The Starving Time

Argall's ship came up the last reach of the James on the flood and let go her anchor off the island, in the deep water close under the bank where the colony's ships had always lain. The cable ran out through the hawse with a roar and then stopped, and the hull swung slowly to it until her bow pointed down the river. Men on the bulwarks of the fort stood up to look at her. In the fields beyond the neck the gangs straightened and leaned on their hoes until the officers called them back to the rows. It was late spring, and the river ran full from rain somewhere upcountry, carrying leaves and broken branches past the ship's side. The marsh grass along the island's edge had come up green to a man's knee. Swallows went low over the water after the flies. The boat was swung out over the rail and lowered.

Hamor gave the end of the voyage a clause: "and so to Iames towne she was brought". He gave no day for it and no hour, and he named nobody who stood at the landing to see it. The boat came in to the island's shore with the oarsmen pulling hard against the current, and grounded on the mud below the palisade, and the men in the bow jumped down into the water to hold it. Pocahontas came ashore there. She was the daughter of the man the colony had been at war with since the winter of 1609, and she had come up out of an English boat onto English ground. The guard at the gate stood aside. Behind her the boat went back out to the ship, and the cargo began to come ashore.

The landing was a trodden bank of mud and shell below the palisade, with a few planks laid across the soft ground and a path worn up from it to the gate. People came down it to look. Laborers came with their sleeves rolled and the dirt of the fields on their hands, and soldiers of the garrison in their buff coats, and a few of the women who kept the houses, wiping their hands on their aprons. Seamen from the ship came behind with chests on their shoulders and rolled the casks up the planks. Her hold carried what the Potomac trade had given her, and the corn went up the path in baskets to the storehouse to be measured in. The ship's boat made trip after trip between the hull and the bank, low in the water going in and riding high coming out. Gulls worked the mud where the oars had stirred it. From the bank the island looked as it always had from the water side: the palisade of split logs, the bulwarks at the corners with their guns, the roofs inside, and the church's roof standing above the rest. Over all of it hung the smoke of the cooking fires, flat in the still air.

The fort she was brought into had been made over twice since the starving winter. The lord governor had reset the palisade and raised houses on the old ground, and Dale had set the gangs to rebuilding whatever still leaned. The houses stood in rows now, clapboard and thatch, with the church among them and the storehouse and the guardhouse at their places, and the market place in the middle where the horses had been killed. Sir Thomas Gates governed the island. Dale, his marshal, had built his new town on its neck of land far up the river. A man who ran to the Powhatans could still answer for it with his life under the Lawes. The drum beat the gangs out at first light and in at noon and out again, and it beat them in at evening, and between the drums there was the noise of saws and axes from the woods beyond the neck. A sentinel stood on each bulwark with his match lit.

A messenger went to her father at once. The message itself went into Hamor's book: "a messenger to her father forthwith dispached to aduertise him, that his only daughter was in the hands & possession of the English: ther to be kept til such time as he would ransom her with our men, swords, peeces, & other tools treacherously taken from vs". Hamor did not name the messenger, and he did not say whether the man was English or one of the Powhatans, or which way he went. The demand was the one Argall had put to Japazaws on the Potomac. Englishmen first. Then the swords, the muskets and the tools, every piece of iron that had gone out of the colony's hands into Powhatan's country in four years of war. Hamor set no number on any of it. Whoever carried the message went out past the sentinels and the gangs in the fields, and the fort turned back to its work. There was a ship to unlade and a summer's corn to tend, and the work did not wait on Powhatan.

Between the fort and any town of Powhatan's lay the country of that season. The towns along the rivers were planting. The women were out in the cleared fields with their digging sticks, making the holes and dropping in the corn and the beans, and the old men and the children sat on the platforms in the fields to keep the birds off the seed. The weirs were full. Smoke from the fish racks hung over the creek mouths, and the paths between the towns were dry underfoot and busy with people going between them. A messenger from the English came into that country with words that went at once to the top of it. They went up to Powhatan himself, and they told him the English had his daughter. In the towns a man who came with words for a werowance was taken to the house, given a mat and food and water, and heard out in front of whoever sat there, and his words were carried on from there by men whose business it was to carry them.

What the news did to Powhatan comes from Hamor alone. In his account it was "vnwelcome, and troublesom vnto him, partly for the loue he bare to his daughter, and partly for the loue he bare to our men his prisoners". The English prisoners were men the colony had thought good for nothing, Hamor said, unfit for any employment, but Powhatan made great use of them. The swords and muskets were of no use to him at all, and still "it delighted him to view, and looke vpon" them. The reasons are Hamor's, not his. Hamor added one more line about the old man: "He could not without long aduise & delibertion with his Councell, resolue vpon any thing".

Spring went into summer at the island, and nothing came from Powhatan. The fort went on as it did every summer. The corn came up a hand high, then a foot, then to a man's waist, and the gangs went down the rows with hoes in the heat, hilling the earth around the stalks and pulling the grass. The sun came up hot over the marsh by the middle of the morning. By noon the men at the saw pits worked stripped to the waist and the sweat ran into their eyes, and the noon kettle came out to them in the shade of the palisade. In the afternoons thunder built up over the woods to the west, and the rain came across the river in a gray wall and hammered on the thatch for half an hour and went on, and the yard steamed after it. The river went warm and brackish along the island's edge. It began to stink at low water, as it did every year.

Summer was the sick season on the island, and had been since the first ships. The fevers came with the heat, and the flux with the water, and the newest men went down first. There were men in the rows of houses lying on their straw with a bucket by them and a mate to fetch their water. The minister went to them, and some of them got up again, and some were carried out through the gate and buried in the ground outside the palisade where the colony had always buried its dead. Mosquitoes came off the marsh at dusk in clouds, and the sentinels on the bulwarks slapped at their necks and faces through the whole of the first watch. On Sundays the companies stood in the church twice, and the Lawes were read to them, and they went out again to the heat. The fishing boats went out on the river in the cool of the early mornings and came back with what the summer water gave. Nights in the houses were close and hot. Men slept on their straw in their shirts with the shutters open to whatever air came off the river, and woke before light with the mosquito bites swollen on their arms. The meal for the kettles came out of the store by the measure and was cooked with fish, or with peas, or with nothing, and on days when the hunters of the garrison had been lucky there was venison in it.

Upriver the boats went between the island and Dale's town on the ebb and the flood, carrying men, meal and iron, and bringing down news of the work. The boats going up rode deep with casks of meal and powder, bundles of tools and kegs of nails, and the men at the oars sweated in the heat of the reaches where the woods came down to the water and no wind reached them. The boats coming down brought sick men lying on the thwarts, and letters, and word of the fields inside the long pale and the houses going up behind it. On the island the sentinels watched them in and out. A boat that came in late was looked for from the bulwarks until it rounded the point above the island, and the guard at the landing went down with a lantern to meet it. At Point Comfort, forty miles below, Algernon's Fort stood rebuilt on the sand. The store was opened every day and shut every day under its guard. In all of that time no word came from Powhatan. June passed, and most of July.

In July, by the reckoning Tyler's 1907 edition sets beside the passage, the answer came. Hamor gave it in one long run:

"we heard nothing of him till three moneths after, by perswasions of others he returned vs seauen of our men, with each of them a Musket vnseruiceable, and by them sent vs word, that whensoeuer wee pleased to deliuer his daughter, he would giue vs in satisfaction of his iniuries done to vs, and for the rest of our peeces broken and stolne from him, 500 Bushells of Corne, and be for euer friends with vs"

Seven Englishmen came in to the fort out of Powhatan's country, and each of them had a musket with him. An officer of the guard brought them through the gate into the market place, and they stood in the open ground in front of the guardhouse while the word went round the fort that they had come. The people of the fort came out of the houses and the fields to see them. They came in whatever clothes they had. Men who had known them crowded in to look at their faces. The muskets were laid down on the ground in a row. Men who had stood in the rows that morning with hoes stood around them now and looked. Seven men out of all the colony had lost were standing in the market place again. The colony had been losing men to Powhatan's country since the autumn of 1609. Ratcliffe's party had gone up to his town to trade for corn and two of the sixteen had come home. In the starving winter men had run from the fort to the towns and had never been heard of after. Others had been taken in the woods outside the palisade, and the war since had taken more. Nobody at the fort could say how many of all those were still alive. The word they carried was spoken there for the first time on English ground. Five hundred bushels of corn, satisfaction for the injuries, friendship for ever, whenever the English pleased to give his daughter back. The corn was offered for two things at once, in Hamor's words: for the injuries Powhatan had done the colony, and for the rest of the colony's muskets, which he sent word were broken, or had been stolen from him.

