I perused it on my lunch break, flipping here and there through its pages, and it was all pretty fascinating stuff. But for some reason, the description of Powhatan people’s fashion really grabbed me. Perhaps it was because the reality of what these people wore and how they did their hair was so unlike the way Disney represented them in the 1995 film. But for some reason, I couldn’t get the image of these people out of my mind: wearing virtually nothing but leather aprons, tattooed and painted, with their heads half-shaven and their hair done up in knots displaying the most extravagant ornaments.
I came up with many other ideas for historical novels during my bookstore days, but I’ve forgotten or abandoned most of them. The lavish hairstyles of the Powhatans, though, stuck with me. I began reading about Pocahontas obsessively—all the books I could find (listed at the end of this note, for curious readers who would like to explore the truth of this historical tale). And as I came to learn more about her and her people, I was shocked by how different the truth was from the popular myth of star-crossed lovers that has made Pocahontas immortal.
I was shocked, but I really shouldn’t have been. The Western world has a long history of treating indigenous peoples with varying degrees of disrespect. On one end of the spectrum, they were and are treated with open hostility and racism. On the other, they are seen as morally flawless, enlightened beings, “noble savages” who had it all right until those white guys came along and screwed up utopia. I find the latter just as inappropriate as the former, because it lumps a huge variety of cultures into one generic category. It strips from these people their real identities, their true heritage. It makes Native Americans of the past, like Pocahontas, into morality lessons instead of celebrating them as individuals whose lives changed the course of history, and whose influence still echoes today. It places a featureless mask onto all of them—the Natives of history and those living now.
As I read several books on the Powhatan Algonquians—Rountree’s and others’—I knew I wanted desperately to tell Pocahontas’s story—the story of an unavoidable clash between two vastly different cultures; a clash which could never end in fairness for both sides of the conflict. It was a story fraught with intense conflict and tragic figures who were determined in the face of a fate they surely knew they could not hope to escape. It was big, dense, complicated history—the kind of stuff historical novelists can’t resist. But I wanted to do it right. I wanted to represent the people of the Powhatan Confederacy as they probably were, not as the stock characters Western culture so often demands of Native American figures.
Chief Powhatan, for example, was not the most ethical man. He definitely does not fit with the pop-culture caricature of a Native, living in harmony with all around him. When an alleged prophecy predicted that Powhatan would be defeated by people who emerged from the Chesapeake region, he decided to nip that in the bud and massacred the entirety of the Chesapeake tribe. He was an aggressive expansionist who maintained order in his ever-growing empire by marrying women from every family he could find, getting them pregnant, then keeping the offspring with him in his capital city of Werowocomoco, raising them to believe in his own politics. Powhatan demanded “tribute” from all his conquered tribes—a tithe of sorts, whereby he collected a portion of all other tribes’ goods: crops, hunted meat, skins, and other valuables such as beads and puccoon. In spite of the Western desire to see all Native Americans as enlightened and harmonious people who understood how to be human better than anybody else did, Chief Powhatan most assuredly did not paint with all the colors of the wind.
And he wasn’t the only one.
My desire to “do it right” posed a real problem, for the Pocahontas myth of popular culture is a story hugely beloved by many, many people. The myth is so widely known that I don’t even need to recap it here. I can virtually guarantee that you’ve read it or heard it before, even if you aren’t a North American, even if you haven’t seen the Disney film five hundred times. It’s a well-known myth.
It’s also, except for a few very tiny and insignificant details, completely false.
“Pocahontas” was a nickname, meaning (in the English of the early 1600s) “little wanton,” or as we would say today, “mischief maker” or “scamp.” The girl’s real name was, depending on whom you consult, either Amonute or Matoaka, or perhaps both. The Algonquians of the Tidewater region changed their names at momentous points in their lives, and so it is not unlikely that she was known by all three names at various points in her life. Later, when she married John Rolfe and took up Christianity, her name changed again to Rebecca—a change which Rountree posits was probably natural for her to make, since adopting a new religion and English ways was almost certainly one of those momentous points in life that call for a new name. I tried to show the Powhatan tradition of changing names in this novel without confounding the reader. It was quite a trick for an author to pull off, and I can only hope that I did it well and that you were not too terribly confused.
Contrary to the popular myth, Pocahontas was not a young woman when she met John Smith. She was a prepubescent child who likely had zero interest in romance. John Smith and the rest of the English would have been a curiosity to her, or perhaps, as I showed in my novel, she might have visited them in order to learn what she could about their culture and plans, and transmit that information to her father. She was apparently quick with languages and often served as an interpreter and negotiator on her father’s behalf, in spite of her extreme youth.
So, then, if she was likely not interested in romance, why did she rescue John Smith from death? Everybody knows she threw herself across his body to save him from the war clubs before her father and his savage warriors could beat out Smith’s brains.
Well—no.
