Empire: World History - 148. America: The Empire of Liberty

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

The Empire that dare not speak its name. America was born through an explicit rejection of empire as it forced the British from the continent and indeed many of its citizens would baulk at the suggestion their nation is an empire. Yet, over its lifetime the empire of liberty, as Thomas Jefferson himself once called it, has continually flexed its imperial muscles. In our newest series, William and Anita will take you from the great plains of North America to the shores of the Philippines and explore the history of the American Empire. In today’s episode, William and Anita look at the first colonial interactions on the North American continent as the British land in Virginia and establish contact with the Powhatan Native Americans. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight. or the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming. And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

Or say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, or the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now, it's a big old clue. Hello, welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. Hello from me, William Dribble. I've been listening to that. And it took me several lines to get what that. was and it was not immediately obvious. Go on, go on. Well, you know, normally it's performed at all

sporting events. As you know, I was in America and Canada this year. You were going, looking for eclipses. I was indeed. But what happens normally is that you see a whole bunch of sporting celebrities doing the first two lines. Oh, can you see? And then the mouths just tail off because not many people know the lyrics or sing all of the lyrics. Don't write at me angrily. I've seen it with my own eyes. It sort of dwindles away. But I thought it would be a good sort of leaping off point because this is our big announcement. Our big new series for Empire, it is America, the history of the evolution of the United States. I just found it really helpful to sort of look at that national anthem and look at the origins of it because it also tells you so much about the history of America. So first of all,

this is a secondhand tune, by the way, wasn't composed for the national anthem. Who is it composed for? What was the original? It was a British composer, number one, who was called John Stafford Smith, who composed it in around 1773. But he sort of like shelved it. He made this lovely piece of music, and it is a stirring piece of it. And did it have a different set of words at that point? No words. It was lyric free until 1814 when an American lawyer and an amateur poet Francis Scott Key set his poems.

He also dusted something off the shelf, which was called the Defence of Fort McKenry to the music. Now, it's really important to know what that defence was of this fort. Yes, I mean, this is all stuff I have never heard of. We've heard those words a million times, sung recited, never ever thought what it meant. Well, this is what this series is all about, my friend. So this defence was against the British who had bombarded this fort to smithereens. And it was this vision of looking up at the sky and still seeing this flag defiantly waving over the remnants of this once great fort. the defiance of America. But it's a defiance and an identity of America in opposition to the

British Empire. And I think all of that, you know, this is a thing that's full of contradictions because the lyrics are about the defiance of the British Empire. The tune, however, is a British tune. That's such a nice symbol. Don't you think? I should say that Anita did not warn me fully what she was getting up to when she said, I got something to recite. I know better than to try stop her when she's in full poetic flow. Wasn't it worth it? But the other thing is, is that it also symbolizes. So apart from the fact it's America trying to define itself as not British, and therefore not having the values of the British Empire, even though it has a British tune. But it's also now a national anthem that has come under a lot of scrutiny and people are saying

in America, we don't want this anymore because as well as being a lawyer and amateur poet, this man was also a slave owner. So it is all the complexity of what we're going to be hopefully unraveling over the next few weeks about the empire of America. And I first of Well, even that idea, William, is quite controversial because some may say it's a country, it's not an empire. What are you talking about? There are people who get very upset when you suggest that America is itself a colonial project or that it has an empire, two different ideas, both of which are undeniably true, in my view. So what we're going to be exploring in this series is how white European settlers largely colonised, then conquered great chunks of the North American continent, aided by microbes and European diseases, which whittled down the massive Native American population, which was already there.

Yes, it was. Again, it's not an empty land. You know, when people say Columbus discovered America, it's as if he sort of walked in and it was a vacant parking lot. I mean, you know, people lived there for hundreds and thousands of years before. But this argument about whether it was an empire, it rages. So Nile Ferguson, who is a historian of the right, I think it's fair to say. It certainly is, and I think he would be very proud to wave his right-word flag. Yeah, so he wrote a book, and he certainly did argue that America is an empire. He called it the Colossus, the American Empire, and saying that it was a force for good.

