Pocahontas: Nature and Artifice in the American Imagination

“And being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms and laid down her own upon his to save him from death” (Smith 36).

The story of Pocahontas saving John Smith from execution has been told and retold in the four hundred years since the incident took place. It has gained the status of a folk tale, becoming part of the national mythology of America alongside Paul Revere’s ride and George Washington’s cherry tree. Considering that it is doubtful whether or not the episode even took place, the tenacity of the tale is remarkable. Pocahontas’s narrative is a compelling one to be sure, and it has been seized upon and used by sources as sundry as the Walt Disney Company, painter John Gadsby Chapman, film director Terrence Malick, and John Smith himself, in pursuit of their own agendas, and to convey their own understandings of the encounter between the Europeans and native peoples of America.

The public first encountered Pocahontas when she traveled to England with a group of other Powhatans, appearing before King James in 1616, and then in John Smith’s own account of his rescue by her in his Generall Historie of Virginia. The story metamorphosed over the years to communicate changing notions about the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans, and to incorporate romantic elements absent from Smith’s telling. 380 years later, American director Terrence Malick released his take on the story, aiming, ostensibly at least, to dispel the inaccuracies of earlier versions, and using Smith’s General History as its source to present a more historically factual version of events. The ways in which these various authors, particularly Smith and Malick, present the story and character of Pocahontas reflect an evolution in fundamental social assumptions about mankind’s relationship with the natural world, and more specifically the evolving understandings of the value of the “natural” versus “artificial” from the time of the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 until the release of Malick’s film in 2005.

The first and most prominent telling of the Pocahontas story was by John Smith in his General History of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. Smith was actually there, the witness or the subject of many of the events he describes, but the authenticity of his account is colored by his motives in addressing his intended audience as well as by his own cultural prejudices. Smith wrote the General History at a dangerous and pivotal moment for the Virginia Company, on the heels of the Powhatan massacre of Jamestown settlers in 1622, which left about one third of the English population dead. This was a major public relations disaster for the Virginia Company, and for Virginia itself, and there were fears that immigration would drop off to a dangerously unsustainable level. The joint-stock company, operated since 1606 under a charter granted by King James, would be dissolved because of this pressure in 1624, and Virginia would become a royal colony administered by the Crown.

Smith seems to have a few primary objectives in the General History. He hopes to assuage the doubts of investors back in England, alleviate public fears about the dangers posed by starvation and Indian attack in the colony to encourage settlers to migrate to Virginia, and bolster his own reputation and personal glory. He begins with an ethnographic report of the country, in which he describes the land as plentiful, “they plant their fields and live most off acorns, walnuts, and fish…to amend their diet…[they] live upon fish, beasts, crabs, oysters, land tortoises, strawberries, mulberries, and such like” (Smith 8), as well as being free for the taking, “the land is not populous, for the men be few; their far greater number is of women and children” (Smith 5). Smith then describes the history of the settlement at Jamestown up to that point, focusing on his personal role in the colony’s affairs. The key passage comes relatively early, as Smith relays the account of his capture by Powhatan warriors while scouting for the head of the Chickahominy River. He describes fighting off “two hundred savages” before being “shot in his thigh a little…but with no great hurt, till at last they took him prisoner” (31). He says he was held by the Powhatans for seven or eight weeks (though it was actually around three) before “having feasted him after their best barbarous manner…as many as could laid hands on him” and laid his head on “two great stones” (36). At this point Pocahontas enters the narrative for the first time, saving John Smith by appealing to her father for clemency. The rest, as they say, is history. Today many scholars doubt whether this incident took place as Smith described. Smith’s two earlier accounts of his time in Virginia did not include the episode of Pocahontas saving his life, a detail it seems strange to have left out. Furthermore, Smith had already recounted a similar story of being saved by an exotic damsel at least once before. In his earlier book True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, he is saved by one Charatza Tragabigzanda after being captured by the Ottomans (Kupperman 125). It is impossible to know if Pocahontas actually saved Smith’s life as he tells it, but it does not ultimately matter very much. Whether he decided to relate the story after glossing over it in previous accounts, or if he simply fabricated it seventeen years after the fact, he included the episode in the General History for the same reason.

Pocahontas presented a vivid symbol of a charitable “savage” that could controvert the sinister picture drawn by accounts of the recent Jamestown massacre. She had accompanied her husband, as Mrs. Rebecca Rolfe, to England in 1616 on a publicity tour for the Virginia Company, intended to demonstrate to the Court and the public that the natives of Virginia were friendly, peaceful, and most importantly, amenable to religious conversion and Anglicization. Native peoples from the New World had been brought back to England with relative frequency ever since John Cabot brought three men from Newfoundland back to the court of Henry VII in the 1490’s (101). Previously, these natives had been displayed merely as artifacts from the New World, to satisfy the curiosity of England for exotic objects. They were, in other words, live specimens for the curiosity cabinets which had become hugely popular on the Continent. Pocahontas, on the other hand, was not presented as an artifact of foreignness, but for her very Englishness to be marveled at. It is hugely significant that of the several dozen Native American arrivals in England, Pocahontas was the first to have her portrait made in English pose and dress (269). Pocahontas was presented to the court of King James and to the investors of the Virginia Company as an example of what could be made of the “savages.” She had been baptized, spoke English, was clad in western dress, and was married to an Englishman. The Virginia Company subsequently voted the sum of £100 to begin a program that would convert the Chesapeake Algonquins to Christianity (271). With the addition of the rescue story to his narrative, Smith was relying on, as well as supplementing, the popular image of Pocahontas to again stress a similar point: that the natives of Virginia were not all bloodthirsty and dangerous, but could indeed be successfully converted to Western ways.
This narrative of Pocahontas, as a symbol of the friendly “docile” native, appropriately receptive to “superior” Western thinking, persists for several centuries. A notable example of this perspective of the Pocahontas story is in the painting of the Baptism of Pocahontas by John Gadsby Chapman. Chapman was commissioned in 1837 to paint a historical scene on the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington, DC (John Gadsby Chapman). This is the image of Pocahontas that became part of America’s national mythology. Very much founded in the 17th century approach to civilizing and converting Native Americans, Pocahontas’ most significant achievement for American society is portrayed as simply receiving a baptism, the blessings of Western civilization.

