Chesapeake (15 page)

‘I meant … you’ll not return.’

‘Me! This bay is blood to me. It courses through my veins.’ He said much more, and in the end drew himself to maximum height, saluted the little colony he had kept alive, and was seen no more in Virginia.

On the day he sailed down the river, the testing time began, those starving weeks and months of autumn 1609 and winter 1610. When Smith left, the expanding colony contained 507 members; six terrible months later only 61 remained. Of this foodless, heatless catastrophe Steed reported to the managers in London:

It was a time of such gnawing horror that those few who survived sought ever after to erase it from their memory, and yet it was the foundation of fact on which the great colony of Virginia was erected.

On May 23, 1610, when the spring breezes made starvation even more monstrous, a man who had crawled to the river to die set up a howling, and when Steed went to him he saw that the man was pointing downstream where two rescue ships hove into view, and when they moved to shore Steed saw that their names were
Patience
and
Deliverance.

It was during the following spring, in 1611, when the colony was stabilized, that Steed decided to quit Jamestown and start a new life on that
hospitable island he had scouted with Captain Smith three summers earlier. During all the trials which beset him in Virginia, he had kept alive his vision of that island with the tall trees and abundant fish, and even when it seemed that the Indian women must hack him to pieces, or that starvation would evaporate him before the day ended, he could visualize that island and imagine himself living quietly there.

He could even recall the Indians he and Captain Smith had met along the river, especially the giant chief, and he wanted desperately to believe that they were different from the mercurial and untrustworthy tribes under Powhatan. He had no evidence to support this hope, but he had seen those gentle Choptank Indians, and it was not unreasonable to hope that they were different.

The driving force which impelled him to leave Jamestown was one which his ancestors would have understood: Sir Devon with his simplistic sense of right and wrong; bumbling, stumbling Sir Latimer willing to be torn apart for his faith; hesitant Sir Fairleigh trying to be both a good Catholic and a loyal Englishman—they would have comprehended when he said, ‘I am strangled with duplicity. I must live where I can stand forth as an honest Catholic.’

Jamestown was far too preoccupied with mere survival to worry much about the forms of religion; it was not flamboyantly anti-Catholic, but that was because the leaders of the settlement could not imagine that any of their flock were Catholic. With them it was always ‘Good Queen Bess for whom Virginia was named’ and ‘Faithful King James, a reliable man even though his mother was that Catholic whore, Mary of Scotland.’ It was known, of course, that Steed’s grandfather, Sir Latimer, had been drawn and quartered for his treasonous adherence to Rome, but it was also known that young Steed had abjured that poisonous faith; besides, on various occasions he had proved his valor, and that counted.

Edmund Steed could have continued his masquerade as a false Protestant, and his offspring, when he had them, could certainly have been counted among the first families of Virginia, but the tricky doubleness of his position—Protestant by day, Catholic by night—was more than he could sustain. He was indeed sick of dissembling and determined to put an end to it. For a Catholic, there was no future in the Virginia settlement, so he would go elsewhere.

He was not forthright in offering his reasons for moving to the eastern shore. ‘I want to go where the oystering is better,’ he said lamely. ‘Trade with the Indians who live across the bay could be profitable to Virginia.’ One after another he paraded his spurious reasons, and in the end the governors of the colony granted him permission—‘It will be to our advantage to have an outpost firmly located on the eastern shore.’

So in May 1611 he rose each day before dawn to hack out the planks required for the boat he had in mind. Samuel Dwight, a ship’s carpenter
on one of the rescue ships, gave Steed some rule-of-thumb advice.

‘For these shallow waters make her flat-bottomed. Also, it’s easier for them as doesn’t know to build a keel. One mast is all a man alone can handle, and it a short one. Pointed bow for probing, transom stern for stability. And leeboards to hold her into the wind.’

‘What are leeboards?’ Steed inquired.

‘When you’ve finished putting her together, I’ll instruct you.’

It took Steed four weeks, with spasmodic help from Mr. Dwight, to build his small craft. It was only fifteen feet long, but it was sturdy, and if the uneven finishing of the planks allowed water to flow in at a rate that would soon sink her, stout caulking would cure that. It was launched on the last day of June, and when it swayed on the placid waters of the James, Steed asked his carpenter, ‘What type of boat is it?’ and the newcomer replied, ‘Bateau,’ and he demonstrated how the leeboards must be attached.

They were two stout oval slabs of wood, fastened outboard at amidships by pivots, one to the starboard, the other to port. By convenient ropes they could be lowered into the water or lifted out, and their purpose was to counteract the normal sideways drift of a boat under sail. They were, in short, a clever, practical substitute for a fixed keel, and they worked. Like two misplaced fins of a fish, they dominated the appearance of the bateau, but Carpenter Dwight said of them approvingly, ‘You’ll find them valuable in the bay. Remember, when the wind is pushing you sideways on the starboard tack, put down your port leeboard. And when it pushes you from port, put down your starboard.’ Steed said he thought he could manage the low, heavy bateau.

Into it he piled the goods he had collected from those unfortunates who had died during the starving time, with special attention to axes, knives, gunpowder and nails. He left Jamestown with one barrel of dried foods, an extra pair of heavy trousers and three woolen shirts. He had no medicine, no small tools, no needles for sewing, and only two knives, three forks, four spoons and a pair of guns. Yet he had not the slightest doubt that he could occupy his island, and tame it, and make it an industrious part of the empire. On June 12, 1611, he set forth, and because there was no wind, he rowed all that day down the James. His fancy leeboards were of no use, but his hands were well blistered.

