Debedeavon, Debbedeaven, Debbedeavon, and Debat Abbey are among the variant phonetic spellings of the name Tapatiapon (fl. 1648–1664), an Algonquian ruler of several small chiefdoms in the Occohannock, or Accohannock, region of the Eastern Shore. The first mention of Debbedeaven, identified as the "Kinge of Nandue," occurs in a Northampton County land transaction dated June 1648; his name last appears in surviving records on 17 October 1664, when he acknowledged a sale of land. He had died by 5 October 1672, when the governor referred to "Johnson the kinge of the Easterne Shore Indians." The following year the governor acknowledged that "Mary the daughter of Tabbitty Abby is the lawfull Queene of all the Indians on the Easterne Shore."

Since the early years of the twentieth century, however, the names Debedeavon and Debbedeaven have been mistakenly applied to another Eastern Shore chief who lived a generation earlier and thirty or forty miles to the south and whom English-speaking Virginians called the Laughing King.

Captain John Smith visited the chief who resided near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore in June 1608 when beginning the first of his two voyages of exploration in the Chesapeake Bay. Smith described him as civil and hospitable but did not record his name. In 1621 John Pory, secretary of the colony, met a chief, whom he called the Laughing King, near the same place, but he did not indicate whether the man was the same chief Smith had met thirteen years earlier; nor did Smith when he published Pory's report. About 1650 Governor Sir William Berkeley wrote that "the Indyans commonly called by the name of Laughinge Kinge Indyans" had always been "most faythfull to the English," but it is not clear from Berkeley's letter that the Laughing King was then still alive or whether his tribe had come to be called the Laughing King Indians.

It is possible that the Laughing King's name sounded like Esmy Shichans, or Lui (or Lin) Stuchans, which is how the name of the "King of the Easterne shoare" was rendered in 1635 and 1637 land records describing property that he had presented to the interpreter Thomas Savage, but neither document explicitly identified that chief as the Laughing King.

No writer before 1900 is known to have applied the name Debedeavon to the Laughing King. In that year, in an oration later published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Thomas T. Upshur conflated into one all of the references to Smith's kindly host, the Laughing King, the man who had presented land to Savage, and appearances of the name Debedeavon in its various forms. Jennings Cropper Wise uncritically accepted the mistaken identification in his influential history, Ye Kingdome of Accawmacke, or the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (1911), and he and later students of the Eastern Shore propagated and in some instances embellished the legend. As with the cases of Pocahontas, Chauco, and other Virginia Indians who exhibited marked friendship for the colonists, the composite story of Esmy Shichans, the Laughing King, Debedeavon, and the civil chief Captain John Smith met appealed powerfully to historical imaginations early in the twentieth century. In 1931 a bronze plaque, placed in the reconstructed brick church ruin on Jamestown Island to memorialize Thomas Savage, mistakenly described Savage's benefactor as Debedeavon, "THE LAUGHING KING OF THE ACCAWMACKES."

Sources Consulted:
Northampton Co. Deeds, Wills, Etc. (1645–1651), fol. 135 (earliest mention and first quotation); Accomack Co. Deeds and Wills (1663–1666), fols. 64, 74 (last recorded mention); Accomack Co. Orders, Wills, Etc. (1671–1673), 150 (second quotation); Accomack Co. Wills, Deeds, Orders, Etc. (1673–1676), 33 (third quotation); Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631) (1986), 1:224–225, 2:290–291; Warren M. Billings, with Maria Kimberly, eds., The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605–1677 (2007), 90 (fourth and fifth quotations); Virginia Land Office Patent Book, 1: pt. 1, 275–276 (sixth quotation), pt. 2, 499–500, Record Group 4, Library of Virginia; Thomas T. Upshur, "Eastern-Shore History: An Address Delivered at Accomack Courthouse on June 19, 1900, Being the Occasion of the Dedication of the New Courthouse at that Place," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 9 (July 1901): 88–99; discussions of evidence in Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (1989), 183, J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (1993), 11, 63, and Helen C. Rountree and Thomas E. Davidson, Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland (1997), 55–58.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by J. Frederick Fausz.

How to cite this page:
J. Frederick Fausz, "Debedeavon (fl. 1648–1664)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Debedeavon}, accessed [today's date]).

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