Elizabethan notions of nature and undeveloped space strongly colored the attitude of the Jamestown settlers toward the land and the Native Americans they encountered. The English viewed the environment as “pure potential” that had to be improved by people, by cultivating the land and building upon it. When they encountered landscapes, as they did in Virginia, that were almost entirely untouched by the hand of man, they believed that it was because the native peoples were not able to properly develop the land, as God intended. This understanding is reflected by the contemporary slang in England, by which a person with below average intelligence would be called ‘natural.’ In contrast, artificiality was a state that should be strived for. Bringing the land to its full potential “through the application of art and intelligence” signified the fulfillment of Man’s role in the world (Kupperman 133-4). Artifice was highly valued even in English gardens, which tended to be highly ordered and managed. The estate of Chatsworth, even included an ersatz willow tree, built in 1695 and made entirely of copper and bronze, which could shoot water at unsuspecting guests out of spigots on each of its branches (Devonshire 74).

The English view of the Powhatans is impacted by the lack of development they saw in the landscape. Smith describes how “their houses are in the midst of their fields and gardens” and “that a man may gallop a horse amongst those woods any way but where the creeks or rivers shall hinder” (Smith 7). The bafflement expressed here is at the lack of fences or walls in the Powhatan settlements. While this merely reflects a different understanding of land ownership and property rights, the settlers viewed the cause as a deficiency on the part of the Powhatans, making them incapable of properly developing their land. Similarly, English observers conveyed confusion concerning the Indian practice of planting multiple crops in the same field, which contrasted with the English practice of monoculture. The English saw disorder and barbarism, when in fact polyculture is a more sustainable approach to agriculture than monoculture.

The early-modern perspectives on nature and development held by the Jamestown settlers can be easily contrasted with those of today. Attitudes have almost wholly flipped in the intervening four hundred years. In America today, pristine, untouched areas of nature are set aside as National Parks to be preserved and enjoyed. Environments and vistas free from signs of human development are seen as beautiful and valuable. The rampant surplus extraction and development of land that marked much of America’s history has been repudiated in favor of preservation and conservation. This is the perspective from which Terrence Malick approaches the arrival of English settlers at Jamestown. The film opens with shots of the unspoiled natural beauty of Virginia, and throughout the film Malick’s camera lingers perceptibly on images of fields of grass, serene forests and flocks of birds filling the skies, and he depicts the natives as living perfectly in concert with these natural rhythms. This spirit is also expressed through Malick’s repeated use of the Prelude from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which appears in both the opening and closing scenes. In the opera, the Prelude accompanies the Rhinemaidens as they swim in the Rhine, and evokes the unchanging rhythms of the river and its eternal natural tranquility. Malick portrays Smith as being taken in by this natural repose during his captivity among the Powhatans. When Smith returns to Jamestown, the settlement appears muddy and chaotic. A herd of boys, with dirty pockmarked faces, mob around Smith yelling unintelligibly. The contrast drawn with the peaceful and seemingly carefree world of Powhatan is clear, and powerful.

Malick’s aesthetic, manifested as well in his other three films, is consistently meditative and engrossed with images of natural beauty. The calm of nature is always contrasted with an element of discord generated by human society, whether criminal passion in Days of Heaven or war in The Thin Red Line. Pocahontas, portrayed by the young actress Q’orianka Kilcher, is introduced in the film as wild and animal-like, her supple movements are healthy and vigorous, and her wide eyes are curious and intelligent. At the point in the film when she transitions into wearing European dress, around the same time Smith departs Virginia, her demeanor changes prominently. For the remainder of the film she is no longer the playful, inquisitive “natural” encountered at the beginning of the film. She takes on a sort of quiet sadness, along with her petticoats. Later in the film when she visits the court of King James, she is shown alongside a bald eagle in a cage, also brought from America to be exhibited to an English public eager for artifacts from the New World. The visual metaphor is clear, that Pocahontas is a captive in this world, whose freedom has been unfairly fettered. Malick’s aesthetic is an illustrative representation of the 21st century’s perspective on “natural” versus “artificial,” that the natural embodies an ideal, well-ordered world that can never be restored once disrupted.

These depictions reflect an evolution in fundamental social assumptions about the way the natural world functions. Pocahontas’ identity as one of the first individuals to cross the immense cultural divide that separated Native Americans from the Europeans newly arrived in their land, has made her the subject of what can only really be described as propaganda. The story of Pocahontas and her role in the colony’s early development has been utilized to comment on different readings of the encounter between Native American and European, colored by remarkably different worldviews in different periods of history. She may be the most famous figure in American history of whom so little is known. Her legacy is both assured and as unconfined as the Pocahontas portrayed by Malick at the beginning of his film, but most importantly, it is always open to interpretation.