The Starving Time

On an August afternoon a log lay half cut across the trestles at the saw pit, the long saw left standing in the kerf. The gangs had been called in from the woods beyond the neck with the axes still in their hands. Sir Thomas Dale had every company in the fort under arms, drawn up in the market place in corslets and morions with the sun full on them. The iron took the heat and passed it to the men inside it. Pikemen stood in their files with the butts grounded and their hands slick on the staves. The musketeers carried their rests over the shoulder and their match lit at both ends, and its reek hung about the ranks in the still air. Boys carried powder from the storehouse in small kegs and set them down by the drum.

The word had come up the river from the point. Captain Davis, at Algernon's Fort, had seen nine ships on the coast and sent notice of them to Dale, supposing them to be Spanish. A Spanish caravel had come into the bay earlier that summer and gone out again with an English pilot aboard, and the three men she had left behind were still prisoners on the colony's ships. One caravel had been an errand. Nine ships could carry an army.

Dale sent Captain Brewster down the river to discover what they were, with a lieutenant and forty men. They went down on the ebb in the afternoon light, oars working, and they went out of sight round the reach below the island. Dale had reckoned on their return within a certain time. The time passed. The companies stood, then sat on the ground in their files with their pikes laid down beside them, and the water bucket went along the ranks with a dipper. A sentinel on the bulwark toward the river kept his eyes on the reach below the island, where the water turned out of sight behind the trees. Nothing came round it. The sun went over toward the woods and the shadow of the palisade crept out across the market place. The river below the island stayed empty, and Dale feared they had been surprised or beaten. Then he drew all his forces into form and order, ready for an encounter, and called a council.

Its question was a plain one. The colony could meet the ships in the river, aboard its own vessels at anchor off the island, or it could stand behind the palisade and keep the fort. Each way had its arithmetic. A palisade of split logs could be battered from the water by a ship's guns at leisure, and the men behind it could see the woods at their backs. A ship could be boarded, and the fight on her deck would be close, with pikes and swords and muskets fired at the length of a man. On a ship the river was the wall.

George Percy sat in the council. He had held the presidency through the starving winter and the deputy's place after the lord governor sailed, and in the first of them he had watched men run from the fort to the Powhatans and never come back. His advice went into his relation in the words he gave it:

"My opinyon I delyvered to Sir Tho: Dale and the Reste. Thatt is was dowttfull whether our men wolde stande unto itt A shoare and Abyde the Brunte, butt A shippboard of necessety they muste for there was noe runneinge Away."

The council resolved for the ships. Men went down to the landing with casks of powder and shot on their shoulders and handed them into the boats. Bread went aboard in sacks, and water in casks. The boats pulled out to the ships in the stream with men sitting knee to knee in their armor, and the men climbed the ships' sides by the battens with their muskets passed up after them. Sailors cleared the guns, cast off the lashings and laid the rammers and sponges along the deck. The preparation was still going on when a boat came up the reach from below.

It was Brewster. He had the lieutenant with him, and he brought certain news. The ships were English. They were Sir Thomas Gates's fleet, and Gates had come now to be governor, and the fleet would be at the island that evening. The men came back down the ships' sides. The powder went back up the bank to the storehouse, keg by keg, and the match was put out.

Sir Thomas Gates came up to the island with six ships, three hundred men and a hundred cows and other cattle, with munition and every kind of provision the Company could think needful. He was the commander who had been wrecked on Bermuda in the Sea Venture and had come up the river in the spring of the year before last to find the fort starving. He had taken Kecoughtan with a pipe and a drum the summer before and gone home. Now he came back with the government in his commission. The ships anchored off the island in a line, their lanterns lit at the sterns, and the boats ran between them and the landing until long after dark. The cattle came ashore lowing and were driven out onto the neck, where they stood in the grass by the wood's edge and could be heard from the fort all night.

That night the two knights met, and after the welcoming Dale acquainted Gates with what he had done since May. It made a short account for three months: the corn set at Kecoughtan, the gangs under the drum, the Lawes enlarged, a hundred men in armor up the Nansemond River, three Spaniards in the ships. In the morning the colony found a new governor in the house and new faces at every fire, and the drum beat the gangs out as it had the day before.

