On June 16,1608, Englishman Captain John Smith and fourteen other men from the Jamestown colony entered the Potomac River aboard a two-ton open barge in search of a glistering metal the [natives] told us they had from Patowmeck. They explored upriver as far as the Great Falls. Along the way, Smith recorded many American Indian villages, which he later included on his Map of Virginia.
The first three villages below the falls, on the right bank of the Potomac, were located on lands now part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The names of these villages, as heard by Smith and spelled in Elizabethan English, were Namoraughquend, Assaomeck, and Namassingakent. Translated from Eastern Algonquian into English they mean "fishing place," "middle fishing place," and "fish - plenty of." The village of "fishing place" was probably between present-day Theodore Roosevelt Island and the Pentagon.
From late winter through August, anadromous fish (that live in salt water but spawn in fresh) like herring and sturgeon, swam upriver to the falls. When Smith first observed these three villages it was late June, after the native peoples had planted their crops. Very likely, the villages were seasonal fishing camps and not more-permanent agricultural towns.
Captain John Smith's Map of Virginia (above), first published in 1612, is one of the best known maps of colonial America. The three seasonal fishing camps that Smith recorded are identified above. The Tuscan cross marks the Great Falls - the farthest limit of Smith's exploration.
If the map appears "sideways," it is because "up" is west rather than north. In the 1600s, mapmakers customarily drew maps from the perspective of a sailor approaching the land from the sea.
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