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.
Native American tribes in Virginia watershed (above Great Falls, Virginia) was once renowned for its unsurpassed abundance of wild geese, earning the Upper Potomac its former Algonquian name, "Cohongoruton" (Goose River). In 1607, when the English made their first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, the area of the current state was occupied by numerous tribes of Algonquian, Siouan, and Iroquoian linguistic stock. Captain John Smith made contact with numerous tribes, including the Wicocomico. More than 30 Algonquian tribes were associated with the politically powerful Powhatan Confederacy (alternately Powhatan Chiefdom), whose homeland occupied much of the area east of the Fall Line along the coast. It