The day after this encounter, the fort was pronounced complete. It was crudely made and far from impregnable, but probably sufficient to frustrate a full-scale attack. Inside, however, conditions for the settlers were not much better than when they had arrived, possibly worse. Having failed to extract any trade or tribute from the Indians, their food was little more than bran. ‘Our drink was water, our lodgings castles in the air,’ as Smith put it. There were no permanent buildings, except perhaps for a store to keep provisions and armaments.31
Newport decided the time had come for him to leave. The ships were now fully laden with clapboard timber, the barrel of soil to test for metals, and upwards of two tons of sassafras, the highly profitable commodity brought back by Gosnold on his 1602 voyage.
The council assembled to draft a progress report for the Royal Council in London. It was brief and began on an optimistic note:
Within less than seven weeks, we are fortified well against the Indians; we have sown good store of wheat; we have sent you a taste of clapboard; we have built some houses; we have spared some hands to a discovery; and still as God shall enable us with strength we will better and better our proceedings.
There followed a complaint about the sailors, ‘waged men’ who fed off their supplies, and gathered valuable commodities such as sassafras for their own private gain, losing or damaging many tools in the process. However, mindful that these same sailors might be recruited for future relief missions, the council asked that they be ‘reasonably dealt withal, so as all the loss neither fall on us nor them’.
‘The land would flow with milk and honey if so seconded by your careful wisdoms and bountiful hands,’ the report continued. ‘We do not persuade to shoot one arrow to seek another, but to find them both. And we doubt not but to send them home with golden heads. At least our desires, labours, and lives shall to that engage themselves.’
They then listed the bountiful glories of their new home, the mountains, the rivers, the fish, the fruit, the miraculous medicinal herbs, before ending on a note of desperation:
We entreat your succours for our seconds with all expedition lest that all-devouring Spaniard lay his ravenous hands upon these goldshowing mountains, which, if it be so enabled, he shall never dare to think on.
This note doth make known where our necessities do most strike us. We beseech your present relief accordingly. Otherwise, to our greatest and last griefs, we shall against our wills not will that which we most willingly would.
The report was dated ‘James town in Virginia, this 22th of June’ and signed ‘your poor friends’ followed by a list of council names. Smith’s name appeared after President Wingfield’s.
As the council handed their report to Newport, another was pushed into his hand by one of the settlers, William Brewster. Brewster may have been related to the Pilgrim Father of the same name who set sail for America aboard the Mayflower 13 years later. He had been secretly commissioned by Cecil to write a private report on the expedition and in particular the conduct of the council.32
Like the council, Brewster began with an optimistic assessment of the settlement’s prospects, and added an equally desperate plea for a supply mission to ensure their fulfilment:
Now is the King’s Majesty offered the most stately, rich kingdom in the world, never possess’d by any Christian prince. Be you one means among many to further our seconding to conquer this land as well as you were a means to further the discovery of it.
This was just the garnish for what followed: a report on the conduct of the council, describing the faction fighting that had nearly destroyed it. Unfortunately, although the beginning of the letter is still to be found among Cecil’s papers, the confidential part was torn off, and has never been recovered.
On Sunday 22 June, Hunt led the company in Holy Communion, the first to be held since their arrival. In the evening, Newport invited some of the gentlemen aboard his ship for a last supper. Final preparations were made on the Susan Constant and Discovery, while the Godspeed, which was to remain in Virginia, was decommissioned, her sails removed to the fort to prevent her being taken by renegades or attackers.
Newport set sail the following morning, promising to return within twenty weeks.33 The settlers lined the shore and watched the fleet cast off and make its way down the majestic James. The ships disappeared within minutes behind the thick canopy of trees covering the eastern end of the island.
Anxiety, if not dread, gripped those left behind, as they walked back into their makeshift accommodation. Living conditions were still rough. Their ‘houses’ were for the most part fragile tents, devoid of home comforts. The weather, Indians and supplies were erratic, preventing all attempts to find a settled or familiar routine. Worse yet, the councillors in whose hands their fate now rested seemed to be infected with the scheming and plots, petty rules and brutal punishments they had hoped to leave behind in England.
‘You shall live freely there [in Virginia], without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers,’ a character in Eastward Hoe had promised. The hollow laughter aroused by those scurrilous words at the Blackfriars Theatre each night echoed all the way across the Atlantic.
SOMETIME IN JULY, 1607, Robert Cecil was strolling under a warm summer sun in the gardens of Whitehall Palace, the royal residence in Westminster. One Lanier, either John, son of a Huguenot refugee and a royal musician, or his son Nicholas, also a musician, approached him, accompanied by a soldier called Captain Hazell. A discussion took place between this Hazell and Cecil about which nothing is known, except that it concerned Hazell embarking on a secret mission to Spain accompanied by someone ‘best experienced’ in the coasts of Virginia.
Hazell apparently recommended for the job one George Weymouth, ‘a special favourite of Sir Walter Cope’s’, and an experienced mariner who as recently as 1605 had led a reconnaissance mission to Cape Cod. Weymouth was duly hired, and a few days later, he and Hazell slipped out of London, and made their way towards Deal in Kent, where they were to pick up a ship bound for Spain.1
Meanwhile, on 29 July, the Susan Constant slipped into Plymouth harbour. Newport scribbled a letter to Cecil, announcing his arrival, and the discovery of ‘a river navigable for great ships one hundred and fifty miles’. ‘The country is excellent and very rich in gold and copper,’ he reported, adding that ‘of the gold we have brought a Say’ or sample, which he hoped to present to the King and the Privy Council. ‘I will not deliver the expectance and assurance we have of great wealth, but will leave it to Your Lordship’s censure when you see the probabilities.’
The remainder of the letter contained excuses for not leaving his ship and making the journey overland to London. His ‘inability of the body’ detained him, he wrote, possibly referring to the difficulty of making a long journey on horseback with a missing arm. So he would sail his ship round to London as soon as ‘wind and weather be favourable’.2
His desire to spend some time at Plymouth might not have been motivated by medical needs alone. He had probably decided to allow the crew time to sell some of the sassafras they had brought from Virginia. They would have found on the quayside at Plymouth any number of merchants happy to buy the precious