You've got Daniel Imowar who wrote How to Hide an Empire, who has the same thesis, but probably with a different... From the left, yeah. From a different direction. But we will actually in this series tell you about colonialism from America. So even though this was a place where the founding father said they'd had enough of taxation from overseas and control from a monarch who was not of the people, from the people, by the people. Taxation without representation. All of that.

But they still went and put their flags in other lands and did the same thing, arguably, that the British had done to them. So all of that nutty complexity is what we're going to look at. And at the same time that they are doing that, of course, you're seeing the Native American lands shrinking and shrinking in the middle with smaller and smaller patches left for the tribes and the peoples who had been there before the Europeans turn out. And then I think at the very end, we're going to look at projects of America, which, while not strictly colonial, were definitely imperial. So Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia to the present. Also, it's just the image that Americans have of themselves as well and how that's informed by history and how that's also changing. We on this podcast, we don't talk about the present, but we talk about the past and how it might inform the present. But you have people, I don't know whether you saw this.

I thought it was a magnificent music video by Childish Gambino. Did you see this? This is America. I like Childish Gambino, but I can't think of the video. This is America. Whoop, whoop. It sort of starts off like a guy in a vest. It's him.

And he starts doing this chant about this is America. And it feels like it's going to be stirring. and then there's this sort of gospel choir that's singing in the background, and he takes a machine gun and machine guns them all. And it is a video full of violence but also happy dancing. And I commend you to look at it anyway. But it's all about complexity, as all our empires are. So one thing I think we ought to mention is that sometimes when we're reading historical texts

and we will do so throughout the course of this empire series on America, a lot of writers, you know, yesterday, would refer to the indigenous. people of America as the Indians or the Native Americans or sometimes if it's in Canada, the First Nation tribes. But I think the preferred nomenclature of the day is the indigenous people of America. So can I just say that we acknowledge that? We know that. But when we do sometimes slip into those other terminologies, it is because we're discussing things from the period and maybe even reading from source material that uses that. So forgive us, don't get across with us, but I'm just trying to explain why sometimes some phrases might come up,

as indeed happened in the slavery series where some people said, look, you can't refer to human beings as slaves, it's enslaved people. We appreciate that, we respect that, but sometimes we're reading from source material, we're taking you right back to this, in this case, the 17th century. And so these things will creep in because they creep in in source material at the time. So, look, shall we start, first of all, by lancing the boil, which was America started when the Virginia Company made it so. I mean, there were, first of all, of course, the Native American tribes who were their first nation.

But then everybody sort of assumes that Columbus was the first to set foot from Europe. And the Virginia Company made America a real thing. And that's not right. So do a gallop through the first 30,000 years of American history. First of all, the peopling of the Americas begins when Paleolithic hunter gatherers cross the land bridge over, what is now the Bering Straits, the water between Kamchakka and Alaska, 26,000 years ago. We have human remains turning up as far south as Chile by 10,000 BC. There's also substantial remains in Texas from about 10,000 BC. But archaeologists are pushing back this picture,

clarifying this picture every year. Last year we had on the pod David Wengro. And his extraordinary book, The Dawn of Everything, restricts the traditional areas of sort of prehistory superstars like ancient Egypt, ancient Sumeria, ancient Assyria, to about half the book. And half of it is given over to a whole variety of prehistoric cultures in America that I'd honestly had no idea existed until I read his book. He talks, for example, about a place in modern Louisiana called Poverty Point. And he says that at Poverty Point, there are monumental precincts

that once extended over 200 hectares, which is larger than any of the ancient Eurasian cities like Uruk or Harappa in the Punjab. And this begins 3,500 BC with substantial earthwork. So all this stuff goes, back far further, 3.5,000 BC, we get substantial remains. And what's fascinating is that it's not farmers who build it. They are hunters, fishes, foragers, and nomads who are exploiting a superabundance

of wild resources such as fish, deer, nuts, and waterfowl. And that's before you begin, you know, the archaic period of the Maya around 2000 BC. So there's a huge and complex history of humanity in North and South America that we're only just beginning to understand. But as far as Western involvement travelling over the sea westwards from Europe, that's now possibly thought to begin with the voyage of St. Brendan, the Celtic saint.

