The Starving Time

The letter opened on the man who would carry it. He was very trustworthy, Don Diego de Molina told his reader, and everything he said could be believed, so the writer would not be long and would put down only what mattered most. Molina wrote it in Spanish, at the island, in the spring of 1613. He was the Spanish captain who had come ashore on the sand at Point Comfort two summers before to ask for a pilot, and had been taken in Captain Davis's ambush with his two companions. The letter was for the Spanish ambassador in London. Molina did not name him. He did not need to. The ambassador was the one man in England who could carry a prisoner's words to the King of Spain, and the letter was written to be carried to the King. Molina had been ill for most of a year. His health, he wrote, had failed him for eleven months, and God was beginning to give it back. He had been in the country two years. He had been examined and watched by the people he was writing against, and he had had time to look at them.

He had written to his King once before, when he first came. That letter, he admitted now, had need of some interpretation, and he did not know whether it had arrived. This one was plainer. It set the business of a soldier's report among the courtesies a captain owed an ambassador, and it was written by a man who knew he was seen. What he called "the publicity of my position" gave him no chance to make a proper description of the country. He made one anyway, at the end, in a few lines. He wrote the rest as an argument.

The island he wrote it on was in its spring. The marsh round it had gone green, and the river was high and brown from the rains upcountry. The shad had come up in their season, and the boats went out with nets at the turn of the tide and came back low in the water. The drum beat before light, and the companies fell in by their officers in the market place in the half dark, and went out through the gate to the neck with axes and mattocks on their shoulders. A Spaniard at the island was a thing every man in the fort knew about, and the Spaniard knew it. His letter shows him counting all the same: the pieces on the bulwarks, the men at muster, the women and children among them, the forts down the river and the town up it. The numbers went into the letter one garrison at a time.

The argument began with a name. The colony, he told the ambassador, was "this new Algiers of America". Algiers was the corsairs' city on the Barbary coast, the port that fitted out the ships that took Spanish shipping in the Mediterranean and sold Spanish crews in its market. Molina meant the comparison exactly. The English, he wrote, had great thoughts of an alliance with the pirates of Europe, and this river would be their gathering-place. He called it "a hydra in its infancy". Its intention was to grow and to destroy the whole of the West, by sea and by land. England abounded in poor men who hated peace, because in peace they perished, and rich men greedy for the Indies. Once there was wheat in the ground here and cattle enough, every one of them would fit out a ship and come. He wanted the hydra killed while it was small. The rest of the letter was his evidence that it was small.

He had been eating the colony's food for two years. The soil was fertile, he allowed, and there was much game and fish. But the merchants in London had got no profit yet from mines, only from timber, and they had not kept the colony as it needed keeping. The people lived on "miserable rations of oats or maize" and went poorly dressed. If three hundred men came out today, he wrote, this same year would destroy more than a hundred and fifty, and there was not a year when half did not die. That was the climate of the place, as he saw it, and the climate of the government. Then he gave the ambassador a figure.

"Last year there were seven hundred people and not three hundred and fifty remain, because little food and much labor on public works kills them and, more than all, the discontent in which they live seeing themselves treated as slaves with cruelty."

The labor on public works went on in front of him at the island. The drum beat the companies out before light and in at noon and again at evening. The gangs went out under their officers to the felling beyond the neck, to the saw pit and the ditch and the pales, and came back with their tools on their shoulders. The gallows stood in the market place. The Lawes were read in the church on Sundays, and many of the articles ended in death, among them one for any man who ran to the Powhatans. The noon kettle was meal and peas and fish, issued at the store against the roll. Molina, a soldier, knew a garrison ration when he saw one. He knew a garrison's temper as well. Many of them, he wrote, had gone over to the Indians, and some had been killed at their hands. Others had been sent out to fish and had gone out to sea instead, and not come back. Those who remained had grown violent. They wanted a fleet to come from Spain and take them out of their misery. They cried to God of the injury done them and appealed to the King of Spain, and if a fleet came to give them passage home, "not a single person would take up arms".

That was the claim that mattered to an ambassador, and Molina put it as strongly as he could. Sooner, he wrote, would the colonists throw off their obedience to rulers who meant to hold the place till death. He was counting for a fleet.

