The Story of Pocahantas

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> The Story of Pocahantas


This is the earliest use I find of our word "conundrum," and the
sense it bears here may aid in discovering its origin.

Powhatan is a very large figure in early Virginia history, and
deserves his prominence. He was an able and crafty savage, and made
a good fight against the encroachments of the whites, but he was no
match for the crafty Smith, nor the double-dealing of the Christians.
There is something pathetic about the close of his life, his sorrow
for the death of his daughter in a strange land, when he saw his
territories overrun by the invaders, from whom he only asked peace,
and the poor privilege of moving further away from them into the
wilderness if they denied him peace.

In the midst of this savagery Pocahontas blooms like a sweet, wild
rose. She was, like the Douglas, "tender and true." Wanting
apparently the cruel nature of her race generally, her heroic
qualities were all of the heart. No one of all the contemporary
writers has anything but gentle words for her. Barbarous and
untaught she was like her comrades, but of a gentle nature. Stripped
of all the fictions which Captain Smith has woven into her story, and
all the romantic suggestions which later writers have indulged in,
she appears, in the light of the few facts that industry is able to
gather concerning her, as a pleasing and unrestrained Indian girl,
probablv not different from her savage sisters in her habits, but
bright and gentle; struck with admiration at the appearance of the
white men, and easily moved to pity them, and so inclined to a
growing and lasting friendship for them; tractable and apt to learn
refinements; accepting the new religion through love for those who
taught it, and finally becoming in her maturity a well-balanced,
sensible, dignified Christian woman.

According to the long-accepted story of Pocahontas, she did something
more than interfere to save from barbarous torture and death a
stranger and a captive, who had forfeited his life by shooting those
who opposed his invasion. In all times, among the most savage tribes
and in civilized society, women have been moved to heavenly pity by
the sight of a prisoner, and risked life to save him--the impulse was
as natural to a Highland lass as to an African maid. Pocahontas went
further than efforts to make peace between the superior race and her
own. When the whites forced the Indians to contribute from their
scanty stores to the support of the invaders, and burned their
dwellings and shot them on sight if they refused, the Indian maid
sympathized with the exposed whites and warned them of stratagems
against them; captured herself by a base violation of the laws of
hospitality, she was easily reconciled to her situation, adopted the
habits of the foreigners, married one of her captors, and in peace
and in war cast in her lot with the strangers. History has not
preserved for us the Indian view of her conduct.

It was no doubt fortunate for her, though perhaps not for the colony,
that her romantic career ended by an early death, so that she always
remains in history in the bloom of youth. She did not live to be
pained by the contrast, to which her eyes were opened, between her
own and her adopted people, nor to learn what things could be done in
the Christian name she loved, nor to see her husband in a less
honorable light than she left him, nor to be involved in any way in
the frightful massacre of 1622. If she had remained in England after
the novelty was over, she might have been subject to slights and
mortifying neglect. The struggles of the fighting colony could have
brought her little but pain. Dying when she did, she rounded out one
of the prettiest romances of all history, and secured for her name
the affection of a great nation, whose empire has spared little that
belonged to her childhood and race, except the remembrance of her
friendship for those who destroyed her people.