However, on June 13 a tidy breeze came down the James and into it he hoisted his sail. Since the wind came from directly behind, he still had no use for his leeboards, but on the third day, as he approached the bay itself, a brisk wind swept down from the northwest, and he put his bateau on a port tack so that it would head up the bay, against the wind, and now he dropped his starboard leeboard and felt it catch the water and brace him against sideward drifting.

‘Carpenter Dwight knew what he was doing!’ he exulted as the wind
drove him forward, and all that day he lay at ease admiring the bateau he had built.

Now the waters of the bay became familiar and he was able to tick off the rivers of the western shore—York, Rappahannock, Potomac—and when he reached the Patuxent he knew it was time to start swinging eastward to strike the entrance to the Choptank and the island he sought.

It was the longest day of the year when he approached the western end of the island, and he decided not to go ashore that night, because he could not foretell what mood the once-peaceful Choptank Indians might be in. Of one thing he was certain: he would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. This would be his empire; here he would live according to the principles of his fathers. When long-delayed night closed in, and the outlines of the island became increasingly dim, so that in the end it existed only in his mind, he uttered a prayer: ‘Divine Leader Who has brought me here, permit me safe conduct onto my island and allow me to live here in Thy ways.’

He could not sleep. All night he sat in his bateau staring in the direction of land, and toward four, when dawn began to brighten and his island rose from the mists like a sanctuary preserved, he shouted joyously and steered his boat around the north shore and into that safe creek he had noted three years before. As he sailed its deep clear waters and saw the massive trees lining the banks like courtiers arranged to welcome a returning king, he nodded gravely and announced, ‘This is the island of Devon, proprietary of the Steeds, and so it shall remain forever.’

He anchored at the head of the creek and waded ashore. After scouting the area for likely spots, he found a rise containing only a few trees, with open space enough to build a hut from which he would be able to watch the river and his boat. With the good luck that comes to countrymen who have a feeling for land, he had stumbled upon the choicest spot for building, and as the days progressed and he cleared the brush, he was satisfied that he had chosen well.

He worked from dawn till dusk, day after day, catching fish and crabs for his food and spotting the berry patches and nut trees for future use. Deer came to watch. Raccoons were plentiful and three blue herons patrolled his shore, catching so many fish that he felt certain he could do the same.

With all this food, he reflected, why did we starve in Jamestown? But as soon as he posed the question he knew the answer: Because the Virginia Indians were hostile and would not allow us to hunt or fish. And he wondered how long his muskets and bullets would defend him if the Choptank Indians turned hostile.

With so much work to do, he could not brood upon this possibility, but he did refrain from wasting ammunition. With his ax he went to the woods and began chopping down the small trees he would need for his
hut, and when the outline was formed, he cut branches and wove them between the poles, as he had seen Indians do, but the result was rough and rain entered almost unimpeded. But then he brought rushes from the river and tangled them among the branches, and when he compacted them, like a woman tightening threads upon a loom, he had a satisfactory wall.

He was then free to explore his island, and found it a fascinating place. Utilizing various tricks of measurement, he calculated that it ran about two and a quarter miles east and west, one and a half north and south, for a total of something more than two thousand acres. It was cut nearly in the middle by the intruding river and a deep bay leading up from the south, and the two halves were sufficiently different to accommodate two varied styles of husbandry: sheep to the west, corn to the east. He had no premonition of what the real treasure of this land was going to be.

He had occupied his island for more than four weeks without seeing any Indians, or signs of any. No canoes had appeared on the river, nor had any fires been set. He tried to recall how far to the east he and Captain Smith had gone before they encountered the village of Patamoke, but his memory was vague.

Where can the Indians be? he thought one morning as he surveyed the empty river; he could not know they had moved eastward to escape mosquitoes.

And then toward the end of September, while he felled trees on the eastern point of the island, he saw three canoes edging gingerly out from the white cliffs opposite. They were not war canoes, so they could not have come seeking war; they seemed, in fact, timorous, for when they reached a spot about a half mile from the island they stopped. There they stayed all day, making no further gesture, even though they must have seen Steed. Finally they retired.

They repeated this for two days, and on the third Steed made signals and lured them closer, and when they were less than a hundred yards from shore, so that their faces were becoming distinct, a short thin man shouted in a language Steed could not understand. The canoes milled about, guided by what must have been conflicting suggestions, and on the spur of the moment Steed dropped his ax, walked to the edge of the water and held up his hands, empty.

The canoes moved closer, until the faces became so individualized that he could see one of the men had a cleft chin. No one spoke. Steed continued to hold his hands open and pointed to the emptiness behind him, indicating that he was alone. The Indians stared at him stolidly, remained in position for perhaps half an hour, then smartly withdrew, paddling upstream to their village.

On the fourth day this procedure was repeated, and Steed suspected that the man with the cleft chin wanted to come ashore but was restrained by the men in his canoe.

On the fifth day Steed kept about his work, watching the canoes out of the corner of his eye, but again no moves were taken by the Indians, and well before dusk they retired. He judged that on the morrow something definite would happen, and he prepared his axes and his guns. That evening, as the sun left the sky and a darkness deeper than usual enveloped the island, he recalled the scenes of torture he had witnessed, and the destructive fighting on the western shore, and he prayed: ‘God, let my Indians come in peace.’

He could not sleep. His hut seemed unbearably close and he left it to sit on a log, staring into the darkness and wondering what he might be forced to do in the coming day, and when the pale streaks of early dawn lighted the east he decided that he would stay in his hut, like a proper chief, and wait for the Indians to come to him. Day brightened and nothing happened. Forenoon brought buzzing insects and an inquisitive deer, but no visitors. High noon arrived, bringing with it a stillness that quieted even the rustling of the tallest trees, and then when the sun had begun its descent he saw four canoes come into his river, and in the lead position in the lead canoe sat the immensely tall Indian with the three turkey feathers, whom he and Captain Smith had met.