The Susquehanoughs

After this, and while the company were conversing, one or another expressed surprise because these brown-skinned men had been so ready and willing to abandon their village for our comfort, giving up at small price the fields already planted, whereupon Captain Fleet, who had been called into the council, gave us a key to the seeming mystery, at the same time declaring that what seemed like ill fortune to the Indians was greatly to their advantage.

It seems that near by, I cannot say how far away, live other brown-skinned men who belong to a tribe called Susquehanoughs, and these Indians are enemies to those of Yaocomico. More than once already had war parties come into the land, killing and carrying away as slaves these peaceful savages of ours, so said Captain Fleet, and just before we sailed up the Chesapeake Bay, it had been decided by the brown men of Yaocomico that they would leave this village, which we have bought, and move to some other place, where they might the better defend themselves from the blood-thirsty Susquehanoughs.

It caused me no little discomfort of mind to hear that there were in the land savages who, instead of being peacefully inclined like those we had already met, were given to making war, and I questioned whether, on learning that the people of Yaocomico had moved away, they might not attack us.

But this possibility did not appear to have any weight with our people, at least, not so far as I could see during this evening when we were thus assembled in the great cabin of the Ark, for they treated with seeming indifference the information given concerning the warlike tribe, and all the gentlemen, including my father, acted as if to them it was a matter of little importance what the Susquehanoughs might try to do.

Mayhap I am giving too many words to the story of these brown men whom we found in our Province of Maryland; but he who reads must remember that we had come a small company as compared with the number of natives, to build up new homes, and were, one might say, defenseless in event of a war with the savages.

Such being the case, and knowing that all our future well-being depended in a great measure upon these same Indians, it is little wonder that I dwell upon them, for to us, however indifferent our gentlemen might appear, what these savages did, or tried to do, was of great moment.