[165:A] Smith, ii. 79; Chalmers' Introduction, i. 19; Belknap, art. Wyat.
[165:B] Beverley, 43.
[165:C] Anderson's Hist. of Col. Church, i. 343; Smith, 139; Stith, 233.
CHAPTER XVII.
1622.
Crashaw and Opechancanough—Captain Madison massacres a Party of the Natives—Yeardley invades the Nansemonds and the Pamunkies—They are driven back—Reflections on their Extermination.
During these calamitous events that had befallen the colony, Captain Raleigh Crashaw had been engaged in a trading cruise up the Potomac. While he was there, Opechancanough sent two baskets of beads to Japazaws, the chief of the Potomacs, to bribe him to slay Crashaw and his party, giving at the same time tidings of the massacre, with an assurance that "before the end of two moons" there should not be an Englishman left in all the country. Japazaws communicated the message to Crashaw, and he thereupon sent Opechancanough word "that he would nakedly fight him, or any of his, with their own swords." The challenge was declined. Not long afterwards Captain Madison, who occupied a fort on the Potomac River, suspecting treachery on the part of the tribe there, rashly killed thirty or forty men, women, and children, and carried off the werowance and his son, and two of his people, prisoners to Jamestown. The captives were in a short time ransomed.
When the corn was ripe, Sir George Yeardley, with three hundred men, invaded the country of the Nansemonds, who, setting fire to their cabins, and destroying whatever they could not carry away, fled; whereupon the English seized their corn, and completed the work of devastation. Sailing next to Opechancanough's seat, at the head of York River, Yeardley inflicted the same chastisement on the Pamunkies. In New England it was said: "Since the news of the massacre in Virginia, though the Indians continue their wonted friendship, yet are we more wary of them than before, for their hands have been embrued in much English blood, only by too much confidence, but not by force."[166:A]