The Starving Time

Henry Spelman woke at Yawtanoone to the sound of the mortars. The women of the town were at them before the men were up, pounding dried corn in hollowed logs outside the doors, and the knock of the pestles came through the mat walls of the house where he slept beside Samuel the Dutchman. The fire in the middle of the floor had burned down to a red bed in the night, and the smoke went up through the hole in the roof into a gray sky. Outside, the houses stood in a loose ring on rising ground above a creek, arched and rounded, their bark and matting blackened around the smoke holes. Beyond them the fields lay brown and open, last year's stalks broken down among the stumps of girdled trees. Men were already going down to the creek with nets. The fish were coming up the rivers. Spelman had been in the country since the summer fleet, and he could tell the season now by what a town did with its mornings.

The town's spring was all work, and most of it was the women's. They went out to the fields in the mornings with their children behind them, raked the old stalks and the brush into heaps and burned them, and the smoke of the burning lay along the ground at the edges of the clearings for days. Then they made the hills with their hands and with short wooden tools, row on row among the stumps, ready for the seed when the ground was warm enough to take it. Down at the creek the men worked on the weir, driving stakes into the mud and weaving the walls between them, and they came back up the bank with fish strung through the gills. Spelman went where he was sent. He carried wood, he went to the fields with the women when they wanted another back, and he learned the words for what was in front of him by pointing at it. The days were long and the food came twice a day from the pots, corn and fish and what the hunters brought, and it was more than any Englishman on the island had eaten since the autumn.

Powhatan had sent the two of them there in the winter, while Ratcliffe's business at Pamunkey was still in action. Yawtanoone was a town about sixteen miles off, and Powhatan's order had been that they should stay there for him. They stayed. The town fed them from its pots, with the corn the women pounded and the deer the men brought in, and they slept warm under skins by the fire. Spelman had no trade and no weapon, and Samuel had none either. Between them they had the clothes they had come in, a little of the language, and the habits of a house where everything was done at the chief's word.

When Powhatan came to Yawtanoone himself, Thomas Savage was there with him. Savage had lived in that household since the year before, and he had the language better than either of them. From him Spelman and Samuel learned how everything had passed after Powhatan took them away from the storehouse: the men in the corn, the sixteen who had come by barge and the two who had got away. The great Powhatan's manner toward them did not change. He gave them their place near his fire and their share of what came to his table. Spelman watched him through the days that followed, as a boy in a stranger's house watches the master of it, and what he saw he put into one line years later. The king in show made still much of them, he wrote, "yet his mind was much declined from us wch made vs feare the worst".

The worst had a shape they both knew. They had heard from Savage what Powhatan's welcome to Ratcliffe had come to, the bread and venison of the first evening and the corn of the next morning. They could not walk to the fort. The paths were Powhatan's paths, the towns on them were his towns, and the island was a long way down the river from the Pamunkeys' country through ground they did not know. They could not ask to go. There was nothing to do but go on being useful, fetch wood, eat what was set before them, and watch the old man's face.

By the spring Spelman had been with Powhatan about twenty-four or twenty-five weeks. Then the Patawomeck king came to visit him. He was the chief of the Patawomecks, the people of the Potomac. He came as a visiting chief comes, with men of his own around him, to be met with food and mats and the long speeches that were owed between great men. He stayed a while. In that while he took notice of the two English boys and the Dutchman in Powhatan's house, and he showed them kindness: food from his own portion, talk through Savage, the attention of a powerful man who wanted nothing from them that they could see. It was the first kindness in months that did not come with Powhatan's eyes behind it. Spelman, Samuel and Savage talked it over among themselves, out of hearing, and determined to go away with him.

The town turned out for him. Mats were spread on the ground before Powhatan's house, and the women brought food out to them in wooden dishes, corn cakes and fish and venison, more than a visiting party could eat, for a guest was measured by what was set before him. Powhatan sat on his mat with his women about him and his men ranged behind, and the Patawomeck king sat across from him with his own. Then the speeches began, long and slow, each man standing to make his and sitting when it was done, while the rest listened with their eyes down and the smoke from the cooking fires drifted across the open ground between the houses. Spelman and Samuel watched from the edge of it with the other people of the household. The king's men were strangers to the town, and they looked at the two foreigners in Powhatan's keeping with open curiosity, at their pale skins and their worn English cloth.

