The Starving Time

"Of worse condition then those formerly there": that was Ralph Hamor's judgment of the people Sir Thomas Dale brought into the bay in May of 1611. Hamor, the colony's secretary, printed it in London four years later, in a book written to praise the government he served. There were about three hundred of them, in three ships, gathered as fast as a quick dispatch allowed. They had crossed in less than eight weeks. Cattle came with them, penned in the waists of the ships and lowing. On May 10 the three ships anchored in the road off Point Comfort. The garrison came down onto the sand to look at them. The men at the rails looked back at a ditch, a palisade, and shell heaps along the shore.

The ships' boats went in first, loaded to the gunwales, and men climbed over the bows into the shallows and waded the last yards with their bundles held up out of the water. The sand was soft and gave under them. Behind the palisade the garrison's hogs were penned, rooting and grunting, and the smell of them came down to the beach with the smell of wood smoke and old shells. At low water the flats ran out a long way, and the oysters lay on them in beds. The cattle came last. They were swung out of the waists in slings, lowered into the boats one at a time, and rowed in bawling, and two or three men stood in each boat to hold their heads. On the sand they stood with their legs spread, swaying, as if the beach were still a deck. Dale went ashore at the point.

They had been expected. Not long after the lord governor sailed for the West Indies, Captain Adams had come into the bay in a ship called the Blessing, with fresh men, fresh victuals, and word that Dale was following with a greater supply. Percy, the lord governor's deputy, had held the forts through the spring with what the store gave out each day and with the companies of fifty the lord governor had left him. He had buried Puttocke's men inside the palisade. He had sent a messenger after a ship that was already gone. Dale came within two months of the Blessing. He brought armor, munition and victuals with his three hundred, and he did not go up the river at once.

His first order was for corn. Hamor wrote that the people in Virginia, though they had once been bitten with hunger, had put no corn into the ground for their winter's bread, and trusted to the store, which then held eight months' provision. Dale put every hand that could be spared to setting corn at the two forts the lord governor had raised at Kecoughtan, Fort Henry and Charles Fort. The fields were the Kecoughtans' fields, cleared by girdling and fire long before, hilled by their women, and taken with their town the summer before. A year of weeds stood in them. Men from the ships worked beside the garrison with hoes and mattocks in the middle of May, late in the season, opening the old hills and dropping the kernels in. They drew the earth back over with their feet and moved on down the row.

The wind came in across the flats off the bay. Gulls walked behind the hoes. At the field edges men stood with muskets and lighted match, facing the woods, because the Kecoughtans were in those woods and had been since their town was taken. The ground was sandy and dry on top and dark a hand's depth down. Men pulled the weeds out by the roots and threw them into heaps in the furrows. The officers walked the rows and counted hills. By the end of May the corn was in the ground. It made an indifferent crop.

Dale left it with his under-officers and went up the river. The way from the point to the island ran forty miles against the current, and a ship made it on the flood tides, anchoring through each ebb. The river narrowed as she went. The banks closed in, wooded to the water, with marsh in the bends where herons stood and lifted away as she passed. She went by Mulberry Point and Hog Island, and by the Paspaheghs' country on the north shore. On the last flood the island showed on the right hand, low among the trees: the palisade, the roofs inside it, a few chimneys smoking, and the landing below. His ship came to the fort on Sunday, May 19, and anchored off it, and Dale went in by the boat. Smith's 1624 book, abridging Hamor, put what he found into a single line: "to James towne he hastened, where most of the companie were at their daily and usuall works, bowling in the streets". Smith gave the passage a heading, too: "The government surrendered to Sir Thomas Dale."

The morning sermon was over by then. The church stood empty with its door open, and the store was shut, as it was on Sundays, with a guard on its step. The game ran on the beaten ground of the street between the houses. A small white ball, the jack, lay at the far end, and men in their shirts bowled at it with balls of turned wood, each weighted to curve as it slowed. A bowl knocked against another with a dry sound and both men walked out to see. A straw or a stick settled the close ones. Others stood along the house fronts and watched, or sat on the sills in the afternoon sun. Some of them were the lord governor's men of the year before, some had come up from Bermuda with Gates, and some were the sixty. Behind them the houses leaned. Thatch had slipped off the rafters, daub had fallen out of the wattle in plates, and posts had rotted at the ground. Hamor described those houses as "ready to fall vpon their heads". There was no corn growing on the island. Swallows went in and out under the eaves.

