From 1607 every report of the colonists came through Jamestown, the settlement that the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company chartered in London in 1606, planted on the James River in May 1607, and all of it was Indian report, heard through interpreters and recorded by officers of a company that was looking for survivors and raising money on the prospect. The texts are read here in full, in their first editions or the standard transcriptions: the writings of Captain John Smith, the Jamestown leader, in his True Relation (1608), Map of Virginia and Proceedings (1612) and Generall Historie (1624), from the Text Creation Partnership transcriptions of Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) with Edward Arber's edition as control; the legends of the Zúñiga chart, a manuscript map of Virginia drawn at Jamestown in 1608 and known from the copy that the Spanish ambassador in London sent to Madrid, in the three published readings (Alexander Brown's Genesis of the United States, 1890; Philip Barbour, 1975; Encyclopedia Virginia); the instructions of the Virginia Company's Council in London to Sir Thomas Gates, the governor it sent out in May 1609, in Susan Kingsbury's edition of the Records of the Virginia Company, vol. III; Hakluyt's dedication of 15 April 1609; the Council's True and Sincere Declaration (December 1609) in Brown; the Historie of William Strachey, the colony's secretary in 1610 and 1611, in R. H. Major's 1849 edition of the British Library's Sloane manuscript; Purchas's Pilgrimes (1625) from the EEBO-TCP transcription, which keeps the margins; and the account of Ralph Hamor, another secretary of the colony (1615). The notes published with this report give every passage with its page. What follows is the record in the order it was made.

December 1607 to February 1608: clothed men to the south

Smith, captured in December 1607 and held by Opechancanough, Powhatan's brother and the chief of the Pamunkey, was told "of certaine men cloathed at a place called Ocanahonan, cloathed like me" (True Relation, EEBO-TCP image 12; Arber I, p. 17). An early reader corrected a copy of the printed book in ink to "certaine men at a place 6 dayes jorny beyond Ocanahonan" (Barbour, Complete Works I, note to the passage). Powhatan, a fortnight later, "confirmed" "the people cloathed at Ocamahowan" and placed "Mangoge", "Chawwonock" and "Roonock" to the south, with a country called Anone "where they haue abundance of Brasse, and houses walled as ours" (image 13; Arber I, p. 20). In January or February 1608 the weroance (chief) of Paspahegh, the people on whose land Jamestown stood, agreed "to conduct two of our men to a place called Panawicke beyond Roonok, where he reported many men to be apparelled", took his reward at Warraskoyack, a town down the James, and turned back (image 15; Arber I, p. 23). Three Powhatan informants in two months put clothed men in the interior to the south; none mentioned a killing, and Powhatan had volunteered his account.

June 1608: the Zúñiga chart

The manuscript chart of Virginia that Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador in London, sent to King Philip III on 10 September 1608 went out from Jamestown with Smith's letter in June. Its legends are read differently by each transcriber. Brown (1890, I, p. 185): "Here remayneth 4 men clothed that came from Roonock to Ocanahawan." Barbour (1975, pp. 4 to 5): "Here remayne the 4 men clothed that came from Roonock to Okanahowan", written beside a town he reads as Pakerikanick on the second river south of the James. The chart also marks where "the King of Paspahege reported our men to be" and where "Paspahege and 2 of our own men landed to go to Pananiock" (Brown's readings). The chart is the first text to give a number, four, and a movement, from Roanoke to Ocanahowan. The Company took it seriously: in the autumn of 1608 Christopher Newport, the captain who brought each fleet out from England, carried a private commission "not to returne without a lumpe of gold, a certaintie of the South sea, or one of the lost company sent out by Sir Water Raleigh" (Generall Historie, p. 66). Newport went west to the Monacans, the people above the falls of the James, instead.

Winter 1608 to 1609: one informant in London

Newport reached England in January 1609 with two Powhatan men, Namontack and Machumps. Three London texts of 1609 to 1612 carry what was learned from them, and they are one channel, not three.

"Besides, our owne Indians haue lately reuealed either this or another rich mine of copper or gold in a towne called Ritanoe, neere certaine mountaines lying West of Roanoac."

Hakluyt, epistle dedicatory to Virginia richly valued, dated 15 April 1609.

"besides you are neere to Riche Copper mines of Ritanoc and may passe them by one braunche of this Riuer, and by another Peccarecamicke where you shall finde foure of the englishe aliue, left by S^r Walter Rawely w^ch escaped from the slaughter of Powhaton of Roanocke, vppon the first arrivall of our Colonie, and liue vnder the proteccon of a wiroane called Gepanocon enemy to Powhaton, by whose consent you shall neuer recouer them, one of these were worth much labour, and if you finde them not, yet seach into this Countrey it is more probable then towards the north."

