The Starving Time

Henry Spelman wrote his part of it down himself, a few years afterward, in a hand that spelled each word as it sounded to him. He had come over in the summer fleet, a gentleman's son of about fourteen, and he had been in the country only a week or two when John Smith, then still president, took him up the river to the falls of the James. There Smith handed him to the little Powhatan, the chief at the falls, and went back down to his boat. Spelman learned afterward what had passed between the two men. His own words for it were plain: "wher vnkowne to me he sould me to him for a towne caled Powhatan". Smith had wanted the town for his men to live in. The price was a boy. Spelman did not know he had been paid over until it was done.

The little Powhatan made much of him. He gave the boy such things as he had, to win him to stay, and Spelman ate and slept among people whose talk he could not yet follow. He stayed seven or eight days. Then he wanted to see the English again, and he made signs to the chief that he would go down to the ship for the things he had left aboard her. The chief sat down on the ground and clapped his hand on it, which meant he would wait there until the boy came back. Spelman was gone longer than he meant to be. When he came back to the place the chief had gone. He went down to the ship again, still lying at the falls, and sailed with her to the fort, and found Smith gone for England and George Percy president in his place.

Autumn was well along, and the fort was a hungry place. Spelman had not been there long when Thomas Savage came in at the gate with four or five Powhatan men behind him, carrying venison. Savage was the boy given to Powhatan as a son the year before, and he had lived since in the great chief's household and spoke its language. The venison was a present from the great Powhatan to the new president.

Men in the market place stopped what they were doing to watch it go by. The meat came across on the Powhatans' shoulders, quarters of deer with the hair still on the hide, and the smell of it was fresh blood and the cold woods, not the moldy breath of the store. Men who had been eating out of a can for weeks stood at the doors of the huts and looked at it. The Powhatan men walked through them without hurry, in deerskin mantles, with their bows unstrung and their faces painted, and looked about them at the houses and the bulwarks and the people as they went. They took the meat to the house where the president lay. Percy could not come out to meet them. The gift was carried in to him, and the men who governed for him stood about the door, and the Powhatans waited outside it in the cold for the boy to come out again. Savage gave it over and then had to go back, and he did not want to go back without some of his own countrymen with him. Spelman was appointed to go. He went, he wrote, the more willingly "by Reason yt vitals were scarse wt us", and he took with him what he owned of value, some copper and a hatchet. The two boys went out with the Powhatan men and into the woods, the fort's smoke behind them, toward the towns that had stopped trading.

Powhatan (Wahunsenacah) was a different order of chief from the one at the falls. He was an old man with a court around him, wives and counselors and guards and storehouses of the tribute every town paid up to him, and he took the boy's copper and the hatchet and kept him. Spelman wrote that he was used "uery kindly". He lived in the great Powhatan's own household, beside Savage, and ate from the wooden dishes the women brought in: corn bread baked in the ashes, venison, turkey, hominy boiled soft in the pot. The house was long and dim, the walls of bent saplings covered with mats and bark, and the smoke of the fires went up through a hole in the roof and some of it stayed in the room. Men came and went with the cold on their clothes. Women pounded corn in wooden mortars outside the door, and the thud of the pestles went on most of the day. Spelman slept on a platform of poles along the wall with a mat and a skin over him. He was learning the language the only way it could be learned.

Winter came on around the household. Frost stood on the mats in the mornings, and the women went out to the fields for the last of what could be gathered and came back with their hands raw. Hunters went out in parties and came back with deer slung on poles, and the meat was cut up and hung in the smoke. Copper and shell beads passed from hand to hand at the fires. As the season turned the great Powhatan moved from Orapax into the country of the Pamunkeys at the head of the York, his brother's country, where the corn lay in the storehouses of the towns. The boys moved with him.

After about three weeks he sent Spelman back to the English with a message. If they would bring a ship and some copper, Powhatan said, he would send her back full of corn. Nothing could have been more welcome at the fort. Spelman carried the offer down to the island. He went on foot through the winter woods by the paths the Powhatans used, sleeping at night by a fire in the lee of a fallen tree with a skin over him and his feet toward the coals. The trees were bare and the ground was hard with frost in the mornings, and the creeks had ice along their edges where the water ran slow. At the fort the store was still being let out into cans each morning, and the men who governed there heard the message from a boy just come in out of the woods. They gave him their answer. He took it back up the same paths to the great Powhatan, and the household received him again, and the waiting began. Ratcliffe was the man who came.

