![]() But as more settlers arrived, including women and children, relations deteriorated, eventually leading to full-scale hostilities. At first, relations with people along the river were cordial, if sometimes uncertain. ![]() In May 1607, 104 Englishmen set up camp on the banks of the James River on land they called Jamestown, but which actually belonged to the Paspahegh people. By the time English colonizers arrived, it reached from south of the James River to the shores of the Potomac River. From the mid-1570s to the early 17th century, the chiefdom, called by the Powhatan Indians Tsenacommacah, expanded rapidly across coastal Virginia. His awareness likely played a major role in encouraging his brother, Chief Powhatan, to begin building a massive chiefdom encompassing more than 30 different tribal groups, which would be able to mount an effective defense against Europe’s powerful invaders. Virginia’s First Indian WarsĪs one of a very select few Native Americans who had traveled across the Atlantic-and returned-Don Luís understood better than his peers the grave, looming threat Europeans posed, whether from Spain or elsewhere. But when sent with Spanish Jesuits to help convert his people and colonize his ancestral land, he turned on the missionaries and orchestrated their killing. Paquiquineo (later Opechancanough) let his Spanish captors believe he had converted to the Catholic faith. He knew if he let Jesuits establish a beachhead in the Chesapeake, more soldiers and settlers would follow, eventually taking the land and destroying his people. While living in Mexico City and Florida in the years before returning to his own land, he’d seen firsthand how Spanish conquest and conversion to Catholicism had destroyed Indian ways of life and beliefs. He completely destroyed the mission-and with it, the Spanish hoped to create future settlements in the Chesapeake Bay.ĭon Luís’s motives for the betrayal aren’t difficult to fathom. Within six months of landing, Don Luís led an Indian war party that killed all eight Jesuits, sparing only a young servant boy. With unshakeable faith in Don Luís’s piety and commitment to convert his people to Christianity, the missionaries allowed themselves to be led deep inland without armed support. In 1570, nine frustrating years after his abduction, Paquiquineo/Don Luís was returned to his homeland as part of a small Jesuit mission to the Chesapeake, intended as the prelude to Spanish colonization. The Spaniards baptized and educated Paquiquineo, honoring him with the princely Spanish name of Don Luís de Velasco, after the viceroy of New Spain. Specifically, he might play a vital part in establishing a holy mission that would convert Indian peoples and facilitate Spanish settlement beyond Florida, the first major European territory claimed in North America. The king believed Paquiquineo, intelligent and high-born, could help achieve that goal. He saw it as his sacred duty to convert them to Catholicism. A deeply religious man, Philip oversaw an immense empire of recently conquered territory in the West Indies and Central and South America, whose Indigenous peoples he considered heathens. But while he stands as one of the greatest military leaders in early America, his achievements remain almost completely unknown.įollowing his abduction, Paquiquineo-reputed to be the brother of Powhatan, principal chief of a confederacy of Algonquian-speaking tribes-was transported across the Atlantic to the court of King Philip II in Madrid. And 50 years later, with his coordinated 1622 attack on the Jamestown colony, he came close to ending English colonial ambitions in the region. A brilliant tactician and charismatic leader, he successfully thwarted Spanish efforts to establish a Chesapeake settlement. But “Paquiquineo,” as Spanish officials rendered the young man’s name later that year, would in time re-emerge as Opechancanough, the most formidable warrior chief encountered by Europeans in 16th and early 17th century Virginia.Īfter returning to his homeland, he helped build the greatest chiefdom along the mid-Atlantic and spent the rest of his life defending his people from European invaders, whose mindset and strategies he had studied at close range. The abduction itself wasn’t unusual, since the Spanish in America often trained Native youth to serve as interpreters, or pressed them for information about local peoples and perhaps the whereabouts of gold or silver. The kidnapping set off a chain of events that would alter the course of American colonial history. ![]() In the summer of 1561, Spanish explorers abducted a Powhatan Indian youth from the Chesapeake Bay tidewater region and brought him to the royal court of Spain.
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