rest, and made a dash at the little ten-year-old tumbler, which she as
nimbly evaded, “Ma-ma-no-to-wic,” (1) he said, “the feet of Ma-ta-oka
are even heavier than the snake of Nun-ta-quaus, her brother. I have but
escaped them both with my life. Ma-ma-no-to-wic, I have news for
you. The braves, with your brother O-pe-chan-ca-nough, have taken the
pale-face chief in the Chickahominy swamps and are bringing him to the
council-house.”
(1) “Great man” or “strong one,” a title by which Wa-bun-so-na-cook, or
Powhatan, was frequently addressed.
“Wa,” said the old chief, “it is well, we will be ready for him.”
At once Ra-bun-ta was surrounded and plied with questions. The earlier
American Indians were always a very inquisitive folk, and were great
gossips. Ra-bun-ta’s news would furnish fire-pit talk for months, so
they must know all the particulars. What was this white cau-co-rouse,
(captain or leader) like? What had he on? Did he use his magic against
the braves? Were any of them killed?
For the fame of “the white cau-co-rouse,” the “great captain,” as
the Indians called the courageous and intrepid little governor of the
Virginia colony, Captain John Smith, had already gone throughout the
confederacy, and his capture was even better than a victory over their
deadliest enemies, the Manna-ho-acks.
Ra-bun-ta was as good a gossip and story-teller as any of his tribesmen,
and as he squatted before the upper fire-pit, and ate a hearty meal
of parched corn, which the little Ma-ta-oka brought him as a
peace-offering, he gave the details of the celebrated capture. “The
‘great captain,’” he said, “and two of his men had been surprised in
the Chicka-hominy swamps by the chief O-pe-chan-ca-nough and two hundred
braves. The two men were killed by the chief, but the ‘captain,’ seeing
himself thus entrapped, seized his Indian guide and fastened him before
as a shield, and thus sent out so much of his magic thunder from his
fire-tube that he killed or wounded many of the Indians, and yet kept
himself from harm though his clothes were torn with arrow-shots. At
last, however,” said the runner, “the ‘captain’ had slipped into a
mud-hole in the swamps, and, being there surrounded, was dragged out and
made captive, and he, Ra-bun-ta, had been sent on to tell the great news
to the chief.”
The Indians especially admired bravery and cunning. This device of
the white chieftain and his valor when attacked appealed to their
admiration, and there was great desire to see him when next day he was
brought into the village by the chief of the Pa-mun-kee, or York River
Indians, O-pe-chan-ca-nough, brother of the chief of the Pow-ha-tans.
The renowned prisoner was received with the customary chorus of Indian
yells, and then, acting upon the one leading Indian custom, the law of
unlimited hospitality, a bountiful feast was set before the captive,
who, like the valiant man he was, ate heartily though ignorant what his
fate might be.
The Indians seldom wantonly killed their captives. When a sufficient
number had been sacrificed to avenge the memory of such braves as had
fallen in fight, the remaining captives were either adopted as tribesmen
or disposed of as slaves.
So valiant a warrior as this pale-faced cau-co-rouse was too important
a personage to be used as a slave, and Wa-bun-so-na-cook, the chief,
received him as an honored guest(1) rather than as a prisoner, kept him
in his own house for two days, and adopting him as his own son, promised
him a large gift of land. Then, with many expressions of friendship, he
returned him, well escorted by Indian guides, to the trail that led back
direct to the English colony at Jamestown.
(1) “Hee kindly welcomed me with good wordes,” says Smith’s own
narrative, “assuring me his friendship and my libertie.”
This rather destroys the long-familiar romance of the doughty captain’s
life being saved by “the king’s own daughter,” but it seems to be the
only true version of the story, based upon his own original report.
But though the oft-described “rescue” did not take place, the valiant
Englishman’s attention was speedily drawn to the agile little Indian
girl, Ma-ta-oka, whom her father called his “tomboy,” or po-ca-hun-tas.
She was as inquisitive as any young girl, savage or civilized, and she
was so full of kindly attentions to the captain, and bestowed on him so
many smiles and looks of wondering curiosity, that Smith made much of
her in return, gave her some trifling presents and asked her name.
