The Starving Time

The Powhatans came out of the woods beyond the neck on a winter morning. There were six or seven of them in single file, with baskets on their backs. Two of them carried a deer slung by its bound legs from a pole. They walked across the neck in the frozen ruts the timber carts had cut and stopped a little short of the gate. Their breath hung in the air in front of them. The sentinel on the bulwark called down into the fort. After a time the gate opened far enough to let out an officer and a file of musketeers with their match lit. The visitors set their loads down on the hard ground to be seen: shelled corn in baskets of bark, the deer, a string of dried fish, a bundle of roots wrapped in a mat. The officer walked along the line and looked into the baskets and turned the fish over with the toe of his boot. One of the visitors spoke a few words of English and pointed back toward the woods, and the officer answered him with his hands. The others stood with their mantles drawn round them and their bows unstrung at their backs. They had copper at their ears and their hair cut short on the right side. The musketeers watched them down the length of their pieces. Behind him the drum was beating the gangs out to their work. Then the gate opened wider and the Powhatans went in with their loads.

Two winters earlier nothing had come to that gate to sell. The towns had sent no corn after Smith sailed. The men who went out into these woods for roots had been cut off within a walk of the palisade. The fort had eaten its horses in the market place. Now the market place was full of men in companies. The houses round it had been raised again on the old ground. A guard stood at the storehouse door with a halberd. The Powhatans set their baskets down in the middle of it. Men of the gangs looked at them as they passed. A deer carried in whole was a thing many in the fort had not seen since they landed.

The island Gates kept that winter was a garrison. Two or three hundred men had gone up the river with Dale in September, men of his own choosing, and the island kept the rest. The companies were called by drum before light and marched out by their officers. The work went on through the short days whatever the weather: felling beyond the neck, sawing at the pit, the ditch, the pales. Ice stood in the ruts by the gate in the mornings. The wind came off the river across the marsh and through the gaps in the clapboard, and men slept in their clothes. The store issued meal and peas against the roll, and fish came in when the boats could get out. Percy lived in a house of the fort with his servant, and was fed from the store like the rest. He had no company to march out.

George Percy had given up the government to Dale in May. He had sat in the council when the nine ships were sighted in August, and had watched Gates come in as governor. Dale had gone up the river to raise his town. Gates had the governor's house, with his guard at the door. Percy saw the visitors come and go, and when he came to write his relation he did not believe them. They came, he wrote, "bringeinge victewalls wth them Butt indede did Rather come as Spyes then any good affectyon they did beare unto us." Percy gave no other evidence. Inside the gate there was a good deal to count. A man could see the companies at muster, the guns on the bulwarks, the ships at anchor off the island, the store and its guard.

Gates acted on the same belief:

"Some of them Sr Tho: Gates cawsed to be Apprehended and executed for A Terrour to the Reste to cawse them to desiste from their subtell practyses."

Percy gave no number, no day and no manner of death. The men taken had walked in through the gate with food on their backs, past the sentinel and the musketeers, and set it down where they were told. In the starving winter the fort would have given anything it had for one of those baskets. The order that took them came from the governor's house, and its purpose was in Percy's sentence. It was meant for the rest.

Percy's relation turns aside at this point, "Onely by the waye", to Algernon's Fort at the mouth of the river. The fort at the point had burned to the ground by accident, all of it but Captain Davis's own house and his storehouse. A fort of that kind burned easily. The cabins were split timber and reed thatch, with a hearth in every one. The palisade was dry posts. The wind came straight off the bay across the sand. When it was over, the two buildings stood alone in a field of ash and charred stumps where the wall had been. The hogs rooted at the edge of it. The point had been Davis's command since the starving winter. His men had fed crab fish to their hogs that winter while the fort forty miles up the river boiled its shoes. Percy had come down in the spring of 1610, found them fat, and taxed him with it. After the fire the garrison went back to the woods behind the point for posts and to the marsh for reeds. The ditch was cleared of ash and the bank thrown up again. Men split pales on the sand and set them in the trench with the wind off the bay on their backs. Davis built it again with an expedition almost past belief. Percy gave the reason as he saw it: Davis feared some displeasure, and feared to be removed from a place that was "the moste plentifulleste place for food". The hogs were penned again behind it, and the boat went out to the flats at low water as it always had. The new palisade went up round the old ground. The oysters were still on the flats.

