The Starving Time

The pinnace came back up the James on a flood tide with sixteen men in her and no corn in her hold. The watch saw her sail come round the bend below the island in the early afternoon and called it down, and men came out through the gate and down the bank to the landing to see which boat it was. They counted the heads in her before she touched. Her captain was William Phetiplace, and in Percy's account he had stayed in the pinnace with a few men while the rest went ashore, had been set upon more than once on the way down the rivers, and had lost some of the few before he got clear. The sailors worked her in with the sweeps and made her fast, and the men in her climbed out onto the landing in the cold. Sixteen was Percy's figure, and he set another beside it: they were "the Remaynder of fifty". The rest did not come up the bank.

The sixteen came up through the gate into the market place with their muskets and their bedding on their shoulders, and the fort came out of its houses to look at them. Men who had friends in Ratcliffe's company went from one face to the next and asked for names, and the men from the pinnace gave what names they could. Some were answered with a word and some with a shake of the head. Women stood in the doorways of the cabins with their arms folded against the cold and watched the faces too, and the boys of the fort ran ahead to the houses with the names. The sixteen had been hungry since before the trading went wrong, and it showed in their faces, gone gray and hollow under the stubble, and in their hands, which shook when they held them out to the fires. They sat down on the first bench or cask they came to and held their hands to the nearest fire. Archer and Martin came across from the guardhouse to hear them out. The store had nothing extra for them.

Phetiplace went up through the gate to the president's house, past the guardhouse and the church and across the market place, with the councillors following. Percy was still too sick to go down to the water, and the captain told it to him there, standing in the room with his hat in his hand while the councillors stood along the wall. A servant built up the fire. The room was small and dark, and the shutter let in a strip of the gray afternoon over the palisade. He had a long story and no corn to show at the end of it. Percy's word for what he heard was a word from the stage. Phetiplace, he wrote, "related unto us the Tragedie of Capte: Ratlife", and the rest of the sentence was as plain as the first half: "nott bringeinge any Reliefe wth them either for themselves or us." The pinnace had been the colony's hope of corn from Powhatan's country. She had brought back sixteen more men to feed. The telling went on until the light in the shutter was gone, and when it was done the councillors went out into the fort and the captain went to find a fire. Ratcliffe had not come back.

Percy had a command to fill, and he filled it from his bed. The fort at Point Comfort had been Ratcliffe's work and Ratcliffe's charge since the autumn, with Davis and his sixteen beside him on the wall. Now Percy sent James Davis to command there in Ratcliffe's place. The order went down the river in a boat, rowed on the ebb past the empty shores and the mouths of the creeks where no canoes came out, forty miles to the sand point and the wall the two companies had raised together. Davis took up the command of the ground he was already standing on. He had the bay in front of him and the flats below him and Kecoughtan across the water. Down at the point Davis had the watch on the bay.

The wall on the point was finished by then, the bank and the ditch and the posts closed round, and the winter came straight across it off the open water. The men kept a fire in the pits day and night and stood their turns on the bank in their cloaks with their backs to the wind and their faces to the bay. Across the river the smoke of Kecoughtan went up from the trees in the mornings, and its people did not come to the point. At low water the flats stood out below the point, and the men went down onto them with baskets as they had in the autumn. A watch on that point saw everything that came in from the sea or down the bay to the river. Then a sail showed in the north.

Davis was on the point when the other pinnace came down the bay toward it. West had taken her to the Potomac, the great river beyond the York, where the Patawomecks lived at a distance from Powhatan's rule and traded with whoever came. Percy put West's company at about thirty-six men and their errand as trade for maize and grain. The Patawomecks had sold it. Their towns stood up the creeks of that river, a long way from Pamunkey and from Orapax, and they had their own king. In a short time West had his pinnace loaded, and loaded sufficiently. She came down along the western shore of the bay past the mouths of the rivers. The corn was aboard.