The infamous “rescue scene” was my one concession to the myth, and the only place where I went against historical fact for the sake of fiction. I felt I truly could not exclude the scene, as it is stamped so firmly in the zeitgeist. When one thinks of Pocahontas, one pictures an Indian maiden throwing herself across the body of a doomed white man—even though Pocahontas’s real accomplishments, her intellect and skill with language, her willingness to work with the English to try to forge some sort of peace—amount to so much more than the mythic “rescue.”
But the real achievements of women in history are so often ignored, and we are remembered only for our relationships to influential men. In truth, it’s not even a problem confined to history—it’s a sad fact of our culture that persists to this day. Double that obnoxious truth for any historic woman of color, who will only be remembered for her relationships with white men, even if those relationships are fictitious.
While many historians have proposed conceivable reasons why the mythic rescue could have happened, because they want the exciting and touching myth to be true, I am thoroughly convinced by Rountree’s evidence that it almost certainly did not happen. John Smith claimed it did, but it was not the only time he’d claimed that a besotted female in a foreign land had risked her own life to spare him from death. It was actually a pretty common theme in Smith’s autobiographies, and, although Pocahontas was known in English accounts as “the favorite” of her powerful father, she was actually a girl of very low social standing, and not any kind of “princess” who might be able to stop her father from killing anybody he wanted to kill.
If her father was Chief Powhatan, the most influential and powerful man in the Tidewater region, then why was she not considered royal?
Well, inheritance in the Powhatan Confederacy was matrilineal. This means that a person’s right to rule came from his or her mother, not from the father—and Pocahontas’s mother was apparently a woman of no standing. Although she was the daughter of the Chief of Chiefs, she was not “royal” by Powhatan reckoning. Before she could ever inherit the right to rule, control of the Tidewater would first pass to Powhatan’s brothers, then to his sisters (all of whom shared a mother with Powhata
n), and then to the children of his sisters, male first, then female, in order of birth.
Pocahontas was about as common as dirt, and likely kept herself from a life of total obscurity by clowning and joking, thereby charming the moccasins off her mighty father—as hinted in her nickname.
“Pocahontas as princess” was also just too common a trope to interest me, in addition to being historically inaccurate. Instead, I found in Pocahontas’s low social standing a mirror of John Smith, whose own lack of social clout obviously gnawed at his mind for many years.
Smith wrote prolifically about his various adventures. They are often so swashbuckling that one can never be sure whether anything he wrote was true, but according to many historians, this was not uncommon in “true accounts” of the 1600s. A “true account” was expected to have a lot of pizzazz, and so the requisite sparkle was often injected into otherwise ho-hum diaries.
I can’t fault Smith or any other author of the time too harshly for spicing up the facts. I make my living writing fiction, too.
But Smith’s writings are hugely entertaining, if they are not likely to be entirely true. His utter disdain for the highbred members of English society reaches across the centuries and rings loud in a modern reader’s ear. Wingfield and Ratcliffe both obviously rubbed him the wrong way, as did most men he encountered. He accused the men of the colony of “envying his repute” even though his repute was largely manufactured by his own writings. He had all sorts of choice names for his fellow colonists, and his journals are colorful and full of character; his sarcastic, self-aggrandizing voice can be heard loud and clear centuries after his death.
Smith valued hard work and intelligence above any other trait, and anybody who was industrious and clever got his respect, while a roustabout who tried to coast on reputation earned dense layers of Smith’s colorful and copious scorn.
I confess I found myself liking John Smith more as I continued to read his writings. Like my fictional Pocahontas, I found some kinship with him, for I know what it means to see my natural abilities and strengths completely disregarded because I lack a pedigree—the 2014 American equivalent of seventeenth-century high English breeding being, of course, a college education. I don’t have that crucial marker of societal worth, and, in fact, I don’t even technically have a high school diploma or a GED, although I did complete all four years of high school. (It’s a long story, and goodness knows this note is already long enough.) Suffice it to say, I am also no gentleman, and yet I’d like to see your average PhD write four historical novels in less than two years.
John Smith, I understand you.
Smith’s two accounts of his time at Jamestown are our main sources of information about the Native people of the Tidewater region. Many of the details he recorded of Native life were corroborated by later visitors and settlers in the region, and so we know that he was mostly truthful about the Powhatans, if about little else. (Smith and other observers recorded virtually nothing about Powhatan women, and so I was obliged to invent many of the details of their lives. Pocahontas’s coming-of-age ceremony, for example, is entirely fictitious.)
The stories John Smith recounted about his interactions with the “Naturals” and “Salvages” (sic) were so rich and amusing that I had a very hard time selecting which scenes to include in Tidewater. This book could easily have been twice as long as it was, if I’d included them all.
Particularly enticing was the story of a certain “dreadful bridge,” a thin sapling spanning a ravine-like creek bed that the Indians could cross with ease in their moccasins, but which the English found awkward and dangerous in their stiffer clothing. The “dreadful bridge” became a persistent nemesis of the English, and I left it out of this book with real regret. I can’t tell you how I adore the image of a bunch of young Powhatan men standing around laughing as the tassantassas try to cross a narrow, wobbly log.
