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.

The Rise and Fall of Robert Owen: Intellectual Foment and Fizzle

The village of New Lanark lies on the River Clyde, twenty miles southeast of Glasgow. A visitor, approaching from the north, would observe neat rows of uniform three and five storied gray stone buildings huddled together in the hilly bucolic Scottish countryside, but at first one would likely not discern the significance of the utopian proto-socialist factory community laid out before them. In many ways, Lanark was like the dozens of other mill towns that sprung up around the British isles in the years since Richard Arkwright first harnessed water to power spinning machines in the 1770s. This little industrial hamlet contained mills and factories, spinning and weaving the cotton thread which clothed Britain and constituted one of her principal exports to the rest of the world. There were tenements and houses for the approximately eighteen hundred workers and managers, a bell tower to bring the laborers to work in the morning, and send them home in the evening. However, Lanark was made peculiar by its unconventional manager and operator, the Welshman Robert Owen, who turned Lanark into a laboratory for his own revolutionary theories on business, community, and education.

If this visitor proceeded to peer inside the buildings of Lanark they might begin to see the nascent components of what Owen termed “the New Moral World.” Above each laborer’s station within the factory is a carved, painted block of wood – a “silent monitor” – whose painted faces would be turned according to the worker’s productivity, from black for deficient to white for excellence. Inside one room, uniformed schoolgirls practice a dance while an instructor looks on, under an immense map of Europe and large posters of exotic animals. Lining the walls are well-dressed patrician visitors, who have probably come to satisfy the curiosity aroused by the deluge of praise and attention lavished on Lanark by the press and important thinkers of the day. The Institute for the Formation of Character, formed in 1816, supervised the education of Lanark’s five hundred indigent child laborers. Housing, fuel, clothing and provisions were provided for the workers at low rates, and an atmosphere of communal good and religious tolerance was impressed. Robert Owen was the architect and potentate behind this entire enterprise at Lanark, and his successes here would bring him international celebrity.

Robert Owen was born the sixth of his parents’ seven children on May 14th, 1771. He was born and brought up in the small market town of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, near the English border in the west of Wales. It was a comfortable, though modest background. His father, also named Robert Owen, was a saddler and ironmonger by trade, as well as the town’s postmaster. He was a precocious and clever youth, graduating at the age of seven to schoolmaster’s assistant. The young Owen developed an early passion for reading and devoured volumes from the libraries of the town clergyman, doctor, and lawyer, from Charles Rollin’s Ancient History to the adventure of Robinson Crusoe and Christian allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress. Owen wrote later that he believed every word in these books to be true, and would often read a volume per day.” It was around the age of eight or nine that Owen turned his keen mind toward the question of religion. Upon prompting from some Methodist friends of the Owen family, he began to read tracts on the religious thought of various peoples of the world. Owen was to write that the “study of these contending faiths, and their deadly hate of other, began to create doubts” in his mind as to the accuracy or preeminence of any set of beliefs.

Already restless with his rustic surroundings, Owen obtained permission to leave home upon his tenth birthday. Thus, in 1781, Owen made the journey by coach to London, where he stayed with his brother William for six weeks before securing employment with James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Owen found great pride in self-sufficiency, bragging, “from that period, ten years of age, [I] maintained myself without ever applying to my parents for any additional aid.”
Owen’s future father-in-law, Glasgow businessman and preacher David Dale, founded New Lanark in 1784. Dale selected the location due to the nearby waterfalls on the River Clyde, which would power the cotton mills he constructed on the site. New Lanark however, was remote, the roads were bad, and the area around it under-populated. Dale was forced to secure a new labor force, and transport and provide accommodations for them at New Lanark. This was achieved by procuring about 500 children from workhouses public charities, and by persuading families to move to the fledgling factory village. At this early juncture of the Industrial Revolution there was still a considerable aversion for factory labor among the general public, and the workers who arrived in New Lanark were of a less than savory nature. Owen later described them as, “destitute of friends, employment, and character.”

Owen first visited Lanark on June 15, 1798, at the age of twenty-seven. If his own version of the story is to be believed, Owen fell into an appraisal of Lanark while attempting to win the hand of Dale’s daughter, the nineteen-year-old Ann Caroline Dale. Whatever Owen’s original intentions were, he secured the purchase of the land, village, and mills of Lanark for himself and his partners, John Barton and John Atkinson, for sixty thousand pounds. Later that year, on September 30th, Owen was married to Ann Dale in Glasgow. On January 1, 1800, Owen took over as manager of the New Lanark Twist Company. He and Ann moved into one of the two large houses located in the center of the village, and Owen went about using his new role as a pulpit for some of his own theories on management and harmonious community. Owen was impressed with the spacious rooms and plentiful food afforded the child laborers at New Lanark, but found fault with Dale for having lived in Glasgow and not devoting himself fully to the well-being of his employees. Owen maintained that prior to his arrival the “population lived in idleness, in poverty, in almost every kind of crime [and] consequently, in debt, out of health, and in misery.” He was horrified to find as well that “the whole was under a strong sectarian influence, which gave a marked and decided preference to one set of religious opinions over all others.”