The unlading took days. Casks went up the bank on rollers, bales of cloth and canvas on men's backs, iron in bars, nails in kegs, spades and mattocks and axes by the hundred. The new men were counted off into companies under the drum and shown where to lie. They had come out in a summer passage, and some were already sick. Then Gates made his appointment, and Percy set it down in a line: "Sr Tho: Gates Apointed Sr Tho: Dale their Marshall of the Collonie". The marshal was the officer of martial law, who commanded the soldiers and kept the Lawes. Dale had been doing the work since May without the name.

He had his plan ready. In the summer, after the Nansemond River, he had taken boats up the James as far as the falls. Some twelve miles below them he had found high land with the river bending round it, near the Arrohatecks, the people whose town stood on that reach of the upper river. That was where he meant to plant his new town. He told Gates what he intended. Gates approved it and gave him men of his own choosing, two or three hundred of them, out of the old companies and the new.

They went at the beginning of September. Dale went by water with a small company, in boats loaded with tools, nails, provision and the heavy things that could not be carried through the woods. Brewster led most of the men overland. The column was long on the narrow paths: pikes carried at the trail, muskets with the match covered, men with axes and spades over their shoulders and kettles hung from poles. The paths ran single file through oak and pine and down into creek bottoms where the water came to the thigh and the mud took the shoes. September was still hot under the trees. The column halted at every creek to bring the last men over, and the files stretched out and closed up again like a rope paid out and drawn in.

Brewster's men were assaulted again and again on the march. The bowmen who came against them were sent by Powhatan, and they had a leader. Percy names him, "one Munetute comonly called amongste us Jacke of the feathers", and gives the reason for the English name: Munetute came into the field "all covered over wth feathers and Swans wings fastened unto his showlders as thowghe he meante to flye". Arrows came out of the leaves at the head of the column and at its tail. The files faced outward and fired into the trees, and the powder cloud rolled back through the ranks. The bowmen were gone by the time it cleared. The men reloaded standing, blowing on their match, and the officers walked the files and counted heads. A mile on the arrows came again. Men learned to march with the musket on the shoulder nearest the woods and the match held clear of the brush, and to watch the leaves more than the path. The wounded were carried on the shoulders of the men nearest them, and the column went on.

Brewster came to the place appointed, and Dale met him there. More encounters followed, and more skirmishes, before the English held the ground. The neck rose out of the river on high land, open in places and grown in others with oak and chestnut, with the James bending round it on three sides. Across the narrow end the woods came down close. The boats lay under the bank, and they were unloaded the first evening, tools and casks and kettles and coils of rope piled above the waterline under a guard. The men who had come by land lay down that night on the ground with their arms beside them, wet to the waist from the last creek, and the sentinels changed every two hours around a ring of fires. Nobody slept long. The men who had come by land and the men who had come by water were set to work together the first morning.

A pale was a fence of posts, and the work of raising one was the whole colony's trade by then. The axe men felled the trees on the line of the narrow end and lopped them, and the sawyers and cleavers cut them to length, a little more than twice a man's height, and split them lengthwise into halves and quarters. The heads were sharpened with the axe. Along the marked line other men dug a trench a spade and a half deep. The posts were stood upright in it, close together, the split faces in, and the earth was thrown back and rammed hard round their feet with the butt ends of poles. Rails went along the inside, pinned to the posts with treenails. Musketeers stood in a line at the edge of the woods while the axes worked, match lit, facing the trees. In ten or twelve days the neck was closed, and the pale took in seven English acres.

Dale named the town Henrico, for Prince Henry, the King's elder son. Inside the pale the first work was a high watch-house at each corner, where a man could stand above the posts and see over the woods and down both reaches of the river. The watch-houses were squared timber on corner posts sunk deep, with a ladder inside and a floor at the height of the pale's points, roofed against the rain and open on every side to the eye. A sentinel stood in each through the night with his match lit and a horn to sound. From up there the fires of the camp lay below him in a ring, and beyond the posts there was only the dark of the woods and the river moving under the bank. Then came a church and storehouses. When those were finished he began on houses for himself and his men. They were framed houses, English work, the sills laid on the ground and the posts and studs mortised into them, the joints pinned, the walls closed with clapboard riven from the oaks and the roofs thatched with reeds cut along the river. The carpenters set out the frames on the ground and the men raised them in a gang, heaving on poles and ropes, until a frame stood and could be braced. Until then they slept under the boats' sails and in huts of bark and boughs along the inside of the pale, with fires at the doors against the mosquitoes. The evenings shortened. The leaves on the chestnuts turned at the edges.