It had not come cleanly, and Percy put the next part of the voyage into the same sentence as the loading, without a pause between them: West "used some harshe and Crewell dealinge by cutteinge of towe of the Salvages heads and other extremetyes". The sentence gave no names for the two men, no town and no cause, and it did not say what the other extremities were. It said only that they happened on the Potomac, among a people who were selling corn to the English, and that the pinnace came away full. The Patawomecks had traded. Two of them had lost their heads.

The pinnace came by Algernon's Fort on her way to the river's mouth, close enough to be hailed. The men on the bank watched her come on under her one sail, heeled a little in the wind, until they could make out the men along her side. Davis went down to the edge of the water below the wall, where the sand ran out into the shallows, and the men who had come down with him stood behind him with their muskets. Davis called across the water to her. He told the men aboard of the fort's great wants up the river and urged them to make all the speed they could to relieve it. The bay lay open to the east beyond the point, gray to the horizon, with the swell breaking along the outer side of the sand and the gulls working the flats at low water. The men on the wall could see the men in the pinnace, and the men in the pinnace could see the wall. Davis had given them the island's news. They took it with them.

Percy wrote what happened next in a single sentence, and he did not soften it: "Capte: Weste by the p[er]swasion or rather by the inforcement of his company hoysed upp Sayles and shaped their course directly for England and lefte us in thatt extreme misery and wante." The pinnace stood out past the point into the bay and turned for the sea, with her corn, her thirty-six men and De La Warr's brother aboard. From the wall her sail could be followed a long way, out past the shoals and across the mouth of the bay toward the open sea, smaller each time a man looked up from his work, until it was a gray mark on a gray sea and then nothing. The men at the point went back to the fires and the flats. Up the river the island did not yet know she had come and gone. Persuasion or enforcement: Percy offered both words and chose the harder one. He did not say which of the men had done the enforcing, or what West said to them, or whether he said anything. He laid it on the company and kept it off the captain. The corn went to England.

Smith had his own sentence for it, in the book he published in London in 1624, and his had a different cause in it: "Powhatan still, as he found meanes, cut off their Boats, denied them trade: so that Captaine West set saile for England." In Smith's version West sailed because there was no corn to be had. In Percy's, West sailed with the corn already aboard. Smith was in England by then, and his news of that winter came to him from other men. Percy was president of the colony West left, and Davis answered to him. Here Percy is the better witness. The pinnace had not been empty.

Smith's men had given West a line of their own in 1612, in the book of the colony's proceedings they brought out under his name, and it was shorter than either. West, in their telling, found little better success than Ratcliffe and so set sail for England. They put the two voyages side by side and ended them with one stroke. Then they wrote the sentence that came next in their book: "Now wee all found the want of Captaine Smith, yea his greatest maligners could then curse his losse." The book was compiled by men who had served under Smith, and it carried his name. It had no line for the corn in West's hold.

In the fort the store was all there was. In Percy's own sequence the store had been set in order earlier, when West first came down from the falls with what was left of his men and the numbers on the island rose while the store went down. He appointed Daniel Tucker, who kept the store, to cast it up. Casting up a store meant going through it cask by cask with a light and a gauging rod, sounding each cask to see how full it stood. The sacks were opened and what was in them measured into the can, and the cans were scored on a tally, the meal first and then the corn and the peas and whatever the ships had left. The sum went on one side, and on the other went the people on the island, the old planters and the summer's newcomers and West's men from the falls and the women and the boys, each of them a mouth every day. The one was divided by the other. Percy's phrase for the result was exact: "a poore alowanse of halfe a Cann of meale for A man A day". A can was a drinking-can, and as a measure of meal it held about a pint or a little more. At half a can a day, by Tucker's reckoning, the store came to three months. Percy gave Tucker's industry and care the credit for what followed. He made it last four.

Tucker kept the storehouse as a purser keeps a hold. The stock in it was the common stock of the colony, the meal and peas the ships had left and the corn of the summer's own small harvest. The casks and sacks stood stacked by kind against the walls, the meal in one place and the peas in another, the empty casks rolled out and the tally kept. In the mornings, with a light in the doorway and the guard outside, he and his men broached what had to be broached and let the meal out by the can. It went half a can to a man, struck level with a stick so that no man had a grain more than his neighbor. Meal that spilled was swept up and went back in the cask. The full casks stood in their rows in the dark at the back of the building. At night the door was barred and the guard set. Every half can that went out the door brought the end of the rows nearer, and Tucker kept the count. He did not make it larger. He made the measure last.

