Friday, 22 March 1622, was the most lethal day ever experienced by British colonists in peacetime, as Powhatan warriors slaughtered almost 30 percent of Virginia’s entire white population, including at least 35 women and 30 children; destroyed many buildings and other property; and threatened the survival of England’s embryonic empire on this continent. “Besides them they killed,” wrote one of the nine hundred English survivors, the Indians “burst the heart of all the rest.” After fifteen years of tortured progress, Jamestown was “brought down again to the ground” in only a few hours and was once again like a “Child . . . exposed in the Wilderness to extreme danger, . . . fainting and laboring for life.”
That terrible, traumatic “Flood of Blood,” as John Donne so graphically described it, was immediately recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a major watershed event, different from anything that English citizens had ever experienced. Contemporaries regarded the “devilish malice” and “unnatural brutishness” of killing unarmed innocents in their own homes as an unprecedented, exceptionally heinous deed, since honorable Powhatan warriors had always spared the lives of women, children, and even enemy chiefs in their traditional warfare
“Barbarous Massacre”
