Clippings

Here is an ever-growing collection of over 300 clippings from primary and secondary works on Pocahontas, a compilation of some of the most significant reference points in the study of this important figure. Users are invited to jump in to this collection of clippings anywhere and to keep jumping, enjoying the stimulating juxtapositions of ideas. There is no pre-conceived, organizing principle. The compilation is consciously random, designed to encourage critical thinking by making users make meaning.

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1) Little girls often dream of becoming princesses, of magically transforming into fairies whose wings carry them to faraway lands: I wasn’t one of those little girls. I chose to deviate from the norm. In third grade I dressed up as Pocahontas for our very own “wax museum,” plaiting my hair into two braids that hung low on my short torso. Her image captivated me, her beauty was different—real, and I recognized her sense of complacency -- it defined Pocahontas like the soft features that sculpted her mahogany skin. I perceived Pocahontas as a direct product of Mother Nature, a Native American young woman who stood out starkly among White Europeans. Evidently, my insight of Pocahontas is narrowed and biased—to say the least. Yet, using my knowledge from the Disney movie and a grade school education, I have seamlessly sewed my own perception of her ambiguous identity. (Gaelyn Rosenberg, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #452]

2) In her former persona Pocahontas was an ideal model for nostalgic, pro-intermarriage sentiments, but as the nineteenth century progressed, the birth of Thomas Rolfe, the most positively portrayed representative of the issue of a successful mixing of the races, had steadily begun to be relegated to the status of a minor incident in her life, when it was mentioned at all. John Smith had emerged as an American hero shortly after the birth of the new nation, and the publishing of the first admittedly fictional versions of her story by John Davis and the production of James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess, the first of the "Pocahontas dramas," the emphasis in representations of her narrative had begun a relentless shift. Her role as an actual mother and ancestor gave way to her persona as a mythic protector, which she gained by demonstration rather than procreation. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 26) [Clipping #236]

3) Rendered impotent by the implied potency of Anglo-Christian romantic love, [in Barker's play] Powhatan can only fall back on his domesticated role as toothless father of a headstrong daughter. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 182) [Clipping #197]

4) Fortunately, growing up in Canada gave me an opportunity to be influenced by Native American culture. My primary school music classes were filled with songs of canoes, nature, and great spirits of the north. I learned about the Iroquois, and the Hurons, and the courreurs de bois who hunted together for furs along Canada’s rivers and lakes. However, like most children living in North America, Pocahontas was as mysterious to me as the “D” in Disney. Until, of course, I watched Disney’s version of her story. I may be able to sing “Colors of the Wind” by heart, but as far as understanding Pocahontas’s true colors, I am as lost as our Indian princess, wandering around the willow trees, without a compass. From my own viewing experience, Pocahontas seemed to be a tall, confident woman. So, of course, considering my 6’5 frame, she became one of my favorite Disney characters. Despite her powerful demeanor, it is easily noticeable that she has some serious identity issues. Every character must have some flaws and be able to grow, but my Disney-generation mind might have me stuck in the happily-ever-after outcome. My role model, it seems, may not be as much of a role model as I used to perceive. Disney has a pretty horrendous track record as far as presenting fairy tales and other stories with their original messages and consequences. Nonetheless, her potential tragic, happy, or simply outrageous identity is unbeknownst to me. So I’ll be waiting by the willow trees, eager to see, if her spirit be free, what kind of woman Pocahontas may happen to be. (Alexandra Yantzi, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #455]

5) Above his head in air, / The savage war-club swung; / The frantic girl, in wild despair, / Her arms about him flung. / Then shook the warriors of the shade, / Like leaves on aspen-limb, / Subdued by that heroic maid / Who breathed a prayer for him. (George P. Morris, "The Chieftain's Daughter" 202) [Clipping #184]

6) A beautiful Native American woman, daughter of the chief of her tribe, falls in love with an English settler. The way Disney tells it, Pocahontas's story comes off as a tale of forbidden love, with a cultural twist. Much of what I know from Pocahontas, I learned from a Disney movie. So then how much of what I know to be true actually is? I remember hearing somewhere that the story of Pocahontas is a pretty lie Americans have passed on from generation to generation to make ourselves feel better about the way white men actually treated the Native Americans. If we knew the real story, we would be horrified. Is this the actual truth? What really made Pocahontas a legend? Is her story merely propaganda, used to idealize the story of the birth of our nation, which in reality was an atrocity that enslaved and killed millions of Native Americans? Or is there some truth that serves as a basis for this favorite Disney story? Who was this woman, and why is she so often associated with strength, love, and defiance? (Jacklyn Temares, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #449]

7) For those qualities more especially which do honor to our nature -- a human and feeling heart, an ardor and unshaken constancy on her attachments -- she stands almost without a rival. She gave evidence, indeed, of possessing in a high degree every attribute of mind and heart, which should be and has been the ornament and pride of civilized woman in all countries and times. . . . She asked nothing of Smith in recompense for whatever she had done, but the boon of being looked upon as his child. . . . Her dignity, her energy, her independence, and the dauntless courage which never deserted her for a moment, were worthy of Powhatan's daughter. (B. B. Thatcher, Indian Biography 75-76 ) [Clipping #391]

8) The first and, somehow, the only image that comes to mind when I think about Pocahontas is Walt Disney's animated character and film. I visualize the beautiful, youthful, brown-skinned woman whose long smooth hair practically encased her strong body in protective armor. Her being bilingual seemed to be representative of her ability to walk the brink between the Native Americans and the English settlers as a wise peacemaker. She was clearly the protagonist, hence the film being named after her, and was inspiring as a female leader. However, the film notably garnered quite a bit of criticism in its portrayal of Native Americans and their "savage" state of being. Furthermore, the cheery note that the film ends on skews the historical suppression and reality of the killings. Aside from this small interpretation based on Disney's Pocahontas, there is fairly little that I know and quite a bit left to learn about this woman's true story. (Robin Pertusi, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #451]

9) [John Gadsby] Chapman largely avoids mentioning what she did for Smith because his ultimate emphasis is on what the English had bestowed on her. In effect, the sacrament of baptism evened the colonists' score with Pocahontas; indeed, it put her in the debt of Christian Anglo-Americans for the gift of possible eternal salvation that they had chosen to share. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 128) [Clipping #263]

10) My knowledge of Pocahontas is based on the Disney rendition of her life. The storyline goes as follows: the Native Americans are living happily in America in the 1600s taking only what they need from the land. Suddenly, a group of white settlers invade their land; conflict ensues as they disrupt the Natives’ entire way of life. The settlers’ motives are based on greed while the Natives’ are focused on harmony and survival. The two groups do not fundamentally agree on how to use the land. Pocahontas understands that her father, the chief of her tribe, does not effectively communicate with the settlers and therefore accomplishes nothing. Disney movies tend to glorify the female protagonists and show them in a positive light, even when their situations seem dire at first. Cinderella starts out as a servant for her stepmother and sisters; Belle in "Beauty and the Beast" is a peasant girl who takes her father’s place as a prisoner. In the end, however, the moral of the story is presented, and the “princesses” are made to look heroic. Pocahontas takes it upon herself to bridge the gap between the Native Americans and the explorers so that the two could coexist peacefully. Like many other Disney princesses, Pocahontas starts out living simplistically and ends up with “Prince Charming,” John Smith. (Sarah Ballan, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #454]

11) Fate broods upon the Red Man's darkened land; / His tribes are scattered by the ocean blast, / For the Great Spirit hath his arrows cast, / Nor can the strong ones stay his mighty hand. / On! to the set of sun, / Where other lands are won; / The last, last hunting ground of all your race. / Ye must not dwell where those bright orbs arise / By day and night, alternate in the skies; / But where the evening gray shadows the sleepy day, / And occidental sands your weary footsteps trace. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 105) [Clipping #282]

12) In my memory of prominent female figures in history, Pocahontas appears to be the first woman whose beauty was derived solely from nature as opposed to an artificial source. Her image emanated from a society defined by materialism and artificiality, though she remained true to herself. Pocahontas’s connection with nature is a large component of her uniqueness, much of which prompted my curiosity about her. I am aware that she did not live for very long, perhaps up until her mid to late teens. But why then has Pocahontas’s legacy surpassed her physical life span? Her love affair with John Smith and encounter with the Europeans is about as far as I can conjure up, but I have always had one unanswered question: is she real? Did Pocahontas really exist, and is her name truly representative of what she stands for? I avidly look forward to delving deeper into the past—uncovering the life of Pocahontas, discovering more about why the media portrays her the way it does. (Gaelyn Rosenberg, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #453]

13) The particular, highly successful marriage of Pocahontas and Rolfe had provided the early colonists with an opportunity that they failed to grasp, and by the eighteenth century was providing historians with the opportunity to discuss this wonderful chance that had been missed at the beginning of the colonial enterprise. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 17) [Clipping #235]

14) Native American, Princess, Heroine, Natural, Tribal, and John Smith are some words and ideas that immediately come to mind when I think of Pocahontas. However, as I reflect on my previous exposure to Pocahontas’s story, what grasps me the most is the sense of mystery that surrounds her. I admit I have little knowledge of Pocahontas other than how she is depicted by Disney, which only adds to her mysteriousness. I wonder if she is believed to have powers involving the forces of nature? Why are Americans so interested in this particular character of our history? Was she even real? How was life on our land before the story of John Smith? Another image that comes to mind when I think of Pocahontas is that she is an icon for the natural world and John Smith an icon for the industrial world yet to come. The natural world holds a lot of mystery in itself. I first heard the story of Pocahontas as a little girl, but as I’ve gotten older, it has gradually gained meaning. However, although her story about the first settlement of the New World holds more importance for me as an adult, the mystery remains. (Elle Irwin, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #450]

15) The inclusion of Pocahontas during the postwar [Revolutionary War] period both helped to assuage any guilt that might have been felt at this process, in that these "good" Indians were often portrayed as complicitous in ensuring the success of the white race, and, conversely, promoted a belief in the fantasy of absorption, which Jefferson and many of his followers maintained was still a possibility. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 51) [Clipping #244]

16) Her baptism, her new name, her grasp of English, all mark her ritual passage into the fold of civility. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 169) [Clipping #152]

17) [In Barker's play] Earthly treasure for heavenly treasure, life for life, all that Pocahontas, standing in here for the ideal Indian of Euro-American fantasy, has given to the English has been repaid, and the idealized Indian responds with gratitude and love. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 236) [Clipping #214]

18) "Unbind him!" gasped the chief, / "It is your king's decree!" / He kissed away her tears of grief, / And set the captive free. / 'Tis ever thus, when, in life's storm, / Hope's star to man grows dim, / An angel kneels in woman's form, / And breathes a prayer for him. (George P. Morris, "The Chieftain's Daughter" 202) [Clipping #185]

19) In Pocahontas we view the simple child of nature, prompted by her own native virtues alone, discharging the most generous acts of self-devotion, without seeking any reward, other than that arising from a consciousness of acquitting sacred duties. Unenlightened by revelation, we find her loving her enemies, doing good to those who despitefully used and persecuted her, without knowing that such obligations were imposed on us by "a teacher come from God." (William Watson Waldron, "Pocahontas, Princess of Virginia" 9) [Clipping #419]

20) Pocahontas and Rolfe's bond -- composed in equal parts of imported romance and native reciprocal obligation -- resolves the impending political crisis between the Indians and the colonists. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 66) [Clipping #175]

21) Pocahontas: I know not what a beggar is; but oh! I would I were a beggar's daughter so thou [Rolfe] wouldst call me love. Ah! Do not any longer call me king's daughter. If thou feelest the name as I do, call me as I call thee: thou shalt by my lover; I will be thy lover. (James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess Act 2, scene 2) [Clipping #25]

22) Pocahontas, an alien from a culture incomprehensible to the English, was a woman through whom the figure of the fearful New World female "monster" was subdued by christianizing, anglicizing, and domesticating her as the savior of the early colony and wife of an English colonizer. In this guise she was rendered a docile immigrant into English culture, assimilated, and ashamed. She was the counterpart to the threat of the failure of the colonial enterprise represented by the white woman captured by Indians [Mary Rowlandson]; our Pygmalion myth, English colonialism's great success story, Pocahontas has continued to be invoked in American literature, art, and popular culture as a site for reasserting and legitimating racial and cultural dominance throughout the centuries of white effort to claim and control the North American continent. (Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire 140-41) [Clipping #114]

23) The Pocahontas myth glorified a symbiotic relationship between man and nature. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas xvi) [Clipping #3]

24) Pocahontas thus became our first Christian convert -- a beacon that would bring light to an entire continent of savages. She was living hope for the religious leaders of the colony -- proof that savages could be converted. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 23) [Clipping #163]

25) It was during one of those nights, when Mr. Rolfe was sitting woe-begone under an oak, sighing and groaning, and coupling love with dove, that a foot wandering among the trees disturbed his profound thoughts. . . . He stole to the spot. It was SHE. It was Pocahontas strewing flowers over the imaginary grave of Captain Smith. Overcome with terror and surprise, to be thus discovered by a stranger, the powers of life were suspended, and she sunk into the arms of Rolfe. For what rapturous moments is a lover often indebted to accident! The impassioned youth clasped the Indian Maid to his beating heart, and drank from her lips the poison of delight. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 311-12) [Clipping #105]

26) Her pose [in the Capitol painting] actually resembles that of the kneeling Virgin Mary of Nativity scenes, with her hands clasped in prayer and her eyes lowered as if she were looking down into the manger. In this posture Pocahontas has her back turned to the other, traditionally dressed, Indians -- including the partially unclothed young woman whom Chapman identifies as her sister -- who serve as obvious figures of comparison. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 115) [Clipping #260]

27) "Here," Crane himself explains, commenting on the passage to Otto Kahn, "one is on the pure mythical and smoky soil at last! Not only do I describe the conflict between the two races in this dance -- I also become identified with the Indian and his world, before it is over." (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 88) [Clipping #130]

28) "Oh, sir!" continued the lady [Mrs. Forest], he [Smith] was such a fine gentleman, and such a good Christian. He would put the hand of Pokahontas into my daughter's and say with a grateful smile, When the doom of death was pronounced by my enemy, and, when led to the place of execution, my head was already bowed down to receive the fatal blow; this tender girl rushed in between me and the executioner, and by her entreaties and tears made the savage heart of her father relent. I have been her instructor in the English language; be you her instructress in the word of God. Read to her the bible . . . teach her the Christian religion; she has an eager desire to know it, and a capacity to learn." (John Davis, First Settlers of Virginia 185) [Clipping #362]

29) Though a simple Indian maid, [Pocahontas's] life and actions are closely associated with events, which, in their consequences, have assumed a magnitude that fully entitles her to be placed among those who exercised an extensive influence in the destinies of states and the course of human events. She was, therefore, deemed a fit subject for a National Picture, painted by order of Congress, to commemorate the history and actions of our ancestors. (John Gadsby Chapman, The Picture of the Baptism of Pocahontas 4) [Clipping #61]

30) And indeed I did rescue you / not once but a thousand thousand times / and in my arms you slept, a foolish child, / and beside me you played, / chattering nonsense about a God / you had not wit to name; / and wondered you at my silence -- / simple foolish wanton maid you saw, / dusky daughter of heathen sires / who knew not the ways of grace -- / no doubt, no doubt. / I spoke little, you said. / And you listened less. (Paula Gunn Allen, "Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe" 8-9) [Clipping #15]

31) Thus the play [Barker's] and the nation are made equivalent metaphorically and the survival and legitimacy of both depend upon the maternal power and domestic virtues of women. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 233) [Clipping #208]

32) and so the great king Powhatan, called a young daughter of his, whome he loved well Pochahuntas, which may signifie Little-wanton, howbeit she was rightly called Amonute. (William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile 113) [Clipping #312]

33) The above "heads of argument" [about whether Pocahontas saved Smith from death] have been disentangled from a great mass of discussion in which the opponents seem to be inspired by the atmosphere of battle. (John Esten Cooke, "Did Pocahontas Really Rescue Captain Smith?" 402) [Clipping #71]

34) Ah long abhorr'd! destested race! / Can mercy find no resting place / In that dark bosom, for the maid, / Who my just vengeance once delay'd? / Must all her people and her friends, / Be victims to they lawless ends? / Oh! that the blow had then descended, / With giant force it had been blended / The stroke had crush'd th' accursed brood / That batten'd on an Indian's blood! / Then never had my waving woods, / My hunting grounds and foaming floods, / Been subject to the vile behests / Of trecherous foes and perjur'd guests. / My daughter! thine unthinking heart / Hath spar'd for us the deadly dart. (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 9) [Clipping #53]

35) Every incident in the brief but glorious career of Pocahontas, is calculated to produce love and admiration, and to reflect the highest honor on the name of woman. . . . Pocahontas is one of those characters, rarely appearing on the theatre of life, which no age can claim, no country appropriate. She is the property of mankind, serving as a beacon to light us on our way, instruct us in our duty, and show us what the human mind is capable of performing when abandoned to its own operations. (William Watson Waldron, "Pocahontas, Princess of Virginia" 7, 9) [Clipping #418]

36) [The criticism of Henry Adams] knocks all the poetry out of the Capt. Smith and Pocahontas romance, but for what we in Arizona know of the Indian maiden as she is, lewd, lousy and lazy, we are disposed to believe it . . . as a truthful, if to many a novel and unpalateable statement. Pocahontas was probably one of Poston's 'dusky maidens,' such as hang about the store at Mojave, La Paz and Arizona City, and earn a livelihood -- well, we won't say how. ("Pocahontas" 2) [Clipping #380]

37) Shopworn by sentimentality, Pocahontas endures and stands with the most appealing of our saints. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 391) [Clipping #300]

38) Forest big. Room for all to live in peace. Indians and white skin, all children of Great Spirit. Pocahontas believe heart made for love. Pocahontas believe Great Spirit want it that way. Indians and white skin forget sometimes. Pocahontas never forget. (Captain John Smith and Pocahontas ) [Clipping #338]

39) Yet the myth lives on, and there is no fear of its demise. Pocahontas has always been good business; there is no reason to expect that will change. After all, she is Every Indian, the archetypal Noble Savage. She was a deus ex machina, rescuing Smith for reasons she never made public. She appealed to Englishmen like Rolfe because they were lonely and sex-starved, surrounded by a masculine community that in turn was enclosed by a foreboding world of dark shadows. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 30) [Clipping #167]

40) Pocahontas is no angel, but she is a gentle, sensitive, reflective being, where all are rude, gross, and sensual. She feels painfully that ignorance of those laws of Nature, and of our being, which is ever so oppressive to the meditative mind. And when she knows that another and nobler race of beings have come to live among them, how quickly the thought that of them she can learn, in these confide, and to these assimilate. (Ella, "Pocahontas" 17) [Clipping #411]

41) One of the most striking divergences of the play from history is Barker's incorporation of women into his drama and the importance they have in the overall narrative. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 171 ) [Clipping #190]

42) I find the choice of names intriguing and prophetic. In Pocahontas' quest for literacy, the bible was the only tool she had at that time. Did she read the story of another ancient legend, Rebecca, who was told "Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them." (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 91) [Clipping #42]

43) When Pocahontas ran with mournful distraction to the stone, and getting the victim's head into her arms, laid her own upon it to receive the blow. Fair spirit! thou ministering angel at the throne of grace! If souls disengaged from their earthly bondage can witness from the bosom of eternal light what is passing here below, accept sweet Seraph, this tribute to they humanity. Powhatan was not wanting in paternal feeling; his soul was devoted to his daughter Pocahontas; and so much did his ferocity relent at this display of innocent softness in a girl of fourteen, that he pronounced the prisoner's pardon, and dismissed the executioners. Indeed, every heart melted into tenderness at the scene. The joy of the successful mediator expressed itself in silence; she hung wildly on the neck of the reprieved victim, weeping with a violence that choaked her utterance. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 297-98) [Clipping #98]

44) And there was a historical precedent for the Pocahontas tale: the story of a soldier, Juan Ortiz, who was lost on an expedition to Florida in 1528 and was found there by De Soto about twelve years later. Ortiz said he had been captured by Indians, and saved at the last second from the burning at the stake by the chief's daughter, who later came at night in peril of her life to warn him of her father's plot to kill him. This story appeared in London, in an English translation by Richard Hakluyt, in 1609, the year of Smith's return to that city. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 182) [Clipping #294]

45) We rise from out of the soul of her / Held in native wonderland, / While the sun's rays kissed her hand, / In the springtime, / In Virginia, / Our Mother Pocahontas. (Vachel Lindsay, "Our Mother Pocahontas" 40) [Clipping #170]

46) . . . till at last slipping into a bogmire they tooke him prisoner: when this newes came to the fort much was their sorrow for his losse, fewe expecting what ensued. A month those Barbarians kept him prisoner, many strange triumphes and conjurations they made of him, yet hee so demeaned himselfe amongst them, as he not only diverted them from surprising the Fort, but procured his own liberty, and got himselfe and his company such estimation amongst them, that those Salvages admired him as a demi-God. (William Symonds, The Proceedings of the English Colonie 13-14) [Clipping #330]

47) Spare, parent, spare -- The warrior begs to spare -- / A friendless stranger on Powhatan's hearth; / Or if you strike the blow -- you cannot tear / My mangled body from this gory earth! / Hark! how the spirit of Powhatan's sire, / Frowns down in wrath from out yon mutt'ring cloud -- / See, see the mighty spirits vengeful fire, / Bursting in awful thunder peals aloud! Slay not the wretch -- slay not the wretch my sire; / But let my life appease the chieftains' ire! (A Citizen of South Carolina, "Pocahontas" 83) [Clipping #394]

48) I believe that Chapman is presenting not so much the old idea of an actual absorption, which I would agree had ceased to be viewed as a practicable solution to the Indian question by the end of the Jeffersonian era, but rather this type of mythic absorption. The primordial assimilation of Pocahontas into the Anglo-American community can be interpreted as allowing for the destruction of all other Indians because their race, through her unique absorption, had been granted a kind of perpetual survival. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 137) [Clipping #264]

49) Desire is brought about by whites, not expressed by Natives; in other words, Barker conflates sexual awakening with imperialist surge. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 184) [Clipping #200]

50) Barker uses [John] Smith's text [The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624)] freely, adds characters or changes their importance with only occasional fidelity to their original presentation. The particular conversions he makes reflect not only dramaturgical preferences in the early nineteenth-century American theatre, but also the ways in which Barker reconstructs Smith's mythologies of colonization and national origin; radically alters his accounts of relations between whites and Natives and Natives with each other; and, especially, exposes the eroticizing of imperialist contact that Smith suggests but never develops -- all in an attempt to convert history into a pleasing commodity for middling tastes. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 169) [Clipping #189]

51) By the end of the eighteenth century, Pocahontas was already beginning to take on a mythic significance based on John Smith's representations of her as his heroic rescuer and the savior of the fledgling Jamestown colony. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 11 ) [Clipping #231]

52) When Wahunsenacah and his allies retreated, they left Pocahontas either stranded or in place as a "mole," a secret agent who could pass information to the council and the Midewewin while acting as the human eyes and mind of the manito. . . . Earlier interpretations of the facts of her life . . . describe her as a docile and willing convert to Christianity and civilization, a model for us all, particularly American Native people. But if Pocahontas was "Mischief" personified, involved in not only espionage but a kind of undercover diplomacy as well . . . the matchacomoco would not have paid her ransom but left her to function as a "mole" or "sleeper." (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 132-33) [Clipping #22]

