1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [37]
On some level the colony’s plight is baffling. Chesapeake Bay was and is one of the hemisphere’s great fisheries. Replete with pike, carp, mullet, crab, bass, flounder, turtle, and eel, this long, shallow estuary was so biologically productive that John Smith joked about being able to catch dinner in the frying pan used to cook it. The Atlantic sturgeon that swam in the James grew big enough, one colonist reported, that native boys could loop vines around their tails and be pulled underwater. (I didn’t believe this until an archaeologist at Jamestown told me he had uncovered bones from a sturgeon that may have been fourteen feet long.) Oysters grew in such numbers that one mound of discarded shells from native feasts covered nearly thirty acres.
The luckless George Percy, younger son of the earl of Northumberland, in a nineteenth-century copy of a portrait, now lost, made during his lifetime. (Photo credit 2.5)
How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. The first three convoys brought a total of 295 people to Jamestown. According to the historian Edmund S. Morgan, fully 92 of them were gentlemen—and many of the rest were “the personal attendants that gentlemen thought necessary to make life bearable even in England.” The attendants, too, defined their position by not performing manual labor. But even if they had been able to cast aside their life-long, ingrained customs, they might not have been able to survive, because the English were unfamiliar with the Virginia environment. They could have tried fishing for bass and catfish, which are common in the lower river at winter. But they didn’t know where and when these fish like to feed. As anglers know, fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time is futile. The colonists died of ignorance as much as inanition.
John Rolfe was lucky enough to arrive in Virginia the following spring, after the starving time. Almost a year before, he had left England on the flagship of the expedition that brought the Smith-hating gentry. Rolfe’s ship carried Smith’s official replacement. Halfway across, a hurricane slammed into the group. The other ships slipped through the storm and made landfall in Virginia, with the results that I described above (attacking the Nansemond, enraging Powhatan, dying in droves). Meanwhile Rolfe’s vessel was blown south and nearly sank. For three straight days, one passenger remembered, every person aboard, many “stripped naked as men in galleys,” worked bucket chains in chest-deep water. The ship staggered awash to Bermuda, where it wrecked on the northernmost of the country’s four main islands. For nine months the survivors remained on the beach, surviving on fish, sea turtles, and the pigs they had brought for Jamestown. They slowly fashioned two smaller vessels from island cedar and the wreckage of their ship. Rolfe’s party arrived in Chesapeake Bay on May 23, 1610.
Appalled by the famine and ruin they found, the Bermuda group decided within two weeks to abandon Jamestown. Rolfe and the other newcomers loaded Jamestown’s skeletal inhabitants onto their two makeshift vessels and two others at the colony, intending to set off for Newfoundland, where they would beg a ride home from fishing boats that plied the Grand Banks. As they waited for the tide to turn for their departure, a small boat hove into view. It was the longboat preceding yet