Such harmony, if it ever existed, was short-lived. Courtesy Library of Congress. Smith's primary response is to seize that food, to force the natives to trade at gunpoint, and if the natives won't trade, to attack native villages and simply take what he and the English want. So we find armed English military expeditions to native communities, which are resulting in bloodshed and the rather ironic development of the English burning down cornfields after they've taken all the food they can carry away.
Among the strong-armed efforts to force the Indians to trade food was an English expedition to Werowocomoco. The Indians, as usual, insisted the English leave their weapons at the edge of the village, which the English were unwilling to do. In the midst of negotiations, all of a sudden Chief Powhatan disappeared. The English were fairly certain they were about to come under attack. And indeed, Pocahontas herself, according to John Smith, came and gave him a warning that he and his men were in peril.
And so the English beat a hasty retreat. We simply can't know Pocahontas's intent. Now, it might very well be that she empathized with the English, that she had feelings toward Smith and didn't want to see him die.
It also might be that this was an act of political theater in which Powhatan sent Pocahontas to give what amounted to a warning to the English, to say, "If I wanted to cut you off I could. Reform your behavior. Act the way I expect you to act. We have contradictory signals; we can't sort them out through the meager historical record. Contemporaries said that this explosion was an accident, and yet there are conspicuous hints that suggest it was deliberate, that someone within the English community was trying to kill or to hurt Smith and remove him from power.
We do know that the rivalry between John Smith and other English elites at Jamestown was at an absolute pitch during this time. Smith, always bold, was being even more aggressive at trying to dictate English-Indian policy. And suddenly, this explosion occurs, and Smith's forced to return home.
More than a few Englishmen were happy to see John Smith go. They didn't like his overbearing manner, his rising above his class station in life. Now he was gone, and yet the Indians and the English needed him to serve as an ambassador between their communities more than ever.
Pocahontas is not told that John Smith is injured and is going back to England to recover; she is told that Smith is dead. The English enter a severe period of starvation in which they lose most of their numbers. Almost everyone at Jamestown is sick. They're malnourished. They're coming down with a variety of diseases, including dysentery and salt poisoning.
And they're psychologically depressed. They're under intermittent siege by native people whom they deeply, deeply fear. They feel isolated. They feel at risk. And they turn inward, almost collapsing upon themselves, and they refuse to do the basic functions that people need to perform in order to survive. In April of , the English capture Pocahontas and hold her as a bargaining chip in their diplomacy with Powhatan, offering to return her in exchange for peace.
Over and over again the Powhatan chief rebuffs them. He might have been thinking that Pocahontas could learn their ways, learn their language, cultivate their leaders, and try to broker a truce between the peoples.
If that was his strategy, it was a very, very savvy one, because that's exactly how things played out. Was this coincidence or was it strategy? It's hard to know. What we do know is that the marriage between Pocahontas and John Rolfe is a key step in establishing an uneasy truce between the Powhatan and English peoples in early Virginia. Among the shocks that Pocahontas receives while visiting England in is that John Smith, whom she had been told was dead, is indeed alive and well.
It crushed her to learn this news. It crushed her not only that the English had been lying to her all along but that John Smith, a man with whom she had a personal relationship of some sort or another, had done absolutely nothing to contact her, to contact her people, to contact her father, who called Smith his son.
However Pocahontas was feeling when she finally saw John Smith—whatever heartache she was feeling, whatever fury she was feeling—she behaved with dignity. She reminds him that her father called Smith "son. We were responsible for one another. This map, based on Smith's exploration and description of the region and first published in , is the work of a culture intent on conquering a "virgin" land.
The Pocahontas story, the Pocahontas myth, has traditionally been told to make Americans feel better about the evils of colonization. Pocahontas seemed to acquiesce to English colonization, to willingly adopt Christianity and "civility. To set up, as the Indians would have it, a relationship of kin in which the two peoples help to meet each other's needs and live as a single people.
After being captured by Powhatan in , Captain Smith negotiated an alliance that helped the colony survive its first year. However, his subsequent dealings with other tribes led to the collapse of this alliance. The English were not the first Europeans to visit the Chesapeake Bay.
The Spanish preceded them. Spanish vessels had likely sailed into the Bay several times in the s. The English were the first Europeans to come to Virginia with the intention of staying.
But the Indians would not have known that. They may have thought the English would stop for a short time, but soon they discovered the real intention. Compared to other Europeans of the early s, Captain Smith seems to have been open-minded towards native peoples. He described them in glowing terms as comely and civil and referred to their chiefs as kings and emperors. Smith learned the local language, and was able to carry on most of his negotiations without an interpreter.
He must have been a persuasive speaker and a man of considerable charm and diplomacy, as he was frequently able to turn initial hostility into a warm welcome.
It is likely that his positive attitude towards native peoples, his talents for diplomacy, and his practive of treating them as equals that led to his successes in Jamestown and on his voyages. Two years later, he set off for the Mediterranean Sea as a sailor on a merchant ship. He was fighting in Transylvania in when he was wounded in battle, captured, and sold as a slave to a Turk. This Turk then sent Smith as a gift to his sweetheart in Istanbul, but Smith wrote that this girl fell in love with him and sent him to her brother for training to join Turkish imperial service.
Smith said he escaped by murdering the brother and fleeing through Russia and Poland. He traveled throughout Europe and Northern Africa before he returned to England in the winter of Restless in England, Smith became actively involved with plans by the Virginia Company to colonize Virginia for profit. Smith was on the fleet of three ships that set sail December 20, , and during the four-month voyage was charged with mutiny by the leader of the expedition, Captain Christopher Newport.
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