Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  It was a perfect confluence of bad fortune, brought about by the fact that Percy was in over his head. On top of his improvidence in failing to set aside food for the winter and in letting the nets fall into disrepair, his administration had given Powhatan confidence that the English could be beaten. If Powhatan had once merely suspected it with the departure of Smith, the only Englishman who had seemed a serious adversary, the chief no longer needed to rest on gut feelings and suspicions. The ease with which Powhatan had driven the English from Nansemond and the falls, the ease with which he had defeated Ratcliffe: all this made it clear that he could starve the English out with no fear of repercussions.

  Powhatan’s men released some of the English boats at Jamestown from their moorings, hampering the ability of the colonists to mount their own raids or to reach out to his enemies for help. Powhatan attacked Hog Isle, an island that had been stocked with sixty or so free-roaming hogs as a backup food source the previous spring, during Smith’s administration. The hogs by then numbered in the hundreds, until the natives slaughtered them all. It was a moot point, in a sense, since the colonists had evidently not been drawing on Hog Isle for sustenance in the first place; they were too fearful of straying from the fort. Although Powhatan did not conduct any full-scale attacks on Jamestown—unnecessary under his strategy of starvation—his men did make opportunistic raids on any small groups that they found.

  Some hungry colonists robbed the storehouse, for which Percy had them put to death. As the stores dwindled, the colonists looked to any source of food that was at hand. First they consumed the colony’s horses, cats, and dogs. Next were the rats and mice. Then came the leather of their shoes and boots. A few hardy souls left the fort to tromp through the snowy woods in search of snakes; if they did not make it back, it was that many fewer mouths to be fed.

  A quirk of Elizabethan and Jacobean fashion among English gentlemen provided a source of nourishment for some. Around their necks they wore a ruff, a pleated circular collar usually nine inches wide or more. To keep the ruffs in properly stiff form, the gentlemen (or their servants) washed them in starch, brought over from the old country. The starch turned out to be edible, and so down the hatch it went, in the form of a “gluey porridge.”

  While en route to the New World, the founding colonists of 1607 had been apprehensive of the cannibalistic Caribs who resided on the islands of Dominica and Nevis in the West Indies. When cannibalism did come to Jamestown, though, it was not brought by indigenous “savages”; it was practiced by the colonists’ own desperate countrymen. “Now famine beginning [began] to look pale and ghastly in every face [so] that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible,” Percy recalled. Under the right conditions, it was a short step from eyeing rats and mice to eyeing the freshly fallen corpses. An untold number of the English fed on the meat of their dead fellows. After one native was killed during an attack and buried, a group of colonists dug him up several days later and ate him.

  A man by the name of Collins—probably Henry Collins, gentleman—cast a hungry stare at his pregnant wife and murdered her in her sleep. He then chopped apart her remains, salted them, and feasted on them. He stopped short of consuming his own child, whose body he had first removed from its mother’s womb and dropped into the river under the cover of night. It is pleasing to note that when Collins’s depravity was discovered, Percy had him hung by his thumbs with weights on his feet until he confessed, and then had him executed. Virginia Company propaganda would later seek to minimize the incident, claiming that Collins had killed his wife because he hated her, not because he was hungry; that he had dismembered her only to conceal the evidence; and that a search of his house had refuted his excuse of hunger by uncovering “a good quantity of meal, oatmeal, beans, and peas.”13

  For those with the moral compass to keep them from eating other humans, the reward was usually slow death. Some dug their own graves, lay in them, and waited for the end to come. Others ran away to the natives, expecting succor from the colony’s enemies—but those days were over. They found instead that death awaited them at the natives’ hands. Percy saw a colonist named Hugh Pryse, at the end of his tether, come to the fort’s public square, “crying out that there was no God, alleging that if there were a God He would not suffer His creatures, whom He made and framed, to endure those miseries, and to perish for want of food and sustenance.” Pryse went into the woods later that day to root around for something to eat; when his body was discovered, it was still shot through with the arrows that the natives had used to kill him, and had been torn apart by wolves or other roving animals.14

  By March 1610, six months after Smith had gone, sixty colonists out of five hundred in Jamestown were left alive—plus, of course, Francis West and the lucky thirty-six in his party who had absconded. The mortality rate for the winter, in other words, had been around 80 percent. What made the Starving Time doubly tragic was that it could have been avoided with astute leadership: when Percy worked up the gumption that month to visit James Davis at Point Comfort, he was dumbfounded to discover that the men there were hale and hearty. They had been living well on Chesapeake Bay crabs and their own hogs.

