1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [32]
Intending to explore the headwaters of the Chickahominy River, Smith went off in a canoe with two Indian guides and two English companions. They ran into a hunting party led by Opechancanough (oh-pee-CHAN-can-oh), Powhatan’s younger brother, who was vocally anti-immigrant. He wanted no illegal aliens in Tsenacomoco. During the inevitable skirmish the Indians killed Smith’s companions; Smith fell into a swamp and was captured. Opechancanough brought the adventurer to his brother’s capital, Werowocomoco. In the most famous version of the story—the one published in True Travels—Smith approached Powhatan through a gauntlet: “two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all of their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds.” The king gave him a public feast. Then, Smith wrote, Powhatan decided to kill him on the spot, in the banquet hall. Executioners “being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter,” then perhaps eleven years old, suddenly rushed out and cradled Smith’s head in her arms “to save him from death.” Fondly indulging his daughter’s crush, Powhatan commuted Smith’s sentence and returned him to Jamestown, where the girl “brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els[e] for all this had starved with hunger.”
Countless romantic novels have been spawned by Smith’s tale, but most researchers believe it to be untrue. In his debunking, Henry Adams pointed out that the earliest account of the rescue dates from 1624, in the boastful autobiography Smith published just before the boastful True Travels. But Smith also wrote about his abduction in 1608, a few months after it happened, in a report not intended for public view, and said not a word about being saved by a love-smitten Indian maiden. Smith clearly relished the image of infatuated women coming to his rescue—in True Travels, it happens no less than four times. More damning still, no anthropologist or historian has found any suggestion that the Powhatan ever held feasts for prisoners of war before executing them. Nor were children like Pocahontas admitted to official dinners—they were in the kitchen, washing dishes. “None of the story fits the culture,” the anthropologist Helen Rountree told me. “Big meals are for honored guests, not criminals to be executed.” In her view, the feast suggests the Indians regarded Smith as a potential treasure trove of data about the foreign invaders. “It’s hard to see them killing an intelligence asset,” she said.
John Smith’s tale of rescue from execution by the “Indian princess” Pocahontas has proven irresistible to generations of artists, despite historians’ disbelief in its veracity. In this 1870 engraving, Pocahontas resembles an opera star, the Powhatan have been given tipi homes like those in the West, and the venue has been transplanted to a hilly and almost treeless expanse unlike anything in coastal Virginia. (Photo credit 2.4)
Historians dislike the Pocahontas-rescue story for another, deeper reason. By pumping up the romance and fanfaronade, it draws attention from what the English were actually trying to accomplish in Virginia—and what happened to Tsenacomoco when they arrived. Brave adventurers like Smith were integral to Jamestown, but the colony was primarily an economic venture. And for all the danger and conflict, its fate was decided less, in the end, by the clash of arms than by impersonal ecological forces—the Columbian Exchange—that nobody in Virginia was then equipped to understand.
Like La Isabela, Jamestown was intended as a trading post, a midway point from which England could seize its share of the China trade. But whereas La Isabela was largely sponsored and controlled by the Spanish monarchy, Jamestown