The Fall of the Weapemeoc

The chiefdom of Weapemeoc died with a whimper and not a bang.  Most of the other Native groups who I mentioned in my previous post on North Carolina lost a major Indian war ("major" for them at least) against the English and this resulted in them losing autonomy over their previous territory: the Tuscarora War saw the Pamlico, Mattamuskeet, Coree, and Neusioc all allying with the southern Tuscarora and all losing alike.  But there was no Weapemeoc War, no major land cession, and no forced removal to the west.  The English settlers just landed like raindrops, until one day all of Weapemeoc was soaked.

 

This situation was probably caused by: a) the severe depopulation of the native North Carolinans by the time of the Albemarle colony, possibly caused by Old World contagion.  The depopulation may not have been quite so severe in the beginning, when Nathaniel Batts staked his claim in ca. 1655, but it got there soon enough.  And: b) the extremely diffuse nature of the Albemarle settlements.  Noeleen McIlvenna's book argues that the first settlers here wanted to get away from "The Man" and to live independently—each house was on its own, sometimes miles away from the next, and it took decades before they even had their first town.

 

In other words there weren't very many whites or Indians involved, which makes trying to decide exactly who owned what a problematic endeavor.

 

Against my better judgement I went through every entry in Margaret Hofmann's The Province of North Carolina: Abstracts of Land Patents and recorded the date and location of every patent listed up to the year 1705—with a few additional entries from the NCLandGrants website and Nell Marion Nugent's Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants—and plotted their location and density-per-area on the following map.  This was not a straightforward task: many entries were extremely vague about their location, which had to be inferred from neighbors' entries or other hunches.  For obsolete names the North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places and Their History was a little help but not much.  The map is arbitrarily divided into 27 geographical districts, and because of the inevitable errors I didn't bother with numbers: each district is fuzzily color-coded for population:

 

 

Having done that I can firmly say that it was mostly pointless.  I knew this wouldn't give me a real-time unfolding of settlement, since most people didn't bother officially registering theirs at the time they first made it—this is especially true for the first couple decades.  So the "first" appearance of a land claim is artificial: determined by politics more than anything else.  There is a sudden glut of new entries for the year 1696 that came as a result of governor Phillip Ludwell encouraging people to register their lands (McIlvenna p.85).  There are other gluts for 1684 and 1704.

 

The Abstracts also list very, very few of the settlements made before the 1680's, though there must have been many more of these unrecorded.  My heatmap accounts for what few of these I could locate in space and time, and they demonstrate the aforesaid diffuseness:

 

1657:  Nathaniel Batts has a house at the western end of Albemarle Sound, according to the Comberford Map.  People seem to say he settled there in 1655; I don't know how much of that is an estimate or guess.

1660:  Nathaniel Batts purchases all the land south of Pasquotank River from King Kiscutanewh of the "Yausapin" Indians [= Yeopim = Weapemeoc].

1661:  King Kilcocanen of the Yeopim sells two parcels along the Perquimans River to George Durant and one to Samuel Pricklove.  The language is hard to interpret but I think both parcels were south of the Perquimans, northeast or east of Yeopim Creek. (Albertson 1914:7, Petrey 2014:100f)

1663:  John Varnham is granted a settlement near "Skinner's Point" a.k.a. "Moseley's Point".  These names appear on John Lawson's map, located at modern Horniblow Point. (Hofmann:37, NCHGR:3)

1663:  John Harvey also this year purchases land on "a small Creek called Curatuck falling into the River Recoughtancke".  I can't connect the name "Recoughtancke" to anything, but several later settlements were made along the Northwest River-Tull Creek system which drains into Curritunk Sound, so I'm guessing it was somewhere there. (Hofmann:37)

1663:  Henry Palin registers a settlement at the mouth of Newbegun Creek on the southwest shore of Pasquotank River. (Nugent:425)

1663:  Samuell Davis and five others have settlements east of the Little River. (Nugent:426, Hofmann:11,37)

1663:  Three settlements are registered west of the Chowan River. (Nugent:426)

1663:  Thomas Hodgkin registers a settlement on the western side of Edenton Bay. (Nugent:426)

 

Mapped out:

 

 

Kings Kiscutanewh and Kilcocanen are probably the same person: in one of George Durant's deeds Kilcocanen is also called "Kistotanene", and in the other deed the king is called both "Ciskitando" and "Cuscutenew".  Kilcocanen might be a misreading of "Kiſcocanen" (yes, people mistook long ſ'es in those days too): all these names then seem to have the same /kisko/ element also found in Okisco, the name of the Weapemeoc chieftain in 1585.  One wonders what relevance this has to royal nomenclature in the language of the Weapemeoc; we'll probably never know for sure.