Owen’s first project was to provide for the education of the children at New Lanarck. Education was at the forefront of Owen’s theories for social betterment. In his own memoirs, Owen’s son Robert Dale wrote that the “New Lanark schools, and the cause of popular education generally, were the subjects which, at this period of my father’s life, chiefly engrossed his attention.” The village school taught the children at New Lanarck for five years, between the ages of five and ten, and without expense to their parents. The schools aimed to educate the children in the broad tenets of Christianity, with no specific doctrinal bent. Mrs. Thrall, a former pupil at the Owenite Lanark-modeled schools at New Harmony, recollected her time there and gives a vivid picture of the dreary monotony of the “coarse linen” uniforms, stringently enforced hours, suppers of “mush and milk again,” and being “marched together to the Community apothecary’s shop, where a dose that tasted like sulfur was impartially dealt out to each pupil.” Admittedly however, this inflexible educational regime would have been a marked improvement over the fourteen hours per day at the factory common for thousands of other British children.

Owen had developed the belief, popular at this time of the advent of the social sciences, that the character of human beings is determined by their environment experiences, and education during childhood. Owen found children to be naturally “without exception, passive and wonderfully contrived compounds.” Owen thought that the growing trend of child labor was creating members of society who were “dwarfs in body and mind,” and he became convinced that society’s ills could be cured if only children were educated before entering the labor pool, and taught intellectual curiosity and tolerance. In his autobiography, Owen applies this theory to himself. At one point, he bizarrely attributes his unique characteristics and any “favorable difference” he possessed, to have stemmed from an episode that occurred when he was around the age of five. Owen writes that once, in his rush to arrive first to school, he swallowed a scalding spoonful of flummery , which scorched his stomach and thereafter made the digestion of food decidedly difficult. By his account, this minor disability aroused in Owen “the habit of close observation and of continual reflection .”

Lanark became a spectacular success. Owen used the profits from the mills to finance new elements of his plans for the ideal society. The Institute for the Formation of Character taught singing and dancing to supplement the typical schoolwork of reading, writing and arithmetic. Owen instituted an autonomous jury system, neighborhood-based community representation, and even a fledgling social security system to provide for workers in injury and old age. Owen reduced his employees’ working day by an hour, and still earned enough profits to circumvent the persistent naysaying of his partners by buying them out in 1813. Some 20,000 visitors flocked to Lanark between 1815 and 1825 to see how Owen had so successfully paired altruism and humanitarian interests with profitability. In 1816, Owen declared that “the chief object” of his life would be to export the successes of Lanark to the world at large.

In an 1813 account of Owen’s early work at Lanark, he holds himself up as a savior to these pauper Scottish laborers. Owen held himself up as somewhere between missionary and messiah – declaring of his work at Lanark, “the population could not continue to resist a firm well-directed kindness, administering justice to all.” This likeness was carried on by many others at the time, at least to some extent as a direct result of Owen’s avid self-promotion. Owen made his first appearance as a speaker in 1812, at a dinner in Glasgow, and would eventually become best known for his many public speaking tours and engagements. In an 1824 tour of the United States he addressed a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in Cincinatti, engaged in an eight-day public debate on religion. His ideas held enough sway to gain Owen the ears of the American President, the Austrian minister Metternich, Prime Ministers and Members of Parliament. Owen’s success seems to have frozen his once vigorous and active mind. His son describes his reading habits’ atrophy, “he usually glanced over books, without mastering them; often dismissing them with some…curt remark…I never remember to have seen him occupied in taking notes from any book whatever.”

His reputation as an innovative thinker and successful manager began to be replaced however, with one for pomposity, garrulity, and a dictatorial approach in his little “new moral worlds.” Reports that Owen had himself castrated a boy who had transgressed Owen’s law against licentiousness, whether true or not, did nothing to help his public persona. The power and capacity of this sort of mass leadership seems to have gone to Owen’s head. From this point on, Owen had passed his apogee, and his fame and fortunes began to fall. Convinced of his own rectitude and philosophical infallibility, Owen continued to preach his increasingly extreme social and moral solutions. His long-held secularism turned subtly to anti-religious rants, alienating, and likely limiting, his audience. He continued to publish prolifically and held frequent speaking engagements, but he ceased to say anything new, and fewer and fewer people found what Owen had to offer interesting. His published work held such grandiloquent titles as “The Measures Which I have been Impressed from My Youth to Adopt Through Life to This Period, To Prepare the Population of the World to Change Their System of Falsehood, Ignorance, and Misery, for the System of Truth, Wisdom, and Happiness.”

Owen’s obituary, announcing his death in The Times on November 19, 1858 carries the air of a bright, but dirtied past. Owen perhaps was too similar to his signature wooden block, announcing workers’ progress: designed with the best intentions to be efficacious, but ultimately uncompromising and, above all, blockish. The legacy of Robert Owen is perhaps best reflected in these lines of verse from an 1834 edition of the Poor Man’s Guardian:
Robert Owen, wise and good,
Better known than understood;
Too often putting wisdom’s tools
In the very hands of fools.