The Jamestown Experiment (18 page)

The return of the dispersed settlers to Jamestown in early November 1609 was extremely troubling. President Percy could not turn the men away. “In charity we could not deny them to participate
with us,” he wrote, even if it meant only “a poor allowance of half a can of meal for a man a day.” When Percy asked Daniel Tucker to estimate how long their stores would last, Tucker reported that he expected their pitiful rations to last only three months, perhaps four if they somehow tightened their belts even more.
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Wahunsonacock continued to pressure to the Jamestown settlement. Young Indian interpreter Henry Spelman had been among the Powhatans for three weeks when Wahunsonacock sent him to Jamestown with a message: “Tell them that if they would bring their ship and some copper, he would fraught her back with corn.” The werowance’s subsequent actions reveal that he was plotting to murder the Englishmen who came.
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Spelman delivered the message to the president and waited for an answer. Although the settlers had lost dozens of men to Indian attacks, a desperate George Percy decided that he had no choice but to send a trade delegation to Wahunsonacock. He ordered John Ratcliffe to take fifty men to “procure victuals and trade by the way of commerce and trade.” Ratcliffe was a poor replacement for the tough John Smith, whom he had helped drive out of the colony.
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He lacked the skill that Smith had demonstrated in trading with the Indians and made numerous mistakes that led to disaster.

Although Ratcliffe had “Powhatan’s son and daughter aboard his pinnace,” he did not use them properly. Smith would have held on to them as bargaining chips. Even Percy recognized that Ratcliffe should have detained them, since they would have been “a sufficient pledge for his safety.” But the “credulous” Ratcliffe made his first mistake when he but allowed them to “depart again on shore.”
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The “subtle old fox” Wahunsonacock received Ratcliffe warmly and seemed willing to trade, leading the Englishman to a storehouse “above half a mile from the barge.” The pair exchanged gifts and then began trading the following day, Ratcliffe offering “pieces of copper
and beads and other things according to the proportion of baskets which they brought.” Unfortunately, Ratcliffe—like Christopher Newport—offered terms that were far too generous. Powhatan, who already had the upper hand over the English generally and was toying with them, offered few bushels of corn for the copper.
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The Powhatans also deceived the English by “pulling or bearing up the bottom of their baskets with their hands, so that the less corn might fill them.” Ratcliffe and his men discovered the fraudulent practice and angrily protested, but Wahunsonacock denied the charge and simply left.

Meanwhile, Ratcliffe foolishly allowed his men to be lured into small groups by Powhatan women in different homes. Wahunsonacock, the “sly old king,” bid him time until the Englishmen were separated and then “cut them all off.” The men were easily slaughtered when warriors surprised and overwhelmed them. Ratcliffe was taken alive, and the chief ordered him “bound unto a tree naked with a fire before.” Powhatan women scraped the flesh “from his bones with mussel shells [which were then] thrown into the fire” while he was still alive. Poor Ratcliffe witnessed the grisly scene of his own torture and slow execution until he lost consciousness.
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Wahunsonacock dispatched his warriors to assault the few Englishmen remaining in the pinnace. William Phetiplace and a few sailors were anxiously awaiting word from Ratcliffe when they were assaulted. Several were hit by arrows in the assault, and many were killed. The English returned fire with their muskets and pistols. War cries and the screams of the wounded filled the air as the Phetiplace frantically tried to sail away. The Powhatan warriors and English exchanged fire until the pinnace was safely out of range.

The few survivors of the expedition disembarked at Jamestown and quickly dashed the expectations of the settlers at the fort. They
had lost three dozen men and returned without any corn. Percy was running out of options to feed the settlers.

Percy understood that the tribes under the dominion of the Powhatans were overtly hostile and would continue to kill Englishmen or refuse to trade with them. He had no choice but to send Francis West to the more distant Patawomecks in the Chesapeake to trade for “maize and grain.” The lives of the settlers depended upon his success. West sailed with thirty-six men and emulated Smith’s “harsh and cruel” strong-arm tactics in forcing the Patawomecks to part with some of their food supplies and killed two of them in the process. After West cut off “two of the savages’ heads and other extremities,” the frightened Patawomecks loaded the pinnace with corn.
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On their return to Jamestown, West’s party passed by Point Comfort. There, James Davis and his small garrison hailed the
Swallow,
calling out and “acquainting them with our great wants, exhorting them to make all the speed they could to relieve us.” The starving men expected West to pull in and share some of the bounty to mitigate their condition temporarily.
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Rather than disembarking and sharing their provisions, the mariners suddenly hoisted the sails and turned with the wind, sailing directly for the Atlantic. A stunned Davis watched the small ship disappear on the horizon.

The company of men on the
Swallow
had mutinied and demanded that they be allowed to sail for England to have a chance at survival. They understood that returning to Jamestown was a death sentence. West was sympathetic to their (and his own) plight and acceded to his men’s wishes to make for home. They had enough provisions to cross the Atlantic and make it safely to England.