 

 

The Abstracts of Land Patents also utterly fail to record the settlements on the eastern shore of the Chowan river prior to 1700.  We know that these existed because George Fox (founder of the Quakers) visited that region in 1672 and wrote of it in his journal, which is one of our best sources of information on the first couple decades of Albemarle, even if his visit there only takes up a few pages.

 

As Fox writes: he left Virginia from the Nansemond River ["Nancemum Water"] traveling by horse overland to a Bonner's Creek.  He descended Bonner's Creek by canoe to a Macocomocock River.  He then paddled down a Maratick river (without mentioning whether the aforementioned Macocomocock is a tributary of Maratick) to "the bay Connie-oak" and, exchanging his canoe for a boat, crossed the sound to reach the house of governor Nathaniel Batts.  These are the only locations he names.

 

Blue = "Maſsacacany", Purple = "Morataux", Red = "Batts Houſe"

 

The "Maratick" river cannot be the Roanoke or "Marattico" river of previous decades.  It may however be the "Morataux" river of the 1657 Comberford map.  That same map also shows governor Batts' house at the western end of Albemarle sound.  Upstream from the Morataux is another river with a name something like "Maſsacacany"—it's really hard to tell, but this may be Fox's "Macocomocock".  Beyond that it's hard to reconcile the map with Fox's narrative: these rivers may have been part of the Bennetts, Catherine, or Indian creeks.  Altogether the Fox memoir shows that in 1672 there were settlements along the following itinerary:

 

 

"How many" settlements is harder to say.  In places Fox's narrative makes it sound like there were still more Natives in that area than there were English.

 

"The governor, with his wife, received us lovingly; but a doctor there would needs dispute with us.  And truly his opposing us was of good service, giving occasion for the opening of many things to the people, concerning the light and Spirit of God, which he denied to be in every one; and affirmed that it was not in the Indians.  Whereupon I called an Indian to us, and asked him, "Whether or not, when he lied, or did wrong to any one, there was not something in him that reproved him for it?" he said, "There was such a thing in him, that did so reprove him; and he was ashamed when he had done wrong, or spoken wrong."  So we shamed the doctor before the governor and the people; insomuch that the poor man ran out so far, that at length he would not own the Scriptures."

(Journal of George Fox)

 

I have several population maps which marginally cover North Carolina, but the only ones of any use are the following:

 

Binford 1964 (left) and 1967 (right), showing settlement in 1675:

 

 

These are almost identical, except that the '64 map shows settlement in Albemarle and the '67 map does not.  This is probably a mistake on the '67 map.

 

Binford again but for 1711:

 

 

And 1722:

 

 

And a map by Mark Anderson Moore from NCPedia:

 

 

Binford's maps as well as my heatmap together show a general trend of settlement moving west-to-east within the Albemarle district.  Binford shows it advancing more slowly than mine—my maps show many settlements both sides of Pasquotank river by 1705, his show all settlement west of the Perquimans by 1711—but who knows how long the local Indians remained a controlling majority in an area after the first few English settlements were put down?  Eventually, though, what remained of the Weapemeocs were gradually hemmed in to the east.  Their second-to-last holdout was along the upper Pasquotank River, where a tribe called the Pasquotank resided for a time.  Presumably they had previously lived on the bay or the sound but had been driven inward toward the swamp by English settlers:

 

Map of wetlands, from Taukchiray (2021).

 

These Pasquotanks had a legal order of protection drawn up for them in 1697, but according to Wesley Taukchiray this order had very dull teeth and many of the Indians relocated soon after, presumably to the east.  There was still a small village of Pasquotanks living there in 1709, according to John Lawson, but from a geographical standpoint these people had—so to speak—been swamped.

 

The last Weapemeoc holdout was along the shores of North River (inhabited by the Yeopim) and on the finger of land between it and Curritunk Sound (inhabited by the Poteskeet).

 

Detail from the Cowley & Moseley map of 1737

 

By the 18th century it becomes difficult to say exactly when the former Weapemeoc chiefdom finally lost its independence.  As a people and an ethnos they persisted into the days of the American Revolution.  They even continued to have "kings" but this in itself doesn't equal geopolitical autonomy: think of all the African kingdoms which still have hereditary kings even though the actual business of governing is now done by nation-states of entirely different configuration.  All through the latter-1600's the Weapemeoc had been becoming more and more like the English—culturally and, one assumes eventually, genetically.  They owned individual plots, raised cattle and English crops, and many practiced Christianity.

