Werowocomoco stood upon a bluff on the north side of York River. Here came Smith and his captors, around them the winter woods, before them the broad blue river. Again the gathered Indians, men and women, again the staring, the handling, the more or less uncomplimentary remarks; then into the Indian ceremonial lodge he was pushed. Here sat the chief of chiefs, Powhatan, and he had on a robe of raccoon skins with all the tails hanging.
About him sat his chief men, and behind these were gathered women. All were painted, head and shoulders; all wore, bound about the head, adornments meant to strike with beauty or with terror; all had chains of beads. Smith does not report what he said to Powhatan, or Powhatan to him. He says that the Queen of Appamatuck brought him water for his hands, and that there was made a great feast. When this was over, the Indians held a council. It ended in a death decree. Incontinently Smith was seized, dragged to a great stone lying before Powhatan, forced down and bound. The Indians made ready their clubs; meaning to batter his brains out. Then, says Smith, occurred the miracle.
A child of Powhatan's, a very young girl called Pocahontas, sprang from among the women, ran to the stone, and with her own body sheltered that of the Englishman....*
* A vast amount of erudition has been expended by historical students to establish the truth or falsity of this Pocahontas story. The author has refrained from entering the controversy, preferring to let the story stand as it was told by Captain Smith in his "General History" (1624).--Editor.
What, in Powhatan's mind, of hesitation, wiliness, or good nature backed his daughter's plea is not known. But Smith did not have his brains beaten out. He was released, taken by some form of adoption into the tribe, and set to using those same brains in the making of hatchets and ornaments. A few days passed and he was yet further enlarged. Powhatan longed for two of the great guns possessed by the white men and for a grindstone. He would send Smith back to Jamestown if in return he was sure of getting those treasures. It is to be supposed that Smith promised him guns and grindstones as many as could be borne away.
So Werowocomoco saw him depart, twelve Indians for escort. He had leagues to go, a night or two to spend upon the march. Lying in the huge winter woods, he expected, on the whole, death before morning. But "Almighty God mollified the hearts of those sterne barbarians with compassion." And so he was restored to Jamestown, where he found more dead than when he left. Some there undoubtedly welcomed him as a strong man restored when there was need of strong men. Others, it seems, would as lief that Pocahontas had not interfered.
The Indians did not get their guns and grindstones. But Smith loaded a demi-culverin with stones and fired upon a great tree, icicle-hung. The gun roared, the boughs broke, the ice fell rattling, the smoke spread, the Indians cried out and cowered away. Guns and grindstone, Smith told them, were too violent and heavy devils for them to carry from river to river.
Instead he gave them, from the trading store, gifts enticing to the savage eye, and not susceptible of being turned against the donors.
Here at Jamestown in midwinter were more food and less mortal sickness than in the previous fearful summer, yet no great amount of food, and now suffering, too, from bitter cold. Nor had the sickness ended, nor dissensions. Less than fifty men were all that held together England and America--a frayed cord, the last strands of which might presently part . . . .
Then up the river comes Christopher Newport in the Francis and John, to be followed some weeks later by the Phoenix. Here is new life--stores for the settlers and a hundred new Virginians! How certain, at any rate, is the exchange of talk of home and hair-raising stories of this wilderness between the old colonists and the new! And certain is the relief and the renewed hopes. Mourning turns to joy. Even a conflagration that presently destroys the major part of the town can not blast that felicity.
Again Newport and Smith and others went out to explore the country. They went over to Werowocomoco and talked with Powhatan. He told them things which they construed to mean that the South Sea was near at hand, and they marked this down as good news for the home Council--still impatient for gold and Cathay. On their return to Jamestown they found under way new and stouter houses. The Indians were again friendly; they brought venison and turkeys and corn. Smith says that every few days came Pocahontas and attendant women bringing food.
Spring came again with the dogwood and the honeysuckle and the strawberries, the gay, returning birds, the barred and striped and mottled serpents. The colony was one year old. Back to England sailed the Francis and John and the Phoenix, carrying home Edward-Maria Wingfield, who has wearied of Virginia and will return no more.
What rests certain and praiseworthy in Smith is his thoroughness and daring in exploration. This summer he went with fourteen others down the river in an open boat, and so across the great bay, wide as a sea, to what is yet called the Eastern Shore, the counties now of Accomac and Northampton.
