Pocahontas
is known throughout the world, especially to Americans and Britishers, as an
example of friendly relations between the races as well as an epitome of the
Rousseauvian ‘noble
savage’. Her images adorn Washington’s Capitol building in portraits
and friezes, and she has been a character in numerous dramas, beginning
in the 17th century with Ben Jonson.
In 1995, Walt Disney’s studios
made an animated
movie
of the famous Smith-Pocahontas tale, in which the native princess is
portrayed
as a rather voluptuous and beautiful woman. Her body is scarcely contained
within a
buckskin
outfit
that is not only split on both sides of its skirt, but is
several inches shorter than the dresses of the other women in Disney’s
unhistorical Indian tribe. We know that when
Captain
John Smith, 42, met her, Pocahontas was only 11 years old, and we
also know that she did not resemble Disney’s ridiculous heroine. (There
are numerous assertions on the Internet that Smith raped her and left her
with a child, but I have found no verification of these.)
The only portrait
known to have been made while she was alive was an etching made in
England by Dutch engraver, Simon Van de Passe (used on an American
stamp in 1907), prints of which were sold at the time to the
curious. Over time, images of her (as in the case of Cleopatra)
were beautified to suit contemporary tastes, but John Chamberlaine, a
member of the English nobility, commented that she was "no fayre
[beautiful] Lady".
On April 5, 1614, at Jamestown,
Virginia,
one of England’s earliest New World colonies, 18-year-old native Algonquin
‘princess’ Pocahontas
married wealthy English tobacco planter,
John
Rolfe. Pocahontas was a nickname meaning ‘naughty
one’
or ‘spoiled child’, her real name being Amonte (as she was known to her parents), or Matoaka, her clan name.
She had already married an Indian warrior named Kocoum
in 1610. Her
aging father, the Mamanatowick (great chief) Powhatan, did not attend
the wedding, although some relatives were there.
According
to some, the religious 28-year-old widower, John Rolfe, had found it
difficult to decide whether to marry a "strange wife”, a heathen
Indian, who had proclaimed her love for him. What is more likely is that
after Matowaka had been treacherously captured and held hostage for more
than a year, she was released, with marriage to Rolfe a condition of her
freedom. Women were always in short supply in the colonies.
However
that may be, the princess married one of the leading men in the early
history of commercialised tobacco, after she had been converted to
Christianity, "for the good of the plantation, the honor of our
country, for the glory of God, for mine own salvation ..." Matoaka took, or was given, the baptismal name of
Rebecca.
Some years before, in December 1607 when she was aged 11,
Pocahontas/Mataoka might have been a participant in one of history’s
romantic moments. According to a story whose veracity is doubted by many
historians but staunchly defended by others,
she saved the life of 42-year-old Captain John Smith by interceding on his
behalf when he was stretched out on the ground and about to be executed
according to Powhatan’s command. However, Indian
activists claim that this incident is highly unlikely and Smith
invented it as “justification
to wage war on Powhatan's Nation”, and that he only did so “after her death and her fame in London society” – which
was at least eight years after the alleged incident.
What definitely is accepted by scholars, is that she was
lured aboard a ship, kidnapped
and used as a hostage by Samuel Argall in 1612-13. After
almost a year of her captivity, Sir
Thomas Dale (acting Governor of Virginia, 1614 - 16) brought 150 armed men
and Pocahontas into Powhatan’s territory to secure her ransom. The
Englishmen, attacked by the Algonquin, burned many houses, destroyed
villages, and killed several men.
Following
her marriage to Rolfe, Mataoka was taken
in 1615 to England, with her husband and child and about a dozen Algonguins,
by Dale,
whose purpose was to raise funds for the Virginia Company. The curiosities
in the shape of people from another place were bound to attract attention,
and the media-PR mill of the day went into overdrive, to the great advantage
of the fledgling tobacco industry. The young princess was taken to the royal
court, where she was presented to King
James I (he whose scholars gave us the King James Bible) and Queen Anne,
as well as a drunken Ben
Jonson, the English playwright, who featured her in a play, The
Staple of News.
|
This would
certainly have been a fine time to be in London with some money to
burn, perhaps to see a Jonson or Shakespeare play. As it happens, good
ol’ Cap’n Smith was also in town at this time – Princess Mataoka
had not seen him for eight years and had believed him dead. Smith
records that at their meeting, she was at first too emotional to speak
(we can only guess why). At one point she called him
"father," and when he objected, she replied, according to
Smith, with defiance: "Were you not afraid to come into my
father's Countrie, and caused feare in him and all of his people and
feare you here I should call you father: I tell you I will, and you
shall call mee childe, and so I will be for ever and ever your
Countrieman".
Another source says she turned her back on him, wept, called him
a liar and showed him the door.
The two never met again.
Before she could set sail for her homeland, in March 1616, Mataoka died of
pneumonia (some say smallpox), aged about 20, just one month before the
demise of William Shakespeare on April 23rd. The much-misrepresented Mataoke/Pocahontas
was buried at St
George’s Church, Gravesend, London, which operates a tourist facility
and website that maintain the Pocahontas fictions, as does Hollywood – and
not a few educators.
And what of
husband John Rolfe? He returned to Virginia where he was killed in an
Indian massacre in 1622. Their son Thomas Rolfe, after receiving an
English education, returned to Virginia where he became a prominent
citizen. And Captain Smith? He returned to the New World in 1614 and
explored the New England coast. On one voyage of exploration, he was
captured by pirates but escaped after three months of captivity. He
then returned to England, where he died in 1631.
|
John
Smith in a stained-glass
window
at St Sepulchre’s Church, London,
where he was buried
|
