"My Lord,

"Talkinge with the King by chance I tould him of the Virginia squirrills which they say will fly, whereof there are now divers brought into England, and hee presently and very earnestly asked mee if none of them was provided for him, sayinge that hee was sure you would gett him one of them. I would not have trobled you with this but that you know so well how he is affected by these toyes, and with a little enquiry of any of your folkes you may furnish yourself to present him att his comminge to London which will not bee before Wensday next: the Monday before Theobald's and the Saterday before that to Royston. Your lordships most assuredly,

"to doo your service, "H. Southampton."

Captain Smith indulged himself in writing an imprudent, sharp letter to the "Right Honourables" in London. He entitled his epistle "A Rude Answer," in which he exhibited in caustic terms the preposterous folly of expecting a present profitable return from Virginia. As to gold, he had from the first discouraged all hope of it. The pieced barge for the South Sea? That, at least, was a feasible project. True, it could not be borne many hundreds of miles and over mountains on the backs of his men, but he could burn it and have the ashes carried over in a bag!

He then rallies the company for its prodigality in giving Newport a hundred pounds a year for carrying news, and informs them that he sends Ratcliffe home lest the colonists should cut his throat.

All this did but little good to our captain, as he had cause to realize afterward. "Had Newport suspected the character of the Rude answer," says Cooke, "it is probable he would have dropped it into the Atlantic. But he duly took it to England and the Right Honourables no doubt gasped at its truculence."

CHAPTER XV

In December, 1608, there were two hundred men within the palisades at Jamestown; already, although the weather was delightful, "affrighted with famine." The little wooded peninsula, small and marshy as it was, might with proper foresight and industry have yielded corn and garden products, but as Captain Smith in his "Rude Answer" had stated: "The one-half of us are sicke, the other little better. Our diet is usually a little meale and water, and not sufficient of that. Though there be fish in the sea, fowles in the aire, and beasts in the woods, their bounds are so large, they so wilde, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot trouble them. And we must long lodge and feed the men you send before they can be made good for anything. In over-toyling our weake unskilful bodies, we can scarce recover ourselves from one supply to another. If you would send out carpenters, husbandmen and diggers-up of trees' roots, they would be worth more than a thousand of such as we have."

It was always the old "question of bread and cheese," which has settled adversely many a good cause. Smith, however, did his best with the effeminate gentlemen who had come in Newport's latest ship. He himself shrank from no toil, no exposure. Neither danger nor labour discouraged his manhood, and with his example before them—grappling as he did with the hardest tasks—his followers were deprived of all excuse for complaint or discontent. Two very choice "gallants"—Gabriel Beadle and John Russell, "both proper gentlemen," were among the thirty whom he invited to join him in the noble art of wood-craft—felling trees, splitting them with wedges, and shaping them with hatchets into clapboards for the additional shelter needed by themselves. Meantime they were to lie in the woods at night. The Mary & Margaret had brought over six mares and a horse, so these new "gentlemen" would not be forced, as were their predecessors, to bear this timber on their backs out of the forest.

The novelty had its charm of pleasurable excitement.[48] "Strange were these pleasures to their conditions, yet lodging, eating, drinking, working or playing, they doing but as the President, all these things were carried so pleasantly as within a weeke they became Masters; making it their delight to heare the Trees thunder as they fell. But the Axes so oft blistered their tender fingers that commonly every third blow had a lowd Oath to drowne the Echo."