The clue to the trouble, of course, lies in the sympathetic phrase “ignorant souls.”

From Love & Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price. Page 11.

As it happened, the Powhatans also hated the Spanish. A Spanish party had come to the Chesapeake Bay around 1560 and captured a teenage Powhatan boy; he was baptized and renamed Don Luis de Velasco. Don Luis was educated in Mexico and Spain, and then brought back to Virginia ten years afterward to establish a Catholic mission. Don Luis fled, returning to his own people, and the Powhatans took their revenge on the Spanish by killing the missionaries. The Spanish, tipped off to the events by a native prisoner, sent a gunboat in 1572 to retaliate and look for survivors. The Powhatans’ memory of the affair was still fresh in the early 1600s.9

But if the English were opposed to the Spanish and their ways, and the Powhatans were as well, why did they become antagonists? Indeed, the Virginia Company, with its intended policy of “liberality” toward the natives to win them over, envisioned a sort of peaceful coexistence between the two groups. Toward that end, the colonists were to seek out only uninhabited ground for settlement. The clue to the trouble, of course, lies in the sympathetic phrase “ignorant souls.” The English, while more humanely inclined than the Spanish at this stage, still saw the natives as savages—and that was their everyday term for them: “savages.” (It was sometimes rendered as “salvages” in the chaotic spelling of the day.)