Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  The picture that the king presented was not enhanced by his uncouth manners and his particular disdain for the female sex. “He piques himself,” wrote the French ambassador, “on great contempt for women. They are obliged to kneel before him [rather than curtsy] when they are presented, he exhorts them openly to virtue, and scoffs with great levity at men who pay them honour.” Englishwomen, the ambassador found, “hold him in abhorrence.” So undistinguished was King James—in form, in attire, in comportment—that when Pocahontas and Tomocomo were brought before him and instructed to kneel, they had no idea that the man in front of them was the British monarch.12

  Pocahontas had to rely on Lord and Lady De La Warr to help her navigate her way through the names and faces of court society. She evidently did not have her husband with her at the masque that evening, and it is easy enough to see why. If John Rolfe had been presented to James, the king would have received him with brusque indifference, if not hostility. Rolfe, as the father of Virginia’s growing tobacco trade, personified one of the king’s vexations: the pipe smoking indulged in by more and more of his subjects. For all of the king’s shambling appearance and doubtful hygiene, he was repulsed by the tobacco habit. In a commentary entitled A Counterblaste to Tobacco, he had argued that smoking pollutes men’s “inward parts . . . with an unctuous and oily kinde of soote, as hath been found in some great [heavy] tobacco takers, that after their deaths were opened.” He considered it “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs. . . .” It was perhaps the better part of discretion for the company to keep Rolfe out of sight.

  Once the crowd settled down for the performance, Pocahontas would have observed a street scene and elegant buildings onstage, constructed and painted in perspective so the street appeared to recede into the distance. From “afar off” entered a bare-breasted woman representing Delight, joined by Grace, Love, Harmony, Revel, Sport, and Laughter. Delight gave a rhythmic exhortation to the players to “play and dance and sing.”

  What followed was an hour or so of singing and dancing scenes that became increasingly surreal. Delight’s song was interrupted by the appearance of a “she-monster”; from beneath the monster’s costume tumbled a series of grotesque clowns, to whom she was giving birth. The half dozen young clowns proceeded to dance with a half dozen old clowns until the clowns and monster both vanished. The daytime turned to a moonlit evening, and the figure of Night beckoned Fantasy “from thy cave of cloud” to “create of airy forms a stream.” Fantasy, emerging from a cloud, answered that she was happy to oblige:

  Bright Night, I obey thee, and am come at thy call,

  But it is no one dream that can please these all;

  Wherefore I would know what dreams would delight ’em,

  For never was Fant’sy more loath to affright ’em.

  And Fant’sy, I tell you, has dreams that have wings,

  And dreams that have honey, and dreams that have stings....13

  Stings indeed. Pocahontas must have become utterly lost as Fantasy’s speech descended into a mad gibberish embedded with double entendres and interrupted by a dance of otherworldly “phantasms.” The anarchy of the masque progressed until an unseen god banished the chaos and created an idyllic springtime setting for the masque’s conclusion. In due course, the players informed the audience that this god was none other than King James. Jonson had not forgotten who was paying the bills:

  Behold a king

  Whose presence maketh this perpetual spring,

  The glories of which spring grow in that bower

  And are the marks and beauties of his power.14

  Even though Pocahontas likely would not have been able to follow a good part of Jonson’s text, the spirit of the masque—dreamlike, mischievous, opulent—would have shone through. In it, she must have seen echoes of the royal entertainment she had staged for John Smith and his company at Werowocomoco years earlier (minus the opulence). Smith certainly saw the parallel between those dances on a Virginia field and the masques of Whitehall, and even called the performance “a Virginia maske.” There was a vein of pathos in that grand description; he surely realized that Pocahontas’s spectacle was the only royal festivity he would be invited to see.15

  During Pocahontas’s stay in London, Smith had been busily making plans for a third voyage to New England. Business brought him to the city from time to time to try to raise investment money from the large guilds and their members. It was probably during one of these visits that he chanced to encounter Tomocomo. After the two men hailed each other and chatted briefly, Tomocomo asked Smith to show him the English god and the English king that he had spoken so much about. Powhatan had ordered Tomocomo to attempt to find them both, he said. “Concerning God, I told him the best I could,” Smith recalled. Smith had heard that Tomocomo already met the king at the Twelfth Night masque, and told him so. Tomocomo refused to believe it, until Smith supplied enough detail—a description of James, perhaps—for Tomocomo to realize he had.

