The colony grows
Throughout the spring and summer of 1609, the investors in London recruited settlers for the colony at James Fort, and several hundred arrived in August. An earlier expedition bound for Virginia had been driven by storms to Bermuda, where their ships were wrecked. Some of them would make their way to Virginia the following year. The Virginia Company in London was burdening the colony with a population that it was unable to sustain. Smith insisted that all members of the settlement work in some form or another, militarized the colony, and demanded support from the natives under threat of military action.
In the late summer of 1609 Smith was injured when a supply of gunpowder in a canoe he was using to explore accidentally exploded, and he was forced to return to England for treatment of his injuries. He left Virginia in October, and never returned to James Fort. After arriving in England he wrote several accounts of his adventures in the colony, most of them self-serving, and all of them conflicting in details and sequence. Meanwhile the settlement continued to suffer, from overcrowding, inadequate food, and conflicts with the natives. The drought continued. Crops continued to fail. It was the beginning of what became known as the starving time.