Such was the effect of this speech that of the two hundred only seven
died in this pinching time, except those who were drowned; no man died
of want. Captain Winne and Master Leigh had died before this famine
occurred. Many of the men were billeted among the savages, who used them
well, and stood in such awe of the power at the fort that they dared
not wrong the whites out of a pin. The Indians caught Smith's humor, and
some of the men who ran away to seek Kemps and Tussore were mocked and
ridiculed, and had applied to them--Smith's law of “who cannot work must
not eat;” they were almost starved and beaten nearly to death. After
amusing himself with them, Kemps returned the fugitives, whom Smith
punished until they were content to labor at home, rather than adventure
to live idly among the savages, “of whom,” says our shrewd chronicler,
“there was more hope to make better christians and good subjects than
the one half of them that counterfeited themselves both.” The Indians
were in such subjection that any who were punished at the fort would beg
the President not to tell their chief, for they would be again punished
at home and sent back for another round.
We hear now of the last efforts to find traces of the lost colony of Sir
Walter Raleigh. Master Sicklemore returned from the Chawwonoke (Chowan
River) with no tidings of them; and Master Powell, and Anas Todkill who
had been conducted to the Mangoags, in the regions south of the James,
could learn nothing but that they were all dead. The king of this
country was a very proper, devout, and friendly man; he acknowledged
that our God exceeded his as much as our guns did his bows and arrows,
and asked the President to pray his God for him, for all the gods of the
Mangoags were angry.
The Dutchmen and one Bentley, another fugitive, who were with Powhatan,
continued to plot against the colony, and the President employed a
Swiss, named William Volday, to go and regain them with promises of
pardon. Volday turned out to be a hypocrite, and a greater rascal than
the others. Many of the discontented in the fort were brought into
the scheme, which was, with Powhatan's aid, to surprise and destroy
Jamestown. News of this getting about in the fort, there was a demand
that the President should cut off these Dutchmen. Percy and Cuderington,
two gentlemen, volunteered to do it; but Smith sent instead Master
Wiffin and Jeffrey Abbot, to go and stab them or shoot them. But the
Dutchmen were too shrewd to be caught, and Powhatan sent a conciliatory
message that he did not detain the Dutchmen, nor hinder the slaying of
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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