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Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: The American Portraits Series Hardcover – October 13, 2004
by
Camilla Townsend
(Author)
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Camilla Townsend's stunning new book differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world---not only to the invading British but to ourselves.
Neither naïve nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is here shown as a road map to Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope for a semblance of independence worth the name.
Townsend's Pocahontas emerges--as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London--for the first time in three-dimensions; allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHill and Wang
- Publication dateOctober 13, 2004
- Dimensions6 x 0.98 x 9.64 inches
- ISBN-100809095300
- ISBN-13978-0809095308
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Camilla Townsend brings a fresh perspective to this timely and welcome biography. She goes beyond the usual accounts by English colonists, drawing on sources such as the early Spanish explorers, opinions of members of the Virginia Indian descendent communities, original but highly plausible interpretations of Algonquian words, and recent archaeological studies. This history is meticulously researched and yet thoroughly charming; it should appeal to both casual readers and serious scholars." ---Deanna Beacham, Program Specialist, Virginia Council on Indians
"Who would have thought there was anything new to say about Pocahontas? Yet fresh insights abound in this book. With sparkling style, sound scholarship, and disciplined historical imagination, Camilla Townsend weaves from the fragmentary evidence a tale far more compelling than the myths and wishful thinking that have surrounded the subject since the days of John Smith." --Daniel K. Richter, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
"There are few characters in American history less understood than Pocahontas. Camilla Townsend's fascinating new book has rescued Powhatan's daughter from both myth and mistakes. By applying the insights of recent scholars to the contemporary texts she knows so well, Townsend has done more than provide a brief biography of a crucial figure. She has made Pocahontas understandable to a twenty-first-century audience, and she has done so with elegant and spare prose. Her book should be read by everyone interested in the early colonial era or the Native American past." --Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
About the Author
Camilla Townsend lives in Hamilton, New York, and is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. She is the author of Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
ONEAmonute’s People
Casa cunnakack, peya quagh acquintin uttasantasough?(In how many daies will there come hither any more English ships?)—Powhatan query, recorded 1608-1609, quoted in John Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612)
The canoe bearing the news skimmed rapidly over the water. It was a spring day in 1607, and the rivers and streams of Tsenacomoco were swollen with rain and melted snow that came cascading down to the tidewater from the western mountains. The boat’s messengers were bound for the main settlement of Powhatan, their paramount chief, and they used the riverine network that connected his dominions to move with their customary speed. There may have been an added urgency to the well-timed dips of their paddles, though, for they carried important news. The strangers on the three great ships that had entered the bay near the place where the Chesapeakes lived were not leaving. On the contrary, they seemed to be seeking a water supply and a camping ground—in short, a place to stay.1The messengers drew near Powhatan’s village of Werowocomoco, or “King’s House.” It was on the north shore of the Pamunkey (the York River, in today’s world). Strangers unfamiliar with the area might have passed by without seeing anything other than a lovely bay, for the village was nestled back in the trees, but to these men the spot was well known, with a long history of power. It was a remarkable bay, like no other on the river: three creeks made their way in almost perfect symmetry down to the enfolded semicircle of water. To the left of the central creek, it was perfectly flat. But to the right, a knob of land rose up twenty-five feet, a fitting platform for a king.2The men had to leave their canoe in a cove formed by the creek wrapping around the side of the village. Toward the rear a spring gushed, and beyond that lay the people’s fishing weirs. Here the village land sloped gradually down to the water. But if, as often happened, several of the men sprang lightly off their craft right at the riverfront rather than entering the secluded cove, they had to follow a path up the twenty-foot bluff before they could see the village spreading out on either side, reaching into the ancient woods. It covered at least fifty acres, spreading over a much larger territory than like numbers of people usually chose to claim. Normally it was impractical to live like this. Powhatan, however, was a chief of chiefs. He had a point to make to visitors. And he had prisoners of war to do some of the requisite work. If the messengers turned around, they could see the whole bay spread before them and, beyond it, the wide grayness of the slow-moving Pamunkey Herons stood patiently near the shore; ospreys swooped low, seeking unsuspecting fish.3That evening the sky over the water glowed as it always did as the sun prepared to slip down behind the river. The summer light filtered into the woods, illuminating bits of stone or wood or leaf with low beams shot with gold. Powhatan may have received the messengers in state, as was his wont, reclining on a low platform at one end of his eighty-foot longhouse, the wall mats pinned back to let the breeze carry away some of the smoke from the hearth, his wives and children listening. Or he may have spoken alone and outdoors to those who brought the tidings, leaving his family to learn what there was to learn through village gossip. Werowocomoco, with its constant activity, was a poor place to keep a secret.Sometime soon the chief’s nine-year-old daughter, Pocahontas, would have heard the whole story.4 News of this magnitude invariably entered the rumor mill: great boats had come again, this time perhaps to stay. Even a nine-year-old child who had never seen a ship would have understood what was anchored in the bay—boats larger than any canoe, able to catch the wind with huge blankets more finely woven than any net, perhaps something like the ones wealthy chiefs acquired through long-distance trade. These boats were widely known, their arrival even anticipated, for at least one appeared off the coast every few seasons. Mostly they just passed by. Some were driven by storms into the mouths of the four rivers of Powhatan’s kingdom and sought shelter for a few days before departing.Twice before, though, in Powhatan’s long memory, such strangers had come with the intent to stay. Both times it had boded ill. Over forty years ago, when he was young, a kinsman—the son of the chiefly family of a neighboring tribe—was kidnapped when he dared to board one of the great boats. The strangers returned with him ten years later, after he had traveled over the sea and back again. By then he was a full-grown man who spoke their tongue; he had acquired one of their names, “Luis.” He told everyone that the strangers came from a land of thousands and should be killed, or many more would come. His tribe took his advice and killed them all, sparing only a child. More came anyway. Vengeful, powerful, and ignorant, they attacked with deadly force, but wreaked their retribution on the wrong tribe.Then about twenty years ago, when Powhatan was already a chief and had begun to conquer many of the tribes he now ruled, more strangers arrived, this time to the south of his lands, where the Roanoke and Croatan lived. These coat-wearers, as his people began to call them, were from a different tribe—“English” they called themselves, insisting they were not “Spanish.”5 It was said that they, too, took at least one chief’s son hostage. And they, too, came and went, came and went. Once a group of them traveled northward and stayed for a few months with the Chesapeake tribe on the coast, just across the river from Powhatan’s lands, before returning to their settlement at Roanoke. There they starved and declined until the few remaining fled the little colony and were probably sold as slaves among inland tribes.Only four years ago, in 1603, there had been another incident that everyone still remembered, probably even those as young as Pocahontas. More English had come, this time to the place where the Rappahannock lived, right in the middle of Tsenacomoco. No one was foolish enough to board the boat, but the coat-wearers still managed to seize some men, killing others who tried to stop them. Powhatan and the werowance—the chief—of the Rappahannock wondered if these coat-wearers, too, would return.Now in April 1607 they asked themselves if those who had come this time were the same men. The relatives of the kidnapped Rappahannocks, remembering the story of the return of “Luis,” would have heard the news of the ship with greater and more heart-stopping interest than did Pocahontas. They lacked information, had only some of the puzzle pieces. They could not know that the earlier ship had indeed come on a reconnaissance mission for the present expedition, but that its crew was composed of different men. Nor could they know that their kinsmen had already died: in 1603 some “Virginia Indians” had been made to demonstrate their handling of canoes on the Thames, and their subsequent deaths had gone unremarked in a city where thousands were perishing of the plague.6Indeed, there was much that the Indians could not then know about the Europeans’ interest in them, and about how the short-lived Spanish mission, the failed colony at Roanoke, and the recent English arrivals were all part of a much larger geopolitical contest. Confusing the Indians’ minimal knowledge of Europe, however, with no knowledge at all—or worse, with essential innocence—would be to misread the historical record and do them a disservice. Powhatan clearly knew there was more to the story; he undoubtedly would have given much to have had more information earlier on.Later Pocahontas and others interacting with the newcomers would learn the whole history. There had, as they knew, been dozens of European ships plying the continent’s eastern seaboard in the preceding century. Perhaps Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 was the first of them to pass the four rivers of Tsenacomoco (now the James, the York, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac), but the Spanish settling farther south had been the most frequent passersby as they worked to perfect their cartography of the New World. They recognized that the economic potential of this territory paled in comparison to that of the warm and resource-rich lands of Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean, but they believed some sort of northern settlement could still be useful. Colonists might discover a sea route to the Pacific, capture