By the next incoming tide the Deliverance and the Patience were on their
way up the wide James River, bound for Jamestown. Depending on the tides, the 40-mile
journey would take two to three days.
George Percy sailed with them and
tried to prepare them for what to expect at Jamestown. Soon, he said, they
would
Read
a lecture of misery in our people’s faces, and perceive the scarcity of victuals
and understand the malice of the savages, who knowing our weakness had diverse times
assaulted us without [outside] the fort. Finding of five hundred men we had
only left about sixty, the rest being either starved through famine or cut off
by the savages, and those which were living were so meager and lean that it was
lamentable to behold them, for many through extreme hunger have run out of
their naked beds, being so lean that they looked like anotannes [trees on which
the old fruit clings until a new crop grows] Crying out, ‘we are starved, we
are starved.’ Others going to bed as we imagined in health were found dead the
next morning.
Passengers aboard the two small
vessels had plenty of time to think about what they might find at Jamestown. The
voyage upriver took them two days. There was no breeze, and the air was as
oppressive and heavy as their thoughts. One of them wrote that “only by the
help of tides (no wind stirring) we plied it sadly up the river.”
No one could imagine what awaited
them.
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