Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Several months after her initial capture, Pocahontas remains imprisoned at Jamestown. Though Powhatan has sent back captive colonists and weapons in exchange for Pocahontas’s release, her English captors refuse to make a trade. Jamestown is, at the time, under strict military rule—Sir Thomas Gates and his second-in-command, Sir Thomas Dale, rule with such iron-fisted cruelty that a report from a Spanish captive at the time claims “many [had] gone over to the Indians.”

About 50 miles north of Jamestown, another there is another colony called Henrico with is smaller but happier. Several months into Pocahontas’s captivity, she is relocated there in hopes that she might be “socialized” by the white men and women who comprise the colony’s majority—at Jamestown, many Spaniards and Indian captives make up the population. Pocahontas is delivered to the household of Reverend Alexander Whitaker, who has built a church across the river. Here, Pocahontas is dressed in English clothing, instructed further in the English language, and given a copy of the King James Bible to learn. The reverend, though Pocahontas’s jailer, is “determined to treat her with such kindness that [she would allow him to] control her hopes, her thoughts, her very life.” Whitaker, born into a wealthy family of scholars, had come to Virginia in 1611, hoping to convert as many Indians as he could to Protestantism.

During the week, Pocahontas has lessons in language, conversation, and religion with Whitaker—who viewed her less as a person, Townsend writes, and more as a way to test his ability to convert natives. On weekends, Pocahontas joins Whitaker in town, where he preaches. It is on one of these Sundays, Townsend presumes, that Pocahontas and the widowed John Rolfe first meet. By the end of the winter of 1613, Rolfe writers a letter to Thomas Dale asking permission to marry Pocahontas and professing his love for the young woman. Though Pocahontas is unconverted—and though Rolfe expresses reservations about her “background”—he also uses impassioned language as he describes his love for her and his wish to marry her.  

Townsend uses a combination of records and speculation to construct Rolfe’s qualms and quandaries during this time. He loved Pocahontas, but the Bible warned against taking “strange wives.” Rolfe tried to fight his passion for the woman—he was also no doubt, Townsend writes, full of guilt over the fact that he had, by his own admission, begun to forget his recently-deceased first wife. Rolfe’s letters reflect his determination to assure Pocahontas’s conversion to Christianity—perhaps to mitigate his own guilt, and perhaps to ensure that their potential children would be Christians.

Though Rolfe’s feelings are evident in his many letters and diary entries, Townsend writes, there is not even a scrap of information about Pocahontas’s feelings for Rolfe—or her motivations for accepting his proposal and allowing herself to be baptized. Townsend turns to anthropological, cultural, and historical perspective to fill in the blanks about what Pocahontas may have been thinking. It is “impossible,” Townsend writes, that Pocahontas was motivated (as the cultural myths about her have so often suggested she was) by genuine love of the English or belief in Christianity. She most likely had independent agendas of her own—but no real control over her own circumstances. At the same time, Pocahontas was not likely forced into marriage, as three of her relatives attended the ceremony—the question, then, Townsend writes, becomes why an Algonkian noblewoman would “cross into another world” forever.

Townsend suggests that Pocahontas, following a “time-honored custom,” married her enemy in order to bear children who would owe their allegiance to both sides. Powhatan even sent a letter, prior to the marriage, suggesting Pocahontas find a way to stay with the English—a letter that seems to confirm that both Pocahontas and her father were thinking strategically. It is also worth remembering, Townsend writes, that in her own tribe, Pocahontas would not have been eligible for a “politically significant match”—but here, in Henrico, she was a princess in the English’s eyes, and could create a meaningful and potentially powerful alliance.

Townsend rewinds the narrative a bit to March of 1614 in order to illustrate how Pocahontas’s marriage—and her remaining with the English in Henrico—was, in fact, politically significant. After Sir Thomas Dale takes over as governor of Virginia, he immediately launches an offensive against Powhatan, using Pocahontas as a pawn. With the young woman and many soldiers, he sails upriver from the settlement in search of Powhatan. Even with Pocahontas as a bargaining chip, though, they are barred from meeting with the chief. Instead, John Rolfe and another settler are brought to meet with Opechankeno, who relays Powhatan’s wishes that Pocahontas stay with the English as Dale’s symbolic “child.” Pocahontas’s willingness to do so in her father’s name, Townsend asserts, effectively ends the war that had been raging for so many years.