Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

The voyage to England was crowded and difficult, and marked with death: Dale ordered a man known as Francis Lymbry hanged as a Spanish spy. In addition to the political drama, Pocahontas and her Indian attendants would have found sea travel difficult and possibly nauseating. The presence of many attendants on such an expensive and painful voyage suggests that Pocahontas saw this journey as a diplomatic fact-finding mission, not a honeymoon.

Pocahontas, on seeing the bustle and wealth of England—back at the point where the book began—must have understood for the first time the huge force behind colonization. The party stayed at a popular inn, the Bell Savage, known for its wits and entertainments, a fitting place for Pocahontas, who was about to become a celebrity. A member of Parliament named Sir Edwin Sandys took it upon himself to sponsor her, providing an allowance for fancy clothing and good food. She was to be an advertisement for the Virginia Company, which was plagued by lawsuits at the time, suggesting the success of the colonies and encouraging more settlers to make the journey.

Though Pocahontas was welcomed and feted, she suffered from malaise in the polluted London air and from the sea of unfamiliar germs. She may also have suffered from being treated as more of a curiosity than a person. In one notable instance, she was invited to King James’s annual Twelfth Night masque, but the king had to be reminded in advance to treat her like a visiting dignitary rather than a sideshow attraction.

This particular masque—an elegant variety show, culminating in a ball—was especially splendid, reflecting England’s rising wealth and status. Written by none other than Ben Jonson, contemporary and friendly rival of Shakespeare, it was called The Vision of Delight and featured elaborate stage machinery and allegorical dances. In this mannered setting, Pocahontas stood out, and many who saw her there remembered her, often in terms that were unflattering at best and overtly racist at worst.

Pocahontas was accompanied to the masque by Uttamatomakin, an important political and religious Algonkian figure. Chosen to represent Powhatan, he had misgivings about the trip from the beginning:

“When he had first been chosen to travel [...] he had gone to pray, to speak to his okee in the temple. He had outlined the trip’s agenda and its probable duration. But, he said, his god had corrected him, warning him that it would probably turn out to be longer than he thought. The god had been right” (150).

Uttamatomakin was unimpressed with England and the English, and often told them so.

Only two sources of direct information exist to convey Pocahontas’s impressions: a portrait she sat for, and records of an impassioned public statement. The portrait presents a rich and elegant lady, decked in symbols of power—and making some bold choices, such as affecting a man’s hat, a controversial style at the time, and directly meeting the eye of the observer rather than looking coyly away. The portrait is also labeled with words Pocahontas would have provided, giving her name as Matoaka and providing the Algonkian name for her land.

Her speech was delivered in anger to John Smith when he came to visit in London. Waving away his mannered flattery, she accused him of treachery to her father and disrespect of their shared past and agreements. Smith, uncharacteristically, recorded this tirade, and it’s confirmed by several onlookers; Smith may have wanted to explain away an interaction that didn’t go at all as he’d bragged it would.

At last, Pocahontas and John Rolfe prepared to depart again, taking with them a substantial chunk of money intended to support the conversion of Indian children. On their way out to sea, Rolfe told the captain to stop; Pocahontas had become too ill to travel. Pocahontas died, probably of pneumonia, in an inn at Gravesend and was buried nearby in an unmarked grave. Rolfe, after much agonizing, decided to leave their son Thomas (also sickly) with his brother in England. He would never see his son again.

Rolfe returned to a Jamestown that was again falling into disrepair. Many colonists ran away to live with the Indians, and Reverend Whitaker had drowned. Rolfe went to deliver the sad news of Pocahontas’s death to her family. He found them loving and welcoming, and willing to entrust their children to him for schooling.

Relations between the English and the Indians were still strained. Powhatan had retired and died in 1618, leaving the kingdom to his younger brother, with Opechankeno as a sort of chief military adviser. Uttamatomakin sowed discord with his reports of the power and dishonesty he’d seen in England. Meanwhile, diseases brought back from England ravaged the population.

The Algonkians took a great interest in Thomas, whom they thought might become a potential mediator and a way of keeping land in Indian hands. They gave land to Thomas but to no one else. Tensions grew, fights broke out, and the English decided to subjugate rather than negotiate with the Indian population. Rolfe tried to hold these forces in check and tried to collaborate with Opechankeno as much as possible. Rolfe remarried an Englishwoman and became involved in legal broils over land rights and debts. Through clever negotiation, he retained a position of power and wealth in the colonies.

Rolfe died at 37, not knowing that the precarious peace and prosperity he had negotiated in Virginia was about to collapse. Only days after Rolfe’s death, Powhatan’s people launched a major attack on the colonies, killing hundreds. Motives for this turn have been the subject of much debate. The sturdiest explanation is that Uttamatomakin’s reports of the English desire for land persuaded the indigenous people that long-term peaceful cohabitation could not happen.

The attack gave the English the excuse they’d been looking for to drive the Indians from the land. Thomas Rolfe was eventually called back to the colonies, and after attempting to ally himself with Opechankeno, ended up fighting against his mother’s people; “he must have done so with apparent alacrity, for by 1646 he held the title of lieutenant and was rewarded with the assignment to keep Fort James in the Chickahominy territory” (174). He lived a prosperous life on the land he was awarded there.

The paramount chieftainship that Powhatan had built fell apart, and later, less powerful chiefs were forced to sign peace treaties with the English. A queen, Cockacoeske, did rule for some 30 years, but her work was mostly to shore up a struggling population. She was eventually involved in a famous incident in which she offered to ally with the English against poorer members of her population who had started a rebellion. She lost many of her people through this deal but helped to establish treaties that would govern the relationships between the English and the Indians up until the American Revolution.

Although some lament Pocahontas’s death as the end of a chance for peace between the English and the Indians, Townsend dismisses this idea as naïve. It was not up to individual heroic Indian figures to save their people, and the deck was stacked against them from the start. The story of Pocahontas, Cockacoeske, and people like them “is a story of heroism as it exists in the real world, not in epic tales. Their dwindling people did survive, against all odds” (178).