The crab "able to suffice four men" could scarcely have been other than the horseshoe. It has never been considered a delicacy. It is usually by contraries that the truth is determined. Even in the midst of the apparent plenty of fish, fishing crews sometimes came home empty-handed after continued effort. Often storms interfered. From personal experience John Smith was able to sound the warning about Chesapeake weather: Our mast and sail blew overboard and such mighty waves overraked us in that small barge that with great danger we kept her from sinking by freeing out the water. The winds are variable, but the like thunder and lightning to purify the air I have seldom either seen or heard in Europe. As if struck by the helplessness of the settlers, a compassionate chief extended aid to them in 1608. A letter from Francis Perkins tells the story: So excessive are the frosts that one night the river froze over almost from bank to bank in front of our harbour, although it was there as wide as that of London. There died from the frost some fish in the river, which when taken out after the frost was over, were very good and so fat that they could be fried in their own fat without adding any butter or such thing.... Their own great emperor or the wuarravance, which is the name of their kings, has sent some of his people that they may teach us how to sow the grain of this country and to make certain traps with which they are going to fish. A letter from the Council in Virginia to the Virginia Company in London in 1610 shows that such favors were returned: Whilst we were fishing divers Indians came down from the woods unto us and ... I gave unto them such fish as we took ... for indeed at this time of the year [July] they live poor, their corn being but newly put into the ground and their own store spent. Oysters and crabs and such fish as they take in their weirs is their best relief. Oysters occurred in vast banks and shoals within sight of the Jamestown fort. During the 1609-10 "starving time" a minimum force was retained at the settlement while everyone else was turned out to forage as best he could. Most sought the oyster grounds where they ate oysters nine weeks, a diet varied only by a pitifully negligible allowance of corn meal. In the words of one of the foragers, "this kind of feeding caused all our skin to peel off from head to foot as if we had been dead." The arrival of supplies ended the ordeal. But soon hunger descended again and the oyster beds would have been the natural recourse if it had not been winter and the water too cold to wade in. So the oysters were no help. That conscientious reporter, William Strachey, wrote in 1610: