The Starving Time

The frost came down on the island in the night and lay white by morning on the thatch of the cabins, on the bank above the landing and on the marsh grass along the shore. The river ran black and slow between skins of ice at its edges. Smoke went straight up from the chimneys in the still air and hung over the palisade. In the market place the ground was hard as iron under the men's shoes, rutted where feet and barrows had churned it in the autumn rains and frozen in the ruts. At the far end of it, where the horses had stood with their heads down through the first of the cold, men came with a halter and led them out one at a time.

They killed them in the market place, where the ground was flat and the work could be watched. The meat was cut and shared out by the cabins, and the kettles took the rest: the heads, the feet, the bones cracked for what was in them. Women stood at the doors with their pots and waited their turn. The fat that rose on the water was skimmed off and kept. The other beasts the ships had brought went the same road as the horses, and they did not last. Percy put the whole of it into one sentence, and it moved down from the beasts as fast as the fort did: "Then haveinge fedd uponn horses and other beastes as long as they Lasted we weare gladd to make shifte wth vermine as doggs Catts Ratts and myce All was fishe thatt came to Nett to satisfye Crewell hunger as to eate Bootes shoes or any other leather some colde Come by".

The dog that had nosed along the foot of the palisade was gone before the horses were finished. The cats went after the dogs. Men set snares of cord in the dark corners of the storehouse and along the sills of the cabins, and boys sat up by the walls with sticks for the rats that came for the meal. What they caught went into the kettle whole. A shoe was soaked overnight in water and boiled the next day until the leather went soft and gave up something into the pot. A man with a pair of boots had something to eat for a week. Belts went, and the straps of the bandoliers, and the flaps of the knapsacks. In the mornings the half cans still came back from the store to the cabins and went into the water with whatever else there was. By the time the shoes were eaten, men were going out through the gate in their stockings with rags bound round their feet.

Percy kept his house through all of it. It stood across the market place from the storehouse, one room with a hearth and a shuttered window, and his servant kept the fire in it with what wood came in from the edge of the trees. His share came to him from the kettles like every other man's, carried across in a bowl and set down by the bed. The councillors came and went. Archer and Martin brought him the fort's business standing at the foot of the bed, the guard and the store and the work at the wood, and went out again with his answers into the cold. The fort's cases came to that room, and the orders went out from it. The president of the colony was a man lying under a cloak and two blankets with his boots by the hearth. Through the shutter he had the sound of the market place: the axes at the bones, a kettle lid, the guard changing at the gate, the bell for prayers in the morning and the evening.

The woods began a musket shot from the palisade, and the near ground went first. Men went out in small parties with spades and mattocks and a basket, two or three of them with a musket and a lit match among them, and knelt at the edge of the trees to dig. The ground was frozen a hand's depth down, and they broke it with the mattocks and went at the roots underneath with their knives. They took anything that grew underground, "wylde and unknowne Rootes", with no names in English and no one to tell them which were good. They turned over logs and pulled away the bark for what lay under it, and ate snakes and the other creeping things they found asleep in the cold. They ate some of it on their knees where they dug it, with the earth still on it, and carried the rest back in the basket. When the near ground was dug over, the parties went farther in among the trees, out of sight of the bulwarks, where the paths ran off toward the creeks and the marsh.

A party going out stopped at the gate while the guard drew the bar, and the men in it looked along the edge of the woods before they stepped through. They went in single file along the old path toward the creek with the musketeer in the middle, his match lit and smoking in the cold, and the men with the spades before and behind him. Under the bare trees the ground was brown with fallen leaves and gray with frost in the hollows, and every trunk had a far side to it. Where the ground had been dug before, the holes lay open and frozen with the frost standing in them, and the men walked past them looking for ground that had not been turned. When they found it they set the musket against a tree and knelt down in a row and dug, and the man nearest the path kept lifting his head from the work to look along it. The mattock rang on the frozen crust. Nothing else in the woods made a sound. Their breath went up in the still air while they worked, and when they had what they could carry they got up slowly, one hand on the knee, and started back toward the gate.

Some of them came back with full baskets and some with nothing, and some did not come back at all. The others went out the next morning anyway, because the half can would not keep a man alive. Many of the men who dug them were "Cutt off of and slayne by the Salvages." The sentence gave no count of them, no names and no places. A party went out with its spades in the morning, and by the time the shadows came across the market place the watch on the bulwarks had stopped looking for it. The gate was barred earlier in the afternoon as the winter went on.

A man of the Paspaheghs, the people whose country held the island, went out on the paths before the light. His town lay up the river on the north shore. He wore a mantle of deerskin with the fur turned in and leggings to the thigh, and he carried his bow strung and a quiver of arrows at his back, and he walked without noise on the leaves where the frost had softened them. The paths ran through the woods behind the island from the towns to the creeks and the hunting grounds and down to the shore. The cold got into his hands. He blew on them and went on.

From the trees on the high ground across the marsh he could see the fort. The smoke stood up over the palisade in a few thin columns. The gate was shut. After a while it opened and three men came out with spades on their shoulders and walked slowly along the edge of the wood, stopped, walked again, and knelt down at the foot of the trees within sight of the bulwarks. One of them had a musket and set it against a trunk. They dug a long time for what they found. One sat back on his heels with a root in his hand and ate it where he sat, and then lay down on the frozen ground on his side and stayed there until the others had finished. When they went back to the gate, he walked behind them with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front.

The boat lay at the landing below the fort with her mast bare and a crust of ice along her side, and no one went down to her. Out on the river nothing moved. He watched the gate shut again behind the three men, and the guard go up onto the bulwark and stand there with his match lit in the cold, his back hunched against the wind. Then he turned back into the woods.