Is the Brendan voyage before Leif Eriksen? Because my son, so it's very exciting because I never learnt this stuff. He's nine and we're doing the Vikings right now. And the whole history of Leif Erikson sailing to America It's a big deal, bigger than when I was growing up. Newfoundland and the whole of that coast was populated and settled by the Vikings who did interact with the indigenous people.

And you can go and see the site at Lance Meadow in Newfoundland, where there are now reconstructed Viking houses and so on. Abandoned, I think, quite a hundred years or something. Yes, I didn't stay long. But tell me more about the clerical visit. So the Brendan voyage, you see, remember that before the Vikings, you've got the golden age of Celtic Christianity and that whole Irish chapter of European history when you have Irish monks bringing Christianity, not just to

Lindisfarne and Iona, but also to the European continent. At the same time, other monks are exploring the route westwards. And there is a chronicle by somebody called St. Brendan, talking about his voyages, and there is a long theory unproven because there's no archaeological evidence of it that he, like Lee Verrickson, touched down somewhere in Newfoundland or wherever. So then after St Brendan, after Leif Erikson and the Vikings, you get Columbus. Over to you. So with that, you know, those forays into America from Europe, they were contained. They didn't spread and they weren't sort of settler colonialism as we understand it today. And then you have a whole new chapter, you know, the 1492 Columbus sailing the ocean blue, who is not looking for America, who's looking for India. He's not necessarily looking for conquest. He's looking for trade. But what he finds when he does,

land in the new world, as it will then be known. It is gold. Initially, the Bahamas, Haiti and Columbia, I think, isn't that right? I think that's right. And then that opens up a gateway to others who say, hmm, there's gold in them, their hills. And then this whole sort of settler colonial chapter begins after that when the new world's door opens. So we're going to be talking about all of those things. And then the British attempts to get to North America. And they follow quite closely on the heels of Columbus. Columbus sets off on his first voyage 1492 and John Cabot under commission from Henry the 7th leaves Bristol in 1497. So he's only five years behind. Five years later. Close on the heels. The news has got out rather like when the news of the Dutch sailing successfully to the

East Indies and making a fortune in Holland, when that news gets back, that provokes the Brits to find the East India Company and go look for spices themselves. When the news that Columbus has found a whole new landmass and a whole exciting series of violence, it's only five years later that Cabot sets off on his own voyage. We don't know exactly where Cabot landed, but we think it's sort of the area where the Vikings, where Leif Erickson also landed sort of Newfoundland on the Canadian coast somewhere. And Cabot actually also, I find interesting, he unfurts two flags when he reaches landfall, an English flag and a Venetian flag. So we're not taught that in the English history books either. No, but he claims it very clearly. So he's claiming land. You know, it's not just I'm visiting and I'm

trading and do you want to see what I've got to swap? He's claiming this land. By the way, do you know where Cabot's Cove comes from? Tell me. It's always when I first heard of Cabot. Murder, she wrote. That's where Angela Lansbury writes her books in Cabot's Cove. Anyway, a little freebie there for you. So the next up is Sir Walter Rally. And in 1584, he found the first British settlement at Roanoke Island south of Chesapeake Bay in the area that he names Virginia after his monarch. But the colony barely survives the and is abandoned by June 1586, when the first relief fleet arrives to find the settlement deserted. And a shipload of eager new colonists jump ashore to find both the stuccade and the houses completely dismantled. And nothing to indicate the fate of the settlers except a single skeleton.

And I love this detail. And the name of the local Indian tribe, the Croatone, carved in capital letters into a tree. And there's simply no sign whatsoever of the 90 men, 17 women. and 11 children whom rally has left there only two years earlier. It's as if the settlers had vanished literally into thin air. And then you have this second attempt to plant a colony by the Virginia Company. And Virginia, when William said named after the monarch, no, we didn't have a Queen Virginia. It's the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth First, the Virgin Queen, just for our overseas listeners who were going, oh, there was a Queen Virginia, I've to skip that. But in 1606, that happens.

