"neere led to hell
amongst the Devills to dwell."
The details of their orgies are too disgusting for repetition. No wonder, as the captive tells us, he had hideous dreams! As our rhyming clergyman hath it:—
"His wakynge mind in hideous dreams did oft see wondrous shapes
Of bodies strange and huge in growth and of stupendous makes."
But he preserved a bold front, this stout-hearted Briton, and for aught his enemies knew to the contrary his courage never forsook him. They had captured a bag of gunpowder in the barge, and he encouraged them to keep it for the spring-sowing that it might yield an abundant crop like grain. They returned his pistol, that he might instruct them in its use, but he contrived to break the lock of the weapon as if by accident.
When near the end of their journey, they received an invitation from the great chief, Opitchipan, Powhatan's brother and heir to the kingdom, to spend a few days at his house. There a banquet was spread for the prisoner, whether to impress him with a sense of the chief's grandeur, or to strengthen him for enduring the fate that awaited him, we cannot tell. Great platters of bread, venison, and wild fowl were spread before him, "but not any one would eat with him." The fragments in every case were collected in baskets and hung over his head while he slept, or feigned to sleep, and if rejected a second time were given to the women and children.
At length, after a long journey by a circuitous route which brought him within twelve miles of Jamestown, he was conducted to Werowocomoco, the residence of the great Powhatan, situated on the north side of York River. He was not immediately conducted into the presence of the emperor, but remained for several days in the forest at some distance. His reception, it appears, was to be the occasion of much pomp and ceremonial, far exceeding anything he had yet seen. These despised palefaces, who wore outlandish garments and hair on their faces, who could fire great guns that battered down the limbs of trees, who had no wives of their own and declined to accept them from others—these fellows should see how the great Powhatan held his court. Kept in waiting, accordingly, the captive was thronged by curious crowds who watched him from morning until night. "Grim courtiers," he tells us, "more than two hundred, who stood gazing as they had seen some monster."
CHAPTER XI
The Emperor Powhatan was now living at Werowocomoco, twelve miles from Jamestown. This had been his favourite residence until the arrival of the English, but he soon "tooke so little pleasure in their neighbourhood—seeing they could visit him against his will in six or seven hours—that he retired himselfe to a place in the desarts at the top of the river Chickahomnia."
In all the countries which had come to him by inheritance he had houses "built after the manner of arbours"—of saplings, thatched with boughs of trees, and lined with mats. Some of these houses were a hundred and twenty feet long, and at every house provision was kept for his entertainment when it pleased him to make a royal progress through his dominions. Besides these, he kept for his own use a treasury building at Orapakes, filled with skins, copper, pearls, beads, bows and arrows, also a store of the precious red paint, with which the ladies of his court adorned themselves. At the four corners of this house were four images rudely carved out of the trunks of trees—one represented a dragon, another a bear, the third a leopard, and the fourth a man, signifying that the great Emperor was lord of beast and man. Indeed, his power was absolute. He had under him inferior kings of his own kindred, and all paid him tribute. Eight of ten parts of everything they acquired—game, corn, skins, beads, dye-stuffs, and the precious copper—were reverently laid at his feet. At his least frown they trembled with fear, for cruel and ingenious he could be in devising tortures for the punishment of those who offended him. The arrow and the tomahawk were his most merciful agents in despatching them. Before the door of his rural palace many a victim had been, in the presence of his women and little children, flayed alive, dismembered by degrees, thrown alive into a pit of fire.
On this fifth of January some such divertisement was keenly anticipated. His family and retainers were awake early, and bustling about in preparation for an unusual event.