The Starving Time

Two men with brooms of rushes worked down the length of the church on a morning in April, sweeping the dirt and the dried mud of Sunday's boots toward the open door. The church stood inside the palisade with the storehouse and the guardhouse and the rows of houses, a building of timber like the rest of them. It held a pulpit and a font of cedar. Twice a day the drum called the men of the colony into it to hear the sermon, and a man who stayed away was punished for it. On Sundays the Lawes were read there to companies standing with their hats in their hands. The sweepers threw what they had gathered out onto the beaten ground beside the door and went back in for the corners, where the dirt had piled. Light came through the doorway and lay along the floor as far as the font. The governor had approved a marriage.

Around the church the fort went about its business. The gangs had gone out at the drum to the fields beyond the neck, and the smoke of the cook fires went up from the clay chimneys of the houses into a still sky. Water was being drawn at the well and carried off in buckets. A sentry walked the platform of the bulwark on the river side with his piece on his shoulder, looking down the James toward the point and up it toward the bend, where the woods came down to the water in new leaf. At the landing the boats lay drawn up on the mud with their oars across the thwarts. At the smith's forge the hammer was going. In the storehouse the clerks were at their tallies. The work of the day went on.

The bride's people had come to the island to see it done. Opachisco was there, her old uncle, sent down from Powhatan's country with two sons, and the fort lodged them among its houses for as long as the business took. They wore what the Powhatans wore on an errand of state, dressed deerskin and copper at the ears and the throat. The guard let them through. Laborers coming in from the fields stopped at the ends of the rows to look at them, and the officers sent the laborers on. Powhatans had come inside the palisade before, men with corn or venison or fish to trade in the lean years, and Powhatan's daughter herself, a year before, brought ashore from a ship. These three had come as guests. They had come on her father's word.

They were taken where visitors were taken. There was a fire for them and food, and men of the fort who had some of the language to sit with them and answer what could be answered, as the English had sat at the fires of the towns on their own errands. They walked the fort, or were walked through it. They passed the bulwarks with the great guns lying in them, black iron on wooden carriages, the muzzles over the river. They passed the guardhouse and its watch, the storehouse with its door barred, the houses in their rows with their thatch and their daubed walls, the well, the church. Children of the fort followed them at a distance and were called back. The old man looked at what he was shown and said little that anyone set down. The two sons went where he went.

At evening they sat by their fire in the lee of a house while the gangs came in from the fields at the drum and the companies were counted at the guardhouse and dismissed. The smells of the fort's supper came over the roofs, pottage and fish and wood smoke. The gate was shut and barred for the night, as it was shut every night, with the three of them inside it. Overhead the bulwark sentries called the watch to one another along the palisade. The fire burned down.

It had been April, by Hamor's reckoning, when the boats left the Pamunkey and came down the river to plant. Powhatan's answer was the old man walking among the English houses. Opachisco had one part in what was to happen, and only one. He was to give her away. In the English church a bride was given by her father, or by a kinsman in her father's place, and the giving was done in front of everyone. Powhatan had sent her kinsman to do it. Whatever the old man was to the king, he stood that day in a place that was not his own. The father stayed in his own country.

On the day the English put on what they had. The gentlemen came in their best doublets, brushed and mended, their swords at their sides and their bands washed white, and the officers came with them. The laborers who could get in stood at the back in the clothes they owned, which were the clothes they worked in, scrubbed for the day. The women of the fort stood with their husbands, the few who had lived through the winters and the few who had come in the ships since. Across from them stood the Powhatan witnesses in their deerskins, watching. The church filled from the front, and those who could not get in stood at the door and along the wall outside, in the light, and passed back what they could see. Inside it smelled of wool and smoke and of the cedar. The minister took his place by the font. Rolfe was there. He had written to the governor to ask leave for this, and the governor had given it.

She came in. Pocahontas had been baptized in the colony's faith in the year she was held, and now she stood in its church to be married. Her uncle stood beside her, and the two sons stood with the Powhatan witnesses, as they had been sent to stand. The service went on in English over the bride and the groom and the old man at her side. Then Opachisco did what he had come down the river to do. He gave her.

When it was done the church emptied into the market place the way it had filled, from the door backward, the men at the wall outside giving ground to let the others through. The gentlemen stood about in the sun in their good doublets. The laborers went back to the fields, where the work of the day was waiting. The Powhatan witnesses came out among the English and stood together a little apart. The old man had done what he had been sent to do, and the sons had seen it. Whatever word went back to Powhatan of what had been done in the English church, it went back with them.