And this is a huge deal because, again, when these corporate entities become involved with and lands, it changes the dynamic completely. And this is one of the great new developments in history, I think that people studying this period are beginning to latch onto in a big way. And particularly, there's an amazing writer called Philip Stern, whose book Empire Incorporated, the corporations that built the British colonialism was one of my favorite books of last yet. It's full of this extraordinary revelation that basically the state did not colonize Elizabethan times. They subcontracted to commercial entities, to corporations, to this new idea that you can form a corporation with your friends, anyone can invest, you share the profits, you share the losses. And just as it was the East India

company that was given the right to first trade in spices, then former colonies all over Asia, so you get a variety of corporations funded, setting off to colonize a new world. There's bizarrely a Puritan colony in the Bahamas of all places. You think of the Bahamas rather differently, the people wearing black and little white collars. You get the Hudson Bay Company. You get the Rhode Island Company. So rather like in the movie Avatar, where you've got the mining corporation that goes to a different planet and just begins extracting resources for commercial profit, actually that's exactly what happened in the Elizabethan period when you have merchants, often the same group of merchants, often investing in several different corporations and having fingers in all these different pies, minimizing their risk by giving a little bit of money to the Muscovy Company to trade with Russia, money to the African company, which we dealt with in our slavery episode, to trade slaves, all these different corporations.

And the other thing, I mean, apart from finances, because if you have other people's money to finance these trips, you know, it doesn't have to come out of the Crown's purse. But there's also plausible deniability when it becomes a political issue because certainly the monarch sitting in England does not want to piss off the Spanish by suggesting that they're going for a land grab because then Spain may retaliate. But if it is a company, if it is a corporation, if it is shareholders who are doing that, you could turn around and say, all those traders, all those merchants. You have a little bit of distance from that project. And that is literally, I think, what happens when the East India Company is founded, the people who join it are. people that describe themselves and put their names down in the ledger as privateers. Now, privateers doesn't sound like much to us, but it basically meant people who made their living as pirates raiding Spanish and Portuguese shipping under charter from the crown. And so these guys

are willing to raid other people's ships. They're willing to enslave. They are sort of free-booting merchants making a buck whichever way they want. And so the idea that we had in our school books that the foundation of America was a sort of religious enterprise is only at best half the story. There is a huge corporate thrust for profit from the beginning. As far as corporations are concerned, the Virginia company is the daddy here. And I think for a little while, it's worth dwelling on the motives of the Virginia company. And what people thought their motives might be, you know, because if you've got a corporation, you have an inward face and an outward face.

So for the shareholders, it's really simple. We want to make a buck. We've invested money. We expect a very hefty return. And we've heard that there are vast fortunes being made by the Portuguese and the Spanish in the new world by this stage. And for the last 10 years, England has been enormously augmenting its gold supplies by raiding Spanish and Portuguese ships and just running off with their gold. But there's also, you know, sort of another thing trying to make it palatable among the good people who are around these corporations who aren't necessarily shareholders, which is these are missions to civilise the uncivilized world. that we have Christ our Saviour, and there are parts of the world that do not.

And so it is a great service to the Lord to take Christianity over, but not necessarily the established church, and that's also attractive to people. And I think there's an awful lot of, we'll come to the Mayflower and the Pilgrim fathers in the second, but there's a lot of people who want to escape the established church, the Anken Church, and who want to found their own religious republics in a sort of utopian landscape that they imagine the other side of the Atlantic. And it's very tempting to see these as different things, but often these motives are intertwined. They see profit in both, material profit and the gold that they hope to find and the rumors of

El Dorado, which remember at this point are still very much swimming around Europe. There's a lot of talk of unbelievable amounts of gold in the mountains somewhere over the Atlantic, if only you could find it. There are endless rumours circulating that the city of gold is there if you look for it. But also, as you say, people have very strong religious faith. are at this period extremely firm in their identity as a Protestant nation and then resisting what they see is the liars of popery. And this is going to be important in future episodes because the French bring Catholicism to what becomes Canada. And that's another major cleavage that

