Pocahontas

• Born: c. 1596
• Birthplace: Werowocomoco (near present-day Jamestown, Virginia)
• Died: March 1, 1617
• Place of death: Gravesend, Kent, England

Powhatan princess

One of the first women to influence the course of American history and an extremely skilled diplomat, Pocahontas provided aid that was critical to the survival of the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

Area of achievement Diplomacy

Early Life

According to estimates by early English settlers in Virginia, Pocahontas (poh-kuh-HAHNT-uhs) was born in 1595 or 1596, but her place of birth is unknown. Her father was Powhatan, the head of a confederation of Native American tribes in Tidewater Virginia. Because he had many wives, it is uncertain which of them was Pocahontas’s mother. Although Powhatan named her Matoaka, she was more widely known as Pocahontas, a name that the English understood to mean “playful” or “adventuresome.”

In the decade prior to the arrival of English settlers in Virginia, Powhatan was busy consolidating one of the most powerful confederations along the East Coast of North America. It is unclear whether he saw the English as potential allies in this effort or simply as intruders. When, in later 1607, his warriors captured and brought the English leader Captain John Smith to him, Powhatan ordered the staging of an elaborate ceremony. After a feast, Smith found himself being dragged to two large rocks where men with clubs appeared to be ready to execute him. At that moment, a girl, who Smith later learned was Pocahontas, raced to his rescue. She placed her head on his and implored her father to spare the white man’s life.

The details of this episode, which elevated Smith and Pocahontas into the pantheon of American mythology, come exclusively from John Smith’s pen. Yet according to several scholars who have carefully scrutinized the famed adventurer’s writings, there is a ring of truth about it. Powhatan probably put Smith through this mock execution as an initiation or adoption ceremony, a ritual similar to those of other tribes in the region. Whatever Powhatan’s rationale, John Smith always credited Pocahontas with his rescue, and whether her actions were spontaneous or staged, from that moment, she became a leading figure in the salvation of the Virginia colony.

Powhatan permitted Pocahontas to visit the English settlement at Jamestown several times over the next year and a half. Her presence made it easier for the English to trade with Indians in the confederation. She advised Smith which tribes to avoid and helped the English negotiate for food. The settlers enjoyed this young teen, who lived up to her playful public name. She delighted the boys at Jamestown by turning cartwheels with them in the marketplace. Pocahontas particularly liked John Smith. Smith also seemed genuinely interested in her culture. He eagerly listened as she instructed him in the Powhatan language, and he taught her some English in return.

Pocahontas’s diplomatic role was even greater than her role in improving trade relations. Four months after Powhatan freed Smith, she participated in the successful negotiations for the release of native prisoners held by the English. Pocahontas also helped an English messenger boy, Richard Wiffin, escape when her father ordered him killed. In December of 1608, while John Smith and several of his men were in Powhatan’s village negotiating for corn, Pocahontas warned them of a plot to kill them. After the men escaped, it was almost eight years before John Smith and Pocahontas saw each other.

Life’s Work

Relations between the English and the natives rapidly deteriorated when Smith had to return to England in 1609 because of a serious wound he suffered in an accident. Prolonged hostility replaced the cautious peace that had previously characterized Indian-English relations. Because of the warfare, Pocahontas had little contact with the settlers. She did not visit Jamestown for four years, and Powhatan sent her north to live with the Potomacs, the most distant of his subject tribes.

In early 1613, Captain Samuel Argall decided to seize Pocahontas and hold her hostage. Argall hoped to obtain from Powhatan the release of several English prisoners and a substantial supply of corn. On an expedition up the Potomac, Argall persuaded Iapassus, a Potomac chief, to lure Pocahontas aboard his vessel. Argall took his prize to the new settlement of Henrico, about eighty miles upriver from Jamestown, and left her in the care of the Reverend Alexander Whitaker while he awaited Powhatan’s response.

