In these three months they manufactured three or four lasts (fourteen barrels in a last) of tar, pitch, and soap-ashes, produced some specimens of glass, dug a well of excellent sweet water in the fort, which they had wanted for two years, built twenty houses, repaired the church, planted thirty or forty acres of ground, and erected a block-house on the neck of the island, where a garrison was stationed to trade with the savages and permit neither whites nor Indians to pass except on the President’s order.  Even the domestic animals partook the industrious spirit:  “of three sowes in eighteen months increased 60 and od Pigs; and neare 500 chickings brought up themselves without having any meat given them.”  The hogs were transferred to Hog Isle, where another block house was built and garrisoned, and the garrison were permitted to take “exercise” in cutting down trees and making clapboards and wainscot.  They were building a fort on high ground, intended for an easily defended retreat, when a woful discovery put an end to their thriving plans.

Upon examination of the corn stored in casks, it was found half-rotten, and the rest consumed by rats, which had bred in thousands from the few which came over in the ships.  The colony was now at its wits end, for there was nothing to eat except the wild products of the country.  In this prospect of famine, the two Indians, Kemps and Tussore, who had been kept fettered while showing the whites how to plant the fields, were turned loose; but they were unwilling to depart from such congenial company.  The savages in the neighborhood showed their love by bringing to camp, for sixteen days, each day at least a hundred squirrels, turkeys, deer, and other wild beasts.  But without corn, the work of fortifying and building had to be abandoned, and the settlers dispersed to provide victuals.  A party of sixty or eighty men under Ensign Laxon were sent down the river to live on oysters; some twenty went with Lieutenant Percy to try fishing at Point Comfort, where for six weeks not a net was cast, owing to the sickness of Percy, who had been burnt with gunpowder; and another party, going to the Falls with Master West, found nothing to eat but a few acorns.

Up to this time the whole colony was fed by the labors of thirty or forty men:  there was more sturgeon than could be devoured by dog and man; it was dried, pounded, and mixed with caviare, sorrel, and other herbs, to make bread; bread was also made of the “Tockwhogh” root, and with the fish and these wild fruits they lived very well.  But there were one hundred and fifty of the colony who would rather starve or eat each other than help gather food.  These “distracted, gluttonous loiterers” would have sold anything they had—­tools, arms, and their houses—­for anything the savages would bring them to eat.  Hearing that there was a basket of corn at Powhatan’s, fifty miles away, they would have exchanged all their property for it.  To satisfy their factious humors, Smith succeeded in getting half of it:  “they would have sold their souls,” he says, for the other half, though not sufficient to last them a week.