Pocahontas in Gravesend
Growing up in New Zealand, it never occurred to me that I’d one day live 45 minutes from where Pocahontas is buried. Even when I moved to London, that didn’t seem likely. Pocahontas, you’d think, should be buried somewhere in America. And yet her remains are in the town of Gravesend, in Kent, which for some residents of Gravesend is a delightful novelty. “So glad Gravesend has history,” writes Alicia D. on TripAdvisor: “[My kids] are so happy they live in a Disney town. Very magical for children.”
Disney probably comes to mind for a lot of people when they think about Pocahontas. That Pocahontas, from the 1995 animated musical, is the best-known depiction of history’s best-known Native American woman. A cartoon princess steering a canoe towards a symbolic fork in a thundering Virginia river, singing “Why do all my dreams extend just around the river bend?” while a raccoon clutches to her leg in comic terror.
There’s a lot not to like about Disney’s movie, from its near-total disinterest in the real Pocahontas’s biography to how ultimately it uses her legend to conclude that the colonised oppressed are just as racist and bad as their colonialist oppressors. At least Pocahontas herself is portrayed flatteringly. Eleven years old during the historical events depicted in the film, Disney’s Pocahontas is a grown-up romantic heroine, with beauty, grace and perfect posture — you can imagine her staring boldly off into the horizon at all times, even when she’s sleeping. She sings about making difficult life choices, as though those choices were ever actually hers to make.
It feels almost transgressive to think of that Pocahontas — brave, glamorous, an official Disney Princess alongside Cinderella, Belle and the Little Mermaid — meeting the same end as the real one. Having died at age 21, she was buried in an unremarkable English commuter town, and her bones now lie somewhere beneath a Domino’s Pizza and a shopping mall parking lot. But nobody really knows where she is.
Gravesend, England sits on the south bank of the Thames Estuary, where the river flows into the North Sea. Historically, the town’s greatest utility has been its proximity to the Thames. It’s a good landing port, and a useful spot to coordinate shipping in and out of London. Its heyday as a commuter town was in the 15th century, when it had exclusive rights over all passenger water transport to and from London, by order of King Henry IV. Nowadays the commute is twenty minutes on your choice of train, and like the town itself, the trip has little ceremony.
The commercial hub of the town these days is a shopping centre, which hosts low-cost coffee shops and department store chains. On the high street, there’s a guy who sells handcrafted Comedy Coat Hooks while expressly prohibiting photography of them. One of the coat hooks is called “Dave’s Dangler”, and it’s in the shape of a man, and the coats hang on his penis.
The bones of Pocahontas now lie somewhere beneath a Domino’s Pizza and a shopping mall parking lot
Pocahontas died in March 1617 of a respiratory illness — thought to be either tuberculosis, pneumonia or smallpox — on a ship from England to Virginia. Having only made it as far as Gravesend, she was buried there, beneath St. George’s Church. A hundred years later, the church was destroyed in a fire and rebuilt at a different site. Nobody really knows where that church originally was, and so nobody really knows exactly where Pocahontas is buried.
In the Disney animated canon, Pocahontas must be one of the weirder entries. Which is saying something: one of Disney’s best-loved family classics is famous for a scene where a chef coerces his staff into helping him get two stray dogs to fuck. Disney has made worse movies than Pocahontas, but none that have had to put quite so much gloss on the source material.
Disney’s Pocahontas broadly adapts the conventional but inaccurate understanding of Pocahontas’s story. In the film, Pocahontas of the Powhatan people, daughter of Chief Powhatan, has a chance encounter with dashing English explorer and Jamestown settler John Smith. Smith is played by Mel Gibson; an adorable artefact of a time when someone would put forth Mel Gibson as a romantic ideal for young girls.