  Percy berated Davis for “not regarding our wants and miseries at all,” but the real lesson was that the Starving Time never had to happen. Even with all the colonists’ improvidence, Smith’s policy of dispersal would have gotten them through the winter if it had been sustained. That would have required an effective defense of the outposts at Nansemond and the falls, which the new leaders had been too timid to undertake. Instead, Percy, Martin, and West had pursued an incoherent response to the natives’ hostility, a course that alternated between craven retreat and random atrocity—with disastrous results. Added to that was Ratcliffe’s tactical incompetence.

  “It were too vile to say what we endured,” wrote the anonymous reporter, “but the occasion was only our owne, for want of providence, industrie, and government, and not the barrennesse and defect of the countrie, as is generally supposed. . . . Had we been in Paradice it selfe (with those governours) it would not have been much better with us.”15

  10

  RESTORATION

  For the voyage of the 1609 resupply, a council of the ships’ captains and pilots had decided not to follow the usual route. Rather than heading south for the Canaries, and then across to the West Indies before heading north again to the mainland, the ships would veer north of the West Indies on their way to Virginia. By shunning the tried-and-true West Indies route, they hoped to elude detection by the Spanish, and perhaps gain a shorter crossing in the bargain. Their plotted course was similar to the one taken by Samuel Argall a month earlier. Under the overall command of Sir George Somers, the fleet’s admiral, the nine ships sailed from England on June 2.

  The route worked out fine for Argall, but not so well for the Somers fleet. On Monday, July 24, just seven or eight days’ distance from Virginia, the voyagers found “the clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing and whistling most unusually.” As the sky turned black, a storm came from the northeast and tossed the ships for the next four days. All but one of the ships made it through and carried their star-crossed passengers to Jamestown, where the Starving Time winter of 1609–1610 awaited them. The fate of the ship that did not reemerge from the storm—the Sea Venture, the 300-ton flagship of the fleet—would prove crucial to Jamestown’s future.

  On the Sea Venture, recalled passenger William Strachey, the “hell of darkness” in the sky left even the most experienced and hardened mariners unable to keep their anxiety from their faces. They unfastened the towline to the Virginia, a smaller ship that the Sea Venture had been towing, for fear that the two boats would be smashed into each other. As the Virginia bobbed away through the rising waves, the men braced themselves.

  For a full twenty-four hours, the wind and the rain were so loud and punishing that it seemed as if they could not possibly get worse. Many on board held out hope that the s
torm would soon exhaust itself. “Yet we did still find it not only more terrible but more constant,” Strachey remembered, “fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second more outrageous than the former.” A wall of ocean water periodically hit the decks and washed down below, terrifying the passengers—men, women, and children—who shouted out prayers for deliverance.

  The sailors expected the ship to break apart at any time. On Tuesday morning, they became aware of another danger: while they had been expecting destruction from above, hidden leaks were bringing in a flood from below in the ship’s lowest reaches. The caulking material used to seal the ship’s joints had been torn open in multiple places. By the time the water was discovered, it was five feet deep above the ship’s ballast. Given time, and not that much of it, the leaks would take the Sea Venture down. Word of them spread quickly among the crew and passengers, who were struck with redoubled panic.

  Members of the crew crawled along the ribs of the ship in the dark with candles, searching frantically for the openings and listening for the sound of flowing water. A number of leaks were found this way and plugged; one, discovered in the gunner’s quarters, was so large there seemed no way to handle it, until someone thought to stop it up with slabs of beef from the stores. Yet as the crewmen continued to plug holes, the water kept rising.