The settlers at Jamestown waited in vain for the
Swallow
to return with a supply of corn. The famished men continued to hope until it became clear that West’s company would not be returning.
They assumed the Patawomecks had slaughtered West’s trade party just as they had Ratcliffe’s. When they learned from James Davis that West had sailed east for England, they were furious at being betrayed by their countrymen and being left with neither food nor ship for launching additional trade expeditions.

The Jamestown colonists now faced a terrible predicament. They were starving to death on their meager provisions, and unlike the past few years, they could not get supplies from the native peoples. Those tribes had also killed dozens of the settlers over the last couple of months and pinned them down within the fort. There was very little food, no way to get any more, and no expected supply fleet coming from England. The colony teetered on the brink of disaster as the settlers hourly contemplated their own deaths. If only Thomas Gates and the
Sea Venture
had arrived, though, things would have turned out differently.

Chapter Twelve

H
undreds of miles to the east, the survivors of the disastrous hurricane and shipwreck of the Sea Venture were stranded in Bermuda. The leaders, however, were determined to keep everyone alive. Admiral George Somers proudly watched over the rescue effort and directed his men. His first priority, after getting everyone ashore, was to salvage their provisions. During the early afternoon, the sailors had time “to save some good part of our goods and provision which the water had not spoiled.” The next priority was to anticipate what materials they would need to get off the island. The sailors rowed between the wreck and the shore over and over, eventually going for whatever was “available for the building and furnishing of a new ship and pinnace, which we made there for the transporting and carrying of us to Virginia.” The mariners dismantled the rigging that remained aboard the ruined
Sea Venture
as well as any ropes, sails, nails, planks, and tools. They gathered up loose articles of clothing and household items that might contribute to their survival. After they stripped the ship, all that was left looked
like the ribs of a large whale. Within a few days, the pounding of the surf destroyed the last remnants.
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The settlers thanked God for providentially landing them on an island where all of their basic necessities were bestowed upon them. The Reverend Richard Buck led the colonists in prayers of thanksgiving when they were deposited on shore. The next day was the Sabbath, and Buck preached two sermons during a morning and afternoon Anglican service. Most of his sermons were appropriately focused on “thankfulness and unity,” for he supported the social order and exhorted everyone to obey the will of Thomas Gates as an extension of their fidelity to the king, God and His church, the Great Chain of Being, and the traditions of the English rule of law. Moreover, “every morning and evening at the ringing of a bell we repaired all to public prayer.” They had much to be thankful for, although any shirkers were “duly punished.” Buck held Communion and performed all the offices and rites of the Anglican profession, including marrying a few couples and christening a few babies.
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As the sun dipped brilliantly below the horizon on the first night, the crew and passengers feasted on the fresh food that the island provided. They took generous swigs of the alcohol being passed around. Their moods were finally lightened after their harrowing escape from the hurricane. The campfire gave off welcome heat that dried out their clothes after days of bailing out water. “Our delivery was not more strange in falling so opportunely and happily upon the land, as our feeding and preservation was beyond our hopes and all men’s expectations most admirable.”
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Not everything was as it seemed, however. In fact, the people became downright frightened as the leaders of the expedition and a few sailors informed them that they had landed on Bermuda, nicknamed the “Isle of Devils.” They discovered with great shock
that it was “the dangerous and dreaded island or rather islands of the Bermuda.” The island was superstitiously reputed by sailors to be “so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearful objects are seen and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devil’s Islands, and are feared and avoided of all sea travelers alive above any other place in the world.”
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Another chronicler of the shipwreck confirmed that “every man knoweth” from rumors that Bermuda was “a most prodigious and enchanted place affording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather.” Sailors avoided Bermuda as “they would shun the Devil himself; and no man was ever heard to make for the place, but as against their wills, they have by storms and dangerousness of the rocks, lying seven leagues into the sea, suffered shipwreck.” Bermuda was certainly a dangerous place to sail near, with its underwater reefs and tempests, but it was also considered to be occupied by evil spirits.
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After a few weeks on the island, though, the people discovered that their horrific fears were completely unfounded. The bountiful land was free of disease, had a temperate climate, and provided for their every need. Thus the island was not a place where devils and wicked spirits lived, nor a place of mythical sea monsters. William Strachey personally hoped that the publication of his account would “deliver the world from a foul and general error” that Bermuda was uninhabitable.
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The survivors now knew through firsthand experience the island was as “habitable and commodious as most countries of the same climate and situation.” Strachey for one had learned an important lesson in the ordeal: “Men ought not to deny everything which is not subject to their own sense.” In other words, one had to make up one’s own mind rather than relying on the opinions of others.
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Once the
Sea Venture
crew and settlers bound for Virginia reached land, they came under the authority of the governor of the colony.
Thomas Gates opened the sealed box with the instructions for the colony and asserted his just and near absolute authority under the command of the Virginia Company. He directed the crew and passengers of the shipwrecked
Sea Venture
to attend to their survival needs immediately. “Every man disposed and applied himself to search for and to seek out such relief and sustentation as the country afforded.” He organized them into foraging groups and sent them out to find food and water. There were no rivers or freshwater springs, but one group dug a well near the beach that provided enough water for their needs. They also collected armfuls of firewood to cook whatever food they could find. Others searched for saplings and palm leaves to gather to build primitive shelters.

