Our drink was water, our lodging, castles in the air. With this lodging and diet our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades strained and bruised us. Our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us as were cause sufficient to have made us miserable in our native country, or any other place in the world. From May to September those that escaped dying lived upon sturgeon and sea crabs. Fifty in this time we buried. [_The original colony numbered 104._] Then seeing the President’s projects (who all this time had neither felt want nor sickness) to escape these miseries by flight in our pinnace [_small sailing boat_] so moved our dead spirits that we deposed [_removed_] him and established [_John_] Ratcliffe in his place.... But now was all our provision spent, the sturgeon gone, all helps abandoned, each hour expecting the fury of the savages, when God, the patron of all good endeavors, in that desperate extremity, so changed the hearts of the savages that they brought such plenty of their fruits and provision that no man wanted. And now where some affirmed it was ill done of the Council to send forth men so badly provided, this incontradictable reason will show them plainly they are too ill-advised to nourish such ideas. First, the fault of our going was our own. What could be thought fitting or necessary we had; but what we should find, what we should want, where we should be, we were all ignorant. And supposing to make our passage in two months with victual [_food_] to live and the advantage of spring to work, we were at sea five months where we spent both our victual and lost the opportunity of the time and season to plant. Such actions have ever since the world’s beginning been subject to such accidents. Everything of worth is found full of difficulties, but nothing [_is_] so difficult as to establish a commonwealth so far remote from men and means and where men’s minds are so untoward [_unlucky_] as neither [_to_] do well themselves nor to suffer others [_to do well_]. But to proceed. The new president, being little beloved, of weak judgment in dangers and less industry in peace, committed the managing of all things abroad to Captain Smith, who, by his own example, good words, and fair promises set some to mow, others to bind thatch, some to build houses, others to thatch them, himself always bearing the greatest task for his own share. In short time he provided most of them lodgings, neglecting any for himself.