ld fruits they lived very well. But there were
one hundred and fifty of the colony who would rather starve or eat each
other than help gather food. These "distracted, gluttonous loiterers"
would have sold anything they had--tools, arms, and their houses--for
anything the savages would bring them to eat. Hearing that there was
a basket of corn at Powhatan's, fifty miles away, they would have
exchanged all their property for it. To satisfy their factious humors,
Smith succeeded in getting half of it: "they would have sold their
souls," he says, for the other half, though not sufficient to last them
a week.

The clamors became so loud that Smith punished the ringleader, one Dyer,
a crafty fellow, and his ancient maligner, and then made one of his
conciliatory addresses. Having shown them how impossible it was to get
corn, and reminded them of his own exertions, and that he had always
shared with them anything he had, he told them that he should stand
their nonsense no longer; he should force the idle to work, and punish
them if they railed; if any attempted to escape to Newfoundland in the
pinnace they would arrive at the gallows; the sick should not starve;
every man able must work, and every man who did not gather as much in a
day as he did should be put out of the fort as a drone.

Such was the effect of this speech that of the two hundred only seven
died in this pinching time, except those who were drowned; no man died
of want. Captain Winne and Master Leigh had died before this famine
occurred. Many of the men were billeted among the savages, who used them
well, and stood in such awe of the power at the fort that they dared
not wrong the whites out of a pin. The Indians caught Smith's humor, and
some of the men who ran away to seek Kemps and Tussore were mocked and
ridiculed, and had applied to them--Smith's law of "who cannot work must
not eat;" they were almost starved and beaten nearly to death. After
amusing himself with them, Kemps returned the fugitives, whom Smith
punished until they were content to labor at home, rather than adventure
to live idly among the savages, "of whom," says our shrewd chronicler,
"there was more hope to make better christians and good subjects than
the one half of them that counterfeited themselves both." The Indians
were in such subjection that any who were punished at the fort would beg
the President not to tell their chief, for they would be again punished
at home and sent back for