The sad fate of Humphrey Blunt

         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

The “sacrifice” of July 6, 1610

     This is the non-fiction version (the fictional one is the blog of 12/20).

    The sixth of July, Sir Thomas Gates, lieutenant general, coming down to Point Comfort, the north wind blowing rough he found had forced the longboat belonging to Algernon Fort to the other shore upon Nansemond side, [about eight miles across] somewhat short of Weroscoick, which to recover again, one of the lieutenant general’s men, Humfrey Blunt, in an old canoe made [went] over. But the wind driving him upon the strand [shore], certain Indians watching the occasion seized the poor fellow and led him up into the woods and sacrificed him. It did not a little trouble the lieutenant governor, who since his first landing in the country, how justly soever provoked, would not by any means be wrought to a violent proceeding against them, for all the practices of villainy with which they daily endangered our men, thinking it possible by a more tractable course to win them to a better condition. But now, being startled by this, he well perceived how little a fair and noble entreaty works upon a barbarous disposition, and therefore in some measure purposed to be revenged.

--William Strachey, “A True Reportory....” July 1610. Strachey sent this long letter to a mysterious “unknown lady” in England. Its account of the shipwreck on Bermuda inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest  in 1611.

        

         Revenge would come three days later.

Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays, and a fine 2015!

Jamestown Mysteries will continue when the new year begins.

A grisly “sacrifice” on the river, July 10, 1610

         Humphrey Blunt had volunteered. As his cries split the air of the calm afternoon, that was the only consolation Lieutenant General Gates and Captain Yardley had.

         Approaching Point Comfort in the pinnace Discovery, they had found the fort’s longboat broken free from its moorings. “Let me go after it,” Blunt had said. “I can take the little canoe and catch her, tie her line round my waist, and tow her back in a trice.” Small and agile, he had been a waterman on the Thames River when he was twelve.

         Now the Indians had him.

         A sudden and contrary wind had blown his canoe and the longboat against the sandy riverbank on the Nansemond side, and before he could push off, there was a wild, gleeful shouting from the woods, and nine Indians wearing the heads of bears and foxes ran out. Two of the tallest ones took Humphrey Blunt by the arms and dragged him out of the canoe. On the deck of the Discovery, Thomas Gates, George Yardley, and the rest of the men could do nothing but watch in horror.

         Gates, his knuckles white on the hilt of his sword, cursed himself for letting Blunt go. There was nothing they could do now. By the time they could load and fire a round from the ship’s demi-culverins, poor Blunt would be dead and the Indians long gone.

         “Shall I order the men to fire, sir?” Yardley asked.

         “No. No point wasting powder and shot.” Gates pounded both first helplessly on the Discovery’s gunwale.

         “Save it for later,” he said through his teeth.        

1610: Hunger a permanent resident at Jamestown

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.

---

Was Admiral Somers up to something?

       On June 10, just five days after De La Warr had taken command at Jamestown, the indomitable Admiral Sir George Somers had a plan to feed the colony: he would sail back to Bermuda and bring back six months’ worth of pork and fish and turtle meat. He wrote of this scheme in a letter to Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, saying “I am in a good opinion to be back again before the Indians do gather their harvest. Bermuda is the most plentiful place that ever I came to for fish, hogs, and fowl.” Somers was also remembering the castaways who were left there: Christopher Carter and Robert Waters were waiting to see him again. He was eager to return “by reason of his promise to those two left behind, as [well as] upon an affection he carried to the place it selfe. . . .”

         Here is another Jamestown mystery--or rather, a Bermuda one: Some say that Admiral Somers had a secret agreement with the two men he left behind in Bermuda, and that he planned to set up his own colony there. In that case, no wonder he was eager to get back to Bermuda.

         Somers sailed for Bermuda on June 19, 1610. He went in his own pinnace, the Patience, and with him went Samuel Argall in the Discovery. The residents of Jamestown watched hopefully and By June 22 (as always, obliged to sail with the outgoing tides) they reached Chesapeake Bay and, as Strachey put it, “left the Bay, or Cape Henry, a sterne.”

        

         Argall they would see again; Somers, never.

Spain gloats as England’s fledgling colony starves.

     Word of Jamestown’s ttroubles made the Spanish gleeful. On June 14, 1610, the Spanish ambassador in London, Don Alonso de Velasco, wrote to King Philip III of Spain. Some of Jamestown’s news was old, but he put in all he had heard, aiming to please the king. His letter repeats the cannibalism stories with grisly relish, and sees little hope for Virginia’s survival:

... the Indians hold the English surrounded in the strong place which they had erected there, having killed the larger part of them, and the others were left so entirely without provisions that they thought it impossible to escape, because the survivors eat the dead, and when one of the natives died fighting, they dug him up again, two days afterwards, to be eaten. The swine which they carried there and which commenced to multiply, the Indians killed, and almost all who came in this vessel died from having eaten dogs, cat skins, and other vile stuff. Unless they succor them with some provisions in an English ship which they met close to the Azores, they must have perished before this....Thus it looks as if the zeal for this enterprise was cooling off, and it would on that account be very easy to make and end of it altogether by sending out a few ships to finish what might be left in that place, which is so important for pirates.

        

         From Chesapeake Bay, pirates could prey on Spanish galleons, laden with gold and silver from mines in Spain’s New World colonies. No starvation there.