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  As the new fort of San Diego rose up in Acapulco over the year 1616, the Dutch engineer Adrian Boot must have watched with pride. Shaped like a five-pointed star, it was placed on a hill overlooking the bay, called El Morro (The Nose); there it was defensible to attack from any direction. In a nod to the traditional hierarchies of Spanish society, the five protruding sides were known by names such as King, Duke, and so on. On the interior it consisted of a number of domed rooms arranged around a central courtyard, providing ample space for provisions, ammunition, and soldiers. The fort was intended to be large enough to provide shelter for residents and soldiers if necessary, while also training powerful cannons upon the bay. Signal fires would warn the town of an impending attack.

  While the Acapulco trade fair was in full swing, the construction was well underway and several of the heavy artillery pieces had been cast. In May the supervisor in charge of the construction wrote that it was a triumph of military architecture. Well constructed and architecturally advanced, the fort would be substantially finished by the end of the year; the archbishop of Mexico reported that it was complete when he visited in January 1617. It would be one of the three strongest fortresses in Spanish America (the others are located at Veracruz, Acapulco’s Gulf Coast counterpart, and at Cartagena, Colombia, the Caribbean slave trade port). Under its protection Acapulco would never again be taken.

  Fortification at Veracruz, 1628. Color lithograph from a watercolor probably by Johannes Vingboons based on a drawing by Adrian Boot. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

  In 1621 Boot would be called upon again for work on fortifications, this time at Veracruz on the Gulf coast. Boot’s representation of the fortifications, while capturing the tropical light and ambience, is laid out on a grid-like plan suggesting an orderly and systematic mind.

  Boot made his final report on the project on February 4, 1617. He then resumed work on the Mexico City drainage problem, and later on fortifications in Veracruz. Yet twenty years later he would be imprisoned by the Inquisition. What occasioned the trouble? A letter sent from the king to the viceroy of Mexico reports that many of Boot’s colleagues, jealous of his salary of a hundred ducats a month, were his bitter enemies. Enrico Martinez, in his role as interpreter for the Inquisition, no doubt had fed the resentment before his death in 1632. Boot’s origins in the Low Countries could have brought him under suspicion, yet he had lived and worked in Mexico for twenty-three years. It is hard to escape the suspicion that, after nearly a quarter century in New Spain, the engineer was done in by office politics.

  A conventionalizing twentieth-century representation of the Basque hell-raiser Catalina de Erauso featuring Mexican film star Maria Félix in The Lieutenant Nun (1944). Movie viewers were supposed to believe that the starlet’s female identity could not be discerned beneath her male disguise. The true story of early-seventeenth-century women is richer and more interesting than such reductionist renderings.

  2Shakespeare’s Sisters

  In June 1616 a desk clerk in a London hotel checked in a party of travelers that was remarkable even to his jaded eyes. The lodgers were a mixed group of about ten or twelve men, women, and children. The most startling was a shaman named Uttamatomakkin. His face was boldly painted in bright colors. His hair was shaved on one side of his head and braided to a length of several feet on the other. He wore a breechcloth and carried a long, notched stick, on which he had tried for a time to record an estimate of England’s population before giving up the attempt as hopeless. He was probably traveling in the company of his wife, a daughter of the mamanatowick, his people’s paramount chief, Powhatan. The clerk must have eyed him nervously, because Uttamatomakkin was in a foul mood — he found everything about London annoying, especially the condescension of its citizens. He would be unimpressed with its King James, about whom he had heard so much, for when English colonists had given Powhatan a white dog the chief himself had fed it. But after Uttamatomakkin had crossed the ocean the English king had given him nothing, proving that he was ignorant of the standards of diplomacy of civilized people. “I am better,” he said, “than a white dog!”

  Also among the party was a Virginia tobacco farmer named John Rolfe. He was traveling with his young son, Thomas, and his nineteen-year-old wife, whose name prior to her marriage was Matoaka but who would be known in London by her Christian name, as “the Lady Rebecca.” She was Uttamatomakkin’s wife’s half-sister; both were daughters of Powhatan. The group, led by firebrand Virginia governor Sir Thomas Dale — who had hanged a man on board ship during the ocean crossing — had been assembled as a promotion on behalf of the managers of the Virginia Company, a joint business venture financed by a group of London shareholders who were increasingly impatient to see a return on their investment. But it was Matoaka, whose childhood name had been Pocahontas (“Mischief”), who was to be the celebrity of the party.

