Over the Seas

by Josephine Bell

  Alec found in Captain John Smith a friend of a kind he had not looked for. Though Smith was no seaman he soon got Alec’s story from him in fuller detail than Captain Newport.

  ‘If you made boats on that Highland loch where they kept you a prisoner, you should be capable of building us a pinnace. We would welcome another and maybe another shallop, having but one of each as our sole transport over water when the barque sets out again, as she will when Master Newport hath his new cargo stowed.’

  He made a face of such disgust as he said this that Alec laughed.

  ‘Why such disfavour?’ he asked?

  ‘Because he thinks he hath discovered gold,’ the Captain said angrily, ‘and ’tis nought but gilded dirt.’

  He explained that the samples Newport had carried to England before had been assayed and declared not to contain gold. My Lord Salisbury had confirmed this finding.

  ‘If Master Secretary says so it must be true,’ Alec said. ‘He is a man of great wisdom and great integrity is my Lord Salisbury.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I have met him, aye. At his great house, Theobalds, where he hath entertained our Jamie.’

  ‘You speak thus of the King?’

  Alec looked surprised at the stiff way Captain Smith spoke. ‘Aye, so. We followed him all the way to England. Francis Leslie and I. But they all call him that in London. The Scots, I mean, maybe the English now, as well.’

  After a moment’s silence, Smith said, ‘You should seek out Master Wingfield. He hath a great pride in his gentle birth, too great to allow him fellowship with lesser men. But thy familiarity with the greatest of all—Master Wingfield would be astonished.’

  ‘I have no wish to astonish any man,’ Alec said, turning away. ‘Also I hear Master Wingfield plans to go back to England. But about that pinnace—’

  ‘I did but jest,’ Captain Smith said, laying a friendly hand on Alec’s arm. ‘Come thee down to the water. We have the old pinnace ashore to careen her. Thou may’st see the construction. Matthew Scrivenor approves my project. And there is a shipwright among Master Newport’s crew who hath the proper plans. Come.’

  So for several weeks the settlement, stirred into active life by the newcomers, resounded to the thump of axe on tree, the screech of double saw, the knock of hammer on nail. New frame houses rose over the ashes of the old and there was a great clearance of rubbish that had been dropped into the snow when the ground was too hard to bury it.

  Captain Newport made a ‘State’ visit to Powhatan and renewed his acquaintance with the savage potentate, making him a present of an English boy of thirteen, whom he called his son, as a token of the peaceful intention of the colony. Like most of the Councillors he disapproved of Captain Smith’s active severity towards the natives. The London Company had advised kindness, but Smith knew from experience that the Indians were not to be trusted. Quite plainly they wanted to get rid of the foreigners. Smith both understood and sympathised with this wish but since he had come as a conqueror he intended to behave as such. He therefore continued to plan voyages of discovery in spite of much obstruction.

  Though the cold persisted through March the days grew longer and the sun’s warmth melted the frosts of overnight showing vivid green patches of grass where the white carpet, was melted away. Birds flew from the forest, great robins the size of English blackbirds and blue jays, bright as kingfishers at home; all eager to pick up any scraps of food the careless settlers threw outside their doors.

  Little groups of Indians came too, not seeking food but, bringing it, turkeys and deer and those roots the settlers called ‘earth apples’ as well as corn. These they bartered for the cheap gewgaws the Company had sent out. Some managed to obtain swords by this method, the owners too greedy or too careless or too trusting to imagine the steel would ever be used against them.

  Before the spring was fully established Captain Newport was ready to sail. Alec went to him on board the Gift of God as he waited with hatches closed on his cargo for the tide to turn in the river.

  ‘I have a favour to ask, sir,’ he said humbly, for he saw the captain was tired after the initial troubles, the calamity of the fire and the later obstruction he had met with on this visit.

  ‘A passage home again?’ asked Newport.

  Alec flushed angrily.

  ‘Nay, sir. I’ll no’ leave the work here for any man.’

  ‘I’d not blame thee, lad,’ Newport smiled wanly. ‘Well, tell me the favour.’

