etained
at the settlement while everyone else was turned out to forage as best
he could. Most sought the oyster grounds where they ate oysters nine
weeks, a diet varied only by a pitifully negligible allowance of corn
meal. In the words of one of the foragers, "this kind of feeding caused
all our skin to peel off from head to foot as if we had been dead." The
arrival of supplies ended the ordeal. But soon hunger descended again
and the oyster beds would have been the natural recourse if it had not
been winter and the water too cold to wade in. So the oysters were no
help.

That conscientious reporter, William Strachey, wrote in 1610:

In this desolation and misery our Governor found the condition and
state of the Colony. Nor was there at the fort, as they whom we
found related unto us, any means to take fish; neither sufficient
seine, nor other convenient net, and yet of their need, there was
not one eye of sturgeon yet come into the river.

The river which was wont before this time of the year to be
plentiful of sturgeon had not now a fish to be seen in it, and
albeit we laboured and hauled our net twenty times day and night,
yet we took not so much as would content half the fishermen. Our
Governor therefore, sent away his long boat to coast the river
downward as far as Point Comfort, and from thence to Cape Henry and
Cape Charles, and all within the bay, which after a seven nights
trial and travail, returned without any fruits of their labours,
scarce getting so much fish as served their own company.

And, likewise, because at the Lord Governor and Captain General's
first coming, there was found in our own river no store of fish
after many trials, the Lord Governor and Captain General dispatched
in the _Virginia_, with instructions, the seventeenth of June,
1610, Robert Tyndall, master of the _De la Warre_, to fish unto,
all along, and between Cape Henry and Cape Charles within the
bay.... Nor was the Lord Governor and Captain General in the
meanwhile idle at the fort, but every day and night he caused the
nets to be hauled, sometimes a dozen times one after another. But
it pleased not God so to bless our labours that we did at any time
take one quarter so much as would give unto our people one pound at
a meal apiece, by which we might have better husbanded our peas and
oatmeal, notwithstanding the great sto