Argall sailed from Point Comfort on the first of December and entered Pembroke, now Rappahannock, River where he met the king of Pastancie, who told him the Indians were his very great friends and had a good store of corn for him, as they had provided the year before. He carried his ship to the king's town and there built a stout shallop to take the corn aboard. After concluding a peace with other divers Indian lords, and giving and taking hostages, Argall hastened to Jamestown with 1100 bushels of corn, which he delivered to the storehouses there, besides the 300 bushels he retained for the use of his own company. As soon as he had unloaded the corn, Argall set his men to work felling timber and hewing boards with which to build a "frigat." He left this vessel half finished in the hands of his carpenters at Point Comfort in order to make another voyage to Pembroke River, and so discovered the head of it. Upon learning that Pocahontas was with the King of Patowomack, he devised a stratagem by which she was captured. Pocahontas was taken to Jamestown and delivered to the protection of Sir Thomas Gates, who hastened to conclude with Powhatan, her father, a peace based upon the terms demanded by Argall. Argall returned to Point Comfort and "went forward with his frigat and finished her." He sent a "ginge" of men with her to Cape Charles, to get fish and transport them to "Henries Town" (Henrico). Another gang was employed to fell timber and cleave planks to build a fishing boat. Argall himself, with a third gang, left in the shallop on the first day of May to explore the east side of the Bay. Having explored along the shore for some forty leagues northward, he returned on the 12th of May, fitted his ship and built a fishing boat, and made ready to take the first opportunity for a fishing voyage.
Other Voyages of Argall
Samuel Argall is said to have achieved lasting fame as one of England's maritime pioneers by establishing a shorter route to Virginia from England in 1609, although Batholomew Gosnold took that route in 1602, and Martin Pring did so in 1603. The usual course led by way of the Canaries to the Island of Puerto Rico in the West Indies, the route of Columbus, a long, circuitous pathway exposed to pirates and interference from Spain. Argall made the round trip by the shorter route in five months. However, the shorter route did not supplant entirely the longer southern route for several decades.
Argall accompanied Lord De La Warr to Virginia in 1610, to point out the northern route. While in Virginia, he was sent with Sir George Somers to Bermuda with two pinnaces to get a supply of hogs and other provisions for the colony. In a storm, Argall lost sight of Sir George's pinnace and failed to locate Bermuda; so he changed his course toward the north and went to Sagadahoc and Cape Cod where he procured a large cargo of fish, which he brought to Jamestown. Sir George Somers reached Bermuda, but died there on November 9, 1610. Argall was then sent by Lord De La Warr to the river Patawomeke to trade with the Indians for corn, where he rescued the English boy, Henry Spelman, who had been living with the Indians. Through Spelman's influence, the Indians "fraughted his ship with corn."
Soon after June 28, 1613, Argall sailed from Virginia on his "fishing voyage" in a well-armoured English man-of-war. His object was the French colony of Jesuits at Mt. Desert, now in Maine, but at that time within the bounds of Virginia. He attacked the buildings and returned with the priests late in July. He was sent back by Gates to destroy the buildings and fortifications there and at St. Croix and Port Royal. This was done and he arrived back at Jamestown, about the first of December. On this voyage, he stopped at New Netherlands, on the Hudson, and forced the colonists there to submit to the crown of England.
Shipbuilding on Plantations
The tracts of land or plantations occupied by individual settlers of the colony were very few until after the "starving time" in 1610. When the colony had been reorganized by Lord De La Warr and Sir Thomas Gates, and something like peace existed with the Indians, more land patents were issued year after year. A list of land owners, in 1625, in the records of the Company, shows nearly two hundred persons owning plots of land varying in size from forty acres to the thirty-seven hundred acres of Sir George Yeardley's plantation at Hungar's river on the Eastern Shore.
In A Perfect Description of Virginia by an unnamed writer in 1648, it is stated that there were in the colony "pinnaces, barks, great and small boats many hundreds, for most of their plantations stand upon the rivers' sides and up little creeks and but a small way into the land." Every planter must have had a boat of some kind. Neighborly communication had to be maintained, religious services attended, fishing and oystering to be done, crops of tobacco transferred to the ships anchored out in the channel, and cargoes of goods taken from the ships to the warehouses. The planter navigated the boat himself unless he could provide a slave or an indentured servant.
Most of the shipbuilding done on the plantations was done by ship carpenters or men trained by them. The shipyards were very simple affairs, the essentials being a plot of ground on the bank of a stream with water deep enough to float the vessel and near a supply of suitable timber. Later would be added, perhaps, a small pier to which the boat could be attached, and a small building or shed for the protection of tools.
A visiting ship in need of repair would seek some convenient place on the river and the hospitality of the neighboring planter. An instance is that of Captain Thomas Dermer from Monhegan, North Virginia, now in Maine, who arrived at the colony in September, 1619, in an open pinnace of five tons. He had met Captain Ward several weeks earlier at a place called "St. James his Isles," and there had put most of his provisions on board the Sampson, Captain Ward's boat. Of his arrival in Virginia, he wrote to Samuel Purchas as follows: "After a little refreshing, we recovered up the river to James Citie and from thence to Captain Ward his plantation, where immediately we fell to hewing boards for a close deck." He and his men soon fell sick with malaria and "were sore shaken with burning fever." As their recovery was slow and winter had overtaken them, Dermer decided to wait until spring before sailing north. Captain John Ward had arrived in Virginia during the previous April and was already a member of the House of Burgesses.