The account above, written by Captain Smith while at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay, documents one of the first English encounters with the Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian people who controlled most of central and eastern Pennsylvania at the time.1 Their geographic position allowed them to serve as primary middlemen in the burgeoning European–Native American trade network of this region, trading Native American pelts from the interior for European goods, and vice versa. Trading partners of the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries first included English and Spanish explorers, followed by the Swedish, Dutch, and English colonists who settled along the lower Delaware and lower Susquehanna river valleys in the following decades.
By the 1680s the Susquehannock population had declined sharply as a result of disease, conflict, and out-migration. In the 1690s the few Susquehannocks that remained joined with Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and Conoy refugees to establish a town...
