In December, 1608, Newport returned to England, taking with him a cargo of pitch, tar, iron ore, and other articles provided at great labor by the overworked colonists.  Smith availed himself of the opportunity to send by Newport an account of his summer explorations, a map of Chesapeake Bay and tributary rivers, and a letter in answer to the complaints signified to him in the instructions of the home council.  Smith’s reply was querulous and insubordinate, and spiteful enough against Ratcliffe, Archer, and Newport, but contained many sound truths.  He ridiculed the policy of the company, and told them that “it were better to give L500 a ton for pitch, tar, and the like in the settled countries of Russia, Sweden, and Denmark than send for them hither till more necessary things be provided”; “for,” said he, “in overtaxing our weake and unskillful bodies, to satisfie this desire of present profit, we can scarce ever recover ourselves from one supply to another.”  Ratcliffe returned to England with Newport, after whose departure Smith was assisted for a short time by a council consisting of Matthew Scrivener, Richard Waldo, and Peter Wynne.  The two former were drowned during January, 1609, and the last died not long after.  Smith was left sole ruler, and, contrary to the intention of the king, he made no attempt to fill the council.[4]

The “Second Supply” had brought provisions, which lasted only two months,[5] and most of Smith’s time during the winter 1608-1609 was occupied in trading for corn with the Indians on York River.  In the spring much useful work was done by the colonists under Smith’s directions.  They dug a well for water, which till then had been obtained from the river, erected some twenty cabins, shingled the church, cleared and planted forty acres of land with Indian-corn, built a house for the Poles to make glass in, and erected two block-houses.

Smith started to build a fort “for a retreat” on Gray’s Creek, opposite to Jamestown (the place is still called “Smith’s Fort"), but a remarkable circumstance, not at all creditable to Smith’s vigilance or circumspection, stopped the work and put the colonists at their wits’ end to escape starvation.  On an examination of the casks in which their corn was stored it was found that the rats had devoured most of the contents, and that the remainder was too rotten to eat.[6]

To avoid starvation, President Smith, like Lane at Roanoke Island, in May, 1609, dispersed the whole colony in three parties, sending one to live with the savages, another to Point Comfort to try for fish, and another, the largest party, twenty miles down the river to the oyster-banks, where at the end of nine weeks the oyster diet caused their skins “to peale off from head to foote as if they had been flead."[7]

While the colony was in this desperate condition there arrived from England, July 14, 1609, a small bark, commanded by Samuel Argall, with a supply of bread and wine, enough to last the colonists one month.  He had been sent out by the London Company to try for sturgeon in James River and to find a shorter route to Virginia.  He brought news that the old charter had been repealed, that a new one abolishing the council in Virginia had been granted, and that Lord Delaware was coming, at the head of a large supply of men and provisions, as sole and absolute governor of Virginia.[8]