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Chesapeake people

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Chesepian
K'che-sepi-ack
Map of Virginia
Map of Virginia with Chesapeake native villages, circa 1585
Total population
Extinct as a tribe
Regions with significant populations
Virginia, South Hampton Roads
Languages
Algonquian languages
Religion
Indigenous religions
Related ethnic groups
Nansemond

The Chesepian (Chesapeake) were a Native American tribe who lived near present-day South Hampton Roads in the U.S. state of Virginia. They occupied an area which is now in the independent cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach (formerly Norfolk County and Princess Anne County).[1][2]

Name

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The name Chesapeake is an anglicisation of the Algonquian word, K'che-sepi-ack, which translates as "country on a great river."[2] The name for the Native American tribe is spelled many different ways, "Chesapian" is commonly used.[3][4][5] In 1585, Ralph Lane used both "Chesapians"[6] and "Chesapeaks",[2]. John Smith's charts and writings also show variety but most frequently used "Chesapeaks".[2] John White's illustrations used "Ehesepiooc".[2]

Settlements

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They occupied an area which is now the Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach areas.[7] The main village of the Chesepian was Skicoak on the peninsula east of the Elizabeth River either on that river[8] or near the Lynnhaven River.[9]

Two other Chesepian towns were Apasus and Chesepioc (Chesepiuc), both on the same peninsula in what is now the city of Virginia Beach. Chesepioc lay on Great Neck Point east of the Lynnhaven River.[10] Archaeologists and others have found numerous Native American arrowheads, stone axes, pottery, and beads in Great Neck Point. Several native burials were found as well.[10]

Language and affiliation

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Although they spoke an Eastern Algonquian language like many tribes within the Powhatan Confederacy, archaeological evidence suggests that the Chesepian people originally belonged to another group, the Carolina Algonquian.

History

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The culture of the Chesapians is called "Late Woodland" and they depended heavily on the resources of the Chesapeake Bay, notably the fish and shellfish.[11][12]

There is evidence that some of the survivors of the Roanoke Colony settled with the Chesapians after the failure of their settlement.[13][14]

In 1607, after the decimation by Powhatan,[15] the Chesapians had about 100 warriors and a total population estimated at 350.[2] By 1669, they ceased to exist as a tribe.[2]

Demise

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Grave marker of relocated remains of Chesapeake natives

According to William Strachey's The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia (1618), the Chesepian were wiped out by the Powhatan, the paramount head of the Virginia Peninsula–based Powhatan Confederacy, sometime before the arrival of the English at Jamestown in 1607. The Chesepian were eliminated because Powhatan's priests had warned him that "from the Chesapeake Bay a nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his empire".[16][15]

Though historians of the period express little doubt that the Powhatans eradicated the Chesapeake tribe, Strachey's belief that these rumored prophesies indicated the Christian God's intervention on behalf of the Jamestown Colony against "The Devil's Empire" appears, in hindsight, rather eccentric.[17]

References

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  1. ^ Tazewell, William L.; Friddell, Guy (2000). Norfolk’s Waters: An Illustrated History of Hampton Roads. Sun Valley, California: American Historical Press. p. 17. ISBN 978-1-892724-16-8.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Hodge, Frederick Webb (1911). Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Smithsonian Institution. p. 249. Retrieved 18 March 2025.
  3. ^ Tazewell, William L. (1982). Norfolk's waters : an illustrated maritime history of Hampton Roads. Norfolk, Vurginia: Windsor Publications. pp. 18–19. ISBN 978-0-89781-045-6.
  4. ^ Lawler, Andrew (2018). The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. New York: Knopf Doubleday. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-385-54201-2.
  5. ^ La Vere, David (2010). The lost rocks: the Dare Stones and the unsolved mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony. Wilmington, North Carolina: Dram Tree Books. p. 298, footnote 129. ISBN 978-0-9844900-1-1.
  6. ^ Dillman, Jefferson (2015). "English Encounters with the New World". Colonizing Paradise: Landscape and Empire in the British West Indies. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-8173-8804-1.
  7. ^ Feest, Christian F. (1973). "Seventeenth Century Virginia Algonquian Population Estimates" (PDF). Quarterly Bulletin, Archeological Society of Virginia. 28 (2): 66–79, page 71. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 March 2025.
  8. ^ Hodge 1911, p. 249 citing Smith (1629) Virginia I, 87
  9. ^ Hodge 1911, p. 249 citing Jefferson Notes 138 (1809)
  10. ^ a b Painter, Floyd (1979). "The Ancient Indian Town of Chesapeake on the Peninsula of Great Neck: A Brief History". Chesopiean. 17: 4–51 and 65–75.
  11. ^ Miller, Henry M. (2001). "Chapter 6: Living along the Great Shellfish Bay: The Relationship between Prehistoric Peoples and the Chesapeake". In Curtin, Philip D.; Brush, Grace S.; Fisher, George W. (eds.). Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 109–124. ISBN 978-0-8018-7517-5.
  12. ^ Dent, Richard J., Jr. (1995). "Chapter 6: The Woodland Period: Expansion, Chiefdoms, and the End of Prehistory". Chesapeake Prehistory: Old Traditions, New Directions. Boston, Massachusetts: Springer. pp. 217–285, pages 223–224. doi:10.1007/978-0-585-29562-6_6. ISBN 978-0-306-45028-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  13. ^ Nichols, Roger L. (1998). Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 40–41, note 8 page 328. ISBN 978-0-8032-3341-6.
  14. ^ William Strachey (1846). The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, approx. 1618. London: Hakluyt Society edition. p. 26.
  15. ^ a b Horn, James (2005). A Land As God Made It – Jamestown and the Birth of America. New York: Basic Books. pp. 145–146. ISBN 978-0-465-03094-1.
  16. ^ Strachey 1846, p. 101
    [It is] not long since that his priests told him how that from the Chesapeack Bay a nation should arise which should dissolve and give end to his empire, for which, not many yeares since (perplext with this divelish oracle, and divers understanding thereof), according to the ancyent and gentile customs, he destroyed and put to sword all such who might lye under any doubtful construccion of the said prophesie, as all the inhabitants, the weroance and his subjects of that province, and so remaine all the Chessiopeians at this daye, and for this cause, extinct.
  17. ^ Strachey 1846, p. 102
    Judge all men whether these maye not be the forerunners of an alteration of the devill's empire here? I hope they be, nay, I dare prognosticate that they usher great accidents, and that we shall effect them; the Divine power assist us in this worke, which, begun for heavenly ends, may have as heavenly period.

Sources

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  • Helen C. Rountree. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman, Univ. of Oklahoma Press (1989).
  • Helen C. Rountree. Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman, Univ. of Oklahoma Press (1990).
  • Shi, David, E. America: A Narrative History (6th edition), (2004) W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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