John Pagano will tell you that Pocahontas is a part of our country’s foundation.
As the historical interpretation supervisor at Henricus Historical Park in Chester, he manages the interpreters who work the various living history exhibits there – the Powhatan village, English fort and church, tobacco plantation, Reverend Alexander Whitaker’s parsonage, and hospital. His core responsibility is to organize the themes and research of the site, the interpreter’s methods of presentations, and to make sure that encounters with the public are accurate and cohesive.
As part of that research, he became familiar with the years Pocahontas lived as an English woman after her baptism and subsequent marriage to John Rolfe in 1614. When asked to join a civic delegation going to England in 2017 for the 400th anniversary of her death there, Pagano retraced her steps and visited her grave. It was then he decided to research and write a book about Pocahontas’ English years. “I felt people would want to know more, even if it were just better questions and attempts and finding answers, despite not having any written words by the woman,” he says.
The result was “The English Pocahontas: Ten Essential Questions,” which deconstructs the often romanticized view of Pocahontas, and examines the stressors she would have experienced before her untimely death. Pagano will give a talk about his book on Thursday, Nov. 9 at the Libbie Mill Area Library.
Pagano sees layers to the public’s fascination with Pocahontas, a “curious romanticism,” which he insists didn’t start with the Disney movie. Rather, he says it’s been around ever since the English, and eventually the entire United States, put her in their history books, albeit not in a wholly accurate depiction. “Sometimes media and education attempt to simplify history for their audiences,” he says. “Over the centuries, people wanted to believe that her character, presence, and even appearance was one thing, yet it most often wasn’t exactly the accurate version. Historical research and questioning often bring those perceptions back to greater realities.”
His research showed that Pocahontas had a very layered and nuanced life as a daughter of a monarch, her father Chief Powhatan, one that was made extremely complicated after the English created the Virginia colony. She was close friends with Captain John Smith and later married to John Rolfe. From this marriage to Rolfe, a Powhatan-Anglo alliance and peace was created. “It seems that people believed that Pocahontas gave up much of herself to make peace happen, even the loss of her own happiness,” Pagano says. “Ultimately, Pocahontas becoming English and marrying Rolfe allowed the English to stay in Virginia and the British Empire was born, and with that, centuries later, the United States.”
Disney movies and sanitized history books don’t always address the fact that from the time Pocahontas became an English woman after her conversion in 1614, she faced many physical, emotional, and intellectual stressors. The weight and compression of wearing English linen and woolen clothing would have been a great burden for her. Add in an English diet of beer, bread, and cheese with various sugars, salt and fatty meats that she would never have consumed as a Powhatan, and her body would have endured physiological discomforts.
Emotionally, she wouldn’t see her first husband, Kocuom, or her family again. Then there’s the difficult matter of having been given away by her father to the English, essentially married to a stranger, John Rolfe. “She was used as bargaining chip between two cultures so each would gain something from the alliance,” says Pagano. “Intellectually, she had to make the switch between Pagan worship and Christianity, so when she visited England in 1616, the scale of European populations and strangeness of the culture would been a lot to consider.”
During his research, Pagano was struck by how Pocahontas was considered by some of her English friends and associates to be the demonstrative model of what they wanted the Powhatans to be: fellow English citizens. “Apart from that, she met Captain John Smith while in England and yelled at him in a rather awkward encounter because he didn’t think to have anyone going to Virginia inform her that he was well and alive,” he says. “It’s true that she and Smith were closely associated. That’s one fact that Disney and the history books had correct.”
As for future generations, Pagano hopes they’ll regard Pocahontas as a brilliant, strong, and curious person.
“She was a transformative character in our history and shaped our past,” he says. “Most likely, she loved both cultures and wanted them to live in peace together.”
The book talk “Historically Speaking: The English Pocahontas” with John Pagano will be held on Thursday, Nov. 9 at 7 p.m. at Libbie Mill Area Library, https://henricolibrary-va.libcal.com/event/10815025
