This prosperity is marred by a story of heart-rending sickness and suffering.  An extraordinary mortality due to imported epidemics, and diseases of the climate for which in these days we have found a remedy in quinine, slew the new-comers by hundreds.  One thousand people were in Virginia at Easter, 1619, and to this number three thousand five hundred and seventy more were added during the next three years,[17] yet only one thousand two hundred and forty were resident in the colony on Good Friday, March 22, 1622, a day when the horrors of an Indian massacre reduced the number to eight hundred and ninety-four.[18]

Since 1614, when Pocahontas married John Rolfe, peace with the Indians continued uninterruptedly, except for a short time in 1617, when there was an outbreak of the Chickahominies, speedily suppressed by Deputy Governor Yardley.  In April, 1618, Powhatan died,[19] and the chief power was wielded by a brother, Opechancanough, at whose instance the savages, at “the taking up of Powhatan’s bones” in 1621, formed a plot for exterminating the English.  Of this danger Yardley received some information, and he promptly fortified the plantations, but Opechancanough professed friendship.  Under Sir Francis Wyatt for some months everything went on quietly; but about the middle of March, 1622, a noted Indian chief, called Nemmattanow, or Jack o’ the Feather, slew a white man and was slain in retaliation.  Wyatt was alarmed, but Opechancanough assured him that “he held the peace so firme that the sky should fall ere he dissolved it,” so that the settlers again “fed the Indians at their tables and lodged them in their bedchambers."[20]

Then like lightning from a clear sky fell the massacre upon the unsuspecting settlers.  The blow was terrible to the colonists:  the Indians, besides killing many of the inhabitants, burned many houses and destroyed a great quantity of stock.  At first the settlers were panic-stricken, but rage succeeded fear.  They divided into squads, and carried fire and sword into the Indian villages along the James and the York.  In a little while the success of the English was so complete that they were able to give their time wholly to their crops and to rebuilding their houses.[21]

To the company the blow was a fatal one, though it did not manifest its results immediately.  So far was the massacre from affecting the confidence of the public in Southampton and his friends at the head of the company that eight hundred good settlers went to Virginia during the year 1622, and John Smith wrote, “Had I meanes I might have choice of ten thousand that would gladly go."[22] But during the summer the members of the company were entangled in a dispute, of which advantage was taken by their enemies everywhere.  At the suggestion of the crafty earl of Middlesex, the lord high treasurer of England, they were induced to apply to the king for a monopoly of the sale of tobacco in England; and it was granted