Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Meanwhile, in Virginia, the English waited for word from Powhatan. And waited. Powhatan was ignoring the rest of their demands and showed no more signs of wanting his daughter back. He had called the colonists’ bluff.

  Frustratingly little is recorded about the day-to-day conditions of Pocahontas’s captivity, or about her reactions to them, beyond Hamor’s generalities that the English made “much ado” to calm her wrath “with extraordinary courteous usage.” Neither did anyone in Jamestown or London seem to have qualms about the kidnapping— with the predictable exception of John Smith. In Smith’s secondhand relation of the episode, after he described the manner in which she had been tricked, he sternly editorialized, “thus they betrayed the poore innocent Pocahontas aboord.” It was the only disapproval expressed in any of the surviving accounts.

  What is known is that Pocahontas was taken, at some point, to Henricus, a newer settlement located at Dutch Gap in present-day Chesterfield County. Thomas Dale had founded Henricus in 1611 with either 200 settlers (according to George Percy) or 350 settlers (according to Hamor), and named it for Henry Stuart, prince of Wales. Alexander Whitaker, a thirty-eight-year-old minister from Cambridge, was assigned the task of polishing Pocahontas’s English and teaching her the ways of a Christian lady.

  In the minds of the colony’s leaders, evangelism was fine as long as it did not interfere with anything else. Although Dale reportedly treated Pocahontas with kindness, he saw no percentage in maintaining her out of the colony’s stores merely so she could memorize the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed. When the winter came and went without word from Powhatan, and thus no prospect of ransoming the young captive, Dale took matters into his own hands.

  In March 1614, Dale sailed with Pocahontas and 150 men to a Powhatan town on the Pamunkey River where he believed her father was staying. The natives regarded his unexpected appearance with suspicion. “It was a day or two before we heard of them,” Dale recalled.

  At length they demanded why we came; I gave for answer that I came to bring him his daughter, conditionally he would—as agreed upon for her ransom— render all the arms, tools, swords, and men (that had run away), and give me a ship full of corn for the wrong he had done unto us. If they would do this, we would be friends; if not, burn all.6

  Chief Powhatan was actually several days’ distance away. As Dale waited for Powhatan’s men to send for him, the combination of his impatience and their distrust incubated a brief skirmish with shooting on both sides. Dale’s party retaliated by marching through the town, where they burned down some forty houses and killed five or six of Powhatan’s warriors. The English then made their way further upriver to Matchcot, where they were met by a force of around four hundred men with bows and arrows. The landing was peaceful but tense, with each side hanging back and waiting for the other to make the first hostile move.

  The English brought Pocahontas ashore, where a crowd of wellwishers and the merely curious came to see her. Among the visitors were two of Pocahontas’s many half brothers, who rejoiced to find that she had been treated well. They swiftly discovered that Pocahontas was not so enthusiastic about the reunion. She still had her strongwilled spirit, and her capacity for surprise.

  Apart from her half brothers and a few of the most senior members of the tribe, Pocahontas would speak to no one. Her message to those few was as astonishing to them as it was to the English. “The king’s daughter went ashore,” Dale wrote, “but would not talk to any of them, scarce to them of the best sort, and to them only that if her father had loved her, he would not value her less than old swords, pieces [guns], or axes; wherefore she would still dwell with the Englishmen, who loved her.”

  However unexpected her decision, it was true to form: Pocahontas had found a way, against the odds, to remain master of her fate. In electing to stay with the English, she had several evident motives. One was her longtime affinity for the English, going back to December 1607 when she first laid eyes on John Smith, and her subsequent girlhood visits to converse with Smith and to play with the boys of the fort. Another was her attraction to Christianity, which had struck a resonant chord in her; she proved an eager student of the English faith.

  In considering the attractiveness of English culture, flawed as it was, she had to look only as far as the case of her own mother: having attained the status of royalty as one of Powhatan’s wives, she had been cast aside as soon as Pocahontas had been born. It was nothing personal; it was simply the way of Powhatan society. The chief of chiefs sent each of his wives away—divorced her, in effect—after she bore her first child. Once Pocahontas’s mother raised her through her earliest years, Pocahontas had been taken away from her (again, in accord with local custom) and raised in Powhatan’s household. Her mother, now completely on her own, became a commoner again. She remains nameless to this day.

  Lastly, and most importantly, Pocahontas had a secret of the heart, one that was soon to come into the open on Dale’s ship. For some time, the air at Henricus had been warming up between Pocahontas and a certain twenty-eight-year-old colonist. That colonist was John Rolfe, one of the Sea Venture survivors. He had been hit twice by tragedy since coming to the New World: once with the death of his infant daughter Bermuda several years earlier, and again with the death of his wife in Virginia (of causes now unknown). He had since channeled his energies into his ambitions for the colony’s prosperity and his own. In that regard, he saw tobacco as a possible export crop for the colony, and had been tinkering with the planting of varieties from the Caribbean and South America. He is said to have been a handsome man; Pocahontas was perhaps attracted, also, by his gentle and devout nature.

