The Starving Time

The men in the Discovery's waist took hold of the cable on the morning ebb and hauled the anchor up off Hog Island. It came up out of the river mud trailing weed, and they swung it in over the bow and made it fast. Ahead of them the Deliverance was already under way, with the Patience astern of her and the Virginia last in the line. The four pinnaces had lain the night where they anchored at noon, off the island where the colony had kept its hogs. The fort was seven miles up the river behind them, its gate open. The air was light and warm, and the sails filled slowly. One by one the pinnaces came round and went down with the tide.

The Discovery was crowded from her stem to her stern. The people of the fort lay where they had lain all night, along the rails and against the hatch, and below in the hold among the casks and the bedding. Those who could sit up sat up in the sun. The bread baked in the fort's ovens for the voyage went round in the morning, a piece to each, with water from the casks. Gates had brought food enough for a voyage and no more, and the voyage had begun. Flies came off the marsh as the day warmed. The few children slept against their mothers or sat with their legs through the rails, watching the water go by. The bread went slowly.

Percy sat on the deck among them. He had spent most of the winter in his bed and had come aboard on his own feet. He had been president since the autumn, of a fort that was now empty, and he was going home to England with the sixty who were left of it. Behind him upriver were the graves outside the palisade, the store at half a can, and the boat he had driven men after with his sword drawn. Ahead, at the river's mouth, was the point where Davis's hogs had eaten crabs all winter. Beyond it lay the bay and the open sea, then weeks of it, then London. The river widened as they went down. The marsh gave way to woods on either hand, and the banks drew farther off with every mile.

Mulberry Point, the point below Hog Island, came up off the bow in the middle of the morning. The pinnaces were in the reach above it, still in company, still on the ebb. A boat was on the river below the point, small and dark on the bright water, coming up against the tide. Its oars rose together and came down together. The men at the Discovery's rail stood up to see it, and the ones lying on the deck asked what it was. A canoe of the towns carried men kneeling with paddles. This boat carried men sitting at oars, with a man in the stern. It was a longboat, a ship's large rowing boat, the kind a ship carries on her deck or tows astern and puts over the side to go where she cannot. The men at the oars wore English hats. They pulled steadily and did not stop to rest, and the boat grew on the water.

On the Deliverance ahead the men had seen it too, and the pinnaces drew together as the boat came on. The oarsmen were near enough now to show their faces. They were full in the face and brown from the sea, with whole shoes on their feet, and they sat their thwarts like men who had eaten that morning. The people at the Discovery's rail had faces of another kind. The winter was in their cheeks and their loose teeth and the swelling of their legs, and in the way they held the rail to stand. Some of them called down to the boat. The man in the stern stood up to answer them across the last of the water. The ebb ran past the boat's bow, and the oars held it there.

John Smith set the morning down years afterward in his book of 1624, from what others told him: "At noone they fell to the Ile of Hogs, and the next morning to Mulberypoint, at what time they descried the Long-boat of the Lord la Ware; for God would not have it so abandoned." He gave the boat to Providence. Percy, who was on the river that morning, gave the man in it a name.

"we espyed A boate makeinge towards us wherein we fownde to be Capte: Bruster sent from my Lorde La Ware who was come unto us wth many gentlemen of quallety And thre hundrethe men besydes greate store of victewles municyon and other p[ro]vissyon". The boat came up to the pinnaces with its oars trailing and lay alongside. Brewster was a captain of the lord governor's company, sent ahead with the longboat. He told them who had come into the country. Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, Francis West's brother, had come with three ships. Under the Company's charter of 1609 a lord governor ruled the colony alone, with a council that advised him and did not bind him. The Company had given the office to De La Warr. He had sent his longboat on ahead of him.

Percy heard it from the deck of the Discovery. He was still the president of the colony, as far as any paper in the country said, and the colony was sitting around him on the planks with its bundles. The office had come to him in his bed in the autumn, pressed on him by the old councillors, and he had kept it through the winter and the boat and the graves. A lord had come to take it. Percy wrote afterward that the lord governor came with many gentlemen of quality, and he set them first in his sentence, before the men and the victuals. The deck under him rocked a little in the wash of the boat. Downriver the bay was still there, and the sea beyond it, and England beyond that. Upriver was the fort.

