When Fiction Wins: John Davis and the Emergence of a Romantic Pocahontas
Michael King , University of Minnesota
[1] The story of Pocahontas has been told and retold countless times throughout the course of the past four hundred years. Each retelling has its own purpose, stemming from unique combinations of social, political, and artistic motivations. Virtually all Americans have been exposed to the narrative's key elements in some shape or form, but not because of schoolteachers or the story's inclusion in a history textbook. They are remembered because novelists, playwrights, poets, and, more recently, filmmakers have repeatedly appropriated and recreated the Pocahontas story in their own way. This trend, however, was not always so common.
[2] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Pocahontas and Captain John Smith were recognized as subjects of historical and biographical debates more than they were represented as literary characters. Of the many Americans familiar with some version of the story, few know about the ongoing and often heated arguments surrounding its veracity. These debates were most prevalent in the two hundred years following the initial formation of the Jamestown colony. During this period, the inhabitants of what was to become a new nation were trying to shape their own history, and such a task seemed to require consensus about the details of essential "origin stories." For some citizens situated in and around Virginia, the Pocahontas story—in particular, her marriage to John Rolfe and the birth of their child, Thomas—provided an explanation of relative genealogical superiority. Family names like Randolph and Bolling acquired aristocratic status because of their connection to Thomas Rolfe. Eventually, however, toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the story of the noble Indian princess and the valiant Captain Smith piqued the practical interests of writers with no personal stake whatsoever in its authenticity.
[3] No one could have had a smaller personal stake in such a profoundly American origin story than a foreigner. Nonetheless, for writers overseas, Pocahontas represented an opportunity to bolster a career in a challenging industry. So when the Marquis de Chastellux, a French aristocrat, visited the Virginia plantation of Mrs. Robert Bolling, Jr., he took note of her voluntary claim to royal Indian ancestry. Well aware that Europeans loved to read about American Indians, Chastellux amassed a mountain of material about the natives of Virginia, and after his return to France he wrote an account of his U.S. tour, complete with a detailed recapitulation of the Pocahontas legend (Abrams 56). He embellished the story slightly, adding what Abrams calls "a bit of Gaelic earthiness" (56). His embellishments for the most part amounted to imaginative diction, a substitution of dramatic words and phrases here and there for otherwise standard narrative language. Chastellux's adventure in Virginia had a sequel—with considerable consequences for future representations of Pocahontas. Just a couple of decades later, John Davis, an Englishman, heard the Pocahontas story as told to him by Virginians during his own travels in America. A sailor-turned-writer, Davis's literary versions of the legend would forever change the way the story was passed on.
[4] In this essay, I will show how John Davis became the most important purveyor of the Pocahontas narrative. Two of his works, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America During 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802 and Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas: An Indian Tale, paved the way for every artistic representation of the story that followed them. From my analysis of the Davis novels of the early 1800s, their reception, and their legacy, I will demonstrate how they made possible works like Walt Disney's animated productions Pocahontas and Pocahontas II in the 1990s. Finally, I will argue that where a story's authenticity cannot be proved, literature trumps history in the formation of its legacy.
[5] Whereas Chastellux added flavor to John Smith's accounts of the Pocahontas narrative through dramatic language, Davis focuses on the humanity of its protagonists. The result is a new, Romantic reading of the story that is innovative because of its emphasis on the motivations of its characters. This shift in focus required Davis to take significant artistic license in his portrayal of Pocahontas, John Smith, and John Rolfe, and to "make the love of the princess for Smith the primary motivation for her most famous action" – his rescue (Tilton 41). One of Davis's more tangible contributions to the story is that he lengthens it within a medium that has a wider audience. He does insert the Pocahontas narrative into his own account of his travels in America, as Chastellux had done before him, but Chastellux's version is very brief, and any deviations from the facts as they had been passed down by historians over the years are minimal. The relatively bland account of Pocahontas and John Smith published in Chastellux's Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 fits the historic mold well enough that Noah Webster used it in his highly successful educational textbook, An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking (38). Davis's account, on the other hand, would not have been selected for inclusion in schoolbooks because it takes too many liberties to be deemed historically accurate.
