The Starving Time

Smoke from a dozen fires hung under the trees at the edge of the town, and in the last of the light John Rolfe and Master Sparkes sat on a mat by one of them with their pieces across their knees. The March evening came down cold. Women went between the houses with wood for the night and water from the creek, and children stood at the doorways to look at the two Englishmen in their wool and leather, and were called in, and came out again. Dogs nosed at the edge of the firelight. Somewhere a man was singing at a fire of his own. The houses were the long round-roofed houses of the country, bent saplings covered with bark and mats, a smoke hole in each roof, the sleeping platforms along the walls inside and the baskets and pots beneath them. Food came to the strangers in a wooden dish, as it came to any visitor a town meant to honor: hominy, venison, a little of whatever the winter had left. The two men ate. They had been sent to acquaint Powhatan with the business.

The walk had taken them most of the afternoon. From the last of the soldiers at Matchcot the path climbed through the old fields, where the hills of last year's corn still showed in rows under the dead stalks, and then went into the woods and stayed there, worn hard by feet that had used it all their lives. The oaks and hickories were bare, and the ground under them was brown with the fall's leaves, wet and quiet underfoot. Here and there the path crossed a run of water on stones, or a fallen tree, and the two men climbed over it with their pieces held up out of the wet. Twice they met people coming the other way, a man with a bow, two women with loads on their backs held by a strap across the forehead, and each time the people stepped off the path and stood and watched them pass. Nobody stopped them. Before the town came into sight they smelled it, wood smoke and the sourness of hides drying, and then the trees thinned and there were cleared fields, and the houses, and men coming out to meet them.

They were taken in well. Hamor afterward set it down that they were "kindly intreated," and on the ground that meant a fire, a mat to sleep on, food at evening and again in the morning, and men to sit with them and watch them eat. It did not mean the great king. Rolfe and Sparkes were "not at all admitted Powhatans presence," in Hamor's words. Whoever had decided it, and wherever Powhatan was that night, the two Englishmen were not taken to him. They did not see him.

The man they spoke with instead was a brother of the king's. Hamor names him once, in a single clause: "his brother Apachamo, his successor, one who hath already the commaund of all the people." That is Hamor's account of him, the whole of it, printed in London in 1615. He gives the man a name, a kinship, a rank and an authority, and nothing of where he received them, what he wore, or how long they sat. A man Hamor called the king's successor had come to talk with two Englishmen at a fire, in a country where English soldiers had burned some forty houses a few days before.

The substance of the talk is all Hamor kept. Apachamo, he wrote, "likewise promised vs his best indeauors to further our iust requests." The requests were the ones Dale had brought up the river in Argall's ship: the English arms still in Powhatan's keeping, the swords and pieces and tools, the men who had run back to him, and the corn for the trouble. The promise was to further them. It did not say they would be granted, or by whom, or when. A promise of that shape could be carried back to the shore and repeated to the governor without anyone having bound himself to anything. It was the second promise of its kind. Powhatan's sons had made the first, at Matchcot, before they went off to the ship.

The night passed in the town. The fire was banked low in the middle of the floor, and through the smoke hole the sky was full of stars. Outside, the place settled: a child crying and hushed, a dog, a man going out and coming in, the wind in the tops of the oaks. Cold came up from the ground through the mats. Before light the women were at the fires again, and the mortars began, the long pestles knocking down into the hollowed logs where the day's corn was pounded. The two men were fed once more. Then they took up their pieces and went back the way they had come, down out of the woods and through the old fields toward the river and the soldiers on the hill.

While they were gone, the English on the shore had a letter in hand.

The morning on the hill went slowly. The soldiers had stood to their arms through the night by turns, and at first light they were on the height again in their files, buff coats dark with dew, the match smoldering in their serpentines and the spare coils looped at their belts. Men ate biscuit where they stood. Below them the boats lay drawn up on the shore with their crews, and out on the river the ship rode at her anchor. The town's people came and went as they had the day before, walking among the soldiers, sitting on the slope, talking in knots, and the men with the bows kept to themselves at the edge of the trees. Everyone on the hill knew the hour. The truce ran until noon, and at noon the drum and the trumpets were to sound before any blow was struck. The English were waiting on an answer from the king, and on two of their own men gone inland to get it.

