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by Jerome Richard

Pocahontas, the cartoon, is gone, along with the crowds the movie inspired to visit Jamestown two years ago. But the fort where it all began was re-discovered just last fall, making this an ideal time to visit the birthplace of our country.

For a long time it was the other way around. The fort had disappeared, washed into the James River many believed, while the Indian Princess grew from actual person to legend to Disney cartoon character.

Jamestown is preserved as the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America. Before that, it was an Algonquian Indian encampment called Paspahegh, but Pocahontas didn't live there then. The Indians didn't live there all the time either. It wasn't really a fit place for a permanent settlement. But today you can see a recreation of an Indian village very like the one in which Pocahontas lived. To the English who arrived in 1607, the little peninsula they would soon call Jamestown had some important advantages. The water was deep enough for sea-going ships, it commanded the James River against a Spanish intrusion, the narrow neck that connected it to land made it defensible against the Indians (erosion by the river would later turn the peninsula into an island), and it was uninhabited. Its disadvantages, however, would eventually cause the weary colonists to move. The ground was not fertile, the area was surrounded by swamps (one, adjacent to the settlement, was called the "Pitch and Tar Swamp"), it was mosquito infested, and there was little potable water. In the movie, Captain John Smith is a hero. To his comrades, he was a braggart and potential tyrant whom they came very near hanging on their way to America.

While not quite a tyrant, he did prove to be a stern commander. When conditions in the little colony reached a crisis, only Smith was disciplined enough to exert leadership. Hunger, Indian attacks, fire, and disease reduced the original 105 colonists to a mere 38 by the time he took over one year after the landing. Smith forced the idle noblemen among them to work and got the Indians to trade with the colony, providing much needed corn and game. He also oversaw construction of successive forts. In late 1996, remnants of the original fort were discovered in the form of decayed wood that were part of the palisade wall. That enabled archeologists to establish the size and triangular shape of the bastion. Governor Gorge Allen of Virginia said: "We have discovered America's birthplace--the original fort."

That fort burned in 1608 and was replaced with a larger one. A recreation of the fort at it appeared in 1610, after repairs to the 1608 structure, is at Jamestown Settlement now. Relations with the local Indians, whose chief was Powhatan, ranged from tolerance to hostility. The English were often dependant on the Indians for food; the Indians resented the intrusion into their land. Smith's policy towards the Indians was to be conciliatory when that worked, but to quickly resort to force when it didn't.  The story we all learned as children about Pocahontas rescuing Captain Smith is probably only partially true. In December, 1607, Smith and some other colonists were out foraging for food when they were captured by the Indians. Chief Powhatan let them go, which may be the basis for the story Smith told many years later of Pocahontas, who was Powhatan's daughter, intervening on his behalf. There is no corroboration for the story and many authorities doubt it, but as Arthur Quinn writes in A New World, his history of colonial America, "If it never really happened as Smith recounts it, it should have. "The real Pocahontas did win the hearts of those first English settlers in America. In fact, without her, Jamestown, like the earlier settlement at Roanoke, might have disappeared. Of all the local Indians, she was the one most entranced by the strange people who settled in her land. As a child she often visited Jamestown and entertained the colonists by turning cartwheels. She even warned the colonists of impending Indian attacks. The English kidnapped her in an effort to win concessions from Powhatan. Both the English and the Indians were surprised when Pocahontas announced that she preferred to remain in the colony. By her choice and her regard for the colonists, she was the instrument of at least a temporary peace between the parties.  While Disney and legend have her marrying Captain Smith, history records her marriage to a colonist named John Rolfe. In a letter to the governor of the colony, Rolfe asked permission to marry Pocahontas "to whom my dear and best thoughts are and have been a long time so entangled."

Whether or not she loved him is less clear, but they were married April 5, 1614. The church where they were wed was the third of five successive places of worship in Jamestown. The brick tower of the fifth church, erected in 1647 as an addition to the church of 1639, is the only 17th century structure still standing. In a Memorial Church built in 1907 you can see part of the foundations of the fourth and fifth churches.  The Rolfes went to England where Pocahontas, given the Christian name Rebecca, was popular at court. On the day they were to return to Jamestown, she died, apparently of pneumonia. Rolfe was important to the colony in another way: he began the commercial growing of tobacco. It proved the economic salvation of the settlement since the gold the settlers originally hoped to find was not there. This was the seed of the plantation system. Jamestown was also where slavery took root in America. The first Africans were brought there in 1619, perhaps more as involuntary indentured servants than slaves, but by 1638 a slave market existed.  In 1699, weary of fires, mosquitoes, and bad water, the settlers abandoned Jamestown and moved to Williamsburg, about seven miles inland and on higher ground. Jamestown's population never much exceeded 1,000, but in its 92 years of existence it set the stage for much of what was to come in America.

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