peace.  His reply was that ere he would consider any accommodation Lord Delaware must send him a coach and three horses and consent to confine the English wholly to their island territory.[31] Lord Delaware at once ordered Gates to attack and drive Powhatan’s son Pochins and his Indians from Kecoughtan; and when this was done he erected two forts at the mouth of Hampton River, called Charles and Henry, about a musket-shot distance from Fort Algernourne.

No precautions, however, could prevent the diseases incident to the climate, and during the summer no less than one hundred and fifty persons perished of fever.  In the fall Delaware concentrated the settlers, now reduced to less than two hundred, at Jamestown and Algernourne fort.  Wishing to carry out his instructions, he sent an expedition to the falls of James River to search for gold-mines; but, like its predecessor, it proved a failure, and many of the men were killed by the Indians.[32] Delaware himself fell sick, and by the spring was so reduced that he found it necessary to leave the colony.  When he departed, March 28, 1611, the storehouse contained only enough supplies to last the people three months at short allowance; and probably another “Starving Time” was prevented only by the arrival of Sir Thomas Dale, May 10, 1611.[33]

From this time till the death of Lord Delaware in 1618 the government was administered by a succession of deputy governors, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir Thomas Dale, Captain George Yardley, and Captain Samuel Argall.  For five years—­1611-1616—­of this period the ruling spirit was Sir Thomas Dale, who had acquired a great reputation in the army of the Netherlands as a disciplinarian.  His policy in Virginia seemed to have been the advancement of the company’s profit at the expense of the settlers, whom he pretended to regard as so abandoned that they needed the extreme of martial law.  In 1611 he restored the settlements at forts Charles and Henry; in 1613 he founded Bermuda Hundred and Bermuda City (otherwise called Charles Hundred and Charles City, now City Point), and in 1614 he established a salt factory at Smith Island near Cape Charles.[34]

In laboring at these works the men were treated like galley-slaves and given a diet “that hogs refused to eat.”  As a consequence some of them ran away, and Dale set the Indians to catch them, and when they were brought back he burned several of them at the stake.  Some attempted to go to England in a barge, and for their temerity were shot to death, hanged, or broken on the wheel.  Although for the most part the men in the colony at this time were old soldiers, mechanics, and workmen, accustomed to labor, we are told that among those who perished through Dale’s cruelty were many young men “of Auncyent Houses and born to estates of L1000 by the year,"[35] persons doubtless attracted to Virginia by the mere love of adventure, but included by Dale in the common slavery.  Even the strenuous Captain John Smith testified concerning Jeffrey Abbott, a veteran of the wars in Ireland and the Netherlands, but put to death by Dale for mutiny, that “he never saw in Virginia a more sufficient soldier, (one) less turbulent, a better wit, (one) more hardy or industrious, nor any more forward to cut them off that sought to abandon the country or wrong the colony."[36]