the chiefest among whose "grievances" now became their daily and hourly terror of the Indians, made worse by the fact that their Governor was deaf to all their cries for protection.
Indeed, the savages, not the colonists, were the protected ones, for the gain from the Indian beaver and otter fur trade, which the Governor and his friends monopolized, was believed to be a stronger argument with Sir William Berkeley for keeping in league with the red men than the massacre of the King's subjects was for making war upon them. The helpless people could only shake their heads despairingly and whisper under their breath, "Bullets cannot pierce beaver skins."
In a "Complaint from Heaven, with a Huy and Crye and a Petition out of Virginia and Maryland. To Owr great Gratious Kinge and souveraigne Charles ye ii King of Engel'd etc. with his parliament," it is charged that "Old Governr. Barkly, altered by marrying a young Wyff, from his wonted publicq good, to a covetous Fole-age, relished Indians presents with
some that hath a like feelinge, so wel, that many Christians Blood is Pokketed up wth other mischievs, in so mutch that his lady tould, that it would bee the overthrow of ye Country."
The most ghastly accounts of the sly and savage incursions of the Indians, and of the way in which they served their victims, such as flaying them alive, knocking out their teeth with clubs and tearing out their finger-nails and toe-nails, flew from lip to lip. The terror-stricken planters upon the frontiers and more exposed places deserted their homes, left the crops upon which they depended for existence to waste and ruin, and huddled together in the more sheltered places, still not knowing "upon whom the storm would light."
Truly was the colony under the "greatest distractions" it had known since the frightful Indian massacre of the year 1622.
In such a state of horror and demoralization, and remembering all that those of earlier times had suffered, no wonder the colonists did not question whether the natives had any rights to be considered,
and came to scarcely regard them as human beings, or that the sentiment "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" should have prevailed. Indeed, the one chance for the divine law of the survival of the fittest to be carried out in Virginia seemed to be in the prompt and total extermination of the red race.
