But all this made little difference to Opechancanough. He had warred, and had lost; now he expected to be tortured and executed. He was so old and worn, and so stern in his pride of chiefship, that he did not care. He had been a sachem before the English arrived, and he was a sachem still. Nobody heard from his set lips one word of complaint, or fear, or pleading. Instead, he spoke haughtily. He rarely would permit his lids to be lifted, that he might look about him.
His faithful Indian servants waited upon him. One day a soldier of the guard wickedly shot him through the back.
The wound was mortal, but the old chief gave not a twinge; his seamed face remained as stern and firm as if of stone. He had resolved that his enemies should see in him a man.
Only when, toward the end, he heard a murmur and scuff of feet around him, did he arouse. He asked his nurses to lift his eyelids for him. This was done. He coldly surveyed the people who had crowded into the room to watch him die.
"Send in to me the governor," he demanded angrily.
"It is time," rebuked old Opechancanough. "For had it been my fortune to have taken Sir William Berkeley prisoner, I should not have exposed him as a show to my people."
Then Opechancanough died, a chief and an enemy to the last.
While in Virginia the white colonists were hard put to it by the Powatans, the good ship _Mayflower_ had landed the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers on the Massachusetts Bay shore to the north, among the Pokanokets.
The Po-kan-o-kets formed another league, like the league of the Powatans. There were nine tribes, holding a section of southeastern Massachusetts and of water-broken eastern Rhode Island.
The renowned Massasoit of the Wam-pa-no-ag tribe was the grand sachem. In Rhode Island, on the east shore of upper Narragansett Bay was the royal seat of Montaup, or Mount Hope, at the village Pokanoket.
Great was the sachem Mas-sa-so-it, who ruled mildly but firmly, and was to his people a father as well as a chief.
Of his children, two sons were named Wamsutta and Metacomet. They were renamed, in English, Alexander and Philip, by the governor of this colony of Plymouth.
Alexander was the elder. He had married Wetamoo, who was the young squaw sachem of the neighboring village of Pocasset, to the east. Philip married her sister, Woo-to-ne-kau-ske.