  ‘To speak a word of thanks to Master Angus Leslie for his kind letter—’

  ‘Can’st not write it? I have too much already to remember.’

  ‘I have neither paper nor pen nor ink, sir.’

  Captain Newport fetched all three and laid them on the table. ‘Make it short, Sandy,’ he ordered. ‘We sail on the hour.’

  So Alec wrote briefly of his safe arrival, of the plight of the settlement as he found it and the rapid improvement now being made. He expressed strong hopes for his future in this land of exciting promise and his wish to know more of the welfare of his friends at home, particularly Francis. He signed the letter with his own name and formally, as a gentleman should.

  ‘Nay, nay,’ Captain Newport said, when Alec offered to let him read it. ‘Seal it up, Sandy lad. Seal it up and I’ll lock it away and put it out of mind until we sail into Tilbury in five weeks time if the wind serves and the storms be not too great.’

  As he left the ship he saw Master Wingfield and Captain Gabriel Archer, the so-called Recorder of the settlement, standing by the bulwarks. They turned away when they saw him so he passed deliberately close without a greeting or a word of farewell and saw Wingfield’s cheek darken and Archer lay a restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘They be no loss,’ Alec told Mistress Sugden at supper that evening. ‘They it was who made the hubbub our good Captain Smith calls a garboil. And an excellent word for that stirring up of evil passions and threatened murders, though Wingfield too was like to suffer death for his arrogance.’

  ‘They did shoot one of the councillors, I am told,’ said Polly brightly. ‘And him put on the council in London.’

  ‘Captain Kendall, that was?’

  ‘Aye, a proper villain, they say, who would have sold our settlement to Spain. But as they was ahanging that poor wretch of a blacksmith for some lesser fault, he up and accused this Kendall. So they let him off and shot the traitor.’

  ‘A fine stirring tale for a maiden to relish!’ Alec laughed. ‘And mark thee, mistress, how thy daughter speaks of “our” settlement! Where learned ye all this, Poll?’

  She was blushing scarlet at his banter but answered bravely enough, ‘From Mistress Forrest or rather from Anne Burrows, who had it from the lady.’

  ‘They leave again with Master Wingfield I take it, seeing her ladyship’s cousin, Gosnold, is no longer living?’

  ‘That she will not,’ Mistress Sugden declared. ‘I was with her all day until now, arranging Master Wingfield’s house, which he hath bequeathed her, to her liking. She told me, but spread it not abroad for her safety, that this Wingfield had a fine store of food hid away that he dared not take out before the people. He never went short while they starved.’

  Alec sprung to his feet, but the two women clung to him.

  ‘Alack, what have I said!’ Mistress Sugden cried. ‘She swore me to silence and here have I blabbed it out! When the ship sails she told me she means to hand it all in secret to the preacher so that Master Hunt may give it by small parts to those most in need. None other must hear of it or the good lady will be put in peril.’

  Alec, whose first thought had been to stop the ship and have Wingfield hanged at the yardarm, gave way to their pleadings and sat down again. Another death, another of Captain Smith’s garboils, would do no good. Let the villain and Archer, the would-be murderer with his twisted law, go back to England. With a great feeling, besides, of the value of distance, he hoped they would never be troubled again by those two.

&
nbsp; The sense of distance, of the immensity of this strange new world, came upon Alec many times in the days that followed and chiefly through his association with William Trent.

  When Mistress Sugden had gone to her brother again on the morning after their arrival and the fire that followed, he had been able to speak to her, though she was not quite sure, even then, if he knew her for his sister. He was clearly grateful for the gifts she brought, of food and clothing and for her insistence upon cleaning his dreadful little hovel. After a few days she invited him to join them when their new house would be ready, the improvements finished. He did not respond to that offer, but when the second storey was erected, the first of its kind in James Town, Mistress Sugden caught sight of Will, standing outside the door, gazing upwards. She went to him, calling his name and he cried, ‘Meg! Meg! Am I come home?’ and burst into tears for the second time.

  He joined them then, his memory roused by the sight of a building so like in general shape to the farmhouse of his youth, though made of wood, not mellow honey-grey stone. He acknowledged his sister, he listened to news of Witton, but gave no account of his own wanderings.

