The Starving Time

Sir Thomas Dale began his account of the voyage with a clause about another man's departure: "Sir Thomas Gates hauing imbarqued himselfe for England". He wrote it in June, in a long letter to a minister in London, three months after the event and with the colony's affairs pressing on him from every side. Gates had held the government at the island since the summer Henrico was built, and now he was gone down the river, and the colony was Dale's. The new governor did not wait for spring to come in. The corn ground was still bare, the woods along the James were still gray, and the gangs were still felling and splitting at the drum. The ransom had been asked the spring before, and only a part of it had been paid. Dale took Argall's ship and the boats of the colony and made ready to carry her back to her father's river himself. He put his own figure in the letter: a hundred and fifty men "in my frigot," with other boats beside. They were the colony's soldiers, in buff coats and morions, with their matchlocks, their bandoliers and their match, their swords, a store of powder and shot, and biscuit and meal for the days on the water. He took Powhatan's daughter with them.

The loading was done at the island in the raw days of the month. Casks of powder and shot went out to the ship in the boats from the landing, and barrels of meal and biscuit, and the soldiers' chests, and kegs of water from the island's well. Spare match went aboard in coils. Men who were not going stood on the bank and watched the boats go back and forth over the brown water. The Lawes were still read at the church on Sundays, and the drum still beat the gangs out at first light, and a part of the garrison was marched down to the landing and into the boats instead of out to the fields. The planting would wait for them.

Hamor gave the voyage the same men and the same purpose in his own book:

"when with Captaine Argalls Shippe, and some other Vessells belonging to the Colony, Sir Thomas Dale with an hundred and fifty men well appointed, went vp into his owne Riuer, where his chiefest habitations were, and carried with vs his daughter"

The river was the York, which the English called by the name of the people at its head, the Pamunkey. It ran up from the bay through broad water and wooded shores into the country where Powhatan had his chief towns, and above them his brother's. The ship went down the James with the ebb and out past Point Comfort, where the soldiers at Algernon's Fort watched her go by, then north along the shore of the bay to the river's mouth. In March the water was cold and gray and the wind came hard off it. The woods on either hand were bare to the edge of the marsh, and smoke stood up from the towns along the shore where the people were burning brush off the old fields before the planting. Pocahontas had come down the Potomac in that ship the spring before. Now she went up her father's river in it, among the men who held her.

The first days on the river were days of wide water. The shores stood well off on either hand, low and wooded, with creeks opening into them and marsh at their mouths, and the fishing weirs of the towns ran out from the banks in long lines of stakes. The ship went up on the flood and anchored on the ebb. At night the soldiers slept where they could find room, on the deck under their cloaks or below among the casks, and the watch walked the deck with the matches glowing, and the cold came up off the river. The demands went with them. Hamor set them out plainly: the rest of "our peeces, swords, tooles", which Powhatan still had. Then there were the men. Seven Englishmen had been sent back to the fort with seven unserviceable muskets the summer before, and Hamor had a line for what some of them did after: "Some of the same men which he returned (as they promised) ran to him again." Those men were to be given up too. Last there was corn. Because Powhatan had put the colony to the trouble of coming to fetch all this, he was to pay five hundred bushels. Five hundred bushels was the figure Powhatan himself had offered, the summer before, in satisfaction of the injuries he had done the colony. Now it was demanded of him for the trouble of the voyage.

Dale's purpose, as Hamor gave it, cut both ways. The English carried her either to move her people to fight for her, if they had the courage the English had heard reported of them, or to make them pay. The towns along the river watched the ship come. Before long there were men on the banks, and then canoes, and voices calling across the water to ask what the English wanted there. They were told: to deliver Pocahontas, whom the English had brought on purpose, and to receive the arms, the men and the corn, or else to fight, to burn the houses, to take the canoes, to break down the fishing weirs, and to do whatever other damage they could. The answers came back from the shore in the same spirit, and Hamor wrote them down. If the English had come to fight, they were welcome. The people were provided for them. They counseled the English to go back, if they loved their safety, and they boasted that the English had always had the worst of it on that river. Then, by Hamor's report, they named an Englishman: Captain Ratcliffe, whom, they reminded the boats, they had betrayed and killed with most of his company. The English called back that since the people dared remind them of that, they would revenge it now. The ship went on up the river with the talk passing back and forth across the water between the deck and the bank.

