26 The Colonial and Revolutionary PeriodsPowhatan chief as saying, “your coming hither is not for trade, but to invade my
people, and possesse my Country.” “To free us of this feare,” the chief implores, “leave
aboord your weapons, for here they are needless, we being all friends.” Smith proudly
remembers how he refused the request, which is dismissed as a “subtill discourse” or
probable trick. The “Salvages” were frightened by the guns, and what they might
portend, and he wanted to exploit that fear.
Even the most famous story in The Generall Historie, of how the daughter of the
Powhatan chief, Pocahontas, saved John Smith from execution, is not quite the cel-
ebration of Native American courage and grace under pressure that, in the retelling
over generations, it has tended to become. As Smith originally tells the story, it has
quite other implications that reflect his own sense of his mission, to tame the
wilderness and make it fit for civilization. “Two great stones were brought ... then as
many as could layd hands on him ... and thereon laid his head,” Smith recalls, here
as elsewhere telling the tale of his captivity in the third person. The “Salvages,” hav-
ing dragged Smith to a place of execution, are then “ready with their clubs, to beate
out his brains”; and Smith is only rescued when “Pocahontas the Kings dearest
daughter, when no intreaty could prevail, got his head in her armes, and laid her
owne upon his to save him from death.” The moment does not occur in Smith’s
earlier account of his captivity in A True Relation, which has led some to doubt that
it really happened. Whether it happened or not, though, it becomes here part of a
narrative pattern that subsumes it, making it one episode in a tale telling how the
“Barbarians” were mastered. The chief, Pocahontas’s father, is momentarily appeased;
and Smith is returned to confinement. Then, a few days later, the reader is told, the
chief comes to where Smith is being held. He is dressed up “more like a devill than a
man, with some two hundred more as blacke as himself ” accompanying him. And
he orders Smith to go to Jamestown to acquire “two great gunnes” for the Powhatan.
Not having much choice, Smith goes with “12 guides” to keep an eye on him. He
expects “every houre to be put to one death or another” by his guards, “but almightie
God (by his divine providence) had mollified the hearts of those sterne Barbarians,”
Smith records with gratitude. He survives, returns with two cannons and then, by
the simple expedient of firing them off, persuades the Powhatans not to take them.
On hearing the noise of cannon fire, “the poor Salvages ran away halfe dead with
fear,” Smith explains with a mixture of amusement and contempt. After this terrifying
experience, all the Powhatan want by way of gift or trade is not guns but mere “toys.”
Not for the first time, by his own account, Smith uses the fear and ignorance of the
Powhtans to get what he wants, to assert the superiority of his own claims. And, seen
in the context of that account as a whole, Pocahontas’s saving gesture seems less the
act of a noble savage that it later came to be, and more part of an evolutionary tale
in which the savage yields to the advance of the civilized. Pocahontas’s evident
readiness to sacrifice her life for John Smith, in other words, becomes here a roman-
tic variation on the theme that runs through all this particular captivity tale. The
Native American, according to this theme, acknowledges both the superiority and
the inevitability of the European and is overpowered or, as in this specific case, offers
their acknowledgment in the form of personal sacrifice.GGray_c01.indd 26ray_c 01 .indd 26 8 8/1/2011 7:54:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 54 AM