During the five weeks of his captivity, Smith had told the Indians fairy tales about Captain Newport, whose ship was expected soon with supplies for the colony. Newport was the great Merowames, king of the sea. [Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH] When Newport arrived he was fearfully pleased at being the great Merowames, but shared the disgust of the officials at Captain Smith’s importance. When he went to trade with the tribes he traveled in state, with Smith for interpreter, and began by presenting to Powhatan a red suit, a hat, and a white dog--gifts from the king of England. Then to show his own importance he heaped up all his trading goods, and offered them for such maize as Powhatan cared to sell, expecting tons and getting exactly four bushels. Smith, seeing that the colony would starve, produced some bright blue beads, “very precious jewels,” he told Powhatan, “composed of a most rare substance, and of the color of the skies, of a sort, indeed, only to be worn by the greatest kings of the world.” After hard bargaining Powhatan managed to get a very few beads for a hundred bushels of grain. The Virginia Company sent out more idlers from England, and some industrious Dutchmen who stole most of their weapons from the English to arm the Indian tribes; James I had Powhatan treated as a brother sovereign, and crowned with all solemnity, so that he got a swollen head and tried to starve the settlement. The colonists swaggered, squabbled and loafed, instead of storing granaries; but all parties were united in one ambition--planning unpleasant surprises for Captain Smith. Once his trading party was trapped for slaughter in a house at Powhatan’s camp, but Pocahontas, at the risk of her life, warned her hero, so that all escaped. Another tribe caught Smith in a house where he had called to buy grain of their chief. Smith led the chief outside, with a pistol at his ear-hole, paraded his fifteen musketeers, and frightened seven hundred warriors into laying down their arms. And then he made them load his ship with corn. This food he served out in daily rations to working colonists only. After the next Indian attempt on his life, Smith laid the whole country waste until the tribes were reduced to submission. So his loafers reported him to the company for being cruel to the Indians, and seven shiploads of officials and wasters were sent out from England to suppress the captain.