Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/365

Rh When the news of this massacre reached London, and it was brought there before the Council of Virginia, the word sent back to the dismayed wretches at Jamestown was this: “We must advise you to root out from being any longer a people so cursed, a nation ungrateful to all benefits and uncapable of all goodness,” — the “people” and “nation” thus described being the Indian, not the English. And again: “Take a sharp revenge upon the bloody miscreants, even to the measure that they intended against us, — the rooting them out for being longer a people on the face of the earth.” Another concerted outburst of the savages in Virginia took place in 1644, when nearly as many of the whites as in the previous conspiracy were numbered as victims. Still a third similar combination of the hounded and abused natives, in 1656, renewed the efforts, at any cost to themselves, to visit the utmost vengeance upon their tormentors. Though the whites in this case had Indian allies, the result rather aggravated their disasters.

Were it worth the careful and thorough research which would be required for a full examination of all our materials of local and general history, to pursue the details of these various conflicts between the whites and the Indians as they were first enacted by the earlier bodies of the colonists on the regions nearest to the seaboard, it is believed that full verification would be made of the assertion, that, notwithstanding the white man's superiority in weapons and skill, the victims on his own side in all hostilities far outnumbered those of the red men. That, save in the Quaker proprietary province of Pennsylvania, there should not have been a single exception, near the close of the century so filled with savage warfare, to the universal enactment of these tragic massacres between the two races, might offer another subject for thorough investigation by an interested inquirer. Were there forces working through natural antipathies, through