The tidewater Indians with whom Smith had to deal mostly belonged to a group of Algonquian tribes known as the Powhatan Confederacy. Ruling this confederacy was a tyrannous old chief, himself called Powhatan, who was held in considerable awe by his subjects. From each of the tribes under his domination Powhatan demanded an annual tribute consisting mainly of beads and skins and bits of the decorative copper that was so scarce in his kingdom.
Beads were used by the Indians not only for adornment but as a form of currency. As Captain Smith observed, they were the cause of “as much dissention among the Salvages as gold and silver amongst the Christians.” Their manufacture by the natives did indeed call for a high degree of skill, each bead being cut individually from shell, then polished and drilled with crude stone tools. When strung together in belts or arm’s length ropes they were known universally among the Algonquin nations of the eastern seaboard as wampum.
In Virginia wampum strings of white beads made from cockle shell were called roanoke, whereas strings of beads cut from conch shell, dark purple in color, were called peake. Generally speaking the latter were worth ten times as much as the former. The natives used their wampum, or shell money, in barter among themselves to such an extent that the white men found it very convenient as a means of promoting their own fur trade. Often they would trade their wares with a rich tribe for wampum, and then exchange this shell money with a less prosperous tribe for furs.
The collecting of skins for taxes, or tribute, was of course a device older than history. The Romans employed it to collect taxes from barbarian subjects; so did the pharaohs of prehistoric Egypt in gathering tribute from the upper Nile valley. Powhatan could demand pelts in some variety. A contemporary chronicler among the first settlers at Jamestown noted that within the great chief’s kingdom the forests and streams abounded with bears, foxes, otters, beavers, muskrats and “Deere both Red and Fallow.”
The skins of these animals were the tidewater Indians’ most necessary and useful commodity next to food. Mainly they were necessary as clothing in winter, but they were also used as adornment by chiefs and priests, and for many ceremonial purposes. They were utilized, too, as closures and decorations for the Indians’ long-houses. And soft hide leather, such as buckskin, came in for a variety of aboriginal hunting and household requirements, as well as for garments and footwear.
Actually Powhatan’s common subjects often went quite naked, except for skins worn much like aprons. However, when it was cold, they wore matchcores—an Indian word for garments of fur which was later turned into “match-coats” by the English.
At his first meeting with Powhatan, Smith found the old savage blanketed with a matchcore of raccoon skins. One of the priests was “disguised with a great Skinne, his head hung round with little Skinnes of Weasels and other vermine.” Many of the better sort of savages, such as werowances and chief men, affected mantles of carefully dressed deerskin, some painted and embossed with white beads or bits of copper. Others who were opulent had matchcores made from squirrel, beaver, muskrat and otter, the last being held in highest esteem.
Women wore fur blankets of beaver and otter, or tastefully fringed and embroidered skin skirts, appropriate to the season. Children usually went naked, although marriageable maidens, twelve to fifteen, modestly covered their loins at least. Pocahontas herself is referred to on one occasion as being girdled with soft otter skins.
About most of the great Bay of the Chesapeake, on his expeditions, Captain Smith found “Wilde Cats ... Martins, Powlecats, weessels and Minkes.” When he explored the Eastern Shore he discovered it to be thickly inhabited by “Otters, Beavers, Martins, Luswarts and sables.” Truly, the tidewater literally swarmed with fur bearers.
In the northernmost reaches of the bay Smith managed to trade with the giant Susquehannocks. “Their attire,” he recorded, “is the skinnes of beares and Woolves, some have Cassacks made of Beares heades and skinnes that a man’s necke goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the beare fastened to his shoulders behind, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, and at the end of the nose hung a Beares Pawe: the halfe sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of Beares and the armes through the mouth, with pawes hanging at their noses. One had the head of a Woolfe hanging in a chaine for a Jewell.”