53) The later sentimentalizers of the tale tended to make the Indian Maiden a little lighter in color than her evil papa, and, therefore, archetypally a little better. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 68) [Clipping #122]

54) Perhaps it was some wild-Indian semi-lunacy that drove her to it, for I confess I am very skeptical about any pure philanthropy in an Indian child that would drive her through a forest in mid-winter many miles in order to betray her father. (Henry Adams, Letter to Palfrey 259) [Clipping #372]

55) There have been few American narratives as popular or adjustable as the life of Pocahontas. . . . By the second half of the nineteenth century, her heroic identity was far beyond the scope of any such attempts at demythologization. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 174-75) [Clipping #276]

56) Nor was I ignorant of the heavie displeasure which almightie God conceived against the Sonnes of Levie and Israel for marrying strange wives, nor of the inconveniences which may thereby arise, with other the like good motions which made me looke about warily and with good circumspection, into the grounds and principall agitations, which thus should provoke me to be in love with one whose education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all nurturiture from my selfe, that oftentimes with feare and trembling, I have ended my private controversie with this: surely these are wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in mans destruction; and so with fervent praiers to be ever preferred from such diabolical assaults (as I tooke those to be) I have taken some rest. (John Rolfe, Letter to Dale 64) [Clipping #314]

57) Pocahontas was eminently interesting both in form and features. Her person was below the middle size, but admirably proportioned. Her waist resembled that of the French Monarch's mistress; it was la taille a la main. Her limbs were delicate, and her feet were distinguished by exquisite insteps, such as of those women whom Homer calls ____. . . . Sensibility had left its signature upon the countenance of Pocahontas. It need no Ghost, to inform him who delights to read the human face divine, that the softer passions had produced a mechanical effect on the aspect of this Indian Maid. . . . Her beauty did not depend on mere features, but temper and sentiment. And we ought not to wonder that her looks afterwards captivated a man of elegant education. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 302-3) [Clipping #100]

58) Vain was thy love, fond Pocahontas! Thou / Dreamed not so false the race which thou hadst saved: / Yet -- though with fainting heart -- thy flashing brow, / Queenly and cold, that scene of torture braved. / Loving and lost, they grief and scorn were graved / Where no one turned the leaf. Didst thou not think, / Fawn of the desert! of the day when waved / The war club o'er his head, and thou didst sink / Between him and the death? Alas, that love / Young, yearning, truthful, hath no home save that above! (Judge Conrad, "The Sons of the Wilderness" 40) [Clipping #431]

59) Pocahontas: Oh, do not, warriors, do not! Father, incline your heart to mercy; he will win your battles, he will vanquish your enemies. Brother, speak! save your brother! Warriors, are you brave? preserve the brave man! Miami, priest, sing the song of peace; ah! strike not, hold! mercy! White man, thou shalt not die; or I will die with thee! My father, dost thou love thy daughter? listen to her voice; look upon her tears; they ask for mercy to the captive. Is thy child dear to thee, my father? Thy child will die with the white man. (James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess Act 2, scene 1) [Clipping #23]

60) At the time of the Rescue, according to Smith's description, Pocahontas would have been twelve or possibly thirteen, and although therefore probably old enough to have had a romantic (or even sexual) response to the handsome captain, she would not have been as nubile as Davis wished his readers to believe. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 43) [Clipping #240]

61) Pocahontas keenly felt love and loyalty both to her father, Wahunsenaca, and to her people. With Smith's position as a werowance, Pocahontas would have expected Smith to be loyal to her father and people. Pocahontas would have expected Smith to be loyal to her father and people. As a werowance, Pocahontas considered Smith a leader, a defender of the Powhatan. Pocahontas saw Smith the same way her father saw him -- as an allied chief of the English tribe, under and part of the Powhatan nation. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 20) [Clipping #88]

62) Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder, does she remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs? (Carl Sandburg, "Cool Tombs" 120) [Clipping #207]

63) Women and men suffer somewhat different fates in dramatized colonialism: men are darkened beyond redemption, women lightened enough to kindle erotic interest in demonstrably white males. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 176) [Clipping #191]

64) It is the last sad office of history to record the fate of this incomparable woman. The sever muse, who presides over this department, cannot plant the cypress over her grave, and consign her to the tomb with the stately pomp and graceful tears of poetry: She cannot with pious sorrow inurn the ashes and immortalize the virtues of the dead by the soul piercing elegy, which fancy mysterious deity, pours out, wild and plaintive; her hair loose, and her white bosom throbbing with anguish: Those things are placed equally beyond her reach and her inclination. But history affects not to conceal her sorrow on this occasion. (John Burk, History of Virginia 188) [Clipping #52]

65) At last they brought him to Meronocomoco, where was Powhatan their Emperor. Here more than two hundred of those grim Courtiers stood wondering at him, as he had beene a monster; till Powhatan and his trayne had put themselues in their greatest braveries. Before a fire vpon a seate like a bedsted, he sat covered with a great robe, made of Rarowcun skinnes, and all the tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 or 18 yeares, and along on each side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red: many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds; but every one with some thing: and a great chayne of white beades about their necks. At his entrance before the King, all the people gaue a great shout. The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready for their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the King's dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne vpon his to saue him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should lieu to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him aswell of all occupations as themselues. (John Smith, The Generall Historie 48-49) [Clipping #324]

66) Pocahontas to Smith: I'll always be with you no matter what, no matter where. Smith: What voice is this that speaks within me, guides me towards the best? We shall make a new start, a fresh beginning. Here the blessings of the earth are bestowed upon all. None need grow poor. Here there is good ground for all, and no cost but one's labor. We shall build a true commonwealth, hard work and self reliance our virtues. We shall have no landlords to wrack us with high rents or extort the fruit of our labor. . . . None shall eat up carelessly what his friends got worthily or steal away that which virtue has stored up. Men shall not make each other their spoil. (The New World ) [Clipping #342]

67) She comes -- like a fawn of the forest, / With a bearing mild and meek, / The blood of a line of chieftains / Rich in her golden cheek. // With the tender, fluttering bosom, / And the rounded shoulders, bare -- / The fields of her mantle waving / In the breath of the idle air. // With a crown of nodding feathers / Set round with glittering pearls; / And the light of the dreamy sunshine / Asleep in her raven curls! // Our own dear Pocahontas! The Virgin Queen of the West -- / With the heart of a Christian hero / In a timid maiden's breast! (John Esten Cooke, "A Dream of the Cavaliers" 253) [Clipping #73]

68) How and why John Smith returned alive to Jamestown. A woman's pity! Was it a savage girl's love? We do not say, but if so, it was a love not dishonoring her and not dishonored by him. She had never before seen such a man, of Godlike power, armed with the thunder and lightning of heaven, as the Indians believed, and of the prowess and bearing that more than realized the barbarian ideal of heroism. (Charles Poindexter, Captain John Smith and His Critics 47) [Clipping #379]

69) She has been called "the first lady of America," a "daughter of Eve," "a child of the forest," "an angel of peace," "a madonna figure," "the nonparell of Virginia, "the mother of two nations, "the mother of us all," and "the Great Earth Mother of the Americas." In a way, of course, she is all of these and more -- an Indian princess (one of our few claims to royalty), an ersatz Christian, and, much more, our first assimilated Indian. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 24) [Clipping #164]

70) The acclamations of the crowd affected to tears the sensibility of Pocahontas; but her native modesty was abashed; and it was with delight that she obeyed the invitation of Captain Smith to wander with him, remote from vulgar curiosity, along the banks of the river. It was then she gave loose to all the tumultuous ecstasy of love; hanging on his arm, and weeping with an eloquence much more powerful than words. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 303) [Clipping #101]

71) The captive Smith in bonds is brought, / His head reclines upon a stone; / The fatal club of death is sought, / While tawny maids his fate bemoan. / When lo! with scream of anguish loud, / A tender child, in gorgeous vest, / Runs to the stranger, through the crowd, / And, kneeling, clasps him to her breast. / See, see her arms around him twined, / And hear her pour her piteous wail, / As if for hopeless love she pined, / Her tresses loose, her dear cheek pale. . . . Fair Spirit! nursed in forest wild, / Whence caught thy breast those sacred flames, / That mark thee Mercy's meekest child, / Beyond proud Europe's titled-dames? (John Davis, "The Angel of the Wild" 374-75) [Clipping #365]

72) In a word, Barker -- like President Jefferson -- advocated miscegenation as an Enlightenment concept but rejected it as a realistic possibility in the relationship between Euro-Americans and Indians. Rather, Barker promoted the idea of assimilation through Christian conversion and social transformation. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 23) [Clipping #84]

73) Being about this time preparing to set saile for New-England, I could not stay to doe her that seruice I desired, and she well deserved; but hearing shee was at Branford with diuers of my friends, I went to see her. After a modest salutation, without any word, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented; and in that humour her husband, with diuers others, we all left her two or three houres, repenting my selfe to haue writ she could speake English. But not long after, she began to talke, and remembred mee well what courtesies shee had done: saying, You did promise Powhatan what was yours should bee his, and he the like to you; you called him father being in his land a stranger, and by the same reason so must I doe you: which though I would haue excused, I durst not allow of that title, because she was a Kings daughter; with a well set countenance she said, Were you not afraid to come into my fathers Countrie and caused feare in him and all his people (but mee), and feare you here I should call you father; I tell you then I wil, and you shall call mee childe, and so I will bee for euer and euer your Countrieman. They did tell vs always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plimoth; yet Powhatan did command Vttamatomakkin to seeke you, and know the truth, because your Countriemen will lie much. (John Smith, The Generall Historie 122-23) [Clipping #327]

74) Although the fully-fledged Pocahontas myth belongs to the nineteenth century, some of the story's implications were glimpsed by its contemporaries. It is difficult to judge exactly what effect the marriage between Rolfe and Pocahontas had on the relationship between the English and the Algonquian in Virginia, but it certainly symbolized a period of uneasy truce. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 168) [Clipping #151]

75) One of the puzzles of American history is the question of whether Pocahontas really rescued Captain Smith? (John Esten Cooke, "Did Pocahontas Really Rescue Captain Smith?" 398) [Clipping #67]

76) Naked she was, and wanton as a child. / She brought us bread and fish and feasted us / With all the savage dances of the tribe, / Singing, "Love you not me? Love you not me?" / She hung upon me like the cruel bribe / We lavished on her father. (Samuel French Morse, "John Smith Remembers" 514) [Clipping #186]

77) Tho' all untaught, the Christian soul / The woman's mood, the human heart. (William Gilmore Simms, "The Forest Maiden" 59) [Clipping #225]

78) We tread, however, upon the ashes of aboriginies; -- and while the mounds that enclose their sacred relics may be distinguished from the everlasting hills, we shall cherish towards them the sentiments of solemn respect. All the heroes of Ossian can never to us possess that thrilling and mournful interest which we feel in the characters and deeds of a Logan, an Alknomok, a Pocahontas. Their fate, and the fate of the many tribes that fished in our rivers, and hunted in our forests, should excite the sympathy of every heart not dead to the feelings of humanity. (Baron Stow, Oration 11) [Clipping #389]

79) Barker's reading of Smith, filtered and transformed through . . . innumerable other plays of whites conquering Asians, is that history is less war and negotiation and more sex and theatre, and that the representation of sex on stage, tied to the potential consumption of the Native virgin, should be both coy and conquering . . . . The message of the play is that the phallic permeates not only love and war, but theatre and imperialism as well. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 187) [Clipping #204]

80) The romantic story of Smith and Pocahontas, true to Indian character and so appealing to human nature . . . . perennially fascinates the youthful mind, and of late her romantic person has again been put before the eyes of the public, proof sufficient of the vitality of the intriguing material. (Albert Keiser, "The Pocahontas Legend" 8-9) [Clipping #155]

81) Such {Indian] names[for ships] recognized that the Indian, or at least those Indians who no longer constituted a threat, had been important to the Anglo-American history of the nation, and perhaps even that they personified certain attributes that whites could by the mid-nineteenth century afford to find attractive. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 146) [Clipping #266]

82) On the one hand, the authority of the Pocahontas narrative provided something of a thematic, if not a factual, basis for each of these romances, whose audiences may well have been convinced that such noble actions by Indians were possible, or at least had been in the seventeenth century. More significant, however, was the symbolism of "Rescue of Captain Smith" as a decisive event in the Anglo-American conquest of the New World. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 81) [Clipping #251]

83) It would puzzle the most ingenious dialectician to prove that there was a Pocahontas, a Powhatan, or even a Captain Smith. We have only to set out with the determination to believe nothing except on the testimony of our own eyes and ears. . . . it will be enough to insist on the evidence of credible witnesses whom we may cross examine. . . . why should we give more belief to the story of Captain Smith, because we find it in several books, than we do to the story of Captain Gulliver? . . . . the tale rests on [Smith's] veracity alone. . . . Who can give assurance that in this particular matter he did not draw upon his imagination, to magnify his peril in the service of the colony?. . . . Perhaps the story is an allegory -- a myth. . . . But cui bono?. . . . The story as it stands is a beautiful and touching story; one very worthy of belief; and for the sake of Pocahontas, I would not have it disproved if I could. . . . let us believe the story; let it be sacred in our memories and our faith. ("Captain Smith and Pocahontas" 236-37) [Clipping #428]

84) Who will shield the fearless heart? / Who avert the murderous blade? / From the throng with sudden start / See, there springs and Indian maid. / Quick she stands before the knight: / "Loose the chain, unbind the ring! / I am daughter of the king, / And I claim the Indian right!" (William Makepeace Thackeray, "Pocahontas" ) [Clipping #228]

85) They gaz'd, -- their dark souls bow'd before the maid, / She of the dancing step in wood and glade! / And, as her cheek flush'd thro' its olive hue, / As her black tresses to the night-wind flew, / Something o'ermaster'd them from that young mien -- / Something of heaven, in silence felt and seen; / And seeming, to their child-like faith, a token / That the Great Spirit by her voice had spoken. (Felicia Hemans, "The American Forest-Girl" 135) [Clipping #142]

86) Notwithstanding the eternall all-seeing God did preuent him [Powhatan], and by a strange meanes. For Pocahontas his dearest iewell and daughter, in that darke night came through the irksome woods, and told our Captaine great cheare should be sent vs by and by: but Powhatan and all the power he could make, would after come kill vs all, if they that brought it could not kill vs with our owne weapons when we were at supper. Therefore if we would liue, shee wished vs presently to bee gone. Such things as shee delighted in, he would haue giuen her: but with the teares running downe her cheekes, shee said shee durst not be seene to haue any: for if Powhatan should know it, she were but dead, and so shee ranne away by her selfe as she came. (John Smith, The Generall Historie 77) [Clipping #326]

87) In the mean while she gain'd the good Opinion of every body, so much that the poor Gentleman her Husband had like to have been call'd to an Account for presuming to marry a Princess Royal without the King's Consent; because it had been suggested that he had taken Advantage of her being a Prisoner, and forc'd her to marry him. But upon a more perfect Representation of the Matter, his Majesty was pleased at last to declare himself satisfied. (Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia 32) [Clipping #332]

88) She flies on seraph's wing, and through the crowd, / With piercing cry, 'mid acclamations loud, / Seeks the pale victim, by compassion led, / And in her arms sustains his languid head / . . . Streams from her eyes -- sobs from her bosom flow -- / And pale that cheek where the rose loves to glow. (John Davis, American Mariners 220) [Clipping #206]

89) Not yet for this alone shall history's scroll / Embalm thine image with a grateful tear; / For when the grasp of famine tried the soul, / When strength decay'd, and dark despair was near, / Who led her train of playmates, day by day, / O'er rock, and stream, and wild, a weary way, / Their baskets teeming with the golden ear? / Whose generous hand vouchsafed its tireless aid / To guard a nation's germ? Thine, thine, heroic maid! (Lydia H. Sigourney, "Pocahontas" 20) [Clipping #406]

90) His [Chapman's] mandate [for the Capitol painting] was simply to select a subject that served "to illustrate the discovery of America, the settlement of the United States, the history of the revolution, or the adoption of the constitution." (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 104 ) [Clipping #256]

91) For my own part I don't recollect any of the celebrated Heroines of Antiquity of half so just a behaviour or that any way exceed her in virtue or true greatness of Mind. How many Statues and Medals would have been made by the Romans in memory of such a Lady? (Boston Gazette letter 485) [Clipping #335]

92) The spectacle of Pocahontas in an attitude of entreaty, with her hair loose, and her eyes streaming with tears, supplicating her enraged father for the life of captain Smith, when he was about to crush the head of his prostrate victim with a club; is a situation equal to the genius of Raphael: And when the royal savage directs his ferocious glance for a moment, from his victim, to reprove his weeping daughter; when softened by her distress, his eye loses its fierceness, and he gives his captive to her tears, the painter will discover a new occasion for exercising his talents. (John Burk, History of Virginia 187) [Clipping #47]

93) With the history of Captain Smith is interwoven the story of Pocahontas, whose soft simplicity and innocence cannot but hold captive every mind; and this part of my volume, many of my fair readers will, I am persuaded, hug with the tenderest emotion to their bosoms. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 283) [Clipping #96]

94) Sir Thomas Dale hauing thus established things as you haue heard, returned thence, appointing Captaine George Yardly his deputy Gouernour in his absence , and arriued at Plimmouth in May or June 4. 1616. to aduince the good of the Plantation, Master Rolfe also with Rebecca his new conuert and consort, and Uttamatamakin (commonly called Tomocomo) one of Pohatans Counsellours came ouer at the same time. With this Sauage I haue often conuersed at my good friends Master Doctor Goldstone, where he was a frequent guest; and where I haue both seen him sing and dance his diabolicall measures, and heard him discourse of his Countrey and Religion, Sir Tho. Dales man being the Interpretour, as I haue elsewhere shewed. Master Rolfe lent mee a discourse which he had written of the estate of Virginia at that time, out of which I collected those things which I haue in my Pilgrimage deliuered. And his wife did not onely accustome her selfe to ciuilitie, but still carried her selfe as the Daughter of a King, and was accordingly respected, not onely by the Company, which allowed prouision for her selfe and her sonne , but of diuers particular persons of Honor, in their hopefull zeale by her to aduance Christianitie. I was present, when my Honorable & Reuerend Patron, the L. Bishop of London, Doctor King entertained her with festiuall state and pompe, beyond what I haue seene in his great hospitalitie afforded to other Ladies. At her returne towards Virginia she came at Grauesend to her end and graue, hauing giuen great demonstration of her Christian sinceritie, as the first fruits of Virginian conuersion, leauing here a godly memory, and the hopes of her resurrection, her soule aspiring to see and enioy presently in heauen, what here shee had ioyed to heare and beleeue of her beloued Sauiour. Not such was Tomocomo, but a blasphemer of what he knew not, and preferring his God to ours. (Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes 4th part, 1774) [Clipping #328]

95) They did not trifle with Pocahontas -- they did not promise the white man's life, and thus seduce her away, that they might work his death with no more molestation. Powhatan treated her not as a child -- but as a woman. Aye, there and then, she was treated as a man. (Ella, "Pocahontas" 18) [Clipping #412]

96) At the first appearance of the Europeans, her young heart was impressed with admiration of the persons and manners of the strangers: But it is not during their prosperity, that she displays her attachment . . . . She is not influenced by the awe of their greatness, or fear of their resentment, in the assistance she affords them: It was during their severest distressed, when their most celebrated chief was a captive in their hands, and was dragged through the country, as a spectacle for the sport and derision of her people, that she places herself between them and destruction. (John Burk, History of Virginia 187) [Clipping #51]

97) And when, condemned by ruthless hate, / His life-blood doomed to flow around, / Her courage stayed the victim's fate, / And bared her bosom to the wound. / And even when the ready knife, / Seemed thirsting for the pale man's blood, / Threat'ning wild vengeance on a life / Devoted to the public good, / The watchful, kind Matoa came / Like winged seraph from afar, / Sweet mercy's errands to proclaim, / And heal the feuds of savage war. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 91) [Clipping #404]

98) Upon returning from England, Mattachanna and the high priest Uttamattamakin, together with other quiakros (priests) who had accompanied them on the journeys, reported to Chief Powhatan Wahunsenaca that Pocahontas had been murdered in England. The quiakros reported that Pocahontas had been murdered in England. The quiakros reported that Pocahontas was most likely poisoned. . . . Upon learning the truth of the intentions of the English during her visit to England, Pocahontas became emboldened. No longer were her eyes closed to their deceit. We believe that the English colonists did not want Pocahontas to return to her homeland. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 83-84) [Clipping #95]

99) I saw her unspotted soul, departing to the regions of peace and everlasting bliss . . . before the occurrence of that murderous warfare [the 1622 events], in which all that was dear to her, was involved in deadly strife; and in which, her brothers, kindred and countrymen, fell before the men whose lives she humanely saved. (William Darby, Lectures on the Discovery of America 193-94) [Clipping #384]

100) Bred in the seclusion of the forest, accustomed only to such nurture as its primitive and superstitious occupants are wont to bestow upon their offspring -- no companions or object of admiration save the wild maidens of her tribe, and the savage feats of its young braves; in all things a simple child of nature, unskilled in the arts of her sex; a heart like that of Pocahontas, so noble, ardent, and affectionate, must have turned as naturally to the commanding and chivalrous soldier as the lowly marigold to the sun -- and as purely -- her whole course of conduct towards him being an undeviating flow of spontaneous child-like worship, happiest when loading him with benefits, and neither desiring nor expecting a return. (Mary Balmanno, "Pocahontas" 289) [Clipping #65]

101) By this means he [Smith] got them all to resolve to maintain their fort, and to provide for themselves in the best manner they could; and this resolution was in a few days confirmed by Pocahontas's coming with a great number of attendants, and bringing them plenty of all kinds of provisions, which she continued to do every four or five days for some years afterwards; for Capt. Smith had impressed such an idea upon the Indians of the English courage and knowledge, and such a terror of their instruments of war, that Pocahontas easily prevailed with her father and her countrymen to allow her to indulge her passion for the captain, by often visiting the fort, and always accompanying her visits with a fresh supply of provisions; therefore it may justly be said, that the success of our first settlement in America, was chiefly owing to the love that this young girl had conceived for Capt. Smith, and consequently in this instance, as well as many others, that love does all that's great below. . . . She at first shewed great resentment against him, which is a plain sign of her having expected that he would have married her, and indeed it was what he ought in gratitude to have done. However, such is the native modesty of the sex in all countries, that she did not even then insinuate any such expectation. (Edward Kimber, "A Short Account of the British Plantations in America" 355, 435 ) [Clipping #336]

102) I love the WHITE WARRIOR from over the water, / He's brave in the fight and kind to his foe; / And the heart that is these, will slight not the daughter (Hiram Haines, "The Virginiad" 31) [Clipping #138]

103) Captain Whiteman, I would pledge my life to you / Captain Whiteman, I would defy my father too. / I pledge to aid and to save, / I'll protect you to my grave. / Oh Captain Whiteman, you're the cheese in my fondue. (Monique Mojica, "Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots" 26 ) [Clipping #182]