Ralph Hamor, the colony's secretary, had come up the river with Dale, and he had a letter from Rolfe. In those hours, before the errand came back, he gave it to the governor on the hill. Hamor told it himself, in the book he printed the next year, in one long sentence:

"Long before this time a gentleman of approued behauiour and honest cariage, maister Iohn Rolfe had bin in loue with Pocahuntas and she with him, which thing at the instant that we were in parlee with them, my selfe made known to Sir Thomas Dale by a letter from him, whereby he intreated his aduise and furtherance in his loue, if so it seemed fit to him for the good of the Plantation"

The letter itself was Rolfe's, and Hamor printed it whole at the back of his book, with Dale's own letter. It carries no date and no place. It runs to eight pages there, in a close italic, and it opens on the man who held her: "Honourable Sir, and most worthy Gouernor."

Dale had a war in front of him, a town on a hill and a truce that ran out at noon, and in his hand a gentleman of the colony was asking leave to marry the hostage. Rolfe did not come to the point at once. He hoped, he wrote, that the beginning of his letter would not amaze the governor more than its end would content him. The matter was of no small moment, and it touched him as nearly as his own salvation. He put himself under Dale's judgment and asked for his protection, for there was no other refuge he could look for in that country. He dismissed in advance the malicious and the turbulent, to whom nothing was pleasing but what suited their own unsavory taste.

When he came to it, he came as a witness comes to his evidence, by swearing first. He called on God and the day of judgment to condemn him if his chief intent was not what he was about to say. He had been so long entangled in his own thoughts, he wrote, "so intricate a laborinth, that I was euen awearied to vnwinde my selfe thereout." He called it "this my setled and long continued affection (which hath made a mightie warre in my meditations)." He had not gone into it blind. He had set the frailty of mankind before his own eyes, and its proneness to evil, and he knew his Bible: he was not ignorant, he told Dale, of the heavy displeasure God had conceived against "the sonnes of Leuie and Israel for marrying strange wiues." That was the case against him, and he made it himself, in his own hand, before anyone else could:

"one whose education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all nurtriture from my selfe, that oftentimes with feare and trembling, I haue ended my priuate controuersie with this: surely these are wicked instigations"

He had prayed to be kept from such assaults, he wrote, and had taken some rest. Then another temptation had come, a more gracious one, and made breaches in his holiest meditations. It came to him daily and hourly, and in his sleep, "euen awaking mee to astonishment," taxing him with carelessness, pulling him by the ear and crying: "why dost not thou indeuour to make her a Christian?" It came, he said, even when she had been furthest from him. He wrote of "her desire to be taught and instructed in the knowledge of God," of her capacity to understand, of her aptness to take a good impression. Should he refuse to lead the blind into the right way? Should he deny bread to the hungry? He put the questions to Dale one after another.

He knew what the colony would say. The vulgar sort, who measured all men by their own filthiness, would taunt him, and he answered them before they could speak: "it is not any hungry appetite, to gorge my selfe with incontinency." If that had been all he wanted, he wrote, there were Christian women more pleasing to the eye, and the offense less to be feared. He was not desperate. He had friends at home, and a birth good enough to make a match there. He came at last to the sentence that held the whole of it. He was in no way led, he swore, so far as a man's weakness might permit,

"with the vnbridled desire of carnall affection: but for the good of this plantation for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God, for my owne saluation, and for the conuerting to the true knowledge of God and Iesus Christ, an vnbeleeuing creature. namely Pokahuntas."

He listed the plantation first. He had read and talked with honest and religious men, he went on, and had their encouragement, and the clearness of his own conscience was to him a wall of brass. He looked for the promise the prophet Daniel made to those who brought many to the knowledge of God, that they would shine like the stars for ever and ever. Then he gave himself into Dale's hands. If God disposed of him so, he would take it as a task appointed him and never cease until it was done. He signed as a servant signs, "At your commaund most willing to be disposed off," with his name below.

The man who held the paper was standing on the shore of Powhatan's chief town with a hundred and fifty soldiers and a demand for swords. Rolfe had asked for his advice and his furtherance, and the test, in Hamor's sentence, was the governor's own: whether it seemed fit, for the good of the colony. That was a question a governor could answer. Dale's answer, in words, survives nowhere. Hamor gives only that he approved.