 

One contender for "last year of the Weapemeoc" is 1704.  That year the Yeopim registered a claim, listed in the Abstracts of Land Patents:

 

368   pg. 136   the KING and NATION of the YAWPIN INDIANS   2 October 1704   10,240 acres on the North East side and South West side of North River, joining HENRY CREECH   /s/ ROBT. DANIELL, SAMUEL SWANN, FRANCIS TOMES, W. GLOVER

 

This is sometimes referred to as the Yeopim being placed onto a reservation, and if they were then having to live only where the government of North Carolina permitted them then it may be fair to say these people were politically defeated and that their territory was thenceforth a part of the English Empire.  I don't know how many acres deep these riverside grants were typically stacked, but 10,240 acres could potentially be a large percentage of the North River Bay.  I'm also not certain whether by "the Yawpin Indians" this is supposed to refer to all the former Weapemeoc or only the Yeopim proper (i.e. not including Poteskeet and Pasquotank) —according to Taukchiray, the English at times just called them all Yeopims.  John Lawson appears to have distinguished the three groups, except his listing of the Yeopim ("Jaupim") is a little anomalous, and Whitney Petrey thinks the "Jaupim" may have been a different group altogether (Petrey p123; Lawson p234).

 

If the 1704 reservation did only apply to the Yeopim proper, then the Poteskeet tribe would have retained possession of the finger of land by Currituck Sound—at least for a time.  Whitney Petrey (p145) and Wesley Taukchiray (p134) both believe that the Poteskeets outnumbered the Yeopims at around this time, despite what John Lawson had said to the contrary.  Petrey infers this partly from the Crowley and Moseley map of 1737 (shown above), which shows the Potoſkite village toward the end of the finger, south of the village of the Yawpim.

 

If the Poteskeets of Currituck were the last autonomous Weapemeocs, it is impossible to objectively decide when that autonomy was lost.  A somewhat arbitrary but appealing date might be 1715, after the conclusion of the Tuscarora War.  Elsewhere in the North Carolina tidewater, other Native tribes effectively lost their independence at this time, having chosen the losing side in that war; and although the Weapemeoc in fact chose the winning side, I still assume a shift at this time in English attitudes and policy toward Indian nations resident in the Sounds.  I must "assume" this because, unfortunately, there is so little solid ground to stand on.

 

*     *     *

 

The English presence west of the Chowan River is more difficult to assess than that to the east.  The Virginia Land Patents list three settlements west of the Chowan in 1663.  Then there are no more patents listed until 1704 when the North Carolina Abstracts list one.  Thomas Parramore in his article on the Tuscaroras' relationship with Albemarle suggests that the 1663 settlements were along Salmon Creek, but that the Tuscaroras soon after chased them off.  I don't know how many English remained west of Chowan after this, but the Tuscarora evidently didn't drive everyone off: George Fox found Nathaniel Batts still living there in 1672, as well as that doctor who doubted whether the Light and Spirit of God dwelt within the Indians.

 

The same year as George Fox's visitation, the Albemarle settlers made an agreement with the Tuscarora that the English wouldn't build settlements (or maybe just wouldn't build more settlements) west of the Chowan River.  Thomas Parramore says that this treaty held for the next thirty years, until 1701 when the English began seizing westerly lands from the Meherrin.  By this time the Chowanoc had been defeated by the English and the Weyanoke had left the Chowan river, and according to Parramore the Meherrin were "tolerated by [the Tuscaroras] in an area nominally within Tuscarora jurisdiction".

 

Some people must have at one point thought that the 1660's settlements were located along Roanoke River, rather than on Salmon Creek.  D. W. Meinig shows as much in The Shaping of America, volume one:

 

 

Meinig's source for this may have been Herman Friis' population maps, which show a cluster there in 1675:

 

 

This might have been motivated by misidentifying George Fox's "Maratick" river with the Roanoke, which was also called the Moratuc.  I don't think the Comberford map had been discovered when Friis did his research.

 

From the Weapemeocs' perspective, however, they would have lost their territory west of the Chowan river to the Tuscarora well before Nathaniel Batts moved in.  In my Carolina Algonquian post I speculated that the Moratucs had been driven from the west end of Albemarle sound by 1608 (and more tentatively that it happened by 1600) . . . it's possible that the Tuscaroras had driven off the Weapemeocs at this time as well.  It almost certainly wasn't later than 1644, when the Tuscaroras granted the Weyanocks a residence west of the Chowan river.  I speculate in my earlier post that the Chowanocs there weren't swept by the Tuscarora until after 1632, and that if they had driven off the Moratuc and Chowanoc by then they would've done so to the Weapemeoc in between as well.  So as a guesstimation, on the map below I date this first Weapemeoc retreat to ca. 1635.

