The name Chesapeake is an anglicization of the Algonquian word, K'che-sepi-ack, which translates as "country on a great river."[1] In 1585, their name was recorded by English colonists as Ehesepiooc.[1] Their name is spelled many different ways and also listed as Chesapians.[1]
Two other Chesepian towns were Apasus and Chesepioc, both near the Chesapeake Bay in what is now the independent city of Virginia Beach. Chesepioc was located in near Great Neck Point. Archaeologists and others have found numerous Native American arrowheads, stone axes, pottery, and beads in Great Neck Point. Several Native burials are present as well.
According to William Strachey's The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia (1618), the Chesepian were wiped out by the Powhatan, the paramount head of the Virginia Peninsula–based Powhatan Confederacy, sometime before the arrival of the English at Jamestown in 1607. The Chesepian were eliminated because Powhatan's priests had warned him that "from the Chesapeake Bay a nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his empire".[2][3]
Though historians of the period express little doubt that the Powhatans eradicated the Chesapeake tribe, Strachey's belief that these rumored prophesies indicated the Christian God's intervention on behalf of the Jamestown Colony against "The Devil's Empire" appears, in hindsight, rather eccentric.[4]
[It is] not long since that his priests told him how that from the Chesapeack Bay a nation should arise which should dissolve and give end to his empire, for which, not many yeares since (perplext with this divelish oracle, and divers understanding thereof), according to the ancyent and gentile customs, he destroyed and put to sword all such who might lye under any doubtful construccion of the said prophesie, as all the inhabitants, the weroance and his subjects of that province, and so remaine all the Chessiopeians at this daye, and for this cause, extinct.
^James Horn. A Land As God Made It – Jamestown and the Birth of America. Basic Books (2005), pp. 145–146.
Judge all men whether these maye not be the forerunners of an alteration of the devill's empire here? I hope they be, nay, I dare prognosticate that they usher great accidents, and that we shall effect them; the Divine power assist us in this worke, which, begun for heavenly ends, may have as heavenly period.
