At the time of Smith’s deposition the colony was in prosperous condition.  The “General Historie” says that he left them “with three ships, seven boats, commodities ready to trade, the harvest newly gathered, ten weeks’ provision in store, four hundred ninety and odd persons, twenty-four pieces of ordnance, three hundred muskets, snaphances and fire-locks, shot, powder, and match sufficient, curats, pikes, swords, and morrios, more than men; the Salvages, their language and habitations well known to a hundred well-trained and expert soldiers; nets for fishing; tools of all kinds to work; apparel to supply our wants; six mules and a horse; five or six hundred swine; as many hens and chickens; some goats; some sheep; what was brought or bred there remained.”  Jamestown was also strongly palisaded and contained some fifty or sixty houses; besides there were five or six other forts and plantations, “not so sumptuous as our succerers expected, they were better than they provided any for us.”

These expectations might well be disappointed if they were founded upon the pictures of forts and fortifications in Virginia and in the Somers Islands, which appeared in De Bry and in the “General Historie,” where they appear as massive stone structures with all the finish and elegance of the European military science of the day.

Notwithstanding these ample provisions for the colony, Smith had small expectation that it would thrive without him.  “They regarding nothing,” he says, “but from hand to mouth, did consume what we had, took care for nothing but to perfect some colorable complaint against Captain Smith.”

Nor was the composition of the colony such as to beget high hopes of it.  There was but one carpenter, and three others that desired to learn, two blacksmiths, ten sailors; those called laborers were for the most part footmen, brought over to wait upon the adventurers, who did not know what a day’s work was—­all the real laborers were the Dutchmen and Poles and some dozen others.  “For all the rest were poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth than either begin one or help to maintain one.  For when neither the fear of God, nor the law, nor shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule them here, there is small hope ever to bring one in twenty of them to be good there.”  Some of them proved more industrious than was expected; “but ten good workmen would have done more substantial work in a day than ten of them in a week.”

The disreputable character of the majority of these colonists is abundantly proved by other contemporary testimony.  In the letter of the Governor and Council of Virginia to the London Company, dated Jamestown, July 7, 1610, signed by Lord De La Ware, Thomas Gates, George Percy, Ferd.  Wenman, and William Strachey, and probably composed by Strachey, after speaking of the bountiful capacity of the country, the writer