Smith going up the river to West's settlement at the falls, found the English planted in a place not only subject to the river's inundation, but "surrounded by many intolerable inconveniences." To remedy these, by a messenger he proposed to purchase from Powhatan his seat of that name, a little lower down the river. The settlers scornfully rejected the scheme, and became so mutinous that Smith landed among them and arrested the chief malcontents. But overpowered by numbers, being supported by only five men, he was forced to retire on board of a vessel lying in the river. The Indians daily supplied him with provisions, in requital for which the English plundered their corn, robbed their cultivated ground, beat them, broke into their cabins, and made them prisoners. They complained to Captain Smith that the men whom he had sent there as their protectors, "were worse than their old enemies, the Monacans." Smith embarking, had no sooner set sail for Jamestown than many of West's party were slain by the savages. It so happened, that before Smith's vessel had dropped a mile and a half down the river, she ran aground, whereupon, making a virtue of necessity, he summoned the mutineers to a parley, and they, now seized with a panic, on account of the assault of a mere handful of Indians, submitted themselves to his mercy. He again arrested the ringleaders, and established the rest of the party at Powhatan, in the Indian palisade fort, which was so well fortified by poles and bark as to defy all the savages in Virginia. Dry cabins were also found there, and nearly two hundred acres of ground ready to be planted, and it was called Nonsuch, as being at once the strongest and most delightful place in the country. Nonsuch was the name of a royal residence in England. When Smith was now on the eve of his departure, the arrival of West again threw all things aback into confusion. Nonsuch was abandoned, and all hands returned to the falls, and Smith, finding all his efforts abortive, embarked in a boat for Jamestown. During the voyage he was terribly wounded while asleep, by the accidental explosion of a bag of gunpowder, and in the paroxysm of pain he leapt into the river, and was well-nigh drowned before his companions could rescue him. Arriving at Jamestown in this helpless condition, he was again assailed by faction and mutiny, and one of his enemies even presented a cocked pistol at him in his bed; but the hand wanted the nerve to execute what the heart was base enough to design.