Pocahontas

• 1. Introduction

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  Pocahontas died at Gravesend, Kent, in March 1617, aged about 20 or 21. She had sailed only a short way down the River Thames on a voyage meant to take her home to Virginia. In that short life she was a chief's daughter, a hostage, a convert, a wife, a mother and a celebrity in London. Almost every popular story about her was written by Englishmen. Some of those accounts appeared after she could no longer answer them. Which of them can be trusted? What did Powhatan families remember instead? And why do so many people still claim her as an ancestor?

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• 2. Names and Lineage

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  Pocahontas was not the name she was born with. Her birth name was Amonute, and she was also called Matoaka, sometimes spelled Matoax. Powhatan children, it appears, received two names at birth. One was a formal name announced to the community. The other was a secret name known only to the parents. The best evidence for a secret name among the Powhatan is Pocahontas herself. The anthropologist Helen C. Rountree notes that she revealed Matoaka to the colonists only after taking the baptismal name Rebecca.

  The name that stuck was a nickname. The colonist William Strachey said it meant "little wanton". He described a child who visited the fort at Jamestown, gathered the boys and led them into the marketplace to turn cartwheels. He added that she did this naked, all over the fort.

  No one knows the year she was born, though historians estimate around 1596. John Smith first described her in 1608 as "a child of ten years old". In a 1616 letter he described the same moment but called her "a child of twelve or thirteen years of age". Her father was the paramount chief Powhatan, who ruled Tsenacommacah. That was an alliance of about thirty Algonquian-speaking groups and small chiefdoms in the Tidewater region of Virginia.

  Her mother's name and origin are unrecorded, and she was probably of low status. The interpreter Henry Spelman noted a custom for the paramount chief's many wives. After giving birth, a wife went back to her place of origin. Powhatan supported her there until she found another husband. Some have theorized that Pocahontas's mother died in childbirth instead.

  Popular culture often calls Pocahontas a princess, and the habit is old. In 1841 William Watson Waldron of Trinity College, Dublin, published a book of poems calling her the king's beloved and only surviving daughter. The colonist Ralph Hamor wrote that she was her father's "delight and darling". Yet she stood nowhere near the succession. Smith explained the Powhatan rule in A Map of Virginia: rule passed first to the chief's brothers, Opitchapan, Opechanncanough and Catataugh. After them it went to his sisters, and then to the sisters' children. It never passed to the male line.

  The Mattaponi Reservation people are descendants of the Powhatans. Their oral tradition holds that Pocahontas's mother was Powhatan's first wife, and that the daughter was named after her.

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• 3. Smith's Rescue Story

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  In December 1607, a hunting party captured John Smith on the Chickahominy River. It was led by Opechancanough, a close relative of Powhatan. Smith had arrived in Virginia that April with 100 other settlers, who built a fort on a marshy peninsula on the James River. The captors took him to Powhatan's capital at Werowocomoco.

  Smith's own 1608 account describes a great feast and a long conversation with Powhatan. It does not mention Pocahontas at all, and says they met some months afterward. Margaret Huber suggests that Powhatan wanted the colonists under his own authority. He offered Smith rule of the town of Capahosic, close to Werowocomoco, which would keep Smith and his men nearby and easier to control.

  The famous version came later. In 1616, Smith wrote to Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of King James, before Pocahontas visited England. In that letter his capture now involved a threat to his life. At "the minute of my execution", he claimed, she "hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine". The Generall Historie of 1624 added the stones. Warriors dragged his head onto them and raised their clubs. Then, as Smith told it, Pocahontas took his head in her arms and laid her own upon it. That book appeared seven years after she died.

  Scholars disagree about why the story grew. Karen Ordahl Kupperman argues that Smith embroidered his first account for a royal audience. He had fallen from favor with the London Company, which had funded Jamestown, and a heroine helped his reputation. Frederic W. Gleach thinks the second account was substantially accurate. In his view Smith misunderstood a three-stage ritual meant to adopt him into the confederacy. Other writers remain unconvinced, partly because corroborating evidence is missing.

  Early histories do agree that she befriended Smith and the colonists. She often visited the settlement and played games with the boys. During the starving times she and her attendants brought food every four or five days, and one account says this saved many lives. As the settlement grew, the Powhatans felt their lands were threatened, and fighting returned. In late 1609, a gunpowder injury sent Smith back to England for medical care. The colonists told the Powhatans he had died. Pocahontas believed them and stopped visiting Jamestown.