develops. But as far as the world of the companies is concerned, they need a base. And they've lost Roanoke. Roanoke has mysteriously disappeared. All those first colonists who just disappeared into thin air. And so a new experimented. arrives in Virginia in 1607 and 104 colonists land. Now, we know in retrospect that this will be the beginning of the Virginia colony, that it will be ultimately successful. It will be the seed from which everything else grows. But there's no reason to think that the colonists themselves had any optimism like this. They'd seen and heard about the Roanoke catastrophe. The attempted Protestant plantations in Ulster, which were happening at the same time, were failing. There was

enormous resistance from the Irish. And when the first colonists arrive in Virginia, they starve because they were hoping to trade with the locals. They're well aware that there are these Powhatan tribes who are very numerous in the area. And initially, there is no trade and they have no food. And so the initial colony of Jamestown lurches immediately into a state of near salvation. More of that to come. But I just want to leap forward a little bit because the one story that we haven't talked about, because we're going to come back. We're going to circle back to the Power Hartons and to Jamestown and the difficulties faced by them. But there's one word that I know you associate. Everybody associates with America and the colonisation of America.

And that's the Mayflower, the Pilgrim fathers. So these non-conformist Christians who are fleeing persecution in England, they've gone to the Netherlands. They've then created a joint stock association which funds their departure to get them to America. And they're not actually just interested in profit. They want to make a life. they want to make a home for themselves where they won't be hunted down. But they specifically want to spread their religion. They want to find a place that is safe for them and the way to make it safe is to make everybody believe in them. So in 1620, just over 100 settler shareholders who thought of themselves as pilgrims, they secured land from the Virginia Company and they financed this ship, the Mayflower. Which incidentally was a ship which the East India Company had rejected. When the very first money is raised in 1599 to found these

Indy Company, the first thing they do is go looking for a ship at Depford. And they choose something called the scourge of malice, which had, as its name suggests, been a pirate ship, which they renamed the Red Lion. And they reject this creaky old hulk called the Mayflower, but it's still sitting there, obviously going for a bargain when the pilgrims are. When the pilgrims, who maybe don't have a vast sum of money to spend on a boat, so this creaky old thing will do just fine. But instead of landing in Virginia, you know, they've bought land from the Virginia company, they've secured land, but they land instead near Cape Cod. And this is an area that eventually becomes known as New England.

And when you talk about sort of old money and old America and pride in being, you know, sort of one of the first to be there, it is all sort of about New England and the pilgrim fathers. You know, the whole of Thanksgiving, let's not forget, it's all about celebrating those first pilgrims coming to America. And, you know, the way it's often acted out of sharing a turkey with the indigenous people, whereas a lot more like sharing diseases and smallpox and wiping great vast swathes of the population out. There are figures that I think are worth giving because they are horrific. There's no scholarly consensus on the scale of America's pre-contact indigenous population estimates range between about 2 and 18 million. But it's clear that very quickly the diseases that the Europeans bring

with them, that smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, cholera, measles and so on, all of which the Indians have no immunity to. Indian communities suffer mortality rates that are as high as 70, even 90 percent in the first 20 or 30 years. Nine out of every 10 New England Indians seems to have died from the effects of European diseases in just the dozen years between 1608 and 1620. That's an astonishing figure. And so that's a whole bit of the story that we're not normally told, that it's not even warfare, it's diseases, 90% mortality. After the break, though, we are going to be talking about one particular interaction between Western settlers and the First Nations who are already on this land.

And one name that you'll definitely have heard of is going to come up. It is the story of Pocahontas, the true story, not the Disney one. Join us after the break. Welcome back. So we're leaving Jamestown for a while, although we will come back to it. Now, Anita, you have a story for us about our. its character. So it starts or ends on March the 21st, 1617. A 21-year-old woman for Virginia dies in Gravesend. She is mourned at the time as Rebecca, but the rest of the world will always

know her as Pocahontas. It's a strange thing to start at the end, but as soon as I say the name Pocahontas, a lot of you will have images from Disney conjured up in your mind. Maybe you've read fantastic books about the adventures of Pocahontas, but I guarantee the real story is going to be much richer and possibly very different the one you think you know. Look, to hold our hand through this, the fabulous Camilla Townsend is with us

who has beaten you, hasn't she? She has beaten me. The kind of closest I ever came to historical stardom was when I was a finalist for something called the Cundell History Prize, which is a very well-endowed history prize out of Canada. And the other person who was the finalist as well as Camilla was Vitson Brown,