104) Every Body paid this young Lady all imaginable Respect; and it is supposed, she wou'd have sufficiently acknowledged those Favours, had she lived to return to her own Country, by bringing the Indians to have a kinder Disposition towards the English. (Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia 33) [Clipping #333]

105) By placating the Indians and planting corn, and with the help again of Pocahontas, who is said often to have brought supplies, and once to have come through the forest on a dark night to warn of an attack by her father, Smith is usually credited with having temporarily saved the colony. He gave the credit to her, however, as having done most, "next under God," to preserve the settlers. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 177) [Clipping #292]

106) And it is basically so -- as a whore begging to be screwed -- that the anti-Pocahontas has flourished in the New Western ever since, growing fatter and fatter, as well as ever more slatternly and insatiable. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 153) [Clipping #132]

107) and therefore would the before remembered Pochohuntas, a well featured but wanton young girle Powhatans daughter, sometymes resorting to our Fort, of the age then of 11. or 12. yeares, gett the boys forth with her into the markett place and make them wheele, falling on their handes turning their heeles vpwardes, whom she would follow, and wheele so her self naked as she was all the Fort over. (William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile 72) [Clipping #311]

108) [Pocahontas's] act of bravery in saving the life of Captain John Smith was recast and retold more often than any other American historical incident during the colonial and antebellum periods. The Pocahontas narrative provided literary and visual artists with a flexible discourse that came to be used to address a number of racial, political, and gender-related issues. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 1) [Clipping #230]

109) Although [Indians] still have the potential for passionate actions, it is their antiquated, stoic acceptance of their individual fate and of the ultimate demise of their people that endeared these noble savages to white readers. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 56) [Clipping #248]

110) In her Dream-Vision, Pocahontas found herself by the water. She saw several ships, like great white birds, coming into Chesapeake Bay, with strange people pouring out of them. She also saw wigwams, fields, medicine houses, the towns of Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Powhatan, Potomac -- all that was familiar and dear to her -- shrinking, made as tiny as any villages, even sinking under the hills and riverbanks. And she saw her people disappearing. (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 33 ) [Clipping #17]

111) Colonial conquest, in fact, is accomplished quite directly [in Barker's play] through the power of love when Pocahontas falls in love with the Euro-American conqueror and his culture. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 234-35) [Clipping #211]

112) Oh woman! -- fairest boon that heaven bestowed, / How oft has mercy from thy bosom flowed. / Pure source of feeling -- friendship -- love divine -- / Oh! what were man but for this holy shrine? / Only abode of bliss without alloy, / Chaste sanctuary for his grief or joy. / If adoration were allowed to thee: / Idolaters! -- how many would there be? (William Watson Waldron, "Pocahontas, Princess of Virginia" 25) [Clipping #422]

113) Thy fate, sweet maid,-Motoa now no more, But Pocahontas,-name forever dear, -- was fraught with every stamp of worldly woe; -- Sad exile, -- hopeless love, -- and bondage drear. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 94) [Clipping #281]

114) Whether or not she was actually [a kind of traitor] her mythic role in the success of Anglo-America would necessarily make a portrayal of Pocahontas's best-known actions from the perspective of her own people difficult at best. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 180) [Clipping #279]

115) Like Pocahontas, the Native American has rarely been able to tell his own story. Rather, it has been told for him by others -- examined, digested, misinterpreted. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 31) [Clipping #160]

116) The Kings daughter went ashore, but would not talke to any of them scarce of them of the best sort, and to them onely, that if her father had loved her, he would not value her lesse then olde swords, peeces, or axes: whereof she would stil dwell with the English men, who loved her. At last came one from Powhatan, who told us, that Simons was run away, to Nonsowhaticond, which was a truth, as afterwards appeared, but that the other English man was dead, that proved a lie: for since, Mr. Harmor, whom I employed to Powhatan brought him to me, our peeces, swords, and tooles within fifteen daies, should be sent to James towne, with some corne, and that his daughter should be my childe, and ever dwell with mee, desiring to be ever friends, and named such of his people, and neighbour Kings, as he desired to be included, and have the benefit of the peace. (Thomas Dale, Letter to R. 53-54) [Clipping #317]

117) I have saved thee before from his terrible ire, / When the club was uplifted, and kindled the fire, / And thy death was decreed by his oath; Thy head on the block as my arms did entwine, / Between it and the club I then interposed mine, / And I told them to strike at us both. / Then believe me, my Chieftain, and hasten away; / I return, or suspicion will blacken my stay, / And the morning my embassy tell. / May thy God e'er protect thee, and give thee his aid, -- / Oh, live mindful of me, tho' a poor Indian maid -- / Pocahontas now bids thee farewell. ("The Preservation of the Early Colonists from Massacre" 228) [Clipping #395]

118) Barker is expressing here an attitude that had accompanied British colonization of America since the seventeenth century and that had developed into one of the aims of President Jefferson 's policy toward indigenous people: their assimilation into the new American culture to resolve the problem of European expansion into native lands. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 19 ) [Clipping #83]

119) These women I am writing about were our grandparents. They were our Grandmothers in spirit, if not actual blood. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 89 ) [Clipping #39]

120) Pocahontas: No, 'tis no dream! / Souls of the prophet-fathers of my race, / Light from the land of spirits have ye sent / To paint the future on my mental sight. / Like the great river of far western wilds, / Improvement's course, unebbing, shall flow on. / From that beloved soil where I drew breath / Shall noble chiefs arise. / But one o'er all, / By heaven named to set a nation free, / I hear the universal world declare, / In shouts whos echo centuries prolong, / 'The Father of his Country!' O'er the path / Of ages, I behold Time leading Peace. / By ties of love and language bound, I see / The island mother and her giant child / Their arms extend across the narrowing seas, / The grasp of friendship to exchange! (Charlotte Barnes, The Forest Princess Act 3, scene 5) [Clipping #28]

121) But him, for whom her chaste affections burned, / Ne'er from his breast, love's echoing notes returned; / O! Smith--thy heart if ever thou hadst one, / Was made of adamant or ice cold stone! (Hiram Haines, "The Virginiad" 32) [Clipping #139]

122) These days, Smith's stock as a historian is probably as high as it ever has been, thanks largely to the work of Bradford Smith and Philip Barbour, but no totally convincing explanation has ever been offered for the rescue's absence from the 1608 account. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 140) [Clipping #145]

123) The court of King James was very adamant in discouraging contact between the races (although I doubt there was discouragement against rape and pillage). This issue of class was a barrier to the marriage. This is why we end up with the ridiculous legends of Pocahontas being a princess. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 90) [Clipping #40]

124) Smith: All the children of the king were beautiful, but she, the youngest, was so exceedingly so, that the sun himself, though he saw her often, was surprised whenever she came out into his presence. Her father had a dozen wives, a hundred children, but she was his favorite. She exceeded the rest not only in feature and proportion but in wit and spirit too. All loved her. . . . (The New World ) [Clipping #343]

125) Such Anglo-American interpretations of the actions of indigenous American women point to the popularity of a particular white male fantasy. The Indians are defeated not solely by the superior arms of the Europeans, but also by the irresistible sexual attractiveness of their charismatic leaders. What also becomes apparent is that each of the women listed by O'Meara, as well as Pocahontas, can therefore be depicted as a convenient scapegoat for the subjugation or destruction of her culture . . . . The Indians could therefore be usefully portrayed as having had a hand in their own demise. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 85) [Clipping #252]

126) Smith: At hazard of her own dear life she saved me, / E'en the warm friendship of the prince had fail'd, / And death, inevitable death, hung over me. / O had you seen her fly, like Pity's herald, / To stay the uplifted hatchet in its flight; / Or heard her, as with cherub voice she pled, / Like Heav'n's own angel advocate, for mercy. (James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess Act 2, scene 1) [Clipping #24]

127) In the afternoone, they being gone, we guarded them as before to the Church, and after prayer, gave them to Pocahuntas, the Kings Daughter, in regard of her fathers kindnesse in sending her: after having well fed them, as all the time of their imprisonment, we gave them their bowes, arrowes, or what else they had, and with much content, sent them packing: Pocahuntas also we requited, with such trifles as contented her, to tel that we had used the Paspaheyans very kindly in so releasing them. (John Smith, A True Relation E4r) [Clipping #307]

128) Pocahontas was trained from early childhood in the sacred ways of a Beloved Woman -- a certain kind of medicine woman or priestess -- because her birth name, Matoaka or Matoaks, is thought to mean "white (or snow) feather." Since a white feather, or numerous white feathers, always signifies a Beloved Woman and is carried or worn by such women most of the time, it is likely that she did indeed have that "calling," or vocation, from birth. Her clan name, Matoaka, signified her station in life -- her destiny, if you will. It foreshadowed the part she would play in the transformation of the Powhatan people and of the land they knew as the tsenacommacah. (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 31) [Clipping #16]

129) The political message has been subsumed in the erotic [in Barker's play]. Just as the sympathetic bosom of the female playgoer stands between the child-drama and the "iron rod" of the critic -- with the implication that she stands ready to absorb its power -- so too does the welcoming bosom of the Native Princess deflect the red hatchet of savage males and preserve the "blushing head" of her lover's rising flower for her future pleasure. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 185) [Clipping #203]

130) Moreover, the initial attacks by Northern historians on the veracity of the [John Smith] rescue story, and therefore on the word and character of John Smith and the importance of Pocahontas in the Anglo American colonial enterprise, were made in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities in order to discredit the South's effort to formulate a history of its own. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 148-49) [Clipping #268]

131) (The HANDMAIDENS huddle closely with POCAHONTAS for the intimate details. One of them pops up, exclaiming "Pink?" Then POCAHONTAS rises above them, lifts her arms in a manner to suggest an erect phallus. The HANDMAIDENS gasp. Then a kazoo whistle indicates that the erection falls quickly, and the HANDMAIDENS explode with laughter.) POCAHONTAS: (Fighting for their attention.) He said to me, I love you, dear Pocahontas. I promise you it won't happen the next time, I promise, I promise, I promise. (Hanay Geiogamah, "Foghorn" 114) [Clipping #136]

132) On a national level . . . it had become clear by the second decade of the nineteenth century that Pocahontas had rescued Smith, and by implication all Anglo-Americans, so that they might carry on the destined work of becoming a great nation. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 55) [Clipping #246]

133) According to Mattaponi sacred oral history, Wahunsenaca truly liked Smith. He offered Smith a position to be a werowance of the English colonists, to be the leader of the English within the Powhatan nation. . . . Although Smith alleged years later that Pocahontas saved his life during a four-day ceremony in the process of his being made a Powhatan werowance, his life was never in danger. His life did not need saving. Why would the Powhatan want to kill a person they were initiating to be a werowance? By Smith's own admission, Wahunseneca gave Smith his word that Smith would be released in four days. Smith's fear was either a figment of his own imagination or an embellishment to dramatize his narrative. The quiakros played an integral part in such a ceremony. Children, male or female, were not allowed to attend. Children were not allowed into a religious ritual entailing priests. . . . Pocahontas would not have been in the ceremony to throw herself on top of Smith because the quiakros would not have allowed Pocahontas to be there. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 19-20) [Clipping #87]

134) Profound indeed during that dark interval, must have been those sensations of that wild, young creature. . . . Who can say that she did not, for a flashing moment, repent that love had changed her forest nature? She thought of her free girlhood before the bark of the white man penetrated the waters that girded her father's kingdom -- before she was conscious of a race existing superior to her own; and she, who was a great, a Princess and the daughter of a great King, felt degraded by the comparison. Then, she wished she had remained in happy ignorance -- happy in the simple pleasures of her forest life, and pleased with the simple sorts of her wild followers; and her heart was gradually filled with deep sadness. ("Pocahontas" 1) [Clipping #439]

135) When he comes to the paragraph in which the Generall Historie relates the touching story of Pocahontas, and her intercession at the moment when no chance appeared to exist that Smith's life could be preserved, and when he casts his eye upon the opposite column of the True Relation to find its version of the incident, he will surely be amazed to see that not only does it fail to furnish the remotest allusion to this act, or even by a single word to indicate that Pocahontas so much as existed, but that it expressly states that Powhatan treated his captive throughout with the greatest kindness, assuring him at once of his early liberation. (Henry Adams, "Captain John Smith" 11) [Clipping #375]

136) The figure of Pocahontas was thus called upon, in nineteenth-century American versions of the story, to carry a heavy and rather unwieldy ideological burden: to represent and legitimize American colonialist and nationalist projects. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 235) [Clipping #212]

137) Her adoption of Christianity seems to have been fervent and sincere. She is described as of quick intelligence, in learning equally the faith and language of her husband; and her career from childhood amply declares the aversion which she felt for the wild exercises and coarse brutalities of her own people. She was with them, but not of them -- a creature, as foreign to the sort of world in which she is found, as was that exquisite creation of Goethe -- the Mignon of the Wilhelm Meister. (William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Captain John Smith 358) [Clipping #435]

138) The angelification of the Indian female has been tried over and over again in the United States for a host of local Red Wings, Minne-ha-ha's, etc; all of whom have passed rapidly into the realm of parody and burlesque. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 72) [Clipping #126]

139) How could men be sick at heart, / With a savage chief to visit and beguile, / Or a wild child-princess, bursting out of the woods, / Her train of girls behind her, shouting and screaming, / With deerhorns set on their foreheads -- a Bacchant rout, / Led by the nonpareil, the daring child, / Who was to die a Christian and a lady / And leave her slight bones in the English earth / And her son's sons to know Virginia still, / Such being the fate. (Stephen Vincent Benet, Western Star 74) [Clipping #29]

140) After 1850, the story of Pocahontas became a scapegoat for New Englanders, and as the slavery issue began to dominate all cultural endeavors, few tears would be shed over the fate of Pocahontas. . . . Only the Old Dominion would remember Pocahontas's daring deeds, but those stories would soon be directed toward preserving the Southern way of life. Her devotion to Christianity and Rolfe and her daring intrepidity would soon be used to substantiate the decent and noble heritage of Virginia's first families. In Massachusetts, the Virginia legend would eventually elicit skepticism and scorn. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 137 ) [Clipping #11]

141) For centuries, heirs of that legacy [Pocahontas's descendants] drew a clear distinction between their deified Indian ancestor and all other 'savages.' She was regal, she converted to Christianity, her father was an 'emperor,' and her marriage to Rolfe produced a perfect blend of forest and field. Because the first Jamestown settlers were all male and no doubt quite a few interracial couplings took place, exaggerated claims about Pocahontas's ladylike behavior, regal demeanor, and Christian faith served as an elaborate rationale to justify the mixed blood flowing through many Old Dominion veins. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 12-13) [Clipping #6]

142) There may have been some thought among the matchacomoco, the Grand Council, that one of the budding Beloved Women they were taining at the ceremonial center of the tsenacommacah, a town called Werowocomoco, might be the one the manito would move to "remake" him -- that is, to "give him birth" as one of the tsenacommacah, no longer stranger and threat, but relative, bound in law and loyalty to the tradition that held them all within one common being. Among the powers invested in a Beloved Woman was the authority to decide who among captives would live and be adopted into the tribe, or die. The ones so chosen weren't being "saved" from death so much as dying in one identity and being transformed into another. (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 39) [Clipping #18]

143) None of Pocahontas's words have come down to us directly, so we have no immediate access at all to what she might have thought of the strange pattern of events in which she was caught. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 146-47) [Clipping #147]

144) But he [Smith] -- I pity, while I scorn / The tribe in which the wretch was born. (William Gilmore Simms, "The Forest Maiden" 58) [Clipping #224]

145) While lowly bending at the altar-stone, / Alone in seeming, not in heart alone, / The bright girl knelt, bathed in repentant tears / Connecting link between two hemispheres. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 134) [Clipping #286]

146) The influence of the passions is uniform, and their effects nearly the same in every human breast; hence love operates in the same manner throughout the world, and discovers itself by the same symptoms in the breasts of beings separated by an immeasurable ocean. When Smith appeared before Powhatan, the first impression he made decidedly favourably for him on the minds of women. This his knowledge of the sex soon discovered; but his attention was principally attracted by the charms of a young girl, whose looks emanated from a heart that was the seat of every tenderness, and who could not conceal those soft emotions of which the female bosom is so susceptible. It is in vain to attempt opposing the inroads of the blind god: the path of love is a path to which there is no end; in which there is no remedy for lovers but to give up their souls. This young girl was the daughter of the Emperor Powhatan. She was called Pocahontas; and when Smith was engaged by the interrogations of the King, and she thought herself unobserved, never did the moon gaze more steadfastly on the water than she on the prisoner. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 296-97) [Clipping #97]

147) Then teaching -- insidious recourse -- / enhanced Pocahontas and flowered of course / in marriage. John Rolfe fell in love / with her and she -- in rank above / what she became -- renounced her name / yet found her status not too tame. (Marianne Moore, "Enough: Jamestown, 1607-1957" 500-1) [Clipping #183]

148) The painter, it must be remembered, has but a single moment of time for his delineations -- but a single moment; -- and his art is so far dramatic that his rule must be, to seize upon that moment, in the event which he seeks to celebrate, which presents us equally with the most impressive and intelligible action. . . . That moment in the history of Pocahontas is when Smith is rescued by the Indian maiden from the stroke of the Executioner. Our artists, generally, have shrunk from this subject. I know not one, having any genius, by whom it has been attempted. Mr. Chapman, whose high merits I am pleased to acknowledge and assert, has made a noble picture of the reception of the Indian Princess into the bosom of the English Church; but it is to the reproach of this gentleman, that he avoided the nobler incident in her fortunes. (William Gilmore Simms, "Pocahontas; A Study for the Historical Painter" 305) [Clipping #423]

149) The ironies here are boundless. In a way, Pocahontas was more of a Christian than Rolfe, John Smith, and all the Puritan fathers rolled into one. She had played the role of Good Samaritan without knowledge of the Biblical model. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 26) [Clipping #166]

150) It is said that [James I], pedantic and ridiculous in every point, was so infatuated with the prerogatives of royalty, that he expressed his displeasure, that one of his subjects should dare to marry the daughter even of a savage king. It will not perhaps be difficult to decide on this occasion, whether, it was the savage king who derived honour from finding himself placed on a level with the European prince, or the English monarch, who by his pride and prejudices reduced himself to a level with the chief of the savages. (Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America 271) [Clipping #349]

151) Dauntlessly aside she flings / Lifted axe and thirsty knife, / Fondly to his heart she clings, / And her bosom guards his life! In the woods of Powhatan, / Still 'tis told by Indian fires / How a daughter of their sires / Saved a captive Englishman. (William Makepeace Thackeray, "Pocahontas" ) [Clipping #229]

152) What emerges from Smith's narrative is precisely what the English were blind to--that Powhatan acted in accordance with a set of established social and political practices. It is difficult to judge just how novel the arrival of the three English ships would have been to Powhatan, but the establishment of the fort clearly called for a response. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 149) [Clipping #148]

153) A beautiful Native American woman, daughter of the chief of her tribe, falls in love with an English settler. The way Disney tells it, Pocahontas's story comes off as a tale of forbidden love, with a cultural twist. Much of what I know from Pocahontas, I learned from a Disney movie. So then how much of what I know to be true actually is? I remember hearing somewhere that the story of Pocahontas is a pretty lie Americans have passed on from generation to generation, to make ourselves feel better about the way white men actually treated the Native Americans. If we knew the real story, we would be horrified. Is this the actual truth? What really made Pocahontas a legend? Is her story merely propaganda, used to idealize the story of the birth of our nation, which in reality was an atrocity that enslaved and killed millions of Native Americans? Or is there some truth that serves as a basis for this favorite Disney story? Who was this woman, and why is she so often associated with strength, love, and defiance? (Jacklyn Temares, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #447]

154) Pocahontas: Thou [Rolfe] art my life! / I lived not till I saw thee, love; and now, / I live not in thine absence. Long, O! long / I was the savage child of savage Nature. . . . But now, O! now. . . . O! tis from thee that I have drawn my being; / Thou'st ta'en me from the path of savage error, / Blood-stain'd and rude, where rove my countrey men / And taught me heavenly truths. . . . Hast thou not heaven-ward turn'd my dazzled sight, / Where sing the spirits of the blessed good / Around the bright throne of the Holy One! (James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess Act 3, scene 2) [Clipping #26]

155) It is not surprising that the only woman's name identifying an American Naval vessel of this era is that of Pocahontas, whose image combined the valor necessary for fighting with a reminder of the peaceful relationship that might be possible through cooperation. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 146) [Clipping #267]

156) Argall used the gift of a copper pot as a means of accusing Japazaw and his wife of betraying Pocahontas for a copper pot. This appears to have been a common tactic of the English colonists. Captain John Smith had acted similarly when he "traded" for corn. Smith often put his pistol to the head of the chief of a village, forcing him to turn over the village's corn. As Smith left, he would throw down some beads. Later he would tell his fellow colonists that he had traded for the corn. The long continuation of these implications by popular media and scholars is deeply offensive to Powhatan descendants. It insinuates that the Potowomac valued material possessions over the love and commitment to their relatives and their paramount chief, that they were immoral. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 51) [Clipping #90]

157) Like a little flower growing under the shadow of such a rock was the young Indian maiden -- her image flits through the heart like that of some inhabitant of the earth ere sin was not -- when woman, fresh from the hands of her creator, could love all that was worthy, good, and noble. (Mary Balmanno, "Pocahontas" 290) [Clipping #66]

158) Thy fate, sweet maid, -- Matoa now no more, / But Pocahontas, -- name forever dear, -- / Was fraught with every stamp of worldly woe; -- / Sad exile, -- hopeless love, -- and bondage drear. / How did her gentle sympathies arise / For the pale captive of her father's crown, / When as she deemed, from climes beyond the skies, / Bright hope had lured some kindred spirit down. / For such a Hero seemed of purer race, / Like the loved image of her dreaming bliss; / In form all majesty, divine in face; / Too fair, too gentle, for a world like this. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 94) [Clipping #405]

159) Can the wild legends of rude ages, or the sentimental fictions of refinement, supply an heroine whose qualities would not be eclipsed by the Indian Pocahontas? (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 304) [Clipping #102]

160) [Pocahontas's] heroic deed is credited with saving Jamestown from destruction and preserving the North American continent for future English colonization. She allegedly brought food to the Jamestown settlers and warned them of raids by her tribesmen; during these frequent visits, Pocahontas became so enamored with the British way of life that she spurned her pagan past, joined the Anglican Church, and wed the Englishman John Rolfe. Offspring of that union ostensibly married into families of English Cavaliers and sired the upper echelon of the Old Dominion's plantation society. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 3) [Clipping #4]

161) [William] Hillhouse used the name "Pocahontas" [in his antislavery pamphlet Pocahontas; A Proclamation: With Plates] against Virginia and the South in part because her name in his title would have attracted some attention to the pamphlet, but primarily because she was the literal and/or figurative progenitrix of the Virginia gentry. This pseudonym helps him to express the foolishness of having a mixed-blood aristocracy in a society where racial separation is mandatory, and where the great majority of both whites and blacks must necessarily be reduced to positions of poverty or servitude. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 153) [Clipping #269]