At the island the gangs worked under the Lawes, and men still ran. Under the Lawes a man who ran from the colony died for it. Every man in the gangs had heard the article read in the church on a Sunday. Most ran to the Powhatans, and some of those were taken again and brought back to die. Some ran the other way. Smith's book of 1624 tells of two men of the colony named Cole and Kitchins, who in the summer of 1611, before Gates came, plotted "with three more". They were "bending their course to Ocanahowan, five daies journey from us, where they report are Spaniards inhabiting". The Spaniards were real enough. They held a fort and a town on the coast of Florida, far to the south. Their ships came up the coast when they pleased. A caravel of theirs had come into the bay that same summer asking for a pilot. To a man in a gang at the saw pit, a Spanish town five days off was a town with bread in it and no drum. Five days was a long way on foot through that country. It meant rivers to be crossed with no boat, and swamps of black water and cypress knees. It meant the creeks of the south shore and the towns on them, and paths only the towns knew. The five men went out of the fort and into it.

They did not get to the Spaniards. The end takes a line. They were cut off by Powhatans who had been "hired by us to hunt them home to receive their deserts." The hunters brought them back up to the island, past the fields and in at the gate. In the winter of 1609 the towns had sold the fort no corn. In the summer of 1611 the fort hired their men to bring its own men home. Smith's book says nothing more of Cole and Kitchins or the three, and gives no word of what the deserts were.

Tyler, who printed Smith's book in his collection of 1907, set a note under the passage on the authority of a later historian. In the note the runaways had been the guard over Diego de Molina, the Spanish captain taken on the shore at Point Comfort. Molina had persuaded them to make for the Spanish settlements in Florida, it being a time of peace between the crowns. They had traveled some five days before the Powhatans cut them off. They were brought back, tried, and six of them were condemned and executed. Smith's own page names no Spaniard. It counts five men. The note counts six dead.

Smith had sailed from the island in October of 1609, burned and unable to stand, and had not been back. In London, fifteen years later, in a thick folio with maps and engraved portraits, he followed the story of Cole and Kitchins with a defense of the marshal's severity. Dale had not been half so tyrannous or severe, he wrote, as there was occasion and just cause for. If the manner of his punishments was not usual, the purpose was to terrify the rest. The offenders were justly condemned. Then the reason:

"for amongst them so hardned in evill, the feare of a cruell painfull and unusuall death more restraines them, than death it selfe."

The same year, at the island, the colony answered for itself. By 1624 the plantations ran for miles along both banks of the James. The men who sat for them came down the river in their own boats to meet at the island, in their best coats, with a clerk at a table to write. Their answer was read out to them and amended and read again. It ran to pages. An alderman of the Company in London, with others, had put out a declaration of the state of the colony in the twelve years of the Company's old government. Those were the years from the first landing to 1619. The declaration was full of praise. The colony's general assembly, the men chosen to sit for the plantations, framed an answer in the name of the whole colony. It was a sin against God, the answer began, to let the world be abused with untrue reports, and they called their paper a dismasking of those praises. They wrote it as men who had been there, "many of us having beene eye witnesses and patients of those tymes". Patients, in their English, meant sufferers.

The answer charged twelve years and the laws sent over in print, and it charged them plainly. A man's allowance, it said, had been eight ounces of meal and half a pint of peas for a day. Both were moldy and rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, unfit for beasts. Hunger drove many to flee to the Powhatans, and those taken again were put to death by hanging, by shooting and by breaking on the wheel. Others were driven by famine to steal for their bellies:

"of whom one for steelinge of 2 or 3 pints of oatemeale had a bodkinge thrust through his tounge and was tyed wth a chaine to a tree untill he starved".

A bodkin was a sharp awl or dagger. A man too sick to work, the answer went on, had no allowance at all, and died of it. Many, weary of life, dug holes in the earth and hid in them till they starved. The paper named no governor. Smith's sentence and the assembly's were set down in the same year, one in London and one on the river.

