The explorers could not have known then that the Bay is actually the tidal lower reach of a waterway that extends hundreds of miles to the North. To Smith and his crew, the change certainly looked like a dividing point, with all four rivers deserving of names.
Those four headwaters are what we know today as the six-mile-wide Susquehanna Flats, comprised of the half-mile mouth of the largest river, which he named for the upriver Susquehannock tribe, and the smaller Northeast, Elk and Sassafras rivers (the last of which Smith came to know by its Native tribe, the Tockwogh). He and his crew aboard the Discovery Barge thought that at the top end of the Bay they “might see the bay to divide in two heads, and arriving there we found it divided in four, all of which we searched so far as we could sail them,” according to his General History.
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