The Starving Time

The lord governor kept his house in the fort with a guard at the door. The guard wore his livery, the coats that had come up the bank behind him on the tenth of June, and two of them stood at the doorway from the morning drum to the evening one with their halberds grounded. The house had been made ready for him out of what the winter had left standing. It was swept out and its thatch patched, a table carried in, benches set along the walls and a chest at the foot of the bed. His gentlemen came and went through the door all day in their doublets and good hats. Clerks sat at the table with ink and paper and the lists the ships had brought, of men and casks and arms. Trumpets sounded for him when he went across the market place to the church, and again when he came back. The colony's people stood aside to let him pass.

On Sundays he went to the church in state. The trumpets sounded at his door and the guard fell in ahead of him, and his gentlemen walked behind in their best, and a drum went before them across the bare ground. At the church door the guard stood aside. Inside, a chair had been set for him near the pulpit, with his gentlemen on the benches behind it. The colony stood or sat where there was room, the soldiers in their companies, the laborers at the back, the few women of the summer fleet together near the door with their children. The minister preached for an hour and more. The heat came in at the open door with the flies. When the sermon was done the lord governor rose first, and the church waited while he went out, and the trumpets took him up again outside.

He began with a council and with captains. Percy put the whole of it into one line of his relation: the lord governor "sett all things in good order selecteinge A Cowncell and makeinge Capteines over fifty men A piece." The council sat with him at the table in his house and gave him its advice. The captains took the men. Rolls were called in the market place on a hot morning, name after name, the men of the lord governor's ships and the men of the Sea Venture and the sixty who had wintered in the fort, and each name went down on a captain's list until he had his fifty. The gentlemen answered to their names and their rank and stood apart. The laborers answered to their names and stood in rows. Every company had its captain and its officers, its own work and its own place on the ground. All winter the orders had come out of a sick man's house. Now each man had a captain.

The work began that week. Companies went out of the gate under guard with axes and saws to cut posts in the woods beyond the neck, and came back in the afternoon with the posts on their shoulders, two men to a post, sweating in their wool. Others cut reeds at the edge of the marsh for thatch, standing to their knees in warm brown water with the flies about their heads. The houses pulled down for firewood in the winter went up again on their old ground. New posts went into the old holes, and wattle was woven between them and daubed with clay from the riverbank and left to dry in the sun. Men reset the palisade where it had leaned. The lord governor's men worked hard, fresh from the sea and fed from their own casks. The men who had wintered in the fort worked beside them on legs still swollen, slower, stopping to sit. Gates's castaways from Bermuda stood between the two in strength. The drum beat them all out in the morning and in at night.

Not every company went to the woods. One went to the river with the boats and the nets, and hauled in the shallows below the fort on the turn of the tide, and brought back what it caught in baskets to the storehouse. One stood the guard on the bulwarks at the corners of the palisade, and looked out over the marsh and the neck at the woods where the diggers had been cut off in the winter. One cut and carried firewood, for the kettles now, not for warmth. At noon the companies came in to eat and went out again. The captains walked their lines and the officers called the names. A man's day belonged to his company from the first drum to the last.

Gates walked the fort under the new order. He had commanded there since the end of May with no title any paper gave him. He had brought the Lawes into the market place, and taken the whole colony down the river toward England, and been turned around in the reach above Mulberry Point. Now the lord governor's commission stood over him. Percy was in the fort as well, up and walking, out of the bed he had kept most of the winter. He had been president there when the palisade leaned and the houses came down for fuel. He was in the market place now while they went up again under another man's captains. The posts went into the holes one after another along the rows.

Somers went down to the landing on the fifteenth of June. The lord governor was sending him back to Bermuda, and with him Samuel Argall, a captain of the fleet, in two ships. They were to bring back hogs and fish. The colony had eaten its own hogs and horses in the winter, down to the last beast inside the palisade, and it would need meat before the next one. Somers knew where the meat was. He had lived on Bermuda from the summer of the wreck to the spring, ten months on islands six hundred miles out to sea. The wild hogs had come down out of the cedar woods there to root along the shore, and there had been fish in the shallows and birds nesting on the rocks, and the hundred and fifty people of the wreck had lived on them. He had brought that company off the islands in two pinnaces of cedar and wreck iron. Now he was going back for the islands' meat.