  Tomocomo was stunned when he understood that Smith was right. Not only did James lack the impressive gravity of Tomocomo’s own emperor, James had failed to offer gifts to him as a representative of another sovereign. Tomocomo thought of the white greyhound that Smith had given to Chief Powhatan on behalf of Christopher Newport in the colony’s first year, and the regal care that Powhatan had accorded the animal. “Then he replyed very sadly,” Smith remembered, “ ‘You gave Powhatan a white dog, which Powhatan fed as himself, but your king gave me nothing, and I am better than your white dog.’ ”

  King James was not the only one lacking in sensitivity. Smith well knew that by any standard of courtesy, to say nothing of gratitude, he should visit Pocahontas and pay his respects. He had spared the time to write a letter to the queen on Pocahontas’s behalf, but he had let six months or more go by without calling on her. In his recollections of the period, he sought to excuse his behavior on the ground that he was preoccupied with his latest project; “being about this time preparing to set saile for New-England,” he explained, “I could not stay to doe her that service I desired, and she well deserved.”

  Doubtless there was some truth in that excuse, yet there was almost certainly another factor behind his reluctance—one that he would have been hard pressed to admit, even to himself. Pocahontas had known him in Virginia as a leader of men: capable, confident, respected by some, feared by others. Now, more than seven years after their last meeting, Smith was no longer what he once was. To be sure, he had achieved a kind of success as an explorer of New England and an author. But the middle-aged Smith, unlike his younger counterpart, had predominantly seen disappointment and frustration, from the loss of his presidency in Virginia to the failure of his two New England voyages. While struggling to make another go of it, he was in charge of no one and nothing. He would have been less than human if he had not wondered whether he was still someone Pocahontas would look up to—and whether he ought to leave her old memories of him undisturbed by his new reality.

  Finally Smith found the impetus to do what he needed to. Sometime in early 1617, he learned that Pocahontas had moved to Brentford, an eastern suburb of London, while awaiting a return voyage to Virginia. Evidently the news of her imminent departure jolted him into seeing reason, and he went to call on her.

  Pocahontas had been told in England that Smith was alive; the tale of his death, she learned, had been an English deception. Still, she found herself unready to see him in the flesh. “After a modest salutation,” Smith recounted, “without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented.” Smith and John Rolfe left her to herself for some time—two or three hours, by Smith’s reckoning.

  When they returned, she had regained her composure and had some tough-minded words for her visitor. She “remembered mee well what courtesies she had done,” as Smith put it.

  Smith stopped her at one point when she referred to him by the title of “father.” He had be
en accused in Virginia of plotting to set himself up as the heir to Powhatan’s empire by marrying Pocahontas. The charge had been groundless, but Smith could not accept any suggestion of a family relationship, however colloquial and innocent, that might cause renewed suspicions as to his intent. To establish an alliance with foreign nobility, after all, could be construed as treason. “I durst [dared] not allow of that title, because she was a king’s daughter,” he recalled.

  Pocahontas’s reaction to that correction showed she was as spirited as ever. She also made clear that he had nothing to fear about her seeing him as a diminished man:

  With a well set countenance she said, Were you not afraid to come into my father’s countrie, and caused feare in him and all his people (but mee) and feare you here I should call you father? I tell you then I will, and you shall call me childe, and so I will bee for ever and ever your countrieman.16

  Toward the colonists in general, Pocahontas was not so warmly disposed. “They did tell us always you were dead,” she told Smith, “and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth; yet Powhatan did command Uttamatomakin [Tomocomo] to seeke you, and know the truth, because your countriemen will lie much.”

