Captain John Smith is constantly seeking a supply of food for the colonists, and, using the Discovery, the smallest of the three ships which had been left behind for their use, he successfully trades for food with the Nansemonds, who are located along the Nansemond River in the modern-day City of Suffolk, and several other groups.

With the coming arrival of the new supply fleet, Captain Smith feels the colony is sufficiently reinforced to engage the Powhatan directly with a diplomatic initiative aimed at securing at least a temporary respite from native sniping, kidnapping, and assaulting.

Taking a small escort, they make their way through a attacks to the capital of the Powhatan Confederacy.

While leading the expedition in December 1607 up the Chickahominy River west of Jamestown, his men are set upon by Powhatans.

As his party is being slaughtered around him, Smith straps his native guide in front of him as a shield and escapes with his life but is captured by Opechancanough, the Powhatan chief's half-brother.

Smith gives him a compass which pleases the warrior and makes him decide to let Smith live.

Smith is taken before Wahunsunacock, who is commonly referred to as Chief Powhatan, at the Powhatan Confederacy's seat of government at Werowocomoco on the York River.

However, seventeen years later, in 1624, Smith will first relate that when the chief decided to execute him, this course of action had been stopped by the pleas of Chief Powhatan's young daughter, Pocahontas, who was originally named Matoaka but whose nickname meant "Playful One."

Many historians today find this account dubious, especially as it was omitted in all his previous versions.

The life of Chief Powhatan's young daughter, Pocahontas, will be largely tied to the English after legend credits her with saving John Smith's life after his capture by Opechancanough, but her contacts with Smith himself are minimal.

Records indicate that she has become something of an emissary to the colonists at Jamestown Island.

During their first winter, Pocahontas brings food and clothing to the colonists.

She later negotiates with Smith for the release of Virginia natives who had been captured by the colonists during a raid to gain English weaponry.

The trade soon proves to Chief Powhatan the weakness of the English colony.

Many of Virgina’s smaller communities, which are essentially outposts of Jamestown, are attacked during the one-day surprise attack of Good Friday, March 22, 1622, including distant Henricus and its fledgling college native children and those of colonists. (In 1618 a royal charter had been obtained for founding what would have been the first institution of higher education in the British colonies.

The school for native boys and college for the sons of colonists is in its infancy when the progress and the new town here are both lost.

Another effort to establish such a school will have to wait three generations until plans for the College of William and Mary are successfully presented to the monarchy in England by the rector of Henrico Parish, James Blair, and a royal charter issued.

Apparently taking no chances of the new school being at risk of another devastating attack, in 1693, the institution will be established at Middle Plantation, a well-fortified location a few miles from Jamestown.

A few years later, the capital of the colony will be relocated there, and the name changed to Williamsburg.)

Leadership of the Powhatan Confederacy after the death of Wahunsonacock in 1618 had passed to his half-brother Opechancanough, who does not feel that peaceful relations with the colonists can be maintained.

Having recovered from the defeat of his earlier command of the Pamunkey warriors at the end of the First Anglo-Powhatan War, he plans the eventual destruction of the English settlers.

After the murder of his adviser, Nemattanew, by an Englishman in the spring of 1622, Opechancanough seizes his moment, and launches a campaign of surprise attacks upon at least thirty-one separate English settlements and plantations, mostly along the James River.

Jamestown, the capital and primary settlement of the colony, is saved when an native boy named Chanco, who had been assigned to slay his employer, Richard Pace, awakened Pace during the night and warned him of the imminent attack.

Pace, who lives across the James River from Jamestown, had secured his family and then rowed across the river to Jamestown in an attempt to warn the rest of the settlement.

As a result, some preparations can be made for the attack in Jamestown.

Outlying settlements, however, have no forewarning.

Over half of the settler population is killed At Martin's Hundred, thirty miles upriver from Henricus, at its principal development of Wolstenholme Towne, where only two houses and a part of a church are left standing.

The series of coordinated attacks occurs along both shores of the James River, ...

...extending from Newport News Point near the mouth ...

...all the way west to Falling Creek, near the fall line at the head of navigation.

At least three hundred and forty-seven people, or a fourth of the English population of Jamestown, are killed in all and around twenty women captured, taken to serve as slaves to the natives until their death or ransom years later.

The March 22 attacks have destroyed many of the colonists' spring crops and caused some of the settlements to be completely abandoned.

The English settlers are in shock, and it takes quite a while for the colony to gain control again.

As the colony begins to settle down, both the council and planters agree to draw people together into fewer settlements.

The colony also intends on gathering men together in order to plan on attack on Opechancanough, but this is difficult because of the survivors of the massacre “two-thirds were said to have been women and children and men who were unable to work or to go against the Indians”.

The Powhatans wait in the days and months after the day of the attacks, apparently in the belief that the colonists will accept the losses as a signal that the Powhatans are more powerful and are to be respected and that conflicts and breaches of agreements are to be avoided.

However, this proves to be a serious lack of understanding of the mindset of the English colonists and their backers overseas. (As historian Helen Rountree points out, Opechancanough did not engage in any major followup to finish off the colony, because he believed the English would react in the manner of other native nations receiving such a blow, and simply move on to other grounds.

Following the event, he told the weroance of the Patawomecks, who were detached from the Powhatan Confederacy and remained neutral throughout this time, that he expected "before the end of two Moones there should not be an Englishman in all their Countries.")

The English seek revenge against the natives by “the use of force, surprise attacks, famine resulting from the burning of their corn, destroying their boats, canoes, and houses, breaking their fishing weirs and assaulting them in their hunting expedition, pursuing them with horses and using bloodhounds to find them and mastiffs to ‘seaze’ them, driving them as they fled into the hands of their enemies among other tribes, and ‘assimilating and abetting their enemies against them”.