A
few days passed and he was yet further enlarged. Powhatan longed for two of
the great guns possessed by the white men and for a grindstone. He would
send Smith back to Jamestown if in return he was sure of getting those
treasures. It is to be supposed that Smith promised him guns and
grindstones as many as could be borne away.
So Werowocomoco saw him depart, twelve Indians for escort. He had leagues
to go, a night or two to spend upon the march. Lying in the huge winter
woods, he expected, on the whole, death before morning. But "Almighty God
mollified the hearts of those sterne barbarians with compassion." And so he
was restored to Jamestown, where he found more dead than when he left. Some
there undoubtedly welcomed him as a strong man restored when there was need
of strong men. Others, it seems, would as lief that Pocahontas had not
interfered.
The Indians did not get their guns and grindstones. But Smith loaded a
demi-culverin with stones and fired upon a great tree, icicle-hung. The gun
roared, the boughs broke, the ice fell rattling, the smoke spread, the
Indians cried out and cowered away. Guns and grindstone, Smith told them,
were too violent and heavy devils for them to carry from river to river.
Instead he gave them, from the trading store, gifts enticing to the savage
eye, and not susceptible of being turned against the donors.
Here at Jamestown in midwinter were more food and less mortal sickness than
in the previous fearful summer, yet no great amount of food, and now
suffering, too, from bitter cold.
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