Toward noon he came on the track of a deer in the soft ground along a creek and followed it up into the trees, slowly, a long way, and found her browsing at the edge of a cane brake with her head down. He shot her behind the shoulder from twenty paces and followed the blood until she lay down. He knelt by her and gutted her with his knife, and took the liver while it was warm, and ate it there. Then he tied her feet together, got her up across his shoulders with her head hanging against his chest, and carried her out along the path above the marsh toward his town. Below him across the water the fort lay quiet in the afternoon light. The smoke had thinned again. He shifted the weight on his shoulders and kept walking, and the island went out of sight behind the trees.

His town stood back from the river among its fields, the corn ground bare and black with frost and the stalks of the summer's crop lying where they had been cut. The houses were long and round-roofed, made of bent saplings and covered with mats and bark, with a hole in the roof for the smoke, and the smoke from them went up thick in the cold air. Dogs came out barking to meet him and fell in at his heels. He carried the deer in through the doorway of his house and let her down by the fire, and the women took her from there with their knives. Children came in out of the cold to watch. The fire was built up, and the meat went onto it in strips and into the pot with the dried corn from the store baskets at the back of the house. The smell of it filled the house and went out at the door. He sat down by the fire with his bow beside him and held his hands to it until the feeling came back into them. Outside it was getting dark. The men who had gone out on the other paths that day came in one by one, and some of them carried meat.

Then the graves were opened. Percy's relation came to them next: men went "to digge up dead corpses outt of graves and to eate them". In the same sentence came a man of the colony who killed his wife, "Ripped the childe outt of her woambe and threw itt into the River", cut the mother in pieces and "salted her for his foode", and was not found out until he had eaten part of her. Percy was president, and the case came to him. The man would not confess until he had "hunge by the Thumbes wth weightes att his feete a quarter of an howere". Then he confessed, and Percy judged him to be executed. Smith's book has the same man in one sentence: "And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne; for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved". After that sentence Smith made a joke about the dish.

The winter's name came on the next line of the same page. Smith had gone down the river in the first days of October, before the frost, and he was in England while the fort ate its horses. Fifteen years later he set the name down in the first person: "This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time". He added that what they endured was too vile to tell and hardly to be believed. Then came the cause, and he gave it to the colony: "but the occasion was our owne, for want of providence industrie and government, and not the barrennesse and defect of the Countrie, as is generally supposed". Out at the edge of the woods, the ground the diggers had broken lay frozen again under the frost.

On the island there was one boat left, and a canoe. One day the boat broke loose from the landing, and the ebb carried her down the river, and she was four miles below the island before anyone saw that she was gone. A boat was the fort's only way to the fish in the river, to Point Comfort, to anything that came up from the sea. Martin, of the old council, named men to go after her in the canoe. They stood on the bank and did not go. The canoe was small and the river was wide and cold, and the shores on both sides belonged to the Paspaheghs and their neighbors. Martin went up through the gate to the president's house and told Percy.

Percy had been in that house since October. He got up from the bed, took his sword, and came out of the door with it drawn in his hand, into the cold. In the market place the men left off their work and watched him go by. He walked slowly across to the gate, and the cold went through his clothes, and the sword was heavy in a hand that had held nothing heavier than a cup all winter. He had been too sick to go to the water when Phetiplace came in. Now he went down through the gate to it with a naked blade. At the landing the canoe lay pulled up on the mud with her paddles in her, and the men Martin had named stood by her with their arms folded against the wind, looking down the river where the boat had gone. Percy stood over them in the wind off the river. He used threats, and he used the men's fear of him, and the men who had stood on the bank found the canoe crowded. Each of them tried to be the first into her. They pushed off and went down the river after the boat with the paddles going, low in the water, and the men on the bank watched them until they were out of sight below the bend. They found her and brought her back up the river the same night.

One boat and a canoe were not enough for fishing, or for any of the other errands a fort on a river needed boats for. Daniel Tucker set to work to build another, and by "his greate industry and paines" he built a large boat with his own hands. He cut the timber in the edge of the woods within sight of the gate and dragged it in. He sawed the planks in the cold, set up the keel and the stem on the bank above the landing, shaped the frames and fastened the planks to them one at a time, and stopped the seams with whatever the fort had left for caulking. The work went slowly, as all work went slowly that winter, with the half can in a man's belly and the cold in his hands. Men came down from the fort to watch him at it, and stood about the bank with their hands under their arms, and went back up through the gate when the cold got into them. The sound of his adze and mallet carried up into the market place in the short days, and stopped when the light went. He kept at it. When she was finished she was launched off the bank into the river, and she floated, and she was big enough to carry men and a net out to the deep water.

The boat "was some helpe and A little Reliefe unto us And did kepe us from killinge one of An other." That was the end of the sentence. The next one began with the same hunger: "To eate many our men this starveinge Tyme did Runn Away unto the Salvages whome we never heard of after." They took the paths into the woods toward the towns, and they did not send word back. Their names went out of the fort's count with them.

In the late afternoon, on the slack of the tide, Tucker's boat went out from the landing with men at the oars and a net heaped in her stern. They pulled out into the river past the edge of the ice, shot the net in a long curve across the current, and lay on their oars beside it while the light went. The water was gray and still, and the cold came up off it into the boat. Downriver the marsh had gone dark, and the trees along the north shore stood black against what was left of the sky. Smoke rose from the woods beyond them in a few places and went straight up. The watch on the bulwark followed them. When the net came in, they rowed back to the landing in the near dark with what it held, and carried it up the bank in the basket. At the gate the guard stood with his lantern and counted them in, the men from the boat and the last of the diggers from the woods behind them, one man at a time, and then he barred the gate.