La Belle Sauvage
While the Virginia Company busied itself with finding suitable English brides for its colonists, it turned its back on a source much closer to hand: the many native women living around the James River, who mostly belonged to Algonquian-speaking Indian tribes under their paramount chief, Powhatan.1 The first seventeen years of Virginia Company rule over its colony produced just one recorded marriage between the settlers and the native community: that of tobacco planter John Rolfe and Powhatan’s daughter, best known to Europeans by her nickname of Pocahontas. Why did the English keep themselves aloof when intermarriage would have solved the colony’s chronic shortage of women, whether as wives, mothers or female labour?
John Rolfe supplies many of the answers in a deeply troubled letter he wrote to Virginia’s then governor, Sir Thomas Dale, when he was agonizing over the dangers of marrying ‘strange wives’ and falling in love with one whose ‘education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all nurtriture from my selfe’. His letter reveals much about how English men viewed themselves in relation to Indian women, and especially their reluctance to take heathen brides, a dilemma that Rolfe neatly resolved by turning his bride’s barbarism to his advantage. By labouring in God’s vineyard, he reasoned, he would bring this ‘unbeleeving creature’ into the Christian fold, pointing to ‘her desire to be taught and instructed in the knowledge of God, her capablenesse of understanding’. Had he wished simply to slake his lust, he would surely have satisfied his desires ‘with Christians more pleasing to the eie’.2 What the spirited Pocahontas thought of this unintended slight, and what Indian women generally thought of these blundering, bearded, smelly, overdressed, hapless and intermittently helpless European men can only be imagined.
English colonists, by contrast, were forever recording their impressions of Indian women. One of the first to write about Virginian women in any detail was the astrologer and mathematician Thomas Hariot (or Harriot), who had sailed to Virginia with the watercolourist and future governor of Roanoke’s lost colony, John White, on Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition of 1585 led by Sir Richard Grenville. Hariot and White were the expedition’s recorders, charged with noting and drawing everything that might interest present and future colonists.
Writing of the Indians they encountered in their wanderings, Hariot noted their surprise that the settlers had brought no women with them, ‘neither that we did care for any of theirs’3 – a puzzling remark since Hariot himself showed a keen interest in Indian women, and must have inspected them at close quarters: ‘They have small eyes, plaine and flatt noses, narrow foreheads, and broade mowths,’ he wrote of the women of Secotan village, describing in elaborate detail their hairstyles, their tattoos, their adornments, the colour of their eyes (‘reasonable fair black’) and their bearing. Unmarried girls of good parentage often covered their naked breasts ‘in token of maydenlike modestye’, he noted approvingly, but perhaps he was simply standing too close. Indian dress clearly fascinated him, as it did most early settlers used to judging rank from a person’s attire,4 from the fringed deerskin worn like an apron by the wife of an Indian chief from Pomeiooc, leaving her almost naked behind, to the moss or milkweed pad held by a cord to cover the ‘priviliers’ of her young daughter, who waves an expensively dressed European doll in White’s original watercolour, to which his engraver Theodor de Bry has added a European rattle. Most of the women Hariot inspected were the wives and daughters of chiefs, whose apparent delight in walking in the fields and by the riverside he misinterpreted as leisure, when the business of gathering, growing or preparing food would have left them precious little time to spare, however high their status within the tribe.5
Another who recorded his impressions of Indian women was William Strachey, the chronicler of the Sea Venture’s shipwreck in Bermuda and briefly secretary to the Jamestown colony. Strachey describes Indians generally as ‘most voluptious’ and their women as willing, with their husbands’ permission, to ‘embrace the acquaintance of any Straunger for nothing, and yt is accompted no offence, and uncredible yt is, with what heat both Sexes of them are given over to those Intemperances’.6 You might reasonably wonder if he had first-hand experience of their embraces. ‘The women have handsome lymbes, slender armes, and pretty handes,’ he tells us, ‘and when they sing they have a delightful and pleasant tang in their voices.’ Some of these songs were ‘ errotica carmina or amorous dittyes… which they will sing tunable ynough’. Strachey’s dictionary of more than 800 Algonquian words and phrases provides much helpful material for would-be suitors, from the hesitant ‘What is your name?’ (Cacutterewindg Kear) to the bolder ‘I love you’ (Nouwmais), and from the act of lying with a woman (Saccasac) to the resultant cuckolded husband ( Winpeton or Wimpenton). Here too were words for a woman’s breast (Otaus), a woman’s ‘Secrett’ (Muttusk, Mocosiit) and a whole host of body parts, including hand, hair, head, eyes, nose, ears, thighs, arse and tongue.