Pocahontas now entered the most significant period of her life. Her father, apparently believing that the English would not harm her, released just a few English prisoners and sent only a token amount of corn. Outraged, Deputy-Governor Thomas Dale resolved to hold Pocahontas until Powhatan met his demands. As negotiations continued, the Reverend Whitaker began to instruct his charge in the Christian faith. Joining him in the effort was a widowed planter named John Rolfe.

Rolfe had come to Virginia in the spring of 1610 and had already gained notoriety for introducing a successful variety of tobacco into the colony. Because the native plant was too harsh for European tastes, Rolfe had brought the seeds of milder tobacco from Trinidad in 1611. Through careful cultivation, he was able to send a crop to England the next year. He probably met Pocahontas in the summer of 1613 while experimenting with tobacco plants in the Henrico area.

Rolfe and Whitaker taught Pocahontas the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the ritual of the Church of England. After several months of indoctrination, the young woman accepted the Christian faith, and the Reverend Whitaker baptized her into the Anglican Church, naming her Rebecca.

In the process, Pocahontas gained not only a new faith but also a new suitor. John Rolfe admitted that while instructing the teenager, he had fallen in love with her and wanted to marry her. Acknowledging that he was attempting to bridge an enormous gap between the two very different cultures of Virginia, Rolfe wrote a lengthy letter of explanation to Deputy-Governor Dale. He knew that the church disapproved of marriages with “strange,” or heathen, people. Despite Pocahontas’s recent instruction in Christianity, Rolfe admitted that he would be marrying a woman “whose education hath been rude, her manners barbarous,” and “her generation cursed.”

Even as he conceded this problem, however, Rolfe contended that he was presenting Dale with a wonderful opportunity. One of the goals of King James I when he had granted a charter to the Virginia Company of London was the conversion of the peoples they encountered. In the first decade of the colony’s existence, it had failed miserably on that score. Now, Rolfe was posing his marriage to Pocahontas as a way to demonstrate to the king that the company could civilize and Christianize natives. This marriage, according to Rolfe, would be for the glory of God, “our Country’s good, the benefit of this Plantation, and for the converting [of] an irregenerate to regeneration.”

Thomas Dale readily assented to the marriage, but they still needed the permission of Powhatan. Although he likewise agreed, the aging leader decided not to attend the wedding, perhaps wanting to ease the permanent break with his favorite daughter. He sent one of his brothers, Opachisco, to give Pocahontas away at the April 5, 1614, wedding in Jamestown.

The marriage was a momentous event. It inaugurated years of peace between the English and the natives. John Rolfe obviously deserves some of the credit for proposing the match, but Powhatan also played an important role. He may not have wished to jeopardize his daughter with further hostilities, or he may realistically have concluded that the recent warfare had made his confederation too weak to confront the English with superior numbers. Most likely, he was telling the truth when he explained to an English envoy, shortly after the wedding, that he was an old man who wanted to live his remaining days in peace.

Yet it was Pocahontas who was critical in this development. In accepting Christianity and marrying an Englishman, she was renouncing her family and her culture. Given her earlier efforts to ease relations between the Indians and the English, it is not surprising that Pocahontas now would be willing to make such a sacrifice. Since the arrival of white men in her midst, she had always proved willing to act in the interests of peace.

Not wanting to waste the public relations value of the marriage of an Indian princess to an Englishman, the Virginia Company arranged a visit to England for the couple and their infant son, Thomas, in 1616. Accompanied by Deputy-Governor Dale and about a dozen Powhatan Indians, the Rolfes arrived in England in June. Over the next nine months, the Virginia Company worked hard to keep Pocahontas constantly in the public eye. Several appearances at the palace of James I, attendance at a gala staged by the bishop of London, and a sitting for an engraved portrait ensured that all in the city would know of the famous Pocahontas. By year’s end, Londoners could purchase a copy of the only likeness of Pocahontas to be painted in her lifetime. In it, the young woman with dark eyes and high cheekbones is dressed in a beaver hat, a cloth coat, a lace collar, and pearl earrings, and she is holding a three-plumed fan.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the trip for Pocahontas was her reunion with John Smith. It was an awkward meeting for her. She had always adored Smith, but everyone in Virginia had told her that he had died. Only upon her arrival at Plymouth had she learned the truth. Shocked to see him again, Pocahontas initially was silent when she saw him, and then she wept, but finally they talked briefly about their experiences in Virginia. When they parted, she told Smith, “you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman.”

The culmination of Pocahontas’s visit to England was her attendance with King James and Queen Anne at the Twelfth Night Masque. The gala event at Whitehall on January 6, 1617, held to celebrate the end of the Christmas season, featured a play by Ben Jonson. Pocahontas enjoyed the masque as well as the rest of her stay in England, but her husband was appointed secretary of the Virginia colony, and they had to return. Shortly after their departure from London in mid-March, she became very ill with a fever. Taken ashore at Gravesend, Pocahontas died and was buried in the parish church there.

Significance

Although Pocahontas’s was a short life, it was a truly significant one. Primarily because of John Smith’s account of her rescue of him, Pocahontas has been the subject of many novels, biographies, and poems and has become an indelible part of American mythology. More important, she played a role almost always reserved for men in the seventeenth century—that of a diplomat. Undoubtedly, her youth and engaging personality were an advantage. She was her father’s favorite, and she captivated the English settlers. Yet Pocahontas demonstrated considerable negotiating skills, which she employed often to improve trade and accomplish prisoner releases for both English and Native American prisoners.

Along with Powhatan, John Smith, and John Rolfe, Pocahontas played a pivotal role in early Virginia’s history. She gave the English hope that the Indians could be assimilated into their culture, and she demonstrated that it was possible for English and Indian to coexist. The most authoritative assessment of her role in American history came from Captain John Smith, who concluded that she literally was the savior of the first permanent English settlement in North America. In a letter he wrote to Queen Anne in 1616, Smith explained that Pocahontas had been the instrument that had preserved the colony “from death, famine and utter confusion.”

Bibliography

Abrams, Ann Uhry. The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. Abrams explores two myths about America’s origins: Virginia’s beliefs about Jamestown and Pocahontas, and New England legends about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. She compares and contrasts these mythologies and the messages they convey.

Allen, Paula Gunn. Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. Allen presents a multifaceted view of Pocahontas’s life and historical significance.

Barbour, Philip L. Pocahontas and Her World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. One of the best accounts of Pocahontas’s life and times.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Of the numerous biographies of Smith, this remains the most comprehensive and authoritative.

Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763. 3 vols. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. Davis provides an excellent analysis of the numerous contemporary writings on Pocahontas and assesses her place in American literature.

Lemay, J. A. Leo. Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. An interesting study that attempts to discern the truth or falsehood of John Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas.

Price, David. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf, 2003. Price draws on period letters, chronicles, and documents to relate the founding of the Jamestown colony.

Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Rountree examines the impact of colonization upon the lives of Pocahontas, her father, Powhatan, and her uncle, Opechancanough.

Smith, Bradford. Captain John Smith: His Life and Legend. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953. Smith’s biography is useful because he makes the best case for the veracity of John Smith’s writings. In doing so, he draws on the research of Laura Polanyi Striker into John Smith’s years in Europe.

Townsend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Townsend depicts Pocahontas and her father, Powhatan, not as naïve or innocent, but as people who were able to confront the British with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence.

Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907. This collection of primary sources includes John Rolfe’s letter to Thomas Dale, John Smith’s letter to Queen Anne, and several selections from Smith’s General Historie of Virginia.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Seventeenth Century

May 14, 1607: Jamestown Is Founded; 1617-c. 1700: Smallpox Epidemics Kill Native Americans; December 26, 1620: Pilgrims Arrive in North America; March 22, 1622-October, 1646: Powhatan Wars.