Pocahontas herself told her brothers. Hamor put it into the same breath as the letter: Rolfe had written to Dale, "and Pocahuntas her selfe, acquainted her brethren therewith." Where she told them, and what she said, he does not record. The two sons of Powhatan who had come down to see her, and rejoiced to find her well, and promised to persuade their father to redeem her, had gone off to the ship with the English. They had promised a ransom. Now they had been told of an Englishman.

Rolfe and Sparkes came down out of the trees the next day, past the old fields, with the soldiers still in their files on the height. A sentinel at the edge of the files saw them first, two figures in English clothes on the path, and the word went along the line. They came up the slope through the town's people and through the soldiers to where the officers stood, mud to the knee, and made their report. They had a kind reception to give account of, a king they had not seen, and his brother's promise of his best endeavors. It was not the king's answer. The truce had held through the night, and the drum and the trumpets stayed silent at noon.

Dale did not fight. On the way up, his soldiers had burned some forty houses below Matchcot. At Matchcot he made terms instead, and Hamor gave the reason. Dale approved Rolfe's resolution, and that approval, he wrote, "was the onely cause hee was so milde amongst them, who otherwise would not haue departed their riuer without other conditions." There was a second reason in the same pages, and it was the calendar. It was, in Hamor's phrase, "the time of the yeere being then Aprill," and April called the colony home to prepare its ground and set its corn for the winter's provision.

So the English made their terms on the shore and went. They gave the Pamunkeys respite until harvest to resolve what was best for them to do. If no final agreement was made before then, the English would come back and destroy and take away all their corn, burn every house upon that river, "leaue not a fishing Weere standing, nor a Canoa in any creeke therabout," and kill as many of them as they could. The weirs were not a figure of speech. In the shallows along that river and in the creeks that ran into it, the people had driven lines of stakes into the mud and woven them with brush and reeds into fences that turned the fish into traps, and in a few weeks the shad would be coming up to them. The canoes lay pulled up on every landing, each one a tree burned and scraped hollow over many days. The threat was a threat against the next winter's food. Then the files broke up on the height and the soldiers came down the slope to the boats in companies, with the drum, and were rowed out to the ship and the other vessels, and the anchors came up. The town's people stood on the hill and watched them go.

Going down was faster than coming up. The ebb carried the boats along under the bare woods, past the narrows where the arrows had come out of the trees, past the town where the houses had been burned and the ground lay black and wet between the cold hearths, and out into the wider water where the York began. Sailors leaned on the sweeps when the wind died and made sail when it came again. Pocahontas was among the English, as she had been coming up. Somewhere in the same company was the man who wanted to marry her. Down the York, around into the bay, and up the James on the flood, they came back to the island in April.

At the fort it was planting time. The drum beat the gangs out in the morning to the fields beyond the neck, and the men went down the rows with hoes and mattocks, raising the hills and setting the corn in them, four or five kernels to a hill, and the beans beside them. The ground was cold under the hand and heavy from the March rain. Gulls followed the hoes. At noon the drum called the men in to the kettle, and in the afternoon they went out again until the light went. On the bank the boats were drawn up, and the fishermen mended their nets for the shad that would soon come up the river. Everything the colony meant to eat the next winter was going into the ground that month. The island was greening. New grass came up through the old along the palisade, the marsh at the neck was loud with frogs at dusk, and in the woods across the water the dogwood and the redbud were in flower against the bare trees. The days were longer, and the Lawes were still read on Sundays in the church, and the men who had come down from the Pamunkey went back to the gangs and the hoes as if they had never been away.

Word of the marriage went to Powhatan. Hamor called it "The bruite of this pretended marriage." In his English a pretended marriage was an intended one, and the bruite was the report of it, the talk going from town to town. It "came soone to Powhatans knowledge, a thing acceptable to him, as appeared by his sudden consent thereunto." Who carried it to him Hamor does not say. Powhatan had been told a year before that his daughter was a prisoner. He had answered then with seven men and seven unserviceable muskets, and after that with silence, and the English had come up his own river with soldiers to make him answer again. To the news that an Englishman meant to marry her, he answered at once.

He consented, and he did more than consent. He chose someone to stand in his place. Within about ten days Powhatan sent her old uncle, Opachisco, to give her away in the church.