Reflecting on Pocahontas1
What do we know about Pocahontas? We know that she was Powhatan’s daughter, and in 1609 he was the principal leader of his people; and that Powhatan’s two brothers and a sister, her uncles and aunt, were the leaders in three of the towns nearby, and that when Powhatan died, his brothers, not his children, governed in his place. We will never know if, like Powhatan’s sister, Pocahontas would one day have ruled a town and become a powerful leader among her people because, as a teenager, she was kidnapped by the British, converted to Christianity, married to John Rolfe, taken to England where she died at the age of twenty-one, and was buried in St. George’s Church in Gravesend.
The British called her princess, but that is because the British thought Powhatan, because he was the principal leader in his country, must be a king. They didn’t speak enough of the local Algonquian language to pick up on the subtleties of the political system of the indigenous people they met, and so they guessed at things and what they saw was shaped by their own cultural expectations of “pagan” society. Reading the documents the colonizers wrote is a revelation of what prejudices they held. The stereotypes are that old, and they grow. We know that the colonists were shocked that the people around Chesapeake Bay wore little clothing, and, in particular, they thought the women wanton. Three different historians tell us that the British translated the name Pocahontas to mean “little wanton,” and they all comment on how most Powhatan women had naked breasts and that before puberty young girls went naked. They give Pocahontas’s real name as Mataoka, and none tells us what it means.
In his early writings from the period, John Smith mentions that Pocahontas brought food to trade for English goods, and that her generosity saved the colonizers from starvation. But not until 1624, after she was dead, did he write the Generall Historie of Virginia in which he talked about how she saved his life. Before she died, no one told that story, and after Smith wrote of it only two of that first group of colonists, neither of whom were present at the place where the alleged incident happened, corroborated what Smith wrote. In defense of his story, which was questioned even then, Smith wrote that he sent a letter dated 1616 to Queen Anne about how Pocahontas rescued him, but there is no clear record of the story in a surviving letter from her court, or any evidence that Pocahontas knew about what he wrote. The record of their meeting in London tells us Pocahontas was incredibly angry with Smith, but most writers assume it is because he was still alive and never contacted her.
Historian Helen C. Rountree argues that Pocahontas never saved Smith’s life at all. She believes the story about the multiple threats Powhatan made on Smith’s life was written because of anti-Indian sentiment after Powhatan’s brother commanded an army that attacked and killed several hundred colonists in 1622. By the time the Generall Historie was written the British wanted excuses “to root out the ’savages’” from Virginia. Rountree points out that in Smith’s later writings, not once, but three times his life is saved by ladies of high rank when he is “at the moment of direst peril,” and “the women were not depicted as real people.” So there is debate back and forth about what is myth and what is history.
We do know that in 1608 Smith wrote in his True Relations that Pocahontas was “a childe of tenne,” but Frances Mossiker writes that in his supposed letter to Queen Anne in 1616 he contradicts himself and refers to Pocahontas as having been “a childe of twelve or thirteene yeeres of age.” At any rate, she was a young girl and he was a man of twenty-seven and -eight when he was living in Jamestown. On October 4, 1609, he left Jamestown on a boat for England after being badly burned in a gunpowder explosion and then deposed as president of the colony. He never returned. The colonists told Pocahontas he was dead, and she did not learn differently until she traveled to England in 1616 as the wife of John Rolfe.
According to William Strachey in his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, written in 1610, Pocahontas married a man from her own nation named Kocoum who Strachey describes only as a “private Captayne.” He gives no other detail about the marriage, and no other colonial writer mentions it. The next report of Pocahontas is about her “abduction.” She was staying in a Patawomeck town in April of 1613 when Captain Samuel Argall succeeded in kidnapping her by having Native people whom she thought were her friends invite her to accompany them on a tour or the British ship, Treasurer, which was anchored in the Potomac River. The British served their visitors dinner in Argall’s cabin, and then her friend Jopassus led her to the gunner’s room where he abondoned her after promising to return. Grace Woodward’s book on Pocahontas tells us that according to Argall’s own report, when she discovered she was his prisoner, “she grew ‘pensive and discontended.’” Pocahontas was taken by the British to Jamestown, and her father was notified that, if he wished his daughter returned, he must return the British prisoners he had taken in war, their weapons, and give the British many baskets of corn. Powhatan eventually sent the British prisoners, some tools, and some corn, but was unwilling to surrender the weapons of his enemies.