The Starving Time

The weir ran across the mouth of a creek where it opened into the Potomac, a fence of stakes driven into the mud and woven through with saplings, narrowing to a pocket where the fish crowded and could not turn. A man of the town waded out to it at low water in the middle of the morning, a basket on his back and a dip net in his hands. The water came to his thighs and still had the winter in it. The herring had been coming up the creeks for days, and the shad behind them, and when he reached the pocket it was thick and moving. He worked the net down and swung it up dripping and tipped it over his shoulder into the basket. The scales stuck to his forearms and dried there in the wind. Gulls stood on the stakes at the far end and watched. He filled the basket twice before the tide turned.

On the bank the women had fires going under racks of split saplings, and the fish he brought in were opened with shell and stone and laid across the racks to dry in the smoke. Children kept the gulls off with sticks. The baskets that had come down from the storehouses in autumn were light now, and some of them were empty and stacked inside the doorways. Spring was the thin end of the year in every town on the river, the time between the last of the old corn and the first of anything new. The fish came into that gap every year. Nobody in the town had to be told what they were worth. The racks filled from one end to the other, and the fires under them were fed all day.

Above the bank the fields were being readied. Last year's corn hills stood in their rows among the dead stumps, and the women went along them pulling the old stalks and piling the trash in heaps to burn. The smoke from the heaps lay along the edge of the woods all day. The ground was still cold to the hand and the seed would not go in for weeks. Men mended the frames of the drying racks and brought in firewood. Two canoes were being burned and scraped out on the shore below the houses, the fire laid along the log and the char hacked away with shells. The work went on through the morning without anyone calling it.

Out beyond the creek mouth, in the broad water of the river, the English ship lay at anchor. The man at the weir could see her when he straightened his back: a black hull riding high, her masts and crossed yards, the small boat that went between her and the shore. She had been in the river before. The towns along that shore knew what came out of her, copper and beads and iron tools, and what went into her, which was corn. Canoes had gone out to her before, low in the water with baskets, and come back light with copper, and on still evenings the sounds carried across the water from her deck, a bell, a shout, a hammer on wood. The man at the weir had no corn to sell her. He went back to the fish. She swung on her cable with the tide.

In the afternoon he carried the second basket up the bank on a tumpline across his forehead, bent under it, the water running out through the weave and down the backs of his legs. The path went up between the racks and the cleared hills to the houses, where the dogs came out to meet the smell of him. His wife took the basket at the door and tipped it out onto a mat, and the children sorted the shad from the herring by size. The big fish went to the racks. The small went into the pot with water and a handful of the old meal, and the pot went onto the fire at the middle of the house. He sat on the sleeping platform and scraped the scales off his arms with a shell. Outside, a canoe from up the river came in to the landing with two men in it and a bundle of skins, and the men of the town went down to talk with them. The talk went on until dark.

Somewhere in that country, that spring, was Powhatan's daughter.

Pocahontas had come up to the Patawomecks some three months before, or longer, from her father's country to the south. On their own river at the north of the bay, the Patawomecks kept their distance from Powhatan's rule and traded with whoever came. Ralph Hamor, who wrote the capture into his book of 1615, called her "Powhatans delight and darling". He gave her errand in a line. She was "imploied thither, as shopkeepers to a Fare, to exchange some of her fathers commodities for theirs". He did not list the goods. Her father had been at war with the English since the winter of 1609, when his men killed Ratcliffe's party over the bottoms of the baskets. In the years since, the English had burned the Paspaheghs' town, taken Kecoughtan and the Appamattucks' corn, and raised a new town on the Arrohatecks' reach of the upper river.

Her name had been in English papers before. In his book of 1624 John Smith wrote that she had once saved an English boy, Henry Spelman, and that he lived many years after among these same Patawomecks by her means. Spelman's own pages tell of a run from her father's men with the Patawomeck king's party behind him, and they do not mention her. That was Smith's claim, set down far away and long after. What stood on the river in the spring of 1613 was a ship.

She had come while Samuel Argall was away. Then, in Hamor's words, it fortuned "vpon occasion either of promise or profit" that Argall arrived, and his ship came up the Potomac to trade as it had before. Pocahontas went to see the English. Hamor supplied her reasons for it. She was, he said, "desirous to renue hir familiaritie with the English" and delighted to see them, though afraid, perhaps, of being surprised. She went, and Argall had word of her at once.

