Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 136. I'm your host, Jack Heneman,

and I am recording this episode on December 23, 2023, in Austin, Texas. We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without intentional presentism. Okay, so I had planned to finish this one well

before Christmas, but I was overwhelmed by the spirit of the holidays, all of them, and did other stuff instead.

So here we are on the very brink of Christmas going on about something called the plundering time.

Not really in the spirit of the season, Kisarasa.

It is the summer of 1644. The English Civil War is raging, and it is spilling into the

English colonies in North America. Opa-Kankana has launched his last futile war to eject the foreigners

from the James and York rivers, in part because it believes that the war

has divided the English to such a degree that they will be weakened.

He is almost right. His attack came just too soon, uniting the Virginians just as they

themselves might have descended into intramural

violence. But Opa Cancana had his own window. He had to attack after the crops were in, and

while Indian women and children had moved away to gather food in the forests to the west,

and he himself was at the end of his own time.

Maryland was in a precarious state, both politically and religiously.

Leonard Calvert had been away for a year and left the intemperate Giles Brent to act as

governor in his stead.

Brent had arrested Richard Engel, the Protestant trader,

who was Maryland's principal commercial connection to the mother country. Engel had gotten away,

and Thomas Cornwallis, Maryland's most effective leader, had gone back to England with him.

Maryland was at war with the Susquehannocks to the north, and that was not going well.

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