#OnThisDay

It is believed that on May 22, 1623 Captain Daniel Tucker, commissioned to negotiate peace with the Patawomeke tribe, succeeded in the peace talks and so, to celebrate, proposed a toast with wine specially prepared for the occasion. However, the wine had been prepared by Dr John Pott and was intentionally poisoned. The Puritan Robert Bennet wrote of the incident that “some tooe hundred weare poysned”. According to The Virginia Magazine of 1911 the Minutes of the Court and General Court, 1622-1624 of Virginia suggested that “if this account is true, no details of the affair remain”. Seeking peace whilst planning slaughter is unfortunately not unusual in history, and neither is using poison to kill an enemy. Poison was one of the preferred means of assassination on the seventeenth-century and gifts of poisoned gloves were not unknown!

To find out what poisoned gloves have to do with the history of whaling, plague masks and catholic rituals listen to our podcast here!