he "General Historie." It is also hinted plainly enough
that Smith might have taken the girl to wife, Indian fashion.

XIV. THE COLONY WITHOUT SMITH

It was necessary to follow for a time the fortune of the Virginia
colony after the departure of Captain Smith. Of its disasters and speedy
decline there is no more doubt than there is of the opinion of Smith
that these were owing to his absence. The savages, we read in his
narration, no sooner knew he was gone than they all revolted and spoiled
and murdered all they encountered.

The day before Captain Smith sailed, Captain Davis arrived in a small
pinnace with sixteen men. These, with a company from the fort under
Captain Ratcliffe, were sent down to Point Comfort. Captain West and
Captain Martin, having lost their boats and half their men among the
savages at the Falls, returned to Jamestown. The colony now lived upon
what Smith had provided, "and now they had presidents with all their
appurtenances." President Percy was so sick he could neither go nor
stand. Provisions getting short, West and Ratcliffe went abroad to
trade, and Ratcliffe and twenty-eight of his men were slain by an ambush
of Powhatan's, as before related in the narrative of Henry Spelman.
Powhatan cut off their boats, and refused to trade, so that Captain West
set sail for England. What ensued cannot be more vividly told than in
the "General Historie":

"Now we all found the losse of Capt. Smith, yea his greatest maligners
could now curse his losse; as for corne provision and contribution from
the salvages, we had nothing but mortall wounds, with clubs and
arrowes; as for our hogs, hens, goats, sheep, horse, or what lived,
our commanders, officers and salvages daily consumed them, some small
proportions sometimes we tasted, till all was devoured; then swords,
arms, pieces or anything was traded with the salvages, whose cruell
fingers were so oft imbrued in our blouds, that what by their crueltie,
our Governor's indiscretion, and the losse of our ships, of five hundred
within six months after Capt. Smith's departure, there remained not past
sixty men, women and children, most miserable and poore creatures;
and those were preserved for the most part, by roots, herbes, acorns,
walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish; they that had starch in
these extremities made no small use of it, yea, even the very skinnes
of our horses. Nay, so great was our famine, that a salvage we slew and
buried, the