162) And now, O pliable tenderness of lovely woman! No longer did the bosom of the young princess sigh over the ashes of Smith; no longer did her idolatrous fancy sanctify his relics! Could she hear the voice of the passionate lover whisper in her ear the music of his vows, and not be melted to endurance? No! though at first she felt repugnance, his looks, his sighs, his tender embraces, soon quelled her fugitive terrors; and, when encircling with his arm her unrobed but pure form, he made her to comprehend that he pressed to his heart the dearest object of his affections; the bosom of the Indian maid gave motion to her ebon tresses, that seemed officious to conceal its dazzling beauties; and though she turned aside in disorder, yet a languishing look, half-concealed under the shadow of her long eye-lashes, discovered what her lips withheld, that she had been wooed by a new lover only to be won! (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 94-95) [Clipping #359]

163) In the wildest scenes of nature have been found her most engaging beauties. The desert smiles with roses, and savage society sometimes exhibits the graces of humanity. Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, with the colour and the charms of Eve, at the age if fifteen, when nature acts with all her powers, and fancy begins to wander, had a heart, that palpitated with warm affections. . . . Smith was by nature endowed with personal graces, that interest the female mind. . . . Pocahontas had never before beheld such a human being, and her heart yielded to the empire of love. In the first interview she looked all she felt, and like Dido, hung entranced on the face and lips of the gallant man. ("A Sketch of the Life of Pocahontas" 170 ) [Clipping #350]

164) Oh Love! how powerful o'er all thou art, / In dusky breasts or breasts of whiter hue, / To thy delicious touch the human heart / Throbs with respondent transport ever true. / On Love's swift wings, this Indian virgin flew, / To snatch from hateful death the lovely chief, / Love drew her tears, like showers of pearly dew, / Love filled her passionate breast with tender grief / And love still drinks her soul, and naught can give relief. . . . He whom she loved to all these charms was cold, / Though well he saw her bosom's gentle fire, / Stern is the soul that worships fame or gold, / To all that softer ecstacies inspire. / A stony heart these tyrants e'er require, / Brave Smith ne'er thought of Pocahontas' love, / But only that his name would glitter higher / In coming centuries, others' names above, / Whose soon contented souls an humbler distance rove. (James Avis Bartley, "Pocahontas" 9-10) [Clipping #442]

165) No more my failing visions find / The past dark records of any kind; / Not e'en the curse that comes to all / The dastard sons of Europe's race / From out these withered lips shall fall; / Nor can my hand their feet trace; / Yet vengeance dire, with scorpion sting, / And shame's dark blush, shall ages bring! (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 107) [Clipping #283]

166) So long a journey within the time specified cannot be called impossible. But it argues marvelous despatch. . . . On the whole, the reader perhaps inclines to the opinion that John Smith was not the sole author of his books, but that they passed, for embellishment, at least, through the hands of some craftsman, who was not perfectly possessed either of Smith's own story, or of the geography or public history to which it related. (John Gorham Palfrey, History of New England 92) [Clipping #371]

167) The addition here made, was intended to place in a stronger light the amiable spirit of Pocahonta, and the great sacrifice, by her father, of his personal feeling and native impulse, in his compliance with her entreaties. (William Gilmore Simms, "The Forest Maiden" 52) [Clipping #222]

168) These are the walks, and this the bowery shade, / The lov'd recess where Pocahontas stray'd; / When Smith's dear image to her bosom stole, / And love usurped the empire of her soul. / For thee, heroic maid, no kind return, / In him thou sav'dst, no kindred fervours burn! ("The Beauties of York" 595) [Clipping #364]

169) The collective sympathies of a female audience . . . will save his [Barker's] head, like that of his hero Smith, from the critical chopping block. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 177) [Clipping #192]

170) Barker makes Pocahontas's exploitation the very thing to be celebrated. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 180) [Clipping #194]

171) Pocahontas? She was an Indian we created solely out of our ethnocentric imaginations. She was the shadow in the great forest. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 31) [Clipping #168]

172) Though the breast of Pocahontas cherished the deepest affection for Captain Smith, yet, such is the native modesty of the sex in all countries, that she could not collect resolution to tell him of her love; and the Captain, like a true soldier, unwilling to put his unhoused free condition into circumscription and confine, though he ventured her endearments, never dropped the slightest hint of marriage. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 306 ) [Clipping #103]

173) Davis correctly predicted that early nineteenth-century Americans would appreciate this condemnation of the king for his prejudice especially against this particular marriage. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 45) [Clipping #241]

174) While the actual daughter of Powhatan may well have been an extraordinary woman, she left no verifiable words of her own. The ultimate reality of Pocahontas, therefore, is in the cumulative power of the often contrasting representations of her in the multifarious narratives ironically made possible by her silence. A study of a tradition like that of Pocahontas reminds us that every new era interprets the cultural documents of the past in the service of prevailing agendas. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 186) [Clipping #280]

175) Finally, she is one of our few, true native myths, for with poets she has successfully attained the status of goddess, has been beatified, made holy, and offered as a magical and moving explanation of our national origins. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 176) [Clipping #291]

176) The central conflict in Barker's play turns out not to be what it is in Smith's text, the struggle between Powhatan and Smith for hegemony . . . . In the play . . . Powhatan . . . basically accepts the presence of the whites. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 181) [Clipping #195]

177) The bruite of this pretended marriage came soone to Powhatans knowledge, a thing acceptable to him, as appeared by his sudden content thereunto, who some ten daies after sent an olde uncle of hirs, named Opachisco, to give her as his deputy in the Church, and two of his sonnes to see the marriage solemnized, which was accordingly done about the fifth of Aprill and ever since we have had friendly commerce and trade, not onely with Powhatan himselfe, but also with his subjects round about us; so as now I see no reason why the Collonie should not thrive a pace. (Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse 10) [Clipping #321]

178) The false European legend must end. Pocahontas' honour demands it. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 96) [Clipping #44]

179) It chaunced Powhatans delight and darling, his daughter Pocahontas, (whose fame hath even bin spred in England by the title of Nonparrella of Virginia) in her princely progresse, if I may so terme it, tooke some pleasure (in the absence of Captaine Argall (to be among her friends at Pataomecke (as it seemeth by the relation I had) imploied thither, as shopkeepers to a Fare, to exchange some of her fathers commodities for theirs, where residing some three months or longer, it fortuned upon occasion either of promise or profit, Captaine Argall to arrive there, whom Pocahantas, desirous to renue his familiaritie with the English, and delighting to see them, as unknowne, fearefull perhaps to be surprised, would gladly visit, as she did, of whom no sooner had Captaine Argall intelligence, but he delt with an old friend, and adopted brother of his Iapazeus, how and by what meanes he might procure hir captive, assuring him, that now or never, was the time to pleasure him, if he entended indeede that love which he had made profession of, that in ransome of hir he might redeeme some of our English men and armes, now in the possession of her Father, promising to use her withall faire, and gentle entreaty: Iapazeus well assured that his brother, as he promised would use her curteously promised his best indeavours and secrecie to accomplish his desire, and thus wrought it, making his wife an instrument (which sex have ever bin most powerfull in beguiling inticements) to effect his plot which hee had thus laid, he agreed that himselfe, his wife, and Pocahuntas, would accompanie his brother to the water side, whether come, his wife should faine a great and longing desire to goe aboorde, and see the shippe, which being there three or foure times, before she had never seene, and should bee earnest with her hushand to permit her: he seemed angry with her, making as he pretended so unnecessary a request, especially being without the company of women, which deniall she taking unkindely, must faine to weepe, (as who knows not that women can command teares) whereupon her husband seeming to pitty those counterfeit teares, gave her leave to goe aboord, so that it would please Pochahuntas to accompany her; now was the greatest labour to win her, guilty perhaps of her fathers wrongs, though not knowne as she supposed to goe with her, yet by her earnest perswasions, she assented: so forth with aboord they went, the best cheere that could be made was seasonably provided, to supper they went, merry on all hands, especially Iapazeus and his wife, who to expres their joy, would ere be treading upó Capt. Argals foot, as who should say tis don, she is your own. Supper ended, Pochahuntas was lodged in the Gunners roome, but Iapazeus and his wife desired to have some conference with their brother, which was onely to acquaint him by what stratagem they had betraied his prisoner, as I have already related: after which discourse to sleepe they went, Pocahuntas nothing mistrusting this policy, who nevertheless being most possessed with feare, and desire of returne, was first up, and hastened Iapazeus to be gon. Capt. Argall having secretly well rewarded him, with a small Copper kettle, and som other les valuable toies so highly by him esteemed, that doubtlesse he would have betrayed his owne father for them, permitted both him and his wife to returne, but told him, that for divers considerations, as for that his father had then eigh of our English men, many swords, peeces, and other tooles, which he had at severall times by trecherons murdering our men, taken from them which hough of no use to him, he would not redeliver, he would reserve Pocahuntas, whereat she began to be exceeding pensive, and discontented, yet ignorant of the dealing of Iapazeus, who in outward appearance was no less discontented that he should be the meanes of her captivity, much a doe there was to perswade her to be patient, which with extraordinary curteous usage, by little and little was wrought in her, and so to James towne she was brought, a messenger to her father forthwith dispached to advertise him, that his only daughter was in the hands & possession of the English. (Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse 3-6) [Clipping #319]

180) And when Grieve promulgates the idea that it is the Indian women who are the most vicious to their victims, it becomes clear the Pocahontas is an amazing exception to those who were normally thought to be ready to practice the worst type of savagery. Her actions could then be appreciated without one's having to alter one's well-established hatred and fear of Indians. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 40) [Clipping #239]

181) [Smith's Powhatan prisoners] being threatened and examined their intents and plotters of their villanies confessd they were directed only by Powhatan, to obtaine him our owne weapons to cut our own throats, with the manner how, where, and when, which wee plainely found most true and apparent, yet he sent his messengers and his dearest Daughter Pocahuntas to excuse him, of the injuries done by his subjects, desiring their liberties, with the assuraunce of his loue. After Smith had given the prisoners what correction hee thought fit, used them well a day or two after, and then delivered them Pocahuntas, for whose sake only, he fained to save their lives and graunt them liberty. (William Symonds, The Proceedings of the English Colonie 24) [Clipping #309]

182) Her image seemed continually present during my stay at Richmond. She seemed to stand at every sylvan gate, and to be reflected in every setting sun. When the imagination unfolded its saloon, she entered as a welcome but pensive guest; and amid all its gay and vernal creations, she seemed to pluck nothing but cypress leaves, and suspend her wampum belt among its golden willows. Child of the forest! hadst thou been in Wyoming, that helmet never would have perished, and the tones of that tragic story would never have echoed among the slopes of Parnassus. (Rev. T. B. Balch, "Pocahontas, Burr, and Wirt" 19) [Clipping #427]

183) It was not that aught was wanting in her heart which dwelt in theirs [Pocahontas's tribe], of social and domestic affection, or even of patriotism; but that she had that which they did not possess -- innocence, which could suspect no evil; conscientiousness, which could permit no wrong; benevolence, which yearned to do good to the pilgrim and stranger; and disinterestedness, which could forget all thought of self in her exertions for the benefit of others. We never feel that her opposition to her father, and her race, was from lack of aught that is noble or kindly in our nature; and we wonder no more that she could never sympathize with her dark-browned kindred, than that the daughter of Shylock was false to him, and to her Hebrew faith. Pocahontas is separate from all her tribe, because there are none else pure, soullike, gentle, and affectionate like her. A lonely life must hers have been in early days, yearning for communion with those she could not find; sending forth the warm aspirations of her heart into the void around her, to be ever reminded that they are but wasted breath. (Ella, "Pocahontas" 16) [Clipping #410]

184) And to her influence is to be attributed, perhaps, the number of Virginians distinguished by the vigor of their judgment, the soundness of their views, the steadiness of their principles, the force of their eloquence, the loftiness of their conceptions, the purity of their lives, the warmth, and truth, and strength of their patriotism; of such were Washington, Randolph, Jefferson, Clay, Marshall, and a host of other immortal names. May these not have been formed, humanly speaking, by the gentle, undying influence of their quiet, retiring, simply educated ancestors, who were the descendants of Pocahontas? (Mary J. Windle, "Pocahontas: A Legend of Virginia" 275) [Clipping #443]

185) Ceremonies such as that marked Nikomis, the midwinter feast, were designed to manipulate or direct spiritual energies toward some larger goal, to transform someone or something from one condition or state to another. . . . In the transformation from one state to another, the prior state or condition must cease to exist. It must "die." During the Nikomis festival, John Smith would undergo just such a ritual -- magical -- trans formation. The purpose of this "adoption" or remaking ceremony is to magically change an Englishman into a Powhatan. If the magic works, the new man will belong to the tsenacommacah. (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 42) [Clipping #20]

186) Barker's move toward the definition of the new Pocahontas is therefore an important one, not only for the mythological and romantic aura it gave to the early American history, but also -- and even more so - -for the change of perspective it determined in the consideration of the Indian question. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 12 ) [Clipping #81]

187) She had sat gazing on the victim long, / Until the pity of her soul grew strong; / And, by its passion's deep'ning fervour sway'd, / Ev'n to the stake she rush'd, and gently laid / His bright head on her bosom, and around / His form her slender arms to shield it wound / Like close liannes; then rais'd her glittering eye / And clear-toned voice that said, "He shall not die!" (Felicia Hemans, "The American Forest-Girl" 134-35) [Clipping #141]

188) Around this skeletal narrative has grown a vast body of material--novels, poetry, history books, comics, plays, paintings--that constitute what can only be called the myth of Pocahontas. The major feature of this myth is the ideal of cultural harmony through romance. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 141) [Clipping #146]

189) [Barker] . . . distinguishes between love play and animal need, where teasing, seduction, and postponed satisfaction mark a Euro-American erotics of control over Native customs and culture. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 185) [Clipping #202]

190) Powhatans daughter I caused to be carefully instructed in Christian Religion, who after shee had made some good progresse therein, renounced publickly her countrey Idolatry, openly confessed her Christian faith, was, as she desired, baptized, and is since married to an English Gentleman of good understanding, (as by his letter unto me, coutaining the reasons for his marriage of her you may perceive) another knot to binde this peace the stronger. Her Father and friends gave approbation to it, and her Uncle gave her to him in the Church: she lives civilly and lovingly with him, and I trust will increase in goodness, as the knowledge of God increaseth in her. She will goe into England with me, and were it but the gayning of this one soule, I will thinke my time, toile, and present stay well spent. (Thomas Dale, Letter to R. 55-56) [Clipping #318]

191) We have a right to infer that if nothing is done to preserve the Indians, they will soon cease from the earth, and not a memorial remain but the mounds which cover their ashes. . . . Are the services of Uncas, and the good Pocahontas, to be forgotten, or requited with the extirpation of the Indian race? (John Halkett, Historical Notes 73) [Clipping #388]

192) Only the Indian survives, however ghetto-ized, debased, and debauched, to remind us with his alien stare of the new kind of space in which the baffled refugees from Europe first found him. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 24) [Clipping #116]

193) The distortions of fact about Pocahontas's life are not limited to her relationship with Smith; they embrace the entire span of her life -- up to the time of her death. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 24) [Clipping #158]

194) [Barker's] The Indian Princess, far from offering a clear position in relation to the problem, reveals the difficult balancing of different perceptions of that same question. In its continual playing back and forth with opposite ideas, the play comes ultimately to be one of the first products in American culture to work toward the acceptance and therefore the legitimation of such political processes as removal and displacement of native peoples. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 31) [Clipping #86]

195) What a worthy girl was this! She was a savage, but her deed was noble! She had never been taught to love her enemies; but she shewed a benevolent disposition. Indians are cruel, and, at times, excessively so; but they sometimes show kind and generous feelings. The name of Pocahontas, and her generous deed, ought to be remembered, and will be remembered while America lasts. (Samuel G. Goodrich, Stories about Captain John Smith 69) [Clipping #383]

196) We tell it to our children, and they pass it on to their children. If they forget they have only to turn to any one of the countless written versions that have proliferated for more than three hundred years. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 18) [Clipping #156]

197) Kekaten pokahontas patiaquagh niugh tanks manotyens neer mowchick rawrenock audowgh. Bid Pokahontas bring hither two little Baskets, and I wil give her white beads to make her a chaine. (John Smith, A map of Virginia 4r) [Clipping #308]

198) She loved her sire, she loved his land: / She loved them as her life -- / What feeling in her heart is now / With that pure love at strife? / 'Tis pity, pleading for the lives / Of those who soon must fall -- / . . . . Mayhap another feeling too / Its secret influence wrought / In her pure heart; but if 'twere so, / She understood it not -- / But true it was, that since Sir John / First pass'd before her sight, / Something was twining round her heart; / She felt it night and day. (Seba Smith, Powhatan: A Metrical Romance 124) [Clipping #417]

199) As Ann Uhry Abrams points out, "Smith's rescue by a scantily clad Pocahontas became a favorite topic for a number of popular prints that flooded the market from the 1830s well into the 1870s." Such depictions, which were frequently included in the popular histories of the period, often portrayed the princess as a beautiful, well-endowed child of the forest, who, recalling the line from Joseph Crosswell's New World Planted, was also generally "white far, than other natives are." (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 94) [Clipping #254]

200) I hardly know whether I ought not to be ashamed of myself for devoting myself to a literary toy like this. . . . perhaps the thing is excusable, especially as it is in some sort a flank, or rather a rear attack, on the Virginia aristocracy. . . . if it weren't for you and Mr. Deane behind me, I hardly think I should dare to attack an article of American religious creed, so vital as this. (Henry Adams, Letter to Palfrey 287) [Clipping #373]

201) John Smith is squashed / Beneath the breasts of Pocahontas: some true Christian, / Engraving all, has made the captain Man, / The maiden the most voluptuous of newts. / Met in a wood and lain with, this red demon, / The mother of us all, lies lovingly / Upon the breastplate of our father: the First Family / of Jamestown troubles beneath the stone / Axe -- then Powhatan, smiling, gives the pair his blessing / And nymphs and satyrs foot it at their wedding. / The continents, like country children, peep in awe / As Power, golden as Veronese, / Showers her riches on the lovers: Nature, / Nature at last is married to a man. / The two lived happily / Forever after . . . and I only am escaped alone / To tell the story. / But how shall I tell the story? (Randall Jarrell, "Jamestown" 512) [Clipping #154]

202) While in both cases Chapman is quite clever in finding ways to avoid having to present Pocahontas full-face to his audience, what is more important is that in these paintings he chooses to subordinate his princess to the event being portrayed. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 112) [Clipping #258]

203) [In Barker's play] In her role as "foster-mother," Pocahontas gives the "orphan nation," which the colony will become through the patricidal act of rebellion against England, an alternative family lineage distinct from the Old World heritage it will reject. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 239) [Clipping #218]

204) In relation to the emergence of Smith as a hero, at the beginning of the nineteenth century Pocahontas began to assume a role significantly different from the one she had played in eighteenth-century minds. Tilton points out this fundamental evolution of the Pocahontas figure from the eighteenth-century "wife of Rolfe" to the nineteenth-century "savior of Smith." Implied in this metamorphosis is an important cultural shift: as "wife of Rolfe" Pocahontas was an historical person, the actual mother and ancestor of a noble, and at the same time still extant, family, and represented for the American culture an example of successful interracial mixture; as "savior of Smith" she became the symbol of civilized savagery and the means through which the English had been able to settle in the new country. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 11) [Clipping #80]

205) As "woman," Pocahontas does not act on the world-historical stage to represent her own interests, or even finally those of her people. Her womanly altruism is so generalized as to transcend all specific loyalties, be they familial, erotic, or ethnic. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 72) [Clipping #180]

206) [Pocahontas] would be involved in a great world change in these ways because it was the role of a Beloved Woman to do these things. . . . The universal symbol of office for such women was one or more white feathers. . . . Because Pocahontas is always depicted with white feathers, the major symbol of office of Beloved Woman, and because of the role she played in the ceremony during which John Smith's fate -- and that of his fellow travelers -- was decided, and because he specifically mentioned that the girl who saved him had her hair adorned with white down feathers, we can safely identify her as one who held the office. (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 60) [Clipping #21]

207) The fears of the feeble aborigines were about to prevail, and his immediate death, already repeatedly threatened and repeatedly delayed, would have been inevitable, but for the timely intercession of Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan, a girl "of tenne" or "twelve" "years old, which not only for feature, countenance, and expression, much exceeded any of the rest of his people, but for wit and spirit, was the nonpareil of the country." The gentle feelings of humanity are the same in every race, and in every period of life; they bloom, though unconsciously, even in the bosom of a child. Smith had easily won the confiding fondness of the Indian maiden; and now an impulse of mercy awakened within her breast; she clung firmly to his neck, as his head was bowed to receive the strokes of the tomahawk. Did the child-like superstition of her kindred reverence her interference as a token from a superior power? (George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States 131) [Clipping #441]

208) Whatever our literary evaluation of Barnes's play, the very least we can grant her is the recognition that The Forest Princess, in its time, did "cultural work" (to borrow Jane Tompkins's term) of real importance for shaping an American national identity. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 72) [Clipping #179]

209) After the achievement of Hemingway and West, it is possible for young writers to treat the oldest American myth of the encounter between Whites and Indians as farce: to replace nostalgia with parody, sentimentality with mockery, polite female masochism with gross male sadism. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 150) [Clipping #131]

210) The breast of Smith did not yield to this act of female softness and humanity; it excited an emotion of gratitude, but it kindled no passion in his heart. Formed for action and enterprize, he considered love an imbecility unworthy of a great mind; and although his person could inspire tender sentiments, his mind was not ductile to them. His penetration, however, foresaw the uses to which the passion of Pocahontas for him might be converted; and his solicitude for the success of the Colony, which was much nearer his heart, made him feign a return of that fondness which every day augmented in the bosom of the Princess. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 298-99) [Clipping #99]

211) The historical Pocahontas's generosity towards the strangers in general, and John Smith in particular, is the single most salient point of correspondence between the characters of Pocahontas and Miranda and has often been remarked on. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 62) [Clipping #174]

212) The tale of an adventurer, that is, who becomes the captive of the king of another country and another faith, and is rescued by his beautiful daughter, a princess who then gives up her land and her religion for his, is a story known to the popular literatures of many peoples for many centuries. The theme is so common in the Middle Ages that medieval scholars have a name for it: "The Enamoured Moslem Princess. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 196 ) [Clipping #297]

213) The new social order that Smith announces [in Barker's play] is distinctly American. Leaving behind the "savage cry" of the native inhabitants of the New World and the vice of "old licentious Europe," this "virtuous empire" is indeed a new nation. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 238) [Clipping #217]

214) Buried deep in our memories is our first piece of "fiction" about Indians: the story of Pocahontas, our earliest tale about red-skinned peoples -- a living myth that will not die. Even today she dominates our image of Native peoples; any consideration of the subsequent fiction by her people belongs to the context of its origins: the Pocahontas legend, where the distortions begin -- the symbolic beginning of all Indian-white relationships. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 17 ) [Clipping #161]

215) Pocahontas is the archetypal sacrifice to respectability in America -- a victim of what has been from the beginning our overwhelming anxiety to housebreak all things in nature, until wilderness and wildness be reduced to a few state parks and a few wild oats. Our affection for Pocahontas is the sign of our temptation, and our feeling that her misfortunes in love have a final, awkward fitness comes from our knowing that all that madness is not for us. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 203) [Clipping #299]