Among the men who had come up from Bermuda with Gates in the spring of 1610 was John Rolfe, a gentleman from the Sea Venture. He had lived through the wreck, the ten months on the islands and the voyage up in the cedar pinnaces. He had come ashore into the fort of sixty. Ralph Hamor, the colony's secretary, wrote in his book of 1615 that in 1612 Rolfe was the first to take the pains to make trial of tobacco in Virginia. He did it "partly for the loue he hath a long time borne vnto it, and partly to raise commodity to the aduenturers". The adventurers were the Company's shareholders in London, who had put their money into the colony and had seen almost none of it come back. The Company needed a crop.

The English in London smoked leaf brought from the Spanish Indies, from Trinidad and Caracas, and paid dearly for it. In Hamor's reckoning any man might plant tobacco and, with the least part of his labor, earn his clothes and his other necessaries by it. He claimed that Virginia leaf would answer to the best of the Spanish, Trinidado or Caracas, though he admitted none of that goodness had yet been shipped home. The Powhatans grew a tobacco of their own in the gardens about their towns, small in the leaf and harsh in the pipe. The English had smoked it since 1607 and complained of it. Rolfe's trial was of a leaf that might sell in London. The work was a year's work. The seed was as fine as dust. It went into a bed of raked earth in the early spring, mixed with ashes, and the bed was covered with boughs against the frost. The seedlings were drawn when they had four or five leaves and set out in hills in a field cleared of stumps. Through the summer they were weeded and wormed by hand, and the tops were broken off so the plant would spend itself in leaf and not in flower. The suckers that came at the joints were pinched away. In late summer the plants stood higher than a man's waist with leaves as broad as a spade. They were cut and hung on sticks in a shed to cure, until the green went out of them and they turned the color of a dry oak leaf. Then they were stripped and packed. None of it was work the gangs knew.

In the spring of 1612 that work began. The companies went out under the drum to the felling and the ditch. On some part of the colony's ground a gentleman's seedbed lay under its boughs. Nobody marched to it.

On April 22, 1612, George Percy went aboard a ship called the Tryall to sail for England. She lay off the island in the channel where the ships always lay, with her yards crossed and her boat at the landing, tarred black along the wales. The river was high with spring water and running brown, and the marsh behind the fort had gone green. The shad had come up in March. The sturgeon were in the river now, and the fishing boats went out for them in the early mornings and came back low in the water. She was to carry letters to the Company and whatever men had leave to go home. Percy's chests went down to the landing on men's shoulders and out to her in the boat, with his servant beside them. They held what a gentleman carried home after five years: his arms, his clothes gone thin, the linen and plate of a household that had kept its state in a fort. He had come into the river with the first ships in the spring of 1607. He had been in the country five years, and he held no office in it on the day he left.

He walked out through the gate. He had come in through it on the evening of the return in June of 1610, when the four pinnaces came back up the river and found the kettles cold. Behind him was the house where he had lain sick in October of 1609 while three councillors pressed the presidency on him. The market place where the horses had been killed was a parade ground now. The church where the lord governor's commission had been read stood on its old ground. Out on the neck the gangs were breaking ground for the year's corn, a long line of men bent over mattocks with an officer standing at the end of it. Somewhere upriver Dale was finishing his town, and at the point Davis was finishing his fort, and in the governor's house Gates was governor. He had been president, then deputy governor, then a gentleman without a place. He went down the bank to the boat on his own feet. Through most of the winter of 1609 he had not been able to stand.

He was going home with no account of his own in print. In England that same year Smith's men published their book of the colony. It said of the winter Percy had governed that the whole colony had found the want of Captain Smith.

Years later he wrote his relation for his brother the earl, and he closed his account of the colony on the deck of that ship:

"Thus haveinge Related unto your Lordshipp the Trewe p[ro]cedeinges in Virginia from Sr Tho: Gates shippwracke upon the Bermudes untill my depture outt of the cowntry wch was the 22th Aprell 1612 The wch day I sett sayle in A shipp named the Tryall".

Aboard, the chests went below and the boat was hoisted in. The seamen went to the capstan, and the cable came in wet over the bow with the river running off it. The anchor came up and the Tryall went down on the ebb with her topsails loosed and the river under her. Men stood at the landing and watched her go. A gang on the neck straightened from its mattocks for a moment, and the officer at the end of the line said something, and they bent again. Percy stood at her rail with the island astern of him across the water. It lay low and green in the river. The palisade ran along its edge, the gangs were at work on the neck, and the marsh round it was bright with the spring. Then the ship came round in the reach and the island was behind the trees.