 

*     *     *

 

South of Albemarle Sound, settlement began at least by 1684: this is when the Abstracts of Land Patents list the first patent along the west of Scuppernong River.  Many more patents on either side of Scuppernong are listed in 1704.  It seems that the first half-decade of the eighteenth century was when Albemarle started expanding to the far sides of both the Chowan River and the Albemarle Sound, exactly as Mark Anderson Moore's map shows.

 

But this blog post is about the Weapemeoc—it isn't about the Meherrin and Chowanoc in the west or the Roanoke and Mattamuskeet in the south.  So just confining ourselves to "mainland" Albemarle, how might we map the progressive dimunition of Weapemeoc territory?  To recap, the anchorpoints are:

 

·  English settlements on the east side of Chowan river and at the back end of Albemarle sound by 1672, when George Fox sojourned there.  This bloc of settlement got its start with Nathaniel Batts in the mid-1650s.

·  The Indians' loss of [the northeast side of] the Pasquotank River district shortly after 1697.

·  The granting of a "reservation" to the Yeopim on North River in 1704.

·  (Subjective) The English settlements on Roanoke river and/or Salmon creek were probably not sufficient enough to not make that area de facto Tuscarora territory until at least 1701.

·  (Very Subjective) The finger of land between North River and Currituck Sound remained Poteskeet territory until after the Tuscarora War.

 

To this only a little can be added by my heatmap data: the presence of English settlements in the Northwest River/Tull Creek area starting in 1663, and a solid English occupation of the lands west of Perquimans river by 1685 . . . In fact since most of those "1685" datapoints are from the 1684 glut of entries (which were probably late to be recorded), I'm going to guess that that area was actually English-controlled by about 1680.

 

That yields this map:

 

 

Any future animation or streamlining of this will probably just be naked interpolation.

 

By the way, I am not at all assuming that the so-called Weapemeocs in the mid-1600s were still functioning or considering themselves as a single group in any meaningful sense.  (This is assuming that they even did so in the late 1500's . . . but I went over that already in my Carolina Algonquians post.)  Rather they were Yeopim, Poteskeets, Pasquotanks, and possibly other tribes as well.  Whitney Petrey names the Chepanoc and Masconing tribes, and Maurice Mook named (a little skeptically) the Perquimans and Currituck.  But these smaller tribes mostly can't be tracked—I have no idea what tribe inhabited the east bank of Chowan river, for instance—so it's best to lump them all under the umbrella label "Weapemeoc".  No need to pretend to any more precision than we have to.

 

 

 

 

Sources:

 

Catherine Albertson (1914). In Ancient Albemarle.

Lewis Roberts Binford (1964). Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Investigation of Cultural Diversity and Progressive Development among Aboriginal Cultures of Coastal Virginia and North Carolina. Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan.

— (1967). An Ethnohistory of the Nottoway, Meherrin and Weanock Indians of Southeastern Virginia.

Herman Friis (1940). A Series of Population Maps of the Colonies and the United States, 1625-1790. Geographical Review, Vol 30, No 3.

George Fox (1694). Journal of George Fox. (PDF available at https://www.friendslibrary.com/george-fox/journal).

Margaret M. Hofmann (1979). Province of North Carolina 1663 – 1729: Abstracts of Land Patents.

John Lawson (1709). A New Voyage to Carolina.

Noeleen McIlvenna (2009). A Very Mutinous People.

D. W. Meinig (1986). The Shaping of America, Volume 1.

Maurice A. Mook (1944). Algonkin ethnohistory of the Carolina Sound. Part One in Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Vol 34, No 6, Part Two in Vol 34, No 7.

NC Land Grants website (www.NCLandGrants.com).

NCPedia website (www.ncpedia.org).

Nell Marion Nugent (1934). Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants 1623-1800, Volume One.

NCHGR: The North Carolina Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol 1, No 1 (1900).

Thomas C. Parramore (1982). The Tuscarora Ascendancy. North Carolina Historical Review, Vol 59, No 4.

Whitney R. Petrey (2014). Weapemeoc Shores: The Loss of Traditional Maritime Culture among the Weapemeoc Indians. Master's thesis, East Carolina University.

William S. Powell and Michael Hill (2010). The North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places and Their History, Second Edition.

Wesley D. Taukchiray (2021). Merging in the Other Direction. Chapter in Helen C. Rountree, Manteo's World: Native American Life in Carolina's Sound Country Before and After the Lost Colony.