Pocahontas only surviving daughter of the king". Pocahontas was her father's "delight and darling", according to the colonist Captain Ralph Hamor but she was not in line to inherit a position as a "weroance", subchief, or "mamanatowick" (paramount chief). Instead, Powhatan's brothers, sisters, and his sisters' children all stood in line to succeed him. In his "A Map of Virginia" John Smith explained how matrilineal inheritance worked among the Powhatan: Pocahontas is most famously linked to the English colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with a hundred other settlers in April 1607, at the behest of the London Company.
Nansemond the Powhatan chiefdom, which was a loose confederacy of about 30 tribes, estimated to have numbered more than 20,000 people in the coastal area of what became Virginia. They lived along the Nansemond River, an area they called "Chuckatuck". In 1607, when English people arrived to settle at Jamestown, the Nansemond were initially wary. In 1608, the English raided one of the Nansemond towns, burning houses and destroying canoes to force the people to give corn to the settlers. Captain John Smith and his men demanded 400 bushels of corn or threatened to destroy the village, remaining canoes, and houses.