The Starving Time

The boats came into the mouth of the Nansemond River on a summer morning with a hundred men in them in armor. Sir Thomas Dale sat in the stern of the leading boat. The men at the oars wore corslets, the iron breastplate and backplate strapped over a padded doublet, and morions on their heads, the high-combed helmets with a brim that turned up at front and back. The sun came off the water into their faces, and the iron grew hot to the hand before the tide had turned. Sweat ran down under the padding and gathered at the belt. Muskets lay along the thwarts with their rests beside them, and the pikes stood up between the knees of the men who carried them. The James was wide here, three or four miles from shore to shore, and brown with the summer. The south shore lay low ahead of them, marsh and reed and a dark line of pine behind. This was the country of the Nansemonds, the people of the south shore at the mouth of the James. It had no English fort in it.

The work at the island was settled by then. The gangs went out to the woods under the drum, the saw pits were working, and the corn at Kecoughtan stood in its hills. Dale meant to build a new town, and he had not yet resolved where to seat it. Hamor gives the reason for the voyage: to better his knowledge of the country, Dale spent some time with his hundred men in discovery of the Nansemond River, and followed it to its head, in spite of the people who lived along it. Francis West, the lord governor's brother, was in the company. So was John Martin, of the old council. Martin had been in this country before. In the autumn of 1609 he had come back from the Nansemonds to the fort without his boats and with nearly half his men gone.

The river narrowed as they went up it. The banks closed in, the marsh gave way to higher ground and timber, and creeks opened off it into the reeds on either side. The boats kept to the channel. At the bends the men at the oars could see nothing ahead of them but water and trees. Fields came down to the bank in places, with corn standing in them and the stumps of girdled trees among the hills, and beyond the fields were the round-roofed houses of a town and the smoke of its fires. Herons lifted out of the shallows and went off low over the reeds. The men in the bows watched the banks. The oars knocked in the tholes and dripped.

Where the company went ashore, it went ashore in mud. The boats ran in until they grounded, and the men went over the sides into water to the knee and then to the thigh, with the iron on their backs and the bottom soft under them. The musketeers held their pieces and their bandoliers above their heads and kept their match dry in their hats. The pikemen passed their pikes ashore butt first. On the bank the officers formed them into files, and the files went up off the shore into the trees with the pikes at the front and the muskets behind. The ground under the pines was open and littered with needles, and the heat stood among the trunks without a breath of wind. The soldiers sweated through their doublets in the first mile. The pikes caught in the low branches and had to be carried slanted. Where a field opened the files went out into it, through corn higher than a man's waist with the bean vines climbing the stalks and the squash spread on the ground between the hills.

They had encounters and skirmishes with the Nansemonds by land and by water, and more than one. When the arrows came, they came out of the reeds where the channel ran close under a bank. They were reed shafts, fletched with feathers, and they came without a sound until they struck. Some went into the water alongside. Some rattled on the gunwales and the thwarts. Some struck iron and fell into the bottom boards, and some struck men. The musketeers blew on their match, laid their pieces in the rests or across the gunwale, and fired into the reeds where the arrows had come from. The smoke hung over the water in the heat and drifted slowly upstream. Files went ashore where the bank allowed it, in their armor, and came back with their wounded. Canoes came out of the creeks and went back into them. Divers of the company were hurt. Francis West was shot in the thigh. Martin was shot in the arm.

On land the fighting went the same way, at the edge of the woods and in the fields. The bowmen shot from behind the trunks and from the standing corn, and moved before the smoke cleared. A musketeer needed time between shots. He poured powder down the barrel from one of his flasks, rammed a ball home on it with his scouring stick, primed the pan, blew on his match and set it back in the lock, and in that time a bowman could loose arrow after arrow and be gone. The files could not run after him in their iron. They stood, and fired, and loaded, and went forward when they were told. The wounded were brought back to the boats and laid in the bottoms, and their wounds were dressed there, the arrowheads cut out and the holes bound with linen.

Dale himself came nearest. His morion had a brim, like every man's, a raised edge of iron that ran round the helmet over the ears. Percy put the moment into a single line:

"Sir Tho: Dale himselfe narrowly eskapeinge for An arrow light, iuste upon the edge or Brimme of his headepiece"

The arrow struck the brim and glanced off. It was an arrow which "if itt had fallen A thowght Lower mightt have Shott him into the Braynes and indangered his Lyfe." Dale had been in the country a matter of weeks. At the island the Lawes were read in the church on Sundays under his eye, and the gallows stood in the market place.

