So peaceful were all things, and so amicable appeared the relationship with the natives, on the arrival of Wyatt, that the emigrants needed fire-arms apparently merely for the destruction of game; and the old law of the colony which had made it death to teach an Indian the use of fire-arms, was now so much disregarded, that the Indians were employed by the whites as their huntsmen. Enmity, however, was not extinct in the heart of the savage. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, the firm friend of the English, was dead, and his younger brother, his successor, entertained different sentiments towards the strangers, whose rapidly increasing numbers and widely extending settlements might justly awake the fear and the jealousy of the primeval possessors of the soil. A deep plan of extermination was laid. In open battle the Indian knew that he had no chance, but by cunning and guile he could accomplish much. A general attack was determined on by the Indians, but all preparations concealed by impenetrable secrecy. The Indians appeared as amicably disposed as heretofore. They visited the settlements of the English, borrowed their boats, sat at their tables, and made professions of friendship; “sooner,” said they, “shall the sky fall than our friendship be broken by us!” and this on the very morning of the day which was to destroy the whole race. At mid-day on the 22nd of March, at one and the same moment, the Indians fell upon the whole white population scattered in distant villages, one hundred and forty miles along each side of the river! No suspicion of such an intention had been excited;—men, women, and children, the missionary who had taught them and laboured among them with unwearying kindness; those from whom the Indian never received anything but benefits, all were murdered, with every appalling circumstance of Indian barbarity, and so great was their fury, that they even attacked the dead, as if to murder them anew. In one hour three hundred and forty-seven persons were destroyed. And the whole of Virginia might have slept in one bloody grave, had not a converted Indian, the night before the massacre, revealed the plot to an Englishman, to whom he was much attached, and whose life he wished to save. By this means Jamestown and the nearer settlements were fully prepared. The larger portion of the colony was saved, but so universal was the terror which this bloody massacre occasioned, that all public works were interrupted, and the more remote settlements abandoned. The cultivation of the land was almost at once given up, and of the eighty flourishing, happy settlements which had so lately existed, now there remained but eight. Some of the colonists fled in their terror to England, and sickness broke out amongst those who remained.