country extending from the Pyanketank to the southern bank of the Powhatan and east of Orapaks,[1] there was a population in this interval alone as large as the whole of the population which, according to Smith, belonged to the Powhatan Confederacy throughout its territory. Strachey asserts that there were three thousand three hundred and twenty fighting men in this part of aboriginal Virginia, which would signify a general population of ten thousand, but this was probably as much in excess of the real number of the inhabitants in this division of the Colony as the calculation of Smith was below it. Strachey, however, lived in Virginia some years after Smith had withdrawn from it, and therefore had the advantage of the greater knowledge which the English had acquired of the country by more careful exploration. The larger enumeration of Strachey arises not so much from his having attributed a greater force of warriors to the different towns mentioned by Smith than Smith does himself, as from the fact that he includes in his statement of population, towns which Smith had failed to name, doubtless because he was ignorant of their existence.[2]
- ↑ Orapaks was one of the residences of Powhatan, and was situated east of the modern city of Richmond.
- ↑ See, for instance, the list of towns situated on the modern York, the Indian Pamunkey, given by Strachey in his Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 62. With the exception of the king and werowances, who had numerous wives, it is not recorded that the families of individual Indians were large. It is well known that the aborigines began many of their wars merely to obtain a supply of women and children. The presence of venereal diseases of a virulent type among members of both sexes must have had an important influence in repressing their growth in numbers. However numerous the Indians may have been in Virginia when the English founded the Colony, they had by 1609 dwindled in the area of the settlements to seven hundred and twenty-five bowmen, representing a population which probably did not exceed three thousand. Hening’s Statutes, vol. II, p. 275.