Indian slaves, and trade for valuable furs. And a settlement would provide a deterrent to French ambitions, as well as a port for beleaguered Spanish ships tossed by storms and chased by the much-feared English pirates.The Spanish had their own version of the story of the kidnapped Luis, which, combined with what the Indians knew, yields a much fuller picture. In 1561 a fleet on an exploratory expedition seized a young lord who was probably of the Chiskiak people and almost certainly a cousin of Powhatan, if not a nearer relation. Some of the Spanish claimed he had come with them of his own free will, to learn their language and their religion, but it is impossible that he could have understood all that was about to happen; other chroniclers said his family did not know he had been taken. He was taken to Spain, then sent to Mexico to be educated by Dominicans. There, living among the conquered Aztecs, the man who said he was called “Paquiquineo” at home was baptized and given the princely name Don Luis de Velasco, after the viceroy of New Spain. A few years later, one of the Spaniards who had been involved in organizing the expedition that took him became adelantado of Florida. Determined to settle the coast, and needing to communicate with the natives, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés asked the Spanish king if the valuable boy could be given into his care. Thus Don Luis was sent to Havana, and in 1566 he set sail with thirty soldiers and two Dominican friars to find his homeland.Don Luis failed to recognize anything familiar. Or so he said. Perhaps his fellow travelers didn’t press him. Many of those on board were eager to return to Spain, whither they sailed when a storm gave them a good excuse to say they had lost their bearings. In 1567, discouraged but still hopeful, the eager adelantado of Florida himself went to Spain and got himself named governor of Cuba. In 1570, Don Luis sailed back to Havana, along with a group of Jesuits seeking a foothold in the Americas whom either he or Menéndez had succeeded in interesting in the project of settling the coast. The missionaries sailed north without any soldiers. It was a most unusual decision, but Cuba and Florida had none to spare just then, and the Jesuits wanted to be free of the reins of government. Besides, Don Luis promised that all would be well. This time he had no trouble finding his homeland: halfway up the James River, he and his blackrobed friends were welcomed joyfully by his kin.7Luis helped the fathers find a place to build their mission. He said he had mistakenly led them up the wrong river: they would travel north over a narrow neck of land to the next river up and settle where his brother now ruled, quite near his own home village. He stayed with the Jesuits for a few nights, as their equipment was unpacked from the boat, and explained something of the region to them. One of the men prepared a letter to send back on their ship, which was to return to Havana to collect further supplies: “Don Luis has turned out as well as was hoped, he is most obedient to the wishes of Father.”8 Luis had explained that it would be impolitic and unnecessary to abduct and send back another Indian boy as the Spaniards had planned: “In no way does it seem best to me to send you any Indian boy, as the pilot [of the ship] will explain.” Don Luis waited until the ship left with its letter. Then—after ten years—he went home.The fathers waited at their mission settlement for Luis to return to them, but he did not come back. They languished, without food or converts. They sent pleading messages to his village. There was no response. Finally, after the winter, three of them decided to visit him: they cast public reclamations in his face, shaming to any Algonkian, and no doubt reminded him of the coming wrath of his Spanish sponsors if he did not mend his ways. Luis promised he would return to the mission.He did so, leading the war party that came to kill the strangers and remove all trace of their presence from the land. The three who had visited him were already dead, having met their fate on their way back to the settlement. Only a young boy named Alonso was spared and adopted, over Don Luis’s objections. Luis said the boy should die so as not to tell tales, but he was overruled by those who did not know the power of their new enemies.The next year the supply ship came but could not find the mission. The crew seized two Indians. One jumped overboard; the other was brought back to Havana. There he was questioned in chains—perhaps he was tortured, following European custom—but he would or could communicate only that Alonso alone was left alive. A year later the governor himself led a punitive mission to find Luis. On the James River, in the general area of the first landing, one of the expedition’s ships came upon a group of Indians who showed no fear and boarded the boat when the Spanish invited them to trade. Obviously they were not of Luis’s tribe, but the Spanish did not understand that and only marveled at their innocence. Those who boarded were held at gunpoint, while last year’s prisoner, who could now speak some Spanish, explained that they would be freed in exchange for Alonso. One of the hostages was sent as a messenger to Don Luis’s people, who did decide to release the boy, but not to the tribe that was hoping to exchange him for their captive brethren. Rather, Luis’s family sent Alonso straight to the captain of the Spanish fleet, whose ship lay at the mouth of the James River. They hoped, most likely, to convince the foreigners that they themselves were their friends, though other Indians might not be.The Spanish holding the hostages upriver waited for two days, and when Alonso did not come, they blasted a round of shot at the assembled Indians crowding the shore, killing many who were undoubtedly relatives of their prisoners. Then they sailed back to the mouth of the river to discover that Alonso was already there—and that he had told all. One of the prisoners was released with the message that the renegade Luis must be turned over to them within five days or the others would be killed. But the captives were apparently Chickahominy, no friends of Luis’s people. They would have known there was little prospect of Luis turning himself in. After five days a few men were released as “innocent”—perhaps Alonso had spoken for them—and the rest were hanged from the ship’s rigging in full view of the shore. Years later the Chickahominy still remembered the Spanish with bitterness.9It was the English, not the Spanish, who could have told Powhatan what he wanted to know about the Roanoke colony. It was their first attempt to settle this area, which they saw as being just beyond real Spanish control. Their tactics were in many ways comparable to those of their Catholic rivals. Sir Walter Raleigh, the force of energy behind Roanoke as well as numerous English explorations of the Caribbean, embraced the practice of taking Indian boys to England to be trained as interpreters. If they were to be effective, however, he thought that they should come by choice. Over the course of his life Raleigh brought about twenty Native Americans to Durham House, his home in London, and hired tutors for them. Among his protégés were Manteo, a Croatan, and Wanchese, a Roanoke, picked up in 1584 on a reconnaissance mission in the Carolinas. When the two returned to Roanoke Island in 1585 with a group of English colonists, Manteo, whose home was several days distant, remained friendly, but Wanchese, like Luis, turned on the English and convinced his people to make war against them. He probably had never trusted the English, never even given them his real name: in Pocahontas’s language, which was closely related to his own, maro/wancheso simply meant “young boy.”10The surviving Roanoke colonists, meeting hostility from the Indians and abandoned by their London suppliers for three years while the English faced the Spanish Armada, eventually fled the island. No European ever learned for certain where they had gone. They seem to have dispersed: most likely they were sold as slaves along a great inland trade route that followed the course of today’s Interstate 85. Some scholars believe they went to the Chesapeake tribe, who had sheltered some of them earlier. They point out that, at about the same time as the Jamestown colonists arrived, Powhatan made war on the Chesapeakes and in a most unusual move chose to exterminate them all. It was said that he had no choice: a prophecy supposedly had it that he would otherwise meet his doom at the hands of a people coming from the Chesapeake Bay. But it was the self-satisfied English who wrote about this prophecy, fancying themselves the destroyers and pitying the chief for mistakenly imagining that the prophecy referred to the Chesapeakes. There may never have been any such prognostication. Or if there was, perhaps Powhatan’s priests made it in order to justify their sovereign’s politically necessary action. For whether they harbored any surviving Roanoke colonists or not, the Chesapeakes were, at that time, the only large tribe in the area that refused to pay tribute to Pocahontas’s father. In ordinary times that just made them recalcitrant, but with the English on the scene it made them dangerous.11Whatever plans Powhatan made after he received the news about the English ships, Pocahontas was not immediately affected. When she awoke the morning after she first heard of the exciting events, her life would have remained unchanged. The fire would have smoked as usual. It was the women’s spiritual and practical duty to prevent it from ever going out, but by morning it always smoldered. She most likely removed her bedding from the low platform she slept on, bathed in the river, and breakfasted from the household stewpot of leftovers. It would be eight more months before she caught her first glimpse of a coat-wearer. She lived in the heartland of her father’s chieftainship, surrounded by his personal army of at least forty warriors. Visitors came to him; he did not go to visitors.Her father’s power had not always been so immense. The idea that the coastal plain, the region of the four rivers running to the sea (or the Virginia Tidewater, as the maps call it now), should have one great governing figure was relatively new. Powhatan had fought many wars to make himself the paramount chief, the mamanitowik, with power over about thirty subordinate chiefdoms and perhaps twenty thousand people. When he was a young man named Wahunsenacaw, he had inherited from one or both of his parents six chiefdoms—the Powhatan, Arrohattock, and Appomattock on the James River, and the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and Youghtanund on the upper York. This was an unusual circumstance but not incredible, as the noble families of most of the chieftainships were related by marriage. He had been born on the James River, but the northerners on the York had embraced his joint rulership, probably because the southerners had valuable trade ties to the tribes in the Carolinas, and because he was willing to establish his seat of power on the banks of their river rather than in his homeland. Since then, through peaceful alliance and intermarriage, as well as war and the forced resettlement of survivors, he had brought other tribes into submission. They paid tribute in