His men traded the way the English traded on every shore of the bay. The boat came in on the flood with a chest lashed under the thwarts and a guard of musketeers in the bow, and the trade was done on the sand within range of the ship's guns. The chest held copper cut in plates and strips, blue and white beads on strings, hatchets, knives, a few hoes. The corn came down in baskets on women's backs and was tipped into the English measure and counted, a bushel at a time, with a man of the ship keeping the tally on a board. Haggling went on through signs and the few words each side had of the other. When the boat was low in the water it pulled off to the ship, and the hold took the corn, and the boat came back. The towns knew the boat and the chest by sight.

Argall's reckoning was a soldier's and a merchant's together. Powhatan held Englishmen. Some had run to his towns in the starving winter and the years after, and some had been taken outside the palisade, and none had been sent back. He held their swords and their muskets and the tools they had carried, taken from the dead and from the living. A daughter could be exchanged for all of it. That was the use of a hostage: she was kept until her father paid. Argall needed only a way to bring her aboard without a fight on another people's shore. He found it in a friend.

Japazaws was "an old friend, and adopted brother of his", a man of the Patawomeck country. Argall put it to him plainly, in Hamor's telling, "that now or neuer, was the time to pleasure him" if he meant the love he had professed. He told him why: with her in English hands, Englishmen and English arms might be redeemed from her father. He promised that she would be used well and gently. Japazaws took him at his word. He promised his best endeavors and his secrecy. Then he made the plan, and his wife had a part in it.

It was a small plan, and it turned on the ship. Japazaws, his wife and Pocahontas would walk down with Argall to the water side, where his boat lay. There the wife would show a great longing to go aboard and see the ship. She had never seen it, though it had lain in that river three or four times, and the longing was easy to believe. Japazaws would refuse her. The refusal was the bait.

They came down to the shore together, by the path through the fields where the women were burning last year's stalks, past the racks of fish, to the sand where the trade was done. Japazaws walked with Argall. His wife walked with Pocahontas. They wore what people of rank wore on that river in the cool of spring, mantles of dressed deerskin over the shoulder, beads and copper at the throat and ears. The English wore wool and leather and carried their swords. The sand at the landing was trodden flat by the trading and scattered with husks and broken shell. The boat was drawn up on it with its oars laid across the thwarts and two or three of the ship's men beside it, and the ship lay out on the water beyond with her ports shut. The river was wide there and gray under a high sky.

The wife made her request. Japazaws seemed angry with her, Hamor wrote, "making as he pretended so vnnecessary a request, especially being without the company of women". His pretense was that she would be the only woman among English sailors. She wept. The ship's men by the boat stood and watched a woman crying on the sand and did not understand a word of it. Pocahontas stood by. Hamor, who thought the tears counterfeit, said so. Her husband appeared to soften, and gave her leave to go aboard, so long as Pocahontas would go with her.

Then came what Hamor called "the greatest labour to win her". Pocahontas hesitated, and he gave his own guess at the reason: she was "guilty perhaps of her fathers wrongs". It was a guess. He offered no other. The wife pressed her hard, and she assented. They went out to the ship in the boat, the three of them and Argall, the seamen pulling at the oars and the boat lifting to the chop where the creek water met the river, spray coming over the bow onto the mantles, the shore and its fires falling behind, the hull growing until it stood over them, black with pitch and rough with weed at the waterline. A rope ladder hung down the side. They climbed it.

The deck smelled of tar and wet hemp. Guns stood on their carriages along the sides with their muzzles turned in, and the rigging went up overhead in its lines and blocks, and the men of the ship stopped what they were doing and looked. Argall had the best cheer the ship could make set out. A ship on a trading voyage carried bread and beer, salt beef and peas, and whatever fish and fowl it had bought on the river, and that night the table had the best of it. They ate by lamplight in the cabin under the poop, at a board table fixed to the deck, on stools and a sea chest, with the stern windows showing the last of the river and the low black line of the shore. Pewter and wooden trenchers went round, and the beer came in a leather jack. The cabin was small for so many. The deck beams were close over their heads. Down the deck in the waist the ship's company ate their own supper out of the common kettles, and the cook's fire showed red in the brick of the hearth until it was raked out for the night.