Hamor gave it one sentence. He had set down how the news of the marriage reached Powhatan and how readily Powhatan took it, and then he wrote that Powhatan was the man "who some ten daies after sent an olde vncle of hirs, named Opachisco, to giue her as his deputy in the Church, and two of his sonnes to see the mariage solemnized, which was accordingly done about the fift of Aprill." That is the whole of the wedding in Hamor's book. He named the old man and gave his office, and he gave the two witnesses and the day. He gave the minister no name. Then he went on to what the marriage had bought.

Dale gave it less. In June, writing from the colony, he set it down in a single clause of a long letter. He had caused Powhatan's daughter to be carefully instructed in the Christian religion, he wrote, and she had renounced her country's idolatry and confessed her faith and been baptized, and was "since married to an English Gentleman of good vnderstanding." He gave the gentleman no name.

What the marriage had bought came quickly, and Hamor counted it: ever since the wedding, "we haue had friendly commerce and trade, not onely with Powhatan himselfe, but also with his subiects round about vs." Canoes came to the island from the towns up and down the river and from across the water on the south shore, a few at first and then more, the paddlers standing in them to bring them in to the landing. They brought fish from the spring runs and skins and whatever the towns could spare at the lean end of the year, and they went away with copper and beads and hatchets. The men from the canoes walked up from the landing and stood in the market place and bargained with the officers set over the trade. A man from a town across the river came up from the water one morning with a bundle of deerskins over his shoulder, dressed soft and rolled with the hair inward, and laid it on the board at the storehouse door. The officer unrolled the skins one at a time and turned them to the light and looked for holes, and the man stood and watched him do it. They settled with their hands as much as with words, the officer holding up a hatchet, the man shaking his head and touching the beads, the officer adding a second string, the man taking the hatchet and the beads both and saying something to the men behind him that made them laugh. The skins went into the storehouse. The Powhatans carried their goods home and the English carried their fish to the kettles. The gangs went out past them to the fields in the morning and came back past them at noon. Some of the men who passed them had lived through the winter when the gate stayed shut. Hamor drew his own conclusion: "so as now I see no reason why the Collonie should not thriue a pace."

The news of the peace went out from the river towns, and it reached a people who had never been Powhatan's. The Chickahominies lived up an arm of the James above the island, along a river of their own, and Hamor called them "a lustie and daring people, who haue long time liued free from Powhatans subiection, hauing lawes and gouernors within themselues." They had no great werowance. Eight of their elders and principal men governed them. Hearing that Powhatan had made his peace with the fort, they sent to the island.

The Chickahominy men came in across the neck on foot, two of them, with the deer slung from poles between them and the poles on their shoulders, and the sentry called down to the guard to ask what he should do with them. They were let in. They had brought "two fat Bucks for present to our king (for so Sir Thomas Dale is generally reputed and termed amongst them)." The carcasses were laid down before the governor's house with the hides still on them and the legs tied. The two men had come with an offer, and they made it whole. One of them spoke and the other stood by him. The speech was long, in the manner of the country, with the bucks lying on the ground between the speaker and the governor and the men of the fort gathered behind to listen to what they could not understand. Someone who had the language put it into English as it went.

In former times, they said, they had been enemies of the English, and the English theirs. Now they would become "not onely our trustie friends, but euen King IAMES his subiects and tributaries." They would give up the name they had always had and take the one they gave the English: "and relinquish their old name of Chicohominies, and take vpon them, as they call vs the name of Tossantessas." Tossantessas was their word for the men from the ships.

They asked for something in return. Because they had "no principall commander or Weroance," as Hamor reported them, they would "intreate Sir Thomas Dale as King IAMES his deputie to be their supreame head, King and gouernor, and in all iust causes and quarrels to defend them, as they would be ready at all times to aide him, onely their desire was to inioy their owne lawes and liberties." The governor had his own people to rule and could not always be among them. In his absence they would be ruled as they always had been, "by eight of the elders and principall men amongst them, as his substitutes and councellors." That was the sum of their embassy. A king beyond the sea, a governor down the river, and their own eight old men at home.

Dale answered them with a day. On it he would send men into their river to put conditions to them, and if they agreed to the conditions he would gladly accept their friendship and be their werowance himself. Then he offered them copper for their venison. They would not take it. Dale sent them home with his answer, and the two men went out empty-handed and took the path across the neck.