corn, tanned hides, pearls, purple shell beads, and even valuable copper; and in exchange, he fought with them against their common enemies. In short, they recognized themselves as vassals of the man who had once been the Powhatan tribe’s chief; he now took the political name “Powhatan” as his own, giving it as well to all the tribes who were tributary to him.12The epidemics and migrations set in motion by the earlier arrival of Europeans in faraway Canada and Florida probably helped Powhatan gain power: when Iroquoian enemies closed in from the north (the Susquehannocks got as far as the Chesapeake), or microbes decimated some populations, the peoples of the region, who spoke closely related Algonkian languages, likely became more willing to work together. At the very least, these crises left temporary power vacuums that Powhatan deftly filled.13In 1596 or 1597 Powhatan conquered the Kekoughtan in just this way. Fifteen years later the still-resentful losers of the war told the story to any white man who would listen: “Upon the death of an old Weroance … Powhatan taking the advantage subtilly stepped in, and conquered the people killing the [new] chief and most of them, and the reserved [i.e., those he spared] he transported over the River, craftily chaunging their seat [of residence] and quartering them amongst his owne people.”14 Was Pocahontas’s mother one of the young women he brought home after that brutal war? It is certain that the child was born in or near 1597, and that her mother’s family had no political significance.When the baby girl was born, she was not considered particularly important, for by that time Powhatan had many other children by far more powerful queens. Still, she was the daughter of the mamanitowik and so received presents and food in abundance. Like all children, she was given two names: she was called Amonute in a ceremony before the village, and she was probably also given a private or hidden name, which her parents revealed to no one else. Everyone assumed that her mother or father would eventually give her another name reflective of her personality. By the time she was ten, the child was known as Pocahontas, apparently meaning something like “Mischief” or “Little Playful One.” It was understood that her deeds or experiences might cause her name to change again, just as her father’s had.15What did it mean for a girl to live as the daughter of the paramount chief? Many people in the modern world like to imagine that Native Americans were inexplicably and inherently different from Europeans—kinder, gentler, more spiritual—and that they instinctively chose not to deploy power in the same way. It is wishful thinking. The Indians were not essentially different from Europeans. Powhatan, who showed a sense of humor in his dealings with the newcomers, might well have laughed at our modern notions—if he did not use them to his advantage first. He knew how to wield power. His storehouses were full of goods produced by conquered tribes; he did not hesitate to dispense harsh justice when criminals were brought before him.16 And as he managed his wealth and employed effective political stratagems, Pocahontas and his other children watched, reaping the benents.Realpolitik, not inherent egalitarianism, dictated the limits of Powhatan’s power. Europeans later observed that he could not always make his subordinate werowances do his bidding. Indeed he could not. Even an absolute monarch at the head of a standing army must bargain to some extent with his underlings, spending symbolic capital on some occasions, real capital on others, threatening and practicing violence at some moments, giving way judiciously at others. And Powhatan was no absolute monarch. He was a brilliant strategist forging a new political unity out of groups that had lived separately for centuries. Those on the outskirts of his territory had least reason to fear his wrath and do his bidding. Even the Chickahominy, though surrounded by his followers, managed as a particularly large group to avoid having him name their werowances—though they made periodic tribute payments to help keep the peace.Women and children were key players in these constant power negotiations. Many Algonkian groups were matrilineal, that is to say, the chieftainship was inherited through the female line. Men ruled, unless there was no male heir, but power passed through women. A chief was succeeded not by his son but by his younger brothers (his mother’s other sons) and after them, in the next generation, by his sister’s sons. They in turn were succeeded by their sisters’ sons. If a suitable man was unavailable, then one of these sisters could herself become a female werowance, or werowansqua: before they ever saw Powhatan, for example, the Jamestown colonists would be awed by the stately queen of the Appomattock. There were clear advantages to the system: whole clans of brothers and sisters had an obvious shared interest in remaining united and maintaining their family’s power.17Powhatan incorporated matrilineality into his patterns of conquest. Viewers of twentieth-century movies may tend to think of women stolen in ancient wars as mere trophies, but when power passes through the female line, they are much more: they may be the source of legitimacy for a new dynasty. The Indians never explained this to the English, at least not in such a way that they could understand, but we see the principle playing out in the varying political arrangements that the Virginia Indians made. Powhatan placed his grown son Parahunt as werowance over the Powhatan tribe, but the young man ruled in his father’s stead, not as his successor, and it was undoubtedly understood that he would not inherit. He was a “homegrown” child, and the Powhatan people would have had no resentments about the temporary arrangement. But the case must have been quite different when Powhatan deposed another tribe’s own werowance and placed one of his sons to rule instead, as he frequently did. How could a people endure the disgrace of losing their kingly line? The answer is, they did not. Powhatan simply married a woman of their royal family. A son conceived by her would grow up to rule with loyalty both to his father and to his mother’s people. When the English came, Powhatan’s son Tatacoope was heir to the Quioccohannock, the child’s mother their werowansqua; his son Pochins, born to a Kekoughtan noblewoman before the conquest of that chiefdom, was placed in power after their werowance’s defeat.18The English made confused and scandalized comments concerning Powhatan’s marriage practices. One boy who lived for many months in his village later wrote, “If any of ye Kings wives have once a child by him, he keepes hir no longer but puts hir from him givinge hir suffitient Copper and beads to mayntayne hir and the child while it is younge and then [it] is taken from hir and mayntayned by ye King, it now being lawfull for hir beinge thus put away to marry with any other.”19 John Smith and others told similar stories, less respectful in tone. Though it was undoubtedly an exaggeration that Powhatan “put away” all his wives (observers tell us that most of his wives were young, but by implication some were older), the story was probably largely true.In context, the practice makes far more sense than it first appears to. For his political purposes, Powhatan needed many children by many different women. However, the lands of one village could not possibly provide the food and firewood necessary to keep all of them. In fact, he usually had only about twelve wives living with him. It made practical political sense for the women he married to be free to return to their people and remarry once they had borne a child of his. The children, however, were fated to return. To ensure their loyalty to their father and his people, they had to be raised with him. So after a child was weaned and no longer in need of constant care, probably at about the age of four or five, it came back to live with Powhatan’s family. Other Native Americans, like some of the Aztecs, followed this sort of arrangement as a matter of course.20Where did Pocahontas fit in this complicated web? Scholars do not know exactly. It is certain that she was not a carrier of political power: her mother was not a political pawn from a chiefly family but rather a young woman Powhatan simply wanted to marry. Did her mother live in the village with Pocahontas? Or had she returned to her own people, sending the girl back to her father only a few years before the English ships appeared? Perhaps she had died. It seems unlikely that she was present in the town. An Englishman who wrote with great interest about Pocahontas took the trouble to list the names of the wives residing with Powhatan in about 1610 and to explain which was the mother of two other children well known to the colonists, yet he merely noted in his list that living with Powhatan was “young Pocohunta a daughter of his.” We do know that when Pocahontas was about six, a daughter was born to a favored wife named Winganuske. That child was known as “the great dearling of the king’s” and later married a powerful werowance three days’ journey away. It was almost certainly one of Pocahontas’s jobs to help care for this daughter of daughters, as older girls always helped with their fathers’ younger children.21Pocahontas worked. Everybody worked. No exceptions were made for a king’s daughter. And she worked with her father’s other children and their mothers, negotiating her way successfully among them, earning or retaining her name, “Little Playful One.” A love of solitude was not tolerated in a girl. In April, when the news of the ships first reached her village, last year’s supply of dried corn and beans would have been gone or nearly gone. It was time to prepare for planting again, and to gather wild fruits. They would do it together.Every morning the women divided into groups and set out on their self-appointed tasks. Their fields, already cleared by the men, were in walking distance from the village. When the land grew tired from overfarming after a number of years, the town would move. Each man’s family planted corn, beans, squash, and fruits in their square of ground, intermingling the seeds so that the different species provided one another with what they needed—shade, varied nutrients, or trellises for climbing vines. The fields had to be small, as their only tools were digging sticks and wooden hoes, and each family had to provide all its own labor, with some of the women stopping periodically to nurse the babies suspended in cradleboards hung from nearby trees. At the end of the day young boys were left to practice their archery, proudly guarding the fields from ravenous birds and rodents. On the way home some women would stop to gather firewood, piling loose branches onto skins that they dragged back to the village; others gathered early spring berries and greens. There were eleven hundred edible species in the area, and Pocahontas was expected to learn them all from the older women.22“Ther was never seene amonge us soe cunninge a way to take fishe withal.” (Theodor de Bry, 1590)On certain days they had the more difficult—but perhaps more exciting—task of taking a canoe to gather tuckahoe root from the creeks. Tuckahoe was poisonous, but when processed properly, it could be ground into flour and made into bread. In