Corn Conquers Virginia 55 



with from two to five hundred kernels. Also, the Captain 

 noted, the green stalks cut and sucked, yielded a sweet juice. 



To ward off the herds of deer, the marauding squirrels, 

 crows, buzzards and woodchucks, four cedar trunks were set 

 up in the center of each field, with a platform atop them, 

 where a young lad was kept on sentinel duty. John White's 

 sketch of the Village of Secota in Hariot's Briefe and True 

 Report shows a neat street, with bark houses ranged along it, 

 fields of tobacco fenced with sunflowers and fields of corn in 

 various stages of growth. In the most advanced planting is one 

 of the watch towers. Every village, too, had its granary, set up 

 on four posts. Le Moyne pictured a round granary with a con- 

 ical roof in his description of sixteenth-century Florida. 



The prestige of the tribal rulers was measured in their maize 

 fields. The Queen of Appomattox was mistress of one hundred 

 acres of beans, squashes, pumpkins and many corn lands. 



Here, John Smith saw, was the readiest and most necessary 

 wealth Jamestown required food. As the English wheat 

 drooped and parched under the July sun he contrasted it with 

 the vigorous growth of the Indians' maize. Why, he demanded 

 of the Council, cram the holds of the ships with seed from 

 England which was alien to Virginia soil, when right at hand 

 was a native grain which yielded plenteous harvest under even 

 primitive methods of cultivation? Let the settlers forget the 

 white loaves of Lincolnshire and eat the American yellow 

 bread, which apparently had power to nourish warriors and 

 keep them vigorous to an age when English graybeards were 

 tottering. The Powhatan himself was eighty years old. Yet 

 there was not a white man in Jamestown who would have 

 chosen to match his physical strength against the red king's. 



By December the stores in Thomas Studley's warehouse 

 were exhausted. The colony had dwindled to one-half its origi- 

 nal number. These were living on wild game and matroum, 

 the seed of the wild barley growing on the river banks. Ahead 

 stretched four months of winter, and all around were the sav- 

 ages. Smith proposed to the Council that they allow him the 



