[Sidenote: The Powhatan tribe, confederacy, and head war-chief.]
Smith's enemies were a majority in the Council and would not admit him as a member, but he was no longer held as a prisoner. Newport's next business was to explore the river, and Smith with four other gentlemen, four skilled mariners, and fourteen common sailors, went along with him, while the Jamestown fort was building. They sailed up about as far as the site of Richmond, frequently meeting parties of Indians on the banks or passing Indian villages. Newport was uniformly kind and sagacious in his dealings with the red men, and they seemed quite friendly. These were Algonquins, of the tribe called Powhatans, and the natives who had assaulted the English at Cape Henry belonged to a hostile tribe, so that that incident furnished a bond of sympathy between the Powhatans and the white men. After a few days they reached the village called Powhatan (_i.e._ "Falling Waters"), which Thomas Studley, the colonial storekeeper, describes as consisting of about a dozen houses "pleasantly seated on a hill." Old drawings indicate that they were large clan houses, with framework of beams and covering of bark, similar in general shape though not in all details to the long houses of the Iroquois. The Powhatans seem to have been the leading or senior tribe in a loose confederacy. Their principal village was called Werowocomoco, situated on the north side of the York River, about fifteen miles northeast from Jamestown as the crow flies. The place is now called Putin Bay, a name which is merely a corruption of Powhatan. At Werowocomoco dwelt the head war-chief of the tribe, by name Wahunsunakok, but much more generally known by his title as The Powhatan, just as the head of an Irish or Scotch clan is styled The O'Neill or The MacGregor. Newport and Smith, hearing that The Powhatan was a chief to whom other chiefs were in a measure subordinate, spoke of him as the emperor and the subordinate chiefs as kings, a grotesque terminology which was natural enough at that day but which in the interest of historical accuracy it is high time for modern writers to drop.[49]
When Newport and Smith returned to Jamestown, they found that it had been attacked by a force of 200 Indians. Wingfield had beaten them off, but one Englishman was killed and eleven were wounded. In the course of the next two weeks these enemies were very annoying; they would crouch in the tall grass about the fort and pick off a man with their barbed stone-tipped arrows. Hakluyt had warned the settlers against building near the edge of a wood;[50] it seems strange that bitter experience was needed to teach them that danger might lurk in long grass. Presently some of their new acquaintances from the Powhatan tribe came to the fort and told Newport that the assailants were from a hostile tribe against which they would willingly form an alliance; and they furthermore advised him to cut his grass, which seems to prove that they were sincere in what they said.