Charles City Charles City Virginia United States
Related Events
Showing 3 events out of 3 total
The arrival of Lord De la Warr with a substantial armed force of pilgrims filled with patriotic fervor, spreading Protestantism and the English, results in a counteroffensive against the Powhatan Confederacy.
As a veteran of English campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr employs "Irish tactics" against the natives: troops raid villages, burn houses, torch cornfields, and steal provisions; these tactics, identical to those practiced by the Powhatan themselves, prove effective.
On August 9, just nine weeks after De La Warr had taken command of the colony, seventy English under Percy launch a major attack on the Paspahegh capital, killing sixty-five to seventy-five, burning houses, cutting down the cornfields, and capturing one of the weorance Wowinchopunk's wives and her children.
Returning downstream, the English throw the children overboard, and, in Percy's own words, shoot out "their Braynes in the water".
They stab the queen to death in Jamestown, burning houses and chopping down the corn fields.
The Paspahegh abandon their town; they will never recover from this attack.
The English attack, and their murder of elite native women and children, ignites the First Anglo-Powhatan War.
Wowinchopunk is mortally wounded in a skirmish near the Jamestown fort, in February 1611.
His followers soon thereafter avenge his death by luring several colonists out of the fort and killing them.
The bulk of the broken tribe appear to have merged with the other chiefdoms, owever, and they disappear from the historical record at this point.
Subsequent use of the word Paspahegh in documents is mainly in reference to their former territory.
Thirty-eight colonists from Berkeley Parish in England disembark in Virginia to settle on the north bank of the James River, near Herring Creek, in an area known at this time as Charles Cittie, about twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) upstream from Jamestown.
The group's charter requires that the day of arrival be observed yearly as a "day of thanksgiving" to God: the consequent ceremony is considered by some to be the first Thanksgiving in the Americas.