A few quotations from the records of that period paint the picture in its most terrible colors. Lord De La Warr who arrived in 1610 just in time to save the colony from abandonment reported to the London Company:
Our people, together with the Indians (not to friend), had the last winter destroyed and kild up all our hoggs, insomuch as of five or six hundred (as it is supposed), there was not above one sow, that we can heare of, left alive; not a henn nor a chick in the forte (and our horses and mares they had eaten with the first).
_Wherein is proved plainely that Plowing and_
Setting, is much more profitable and lesse
_He that withdraweth the Corne, the people will curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth Corne._ Prou.11.26.
Imprinted at London by _Felix Kyngston_, dwelling in Pater noster Rowe, over against the signe of the Checker, 1601.
[Illustration: Indians boiling maple sap below and planting corn above.
[Illustration: The earliest picture of Maize.
And Reverend William Simmonds states in regard to this same starving time of the winter of 1609-10:
as for our hogs, hens, goats, sheepe, horse, or what lived; our commanders and officers did daily consume them: some small proportions (sometimes) we tasted, till all was devoured.
Thus after three years they had nothing of a material nature to show for their efforts. Their most valuable achievement had been their acquired knowledge of the Indians' methods of farming. To make a bad situation worse the Indians began to make trouble. Lord De La Warr speaks of their "late injuries and murthering of our men." It was not until 1611 that real farming got under way at Jamestown. Then corn planting and fence building began in earnest.
Sir Thomas Dale with "three ships, men, and cattell (100 kine, 200 swine)" arrived in Virginia May 10, 1611. Dale had seen military service in the Old World and was a severe and strict disciplinarian. The surviving colonists received a jolt in their manner of living. From habits of indolence into which they had fallen, owing to the hot climate and lack of food, after the departure of Captain John Smith, they were with little ceremony put to work. "His first care therefore was to imploy all hands in the setting of corne at the two forts at Kecoughtan, Henry and Charles," wrote Ralph Hamor "and about the end of May wee had an indifferent crop of good corne." This corn was planted near what is now Hampton where Strachey says, "so much ground is there cleared and open; enough with little labour alreddy prepared to receive corne or make viniards of two or three thowsand acres." With corn planting completed, two palisaded forts were built for the protection of a few men left to care for the crops. They made another planting across Chesapeake Bay on the Virginia Cape. They had learned the hard way that clearing the heavily timbered land at Jamestown was hopeless for immediate results. Dale then returned to Jamestown "where the most companie were, and their daily and usual works, bowling in the streets." This game was interrupted and the men put to work felling timber, repairing their houses and providing pointed pickets for fencing a new town, which Dale proposed to build, eighty miles above Jamestown.