NANSEMOND CHIEF WEYHOHOMO AND HIS DESCENDANTS

According to Helen Rountree's John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages 1607-1690, pages 144-145, circa 1607 the coastal plain in the James River drainage was occupied by eleven Algonquian-speaking groups, with the piedmont being held by the Siouan Monacans. Of these eleven tribes, all but two belonged to the paramount chiefdom of the King Powhatan, who took his name from his hometown; modern scholars bestow it upon his subjects language and political organization as well. Two groups resisted beging absorbed into that organization: the Chickahominies, who were governed by elders and were populous enough to remain autonomous, and the Chesapeakes, who, were overrun sometime around the time Jamestown was founded.The Powhatan towns along the James were mainly dispersed-settlement towns: scatters of houses, gardens, and groves of trees along the banks of streams. The known exceptions mentioned here were in frontier areas near the Virginia Capes and near the fall line, where attacks from the Monacans were an annual occurrence.The Nansemond Indians consisted of four towns with an estimated 850 people, including 200 fighting men; the chief was Weyhohomo, with satellite town chiefs Amapetough, Weywingopo and Tichtough under him. To date there have been no major archaeological excavations. The towns were: Nandsamond, on the three points where the Nansemond River splits; Mantoughquemend, on the east side upriver; Teracosick, farther upriver on the west side; and Mattanock, uncertain location somewhere downriver on the west side. Sites revealed by archaeological survey and of the correct age are Mattanock and part of Nandsamond. By 1607, when the first English settlers founded Jamestown, the Nansemond lived in several villages centered near Chuckatuck, in present-day Suffolk, along the Nansemond River. Their head chief lived near Dumpling Island, where the tribe's temple and sacred objects were located. The Nansemond tribe spoke a dialect of Algonquian and was among the roughly twenty-eight to thirty-two tribes of Tsenacomoco, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking tribes that was ruled by the paramount chief Powhatan.Like the other tribes of Tsenacomoco, the Nansemond had a tense and often hostile relationship with the English settlers. The colonists had exhausted their supplies soon after arriving in Virginia and, unaccustomed to growing their own food, sought to trade with the Indians for corn. In late 1608, Powhatan directed the tribes of Tsenacomoco to refuse to trade. In 1609, Captain John Smith sent George Percy and John Martin, along with a group of sixty colonists, to bargain with the Nansemond for an island. After two of their English messengers disappeared, Martin and Percy's men attacked a nearby Nansemond settlement, where, according to Percy, they "burned their houses ransaked their Temples, Tooke downe the Corpes of their deade kings from their Toambes, and Caryed away their pearles Copper and braceletts wherewith they doe decore their kings funeralles." The English also destroyed the Indians' crops. More than half of Martin and Percy's men were killed during the attack, an event that helped initiate the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-1614), one of three distinct periods of hostility between the Indian and English communities. The Nansemond towns were burned again in 1622 in retaliation for the coordinated Indian assault against English settlements on March 22, 1622, which was led by the Pamunkey chief Opechancanough and marked the start of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-1632).The peace treaty that concluded the Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644-1646) set aside land for the people of Tsenacomoco, including the Nansemond. By 1648, according to the scholar Helen C. Rountree, the Nansemond lived on the northwest and south branches of the Nansemond River and this is the story of their descendants.