Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma Summary

In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, historian Camilla Townsend attempts to revise the inaccurate, racist, and harmful cultural myths about Pocahontas, the Powhatan people, and the colonization of the Virginia Tidewater region—known as Tsenacomoco to the Algonkian-speaking tribes native to the area. Though the Virginia Company, chartered by King James I of England, arrived in Virginia in 1607, Townsend posits that an understanding of the complex relationship between the English and the Native Americans lies in the history both of England and of the New World. The eventual victory of the English settlers over the region’s Indigenous tribes, Townsend says, was not a question of physical might or political savvy, but a fate rooted in the fact that the English had been living a sedentary, agriculturalist lifestyle for millennia. This lifestyle allowed them to focus on other areas of development including metalworking and weaponry. The Algonkian tribes, meanwhile, had only begun farming 300 years prior to the settlers’ arrival. This meant that while they were powerful warriors and savvy politicians on the cusp of developing systems of taxation, a written language, a formal calendar, and metalwork for weaponry, the arrival of the settlers meant that any chance of innovation or development was lost forever. “A new nation,” Townsend writes, “was going to be built on their people’s destruction—a destruction that would be either partial or complete.”

Pocahontas is born circa 1597 to Powhatan, the mamanitowik—or paramount chief—of a cluster of Algonkian-speaking tribes he’d brought under his command over the course of his life. Pocahontas is often erroneously described as Powhatan’s favorite child. However, Townsend posits that Pocahontas is, in fact, the daughter of a commoner, and of little political value to Powhatan at all in the early years of her life.

In the spring of 1607, when Pocahontas is around nine years old, a group of Englishmen (who have either paid their way or sold their labor to travel to the New World and settle a colony at Jamestown) arrive in the Tsenacomoco region. Months later, in December, Captain John Smith, a naval officer who’s traveled the world and written widely about his salacious (and largely fictitious) exploits, is captured by Opechankeno, the werowance (chief) of the Pamunkey tribe. Opechankeno brings the man—who he knows is the “werowance” of the strangers who recently arrived in the bay—before Powhatan. Townsend destroys another myth associated with this first meeting between Powhatan and Smith, stating that Powhatan never tried to kill Smith. Nor did Pocahontas—as she is often rumored to have done—throw herself over Smith’s prone body to save him. Instead, Powhatan likely ritually adopts Smith in a ceremony he’s performed perhaps hundreds of times—a common move meant to create an allegiance between two groups. Powhatan asks for a gift of guns in exchange for food, including corn and seeds—but having been told by the backers of the Virginia Company to never hand over weaponry to the natives, Smith instead gifts unwieldy cannons, which displeases Powhatan. Powhatan likely considers destroying Jamestown through a coordinated assault—but instead decides to try to outmaneuver the settlers into picking up and leaving Jamestown of their own accord.

In 1608, as relations between the settlers and the Powhatan people deteriorate, Powhatan sends Pocahontas to Jamestown to negotiate for the return of several hostages. Again, Townsend debunks the myth that Pocahontas was sent because she was especially beloved by either John Smith or Powhatan. Rather, she is likely sent because as a young girl of about 10, she’s absorbed much more of the English language than the adults in her tribe have, and is an apt translator. Pocahontas successfully makes the negotiation with the help of two other translators. As relations ease, she begins regularly visiting the colony to instruct John Smith in Algonkian and learn English from him in return. Smith, now president of Jamestown and tasked with managing a failing colony, continues to demand corn and food from the surrounding tribes, yet still will not surrender the weapons Powhatan wants. Powhatan and his people retreat into the woods where the settlers cannot find them, and Smith begins leading raids on other villages, exasperated with his inability to bend the Algonkians to his will. Frustrated and wounded, Smith leaves Jamestown in 1609. In 1610, when two new ships of settlers arrive, they find Jamestown with a population of less than 100 people. They rescue the colonists and begin preparing to abandon the colony. However, as they sail downriver, they find that yet another fleet of ships, settlers, and supplies (led by Lord De La Warr and his second-in-command, Captain Samuel Argall) have arrived.

Back in 1609, the Virginia Company’s wealthy backers—aware the colony at Jamestown is foundering and desperate for more investors, laborers, and attention—converts the charter from a private venture into a public joint-stock company. Many new settlers, anxious about the tales of violence they’ve heard from the New World (and, Townsend writes, likely morally conflicted about taking land from the natives) nonetheless sign up to seek their fortunes. Among these men is John Rolfe, the son of a merchant who wants to make a name for himself in the New World. Rolfe and his wife leave England in 1609, become shipwrecked in Bermuda, and eventually make their way to Jamestown as part of the fleet that arrives just before Lord De La Warr’s. They decide to stay, buoyed by the idea that new bodies and new provisions might turn the colony around yet.