Many of the Nansemonds were killed and wounded in these fights. Percy gave no count. They had fought the English before. Now the arrows struck the corslets and the morions and fell off them, and the men inside the iron stayed on their feet and went on loading. The Nansemonds were not acquainted with men in armor, and they "mutche wondered thereatt especyally thatt they did nott see any of our men fall as they had donne in other conflictts." Then they fell to their charms where the English could see them, "throweinge fyer upp into the skyes Runneinge up and downe wth Rattles", and spoke their spells over the ground between. The fire went up in brands and handfuls from the edge of the trees and came down in sparks. The rattles carried across the open ground to the files, a dry shaking sound under the voices, and over it all the smoke of the muskets hung in the hot air.

The English muskets were matchlocks. Each was fired by a length of slow match, a cord of hemp soaked in saltpeter that smoldered at one end and was held in the jaws of the lock. When the trigger was pulled, the burning end came down into a pan of fine powder, and the pan fired the charge. A soldier on the march kept his match lit at both ends and carried his powder in a row of wooden flasks on a bandolier across his chest. Rain was the matchlock's enemy. A wet match went out, and wet powder in the pan would not take fire. Percy read the rattles and the fire as a charm against exactly that, the Nansemonds "Imageinge thereby to cawse Raine to fall from the Clowdes to extinguishe and putt owtt our mens matches and to wett and spoyle their powder". The sky over the river stayed as it was. The muskets went on firing. The soldiers cut down the Nansemonds' corn, burned their houses, and brought some of them back to the fort as prisoners. The prisoners went down the river in the boats with their hands bound, sitting in the bottoms among the soldiers' feet and the wounded, under the muskets of the men they had been shooting at.

Dale made more excursions after that, and there were more fights. One of them ended strangely. On one of these marches the company came into a town, and its houses stood about them in their fields. Dale and some of the better sort were sitting in one of them, a long house with a fire on the floor and the smoke going up through the hole in the roof. The light inside such a house came from the fire and the door. The walls were dark, hung with mats and baskets and bundles, and the far end ran off into shadow. The men in it were in their armor, or near it, with their swords at their sides. Nothing came in at the door. Then "A fantasy possessed them thatt they imagined the Salvages were sett upon them eache man Takeinge one another for an Indyan". They fell on one another pell mell in the dark of the house, beating each other down and "breakeinge one of Anothers heades". In the end the fit passed, and every man understood his error. Percy laid it to the charms, the sorceries of the people the company had come to fight.

In the house the swords went back into their scabbards. The men sat on the mats with their hands to their heads, and their fellows bound the cuts with strips of linen torn from shirts. Then the company formed again outside, and the boats went on. Above the last of the towns the Nansemond River grew narrow and slow. The banks came in until the oars on either side touched reeds, the water went dark under cypress and gum, and the channel ran out into swamp. The boats turned in the narrows and went back down with the current, past the cut fields and the burned houses, to the wide mouth and the James. Dale had seen the Nansemond River to its head and the country along it, and he did not seat his town there.

While Dale was in the Nansemond country, Captain James Davis kept his garrison at Algernon's Fort. The fort stood on the sand point at the mouth of the James, a bank and a ditch and a palisade, with cabins inside and the hogs penned behind it, and the oyster flats running out at low water. It looked over the bay. Davis had held the point since the starving winter, and his men had lived there on crabs and oysters while the fort upriver ate its horses. The watch on the bank faced the water. Ships coming in from the sea passed close under the point, because the channel into the James ran there. Every sail that came into the bay came past Davis first.

That summer the watch had little to watch. Dale's three ships had come in past the point in May. After them the bay lay open to the capes, gray in the morning and blue by noon, with the fishing birds working over it and the low land on the far shore blurred in the heat. A sentinel stood on the bank with his match lit and his musket beside him, and changed at the turn of the glass. The rest of the garrison went out on the flats at low water with baskets for the oysters, or mended the palisade, or sat in the shade of the cabins. The hogs rooted in their pen. Davis was captain of the place, and the place was a sand point at the end of the colony, with the whole sea in front of it.