  Smith recorded only those fragments of their conversation. It was an awkward reunion, with neither Smith nor Pocahontas sure of how to pick up the thread of their friendship. They had crossed into one another’s cultures more than any other Englishman or native woman had done—John Rolfe, it seems, had not even bothered to learn her language—but they could not cross the chasm of years and circumstances. Beyond the fragments of Smith’s notes, one can surmise what else their conversation touched on. He would have inquired solicitously as to her father’s health and fortunes (Smith’s fights with Powhatan were all in the past now). When she asked Smith whether he was going to come to Virginia again, he would have declaimed with excitement about his third hoped-for trip to New England. He must have asked whether life in England was to her liking; at this, her stomach would have tightened, and stayed that way long after Smith had said his farewells.

  It was a difficult subject precisely because Pocahontas did like England and preferred to stay there. The fact had become notorious within the company. Her husband’s advancement, however, demanded that he resume his work in the colony. London offered much for the lively woman of twenty or twenty-one to like: the company of other women of her adopted society (who were still comparatively sparse in the colony), the attention she received at the stylish festivities, the energy of the city’s hustle and bustle. Above all, there was the chance to explore a new world—for England was the New World from her point of view, no less than Virginia was the New World to John Smith.

  Pocahontas’s dream of staying in London was gratified for a while, as unfavorable winds delayed the Rolfes’ sailing. They finally left from London with Tomocomo in March, once again traveling on a ship commanded by her former kidnapper, Samuel Argall.

  Some dreams have stings, Fantasy said, and Pocahontas’s London dream proved to be among them. The coal smoke of the city had long disagreed with her—hence the Rolfes’ move to Brentford—and she had begun to struggle with illness as she and her husband waited for a change in the weather. Neither Smith nor Purchas had made note of any visible problems in her health before then. In view of her sensitivity to the foul air, it is generally believed her condition was a pulmonary infection such as pneumonia or tuberculosis.17

  Rolfe apparently assumed his wife’s affliction was nothing more serious than the sputtering that came and went among so many residents of the polluted city. By the time the ship was approaching the town of Gravesend, he could see how wrong he had been. Pocahontas was dying.

  Argall anchored his ship, the George, at the town and Pocahontas was taken ashore. The details of her final hours are lost, but one can imagine the party having taken her to an inn, where John Rolfe sat by her bedside during her last few hours in a state of shock; two-year-old Thomas Rolfe, who was also ill, sitting in his father’s lap, understanding little of what was happening; Tomocomo, looking on with growing bile toward the English; and Argall calculating how his employers in the Virginia Company would react to the news.

  One thing is known. In Pocahontas’s last moments, it was she who had to soothe her husband, not the other way around. “All must die,” she reminded him as her life slipped away. “Tis enough that the child liveth.”

  Her funeral took place the same day, on March 21, 1617, at Gravesend’s medieval church, St. George’s Parish. The bells of the church marked her passing. She had been ushered into Christianity and then into marriage by the Book of Common Prayer. Now it would be read for her one more time: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, yea, though he were dead, yet shall he live. . . .”

  Argall, Rolfe, and Tomocomo returned to Argall’s ship and continued downriver. Thomas Rolfe, too, was becoming sicker, and his father realized that the boy probably could not survive a crossing to Virginia. John Rolfe found himself forced to choose between one shore, where he could attend his son, and the other shore, where his tobacco and his fortunes awaited.

  Rolfe made his decision: when the George reached Plymouth, he left his son in the care of an official of the local shire, Sir Lewis Stukely. The George then left Plymouth on April 10, with John Rolfe on board, for the crossing to Virginia. Stukely looked after the boy until Rolfe’s brother Henry could pick him up. Rolfe’s son would survive into adult-hood, but he would never see his father again.