It’s love at first sight for Smith and Pocahontas, and not just any love — the awesome cosmic import of their connection magically gives Pocahontas instant English literacy. Unfortunately, Smith is captured by the Powhatans, who prepare to execute him. He’s saved by Pocahontas, who throws herself on Smith to save him from her father. Chief Powhatan agrees, and thus there is peace between the Powhatans and the Jamestown colonists. But Smith is called back to England, and Pocahontas doesn’t go with him, feeling that her place is at home. They part, having changed: she has taught him to respect other cultures, and he has taught her that she is ready to thirst for adult men.
This is all historically questionable. While John Smith did encounter the Powhatans and Pocahontas, his initial account of the meeting was drama-free. Only ten years later would he claim that he’d almost been ritually killed and dramatically saved by Pocahontas, who by that time had acquired some small measure of celebrity and respectability in England. Smith has a reputation among historians for fabrication, arrogance and self-aggrandising tales of adventure, which specifically included, as it happened, being saved from death by young foreign girls. Smith was almost murdered in Jamestown, but it was at the hands of his fellow settlers, who nearly executed him just because they all thought he sucked. There’s no evidence, not even in Smith’s embellished accounts, of a romantic relationship with Pocahontas — who was eleven years old to his 27.
Of Pocahontas during this period, little is known. But her given name wasn’t Pocahontas — it was Matoaka, and later in life she was called Amonute. “Pocahontas” was a nickname meaning “playful one” or “little wanton”, and that’s about the only suggestion that survives of what she was like as a child. She was said to have encouraged the English boys to run around the marketplace doing cartwheels with her. She grew up learning how to forage and prepare food. Of her many half-siblings, she was supposedly their father’s favourite.
What happened to Pocahontas after John Smith left Virginia is better documented. In 1610, she married Kocoum, a Powhatan warrior. Then, in 1613, with relations between the Powhatans and Jamestown having deteriorated into open hostility and occasional warfare, Jamestown conspired with another Virginia tribe to kidnap Pocahontas. She was held hostage in Jamestown, used to extort ransom from Powhatan while insuring the colony against his attack.
Pocahontas was remarried in captivity to an English tobacco farmer, John Rolfe, who’d recently lost his wife and infant daughter. Rolfe believed that through marriage he could save Pocahontas’s soul. Pocahontas was converted to Christianity and baptised, taking on the name Rebecca Rolfe. She gave birth to a son, Thomas, when she was nineteen.
It’s so hard to know how much of this Pocahontas went along with because she wanted to, because it would help her survive, or because she had no choice. Most of the English or American accounts present it like — “she loved it! This was her favourite thing!” But the oral history passed down by Pocahontas’s tribe is adamant that while held captive in Jamestown, she was raped by the English, and ultimately murdered by them.
Rolfe and his bride were summoned back to London in 1616, the newly-christened Rebecca being valuable living evidence to the Virginia Company’s stockholders of the good work the company was doing in the area of colonisation. Pocahontas, the first Native American Christian, was received in England as a minor star, even meeting with King James. On the voyage home to Virginia — on a ship captained by the same man who orchestrated her kidnapping — she succumbed suddenly to illness, and died. Having only sailed as far as Gravesend, that’s where she was buried.
Katzenberg asked that Pocahontas be “the most idealized and finest woman ever made”
Pocahontas, the Disney film, was conceived as an epic love story between the princess and John Smith: the story of “a girl caught between her father and her people, and her love for the enemy.” The movie was greenlit on the back of a simple and symbolically loaded pitch, in which Mike Gabriel, the movie’s eventual co-director, wrote the word “Pocahontas” on a picture of Tiger Lily from Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan — a film in which the characters refer to “savages” and “redskins”, and learn of Native American ethnography in the musical number “What Made The Red Man Red?”
Jeffrey Katzenberg, then Disney’s chairman, saw Pocahontas as a serious Best Picture contender in the mien of Beauty and the Beast. Under his supervision, the film adopted a more mature tone, meaning that the animals could be cute, but they couldn’t talk. Katzenberg also asked that Pocahontas be “the most idealized and finest woman ever made.”
