During a part of Dale's time eight or nine ounces of meal and half a pint of peas was the daily ration. In their declaration, made some years afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both the meal and the peas were "moldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and unfit for beasts." Better men than these might have been driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and bad food. And mutiny and desertion were usually but other names for suicide under the rule of the pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the woods, hoping to reach a mythical Spanish settlement believed to be not very far away. Dale set the Indians on them, and they were brought back to be burned at the stake. Others, who in desperation or deadly homesickness resolved to venture their lives in a barge and a shallop "for their native country," suffered in various ways for their temerity. Death by shooting or hanging was clemency. One offender was put to death by the awful torture of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may have learned during his stay on the Continent. Taylor, the water poet, has left us the sickening details of such an execution in Germany in 1616. One need not waste any sympathy on those who were hanged for stealing to satisfy hunger; death is more merciful than life to men in such a case. But one poor rogue, who thought to better his rations by filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had a bodkin run through his tongue and was chained to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though these things were twice attested by the best men in the colony, one prefers to make some allowance for their passionate resentment, and to hope that some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is hard to believe, for example, that men unable to work were denied food, and left to creep away into the wretched burrows in the ground used for shelter, there to die unregarded in the general misery. [Sidenote: Briefe Declaration.] In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch fish braved the perils of the ocean in a little bark and got back to England. It was the only escape from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Abandon every hope who enter here" was almost as appropriate to the mouth of the James River as to the gate of Dante's hell. All letters of complaint sent to England were intercepted, and all efforts of friends of the colonists in England to succor or rescue them were thwarted by the company in London. The king's pass to one of the colonists authorizing him to leave Virginia was sent to him by his friends closely made up in a garter, to avoid the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale. [Sidenote: Dale's services.] [Sidenote: Note 9.]