A point of land at the mouth of the Potomac, on the south side, he named for himself, Smith's Point.[2]
MOTHER OF WATERS
When Captain John Smith and his bargeload of adventurers left the Potomac they passed the tip of Smith's Point and headed south. They were now on the Chesapeake Bay.
Indians had long used this great inland sea as their waterway. Their word, Chesapeake, has been translated in a number of ways, among them—country on a great river and great salt bay.
The Spaniards, who visited the Bay in the sixteenth century, had documented it as Bahia de Santa Maria (St. Mary's Bay). Later, they called it Bahia del Xacan (Axacan Bay), and a very old Spanish map calls it, Madre de Aguas, meaning Mother of Waters.
Captain Smith describes it simply as "a goodly bay." He wrote: "This Bay lyeth North and South, in which the water floweth neare 200-myles, and hath a channell for 140 myles, of depth betwixt 6 and 15 fadome, holding in breadth for the most part 10 or 14 myles."
Two of Smith's company recorded the fact that "Neither better fish, more plenty or variety, had any of us seene in any place, swimming in the water, then in the bay of Chesapeake."
The Indians well knew the riches of their great Bay. They caught the fat fish in weirs, with nets and lines for their angles made by their women from thread spun from "the barkes of trees, Deeres Sinews, or a Kind of Grass." They ate the sea-crabs that were said to be so large that four Englishmen could feast on one of them. They roasted the oysters reported to have been thirteen inches long at the time of the coming of the white man. The shells were not wasted by the Indians—they were used for medicine, ornaments, and wampum was made from the purple edges of the clams. Even the lowly periwinkle was eaten.
As the first English ships entered Chesapeake Bay the crews were startled to see whales and schools of tumbling porpoises. The early colonists were soon to learn that there were so many porpoises in the Bay that canoes were sometimes overturned by them.
When the Jamestown colony was starving they lived on the bounties of the Bay—they caught the sea-crabs and sturgeons and sheepshead; the latter they likened to the broth of their English mutton. And these same strangers "groped in the deep for oysters which lay in places thick as stones," according to an early writer.