Now it was one of the many singular customs of the American Indians
never to tell their own names, nor even to allow them to be spoken to
strangers by any of their own immediate kindred. The reason for this lay
in the superstition which held that the speaking of one’s real name gave
to the stranger to whom it was spoken a magical and harmful influence
over such person. For the Indian religion was full of what is called the
supernatural.
So, when the old chief of the Pow-ha-tans (who, for this very reason,
was known to the colonists by the name of his tribe, Pow-ha-tan,
rather than by his real name of Wa-bun-so-na-cook) was asked his little
daughter’s name, he hesitated, and then gave in reply the nick-name by
which he often called her, Po-ca-hun-tas, the “little tomboy”--for this
agile young maiden, by reason of her relationship to the head chief,
was allowed much more freedom and fun than was usually the lot of Indian
girls, who were, as a rule, the patient and uncomplaining little drudges
of every Indian home and village.
So, when Captain Smith left Wero-woco-moco, he left one firm friend
behind him,--the pretty little Indian girl, Ma-ta-oka,--who long
remembered the white man and his presents, and determined, after her
own wilful fashion, to go into the white man’s village and see all their
wonders for herself.
In less than a year she saw the captain again, For when, in the fall
of 1608, he came to her father’s village to invite the old chief to
Jamestown to be crowned by the English as “king” of the Pow-ha-tans,
this bright little girl of twelve gathered together the other little
girls of the village, and, almost upon the very spot where, many years
after, Cornwallis was to surrender the armies of England to the “rebel”
republic, she with her companions entertained the English captain with a
gay Indian dance full of noise and frolic.
Soon after this second interview, Ma-ta-oka’s wish to see the white
man’s village was gratified. For in that same autumn of 1608 she came
with Ra-bun-ta to Jamestown. She sought out the captain who was then
“president” of the colony, and “entreated the libertie” of certain of
her tribesmen who had been “detained,”--in other words, treacherously
made prisoners by the settlers because of some fear of an Indian plot
against them.
Smith was a shrewd enough man to know when to bluster and when to be
friendly. He released the Indian captives at Ma-ta-oka’s wish--well
knowing that the little girl had been duly “coached” by her wily old
father, but feeling that even the friendship of a child may often be of
value to people in a strange land.
The result of this visit to Jamestown was the frequent presence in the
town of the chieftain’s daughter. She would come, sometimes, with
her brother, Nan-ta-qua-us, sometimes with the runner, Ra-bun-ta, and
sometimes with certain of her girl followers. For even little Indian
girls had their “dearest friends,” quite as much as have our own
clannish young school-girls of to-day.
I am afraid, however, that this twelve-year-old, Ma-ta-oka, fully
deserved, even when she should have been on her good behavior among the
white people, the nickname of “little tomboy” (po-ca-hun-tas) that
her father had given her,--for we have the assurance of sedate Master
William Strachey, secretary of the colony, that “the before remembered
Pocahontas, Powhatan’s daughter, sometimes resorting to our fort, of
the age then of eleven or twelve years, did get the boyes forth with
her into the market-place, and make them wheele, falling on their hand
turning their heeles upward, whome she would followe and wheele so
herself, all the fort over.” From which it would appear that she could
easily “stunt” the English boys at “making cart-wheels.”
But there came a time very soon when she came into Jamestown for other
purpose than turning somersaults.
The Indians soon learned to distrust the white men, because of the
unfriendly and selfish dealings, of the new-comers, their tyranny, their
haughty disregard of the Indians’ wishes and desires, and their impudent
meddling alike with chieftains and with tribesmen. Discontent grew
into hatred and, led on by certain traitors in the colony, a plot was
arranged for the murder of Captain Smith and the destruction of the
colony.
Three times they attempted to entrap and destroy the “great captain” and
his people, but each time the little Ma-ta-oka, full of friendship and
pity for her new acquaintances, stole cautiously into the town, or found
some means of misleading the conspirators, and thus warned her white
friends of their danger.
One dark winter night in January, 1609, Captain Smith, who had came to
Wero-woco-moco for conference and treaty with Wa-bun-so-na-cook (whom
he always called Pow-ha-tan), sat in the York River woods awaiting some
provisions that the chief had promised him,--for eatables were scarce
that winter in the Virginia colony.