  It is said that the inn the travelers checked into was the Bell Savage, which was located on London’s Ludgate Hill, not far from St. Paul’s Cathedral; the site is now mostly a parking lot. The inn had doubled as a playhouse since about the 1560s, making it one of the first stages of the Shakespearean era, and one of the few that somehow managed to operate within the city walls, despite prohibitions against such entertainments. The inn could not have offered the most tranquil lodging experience, as the playhouse had presented martial arts exhibitions by the London Company of the Masters of Defense along with such entertainments as bear baiting and demonstrations of song and wit by actors such as Richard Tarlton. Theatrical “enterludes” were also part of the fare. In 1579 a writer critical of theatrical entertainments made an exception of “the twoo prose Bookes plaied at the Bel-Sauage” (whose name derived from that of an early owner of the establishment), “where you shall finde neuer a woorde without wit, neuer a line without pith, neuer a letter placed in vaine.” By the turn of the century, however, the entertainments had been suppressed. Yet the alien, noisy, and aromatic London setting must still have made sleep difficult for the American visitors accustomed to the green forests of the Chesapeake Bay river drainage.

  An early inn and playhouse, the White Hart at Southwark. From Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses (1917).

  The Virginia Company’s delegation to London, including the Powhatan maiden Matoaka (Pocahontas), probably stayed in an inn similar to this one — a long tradition maintains that it was the Bell Savage in London’s Ludgate Hill. The arrangement of such inns made them suitable for performances: the yard served as a stage and the stables as dressing rooms for the actors. Lower classes craned for a view from the outer edges of the yard while the more privileged looked down from the upper levels.

  The party’s stay at the Bell Savage is presented as fact in many sources, including P. L. Barbour’s The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith; Anthony Parr’s Ben Jonson, The Staple of News; Camilla Townsend’s Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma; Alden Vaughan’s Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776; Ben Weinreb’s The London Encyclopaedia; Grace Steele Woodward’s Pocahontas; and many more. Yet not a single comment exists from the time of her visit that mentions Pocahontas staying there. Rather, the story’s persistence reflects an enduring association that was deeply held among the colonizing powers.

  Europeans had long viewed America as a “belle savage.” The word America is a feminized version of the name of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. The feminization was not inadvertent. On early maps the continent is often represented by a naked native woman. Columbus had set the tone at the outset, when he claimed to have discovered the Garden of Eden on the Caribbean coast of South America — it was shaped, he said, like a nipple on a woman’s breast. Much later, when England entered the Caribbean, Walter Raleigh still saw the region as a woman ripe for taking: “Guayana,” he said, “is a country that hath yet her maidenhead.” The travel writer Sam Purchas, an active cheerleader for the Virginia Company, saw Virginia in similar terms,
as “a virgin … not yet polluted with Spaniards’ lust”; the name Virginia (honoring England’s Virgin Queen) encapsulates this point of view. The role of the colonizers, Purchas advised, was to woo her and make her “not a wanton minion, but an honest and Christian wife.” Needless to say, as a wife she would serve in a subordinate position. If the early returns from the Virginia colony were not impressive, William Crashaw, in a sermon to “Adventurers and Planters of the Virginia Company,” advised, the suitors should not lose heart. Crashaw urged the “adventurers” (investors) to be patient with the results of the “planters” (settlers), on the grounds that even great leaders were once infants “carried in the arms of sillie women.”

  In an elegy entitled “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” John Donne inverted the conceit of colonialism as sexual conquest, comparing his mistress to the continent:

  Licence my roving hands, and let them go

  Before, behind, between, above, below.

  O, my America, my Newfoundland,

  My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,

  My mine of precious stones, my empery;

  How am I blest in thus discovering thee!

  To enter in these bonds, is to be free;

  Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.

  Elsewhere, however, the poet’s imperious conceit breaks down, and his lover appears a more treacherous continent:

  The hair a forest of ambushes,

  Of springes, snares, fetters and manacles;

  The brown becalms us when ‘tis smooth and plain,

  And when ‘tis wrinkled shipwrecks us again.

  For Londoners, Matoaka — the Indian “princess” who as a naked girl had once turned cartwheels on the quad in Jamestown but now was making the rounds as a Christian lady bedecked in London finery — embodied and validated their paternalistic vision. Matoaka herself addressed John Smith, the man she was to become famous for rescuing from execution by her father, on this theme. According to Smith, he visited her with several other people in the country home outside London where she and her son and husband had relocated. Upon seeing him “she turned about” and “obscured her face, as not seeming well contented.” She was left alone to cool off. When — hours later — she had collected herself and returned to the group, she confronted Smith, telling him, “You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father being in his land a stranger, and by the same reason so must I do you.” Smith replied smoothly that it would not be right for her to call him “father” because she was nobility, the daughter of Powhatan, a king. To this Matoaka answered that Smith was “not afraid to come into my father’s country, and cause fear in him and all his people (but me).” Yet, she said, “you fear you here I should call you father. I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child …”

  The encounter between Matoaka and John Smith in England is one of history’s palimpsests. Virtually all of the many writers on the Pocahontas story mention it, and all interpret it according to their perceptions of the participants, particularly of Smith. He is the only source for this incident, which nonetheless has the flavor of authenticity and is one of the few times we hear Matoaka speak.

