Pocahontas, Smith, and Rolfe

Not  just a Disney Movie!

She Saved His Life
By BILL KAUFFMAN
NOVEMBER 25, 2003
Wall Street Journal

As Thanksgiving approaches, our thoughts naturally turn to a certain NewEngland repast. But no Pilgrim bewitches posterity quite like the princessPocahontas, best known to schoolchildren (and their dads) as the fetchingheroine of the Disney cartoon, in which she is depicted as a tawnysupermodel of the 17th century.

Pocahontas and the Englishmen who came "to invade my people, and possessmy country," in her father's blunt phrase, are the subjects of David A.Price's well-researched "Love and Hate in Jamestown" (Knopf, 305 pages, $25.95).

Mr. Price notes wryly that "English America was a corporation before itwas a country." The Virginia Co., which sponsored the Jamestown settlement,at first desired peaceful coexistence with the natives. It instructed itsmigrants to settle on uninhabited land in this El Dorado, where, snickeredthe satirists, even the chamberpots were made of gold.

The 105 male settlers who arrived in Jamestown in 1607 ran through aseries of ineffectual toffs as colony presidents until that meritocraticmoment when a stocky commoner with the demotic name of John Smith assumedleadership.

Smith was a hard man under whom fools and the indolent suffered. Hisdiplomacy with the natives consisted of equal parts bluff and courage. Mr.Price defends him: "It is clear that he respected the talents andintelligence of the native leaders more than he did the leaders of his ownside, but he also meant for the colony to survive. The alternative tointimidation was not love and friendship; it was open war -- which theEnglish, in 1608, would have lost to the last man."
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The captain would be forgotten today as just another John Smith were itnot for the intercession of an 11-year-old native girl nicknamedPocahontas. Searching for a Virginia passage to the Pacific, Smith wascaptured by evidently unpacific Chickahominy warriors. After a puzzlingtour of Indian villages, Smith -- whose mates had been tortured and killedby methods primly omitted in contemporary social-studies texts -- found hishead on the bashing block.

In Smith's famous account, the princess Pocahontas dashed to his rescue,pleading with her father, the chief Powhatan, to spare his life. "Shehazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine," Smith would writeto Queen Anne. Later, Pocahontas saved Smith's life a second time, warninghim of an imminent attack by Powhatan's men. When Smith gracelessly offeredher beads in gratitude, she sobbed.

To the eternal dismay of romancers everywhere, John Smith never marriedthe woman who kept saving his life. Instead, Pocahontas, the first Indianconvert to Christianity, took the name Rebecca, married the tobacco titanJohn Rolfe and moved to England, whose palefaces were dazzled by the exoticyoung lady from beyond the sea. She would die in exile, seeming to preferthe balls and masques of her New World to the corn and venison of theold.

Why did Pocahontas save John Smith? Though Peggy Lee chalked it up tothe fever, Smith himself, as Mr. Price writes, saw it as simply "compassionfor a man in distress."

Then what's love got to do with it? Nothing, answers Paula Gunn Allen in"Pocahontas" (HarperSanFrancisco, 350 pages, $26.95), whereinshe scoffs at the hoary view that her subject "had fallen so helplessly forold blue eyes that she was forever pining after white meat."

Ms. Allen insists that Pocahontas cannot be understood except within anAlgonquin Indian context, with its dream-visions and communal acceptance ofthe supernatural. She rejects the Noble Red Woman cliché thatsaddles all natives with the blandly faultless victimhood of a SidneyPoitier character. Yet Ms. Allen can be as tendentious as the deadestwhitest malest historian.

Her "hapless" John Smith is so "obtuse" that when he finds his head onthe bashing block, he thinks the situation is threatening! In fact, writesMs. Allen, the Indians were adopting Smith in a "rebirthing" ritual. (Mr.Price, as if in rebuttal, notes that "nothing is known about 17th-centuryPowhatan adoption ceremonies" -- if such things even existed.)

In a classic case of the wish being mother to the thought, Ms. Allenasserts, adducing scant evidence, that Pocahontas was a "Native espionageagent." She was no "docile and willing convert to Christianity andcivilization" but rather an intelligence-gathering "mole." Thus does Ms.Allen parry the charge that Pocahontas was a sell-out "Apple" (red on theoutside, white on the inside) who collaborated with English invaders andsealed her people's fate.

Ms. Allen further suggests that secret agent Pocahontas was poisoned byhusband John Rolfe. Now, Rolfe may have been an avaricious cad who nevereven bothered to learn his wife's language, but a uxoricide?

I understand why a proud Indian patriot would wish that Pocahontas hadrejected Rolfe and expatriation, but she didn't. The ways of the heart havea way of confounding the best-laid ideologies.

Pocahontas's dying words were a model of equanimity: "All must die. 'Tisenough that the child lives." Her child, Thomas, did live, but the childPocahontas has lived even longer. She is at four centuries and counting,and despite Ms. Allen's spirited revision, Pocahontas remains thecartwheeling imp who in an impulsively humane moment saved a foreigner'slife and made herself immortal.