[6] A piece of ironic evidence in Davis's Travels suggests that initially he may not have had full confidence in the unprecedented way he was transforming the Pocahontas legend. At the end of the fifty-page digression in the Travels that tells the story of Pocahontas, he advises the reader, "In the progress of my story I have adhered inviolably to facts; rejecting every circumstance that had not evidence to support it" (321). The irony of his statement is twofold: first, Davis became acquainted with the story because it was told to him by Virginians during his travels, not because he had read John Smith's primary documents; second, he imaginatively invents passions and emotions for his characters in order to account for their crucial decisions. It is likely, however, that there is some truth to Tilton's belief that Davis provides this assurance "more as the standard disclaimer of the early writer of historical fiction than as a demand that each detail of his text be believed" (40). As will be discussed later, Davis was both young and new to serious writing, conditions likely to have made him mindful of readers' potential criticisms.
[7] In Travels, Davis is in no way subtle about his hopes for the version of the Pocahontas legend that he tells. He establishes a tone of almost exaggerated Romanticism at the first mention of John Smith, describing him as "a man who seemed to inherit every quality of a hero; a man of such bravery and conduct, that his actions would confer dignity on the page of the historian" (282). Though it is hard to say whether Davis thought of himself more as a historian or more as a writer of fiction, it is apparent that he hoped to confer dignity and merit on his own promising career. He then introduces Pocahontas:
With the story 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 emotions to their bosoms. (282-83)These opening lines intrigue readers (especially, Davis hopes, female readers) with their preview of a major historical figure's inner character, and at the same time they raise expectations of what many Americans had previously understood only as a noteworthy historical episode. Luckily for Davis and his readers, he delivers on the implicit promises made in the introduction to his version of the Pocahontas story.
[8] An inherent oddity of history's Pocahontas story is that its climax is its beginning. Anything coming before the famous rescue scene usually amounts to background information on how John Smith and the English came into contact with Pocahontas and her people. To overcome this obstacle, Davis drags out the segment of the story preceding the aborted execution scene and immediately begins to insert hints of Romanticism. He draws a contrast between the two peoples, highlighting the savagery of one and bravery of the other. As John Smith explores the area surrounding the Chikahominy River, the English and the Powhatan meet with a violent clash. In John Smith's 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, he writes that "as is supposed," the two men whom he had instructed to watch over the canoe while he was hunting for food had likely fallen asleep (157). In Travels, however, Davis makes concrete the Generall Historie's sleeping Englishmen, and the PowhatanIndians, "after scalping them in haste," discover Smith unaccompanied: "The gallant adventurer found himself beset by these barbarians; but the imminent danger to which he was exposed, only animated him to more heroism, and he determined to die with a resistance worthy his former reputation for courage" (287). His heroism animates the scene with manly action; Davis tells the reader that Smith, though alone, laid six men dead on the spot and wounded several others (287). (In his own account, Smith boasts of killing only two men.) But the Powhatan do capture Smith, not because he lacked ability but because he was "unacquainted with the nature of the soil" in a new land (287). Rapidly embellishing the confrontation scene, Davis thus engages his readers in high adventure early in the narrative, some time before we meet our heroine, Pocahontas.
[9] The pre-rescue Romanticism of Davis's narration continues as Smith is taken into captivity. Davis consistently sympathizes with Pocahontas's people, and when Smith is brought into the Indian town of Orapakes, he sets this scene: "The whole village came out to learn the particulars of what they had only heard in general terms; and now a widow was to be seen mourning her husband, a mistress bewailing her lover, and children crying for their fathers" (289). In the Davis narrative, the humanity not only of the English and of Pocahontas, but of the other Native Americans, truly constitutes an innovation—one eventually taken up by playwrights and poets of the nineteenth century, and, much later, by such filmmakers as Walt Disney in the twentieth century. Davis, however, was the first to thrust John Smith into a world that, although savage, encompassed human emotions that would resonate with his readers.
