The Starving Time

The soldiers loaded the boats at the island's landing on the ninth of August. Two boats lay against the bank with their oars shipped, and the men came down to them by companies with their muskets on their shoulders and their match coiled at their belts. They carried powder in flasks and bandoliers, bullets in pouches, swords at their sides and the day's bread in their snapsacks. Some wore corslets and morions, and the sun was hot on the iron. A drum went aboard, and the colors furled on their staff, and a few pikes were laid along the thwarts. The men climbed in over the gunwales and sat close on the benches with their knees together. There were seventy of them in the two boats. Davis was among the captains. Percy came down the bank among his officers with a truncheon in his hand, the short staff a commander carried. He held the lord governor's commission, drawn up in the house where De La Warr lay with his fever. The seventy were his to command.

He had been president of this fort through the winter. He had spent most of it in his bed, with Archer and Martin carrying his business in and out of his room. Now he was going up the river in his armor, on his own feet. A man of the country went down the bank last, between two soldiers. He was to be their guide to the town. The provost marshal, the officer who kept an army's prisoners and its punishments, led him by a hand lock, an iron on the wrist with a chain to it. He sat down beside him in the stern and kept the chain in his fist. The people of the fort stood along the bank to watch, as they had stood for Somers and for Gates.

The island lay in the Paspaheghs' own country. Their werowance was its chief, and his town lay up the river on the north shore. The boats pushed off and turned their bows upstream. The oarsmen leaned into the stroke, and the island fell behind them with its palisade and its church roof and the smoke of the kettles. The river was wide and brown and slack in the August heat. The marsh went by on the north side, and then the woods came down to the water. Herons stood in the shallows and lifted off as the boats came abreast. Creeks opened in the bank and closed again behind them. The soldiers who were not rowing sat with their muskets between their knees and their helmets in their laps, sweating in their wool. The officers kept them quiet. The sergeants watched the match, and blew on it when it dulled, and kept it away from the powder. Percy sat in the stern of the leading boat with the colors at his feet. The oarsmen changed at the benches in turn. Behind their backs the sun went down over the woods ahead, and the river darkened, and the boats went on up it.

They landed that night, within three miles of the town. The boats ran in under the bank in the dark, and the soldiers went over the sides into the shallows with their muskets held up out of the water. They came up onto the mud and the roots, wet to the thigh, and stood among the trees. The boatkeepers stayed with the boats. The officers found their men by voice, in low tones, name by name, and got them into some order on the ground under the trees. A pike knocked on a trunk and somebody cursed it. The drum was carried muffled under the drummer's arm. The colors stayed furled.

Percy drew them up into battalia, the soldiers' word for a body of men in ranks and files, and he set a captain or a lieutenant at the head of every file. Each file was a short column of men one behind another, and each leader knew his own. Then they marched toward the town. The guide went at the front with the provost marshal holding his chain, and the files came on behind him in the dark. The path ran through woods and across low ground where the mud took a man's boots to the ankle and let them go with a suck. Branches caught at the pikes. The men kept their match covered in their hands so that the glowing ends would not show, and went on with their breathing loud and their armor knocking. Men stumbled on roots and were caught by the man behind. Nobody spoke above a whisper. The woods were full of the noise of insects, and the frogs in the low ground stopped as the column came up to them and started again when it had passed.

Some way on, Percy came to mistrust the guide. The man was leading them, he believed, out of the way. He went up to the front of the column in the dark with his truncheon. The files halted behind him and stood. He beat the guide with the truncheon, there on the path, and threatened to cut off his head. The provost marshal held the chain while he did it. The guide altered his course. After that he brought them the right way, and near the town.