  Within the Powhatan culture of the time, a woman’s favor was to be won through the manly virtue of superior hunting ability. It made sense, given that hunting was the man’s only responsibility within the marriage. In this, Rolfe (like all of the colonists) was noticeably deficient in comparison to the men of Pocahontas’s tribe. That Pocahontas was attracted to Rolfe anyway was a reflection of her nonconformist spirit, but it might also have been the product of something more. There was an unconfirmed rumor that she had already been married to and divorced from a man of her own people, a Powhatan captain named Kocoum. In that case, it likely would have been Kocoum who divorced her; Powhatan men were free to divorce their wives at their pleasure, but nothing is recorded of the women being able to divorce their husbands. If the rumor of Pocahontas’s marriage and divorce was true, the unhappy experience could well have given her a heightened appreciation for the softer virtues that Rolfe presented.7

  Rolfe struggled against his infatuation with Pocahontas at first. He was concerned that a romantic attachment to the native girl would render him a laughingstock. Moreover, while a relationship with Pocahontas would not violate the letter of Dale’s “Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall,” Rolfe was apprehensive as to how Dale would react— with good reason, since Dale’s punishments could be as cruel as Chief Powhatan’s. Still, Rolfe visited her discreetly at the Reverend Alexander Whitaker’s home, “Rocke Hall,” under Whitaker’s approving eye.

  Rolfe’s doubts and fears never had much chance of prevailing. Stationed at the end of the earth, he had happened upon a young woman of exceptional vitality, intelligence, and good looks. Pocahontas’s looks were altogether exotic from the perspective of an Englishman in 1614, with her light brown skin, her dark eyes, and the long hair running down her back. As time went on, Rolfe found himself distracted by day with thoughts of her, and sleepless by night. Finally he surrendered to the inevitable and sat down to compose a letter to Sir Thomas Dale explaining that he wished to marry the captive princess.

  Rolfe clearly felt that gaining Dale’s approval would be a delicate matter. He framed the issue in terms of the good of the colony, a strategy that he probably calculated would win favor from the tough-minded marshal and deputy governor faster than a declaration of undying love. Yet Rolfe’s feelings managed to surface despite himself
. He was, he claimed,

  [in] no way led—so far forth as man’s weakness may permit—with the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the glory of God, for my own salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ an unbelieving creature, namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are and have a long time been so entangled and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth, that I was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout.8

  Rolfe wrote that he had attempted to scrutinize the peculiar emotions he had been experiencing, in hopes of understanding where they had come from—the better, he said, to help him make them go away. Pocahontas’s education, after all, had been primitive, her English social graces were still ill-formed, and her upbringing had been totally different from his own. He had pondered the Book of Ezra’s warning against marriage to foreign wives. “Oftentimes with fear and trembling,” he recalled, “I have ended my private controversy with this: ‘Surely these are wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in man’s destruction!’ ” But in the end, he had failed utterly to put Pocahontas out of his thoughts.

  On that day in Matchcot, Rolfe was in Dale’s party, but he either would not or could not talk face-to-face with Dale about his intentions. He would not even hand Dale the letter in person. Instead, he gave it to Ralph Hamor, to be given to Dale at some suitable moment. Dale, unaware that anything was up, sent Rolfe and another man on an expedition to try to find Powhatan and deliver Dale’s demands. One suspects that Rolfe was happy to be off the scene.

  After Pocahontas announced to the Powhatans that she wished to stay with the English, “who loved her,” she returned with her half brothers to the ship. There, the full import of her decision was unveiled. Hamor pressed the note into Dale’s hand, while Pocahontas broke the news to her brethren: she and John Rolfe wished to become wife and husband.

  After recovering from his surprise, Dale must have smirked at Rolfe’s claim that he wanted to marry Pocahontas for the sake of her religious conversion. Not only was the contention dubious on its face, Dale was well aware that Whitaker was already succeeding in that department; no marriage vows were necessary. That was all beside the point in any case, from Dale’s perspective. He was attracted to the pragmatic possibilities in the union—possibilities for better relations with the natives—and gave his assent on the spot.

  The English returned with Pocahontas to the Henricus settlement, where she asked for and received the rite of baptism. With that done, she became the first native in English America to convert to Christianity. In baptizing her, Whitaker gave her the name of Rebecca, after the Old Testament story of the beautiful and pure foreign girl whose arrival was a sign of God’s blessing of Abraham.9

  Powhatan learned about the intended marriage from his sons, and found it acceptable. He sent one of Pocahontas’s old uncles by the name of Opachisco, apparently a brother of Pocahontas’s mother, to stand in for him at the wedding ceremony. (The fact that he did not also send her mother suggests that she had died by this time.) Powhatan also sent two of his sons as observers, though not, it seems, the same ones who had met with Pocahontas at Dale’s ship—not surprisingly, since he had twenty sons or more.

  The wedding took place in April 1614, in the church at either Jamestown or Henricus. Hard details of the occasion are lacking, but under English customs of the time, a springtime wedding would normally have taken place on a Sunday morning at dawn. A woman of the colony must have been drafted to help Pocahontas dress at first light, draping her in the fanciest clothes that could be made or borrowed on short notice—a “tunic of dacca muslin, a flowing veil and long robe of rich material . . . [and] a chain of fresh-water pearls,” it has been conjectured—along with a colorful pair of gloves. Pocahontas’s hair may have been braided for the special occasion, and in her hand she probably carried a circle of garland made of flowers or fragrant rosemary.