who he had on the poem last year with his wonderful Tacky's revolt. But neither Vincent nor I went home with anything, because Camilla's wonderful book, The Fifth Sun, which is her new history of the Aztecs, quite rightly and properly swept the boards and was a huge commercial as well as critical success and has completely rewritten our understanding of the Aztecs. But I hadn't realized how much work before that

she had done on other indigenous American stories, including Pocahontas. It was a huge pleasure to find that we could call her on this story, which, as you say, we all know from Disney and from whole variety of very unreliable sources, but to get Camilla on is an extra bonus. Well, Camilla, your book, Pocahontas in there. Now, how should I say that? Powhatan, is that the right way, the Pauhaughton dilemma?

Poharten is fine. It is quite a good rendition. We can't actually be certain, since we have no tape recordings from the era. How could that have happened? Where was Disney when you need them? Now look, we are so happy to have you here, but is it true to say that most of what we think we know about Pocahontas is to use a word we often use on this podcast bullshit?

I'm afraid that is in fact true. There are an awful lot of silly stories out there about Pocahontas. But first of all, I think we should establish that she is absolutely rock-solid fact because that's also another view that some people think she's just a story. Oh, she was very much a real person. And as you say, many of my students in the university come into my classroom believing that she is a fictional person. All they've ever known about her is

the Disney film, but she was very much a real girl, the real daughter of the real high king of the indigenous people of the area now called Virginia. Camilla, when you wrote your wonderful fifth son, one of the extraordinary achievements of that book was that you used a whole variety of indigenous languages, and particularly is it Nahatel? How did I pronounce it? The Aztec language, Nawat, it's pronounced. Do we have any part of Pocahontas' story from her side, or is it all European versions? We are almost entirely left to read between the lines or against the grain of European sources. There are a few traces of things that she said, but they're not written down by her.

We find these comments in the writings of European men. We're assuming that everybody gets their history from animation as we did, But just in case you haven't watched the cartoon, I mean, the story is that there's a dashing blonde-haired John Smith, who is so gorgeously attractive and irresistible that she happily falls for him. And has remarkably white shirts, too. Yeah, converts to Christianity. She loves England more than her homeland in the end. I mean, we're going to get into all of the truth and the nonsense of this. But I think maybe we should start with her origin story and just completely divorce ourselves from the whole Disney vacation of it. When was she born? Where was she born?

and what do we know about that? Well, we cannot be absolutely certain of the year of her birth, but it would have been in the mid to late 1590s. She was born in the land we now call Virginia, although then it was called Sena Komoko, which just means, in effect, land of the four rivers. And her father, Poiton, had become high chief, or we might say king of the Poiton Indians.

This was a loose confederation or paramount confederacy, as the anthropologists would call it, of various tribes who lived in Virginia. Her father had been born into power in six tribes, and this allowed him to lead war parties against others or suggest to others that they join his political entity, and they did because they didn't want to make war. So she was an important young lady. Camilla, we had on the pod last year, David Wendgro, who mentioned about how very different the history of North America is before European settlement to traditional conceptions and how there had been large urban-like settlements or large groupings of people, that it wasn't

just a world of nomads and tents. But in this period, there are no large groupings. People are on the move. This is a nomadic society. I would prefer to say semi-nomadic. That is to say, for part of each year that Poetan Indians lived in one place and farmed, but they had only been farming for about 300 years. We think that they had received crops, corn and beans, about 300 years earlier. So they would just be at the beginning stages of becoming farmers, which meant that, as is true, everywhere in the world, as people become farmers, for part of each year, you continue to hunt. So they would, during the winter months, they would wander about in small groups, you know, nuclear family groups hunting. But in the spring, they would come back together to plant their corn and beans and squash. So they did have towns, although the towns would move after about 20 years in one place. But, you know, the land would become depleted and they would move their town. So that was the world that Pocahontas was born into. And her name has a meaning. Does it mean what mischievous one? That's right, little mischief. She would have had another name. We believe it from something that she said. We believe it was Matoka,

which seems to have meant something like shining one. Although again, our knowledge of her language is quite limited. But such a name like Matoka would have been a private name. In public, one was known by the name that others gave you. It's always had to do with your experiences or your certain traits and your personality, and it could change. For example, her father had been Juan Senico, but he became known as Poetan when he became the High Chief. What did his first name mean? You know, we don't know. That's an excellent question. It's one of the many things we don't know. Okay, but we do know she was born into a very important family. Did that give her status? And what was generally the status of women in these tribes? Two very good questions. I'll do that backward. So women's status was perfectly fine.

