Machapunga Erotic

The Machapunga were a small Algonquian-speaking people of coastal North Carolina. They appear in colonial records of the late 1600s and 1700s around Lake Mattamuskeet, in the flat, waterlogged country between Pamlico Sound and the Alligator River that is now Hyde County. They stopped being a distinct nation in the decades after the Tuscarora War, and their surviving families are generally thought to have merged into the rural population of the sound country. What defined them was a place as much as a lineage. The big shallow lake and the pocosin swamps around it shaped how they ate, how they fought and, in the end, how long they held out.

They belonged to the Carolina Algonquian world, the southern end of the Eastern Algonquian languages that ran up the Atlantic coast. Their speech was close kin to that of the Pamlico and of the Secotan towns that the Roanoke colonists described in the 1580s. It sat beside very different neighbors: the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora inland and Siouan-speaking peoples farther west. Life followed the water. Towns of bark- and mat-covered houses stood near fields of corn, beans and squash, while fish weirs, dugout canoes, oyster beds and the great winter flocks of waterfowl filled out the year. Among these coastal Algonquians, English observers recorded a religion with many spirit beings and priests who dealt with them. They also described temple houses where the preserved remains of leading men were kept.

By 1701, when the explorer John Lawson passed through, the Machapunga were down to a single town with a few dozen fighting men. Disease and English settlement pushing south from the Albemarle had worn them down. When the Tuscarora War broke out in 1711, they joined the Tuscarora and the Coree against the colonists. After the main Tuscarora resistance collapsed in 1713, they kept up raids from the swamps around Mattamuskeet before making peace in 1715. The colony then confined the survivors, along with Coree refugees, to reserved land near the lake. That land was sold off piece by piece over the following decades, and by the end of the century the Machapunga no longer stood as a separate community.

What remains of them today is mostly on the map. Lake Mattamuskeet, the largest natural lake in North Carolina and now the center of a national wildlife refuge, carries the name of their town. The clearest picture of their world is still John White's 1585 watercolors of neighboring Algonquian villages, painted more than a century before Lawson counted the Machapunga's last town.