The Chesapeake Bay has been a highway, more than a barrier, since Native Americans paddled to the Eastern Shore in canoes.
Europeans used sailing ships as the wheel trucks of the colonial era, penetrating up rivers to the Fall Line throughout Tidewater. Both pirates and warships have followed the same routes. Before invading Virginia in , Lord Cornwallis wrote his superior in New York City that North Carolina was hard to conquer because it lacked "interior navigation," but: 1. The threat of attack via the bay has shaped the location of colonial settlement, and even the location of modern industrial facilities.
The threat was real. In during the English Civil War, Governor Berkeley maintained his authority as royalist governor only until a fleet sent across the Atlantic Ocean by Parliament appeared in the Chesapeake Bay, at which point Gov. Berkeley surrendered. Even in , a contractor reported to the Pentagon that the two nuclear reactors at Surry were vulnerable to a terrorist attack from the sea. Throughout the colonial era, ships sailed from Caribbean islands or Europe to trade directly with Tidewater plantations.
The bay provided equally good access for pirates and foreign navies to attack those plantations. The range of land-based cannon shore batteries was inadequate to block the entrance to the Elizabeth and James rivers until Fort Calhoun was constructed on the Rip Raps shoal between Hampton and Norfolk in the 's.
Even during the Civil War, when a domestic army with support from inland states invaded Virginia, the Peninsula Campaign and the siege of Petersburg in relied upon water-based transport. Algonquian-speaking Native Americans had crossed the bay in boats long before Europeans arrived. Native American canoes were far less maneuverable than the European sailing ships, and moving a canoe by muscle power was more exhausting than using wind power, but Powhatan's subordinates crossed the bay to establish control over Eastern Shore tribes before English colonists settled in Jamestown in If the Native Americans had documented their military history in writing, the annals of Powhatan might have included glorious stories of water-based maneuvering and amphibious attacks.
