The Starving Time

The men at Algernon's Fort stood to their arms on the bank all that night. The match was lit on their muskets, and the fires on the beach were let down to coals. Percy kept the watch with them. He was on his feet again after the long sickness of the winter. He had come forty miles down the river for revenge on the Kecoughtans, and the point's plenty had given him another purpose. His plan was made and told. Half the colony would come down to the point to be fed and go back, and then the other half. If that would not serve, all of them would come, and the island would be left to the marsh. Upriver the fort was on its half can, waiting for nothing it knew of.

On the very next tide after he told Davis, two pinnaces had come in out of the sea and anchored in the bay beyond the flats. In the last of the light nobody on the point could tell what they were. A vessel in the bay that did not come in to the fort could belong to anyone. So the point stood on its guard, "kepinge A Courte of Guard and watche all That nighte". The sentries walked the palisade. The men off watch lay down in their clothes with their weapons beside them, and the hogs shifted and grunted in their pen behind the cabins. The wind came off the bay and stirred the coals. Toward morning the tide turned, and the two hulls swung on their cables, dark on the dark water, and stayed where they were.

At first light a boat put off from one of them and came in across the flats under oars. The guard went down to the water's edge with their muskets and stood there until she was within hail, and then they hailed her and asked who she was. The answer came back over the water. Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers were in those pinnaces, the commander and the admiral of the Sea Venture. The flagship had gone ashore on Bermuda the summer before. The fort on the island had heard nothing of her all winter. The men on the sand received the news with no small joy and called to the men in the boat to come ashore.

They would not. The boat lay off on her oars, and then turned and pulled back to the pinnace she had come from. Gates had come from Bermuda knowing nothing of any fort at the mouth of the river, and he was "dowtfull whether we weare frends or noe". For some hours the two parties looked at each other across the flats, the point's men on the sand with their muskets and the strangers at their rails. The sun came up over the bay behind the pinnaces and put them in silhouette. The men on shore squinted into it and saw shapes along the rails, and now and then the gleam of metal.

The tide went out from under the flats and left the oyster beds bare and steaming, and the boat could have come in over them only by wading. Behind the guard the fires were built up again for the morning, and the crabs went onto the coals as on any other day. When Gates was satisfied of the truth, he and Somers came ashore at Algernon's Fort with divers others behind them, up the sand past the shell heaps to the gate. Percy was there, the colony's president, on a point of sand with a guard that had been up all night. They walked through a fort that was eating. Crabs roasted at the edges of the fires on the beach, and the cabins were whole. The men who stood about the gate to look at them wore boots and had color in their faces.

About a hundred and fifty people had come ashore on Bermuda from the wreck, on the islands six hundred miles off the coast. They had lived there from the summer through the winter and into the spring. They had eaten the wild hogs that ran on the islands, and fish, and seabirds and their eggs, and the hearts of the palmetto. The men who walked up the sand at the point were brown from that sun and had flesh on their bones. They had built the two pinnaces themselves out of the island's cedar and what they could save from the wreck, fastened with the Sea Venture's iron. They called them the Deliverance and the Patience. Into the two small hulls they had packed themselves, their goods, and food for the passage. They had not packed food for a colony.

At the point they found a garrison in good case, with oysters on the flats and hogs in the pen. The next tide took the pinnaces in at the river's mouth and up the James toward the island. Forty miles of brown water lay ahead of them between the marsh and the woods, past creeks opening on either hand and the Paspaheghs' country on the north shore. The point was all of the colony that Gates had yet seen.

On the twenty-third of May the two pinnaces came up to the island and made fast at the landing. The fort stood where it had stood for three years: the triangle of split logs along the riverside, the bulwarks at the corners, the gate toward the water. There was nobody at the landing to take a line. The men from Bermuda made fast themselves and came up the bank, past Tucker's boat drawn up on the mud with its nets heaped in it. They came in through the gate into the market place, and the colony came out of its houses to meet them. Some of the houses were gone. Their walls had been pulled down a timber at a time through the winter and burned, and the market place had gaps along its sides where doors had been. The people who came out of the others had faces of skin over bone. Their legs had swollen, their gums had gone bad and their teeth were loose. They moved slowly and held on to one another and to the door frames.