  Smith’s admirers tend to believe that Matoaka was flustered by a surprise encounter with a man she had loved, when she had thought him dead. Smith encouraged this reading. Over the years he gradually upped her age in retelling the story, presumably to make a romance more plausible, or less prurient; in fact she was no more than ten or eleven years old when Smith was held captive by Powhatan. Throughout his writings Smith tells of admiring women coming to his assistance when he is in tight spots. He reports that as a slave in Turkey he was protected by a young Muslim princess named Charatza Tragabigzanda. On his escape, Callamata, the wife of a Cossack chief, came to his aid. After he was shipwrecked in France a Madame Chanoie befriended and tended to him. In Virginia, Smith reported, “thirty young women came naked out of the woods (only covered behind and before with a few green leaves), their bodies all painted, some white, some red, some black, some parti-colored” and danced a ring around a fire, offering themselves to him, each in turn crying “Love you not me?”

  Despite this suspect pattern in his narrative, Smith has many champions, especially among those who think of him as one of the founding fathers of America. In historian J. A. Leo Lemay’s assessment, for example, Smith was “energetic, disciplined, assertive, brave, independent … practical yet idealistic, studious and learned as well as a man of action, a social visionary as well as a pragmatist, and a kindly humanitarian … [with] nearly universal competence.” Lemay and others tend to have faith in the veracity of Smith’s stories, many of which have indeed been substantiated from other sources.

  There are problems, however, with Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas. According to Smith, in December 1607 he and two companions were exploring (or perhaps trying to extort corn from the Indians — his story varies) upriver from the English settlement at Jamestown when they were attacked by Powhatan Indians. Smith was captured and taken to the confederacy’s leader, Powhatan, father of Pocahontas (somewhat confusingly he was known by a throne name that was the same as the name of his people, and not by his regular name, Wahunsenacawh). As Smith told and retold this story, his part in it swelled with the passage of time — and the passing of witnesses to his Virginia adventures. In a 1608 account of his capture, for example, Smith reported that he held off a small group of Indians with a pistol until being overwhelmed by a force of two hundred men. In 1612 he revised the story and now held off two hundred men until getting mired in a bog. By 1624 the party had grown to three hundred men, with Smith suffering several wounds not previously mentioned. In this version he single-handedly held off the warriors even after falling into the bog, being captured only after he had become too numb with cold to continue.

  The Portraictuer of Captayne Iohn Smith, Admirall of New England, seventeenth century, after Simon Van de Passe. Engraving.

  The rousing tales of John Smith, such as his report of beheading three Turks in combat, gave rise to a satirical poem by David Lloyd, a Welsh clergyman, entitled “The Legend of Captain Iones.” Published in 1631, the year of Smith’s death, it parodied his autobiography. The poem proved popular and went through six printings. According to Lloyd, “Nor need we stir our brains for glorious stuff / To paint his praise, himself hath done enough.”

  Powhatan, believing Smith to be a leader of the English colony, tried to coopt him into his confederacy, as he had done with other vassal chiefs. The two men shared a banquet, and then Smith was released back to Jamestown. The entire legend of Pocahontas’s rescue of Smith while he was Powhatan’s prisoner stems from this brief passage from his Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, 1624 (Smith refers to himself in the third person):

  At last they brought him to Meronocomoco, where was Powhatan their Emperor. Here more then two hundred of those grim Courtiers stood wondering at him, as he had beene a monster; till Powhatan and his trayne had put themselues in their greatest braveries. Before a fire vpon a seat like a bedsted, he sat covered with a great robe, made of Rarowcun [raccoon] skinnes, and all the tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 to 18 yeares, and along on each side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds; but every one with something: and a great chayne of white beads about their necks. At his entrance before the King, all the people gaue a great shout. The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then 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, Pocaho
ntas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne vpon his to saue him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should liue to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselues.

  The only source for the legend is again Smith himself, and whether it happened at all has been the subject of lively debate since the nineteenth century. Because the story is difficult to prove or disprove, the debate will doubtless continue. But it is hard to reconcile Smith’s romantic tale of rescue with what is known of Powhatan practices, and it promotes a ten- or eleven-year-old girl to a position of power that has no precedent in this context. Anthropologist Helen Rountree, the leading researcher on Virginia Indians and an honorary member of the Nansemond and Upper Mattaponi tribes, has written that “the ‘rescue’ is part of a sequence of events that would be farcical if so many people did not take it seriously as ‘Virginia history.’… Pocahontas did not rescue John Smith. Even if she had been inside the house at the time, he would not have needed rescuing from anything other than overeating.”