to want of judgment, or of vigilance, he suffered himself to be
surprised by the savages, who slew many of his party, rescued the chief,
and carried off their corn. Martin not long after returned to Jamestown,
leaving his detachment to shift for themselves.

Smith going up the river to West's settlement at the falls, found the
English planted in a place not only subject to the river's inundation,
but "surrounded by many intolerable inconveniences." To remedy these, by
a messenger he proposed to purchase from Powhatan his seat of that name,
a little lower down the river. The settlers scornfully rejected the
scheme, and became so mutinous that Smith landed among them and arrested
the chief malcontents. But overpowered by numbers, being supported by
only five men, he was forced to retire on board of a vessel lying in the
river. The Indians daily supplied him with provisions, in requital for
which the English plundered their corn, robbed their cultivated ground,
beat them, broke into their cabins, and made them prisoners. They
complained to Captain Smith that the men whom he had sent there as their
protectors, "were worse than their old enemies, the Monacans." Smith
embarking, had no sooner set sail for Jamestown than many of West's
party were slain by the savages.

It so happened, that before Smith's vessel had dropped a mile and a half
down the river, she ran aground, whereupon, making a virtue of
necessity, he summoned the mutineers to a parley, and they, now seized
with a panic, on account of the assault of a mere handful of Indians,
submitted themselves to his mercy. He again arrested the ringleaders,
and established the rest of the party at Powhatan, in the Indian
palisade fort, which was so well fortified by poles and bark as to defy
all the savages in Virginia. Dry cabins were also found there, and
nearly two hundred acres of ground ready to be planted, and it was
called Nonsuch, as being at once the strongest and most delightful place
in the country. Nonsuch was the name of a royal residence in England.

When Smith was now on the eve of his departure, the arrival of West
again threw all things aback into confusion. Nonsuch was abandoned, and
all hands returned to the falls, and Smith, finding all his efforts
abortive, embarked in a boat for Jamestown. During the voyage he was
terribly wounded while asleep, by the accidental explosion of a bag of
gunpowder, and in the paroxysm of pain he leapt into the river, and w