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From The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 62, Issue 4.
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| Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. By Camilla Townsend. American Portraits. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. 234 pages. $25.00 (cloth), $14.00 (paper).Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. By Helen C. Rountree. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 304 pages. $29.95 (cloth).Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. By Paula Gunn Allen. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2003. 366 pages. $26.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper).Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. By David A. Price. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 305 pages. $29.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). | |
| She is one of white America's most familiar heroines, the subject of countless biographies, school lessons, and a Disney animated feature film. Yet the historical person of Pocahontas remains mysterious and controversial. Two books, by Helen C. Rountree and Camilla Townsend, try once again to uncover the woman behind the myth. This task is difficult, and one that requires creative readings of the scant sources, informed use of ethnography, and a significant amount of inference. Both books accomplish the task remarkably well and complement one another in many ways. In addition books by David A. Price and Paula Gunn Allen, aimed at popular audiences, also address the life and myth of Pocahontas. | 1 |
| The four books cover many of the same events but from vastly different perspectives. Consider the varied ways in which the authors treat the story of the rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas. Price maintains that the rescue happened exactly as Smith said, claiming that contemporary writers with experience in Virginia praised Smith's book (though none of them referred to the famous rescue in their comments). For Allen the rescue was really part of a huskanaw ceremony, a "ritual death and remaking" (52) in which Smith was "'remade' as an Indian, named Nantaquod, and designated weroance" within the Powhatan confederacy (53). Rountree and Townsend reject these interpretations, arguing instead that the famous rescue never happened. Both authors emphasize that Smith did not write about the incident until 1624, some sixteen years after the event supposedly occurred and long after Pocahontas (and most other people who had been in Virginia at the time and could have confirmed or denied the story) had died. His earlier writings do not mention it at all. Even the 1617 letter to Queen Anne, which ostensibly told of the rescue, does not survive in the original but only in Smith's 1624 Generall Historie. Rountree and Townsend also note that Smith told similar stories in his writings about his adventures in other parts of the world. As Rountree aptly puts it, "he seems to have had a knack for getting into drastic situations and then being rescued by high-ranking females" (80). Rountree adds that had the Powhatan intended to kill Smith, the method he records (being hit over the head with a club) would be unlikely; high-ranking enemies were tortured to death by the women soon after their arrival in town, not clubbed after a welcoming feast. She also points out that, as a prepubescent child with little diplomatic importance, Pocahontas probably was not even at the feast to save Smith's life. Rountree also rejects the adoption hypothesis, arguing that the details Smith records do not fit the adoption procedures of any Eastern Woodland tribe. | 2 |
| Townsend's Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, the only book of the four written by a historian, is a traditional biography. The goal, as Townsend introduces it, is to separate the myth of Pocahontas from the historical person. She reconstructs Pocahontas's life by mining the written record for every scrap it contains, and when it fails (as it so often does) she relies on a creative use of cultural history methods and speculation. For example, unable to find records detailing Pocahontas's conversion and marriage, she turns to the Book of Common Prayer to determine what the common practice for such events was. Lacking sources describing Pocahontas's reception in London, she turns to the text of the masque Pocahontas attended and speculates that it probably had at least some similarities with the kinds of entertainment the young Powhatan woman would have enjoyed at home. She makes use of anthropological and ethnohistorical work on the Powhatan and other Eastern Woodland groups to gain insight into Powhatan culture. The narrative will sound familiar, and there is little new ethnographic evidence. The key appeal of this book is the insight it offers on Pocahontas herself, much of which is of necessity speculative. | 3 |