  The men on board, both crew and passengers, were ordered to divide into three groups, stationed in the front, middle, and rear of the ship, to take shifts on a bucket or a pump. Each man bailed furiously for an hour with water up to his waist, rested for an hour, then went to work again. Thus they continued for the next several days, without eating, drinking, or sleeping. The water had completely taken over the hold, so the colonists could not get at the rations. The sky remained as black during the day as it was at night. There was an interruption in the darkness on Thursday past midnight, when a ball of flame appeared to float in the air among the masts for three or four hours; this appearance of Saint Elmo’s fire (actually an electrical phenomenon, and not fire at all) further terrified the superstitious crew.

  By Friday morning, the fourth morning of their ordeal, the crew and passengers were completely spent in body and spirit. They were ready, as Strachey put it, to leave their “sinful souls” to the Almighty, and to entrust the Sea Venture to “the mercy of the sea.”

  Shortly before noon, however, the skies cleared ever so slightly— enough for a stunned Admiral Somers to call out a one-word announcement: “Land!” He had, in fact, spotted the Bermuda Isles. Trees could be seen in the distance, swaying with the wind.1

  The Bermudas were also known at the time as the “Devil’s Islands” for the foul weather and perilous rock and coral shoals surrounding them. Those shoals, which had been the ruin of French, Dutch, and Spanish ships over the previous century, had made the islands impregnable up to this time, leading “every navigator and mariner to avoid them . . . as they would shun the Devil himself.” Still, Somers had no real choice but to try.

  Fortunately for the voyagers, Somers was that rarity among Virginia leaders, a man who combined elevated social position with John Smith’s practical effectiveness. During the days and nights of frantic bailing out the Sea Venture, the admiral had set the tone by taking his shifts the same as everyone else, though he could have pulled rank without a moment’s question from anyone. It was a characteristic move for Somers, whom Smith would laud in later years for his “extraordinary care, paines, and industry” and for “the ever memorable courage of his minde.”

  The former naval commander, a veteran of sea and land battles with the Spanish, had first gone to sea as a young man, rose to become a naval commander, and finally retired to a life of ease at the ripe age of forty-nine, in 1603. That year, he accepted a knighthood for his service and soon settled down to a parliamentary seat representing his native Lyme Regis, Dorset. Six years later, perhaps feeling a mixture of patriotism and cabin fever, he gave it all up to lead the largest Virginia fleet up to that time. 2

  As Somers approached Bermuda with around 140 men on board, as well as ten women and an unknown number of children, his experience and his battle-hardened nerves would be put to the ultimate test. The boatswain dropped the sounding line and reported that the bottom was at thirteen fathom, or around seventy-eight feet deep. With the next reading, it quickly fell to forty-two feet, then only twenty-four—and they were still more than a mile offshore. It was clear that the Sea Venture would wreck a good distance from land, and quite possibly shatter beneath them.

  Thinking quickly, Somers found a way out. He made the wreck a controlled wreck, running the Sea Venture into, and partway through, a V-shaped formation of coral sitting a half mile or three-quarters of a mile from shore. The coral wedge held the ship fast. By nightfall, every one of the men, women, and children on board—plus the ship’s dog— had been carried to land on small boats taken from the ship.

  Thanks to the islands’ frightening reputation, they were uninhabited. The crew and passengers of the Sea Venture soon discovered that they had landed in paradise—a real paradise, unlike the “paradise” that the Virginia Company touted in its propaganda. Thousands of wild hogs roamed free, probably the offspring of hogs from an earlier shipwreck, and were easy to hunt with the dog’s help. There were large tortoises for the taking, large enough that one of them yielded more meat than several hogs. Fruits and berries were plentiful, as were a dozen kinds of fish. Broad-leaved palm trees gave shelter from rainstorms. Clear ocean water—turquoise near the shoreline, darker blue in the distance—lapped against pink sand. “Whereas it hath been and is still accounted the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorn place of the world,” recorded Silvester Jourdain, a passenger, “it is in truth the richest, healthfullest, and [most] pleasing land . . . as man ever set foot upon.”3

  The decision about what to do next fell to Somers and to Sir Thomas Gates, the appointed governor of the colony. For them, there was no question: the voyagers must keep to the company’s instructions by leaving paradise for Jamestown. One of the boats was outfitted for ocean travel, and one of Somers’s senior men, Henry Ravens, was sent with a crew of six on the seven-hundred-mile journey to Virginia; his instructions were to bring back a ship to pick up the stranded colonists.

