On the shore, Humphrey Blunt struggled briefly
with his captors, but they were too powerful and too many. They dragged him,
shouting and swearing, to the edge of the woods and tied him to a tall pine
tree. Then, using hatchets traded to them by the English, they began the
systematic dismembering of Blunt’s body. Grinning, the two warriors who had
captured him took hold of his right thumb and his left thumb and, with swift
clean strokes, severed both from his hands.
Only
then when he realized what they were about to do, did Blunt began to scream.
His cries, torn from his throat as his parts were torn from his body, rent the
air with chilling, sickening repetition. Around him, the Indians began to
dance, each one holding up a bloody part of Humphrey Blunt.
“Up
anchor!” Thomas Gates said in a choked voice. “We can do nothing here, nothing
for him! God rest his soul! Let’s get under way.” Silently, the men aboard the Discovery trimmed her sails and set her
course for Point Comfort.
In
the clearing ihn the woods, the Indians, who had chopped off Blunt’s fingers,
one by one, and then his toes, and then his arms and legs, joint by joint,
continued to dance until the Englishmen’s ship was out of sight. In a few minutes,
all that remained of Humphrey Blunt was a pile of bloody parts in a heap upon
the soft green grass. His severed head, with its thick blond hair, they carried
away in a deerskin bag.
“Last
winter the English cut off the head of Opossanoquonuske’s husband,” one of the
Indians said. “Now we have one of theirs.”
[Excerpt
from JAMESTOWN: THE NOVEL, 2014]
http://www.amazon.com/Jamestown-Novel-story-Americas-beginnings-ebook/dp/B00IC8U6BA/ref=la_B001KCUZPC_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409331558&sr=1
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