Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

In April of 1616, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, their young son Thomas, Sir Thomas Dale, and about a hundred other passengers make their way across the sea on a ship helmed by Captain Argall. An adviser to Powhatan named Uttamatomakin and about six other native attendants are also in their company—a “veritable delegation” sent by Powhatan to discover information about England and report it back, no doubt an advantage afforded to the chief by virtue of Pocahontas’s marriage to an Englishman.

Townsend wonders what Pocahontas’s thoughts must have been as the ship arrived in Plymouth—a huge, dirty port city remarkably different from the world Pocahontas knew. She, Uttamatomakin, and their fellow natives undoubtedly realized the full force of what their people were up against. After pausing for several days in Plymouth, the ship heads up the Thames to London—where Pocahontas encounters a city of 200,000 people. London is not, however, a modern city: the streets are mud, and the low wooden buildings are crushed together. At an inn near Fleet Street famous for hosting notable people, John Rolfe and Pocahontas disembark their carriage and check into their rooms. 

Sir Edwin Sandys is a member of Parliament and a wealthy investor in the Virginia Company. He takes Rolfe and Pocahontas “under his wing,” so to speak, while they stay in London. He pays “the Lady Rebecca” several pounds a week so that she can afford to dress well and pay her attendants throughout her demanding stay, as she’ll need to look her best and be ready to be shown off at any moment. Sandys and the other high-ranking members of the Virginia Company—embroiled at the time in several lawsuits and on shaky financial ground—are determined to get London talking about Pocahontas’s visit, and perhaps thus rescue the venture’s reputation.

John Rolfe and Pocahontas receive invitations to social gatherings left and right—everyone wants to meet Pocahontas and hear tales of life in Virginia. Scholars and socialites alike, Townsend writes, likely saw Pocahontas as the personification of their colonialist desires for the land of Virginia itself: a foreign woman who had been tamed, brought to God, and instilled with a love of England. As Rolfe and Pocahontas go from party to party, Pocahontas becomes run-down and ill, her immune system under attack by “thousands of foreign microbes” to which she has no immunity. To escape the bustling crowds and polluted London air, Rolfe secures lodgings for them and their toddler, Thomas, in Middlesex, a suburb nine miles from the heart of the city.

Pocahontas is, in addition to being sick, no doubt exhausted by the attention being lavished on her and questions and favors being asked of her. In London, Pocahontas is a “model” forced to represent her entire race, and her admirers there likely see her as a caricature of an idea of an Indian they know from stories, plays, and dances. Townsend cites the example of one specific event Pocahontas attends: a Twelfth Night masque (or longform spectacular performance with elaborate sets and costumes) at the Court of King James. Pocahontas and Rolfe are treated well and seated prominently at the masque, though not its guests of honor—that designation is reserved for George Villiers, the king’s new lover. As they watch an elaborate performance scripted by playwright Ben Jonson unfold, the room buzzes with whispers and gossip about Pocahontas—not all of it reverent or even kind.

Letters from the time sent between members of high society—such as John Chamberlain, a “genteel town gossip” popular at court—reveal a cruel, petty disdain for Pocahontas and make barbed jokes about her dark skin, her obsession with London society, and her “trick[ed] up” manner of dressing. For all that was written at the time about Pocahontas, her voice is “difficult to hear” in the cacophony of history—and yet two anecdotes provide a window into what she may have been thinking and feeling throughout her highly-scrutinized time in London.

In the late days of 1616, Pocahontas sits for a portrait: an engraving of her was to be made by the renowned Dutch-German artist Simon Van de Passe. Her image, Townsend writes, was to be used to advertise a fund-raising lottery for the Virginia Company. According to Townsend, the portrait was marred in some ways by the Virginia Company’s propaganda—they listed Pocahontas’s age as 21 when she was 19 due to their need to represent her advertisement as one of a “consenting adult”—but in other ways, the portrait reflects the artist’s desire to render Pocahontas based on how she may have wanted to appear. She wears pearl earrings (a symbol of the pearl-rich Virginia shores) and a plain hat, refusing to don a frilly, hyperfeminine one like those popular at court. Her high cheekbones, dark eyes, and black hair are rendered starkly rather than Anglicized or softened.

Most tellingly, the portrait is surrounded by a description of its subject: “Matoaka als Rebecka daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan Emperour of Attanoughskomouck.” Pocahontas’s true name, Matoaka, appears—as does the word Attanoughskomouck, likely a phonetic spelling of Pocahontas’s homeland’s own true name: Tsenacomoco.

Another anecdote which reveals Pocahontas’s state of mind while in London comes from descriptions of an encounter she has with John Smith when he comes to visit her. Pocahontas is not overjoyed to see Smith, as he assumed she would be. Rather, she “obscure[s] her face” from him at first, then later disparages him in a long tirade. She explains that because Smith betrayed Powhatan and treated him as a “stranger,” she is now treating Smith the same way. Though Townsend reminds readers that Smith often exaggerated accounts of his life, this encounter was indeed witnessed by several others who verified, in their own writings, Pocahontas’s emotions of “profound sadness and anger” mixed with “judgment and superiority.”

In March, Rolfe and Pocahontas are ready to return to Virginia. Edwin Sandys gives the Rolfes some money as a parting gift, symbolically meant to congratulate “the good example of [Pocahontas’s] conversion, and to encourage other of her kindred […] to do the like.” The gift comes with a condition: Rolfe is asked to start a school that will be used to convert Indian children to Christianity. As they make their way down the Thames, Pocahontas’s illness worsened. In the town of Gravesend, Rolfe helps Pocahontas to bed and sends for a doctor—but Pocahontas and many of her other native attendants are simply too ill, and there succumb to their sicknesses. Rolfe never records his wife’s final moments or words.

On March 21st, Pocahontas is buried at the small church in Gravesend. She is given a Christian burial, and her grave remains unmarked by a stone. After the funeral, Rolfe, his son Thomas, Uttamatomakin, and Argall, along with the rest of the crew, continue along the river. At a stop in Plymouth, however, Rolfe arranges for a man named Sir Louis Stukely, a local vice admiral, to keep the child. Smith later wrote in a diary entry that he regretted doing so, and feared being punished or “censured” by God for abandoning his child. He asks that Thomas be sent to Virginia when he is older—but the two never meet again.