Strachey also reveals that Indian women were part of the entertainment offered by Indian chiefs to honoured guests. First the Indians would spread a mat ‘as the Turks doe a carpett’, then bid their guest welcome with ‘a tunable voice of showting’, and such vehement and passionate orations testifying to their love that ‘a Straunger would take them to be exceeding angry or stark mad’. After much feasting they would bring their guest at night to his appointed lodging then ‘send a young woman fresh paynted redd with Pochoe and oyle to be his bedfellow’.
The settlers’ close encounters with native women were not confined to feast days and celebrations. When Jamestown’s food supplies ran low in early 1609, groups of settlers were sent elsewhere: some to fish at Point Comfort on the extreme tip of Chesapeake Bay, others to the falls upriver, where ‘nothing could bee found but a few berries and acornes’, while several more were billeted among the ‘Salvages’ and so were able to glean much useful information about Indian fields, pathways and habitations, and ‘howe to gather and use their fruits’. Preferring life with the Indians to the rigours of Jamestown fort, a number of these billeted soldiers ran away, but an Indian brought them back to Jamestown in recognition of the good treatment he had received when he himself was a prisoner of the colonists.7 Captain John Smith meted out exemplary punishments to the deserters as a warning to others who might be tempted to follow their lead, ensuring that they were ‘rather contented to labour at home, then adventure to live Idle among the Salvages’.
Ever on the alert for news of how the English were extending their toehold on American soil, Spanish spies picked up rumours of such interminglings between the English colonists and the native population, and inevitably drew the wrong conclusions. ‘I have been told by a friend, who tells me the truth, that some of the people who have gone [to Virginia], think now some of them should marry the women of the savages of that country,’ wrote the Spanish ambassador at the court of King James in a coded letter to King Philip III of Spain, ‘and he tells me that there are already 40 or 50 thus married, and other Englishmen after being put among them have become savages, and that the women whom they took out, have also gone among the savages, and they have received and treated them well.’8
A handful of later colonists would regret the missed opportunity that intermarriage presented. The planter Robert Beverley believed that Indian hostility was provoked by the English refusal to marry Indian women, and that ‘the Colony, instead of all these Losses of Men on both Sides, wou’d have been encreasing in Children to its Advantage’.9 Such was the way of French colonists in Canada, thought Alexander Spotswood, an early eighteenth-century governor of colonial Virginia, who credited the strength of French colonization in large measure to their intermarriage with the Indians. But as Spotswood quickly discovered, ‘the inclinations of our people are not the same with those of that Nation, for notwithstanding the long intercourse between ye Inhabitants of this Country and ye Indians, and their living amongst one another for so many Years, I cannot find one Englishman that has an Indian Wife, or an Indian marryed to a white woman’.10
It was a reluctance reinforced by English preachers, who for the most part ardently supported colonization as a means of bringing God’s word to barbarous peoples but drew the line at intermarriage with heathens. ‘Then must Abrams posteritie keepe them to themselves,’ thundered the preacher William Symonds to an audience of Virginia Company adventurers and planters assembled in April 1609 to the east of London at Whitechapel, where Jamestown bride Allice Burges would enter service with a silk weaver. Drawing inspiration from the biblical account of Abraham’s journey into the Promised Land, Symonds likened the company’s colonizing ambitions to Abraham’s God-given mission to leave his country, his kindred and his father’s house, and to found a great nation in the land of the Canaanites. Just so would the English in Virginia, he promised, providing they followed the rule laid down for Abraham’s descendants: ‘They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumsised. And this is so plaine, that out of this foundation arose the law of marriage among themselves. The breaking of this rule, may breake the neck of all good successe of this voyage.’11
Such a clear prohibition explains why the prospect of taking Pocahontas as his wife so deeply troubled John Rolfe, and how her conversion to Christianity might have eased his conscience. Why Pocahontas agreed to throw in her lot with the foreigners is more puzzling. Indian marriage was a working partnership dependent on each partner’s labour, and English settler men had proved themselves spectacularly inept at meeting even the most basic human needs for food and shelter. Far from demanding a dowry from the bride’s family, Indian custom expected the husband’s family to negotiate a male equivalent, the ‘bridewealth’, which was paid to the bride’s family to compensate for the loss of her labour.12 Unlike the English, Indian men did not regard their women as weak and therefore inferior, but at least in accepting the advances of John Rolfe, Pocahontas was allying herself to one of the more successful English planters.