They had no goods to offer him, only themselves. The king's departure was fixed. The three of them kept it to themselves, and on the morning it came they did as they had agreed. They fell in among the Patawomecks as the party left the town and walked out with them on the path north, through the cleared fields and into the trees. Nobody stopped them at the edge of the town.

The woods in that season were open underfoot, the leaves of the year before lying wet and flat, the new growth only beginning in the low places. The path ran along the higher ground between creeks. The Patawomecks walked it at the steady pace of men who walked everywhere, and the English boys kept up. A mile went by, and part of another. Then Savage stopped. "Sauage fayned sum excuss of stay & unknowne to us went backe to the Powetan". At the town he went to Powhatan and told him that Spelman and Samuel had gone with the Patawomeck king.

Savage was Powhatan's son by gift and had lived in his house longer than either of them. Whatever his reason, it went back up the path with him. The two who were left went on with the king's party, not yet knowing that anyone had been told.

They learned soon enough. Powhatan sent men after them at once, with his command that they return. The men overtook the party on the path and gave the order. Spelman and Samuel refused it and went on walking, and the men who had been sent did not turn back without them. They went on too. For some distance the company moved through the woods like that: the Patawomeck king and his men, the boy and the Dutchman among them, and Powhatan's men walking with them, near enough to touch, carrying their weapons. Every step of it Spelman could look across and see who had been sent and what they carried.

The ground went on rising and falling between the creeks, and the company crossed them where the water ran shallow over gravel, wading to the knee and climbing out the far bank wet. Spelman's breath came short on the slopes. Powhatan's men carried what men of their kind carried on a path, bows strung and arrows at their backs, clubs and hatchets at the belt, and they walked as easily as the Patawomecks did, without sign of hurry. The king's men walked on around them and said little. Nobody gave an order. Spelman had feared the worst since the winter, and now the worst was walking a few paces off on the same path, and there was nothing to do with the fear but keep his feet moving.

Then one of Powhatan's men found his moment. Spelman put it into a single breath: "till one of them findinge oportunity on a sunden strooke Samuell wt an axe and killed him, wch I seinge ran a way from a monge the cumpany". Samuel went down on the path, and the boy was already into the trees.

They came after him. Behind them came the Patawomeck king and his own men, running down Powhatan's men in turn, and they overtook them and held them on the path while the boy got clear. He ran through the wet leaves and the brush, over roots and through the low places where the water stood, with the branches whipping across his face and arms and the breath tearing in his chest, until there was nobody behind him, and then he kept going. When he could not run he walked. He drank from the creeks on his knees. Every sound in the woods behind him was a man until it was a bird or the wind. He was a boy alone in a country of towns that took their orders from the man whose men had just killed his companion, and he had no food and no weapon and no English within reach. He made for the king's country, and his own pages close the run in a clause: "till I shifted for my self and gott to the Patomeckes cuntry".

At the island that spring, George Percy was out of his bed. He had been up once in the winter, when the boat broke loose and he went out of his house with his sword drawn, but that had been one day on his feet. Now the sickness that had kept him to his room since the autumn had let him go. In his own words he was "Reasonable well recovered of my sicknes", and the first thing he did with his strength was to leave the fort.

He went down the river to Algernon's Fort. He had two reasons, and he gave both. He wanted to see how things were ordered there, for Ratcliffe had built it on his order while he lay sick, and he had named it for his family, and all he knew of it was what came up the river by boat. And he meant to be revenged on the Kecoughtans, who had, he said, treacherously slain divers of the colony's men. The Kecoughtans' town stood within sight of the point. Their people had not come to it to trade all winter. Percy was the president of a colony that had been dying by the day since the frost, and he went down to the mouth of the river with a soldier's errand and a governor's question.

