The English colonists at Jamestown arrived very late in the colonial game, and the Powhatan had plenty of opportunity to learn about Europeans from first-hand, or second hand, interactions prior to the establishment of the fort.

From the early 1500s onward European explorers, traders, fishermen, and slavers were plying the Atlantic Coast. Ponce de Leon's entrada was the first to officially make landfall on the mainland of Florida in 1512, but even at this early stage he suspected unofficial slave raiders beat him to Florida. Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano explored the Atlantic coast from modern day Massachusetts to North Carolina in 1542. He reported multiple locations where Native Americans, fearful of abduction, were too wary to trade on ship and already established a means of exchanging items via a rope line. Throughout New England and Canada groups of European seasonal fishermen would camp along the coast, drying fish and conducting small-scale trade. The French established a short-lived community at Fort Caroline in modern-day South Carolina 1564, which was quickly destroyed by the Spanish. The Spanish then increased their mission efforts in Florida to protect from encroachment. These permanent missions, and supporting towns, initiated a century and a half of coexistence and cooperation between the Guale, Timucua, and Apalachee and their Spanish neighbors.

Mattaponi/Powhatan oral tradition indicates a young Powhatan boarded a ship/was abducted by Spanish explorers in 1559 or 1560. What followed was a decade of extensive language training as the Dominicans and Jesuits attempted to plan, and then execute, the founding of a mission in Virginia armed with a local interpreter. The first mission was a disaster, and the Dominicans were lost somewhere along the Virginia coast in 1566. In 1570 a small party of Jesuits, armed with an Algonquian interpreter captured during the first voyage, sailed into the mouth of the James River, five miles from the future site of Jamestown. The Jesuits crossed to the York River where they established a small wooden mission, and quickly began to starve. Algonquians indicated “six years of famine and death” depleted food stores, and left them unable to aid the Jesuit missionaries. The Algonquian captive escaped, and in early 1571 returned with an armed party to murder the three Jesuit fathers, ending the short-lived Spanish presence in Virginia.

Our popular version of history traditionally omits these stories of small-scale trade, lost colonies, slave raiders, and shipwrecked souls but the century plus between Columbus's arrival and the founding of Jamestown was a very busy time along the Atlantic Coast of North America. Whether official entradas, or unofficial forays, regular interactions provided a precedent for the arrival of the Jamestown colonists, and gave Powhatan context for their motivations. In response to the Spanish threat he began consolidating allies, eventually uniting over thirty groups into his chiefdom. Given the gradual encroachment of the Spanish, as well as the need to defend the Powhatan from the neighboring Monacans and Susquehannocks, Powhatan/Wahunsenacawh allied with the newly arrived English settlers at Jamestown. John Smith was chosen as the representative of the English for a ceremonial induction into the Powhatan political sphere. Smith was captured by the Powhatans in December of 1607. The capture was a ritual ceremony dedicated to securing the relationship between the Powhatan and Jamestown by appointing Smith as a local chief (werowance). The werowance established Smith as a local governor of an individual town within Powhatan influence, and by extension the English at Jamestown as members of Powhatan society.

Sources/Further Reading:

Charles Mann 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Matthew Restall Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Daniel Richter Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America

Andrés Reséndez The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America