One that summer was not English:

"A Spanishe Caravell Aryved upon the Coaste and did come into the Bay wthowt command of Shotte."

A caravel was a small ship of the Spanish kind, quick under sail and light in the water, built for coasting and for errands. She was smaller than any of Dale's ships, and she came in past the capes from the sea and stood into the bay alone. The garrison stood to its arms along the bank with the match lit on its muskets. She put out her boat. Three men came ashore in it, three of the principal men aboard her. They landed on the beach not far from Algernon's Fort, and the boat's crew stayed with the boat.

Davis saw them coming. He laid men in ambush for them and kept them out of sight. The boat grounded in the shallows and the three stepped out of it and waded in. Behind them the boat's crew rested on their oars. The beach was open sand, with the marsh grass beyond it and the low line of the palisade off along the point. The three came up from the water's edge, "they nott knoweinge of any foarte to be theare", looking about them at the point. Davis's men rose up around them with their muskets leveled and their match lit, and took them. The chief of them was Don Diego de Molina, "A comawnder of some foarte or houlde in the Weste Indies". The second was Antonio Perez, his companion. The third was their pilot, Limbrecke, a man "who wentt under the name and habbitt of A Spanyard", and who was reputed a good pilot. The three were held on the sand point under guard, with the hogs grunting behind the palisade and their own boat lying off in the shallows.

After the three were taken, the boat put off from the shore. It lay out on the water within hail, rocking on the swell with the oars trailed, and Davis came down to the edge of the water to answer it. The men in it were questioned across the water. They had an answer ready. They said they were seeking one of the King of Spain's ships, laden with munition and bound for the West Indies, and they asked Davis to let them have a pilot to bring their own ship into the harbor. Percy wrote that they pretended this. Davis granted it. The pilot went out to the boat, and the boat rowed him out to the caravel. He was no sooner aboard her than her men hoisted their sails. The caravel stood out of the bay with him and carried him quite away, and the three who had been taken were left behind on the point in his stead.

The three were brought up to the island, forty miles by water, in a boat from the point with a guard aboard. They went up past Kecoughtan, where the two English forts stood among the Kecoughtans' old fields and the corn was coming on, and up the wide reaches of the river with the marsh and the woods on either hand. At the island the boat came in to the landing below the palisade. The gangs at work outside the gate stopped to look at them. At the fort they were not kept together. They were sent as prisoners aboard several of the ships that lay in the river. The ships' boats came in to the landing for them and took them out across the brown water, each Spaniard with soldiers on the thwarts beside him, and they went up the ships' sides on the battens and were put below. The ships kept guards on them. Shortly after, Dale sent three men out to examine them. One was George Percy, who had surrendered the government in May and held no office now. One was Christopher Newport, the fleet's captain, who had been wrecked on Bermuda with Gates. The third was William Strachey, secretary to the colony that year, the man who was gathering the Lawes into order for the printer. Percy had kept the colony through the starving winter. Newport had brought the first ships into this river in 1607. Strachey had been on the Sea Venture too. The examination was held aboard ship, in a cabin under the deck, with the light coming in off the water through the stern windows and the timbers working on the tide.

The examiners accused the Spaniards of coming as spies. The Spaniards denied it utterly. The examiners put it to them again, and then again, and the Spaniards denied it each time. Percy, Newport and Strachey were not satisfied. The Englishmen went on pressing them with the charge, and at last Perez gave them an answer:

"Anto: Pereos answered thatt we had noe cawse att all to feare any thinge this yere butt whatt mightt happen the nextt he coulde nott tell."

The examiners had the boat's story of a ship of the King of Spain somewhere at sea with munition, and a Spaniard's word that the colony need fear nothing for a year. The colony had lost a pilot to the caravel and gained three prisoners it had not looked for.

One of the ships lay at her anchor off the island with her yards bare and her boat towing astern. The tide turned under her and swung her slowly round to face downriver. A guard stood at the hatch. Below him, in the close dark between the decks, the commander of a fort in the West Indies sat on the planking among the casks. The light from the hatch fell on the ladder and stopped there. Forty miles down the river, the bay was empty where the caravel had been.