  When ready to emerge, Pocahontas would have led a procession of their guests to the church, where Rolfe awaited the symbolic “delivery” of his bride. Keeping pace just ahead of her would have been a bearer of rosemary (for good luck) and a serenading minstrel, possibly the taborer Thomas Dowse.

  Friends of the bride and groom would have decorated the church the night before, knitting flowers together by their stems into lengthy chains and hanging them on the church walls. When the procession reached the altar, Opachisco would have given Pocahontas to the groom, a concept familiar to him from Powhatan custom. Pocahontas would have then stood to Rolfe’s left while the others took their seats in the pews. The minister in front of them could equally well have been Richard Buck, Rolfe’s compatriot on Bermuda, or Alexander Whitaker, Pocahontas’s teacher. The clergyman began the service with the words of the English Book of Common Prayer: “Dearly beloved friends, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of his congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony. . . .”

  In 1614, as in the present, the emphasis after a wedding ceremony was on merrymaking—only more so. With the conclusion of the service, Pocahontas would have arranged her garland on her hair, where it would now serve as her crown. The guests, after sharing cake and ale at the church, would have made a procession to the couple’s home, formerly Rolfe’s home. The notion of the newlyweds whisking themselves off that night, or the next morning, to the solitude of a honeymoon was altogether alien to the English of this time. Solitude could wait. The celebrants would stay for two or three days of feasting, dancing, and outdoor games.

  Yet there was one interval of privacy to allow the couple to complete their union. Pocahontas’s attendants would have undressed her in her new bedroom and escorted her to bed. By tradition, Rolfe would have been undressed elsewhere and then brought to bed in the midst of much snickering. Rolfe, being a man of an exceedingly serious cast of mind, might not have submitted to this. Nor is it probable that he tolerated the customary wedding-night antics in which the guests, suitably unhinged by alcohol, sewed the couple in between their sheets. Regardless, the guests would have gathered in the bedroom and waited for Pocahontas—coached by the crowd—to toss her stockings from beneath the covers. This was the signal that she was ready for her husband to make love to her, and the signal for the guests to leave the room.10

  Dale had expected the union to bring about peace with Pocahontas’s father, and in this, he was proved right. “Ever since [the wedding] we have had friendly commerce and trade not only with Powhatan but also with his subjects round about us,” Hamor recorded. The ensuing years have been called the “golden age” of relations between the two peoples. From the standpoint of the colonists, at least, the phrase is accurate.

  There was more. The Chickahominy tribe, which made its home on the river of the same name, learned of the Anglo-Powhatan peace with some alarm. The Chickahominies were among the region’s last holdouts against Powhatan domination. Now that the English were no counterweight to the Powhatans, the Chickahominies realized the days of their independence were numbered. They decided to cast their fate with the English, and sent two men to Jamestown with a pair of deer as gifts for Dale. They proposed to become subjects of King James, answerable to Dale as the king’s representative. They would give up the very name of Chickahominy and instead call themselves tassantasses—their word for “Englishmen.” After some further negotiation with the Chickahominy elders, Dale agreed to bring them under the protection of King James, while allowing them to continue to live under their own freedoms and laws.11

  In the aftermath of Rolfe’s marriage to Pocahontas, Dale saw another angle. There were plenty of examples of European monarchs, including King James, who schemed to alter the balance of power in their favor by seeking to wed their heirs to foreign princes or princesses. As the absolute ruler of the colony (as he then was), perhaps Dale had thought of carrying a variant of that practice over to Virginia. Or, more likely, he may have taken notice of Rolfe
enjoying a woman’s affections and decided he was overdue for the same. Whichever his motive, he sent Ralph Hamor on May 15 to visit Chief Powhatan with a most sensitive diplomatic assignment.

  Hamor’s interpreter was Thomas Savage, the young man whom Christopher Newport had left with Powhatan in 1608. Savage had stayed with the chief of chiefs for several years. When Hamor and Savage arrived at Matchcot, Powhatan greeted his former ward with some affection, and then turned to Hamor and put his hands around Hamor’s neck. Hamor, mystified, wondered whether Powhatan was about to kill him.

  Where is the chain of pearl? Powhatan demanded. What chain? Hamor stammered out. “That which I sent my brother Sir Thomas Dale for a present at his arrival,” Powhatan said through Thomas Savage. “Which chain, since the peace concluded, he sent me word [that] if he sent any Englishman upon occasion of business to me, he should wear about his neck; otherwise I had order from him to bind him and send him home again.”

  Powhatan was right: Dale had advised him that any bona fide emissary from the English would wear the chain as proof of his identity. Dale had been so giddy over Hamor’s mission, it would seem, that he had forgotten about it. Hamor’s mission was to bring back one of Powhatan’s daughters, a younger half sister of Pocahontas, for Dale to marry. Dale had heard that the lady in question would soon be marriageable: she was fast approaching the age of twelve.