Choanoac: Menatonon's People

Three miles east of here, where the Chowan River narrows, stood the principal village of the Choanoac Indians. They were among the most powerful Algonquian peoples in North Carolina when English explorers arrived, and their leader Menatonon was considered the wisest and most influential chief from the Neuse River to the Chesapeake Bay. In the spring of fifteen eighty-six, Governor Ralph Lane sailed up the Chowan to Choanoac with Thomas Harriot and John White.

Thomas Harriot wrote that Menatonon governed eighteen towns, though modern scholars estimate the combined population at only about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred people. Though the meeting was tense, with Lane briefly holding Menatonon and taking his son Skiko as a hostage, the chief's knowledge of the interior guided English ambitions for years. The Choanoac world the colonists encountered here would be unrecognizable within a generation.