[10] While in that strange world, John Smith witnesses a steamy scene envisioned entirely by Davis. With Smith tied to a post in a tent in the middle of the night, a young Indian male enters in search of a sexual rendezvous with a young female sharing that very same tent: "The nymph rising up, the lover held to her the light, which he had carefully concealed in the hollow of his hand; and which she immediately blew out" (293). Sparked by the author's imagination, what ensues in the darkness is left to that of the reader. Immediately following the scene in the tent, Davis includes another action-oriented piece of the story, in this case the attempt on Smith's life by an Indian chief that Smith relates in his own writings (Smith 160). How he survives, however, is a product of Davis's creativity. From behind a tree, the Indian chief throws a hatchet at Smith's head, and, almost comically to the modern reader, Smith "stooped providentially at the moment to gather a flower" (292). Hence violence and sexual intrigue combine to lure readers toward the climactic rescue scene, which Davis craftily shifts closer to the middle of the story.
[11] Just before reaching the execution scene, Davis digresses within his larger digression to focus on Pocahontas: "Her looks emanated from a heart that was the seat of every tenderness," and "she could not conceal those soft emotions of which the female bosom is so susceptible" (297). These soft emotions spark the Indian princess's powerful love for John Smith. Davis foreshadows the rescue and makes a famous piece of American history more universal at the same time by declaring, "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" (297). To gain sympathy for both Smith and Pocahontas, one white, one Native, he connects them to an archetypal theme that transcends the limits of culture: "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" (296). And indeed it does discover itself here—in the bosoms of his characters and his readers alike, all joined in sympathy for the humanity Davis alone chose to give the Pocahontas legend.
[12] When Davis cannot stretch the story's rising action any further, the Romantic moment that we think of when we hear the name Pocahontas finally comes to pass. Just before Smith has his "brains beaten out," Pocahontas runs "with mournful distraction to the stone, and getting the victim's head into her arms," lays "her own upon it to receive the blow" (297-98). Davis interjects abruptly at this point to sing his praises of the Indian princess, which are included here to afford my modern readers the chuckle they will surely have: "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 thy humanity!" (298). Upon a second reading, however, Davis's tribute sounds more like a baptism of the Indian princess, with its heavy use of Christian language (ministering, angel, grace, souls, eternal light, seraph). Some readers may even hear echoes of "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee." In the following pages, Davis plants the seeds that yield future writers' emphasis on a love triangle consisting of Pocahontas, John Smith, and John Rolfe. Though Pocahontas's courageous act only "excited an emotion of gratitude" in the character of Smith and "kindled no passion in his heart," Davis promptly adds love-induced jealousy to the list of emotions in the story: when Pocahontas's father, Chief Powhatan, apologetically offers Smith young Indian women, jealousy stirs the "sweet Seraph's" heart (although the virtuous Captain denies the gesture). Perhaps not surprisingly, in Smith's own recounting of his adventures, Powhatan offers him land, not women, in exchange for "two great gunnes and a gryndstone" (Smith 163).
[13] As Smith temporarily exits the story, John Rolfe enters, bringing with him an additional dose of sentimentalism. "The breast of Rolfe," Davis says, "possessed not the ambition of Smith," but was "infinitely more accessible to the softer emotions" (308). In Smith's absence—owing to the historically accurate, life-threatening gun-powder accident that sent him back to England for medical attention—Rolfe quickly falls in love with Pocahontas. Again, this persistent theme of love makes Davis's version of the story unique. It opens the door to plot embellishments, character development, and artistic recreation of the Pocahontas legend as a whole. Davis blurs the line between history and fiction even more by including in his narration love poems (in English, of course) that he has Rolfe write to Pocahontas. He purports them to be Rolfe's own work, saying "I shall not withhold them from the public," though Davis obviously wrote them (309). The most invented Romantic scene in the story, having no basis in any historical records, occurs when Rolfe comforts a grief-stricken Pocahontas while she rains tears on a grave she believes to be Smith's. Rolfe clasps her to his "beating heart" and thereafter "drank from her lips the poison of delight" (312). Davis then uses his narrative voice to solidify notions of a developing love triangle: "The breast of a woman is, perhaps, never more susceptible of a new passion than when it is agitated by the remains of a former one" (312).
