Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

“As it turned out, England was gray. Everything about it was gray—the stonework, the weathered wood, the filthy water slapping the docks. Pocahontas had long wondered what this country would be like. In Virginia she had seen beautiful books bound in red leather, her British husband’s embroidered doublets, weapons with bejeweled handles—all from England. But now from the deck of the ship she saw that the town of Plymouth was simply gray.” 

In the book’s opening passage, Townsend calls on imagination as a means of historical inquiry. In her scholarly effort to unearth the real rather than the legendary Pocahontas, she works to depict the world through Pocahontas’s eyes. Revisiting the past requires both fact-seeking and fresh imagination. The fairy-tale Pocahontas is limited and unrealistic, yet seeking the living Pocahontas requires both creativity and fact finding.

“Myths can lend meaning to our days, and they can inspire wonderful movies. They are also deadly to our understanding. They diminish the influence of facts, and a historical figure’s ability to make us think; they diminish our ability to see with fresh eyes. What has the myth of Pocahontas kept hidden? And if the real woman could speak, what might she tell us about our country’s inception?” 

Townsend lays out her book’s mission: to demythologize Pocahontas, seeking the story of a real human rather than a sanitized feel-good fable for colonizers. Myth has the power both to conceal and to reveal more than it intends to. The false story of Pocahontas unveils the anxieties of the English settlers who invented and disseminated it.

“Over the course of his life Raleigh brought about twenty Native Americans to [...] London, and hired tutors for them. Among his proteges 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 [...] remained friendly, but Wanchese [...] 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.” 

The history of Native Americans’ early visits to Europe reveal the often glossed-over complexity of the interactions between these two worlds. Native Americans had no homogenous cultural response to the European settlers, especially since the colonist’s intentions to dominate and enslave the native people were only slowly revealed. The use of names to set tiers in a power structure also puts in a first appearance here; “boy” is a diminutive epithet that has often been used by white people to address males of color.