216) A Christian soul, though by its creed / Untaught, amid her native wild / Free from all taint of thought or deed / A spotless and a gentle child. (William Gilmore Simms, "The Forest Maiden" 53) [Clipping #223]

217) Barnes in fact, I will argue, evolved her characters and shaped her play into what conventional unity it enjoys partly through reference, conscious or unconscious, to the plot and characters of The Tempest -- perhaps not the first reader to yield or exploit the "tempting fancy" of linking Miranda with Pocahontas, and certainly not the last. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 60) [Clipping #172]

218) Lo! a beautiful raven-tress'd maiden is there, / A lamb, from the tiger to rescue the prey. / Her arms o'er the neck of the victim are thrown, / And a tear-drop bedews the dark fringe of her eye, / While she presses his colorless cheek to her own, / And whispers him softly -- "You live, or I die." (O., "Pocahontas" 363) [Clipping #390]

219) The process of naming ships for individual Indians or Indian tribes was already long established by the outbreak of the Civil War . . . . There are records of six merchant ships named the Pocahontas afloat at various times during the antebellum era, as well as at least three whalers, one of which was stove in by a whale off Brazil in December of 1850. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 146) [Clipping #265]

220) I wish I was a trapper / I would give a thousand pelts / To sleep with Pocahontas / And find out how she felt / In the mornin' on the fields of green / In the homeland we've never seen. (Neil Young, "Pocahontas" ) [Clipping #289]

221) In the play, then, female characters provide points of identification for the women in the audience, and Barker delivers what he assumes they want, love plots. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 178 ) [Clipping #193]

222) The future of the virgin land is enwrapped in the body of the virgin girl . . . . Barker makes the well-being of the Native female the province of a gentlemanly white suitor, while all the threat of rape belongs to the bloodthirsty savage. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 183) [Clipping #198]

223) Nothing survives indefinitely without filling some function, and the usefulness of this story is clear. . . . among other things, [it is] a tale of religious conversion. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 412) [Clipping #302]

224) It is a reproduction of the famous Van de Passe engraving of 1616, labeled Matoaka als Rebecka, Daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan -- Matoaka as, or as I choose to read it, disguised as, Rebecca. (Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire 83) [Clipping #110]

225) Everyone who thinks of himself as being in some sense an American feels the stirrings in him of a second soul, the soul of the Red Man. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 12) [Clipping #115]

226) [But] the conversion of Pocahontas -- the possession of that bright creature of a wild humanity -- has been long since envied to Virginia by all other colonies. (William Gilmore Simms, "Pocahontas; A Legend of Virginia" 129) [Clipping #227]

227) The examination of Smith's works has shown that his final narrative was the result of gradual additions. The influence exercised by Pocahontas on the affairs of the Colony, according to the account given in 1608, was very slight. Her capture and her marriage to Rolfe first gave her importance. Her visit to England, however, made her beyond question the most conspicuous figure in Virginia to the public mind, and it became inevitable that romantic incidents in her life would be created, if they did not already exist, by the mere exercise of the popular imagination, attracted by a wild and vivid picture of savage life. The history of the emperor's daughter became, as we are led by Smith to suppose, a subject for the stage. . . . In this work he embodied everything that could tend to the increase of his own reputation, and drew material from every source which could illustrate the history of English colonization. Pocahontas was made to appear in it as a kind of stage deity on every possible occasion, and his own share in the affairs of the Colony is magnified at the expense of all his companions. (Henry Adams, "Captain John Smith" 29) [Clipping #377]

228) [John Davis] converted the Pocahontas epic into an erotic romp. . . . Pocahontas emerged from the pages of Davis's book as an ideal male fantasy, a passionate girl of the forest totally unrestricted by European moral constraints. . . . the author transformed history into sensationalism. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 57) [Clipping #7]

229) No Native man can act with certainty, [Barker's] ideology suggests, without white guidance. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 183) [Clipping #199]

230) 'Tis autumn in my soul. / From day to day my feelings change their hue / Like to a scared leaf. Thoughts strange and new / Crowd on my mind. Nomony! thinkest thou / Woman was made to be the friend of man, / To share man's confidence -- win his respect -- / To be -- to be -- his EQUAL? That's the word, / Are not these strange -- strange thoughts? . . . . Is't not good to feel / Something within, that tells me, I am born / To aid, but not to slave; to stand beside, / Not crouch behind, the Chief who says he loves me? / To be the object -- not of his desire, / In idle moment, when nought better's found / To fill his thoughts, and then be thrust aside, / Like some vain trinket, when the humor's o'er -- / To be the object -- of his soul's affections! / To dwell -- not only in a hunter's lodge, / But in a warrior's heart! (Robert Dale Owen, Pocahontas 149 ) [Clipping #402]

231) Neither Neptune, nor Jupiter, nor Minerva, took [the colonists] under their protection; nor did Medea assist them in overcoming the obstacles in their way by any of the arts of magic. Fortitude, valour, perseverance, industry, and little Pocahontas, were their tutelary deities, and their golden fleece, fields of corn, and plantations of tobacco. (James Kirke Paulding, Letters from the South 18-19) [Clipping #367]

232) If [Adams's] side be triumphant, then indeed we must blot out from the page of Virginia history this most beautiful instance of female devotion, doubly interesting because it was the act of a savage girl, who in thus saving the life of the master spirit of the Colony, at the risk of her own, saved the Colony. . . . It may be confidently claimed that the world will hereafter, as in the age he lived, recognize in Captain John Smith a hero, distinguished alike for valor and for virtue. (William Wirt Henry, "The Rescue of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas" 523, 597) [Clipping #378]

233) Decem.--The 10th of December, Mr Smyth went vp the ryuer of the Chechohomynies to trade for corne. He was desirous to see the heade of that riuer; and, when it was not passible wth the shallop, he hired a cannow and an Indian to carry him vp further. The river the higher grew worse and worse. Then hee went on shoare wth his guide, and left Robinson & Emmery, twoe of our Men, in the cannow; wch were presently slayne by the Indians, Pamaonke's men and hee himself taken prysoner, and, by the means of his guide, his lief was saved; and Pamaonch--, haueing him prisoner, carryed him to his neybors wyroances to see if any of them knew him for one of those wch had bene, some twoe or three yeeres before vs, in a river amongst them Northward, and taken awaie some Indians from them by force. At last he brought him to the great Powaton (of whome before wee had no knowledg), who sent him home to our towne the viij of January. (Edward Wingfield, "A Discourse of Virginia" 92) [Clipping #329]

234) Pocahontas and her narrative were crucial to the South's growing sense of otherness. Indeed, one could argue that she was instrumental in the coalescing of the notion that there were two separate cultures inhabiting what was in the mid-century the nominally "United" States, in that many of her powerful descendants thought of themselves as being a race that was distinct from the lineage of their northern counterparts. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 172) [Clipping #272]

235) The fatal moment at last arrived, Captain Smith was laid upon the hearth of the savage King, and his head placed upon a large stone to receive the stroke of death, when Pocahontas, the youngest and darling daughter of Powhatan, threw herself upon his body, clasped him in her arms, and declared, that if the cruel sentence were executed, the first blow should fall on her. All savages, (absolute sovereigns and tyrants not excepted,) are invariably more affected by the tears of infancy, than the voice of humanity. Powhatan could not resist the tears and prayers of his daughter: Captain Smith obtained his life, on condition of paying his ransom. (Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America 270) [Clipping #347]

236) I beg Powhatan listen to his daughter's words. Opechanco's tongue is stranger to truth. This white skin and his friends are not our enemies. They wish to live with us as our brothers. If you send them to the land of the shadow, the Great Spirit will turn his face away from our people. Pocahontas begs mercy from Powhatan. Pocahontas asks him to give her this man's life. . . . Powhatan, you see how the spilling of blood leads to bloodshed. This man has done no wrong to visit Powhatan in peace. Only if his arm be raised to strike, should Powhatan strike in turn. (Captain John Smith and Pocahontas ) [Clipping #337]

237) Arriving at Weramocomoco, their Emperour proudly lying uppon a Bedstead a foote high, upon tenne or twelves Mattes, richly hung with Manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and covered with a great Covering of Rahaughcums. At heade sat a woman, at his feete another; on each side sitting uppon a Matte uppon the ground, were raunged his chiefe men on each side of the fire, tenne in a ranke, and behinde them as many young women, each a great Chaine of white Beaddes over their shoulders, their heades painted in redde: and with such a grave and Majesticall countenance, as draue me into admiration to see such state in a naked Salvage, hee kindly welcomed me with such good wordes, and great Platters of sundrie Victuals, assuring mee his friendship, and my libertie within foure days. Hee much delighted in Opechan Comoughs relation of what I had described to him, and oft examined me upon the same. Hee asked me the cause of our comming, I tolde him being in fight with the Spaniards our enemie, being over powred, neare put to retreat, and by extreame weather put to this shore: where landing at Chesipiack, the people shot us, but Kequoughtan they kindly used us: we by signes demaunded fresh water, they described us up the River was all fresh water: at Paspahegh also they kindly used us: our Pinnsse being leake, we were inforced to stay to mend her, till Captaine Newport my father came to conduct us away. He demaunded why we went further with our Boate, I tolde him, in that I would have occasion to talke of the backe Sea, that on the other side the maine, where was salt water, My father had a childe slaine, whiche we supposed Monocan his enemie had done whose death we intended to revenge. . . . having with all the kindnes hee could devise, sought to content me: hee sent me home with 4. men, one that usually carried my Gowne and Knapsacke after me, two other loded with bread, and one to accompanie me. (John Smith, A True Relation C1v-C2v ) [Clipping #305]

238) Pocahontas becomes the embodiment of all Caucasian desires for the Indian. If every Indian can be domesticated, they will cease being savages and be as good as white people. At its very origin, the Pocahontas myth is rooted in an insidious racism. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 25 ) [Clipping #165]

239) When bounding lightly o'er the grassy herbage, / Sylph-like, ethereal, as some mountain Goddess, / Deck'd in the brightness of her native graces, / Stands Pocahontas. / Gazing she stands, uncall'd, and on that victim / Fixing her eyes with varying emotion, / Till in her breast a new and mighty feeling / Prompts her to action. / Swifter than light she flies, that chief embracing, / Clings to his form, and with her frantic gestures; / Calls for his life, with agoniz'd devotion, / Pleading resistless. / Stern stands the chief, her sire, / in silence gloomy, / Bent on the death, till nature warms within him, / And the soft sighs of filial beauty move him, / Conquering his harshness. / What could not then the power of man accomplish, / Beauty and infant innocence effected, / And the red war chief melting into softness, / Yielded his victim. (Charles L. S. Jones, "Pocahontas" 86-87) [Clipping #392]

240) The Forest Princess is (among other things) Barnes's revision of The Tempest -- the earliest of the spate of "Indian plays" in the ninteenth-century United States, so far as I know, to bear a fairly distinct relation to Shakespeare's text. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 58) [Clipping #171]

241) His [Rolfe's] heart and Pocahontas' heart are one, / They have joined hands and hearts. So let it be / With Red Men and Yengeese. Let them sit down / Within the lodge of peace, and let their hearts / Henceforth be one. (Robert Dale Owen, Pocahontas 204) [Clipping #403]

242) Mattaponi sacred oral history states that before Argall took sail, several of Argall's men returned to Pocahontas's home and killed her husband, Kocoum. . . . Taken by surprise, Kocoum was easily overcome. As the ship pulled out, Pocahontas did not realize her husband had been murdered. Her son survived because as Pocahontas left with Japazaw's wife, Little Kocoum was handed over to the other women in tribe. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 51) [Clipping #91]

243) It must not be forgotten -- to the contrary, it must continually be emphasized -- that it was during her own years as a captive that Pocahontas was converted to Christianity and given an English name, was married to Rolfe, and gave birth to the first child of mixed Indian-English parentage recorded in North America. Her status as a hostage must, at the least, call into question her desire for conversion and marriage to an Englishman; in fact, it is not unreasonable to think of her as a victim of war and of the rape that so often accompanies it. (Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire 140) [Clipping #113]

244) XXXV. Pocahontas in 1617 made a "religious and godly end," and it is not charged by the enemies of Smith that she had ever denied the rescue. (John Esten Cooke, "Did Pocahontas Really Rescue Captain Smith?" 402) [Clipping #70]

245) It seems to me that Barnes revises The Tempest self-consciously from a "woman's" point of view: strengthening Shakespeare's Miranda in her own characterization of Pocahontas, insisting that Pocahontas did not act solely from romantic motives, conferring visionary powers on Pocahontas, and asserting (what we might call) the world-historical importance of Pocahontas's life. Just as clearly, however, Barnes revises The Tempest from a point of view that is both nationalistic and Anglocentric, so that The Forest Princess uses the story of Pocahontas and the subtext of The Tempest to ratify the central and abiding importance of English culture for American nationalism. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 70) [Clipping #177]

246) Intermarriage was propos'd at that time as a sure means of continuing the Peace with the Indians: And how far it would have answer'd that end, the Reader may judge; but the English were not fond of taking the Indian Women to their Beds as their Wives. Whether it was on account of their being Pagan or Barbarians we cannot decide; or whether that Nicety was not very unseasonable in the Infancy of the Settlement. (John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America 232) [Clipping #334]

247) Using several passages from Smith's account as well as inventing new scenes and characters, [Barker] gave central attention to the capture and rescue of Captain John Smith and to the marriage of Pocahontas to the English merchant John Rolfe, which actually occurred in 1614. Barker had compelling reasons to take this particular piece of history and rewrite it as he did for the theatre: his determination to contribute to the creation of an independent American dramaturgy, the mythological significance that colonial history had acquired by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the importance of the Indian question in the politics of the time, to cite the most relevant ones. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 9 ) [Clipping #78]

248) Literary works of the 1830s and 1840s implied that only Pocahontas recognized the advantages of peaceful submission to the more powerful English, while male Indians. blinded by pride and native brutality, rejected white civilization and thereby brought about their own extinction. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 128) [Clipping #1]

249) In reality, kings and princesses -- royalty -- do not exist and never have existed in our cultures [Native American]. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 90) [Clipping #41]

250) Americans, their literature swarming with its offspring, still without revulsion can summon up the old image: Smith pinned down by savages, his head on a rock, all those clubs about to smash it; and the lovely Indian princess, curiously moving out from the crowd and across all the allegiances of her family, home, and land, her religion and her race, lowering her head to his. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 175-76) [Clipping #290]

251) It was a rare occurrence during the first two decades of the nineteenth century when a reference to the colonial past was not made to fit into the tapestry of the national prehistory, especially when an even could easily be read as in some ways preparatory to the founding of the nation. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 48) [Clipping #242]

252) Thus thou the royal maid / Of swarthy Egypt, through thy pitying heart / Didst save a humbled nation. Thou didst hear, / An infant wailing in his slimy ark, / 'Mid the green rushes on the river's brink, / And hadst compassion. Ah! how slightly deem'd / Thy haughty father, that his palace proud / Nurtur'd the Hebrews' hope: as little thought / The Indian Monarch, that his child's weak arm / Fostered that colony, whose rising light / Should quench his own forever. (Lydia H. Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines 78) [Clipping #370]

253) Pocahontas chose to save Smith, and, by extension, all white Americans. Although the popularity of her narrative might be seen as something of a repayment for her heroism, more likely it is based on the feelings of superiority that this moment engendered. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 178) [Clipping #277]

254) for besides the many passions and sufferings, which I have daily, hourely, yea and in my sleepe indured, even awaking mee to astonishment, taxing me with remisnesse, and carelesnesse, refusing and neglecting to performe the duetie of a good Christian, pulling me by the eare, and crying: why dost not thou indeavour to make her a Christian? And these have happened to my greater wonder, even when she hath bin furthest separated from me, which in common reason (were it not an undoubted worke of God) might breede forgetfulnesse of a farre more worthie creature. Besides, I say the holy spirit of God hath often demaunded of me, why I was created? If not for transitory pleasures and worldly vanities, but to labour in the Lord's vineyard, there to sow and plant, to nourish and increase the fruites thereof, daily adding with the good husband in the Gospell, somewhat to the tallent, that in the end the fruites may be reaped, to the comfort of the laborer in this life, and his salvation in the world to come? And if this be, as undoubtedly this is, the service Jesus Christ requireth of his best servant; wo unto him that hath these instruments of pietie put into his hands, and wilfully despiseth to work with them. Likewise, adding hereunto her great apparance of love to me, her desire to be taught and instructed in the knowledge of God, her capablenesse of understanding, her aptnesse and willingnesse to receive anie good impressions, and also the spirituall, besides her owne incitements stirring me up hereunto. (John Rolfe, Letter to Dale 65) [Clipping #315]

255) Reading was something that the whitemen did, and because of it, he held a certain kind of power. Bargaining with the British, Pocahontas arranged for her father to be sent home and she would stay to learn more about the christian way. "History" says Pocahontas was an eager convert. I submit that her conversion to christianity was only half-hearted, but her conversion to literacy was carried out with powerful zeal. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 88) [Clipping #36]

256) I naturally look upon the scenes of [Virginia's] history with the eyes of a patriotic lover. A thousand ideas and emotions . . . rushed thro' my mind in an instant. I thought upon Smith, that gallant and romantic spirit, who deserves to be honoured as the founder of the state. I thought upon Pocahontas, that incomparable Indian, who is now perhaps its tutelary angel. . . . I discovered the Indians moving over the little isthmus, dressed off in their finest feathers, with Pocahontas before them, like another fabulous Ceres, bearing presents of corn and fruit to the poor perishing strangers -- they meet together -- they embrace -- they smoke the pipe of peace -- they lead off the dance of simple innocence and joy. Who would not gaze forever on such a vision of delight? (St. George Tucker, "Letter XVII" 150-51) [Clipping #366]

257) Then there was the sound of conflict by the massive prison door: / . . . It was Rolfe, her Yengeese lover, who stood beside her now; / She felt his arms around her, felt his kisses on her brow; / Sweet words of love were falling, like a bird-song on her ear, / Doubt and danger were forgotten, there was nothing more to fear. / Forgotten was the prison, with its darkness and its chain, / She loved, and she was conscious that she was loved again. (Mrs. Sarah T. Bolton, "Pocahontas" 4) [Clipping #438]

258) Had she been a christian, had the generous spark of love, which is inbred in the heart of woman been cherished by the refinements of education, or fanned by the strong impulse of devoted piety, it could not have burned with a purer or brighter flame. The motive of that noble action was benevolence, the purest and most lofty principle of human action. It was not the caprice of a thoughtless girl, it was not a momentary passion for the condemned stranger, pleading at a susceptible heart, for her affections were reserved for another, and the purity as well as the dignity of her after life, shewed that they were truly and cautiously bestowed. . . . Yet this woman was a savage! A daughter of a race doomed to eternal barbarism by the decree of a philosophy which pronounces the soil of their minds too sterile to germinate the seeds of civilization! ("Jamestown" 65) [Clipping #430]

259) Meanwhile, as Pocahontas, she has lived a thousand lives in sentimental novels and semi-fictional biographies about which the less said the better. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 67) [Clipping #120]

260) The debate about the veracity of the rescue story dominated much of the critical writing about the Pocahontas narrative during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but it had little effect on her position in the pantheon of American cultural heroes. . . . In 1907, the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown inspired a new generation of writers to reproduce the narrative and, if nothing else, largely succeeded in tabling the Smith debate through the course of the festivities. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 179) [Clipping #278]

261) Rolfe was now happy in the arms of Pocahontas; nor did satiety necessarily follow from fruition. The Indian bride discovered in every question an eagerness of knowledge; and the elegant attainments of her husband, enabled him to cultivate the wild paradise of her mind. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 316) [Clipping #107]

262) Sir Thomas Gates having imbarqued himselfe for England, I put my selfe into Captaine Argalls ship, with a hundred and fifty men in my frigot, and other boats went into Pamaunkie river, where Powhatan hath his residence, and can in two or three daies, draw a thousand men togeather, with me I carried his daughter, who had been long prisoner with us, it was a day or two before we heard of them: At length they demaunded why we came; I gave for answere that I came to bring him his daughter, conditionally he would (as had been agreed upon for her ransome) render all the armes, tooles, swords, and men that had runne away, and give me a slip full of corne, for the wrong he had done unto us: if they would doe this, we would be friends, if not burne all. They demaunded time to send to their King. (Thomas Dale, Letter to R. 52-53) [Clipping #316]

263) It is a valedictory poem [Vachel Lindsay] is writing, a farewell by an American to the Europe which has produced him. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 86) [Clipping #129]

264) 'Twas in a border foray he was ta'en, / Nor was it bloodless -- many here were slain. / Virginia's king, Powhattan, gained the prize, / His daughter led him captive with her eyes. / The burning pile was destined for his doom, / And Pocahontas vowed to share his tomb. / She and Alcanzor [Smith] should, upon one pyre, / Breathe their last sigh, and, all for love, expire. (William Watson Waldron, "Pocahontas, Princess of Virginia" 19) [Clipping #421]

265) The feelings and morality of Pocahontas, discover a character so evidently distinct from the rest of her tribe, that a reader unacquainted with circumstances, would be apt to place her birth in some age and nation, where a dawning virtue and amiable simplicity were beginning to prevail. (John Burk, History of Virginia 186) [Clipping #50]

266) Though neither joy sparkled in her eye [at the grave of Smith], nor the rose bloomed on her cheek, yet not more beautiful looked she in her days of careless gaiety. Pocahontas turned to chide [Rolfe], but it was with heaving sighs, and half-pronounced upbraidings from murmuring lips. She leant towards him with emotions that discovered tenderness rather than anger. Her warm cheek touched his cheek, and her lips trembled on his. She reclined her head upon his shoulder, and reposed in his fond assurances*. (*The female bosom is never more susceptible of a new passion, than when it is agitated by the remains of a former one. Rochefaucault.) (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 93) [Clipping #358]

267) Upon thy banks sweet Appomottox, roved, / The Indian maid who but too fondly loved; / Fair Pocahontas, of exalted mind, / And race as noble as her heart was kind / When years on years, on fleeting wings have roll'd, / Her "true love tale," with tears shall oft be told; / And list'ning ears her mem'ry still respect. / Mourn o'er her fate and pity her neglect. (Hiram Haines, "The Virginiad" 30) [Clipping #137]

268) According to Mattaponi sacred oral history, the marriage between Pocahontas and Rolfe occurred at Jamestown. Although Pocahontas obviously submitted to the marriage, it is hard to say whether Pocahontas really loved Rolfe or not. Under the circumstances of Pocahontas's confinement, it is doubtful. The power differential was too great. She was not free to return to her people. She was not free to choose. She married Rolfe because she had just recently had a child by an Englishman. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 65) [Clipping #94]

269) To Smith it made no difference, dusky or quite dark, so long as the girl who crossed ethnic lines for his sake was something other than White. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 69) [Clipping #123]

270) Their marriage [Pocahontas and Rolfe] soon followed -- Happy instance of the perseverance of virtuous affection! The prejudices of education yielded to the honest impulses of the heart. The raven tresses and the tawny cheek of Pocahontas were no disparagements to the dignity of her soul or the generosity of her nature. Through this veil Rolfe discovered a thousand virtues, and his love was rewarded with their possession. ("A Sketch of the Life of Pocahontas" 173) [Clipping #353]