It was forty miles by water. The river widened as they went, the banks drew back and flattened, and the brown water went brackish and then salt, with the wind coming up it off the bay in their faces. The marshes on either hand were still the color of winter. Toward the end of it the land on the north side ran out into a long low point of sand. On the end of the point stood the fort: a bank and a ditch, a palisade of posts closed round, a few roofs inside it, and smoke going up from them into the open sky. Beyond it there was nothing but water.

Davis had held the command at the point since Percy sent him the order to take it in Ratcliffe's place, and his men came down onto the sand to see the president out of his bed. Percy looked at them. He had come from a fort where men lay in their cabins and were found dead in the morning, where the guard counted the diggers in at the gate and the count was always shorter, where faces had gone to the bone and legs had swollen and the teeth were loose in men's heads. These men had flesh on them. They walked down the sand at an ordinary pace. Their faces had color in them from the wind.

Percy set it down later in one sentence. "Our people I fownd in good case and well lykeinge haveinge concealed their plenty from us above att James Towne". The plenty was all around him once he knew to look for it. The flats off the point went out a long way at low water, and the men went out on them with baskets and came back with oysters and with crabs, which were thick in those shallows in that season and could be taken by hand. The fishing at the river's mouth was one of the two reasons Percy had ordered a fort built there in the first place. Behind the palisade the hogs were penned, rooting in the sand and the mud, and they were fat. The men had been feeding them on the crabs.

He walked the fort. It was small, a few cabins inside the palisade and a watch kept on the bank toward the bay, where a man could see a long way over the water in every direction but one. The cabins were sound and the roofs were whole; nobody here had been pulling his house apart to burn. Outside the gate, along the sand, the shells lay in long white heaps where the men had thrown them after eating, oyster shells and the red shells of the crabs, years of eating it looked like, though it was only one winter's. Fires burned on the beach with crabs roasting at the edges of them. The smell of the cooking came on the wind. The men he passed had boots on their feet.

The crab fish went over the rails of the pen by the basketful, and the hogs fell on them and cracked them in their jaws and rooted for the pieces. At the island the men had eaten their horses that winter, and then their dogs and cats, and then the rats and mice, and then their shoes. They had boiled leather. They had dug in the frozen woods for roots and been killed doing it. By his reckoning the crabs the hogs were eating would have been a great relief to the fort above and saved many of their lives. He had not known any of it. Nobody at the point had sent word of it up the river, not by the boat that carried Percy's order down, not at any time in the months since.

Then he learned why. Davis and his men had their own plan for the spring, and it did not include the island. Their intent was to keep "some of the better sorte Alyve", and to take their two pinnaces and sail for England. The better sort were the gentlemen. The rest of the colony was to be left where it was, on its half can, with whatever was left of the winter.

Davis left no account of his own. Percy taxed him with it, there on the point with the hogs behind the rails and the men in their good case standing about on the sand, and told Davis what he meant to do instead. He would bring half the men down from the island to be relieved at the point, feed them up on what the point had, and then send them back up the river and bring down the other half to be fed in their turn. And if that would not serve to save the men's lives, he would bring them all, every man and woman left alive at the island, down to Algernon's Fort, and the fort on the island could stand empty.

It was a large thing for the president to say. The island was the colony. It had the church, the store, the houses that were left, the guns on the bulwarks, the graves. Percy was proposing to leave it to the marsh. He gave Davis his reason, and set it down afterward: "Tellinge Capte: Davis that Another towne or foarte mighte be erected and buylded butt mens lyves onse Loste colde never be recovered."

That was the plan. Percy meant to carry it out on the tides that followed, half the colony first and then the rest, by boat down the forty miles of river to a point of sand at its mouth where men had been fattening hogs on crab all winter. The Kecoughtans' smoke went up across the water. The hogs went on with the crabs.

At the island that day the store door opened at the usual hour. The men who could walk came across the market place to it with their bowls, slowly, some of them leaning on the ones beside them, past the bare end of the market place where the horses had stood. Tucker stood at the door with the can, the guard beside him, and the line came up to the door one man at a time, and each man held out his bowl and had half a can of meal put into it.