The men at the rails heard the news in pieces, passed back along the deck from the ones nearest the boat. Three hundred men. Gentlemen of quality. Victuals, munitions and provisions in great store. Most of the people listening had lived through the winter on half a can of meal a day, then on roots, then on whatever there was. They had buried their dead in shallow ground and pulled their houses down to burn. A fortnight before, they had stood in the market place and heard the Lawes read under Gates. Days before, they had been ready to set the fort on fire. Now they were sitting on the deck of a pinnace bound for England, eating the voyage's bread, and a boat was alongside to tell them there was food in the river. The children were held up to see the boat.

The ebb ran on under the hulls while the news went from pinnace to pinnace. It went down past them toward the point and the bay, carrying weed and froth and a dead branch turning in the current, as it had run every day of the winter. The sun stood higher over the river, and the pitch in the deck seams went soft. The women in the waist kept the children out of it. Men who had been sitting stood, and men who had been standing sat down again, because their legs would not hold them long. On the Patience and the Virginia the people stood along the rails in the same way, looking down the river at the boat. A man on the Virginia's rail called across the water to ask the news again, and was told it again.

Percy gave the turn a clause: "whereupon we all Retourned to James Towne ageine". The four pinnaces came about in the reach above Mulberry Point. They had come down on the ebb, and they had to wait for the flood to carry them back up. The anchors went down again into the mud. Brewster's men lay on their oars in the longboat, and then pulled away down the river toward the ships. The people on the decks watched them go. Some of them lay down again. The Deliverance swung to her anchor with the others, her bow upriver. The fort was in that direction.

They lay at anchor through the slack, with the reach empty below them where the longboat had gone. The bundles that had been tied for England lay on the deck where they had been set down, and nobody untied them. The water casks were broached again and the dipper went round. Men slept in the shade of the sails. Others sat and looked upriver at the bend, beyond which, a morning's sailing up the river, the fort stood with its gate open. The river went slack and then turned, the weed on the surface stopped and began to drift the other way, and the hulls swung on their cables until their bows pointed down toward the bay again. The flood was coming in.

When the flood came the pinnaces went back up the James with it. They passed Hog Island again, where they had anchored the day before, and then the reach where the herons stood in the shallows. The same woods went by on either hand, green down to the water, and the same creeks opened and closed in the marsh. The sun was behind them now. Nobody in the waist was eating. The bread had been for the voyage, and the voyage was over. In the hold the casks that had gone down to the landing on men's shoulders were stowed where they had been stowed. They would go back up the bank the same way. The pinnaces kept their order. The Deliverance led.

At the last bend the palisade came out of the trees. It stood on its island as they had left it, the three walls of split logs, the bulwarks at the corners, the church roof inside. No smoke went up from anywhere in it. The marsh lay along the shore below the walls, and the river ran brown past the landing. The pinnaces came up to their old anchorage off the island and let go. The boats went in to the landing first, with the men who could pull an oar. The kettles stood at the landing where they had been left, cold, with river mud dried on their bottoms. Up the bank the gate stood open. The people in the pinnaces looked at it from the decks while they waited for the boats to come back for them. They had walked down out of it with their bundles on the seventh, past the graves, and handed their children down into the boats. The same bank was there, the same mud at the foot of it, the same path worn up to the gate. A heron that had been standing at the landing lifted and went off over the marsh.

They went in through it as they had come out, in a line, carrying their bundles and their baskets. The graves outside the palisade were as they had been the day before the sailing, the newest still dark on top. Inside, the market place was empty in the evening light. The houses that had been pulled down for firewood in the winter were still down, their posts standing, their thatch gone into the fires. At the end of the market place was the place where the horses had been killed, and where Gates had read the Lawes. The church stood. Smith's well stood, and the storehouse, and the guardhouse. The ovens were cold and swept. The people went back to the houses that were still standing and lay down in them. The weakest were carried up from the boats.