Some could not come out at all. They lay in the dark of the cabins on what bedding was left, and the men from Bermuda stooped in at the doors to look at them. The women came out with the men, the few of the summer fleet's women still alive, in gowns that hung on them. They stood at the edges of the crowd with their hands wrapped in their aprons. Children stood with them. A dog would have run out barking at strangers in any village in England, and there was no dog.

The visitors saw the scarcity of victuals for themselves, the store still giving out its half can a day and nearly at the bottom of its casks. At the storehouse door Tucker stood with his can and the guard beside him. The line came to him slowly, each man with his bowl, and each bowl took its half can of meal and no more. The men from Bermuda stood by and watched it measured. Outside the palisade the graves ran toward the woods in low mounds of turned earth. Some were so shallow that the dirt had settled into the shapes beneath. They heard how the people of the towns had come against the fort outside its walls time after time through the winter. The smell of the place was the smell of the sick.

Percy put the colony's count in one sentence. "Fyndeinge of fyve hundrethe men we had onely lefte Aboutt sixty." The rest had starved inside the palisade or been cut off outside it. The living were so meagre and lean that it was pitiful to look at them. Men driven by hunger had run out of their bare beds into the open, so lean that "they Looked Lyke Anotamies Cryeinge owtt we are starved We are starved". An anatomy, in their English, was a skeleton. Others went to bed in what passed among them for health and were found dead in the morning. The bodies were carried out through the gate to the shallow graves.

Sixty was the fort's figure, and the colony's other writers, who agreed on little else, gave it too. The Proceedings, the book Smith's men published in 1612, set it down in a line: "of 500, within 6 months after there remained not many more then 60. most miserable and poore creatures." Smith's own book of 1624, which laid the winter on his successors, gave five hundred and "not past sixtie men, women and children". Percy, writing to answer Smith, gave five hundred and about sixty. On this figure the three agreed.

The Bermuda people had brought their own provisions, and those were already reckoned. Gates had food in his two pinnaces for a voyage and no more. The store in the fort was what the fort had lived on all winter, which was nearly nothing. The towns along the rivers sold the colony no corn and killed the men who went out to dig for roots. Tucker's boat went out on the river and came back with what fish it could take. Sixty starving people and the castaways stood together in the market place with food between them for a voyage and nothing after it.

In those first days, while the newcomers were still finding their way about, the market place heard from one of its own: "one Hughe Pryse being pinched wth extreme famin In A furious distracted moode did come openly into the markett place Blaspheameinge exclameinge and cryeinge owtt thatt there was noe god." He gave his reason to anyone who would hear it. If there were a God, Pryse said, he would not let the creatures he had made and framed endure such miseries and perish for want of food. He stood in the open ground with the sun on him, a thin man in what was left of his clothes. He turned from one side of the market place to the other as he shouted, so that each side heard him in turn. People stood in their doorways and heard him out. Some of them had buried a husband or a wife or a messmate in the ground outside the palisade that month. A few of the men from Bermuda stopped at the edge of the market place to listen, and then went on about their business. The church stood across the market place from him with its door shut.

That afternoon Pryse went out of the gate with a butcher, "A corpulentt fatt man", and the two of them went into the woods to look for something to eat. The guard at the gate let them out, as it had let the digging parties out all winter, and watched them go across the neck toward the trees. They carried nothing to bring food home in. The butcher walked heavily and Pryse walked beside him, and the two figures went in under the first branches and the woods closed behind them. The gate was barred again at dusk without them. In the woods that afternoon "bothe of them weare slaine by the Salvages." When they were found, Pryse's lean body had been torn by beasts. The butcher lay a few yards from him, untouched except by the arrows that had killed him. Percy took it as God's just judgment on the blasphemer.