271) The romantic story of Pocahontas, forms a beautiful episode in the history of this period. Though born and reared in savage life, she was a creature of exquisite loveliness and refinement. The gracefulness of her person, the gentleness of her nature -- her benevolence, her courage, her noble self-devotion in the discharge of duty, elevate this lovely woman to an equality with the most illustrious and most attractive of her sex; and yet those winning graces and noble qualities were not the most remarkable features of her character, which was even more distinguished by the wonderful tact, and the delicate sense of propriety which marked all the scenes of her brief but eventful history (Thomas McKenney and James Hall, "Po-ca-hon-tas" 64-65) [Clipping #429]

272) Fond father -- and mistaken daughter! / The doom is sealed of future slaughter. (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 75) [Clipping #56]

273) This overplay of romantic comedy upon heroic melodrama [in Barker] serves to obscure the violence of conquest by translating conquest into terms of domesticity "love, courtship, marriage." (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 234) [Clipping #210]

274) Pocahontas: Wait! I claim the life of this captive. Powhatan: This white man now belongs to my daughter. This white man is now the son of the great Powhatan. This white man is now called Nantaquas. (Pocahontas: The Legend ) [Clipping #340]

275) In the language of the church, she had become a Christian, having exchanged by the mysterious ceremonies of baptism, her Indian name of Pocahontas, for the more modest and gospel one of Rebecca; while the native elegance of her mind, was delighted at the fortunate transition from the coarse and licentious manners of her former state, to the delicate and decorous restraints of social life. She lived in the midst of refinements unalloyed by the vices, which debase its value, presenting a solitary but honorable example of artificial decency superadded to native virtue. (John Burk, History of Virginia 183) [Clipping #49]

276) Abrams argues that Chapman [in the Capitol painting] seems intent on making Pocahontas an "American Joan of Arc" whose actions had both religious and political overtones. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 119) [Clipping #261]

277) And here my heart oppressed by pleasant tears / Yields to a young girl's half angelic spell -- / Yes, for that maiden like a Saint appears; /She needs no fresco, stone, nor shrine to tell / Her story to the people of this Land -- / Saint of the Wilderness, enthroned amid / The wooded Minster where the Pagan hid! (James Barron Hope, "Three Names" 141) [Clipping #144]

278) John Smith's so -called rescue was, in fact, a mock execution -- a traditional ritual often held after the capture of enemies. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 84) [Clipping #33]

279) For 't was a very miracle of love / When from the savage hawk's nest came the dove / With wings of peace to stay the ordered blow -- The hawk's plumes bloody, but the dove's as snow! (James Barron Hope, "Three Names" 141) [Clipping #143]

280) A Princess of blessed memory. She must ever be the presiding genius of Richmond. . . . She was a kind of tawny Shepherdess to a distant and silvery flock, who had come to stray over her own principality, and she unfolded to them her own green meadows and brilliant savannahs. (Rev. T. B. Balch, "Pocahontas, Burr, and Wirt" 19) [Clipping #426]

281) The council fires are quench'd, that erst so red / Their midnight volume mid the groves entwined; / King, stately chief, and warrior-host are dead, / Nor remnant nor memorial left behind: / But thou, O forest-princess, true of heart, / When o'er our fathers waved destruction's dart, / Shalt in their children's loving hearts be shrined; / Pure, lonely star, o'er dark oblivion's wave, / It is not meet they name should moulder in the grave. (Lydia H. Sigourney, "Pocahontas" 32) [Clipping #408]

282) More interesting than the plays themselves, however, are prefatory remarks their authors made about the material. In an introductory quotation Miss Ullman speaks of her heroine as a "Sweet-smelling sacrifice to the god of Western Planting." Geddes writes that his play is a "folkpiece" and his characters "part of the soul's inheritance." Both writers, in other words, were pointing to some pregnant quality of the story which goes beyond its facts. This was a direction which an informal group of modern poets was taking too. The result was the elevation of Pocahontas to myth. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 193 ) [Clipping #295]

283) [Pocahontas] gives symbolic birth to a vision of future peace; her reward (as Smith tells her) is to become a symbol herself, in effect to join her own allegory. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 72) [Clipping #178]

284) After the Revolution, many American writers and historians felt the need to find a common ground upon which to assemble the image of their new country. To this purpose, they began to dig in their brief past to create an American mythology. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 11) [Clipping #79]

285) The flame of love was now lighted up in the bosom of the Indian maid. Not content with the simpler graces of nature, she diversified the strings of coral that encircled her neck, suspended to her ears the most brilliant of humming-birds, and interwove the gayest flowers of the spring with the streaming tresses of her hair. In the variations that marked the adjustment of her hair she displayed no little coquetry. One while she would suffer it to riot down her comely neck and shoulders, shading, but not hiding the protuberance of her bosom; and anon she would braid it up close behind, while the string of flowers that encircled it was lost in its profusion. And then, gay and conscious, she would steal to the clear stream, and gaze at her own image reflected below. (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 48-49) [Clipping #356]

286) From his self-congratulatory comment, we can see that Davis has little doubt about his standing as the primary purveyor of the Pocahontas story. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 36) [Clipping #238]

287) In ev'ry need, thy guardian angel still! -- / When thou a captive to the block wast led, / How bold--how quick--she to thy rescue sped? -- And yet, thou couldst not love her, --cruel man! / Nor heed the tears which o'ver her features ran. (Hiram Haines, "The Virginiad" 32-33) [Clipping #140]

288) Perhaps they who are not particularly acquainted with the history of Virginia, may be ignorant, that Pocahontas was the protectress of the English, and often screened them from the cruelty of her father. (Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America 268-69) [Clipping #346]

289) Four myths in their interweaving create this image of the Far West: one made in Virginia at the beginning of the seventeenth century... The first is The Myth of Love in the Woods, or the story of Pocahontas and John Smith. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 50) [Clipping #117]

290) Pocahontas was a white dream -- a dream of cultural superiority. The Native American has no more been assimilated into our culture than we have been assimilated into his. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 33) [Clipping #169]

291) With folded arms before the font she stood, / Encircled by the hushed and reverent air; / Her upward glance was a sweet hymn to God, / Her downward look a soul-suffusing prayer. ("Virginia's Rebecca" 88) [Clipping #433]

292) In the early republic [of the United States], the presentation of the native figure created a number of problems and anxieties for playwrights and mangers in terms of how a people, framed so frequently as the savage enemy, would be represented before post-Revolutionary audiences. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 166) [Clipping #187]

293) Unlike the fable of Aesop, where the dog left in charge of the butcher's tray, and unable to defend it from the other curs, concluded he might as well have his share of the meat -- this American heroine, the child of the barbarian, who understood the thorny cuffs of her own formulas, still hovered in love and mercy over the colony of Virginia, and became again and again, the chains and the iron door to keep it from the entrenchments of her father and to save its founder from becoming the fagot for his fire. She was thus the prize by which the colony's salvation was attained, and in love, humility, and grandeur, singularly blended in this American spirit, Virginia became the magnificent acqueduct to slake the thirst of Anglo-Saxon liberty. And thus disembarrassing that majestic desert, and linking her noble race with the children of God, the bosom of this American woman became the first sanctuary of American liberty. (Anna Ella Carroll, The Great American Battle 239-40) [Clipping #445]

294) These are people like her and me -- the mixed-bloods. Did Pocahontas envision Nations of New People? Did she vision a New World? A world where people would say, "I am a human being of many races and Nations." (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 89) [Clipping #38]

295) How beautifully does this young girl come, like a visitant from the ethereal world, in her innocence, trust, and self-forgetfulness. (Ella, "Pocahontas" 15) [Clipping #409]

296) Let therefore this my well adjutsed protestation, which here I make betweene God and my own conscience, be a sufficient witnesse, at the dreadfull day of judgement (when the secret of all mens harts shall be opened) to condemne me herein, if my chiefest intent and purpose be not, to strive with all my power of body and minde, in the undertaking of so mightie a matter, no way led (so farre forth as mans weaknesse may permit) with the unbridled desire of carnall affection: but for the good of this plantation for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God, for my owne salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbeleeving creature, namely Pokahuntas. To whom my heartie and best thoughts are, and have a long time bin so intangled, and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde my selfe thereout. But almighty God, who never faileth his, that truely invocate his holy name, hath opened the gate, and led me by the hand that I might plainely see and discerne the safe paths wherein to treade. (John Rolfe, Letter to Dale 63) [Clipping #313]

297) [Henry]Adams and his followers, however, like Palfrey and Deane before them, were doomed to fail in their efforts to undercut the Rescue. The fact or fiction of this exploit had ceased to be an issue during the early part of the nineteenth century, when it had begun to take on national significance. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 174) [Clipping #275]

298) Having been for three centuries in the immediate neighborhoud of christians, and within the echo of the songs of Zion, they are still rude heathens, and know not the God who made them. Why is it thus? Cannot the Aboriginies be converted to christianity? Are the brethren of Pocahontas and Logan too base, too degraded, to be affected even by word which is sharper than any two edged sword? Have you tried it? . . . . Are ye willing to witness their utter extinction? Are ye willing that the dying moan of the last Indian should reach the ear of Him who is no respecter of persons? ("Newark Bible Society" 248) [Clipping #387]

299) Pocahontas: No! No! In mercy stay! / Perhaps he has a child in that far land -- / A babe just straying from its mother's arms -- / Both watching for his coming, praying to / The good Great Spirit to protect him still! / . . . . Think, were my father captive far o'er seas, / Thus doomed to die alone -- no hand to save -- / His daughter helpless here in agony -- / For her sake, spare him! / . . . . Then slay him thus!" Powhatan: "Hold! Hold! Thou art a worthy daughter of thy race -- / A warrior's spirit in a woman's form / Thou wilt not doubt the word of Powhatan. / 'Tis pledged. / Release the pale-face! (Charlotte Barnes, The Forest Princess Act 1, scene 3) [Clipping #27]

300) In every age and nation, rare instances of benevolence have been found; but in the whole range of educated nations, no female can be produced that has superior claims to Pocahontas. . . . The whole of her story surpasses all that fiction could create, and the embellishments were not wanted along side of the simple character of this child of nature. A thousand artificial flowers, in gilded vases, have not, to the true botanist, the beauty and perfume of one in the garden where it grew; nor can the Geraldines and Cherubines, those monsters of loveliness in fiction, reach the unsophisticated elegance of character displayed in Pocahontas. (Samuel L. Knapp, "Pocahontas" 381, 384-85) [Clipping #440]

301) After the Trail of Tears virtually ended public debate over Indian relocation, the heroine's femininity emerged as a dominant theme in Pocahontas literature. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 127) [Clipping #8]

302) Smith, in the estimation of the present writer, who has attentively studied his life, was a very great man; and probably nothing would have more surprised him than the have been told that he had never been "rescued!" (John Esten Cooke, "Did Pocahontas Really Rescue Captain Smith?" 403) [Clipping #72]

303) There was a bed of leaves, and broken play; / There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride -- / O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May; / And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride. (Hart Crane, "Powhatan's Daughter" 329) [Clipping #74]

304) The South's success in forming its own union would partly depend on its ability to make manifest a national self-definition that would be free from the northern, proto-Democratic model. It would also need to find an alternative history to place against the northern, typological, teleological model in which the Indians had to give way before the onslaught of civilization. The Pocahontas narrative made possible the creation of an aristocracy-based, nontypological, nonteleological history, with its own myth of origin, and in which the Indian (or at least one Indian) survived "in the blood," as Thomas Jefferson had put it. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 172) [Clipping #273]

305) The Pocahontas legend, despite its connections with the first American West, is one which left untouched the imagination of our classic writers. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 64) [Clipping #119]

306) XXII. The "True Relation" probably contained a narrative of everything, and the editor in obedience to the order of the Company, omitted the obnoxious passages-- on grounds of prudence, as he intimated in his preface. (John Esten Cooke, "Did Pocahontas Really Rescue Captain Smith?" 400) [Clipping #68]

307) The Pocahontas story was as innocuous as one of Mother Goose's legends. (W. F. Poole, "The Pocahontas Story" 322) [Clipping #382]

308) The quiet investigations of Mr. Deane have, however, now made it absolutely necessary that every historian should hereafter take one side or the other in regard to this serious question. He must either rely upon the testimony of Smith concerning matters of his own personal experience, and upon the prescription of two centuries in favor of his story, or he must reject the authority hitherto considered unquestionable, and must undertake the the reconstruction of the history of this whole period out of original material hitherto considered as merely auxiliary to Smith's narrative. Unfortunately, there is no possibility of compromise in the dispute. Cautious as the expressions of Mr. Deane are, and unwilling as he evidently is to treat the reputation of Smith with harshness, it is still perfectly clear that the statements of the Generall Historie, if proved to be untrue, are falsehoods of an effrontery seldom equaled in modern times. (Henry Adams, "Captain John Smith" 14) [Clipping #376]

309) As Virginians drew together under attacks against slavery during the 1850s, the Jamestown myth emerged as a rationale for defending plantation society. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 4) [Clipping #5]

310) In 1860, as the war between North and South began to seem inevitable, [Charles] Deane of Massachusetts, himself a New England historian of some renown, first publicly challenged the veracity of the rescue story. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 164) [Clipping #271]

311) With all varieties of New Englanders slandering the Old Dominion for separating slave families and torturing blacks, Virginians answered such charges by canonizing an Indian. Although Powhatan's daughter might seem an unlikely representation for a state with few visible Native Americans in its population, the link between slavery and the origin myth did have its own peculiar rationale. If a non-white woman sat at the apex of the state's social pyramid and her blood supposedly flowed in most aristocratic veins, then weren't Virginians more tolerant than their Northern detractors? (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 201) [Clipping #14]

312) I propose that Pocahontas had her own destiny to fulfill -- that of keeping her people alive. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 88) [Clipping #37]

313) The ritual we feel in her action is itself an unorthodox and dramatic ceremony of marriage, and we are touched. We see Pocahontas at the moment of womanhood. . . . It is an act which bespeaks total renunciation, the giving up of home, land, faith, self, and perhaps even life, that life may go on. Perhaps this helps to explain why it is that what, in its flattery of him, is at first glance a man's story should also be greatly promoted by women. Apparently it is a very pleasant vicarious experience for us all. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 414) [Clipping #303]

314) Some propheticall spirit calculated hee had the Salvages in such subjection, hee would have made himselfe a king, by marrying Pocahontas, Powhatans daughter. It is true she was the very nomparell of his kingdome, and at most not past 13 or 14 yeares of age. Very oft shee came to our fort, with what shee could get for Captain Smith, that ever loved and used all the Countrie well, but her especially he ever much respected: and she so well requited it, that when her father intended to have surprized him, shee by stealth in the darke night came through the wild woods and told him of it. But her marriage could no way have intitled him by any right to the kingdome, nor was it ever suspected hee had ever such a thought, or more regarded her, or any of them, then in honest reason, and discreation he might. If he would he might have married her, or have done what him listed. For there was none that could have hindered his determination. (William Symonds, The Proceedings of the English Colonie 103) [Clipping #310]

315) If Rowlandson's narrative provided first the colonizers and then the architects of the budding nation with a fruitful site for furthering their projects and purposes, the Pocahontas story, or stories, offered an even richer opportunity precisely because Pocahontas left no known text of her own, never represented herself or her point of view on her experience in any way we might read. Thus she never achieved the narrative subjectivity that, in Rowlandson's text, proved so troubling to the English colonizers in New England that it required intervention and efforts to control how the text was read. (Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire 87) [Clipping #111]

316) Implicit in the Pocahontas legend from the very beginning, since it is essentially a myth of Indian assimilation to WASP-dom . . . is the Happy Ending of marriage and the begetting of children to inherit the wealth -- tobacco, in the first instance -- of the Indians' America. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 162 ) [Clipping #133]

317) Thou'rt come! -- I owe thee life, thou noble creature! / Life, that is dear, even to the crippled wretch; / To me now doubly dear, since it was purchased / At risk of thine. I owe thee life and freedom -- / My being -- all that gives that being value. / Thou'st flung upon me such a load of debt, / That gratitude herself is crushed beneath it, / And lays her down despairing! (Robert Dale Owen, Pocahontas 124) [Clipping #401]

318) The Pocahontas myth as it is commonly remembered is replete with factual distortions, racial slurs, and ethnocentric misconceptions. The gentle maid bears little similarity to the actual person who once encountered Smith and later married Rolfe. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 19-20) [Clipping #162]

319) The construction of the passive English characters is a device that Barker used to depict early American colonial history, not as the story of how English culture encroached upon the lives of the natives caused their destruction, but as the story of how the natives willingly dissolved into the white culture. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 19) [Clipping #82]

320) The character of this interesting woman, as it stands in the concurrent accounts of all our historians, is not, it is with confidence affirmed, surpassed by any in the whole range of history; and for those qualities more especially, which do honor to our nature; an humane and feeling heart; an ardor and unshaken constancy in her attachments; she stands, almost, without a rival. (John Burk, History of Virginia 186) [Clipping #46]

321) Intermarriage had been indeed the Method proposed very often by the Indians in the Beginning, urging it frequently as a certain Rule, that the English were not their Friends, if they refused it. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 16) [Clipping #234]

322) Its inclusion [Chapman's paining] in the Capitol at this early date makes clear that the rescue of Smith by Pocahontas had long been perceived as a crucial generative moment in the history of the United States. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 95) [Clipping #255]

323) After 1622, the "rescue" becomes comprehensible: it can be articulated into a narrative in which Pocahontas has an increasingly central role to play as evidence that Algonquian recognition of the values of European culture could have provided the basis for a harmonious relationship had not the inherent viciousness of her uncle destroyed all hope of peaceful co-operation. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 172 ) [Clipping #153]

324) No figure in American history has raised such a ruckus among scholars as Captain John Smith. . . . Throughout the scholarly controversy the plain people have serenely maintained their faith in him. We do today. American history without Smith and Pocahontas is hard to imagine. If the void were there, something else -- yet something similar -- would have to fill it. (Bradford Smith, Captain John Smith 11,13) [Clipping #413]

325) [Davis's] extremely popular fiction was probably the most important model for many of the romancers who portrayed noble Indians during the first third of the nineteenth century. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 57) [Clipping #249]

326) Even if not entirely consciously, [Barker's] The Indian Princess was the earliest of such cultural responses in drama, in the dialectical relationship that the theatre has always held with the political and social life of a country. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 6) [Clipping #76]

327) His eye awaits the coming shock, / Of that dread club, upwhirl'd in air, / With muscle strain'd, and looks that glare / A shriek! arrests the downward blow, / And Pocahontas shields the foe. "Father," in shuddering agony she sighs, / "Oh spare this bosom or thy daughter dies." (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 71) [Clipping #55]

328) Long before this time a gentleman of approved behaviour and honest carriage, master John Rolfe had bin in love with Pocahuntas and she with him, which thing at the instant that we were in parlee with them, my selfe made known to Sir Thomas Dale by a letter from him, whereby he intreated his advise and fur- therance in his love, if so it seemed fit to him for the good of the Plantation, and Pocahuntas her selfe, acquainted her brethren therewith: which resolution Sir Thomas Dale wel approving, was the onely cause: he was so milde amongst them, who otherwise would not have departed their river without other conditions. (Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse 10) [Clipping #320]

329) How conspicuous a place in the early history of Virginia, is held by the celebrated Pocahontas, -- throwing herself between the knife of her father Powhattan, and his prostrate captive, Smith? But for the influence of that heroic and affectionate daughter, where now the "Ancient dominion? ("What Can be Done by a Mother" 58) [Clipping #385]

330) When we reflect that so much virtue, heroism, intellect and piety adorned so young a native of our country, we cannot but regard America as the natural clime of greatness, and consider Pocahontas, as exhibiting proof of the powers and capacity of savage nature, rather than an exception to common degeneracy. ("A Sketch of the Life of Pocahontas" 174) [Clipping #354]

331) O, Matachanna, o'er my life / A dark cloud spreads its shade, / And willingly would Metoka / Be in the green earth laid. / For then to that fair land where dwells / My spirit-mother I should go; / But here abides no joy for me -- / I cannot love Nemattanow. / . . . . He has a cruel heart. / I love to hear the wild-bird sing / Unharm'd in the leafy tree, / I love to see the gentle deer / Through the forest running free; / But 'tis Nemattanow's delight / To slay them with his dart: / I cannot love Nemattanow, / He has a cruel heart / . . . . He never saves a captive's life, / But a scalp will always bring: / How could I live with such a man. (Seba Smith, Powhatan: A Metrical Romance 71-72) [Clipping #416]

332) Mattaponi sacred oral history does not put a great deal of emphasis on the details of the marriage between Pocahontas and Rolfe, which occurred in the spring of 1614. Instead the Powhatan were more concerned with Pocahontas's well-being and safety. Among other things, what is known from Mattaponi oral history is that Pocahontas was deeply depressed. . . . She was not depressed so much from being taken captive. Pocahontas had been trained from the time she was a little girl as to how to deal with such an experience. . . . But Pocahontas was depressed from being separated from her family. . . . While in captivity at Jamestown, she became fearful and withdrawn. Her condition escalated into what could best be described at having a nervous breakdown. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 61 ) [Clipping #92]

333) [Pocahontas to Powhatan] Oh, do not say thou must be gone, / And leave thy daughter here alone, / Like some poor solitary bird, / To live unseen and mourn unheard. / Who will be left for me to love? / And who will lead me through the grove? / And when sweet, fresh-blown flowers I find, / Around whose brow shall they be twined? (Seba Smith, Powhatan: A Metrical Romance 23) [Clipping #415]

334) Pocahontas also played her part. She chose to adopt Smith as her brother since this was her right as a Pamunkey woman. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 84-85) [Clipping #34]

335) Horrible, because the British did their job well -- anointing Pocahontas a princess, while excising her Native blood. We are left with the legend of a woman made into an "incidental" Indian. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 96) [Clipping #43]

336) [Barnes's] The Forest Princess closes with a frozen tableau vivant -- vivant, at any rate, for Rolfe and Smith, mourning over Pocahontas's dead body. Pocahontas's apotheosis and the creation of an American national identity are, symbolically speaking, one and the same event in the play -- both demand the literal death of Pocahontas and her people. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 70) [Clipping #176]

337) Henry Adams, a young New England historian of impeccable lineage, who was looking for a way to make a name for himself, or perhaps to free himself from his name, then took up the battle against the hero and heroine of the Jamestown colony. . . . Like those of the northern historians before him, Adams's attack on Smith was at least partially based on a sectionalist agenda. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 173-74) [Clipping #274]

338) For the Virginia elite, the union of Pocahontas and Rolfe composed the essential link between the Jamestown settlers and Cavalier aristocrats. It marked a merger of cultures anchored in a Christian rite and thereby implied a peaceful move onto Indian lands to build tobacco plantations. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 171-72 ) [Clipping #12]

339) The playwright [Barker]created a play set with double messages that reveal the uncertainty and ambivalence of cultural, social, and political attitudes of nineteenth-century Euro-Americans with regard to the definition of their relationship with indigenous peoples. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 6 ) [Clipping #77]

