Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

At the age of 12 or 13, Pocahontas married a man named Kocoom—her own choice, as she was not important enough to make a political marriage. Although theirs was likely to have been a love match, Kocoom drifted away and disappeared from the historical record; divorce or death are both plausible. The pair probably didn’t have children.

Meanwhile, in England, Pocahontas’s future husband, John Rolfe, was starting his own first marriage. Historians know little about Rolfe, one of a wave of Jamestown colonists inspired with enthusiasm for the colonial project around 1609. The Virginia Company, needing an influx of capital and labor, offered many ways for people to join up, including purchasing shares in the company themselves or (for poorer folks) agreeing to seven years of work in exchange for passage. Missionary as well as economic zeal was high: Pastors began to preach of converting the “savage” and to recommend capture and intermarriage as one biblically supported way to go about it.

Rolfe was part of a restructured Virginia Company expedition that included women and children, and he brought his young pregnant wife with him. Their ship ran into a terrible storm and began to take on water; the travelers all worked together to desperately bail but feared they were doomed. In the nick of time, they ran aground on rocks near the Bermuda islands, rowed to shore, and began a settlement. The Rolfes’ daughter, whom they named Bermuda, was born there but soon died. At last, the settlers sailed on to Jamestown and discovered it in ruins, but the simultaneous arrival of Virginia’s new governor, Lord De La Warr, persuaded them to stay. Rolfe’s wife, whose name we don’t know, died in Jamestown.

By this time, the English and Powhatan’s tribes were in a state of constant low-level warfare. Powhatan sent a message to De La Warr telling him that the English must confine themselves to Jamestown or risk worse fighting; De La Warr responded by sending Powhatan the severed hand of a hostage. Shortly thereafter, the English conducted a horrific raid on an Indian village, murdering captured children. One Englishman, George Percy, disturbed by the violence, stepped in and argued for the lives of other captives, but he was able only to secure their deaths by beheading rather than burning.

The English began to establish settlements and to kidnap Indians as part of their “civilizing” campaign. An ambitious Jamestown settler named Argall also successfully used more diplomatic means to establish trade, including employing Henry Spelman, a boy who had been left to learn Indian languages, as an interpreter. Argall also developed the plan to kidnap Pocahontas, with an eye toward ransoming English prisoners and retrieving some of the English weapons Powhatan had taken in raids. He enlisted one of the more recalcitrant chiefs in Powhatan’s kingdom to help. They tricked her onto an English ship, held her captive there, and took her to Jamestown.

Townsend imagines that Pocahontas would have felt frightened and lonely. All of the people she had known in Jamestown were long gone, and “English men were not known for their kindness to Indian women” (105).

In spite of negotiations for her return, Pocahontas remained imprisoned in Henrico, a settlement upriver from Jamestown, for months. She was placed under the care of one Reverend Whitaker, who had his servants dress her in European clothing and train her in English manners.

Whitaker was an intense man with serious aspirations. The son of a prosperous family, he was an unusual colonist: Rather than seeking his fortune, he tried “to perform a great work in converting the Indians” (111). Whitaker took a both an egalitarian and a condescending attitude toward the Indians, seeing them as fellow human souls who nonetheless lived benighted lives outside Christianity. He expected Pocahontas to be a quick study and was not surprised by her wit and intelligence. He might also have surprised her by agreeing that his countrymen were not all paragons: “He ascribed all of the colony’s former ills to his own people’s erring ways” (113).

John Rolfe probably met Pocahontas at one of Whitaker’s catechism classes. He seems to have fallen seriously in love with her. He wrote a long, passionate letter to Sir Thomas Dale, the deputy governor of Virginia, asking permission to marry her. The letter explored both his feelings and his doubts about his love for a woman from a culture so alien to his own. He justified his desire to marry her as a means to convert her to Christianity.

No records exist of Pocahontas’s thoughts about all this, but she did agree to convert, told Rolfe she loved him, and married him. Colonialist myths often depict this as evidence of Pocahontas’s recognition of white superiority. Townsend notes, however,

“Looking back objectively […] it is impossible to believe that Pocahontas had no independent agendas and desires of her own and that she worshipped unquestioningly the white male figures of our legends. Such a view demeans and objectifies her, in that it deprives her of the full range of human feelings and reactions” (118).

It is equally a mistake to suggest that Pocahontas had no agency in choosing to marry Rolfe. Contemporary reports suggest that she was so happy after her marriage that Virginia Company officials wanted to show her off in England, a thing they wouldn’t have done if she were an unwilling prisoner.

Pocahontas’s thinking may have been founded in her own ideas of the politics of marriage; in choosing Rolfe, she may have hoped to pacify the English by bringing them into a kinship relationship with Powhatan. Powhatan’s approval of the marriage seems to support this theory. Pocahontas may also have enjoyed a boost to her own status: The English knew that she was a princess, but not that she wasn’t a very politically important princess. Evidence suggests that, at the very least, she was fond of Rolfe and saw him as a good husband.

Before the marriage, relations between the English and the Indians once again came to the point of open war. The English sailed upriver to once more demand tribute from Powhatan, with Pocahontas aboard. From the ship she would have watched English attacks on Indian villages, likely the first warfare she would have seen directly. When the English reached Powhatan, she agreed to the marriage, and Powhatan offered captured English weapons and corn; the wedding ended the war for the time being.