Hamor had the supper "merry on all hands". The merriest were Japazaws and his wife.

"Iapazeus and his wife, who to expres their ioy, would ere be treading vpō Capt. Argals foot, as who should say tis don, she is your own."

Hamor was not aboard. He had the story, as he wrote at the start of it, "by the relation I had", from someone who had been. The treading under that table comes from his informant, and so does its meaning. The shape of the evening is not in dispute. Pocahontas sat at an English table on an English ship, among people she had come aboard with, and ate. Above deck the anchor watch went round. The tide turned under the hull and the ship swung to it.

Supper ended. Pocahontas was lodged for the night in the gunner's room, low in the after part of the ship under the deck beams, where the gunner kept his rammers and sponges and coils of match, the ladles for the powder and the spare tackle for the guns. A ladder went up through the hatch to the deck above, and the guns stood forward of the room on their carriages, lashed against the ship's roll. A lantern hung from a hook. There was a blanket on the planking and the smell of powder and old bilge.

Japazaws and his wife did not go down with her. They stayed to talk with Argall, the man they called their brother, and the talk was only to tell him by what stratagem they had brought his prisoner to him. Then they went to sleep. She was below them, "nothing mistrusting this policy". The ship creaked at her cable all night. Water slapped along the planking a hand's breadth from where she lay, and the watch walked the deck overhead, and the bell was struck at each turn of the glass.

In the morning she was up before any of them, and Hamor set it down in one long run: she was "most possessed with feare, and desire of returne, was first vp, and hastened Iapazeus to be gon". Argall had already paid him, secretly, "with a small Copper kettle, and som other les valuable toies so highly by him esteemed, that doubtlesse he would haue betraied his owne father for them".

The kettle was the plainest thing in the ship's trade. It was a pot for a fire, hammered thin from a sheet of red copper, with a rolled rim and an iron bail to hang it by, the kind every English kitchen had. On the river it was something else. Copper went to the werowances in tribute and was worn at the ears and the throat, and a whole kettle was a weight of it that could be cut and shaped and given away a piece at a time. Beads came with it, and the rest of the toys. Argall let him and his wife go. Pocahontas he kept.

Argall told Japazaws why, and she heard it. Her father had Englishmen, many swords, many muskets and other tools, taken from the colony at one time and another, and he would not give them back. Until he did, his daughter would stay with the English. Hamor wrote what that did to her and what it did to the man who had brought her:

"he would reserue Pocahuntas, whereat she began to be exceeding pensiue, and discontented, yet ignorant of the dealing of Iapazeus, who in outward appearance was no les discontented that he should be the meanes of her captiuity"

The boat took Japazaws and his wife ashore. The kettle went with them, and the beads, carried down the ladder and set in the bottom of the boat between the oarsmen's feet. The oars went out and the boat pulled away across the gray water toward the landing, and the two figures in the stern grew small against the fields behind them. On the shore people came down to meet it. The boat set them out on the sand and turned back for the ship.

On the ship, in Hamor's words, "much a doe there was to perswade her to be patient". Argall's people used her with extraordinary courtesy, and the patience, he wrote, "by little and little was wrought in her". The boat had gone in with the two of them, and she was on the deck it had left. Around her the sailors went on with the ship's work. The decks were washed down with buckets over the side. The sails were looked to and the boat's falls made ready for hoisting. The shore she had come from lay in plain sight across the water, with its fields and its fires, a long shout away.

The boat came back and was hoisted in. The anchor was weighed on the ebb, the sails were loosed and sheeted home, and the ship gathered way and stood down the river toward the bay and the long run south to the James and the fort. The passage took some days in those waters, down the Potomac to its mouth, then south along the western shore of the bay, past the mouths of the Rappahannock and the York, to Point Comfort and Algernon's Fort on the sand at the river's mouth, and up the James. The fort lay forty miles above the point.

At the creek mouth the tide was out again and the man of the town was at the weir with his net. The fish were still coming. He straightened his back and saw the ship under sail, her canvas full, moving down the broad river past the creek mouths and the weirs and the smoke of the field fires along the edge of the woods. The gulls rose off the stakes and settled again. The ship went on down the Potomac toward the bay, the tide under her and the wind behind, carrying Powhatan's daughter away from the Patawomeck shore.