However, throughout 1610, relations between the Powhatan and the settlers deteriorate even further, with massacres becoming commonplace. Argall, less hotheaded than other commanders, begins using hostage-taking strategically rather than punitively in hopes of brokering peace with the Powhatan. In 1613, Argall hears of a valuable hostage who is staying at a nearby Patowomeck village as the guest of the tribe’s werowance, Yapassus. This person is Pocahontas, who is on a political visit to her deceased husband, Kocoom’s, people. At this time, she is 15 or 16 at the most. Argall coerces the chief into tricking Pocahontas to come aboard an English ship, where Argall promptly declares her his prisoner and brings her back to Jamestown.

Powhatan begs the English to return Pocahontas to him, claiming they can have anything they want in exchange—but Argall knows the value of the “princess,” and hastens her to Henrico, a new outpost up the river. Here, she is installed in the home of Reverend Alexander Whitaker, a man determined to prove that he has the power to convert large swaths of the native population to Christianity. Whitaker begins instructing Pocahontas in the English language and the King James Bible, and brings her to his weekly sermons at Jamestown. There, Pocahontas meets John Rolfe—who, mourning his recently-deceased wife, falls in passionate love with the young woman. Pocahontas, Townsend writes, communicates with her father through messengers during this time, and likely hatches a plan with him to stay in the company of the English in hopes of easing relations from the inside out. In April of 1614, Pocahontas agrees to convert to Christianity, assume the Christian name Rebecca, and marry John Rolfe. Pocahontas goes to live with Rolfe on his tobacco plantation, where she helps him cultivate new methods of planting, farming, and drying the crop.

In 1616, Pocahontas and John Rolfe, along with their young son Thomas, Captain Argall, an adviser to Powhatan named Uttamatomakin, and several other native attendants (some of them Pocahontas’s relatives) are invited to travel to London to be hosted at court and to meet the wealthy backers of the Virginia Company. The Virginia Company hopes to drum up gossip, press, and political favor by bringing a converted Indian and her husband to be shown off around town. In London, Sir Edwin Sandys, a member of Parliament and prominent investor in the Company, takes John Rolfe and Pocahontas under his wing, giving them funds to use on their trip. Pocahontas and her fellow kinsmen are, Townsend writes, likely demoralized by what they find in London: a bustling city of 200,000 people, endless streams of whom will, no doubt, soon begin making their way to the New World. Pocahontas, overwhelmed and sick from foreign microbes to which she has no immunity, nonetheless attended events at the court of King James I, sits for a portrait by the prominent Dutch-German artist Simon Van de Passe, and even finds herself face-to-face once again with John Smith. In a lengthy tirade, she accuses Smith of betraying her father, massacring her people, and treating those he should have respected as “strangers.”

In March of 1617, Rolfe, Pocahontas, and their group prepared to sail back to Virginia. Pocahontas, however, succumbs to her illness during a stop in Gravesend—and many of her fellow people are too sick to make their journey back home, either. Rolfe buries Pocahontas, leaves their young son in the care of a vice-admiral, and returns to Virginia, where he finds Jamestown in a “pitiful state.” Rolfe is nonetheless prepared to do the bidding of his patron, Sandys, and begins attempting to negotiate the creation of a school for native children, where they will be instructed in English and converted to Christianity. Rolfe oversells the tribes’ willingness to surrender their children in his letters to Sandys—in reality, relations between settlers and natives are worse than ever, and Uttamatomakin’s woeful report to Opechankeno (now Powhatan’s chief military man) leads the Indians to believe that they are running out of time to drive the settlers off their land.

In 1622, just after Rolfe’s death, the Powhatan people launch an organized assault on Jamestown, killing a quarter of the colony’s population on the anniversary of Powhatan’s death and Pocahontas’s funeral—a date, Townsend suggests, that is likely coincidental but nonetheless symbolic. The Virginia Company, upon hearing of the assault, gives the settlers carte-blanche to abandon any efforts at peace with the surrounding tribes and to slaughter them outright. The colonists wage all-out war on the Powhatan—bringing to an end any question of who will control the Tsenacomoco. Though werowances and leaders, such as Queen Cockacoeske of the Pamunkey, continue to fight against the colonists, by 1677 the leaders of all the major local tribes are forced to sign away their lands in peace treaties. Individuals like Pocahontas and Cockacoeske, Townsend states, are done a disservice by the myths that have sprung up around their legacies: their bravery, she says, is a kind of real-world heroism not found in “epic tales.”