The Pocahontas ArchiveHistory on Trial Main Page

Keyword: 
Category: 
From:  To: 
 

1858

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Chapter: "Pocahontas." (Chapter number varies depending on number of volumes in edition.) The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century. London, 1858-59. Also contains poems "Pocahontas" and "From Pocahontas." The narrator writes a flop of a play (a "tragedy") described thusly: "An Indian king; a loving princess, and her attendant, in love with the British captain's servant; a traitor in the English fort; a brave Indian warrior, himself entertaining an unhappy passion for Pocahontas; a medicine-man and priest of the Indians (very well played by Palmer), capable of every treason, stratagem, and crime, and bent upon the torture and death of the English prisoner; -- these, with the accidents of the wilderness, the war dances and cries (which Gumbo had learned to mimic very accurately from the red people at home), and the arrival of the English fleet, with allusions to the late glorious victories in Canada, and the determination of the Britons ever to rule and conquer in America . . . ."
[illustrated; poetry; novel]
[Electronic Version]
[View Images: page 843]