The Starving Time

The five years in this book were written down by a handful of men, and no two of them wrote for the same reason. One was answering a book that had blamed him. One was a boy writing of the towns he had lived in. One was a lord explaining why he had come home. One was a prisoner writing in secret to his king's ambassador. One was the colony's secretary, praising the government he served, and printing letters from its governor and from the man who married Powhatan's daughter. The Powhatans kept no written record. Their acts can be read in what the English set down; their words survive only as the English took them down, in English, often months or years later. What follows is a short account of who wrote what, and how I have used it.

George Percy is the book's principal witness for its first half. He was president of the colony through the winter of 1609 and deputy governor in 1611, and he left Virginia in April 1612. About 1625 he wrote A Trewe Relacyon for his brother the Earl of Northumberland, carrying the story from the wreck of the Sea Venture to his own departure. He wrote it to answer John Smith, whose Generall Historie had appeared the year before and had put the starving winter at the door of Smith's successors, Percy among them. The manuscript stayed in England for nearly three centuries; a copy reached the Virginia State Library, and Lyon Gardiner Tyler printed it for the first time in his quarterly magazine in 1922. Percy is the only witness to much of what he describes: the store, the boat that broke loose, the raid on Paspahegh and the death of the werowance's wife. He wrote fifteen years after the fact, in his own defense, and he is weighed throughout as an interested witness. On some points he is plainly the better one. Smith says Francis West sailed for England because Powhatan had cut off trade; Percy, who was president when West sailed, says West's own men forced him to it, and I have set both down and said which man was in a position to know. On others he is the only one, and the book says so.

John Smith had sailed for England in October 1609 and never returned to Virginia. His Generall Historie of 1624 nevertheless gives these years a full book, the fourth. For the winter he reprints, with additions, The Proceedings of the English Colonies, the book his companions published at Oxford in 1612; for 1611 to 1614 he abridges Hamor, adding remarks of his own. Smith gave the season its name: "This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time". He also gave it a verdict, that "the occasion was our owne", and his men's book of 1612 had said the same. Against that verdict stand facts the same writers record. Smith says that Powhatan cut off the colony's boats and denied it trade; Percy, that men who went into the woods to dig for roots were killed there. The book sets these side by side and does not choose between them. Where Smith's 1624 abridgement differs from the book he abridged, I have followed the earlier text: Hamor's eight months of provision in the store in May 1611, not Smith's three; Hamor's "about the fift of Aprill" for the wedding, not Smith's "about the first".

The death of John Ratcliffe shows how far the accounts can drift. The Proceedings say only that he and most of his men were slain by Powhatan. Smith in 1624 counts about thirty killed and one survivor, Jeffrey Shortridge. Percy, writing about 1625, has fifty men go and sixteen come back, and alone describes the manner of Ratcliffe's death; he was not there. Henry Spelman was. He was in Powhatan's household when Ratcliffe came, and he tells it twice in his own pages, once briefly and once at length on a last leaf his nineteenth-century editor thought might be the original draft: the barge, the bread and venison, the baskets of corn with their bottoms pushed up, the men hidden in the corn, two of the sixteen escaping overland. The chapter follows Spelman for what happened at Pamunkey and gives Percy's account of Ratcliffe's end as Percy's.

Spelman's Relation of Virginia is the book's one account from inside the chiefdom by someone who lived there. He was a gentleman's son of about fourteen when Smith left him with the chief at the falls in 1609, and he spent most of the next two years with Powhatan and then with the Patawomecks. He wrote probably about 1613; the manuscript was not printed until 1872, in an edition of a hundred copies. He describes houses, meals, planting, hunting, burial and punishment, and a night when his host struck one of his own wives to the ground for beating him. In 1624 Smith wrote that Pocahontas had saved Spelman's life. Spelman, who was there, never mentions her; in his account he escaped by running from Powhatan's men while the Patawomeck king's men held them off. I have given Smith's sentence as Smith's.

Lord De La Warr's Relation is the account he delivered to a court of the Virginia Company in London on June 25, 1611, after he had come home. It is mostly a catalogue of his diseases, written to show that he had not left from fear or sloth, and an account of the colony's prospects for the men who had paid for it. He reported more than two hundred people left in health with ten months' food. The Breife Declaration, as Tyler's note cites it, gives three months' food at short allowance and a hundred and fifty dead during his stay, more than half the settlers. Each paper had a case to make, and the chapter gives both.