John Ratcliffe had gone out with one of the colony's two pinnaces when West took the other, and he brought his toward Powhatan's country. By Spelman's account he left her at Orapax with twenty-four or twenty-five men aboard, put sixteen of them into the barge, an open rowing boat, and went up to Powhatan at Pamunkey. The barge came up the river in the cold with the men at the oars in their buff coats and Monmouth caps and the copper and beads stowed under the thwarts. They brought her in where the town came down to the water, and the men stepped out onto the mud and stretched their arms and looked about them at the houses and the smoke and the people watching from the bank.

They were treated well that first day. Powhatan sent them bread and venison, and Ratcliffe sent back copper and beads, and the presents passed as presents did between a chief and a visitor of rank. Spelman, setting it down, said that Powhatan received them very courteously and added two words after it: "in shew". Then the great chief gave Ratcliffe a house for himself and his men to lie in while they traded. It stood not far from Powhatan's own, but, in Spelman's words, "aboue half a mile from the barge". The sixteen carried their bedding and their arms up from the landing. The barge stayed at the water for the corn, and between the boat and the house lay the paths and the woods and the dead stalks of the town's corn, still standing in the fields where the harvest had left them.

In the evening the great Powhatan came to the house himself, "slenderly accompanied", and welcomed Ratcliffe to the town. It was the courtesy of a host. The English sat with him by the fire in a house of mats and bark, men from a fort where the store was let out by the can, and the old man who owned the corn bid them welcome. Spelman and Savage had come to the house in his company. When Powhatan went back to his own lodging he left the two English boys there with Samuel, a Dutchman who was also living in his household, and they spent that night among their countrymen. The sixteen had the great Powhatan's bread and venison to eat, more meat than the fort had seen in weeks, and they ate it by the fire with their knives and their fingers and passed the meat round. For Spelman it was English talk again after weeks of a language he was still learning, men asking him about the town and the chief and the corn, and the names of places he had heard of only from the other side. Some of them slept and some sat up. A man of the company stood at the door with his match lit and looked out at the dark and the fires of the town. The wind went through the mats, and the fire burned down, and the town's dogs barked at the strangers until they tired of it. The men lay with their swords beside them.

The next morning Powhatan came back with a company of his people and took the English to the storehouse, the place where the corn was kept. A Powhatan storehouse was a long house of poles and mats, raised off the ground and dry, with the corn inside in baskets and heaps, shelled or on the ear, and the beans in their own baskets beside it. This was what the sixteen had come up the river for. The fort had not seen so much food in one place since its own harvest went into its own store, and that store was being eaten a can at a time. The men went in and looked and came out. They laid out their copper and their beads and their other trade goods on mats in the cold outside the door, and the bargaining began.

People came from the houses to see it. Women stood at the edge of the clearing with children against their legs and mantles pulled up against the wind, and men leaned on their bows and watched the English and the copper. The great Powhatan's people carried the baskets out of the storehouse one after another and set them down on the mats. The English counted out the copper for each, cut in pieces, and the beads by the string, and their own men stood by with the sacks open and held them while the corn was poured. It was dry, hard, flinty corn, red and blue and yellow on the ear and white when it was shelled, and it rattled into the sacks. The men holding the sacks felt the weight come into their arms. For a while it went as a trade should go, basket after basket, the sacks filling and being tied and set aside and the copper going across the mats. The breath of everyone in the clearing smoked in the air.

Trade at a storehouse was done by the basket. The Powhatans brought their corn out in round baskets woven of rushes and splints, and the English paid for each according to its size, so many pieces of copper or so many beads for a basket of such a measure. Each basket was emptied into the sacks and went back in to be filled again. Neither side used scales. The basket was the measure, and a man trading looked at the basket and paid for what it seemed to hold. A basket with its bottom pushed up from beneath by the hands, so that the floor of it rose inside like the bottom of a bottle, would look full at the rim and hold a good deal less. The English watched the corn come over the edge into their sacks, and somebody saw the bottoms. Spelman put down what they saw: the sellers were "pulling or beareing vpp the bottom of yeir baskets", and the baskets that looked full were short.

