and pleasure, and therefore stands upon reasonable conditions of
peace with all the great and absolute werowances about him, and is
likewise more quietly settled amongst his own."

It was at this advanced age that he had the twelve favorite young
wives whom Strachey names. All his people obeyed him with fear and
adoration, presenting anything he ordered at his feet, and trembling
if he frowned. His punishments were cruel; offenders were beaten to
death before him, or tied to trees and dismembered joint by joint, or
broiled to death on burning coals. Strachey wondered how such a
barbarous prince should put on such ostentation of majesty, yet he
accounted for it as belonging to the necessary divinity that doth
hedge in a king: "Such is (I believe) the impression of the divine
nature, and however these (as other heathens forsaken by the true
light) have not that porcion of the knowing blessed Christian
spiritt, yet I am perswaded there is an infused kind of divinities
and extraordinary (appointed that it shall be so by the King of
kings) to such as are his ymedyate instruments on earth."

Here is perhaps as good a place as any to say a word or two about the
appearance and habits of Powhatan's subjects, as they were observed
by Strachey and Smith. A sort of religion they had, with priests or
conjurors, and houses set apart as temples, wherein images were kept
and conjurations performed, but the ceremonies seem not worship, but
propitiations against evil, and there seems to have been no
conception of an overruling power or of an immortal life. Smith
describes a ceremony of sacrifice of children to their deity; but
this is doubtful, although Parson Whittaker, who calls the Indians
"naked slaves of the devil," also says they sacrificed sometimes
themselves and sometimes their own children. An image of their god