t was no longer possible to go abroad
for food, and as the winter came on we were put to it even in that land
of plenty, for enough to keep ourselves alive.

THE "STARVING TIME"

We came to know what starvation meant during that winter, and were I to
set down here all of the suffering, of the hunger weakness, and of the
selfishness we saw during the six months after Captain Smith sailed for
home, there would not be days enough left in my life to complete the
tale.

As I look back on it now, it seems more like some wonderful dream than
a reality, wherein men strove with women and children for food to keep
life in their own worthless bodies.

It is enough if I say that of the four hundred and ninety persons whom
Captain Smith left behind him, there were, in the month of May of the
year 1610, but fifty-eight left alive. That God should have spared
among those, Nathaniel Peacock and myself, is something which passeth
understanding, for verily there were scores of better than we whose
lives would have advantaged Jamestown more than ours ever can, who died
and were buried as best they could be by the few who had sufficient
strength remaining to dig the graves.

I set it down in all truth that, through God's mercy, our lives were
saved by Master Hunt, for he counseled us wisely as to the care we
should take of our bodies when our stomachs were crying out for food,
and it was he who showed us how we might prepare this herb or the bark
from that tree for the sustaining of life, when we had nothing else to
put into our mouths.

We had forgotten that Lord De la Warr was the new governor; we had heard
nothing of the ship in which it was said Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George
Somers had sailed. We were come to that pass where we cared neither for
governor nor nobleman. We strove only to keep within our bodies the life
which had become painful.

Then it was, when the few of us who yet lived, feared each moment lest
the savages would put an end to us, that we saw sailing up into the bay
two small ships, and I doubt if there was any among us who did not fall
upon his knees and give thanks aloud to God for the help which had come
at the very moment when it had seemed that we were past all aid.

OUR COURAGE GIVES OUT

But our time of rejoicing was short. Although these two ships were
brought by Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, having in them not
less than one hundred and fifty men, they did not have among