in comparison with the extent of dry and solid land, but apart from this, the marshes must have constituted a notable feature of all the country below the furthest line reached by the tide in the rivers. In the country to the west of this line, for instance in the country west of the Falls of the Powhatan, no trace of boggy land was to be discovered; that part was elevated and heavily wooded, with rocky hills here and there and with little champaign. In the lower valley of the Powhatan, marshes undoubtedly existed to a considerable extent. In his account of the landing at Cape Henry, Percy refers to those which he saw there, and which seemed to him to be admirably adapted tobecome pastures for cattle, an evidence that the ground was firm and only subject to periodical inundations of the sea. Properly speaking, it was meadow land not submerged sufficiently long to be turned into a weedy ooze, affording a footing neither to man nor beast;[1] and this was not improbably the character of the great majority of these original marshes. It may have been this fact which led Smith and others to deprecate the charge that a large proportion of Virginia was an unhealthy swamp. Among the many marshes described by Smith himself in his exploration of the Powhatan and Chickahominy, was the one at Manosquosick that spread over an area five miles in circuit. On the York, or, as it was called by the Indians, the Pamunkey, they were equally numerous. From the residence of Opechancanough above the present West Point, which occupied a commanding site, a very expansive view was to be obtained of the marshy plains adjacent to the river, produced by its tortuous channel. The ooze of the Pamunkey must have extended for some distance into the stream even where there was no indication of vegetable growth,
- ↑ Percy’s Discourse, p. lxix.