The Powhatans were not idle while it went up. Arrows came over the pale from the woods and dropped among the men at their work. Men were hit at the saw pit and at the trench. Divers were wounded inside the fort and others put in danger, and the wounded were dressed in one of the huts. Some of the men had their employment outside the pale, cutting timber, fetching water, watching the cattle. Some of those came short home. They were slain in the woods by the men who waited there.

The town grew through that autumn and through the years after it. Hamor described it as it stood when he left the country, and Smith's 1624 book gives his description this way:

"This towne is situated upon a necke of a plaine rising land, three parts invironed with the maine River, the necke of land well impaled, makes it like an Ile; it hath three streets of well framed houses, a handsome Church, and the foundation of a better laid (to bee built of Bricke)".

The brick church was to be a hundred feet long and fifty wide. Along the verge of the river stood five houses, where "the honester sort of people, as Farmers in England" kept continual sentinel for the town. About two miles inland, a second pale nearly two miles long ran from river to river, and the corn ground inside it was guarded by several commanders. Across the river Alexander Whitaker, the minister at Henrico, chose his parsonage and a hundred acres and called the place Rock Hall. In September of 1611 there was a pale, watch-houses going up at the corners, a ring of fresh stumps, and the smoke of the fires going up over the trees.

Downriver the smoke could be seen from the Appamattucks' town, where the Appomattox came into the James. It was harvest there. The women and girls of one household went out to the fields each morning with baskets on their backs and came back bent under them, and the ears were stripped and laid out and shelled. The corn went into baskets of bark and rush, and the baskets were stacked along the inside wall of the house against the cold months, with the beans in smaller baskets beside them. The children chased the birds out of the drying yards with sticks. In the evenings the household sat at the fire in the center of the house.

The English boats came up the James past the river's mouth all through September. They came up on the flood with men sitting close in them, iron catching the light, and the sound of their oars carried across the water. Some were heaped with posts and casks. They passed up the reach and out of sight and came down again empty on the ebb, riding high, the men in them lying back at the oars. Some came down after dark, and their lantern could be seen sliding along the far side of the river and the voices heard across the water. Men of the town went up through the woods along the river to see where the boats were going, and came back after two days, and sat late at the fires. Upriver, five miles by land, the smoke stood over the trees every evening in the same place.

When the leaves were down the men went out after the deer, and the women carried the mats after them, and the town emptied and filled again with the hunting. The skins came home on the men's backs and were pegged out and scraped. Frost came on the marsh. The baskets along the wall went down as the household ate from them, a little each day, and there were still many full when the cold set in.

The days were short by Christmas, and cold. The household kept the fire high in the center of the house through the short days. In the mornings there was ice at the edge of the river and the marsh grass stood stiff and white. The women pounded corn in the mortar by the door, and the sound of the pestle carried across the town in the cold air.

About Christmas the English came. They came from Henrico, five miles off by land, with a drum before them and Dale himself among them. The muskets went off among the houses. Some few were killed. The rest fled into the trees. The English lost no one. They went through the houses one by one. They found the corn.

The people of the town were in the woods by then, in the cold, with what they had carried out in their arms. From the trees above the fields they could see the English at the houses and the smoke of English fires in the town's own hearths.

Smith's book, following Hamor, gives the reason for it, "in regard of the injurie done us by them of Apamatuck", and says that Dale "tooke it and their Corne". Under the lord governor, the Appamattucks had called a boat's crew from the fort ashore at their town to fill their casks with water, feasted them, and fallen on them at the feast, and only one man of the crew had got away. Dale looked over the ground he had taken, its fields along two rivers, its cleared land and its landing, and judged it good for an English town. He resolved to possess it and plant it, and "at the instant called it the new Bermudas".

The household's baskets went out through the door on English shoulders. They went down to the landing in a line of men, one basket after another, and were stacked under guard in the English store.