Werowocomoco was the capital of the Powhatan Confederacy, about twenty miles from Jamestown, and the seat of Wahunsunacock, a ruler whose power the English colonists sought first to understand, then to enlist and control. The town became the setting for their first direct encounter with the political authority in whose territory they had settled—and for a failed effort to make that authority subordinate to the English crown.

Capital of the Powhatan Confederacy

When the English established Jamestown in 1607, they did not realize they had entered territory claimed by the Powhatan Confederacy, a coalition of roughly thirty polities owing allegiance to Wahunsunacock. Werowocomoco, his capital, lay only about twenty miles away. The settlement’s proximity made the colony’s food crisis inseparable from its relationship with the surrounding Indigenous political order.

The colonists initially planned to capture the local chief and use him to obtain provisions and compel the population to produce food and wealth. They also considered whether local people might be induced to trade or provide labor. The assumption that the newcomers would feed themselves by cultivating their own food scarcely entered their plans. Their approach followed a model of conquest familiar from Spanish ventures in the Americas, but the political circumstances in Virginia were different: Wahunsunacock governed a substantial regional power, though not one as centrally controlled as the Inca Empire.

Smith’s Arrival at Werowocomoco

Wahunsunacock learned of the English presence quickly and regarded their intentions with suspicion. He initially sent messengers expressing a desire for friendly relations, while assessing what the newcomers meant to do. His caution became consequential in the winter of 1607, when Jamestown’s food stores dwindled and its appointed leader, Edward Marie Wingfield, hesitated over how to respond.

John Smith organized trading missions to secure supplies. During one, Opechancanough, one of Wahunsunacock’s younger brothers, captured Smith and brought him to Werowocomoco. Smith was the first Englishman to meet Wahunsunacock. Some accounts say that the ruler’s young daughter Pocahontas intervened to save Smith’s life. Smith was freed on January 2, 1608, and returned to Jamestown, still short of food; Newport also returned from England later that day.

The Coronation That Failed

The English did not abandon their attempt to direct relations on their own terms. After Newport sailed to England for supplies and additional colonists, he returned in September 1608 with instructions from the Virginia Company to take firmer control of the local population. The company’s plan was to crown Wahunsunacock, in the hope that the ceremony would make him subordinate to James I.

The English invited Wahunsunacock to Jamestown, but he refused to risk capture. He declared that he was a king in his own land and that the English king should come to him, not the other way around. Newport and Smith therefore had to travel to Werowocomoco to conduct the coronation. The episode appears to have been a fiasco. Rather than establishing English authority, it strengthened Wahunsunacock’s resolve to remove the colony. He imposed a trade embargo, cutting off the colonists’ access to supplies through exchange and seeking to starve them out.

A Political and Colonial Turning Point

Werowocomoco’s importance in the account rests on the contrast between English ambitions and their dependence. The colonists hoped to secure food and wealth by coercing local people, trading with them, or asserting authority over their ruler. Yet the failed coronation and subsequent embargo showed that Wahunsunacock could refuse the role the Virginia Company had designed for him and use control over exchange to place Jamestown under pressure.

The encounters also exposed a basic mismatch between the colonists’ expectations and Virginia’s conditions. Smith recognized that the conquest model associated with Spanish success in Mexico and Peru could not simply be transferred to a place without comparable gold supplies or a population the English could compel to provide their food. In a letter carried to England in December 1608, he urged the Virginia Company to send practical workers—carpenters, farmers, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and others—rather than more people expecting quick riches. Werowocomoco thus stands in the narrative not only as the capital from which Wahunsunacock negotiated with the newcomers, but as the setting of a reversal: the English arrived intending to command local resources, and found that their survival depended on understanding the limits of that command.