[14] In Travels, Davis cites love and other powerful emotions as causes of historical circumstance, but as we have also seen, he readily changes historical circumstance to fit his story's needs. Though many American writers have omitted Pocahontas's own captivity from her legend altogether, Davis includes it in his story, as it could only add to the drama. However, instead of Pocahontas first making Rolfe's acquaintance while being held prisoner by the English, as historical documents suggest, in Travels their love had blossomed before her kidnapping. Davis mentions Pocahontas's capture at the hands of Jamestown's Captain Argall, but he does so without delving too much into the reasons for it. Historical records tell us that Argall, on behalf of the colony, kidnapped Pocahontas to gain leverage in negotiations with the Powhatan (Hamor 3). The Jamestown colonists' need for food and Chief Powhatan's unwillingness to help them amount to a "critical situation of affairs," yet Davis focuses more on the character of Argall, the kidnapper, than on his questionable negotiation tactics (314). Apparently, Argall's "prolific brain was big with stratagem, which, however unjustifiable, met with the concurrence of the colonists. He knew the affection Powhatan bore for his daughter Pocahontas, and was determined to seize her" (314). Again, Davis carefully molds history in order to serve the Romantic ideals of his Pocahontas narrative.
[15] After Pocahontas's melodramatic death scene, Davis concludes her story with a message to his readers. He boasts, "Thus I have delivered to the world the story of Pocahontas; nor can I refrain from indulging the idea, that it was reserved for my pen, to tell with discriminating circumstances, the tale of this Indian girl" (321). Proud though they may be, Davis's words are truer than he may have known at the time he wrote them. He proved to be the first major innovator in representing Pocahontas as more than an unusual historical heroine, giving her and her people humanity that had escaped historians. By incorporating passions and emotions within the story—however imagined they may have been—Davis recreated historical characters who would no longer be known for their actions alone.
[16] What is unique about John Davis's monumental contribution to the Pocahontas legend, and, consequently, to his place in American history, is that he was an Englishman. By no means, however, was he a heralded foreigner when he arrived in America in 1798. He was one of many "inspectors"—curious foreigners hoping to indulge a taste for adventure—who came to the United States between 1776 and 1810, each eager to document his impressions of a new nation in its formative years. A sailor with a literary sense, he decided after a dozen years at sea to make literature his profession. He also decided that the transition should not entail becoming a recluse. Thus Davis made his way across the Atlantic Ocean, to a new nation, to begin a career in writing (Settlers i-iii).
[17] Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in the year 1776—also, of course, the birth year of the Republic—Davis was "reared in the lap of opulence." He never went to school as a child, and in his free time acquired a taste for adventure. While he received no formal education, he did learn to read and write. Such picaresque stories as those of Robert Drury, Captain Richard Falconer, and other books "fired his imagination." Hoping to live like his fictional heroes, Davis embarked on his first sea voyage at age eleven, and over the next twelve years he saw more of the world than most adolescents dream of. When he had his fill of the sailor life and turned to writing, a Romantic quality to his coming work seemed almost inevitable (Morrison, Introduction to Travels vi-vii).
[18] Even at the young age of twenty-two, Davis seemed to have been aware of the potential for the emergence of a national literature in America. The opening pages of one of his books, The First Settlers of Virginia, offer an idea of the status of American authorship at the turn of the eighteenth century: Davis himself says he took stock of the literary situation at the time, talking with authors at Dickins's Bookshop in Philadelphia, acquainting himself with Charles Brockden Brown, the novelist now famous for his gothic Romances, and meeting Joseph Dennie, a prominent editor and literary critic (v). Then, like many inspectors before him, Davis set out on foot to explore the existing fifteen United States. Since his youth he had been a vagabond, evidenced in part by his choice to come-of-age while a sailor, and his wandering ways also played an important role in his literary career. Hoping to entice his readers, Davis recommends himself in the preface to Travels: "This Volume will regale curiosity while man continues to be influenced by his senses and affections" (vi). He obviously understood the importance of a strong first impression, as this self-recommendation appears only in the first published edition. On the surface, Davis's words surely appeal directly to readers and publishers, but they also convey a great deal about Davis the man, suggesting that his curiosities as a writer of Romance would be heavily influenced by his own senses and affections as a traveler in America.
