Kieran Doherty Quote

Then there were the people the Virginia Company called the naturals—the roughly nine thousand Indians gathered into a loose-knit confederation of disparate groups ruled by the paramount chief, Wahunsonacock, who was known to the English as Powhatan. Trouble between the Indians and the settlers started on the first day the English stepped ashore on the banks of the Chesapeake. Late that day, as an exploring party of about two dozen armed settlers returned to the safety of the three ships anchored off a spot of land they called Point Comfort, a group of natives crept from the woods like Beares, in the words of settler George Percy, with their Bowes in their mouths. When the Indians—there were only five or six—got close enough, they loosed a volley of arrows. Gabriel Archer, one of the colonists, was wounded in the hands and a sailor, Matthew Morton, in two places of the body very dangerously.16 The English responded with a volley of musket fire that drove the Indians back into the woods.