They halted short of it. Through the trees ahead the ground opened into fields, and beyond the fields stood the shapes of the houses, low and dark against the sky. The smell of banked fires came across the corn. Percy called his leaders to him and gave his orders in a low voice. Every leader was to draw away his file before him and beset the houses, so that none of the people inside might escape. None was to give the alarm until Percy himself had come up to them with the colors. The leaders went back to their files. The files went off one after another into the dark, along the edge of the fields and in between the hills of corn, until they had the town inside a ring of men. The corn hid them. Percy waited at the edge of the woods with the colors and the drum while they went. It took time to put seventy men around a town in the dark without a sound. The files had to feel their way between the hills, around the fallen stalks and the hoes left lying in the rows, and each leader had to find his own place in the ring and hold his men there. Percy could not see them go. He could see the dark mass of the corn and the darker shapes of the roofs above it, and a faint glow at a smoke hole here and there where a fire was banked for the night. A dog stirred somewhere among the houses and settled. Behind him the ensign held the furled colors against his shoulder, and the drummer stood with his hand flat on the drumhead. Then he went forward himself, through the corn toward the houses, with the ensign carrying the colors behind him. The leaves of the corn were wet and rasped against his armor.

When he came up, he appointed one of his captains to give the alarm. The captain did it with a pistol. He stepped out from the corn with it, close under the nearest roof, and the soldiers in the ring blew on their match and brought their swords out of the scabbards.

The shot went off among the houses. The files fell in from every side. Men came out of the doorways into swords. They were cut down at their own doors. Almost all the rest ran for the woods. The dead were fifteen, or sixteen.

The soldiers went from house to house through the doorways and out again. Some of the people who ran went straight through the corn and into the woods beyond, and were gone. The houses emptied. The fires inside them, stirred up and kicked about, threw light out of the doorways onto the trampled ground.

Percy had the drum beat. The ensign shook out the colors on their staff and held them up where they could be seen against the firelight from the doorways. The drummer struck up, and the sound went out over the fields and the dark houses, and the soldiers came in toward it. Percy drew them all in to the colors. They came out of the houses and the corn by files, with their swords in their hands and their match lit, and stood to their places around the ensign. The officers called their names and counted their files. Percy's lieutenant came in among them, and he brought prisoners with him. They were the werowance's wife and her children and one man of the town. The soldiers stood around them. Percy rebuked the lieutenant for sparing them. His orders had been that no one in the houses should escape. The lieutenant answered that he had brought them into Percy's custody, and now Percy might do with them what he pleased. Percy had the man's head cut off. It was done there by the colors. The man's body lay on the ground of his own town.

Then Percy broke up his files. He set his soldiers to burn the houses and to cut down the corn that grew about the town. The men went into the houses with brands from the hearths and put them to the mats that hung on the walls and lay on the sleeping platforms. The mats were dry with the summer, and the bark on the roofs above them was drier. The fire ran up the walls and along the frames of the roofs, and the houses burned from the inside out. Smoke rolled up over the clearing and hung in the fields. What the houses held went with them: the baskets and the pots, the skins on the platforms, the bows hung from the roof poles, the strings of dried fish, last year's corn in its storage baskets, whatever had been left behind in the running. The heat drove the soldiers back from the doorways. They stood off and watched the roofs, and moved on to the next house with fresh brands. Roof after roof fell in. The frames of bent saplings stood a little while in the fire after the bark had gone, and then those fell too.

The corn was the longer work. It stood in its hills all around the town, higher than a man's head in August, the ears filling on the stalks, the bean vines wound up through it and the squash leaves broad underneath. The soldiers went into it with their swords and hacked at the stalks near the ground, and pulled down what they did not cut, and trampled the hills. The beans came down with the corn they climbed. The squash were kicked off their vines. A soldier could clear a stretch of the field in the time it took to grow tired, and then another man took his place. Their arms ached and their hands blistered on the sword grips, and the sap of the stalks stuck to the blades. Some of the seventy had come up the river from a fort where the store had given out half a can of meal a day. They cut the corn down and left it lying in the rows. The fields went down one hill at a time, and what was left of them lay flat, green and broken, in the smoke. The officers walked the rows behind the men and pointed to what was still standing.