340) And they were to meet again, / Years later, in England, the Lady Rebecca Rolfe / And Captain Smith -- a strange meeting -- strange and sad, / The Indian Princess in her fine English clothes / And the bearded baldish Ulysses, both nine years older / And one very soon to die as caged things will / Just when they seem acclimated to the cage. (Stephen Vincent Benet, Western Star 74) [Clipping #30]

341) When Argall arrived, he demanded that Japazaw bring Pocahontas on board his ship. . . . Japazaw did not want to hand Pocahontas over to Argall. . . . At the same time, Japazaw knew that Argall would be relentless. . . . Japazaw was put in the difficult position of making a decision between the lesser of two evils. . . . It is important to try to look at the situation from [Japazaw's] standpoint. For the safety of his people, Japazaw did not want to antagonize Argall any further, so he tried to be as friendly as possible and proposed a compromise. . . . [However] Argall quickly broke his word and refused to release Pocahontas. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 48-50) [Clipping #89]

342) How could that dark old king forbear, / Though writhing with his own despair, / To still her plaint -- to grant her pray'r! / How could he check the angel grace, / That gave such beauty to her face, -- / How stay the more than sweet control, / That, to the savage could impart, / Tho' all untaught, the Christian soul, / The woman's mood, the human heart! (William Gilmore Simms, "The Forest Maiden" 59) [Clipping #399]

343) As the biographer of Pocahontas, I could contrast her dying moments with those of Mary. The amiable Indian beheld her approaching dissolution with that peace of mind arising from a confidence in the mercy of God, through Him whom he sent to redeem the world; and the last words that faultered on her lips were the praises of the Almighty. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 321) [Clipping #108]

344) Our first celebrated traitor to her own race is not merely a home-grown version of Shylock's daughter, but a model long in advance for Uncle Tom. Our first Tom is an Indian girl: and this, in our deepest national memory, we do not forget! (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 70) [Clipping #124]

345) And she! the glorious Indian maid, / The tutelary of this land, / The angel of the woodland shade, / The miracle of God's own hand, / Who join'd man's heart to woman's softest grace, / And thrice redeem'd the scourges of her race. / Sister of charity and love, / Whose life-blood was soft Pity's tide, / Dear goddess of the sylvan grove, / Flower of the forest, nature's pride, / He is no man who does not bend the knee, / And she no woman who is not like thee! (James Kirke Paulding, "Ode to Jamestown" 71) [Clipping #393]

346) When Pocahontas recovered from her confusion, a blush burnt on her cheek to find herself in the arms of a man; but when Rolfe threw himself before her on his knees, and clasping his hands to the moon, discovered the emotions that had so long filled his breast, the afflicted girl suffered him to wipe the tear from her eye that overflowed with sorrow, and no longer repulsed the ardour of his caresses. . . . Pocahontas urged to go; but Rolfe still breathed in her ear the music of his vows, as he held her in his arms, or still rioted in the draught of intoxication from her lips. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 312-13) [Clipping #106]

347) History books speculate on whether Smith and Pocahontas were lovers, I doubt this is important, but "history," intent on romanticising Pocahontas and Smith seems to linger on this attachment. I think that "history" is a lie -- written down to bolster the ego of the whiteman, to promulgate their status as macho and clever warriors, and the ludicrous idea that whitemen are among the people and houses. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 85-86) [Clipping #35]

348) As stated earlier, what holds such works together is the attempt to find typologically the American present (and often, the American future) in the historical events of the past. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 50) [Clipping #243]

349) Smith's rescue by Pocahontas has been in considerable question ever since the 1624 volume appeared. Since he did not describe the incident in the earlier True Relation, many critics have concluded that the event never took place -- that Smith simply took advantage of Pocahontas's recent presence in London. (Both Powhatan and Pocahontas were dead when the volume appeared -- there was no way Smith could be contradicted.) Why else was it necessary to wait sixteen years to tell the story? Are we to conclude that the 1608 version is fact and the 1624 one is fiction? (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 21) [Clipping #157]

350) This tender girl was the daughter of the Indian Monarch. She was of a delicate form, but admirably proportioned. Her fine dark eyes beamed forth that moral sense, which imparts a magic to every look, and constitutes expression. There was a dash of melancholy in her countenance more interesting than smiles. It denoted a vacancy of heart; the want of some one object on whom to fix her affections. There was a delicious redness in her cherub lips, a red a little riper than that which burnt on her cheek, and the nether one somewhat fuller than the other, looked as if some bee had newly stung it. Her long black hair emulated in colour the glossy plumage of the eagle, and reflected the like luster at different exposures to the light. It flowed in luxuriant tresses down her comely back and neck, half concealing the polish and symmetry, the rise and fall, of a bosom just beginning to fill. She was called Pocahontas. In a word, if not so beautiful as Venus, she was more simple than her doves, and her voice was not less sweet than the song of a seraph. (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 45-46) [Clipping #355]

351) The name of Pocahontas has descended to posterity as the great benefactress, the tutelary genius of the first successful Colony planted within the limits of the United States; who, when famine raged or conspiracy menaced it with swift destruction, ever interposed her benign and gentle influence to supply their wants and ward off their dangers. From all that history and tradition have preserved, as well as from the testimonials of the objects of her kindness and protection; from the particulars of her life that have come down to us, and from every authentic memorial now extant, she appears to have been, both in mind and person, one of the choicest models the hand of nature ever formed. With the purest simplicity she united the kindest heart, and to the timidity of a spotless virgin she joined the sagacity of mind, a firmness of spirit, and an adventurous daring, which more than once, when the existence of the Colony was at stake, prompted her to traverse the midnight forest alone, and brave the indignation of her kindred, to give advice and warning. (John Gadsby Chapman, The Picture of the Baptism of Pocahontas 3-4) [Clipping #60]

352) Pocahontas: The strangers have tools, many things that they can share. The Powhatan people will learn much. The white man will come bearing gifts to my father. He will come. (Pocahontas: The Legend ) [Clipping #339]

353) The heart of every woman is a romance, and its master-chord is Love. (Mary Balmanno, "Pocahontas" 283) [Clipping #63]

354) Pocahontas appeared in the fort with the richest presents of benevolence. With all the charms of nature and the best fruits of the earth, she resembled the Goddess of Plenty with her cornucopiae. Even Smith indulged, for a while, his softer feelings; and in the romantic recesses of uncultured walks, listened to the warm effusions of his Indian maid. She sighed, and she wept; and found solace in his tears or tenderness, which seemed to her the flow of love. ("A Sketch of the Life of Pocahontas" 171) [Clipping #351]

355) Behold thee, kneeling, yield thy wildwood faith, / And on the altar step bestow thy hand; / And far from home, and in an alien land, / Resign thy meek and loving soul to Death. (Philip Alexander Bruce, "Pocahontas" 1) [Clipping #45]

356) Both Pocahontas and Sacajawea are, of course, Protestant versions of the encounter with the Indian, WASP fantasies of reconciliation in the wilderness. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 78) [Clipping #127]

357) By 1860, ancestor veneration in the Old Dominion had become almost frantically defensive. Much of this protective attitude was a direct response to a penetrating assault on Virginia history then taking shape in Massachusetts. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 172) [Clipping #13]

358) Later, when Pocahontas meets and instantly falls in love with John Rolfe, [Barker] makes clear that it is the European culture of which Rolfe is representative and conduit, not the man himself, that is the ultimate object of Pocahontas' love. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 236) [Clipping #213]

359) Pocahontas is a female Squanto, a "good" Indian, and by taking her to our national bosom we experience a partial absolution. In the lowering of her head we feel a benediction. We are so wonderful she loved us anyway. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 200) [Clipping #298]

360) Installation of [John Gadsby] Chapman's rotunda painting marked a watershed in the revision of the Pocahontas legend to conform with contemporary issues. [George Washington] Custis, Chapman, and Mary Webster, Virginians all, were bent on emphasizing the saintly presence of their regional ancestor and presenting tribal relocation as a tragic but necessary stratagem. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 126) [Clipping #9]

361) Powhatan had made war upon the colonists, and had laid his warriors in ambush, so artfully, that Smith and his party must have been destroyed. To save the man she loved, in a night of storm and thunder, Pocahontas wandered through the wilds and woods to the camp of Smith, and apprized him of his danger. Love seems the supreme arbiter of human conduct, and, like Hortensia, forgets the brother, and the father, when opposed to the fortunes of her favorite. ("A Sketch of the Life of Pocahontas" 172) [Clipping #352]

362) Like Miranda in The Tempest, Pocahontas is naturally disposed to be the foreigners' advocate. (Mary Loeffelholz, "Miranda in the New World" 60) [Clipping #173]

363) At a prearranged signal [from Powhatan] Pocahontas threw herself upon him [Smith] and pleaded for his life. Powhatan granted her request. Smith--though he was obviously unaware of it--had passed through an elaborate ritual of mock-execution whereby he allied himself with Powhatan. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 150) [Clipping #149]

364) For my own part, I have little doubt, from the histories which we have of the first attempts at colonizing their country, that Pocahuntas deserves to be considered as the patron deity of the enterprise. . . . in one word, when we recollect how near and how often it verged towards total extinction, maugre the patronage of Pocahuntas; there is the strongest reason to believe that, but for her patronage, the anniversary cannon of the Fourth of July would never have resounded throughout the United States. (William Wirt, Letters of the British Spy 168-69) [Clipping #287]

365) With joined hands, Smith and Pocahontas conduct you naturally to Jamestown, that abandoned nest of the Sire of Eagles. (William Gilmore Simms, "Pocahontas; A Legend of Virginia" 124) [Clipping #226]

366) Yet Powhatan must now claim chief regard, / Ere yet the seek t' explore the Southern Main / And now they furl the sail and lower the yard. / Fair is the land -- they soon possession gain, / And from the ships pours out the adventurous train; / Oh, what a group they form'd -- for now appear, / Full many a one who bore the mark of Cain, / Thrust out from country, and from kindred dear, / Country and home again he seeks to establish here. (John Robertson, Virginia 13) [Clipping #221]

367) Native American, Princess, Heroine, Natural, Tribal, and John Smith are some words and ideas that immediately come to mind when I think of Pocahontas. However, as I reflect on my previous exposure to Pocahontas’s story, what grasps me the most is the sense of mystery that surrounds her. I admit I have little knowledge of Pocahontas other than how she is depicted by Disney, which only adds to her mysteriousness. I wonder if she is believed to have powers involving the forces of nature? Why are Americans so interested in this particular character of our history? Was she even real? How was life on our land before the story of John Smith? Another image that comes to mind when I think of Pocahontas is that she is an icon for the natural world and John Smith an icon for the industrial world yet to come. The natural world holds a lot of mystery in itself. I first heard the story of Pocahontas as a little girl, but as I’ve gotten older, it has gradually gained meaning. However, although her story about the first settlement of the New World holds more importance for me as an adult, the mystery remains. (Elle Irwin, Lehigh University ) [Clipping #448]

368) It would be tedious to relate all the services which this angel of peace rendered to both nations. (Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America 271) [Clipping #348]

369) But the hour was hasting when Pocahontas was to descend to that place where the weary are at rest, and the wicked cease from troubling; that bosom which had so often undergone perturbation for the sufferings of another, was soon to be stilled; that eye which had so often overflowed with humanity, was soon to be closed; that hand which had been raised in supplication to avert the death of the prisoner, was soon to moulder in the grave! (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 110) [Clipping #361]

370) The iron cares that load and press men down / A father can, like school-boy tasks, lay by, / When gazing in his Daughter's loving eye, / Her soft arm like a spell around him thrown; / The passions that, like Upas' leaves, have grown / Most deadly in dark places, which defy / Earth, heaven and human will, even these were shown / All powerless to resist the pleading cry / Which pierced a savage but a father's ear, / And shook a soul where pity's pulse seemed dead; / When Pocahontas, heeding not the fear / That daunted boldest warriors, laid her head / Beside the doomed! Now with our country's fame, / Sweet forest Daughter, we blent thy name. (Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, "The Empire of Woman" 12) [Clipping #432]

371) Pocahontas: I will help ensure peace. I will. (Pocahontas: The Legend ) [Clipping #341]

372) Copies of the 1616 Simon Van de Passe engraving and perhaps of the 1793, less "Indian" version, would have been available, but, although these engravings were probably truest to Pocahontas's actual appearance, neither of these portrayals of a rather (by Anglo-American standards) unattractive young woman conformed to the mid-nineteenth-century notion of what an Indian princess -- and especially this particular Indian princess -- should look like. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 108) [Clipping #257]

373) The PRINCESS POCAHONTAS runs onstage carrying flowers and singing "The Indian Love Call" Her HANDMAIDENS follow, giggling. As POCAHONTAS flutters about, the HANDMAIDENS seat themselves in semi-circle for gossip. HANDMAIDENS (Very eager.) How was it Princess Pocahontas? How was it? Tell us. POCAHONTAS (A languid smile on her face.) I couldn't take my eyes off him when I first saw him. He was so... so... ooh! (Hanay Geiogamah, "Foghorn" 113) [Clipping #134]

374) He had advised / Sagely and humbly, writing to the Queen, / That the little princess be royally entertained, / For she had a great spirit and could move her people. / Well, it had been done -- and there was his nonpareil / -- the red-winged blackbird of Virginia's woods / -- The young, wild child -- / There was his nonpareil / In her fine clothes, coughing. (Stephen Vincent Benet, Western Star 75 ) [Clipping #31]

375) I must also tell you that at the time she met John Smith, She was twelve or thirteen -- a woman by Native standards of the day. (Beth Brant, "Grandmothers of a New World" 84) [Clipping #32]

376) One of the tropes that marks dramas of civilizing is that of romantic love as a humanizing force more powerful than sheer military might to overcome the presumed violence and ignorance of colonized non-Christians. Through erotic force, backed by martial competence, the doubly potent European defeats the doubly impotent "Indian," seizes the woman and the land, and expels the older, unchangeably "native" man, leaving only the younger Indian male on the colonized margin of the stage to wonder at the puissance of the western hero. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 168 ) [Clipping #188]

377) The sequel stands on history's page, / A record true from age to age; / How valour, wisdom, grace and truth / Won the dark maiden's spotless youth; / And how from heathen darkness turned, / Her soul with Christian fervour burned. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 130) [Clipping #284]

378) Thus the first violence directed against Indians in [Barker's] play is depicted as a conflict in which "bad" and "good" Indians destroy each other. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 237) [Clipping #215]

379) One could also argue that in the Englishman's stoic bravery and the Indian princess's inherent understanding of the natural world, Smith and Pocahontas embody two of the traits that would come to be seen as crucial for those who would face the task of building a nation out of the wilderness. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 56) [Clipping #247]

380) So it is, That some ten yeeres agoe being in Virginia, and taken prisoner by the power of Powhatan their chiefe King, I receiued from this great Saluage exceeding great courtesie, especially from his sonne Nantaquaus, the most manliest, comeliest, boldest spirit, I euer saw in a Saluage, and his sister Pocahontas, the Kings most dear and well-beloued daughter, being but a childe of twelue or thirteene yeeres of age, whose compassionate pitifull heart, of my desperate estate, gaue me much cause to respect her: I being the first Christian this proud King and his grim attendants euer saw: and thus inthralled in their barbarous power, I cannot say I felt the least occasion of want that was in the power of those my mortall foes to preuent, notwithstanding al their threats. After some six weeks fatting amongst those Saluage Courtiers, at the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her owne braines to saue mine; and not onely that, but so preuailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to James town: where I found about eight and thirtie miserable poore and sicke creatures, to keepe possession of all those large territories of Virginia; such was the weaknesse of this poore commonwealth, as had the Saluages not fed vs, we directly had starued. And this reliefe, most gracious Queene, was commonly brought us by this Lady Pocahontas. (John Smith, Letter to Queen Anne 53-56) [Clipping #322]

381) Although most Anglo Americans took what became the dominant view that intermarriage was morally wrong and even "unnatural," there were colonial writers who from the beginning suggested that it would have been beneficial for both peoples. Later historians pointed out that such a policy would have allowed for the easier acquisition of Indian lands by the Anglo-American colonists, helped to keep the peace between the races, and helped to "civilize" the Indians, to the point where, in the course of a few generations, the sight of "charming" young white people like Mary Bolling, who were descended from such unions, would not have been a great surprise to European visitors to America. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 12 ) [Clipping #232]

382) Peace waves her garland o'er the favour'd place [where Pocahontas and Rolfe are married] / Where weds the new-born West, with Europe's lordly race. (Lydia H. Sigourney, "Pocahontas" 25) [Clipping #407]

383) Although Barker wrote during a time when conflicts with Natives were still part of the white American expansion, he "domesticates" the figure of the Native father and renders the chief's final acceptance of whites as a kind of impotence. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 181) [Clipping #196]

384) Indeed, there is ground for apprehension, that posterity in reading this part of American history, will be inclined to consider the story of Pocahontas, as an interesting romance; perhaps recalling the palpable fictions of early travellers and navigators, they may suppose, that in those times, a portion of fiction was deemed essential to the embellishment of history: It is not even improbable, that, considering everything relating to captain Smith and Pocahontas as a mere fiction, they may vent their spleen against the historian, for impairing the interest of his plot, by marrying the princess of Powhatan to a Mr. Rolfe, of whom nothing had previously been said, in defiance of all the expectations raised by the foregoing parts of the fable. (John Burk, History of Virginia 188) [Clipping #48]

385) By 1662, Virginians had a law that expressly prohibited interracial marriage, which was amended in 1691 to remove any doubt that Indians were included in this ban. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 14) [Clipping #233]

386) Though the breast of Rolfe possessed not the ambition of Smith, it was infinitely more accessible to the softer emotions. He beheld with interest the tender sentiments which Pocahontas cherished for Captain Smith, and participating in her sorrow, his own heart became infected with a violent passion. (John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half 308) [Clipping #104]

387) [In Barker's play, Pocahontas] is at once child of the New World, embodying its innocence and its fruitfulness, and mother of the "infant colony," displaying all of the feminine virtues associated with Euro-American definitions of the true woman. This is the legacy she bequeaths to Americans who adopt her as national hero. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 240) [Clipping #219]

388) We have no reproaches for Pocahontas, and her conduct is to be justified. She obeyed laws of nature and humanity, of tenderness and love, which were far superior, in their force and efficacy, in a heart like hers, to any which spring simply from ties of blood. But, even though his designs be ill, we cannot but regard the savage prince, in his age and infirmities, thus betrayed by child and subject, somewhat as another Lear. He, too, was fond of his Cordelia. (William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Captain John Smith 268) [Clipping #434]

389) At length the trance of Fear / Vanish'd, and from those dove-like eyes shone forth / A dazzling spirit. That meek child, who seem'd / To shrink as the Mimosa, now evinc'd / More than a warrior's daring. Like the winds, / Rushing in wildness tow'rd th' imprison'd foe, / His head she clasp'd. "Now let the death-stroke fall!" / Boldly she cried, "for ere it reach that head / This shall be crush'd." (Lydia H. Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines 77-78) [Clipping #369]

390) What is somewhat ironic is that while Pocahontas was certainly the archetypal Indian princess, and therefore necessarily beautiful and sexually attractive, the section of the narrative that described her reality-based captivation of Englishman John Rolfe had been tenaciously suppressed in favor of the more traditionally "masculine" activity depicted by the rescue of John Smith, in the great majority of nineteenth- century formulations. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 89) [Clipping #253]

391) Because of the sentiment against the portraying of successful interracial unions during the antebellum period, it is not hard to imagine the dilemma faced by early nineteenth-century writers who wanted to use the already popular Pocahontas material. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 72) [Clipping #250]

392) In bringing Pocahontas to the popular stage, James Nelson Barker enlisted the conventions of melodrama to produce a romanticized version of American history that resolved conflicts implicit in past acts of conquest and revolution and defined national identity in terms that reinforced a sense of moral and cultural integrity. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 241 ) [Clipping #220]

393) Smith's capture came just prior to the time of the great ceremony Nikomis, named for the Woman Who Fell from the Sky. At the ceremony, the stranger could be brought before the leading members of all the tribes of the Powhatan alliance. If Pocahontas recognized him, he would be remade as a member of the tribe. (Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat 40) [Clipping #19]

394) The Pocahontas narrative, which contains the first important event in the history of the Anglo-American settlements, turns on an act of rebellion against a father and king and reinforces the idea that such acts often have positive results. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 54) [Clipping #245]

395) Thus we have a sort of American Ceres, or Demeter, or Gaea, developed from Pocahontas -- a fertility goddess, the mother of us all. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 195) [Clipping #296]

396) The whiteness of her costume [in the Capitol painting] emphasizes her innocence, while its magenta trim acknowledges that the English colonists were conscious of her royal heritage. The color of her dress also directs the viewer's attention to the fact that Pocahontas is lighter in skin tone than the other Indians in the painting. This is immediately obvious, even though she is slightly in the shadow cast by Reverend Whitaker, on whom the light is most directly focused. This conventional depiction allows Chapman to suggest that a blanching of any distinctively Indian racial features has occurred through this Christianization process. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 113) [Clipping #259]

397) Rude was the storm, and her fallen hair / Stream'd in the gale from her bosom bare; / As alone, through the forest's blacken'd shade, / On errand of fear came the Indian maid. / . . . . "White men, beware of Havoc's sweep! / He is wak'd in the forest, from sullen sleep -- / He would drink your blood, in a guardless hour, / And your wives and slumbering babes devour, / . . . White men, beware! -- and when at last, / Your fears are dead, and your dangers past, / Shall the voice of the warner be e'er betray'd? -- / Shall white men forget the Indian maid?" (Moses Scott, "Pocahontas" 45-46) [Clipping #368]

398) Smith: That fort is not the world. The river leads back there. It leads onward too. Deeper. Into the wild. Start over. Exchange this false life for a true one. Give up the name of Smith. (The New World ) [Clipping #345]

399) In all history and in all romance it would be difficult to find a more perfect character than Pocahontas. . . . It is impossible to become acquainted with her story without loving and admiring a being so good, so gentle, so humane, and so heroic. . . . Being by birth a Virginian, with strong attachments for my native State . . . and the memory of Pocahontas being dear to every son and daughter of the "Old Dominion," I trust that in vindicating her memory, I am doing nothing culpable, presumptuous, or officious. (James Chamberlayne Pickett, The Memory of Pocahontas Vindicated 5-6) [Clipping #437]

400) Intermarriage had been indeed the Method proposed very often by the Indians in the Beginning, urging it frequently as a certain Rule, that the English were not their Friends, if they refused it. And I can't but think it wou'd have been happy for that Country, had they embraced this Proposal: For, the jealousie of the Indians, which I take to be the Cause of most of the Rapines and Murders they committed, wou'd by this Means have been altogether prevented, and consequently the Abundance of Blood that was shed on both sides wou'd have been saved. (Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia 25-26) [Clipping #331]

401) The formal, almost political, relationship between Pocahontas and Smith has universally been read as romantic, at least from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pocahontas's otherwise "inexplicable" action "explained" as the spontaneous gesture of an instant love. (Peter Hulme, "John Smith and Pocahontas" 151) [Clipping #150]

402) Woman! All heavenly woman! Thou art every where the ornament of creation, and the empire of benevolence over thy bosom is every where apparent! Whether in the polished cities of Europe, or among the rude forests of America, thou art susceptible of the same softness, and canst practice the same humanity. (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 84) [Clipping #357]