That she would be aged up from eleven was a no-brainer: “We had the choice of being historically accurate or socially responsible, so we chose the socially responsible side,” said Glen Keane, her character designer. Disregarding how the historical Pocahontas looked in the one portrait she ever sat for, (because that artist was “lousy”, which sounds better than “she wasn’t attractive”) Keane drew inspiration from Christy Turlington, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell to come up with the lithe, athletic cocktail dress-wearing supermodel who stars in the film. “She’s a babe!” said Mel Gibson during the Pocahontas press junket, apparently repeatedly.
“We’ve looked at the story of Pocahontas as one of the great American love stories, a romance made more romantic by having become myth,” co-director Eric Goldberg told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995. “We’re talking about really mushy kissing, a dazzling locking of lips for a Disney family film. And consider this — the kissing is interracial. It seems really ‘90s — but the fact is, it’s Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.”
The filmmakers did strive for historical accuracy, working with Native American consultants particularly on the visual details of the locations, clothing and choreography. One of the film’s Native American cast praised Disney for being blunt about the Jamestown colonists’ imperialist motives.
And yet the real Pocahontas bears almost no resemblance to what’s on screen: it’s not her look, not her age, not her personality, not her actions, not even her name. Disney had no interest in the actual Pocahontas story, because that’s not the material of a good Disney movie. So there’s no part and no voice for Pocahontas in what’s ostensibly her story — but, really, her story never was her story.
In Gravesend, on a Saturday — this is last month now — a small anti-EU rally gathered under the awning of a shuttered Marks & Spencer. Boris Johnson’s pre-recorded protest blasted from speakers down the high street: “We must control our borders, we must protect ourselves. We must be proud and confident about who we are as a people. I want us to take back our destiny. I want my country back! Do you want your country back? The same with me! We want our country back! We want our country back!”
West of St George’s Church is the shopping centre car park; this, it’s thought, is about where the original church used to stand. It’s possible that Pocahontas lies unmarked somewhere beneath that multi-storey building, under cars, sporting goods and greeting card stores. But she could be anywhere. She’s not buried in a grave, she’s buried in Gravesend. The boundaries of her resting place have been dissolved; she is buried everywhere and nowhere. Gravesend feels like her open-plan tomb: every street a line on her headstone, every Comedy Coat Hook an offering on her grave.
In the gardens of the new St. George’s Church in Gravesend, there’s a bronze statue of Pocahontas, standing a life-size five feet tall atop a six-foot plinth. The statue, a gift to Gravesend from the Governor of Virginia, is a replica of one in Jamestown. The bronze feather in the Gravesend statue’s headdress has been stolen three times. On the last occasion, in 2014, the feather was recovered by a dog.
TripAdvisor ranks the Pocahontas statue as the seventh best “thing to do” in Gravesend
My fiancée and I went to Gravesend to see the statue, despite warnings from TripAdvisor user reviews that it’s boring, and that after sunset, teenagers congregate there to do God knows what. Nonetheless, TripAdvisor still ranks the statue as the seventh best “thing to do” in Gravesend.
There were teenagers there on the green, their shoes off, practising acrobatics. One after the other, they executed near-perfect somersaults. “I gotta keep training, man!” a teen explained to nobody in particular.
And the statue itself is a little boring. It’s a nice enough sculpture of a Native American woman, if not a particularly accurate Pocahontas: the sculptor’s been criticised for putting her in the distinctly non-Powhatan clothing of a Plains Indian.
Pocahontas’s image recurs throughout the town, in stained glass windows in the church, in a mural by the train station, in portraits in the pubs. On a sign by the statue, she’s illustrated as what is basically objectively a white woman, dressed in Puritan fashions. (See Clickhole’s “5 Disney Princesses Reimagined as Caucasian”, for the basic idea.) I went to the town information centre and bought a Pocahontas finger puppet, “handmade by the friends of St George’s Church who continue to celebrate her conversion to the Christian faith and her love of all humanity.” It’s fine, as puppets go. I don’t use it a lot.