even by quote, modern feminist standards. That is, it wasn't that men and women were equal in the sense of doing the same work, not at all. They had very defined roles. In general, women took greater charge of the farming and men of hunting and making war. In general, women did more of the child care, although men certainly held. So it wasn't that they were each expected to do the same things, but both roles were fully valued. In a world without any McDonald's or restaurants or daycares or breaches or breakfasts or babysitters, nobody could possibly imagine that the work that women do is unimportant, and you can't

just hire it out. So women's status was perfectly fine. We don't believe they experienced much violence against women in particular or anything like that. So she would have had no issues in that regard. Now, you also asked about her status relative to others in terms of who she was when she was born. Well, her father was the high chief. So she was someone that others would have known and recognized. On the other hand, her mother was not nobly born, the way her father was. We think that her mother actually was a prisoner of war from a neighboring tribe, although we cannot be 100 percent certain who she was. What we know is that she was nobody important. How do we know that Camilla? Right, because Poetan actually said this to some of the English a couple of times,

and they wrote it down. That is that she was not the daughter of a high-born wife. She was not particularly important. And we also have reason to believe that, given how old we think she was when the English met her, based on their own statements, she would have been born just when Poetton made war against a particular tribe.

So it's highly likely that her mother was a prisoner of war from that tribe. And Poetton had not just Pocahontas' mother as his wife. He had other wives, too, didn't they? Poetan had many wives. This was actually a key political strategy. I think we today tend to make snide jokes about polygamy and imagine that it's purely for the man's pleasure. But it wasn't really about that.

I'm sure Poetan enjoyed having many wives. I don't mean to deny that. But the reason that he married many women was in order to tie to him politically various other tribes. Exactly what's happening in Europe and in India, for example, at the same time. You have dynastic marriages of rulers. Exactly.

And in fact, if you can make multiple dynastic marriages, then you can say to various tribes, for example, he would marry the most nobly born daughter of a particular tribe and say, her son, by me, will be your next ruler. And the people would accept that, because after all, this was going to be the child of their most nobly born daughter, or princess. We've just come out of an episode on Isabella of Castile,

very similar world. Yes, indeed, right. In many regards, the Native Americans were no different from other human beings. Of course, in other regards, their cultures were unique, exactly. Camilla, so she's born in the 1590s, which is a crucial pivot point in the history of European settlement in North America and presumably in how the indigenous peoples thought of their histories. Describe the first European interventions on their coast. We in America often say without much knowledge that the first time the indigenous people dealt with the English would have been in 1607 when the English arrived and founded Jamestown. But that isn't true, of course, because the Spaniards and other Europeans had been sailing up and down the coast for quite some time. And in fact, in the 60s and 70s, there was quite a to-do.

A young man was kidnapped. An indigenous noble boy was kidnapped by the Spaniards with a friend. The two had gone on to a Spanish ship in order to trade, and they took them with them. And this young man, his friend later died, but the young man, Pakikineo, was his name. He would have been a relative of poetans. He was taken to Spain and to Mexico. And so saw Europe and saw a colonized society, saw what was happening to the indigenous people of Mexico. Then eventually, in 1570, was brought back to his homeland by some Jesuits. who expected to start a little mission and become very important.

And instead, this young man, Paki Kineo, led a war party against them. He ran from the Jesuits, talked to his people, explained what they were up against in the Europeans, and brought a party of people to kill them. The only reason we know this story is that they spared a little boy, because that was their habit. They didn't usually kill children. They adopted them.

