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The aftermath claimed as many as seven hundred more. Because the attack disrupted spring planting, the tassantassas grew even less maize than usual. Meanwhile, the company tried to rebuild Jamestown by sending over more than a thousand new colonists. Incredibly, they were sent with no food supplies. Actually, not so incredibly—ship captains were paid by the person transported, so they overloaded their vessels with passengers, carrying as little unprofitable food as possible. The luckless, scurvy-ridden souls aboard were dumped ashore, where they were forced to eat “barks of trees, or moulds [soil] of the Ground. Again colonists scrabbled in rags over handfuls of maize. It was a second “starving time.” By spring the survivors were so debilitated, colony treasurer George Sandys wrote, “the lyveing [were] hardlie able to bury the dead.” (Emphasis in original.) Altogether about two out of every three Europeans in Virginia died that year.5

Although this image is confused in many ways—note the neatly walled fortress in the distance, so utterly unlike Jamestown or any Powhatan settlement—something of the shock caused by the Powhatan attack on Virginia in 1622 was captured in this engraving by the German artist Matthäus Merian. (Photo credit 2.8)

By any measure, Opechancanough was in a commanding position. His forces now more numerous and better supplied than the enemy, they raided English settlements at will. Jamestown’s governing council confessed that the colonists couldn’t successfully mount a reprisal, “by reasone of theire swyftnes of foote, and advantages of the woodes, to which uppon all our assaultes they retyre.” Opechancanough predicted in the summer of 1623 that “before the end of two Moones there should not be an Englishman in all their Countries.”

Just as he foresaw, the Virginia Company did not survive. Horrified by the attack, James I created an investigatory commission, which issued a damning report. The company’s parliamentary support vanished. Management fought desperately to retain the king’s favor. Its investors had sunk into Virginia as much as £200,000, a vast sum at the time. As long as the firm existed the money potentially could be recouped. If James revoked the company charter, it would be beyond recovery. Nevertheless he revoked the charter on May 24, 1624. “Any responsible monarch would have been obliged to stop the reckless shipment of his subjects to their deaths,” wrote Morgan, the historian. The wonder was that the king had not done so earlier. Opechancanough had defeated the Virginia Company.

But victory over the company did not mean victory for the Indians. Opechancanough did not launch a final, killing assault, pushing the foreigners into the sea. Indeed, a second coordinated attack didn’t take place for twenty-two years, when it was far too late. The reason for his hesitation will never be known with certainty, because English accounts provide the great majority of historical records, and the hostilities ensured that the tassantassas lost what little view they had into native life. But one possible answer is that Opechancanough had lost Tsenacomoco before his troops fanned out into English homes. By growing tobacco, the English had transformed the landscape into something unrecognizable.

Indians had traditionally raised tobacco, but only in small amounts. The colonists, by contrast, covered big areas with stands of N. tabacum. Neither natives nor newcomers understood the environmental impact of planting it on a massive scale. Tobacco is a sponge for nitrogen and potassium. Because the entire plant is removed from the soil, harvesting and exporting tobacco was like taking those nutrients from the earth and putting them on ships. “Tobacco has an almost unique ability to suck the life out of soil,” said Leanne DuBois, the agricultural extension agent in James City County, Jamestown’s county. “In this area, where the soils can be pretty fragile, it can ruin the land in a couple of years.” Constantly wearing out fields, the colonists had