Pocahontas had been a familiar sight to the early colonists since girlhood, striding into the fort at Jamestown and persuading the boys to perform cartwheels in the market place then following them with cartwheels of her own, ‘naked as she was all the Fort over’.13 Living up to her nickname of Pocahontas, which Strachey tells us means ‘little wanton’, she brought a gust of fresh air to the bleak reality of lives lived on the edge of extinction within the confines of the palisade fence. She doubtless used her playfulness and high spirits to catch the attention of her powerful father, Powhatan, and so earned her reputation as his favourite daughter, although she too would have been required to work the fields and carry out all the other tasks reserved for women and children.
As a young girl, Pocahontas played a bit part in the narratives of early Virginia, aiding the settlers through her friendship with Captain John Smith, for whom she braved the ‘darke night’ and ‘irksome woods’ to warn of imminent dangers, or so he later claimed.14 But for all Smith’s mythologizing of the young girl’s role in apparently saving his life when he was taken before her father and subjected to a form of initiation he had clearly misunderstood, there can be little doubt that genuine affection grew up between the swashbuckling settler and Powhatan’s daughter. After Smith left the colony in 1609, relations between the settlers and Virginia’s native inhabitants deteriorated into warfare and Pocahontas drops from sight, married not to some tributary chieftain as one might expect but to a simple captain named Kocoum.15
In a kidnap plot engineered by Captain Samuel Argall, the Indian Iopassus and his wife entice Pocahontas to board Argall’s ship, which will take her back to Jamestown.
There she might have stayed had not Captain Samuel Argall chanced upon her in 1613 while trading for corn with the Patawomeck Indians on Passapatanzy Creek, which feeds into the Potomac River. Enlisting the help of an old Indian friend, whom he bribed with a copper kettle, Argall enticed Pocahontas on board his ship and took her as a hostage back to Jamestown, hoping to force Powhatan to give up captured English booty and prisoners in return for his much loved daughter.16
News of the kidnap even reached England. ‘They have taken a daughter of a king that was theyre greatest ennemie,’ reported John Chamberlain, ‘as she was going a feasting upon a river to visit certain friends.’ The settlers laid down three conditions for Pocahontas’s release: that Powhatan should deliver up English fugitives, hand back any English weapons or arms, and supply 300 quarters of corn. ‘The first two he performed redilie, and promiseth the other at theyre harvest, yf his daughter may be well used in the meane time,’ said Chamberlain. ‘But this ship brought no commodities from thence but only these fayre tales and hopes.’17
Powhatan’s delay in securing his daughter’s release may have contributed to Pocahontas’s growing estrangement from her own people and her acceptance of Rolfe as a suitor. No one mentioned her Indian husband, Kocoum. Rolfe presented his relations with Pocahontas as a love match, admitting to Governor Dale that his ‘hartie and best thoughts’ were lodged with her, and that for a long time they had been ‘so intangled, and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde my selfe thereout’. Pocahontas in turn showed her ‘great apparance of love to me’, as well as her desire to be taught and instructed in the knowledge of God, ‘besides her owne incitements stirring me up hereunto’.18 And so they were married in early April 1614, presumably in the church at Jamestown.19 Governor Dale approved the marriage, as did Powhatan, who sent an uncle and two of his sons to witness the event. She bore Rolfe a son, Thomas, and relations between the settlers and the Indians improved.20
On putting her faith in Rolfe’s Christian god, Pocahontas abandoned her given name Amonute and her secret name Matoaka, rarely revealed in case it was used by malevolent people seeking to lay a curse on her, taking instead the name Rebecca. In the Old Testament Rebecca is the wife of Abraham’s son Isaac, chosen in accordance with Abraham’s wish that Isaac should marry one of his own people rather than any of the indigenous Canaanites among whom they lived.21 The implication of her new name is plain to see. Rolfe was marrying a Christian, not a heathen, and so escaped the prohibition on intermarriage handed down to Abraham’s posterity.