403) All is tumult and excitement. Pocahontas no longer sits by the side of her father -- she has thrown herself in agony on the ground before him -- twining her beautiful arms around his knees, and entreating with wild supplications and many tears for mercy! -- mercy on the prisoner! Every endearing word that on former occasions she has ever used with success, she pours forth now in a flood of tender and passionate vehemence that pierces every heart but that of Powhatan. Unmoved by her appeal, he makes a sign -- a dreadful rush is made upon the prisoner, every hand striving to reach him; and as many as can, by any means, lay hold upon him, seize and drag him to the fatal stones, forcing down his head on one of them in order to beat out his brains with their uplifted war-clubs, already swinging to destroy him, when, with a wild, resounding shriek, tearing away every object that would impede her progress, Pocahontas, forcing her way among them, throws herself across his breast, and clasping his head between her arms, lays her own upon it in breathless expectation of the event -- silent, devoted, prepared to give her own young, sweet life ere his shall be sacrificed. (Mary Balmanno, "Pocahontas" 287) [Clipping #64]

404) In a way, then, Pocahontas was a kind of traitor to her people. Again and again she let them down . . . but we have no written accounts of their [Indians'] opinions about these events. All we know is that Pocahontas rejected her own people in favor of the invaders. Perhaps I am being a little too hard on her. The crucial point, it seems to me, is to remember that Pocahontas was a hostage. (Charles R. Larson, "The Children of Pocahontas" 27) [Clipping #159]

405) But our strongest motive for printing [the poem] is, the elegant tribute it pays to the amiable, the heroic, the neglected Pocahontas -- a princess who, in other countries, if not actually deified, would have been worshipped, at least, as a tutelary saint; but who, in this, where virtue, talents, and worth constitute the only legitimate title to distinction, has been suffered to be almost lost to fame. . . . Under Providence, she was more instrumental than any other being in the original colonization of these United States. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, and the statuary should vie with each other in doing justice to her achievements and in perpetuating her renown. ("The Beauties of York" 594) [Clipping #363]

406) Historically, too, there is little to sustain the Pocahontas legend, since the typical relationship of White settlers to the Indian women they encountered was casual intercourse or long-term cohabitation without benefit of conversion or marriage. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 71) [Clipping #125]

407) Powhatan being 30 myles of, was presently sent for: in the meane time, Pocahontas and her women entertained Captaine Smith in this manner. In a fayre plaine field they made a fire, before which, he sitting vpon a mat suddainly amongst the woods was heard such a hydeous noise and shrieking, that the English betooke themselues to their armes, and seized on two or threee old men by them, supposing Powhatan with all his power was come to surprise them. But presently Pocahontas came, willing him to kill her if any hurt were intended; and the beholders, which were men, women, and children, satisfied the Captaine there was no such matter. Then presently they were presented with this anticke; thirtie young women came naked out of the woods, onely covered behind and before with a few greene leaues, their bodies all painted, some of one color, some of another, but all differing, their leader had a fayre payre of Bucks hornes on her head, and an Otters skinne at her backe, a bow and arrows in her hand. . . These fiends with most hellish shouts and cryes, rushing from among the trees, cast themselues in a rung about the fire, singing and dauncing with most excellent ill varietie, oft falling into their infernall passions, and solemnly againe to sing and daunce: having spent neare an houre in this Mascarado, as they entred, in like manner they departed. (John Smith, The Generall Historie 67) [Clipping #325]

408) Among a savage people still, / She stood, from all their moods apart, / For dream of crime, and thought of ill, / Had never swayed her gentle heart. (William Gilmore Simms, "The Forest Maiden" 53) [Clipping #398]

409) XXVII. If, when Pocahontas visited London in the year 1616, Smith invented the fable of his rescue, he exhibited extreme folly, since he must have been aware that he would be exposed; and a man of his sense could never have made such a statement. (John Esten Cooke, "Did Pocahontas Really Rescue Captain Smith?" 401) [Clipping #69]

410) The name of Pocahontas adorns the brightest page in the history of the natives of America. In whatever light we view her character, either as maiden, a wife, or a mother, she is equally entitled to our respect and admiration. Heroic and amiable, constant and courageous, human, generous, discreet and pious, she combined in an extraordinary manner the virtues and perfections of both savage and civilized nature. The union of so many qualities honorable to the female sex and to the human species, should never be forgotten, in forming our estimate of the human race. (Samuel G. Goodrich, "Pocahontas" 189) [Clipping #425]

411) Notwithstanding all these passages, when inconstant Fortune turned our peace to warre, this tender virgin would still not spare to dare to visit vs, and by her our jarres haue beene oft appeased, and our wants still supplyed; were it the policie of her father thus to imploy her, or the ordinance of God thus to make her his instrument, or her extraordinarie affection to our Nation, I know not: but of this I am sure; when her father with the vtmost of his policie and power, sought to surprize mee, hauing but eighteene with mee, the darke night could not affright her from comming through the irksome woods, and with watered eies gaue me intelligence, with her best aduice to escape his furie; which had hee knowne, hee had surely slaine her. (John Smith, Letter to Queen Anne 53-56) [Clipping #323]

412) [Pocahontas was] apt symbol of the White man's reconciliation with our land and its first inhabitants. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 64) [Clipping #118]

413) We surely ought to know what it is we wish for. In our fondness for Pocahontas can we make out a longing that is buried somewhere below even the affection we bear for our fair selves and white causes? The yearning might be for another kind of love entirely, a love that has been forever hidden under the differences that set countries, creeds, and colors against each other. From the freedom and noble impracticality of childhood, we as a people have taken this Indian girl to heart. Could we be hinting at a wish for a love that would really cross the barriers of race? When the beautiful brown head comes down, does a whole nation dream this dream? (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 414 ) [Clipping #304]

414) Character Descriptions: Princess Buttered-on-Both-Sides -- One of the many faces of the Trickster, Coyote. She is a contestant in the Miss North American Indian Beauty Pageant and she is stuck in the talent segment. Storybook Pocahontas -- The little Indian Princess from the picture books, friend of the settlers, in love with the Captain, comes complete with her savage-Indian-Chief father. Pocahontas/Lady Rebecca/Motoaka -- The three names of Pocahontas , a Powhatan woman whose father was the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy at the time of the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. She is best known for saving the life of Captain John Smith when she was eleven years old, and for saving the colonists from starvation. The legendary Pocahontas of the ballads and romantic poetry has become the archetype of the "good Indian": one who aids and abets white men. Lady Rebecca was what she was named when she was Christianized and married John Rolfe. Matoaka was her name as a child. (Monique Mojica, "Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots" 14) [Clipping #181]

415) . . . while movement across racial dividing lines by white women captives like Rowlandson was feared and policed, Pocahontas figures moved, or were moved, readily back and forth across the borders separating "white" and "dark," "English" and "Indian," "civilized" and "savage." (Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire 88) [Clipping #112]

416) [John] Marshall is not specific about the feeling that this humanity engendered in Pocahontas, but earlier in the first decade of the ninteenth century her emotion had been identified as romantic love by John Davis, a young expatriate writer, who had sensed that the Rescue was the scene with the most potential interest for the growing, largely female, audience for fiction in America. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 35 ) [Clipping #237]

417) [Barker] conveys to the American stage a political message that solidifies American identity as of overwhelming whiteness, capable of absorbing color without displaying any palpable mark of difference. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 187) [Clipping #205]

418) Stated in its widest bearings, the question raised in this publication is upon the veracity of Captain John Smith; and since the account of the colonization of Virginia has hitherto been almost exclusively drawn from Smith's Generall Historie, it is evident that, if the authority of that work is overthrown, it will become necessary to reconsider, not only the statements of fact which rest only on his assertions, but the whole range of opinions which through him have been grafted upon history. These statements and opinions have been received with absolute, unhesitating confidence for more than two hundred years. There are powerful social interests, to say nothing of popular prejudices, greatly concerned in maintaining their credit even at the present day. No object whatever can be gained by their discredit, except the establishment of bald historical truth. It will therefore require that a very strong case indeed should be made out on the part of Mr. Deane and the party which follows him, before the American public can be induced to listen with attention to an argument which aims at nothing less than the entire erasure of one of the most attractive portions of American history. (Henry Adams, "Captain John Smith" 2) [Clipping #374]

419) Literary works of the 1830s and 1840s implied that only Pocahontas recognized the advantages of peaceful submission to the more powerful English, while male Indians. blinded by pride and native brutality, rejected white civilization and thereby brought about their own extinction. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas 128) [Clipping #10]

420) I [Powhatan] dreamt not daughter that so soon, / I should be call'd to curse the boon, / I fondly gave those foolish tears, / That sprung from more than maiden fears. / Caught by the baubles of that foreign band, / Wouldst thou forsake the people of thy land? -- / A daughter leagu'd against a parents' throne, / To robbers trusted, and at night alone, / Oh outrage on a stainless name! / Oh bitter thought! a daughter's shame! (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 94) [Clipping #59]

421) From thy dark shades of superstitious lore, / Thou com'st arrayed in purest vestal white, / That he, the man of God, might on thee pour / Jordan's still wave, to give thy blindness sight. (A. P. H., "The Baptism of Pocahontas" 178) [Clipping #396]

422) Smith: Love. Shall we deny it when it visits us? Shall we not take what we are given? There is only this. All else is unreal. Pocahontas: Mother...where do you live? In the sky? The clouds? The sea? Show me your face. Give me a sign. We rise. We rise. Afraid of myself. A god, he seems to me. What else is life but being near you? Do they suspect? Oh, to be given to you...you to me. I will be faithful to you. True. Two no more. One. One. I am. I am. (The New World ) [Clipping #344]

423) POCAHONTAS: First, he took me to his dwelling and he seemed, uh, kind of, nervous about me being with him. He told one of the other captains that nobody was to... to come into the hut. This made me a little bit afraid at first, but he took hold of my hand and smiled at me. He kept smiling at me, and then he asked me, he asked me if I was a... a... vir-gin. When he said enough so that I knew what he was talking about, I... I said to him "Yes, yes, I am a vir-gin." When I said this, he seemed to get kind of nervous, excited. He looked at me deeply with his big blue eyes and told me that he was... in... in luff with me and he wanted me to... to... know his body and that he wanted to know, know my body too. Then he pulled me gently down on the bed and began to put his lips on mine. He did this several times, and each time his breathing became more, more nervous, like he was getting very warm. Then he began to kiss my neck and my cheeks. (The HANDMAIDENS urge her on.) And then he touched my breasts. And then he stood up, suddenly, and began to take off his clothes. He took off his boots, his shirt, his pants, all that he was wearing. He stood over me, his big, big, big body naked like one of the little children. There was so much hair on his body, it made me a little afraid. (She giggles to herself.) (Hanay Geiogamah, "Foghorn" 114 ) [Clipping #135]

424) Where fair Virginia spreads her wide domain / In towering mountain, valley, hill and plain, / There lived in ages past, of royal line, / A lovely maid, of face and form divine. / Purer than she to life was never given, / Nor can be, / sharing less of earth than heaven. / The gentle Pocahontas was she named, / Through distant realms and future ages famed. (William Watson Waldron, "Pocahontas, Princess of Virginia" 14) [Clipping #420]

425) [Barker's] The Indian Princess appeared at a particularly important moment in the political development of what is known as the Indian question. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 6) [Clipping #75]

426) Attend but first to me. Cruel king, the ties of blood which bound me to thee are dissever'd, as have been long those of thy sanguinary religion; for know that I have abjur'd thy senseless gods, and now worship the Supreme Being, the true Manitou, and the Father of the Universe; 'Tis his Almighty hand that sustains me, 'Tis his divine spirit that breathes in my soul, and prompts Pocahontas to a deed which future ages will admire. (George Washington Custis, Pocahontas 207 ) [Clipping #397]

427) Barker seems intent on proving that the landscape is made erotic by Europeans . . . . In The Indian Princess, the landscape, shrunk to the world of the stage, becomes personalized in the figure of Pocahontas. (Jeffrey H. Richards, "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native" 184) [Clipping #201]

428) But when about the start of the nineteenth century Americans began to search intensely for their history the romance was resurrected, and Pocahontas began to loom large as the guardian angel of our oldest colony. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 395-96 ) [Clipping #301]

429) Her Pocahontas was a doll with a short life expectancy. / Her Pocahontas was a baby who knew better than to cry. No one / talked about it, but there was an unspoken memory of soldiers / and death. Her Pocahontas had a body dark as night, / undomesticated / as stars, naked as dreams. The other girls hated her Pocahontas . / They had their own Pocahontas, a confection of lies. (Susan Deer Cloud, "Her Pocahontas" 110-11) [Clipping #109]

430) In the Pocahontas narrative could also be found an interesting analogy to the fate of many African slaves, as well as perhaps a romantic hope for the ultimate assimilation of the black race into Anglo-American society. It must be remembered that Pocahontas was also tricked and taken prisoner on board a European ship by whites, and, while not enslaved, she had to learn to live in a foreign world that she was not free to leave. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 161) [Clipping #270]

431) The heart's best, purest sacrifice, / Such as the Indian maiden chose / To light her path, to soothe her woes, / When at the cross she bowed her down, / And gave her earthly hopes to win a heavenly crown. (Mary Mosby Webster, Pocahontas: A Legend 133 ) [Clipping #285]

432) In the antebellum period, Pocahontas represented a wide spectrum of ideals. As a Native American, she symbolized uncorrupted nature and inherent common sense; as a woman, she stood for both the strength and weakness of the perceived feminine character; and as an Anglican convert, she personified the path Indians should follow if they wished to survive in Christianized America. (Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas xv) [Clipping #2]

433) The obvious inference here is that if the rescue was actually performed Smith would have said so in the first place or, if he had not, would have told the story to others who would have repeated it. (Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All" 182) [Clipping #293]

434) As there is nothing to question in the propriety of her conduct, so there is nothing which needs defence; as there can be no doubt of the extraordinary courage which she brought to the support of a benign humanity, equally extraordinary, so nothing is necessary to the full comprehension of her virtues beyond the actual facts in her history. As these virtues were not of the time or the people among whom she was born and nurtured, so they denote a degree of excellence which lifts her beyond her race and period, and links her name and reputation with those of the few noble spirits, like herself, of whom the universal heart everywhere keeps a tenacious memory. A more incomparable creature never did honor to her sex. A more feminine spirit never was sent to earth for the purpose of humanity. (William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Captain John Smith 369) [Clipping #436]

435) When Mattachanna and Uttamattamakin arrived at Jamestown, Pocahontas confided in Mattachanna that she had been raped. Mattaponi sacred oral history is very clear on this: Pocahontas was raped. It is possible that it had been done to her by more than one person and repeatedly. . . . While Mattachanna was with Pocahontas, Pocahontas also told her that she believed she was pregnant. Mattachanna found Pocahontas distressed, emotionally disturbed, fatigued, and nauseous. . . . Mattaponi oral history is adamant that Thomas was born out of wedlock, prior to the marriage ceremony between Pocahontas and Rolfe. It is not known who Thomas's father was, but one likely candidate appears to be Sir Thomas Dale. Pocahontas became pregnant while in Jamestown, and Dale had access to her there. (Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas 63-64) [Clipping #93]

436) In this narrative [Barker's], the wilderness will be conquered through romantic love and the assertion of domestic values. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 234) [Clipping #209]

437) Pocahontas's "name is sanctified and incorporated in history; not for acts of splendid eclat. With Joan d'Arc, Isabella, Elizabeth or Catherine II she cannot be compared. Their feat, their fortunes and their characters were unlike. But in deeds of tender heroism, where tears, flowing from the warmest sensibility; where supplications, and soul-subduing expressions of mercy, which no man could ever withstand, and in contests where all the most delicate attentions of female kindness were the weapons, Pocahontas was a heroine who stands without a rival. (Darby's "Pocahontas" 587) [Clipping #386]

438) I [Smith] would our people could in friendship live, / To please thy heart, I would existence give. (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 83 ) [Clipping #58]

439) And thou alas! misguided maid! / Thou Dian of the western shade! How couldst thou dream the impulse of a breast / Where meek ey'd mercy chose enthron'd to rest, / Could bring such wasting desolation down / Upon a parent's heritage and crown? (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 76) [Clipping #57]

440) Do we need Pocahontas to ease our consciences? Is she the proof that our treatment of the Indian could not have been altogether bad? Do we seize upon Smith as our hero because, brave as he was, his rescue by Pocahontas makes him human? Why, despite attempts to dislodge him, is he still the most conspicuous among our colonial heroes? What in us responds to him and what does he symbolize for us? What is the function of such a folk hero, with his attributes like those of a Ulysses, a King Arthur? (Bradford Smith, Captain John Smith 13) [Clipping #414]

441) The conclusion of [Barker's] The Indian Princess, with five happy weddings, Miami's suicide, and the Smith's final speech, fails to offer any coherent thought about the Indian question and remains open in its ambivalence. One thing is sure: Euro-Americans have both the right and the duty to dominate their new country. (Eliana Crestani, "James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas" 30) [Clipping #85]

442) Is it not probable, that this sensible and amiable woman, perceiving the superiority of the Europeans, foreseeing the probability of the subjugation of her countrymen, and anxious as well to soften their destiny, as to save the needless effusion of human blood, desired, by her marriage with Mr. Rolfe, to hasten the abolition of all distinction between Indians and white men; to bind their interests and affections by the nearest and most endearing ties, and to make them regard themselves as one people, the children of the same great family? If such were her wise and benevolent views, and I have no doubt but they were, how poorly were they backed by the British court? No wonder at the resentment and indignation with which she saw them neglected; o wonder at the bitterness of the disappointment and vexation which she expressed to captain Smith, in London, arising as well from the cold reception which she herself had met, as from the contemptuous and insulting point of view in which she found that her nation was regarded. (William Wirt, Letters of the British Spy 169) [Clipping #288]

443) Rolfe now held his princess in his arms in the deep bosom of awful forests, and the presence of the Lord of nature. Nuptial pomp worthy of the delicacy and purity of their love. Sacredly private was the first intercourse of their mutual fondness. Superb forests, towering cypresses, venerable oaks, stately pines waving the long moss floating from your branches; mountains on whose summits repose the hovering clouds; rivers obstructed by cataracts, and rolling in silent majesty your streams; expanded and sublime nature; you alone were conscious of the conjugal endearments of the youthful pair. (John Davis, Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas 102-3) [Clipping #360]

444) Chapman here attempts [in the Capitol painting] to remove Pocahontas forever from the ranks of savages in the national memory, just as her actual baptism and eventual abandoning of Virginia for England had apparently removed the young Powhatan woman from those aspects of her native culture that would have been considered morally questionable by an Anglo-American audience. (Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative 122) [Clipping #262]

445) Pocahontas, at the tender age of twelve years, threw her arms around the neck of the first Christian adventurer into this American nation, and cast her body upon the stone between the victim and the executioner, as the first sacrifice of Anglo-Saxon liberty! . . . Mists gathered round [Smith], and the leer betokened by the loud laugh-storm of the Indians was at hand, when lovely and full of love, this American girl in tears and groans, engraved on her father's stern soul, by looks, by words, by gestures, you cannot tear me from this thought; he was not born to die! That gaze shot a cross-bow to the chieftain's heart, and his gentle, dutiful daughter, in wild rapture made vocal music, which first melted into emotion that devotion to liberty which we, as a nation, have never ceased to expose. (Anna Ella Carroll, The Great American Battle 239 ) [Clipping #444]

446) It is the image which thrills us especially: the stone axe in the hand of the threatening father, which never quite falls, as the White head of our hero is cradled in the dusky arms of the beautiful Indian lass. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 67) [Clipping #121]

447) [Smith's] writings are those of a gascon and beggar. He seemed to be always in the attitude of one craving recognition or remuneration for alleged services, and Fuller's description of his writings and character in the Worthies of England is probably not far from the truth. (Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company 211) [Clipping #381]

448) What arrests the blow? What has arrested the blow of the murderer, so frequently and in all ages? -- what but the interposition of an Angel. A form of light -- that loveliest creation of human beauty, a young girl, just budding into womanhood -- is this interposing angel. (William Gilmore Simms, "Pocahontas; A Study for the Historical Painter" 306) [Clipping #424]

449) Powhatan understanding we detained certaine Salvages, sent his Daughter, a child of tenne years old, which, not only for feature, countenance, and proportion, much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit, and spirit, the only Nonpareil of his Country: this hee sent by his most trustie messenger, called Rawhunt, as much exceeding in deformitie of person, but of a subtill wit and crafty understanding. He with a long circumstance told mee how well Powhatan loved and respected mee, and in that I should not doubt any way of his kindnesse, he had sent his child, which he most esteemed, to see me; a Deare and bread besides for a present: desiring me that the Boy might come againe, which he loved exceedingly, his litle Daughter hee had taught this lesson also: not taking notice at all of the Indeans that had beene prisoners three daies, till that morning that she saw their fathers and friends come quietly, and in good tearmes to entreate their libertie. (John Smith, A True Relation E3v ) [Clipping #306]

450) The dominant plot of courtship and marriage the structures [Barker's] play also serves simultaneously to evoke and mask the profit motive, which drives the action of conquest. (Susan Scheckel, "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest" 237) [Clipping #216]

451) Nay, good Newport, / Forgive me, but I cannot, even in jest, / Hear light word spoken of that Indian maiden. / Had you but seen her there -- her dark eyes flashing -- / Her slender form, where childhood's bounding grace / Contended yet with woman's richer beauty; / Her raven tresses parted, on a brow / Such as one dreams of under summer skies, / Or poet's fancy paints, in some far planet, / Where doubt and fear have never entered yet -- / Had you but seen her, in her innocence, / Confront that savage executioner -- / The tameless spirit of her forest race / Mantling her clear, dusk cheek, kindling her eye, / Breathing its power over her graceful limbs, / Till their slight muscles seemed to grow to steel. (Robert Dale Owen, Pocahontas 117) [Clipping #400]

452) Obviously it is first of all as a scholar, a student of "facts" to whom Smith's belated addition to his memoirs is clearly spurious, that [Henry] Adams finds the Pocahontas story "mendacious." But surely there is a sense, too, in which he must think it "untrue" as Plato considered Homer's accounts of the gods of Greece "untrue": i.e., false to the deepest meanings of life as he understood them, and doing no one any good to believe. (Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American 82) [Clipping #128]

453) Beside him sat his lovely daughter, / Our ark of safety on the troubled water, / Her tear of pity promptly starts, / And wildly throbs the first of hearts. / Around her beauteous form is drawn, / The soften'd skins of spotted fawn; / Her hair adown her shoulders stray'd, / No raven knows so dark a shade. (St. Leger Landon Carter, The Land of Powhatan 70) [Clipping #54]

454) But she also has another claim, not less venerable and touching, to the remembrance of posterity, and which addresses itself to all Christian people and Christian churches. She stands foremost in the train of those wandering children of the forest who have at different times -- few, indeed, and far between -- been snatched from the fangs of a barbarous idolatry, to become lambs in the fold of the Divine Shepherd. She therefore appeals to our religious as well as our patriotic sympathies, and is equally associated with the rise and progress of the Christian church, as with the political destinies of the United States. (John Gadsby Chapman, The Picture of the Baptism of Pocahontas 5) [Clipping #62]