Some of the crew stayed on the beach and rummaged through the piles of recovered supplies for fishing line and hooks and went out into the gentle surf. George Somers led them, personally casting his line and taking in a great haul of fish. The admiral “went and found out sufficient of many kind of fishes, and so plentiful thereof that in half an hour he took so many great fishes with hooks as did suffice the whole company.”

Initially, the men caught baskets of fish and could almost scoop them out of the surf. “Fish is there so abundant that if a man step into the water they will come round about him; so that men were fain to get out for fear of biting. These fishes are very fat and sweet and of that proportion and bigness that three of them will conveniently feed two men.”
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When they caught much of the fish populations near the shore, they made a flatboat that enabled them to go a little farther out, hooking “angelfish, salmon, bonitos, stingray, horse mackerel, snappers, hogfish, sharks, dogfish, pilchards, mullets, and rockfish.” They hunted among the rocky shore for “crayfishes oftentimes
greater than any of our best English lobsters.” Likewise, they had an abundance of crabs and oysters to feed the company.
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The colonists discovered ready sources of meat on the island, much of it from the massive flocks of migratory birds in the area during the autumn and winter. The most abundant birds were nocturnal cahows, which were easily snared when they flew on to the men’s arms. They took as many as “three hundred in an hour.” One survivor described the scene:

Our men found a pretty way to take them, which was by standing on the rocks or sands by the seaside and holloing, laughing, and making the strangest outcry that possibly they could. With the noise whereof the birds would come flocking to that place and settle upon the very arms and head of him that so cried, and still creep nearer and nearer, answering the noise themselves; by which our men would weigh them with their hand, and which weighed heaviest they took for the best and let the others alone. And so our men would take twenty dozen in two hours of the chiefest of them; and they were a good and well-relished fowl.
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The colonists also easily collected the eggs of the cahows without encountering any aggressive defense by the birds. They were very similar in size and taste to a hen’s egg. The eggs were simply plucked out of their nests, even with the birds present.

The islands were also the nesting place of mammoth sea turtles that the company baked and roasted. They were so immense that “one tortoise would go further amongst them than three hogs. One turtle (for so we called them) feasted well a dozen messes, appointing six to every mess.” They were easily captured, although it might require three or four men to carry the large creatures.
Most of the company “liked the meat of them very well.”
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The men also consumed their eggs, which were “sweeter than any hen egg; and the tortoise itself is all very good meat and yieldeth great store of oil, which is as sweet as any butter; and one of them will suffice fifty men a meal, at the least.”
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When there were no fish, birds, or turtles, the men went hunting for wild hogs, which inhabited the islands by the hundreds with no natural predators. The Spanish had deposited them on the island in order to have a ready food supply should sailors be forced to go ashore. The colonists learned of their presence when a wild boar smelled the English swine and came down to investigate. The colonists went out to hunt them with their mastiff and brought home forty or fifty in a single outing, sometimes even alive, because “the dog would fasten on them and hold whilst the huntsmen made in.” The colonists “made sties for them,” feeding them on berries and slaughtering them for meat when other sources of food were more scarce.
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The settlers also ate large palm leaves, which they either roasted to make them taste like fried melons or stewed in order to give them a cabbage flavor, although thankfully “not so offensively… to the stomach.” Berries, fruit, and a variety of other natural crops rounded out their diet. The berries also were fermented into an alcoholic drink.

The colonists made salt by boiling seawater and used it to preserve the meat and fish. “Our governor dried and salted and, barreling them up, brought to sea five hundred, for he had procured for salt to be made.” Three or four pots were kept constantly boiling to meet the demand.
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The provisions on the
Sea Venture
were largely ruined, but the island was endowed with all that they needed to survive and more. Contrary to their expectations when they learned they were on Bermuda, “the air [was] so temperate and the country so abundantly
fruitful of all fit necessaries for the sustentation and preservation of man’s life that, most in a manner of all our provisions of bread, beer, and victual being quite spoiled in lying long drowned in salt water, notwithstanding we were there for the space of nine months (few days over or under) not only well received, comforted, and with good satiety contented.”

They had so much food, Sylvester Jourdain explained, that they even had extra to bring with them to Virginia. “Out of the abundance thereof provided us some reasonable quantity and proportion of provision to carry us for Virginia and to maintain ourselves and that company we found there, to the great relief of them, as it fell out, in their so great extremities.”

The people of Virginia were starving and, ironically, were fed by their compatriots who had been shipwrecked on the Isle of Devils. After seeing that their fears were unjustified, the marooned settlers started to believe that God had landed them in Bermuda to gather supplies in order to feed the starving Virginians. “It pleased God that my Lord’s coming thither their store was better supplied.”

In short, many of the settlers believed Bermuda to be “the richest, healthiest, and pleasing land…and merely natural, as ever man set foot upon.”
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It was a paradise. William Strachey thanked God for bringing the
Sea Venture
to such a beautiful, bountiful island. They never would have sailed for Bermuda—in fact, they would probably have avoided it at all costs had they known what it was. But he thought they were providentially brought there. “It pleased our merciful God to make even this hideous and hated place both the place of our safety and means of our deliverance.”
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