There was a light step beneath which the dry twiggs on the ground
crackled slightly, and the wary captain grasped his matchlock and bade
his men be on their guard. Again the twigs crackled, and now there came
from the shadow of the woods not a train of Indians, but one little
girl--Ma-ta-oka, or Pocahontas.
“Be guarded, my father,” she said, as Smith drew her to his side. “The
corn and the good cheer will come as promised, but even now, my father,
the chief of the Pow-ha-tans is gathering all his power to fall upon you
and kill you. If you would live, get you away at once.”
The captain prepared to act upon her advice without delay, but he felt
so grateful at this latest and most hazardous proof of the little
Indian girl’s regard that he desired to manifest his thankfulness by
presents--the surest way to reach an Indian’s heart.
“My daughter,” he said kindly, “you have again saved my life, coming
alone, and at risk of your own young life, through the irksome woods and
in this gloomy night to admonish me. Take this, I pray you, from me, and
let it always tell you of the love of Captain Smith.”
And the grateful pioneer handed her his much-prized pocket compass--an
instrument regarded with awe by the Indians, and esteemed as one of the
instruments of the white man’s magic.
But Ma-ta-oka, although she longed to possess this wonderful
“path-teller,” shook her head.
“Not so, Cau-co-rouse,” she said, “if it should be seen by my tribesmen,
or even by my father, the chief, I should but be as dead to them, for
they would know that I have warned you whom they have sworn to kill, and
so would they kill me also. Stay not to parley, my father, but be gone
at once.”
And with that, says the record, “she ran away by herself as she came.”
So the captain hurried back to Jamestown, and Ma-ta-oka returned to her
people.
Soon after Smith left the colony, sick and worn out by the continual
worries and disputes with his fellow-colonists, and Ma-ta-oka felt that,
in the absence of her best friend and the increasing troubles between
her tribesmen and the pale-faces, it would be unwise for her to visit
Jamestown.
Her fears seem to have been well grounded, for in the spring of
1613, Ma-ta-oka, being then about sixteen, was treacherously and “by
stratagem” kidnapped by the bold and unscrupulous Captain Argall--half
pirate, half trader,--and was held by the colonists as hostage for the
“friendship” of Pow-ha-tan.
Within these three years, however, she had been married to the chief of
one of the tributary tribes, Ko-ko-um by name, but, as was the Indian
marriage custom, Ko-ko-um had come to live among the kindred of his
wife, and had shortly after been killed in one of the numerous Indian
fights.
It was during the captivity of the young widow at Jamestown that
she became acquainted with Master John Rolfe, an industrious young
Englishman, and the man who, first of all the American colonists,
attempted the cultivation of tobacco.
Master Rolfe was a widower and an ardent desirer of “the conversion of
the pagan salvages.” He became interested in the young Indian widow, and
though he protests that he married her for the purpose of converting
her to Christianity, and rather ungallantly calls her “an unbelieving
creature,” it is just possible that if she had not been a pretty
and altogether captivating young unbeliever he would have found less
personal means for her conversion.
Well, the Englishman and the Indian girl, as we all know, were married,
lived happily together, and finally departed for England. Here, all too
soon, in 1617, when she was about twenty-one, the daughter of the great
chieftain of the Pow-ha-tans died.
Her story is both a pleasant and a sad one. It needs none of the
additional romance that has been thrown about it to render it more
interesting. An Indian girl, free as her native forests, made friends
with the race that, all unnecessarily, became hostile to her own.
Brighter, perhaps, than most of the girls of her tribe, she recognized
and desired to avail herself of the refinements of civilization, and so
gave up her barbaric surroundings, cast in her lot with the white race,
and sought to make peace and friendship between neighbors take the place
of quarrel and of war.
The white race has nothing to be proud of in its conquest of the
people who once owned and occupied the vast area of the North American
continent. The story is neither an agreeable nor a chivalrous one.
But out of the gloom which surrounds it, there come some figures that
relieve the darkness, the treachery, and the crime that make it so sad.
And not the least impressive of these is this bright and gentle little
daughter of Wa-bun-so-na-cook, chief of the Pow-ha-tans, Ma-ta-oka,
friend of the white strangers, whom we of this later day know by the
nickname her loving old father gave her--Po-ca-hun-tas, the Algonquin.