[19] When his Virginian friends told him the story of Pocahontas, therefore, Davis could hardly ignore the Romantic potential of the legend. Seizing the opportunity, he wove into his 1803 publication, Travels, the now-famous fifty page digression that would reinvent the Pocahontas story and add a new chapter to American folklore. His romantic personality and new career path were the perfect combination for turning history into widely-read literature.
[20] The Pocahontas introduced by Davis in Travels did more than enough to change the way she was perceived by Americans, but Davis soon had more to say about her. Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas: An Indian Tale (1805) put the story into novel form and served as the public's mark of approval of his new version of the old story. Devoted entirely to the Pocahontas narrative, Captain Smith testifies to the strong reception of Travels. As Abrams says, "The tale that Davis wove into his Travels . . . was apparently so appealing that he embellished the narrative and reissued it as the admittedly fictional Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas, published two years later" (57). Davis acknowledged as much in correspondence with his publisher: "The character of the foundation of Jamestown," he wrote, "deserves to be known; and, if in tracing the progress of his [Smith's] Colonial establishment there be superadded the adventures he was involved in, History, without losing its dignity, will acquire new attractions" (Davis to Carey). Captain Smith tells essentially the same story as the one in Travels, filled in with more details and a few extraneous subplots, such as a strong friendship between Smith and Pocahontas's brother and some ongoing diplomatic struggles between the Indians and the colonists. Pocahontas's age serves as a prime example of what a positive reception of Travels allowed Davis to do: though historians believed Pocahontas was only twelve—perhaps as young as ten—at the time she saved John Smith, Davis makes her fourteen (Strachey 65). Since her love—for Smith, and later for Rolfe—was to be the primary feature of Davis's versions of the Pocahontas story, he wanted to make sure readers would see her as capable of having mature emotions—implicitly, sexual—from the beginning (Tilton 43).
[21] Beyond the fact that Davis went on to publish a full-length novel about Smith and Pocahontas after Travels, there are other clues to the positive reception of both books. One has to do with the narrative itself. Davis's interests in writing about Pocahontas were for the most part commercial, but the book does have its political undertones. As an Englishman traveling throughout the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War, Davis would have had a sense of patriotic Americans' feelings toward monarchy. For example, when we meet the Indian emperor Powhatan, Davis takes time to describe him "sitting upon a wooden throne," where it was "ridiculous to behold the bald-headed letcher relax from his ferocity, and, waxing wanton, pinch the cheek of the damsel who most conciliated him" (295). Perhaps speaking more directly to his American readers, Davis also comments on England's King James. Robert Beverley's The History and Present State of Virginia (1705) contends that when John Rolfe married Pocahontas—Indian royalty—without the permission of the king, James was outraged that a commoner like Rolfe would so boldly make himself an English diplomat. Davis includes this incident in a scene in the novel. During her visit to England, Pocahontas is introduced at Court to James I:
who, tenacious of his prerogative, was inflamed with indignation that one of his subjects should aspire to an alliance with royal blood; The haughty Monarch would not suffer Rolfe to be admitted to his presence, and when he received Pocahontas, his looks rebuked her for descending from the dignity of a King's daughter to take up with a man of no title or family. (317-18)Davis correctly predicted that early nineteenth-century Americans would appreciate this condemnation of the king for his prejudice against this particular marriage. His unflattering depictions of both English and Indian monarchy would have appealed to many of his readers' democratic beliefs (and very likely his own) while simultaneously acknowledging Beverley, the first historian to have documented the story of King James's tantrum.
[22] Davis also speaks to another relevant political issue of his day – relations between Native Americans and the Federal U.S. government. At the conclusion of his second Pocahontas narrative, Davis writes a lamentation on the passing of the Indians, stating that "The race of Indians has been destroyed by the inroads of the Whites" (Captain Smith 114-15). Thus, when Davis emphasizes the humanity of Indian figures like Pocahontas, her brother Nantaquas, and even Powhatan, he thereby invites consideration of contemporary relations between the races, and forecasts what the continuing destruction of the Indians would mean to the future of the United States (Tilton 46). The historical-political context for Davis's Pocahontas narratives would likely have echoed with American readers, increasing their acceptance and popularity.