The English took exception to it, as Spelman wrote, and discontent rose over it in front of the storehouse door, men from a fort that was eating its last store facing men who had the corn and would give it only by the short basket. Spelman stood among them, an English boy from the great Powhatan's household, close enough to see the baskets and the faces. In the main run of his account he wrote that Powhatan had laid plots to take the English before ever they came, and that in some sort the plots took effect. He did not say how much of them he had known, or when.

Then the great Powhatan departed. He went off from the storehouse and took Spelman and Samuel with him, and his wives. The sixteen Englishmen were left at the storehouse with their copper on the mats and the corn they had bought. Savage is not named among those who went. The English began to carry their corn down toward the barge, more than half a mile away, through the woods and the standing corn. They had no carts and no horses. Each man took a sack on his shoulder, or two men took one between them, and went off down the path with his musket slung or left behind with the others at the storehouse, and came back for the next. The sacks were heavy and the path was frozen in ruts, and the men went bent under them and did not look much to either side. The town was quiet behind them. The corn stalks stood higher than a man along the path, dead and pale and rattling in the wind, close on both hands.

Spelman was already gone with the household when it began. He set it down all the same. A great number of the town's men had been lying hidden in the woods and the corn round about, and they "began wt an oulis and whoopubb", a howling and a whooping out of the cover all at once. The English were loaded and in haste, strung out along the path between the house and the water. The corn hid the men in it. Spelman's sentence for the rest ran on without a stop: "the Indians yt weare hidden in ye corne shott the men as they passed by them and soe killed them all saueing one William Russell and one other whoe being acquainted wth ye cuntry escaped to James towne by land."

The loads went down in the path. The corn ran out over the frozen ground. Men fell along the way they had come. None of them reached the barge. Ratcliffe did not come back. Two knew the country and went by land. Two of the sixteen came home.

The colony's own books told it differently, and none of their writers had been at Pamunkey. The proceedings of the colony that Smith's men published in 1612 had only what reached them by way of the fort, and they gave the voyage a sentence and admitted as much: "how they carried the businesse I knowe not, but Ratliffe and his men were most[ly] slaine by Powhatan; those that escaped returned neare starved in the Pinnace." Smith himself, in his Generall Historie of 1624, gave it a count and a name and something more besides:

"Sickelmore upon the confidence of Powhatan, with about thirtie others as carelesse as himselfe, were all slaine; onely Jeffrey Shortridge escaped; and Pokahontas the Kings daughter saved a boy called Henry Spilman, that lived many yeeres after, by her meanes, amongst the Patawomekes."

Pocahontas (Amonute, also called Matoaka) was Powhatan's daughter, and the boy Smith said she saved was Spelman. Spelman's own pages, which carry him on through Powhatan's household and away at last to the Patawomecks, a people of the Potomac at a distance from Powhatan's rule, do not mention her. The survivor Smith named was Shortridge. The survivors Spelman named were Russell and a man he did not name. Each writer had a different man coming home.

Percy's version came last, about 1625, in the relation he wrote to answer Smith's book. It was the fullest of the four and came from the furthest off. He had the party at fifty men with only sixteen of them back, brought down in the pinnace by one of the captains, and he gave Ratcliffe a death the others did not: "when the Slye owlde kinge espyed A fitteinge Tyme Cutt them all of onely surprysed Capte: Ratliefe Alyve who he caused to be bownd unto a tree naked wth a fyer before And by woemen his fleshe was skraped from his bones wth mussell shelles and befre his face throwne into the fyer." Percy had been the sick president of a fort on an island when it happened, and he wrote it down some fifteen years after. Percy was not in the town.

Spelman was. That night he was somewhere with the great Powhatan's household, with Samuel and the wives and the fires, an English boy living in the house of the man whose people had killed his countrymen that afternoon. At Orapax the pinnace lay at her anchor with the rest of Ratcliffe's company aboard. Spelman told the story a second time, shorter, in the main run of his pages, and there it was the long boat that was set upon as it came toward land, and the arrows that fell on the vessel lying off, and the men aboard her who, in his words, "fearinge the worst, wayed anker and returned."