winter, reeds had been sought to make sitting and sleeping mats as well as walls for the houses the women built, but now all the forays along the creeks were to collect tuckahoe. Canoe trips were not easy; at least three women were needed to handle the heavy dugout craft. Sometimes they had to pass through rapids roiling with spring rains, and they risked sudden squalls. The tuckahoe tubers grew under the icy water twelve to eighteen inches deep in the mud, with embedded root systems that were hard to dislodge without metal blades. The tide had to be at the perfect level if the women were to succeed in filling the canoe. And Pocahontas’s people, in the center of Tsenacomoco, were the lucky ones: other women, living on the outskirts of the chieftainship, risked being abducted by a scouting enemy war party.By late afternoon the women and girls had returned to the village. They busied themselves with the cooking that older women had already begun, or they started to gut and clean the animal carcasses their menfolk had brought home, or to scrape and tan the hides. They were indeed tired. Yet no Indian who saw them laughing and talking as they worked would have said they appeared beaten down or resentful. Skeletons from that time suggest that Indian women were as strong as many modern American men.23 And their own men, who likewise worked hard, who waged war and brought home meat and fish as often as they could, knew their women’s worth. Both sexes knew that neither could survive a month without the other.Play followed work. Nearly every night after dinner there was singing and dancing or storytelling. The melodic, throbbing voices rose and fell, accompanied by rattlelike instruments in a range of pitches. If it was a special feast day or ceremonial event, Powhatan’s family wore the clothing that other villages’ tribute payments made possible. His honored wives were expected to make a grand showing. Women always wore softened deerskin aprons, like wraparound skirts, fringed at the edges, and when they went to the woods, they also wore leggings and shoes (mockasins, they called them), like men. On special occasions—and when it was cold—the wives wrapped mantles around their shoulders and waists like blouses. The finest of these were embroidered with pearl and mother-of-pearl beads, or decorated with furs. Copper jewelry glinted from the noblewomen’s necks and arms. Most beautiful of all were the feathered cloaks, made from the rarest and most beautiful plumes. “The cloak,” an English visitor would later write of one queen’s garment, “ … [is] made of blew feathers so artificially [i.e., artfully] and thick sowed together, that it showes like a deepe purple Satten.”24If it was only an ordinary evening, Pocahontas might have sat in the flickering light of the torches and the central fire, hands busy twisting silk grass fibers into cordage. This was a skill so ingrained in all young girls that they could do it without focusing on the task, their minds intent on something else. At her age Pocahontas listened to the older people tell stories. She might have questions from time to time, but she would wait till the next day to ask them of some woman with whom she was intimate. She would never interrupt; it simply wasn’t done. Later an English visitor would impatiently urge his young translator to interrupt the telling of the creation story with some clarifying questions, but the boy, though known for being saucy, would not do it. “[If they] had proceeded in some order, they should have made yt hang togither the better,” fulminated the confused visitor, “but the boy was unwilling to question him so many things lest he should offend him.”25It is impossible to say with surety what Pocahontas learned about her gods and her history as she listened to her elders. We will never catch more than glimpses of what she was taught, for her people left no written records. The English who asked them about it later, like the Spanish before them in Mexico, claimed that the Indians believed in two great deities: a benevolent creator, and an evil force that plagued human lives. But there is no real evidence that they held such a dichotomized view. The Europeans were no doubt tempted to find evidence for a belief in God and the devil, but the discrepancies in their stories, combined with archaeological evidence and scraps of statements made by Indians and recorded in European writings, yield quite a different view. For the Indians, the universe was not so simple as to be divided between good and evil.Every person, every chiefdom, even the cosmos itself, was a complicated entity in which good motivations and bad ones were inextricably mixed, and in which resulting actions and events could be interpreted in a variety of ways, depending on one’s perspective. The people believed there was one great spirit who made heaven and earth, but infinite manifestations of that deity existed all around. The manitous or manitos of other Algonkian cultures, spirit beings, lived everywhere. Pocahontas’s father was the mamanitowik, which apparently meant something like “keeper of many spirits.” At the edge of every village was a temple in which an embodiment of that people’s own deity, or okee, was kept, who seems to have been understood to protect the people even as he made demands on them.26Pocahontas probably never saw the okee at her father’s town of Werowocomoco, because only the priests tended to the gods and were privileged to enter their temples. When the priests prayed aloud, they sometimes spoke in a rarefied or formulaic style that ordinary people did not understand. But Pocahontas certainly heard the nightly stories—much more elegantly told than the English versions we have with us now—tales of love and pride, envy and competition, death and eternal rebirth:
[The god] made the water and the fish therein and the land and a greate deare, which should feed upon the land, at which assembled the other 4 gods [of the four winds] envious hereat, from the east the west from the north and sowth, and with hunting poles kild this deare, drest him, and after they had feasted with him departed againe east west north and sowth, at which the other god in despight of this their malice to him, took all the haires of the slayne deare and spred them upon the earth with many powerfull wordes and charmes whereby every haire became a deare.27
Pocahontas was probably familiar with the tradition that her people had lived in Tsenacomoco for three hundred years. The Powhatans kept some pictoglyphic maps and apparently noted quantities on notched sticks: they certainly could have kept such a historical year count. Still, all the archaeological evidence indicates that the culture developed there in situ, evolving from earlier cultures that had been present for millennia. Both, in fact, may be true. About three hundred years earlier an agricultural revolution, spreading from the south, had changed the people’s way of life. It began as early as A.D. 900 but was not complete until about 1300. It is possible that newcomers arrived, bearing the seeds of the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—or that the seeds arrived through trade, or both. Eventually the groups that dedicated themselves most effectively to farming the Three Sisters vanquished their enemies and established their chiefdoms, and perhaps that was when the historical count began that would add up to three centuries in 1600.28The fact that Pocahontas’s people had been farming only for something over three hundred years is crucial to understanding the advantages that the Europeans had over them. Anthropologists have long known that turning from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming leads to an increase in population and the proliferation of technological advances—involving not only tools and irrigation but also weaponry, record-keeping, and transportation. What the field of plant biology has recently been able to answer is why some ancient peoples chose to farm, while others chose to remain in the Stone Age. The answer, it turns out, lies in the constellation of suitable—or protein-rich—wild plants available in a particular environment. After all, it is at first a risky venture to turn from hunting and gathering to farming. Farming is time-consuming, and crops may fail or be stolen by enemies. If the plants available in one’s environment include, for example, only such things as squashes and apples, upon which people cannot live, it makes no sense whatsoever to shift to farming, except perhaps on a part-time basis. On the other hand, it makes a great deal of sense to do it for the wheat, barley, and peas that were present in the Fertile Crescent (today’s Southwest Asia, or Iraq and Iran). Unsurprisingly, it was in the Fertile Crescent that people began to farm eleven thousand years ago; their crops and budding technologies soon spread into Europe and Asia.29In the case of the Americas, one rushes to ask, “What about corn?” Why didn’t the Native Americans plant corn, while the people of the Old World were growing their barley and wheat? Corn is indeed a protein-rich plant, and the indigenous Americans did grow it, but they did not begin to farm nearly as soon as the people of the Fertile Crescent—for there was a catch. Unlike ancient wheat, corn eleven thousand years ago was not the same useful plant that we know today. After the millennia of part-time cultivation that it took to turn the nearly useless wild teosinte, with its tiny bunches of seeds, into something approaching today’s ears of corn, the Central Mexicans did in fact become very serious full-time agriculturalists, but they could not do so before. And after several more millennia of long-distance trading, the precious seeds made their way up to Pocahontas’s ancestors in the Virginia Tidewater, where her people immediately put them to good use.In Pocahontas’s time, her people were only just beginning to feel the want of iron that might eventually have driven them to mine it; they were only beginning to organize tribute payments that might eventually have caused them to work out a calendar or a writing system. At the time, however, none of that really mattered. The people were well fed, healthy, and happy. In fact, when white settlers found themselves marooned among the Indians, they often chose to stay with them even when an opportunity arose to return to their own kind. But when the two cultures met and entered a power struggle over land and resources, it would turn out that, unbeknownst to either side, they had been in something like a technological race for centuries. And the cultural heirs of people who had been full-time agriculturalists for eleven thousand years rather than a few hundred had already won.None of this made an individual white man one whit more intelligent or more perceptive than an individual Indian—just better informed and better armed. Powhatan already knew that the strangers’ boats, obvious navigational skills, booming weapons, metal blades, and armor were cause for serious concern. Most of all, he knew he needed to know more. After he first heard the news of the strangers’ arrival, life in Werowocomoco continued normally, and he proceeded with his intelligence-gathering. The strangers settled on an island belonging to the Paspaheghs and called it “James-Towne.” Several of his subject towns had dealings with them and reported everything back to him.Spring gave way to hot summer. Pocahontas helped with the harvesting and the drying of the crops, preserving them for winter. The weather turned cold. The women put on their fur mantles and stayed in the village, weaving baskets and mats, tanning and softening hides, sewing and embroidering. The men were nearly always seeking game. They considered moving to a winter hunting camp. Then came important news. It was December, near the shortest day of the year. Powhatan’s kinsman Opechankeno had caught the strangers’ werowance and was bringing the bearded coat-wearer to the mamanitowik at Werowocomoco. If only Don Luis could have known. The tables were turned this time. No Indian prince had been taken hostage and dragged off to see the coat-wearers’ king. Instead, the Indians had made one of the coat-wearers’ leaders their prisoner, and he was coming to see their ruler. His name, they said, was “John Smith.”30Copyright © 2004 by Camilla Townsend
