over us, our tents were rotten, and our cabins worse than nought."

Percy gives a doleful picture of the wretchedness of the colony: "Our
men were destroyed with cruel sickness, as swellings, fluxes,
burning-fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly, but for the
most part they died of mere famine.... We watched every three nights,
lying on the cold bare ground what weather soever came, worked all
the next day, which brought our men to be most feeble wretches, our
food was but a small can of barley, sod in water to five men a day,
our drink but cold water taken out of the river, which was at the
flood very salt, at a low tide full of shrimp and filth, which was
the destruction of many of our men. Thus we lived for the space of
five months in this miserable distress, but having five able men to
man our bulwarks upon any occasion. If it had not pleased God to put
a terror in the savage hearts, we had all perished by those wild and
cruel Pagans, being in that weak state as we were: our men night and
day groaning in every corner of the fort, most pitiful to hear. If
there were any conscience in men, it would make their hearts to bleed
to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without
relief, every night and day, for the space of six weeks: some
departing out of the world; many times three or four in a night; in
the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins, like dogs, to
be buried. In this sort did I see the mortality of divers of our
people."

A severe loss to the colony was the death on the 22d of August of
Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, one of the Council, a brave and
adventurous mariner, and, says Wingfield, a "worthy and religious
gentleman." He was honorably buried, "having all the ordnance in the
fort shot off with many volleys of small shot." If the Indians had
known that those volleys signified the mortality of their comrades,
the colony would no doubt have been cut off entirely. It is a
melancholy picture, this disheartened and half-famished band of men
quarreling among themselves; the occupation of the half-dozen able
men was nursing the sick and digging graves. We anticipate here by
saying, on the authority of a contemporary manuscript in the State
Paper office, that when Captain Newport arrived with the first supply
in January, 1608, "he found the colony consisting of no more than
forty persons; of those, ten only able men."

After the death of Gosnold, Captain Kendall was depose