Higher up, the river narrowed. The channel swung in close under the shore, within bowshot of the trees, and the ship had to follow it. The arrows came out of the woods while she was in the narrow water. Nobody aboard saw who loosed them. They came in among the men on deck, thudding into the planking and the rail and skittering on the boards, and one struck a man in the forehead. Hamor gives the wound its weight in one clause: it might have cost the man his life without the present help of "a skilfull Chirurgion." The surgeon was the ship's or the colony's man, with his box of instruments, his lint and his salves, and he worked on the deck or below it while the rest of the company stood to their arms. He stopped the blood and dressed the place, and the man lived. Hamor gives neither the man's name nor the surgeon's.

Dale answered at once. The boats were manned and pulled for the shore, the soldiers jumping out into the shallows with their matches lit and wading up the mud to the bank. They went into the town that stood there and burned it. Hamor's count was some forty houses. The houses were long and round-roofed, framed of bent saplings and covered with bark and mats. Before the fire went in, the soldiers went through them and took what they found, the baskets and the skins, the stored corn, the pots, the tools. Hamor called it booty and pillage. Then they carried brands from house to house, and the houses burned fast once the fire took the mats. The roofs went up in sheets of flame and fell in on the hearths and the sleeping platforms, and the smoke rolled out low over the cleared ground around the town and into the bare trees. Dogs ran off barking into the woods. The English saw little of the town's people while they were in it. They knew what it had cost the town only later, from the people's own telling, and Hamor marked it so: "as themselues afterward confest," five or six of their men were hurt and killed. The English were satisfied with that, Hamor wrote, for the presumption of shooting at them. The smoke of the forty houses went up over the trees behind the boats as they pulled back to the ship.

Dale's letter tells these days in another order. His ship was a day or two in the river, by his account, before the people came near it at all. When at last they asked why he had come, he answered that he had come to bring Powhatan his daughter, on the condition already agreed for her ransom: that her father give up all the arms, the tools, the swords and the men who had run away. If they would do it, the English would be friends. If not, they would burn everything. The people asked for time to send to their king. Dale agreed, and the two sides exchanged two pledges, two of Dale's men going to carry his message and two of the people's men coming to the English. All that night Dale's two men lay not far from the water side. About noon the next day they were told that the great king was three days' journey off, and that his brother was close at hand, and that they should give the message to him, since what he agreed to the great king would confirm. In Dale's letter the brother is Opochankano. In narration he is Opechancanough, and Dale gave him a line to himself:

"This Opocankano is brother to Powhatan, and is his and their chiefe Captaine"

Dale's men refused. Their message was for Powhatan and nobody else, and they were brought back to the ship, and Dale sent the people's two men back to them. The people then said they would fetch one of the runaways, an Englishman who had run away from the colony three times, and bring him in. They did not bring him. They delayed, and when the English went ashore they shot at them. In Dale's letter it is here that the English killed some and hurt others, marched into the land, burned the houses, took the corn, and quartered all night ashore. Dale's order and Hamor's do not agree, and neither man explains the other. Dale put a thousand men into the same letter: Powhatan, he wrote, could draw a thousand together in two or three days in that country. He wrote it of the river his hundred and fifty had gone up.

The next day, in Hamor's order, the ship went on higher up the river. The people followed her along the shore and called out to her as she went. They wanted to know why the English had gone ashore and burned their houses, killed and hurt their men, and carried away their goods. The English answered that they had come in peace, and would have been glad to receive their demands in love and peace, but that they had the hearts and the power to take revenge where wrongs were offered, and having done so, though not as severely as they might, they were content and ready to make peace if the people pleased. The people had their excuses ready. They had not shot at the English. If anyone had, it was some straggling man who did not know why the English had come. They would be glad of the English love and would help them get what they came for. But what the English wanted was in Powhatan's possession, and they would send messengers to him at once to know his pleasure, and they asked for fair quarter for twenty-four hours, which was how long they said the messengers would take to return.