A curious episode followed, in which the already married Dale dispatched an envoy to Powhatan asking the chief to give him his youngest daughter as wife, bedfellow and ‘nearest companion’, having heard of her ‘exquisite perfection’. The envoy was Ralph Hamor, accompanied by the boy interpreter, Thomas Savage. At the start of their meeting Powhatan enquired after Pocahontas’s welfare, ‘her mariage, his unknowne sonne, and how they liked, lived and loved together’. Hamor told him that his daughter was ‘so well content that she would not change her life to returne and live with him, whereat he laughed heartily, and said he was very glad of it’. But the interview went badly, and Powhatan rebuffed Dale’s request for Pocahontas’s younger sister, saying that he had sold her a few days previously to a great chief for two bushels of Roanoke beads made from oyster shells, which the Indians used as currency. Hamor tried unsuccessfully to persuade Powhatan to recall his daughter and pay back the beads, offering him three times the price for the girl, who was anyway ‘not full twelve yeeres old’ and therefore not officially marriageable. Still Powhatan refused, berating Dale for his desire ‘to bereave me of two of my children at once’.22
Despite her change of name, Mistress Rebecca Rolfe remained Pocahontas to English eyes, the exotic Indian princess who had captured the heart of a native Englishman. Intent on deriving as much propaganda value as possible from her conversion to Christianity and her evident gentility (she learned to speak English fluently and became ‘very formall and civill after our English manner’),23 the Virginia Company arranged for the Rolfes and baby Thomas to accompany Sir Thomas Dale back to England with a retinue of Virginia Indian attendants, men and women. They arrived in Plymouth in June 1616 and travelled on to London, where the Rolfes lodged initially in the Bell Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill between St Paul’s Churchyard and Fleet Street. The news was of sufficient interest for John Chamberlain to inform Sir Dudley Carleton about the Virginians’ arrival, ‘among whom the most remarquable person is Poca-huntas (daughter of Powatan a kinge or cacique of that countrie) married to one Rolfe an English man’.24
The Rolfes stayed on into winter, moving from the Bell Savage Inn into a house in Brentford close to the River Thames, convenient for court and blessed with better air. Economy may also have dictated the move, for as Chamberlain confided to Carleton early in the new year, ‘you might thincke her and her worshipfull husband to be somebody, yf you do not know that the poore companie of Virginia out of theyre povertie are faine to allow her fowre pound a week for her maintenance’.25
For all Chamberlain’s sneering, Pocahontas was accepted into high society and caused a considerable stir. The Bishop of London hosted a dinner in her honour at Lambeth Palace, where she was treated with ‘festival state and pomp’;26 the Reverend Samuel Purchas was one of the dinner guests. Invited to court by King James, she was ‘graciously used’ by court officials and ‘well placed’ at the masque performed to celebrate Twelfth Night, a singular honour that showed she enjoyed the king’s favour. Later accounts suggest that she was frequently admitted to wait upon Queen Anne, having been introduced by the Lady Delaware, and was ‘carried to many plays, balls, and other public entertainments, and very respectfully received by all the ladies about the court’.27 Her behaviour throughout was impeccable, and those who met her generally concluded that ‘God had a great hand in her conversion, and they have seene many English Ladies worse favoured, proportioned and behavioured.’ John Smith eventually went to visit her in Brentford ‘with divers of my friends’, but the meeting did not go well; she was angry with him for the way he had mistreated her father, and because she had thought him dead all this time and he had not bothered to make contact with her.28
Engraved during her visit to London in the winter of 1616, Simon de Passe’s fashionable portrait of Pocahontas attests to her contemporary celebrity.
As a mark of her celebrity, she had her portrait engraved by the Dutch artist Simon de Passe, who had established a highly successful engraving practice in London. Portraits of noblemen, scholars and royalty were his speciality.29 John Chamberlain called it ‘a fine picture of no fayre Lady’, poking fun at Pocahontas’s ‘tricking up and high stile and titles’.30 This is the only known portrait of her taken from life, and it apparently sold well. Ignoring her popular nickname, de Passe introduces her as Matoaka alias Rebecca, daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan, Emperor of Virginia, converted and baptized in the Christian faith and wife to the worshipful Mr John Rolff. Clutching a fan of ostrich feathers, she wears the embroidered velvet mantle of the early Stuart court and a mannish beaver hat of the sort favoured by Queen Anne but denounced by King James, her neck and wrists encased by a starched white ruff and cuffs.31 Her solemn expression is hard to read: does she feel trapped by her English finery or is she rather projecting the dignity of her position?
