there came three or four of the chief officers and told me I must
presently rise and go to the ships for the soldiers were all mutinying
... and that 200 or 300 men were landed at the back of us." But when
he put on his clothes, mounted his horse, and rode to the spot they
had indicated, he found the report false.

The next day the officers again urged the evacuation of the place. But
the governor demurred, "desiring them with all passionate earnestness
to keep the town ... I told them I could neither answer this to the
King nor to any man that ever was a soldier, unless they gave under
their hands the necessity of my dishonorable quitting the place." This
they immediately did and then hurried him away to the fleet. That
night guns were spiked, arms and stores were taken on board the
vessels, and the soldiers were embarked. Then silently the little
fleet slipped down the river.

The next morning Bacon's men occupied the town. But now he was
uncertain as to what he should do with it. News had come that Giles
Brent, a former supporter of Bacon who had gone over to the governor,
had raised an army in the northern counties and was marching south to
attack him. Brent, who was half Indian, was a sacrilegious man who was
said to have drunk the devil's health, at the same time firing his
pistol "to give the devil a gun." His advance put Bacon in a
quandary. If he remained in Jamestown, he would be trapped between
Brent on land and Berkeley's fleet by water. If he deserted the town,
Berkeley would return and occupy it. In the end, he, Lawrence,
Drummond, and the others decided to burn the town.

A few minutes later the village was a mass of flames. Lawrence applied
the torch to his own house, Drummond to his, and Bacon to the church.
They "burnt five houses of mine," reported Berkeley, "and twenty of
other gentlemen." It was a desperate deed of determined men, a deed
which foreshadowed the burning of Norfolk by patriots in the American
Revolution a century later to prevent the British from using it as a
base of operations.

Turning his back on the ruins of Jamestown, Bacon led his men first to
Green Spring, then to the site of Yorktown, and crossing the York
River made his headquarters at the residence of Colonel Augustine
Warner, in Gloucester. But when word came that Brent's forces were
approaching, he wheeled his veterans into line, the "drums thundered
out the march," and away they went to meet him. But there was no
bat