And when he assumed the stewardship of the colony in the fall of 1608, following two presidents who had failed miserably, John Smith, the soldier of fortune, truly became John Smith, the colonizer. To do this, under communalism, he had to become a virtual dictator. But his rule was as honest and as ingenious as it was arbitrary. These qualities of leadership coupled with his understanding of the true nature of Virginia’s resources and of the need for a firm foundation of trade relations with the natives saved the plantation from extinction. The colony on the James River became the first permanent English settlement in America. For that matter, it was the British Empire’s first permanent colonial settlement anywhere in the world. The tidewater Indians with whom Smith had to deal mostly belonged to a group of Algonquian tribes known as the Powhatan Confederacy. Ruling this confederacy was a tyrannous old chief, himself called Powhatan, who was held in considerable awe by his subjects. From each of the tribes under his domination Powhatan demanded an annual tribute consisting mainly of beads and skins and bits of the decorative copper that was so scarce in his kingdom. Beads were used by the Indians not only for adornment but as a form of currency. As Captain Smith observed, they were the cause of “as much dissention among the Salvages as gold and silver amongst the Christians.” Their manufacture by the natives did indeed call for a high degree of skill, each bead being cut individually from shell, then polished and drilled with crude stone tools. When strung together in belts or arm’s length ropes they were known universally among the Algonquin nations of the eastern seaboard as wampum. In Virginia wampum strings of white beads made from cockle shell were called roanoke, whereas strings of beads cut from conch shell, dark purple in color, were called peake. Generally speaking the latter were worth ten times as much as the former. The natives used their wampum, or shell money, in barter among themselves to such an extent that the white men found it very convenient as a means of promoting their own fur trade. Often they would trade their wares with a rich tribe for wampum, and then exchange this shell money with a less prosperous tribe for furs. The collecting of skins for taxes, or tribute, was of course a device older than history. The Romans employed it to collect taxes from barbarian subjects; so did the pharaohs of prehistoric Egypt in gathering tribute from the upper Nile valley. Powhatan could demand pelts in some variety. A contemporary chronicler among the first settlers at Jamestown noted that within the great chief’s kingdom the forests and streams abounded with bears, foxes, otters, beavers, muskrats and “Deere both Red and Fallow.”