ONEAmonute’s People
Casa cunnakack, peya quagh acquintin uttasantasough?(In how many daies will there come hither any more English ships?)—Powhatan query, recorded 1608-1609, quoted in John Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612)
The canoe bearing the news skimmed rapidly over the water. It was a spring day in 1607, and the rivers and streams of Tsenacomoco were swollen with rain and melted snow that came cascading down to the tidewater from the western mountains. The boat’s messengers were bound for the main settlement of Powhatan, their paramount chief, and they used the riverine network that connected his dominions to move with their customary speed. There may have been an added urgency to the well-timed dips of their paddles, though, for they carried important news. The strangers on the three great ships that had entered the bay near the place where the Chesapeakes lived were not leaving. On the contrary, they seemed to be seeking a water supply and a camping ground—in short, a place to stay.1The messengers drew near Powhatan’s village of Werowocomoco, or “King’s House.” It was on the north shore of the Pamunkey (the York River, in today’s world). Strangers unfamiliar with the area might have passed by without seeing anything other than a lovely bay, for the village was nestled back in the trees, but to these men the spot was well known, with a long history of power. It was a remarkable bay, like no other on the river: three creeks made their way in almost perfect symmetry down to the enfolded semicircle of water. To the left of the central creek, it was perfectly flat. But to the right, a knob of land rose up twenty-five feet, a fitting platform for a king.2The men had to leave their canoe in a cove formed by the creek wrapping around the side of the village. Toward the rear a spring gushed, and beyond that lay the people’s fishing weirs. Here the village land sloped gradually down to the water. But if, as often happened, several of the men sprang lightly off their craft right at the riverfront rather than entering the secluded cove, they had to follow a path up the twenty-foot bluff before they could see the village spreading out on either side, reaching into the ancient woods. It covered at least fifty acres, spreading over a much larger territory than like numbers of people usually chose to claim. Normally it was impractical to live like this. Powhatan, however, was a chief of chiefs. He had a point to make to visitors. And he had prisoners of war to do some of the requisite work. If the messengers turned around, they could see the whole bay spread before them and, beyond it, the wide grayness of the slow-moving Pamunkey Herons stood patiently near the shore; ospreys swooped low, seeking unsuspecting fish.3That evening the sky over the water glowed as it always did as the sun prepared to slip down behind the river. The summer light filtered into the woods, illuminating bits of stone or wood or leaf with low beams shot with gold. Powhatan may have received the messengers in state, as was his wont, reclining on a low platform at one end of his eighty-foot longhouse, the wall mats pinned back to let the breeze carry away some of the smoke from the hearth, his wives and children listening. Or he may have spoken alone and outdoors to those who brought the tidings, leaving his family to learn what there was to learn through village gossip. Werowocomoco, with its constant activity, was a poor place to keep a secret.Sometime soon the chief’s nine-year-old daughter, Pocahontas, would have heard the whole story.4 News of this magnitude invariably entered the rumor mill: great boats had come again, this time perhaps to stay. Even a nine-year-old child who had never seen a ship would have understood what was anchored in the bay—boats larger than any canoe, able to catch the wind with huge blankets more finely woven than any net, perhaps something like the ones wealthy chiefs acquired through long-distance trade. These boats were widely known, their arrival even anticipated, for at least one appeared off the coast every few seasons. Mostly they just passed by. Some were driven by storms into the mouths of the four rivers of Powhatan’s kingdom and sought shelter for a few days before departing.Twice before, though, in Powhatan’s long memory, such strangers had come with the intent to stay. Both times it had boded ill. Over forty years ago, when he was young, a kinsman—the son of the chiefly family of a neighboring tribe—was kidnapped when he dared to board one of the great boats. The strangers returned with him ten years later, after he had traveled over the sea and back again. By then he was a full-grown man who spoke their tongue; he had acquired one of their names, “Luis.” He told everyone that the strangers came from a land of thousands and should be killed, or many more would come. His tribe took his advice and killed them all, sparing only a child. More came anyway. Vengeful, powerful, and ignorant, they attacked with deadly force, but wreaked their retribution on the wrong tribe.Then about twenty years ago, when Powhatan was already a chief and had begun to conquer many of the tribes he now ruled, more strangers arrived, this time to the south of his lands, where the Roanoke and Croatan lived. These coat-wearers, as his people began to call them, were from a different tribe—“English” they called themselves, insisting they were not “Spanish.”5 It was said that they, too, took at least one chief’s son hostage. And they, too, came and went, came and went. Once a group of them traveled northward and stayed for a few months with the Chesapeake tribe on the coast, just across the river from Powhatan’s lands, before returning to their settlement at Roanoke. There they starved and declined until the few remaining fled the little colony and were probably sold as slaves among inland tribes.Only four years ago, in 1603, there had been another incident that everyone still remembered, probably even those as young as Pocahontas. More English had come, this time to the place where the Rappahannock lived, right in the middle of Tsenacomoco. No one was foolish enough to board the boat, but the coat-wearers still managed to seize some men, killing others who tried to stop them. Powhatan and the werowance—the chief—of the Rappahannock wondered if these coat-wearers, too, would return.Now in April 1607 they asked themselves if those who had come this time were the same men. The relatives of the kidnapped Rappahannocks, remembering the story of the return of “Luis,” would have heard the news of the ship with greater and more heart-stopping interest than did Pocahontas. They lacked information, had only some of the puzzle pieces. They could not know that the earlier ship had indeed come on a reconnaissance mission for the present expedition, but that its crew was composed of different men. Nor could they know that their kinsmen had already died: in 1603 some “Virginia Indians” had been made to demonstrate their handling of canoes on the Thames, and their subsequent deaths had gone unremarked in a city where thousands were perishing of the plague.6Indeed, there was much that the Indians could not then know about the Europeans’ interest in them, and about how the short-lived Spanish mission, the failed colony at Roanoke, and the recent English arrivals were all part of a much larger geopolitical contest. Confusing the Indians’ minimal knowledge of Europe, however, with no knowledge at all—or worse, with essential innocence—would be to misread the historical record and do them a disservice. Powhatan clearly knew there was more to the story; he undoubtedly would have given much to have had more information earlier on.Later Pocahontas and others interacting with the newcomers would learn the whole history. There had, as they knew, been dozens of European ships plying the continent’s eastern seaboard in the preceding century. Perhaps Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 was the first of them to pass the four rivers of Tsenacomoco (now the James, the York, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac), but the Spanish settling farther south had been the most frequent passersby as they worked to perfect their cartography of the New World. They recognized that the economic potential of this territory paled in comparison to that of the warm and resource-rich lands of Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean, but they believed some sort of northern settlement could still be useful. Colonists might discover a sea route to the Pacific, capture Indian slaves, and trade for valuable furs. And a settlement would provide a deterrent to French ambitions, as well as a port for beleaguered Spanish ships tossed by storms and chased by the much-feared English pirates.The Spanish had their own version of the story of the kidnapped Luis, which, combined with what the Indians knew, yields a much fuller picture. In 1561 a fleet on an exploratory expedition seized a young lord who was probably of the Chiskiak people and almost certainly a cousin of Powhatan, if not a nearer relation. Some of the Spanish claimed he had come with them of his own free will, to learn their language and their religion, but it is impossible that he could have understood all that was about to happen; other chroniclers said his family did not know he had been taken. He was taken to Spain, then sent to Mexico to be educated by Dominicans. There, living among the conquered Aztecs, the man who said he was called “Paquiquineo” at home was baptized and given the princely name Don Luis de Velasco, after the viceroy of New Spain. A few years later, one of the Spaniards who had been involved in organizing the expedition that took him became adelantado of Florida. Determined to settle the coast, and needing to communicate with the natives, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés asked the Spanish king if the valuable boy could be given into his care. Thus Don Luis was sent to Havana, and in 1566 he set sail with thirty soldiers and two Dominican friars to find his homeland.Don Luis failed to recognize anything familiar. Or so he said. Perhaps his fellow travelers didn’t press him. Many of those on board were eager to return to Spain, whither they sailed when a storm gave them a good excuse to say they had lost their bearings. In 1567, discouraged but still hopeful, the