The ships had been watered and victualed from the lord governor's casks for the voyage out. Their boats lay at the landing below the fort, and the men going with them came down the bank with their bundles and climbed in over the gunwales. Casks of water and meal went down after them. The people at the bank watched the boats pull out to the ships and come back empty. The anchors were weighed on the ebb, and the two ships went down the James under sail. They passed the marsh at the island's lower end and the long reach where the woods came down to the water on both sides. They passed Hog Island, where the colony's hogs had once run loose, and where the four pinnaces had lain at anchor for a night in the first week of June with the fort left empty behind them. The river widened below it toward the bay and the point. Argall missed the islands and fell away to the northward, and Somers reached Bermuda and died there not long after, of a surfeit.

The lord governor fell sick almost at once. He set it down himself, in the Relation he wrote of his time in the country, and he began the list of his troubles with the first of them: "presently after my arrival in James Towne, I was welcommed by a hote and violent Ague". The ague was the fever of the river country, and the fort had known it every summer since the first. It came on as cold. A shaking took the limbs that no blanket stopped, and a man's teeth knocked in his head in the heat of a summer afternoon. Then the cold turned to heat, and the heat burned for hours. Then came a sweat that soaked the bedding through, and a weakness after it that left a man unable to lift his arm. Then came a day or two of quiet. Then the cold again.

Summer on the island was its season. The river in front of the fort ran brackish and warm and foul as the heat came on. The marsh behind bred mosquitoes that came up at dusk in clouds and went through every house and every bed. The water from Smith's well tasted of the marsh. The lord governor lay in his house with the guard at the door and the trumpets quiet, and his gentlemen came and went on the same business more softly. Outside the door the drum still beat the companies out in the morning. The captains still marched them to the woods and the marsh. The colony went on in the order he had given it. He lay inside, shaking.

Kecoughtan lay at the mouth of the river, forty miles below the fort on the north shore, across the water from Point Comfort. The Kecoughtans had not come to the point to trade since the autumn. In the spring Percy had come down meaning to be revenged on them, for men of the colony he said they had treacherously slain, and had found the point fat on crabs and hogs and gone back up the river on other business. The town was still there at the river's mouth, with its fields around it. That summer Gates went down to it by water with a company of men, "beinge desyreous for to be Revendged upon the Indyans att Kekowhatan", in Percy's words. Among the men he took a taborer.

A taborer played a small drum, a tabor, with a pipe. He held the pipe to his lips with one hand and beat the drum with the other, the drum hung from his wrist or his shoulder, and he could play a jig on the two together and dance to it while he played. He was the music of a company on the march at home and of a village fair. This one went down the river in Gates's boats among the soldiers, with their muskets and their corslets and the coils of match, and his drum on his knees.

The boats went down on the ebb and the oars. The soldiers sat close on the thwarts in the heat with their armor on or at their feet, sweating under their helmets, and the river widened around them hour by hour until the shores were far off on either side. The oarsmen pulled in turns. The match was kept lit in the bottom of the boats. Toward the mouth the water grew salt and the swell came in from the bay under the hulls, and the low sand of Point Comfort showed across the water with the palisade of Algernon's Fort on it. On the north shore the woods drew back from the water. Smoke rose above them.

The town stood back from the shore among its fields. Its houses were long and round-roofed, built of saplings bent over and tied at the top and covered with mats and sheets of bark, with a hole in each roof for the smoke. The fields lay all around them in hills. In that season the corn stood green and tall in the hills with the beans climbing the stalks and the squash spreading its leaves underneath. Women worked between the hills with their hoes. Children kept the birds off the corn. Fish weirs of stakes and woven reeds stood in the shallows. Smoke from the cooking fires went straight up out of the roofs in the still air, and dogs barked from the houses when the boats came in sight.