  Until one day, when he had taken Alec to visit the local werowance, or headman, of the Pamunkeys, a friendly tribe who lived locally under the overlordship of Powhatan, with whom the settlement had now signed a treaty of peace.

  The visit was prompted by Alec’s wish to find seeds for planting. Newport had brought some sacks of suitable grain for sowing, but part had been burned and part stolen for food. In any case the local varieties would be more likely to succeed, both Meg Sugden and Will insisted.

  The track to the wigwam of the werowance, Opecancanough lay through the forest, a dense wall of great trees on either side that seemed to close in behind and stand against them before as they moved along. Alec was frankly nervous; he was armed with a pistol, an unfamiliar weapon to him, but knew it would be of little aid, even skilfully used, against a planned ambush. He was astonished at Will’s courage in risking another capture and he was equally afraid for his own safety.

  When they came out from the forest into the clearing round the Indian village Alec saw that the spring had truly arrived. Fruit trees in blossom, lilacs and dogwood made a picture that stirred his heart so long starved of natural colour. He stood amazed while Will went forward to find the Pamunkey chief.

  Later, presenting Alec, Will spoke to Opecancanough in his own language. He explained their quest. Alec produced the necessary price in beads and other gewgaws and they received leather bags of peas, beans and corn with a promise of plants of tobacco and gourds and pumpkins as the season advanced. They smoked a pipe of peace, sitting on the ground and passing it to one another in turn. Will made a speech of thanks and farewell and they started on the track for home.

  When they had gone a few miles, however, Will turned aside, saying, ‘Follow me.’ He led Alec to a small clearing at the centre of which lay a flat stone.

  ‘I fell over it as I walked, not knowing my way,’ Will said. ‘Look what is carved there.’

  Alec stooped and read. Chipped in the surface was a date and an arrow pointing the way they had just come.

  ‘What …? Why…?’

  ‘They tell me there was a settlement of white men by the sea, but it did not prosper. This was a long time ago. The tale hath come down, from the grandfathers and grandmothers. The people rose and destroyed their settlement and started to walk inland. They left this stone as they passed. There is another stone far to the west with another date. There may be more.’

  ‘Roanoke!’ Alec said straightening up. ‘The lost colony they call it. I heard the tale in London when we spoke of Raleigh.’

  But Will was not listening. He was trudging back to the track and Alec ran to join him, for the feeling of immensity had come down upon him again, a realisation of a land of limitless forest, of immense rivers and a picture of a small defenceless alien group walking doggedly into the unknown, leaving a flat stone at long intervals as the only mark of their passage.

  On April 20th, 1608, ten days after Captain Newport left for home, a tall barque sailed into the James River. She was Newport’s sister ship Phoenix, with Captain Nelson, her master on the poop.

  When he came ashore he explained that by reason of sickness among his crew and passengers and his need for water he had stayed for the winter on a small island in the West Indies.

  The Phoenix was most welcome in James Town. She brought forty more settlers, all hale and hearty from their prudent voyage, besides stores that were added most generously to the common need. Captain Nelson was sorry to have missed Newport and decided to go back to England as soon as he had a suitable cargo.

  So once more the gentlemen as well as the commoners turned to tree felling and splitting and loaded Phoenix with red cedar. Captain Smith wrote a long account of his recent explorations, trials and dangers. He described the visiting Indians as arrant thieves deserving hanging, but spared by order of a majority of Council. He reported that the boy hostage, Thomas Savage, had left Powhatan and returned to James Town, to everyone’s relief.

  Captain Smith enclosed with this letter a set of maps, very valuable and remarkably accurate, as later voyages proved.

  On June 2nd Phoenix sailed for home bearing, as well as the red cedar, Councillor John Martin, who still complained of the illness that had carried off his son.

  Chapter Eleven

  All that early spring while Mistress Sugden settled to the work of her new house and the care of her brother, Polly found less to do at home. There were no cows to milk and so no dairy. There were very few pots and pans to polish. Alec had laid a wooden floor over the previous hard-packed mud, but his work on the new pinnace had taken him away before he had planed it down and sanded it, so the scrubbing was hard, disagreeable and unrewarding.