eager adelantado of Florida himself went to Spain and got himself named governor of Cuba. In 1570, Don Luis sailed back to Havana, along with a group of Jesuits seeking a foothold in the Americas whom either he or Menéndez had succeeded in interesting in the project of settling the coast. The missionaries sailed north without any soldiers. It was a most unusual decision, but Cuba and Florida had none to spare just then, and the Jesuits wanted to be free of the reins of government. Besides, Don Luis promised that all would be well. This time he had no trouble finding his homeland: halfway up the James River, he and his blackrobed friends were welcomed joyfully by his kin.7Luis helped the fathers find a place to build their mission. He said he had mistakenly led them up the wrong river: they would travel north over a narrow neck of land to the next river up and settle where his brother now ruled, quite near his own home village. He stayed with the Jesuits for a few nights, as their equipment was unpacked from the boat, and explained something of the region to them. One of the men prepared a letter to send back on their ship, which was to return to Havana to collect further supplies: “Don Luis has turned out as well as was hoped, he is most obedient to the wishes of Father.”8 Luis had explained that it would be impolitic and unnecessary to abduct and send back another Indian boy as the Spaniards had planned: “In no way does it seem best to me to send you any Indian boy, as the pilot [of the ship] will explain.” Don Luis waited until the ship left with its letter. Then—after ten years—he went home.The fathers waited at their mission settlement for Luis to return to them, but he did not come back. They languished, without food or converts. They sent pleading messages to his village. There was no response. Finally, after the winter, three of them decided to visit him: they cast public reclamations in his face, shaming to any Algonkian, and no doubt reminded him of the coming wrath of his Spanish sponsors if he did not mend his ways. Luis promised he would return to the mission.He did so, leading the war party that came to kill the strangers and remove all trace of their presence from the land. The three who had visited him were already dead, having met their fate on their way back to the settlement. Only a young boy named Alonso was spared and adopted, over Don Luis’s objections. Luis said the boy should die so as not to tell tales, but he was overruled by those who did not know the power of their new enemies.The next year the supply ship came but could not find the mission. The crew seized two Indians. One jumped overboard; the other was brought back to Havana. There he was questioned in chains—perhaps he was tortured, following European custom—but he would or could communicate only that Alonso alone was left alive. A year later the governor himself led a punitive mission to find Luis. On the James River, in the general area of the first landing, one of the expedition’s ships came upon a group of Indians who showed no fear and boarded the boat when the Spanish invited them to trade. Obviously they were not of Luis’s tribe, but the Spanish did not understand that and only marveled at their innocence. Those who boarded were held at gunpoint, while last year’s prisoner, who could now speak some Spanish, explained that they would be freed in exchange for Alonso. One of the hostages was sent as a messenger to Don Luis’s people, who did decide to release the boy, but not to the tribe that was hoping to exchange him for their captive brethren. Rather, Luis’s family sent Alonso straight to the captain of the Spanish fleet, whose ship lay at the mouth of the James River. They hoped, most likely, to convince the foreigners that they themselves were their friends, though other Indians might not be.The Spanish holding the hostages upriver waited for two days, and when Alonso did not come, they blasted a round of shot at the assembled Indians crowding the shore, killing many who were undoubtedly relatives of their prisoners. Then they sailed back to the mouth of the river to discover that Alonso was already there—and that he had told all. One of the prisoners was released with the message that the renegade Luis must be turned over to them within five days or the others would be killed. But the captives were apparently Chickahominy, no friends of Luis’s people. They would have known there was little prospect of Luis turning himself in. After five days a few men were released as “innocent”—perhaps Alonso had spoken for them—and the rest were hanged from the ship’s rigging in full view of the shore. Years later the Chickahominy still remembered the Spanish with bitterness.9It was the English, not the Spanish, who could have told Powhatan what he wanted to know about the Roanoke colony. It was their first attempt to settle this area, which they saw as being just beyond real Spanish control. Their tactics were in many ways comparable to those of their Catholic rivals. Sir Walter Raleigh, the force of energy behind Roanoke as well as numerous English explorations of the Caribbean, embraced the practice of taking Indian boys to England to be trained as interpreters. If they were to be effective, however, he thought that they should come by choice. Over the course of his life Raleigh brought about twenty Native Americans to Durham House, his home in London, and hired tutors for them. Among his protégés were Manteo, a Croatan, and Wanchese, a Roanoke, picked up in 1584 on a reconnaissance mission in the Carolinas. When the two returned to Roanoke Island in 1585 with a group of English colonists, Manteo, whose home was several days distant, remained friendly, but Wanchese, like Luis, turned on the English and convinced his people to make war against them. He probably had never trusted the English, never even given them his real name: in Pocahontas’s language, which was closely related to his own, maro/wancheso simply meant “young boy.”10The surviving Roanoke colonists, meeting hostility from the Indians and abandoned by their London suppliers for three years while the English faced the Spanish Armada, eventually fled the island. No European ever learned for certain where they had gone. They seem to have dispersed: most likely they were sold as slaves along a great inland trade route that followed the course of today’s Interstate 85. Some scholars believe they went to the Chesapeake tribe, who had sheltered some of them earlier. They point out that, at about the same time as the Jamestown colonists arrived, Powhatan made war on the Chesapeakes and in a most unusual move chose to exterminate them all. It was said that he had no choice: a prophecy supposedly had it that he would otherwise meet his doom at the hands of a people coming from the Chesapeake Bay. But it was the self-satisfied English who wrote about this prophecy, fancying themselves the destroyers and pitying the chief for mistakenly imagining that the prophecy referred to the Chesapeakes. There may never have been any such prognostication. Or if there was, perhaps Powhatan’s priests made it in order to justify their sovereign’s politically necessary action. For whether they harbored any surviving Roanoke colonists or not, the Chesapeakes were, at that time, the only large tribe in the area that refused to pay tribute to Pocahontas’s father. In ordinary times that just made them recalcitrant, but with the English on the scene it made them dangerous.11Whatever plans Powhatan made after he received the news about the English ships, Pocahontas was not immediately affected. When she awoke the morning after she first heard of the exciting events, her life would have remained unchanged. The fire would have smoked as usual. It was the women’s spiritual and practical duty to prevent it from ever going out, but by morning it always smoldered. She most likely removed her bedding from the low platform she slept on, bathed in the river, and breakfasted from the household stewpot of leftovers. It would be eight more months before she caught her first glimpse of a coat-wearer. She lived in the heartland of her father’s chieftainship, surrounded by his personal army of at least forty warriors. Visitors came to him; he did not go to visitors.Her father’s power had not always been so immense. The idea that the coastal plain, the region of the four rivers running to the sea (or the Virginia Tidewater, as the maps call it now), should have one great governing figure was relatively new. Powhatan had fought many wars to make himself the paramount chief, the mamanitowik, with power over about thirty subordinate chiefdoms and perhaps twenty thousand people. When he was a young man named Wahunsenacaw, he had inherited from one or both of his parents six chiefdoms—the Powhatan, Arrohattock, and Appomattock on the James River, and the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and Youghtanund on the upper York. This was an unusual circumstance but not incredible, as the noble families of most of the chieftainships were related by marriage. He had been born on the James River, but the northerners on the York had embraced his joint rulership, probably because the southerners had valuable trade ties to the tribes in the Carolinas, and because he was willing to establish his seat of power on the banks of their river rather than in his homeland. Since then, through peaceful alliance and intermarriage, as well as war and the forced resettlement of survivors, he had brought other tribes into submission. They paid tribute in corn, tanned hides, pearls, purple shell beads, and even valuable copper; and in exchange, he fought with them against their common enemies. In short, they recognized themselves as vassals of the man who had once been the Powhatan tribe’s chief; he now took the political name “Powhatan” as his own, giving it as well to all the tribes who were tributary to him.12The epidemics and migrations set in motion by the earlier arrival of Europeans in faraway Canada and Florida probably helped Powhatan gain power: when Iroquoian enemies closed in from the north (the Susquehannocks got as far as the Chesapeake), or microbes decimated some populations, the peoples of the region, who spoke closely related Algonkian languages, likely became more willing to work together. At the very least, these crises left temporary power vacuums that Powhatan deftly filled.13In 1596 or 1597 Powhatan conquered the Kekoughtan in just this way. Fifteen years later the still-resentful losers of the war told the story to any white man who would listen: “Upon the death of an old Weroance … Powhatan taking the advantage subtilly stepped in, and conquered the people killing the [new] chief and most of them, and the reserved [i.e., those he spared] he transported over the River, craftily chaunging their seat [of residence] and quartering them amongst his owne people.”14 Was Pocahontas’s mother one of the young women he brought home after that brutal war? It is certain that the child was born in or near 1597, and that her mother’s family had no political significance.When the baby girl was born, she was not considered particularly important, for by that time Powhatan had many other children by far more powerful queens. Still, she was the daughter of the mamanitowik and so received presents and food in abundance. Like all children, she