He had reason to want one. A prisoner's freedom in 1613 came by exchange, by ransom, or by the arrival of his own side's ships. The letter's opening lines had already told the ambassador why none had come: to free him would require an expedition, and the King lacked full information to decide on one. The merchants in London, he went on, were said to be deserting the colony. That was false. It was a stratagem to make the King careless, to persuade him that the affair would settle itself and spare him the cost of a fleet. The colony did not mean to be given up. It meant to grow. Molina wanted the King to understand what it would cost to stop it now, and how little.

The forts were the heart of it. A man who had been taken at one of them could speak to their walls. With eight hundred or a thousand soldiers, he wrote, the King could reduce the place with great ease, or even with five hundred. No help could be looked for from England, and "the forts which they have are of boards and so weak that a kick would break them down". Once an enemy reached the ramparts, those outside would have the advantage of those within, because the beams and loopholes served both sides alike. It was "a fortification without skill and made by unskilled men". The garrisons were no better than the walls. The rulers and captains made a great profession of soldiering, because they had served in Flanders on the side of Holland, where some had held companies and castles. Dale, the marshal, had come out of the Dutch service. His men, Molina wrote, were poorly drilled and not prepared for military action. That was a Spaniard's view of soldiers who had learned their trade against Spain.

At the end of the letter he set down the river itself, fort by fort, as an attacking captain would need it. The bay ran northeast by east. Four leagues from its mouth the river came in from the south, nine fathoms deep. At the entrance stood a fort, or, as he put it, "a weak structure of boards ten hands high with twenty-five soldiers and four iron pieces". That was Algernon's Fort on the sand at Point Comfort, rebuilt by Davis after the fire. It stood above the beach where Molina had stepped out of his ship's boat two years before with Antonio Perez and their pilot, believing there was no fort there at all. He had waded in through the shallows with the boat's crew resting on their oars behind him, and Davis's men had been lying out of sight above the sand. He knew the ground at the point better than any other in the country. It was the only part of it he had seen as a free man. Half a league off was another, smaller, with fifteen soldiers and no artillery. Another, smaller than either, stood half a league inland against the Powhatans, with fifteen more. These were the two forts at Kecoughtan, the town at the river's mouth that Gates had taken with a pipe and drum in the summer of 1610. Their soldiers kept the Kecoughtans' old fields. The corn there was planted under a musket guard.

Then he came up the river, in his count, to where he was. Twenty leagues off, he wrote, was this colony, with a hundred and fifty persons and six pieces. The island lay about forty miles above the bay. Molina's leagues were his own. The hundred and fifty were the people he saw every day: the gangs at muster, the guard at the store, the gunners on the bulwarks with their six pieces, the women and children. Twenty leagues farther up, he wrote, was another settlement, strongly placed, and "on this they place their hopes". All of them would retreat there if occasion arose. It held a hundred more. That was Henrico, Dale's town on its neck of high ground above the river, raised in ten or twelve days in the autumn of 1611. Molina had never seen it, and said so. But he knew, he wrote, that it was like the others, and that one night the Powhatans had got inside it and run all over the place without meeting any resistance, shooting their arrows through all the doors. He gave the story as he had heard it, and named nobody who told it. The men inside Dale's pale had been shot at over it since the first week of its building, and some had been killed in the woods outside it.

The count came to two forts of boards at the mouth, two small forts inland, the island and Henrico. Twenty-five soldiers and four guns. Fifteen and none. Fifteen more. A hundred and fifty and six. A hundred. Then Molina did the subtraction an ambassador would want done for him. Among the people at the island and at Henrico, he wrote, there were women, children and field laborers, which left "not quite two hundred active men and those poorly disciplined". It was the last line of the letter.

He had written his own state into the middle of the letter. He did not make much, he said, of his imprisonment, nor of the hardships he had suffered in it, hunger, want and illness, because "one who does a labor of love holds lightly all his afflictions". He meant his service to his King. He had fared, he wrote, not very ill but tolerably, and since he arrived he had been in favor with the English. They had shown him friendship, in his words, "as far as their own wretchedness would allow", and with real good will. He wrote that line in a letter meant to bring Spanish soldiers up the river against them.

Antonio Perez had not lasted. He was the companion who had come ashore with Molina at the point and who had told his English examiners aboard ship that the colony had nothing to fear that year. He had died in the winter of 1612, while George Percy was still in the country. Molina gave him a soldier's epitaph:

"The ensign Marco Antonio Perez died fifteen months ago, more from hunger than illness, but assuredly with the patience of a saint and the spirit of a good soldier."