  Knowing he would be criticized for abandoning his son, John Rolfe defended himself in a letter to the company soon after he arrived in Jamestown. In explaining one of the most momentous decisions of his life, Rolfe clumsily attempted to shift the responsibility to Argall and nameless others:

  At my departure from Gravesend (notwithstanding I was importuned) I hadde no such intent. But in our short passage to Plymouth, in smothe water, I found such feare and hazard of his health (being not fully recovered of his sicknes) and lack of attendance (for they who looked to him hadd need of nurses themselves, and indeed in all our passage proved no better) that by the advise of Captain Argall, and divers who foresaw the danger and knew the inconvenience hereof persuaded me to what I did.18

  In Rolfe’s case, it seems, gentility and piousness of speech were not accompanied by strength of character.

  While Pocahontas’s death was “much lamented” by her husband and her English friends, the fact remained that she served the same practical purposes in death as she had in life. In Virginia, peace with the Powhatans held: Argall, now promoted to deputy governor, reported a year later that Powhatan “goes from place to place visiting his country taking his pleasure in good friendship with us laments his daughters death but glad her child is living so doth opachank [Opechancanough]. . . .”

  In England, Pocahontas remained the embodiment of the tractable native, the presumed forerunner of the many who would eventually be won over by the colonists’ culture and good intentions—opening the way for unhindered English settlement and commerce. “At her returne towards Virginia,” wrote the Reverend Samuel Purchas, “she came at Gravesend to her end and grave, having given great demonstration of her Christian sinceritie, as the first fruits of Virginian conversion. . . .”

  The native who returned to Virginia with John Rolfe had not been won over, however. Tomocomo found little to like about English society and told Opechancanough as much when he returned. (Chief Powhatan was away visiting another tribe when Rolfe and Tomocomo landed.) In a letter written on June 9, 1617, soon after their arrival, Argall reported to the company that “Tomakin [Tomocomo] rails against England, English people and particularly his best friend Thomas Dale.” Argall got wind of Tomocomo’s claims and, he said, “all his reports are disproved before opechanko and his great men whereupon (to the great satisfaction of the great men) Tomakin is disgraced.”19

  Opechancanough and his counselors may have pretended with utter solemnity to have been swayed by the colonists’
rebuttal. The English, however, could only have been deceiving themselves if they believed they had discredited Powhatan’s hand-picked observer of English life. It would be another five years before they would learn the extent of their naïveté, but they would learn.

  13

  THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICANS

  Chief Powhatan had lived long and, judged by the values of his people, he had lived well. He was esteemed as a hunter and warrior, respected and feared as a leader. He had been husband to more than a hundred women over the course of his life, and father to dozens of children. “The greatness and bounds of [his] empire,” as William Strachey wrote, “by reason of his powerfulness and ambition in his youth hath larger limits than ever had any of his predecessors in former times.” He could feel satisfaction in his accomplishments, as well as sadness for the loss of his favorite daughter, when he died in the woods of Virginia in April 1618—eleven months after he learned of Pocahontas’s death.

  In hindsight, it is clear that he could have eliminated the English threat in its early years with more aggressive methods. Yet it is also true that he faced an unusually formidable diplomatic and martial opponent in John Smith. Much of the time, Powhatan could not be certain of the colonists’ true strength or weakness. He also needed to consider the potential value of the English as pawns in his struggle with his neighboring tribes. He had to be mindful, as well, that the English might have a proclivity for sending reinforcements to take bloody revenge, as the Spanish were known to do. Powhatan’s caution is understandable in light of those ambiguities, which Smith skillfully capitalized on.

  When Powhatan finally did decide to root the English out, following Smith’s departure, his starvation strategy in 1609 and 1610 came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. It was a tribute to his cautious and canny leadership—and to the liberal outlook of the English, weighed against that of their Spanish rivals—that Powhatan ultimately achieved a state of peaceful coexistence with the settlers.