  Consequently Polly, though willing enough, found her mother less and less able to employ her in the house, though stricter than ever in forbidding her to wander abroad alone.

  ‘If I may not help thee, Mother,’ Polly complained, ‘why may I not tend our garden patch? Thou know’st I can hoe as well as any boy and the seeds Uncle Will hath brought grow bravely. Happen we may have barley enough to brew us some ale at harvest.’

  ‘Ask thy uncle, child,’ Mistress Sugden answered. ‘The seasons in this heathen land be not as we know them at home. Already the sun be hot as June; high in t’ sky too and it not yet May. I reckon the blades thou’st seen be nought but this everlasting corn, as they name it.’

  ‘That will not cook soft,’ Polly declared, with a face of disgust.

  ‘Will saith we mun eat it from the cob before it be well ripe, as the natives do. I have a mind to try it that way.’

  ‘May I go hoe our plot, then?’ Polly asked, thinking her mother might now relent.

  ‘That thou may not!’

  Then I will go visit Mistress Forrest. She knows how to employ me, mending her gowns and Anne’s.’

  Mistress Sugden had no objection to this. The former president’s house was within sight of her own door and she could watch her daughter’s progress thither until she was safely within doors.

  Polly and Anne Burrows had become close friends. They had, after the first few days of sea-sickness, been drawn together in companionship on the long voyage to this outlandish place, as they considered it. Neither would have stayed there a day longer if they had been given the choice. In fact Anne had cried almost unceasingly for two days after Mistress Forrest had decided not to accompany Master Wingfield when Captain Newport sailed for England. It did not occur to either girl to disobey parent or employer, but they grumbled heartily when they were together.

  ‘This folly can never succeed,’ Polly declared on the morning she had been denied a visit to their plantation. ‘Do we not lack every necessity? Without beasts to plough with, to give us milk and butter and cheese, to supply dung for the earth—’

  ‘Thou’rt a true farmer’s daughter,’ Mistress Forrest said, coming upon t
he two girls as they sat stitching.

  ‘That I am, madam,’ Polly said with some pride. ‘And right gladly would I tend our poor plants, but my mother forbids me to go outdoors alone.’

  ‘And rightly so in this company of men, to whom you twain must be a sore temptation,’ said Mistress Forrest frankly.

  The girls blushed and exchanged glances. When Mistress Forrest, having inspected their work and made one or two suggestions left them together again, Anne said, ‘She keeps me confined as closely as thy mother, Poll, but yet I have already an admirer I do not altogether hate.’

  She giggled as she spoke and then, to forestall Polly’s evident curiosity she said, ‘Hast not one thyself, Poll? Did he not follow thee and thy mother into this unknown, unfriendly spot?’

  Polly’s expression changed. Her cheeks paled, she turned her face away.

  ‘Sandy’s mind was made up or ever my mother thought to seek out Uncle Will. He hath met with great perils, great hardships. He hath no thought for me or any wish for a wife. Mayhap there is some great sorrow in that past he never speaks of. There is indeed a mystery. He hath never told us fully why he changed his name after we left Plymouth, nor which be the true one.’

  ‘But he told thy mother!’ Anne exclaimed. ‘He was an outlaw for killing a great lord’s servant and he killed again in the Highlands of Scotland. I think he be too dangerous for a husband.’

  ‘He is as gentle as a lamb,’ Polly protested, defending him.

  But Anne only laughed at her. Polly tried again but she faltered and could not go on. She remembered her early daydreams in which Sandy Nimmo, as he now called himself, walked with her about the garden of the Cow and Calf and told her of his love. She remembered with bitterness spoiling her gratitude how he had saved her from Ben Flinders who would have forced her into marriage. He had punished Ben so that the evil-intentioned lout had not come near her again; he had been kind, taking her to the edge of the harvest field and watching her reach the inn. But he had not comforted her as she longed for him to do. He was always kind, never loving. So now she hung her head, while her tears fell on the garment she was sewing.