To better purpose Dale’s strong hand was felt among the Indians along the James and York rivers, whom he visited with heavy punishments.  The result was that Powhatan’s appetite for war speedily diminished; and when Captain Argall, in April, 1613, by a shrewd trick got possession of Pocahontas, he offered peace, which was confirmed in April, 1614, by the marriage of Pocahontas to a leading planter named John Rolfe.  The ceremony is believed to have been performed at Jamestown by Rev. Richard Buck, who came with Gates in 1610, and it was witnessed by several of Powhatan’s kindred.[37]

Dale reached out beyond the territory of the London Company, and hearing that the French had made settlements in North Virginia, he sent Captain Samuel Argall in July, 1613, to remove them.  Argall reached Mount Desert Island, captured the settlement, and carried some of the French to Jamestown, where as soon as Dale saw them he spoke of “nothing but ropes” and of gallows and hanging “every one of them.”  To make the work complete, Argall was sent out on a second expedition, and this time he reduced the French settlements at Port Royal and St. Croix River.[38] On his return voyage to Virginia he is said to have stopped at the Hudson River, where, finding a Dutch trading-post consisting of four houses on Manhattan Island, he forced the Dutch governor likewise to submit by a “letter sent and recorded” in Virginia.  Probably in one of these voyages the Delaware River was also visited, when the “atturnment of the Indian kings” was made to the king of England.[39] It appears to have received its present name from Argall in 1610.[40]

Towards the end of his stay in Virginia, Dale seemed to realize that some change must be made in the colony, and he accordingly abolished the common store and made every man dependent on his own labor.  But the exactions he imposed upon the settlers in return made it certain that he did not desire their benefit so much as to save expense to his masters in England.  The “Farmers,” as he called a small number to whom he gave three acres of land to be cultivated in their own way, had to pay two and a half barrels of corn per acre and give thirty days’ public service in every year; while the “Laborers,” constituting the majority of the colony, had to slave eleven months, and were allowed only one month to raise corn to keep themselves supplied for a year.  The inhabitants of Bermuda Hundred counted themselves more fortunate than the rest because they were promised their freedom in three years and were given one month in the year and one day in the week, from May till harvest-time, “to get their sustenance,” though of this small indulgence they were deprived of nearly half by Dale.  Yet even this slender appeal to private interest was accompanied with marked improvement, and in 1614 Ralph Hamor, Jr., Dale’s secretary of state, wrote, “When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly in the manuring of ground and planting corn, ... the most honest of them, in a general business, would not take so much faithful and true pains in a week as now he will do in a day."[41]