In this narration, when the Indians trifled with Smith he fired a volley
at them, ran his boat ashore, and pursued them fleeing towards their
village, where were great heaps of corn that he could with difficulty
restrain his soldiers [six or seven] from taking. The Indians then
assaulted them with a hideous noise: “Sixty or seventy of them, some
black, some red, some white, some particoloured, came in a square order,
singing and dancing out of the woods, with their Okee (which is an Idol
made of skinnes, stuffed with mosse, and painted and hung with chains
and copper) borne before them; and in this manner being well armed with
clubs, targets, bowes and arrowes, they charged the English that so
kindly received them with their muskets loaden with pistol shot, that
down fell their God, and divers lay sprawling on the ground; the
rest fled againe to the woods, and ere long sent men of their
Quiyoughkasoucks [conjurors] to offer peace and redeeme the Okee.” Good
feeling was restored, and the savages brought the English “venison,
turkies, wild fowl, bread all that they had, singing and dancing in sign
of friendship till they departed.” This fantastical account is much more
readable than the former bare narration.
The supplies which Smith brought gave great comfort to the despairing
colony, which was by this time reasonably fitted with houses. But it
was not long before they again ran short of food. In his first narrative
Smith says there were some motions made for the President and Captain
Arthur to go over to England and procure a supply, but it was with much
ado concluded that the pinnace and the barge should go up the river to
Powhatan to trade for corn, and the lot fell to Smith to command the
expedition. In his “General Historie” a little different complexion is
put upon this. On his return, Smith says, he suppressed an attempt to
run away with the pinnace to England. He represents that what food “he
carefully provided the rest carelessly spent,” and there is probably
much truth in his charges that the settlers were idle and improvident.
He says also that they were in continual broils at this time. It is in
the fall of 1607, just before his famous voyage up the Chickahominy,
on which he departed December 10th--that he writes: “The President and
Captain Arthur intended not long after to have abandoned the country,
which project was curbed and suppressed by Smith. The Spaniard never
more greedily desired gold than he victual, nor his soldiers more to
abandon the country than he to keep it. But finding plenty of corn in
the river of Chickahomania, where hundreds of salvages in divers places
stood with baskets expecting his coming, and now the winter approaching,
the rivers became covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes, that we
daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins,
fish, fowls, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could
eat them, so that none of our Tuftaffaty humorists desired to go to
England.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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