Captain John Smith

At the middle of June, Newport departed for England for more emigrants and supplies, leaving a pinnace for the use of the settlers. Already the prudent thinkers had discovered impending perils. Much of their food had been spoiled during the long voyage, and the hostile Indians withheld supplies. "Our drink," wrote one of them, "was unwholesome water; our lodgings, castles in the air; had we been as free from all sins as from gluttony and drunkenness, we might have been canonized for saints." Most of the emigrants were too idle or too ignorant to make efforts to till the soil. The heat soon became intense and brought deadly malaria from the dank swamps all around them, that prostrated them with fevers and dysentery. Within a fortnight after Newport left hardly ten of them were able to stand, and before the beginning of autumn one-half of the emigrants were underground. Among the victims was the good Gosnold, a man of great worth, to whose example and the precepts of Parson Hunt the settlers were indebted for the little order that prevailed among them. Despair clouded the minds of the survivors, and in the midst of their distress, they discovered that the avaricious and unscrupulous Wingfield was living on choice stores and was preparing to abandon the settlement and escape to the West Indies in the pinnace. He was deprived of his office, and Captain John Ratcliffe, a man much weaker in mind and equally wicked, was put in his place. The settlers soon perceived their mistake, and taking the reins of government out of Ratcliffe's hands, they placed them in those of Captain Smith. It was an event that saved the colony from ruin. Hopeful, cheerful, energetic, honest, full of invention and equal to any emergency, Smith's words and example diffused light amid the general gloom and revived the spirits of the most desponding. He soon brought order out of confusion; inspired the Indians with awe and compelled them to bring him food. And so the settlers lived until the wild-fowl, returning from the northern waters, swarmed upon the bosom of the James in October, and at the beginning of November an abundant crop of Indian corn had been gathered by the savages, who shared it with their dependent white neighbors.