Tyler, editing Smith in 1907, added a note: Dale had come on a Sunday, and bowls was one of the pastimes thought proper in England for that day. In an English parish, on a Sunday afternoon, it was. The store held eight months. The ground had nothing in it.

Percy, the deputy, was at the fort to surrender it. He had held the colony since the lord governor sailed: the store, the companies, the forts down the river and the one at the falls, the boats and the barge. His own relation gives Dale's coming in a few lines. It names Adams and the Blessing, the three hundred men, the armor and the victuals, and the new articles. Percy left the bowling out. From that week he held no office, and Dale gave the orders.

Hamor's sentence goes straight on to the work. From then on a drum beat in the market place. Dale set them to felling timber, to mending the houses, and to making pales, posts and rails for a new town he meant to build. He had not yet settled where it would stand, being newly arrived and ignorant of the country. The pales were split and stacked against that day. Men who had bowled on Sunday went out over the neck on Monday with axes, under officers who called their names.

Being landed, Percy wrote, Dale ordained new Lawes and "sett downe good Articles wch weare well observed". The Lawes were the code Gates had read in the market place the day after he came up the river the year before, in the place where the horses had been killed. Under Dale they ran to more articles, and the whole would be printed in London the following year. They governed the hour a man rose, the hour he ate and the hour he prayed, what he might take from the store, and where he might go. Officers kept the rolls. After that some planted, some sowed corn, and some built boats and houses. Most men were employed in one thing or another, from the drum in the morning to the drum at night.

One of the new men had come over in the hold of one of Dale's three ships, in a space between decks where the men lay in rows with their bundles under their heads. The hatch was opened in fair weather and battened in foul. The water went green in the casks after the first month, and the biscuit came up with weevils in it that the men knocked out against the deck. Men were sick over the side in the first week and again in the gales. He had been taken on in haste, as most of them had. He came ashore at Point Comfort with a canvas bag, a knife, and the clothes on his back. Within days he was at the island.

That summer he slept in a house with six or seven others, on straw laid against the wall. The drum woke him in the dark. It beat in the market place, close, a flat hard roll that came through the daub, and the men in the house sat up and pulled on their shoes in the gray light from the door. Outside, the officers stood by the church with lanterns. The gangs formed in rows before them, each under its own officer, and the names were called. The man answered to his. Then the church, where the minister read prayers by candlelight while the men stood. Then the gate. On the way to it the gang passed the gallows that stood in the market place, two posts and a beam, the ladder laid alongside on the ground. The gang went out through the gate in file.

The neck was a strip of firm ground between the river and the marsh, and the woods began beyond it. The gang felled there. The oaks were hard and the axes jumped in the cold of the first hour, and then the sun came over the trees and the men warmed. Pine bled resin onto their hands and it would not wash off in river water. The gang worked in pairs on the bigger trees, one man on each side of the trunk, the axes falling in turn so the strokes never met, the chips flying white and wet out of the cut. A tree went over with a long tearing crack and a crash that shook the ground through the soles of their shoes, and the officer moved them to the next. They lopped the branches and burned the brush in heaps, and the smoke drifted off over the marsh. In June the flies came up out of the reeds at midmorning, and the mosquitoes came at dusk. The man's hands had blistered in the first week. By the third week the blisters had broken and dried into pads.

The logs went to the saw pits by the river on rollers and ropes. A saw pit was a trench a man's height deep, with the log laid across it on trestles. One sawyer stood on top of the log and one below in the trench, and they drew the long saw between them, the top man guiding it along a chalk line, the pit man pulling it down and taking the sawdust in his face and hair. The man from Dale's ships worked below. The dust stuck to his sweat and caked in his eyes. At the end of a board the pit man climbed out gray from head to foot, and the next man went down. The planks were stacked to dry beside the pit. Some went to the houses with their rotted posts, and some went down the river to the forts.