was given two names: she was called Amonute in a ceremony before the village, and she was probably also given a private or hidden name, which her parents revealed to no one else. Everyone assumed that her mother or father would eventually give her another name reflective of her personality. By the time she was ten, the child was known as Pocahontas, apparently meaning something like “Mischief” or “Little Playful One.” It was understood that her deeds or experiences might cause her name to change again, just as her father’s had.15What did it mean for a girl to live as the daughter of the paramount chief? Many people in the modern world like to imagine that Native Americans were inexplicably and inherently different from Europeans—kinder, gentler, more spiritual—and that they instinctively chose not to deploy power in the same way. It is wishful thinking. The Indians were not essentially different from Europeans. Powhatan, who showed a sense of humor in his dealings with the newcomers, might well have laughed at our modern notions—if he did not use them to his advantage first. He knew how to wield power. His storehouses were full of goods produced by conquered tribes; he did not hesitate to dispense harsh justice when criminals were brought before him.16 And as he managed his wealth and employed effective political stratagems, Pocahontas and his other children watched, reaping the benents.Realpolitik, not inherent egalitarianism, dictated the limits of Powhatan’s power. Europeans later observed that he could not always make his subordinate werowances do his bidding. Indeed he could not. Even an absolute monarch at the head of a standing army must bargain to some extent with his underlings, spending symbolic capital on some occasions, real capital on others, threatening and practicing violence at some moments, giving way judiciously at others. And Powhatan was no absolute monarch. He was a brilliant strategist forging a new political unity out of groups that had lived separately for centuries. Those on the outskirts of his territory had least reason to fear his wrath and do his bidding. Even the Chickahominy, though surrounded by his followers, managed as a particularly large group to avoid having him name their werowances—though they made periodic tribute payments to help keep the peace.Women and children were key players in these constant power negotiations. Many Algonkian groups were matrilineal, that is to say, the chieftainship was inherited through the female line. Men ruled, unless there was no male heir, but power passed through women. A chief was succeeded not by his son but by his younger brothers (his mother’s other sons) and after them, in the next generation, by his sister’s sons. They in turn were succeeded by their sisters’ sons. If a suitable man was unavailable, then one of these sisters could herself become a female werowance, or werowansqua: before they ever saw Powhatan, for example, the Jamestown colonists would be awed by the stately queen of the Appomattock. There were clear advantages to the system: whole clans of brothers and sisters had an obvious shared interest in remaining united and maintaining their family’s power.17Powhatan incorporated matrilineality into his patterns of conquest. Viewers of twentieth-century movies may tend to think of women stolen in ancient wars as mere trophies, but when power passes through the female line, they are much more: they may be the source of legitimacy for a new dynasty. The Indians never explained this to the English, at least not in such a way that they could understand, but we see the principle playing out in the varying political arrangements that the Virginia Indians made. Powhatan placed his grown son Parahunt as werowance over the Powhatan tribe, but the young man ruled in his father’s stead, not as his successor, and it was undoubtedly understood that he would not inherit. He was a “homegrown” child, and the Powhatan people would have had no resentments about the temporary arrangement. But the case must have been quite different when Powhatan deposed another tribe’s own werowance and placed one of his sons to rule instead, as he frequently did. How could a people endure the disgrace of losing their kingly line? The answer is, they did not. Powhatan simply married a woman of their royal family. A son conceived by her would grow up to rule with loyalty both to his father and to his mother’s people. When the English came, Powhatan’s son Tatacoope was heir to the Quioccohannock, the child’s mother their werowansqua; his son Pochins, born to a Kekoughtan noblewoman before the conquest of that chiefdom, was placed in power after their werowance’s defeat.18The English made confused and scandalized comments concerning Powhatan’s marriage practices. One boy who lived for many months in his village later wrote, “If any of ye Kings wives have once a child by him, he keepes hir no longer but puts hir from him givinge hir suffitient Copper and beads to mayntayne hir and the child while it is younge and then [it] is taken from hir and mayntayned by ye King, it now being lawfull for hir beinge thus put away to marry with any other.”19 John Smith and others told similar stories, less respectful in tone. Though it was undoubtedly an exaggeration that Powhatan “put away” all his wives (observers tell us that most of his wives were young, but by implication some were older), the story was probably largely true.In context, the practice makes far more sense than it first appears to. For his political purposes, Powhatan needed many children by many different women. However, the lands of one village could not possibly provide the food and firewood necessary to keep all of them. In fact, he usually had only about twelve wives living with him. It made practical political sense for the women he married to be free to return to their people and remarry once they had borne a child of his. The children, however, were fated to return. To ensure their loyalty to their father and his people, they had to be raised with him. So after a child was weaned and no longer in need of constant care, probably at about the age of four or five, it came back to live with Powhatan’s family. Other Native Americans, like some of the Aztecs, followed this sort of arrangement as a matter of course.20Where did Pocahontas fit in this complicated web? Scholars do not know exactly. It is certain that she was not a carrier of political power: her mother was not a political pawn from a chiefly family but rather a young woman Powhatan simply wanted to marry. Did her mother live in the village with Pocahontas? Or had she returned to her own people, sending the girl back to her father only a few years before the English ships appeared? Perhaps she had died. It seems unlikely that she was present in the town. An Englishman who wrote with great interest about Pocahontas took the trouble to list the names of the wives residing with Powhatan in about 1610 and to explain which was the mother of two other children well known to the colonists, yet he merely noted in his list that living with Powhatan was “young Pocohunta a daughter of his.” We do know that when Pocahontas was about six, a daughter was born to a favored wife named Winganuske. That child was known as “the great dearling of the king’s” and later married a powerful werowance three days’ journey away. It was almost certainly one of Pocahontas’s jobs to help care for this daughter of daughters, as older girls always helped with their fathers’ younger children.21Pocahontas worked. Everybody worked. No exceptions were made for a king’s daughter. And she worked with her father’s other children and their mothers, negotiating her way successfully among them, earning or retaining her name, “Little Playful One.” A love of solitude was not tolerated in a girl. In April, when the news of the ships first reached her village, last year’s supply of dried corn and beans would have been gone or nearly gone. It was time to prepare for planting again, and to gather wild fruits. They would do it together.Every morning the women divided into groups and set out on their self-appointed tasks. Their fields, already cleared by the men, were in walking distance from the village. When the land grew tired from overfarming after a number of years, the town would move. Each man’s family planted corn, beans, squash, and fruits in their square of ground, intermingling the seeds so that the different species provided one another with what they needed—shade, varied nutrients, or trellises for climbing vines. The fields had to be small, as their only tools were digging sticks and wooden hoes, and each family had to provide all its own labor, with some of the women stopping periodically to nurse the babies suspended in cradleboards hung from nearby trees. At the end of the day young boys were left to practice their archery, proudly guarding the fields from ravenous birds and rodents. On the way home some women would stop to gather firewood, piling loose branches onto skins that they dragged back to the village; others gathered early spring berries and greens. There were eleven hundred edible species in the area, and Pocahontas was expected to learn them all from the older women.22“Ther was never seene amonge us soe cunninge a way to take fishe withal.” (Theodor de Bry, 1590)On certain days they had the more difficult—but perhaps more exciting—task of taking a canoe to gather tuckahoe root from the creeks. Tuckahoe was poisonous, but when processed properly, it could be ground into flour and made into bread. In winter, reeds had been sought to make sitting and sleeping mats as well as walls for the houses the women built, but now all the forays along the creeks were to collect tuckahoe. Canoe trips were not easy; at least three women were needed to handle the heavy dugout craft. Sometimes they had to pass through rapids roiling with spring rains, and they risked sudden squalls. The tuckahoe tubers grew under the icy water twelve to eighteen inches deep in the mud, with embedded root systems that were hard to dislodge without metal blades. The tide had to be at the perfect level if the women were to succeed in filling the canoe. And Pocahontas’s people, in the center of Tsenacomoco, were the lucky ones: other women, living on the outskirts of the chieftainship, risked being abducted by a scouting enemy war party.By late afternoon the women and girls had returned to the village. They busied themselves with the cooking that older women had already begun, or they started to gut and clean the animal carcasses their menfolk had brought home, or to scrape and tan the hides. They were indeed tired. Yet no Indian who saw them laughing and talking as they worked would have said they appeared beaten down or resentful. Skeletons from that time suggest that Indian women were as strong as many modern American men.23 And their own men, who likewise worked hard, who waged war and brought home meat and fish as often as they could, knew their women’s worth. Both sexes knew that neither could survive a month without the other.Play followed work. Nearly every night after dinner there was singing and dancing or storytelling. The melodic, throbbing voices rose and fell, accompanied by rattlelike instruments in a range of pitches. If it was a special feast day or ceremonial event, Powhatan’s family wore the clothing that