Also left out with great remorse were the unbelievable number of times Smith’s various canoes and ships got stuck in the mud when the tide went out. It happened so many times that you’d think he would have eventually learned better, but apparently he never did. “Stranded by the tide yet again” was a common reason for Smith’s various perils. I surmised that if I used it more than once, readers would think I was a very uncreative author whose well of ideas had run dry. They never would have suspected that it’s real history (according to John Smith, anyway).
In fact, there were so many points of this abundant history I had to exclude for the sake of pacing a good fictional tale. In other cases, I had to merge multiple characters into one, for the cast was growing far too large by the time I hit Tidewater’s midway point, and I still had yet to cover Pocahontas’s abduction and her integration into English life. The establishment of the Jamestown Colony affected so very many lives and had such far-reaching consequences that I simply could not contain it all in one novel—not even a novel the size of Tidewater. You begin to see why I feel overwhelmed by this (far too long) historical note.
And of course, these characters’ stories didn’t end where Tidewater ends. Not even Pocahontas’s story ended with her death. She became a legend, adored by the English for her conversion to Christianity and her ability to be “civilized.” She was proof that colonization would be successful, that the Natives of the New World would (eventually) welcome the English with open arms. Later, she was distorted out of all recognition by the myth of her love for the dashing John Smith. (I do not think he was particularly dashing, although I will concede that his mustache and beard were quite spectacular.)
But we all know about that. What happened to the rest of the characters?
John Smith went on to enjoy a career as a writer. He still made a few expeditions now and then, mapping and exploring—but his tale of Pocahontas rescuing him from certain death made him into a celebrity. The Pocahontas myth became a popular story in Smith’s own time and remained in the English imagination for some time afterward. Many plays and novels were written about her (and Smith’s supposed rescue) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There has been much speculation that Smith’s account of Pocahontas might have inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest. In any case, Smith achieved the high status he always seemed to covet by riding the very coattails he sewed for Pocahontas.
Powhatan died a year after Pocahontas did. He was an old man, likely in his eighties or possibly even his nineties. When news reached Virginia that Pocahontas had died on the voyage home from England, the delicate peace she had wrought began to crack. Powhatan probably died knowing that the violent and unwinnable conflict with the English would soon return and that he could do nothing to preserve his remarkable empire or protect the people who depended on him.
He was succeeded by a brother, Opitchapam, who did not appear in this novel for simplicity’s sake. Opitchapam ruled only a short time, and, upon his death, Opechancanough took control of the Tidewater—a transition that was already subtly beginning while Powhatan still lived.
I won’t go into too much detail about Opechancanough’s achievements. His rule of the Tidewater region was spectacular in bloodiness and desperation, a last-ditch effort to preserve the Real People’s way of life before it was altered forever by the flood of English immigrants.
Opechancanough is one of the most fascinating and underappreciated historical figures I’ve ever encountered, and if Tidewater is enough of a success, I intend to write a sequel about him and his daughter Cockacoeske, a werowansqua who actually witnessed the true disintegration of the Real People’s way of life after Opechancanough’s death. If I get around to writing that book, it won’t be until 2016, and I will try to keep it well under the 160,000-word mark.
John Rolfe seems to have been truly in love with Pocahontas. He wrote letters to Reverend Alexander Whitaker expressing his desire to marry her, seeking permission from the priest. He tried to disguise his desire and affection for her by insisting that he only wanted to mar
ry her to bring her closer to the Gospel—for, in that time, it was inconceivable that a white man could truly love a Native woman, and in order for such a union to be acceptable, it must be done for missionary purposes. However, his infatuation with Pocahontas couldn’t be so easily hidden.
He was apparently devastated by her death, and insisted that little Thomas remain in England under the care of an uncle until he was older, for Rolfe was afraid that the child, who was still recovering from dysentery, would not survive the voyage home. Rolfe had already seen the death of two beloved wives and one child—he would not risk Thomas’s safety, too.
Rolfe maintained good relations with his Powhatan in-laws even after Pocahontas’s death. His tobacco farm prospered, and he soon became a very wealthy and influential man. He attracted a new wife, an Englishwoman, whom he married in 1619. But in 1622, Rolfe was killed, and his tobacco plantation was destroyed in a concerted and widespread attack by the Native Americans.
But Rolfe’s legacy of tobacco farming lived on, and the crop brought incredible wealth to the colonies spreading across Virginia and, later, great political power to those who controlled the tobacco. Had Pocahontas, with the natural farming skills of a Real Woman, not shown John Rolfe how to nurture the plants in Virginia’s climate, the entire history of North America might have been very different, for tobacco was, in its day, just as potent a political force as King Cotton during the Civil War.
And that leaves Thomas Rolfe. John Rolfe died when Thomas was about seven years old, and by this time Virginia was so war torn that it was no place for an orphaned child. Thomas remained with his English uncle until he reached the age of twenty. When he finally returned to Virginia, it was a very different world from the one he had left as a child carried in his loving mother’s arms. He had to petition the president for permission to visit his Powhatan relatives, and he struggled against societal expectations that he, an Englishman by nurture if not by nature, avoid the dangerous and untrustworthy Natives.
Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony Page 50
