Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

By December of 1607, John Smith has been captured by the Pamunkey tribe, whose werowance is Opechankeno. After days of being dragged from village to village and presented to local tribes, Smith uses some of his rudimentary Algonkian to ask that a missive be sent back to Jamestown, letting the other colonists know he is being treated kindly so that they will not launch a punitive expedition against the local tribes. Shortly after Christmas, Smith is brought to Werowocomoco to face Powhatan. As Smith is brought through the village, Townsend writes, there is no doubt that Pocahontas would have been among the crowds who came out to watch his arrival.

As Smith arrives before Powhatan, he is weary and exhausted—none of his life’s previous adventures, including fighting as a mercenary soldier and working as a slave on a farm in what is now Russia, prepared him for the New World. It has been a year since the Virginia Company departed from England. Throughout the Virginia Company’s first spring in the New World, Smith faced malnourishment, imprisonment aboard his ship, and violent clashes with the Paspahegh, Appomattock, Weyanock, Quioccohannock, and Chiskiak. All of Jamestown was stricken ill by a waterborne parasite during their first summer, and many died. That fall, starvation struck, and as Smith and his men set out to find food, they were captured by Opechankeno’s men.

When Smith is brought before Powhatan, he likely finds the werowance adorned in pearls and furs, his wives all around him. Later in life, Smith claims that Powhatan called for him to lie his head on a stone while a warrior picked up a club. Just before the moment of impact, Smith writes, the young Pocahontas threw herself onto Smith, begging her father to spare Smith’s life. This anecdote is “unequivocally” false, Townsend writes, though it is one of the best-known about Pocahontas. Smith never wrote such a story until 1624, after Pocahontas’s death—and after she had become a celebrity in London whose name would sell books. Townsend adds that in Smith’s writings about his adventures around the world, “at each critical juncture” he writes of a “beautiful young woman” falling in love with him and protecting him from her people.

It is impossible to know, given the salaciousness of Smith’s fabricated tales, if anything “remotely resembling” the anecdote he described happened at his first meeting with Powhatan. The myths he created are so ingrained in the collective cultural imagination, Townsend writes, that scholars defend them to this day. For the truth, she says, one must look to Algonkian culture and ritual. Townsend states that Powhatan would never have had Smith clubbed, since this was a punishment reserved for criminals. In all likelihood, Powhatan actually ritually adopted Smith at their first meeting, in keeping with the political strategy of expanding his control by establishing bonds of kinship.

When Powhatan asks Smith about the settlers’ purpose in Tsenacomoco, Smith likely lies and states that they were stranded and waiting for help to return, then bluffs by describing the might of Europe, the King of England, and the English’s “innumerable”  ships and “terrible manner of fighting.” Powhatan then offers to take care of the “stranded” Englishmen if they will become Powhatan’s tributaries and allies—and provide him with iron and copper weapons. Smith and the English are there to make the opposite arrangement and enlist Powhatan as a vassal—but Smith is in “no position” to argue, and agrees to consider the proposition. 

In spite of all the doubt that can be cast on Smith’s false testimonies about his experiences in Werowocomoco, two things are certain: Powhatan made him a kind of werowance in his own right, and while he lived at the village before returning to Jamestown, he likely got to know Pocahontas—at least a little. After four days, Smith is returned to Jamestown, where he makes a gift of cannons—but not guns—to the Powhatan tribe and reunites with Captain Newport, newly returned from a supply trip back to London.

Powhatan now faces a dilemma: whether to allow the settlers at Jamestown to stay, or whether to attempt to destroy the settlement. He likely knows that even if he and his warriors obliterate the colony, more English will come to create another—and his own people will suffer heavy losses either way. Though Powhatan knows the English possess more powerful weapons, he is not without power himself—but knows he’ll have to come up with ways to “outmaneuver” the settlers into offering him useful weapons and armor as tribute without pitting his forces against theirs.

Townsend writes that contrary to myths perpetuated by even the most well-intentioned historians and anthropologists, Powhatan had no interest in following the advice of priests or gods or trading for goods of “ceremonial or spiritual value.” Powhatan and his werowances wanted guns and metal, and to get them, they wanted to put the English in their debt by sending them gifts of corn and crops. The warriors of the Tsenacomoco tribes aren’t the only ones who wanted metal goods—the women who worked hard as harvesters and cooks wanted kettles, farming tools, and knives as well.

Townsend writes that she wants to make one thing very clear: at no point did Powhatan or his kinsmen ever see or revere the English as gods, or even as beings of superior intellect. Powhatan may have, after consulting with his priests, begun to believe that the Europeans’ gods favored them by blessing them with “enviable tools”—but never saw the colonizers themselves as anything other than men, just as fallible as himself. He recognized the Europeans’ advantages—but also knew the men were at a relative disadvantage, as well, since they were uncertain about the landscape and often unable to even feed themselves.

The early relations between these two groups, Townsend concludes, were marked by tense but logical attempts to understand the strangers who had come to their land on the part of the Indians—and as Powhatan met with his advisers and discussed the Europeans strategically and plainly, Pocahontas would have “heard all her elders had to say.”