While they were gone, the unprotected colony was attacked by Indians. Fortunately, in Smith's absence, someone else had an idea, and a thundering broadside from the boat dispersed the enemy who had victory in their grasp if they had only known it. Smith had been suspecting that mischief was brewing back behind the screens of fire which the Indians maintained. Had he not told them that they needed a palisade?
II
HE was allowed to take his seat on the council on the tenth of June. Eleven days later the Reverend Robert Hunt gave Communion to all. Captain Newport, having dined ashore that Sunday, invited the leaders to supper on his ship. He sailed the next morning to report the grim time which the colonists were having without sufficient supplies. Smith wrote: "Our drink was water, our lodgings, castles in the air."
Every man was doled out three ounces of bread, and a skimpy helping of bran and water. Typhoid and malaria took their toll. Weakened by both diet and disease, they staggered as they toted logs to the fort, and they made a pitiful spectacle for any Indians or spying Spaniards who may have seen them. While wheat grew as high as a man's head within seven weeks of the planting, there was not enough to satisfy the hungry.
By mid-June the fort was built on a low and level half-acre, which was shaped like a triangle. There were streets of occupied houses—each of which had about thirty feet clearance of the palisade. Mud or thatched-reed clamped heavy roofs on the early huts, making them suffocatingly hot. Added to this misery, the eating of molded corn and drinking of brackish water downed nearly all, and killed half of the colonists before the summer had passed. Once only five men were up and about. "Had we been as free from all sins as gluttony and drunkenness we might have been canonized," observed Smith.
Unwilling to be among the downed, he cured himself somehow and learned to subsist on crabmeat and sturgeon, going foraging, trading and exploring up and down the rivers with a few hardy survivors. He heard a great deal about the great Powhatan whose realm included all of the country from the Roanoke River in the south to the head of the Chesapeake in the north. His chief seat was upon the north side of the York River at Werowocomoco.
As Smith crept up the James River in his shallop, guileless Indian swimmers beckoned him on. Taken in by Smith's friendly greetings, they opened the doors of their bark-covered wigwams, where Smith, a natural and welcome democrat, sat down and ate as one of them. He noted that their canoes were often carved out of single trees, that their oval-shaped wigwams were made of bark upon a framework of saplings, and that their gardens produced cymblings, beans and corn as well as tobacco.