Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma.

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. By Camilla Townsend. American Portraits. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Pp. xii, 223. Paper, $14.00, ISBN 0-8090-7738-8; cloth, $25.00, ISBN 0-8090-9530-0.)

To the colonists at Jamestown and to generations of American historians, Pocahontas has been perhaps the most critical figure in the success of the colony. Her importance is in inverse proportion to what we know of her life. Moreover, what we do know about her is so spectacular that we forget to look any further. From the beginning, as a symbol of the triumph of Protestant civilization over savagery, she assumed mythic status. Camilla Townsend's stated intention in writing this book is to rescue Pocahontas from that status and restore her to her proper historical context.

The book begins with brief surveys of aboriginal Powhatan Indian culture, especially as it was realized in the life of a daughter of the paramount chief, Powhatan, and of the history and intentions of the English colonists in Virginia. Having provided the backdrop, Townsend presents the drama of contact between the Powhatan and the English, suggesting how these events must have appeared to Pocahontas herself. She reviews Pocahontas's supposed rescue of John Smith--which Townsend regards as a fiction of Smith's--her marriage to a Powhatan warrior, her capture by Captain Samuel Argall, her marriage to John Rolfe, and her visit to London and consequent death at Gravesend. The book concludes with an account of the aftermath of her decease: the fate of her son, Thomas, and his posterity; the massacres of 1622 and 1644; and the final dissolution of the Powhatan polity by the middle of the seventeenth century.

Even allowing for the fact that little that is startlingly original is likely to come from a restudy of this much-worked material, this is a disappointing book. Townsend never makes clear what the "Powhatan dilemma" is--whether it was the Powhatan's uncertainty regarding the English colony or the colonists' inability to extirpate the Powhatan--or what-Pocahontas had to do with either. Although this is ostensibly a study of Pocahontas, it devotes much more space to the English. To her credit, Townsend rejects the besotted-princess theory of the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith. Instead, she argues--on evidence that, with charity, can only be called extremely shaky--that Smith was a pedophile. The book generally suffers from such cavalier treatment of evidence, even though Townsend is clearly familiar with the colonial accounts and most of the modern literature on the Powhatan. Many of her assertions are unsupported or made without adequate citation. The most serious problem with this work, though, is that she does not understand either Powhatan Indian or Renaissance English culture; she treats both as if they were just like modern, middle-class American culture. Thus, her method of restoring Pocahontas to her own cultural context and giving us the Powhatan point of view is to imagine the thoughts and reactions of the Powhatan rather than to represent the culture in its own terms. Likewise her understanding of the Renaissance English worldview is sketchy, distorted, and, in places, erroneous. In short, those seeking the real Pocahontas--or, for that matter, the real Jamestown colonists--should look elsewhere.

MARGARET HOLMES WILLIAMSON

University of Mary Washington