Pocahontas Statue, Gravesend

[poliphilo]

No-one knows what killed Pocanhontas, but she must have been wide open to any infection that was going the rounds. She was taken ill shortly after boarding a ship bound for Virginia and died in the arms of her husband, John Rolfe. She was buried in the chancel of St George's Church at Gravesend- a place of honour befitting her status as a daughter of "King" Powhatan. She was in her early 20s.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

So familiar. :o)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Idealized and romanticized, but a nice statue, I think.

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

Utterly fascinating. Pocahontas is an American folk hero. We all grow up knowing the name and a little bit of the story, but I had never heard as much of it as I did in your blog post this morning. Of course, there was a Disney movie, but I've never seen it. I have no idea how accurate it is. (I doubt any)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

She was the subject of an interesting discussion on In Our Time quite recently.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched the Disney movie either but I gather it's a complete travesty.

I've been finding out about Pocahontas (by which I mean looking her up in wikipedia.) It was a brief but quite extraordinary life.

[sovay]

Have you seen Terence Malick's The New World? It is a beautiful distillation of dirt-under-the-nails, corn-husk, leaf-mold reality and the myths as John Smith told them and the life underneath the myths as the woman who went by Pocahontas and Matoaka and Rebecca Rolfe might have told them, which the film has to imagine; I went into it with some skepticism and came out thinking it was extraordinarily beautiful. Q'orianka Kilcher is amazing.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't, but I may have to.

Pocahontas was a remarkable woman.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Her, and 99% of her people. I did see The New World, seems like it was OK.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

She had a son who became a man of property on both sides of the Atlantic- and he had a daughter through whom the bloodline of Pocahontas continues through to the present day.

Just saying...

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Yes, there was a lot of money made in the process.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well of course, but I hate to be wholly cynical about the process. From what we know about the Jamestown colony- which isn't a huge amount- the early relationship between settlers and natives was edgy but basically friendly.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

By the time of the Jamestown settlement, the native population of the east coast had already been decimated by plagues brought by cod fishermen who came in the 1500's. Whole villages had been wiped out and could still be seen, littered with skeletons. The extermination of the Indians over the next 250 years was relentless and shameful. I'll grant that hatred of the Indians and the self serving righteousness of the English (and Americans) wasn't universally held, but it was certainly a majority view.

My first ancestor in America came from Plymouth in 1633. The puritans and pilgrims were a nasty grim folk full of righteous prejudice and superstition. I'm afraid I don't hold them in high regard.

A very good book about the indigenous Americans before contact with Europe is Charles C. Mann's "1491".