Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

In 1607, Algonkian canoes raced to Werowocomoco, the impressive village that was home to their chief, Powhatan. The messengers brought news of the arrival of three massive European ships.

The myth of the early colonies holds that the indigenous people had no idea of the colonists’ intentions, but Townsend notes that “confusing the Indians’ minimal knowledge of Europe [...] with no knowledge at all—or worse, with essential innocence—would be to misread the historical record and do them a disservice” (7). Many indigenous people had contact with European settlers, and a number had gone to Europe, whether as hostages or as volunteers. Many of these often-fraught cultural exchanges ended in violence. During one hostage exchange gone wrong, several indigenous people were hanged. These events were fresh in the minds of Powhatan and the Algonkians when new ships arrived.

Powhatan’s supremacy was hard won. He was unusually powerful, with about 20,000 subjects. The tribes he united paid him tribute, and in return he supported them in battles against common enemies. Counter to racist myths of natural harmony amongst indigenous tribes, Powhatan maintained his power through political savvy and warfare.

Women played a complex role in the culture’s power structures. Although Algonkian rulers were always men, power was transmitted matrilineally, and women could very occasionally become chiefs. Because power passed through the female line, marriages and bride abductions were important; political power could be consolidated quickly through strategic unions. Powhatan therefore had many wives and many children.

Pocahontas’s unknown mother doesn’t seem to have been politically important, but Pocahontas herself was beloved. “Pocahontas” meant something like “Little Playful One” (14). Though a princess, she would have helped to take care of her father’s other children and labored in the fields alongside the rest of the women. It was difficult work, but fruitful; skeletons from the period suggest that the people were strong and healthy. The tribes were skilled farmers, using crop rotation and symbiosis. They also had a rich aesthetic world, full of elaborate clothing and nightly singing and dancing.

Algonkian religious beliefs have not survived in detail, as their oral culture disappeared in the genocide to come. Although the English claimed that the indigenous people had a Manichean worldview, with a benevolent and an evil god fighting it out eternally, no solid evidence supports this. Rather, in the indigenous religious system, “the people believed that there was one great spirit who made heaven and earth, but infinite manifestations of that deity existed all around” (21). Each village also had its own protector deity, known as an okee.

Change came to this world in the form of a kidnapping when one of Powhatan’s allies captured a white man named John Smith.

John Smith would have had a skewed view of the New World before his voyage with the Virginia Company: primarily, racy tales of sexy Indian maidens. “Books and broadsides alike conveyed the idea that in taking an Indian woman, one took a continent, metaphorically speaking” (26-7). Indian women were represented as both sexually voracious and loyal, especially to the European men for whom they had a special fancy. These tales didn’t work the other way around; the story was always of manly conquerors welcomed by admiring women who recognized the men’s superiority.

In preparing for his adventure, Smith might have also considered the promise of wealth. Early colonial riches had largely escaped the English, and the country felt wounded pride over Spanish colonial success—and often tried to even the scales through piracy, as in the famous case of Sir Francis Drake. King James wanted both to establish New World colonies that might help England to compete and to ease worries about overpopulation on English soil by “civilizing” new territory.

The Virginia Company must have known that their odds of success were low. Many colonies had failed, and many people in England doubted the value of the colonial project. Even then, some English thinkers pointed out that taking lands from the people who already lived there was wrong. Colonists justified their actions by suggesting that, while the Spanish enslaved native populations, the English would only offer them opportunities: to work, to become Christian, and to use their land more productively.

Regardless, the colonists made careful preparation for the resistance they knew they might meet. They also worried that the project of assimilation might work both ways: “If Indians could become just like Englishman, then could not Englishmen also become just like Indians?” (40).

John Smith, who spent time as a prisoner of war in Turkey, perhaps had more realistic expectations than some of his fellow travelers of what cross-cultural communication would be like. His later writings suggest that he saw himself in the tradition of the conquistadors and that he knew the colonists’ first order of business would be to find translators, a task to which sympathetic women might be well suited.

Initial reports from the colonists, who arrived in Virginia in April 1607, were glowing, to the extent that the Spanish started to get nervous about this new presence. They described the land as fertile and beautiful as the colony gained a foothold. But Powhatan, with his hegemonic hold on the region, presented a problem. Spanish explorers in similar conditions had found success through convincing chiefs to persuade their people to work for the Spanish. English settlers would need better communication to make that happen, but their understanding of the world they had entered was not nearly so comprehensive as they believed.

John Smith, surrounded by Indian bowmen, held a pistol to the head of an Indian hostage. Following a standoff, Smith surrendered, and his captors took him to Powhatan.

Smith’s life had not been easy. Orphaned at a young age, he became a mercenary and fought the Spanish in the Low Countries before being taken prisoner by the Turkish. He escaped, returned to England, and joined the Virginia Company expedition shortly thereafter. His early time in the Jamestown colony was uneasy. As relations between the settlers and the natives deteriorated, and the colony was rife with infighting, malnutrition, and parasitic infections. Many settlers died of “‘the bloody flux,’ a violent diarrhea” (50). In desperation, Smith and a few other men went to try to trade for food with the Indians and established a trade relationship with the Chickahominy, one of the few tribes in the region who had not sworn allegiance to Powhatan. Powhatan, displeased, deputized a chief called Opechankeno to capture Smith on a trade expedition.

According to his account, the captors presented Smith to the sumptuously dressed Powhatan, who ordered Smith’s brains ritually clubbed out; miraculously, the beautiful damsel Pocahontas rushed in to save Smith. Research on Algonkian culture contradicts Smith. Prisoners of war were not executed by the method that Smith describes, and he probably picked the idea up from another popular narrative of the time. Some evidence suggests that Powhatan took a shine to Smith and ritually adopted him, a common way to establish kinship ties between tribes. Smith never told his story until everyone who could have contradicted him had died. Also, Smith told a version of the same story in all of his travel narratives: a beautiful woman always swooped in at the last moment to rescue him in his perils. Although Pocahontas might have been present at these discussions, and Smith would have gotten to know her during his time with Powhatan, she was 10 at the time and would have had neither the political influence nor the adult charms that Smith attributed to her.

Powhatan offered to take the Englishmen of the Jamestown colony under his protection if they would pay tribute to him, giving the colonists territory and food in exchange for metal tools. Smith “was in no position to point out that the English in fact had the opposite arrangement in mind: they expected Powhatan to become their vassal, not their lord” (58). He hedged, promising that the English would consider this proposal.

Powhatan had to decide what to do about Jamestown. The English didn’t seem to be moving on, and their forces were such that defeating them would be bloody. He decided to befriend the English for now, and perhaps to unite with them against his Iroquois enemies. Later historians have often overlooked his savvy, suggesting that his people’s eventual defeat came because he couldn’t adjust to new circumstances. The historical record rather suggests that Powhatan understood exactly what he might gain from trying to make allies of the English.