And that little boy later came back into the hands of the Spaniards and told what happened. So Pocahontas' family knew something. They didn't have extensive knowledge, but they knew something about Europe and about European intentions. I mean, it's not the loveliest story to be told of young children being kidnapped, taken overseas and then their reaction to it is to wage war. So, I mean, would they have been very suspicious of outsiders? Absolutely. And not only for that reason, but because they themselves were involved in wars. That is, her father had such power because he had made war throughout her childhood. there were people who were Sue and speakers, speakers of Sue-related languages to the west of them, and they also made war against those people.

So she, Pocahontas and all her people were well aware that life was very dangerous. And in fact, young women in particular knew that they could always be taken prisoner in these wars and then forced into marriage with their conquerors. So she knew that life was no picnic from the beginning. What was interesting to me is that in these early consequences, They often refer to the Westerners as the coat wearers. In India at the same time, they call the Brits the hat wearers, the Topiwaters. Oh, really?

I didn't know that. That's fascinating. Which actually made me think, what did the tribes wear? What was the difference? Because I want to dispel all of the myths. What would Pocahontas have looked like and what would her people have looked like? Well, actually their clothing was very beautiful. It was very labor intensive because they would take a hide, usually of a deer, but could be other

animals and work it for many hours. This is one of the many jobs, the irreplaceable work that women did, work it for many hours until it was very, very soft. And then at the end, along the edge, they would create a fringe. So they weren't sewing up a hem to smooth it out, but creating a little bit of a fringe. So the women wore skirts, and in the winter some sort of blouse or cape-like covering. The men wore loincloths, and in the winter some sort of leggings and perhaps some sort of blanket over the shoulders. And their clothing was very beautiful because it was also embroidered. They didn't have embroidery floss, obviously.

but they took porcupine quills and dyed them or created beads out of shells or the inside of shells, then the mother of pearl and embroidered those objects onto their clothing. So it was very beautiful. Feathers were very symbolic. You didn't just wear a feather because you chose to. It meant something, the kind of bird or the occasion in your life that allowed you to begin to wear that feather. They also had tattoos that were very significant and very artistic. So they didn't wear as many clothes.

It was very hot in the summer in Virginia, as you probably know, and not that cold even in the winter. But it didn't mean that they didn't wear clothes or that they weren't proud of the raiment. What sort of cosmologies and myths and religions are we imagining at this time? Right. I'm sorry to say that religion is a subject that we probably know least about as regards the poet and Indians. We only have sources written by the Europeans and they tell us more about the politics than they do about the religion that they not only weren't interested in, but rather feared, we do get a few stories. So, for example, we know that there was a great rabbit at the central of some myths, but we don't know much more than that. We do know more about the religion of other Algonquian speakers.

That is, the poet and language was closely related to the language, say, of the Lenape, who lived in the New York City area, or of the Abanake, who lived and still live, actually, in the state of Maine and Canada. So many of the languages along the East Coast, are all in the Algonquian family that were about as closely related to each other as, say, the romance languages are in Europe. Mutually comprehensible just about. Exactly, exactly. So from other groups who spoke closely related languages, we learn a bit more about their religion,

or what we can surmise was probably their religion, because it's extremely unlikely that an island of people who spoke a similar language and lived amongst others had a religion of faith that was profoundly different. So, for instance, it is pretty safe to posit the idea that they believe, believed that the entire universe in effect was divine, that there was that of God everywhere, and that people could find themselves interacting with the spiritual element of the universe unexpectedly, but they would be more likely to if they had their eyes open, if they were noticing, if they were allowing themselves to see it and feel it. So there are things like

that that we know, but I wish I could tell you more, but it's very little that we know. So we've established the world that Pocahontos grew up in, but her story is about to take a turn. Listen to our next episode when she first visits Jamestown and meets the infamous John Smith. Who isn't the heart throb of the blonde locks that we've seen in the movies? Oh no, it's something quite, quite different. And if you want to hear that episode right here and right now, and you want to find out just how Pocahontas ended up in Gravesend, then join the Empire Club today where you're not only going to get access to onus episodes and our weekly newsletter, but you'll get early access to the stuff other people have to wait for? What is not to sign up for? So just go to

Empirepoduk.com. That's Empirepodukuk.com. Until we meet again, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Drimple.