The boats grounded and the soldiers went over the sides into the shallows and up onto the sand. They formed on the shore with their muskets and their match, a line of men in armor on the sand with the sea at their backs, and stood still. The match smoked in the heat. Their officers kept them quiet. Between the line and the fields lay a stretch of open shore and dune grass, and beyond it the first hills of corn and the women stooping in them, who had straightened and were looking. Nobody came out from the town to meet them with mats and speeches, as a town met a visitor it had sent for. What came next is in the same sentence: "he cawsed the Taborer to play and dawnse thereby to Allure the Indyans to come unto him the wch prevayled. And then espyeinge A fitteinge oportunety fell in upon them putt fyve to the sworde wownded many others". The taborer stood out on the sand in front of the soldiers. He put the pipe to his lips and beat the drum, and he danced to his own tune on the open shore. The pipe was thin and high and carried over the water and into the fields. The drum kept the beat under it, light and quick. His feet kicked up the dry sand as he turned. Behind him the line of soldiers stood without moving, their match smoking, and the sun was on their helmets. The people of the town heard it. They came out of the fields and from the houses toward the sound, and stood off at first, and then came nearer, to watch the stranger dancing.

Percy had used nearly those words before. Writing of Powhatan at Pamunkey, where Ratcliffe's men had been shot down carrying their corn to the barge, he said the old king "espyed A fitteinge Tyme".

The pipe stopped. The soldiers fell in upon the people watching. Swords came out on the open sand. Five of the Kecoughtans were killed. Many more were wounded. The rest ran for the corn. Gates had the town.

He took the fields with it. The houses of bent saplings stood empty, their fires still burning under the smoke holes, the mats on the sleeping platforms and the baskets on the floors. Around them the green corn stood unhoed, with nobody of the town left in it. The women who had been working those hills were gone into the woods with their children. The English walked the rows. The ground was good, cleared and planted and tended, and it lay at the mouth of the river where every ship from England came in. Its corn was the colony's now. Five Kecoughtans lay on the sand.

The soldiers kept the town that night. They posted a watch at the edge of the fields where the corn met the woods, and lit fires of their own on the ground among the houses, and slept in their armor or beside it with their muskets in reach. Some of them lay down in the Kecoughtans' houses on the mats. The woods around the fields were dark and full of the noise of insects. Out on the water the boats rode at their grapnels. In the morning the corn stood as it had stood the day before, and the smoke holes in the roofs were cold.

Percy's relation takes Gates home in a single sentence, the one that follows the town: "And then Retourned to James Towne, ageine and shorttly after did take his voyadge for England." Gates had been on Bermuda through the winter the colony starved. He had come up the river in May and found the sixty, and read the Lawes to them in the market place, and taken them down the river with their bundles tied for England. A longboat had turned him back. On the day he left, his boat lay at the landing where the casks had come ashore in June, and the people of the fort were at the bank to see him go, as they had been for Somers. He went down the bank with his gentlemen and his chests and climbed into the boat, and the oars took him out. He had taken the first town of the summer. Now he went down the river again, past Hog Island and Mulberry Point and Kecoughtan with its new masters, past Davis on his point, and out into the bay.

The lord governor kept the ground Gates had taken. He sent Captain Holcroft, one of the captains who had come out in his fleet, to build a fort in the woods near the town. Holcroft's men felled the trees and squared the posts and dug the ditch, the same work the companies were doing at the island, in the same heat. They raised the palisade of split logs on the bank of the ditch, set a gate in it and built a house for the guard inside, and cleared the brush back from the walls so that nobody could come up close under cover. Their axes rang in the woods for weeks. When it was finished De La Warr "named the same Charles foarte in honour of our Kings Matie that now is." Charles was the King's younger son that summer, a boy of nine. Fifteen years later he was king. A second fort went up there too, named Henry for the King's elder son. The colony had two forts at Kecoughtan by the end of the summer, and a garrison in them, and the fields of corn between.

The lord governor's fever went on through the summer. It let him up and took him down again. His council came to his table in his house, and his clerks wrote at it, and the guard in his livery stood at the door. His captains took their fifty men out each morning to the woods and the marsh and brought them back each night. The houses stood again along the market place, thatched and daubed, and the meal went out from his casks. Up the river from the island, on the north shore, the Paspaheghs' town stood in its own fields of green corn. The lord governor gave Percy a commission against the Paspaheghs.