Don Diego de Molina came ashore at Point Comfort in the summer of 1611 from a Spanish caravel and was taken in an ambush. Two years later he wrote to the Spanish ambassador in London, in Spanish, a letter that went out sewn between the soles of a shoe. The Spanish original, which Tyler's headnote places in the archives at Simancas, is quoted here in Tyler's English translation of 1907. Molina counted the colony's forts, guns and garrisons for a Spanish fleet, and his low opinion of the English was the opinion of a man urging his king to destroy them. His figures are always his. Percy, writing much later, says Molina was sent to England soon after his capture; Molina's own letter is dated from Virginia in May 1613, and I have followed the letter.

Ralph Hamor was secretary of the colony. His True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia appeared in London in 1615. It is the fullest account of the capture of Pocahontas, the ransom, the voyage up the Pamunkey, the marriage and the peace. Smith's later version is drawn from it. Hamor wrote it in praise of the government he served. He was not aboard Argall's ship on the Potomac and says so; he heard the story, he writes, "by the relation I had". He was on the Pamunkey in 1614, and he was in the room at Matchcot when Powhatan refused Dale a second daughter. His account of Powhatan's words there is the longest record of Powhatan's speech in the sources of this book, and Smith's 1624 version of the same speeches rewrites it; the book sets Hamor's. Hamor's dates for the spring of 1614 do not quite fit together. He has the boats leave the Pamunkey with "the time of the yeere being then Aprill", Powhatan send Opachisco "some ten daies after" the news reached him, and the wedding fall "about the fift of Aprill". The three fit only if the news reached Powhatan while the boats were still in his river. I have set down Hamor's phrases in his order and not tried to work out the days.

Hamor printed three letters at the back of his book. Sir Thomas Dale's, of June 18, 1614, gives the Pamunkey voyage from the commander's side and the one set of her words that the records of these years give, what Dale says she said ashore to her own people. They are always given here as Dale's report. Dale and Hamor tell the same days on the Pamunkey in different orders; I have kept the two accounts apart rather than merge them. Alexander Whitaker's letter says she was baptized but gives no date or place, and no other source in this book does either. John Rolfe's letter to Dale, asking leave to marry her, is undated. Tyler reprinted it in 1907 from Hamor, and I have quoted Hamor's printing.

One more disagreement concerns the man Rolfe met when Dale sent him to Powhatan in March 1614. Hamor, who was on the voyage, writes that the envoys were not admitted to Powhatan but spoke with "his brother Apachamo, his successor". Smith, abridging Hamor ten years later, gives the brother as Opechancanough. Hamor's name is the only one in the earlier source, and the book keeps it.

The punishments of Dale's years come from two documents that were written for different purposes and are kept apart here. Percy lists the deaths Dale ordered for men who ran away to the Powhatans or robbed the store. In 1624 the colony's General Assembly, answering a London declaration that praised the Company's first twelve years, described the "most severe and Crewell lawes" of that time and the men put to death under them, among them a man who stole two or three pints of oatmeal and had a bodkin thrust through his tongue. The Assembly's paper names no governor and gives that case no date, and I have not given it one. Smith defended Dale in the same year. Each document is quoted as its own.

The book has no Powhatan documents. Powhatan's answers to the ransom, his consent to the marriage and his speeches at Matchcot are as Hamor and Dale recorded them, filtered through an interpreter and through men who had reasons to make him sound as they did. His council stays closed: the record gives what he sent and said, not what was said around his fire. The year Pocahontas spent in English hands is known only from the men who held her; Chapter 18 tells it from their pages. Other traditions of her captivity exist, among them a Mattaponi oral history published in 2007; this book rests on the written record of the period. Six passages stand where that record is silent: a Paspahegh hunter on the paths around the starving fort, a woman of the 1609 fleet inside it, a Paspahegh woman after her town was burned, an Appamattuck household watching Henrico go up across the water, a man at a fish weir in the Patawomeck country, and a laborer in Dale's work gangs. None of them is a named person. They are built from what Spelman and the colonists recorded of how those places worked, and kept to what such a person could have seen and done.

The book gives no total for the dead of the starving winter. The three witnesses agree on the figures that bracket it: about five hundred people in the autumn, about sixty in May. I have given their figures, and not done the subtraction.

The colonists' writings are quoted from Tyler's Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (1907), for Smith, the Proceedings, De La Warr, Molina and the Assembly; from Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine (1922) for Percy; from James F. Hunnewell's edition (1872) for Spelman; and from the first edition of 1615 for Hamor and the letters he printed. Spelling and punctuation are those of the edition, with three exceptions in type. The long s is printed as s. Hamor's printer set w as a double v in italic passages, and it is printed as w. Percy's manuscript used a flourished p for per, pro and par; it is printed as p with the rest of the word in square brackets, as in "p[ro]vissyon". Spelman's editor printed some words of his own, and some of Spelman's false starts, in square brackets; they are left out of the quotations. Page references in the notes are to these editions.