[23] Endorsement of his books by President Thomas Jefferson would also have influenced some readers' perceptions of Davis's books, although, of course, in many political quarters an endorsement from Jefferson would have carried no weight at all. In the opening pages of both Travels and Captain Smith, Davis makes sure to include a letter from the President relaying his respect for and encouragement of his work. In yet another rehashing of the Pocahontas legend published in 1806, entitled The First Settlers of Virginia, readers encounter these lines from the President's secretary: "President Jefferson presents his compliments to Mr. Davis, and his thanks for the book he sent him. He has subscribed with pleasure to his Indian tale." Evidently Davis understood the impact that the President's support would have on his books' reception, especially among Southerners and particularly among Virginians. The President's "subscription" to Davis's Indian tale cannot be understated, since it is Davis's version of the Pocahontas story that many Americans would subscribe to for the next two centuries.
[24] Subsequent editions of Davis's books were published at regular intervals in the two to three decades following their initial publication, a further suggestion of their popularity. A letter from a Professor at Virginia's College of William and Mary even suggests the place Davis's Pocahontas texts began to take in the academic realm. In a letter dated July 11th, 1805, Professor Louie Hue Girardin writes: "We all here rejoice at the appearance of our Indian Princess. You are a magician. Your wand possesses the power of animating even my heart" (Settlers). Though the Professor's words sound a tad effusive, they convey the pride that Davis's publications would have brought Virginians. They also foreshadow how Davis's Pocahontas gradually supplanted the one portrayed in Noah Webster's academic textbooks. Though information on the reception of Davis's books in his own country is scarce, most of his works, including Travels and Captain Smith were published in London. We do know that European readers at the time appreciated stories like the Pocahontas legend, albeit for different reasons. Many either feared or were fascinated by "savage" Indian races and their close proximity to English colonists in the New World (Abrams 56).
[25] To understand the true importance of John Davis's role in recreating the Pocahontas narrative, we must look at his work's short- and long-term legacies. As Philip Young writes in his essay "The Mother of Us All: Pocahontas Reconsidered," Davis was the writer "who really started things, by romanticizing the story in a proper way" (400). Davis was the first person to recognize and exploit the romantic potential of Pocahontas's story, and writers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed in his footsteps when they sought to retell their own versions of the tale. In the 1830s and 1840s, a number of playwrights wrote about Pocahontas, and virtually all of them were directly or indirectly influenced by the Pocahontas that appeared on the pages of Davis's Travels and Captain Smith.
[26] James Nelson Barker, for example, brought to the stage the same passionate Pocahontas that Davis's readers had already met. His theatrical 1808 production entitled The Indian Princess, or La Belle Sauvage, one of the first American plays to deal with a Native American theme, depicted a lively and loving Pocahontas much like the one in Travels. Barker emulated Davis, crafting the play's dialogue around Davis's love scenes and embellishing its rising action (Abrams 58). He even uses Davis's characterization of Pocahontas as a catalyst for his own creativity. Placing more emphasis on Pocahontas's love for Rolfe than for Smith, the highlight of Barker's play is a romantic scene in the woods featuring a love-struck Rolfe and a smitten Pocahontas locked in his embrace. Barker's play illustrates how Davis's publications at the turn of the nineteenth century created a new heroine for the American public "and spawned a host of popular Pocahontas romances that paid little attention to historical facts and often merged the characters of Smith and Rolfe" (60). These fictional representations of Pocahontas also proved important to the nation's "Indian problem," the question of what to do about Native Americans as the United States pushed their borders further and further west. Discussing the idea of assimilation through interracial marriage, Tilton writes: "with the publishing of the first admittedly fictional versions of her story by John Davis and . . . James Nelson Barker . . . the emphasis in representations of her narrative had begun a relentless shift" (26). The process of shifting Pocahontas from "wife of Rolfe" to "savior of Smith," he argues, contributed greatly to the end of the idea of intermarriage as a solution to the Indian problem. Barker's La Belle Sauvage was just one of these influential Romantic plays inspired by Davis, and throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, many more would follow.