| Townsend's Pocahontas is a heroic woman who acted for the sake of her people. The author begins by setting the stage, introducing the Powhatan people and the English colonists. She then traces the major events of Pocahontas's life, intermingling them with the larger history of English-Powhatan relations. The chapters follow Pocahontas from her early visits to Jamestown to her kidnapping and months of captivity among the English, her marriage, and her visit to London as a celebrated foreign princess, followed by her mysterious death at the age of twenty-one. During the crucial early years, Pocahontas was an important intermediary, translating for her father's emissaries and helping to teach Smith his smattering of Algonquian. After her capture Pocahontas expanded this important role. Following the practices of her native culture, she determined to marry John Rolfe to cement an alliance between his people and hers. Prolonged exposure to the English demonstrated that they had resources her people could use, and that they were more useful as friends than enemies. As a diplomatic representative of native Virginians, she navigated a labyrinth of curiosity and prejudice in upper-class London society. | 4 |
| There are times when Townsend strains in her efforts to re-create a world in the absence of documentary evidence. She maintains that Pocahontas served as a translator during her many visits to Jamestown, but cannot supply any evidence to support the assertion. At the age of eleven or twelve, it is doubtful that Pocahontas did so in any kind of official capacity and, with the presence of translator Thomas Savage, it seems unlikely that any skills she had were needed. Townsend also speculates that the Reverend Alexander Whitaker chose the name Rebecca for Pocahontas with the hope that, like the biblical Rebecca, the new convert would favor her white children (like Jacob, whose skin was light) over her "red" children (referring to Esau, who was characterized as red). As Nancy Shoemaker has pointed out, the English did not begin to associate Indians with the color red until the middle part of the eighteenth century, and the term appears to have been of Indian rather than European (or biblical) origin.1 These, however, are relatively minor quibbles. Overall Townsend has written an engaging and highly credible biography. Because of the background she supplies on seventeenth- century Powhatan and English cultures, this book might work well as a supplementary text for an introductory class. It explodes the myths of America's founding and offers an interesting overview of the first years of Jamestown's existence. | 5 |
| Rountree's Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough is the strongest of these four works. An anthropologist, Rountree has spent much of the last thirty-five years studying Virginia's native peoples and is an acknowledged expert on the subject. It would be hard to find a more qualified scholar to tackle the myth and reality of the life of Pocahontas. Rountree examines Pocahantas as part of a triumvirate that includes her father, Powhatan, and her uncle, Opechancanough (the leader of the 1622 war that Rountree aptly terms the Great Assault). By casting her net more widely, Rountree offers a more substantial and far-reaching study than would have been possible had she focused on Pocahontas alone. | 6 |
| Rountree aims to tell the story of these three pivotally important individuals from an Indian rather than an English point of view (though she herself is not Indian). She refers to people, locations, and seasons by their native names whenever possible (John Smith is Chawnzmit, Virginia is Tsenacomoco). Acknowledging her reliance on sources produced by Englishmen as well as on modern ethnographical texts (including several of her own), she then introduces and critically examines the reliability of those sources before beginning her narrative. How successfully Rountree has recaptured a native worldview is open to debate, but it should be noted that she was careful to submit the work for the review of members of Virginia tribes. Certainly, Rountree has done much to make the Powhatan world comprehensible by interlacing ethnographic insight with biographical detail. | 7 |
| Several introductory chapters introduce the Powhatan peoples, their lifestyle, their government and leadership systems, the chiefly family itself, and the politics of the expansion of the Powhatan Confederacy. Subsequent chapters demonstrate the effect the arrival of Europeans had on Powhatan society and on the main figures she studies. Rountree considers Powhatan's response to the arrival of the strangers in his land, and explains the extent to which he relied on the advice of local religious leaders to determine the intentions of the English (especially in the early months and years, when translation was especially difficult). The book then goes on to analyze Powhatan's efforts to establish a working diplomatic relationship with the strangers, especially John Smith, and the reasons for the failure of these efforts. The English defaulted on promises of firearms and other items, failed to respect Powhatan territorial claims, and forced trade at the point of a gun. Fresh insights abound as Rountree explains even seemingly perverse Indian behavior. When the English arrived to negotiate and trade with Powhatan, the townspeople led them across a narrow and rickety wooden bridge, deliberately placing the strangers off balance and demonstrating their own control of the situation. Powhatan's leadership is demonstrated in the ability of the "Real People" (as Rountree calls the Virginia natives, and as they called themselves) to thwart efforts at expansion by the English during the famous starving time of 1609–10. Rountree also documents the dislocation produced by the invasion, as Powhatan was forced to abandon his capital at Werowocomoco and move farther away from the English seat at Jamestown. The English began to strike at the very foundations of his confederacy, negotiating with subordinate chiefdoms without his consent or approval and unhinging his alliances. | 8 |
