him truly how things had gone in his absence. And the story came straight and blunt from the mouth of the old soldier:
When the ships had departed for England the colonists had been reduced to live on boiled wheat and barley, mouldy and wormy from "frying twenty-six weeks in the ship's hold," as Smith said; for the voyage out—of a piece with the folly of the whole enterprise—had been made by way of the Canaries and the West Indies, and they had loitered months in the tropical waters of those islands. No well had been dug, and the water of the river was warm, brackish, and impure with vegetable matter. The site of the settlement was a low bank, the highest part no more than twelve feet above the river, and surrounded with marshes, so that in warm weather the night air was always laden with deadly malaria. One of the council, Bartholomew Gosnold (the first English seacaptain who had sense enough to sail straight across the Atlantic from England to Virginia), had strongly opposed the chosen site, well knowing the danger of malaria, of which he was among the first to perish. He had favored a location on a high bank twenty miles below Jamestown. Smith, being under arrest at the
