While crossing the mouth of the Elk River, Smith encountered a party of Massawomeck in canoes returning from a raid on the Tockwogh, an Algonquian people who lived on the east side of the Chesapeake.
Wahunsenacawh told Smith that the Massawomeck were a fierce people who lived on a sea beyond the mountains, "that did eate men," and had slain many during attacks against the Piscataway, and Patawomeck a year earlier.
[1] On the Carte de la Nouvelle-France, dated c. 1641 and attributed to Jean Bourdon, and on Nicolas Sanson's 1656 map Le Canada ou Nouvelle France, a people called the "Antiovandarons" are located to the west of the Appalachians that may represent the Massawomeck.
[5] In 1991, James Pendergast of the Canadian Museum of History proposed that the Massawomeck were the Antouhonorons who Samuel de Champlain placed south of Lake Ontario on his map of 1632.
Pendergast hypothesized that the Massawomeck had lived east of the Niagara River until conflict with the Haudenosaunee forced them to migrate south in the mid-1620s.