Some men robbed the store. Percy's account gives them a reason, in a phrase: they did it to satisfy their hunger. It does not give their names, or how many there were, or what they took and how much, or how they were found out. The store was the colony's whole provision that winter, and every can taken from it was taken from the men in the morning line. Percy gave the order himself, from his house. He had them executed.

A woman of the summer fleet kept a cabin in the row of houses along the palisade, with her husband and the two men who lodged with them. She had come ashore in August from one of the ships to a fort full of strangers and a winter coming. The house was timber and daub under a thatch, one room and a hearth, rushes on the floor, a bed in the corner and the men's things hung on pegs along the wall. The cold came in at every crack in the daub. She slept in her clothes, as the men did, with her cloak over the blanket and her feet drawn up, and woke stiff with the cold in every joint. She got up in the dark to bring the fire back from the coals, blowing on it with her hands round her mouth, her fingers cracked at the knuckles and swollen with chilblains. The wood was short and had been short since the frosts began. Every stick had to be fetched from somewhere. She fed them in one at a time.

The cans came back from the store with the men in the morning, four half cans of meal for four people, and the day's food was what she could make of them. She put water in the kettle and the meal in the water and stirred it over the fire until it thickened, with a pinch of salt if there was salt, and nothing else to go in it. It made a thin gruel, gray and smooth, and she ladled it into the bowls while it was hot because it was better hot. The men ate it standing or sitting on the edge of the bed, scraped the bowls with their fingers, and handed them back clean. She kept a little back in the kettle for the evening. By the middle of the afternoon her hunger had a place of its own in her body, low and steady under the ribs, and it stayed there into the night. She did not speak of it.

The men went out when the bowls were empty. Her husband and the two lodgers took their turns at the wood with the axes, in the edge of the trees within sight of the gate, with a man standing over them with a lit match, and came back at noon with less than they had brought the week before. Some days they went to the guard instead and stood on the bulwarks. She swept the rushes and shook out the bedding in the doorway and hung it on the pegs. She mended what could be mended of their clothes, the stockings worn through at the heel and the shirts gone at the elbows, with thread that was nearly gone too. The summer's clothes had been made for an English summer. Every piece of cloth in the house had a second use waiting for it, and she knew what each of them was. She had needles enough.

When a man fell sick in one of the cabins, the women of the fleet did the nursing, because there was no one else to do it. She would sit with him in the half dark by the hearth, wet his mouth with a cloth, and try to get a few spoonfuls of the gruel into him, and he would turn his face to the wall. She washed what needed washing in water from the well, cold enough to make her hands ache to the wrist. When a man died, the women washed him and closed his eyes and sewed him into what cloth could be spared, and men carried him out through the gate to the ground outside the palisade. The graves there were shallow, because the ground was hard and the men digging were weak. A few words were said over him, and the men came back inside with the spades on their shoulders. Then the gate was barred.

In the middle of the day she crossed the market place with the kettle to the well. The fort lay around her in the cold: the church, the guardhouse, the rows of cabins with their smoke going straight up, the storehouse at the far side with its guard at the door. Men sat along the south walls of the houses with their backs to the timber and their hats pulled down, out of the wind, and did not look up when she passed. A dog nosed along the foot of the palisade. At the end of the market place the horses stood together with their heads down, their coats rough and their breath smoking in the cold air. Smith's well stood inside the palisade, a ring of timber over a hole in the sand, and the water came up brackish and cold. Another woman of the fleet was there before her, with a child holding to her skirt. They stood together while the bucket came up and spoke a few words about the cold, and about whose turn it was at the wood, and about a man two doors down who had not got up that morning. Then the other woman went back to her cabin. She drew her water and carried the kettle back to the cabin and set it by the fire for the evening's half cans. The horses were still standing in the fort.