When the day came, Dale went up himself. With him went Captain Argall, who had brought Powhatan's daughter to the island in his ship a year before, and fifty men in a barge and a frigate, armed against treachery in case the friendship had been offered to draw them in. They went up the James on the flood, the rowers pulling and the frigate under sail, past the island's fields and the woods beyond them, to the mouth of the Chickahominy, "an arme of our riuer some seauen miles from IamesTown," and up it to where the people waited for them, as the two men had promised. The Chickahominy was a narrower water than the James, brown and slow, running between wide marshes where the reeds stood higher than a man's head and the wildfowl went up in hundreds at the sound of the oars. Beyond the marsh the ground rose to woods and to the cleared fields of the towns, and smoke went up from among the trees. People stood on the bank to watch the boats come. The Chickahominies came together and bade the English welcome in their best and friendliest manner. Because the English could stay only a short while, with business at home, the people sent at once for their principal men. Some were away.

Those who could be reached hurried in through the afternoon and the evening, by the paths and by canoe down the creeks, and the English waited for them. The fifty men kept to the boats that night with a watch set and their match lit, lying on the thwarts and the decks under their cloaks, while the fires of the towns burned on the shore and the people went to and fro between them. Dogs barked along the bank until late. The tide turned under the boats in the dark and turned again before light. Early the next morning the principal men sat down in council. They sat on mats in a ring in the open, the oldest men nearest the middle, wrapped in their mantles against the morning cold, and the others behind them. A pipe went round. The younger men stood at the edge of the ring, and the women and children kept farther off, at the doors of the houses.

The governor did not go to it. Argall went ashore and sat with the elders, "supplying Sir Thomas Dales place amongst them, who though there present for some respects, concealed himselfe, and kept aboarde his barge." Hamor did not give the respects. On the shore the principal men of the Chickahominies sat in the early light and went through the long discourse of all that had passed between their people and the English, the injuries on both sides as each side remembered them. Argall sat in the governor's place and heard it out. When they had done he answered them in the governor's name. Since they had asked for peace and promised their love and friendship, he told them, he had been sent to them "from the great Weroance to conclude the same, all former iniuries on both sides, set apart and forgotten, which he would doe vpon these conditions." These were the conditions the governor had promised to send into their river. The man with the language put them into the Chickahominies' tongue one at a time, and the ring heard each one through before the next was given.

The first was the name. They should take on themselves, as they had promised, the name of Tossantessas, the English name, and be King James's subjects, and be forever honest, faithful and trusty to his deputy in their country. The second was blood. They should never kill any of the English or their cattle, and if any Englishman or any English beast should "offend them or runne to them," they were to bring them home again and be given satisfaction for the trespass. The third was war. They should be ready at all times to send three or four hundred bowmen to fight beside the English against the Spaniards, "whose name is odious amongst them, for Powhatans father was driuen by them from the west-Indies into those parts," or against any other people who broke the peace and did the English injury.

The fourth was the gate. They should never, on any occasion, break down any of the English pales or come into any English town or fort by any way but the ordinary one, "but first call, and say the Tossantessas are there, and so comming they shall at all times be let in, and kindely entertained." The two envoys had come in across the neck that way, and the sentry had called down to the guard. The fifth was tribute. Every fighting man they had, five hundred at the least, was to bring into the English store at the beginning of every harvest two bushels of corn a man, as tribute of their obedience to the king and to his deputy, "for which they should receiue so many Iron Tomahawkes or small hatchets." The people who had refused payment for two deer were to be paid in iron for their tribute. The last article bound the elders. The chief men who governed under the governor as his substitutes were to see every article kept, and for it each was to have every year "a red coat, or liuery from our King," and the picture of King James engraved in metal, with a chain to hang it at his neck, "wherby they shall be knowne to be King IAMES his noble Men." If any article were broken, the offenders would be punished, and the elders with them, "because they stand ingaged for them."

Then the ring answered. Hamor wrote that "the whole assembly assenting thereunto, answered with a great shout, and noise, that they would readily and willingly performe them all." The chief of the eight began at once an oration to the rest. He turned his speech first to the old men, then to the young men, and last to the women and children by the houses, and gave them the sum of the conditions and how strictly they were to keep them. Then he told them what the English had promised in return: to keep them from "the fury & danger of Powhatan, which thing they most feared," and from every other enemy at home or abroad; to furnish them every year by trade with "Copper, Beades, Hatchets, and many other necessaries"; and, "which liked them best," to let them keep their own liberties and laws and be governed as before by eight of their chiefest men.

Out on the water, off the shore, the barge lay at its anchor with the frigate beyond it. In the barge, out of sight of the council, sat the man the Chickahominies called their king.