On the twenty-fourth of May, the day after he came up the river, Gates had the Lawes proclaimed. Their full title was the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, and they were a code of martial law for the colony, set down in articles. A drum beat in the market place to call the colony together, and the sound came back off the palisade, and the sixty were gathered to hear the articles read. The castaways stood among them with their island-browned faces and sound clothes, the Bermuda officers at the front. The two companies looked at each other across the open ground as the reading began.

The colony's people stood or sat in what clothes they had, men who had eaten their shoes and belts that winter. Some of them were held up by the men beside them while the articles were read out over their heads. The reading took a long time. Each article came with its penalty. The voice went on over men who sat down in the dirt when they could no longer stand, and over the women in the doorways behind them. The colony had lived all winter under a president too sick to leave his house and the councillors who gave his orders for him. Now it had a code in writing. The sixty heard it in the place where the horses had been killed.

The decision came within days. There were sixty people of the colony's own and the castaways besides. The pinnaces held food for a voyage and none for a summer, and the towns on every side would not trade. It was resolved by Gates and the whole colony together to return for England with all speed. The word went round the market place and in at the doors of the cabins, and the people who heard it lying down heard it there. Men who had dug for roots in the frozen woods all winter were told they would be going home. Percy's halves were never sent down to the point to be fed on crabs. The colony was going to leave the country altogether.

The fort went to work for the first time in months. Men were set to boil pitch and tar in kettles by the landing and to pay the seams of the vessels with it. The black stuff steamed in the mornings and ran soft in the heat of the afternoons. Others were set to bake bread for the voyage. The smell of the ovens came across a market place where for months there had been nothing to smell but smoke. Every man who could stand was given some work to do, and few or none were idle. The gear went down to the landing on men's shoulders, casks and bedding and arms and tools, and was handed into the boats. In a short space of time four pinnaces were fitted and made ready: the two cedar hulls from Bermuda, the Discovery, and the Virginia.

There was still the fort itself. The men had starved in it, buried their people outside it and pulled its houses down for firewood, and now they meant to burn what was left. They wanted the palisade and the church and the storehouse in flames behind them as they went down the river. Gates would not have it, and by Percy's account the town owed its standing to him: "if Sr Tho: Gates had nott Laboured wth our men they had sett the Towne on fyer". Let the town stand, Gates told them, in words to that effect. For all they knew, honest men like themselves might come and live in it.

They went aboard on the seventh of June. Gates took the Deliverance with his company, Somers the Patience and Percy the Discovery. Davis, who had meant to carry the better sort home in his two pinnaces and leave the rest, took the Virginia. On the last morning the guard came down off the bulwarks and the gate was left open behind the last of them. The people came down the bank in a line, carrying what they owned in bundles and baskets. They were handed down into the boats and up over the sides of the pinnaces. Some of them had to be carried.

The last of the dead had been buried the day before, outside the palisade with the others. The ground over them was still dark and loose when the line went past it. Children went down the bank holding their mothers' skirts, the few children the winter had left, and the women handed them up into the boats ahead of the bundles. The market place stood empty in the sun behind them, the kettles cold by the landing and the ovens cleaned out. The sails were loosed and sheeted home, and the anchors came up black out of the river mud. The ebb took them off the island and down past the marsh, and the palisade went behind the trees at the first bend.

All that morning the four vessels went down the James in company, the Deliverance ahead and the Virginia astern. The banks went by on either hand, the woods green down to the water, the creeks opening and closing, the marsh grass standing up out of the shallows. Herons lifted off the flats as the hulls came abreast of them and settled again behind. Percy stood on the deck of the Discovery, on his feet in the open air, after a winter that had begun with him in his bed. He had been president of the fort since the autumn. The colony was going down the river on Gates's word and its own. The half can, the graves, the crabs at the point and the plan he had made for them were behind him at the first bend. The men on deck sat against the rails in the June sun with their bread. Below them in the holds were the casks, the bedding, the arms, and the people too weak to sit up.

At noon they came down to Hog Island, the island about seven miles below the fort where the colony had kept its hogs. The four pinnaces came to anchor off it to wait for the tide. Seven miles upriver the fort stood on its island with its palisade and its gate, the church, the storehouse, the well and the graves, and nobody in it.