other villages’ tribute payments made possible. His honored wives were expected to make a grand showing. Women always wore softened deerskin aprons, like wraparound skirts, fringed at the edges, and when they went to the woods, they also wore leggings and shoes (mockasins, they called them), like men. On special occasions—and when it was cold—the wives wrapped mantles around their shoulders and waists like blouses. The finest of these were embroidered with pearl and mother-of-pearl beads, or decorated with furs. Copper jewelry glinted from the noblewomen’s necks and arms. Most beautiful of all were the feathered cloaks, made from the rarest and most beautiful plumes. “The cloak,” an English visitor would later write of one queen’s garment, “ … [is] made of blew feathers so artificially [i.e., artfully] and thick sowed together, that it showes like a deepe purple Satten.”24If it was only an ordinary evening, Pocahontas might have sat in the flickering light of the torches and the central fire, hands busy twisting silk grass fibers into cordage. This was a skill so ingrained in all young girls that they could do it without focusing on the task, their minds intent on something else. At her age Pocahontas listened to the older people tell stories. She might have questions from time to time, but she would wait till the next day to ask them of some woman with whom she was intimate. She would never interrupt; it simply wasn’t done. Later an English visitor would impatiently urge his young translator to interrupt the telling of the creation story with some clarifying questions, but the boy, though known for being saucy, would not do it. “[If they] had proceeded in some order, they should have made yt hang togither the better,” fulminated the confused visitor, “but the boy was unwilling to question him so many things lest he should offend him.”25It is impossible to say with surety what Pocahontas learned about her gods and her history as she listened to her elders. We will never catch more than glimpses of what she was taught, for her people left no written records. The English who asked them about it later, like the Spanish before them in Mexico, claimed that the Indians believed in two great deities: a benevolent creator, and an evil force that plagued human lives. But there is no real evidence that they held such a dichotomized view. The Europeans were no doubt tempted to find evidence for a belief in God and the devil, but the discrepancies in their stories, combined with archaeological evidence and scraps of statements made by Indians and recorded in European writings, yield quite a different view. For the Indians, the universe was not so simple as to be divided between good and evil.Every person, every chiefdom, even the cosmos itself, was a complicated entity in which good motivations and bad ones were inextricably mixed, and in which resulting actions and events could be interpreted in a variety of ways, depending on one’s perspective. The people believed there was one great spirit who made heaven and earth, but infinite manifestations of that deity existed all around. The manitous or manitos of other Algonkian cultures, spirit beings, lived everywhere. Pocahontas’s father was the mamanitowik, which apparently meant something like “keeper of many spirits.” At the edge of every village was a temple in which an embodiment of that people’s own deity, or okee, was kept, who seems to have been understood to protect the people even as he made demands on them.26Pocahontas probably never saw the okee at her father’s town of Werowocomoco, because only the priests tended to the gods and were privileged to enter their temples. When the priests prayed aloud, they sometimes spoke in a rarefied or formulaic style that ordinary people did not understand. But Pocahontas certainly heard the nightly stories—much more elegantly told than the English versions we have with us now—tales of love and pride, envy and competition, death and eternal rebirth:
[The god] made the water and the fish therein and the land and a greate deare, which should feed upon the land, at which assembled the other 4 gods [of the four winds] envious hereat, from the east the west from the north and sowth, and with hunting poles kild this deare, drest him, and after they had feasted with him departed againe east west north and sowth, at which the other god in despight of this their malice to him, took all the haires of the slayne deare and spred them upon the earth with many powerfull wordes and charmes whereby every haire became a deare.27
Pocahontas was probably familiar with the tradition that her people had lived in Tsenacomoco for three hundred years. The Powhatans kept some pictoglyphic maps and apparently noted quantities on notched sticks: they certainly could have kept such a historical year count. Still, all the archaeological evidence indicates that the culture developed there in situ, evolving from earlier cultures that had been present for millennia. Both, in fact, may be true. About three hundred years earlier an agricultural revolution, spreading from the south, had changed the people’s way of life. It began as early as A.D. 900 but was not complete until about 1300. It is possible that newcomers arrived, bearing the seeds of the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—or that the seeds arrived through trade, or both. Eventually the groups that dedicated themselves most effectively to farming the Three Sisters vanquished their enemies and established their chiefdoms, and perhaps that was when the historical count began that would add up to three centuries in 1600.28The fact that Pocahontas’s people had been farming only for something over three hundred years is crucial to understanding the advantages that the Europeans had over them. Anthropologists have long known that turning from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming leads to an increase in population and the proliferation of technological advances—involving not only tools and irrigation but also weaponry, record-keeping, and transportation. What the field of plant biology has recently been able to answer is why some ancient peoples chose to farm, while others chose to remain in the Stone Age. The answer, it turns out, lies in the constellation of suitable—or protein-rich—wild plants available in a particular environment. After all, it is at first a risky venture to turn from hunting and gathering to farming. Farming is time-consuming, and crops may fail or be stolen by enemies. If the plants available in one’s environment include, for example, only such things as squashes and apples, upon which people cannot live, it makes no sense whatsoever to shift to farming, except perhaps on a part-time basis. On the other hand, it makes a great deal of sense to do it for the wheat, barley, and peas that were present in the Fertile Crescent (today’s Southwest Asia, or Iraq and Iran). Unsurprisingly, it was in the Fertile Crescent that people began to farm eleven thousand years ago; their crops and budding technologies soon spread into Europe and Asia.29In the case of the Americas, one rushes to ask, “What about corn?” Why didn’t the Native Americans plant corn, while the people of the Old World were growing their barley and wheat? Corn is indeed a protein-rich plant, and the indigenous Americans did grow it, but they did not begin to farm nearly as soon as the people of the Fertile Crescent—for there was a catch. Unlike ancient wheat, corn eleven thousand years ago was not the same useful plant that we know today. After the millennia of part-time cultivation that it took to turn the nearly useless wild teosinte, with its tiny bunches of seeds, into something approaching today’s ears of corn, the Central Mexicans did in fact become very serious full-time agriculturalists, but they could not do so before. And after several more millennia of long-distance trading, the precious seeds made their way up to Pocahontas’s ancestors in the Virginia Tidewater, where her people immediately put them to good use.In Pocahontas’s time, her people were only just beginning to feel the want of iron that might eventually have driven them to mine it; they were only beginning to organize tribute payments that might eventually have caused them to work out a calendar or a writing system. At the time, however, none of that really mattered. The people were well fed, healthy, and happy. In fact, when white settlers found themselves marooned among the Indians, they often chose to stay with them even when an opportunity arose to return to their own kind. But when the two cultures met and entered a power struggle over land and resources, it would turn out that, unbeknownst to either side, they had been in something like a technological race for centuries. And the cultural heirs of people who had been full-time agriculturalists for eleven thousand years rather than a few hundred had already won.None of this made an individual white man one whit more intelligent or more perceptive than an individual Indian—just better informed and better armed. Powhatan already knew that the strangers’ boats, obvious navigational skills, booming weapons, metal blades, and armor were cause for serious concern. Most of all, he knew he needed to know more. After he first heard the news of the strangers’ arrival, life in Werowocomoco continued normally, and he proceeded with his intelligence-gathering. The strangers settled on an island belonging to the Paspaheghs and called it “James-Towne.” Several of his subject towns had dealings with them and reported everything back to him.Spring gave way to hot summer. Pocahontas helped with the harvesting and the drying of the crops, preserving them for winter. The weather turned cold. The women put on their fur mantles and stayed in the village, weaving baskets and mats, tanning and softening hides, sewing and embroidering. The men were nearly always seeking game. They considered moving to a winter hunting camp. Then came important news. It was December, near the shortest day of the year. Powhatan’s kinsman Opechankeno had caught the strangers’ werowance and was bringing the bearded coat-wearer to the mamanitowik at Werowocomoco. If only Don Luis could have known. The tables were turned this time. No Indian prince had been taken hostage and dragged off to see the coat-wearers’ king. Instead, the Indians had made one of the coat-wearers’ leaders their prisoner, and he was coming to see their ruler. His name, they said, was “John Smith.”30Copyright © 2004 by Camilla Townsend
Product details
- Publisher : Hill and Wang
- Publication date : October 13, 2004
- Edition : First Edition
- Language : English
- Print length : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0809095300
- ISBN-13 : 978-0809095308
- Item Weight : 13.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.98 x 9.64 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #480,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #29 in U.S. Colonial Period History
- #52 in Indigenous History
- #67 in Native American History (Books)
About the author
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Camilla Townsend was born in New York City and now lives in New Jersey. She has spent most of her life studying Native American history and is also an avid student of languages. She loves to hear from people who have read her books.
