The supplies which Smith brought gave great comfort to the despairing colony, which was by this time reasonably fitted with houses. But it was not long before they again ran short of food. In his first narrative Smith says there were some motions made for the President and Captain Arthur to go over to England and procure a supply, but it was with much ado concluded that the pinnace and the barge should go up the river to Powhatan to trade for corn, and the lot fell to Smith to command the expedition. In his “General Historie” a little different complexion is put upon this. On his return, Smith says, he suppressed an attempt to run away with the pinnace to England. He represents that what food “he carefully provided the rest carelessly spent,” and there is probably much truth in his charges that the settlers were idle and improvident. He says also that they were in continual broils at this time. It is in the fall of 1607, just before his famous voyage up the Chickahominy, on which he departed December 10th--that he writes: “The President and Captain Arthur intended not long after to have abandoned the country, which project was curbed and suppressed by Smith. The Spaniard never more greedily desired gold than he victual, nor his soldiers more to abandon the country than he to keep it. But finding plenty of corn in the river of Chickahomania, where hundreds of salvages in divers places stood with baskets expecting his coming, and now the winter approaching, the rivers became covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes, that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowls, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them, so that none of our Tuftaffaty humorists desired to go to England.”
While the Chickahominy expedition was preparing, Smith made a voyage to Popohanock or Quiyoughcohanock, as it is called on his map, a town on the south side of the river, above Jamestown. Here the women and children fled from their homes and the natives refused to trade. They had plenty of corn, but Smith says he had no commission to spoil them. On his return he called at Paspahegh, a town on the north side of the James, and on the map placed higher than Popohanock, but evidently nearer to Jamestown, as he visited it on his return. He obtained ten bushels of corn of the churlish and treacherous natives, who closely watched and dogged the expedition.
