Berkeley Hundred and 17 days before the Pilgrims arrived aboard the "Mayflower" at Plymouth, Massachusetts to establish their Thanksgiving Day in 1621. On March 22, 1622, Opchanacanough, head of the Powhatan Confederacy, began the Second Anglo-Powhatan War with a coordinated series of attacks against English settlements along the James River, known in English histories as the Indian massacre of 1622. Nine colonists were killed at Berkeley. The assault took a heavier toll elsewhere, killing about a third of all the colonists, and virtually wiping out Wolstenholme Towne on Martin's Hundred and Sir Thomas Dale's progressive development and new college at Henricus. Jamestown
History of Massachusetts of the Indian population before the first large-scale arrival of settlers in the 1630s. Large numbers of natives were decimated by virgin soil epidemics such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and perhaps leptospirosis, against which they had no immunity. In 1617–1619, smallpox killed 90% of the Native Americans in the region. The first English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, established their settlement at Plymouth in 1620, and developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag. This was the second successful permanent English colony in North America, after the Jamestown Colony. Before heading to the New World, they migrated to Holland to escape