Saturday, July 15, 2017

What would have happened if one or more semi-Christianized Indians had not warned the Jamestown villages of Opechancanough's plan just before the attack can only be imagined. The warning probably saved Jamestown...But elsewhere the assault went much as planned. In plantation after plantation from west to east, north and south of the James, the Indians turned on their unsuspecting hosts, in some places while sharing "breakfast with people at their tables," and with axes, hammers, shovels, and tools, and knives slaughtered them indiscriminately, "not sparing eyther age or sexe, man, woman, or dhilde; so sodaine in their cruell execution that few or none discerned the weapon or blow that brought them to destruction." Those in the fields or otherwise at work were tracked down and murdered...And the horror was compounded by the attackers "defacing, dragging, and mangling the dead carkasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision, with base and bruitish triumph."