Other days he dug. The gangs cut ditches along the low ground inside the palisade to carry the water off, and a new trench outside it where the old one had fallen in. The spades went through a crust of dry earth into blue clay that stuck to the blade and had to be knocked off against a boot. Water came into the bottom of the trench as they went down, brown and cold, and by midmorning the men stood in it to the ankle. The marsh smell came up out of the clay. The officer stood at the lip with a staff and measured the depth with it. When the drum beat, the men climbed out on each other's shoulders and scraped their legs with sticks.

At noon the drum beat them in. The men came back across the neck in file, sat in the shade of the house fronts and ate what the store gave out. It was meal and peas boiled in a common kettle, with fish when the boats had done well and bread when there was bread. Each man held out his own dish or can. The kettle was scraped to the bottom and the scrapings went to whoever stood nearest. The men ate fast, sitting with their backs to the walls, their legs out in the dust of the street, and some of them slept for the little time left before the drum. Tucker, who kept the store, measured it out against the roll. In the afternoon the drum beat them out again, to the timber, the ditches or the pales. Pales were split from short logs with wedges and a wooden beetle, the wedges driven along the grain until the log opened with a crack, and then split again. A man could split a good number in an afternoon if the wood was straight. The officers counted them in the evening.

The evening drum brought them in before sunset. They stood in rows by the church and the names were called again. Then prayers. The church was a timber building with a cedar pulpit and plain benches, and the men stood packed at the back in their working clothes, smelling of smoke and sweat and pine. Twice a day, morning and evening, the whole colony was in it. The minister read the evening prayers and a psalm, and the men said the responses in a low mutter that filled the room. By the end of the psalm the light had gone from the windows, and the candles on the pulpit were the only light left in the church. The men went out into the dusk with their caps in their hands and put them on in the market place.

Some nights he stood the watch. The guard went up onto the bulwarks at the drum after prayers, a musket and a coil of match to each man, the match lit from the guardhouse fire and kept glowing between the fingers. From the bulwark he could see the river on one side, pale under the sky, and on the other the dark line of the woods across the neck. Frogs called in the marsh all night. A fish jumped in the river with a slap. Nothing came out of the woods. At midnight the drum beat the change, and the relief came up the ladder, and he went down and lay on his straw until the drum beat again.

On Sundays the Lawes were read out in the church. The man stood at the back and heard them, article after article, in a voice that carried in the timber room. Some were for God and the Sabbath, some for the store, some for the work, some for the watch and the soldiers. Many of them ended in death. He heard it again at the end of one for any man who ran away to the Powhatans. The reading went on a long time. The men stood through it, shifting their weight from foot to foot, and the heat built up under the roof and the flies circled at the windows. Nobody sat. The reader turned his pages and went on to the end, and then the minister gave the blessing. Afterward they went out past the gallows into the market place, and the afternoon was their own.

Later in the same relation that called the articles well observed, at the point where Dale had almost finished a new town upriver and men who would not take pains ran away to the Powhatans, and many of them were taken again, Percy set down what was done with them:

"Some he apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to deathe all theis extreme and crewell tortures he used and inflicted upon them To terrefy the reste for Attempteinge the Lyke and some wch Robbed the store he cawsed them to be bownd faste unto Trees and so sterved them to deathe."

At Kecoughtan the corn came up in its hills that June, a hand high and then a foot, in fields that had been the Kecoughtans'. At the fort the houses were mended one by one. New posts went in where the old had rotted, new thatch went up in bundles cut from the marsh, and new daub was slapped into the wattle and smoothed with the flat of a hand. The piles of pales beside the saw pits grew. Men who had been in the fort since the starving winter worked in the same gangs as Dale's three hundred, and the officers made no difference between them at the roll. The river ran low and warm. Down the river at Point Comfort, Davis kept his garrison on the sand point and watched the bay.

The drum beat in the dark again. The man from Dale's ships sat up, found his shoes, and went out into the market place with the others. The names were called and he answered to his. His shoes had begun to split at the toe. He took his axe from the rack by the guardhouse door and fell in behind the man in front of him. The officer at the head of the file had a list in one hand and a staff in the other. Above the palisade the sky was turning gray. The gang went past the gallows in file, through the gate, and out across the neck toward the trees.