The next morning all agreed that further advancement was impossible, for there was no prospect of obtaining victuals. The worst had now fallen out, and the party were obliged to resort to their “dogges porredge.” So before sunrise they began their return voyage. By nightfall of the next day they were within a few miles of the river’s mouth. They had rowed in one day with the current as great a distance as they had made in four days up stream against the current. That night they lodged upon an island, where they had “nothing in the world to eat but pottage of sassafras leaves.” They had next day to pass the broad sound with empty stomachs. That day the wind blew so strong and the billows rose so high that the passage could not then be made without danger of sinking their boats. That evening was Easter eve, “which was fasted most truely.” Easter morning, however, opened calmly, so that they could proceed with safety. Late in the afternoon they arrived at Chypannum. The savages they had left here had all fled, but their weirs yielded them some fish, with which they thankfully broke their fast. The next morning they reached “home,” at Roanoke. Their return astonished and dismayed Pemisapan and his allies. A “bruit” had been raised among the tribes that they had all been destroyed by the Chaonists and the Mangoaks, part of them slain and part starved. This had developed in Pemisapan and the hostile confederates a contempt for the English. Instead of a “reverent opinion” that had formerly been shown toward the Englishmen’s God, they had begun “flatly to say that our Lorde God was not God since he suffered us to sustaine much hunger and also to be killed.” Pemisapan had further planned to starve out the rest of the colonists at Roanoke Island, and had now made ready to put this plan into execution. He proposed to take his savages off and leave his ground in the island unsown. This done, the English could not have been preserved from starvation. For at that time they had no fish weirs of their own, nor men skilled in making them; neither had they a grain of corn for seed.