The colony's armorer picked them up one at a time, as any armorer would, and turned each over in his hands, and sighted down the barrel at the sky, and worked the lock. The muskets told their own story to anyone who knew the trade. A musket was a long iron barrel on a wooden stock, with a lock on its side: the serpentine that held the burning match, the pan that held the priming, the pan cover, the trigger and the springs. A musket was serviceable when every one of those parts would do its work and the barrel was sound. It was unserviceable when any of them would not. A lock left in the weather rusted fast and froze. A serpentine snapped, or was lost, and a pan cover went with it. A stock split in the wet, or burned. A barrel that had been fired too hard, or left loaded with a wet charge through a winter, could swell and crack. Any one of these turned a musket into a length of iron and wood that would not shoot. Hamor's word for the rest of the colony's pieces, as Powhatan sent it, was "broken and stolne". The seven laid out in front of the guardhouse had come back unserviceable.

The English took what had come. They took the seven men, and they took the muskets, and they counted both as a part of the price and not the whole. The answer was the colony's, given under Gates's government at the island, and it held to the demand Argall had made on the Potomac. Hamor gave it whole:

"the men, and Peeces in part of payment we receiued: and returned him answere, that his daughter was very well, and kindely intreated, and so should be howsoeuer he dealt with vs: but we could not beleeue that the rest of our Arms were either lost, or stolne from him, and therefore till he returned them all, we would not by any meanes deliuer his daughter, and then it should be at his choice, whether he would establish peace, or continue enemies with vs."

That was the colony's answer to Powhatan in the summer of 1613. He had sent seven men, and the English had kept them. He had sent seven muskets, and the English had kept those. He had promised corn and friendship for the day his daughter came home, and the English had told him that day would not come until every sword and piece came first, because they did not believe the rest were lost. Then the choice of peace was his. The page gives the answer to no one man. It is "we", the voice of the whole colony, and it went back into the country the seven men had come out of. The seven did not go with it.

Everything known of her year in captivity was written by the English who held her. Dale, the marshal, wrote of it in a letter dated June 18, 1614:

"Powhatans daughter I caused to be carefully instructed in Christian Religion, who after shee had made some good progresse therein, renounced publickly her countrey Idolatry, openly confessed her Christian faith, was, as she desired, baptised"

His letter gives no date for any of it, and no place. Instruction in the faith of the Church of England went by question and answer, out of the catechism printed in the Book of Common Prayer, and it went the same way for every learner the Church had: the Creed said line by line, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the meaning of the two sacraments. The questions were asked and the answers given back, over and over, until they came without the book. The Creed ran to a dozen articles, from the maker of heaven and earth to the life everlasting, and every one of them had to be said and then explained. Baptism was done with water and the sign of the cross, before witnesses. All of it was done with Powhatan's daughter before Dale wrote his letter.

The answer that had gone back in the summer brought nothing back. Hamor's next line was "This answere as it seemed, pleased him not very wel", and after it the colony heard no more from Powhatan. The corn ripened and was cut. The gangs stripped the ears in the fields and carried them in baskets to the store, where they were shelled and measured and stacked under the guard, and the stalks were left standing brown in the rows. The heat broke, and the leaves turned along the shores of the river and came down, and the first frosts whitened the marsh. The gangs went out at the drum in the dark of the mornings now, and came in before the light failed, and the fires in the houses were kept up all night. Ships came and went at the island with the seasons. The seven men were back among their countrymen, eating out of the colony's kettle, and the seven muskets were in the colony's keeping. Ice formed at the edges of the marsh in the mornings and went out on the tide by noon. The firewood gangs went out across the neck with their axes and came back bent under their loads, and the smoke of the fort's chimneys stood up straight over the island on the still days. The river country went into winter. She was still in English hands.