By mid-January 1617 Mistress Rolfe was set to return to Virginia, ‘though sore against her will’, according to Chamberlain. The man charged with taking her back was her kidnapper, Captain Samuel Argall, then returning to Virginia to take over as lieutenant governor and to found a private plantation of his own. She was still apparently in good health, and while they waited for a favourable wind, the Rolfes received a grant of £100 from the Virginia Company to found a mission for native children, perpetuating Pocahontas’s propaganda value. The warrant drew attention to her ‘godly and virtuous example’ and to the couple’s promise to ‘employ their best endeavors to the winning of that People to the knowledge of God, and embracing of true religion’.32
They sailed as far as Gravesend, where the Lady Rebecca’s health suffered an unexpected decline. Taken off the ship, she died and was buried on 21 March 1617 in the chancel of St George’s church, her husband’s name wrongly recorded in the parish records, which describe her as ‘Rebecca Wrothe wyff off Thomas Wroth gent A Virginian Lady’.33 No one thought to record the cause of her death at little more than twenty years old, but it may have been a form of dysentery known as the bloody flux, which infected the convoy of ships on which she sailed. Chamberlain duly sent notice to Sir Dudley Carleton that the ‘Virginian woman (whose picture I sent you) died this last weeke at Gravesend as she was returning homeward’.34 John Rolfe sailed on to Virginia, leaving their son Thomas in the care of Sir Lewis Stukely, Vice-Admiral of Devonshire, until Rolfe’s brother could take him.35 Clearly a man who felt the need to justify his actions to escape public censure, he later explained to Sir Edwin Sandys that baby Thomas was dangerously sick and the child’s attendants ‘hadd need of nurses themselves’, adding a postscript that asked Sandys to remember him for some command and some estate of land to be confirmed ‘to me and my childe’.36
In a curious parallel to the story of the Jamestown brides, at least two and perhaps three of Pocahontas’s female attendants stayed on in London under the overall care of the Virginia Company.37 One of the maids went into service with a mercer in Cheapside but by May 1620 had developed consumption and was taken in by a Mr Gough living in the Blackfriars, close to the Bell Savage Inn where the Rolfes had first lodged. This was probably the Reverend William Gough, cousin to the Virginian minister Alexander Whitaker who had presided over Rebecca Rolfe’s conversion to the Christian faith. Gough took great pains to comfort the maid in body and soul, and the company agreed to contribute twenty shillings a week for two months towards the ‘Phisick and Cordialles’ necessary for her recovery. As ever the company was slow to pay, forcing one of its heaviest investors, Sir William Throckmorton, to reach into his own pocket.38
Later that same year the company appointed a four-man committee to take care of the two Virginian maids remaining in the custody of accountant William Webb. The committee hoped to place the women ‘in good services’ where they might learn ‘some trade to live by hereafter’. 39 Since Webb personally vouched for Mary Morrice, one of the Jamestown brides, she would surely have come into contact with either or both of the surviving Virginians, now christianized as Mary and Elizabeth.
Anxious to free the company from the weekly expense of their maintenance, Webb proposed in June 1621 that some course might be found to ‘dispose’ of the two Indian maids. The sums were quite significant: five pounds for Elizabeth’s board for eight months with a Captain Maddison, and up to twelve shillings a week on medical care for Mary at the height of her sickness.40 Yet given that the company was at this time busy putting together its shipments of brides for the Virginian planters, the solution adopted was a curious one: the pair were to be kitted out and sent overseas with a servant apiece, not to their homeland but to the Summer Isles, as Bermuda was then called, ‘towards their preferment in marriage with such as shall accept of them with that means’.41 Although the Virginia Company had happily employed Pocahontas as an instrument of propaganda, it seems that including two of her attendants in the bridal shipments to Virginia was a step too far.
So Mary and Elizabeth sailed to Bermuda on the James with two boys each, to be married to whoever would have them.42 With them went ample stores of oatmeal, brandy, vinegar and oil, and a trousseau that was far more generous than that provided for the Jamestown brides, comprising coifs, cross cloths, neckcloths, material for smocks, a gown and a petticoat each, sletia (a kind of cloth), blue aprons, stockings and shoes, trunks, a bible and a psalter, soap and starch, thread, girdles, pins, laces and needles, as well as beds, rugs and plentiful clothes for the boys. Altogether, William Webb’s charges for equipping and transporting the two Virginian maids and their boys amounted to £71 4s. or £35 12s. per maid, three times the outlay on each of the Jamestown brides.
After the two Virginians were converted and married, it was hoped that ‘they might be sent to their Countrey and kindred to civilize them’. At least one survived the voyage and found ‘a husband fit for her’, a union celebrated by more than one hundred guests ‘and all the dainties for their dinner’ that could be provided.43 Like so much of their tantalizing story, precisely who they married or what happened to them is unknown.