[27] The ripple effect starting with Davis also reached nineteenth-century writers with broader social and political agendas. Robert Dale Owen's 1837 play, Pocahontas: A Historical Drama, appropriated and recreated history in order to publicize the writer's own radical theories about capitalism, the exploitation of women, and the evil influence of colonialism (129). In 1827, Catherine Maria Sedgwick wrote the historical romance novel Hope Leslie, which promoted equality for both women and Native Americans. She even inserts into her narrative a character inspired by Pocahontas. Magawisca is Hope Leslie's selfless young Indian girl who actually saves the white Everell from execution at the hands of her people, losing her arm in the process. Even a Massachusetts novelist could bring Pocahontas into a New England story and count on her readers to recognize the allusion and applaud the Pocahontas figure. Though John Davis's pioneering interpretation of the Pocahontas legend was not so pragmatic, it did pave the way for these types of works carrying social and political aims.
[28] Perhaps ironically, Davis's impact on the Pocahontas story slipped into history as subsequent generations of writers created their own versions, but the ripple effect he started is still expanding today. The early twentieth century saw works like Hart Crane's The Bridge, a narrative poem incorporating Pocahontas into its optimistic depiction of the United States after World War I. Written in response to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Crane's poem used Pocahontas and her humanity as one episode in a Romantic narration of America's cultural history. Then, toward the end of the twentieth century, Davis's legacy made possible a recreation of the Pocahontas story that would reach a wider audience than ever before – Walt Disney's animated feature films, Pocahontas (1995) and Pocahontas II (1998). Disney introduced a headstrong, beautiful, and very adult-looking Pocahontas to millions of children worldwide. (Admittedly, I recall first meeting the character of Pocahontas at the movie theater as a youngster before ever reading her name in a history book.) The animated Pocahontas undoubtedly owes her engaging personal and even physical attributes to Davis's books. Even John Smith's compass, which "excited the wonder of the Indians" for the first time in Davis's Travels, is one of the more memorable emblems of the Disney movies. In the twenty-first century, creative writers like Paula Gunn Allen and William Vollman would cite dreams, even direct communication with Pocahontas, as inspiration for their own Pocahontas stories. But dreams and telepathy aside, none of these writers could have acted on their unique inspirations to retell history in a new way had Davis not done so first.
[29] In the two hundred years since John Davis first published Travels and Captain Smith, fictional representations of the Pocahontas legend have obscured history's disputed version of the story. Davis, an Englishman, recognized the Romantic potential of Virginians' favorite historical narrative and rewrote it, taking several artistic liberties that ultimately made it appeal to a much wider audience. Perhaps another writer, another foreigner even, could have seen the same opportunity, but Davis saw it first. His pioneering representation of Pocahontas turned noteworthy Virginian history into lasting American folklore. "John Davis set out to make the Pocahontas narrative his own, and in many ways he was successful," providing the model for countless novelists, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers who would try telling their own Romantic versions of the tale (Tilton 47).
[30] Davis was also successful because he removed the Pocahontas narrative from the exclusive preserve of historians and biographers. In the two hundred years prior to Davis's arrival in America, not a single one of the many debates surrounding the veracity of the story and its particulars was ever settled. Historians could neither prove nor disprove whether Pocahontas had really rescued John Smith, but Davis's fiction could make a very human Pocahontas as real as any other historical figure. Thanks to John Davis's version of the legend, any child who has seen Disney's version will tell you Pocahontas saved Smith, and someday their children will say the same. Thus demonstrating that where history cannot get its facts straight, fiction takes the lead, Americans will continue to believe in a compelling story even if it may never have happened.
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---. The First Settlers of Virginia. New York: I. Riley and Company, 1806.
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Pocahontas. Dirs. Michael Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. Perf. Irene Bedard and Mel Gibson. DVD. Walt Disney Company, 1995.
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