It was Somers who thought of going to Bermuda for
food, but De La Warr took the credit for it. He wrote his own letter to the
Earl of Salisbury after the admiral’s departure: “I dispatched Sir George Sommers back again to the Barmudas, the good
old gentleman [Somers was fifty-six; De La Warr was thirty-three at the
time] out of his love and zeal not
motioning [opposing], but most
cheerfully and resolutely undertaking to perform so dangerous a voyage, and, if
it please God he do safely return, he will store us with hog’s flesh and fish
enough to serve the whole colony this winter.”
That was wishful thinking.
Meanwhile,
De La Warr set his men and others who were able-bodied to work. Some were put
to cleaning up the debris of ruined houses inside the fort, others to making
coal for the forges (blacksmiths were essential for making tools and weapons
and ammunition), still others to fish, but the latter, the Captain-General
noted with disappointment, “had ill success” in the James River. The starving
residents of Jamestown had become too weak and too frightened of Indians to
fish in the river, and they had let their nets—fourteen of them by one
count—rot to pieces. The
newcomers had some nets, but they had little luck in casting them. They hauled
in their nets every day and night, “sometimes a dosen times one after the
other,” but they did not catch enough to feed even a fourth of the people who
were there.
Hunger--gnawing,
gut-wrenching hunger, was becoming a permanent resident of Jamestown.
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