  Ravens and his crew successfully sailed to the mainland, but were killed by natives before they could reach Jamestown. As weeks went by in Bermuda with no sight of them, Somers conceived another plan, a strategy of self-help. He put Richard Frubbisher, an experienced ship-builder, in charge of building a new ship there on the island. Frubbisher was to build it with Bermudan cedar and with oak beams and planks salvaged from the Sea Venture. Somers took responsibility for the building of a second, smaller ship himself.

  The men of the Sea Venture had their roles in working on the ships, some cutting timber, some hewing it, others shaping and fastening the planks and beams. Most of the ships’ seams would have to be caulked with wax, carried away from the hold of another shipwreck, since the colonists had recovered only one barrel of pitch and tar from the Sea Venture to use for sealant. Their lowermost holds would have to be layered with ballast of rocks or lead. Few of the men were experienced in shipbuilding; there were only four carpenters on the island. For the small company, it was a monumental project that would require months to complete.

  In the meantime, the cycles of life went on. The day was taken up by the tasks of shipbuilding, and also by morning and evening prayers led by the Reverend Richard Buck. George Somers’s cook, Thomas Powell, found that Bermuda was just the place to woo and win Elizabeth Persons, a gentlewoman’s maidservant, and so the two were married in November. Two women gave birth on the island, one to a baby girl and the other to a baby boy. Their parents declared their spiritual attachment to Bermuda in the most emphatic way anyone could, naming the children for their island home.

  The girl was born to Mr. and Mrs. John Rolfe in February 1610. Bermuda Rolfe did not survive long—the cause of her death is unknown—and she was buried on the
island whose name she bore. John Rolfe had already been touched by death once: his own twin brother, Eustacius, had not lived through infancy.4

  Despite the manifest attractions of life on the island, the great majority of the colonists were resolved to follow Gates and Somers to Jamestown. Despite the Virginia Company’s rosy tracts, the travelers must have realized that Jamestown would be no Bermuda; that much was obvious from Smith’s True Relation of the previous year, with its portrayals of natives who were mercurial and sometimes dangerous. That the Sea Venture survivors remained committed to continuing to Jamestown was a testament to the leadership of Gates and Somers, and also to the colonists’ own sense of the importance of their mission. Then, too, some of them were still hoping to find gold mines.

  A handful of dissenters saw things differently, anticipating “nothing but wretchedness” in Jamestown compared to their tranquil new home, and they wanted nothing to do with it. A half dozen men—John Want, Christopher Carter, Francis Pearepont, William Brian, William Martin, and Richard Knowles—secretly pledged among themselves to do nothing to further the building of the ships. Then they went a step further, planning to leave the main island for another that they would inhabit on their own while the others attempted to continue to Jamestown.

  The plot came to light in early September 1609, and the men were sentenced to the same fate they had intended for themselves: they were taken to a distant island and left there. In their isolation, they soon found their separate existence to be a prison without walls. No doubt they found it irksome to have to feed themselves, even in paradise. In due course, they lost their bravado and sent Gates entreaties for forgiveness. The governor, soft of heart, ordered them readmitted.

  The lesson of the plotters was forgotten by January, when another man was found guilty of mutiny—though it is unclear how much of it was simply wishfulness and idle talk. Stephen Hopkins imagined staying in Bermuda with his wife and children, it seems, as a sort of seventeenth-century Swiss Family Robinson. He gave himself away, however, by confiding his plans to colonists Samuel Sharpe and Humphrey Reede. Hopkins explained to them that the authority of Gates and Somers had disappeared with the shipwreck; Gates was the governor of Virginia, not Bermuda, and Somers could no longer claim authority as admiral of the ship if he didn’t have a ship. It was a plausible line of reasoning, but alas, it did not get him far when Sharpe and Reede turned him in. After he was sentenced to death, he begged Gates to spare him for the sake of his family. Gates, moved by his pleas, forgave Hopkins as he had the others.