Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 9, 1994 TAG: 9411090049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
The bronze statue is mostly green with 70 years of weathering outdoors at Jamestown Island, but Pocahontas' forearms gleam dully, free of corrosion, where each year hundreds of thousands of tourists touch her, said exhibit curator William M.S. Rasmussen.
Adoration and universal recognition have marked the history and legend of Pocahontas, the Powhatan Indian chief's daughter who saved Capt. John Smith from execution and the first permanent English settlement in North America from extinction.
``She's always appealed to Americans. Our civilized society is corrupt, and to men not living in a state of virtue, Pocahontas is more virtuous,'' Rasmussen said. ``And she seems to validate that theory: She lessened bloodshed, reduced warfare and contributed to the survival of the Jamestown colony.''
The exhibit, ``Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend,'' and a Gloucester County celebration planned for Nov. 19 are parts of a series of events marking the 400th anniversary of Pocahontas' birth in 1995. It will culminate in the release of a Walt Disney Co. animated film in April.
Disney helped sponsor the exhibit's catalog and will also take part in the Gloucester events, showing a 41/2-minute trailer of the film, ``Pocahontas.''
Disney describes the film as showing Jamestown from the Indian perspective and telling the story of an Indian girl and the choices she faces from the time the colonists arrive in 1607 until Smith's departure in 1609. Mel Gibson will provide the voice of Smith; Shirley ``Little Dove'' Custalow McGowan, a Powhatan Indian from the Mattaponi Reservation near West Point, was a model for Disney artists.
Another highlight of the Gloucester celebration will be the unveiling of a statue by Orange County sculptor Adolf Sehring showing a young Pocahontas with a basket of vegetables and an outstretched handful of corn. Gloucester is where Pocahontas' father, Powhatan, the chief of 32 Algonquin-speaking tribes, lived along the York River. The Pocahontas Celebration Committee has raised more than $27,000 in private donations to pay for the casting and installation of the statue.
Committee chairwoman Beth Richardson has invited 4,000 descendants of Pocahontas to Gloucester, and she expects about 30,000 people to attend from as far away as California, New Mexico and Washington. The celebration also will include American Indian crafts, foods and dancing, and a parade.
``It will be the first time in probably 350 years that the white descendants have met their Native American cousins,'' she said.
The Richmond exhibit explores the life of the Powhatan Indians and six episodes from the life of Pocahontas, beginning with her dramatic rescue of Smith, one of the leaders of the colonial settlement founded at Jamestown. That summer, Smith was sailing up the Chickahominy River looking for a route to China when he was captured by Powhatan's half-brother.
After the Indians took Smith to several villages, where he was displayed and examined, he was taken before Powhatan. There, Smith wrote, ``two great stones were brought ... as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines.'' But Pocahontas ``got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.''
Powhatan relented before this demonstration by his ``dearest daughter,'' Smith wrote, and the captain was allowed to return to Jamestown.
Rasmussen said some historians have questioned the rescue story and the veracity of Smith's uncorroborated report, which the exhibit illustrates with engravings from Smith's 1624 ``Generall Historie.''
``Especially at the time of the Civil War, when sectionalist historians picked up the Pocahontas story and Northern historians sought to discredit it,'' he said. Confederates embraced two Virginians, George Washington and Pocahontas, as the father and mother of their country, and a $100 Confederate treasury note on display includes engravings of both.
But ``practically everything that Smith said that can be verified has been,'' Rasmussen said.
Some ethnologists have suggested the rescue story was untrue because the Powhatan Indians would have reserved clubbing for a petty criminal, and inflicted a more excruciating, honorable death on a leader such as Smith. Others have said Smith's courage was being tested.
``But perhaps Pocahontas believed he was going to be killed,'' Rasmussen said. ``There's just no reason not to believe him - and we know that something must have happened, they must have met there, because they had a special relationship'' afterwards.
Despite many romantic interpretations of that bond, the 12-year-old girl and the 27-year-old captain were not lovers, Rasmussen said. ``She probably did admire him, but there's no evidence of anything else.''
But Pocahontas brought food to the starving colonists, and two years later warned Smith that her father planned to kill him and wipe out the colony when he realized both that the settlement was weak and the colonists' settlement was permanent.
Engravings from a 17th-century encyclopedia on America and a colonial revival painting from the early 20th century depict the abduction of Pocahontas by one of the Jamestown colonists. Capt. Samuel Argall kidnapped her in 1609 to exchange for prisoners and food. But while Pocahontas lived with the colonists, she became the English's first convert to Christianity and in 1614 married one of her religious instructors, colonist John Rolfe.
The Rolfes and their young son, Thomas, left for England in 1616 on a trip sponsored by colony founders the Virginia Company. Pocahontas apparently met King James I and was reunited with Smith.
The company gave the Rolfes money to return to Virginia to start a school for Indians, but Pocahontas died at the beginning of the return trip in 1617 at Gravesend, England.
by CNB