still, he took the scurvy. His gums swelled and bled, his teeth loosened, and old bruises came up black on his legs. It was the disease men in the colony were said to bring on themselves by idleness, and his was not that: "though in others it be a sicknesse of slothfulnesse, yet was in me an effect of weaknesse". It did not leave him. He called his friends to his bedside, and they told him what they saw. His strength was gone and his body almost wasted, his pains growing day by day. There was no food or physic in the colony fit for such diseases. Ruin, they said, was certain "had I lived, but twenty dayes longer, in Virginia".

There was a long consultation. At the end of it, by general consent, he resolved to go to Nevis, an island in the West Indies famous for its hot baths, and try what help the baths would give. A ship was made ready. He chose Percy to govern in his place until Sir Thomas Dale, a soldier from the Low Countries, came out from England with the next supply as marshal, the officer of martial law. Percy wrote:

"my Lorde haveinge lefte and apointed me deputy governour in his Absence To execute Marshall lawe or any other power and Authority as Absolute as himselfe."

The lord governor went aboard in the spring and his ship went down the river. A hundred leagues out, some three hundred miles on the way south, she met southerly winds. His body could not stand a long voyage beating into them, so he changed his purpose and steered for the Western Islands, the Azores, in the Atlantic. He was no sooner there than he began to mend, on fresh food, and above all on "Orenges and Lemonds". He meant to go back to his charge in Virginia, still weak as he was, and he was advised not to hazard it. He was to recover his strength first in his own country's air, and so he came home to England. Percy, who stayed behind, had the winds driving the ship straight for England, with no islands on the way.

In the fort the war went on as before. One evening, late, men of the country came and called at the blockhouse. Their voices came out of the dark beyond the firelight, and the guard inside could see nothing of who was calling or how many. Percy sent word to Puttocke, who commanded there, that he was by no means to stir out of it. He sent him more men to double his guard. He gave him a second charge that he was not to go out on any terms whatsoever, and promised him men in the morning, enough to find out who the callers were and how many. The doubled guard kept awake all night at the loopholes, with their matches lit and their pieces loaded. Early next morning, before the fort's own watch was discharged, they called again. Mist lay on the low ground between the blockhouse and the trees. A few of them showed themselves in the open and drew back toward the trees. Puttocke went out after them with the small number of men he had, against Percy's order, "Sheowinge more vallour then will more fury then Judgementt".

The callers kept falling back. Puttocke kept following. They drew him on into the woods, a little at a time, and into an ambush. Five or six hundred men were waiting there. Their arrows came "as thicke As hayle" into his handful of men. It was over almost at once. Puttocke went down. His men went down around him. Nobody got back to the blockhouse.

The ground where they lay was nearly covered with arrows. The victors raised a shout, and it carried to the island. It rang off the trees and over the marsh and came into the fort, where the morning watch was still on the walls. Percy did not know for certain what had happened, though he feared it. He sent a lieutenant out at once with fifty men to help Puttocke. They met the war party, and the warriors changed their cry and began shouting a name at them across the ground, "Paspahe Paspahe", the name of the werowance, as much as to say they had paid him back at last. The fifty put them to flight. They found Puttocke and his men where they had fallen, among the arrows, and carried them back through the gate. The arrows were drawn out of the bodies before they were laid in the ground. The dead were buried inside the fort.

Percy thought the lord governor should know. He supposed the ship had got no further than the mouth of the river, so he sent a messenger down to Algernon's Fort at Point Comfort to tell him. The messenger went the forty miles and came back. In Percy's relation the errand takes one line: "butt the messenger Loste his Labour my Lord beinge before depted." The colony was Percy's to hold now, under martial law, with a power as absolute as the lord governor's. He had the store, issued out daily at the door. He had the companies of fifty and their captains, the two forts at Kecoughtan, Algernon's Fort at the point and the fort at the falls. He had two boats and a barge to reach them with, and so the fishing went short. The man who had given him all of it was at sea.

On the twenty-fifth of June, 1611, Lord De La Warr stood before a court of the Virginia Company in London and gave his reasons. He was still feeble and weak from the voyage. The men in front of him had put their money into the colony, and some of them had begun to look for ways to take it out again. Men in London had been asking why the colony's lord governor was home after a year, and some did not spare to censure him. He told them about the ague, the relapse, the flux, the cramp, the gout and the scurvy, in that order, so that no one could say he had covered sloth or fear with the common name of sickness. Then he told them how he had left the colony:

"The number of men I left there were upward of two hundred, the most in health, and provided of at least tenne moneths victuals, in their store-house"

He had built three forts in his weakness, two near Point Comfort and one at the falls. He told them that on his way in he had met Sir Thomas Gates at Cowes, near Portsmouth, going out with a new fleet, and had given him an account of everything. The cows had come through the winter on grass. Without the bay, to the northward, there was a fishing bank for cod and ling as good as any eaten, and he had brought a sample of the fish home in the ship's hold. On the banks of the Potomac grew the goodliest trees for masts in the world, and hemp better than English growing wild, and there were mines of antimony and lead. Argall had found the Patawomecks willing to trade great quantities of corn for small pieces of iron and copper. When the Relation was printed again in 1907, its editor set a note under the count. It cites another paper, the Breife Declaration, which gave the colony three months of food at De La Warr's going, at short allowance, not ten. It said a hundred and fifty had died in his year, more than half the settlers. Each paper had a case to make. The lord governor ended his account of the country with Argall's last discovery, a trade with "Patomack (a King as great as Powhatan, who still remaines our enemie, though not able to doe us hurt)."