Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In 1606, about a year prior to Powhatan learning of John Smith, Smith prepares to join the newly-chartered Virginia Company’s first trip across the Atlantic. He devours books by Spanish explorers, thrilled by their accounts of the New World and their encounters with the region’s native tribes. These books, Townsend writes, were often salacious, containing exaggerated accounts of the beauty—and lustiness—of the native women of the New World. These accounts also described native people as obsessed with and desperate to please white Christian settlers, “whom they count[ed] as nobleman,” according to one such book. These popular books inspired Smith—and settlers like him—to conceive of the New World as a place where they’d be worshipped as gods by foreign women.

The Virginia Company’s maiden voyage on three ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—represent the English’s hopes of creating the first viable colony in the New World. The Spanish had already launched their own very successful expeditions in hopes of finding new trade routes to get to the textiles, spices, and gems of the East. The English, having read translated accounts of the Spanish settlers’ success in the Caribbean and their conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas, also launched expeditions to the New World in the late 1500s—but their attempts at establishing colonies in both Canada and the Carolinas failed. The Spanish “soon indirectly ruled Europe.”

Many English explorers and settlers, according to their own written accounts, believed they would be fairer and more just to the native peoples of the New World than their Spanish counterparts—and that this fact made them more worthy of conquest. The feeling that they had a divine right to conquer the New World, combined with war with the Spanish and population overgrowth in England, created a perfect storm which led to the creation of the Virginia Company. In December of 1606, 144 people—among them John Smith—set out for the New World.

Though cultural myth says that John Smith was a fearless explorer who must have been excited as he set out from England, Townsend writes that the truth was likely darker. Smith knew that, in reality, the Virginia Company’s mission might be yet another doomed one. Though perhaps superficially inspired by the exciting tales of the New World many of them had read, most of the colonists were also aware of the violence, bloodshed, and uncertainty of the place. Many, Townsend writes, may even have opposed colonization deep down. “It is rare,” she writes, “that a great wrong is committed […] without some among the perpetrators protesting the deed.”

None of the men, Townsend posits, even dreamed of exterminating the Indians entirely—most settlers knew how dependent they would be on the natives of the New World for help making their colonies thrive. The English had “sworn they would not become […] the Spaniards,” and the historical record indicates that many colonists wanted not to enslave or kill the Indians but rather “give them the opportunity to work [and] to become Christian.” Pastors, explorers, and writers like Thomas More envisioned utopic ideas of the New World in which there existed a “joining and dwelling together […] to the great wealth of both peoples.” Many colonizers, having heard rumors of bloody human sacrifice among the Aztec tribes, even believed they were “sav[ing] the Indians from themselves.”

The Virginia Company’s instructions from King James I were influenced by accounts from explorers, linguists, mathematicians, and artists such as Theodor de Bry and Thomas Harriot, who published an account of their time in Roanoke which described the Indians as “a people poore” who were “for want” of the English’s judgement, knowledge, and indeed their religion. King James, then, instructed the colonists to “draw the […] heathen people…to the true service and knowledge of God.” Other instructions, however, from the shareholders of the Virginia Company themselves, warned the colonists to be prepared for a fight—and to never trust the natives with their weapons.

Many backers and members of the Virginia Company alike envisioned the Indians becoming loyal “Subjects to king James […] whereas now they live in miserable Slavery.” The English, however, “did not know as much as they thought they did” about how the Indians would react to their presence—and their best-laid plans would soon nearly “prove their undoing.”