| Powhatan, however, demonstrated a lack of will to expel the invaders (much to the distress and chagrin of his brother Opechancanough). Seemingly, Powhatan did not think the English were enough of a threat to warrant a coordinated attack by the various towns of the confederacy, and did not consider it worth calling in his chips, so to speak, by demanding support from outlying communities. Powhatan was also in the twilight years of his life, and apparently wanted to avoid the kind of disruption an all-out war would have caused. The kidnapping of Pocahontas only worsened her father's dilemma because it forced him to choose between losing his child and giving in to the English; either way, he lost status and respect within his community. As early as 1613 (before the kidnapping), leadership in the community was already beginning to shift toward the more militant Opechancanough, partly because of Powhatan's inaction. | 9 |
| Pocahontas appears in short glimpses throughout the book. Rountree's Pocahontas has considerably less political importance and a less significant diplomatic role than did Townsend's. As the daughter of a chief, rather than as a member of the chiefly clan in a matrilineal society, Pocahontas would not have inherited any kind of political power in her society. Instead she created an informal position for herself through the power of her outgoing personality and her father's fondness for her. Rountree discusses Pocahontas's frequent visits to Jamestown, explaining the significant degree of personal freedom allowed to a young person in her community, as well as the cessation of those visits as the alliance between her father and the strangers broke down. Tricked into captivity, Rountree's Pocahontas suffered from Stockholm syndrome, coming to identify with the English. Rountree also argues that Pocahontas probably saw a greater potential for maintaining status in English patrilineal society (as the daughter of an influential prince) than she would have enjoyed in her own matrilineal one. Her marriage was a genuine love match, Rountree maintains, in contrast with Townsend's and Allen's assertions; the peace it produced allowed the English to expand unresisted, further weakening the control her father enjoyed over his domain. | 10 |
| The last part of the book focuses on the years of Opechancanough's leadership, an era often neglected by historians (partly because of an even greater dearth of sources than the earlier years of contact). The English, Rountree demonstrates, continued to undermine the confederacy, though Opechancanough tried to lull the English into a false sense of security to allow his own plans of attack to mature. The greater contact between young Powhatan people and the English brought about by English expansion undermined his efforts, however, and individuals warned the English of not one but two proposed attacks leading up to the Great Assault of 1622. In the end Opechancanough's plans were thwarted by the fact that the English had a replaceable population and the natives did not. | 11 |
| Allen is a literary scholar of Laguna Pueblo descent and her biography of Pocahontas is a work of literature rather than a traditional biography. She consciously rejects the methods and conventions of western scholarship and biography, conforming instead as much as possible to American Indian narrative tradition. Specifically, she rejects academic rules of "proof," turning to oral tradition, as well as "music, herbology, architecture, construction, cooking, pottery casting, etc." (14). Some historians will be uncomfortable with the lack of citations and written evidence to support many of the arresting assertions that Allen makes, and will often question the method by which she has reached her conclusions. Because of its approach, the book offers an intriguingly novel (at least to most non-Indian scholars) interpretation of the life of this famous woman. | 12 |
| Allen's purpose is to re-create "the entire life system: that community of living things, geography, climate, spirit people, and supernaturals" (2) in which American Indian peoples lived. She wants to tell Pocahontas's life story from an Algonquian viewpoint, from the myths "and the worldview that informed her actions and character" (2). She draws on oral traditions from a variety of Algonquian-speaking peoples up and down the eastern seaboard and throughout the Great Lakes region. She incorporates spiritual stories from other ethnic and linguistic groups throughout indigenous North America as well, including her own Laguna Pueblo people, to bolster the argument. However, she does not mention in the acknowledgments or cite in her notes any conversations with surviving members of Virginia's Indian community. The book may be more of an illuminating exercise in modern pan-Indian spirituality than a distinctly Powhatan product. | 13 |
