The Virginia Company Term Analysis

When the two cultures met and entered a power struggle over land and resources, it would turn out that, unbeknownst to ei­ther side, they had been in something like a technological race for centuries. And the cultural heirs of people who had been full-time agriculturalists for eleven thousand years rather than a few hundred had already won.

None of this made an individual white man one whit more intel­ligent or more perceptive than an individual Indian—just better in­formed and better armed.

There is no question that John Smith and his peers— those who wrote such books, and those who read them— embraced a notion of an explorer as a conqueror who strode with manly steps through lands of admirers, particularly admiring women. […] The colonizers of the imagination were men—men imbued with almost mystical powers. The foreign women and the foreign lands wanted, even needed, these men, for such men were more than desirable. They were deeply good, right in all they did, blessed by God.

Namontack convinced Powhatan to accept the gifts… […] “But a fowle trouble there was to make him kneele to receave his crowne.” Smith asserted that this was because the Indian did not know the “meaning of a Crowne,” but in fact he probably understood only too well the gesture of kneeling to receive a crown at the hands of another. He himself, after all, liked the practice of anointing tributary werowances who were bound to do his bidding. “At last by leaning hard on his shoulders, he a little stooped, and Newport put the Crowne on his head.”

Did [John Rolfe] and his wife look at the promised violence from the Indians’ point of view? Possibly. Did they believe they were fulfilling God’s will? Probably. Did they hope to become great merchant traders? Most certainly.

The Virginia Company’s standing was precarious. Even as Sandys prepared the Lady Rebecca to meet London society, the company was involved in several lawsuits. […] The organization’s financial situation would remain shaky until the general public became convinced that Virginia was truly a land of promise. Naturally, tobacco shipments would be critical, but to raise a significant crop the company first needed to convince po­tential settlers and investors that the Indians were not bloodthirsty savages.

It would not have taken [Pocahontas] long to realize that friend and foe alike held at least one notion in common: she was to them a model, a stick figure, representing a race that was either barbaric or charming, or both, depending on their perspective, but never simply human.

It would be too simple to say that she faced hatred. The British were fascinated by her, adored her exoticism. At first it probably seemed flattering. Only later would she have begun to experience the psychological costs of being a symbol rather than a person.

Indeed, the initial report written in the colony about the “barbarous massacre” made the claim that in the long run, the event was a net positive: at last the colonists were free to remove the Indians and take the country for themselves… […] In words reminiscent of a modern-day killer who claims he would never have hurt his victim […] if she had not been foolish enough to struggle, the colonial chronicler continued to insist it had never been his choice to fight, even as he loaded his gun and drew on his armor. The policy of extermination had been born.