death. One brief extract from the record of Master George Percy, who looked upon the tragic scene with his own eyes, tells the gruesome story: "The fifteenth day, their died Edward Browne and Stephen Galthorpe. The sixteenth day, their died Thomas Gower Gentleman. The seventeenth day, their died Thomas Mounslie. The eighteenth day their died Robert Pennington, and John Martine, Gentlemen." So the little lives of men were ticked off; when autumn came half the brave and tempestuous band were in their graves.
Those who lived through the awful days quarreled and plotted conspiracies. Governor Dale introduced martial law, hanged, shot, and broke men on the wheel; he chained one malefactor to a tree with a bodkin through his tongue and kept him there till he died; but with all his cruelty the governor was hardly able to suppress disorder. To pestilence and turbulence were added occasional famines. In the "starving time" of 1609 a colony of nearly five hundred persons was reduced in the course of six months to sixty wretched survivors, desperately preparing to leave the scene of their sufferings forever, when relief ships arrived from England. Collisions with the Indians—individual brushes and general conflicts such as the awful massacre of 1622 which swept off three hundred men, women, and children at one dreadful stroke—thinned the ranks of the settlers and held the tiny colony always under the shadow of fear. It is estimated that all in all the Company sent over 5,649 emigrants during its existence from 1606 to 1624, and that of these only 1,095 were in the colony at the end of the period. Some had fled back to England disillusioned; most of them had perished in Virginia.
And yet during these two decades, in spite of every obstacle, the foundations of a prosperous colony were laid as homes were built, the labor supply enlarged, and a profitable crop developed. Early in these years, the fundamental element—European domestic life—which so distinguished the English colonies, was introduced; for two white women