More from hunger than illness. He died in the winter Gates kept the island as a garrison, when the gangs marched out in the dark and the wind came through the clapboard. By Molina's own reckoning the English were dying of the same want. He had set it down a page before in his count of the living: of three hundred new men, a hundred and fifty dead in a year. Perez was one of the number that winter, and he was the only one in the letter with a name.

The third man was still alive, and was a puzzle. He had been the caravel's pilot, the sailor who waded ashore at Point Comfort with the two Spaniards and was taken with them. The sailor who came with him, Molina wrote, "is said to be English and a pilot". He was writing to an ambassador who would know what that meant: an Englishman piloting a Spanish king's ship into an English river was a spy for one side and a traitor to the other. Molina did not commit himself. He gave the ambassador what the man said for himself, and what he himself could see.

"He declares that he is from Aragon and in truth no one would take him for a foreigner."

Percy had left the colony a year before the letter was written, but when he came to write his own relation he settled the question. The pilot, he wrote, "was after fownde and discovered to be Inglishe man his name beinge Limbrecke". The exchange at the point had run both ways. Davis had granted the caravel a pilot of his own, and the caravel had carried him off out of the bay and left its three men on the sand. The colony had lost an English pilot to Spain that day, and had taken one in return who said he came from Aragon. In the spring of 1613 Limbrecke was still a prisoner, a man the English said was theirs and who said he was Spain's. Molina asked the ambassador for ships' stores, the kind brought out for private men, and above all for cloth and linen to clothe himself and one other, for they went naked or so ragged that it came to the same thing. They had not changed their shirts in a month. As the soldier says, he wrote, "my shirts are an odd number and do not come to three".

The man who would carry all this was not a Spaniard. He was "a very honorable Venetian gentleman", in Molina's phrase, who had fallen into great and serious errors and had now come back to his first religion. The man said God had made Molina the instrument of it. Molina gave thanks for that. Venice was a Catholic republic, and a Venetian at the island in 1613 was there among Protestants, under a Church of England minister and a code of laws that required every man at church twice a day. How he had come to the colony, and in what service, the letter does not say. He was going now, poor and sick, to Spain to do penance for his sins. Molina asked the ambassador to make him some present, as a sign that charity had not died out in Spain. If Molina got his liberty, he would help the man in everything he could. The Venetian would also carry what the paper could not: Molina told the ambassador to give credence to everything he said, and to learn from him how his correspondent was faring.

A letter found on its bearer would be read. Molina had a cipher, and no way to use it. In the last lines he explained himself.

"If Your Lordship had the key to my cipher, I should write in it."

The ambassador did not have the key, so the letter went in plain Spanish, forts and garrisons and guns and all, in a hand any Spanish reader could follow and any Englishman with Spanish could read. The protection had to come from somewhere else. Molina named it in the next sentence: "But this letter is sewed between the soles of a shoe". So, he wrote, he trusted in God that he had not done wrong in writing it in that way. The leather of a shoe sole was stitched through with waxed thread, inner and outer, with a welt between them. A folded sheet of paper laid flat between the layers made no shape that showed, and nothing showed at the welt. The letter does not say whose hands opened the soles and closed them again. The count of the colony's men went into the dark between them, with the four iron pieces at the point and the six at the island and the two hundred active men.

He had dated it before the postscript, from Virginia, in his own calendar: "May 28 (according to Spanish reckoning), 1613". Spain had taken up the new calendar of Pope Gregory some thirty years before, and England had not. At the island it was May 18, 1613. The corn was in the ground and a hand high in the hills. The river ran warm along the marsh, and the mosquitoes had come with the heat. The gangs were at the felling and the ditches, and the store was issuing the ration against the roll. At Henrico, twenty of Molina's leagues up the river, the hundred he had counted kept the town the Spaniard had never seen. Molina's letter was going the other way, toward the bay and the sea, with a Venetian who meant to do penance in Spain. It held a count of every gun in the colony and the advice that five hundred soldiers would be enough.

That spring Samuel Argall, the captain who had bought Henry Spelman back from the Patawomecks for copper, had his ship in the Potomac, trading for corn.