Dale granted it. The ship lay at anchor through the day and the night, with the watch kept and the matches burning in the dark, and the river ran past her cold and black, and fires showed along the shore. The wounded man lay below with his head bound. The day of the quarter came round. The English asked what Powhatan would do. The answer was that the Englishmen lately with him, afraid the English would put them to death, had run away, and that some of Powhatan's men were out looking for them. The swords and the pieces, as many as he had, would be brought the next day. Hamor wrote that it was only to gain time. The next day nothing came.

Dale took the ship higher still. The river narrowed again and the marsh gave way to higher ground, and on a height above the water stood the chiefest residence Powhatan had, a town Hamor called Matchcot. The English anchored below it. On the shore there were people waiting for them, and Hamor counted them: about four hundred men, armed with their bows and arrows, standing in the open at the water's edge and along the slope behind. They called down to the ship and dared the English to come ashore.

The English had meant to land there in any case. Hamor wrote that their best landing was up a high steep hill, which might have given the people great advantage over them. The boats ran in, and the soldiers climbed out and went up the slope with their pieces in their hands, and the four hundred did not loose an arrow at them. Neither side, in Hamor's reading, was willing to begin, though both would gladly have been at blows. Once the English were landed, the people showed no sign of fear. They did not draw off. They walked up and down by and among the soldiers, close enough to touch, the best of them asking for the English werowance or king, so that they might know from him why the English had come. When they had been told, they answered that they were there to defend themselves if the English chose to attack them. They asked for a little time to send two or three men once more to their king to know his resolution. If his answer did not satisfy the English, and nothing but blood would serve, then in the morning they would fight, and so settle the quarrel.

Hamor judged it another delay, to give them time to carry their provisions away into the woods. The English agreed to it anyway. They promised that until noon the next day they would not molest, hurt or detain any of the people, and that before they fought, their drum and trumpets would give warning. The soldiers stood to their arms on the height, with the town's people moving among them and around them. The afternoon went on in that way. The English kept their files and their matches lit, and the officers walked the line, and the boats lay drawn up at the foot of the hill with their crews beside them. The people came and went from the town above, and some sat on the slope and watched, and the men with the bows stood in knots and talked among themselves in a language few of the soldiers understood. Smoke went up from the town's fires. Down at the water the ship rode at her anchor with her guns looking out over the river. Nobody fired.

Pocahontas went ashore at Matchcot. Hamor records her there, present on the shore with the English, and nothing more. Dale's letter is the only record of what she did once she was standing among her own people, and it is short. He put it into a single sentence, and her words are inside it, in his reporting:

"The Kings daughter went ashore, but would not talke to any of them scarce to them of the best sort, and to them onely, that if her father had loued her, he would not value her lesse then olde swords, peeces, or axes: wherefore she would stil dwel with the English men, who loued her."

Dale wrote it in June, to a minister in London, in a letter that complained of the colony's "foule mouthed detracters" at home and argued that God had a hand in its affairs. He set her words beside the swords, the pieces and the axes of the ransom he had brought her up the river to collect. Dale was writing for London.

The people she spoke to were of the best sort, in Dale's phrase, the principal men among her people there. They had their king's daughter in front of them for the first time since the spring before, standing among English soldiers with their matches lit. What they said back to her Dale did not record. He recorded what she said to them, and that she would scarcely speak at all.

Then two of her brothers came. Hamor wrote that two of Powhatan's sons were very desirous to see their sister, who was there present ashore with the English, and that they came down among the soldiers to her. They had suspected she was worse treated than she was, though they had often heard the contrary, and when they saw her well, in Hamor's phrase, "they much reioyced." They promised that they would without doubt persuade their father to redeem her and to conclude a firm peace with the English for ever. On that resolution the two brothers went off to the ship with the English. Hamor gives no names for them. Dale's letter does not mention them.

Before the brothers went aboard, Dale sent two Englishmen on to Powhatan. Hamor gave them names: John Rolfe, who had come with the castaways from Bermuda, and Master Sparkes, a man of the colony known only by that one errand. They were to acquaint him with the business. The truce held until the next noon. The soldiers on the height made way for them, and the town's people watched them go. Beyond the town the path ran up through the old fields, where last year's corn stalks still stood broken in the rows, and on into the woods, where the oaks and the hickories were bare and the leaves of the autumn lay thick and wet on the ground. Rolfe and Sparkes went up from the shore past the last of the soldiers and into the trees, walking inland.