The clamors became so loud that Smith punished the ringleader, one Dyer, a crafty fellow, and his ancient maligner, and then made one of his conciliatory addresses.  Having shown them how impossible it was to get corn, and reminded them of his own exertions, and that he had always shared with them anything he had, he told them that he should stand their nonsense no longer; he should force the idle to work, and punish them if they railed; if any attempted to escape to Newfoundland in the pinnace they would arrive at the gallows; the sick should not starve; every man able must work, and every man who did not gather as much in a day as he did should be put out of the fort as a drone.

Such was the effect of this speech that of the two hundred only seven died in this pinching time, except those who were drowned; no man died of want.  Captain Winne and Master Leigh had died before this famine occurred.  Many of the men were billeted among the savages, who used them well, and stood in such awe of the power at the fort that they dared not wrong the whites out of a pin.  The Indians caught Smith’s humor, and some of the men who ran away to seek Kemps and Tussore were mocked and ridiculed, and had applied to them —­Smith’s law of “who cannot work must not eat;” they were almost starved and beaten nearly to death.  After amusing himself with them, Kemps returned the fugitives, whom Smith punished until they were content to labor at home, rather than adventure to live idly among the savages, “of whom,” says our shrewd chronicler, “there was more hope to make better christians and good subjects than the one half of them that counterfeited themselves both.”  The Indians were in such subjection that any who were punished at the fort would beg the President not to tell their chief, for they would be again punished at home and sent back for another round.

We hear now of the last efforts to find traces of the lost colony of Sir Walter Raleigh.  Master Sicklemore returned from the Chawwonoke (Chowan River) with no tidings of them; and Master Powell, and Anas Todkill who had been conducted to the Mangoags, in the regions south of the James, could learn nothing but that they were all dead.  The king of this country was a very proper, devout, and friendly man; he acknowledged that our God exceeded his as much as our guns did his bows and arrows, and asked the President to pray his God for him, for all the gods of the Mangoags were angry.

The Dutchmen and one Bentley, another fugitive, who were with Powhatan, continued to plot against the colony, and the President employed a Swiss, named William Volday, to go and regain them with promises of pardon.  Volday turned out to be a hypocrite, and a greater rascal than the others.  Many of the discontented in the fort were brought into the scheme, which was, with Powhatan’s aid, to surprise and destroy Jamestown.  News of this getting about in the fort, there was a demand that the President should cut off these Dutchmen.  Percy and Cuderington, two gentlemen, volunteered to do it; but Smith sent instead Master Wiffin and Jeffrey Abbot, to go and stab them or shoot them.  But the Dutchmen were too shrewd to be caught, and Powhatan sent a conciliatory message that he did not detain the Dutchmen, nor hinder the slaying of them.