Council of Virginia, instructions to Sir Thomas Gates, May 1609, section 15; Kingsbury, Records III, p. 17, from Bodleian Ashmole MS 1147.

"where, at Peccarecamek and Ochanahoen, by the relation of Machumps, the people have howses built with stone walles, and one story above another, so taught them by those Englishe whoe escaped the slaughter at Roanoak, at what tyme this our colony, under the conduct of Capt. Newport, landed within the Chesapeake Bay, where the people breed up tame turkeis about their howses, and take apes in the mountaines, and where, at Ritanoe, the Weroance Eyanoco preserved seven of the English alive—fower men, two boyes, and one yonge mayde (who escaped and fled up the river of Chanoke), to beat his copper, of which he hath certaine mynes at the said Ritanoe".

Strachey, Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, written 1610 to 1612; ed. Major 1849, p. 26. The Sloane manuscript's side-note reads "Howses of stone, tame Turkyes, and Monkyes, supposed at Peccartcanick."

Strachey names his source, Machumps, and Strachey was in London until June 1609. The Council's section 15 and Strachey's page 26 share the copper mines, the survivors, the escape, a protecting weroance (Gepanocon, Eyanoco) who was Powhatan's enemy, and the dating of the slaughter to "the first arrivall of our Colonie", that is to Newport's landing in the spring of 1607. Hakluyt's Ritanoe of April 1609 shows the same report already current a month before the instructions were drafted. The differences are the count (four men; four men, two boys and a girl) and the town (Peccarecamicke; Ritanoe). The slaughter story is therefore a year older than Strachey, and it and the survivor story are one story from one Powhatan informant, told in London in the winter of 1608 to 1609.

1608 to 1609: the only searches on the ground

At the end of December 1608 Smith, by then president of the colony's council, sent Michael Sicklemore, one of his men, with two guides to Chowanoke, the chief town of the Chowanoc on the Chowan River, "with directions howe to search for the lost company of S^r Walter Rawley, and silke grasse" (Proceedings, p. 57). The result, in Smith's own words:

"M^r Sicklemore well returned from chawonock, but found little hope and lesse certainetie of them were left by Sir Walter Rawley. So that Nathaniell Powell & Anas Todkill, were also, by the Quiyoughquohanocks, conducted to the Mangoages to search thē there. But nothing could we learne but they were all dead".

Smith, Proceedings, 1612, p. 90; repeated in Generall Historie, 1624, p. 87.

In 1624 Smith added what the searchers saw. Sicklemore found the Chowan "not great, the people few, the countrey most over growne with pynes". Powell and Todkill were led "Three dayes iorney ... through the woods, into a high country towards the Southwest: where they saw here and there a little corne field, by some little spring or smal brooke, but no riuer they could see: the people in all respects like the rest, except there language" (p. 88). The Quiyoughquohanocks were a small people on the south bank of the James, and the Mangoags were, in the English usage of the time, the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the interior. Three days' walk south-west from the Quiyoughquohanock towns, into upland with no river and a different language, is the country of the Nottoway and Meherrin, Iroquoian peoples of what is now southern Virginia. The searchers never reached the Roanoke River, where Barbour and the First Colony Foundation place Ocanahowan, and "they were all dead" is what the Mangoags said, reported at second hand. Strachey confirms in passing that the Mangoag journey happened and brought objects back to the fort (p. 124). Meanwhile the Council in London printed, in December 1609, that "some of our Nation planted by Sir Walter Raleigh" were "yet a live, within fifty mile of our fort", as "testified by two of our colony sent out to seek them, who, (though denied by the savages speech with them) found crosses and Letters the Characters and assured Testimonies of Christians newly cut in the barks of trees" (True and Sincere Declaration; Brown I, p. 349). Smith never repeats the tree carvings. The Declaration was a fund-raising document, issued after the loss of the Sea Venture, the flagship of the Company's 1609 fleet, wrecked on Bermuda.

Strachey's slaughter and where he put it

Strachey states the slaughter five times (pp. 20, 26, 50, 85 to 86, 103). The fullest passage is a policy statement, drafted as instructions to be read to the weroances:

"the men, women, and childrene of the first plantation at Roanoak were by practize and comaundement of Powhatan (he himself perswaded therunto by his priests) miserably slaughtered, without any offence given him either by the first planted (who twenty and od yeares had peaceably lyved intermixt with those salvages, and were out of his territory) or by those who nowe are come to inhabite some parte of his desarte lands".

Strachey, ed. Major, pp. 85 to 86.

"Powhatan hath slaughtered so many of our nation without offence given, and such as were seated far from him, and in the territory of those weroances which did in no sort depend on him or acknowledg him".

Strachey, p. 103.

