Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and The Start of a New Nation

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Myth Versus Reality

Early on in Love and Hate in Jamestown, David A. Price brings up Pocahontas, the Disney adaptation of the historical figure’s story: “The imaginative 1995 Walt Disney Co. movie, for example, endowed Pocahontas with a Barbie-dill figure, dressed her in a deerskin from Victoria’s Secret, and made her John Smith’s love interest” (4). Price goes to great lengths to puncture these well-trodden myths, while seeking to establish a few new myths of his own.

Pocahontas was 10 years old when she and a captive John Smith met. In Smith’s retelling of the event, Pocahontas’s plea for his life was not that of a love-struck woman, but a curious and precocious girl. Nevertheless, Smith’s enemies speculated that the pair had a sexual relationship at some point in the four years they knew each other, which might have fueled future romantic retellings (which added a few years to Pocahontas’s life and subtracted a few from Smith’s). Though Price suggests that Pocahontas might have harbored an unrequited crush on Smith, he disproves their dynamic being a Disneyfied tale of star-crossed love.

Journalists who retell history often look for an angle of interest to readers, inventing new myths and often calling them “creative theses.” In Price’s case, he frames Smith and Pocahontas as individualists, ready to defy authority and strike out into the unknown like entrepreneurs. He combs through hundreds of pages of Smith’s writing (which was often quite technical and scolding when it wasn’t self-aggrandizing) to find instances in which he denounces tyranny and praises self-reliance. In this way, new myths are made, and founding fathers born of simple competence.

Foreign People, Foreign Ethics

The ethics of the people who populate Price’s work fluctuate. The Spanish massacres of the Aztec were on the Virginia Company’s mind when they implored investors to “have great care not to offend” the Algonquin population of Virginia (31). But within a few years, their representatives would be burning down villages and demanding tribute as part of “peaceful” trade. On the other hand, Algonquin leaders seemed capable of making life-or-death decisions at the drop of a hat, most famously when Powhatan decided not to kill John Smith at Pocahontas’s urging. Powhatan would go on to consider Smith a friend, one like “his own cherished son” (68)—the exact reason remaining a mystery.

The English must have appeared alien to Powhatan: They arrived by boat and died by the dozen—refusing to plant crops, hunt, or gather—only to be replaced by dozens more. In this respect, the English appear odd, or at least puzzling, to the contemporary reader as well. Before the post-millennial period in which Price wrote his book, it was common for historians to exoticize the Algonquin and their culture as “backwards” compared to the straightforward enterprise of the English. Rather than correct this approach, Price instead exoticizes both players. This estrangement paves the way for a future in which the English kill and replace a continent full of people. In othering the motives of the persecutors of these future crimes, Price avoids connecting them with greed found in the modern world—for better or for worse.

An Economic Transition

The English’s situation in 1606 was borderline unbelievable. Here is a world in which high-ranking members of society embark on rugged adventures—some requiring difficult labor—only to refuse work. It is a world in which lotteries are held by churches to extract funds for investment opportunities. It is also one in which the English protagonist easily slips in and out of imprisonment, while African-born formerly enslaved people take on African-born slaves to work on their tobacco plantations. All these statements encapsulate a capitalist society being born of a feudal one.

Once the English understood commodities, rather than gold, as the driving force for colonization, they (and King James) knew land and labor were needed. In an almost surreal exchange, the colonists were granted the entire Eastern seaboard to divide unequally among themselves. Price describes this unparalleled gift of real estate as if it were a small matter of transferring a deed from one party to another.

The highborn proved incapable of providing for themselves, the solution to this lack of labor being a form of inefficient indentured servitude—in which workers slowly bought off the debt of their labor to own the land they toiled over. But even with the entire seaboard at their disposal, the newly-minted landowners likely realized that there’d be a limit to free real estate. For them, relief came in the form of a captured slave ship in 1619, which instilled in them the notion that large-scale labor could be had for almost nothing at all. A system of inherited slavery soon became normalized within the legal structure of the growing colony.

With this powerful engine of profit produced by free labor and free land being put into place, all that remained for the colony’s exponential success was the subsummation of their land. Price somewhat disingenuously depicts Opechancanough’s “massacre” of 500 English in 1622 as the tactical blunder which made it necessary for England to begin its century-long genocide. In fact, Virginia’s land was marked for theft the moment the first plot of 100 acres was harvested and sold for self-justifying profit.