His later years. He afterward explored the New England coast with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. What he published in his later years by way of advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of admirable good sense. With rare foresight he predicted the coming importance of the colonial trade and the part to be played by the American fisheries in promoting the greatness of England by "breeding mariners." He only of the men of his time suspected the imperial size and future greatness of North America. He urged that the colonies should not annoy "with large pilotage and such like dues" those who came to trade in their ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. This is a strange doctrine in an age when foreign trade seemed almost an evil, and false conceptions of economic principles were nearly universal. Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a wit whose pungency is delightful. In mental and physical hardihood, and in what may be called shiftiness, as well as in proneness to exaggeration and in boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical American pioneer—a forerunner of the daring and ready-witted men who have subdued a savage continent. Note 3.
VIII.
The famine of 1609-'10. Disaster of some sort could hardly have been avoided had Captain Smith been allowed to stay, but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and there was no hand strong enough to stay it. The unchecked hostility of the savages drove the outsettlers from Nansemond and the falls of the James. Note 4. The Indians found exercise for their devilish ingenuity in torturing those who fell into their hands alive, and outraging the dead. A. D. 1609, 1610. The brave but unwise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury by visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs of their chiefs. There was now no one who could carry on the difficult Indian trade. Ratcliffe, who had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell into an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's example in trading with Powhatan. He was tortured to death by the Indian women, and only fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. The brood hogs of the colony were all eaten, the dogs came next, and then the horses, which were to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their very hides. Rats, mice, and adders were relished when they were to be had, and fungi of various sorts were eaten with whatever else "would fill either mouth or belly." A. D. 1610. An Indian slain in an assault on the stockade was dug up after he had been three days buried, and eaten "by the poorer sort," their consuming hunger not being embarrassed by the restraints of gentility. From this horrible expedient it was but one step to the digging up of their own dead for food. Famine-crazed men even dogged the steps of those of their comrades who were not quite wasted, threatening to kill and devour them. Among these despairing and shiftless men there was but one man of resources. Daniel Tucker—let his later sins as tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven—bethought himself to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this small relief "did keep us from killing one another to eat," says Percy. He seems to have been the only man who bethought himself to do anything. Note 5. One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, slew his own wife and salted what he did not eat at once of her flesh, but he was put to death at the stake for this crime. Some, braving the savages, sought food in the woods and died while seeking it, and were eaten by those who found them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw themselves on the tender mercies of the Indians and were slain. To physical were added spiritual torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible into the fire, crying out in the market place that there was no God in heaven. Percy adds, with grim theological satisfaction characteristic of the time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very market place where he had blasphemed in his agony. The depopulated houses, and even the palisades so necessary for protection, were burned for firewood by the enfeebled people, and Jamestown came presently to look like the slumbering ruins of some ancient fortification. Tragicall Relation, 1623. Briefe Declaration, 1624, both in British Pub. Record Office. Percy's Trewe Relacyon, MS., Petworth House. Fortunately, the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had help been delayed a few days longer.
IX.
The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610. Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, 1619, p.23. This ship became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ashore on the Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of swine." Note 6. Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what the islands afforded—live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and waterfowl salted—the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction. Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pinnaces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's provision to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown.
De la Warr's arrival, 1610. With all the formalities thought necessary at that time, De la Warr took possession of Jamestown, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead men's bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock of cattle, while the brave old Sir George Somers once more embarked for the Bermudas in the Patience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built wholly of the wood of that island without a particle of iron except one bolt in the keel. Smith's Oxford Tract, so called. In this boat he sailed up and down until he found again "the still vexed Bermoothes," where he hoped to secure provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was also sent to the Bermudas, but missed them, and went north to the fishing banks in search of food.
Note 7. Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety characteristic of that age the deserted little church was enlarged and reoccupied and daily decorated with Virginia wild flowers. De la Warr's government, 1610. All the bitter experience of the first three years had not taught the true method of settling a new country. Note 8. The colony was still but a camp of men without families, and the old common stock system was retained. To escape from the anarchy which resulted from a system that sank the interest of the individual in that of the community, it had been needful to arm De la Warr with the sharp sword of martial law. British Museum, MS. 21,993, ff. 174, 178. Instr. to Gates and De la Warr. Some of the instructions given him were unwise, some impossible of execution. To convert the Indians out of hand, as he was told to do, by shutting up their medicine men or sending them to England to be Christianized by the methods then in use, did not seem a task easy of accomplishment, for Indian priests are not to be caught in time of war. But De la Warr undertook another part of his instructions. Gold-hunting. A hundred men under two captains were sent on a wild-goose chase up the James River to find gold or silver in the mountains, whither the phantom of mines had now betaken itself. This plan originated with the London managers of Virginia affairs, and men had been sent with De la Warr who were supposed to be skillful in "finding out mines." But being especially