The Starving Time

In the autumn of 1609 the fort on the James held close to five hundred people. By the next spring, by the colonists' own count, about sixty were left. On June 7, 1610 the survivors gave the island up and sailed downriver for England. The next morning a longboat met them in the river and turned them back.

The Starving Time follows the colony from that winter through the five years after it: the martial law that held it together by the drum and the gallows, the war it fought with the towns around it, and the year Powhatan's daughter was held for ransom before she was married in the fort's church. At its center are George Percy, who led the colony through the winter and later wrote it down to answer John Smith, and Sir Thomas Dale, who enforced its laws.

Built from the colonists' own words, from Percy's relation to Hamor's account and a Spanish prisoner's letter sewn into a shoe, and from Powhatan's speeches as the English took them down, this is the true story of how the colony survived, and of what its peace cost.