| Allen's Pocahontas is a powerful spiritual leader, or "Beloved Woman" (51), in her own right and not the daughter of Powhatan at all; this, she asserts, was an English misunderstanding of Powhatan matrilineal inheritance. Pocahontas has foreseen the arrival of the Europeans in a dream vision. She is also an important political leader who sacrifices herself to captivity and a political marriage to gain useful intelligence on the English. She is key in John Rolfe's efforts to develop a working tobacco crop, offering her own knowledge of the plant to aid her husband's endeavor. And in the end, she is a martyr, poisoned by her husband to prevent her from taking her knowledge of English society back to her own nation. Many of the arguments in the book will raise eyebrows among scholars of the period. The lack of written evidence supporting Allen's contention that Pocahontas was assassinated, combined with documentary evidence demonstrating Rolfe's great grief at the loss of his wife, make this claim difficult to credit. Historians will also question the notion that it is tobacco's spiritual qualities that have brought about democracy in the western world. In addition there are a significant number of factual errors in this book. In one instance Allen has John Winthrop giving his famous Arabella sermon aboard the Mayflower, ten years too early and going to the wrong colony. | 14 |
| Price's Love and Hate in Jamestown, written by a journalist, is clearly intended for a popular audience. His prose is smooth and his language vivid. He has drawn his vision of Jamestown (and Pocahontas, though she is not the main focus of his book) primarily from the writings of John Smith, and unfortunately neglects or discounts most of the research of the past several decades that calls into question the reliability of Smith's accounts, particularly the 1624 Generall Historie. He simply notes (in the "Marginalia" at the end) that contemporaries such as Samuel Purchase and William Strachey recommended the book and "twentieth-century scholarship confirmed obscure details of Smith's accounts of his Central European military adventures wherever they could be checked" (243), though he does not indicate what that evidence is and simply refers the reader to other works. | 15 |
| The hero of Price's tale of early Jamestown is, not surprisingly, also Smith. Smith's opponents come in for much of the same censure from Price that they did from Smith. Virginia Company appointees follow naive and destructive policies, despite the sage advice being offered by Smith, with tragic results. Though he rejects the term savages for Virginia's native peoples, Price treats them as little better. Much of their behavior throughout the book is incomprehensible, and the very specific rules by which their society operated are largely ignored. With all the research that has been done on Eastern Woodland societies during the past thirty or forty years, this neglect is particularly surprising. Price cites Rountree and Frederick Gleach, yet his work seems little influenced by any of their research or insights. For example Price tells the story of the murder of the wife and children of the Paspahegh chief, but then editorializes, "even the natives' own narrow conception of rules of warfare, of humane considerations in combat, forbade the killing of an enemy ruler's wife and children" (143). Price fails to explain what Powhatan concepts of warfare were or why those conceptions were so much narrower than the rules of warfare to which Europeans subscribed. Even Pocahontas herself is but a bit player in this story. She conveniently fulfills the part of the eager convert and friend to the English (and admirer of John Smith, of course). Price's easy acceptance of the rescue myth starkly illustrates the way in which the Pocahontas of this story continues to serve as the instrument of Smith's self-aggrandizing (and of modern nationalistic wishful thinking) rather than as an independent historical actor with an agenda of her own. Overall the story Price tells is decidedly Anglocentric, re-creating the narrative of a triumphant conquest of barbaric peoples. For those readers interested in Smith's version of the settlement of Jamestown, Smith's own original accounts would be more useful than Price's book. | 16 |
| The story of Pocahontas deserved a fresh look (perhaps especially in the wake of Disney's animated version of the famous myth) and the works of Rountree, Townsend, and Allen all offer intriguing new perspectives on a familiar story. As the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement approaches, it is to be hoped that more original works will continue to expand scholars' understanding of England's first successful American colony and the people who were displaced to make its survival possible. | 17 |
Notes1 Nancy Shoemaker, "How Indians Got to be Red," American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 625–44. |
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©2005 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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