In the houses that still had roofs the hearths were cold and the ash was days old. The people who could stand went out to the woodpiles and to the posts of the pulled-down houses, and brought in what would burn. Flint and steel struck in the doorways. The first fires took in the dusk, and then others, and the smoke went up out of the thatch and out of the open roofs and lay over the palisade in the still air. The mosquitoes came up off the marsh with the dark. Somewhere a child cried and was quieted. The guard went up on the bulwarks again, at the corners where it had kept watch all winter, and looked out at the woods. The gate was shut and barred at dark.

Tucker opened the storehouse as soon as the casks came up from the boats. He had kept the store all winter, cast it at half a can and made three months of it last four. He had built the boat that fished when the colony was eating its leather. Now he stood in the doorway with his tally while the casks came up the bank on men's shoulders and in at the door. He had them set in their rows on the floor, the meal together and the peas together, and he counted them in against the tally he had made when they went out. When the line formed at the door he took the can off its nail and dipped it in the meal. The first man held out his bowl. Tucker filled the can level to the half and tipped it in. The next man held out his. The line ran back across the market place, the fort's people and the Bermuda men together, each with a bowl or a pot or a hat, and the guard stood by the door with his musket while it moved. Nobody spoke much in it. The men who had been castaways were browner and steadier on their feet than the men who had wintered in the fort, and they stood in the line with them as the fort's own men had stood all winter. The meal went into the bowls dry and was carried off to the fires. Tucker made a mark on his tally for each can.

The colony would live. Its war with the towns would end with Powhatan's daughter married in its church.

On the tenth of June the lord governor came up the river with his fleet. His three ships came round the last bend under sail, larger than any of the pinnaces, and came to anchor off the island where the Bermuda men had anchored in May. Their decks were full of men who were well fed and had been weeks at sea. Smoke went up from the ships' cook fires over the water. The people on the island saw them from the landing, and some of them went down to the bank and stood there in the sun. Boats were swung out and manned. Brewster was among the officers of that company. So were the gentlemen of quality from Brewster's news, the knights and captains who had sailed with the lord governor.

De La Warr went ashore that day. His boat came in to the landing below the fort with its oars tossed and its crew in a line, and the kettles the colony had left there stood on the bank above it. The tide was making and the water at the landing was brown and smooth. He came with a guard in his livery and with drums and trumpets, as a lord came, and his gentlemen came up the bank behind him. The people of the fort were gathered to meet him. They were what was left: Percy's sixty and Gates's castaways from Bermuda, thinner than his own men and burned by the sun of the river, standing in the market place among the pulled-down houses. The gentlemen from the ships walked between the stumps of the houses in clean doublets. The guard kept its ranks. The drums stopped at the church door.

He went into the church and heard a sermon. The church was the same timber building where the colony had said its prayers over its dead all winter, and the people who could crowd into it stood. The minister preached from the pulpit, and the lord governor sat before him with his gentlemen. Then the commission was read aloud, the paper the Company had given him in London, with its seals. It put the government of the colony into his hands. Percy had held the presidency since the autumn. He was the last man to hold it. The people standing at the back of the church heard the reading through the heat of the crowd, the long phrases of the Company's lawyers going on over their heads, the King's name and the Company's, the powers given and the powers taken away. Some of them had stood in the market place outside to hear the Lawes read under Gates a fortnight before. Some had stood there in the winter to hear the prayers said over their own. The doors were open for the air, and the light came in across the floor from the market place. The commission was read to the end, and the presidency was over.

De La Warr came out of the church into the market place. His men were already at the landing with the boats. The casks came off the ships and were rowed in to the bank, and from the bank they went up on men's shoulders, through the open gate and across the market place. Some held meal and some held peas or salt beef, with the marks of London merchants burned into their staves. The men who carried them were the lord governor's men, fresh off the ships, and they went up the bank two to a cask without stopping. The colony's people stood back along the path and watched them pass. Gates's castaways stood with them. The gate stood propped wide with a stone, and the casks went in through it one after another, across the bare ground of the market place toward the storehouse. Tucker stood at the storehouse door with his tally. The first cask from the lord governor's ships came in past him and went down on the storehouse floor.