the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had help been delayed a few days longer. IX. [Sidenote: The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610.] [Sidenote: A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, 1619, p.23.] [Sidenote: Note 6.] Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. This ship became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ashore on the Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of swine." Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what the islands afforded--live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and waterfowl salted--the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction. Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pinnaces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's provision to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown. [Sidenote: De la Warr's arrival, 1610.] [Sidenote: Smith's Oxford Tract, so called.]