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• 4. The Abduction

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  The First Anglo-Powhatan War began late in the summer of 1609. In its early years the colonists seized control of the James River, both at its mouth and at the falls. Meanwhile Captain Samuel Argall courted Native groups in the northern part of Powhatan's chiefdom. The Patawomecks, on the Potomac River, were not always loyal to Powhatan. A young English interpreter, Henry Spelman, lived among them.

  In March 1613, Argall learned that Pocahontas was visiting the Patawomeck village of Passapatanzy. She was under the protection of the weroance Iopassus, also called Japazaws. With Spelman interpreting, Argall pressed him to help capture her, promising an alliance with the colonists against the Powhatans. Iopassus and his wives tricked her into boarding Argall's ship, the Treasurer. The English then demanded that her father free colonial prisoners and return stolen weapons and tools.

  She waited about a year at the English settlement of Henricus, in present-day Chesterfield County. Little is known of that time. Ralph Hamor wrote that she received "extraordinary courteous usage", meaning she was treated well. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow cites an oral tradition that she was raped. Rountree answers that other historians dispute that this tradition survived. They argue that mistreatment would have damaged English interests, since a truce was in place, the Indians still far outnumbered the English, and the colonists feared retaliation.

  At Henricus the minister Alexander Whitaker taught her about Christianity and helped her improve her English. At her baptism she took the name Rebecca.

  In March 1614, the stand-off turned violent. Hundreds of colonists and Powhatan men clashed on the Pamunkey River. Then the colonists met a group of senior Native leaders at Powhatan's capital of Matchcot. They let Pocahontas speak with her people when Powhatan arrived. She reportedly scolded him for valuing her "less than old swords, pieces, or axes". She said she preferred to live with the colonists "who loved her".

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• 5. Husbands and a Fragile Peace

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  One husband appears in only a single line of English writing. Around 1616, William Strachey wrote that Pocahontas had lived for two years married to a "private captaine called Kocoum". Mattaponi tradition goes further. It says Kocoum was the brother of the Patawomeck weroance Japazaws, and that the colonists killed him after her capture in 1613. Today's Patawomecks believe the couple had a daughter, Ka-Okee. In their account the Patawomecks raised her after her father's death and her mother's abduction.

  Scholars have argued for centuries over whether Kocoum existed. Pocahontas married John Rolfe in 1614, and no other record hints at an earlier husband. Some suggest Strachey meant Rolfe himself, and that a later reader mistook the line for a reference to one of Powhatan's officers.

  Rolfe was a widower. His English wife, Sarah Hacker, and their child, Bermuda, had died on the way to Virginia after the Sea Venture was wrecked on the Summer Isles, now Bermuda. He founded the plantation Varina Farms, where he grew a new strain of tobacco. He was also devout, and he agonized over marrying someone he called a heathen, though she had already accepted Christianity. In a long letter asking the governor's permission, he said he was driven not by carnal desire but by the good of the plantation, the honor of his country, the glory of God and his own salvation. He added that his thoughts of her had left him tangled in "so intricate a labyrinth" that he was weary of unwinding himself.

  The chaplain Richard Buck married them on the 5th of April 1614, probably at Jamestown. They then lived for two years at Varina Farms, across the James River from Henricus. Their son Thomas was born in January 1615.

  The marriage brought a lull in the fighting. It lasted eight years and became known as the Peace of Pocahontas. In 1615 Hamor wrote that since the wedding the colonists had enjoyed friendly trade with Powhatan and his subjects round about. At the English court, the match caused a stir. People complained that a commoner had the audacity to marry a princess.

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• 6. The London Season

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  On the 12th of June 1616, the Rolfes landed at Plymouth, accompanied by eleven other Powhatans, including a holy man named Tomocomo. They then traveled to London by coach. The London Company had a purpose for the trip. It wanted to convert Native Americans, and it saw her conversion and marriage as a way to attract investors. Her presence also stood for the end of the First Anglo-Powhatan War. The company planned to present her as proof that the Virginia colony was succeeding and that a New World "savage" could be tamed.

  Smith was living in London, and Pocahontas learned at Plymouth that he was alive. He did not meet her then. Instead he wrote to Queen Anne, urging that she be treated as a royal visitor. If she were treated badly, he warned, her "present love to us and Christianity might turn to... scorn and fury". He added that England might then lose the chance to "rightly have a Kingdom by her means".

  She was not a princess among the Powhatan, but the company presented her as one anyway. A 1616 engraving carries a Latin inscription calling her Matoaka, alias Rebecca, daughter of the most powerful prince of the Powhatan Empire of Virginia. Many English then thought of Powhatan as an emperor and gave his daughter matching rank. The cleric and travel writer Samuel Purchas said she carried herself as the daughter of a king. Bishop John King entertained her, in Purchas's words, with festival state and pomp.

