Powhatan

Powhatan (Wahunsonacock) (d. 1618), paramount chief of the Chesapeake Bay Region when Jamestown was founded in 1607.Historians have doubted the English colonists’ attribution of imperial authority to Powhatan, but recent scholarship argues that he did exercise great power over his subject peoples. Captain John Smith wrote that Powhatan had “such a grave and Majesticall countenance, as drave me into admiration to see such state in a naked Salvage.”

Powhatan and his people were familiar with Europeans and knew their strengths and weaknesses. He and Smith settled into a pattern of wary sparring, each attempting to force the other to conform to his plan for the relationship. Powhatan's young daughter Pocahontas was often the emissary between her father and the fort. Smith accorded Powhatan grudging respect for his subtlety and command. Many of Jamestown's problems, Smith argued, stemmed from its inept leaders’ underestimating Powhatan's intelligence and determination, combined with the colony's dependence on Indian supplies of food.

Powhatan died in 1618, just as the Virginia Company was reorganizing the colony so as to attract large numbers of colonists. He had believed that his people could benefit from the presence of the English and their supplies of manufactured goods from Europe, but always keep the upper hand through control of the food supply and the threat of military action. In the four years after his death, the colony grew dramatically. When his brother Opechancanough tried to wipe out the entire settlement in 1622, the colony's resilience showed the scale of Powhatan's miscalculation.
See also Colonial Era; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian Wars.

Bibliography

Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500–1722, 1993.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman