stayed away in large numbers. They were usually present during warm
weather when spoilage was worst. The first colonists had no ice at all
and very little salt. Frequent spells of damp weather made sun-drying
impractical. If more fish were caught than could be eaten at once, the
excess was very likely wasted. Fishing gear was consistently
inadequate. But from the very first, fishing and its development had
been kept in mind by the promoters of the colony.

Fishing rights were defined in 1606 in letters patent to Sir Thomas
Gates, Sir George Somers and others, as recorded in the Charter granted
in 1606:

They shall have all ... fishings ... from the said first seat of
their plantation and habitation by the space of fifty miles of
English statute measure, all along the said coast of Virginia and
America, towards the west and southwest, as the coast lies ... and
also all ... fishings for the space of fifty English miles ... all
along the said coast of Virginia and America, towards the east and
northeast ... and also ... fishings ... from the same, fifty miles
every way on the sea coast, directly into the mainland by the space
of one hundred like English miles.

In the new fishing territory around Jamestown the Indians were the
professionals and their methods were of great interest to the English
novices. A description is furnished by William Strachey, secretary of
state of the colony and author of _The Historie of Travaile into
Virginia Britannia_:

Their fishing is much in boats. These they call quintans, as the
West Indians call their canoas. They make them with one tree, by
burning and scraping away the coals with stones and shells till
they have made them in the form of a trough. Some of them are an
ell deep and forty or fifty foot in length and some will transport
forty men, but the most ordinary are smaller and will ferry ten or
twenty, with some luggage, over their broadest rivers. Instead of
oars, they use paddles and sticks, with which they will row faster
than we in our barges. They have nets for fishing, for the quantity
as formerly braided and meshed as ours and these are made of bark
of certain trees, deer sinews, or a kind of grass, which they call
pemmenaw, of which their women between their hands and thighs, spin
a thread very even and readily, and this thread serves for many
uses, as about their housing, their m