  On the 5th of January 1617, she and Tomocomo were brought before King James at the old Banqueting House in Whitehall. They attended a performance of Ben Jonson's masque The Vision of Delight. Smith reported that the king was so unimpressive that neither visitor realized whom they had met until someone told them. Her seats were described as well placed. She may also have met Squanto, a Patuxet man from New England.

  Not everyone was dazzled. Rountree finds no contemporary sign that the English saw her as anything like royalty. To most, she argues, Pocahontas was simply "the Virginian woman", a curiosity. The couple lived for a time in Brentford, Middlesex, and at the Rolfe family home in Heacham, Norfolk.

  In early 1617 Smith met the couple at a gathering. By his account, she turned away without a word and hid her face, and was left alone for two or three hours. When they finally spoke, she reminded him of her kindnesses and quoted a bargain: what was Smith's would be Powhatan's, and the reverse. Then she called him "father". She explained that Smith had called Powhatan father when he was a stranger in Virginia, "and by the same reason so must I do you". Smith refused, because she outranked him as a king's daughter. Pocahontas replied, in his record, with a steady face. She said she would call him father regardless, and he must call her child. She would be his countrywoman for ever and ever.

  She ended with one more remark. She and her people had thought him dead, but her father had sent Tomocomo to find him, "because your countrymen will lie much".

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• 7. Gravesend and the Family Tree

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  In March 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas boarded a ship bound for Virginia. They had reached only Gravesend, on the Thames, when she fell gravely ill. She was taken ashore and died of unknown causes, "much lamented". Rolfe reported her saying that "all must die", and that it was enough that her child lived. Guesses at the cause include pneumonia, smallpox, tuberculosis, dysentery and poisoning.

  Her funeral was held on the 21st of March 1617 at St George's Church in Gravesend. The grave is thought to lie beneath the chancel. But a fire destroyed the church in 1727, and the exact spot is lost. Since 1958 a life-sized bronze statue has stood in the churchyard. It is a replica of the Jamestown sculpture by the American sculptor William Ordway Partridge.

  Her son's line is well documented. Thomas Rolfe married Jane Poythress, and their daughter Jane Rolfe was born at Varina on the 10th of October 1650. She married Robert Bolling. Their son John Bolling, born in 1676, married Mary Kennon and had six surviving children. Each of them married and had surviving children of their own.

  Those descendants include members of the First Families of Virginia, First Lady Edith Wilson, the actor Glenn Strange and the astronomer Percival Lowell. The actor Edward Norton is her twelfth great-grandson. Some descendants have contested Smith's stories about her.

  Honors followed. In 1907 she became the first Native American on a U.S. stamp. In 2000 she joined the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History. In July 2015 the Pamunkey, descendants of the Powhatan chiefdom, became the first federally recognized tribe in Virginia.

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• 8. Romance and Rewriting

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  The first claim that Pocahontas and John Smith were lovers appeared in John Davis's Travels in the United States of America, in 1803. Sources from her own time support a friendship, but not a romance. The idea nevertheless took hold. Stage works followed, including James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess in 1808 and John Brougham's burlesque Po-ca-hon-tas, or The Gentle Savage in 1855. The comic opera Pocahontas opened at the Empire Theatre in London on the 26th of December 1884, and ran for just 24 performances.

  The 1907 stamp came from the Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia, which marked 300 years since the settlement. Her five-cent portrait copied Simon van de Passe's 1616 engraving, and about 8 million were issued. Painters returned to her too. John Gadsby Chapman's Baptism of Pocahontas, painted in 1840, hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

  Movies came next. Silent shorts appeared in 1910 and 1924. Disney's animated Pocahontas in 1995 became the best-known version. It invents a romance with Smith in which she teaches him respect for nature. Irene Bedard voiced the character and provided the physical model.

  Critics have pushed back. Cornel Pewewardy argues that giving Indian characters animal companions such as Meeko and Flit turns them into cartoons and leaves them marginal, "strangers in their own lands". Rayna Green links the image of Pocahontas offering her life for Smith to how Native women are treated as exotic and submissive. In the same spirit, a critique of the film says its portrait of a noble, innocent figure keeps alive the single image the mainstream has of Natives as gentle and stuck in the past.

  Her name has also traveled. Lake Matoaka, an old mill pond at the College of William & Mary, took her Powhatan name in the 1920s. There was a troop transport ship, the USS Princess Matoika, and a Norfolk and Western passenger train named the Pocahontas, running from Norfolk, Virginia, to Cincinnati, Ohio. The minor planet 4487 Pocahontas carries her name into the sky.

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