Four things follow from Strachey's own words. The victims had lived "twenty and od yeares ... intermixt with those salvages": 1587 plus twenty is 1607, the year the Council's instructions name, so the tradition itself presupposes twenty years of assimilation before the killing. The victims were "out of his territory" and "seated far from him". Strachey draws Powhatan's southern frontier at "the Mangoages and Chawonoaks bordering upon Roanoake" (p. 48) and writes, of the country of Ralegh's colonies, "No parte of this sowth country is supposed to be under Powhatan, but under an absolute Weroance, as powerfull and great as Powhatan", with the side-note "Ronoak not under the commaund of Powhatan" (pp. 27 to 28). "Roanoak" in these passages is the colony's name, as in "our other colony at Roanoak" (p. 20), a reading Quinn made in 1974; he nowhere says the killing happened on the island. Read on its own terms, Strachey puts the massacred colonists south of Powhatan's reach, in or beyond the Chowan and Roanoke river country, and has some of them escape up the Chowan to a copper-working weroance who was Powhatan's enemy.

Quinn's Chesapeake reading rests on a different passage: Powhatan's priests foretold "that from the Chesapeack Bay a nation should arise which should dissolve and give end to his empire", and "not many yeares since" he "destroyed and put to sword ... all the inhabitants, the weroance and his subjects of that province, and so remaine all the Chessiopeians at this daye, and for this cause, extinct" (p. 101). The passage does not mention the English. The link between the destroyed Chesepians and the colonists is an inference, and it has to override Strachey's repeated statement that the victims lived outside Powhatan's territory, which the Chesepians, his near neighbours, did not.

Purchas's "confession" of 1625

Every modern statement that Powhatan confessed the killing to Smith and showed him English objects rests on two passages by Samuel Purchas, printed in 1625, seven years after Powhatan's death. The first is a marginal note set beside Smith's Sicklemore sentence: "Powhatan confessed that hee had bin at the murther of that Colonie: and shewed to Cap. Smith a Musket barrell and a brasse Morter, and certaine peeces of Iron which had bin theirs" (Pilgrimes IV, p. 1728, outer margin; the note is absent from every machine-read scan of the book and was recovered from the EEBO-TCP transcription). The second is in Purchas's own essay: "as Powhatan confessed to Cap. Smith, that hee had beene at their slaughter, and had diuers vtensills of theirs to shew" (p. 1813). Smith's texts of 1608, 1612 and 1624 contain no confession, no musket barrel and no mortar, and a search of the whole Generall Historie finds none. Purchas knew Smith and may have had it from him in conversation. He may equally have added the objects himself to the story the Council and Strachey already told. Purchas's own Pilgrimage, a different book from the Pilgrimes, never adopts the story in its editions of 1613, 1617 and 1626. The musket barrel therefore fixes neither the place nor the date of any killing: it appears only in an editorial note of 1625 attached to a story that was already in print.

After 1612

In the summer of 1611 five Jamestown men, Cole, Kitchins and three others, ran south "to a Spanish Plantation, reported to be there", travelled "some fiue daies iorney to Ocanahoen" and were hunted home by Indians the colony had hired (Hamor 1615, p. 27; Smith 1624, p. 110). By 1611 the clothed men of Ocanahowan had become Spaniards in the colonists' rumour. In 1619 the council in Virginia counted the "thre riuers of Ronoake Powsatan and Pamunky" among Opechancanough's subjects (Kingsbury III, p. 228). In July 1621 the Company heard a written relation of a voyage "to the Southward to Roanocke" made the previous summer by one Marmaduke Rayner; the relation is lost and the minute records no finding (Kingsbury I, p. 504). In February 1622 John Pory, who had been the colony's secretary, walked sixty miles to the Chowan and reported silk grass (a plant fibre the Company hoped to sell) and two harvests a year, and nothing of the colonists (Smith 1624, p. 143). After 1612 no Jamestown text uses "Roanoke" for the colony at all.

The reports at a glance

What the Jamestown record establishes

1. Every informant placed clothed men to the south and south-west of Jamestown, inland, in the Chowan, Roanoke and Tar river country. None placed them at Croatoan and none in the Chesapeake.
2. The numbers reported were small: four men, or four men with three children. No report describes a community of a hundred.
3. The slaughter story and the survivor story entered the record together, from one Powhatan informant in London, and were dated by that informant to the spring of 1607, after twenty years of the colonists living among Indians outside Powhatan's territory.
4. The only searches on the ground, in 1609, came back with hearsay of death from people who had not been asked to produce a survivor, and never reached the river where the survivors were placed.
5. Powhatan's "confession" and the English objects are a 1625 marginal note. No English writer of the period records seeing either a survivor or a body.