When it was done Percy marched his men back toward the boats with the werowance's wife and her children among them. They went back by the way the guide had brought them, the three miles to the river, the files closed up, the burning behind them. The way was easier going out, in the tracks the files had made coming in. The pikes caught at the branches again. The soldiers carried their muskets on their shoulders now and let their match burn, and talked among themselves in the files, and the officers let them talk. The children walked with their mother between the soldiers, or were carried. The smoke followed the column into the woods and thinned among the trees. At the shore the boatkeepers brought the boats in under the bank. The soldiers climbed aboard by files and took up their places on the benches again, and handed their muskets in after them. The pikes went in along the thwarts and the colors were laid down in the stern. The oarsmen took their oars. The men were tired and black with smoke, their hands cut and blistered, their wool wet through from the night's wading and dried again in the heat of the burning. They had been on their feet since the landing. The woman and the children were put in among them.

No sooner were they shipped than the soldiers began to murmur, because the werowance's wife and her children had been spared. A council was called. Percy wrote: "itt was Agreed upon to putt the Children to deathe the wch was effected by Throweinge them overboard and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water yett for all this Crewellty the Sowldiers weare nott well pleased And I had mutche to doe To save the quenes lyfe for thatt Tyme."

The soldiers sat at their oars and on their benches with the woman among them, and the boats pushed off from the bank and turned downstream. They went down some two miles on the current. There Percy sent Davis ashore with most of the soldiers. The boats ran in to the bank, and Davis's men went over the sides into the shallows as they had the night before. Arrows came at them out of the woods as they came in, from bowmen they could not see, and fell among them in the water and on the mud. Davis got his men up the bank and formed, and the muskets went off into the trees. He put the bowmen to flight within a short time and came ashore without further opposition. Percy stayed aboard. He had been wearied before the day began, and he was no great walker at the best of times. The woman stayed aboard with him and the boatkeepers. Davis marched his men about fourteen miles into the country. They cut down the corn and burned the houses there, and the temples with the images in them. Among them was a great temple clean and neatly kept, a thing Percy had seldom seen in those parts. Percy waited at the boats while the march lasted. The woman sat in the boat on the river while the smoke went up inland. Then Davis brought his men back aboard, and the boats went on down the river to the island.

The lord governor was not well. By the time the boats came back he had left his house to lie aboard one of his ships at anchor off the fort, and they rowed out to her on their way in. The fort lay beyond her on its island with its palisade and its church roof, as the boats had left it. The ship stood high over the boats as they came alongside, her sides tarred and her gunports shut, and the oarsmen held them off her planking with their blades. The men at her rail looked down at the boats full of soldiers black with smoke, and at the woman among them. De La Warr was glad of their safe return. Yet he seemed discontented that the woman had been spared, Percy wrote, as "Capteyne Davis towlde me and thatt itt was my Lords pleasure thatt we sholde see her dispatched The way he thowghte beste to Burne her." The message came to Percy by Davis. Percy answered the first part of it that he had seen so much bloodshed that day that now, in cold blood, he desired to see no more. In cold blood meant with the heat of the fight gone out of him. He had stood by the colors while a man's head was cut off, and watched the houses burn and the corn go down, and been in the boats when the council was called. To the second he answered that "for to Burne her I did not howlde itt fitteinge butt either by shott or Sworde to geve her A quicker dispatche". Then he turned away from Davis.

Davis took the woman ashore with two soldiers. The boat put them on the bank below the fort, and the three men walked her up from the water into the woods. The rest stayed at the landing with the boats. In the woods they put her to the sword. The two soldiers came back to the landing with Davis. The burning had come to Percy as the lord governor's pleasure, and the death came back to him as the lord governor's direction, and both came in Davis's mouth. Percy wrote his relation about 1625, and he set Davis's word and his own side by side: "althoughe Capte: Davis towlde me itt was my Lords direction yett I ame p[er]swaded to the contrary." He had commanded the boats.

Up the river on the north shore, the Paspaheghs' town lay in ash among its cut corn. The frames of the houses stood black over the hearths, where the fires had burned out. The mats were gone, and the bark, and the baskets of last year's corn. The stalks lay where they had fallen across the hills, wilting in the August sun, the bean vines still wound through them and the squash rotting under the leaves. Inland, on Davis's fourteen miles, the houses and the temples were ash as well. The smoke had gone off over the woods. The hills were still in their rows. There was no one in the fields.