good in other mankind, though here and there he made an exception. Evident
enough are faults of temper. But he had great courage and energy and at
times a lofty disinterestedness.

Again winter drew on at Jamestown, and with it misery on misery. George
Percy, now President, lay ill and unable to keep order. The multitude,
"unbridled and heedless," pulled this way and that. Before the cold had
well begun, what provision there was in the storehouse became exhausted.
That stream of corn from the Indians in which the colonists had put
dependence failed to flow. The Indians themselves began systematically to
spoil and murder. Ratcliffe and fourteen with him met death while loading
his barge with corn upon the Pamunkey. The cold grew worse. By midwinter
there was famine. The four hundred--already noticeably dwindled--dwindled
fast and faster. The cold was severe; the Indians were in the woods; the
weakened bodies of the white men pined and shivered. They broke up the
empty houses to make fires to warm themselves. They began to die of hunger
as well as by Indian arrows. On went the winter, and every day some died.
Tales of cannibalism are told . . . .This was the Starving Time.

When the leaves were red and gold, England-in-America had a population of
four hundred and more. When the dogwood and the strawberry bloomed,
England-in-America had a population of but sixty.

Somewhat later than this time there came from the pen of Shakespeare a play
dealing with a tempest and shipwreck and a magical isle and rescue thereon.
The bright spirit Ariel speaks of "the still-vex'd Bermoothes." These were
islands "two hundred leagues from any continent," named after a Spanish
Captain Bermudez who had landed there. Once there had been Indians, but
these the Spaniards had slain or taken as slaves. Now the islands were
desolate, uninhabited, "forlorn and unfortunate." Chance vessels might