In the afternoon, my fiancée and I had a drink at the Three Daws, a pub on the pier, overlooking from Thames. From here, in 1617, you would have been able to see Pocahontas’s ship to Virginia dock here, and the princess carried on shore die here. You could even have seen it from the Three Daws, which was around back then. Five hundred years old, the pub boasts of a shifty history of underground smuggling tunnels just as often used by regular customers to escape being press-ganged into the British navy. I had pint of ale, served on a Deus Ex: Mankind Divided promotional coaster, on the outside terrace, and watched the waters of the Thames: calm, opaque, empty of ships.
It’s from here that Gravesend used to launch the Long Ferry: the regular London-Gravesend service, the pride of Gravesend industry, protected by Royal decree for four centuries. We read a sign about it outside. It’s also pointed out that, while there’s no specific evidence to support it, Charles Dickens could plausibly have used the ferry in his lifetime.
“Everywhere you go here,” my fiancée said, “it insists on its history, but there’s no evidence of it. There’s no evidence of a glorious history if you look around. It’s an ugly place. What you see is a different kind of history. I mean, this port is where slaves would have been brought in, or the spoils of slavery. That’s what the history is. And the Long Ferry, the Long Ferry — what that shows is the history of the slow deterioration of industrial Britain, more than anything else.”
We had dinner at Chattorey, an Indian street kitchen, which was some of the best food either of us had ever eaten. The borough’s population is fifteen percent Sikh, which is why curry houses are so prolific and unusually good in Gravesend, and why a lavish, marble-and-gold Sikh temple preens majestically over the brutalist skyline.
Afterwards, we drank at a different pub with no history of note — unless you count a signed pair of Jake LaMotta’s boxing shorts, purchased from a company called Authentic Signings, Inc., framed on the wall. A machine behind the bar dispensed smoky bacon, salted caramel and melon flavoured shots of Smirnoff. Someone once told me about a friend who lost a tooth in a New Zealand nightclub, and had the music stopped and the lights on while she searched for it on her hands and knees. That’s what smoky bacon flavoured Smirnoff tastes like.
Gravesend teens, having apparently completed their illicit activities at the Pocahontas statue, assembled by the jukebox. Don’t Stop Believin’ shuffled into rotation, to their outrageous delight. “I love Journey,” one of them shrieked, getting up to dance. “Just a small town girl!” he sang, and then all the teens joined in lusty, unwieldy unison. “Living in a lonely world!”
I ordered another drink. “What do you think of the Pocahontas statue?” I asked the bartender.
“Oh, I think it’s brilliant! It’s a social area for me and my mates to hang around at.”
“A singer in a smoky room…”
“We came here to see it.”
“Oh!”
“Strangers waiting/up and down the boulevard/their shadows searching in the night…” At the close of the song, the teenager who’d first joined in turned to his friends and asked: “Do you want to hear a joke about my dick?”
At a table by the window, my fiancée drank a tequila-flavoured beer, having declined to order wine from a bar that prominently advertised special deals on things called Creamy Nuts and Blowjobs.
“I was ready to leave when we got here,” she said. “But I liked it. I definitely wouldn’t come back. I don’t know if the town’s nice. It’s not a nice town. But the people are… I don’t know. Just leave people alone. That’s what I think.”
In real life, Pocahontas met John Smith once more, in London. The conversation was awkward and hostile. In the direct-to-video sequel to Disney’s film, the dramatisation of that meeting provides closure for their romantic relationship, allowing her to move on to this new man she’s fallen for, John Rolfe. Similarly, in Terrence Malick’s The New World — a considerably more melancholic treatment of the Pocahontas legends — the London meeting with Smith serves to close the loop on her story. What it means, in a dramatic sense, is that she is now ready to die.
The tropes of Pocahontas’s story map more closely to horror than to romance. The timing of her death’s almost a dark joke: she survives her journey in England — kingdom to the soldiers who have wrought misfortune and pain on her, her people and her country — and then as soon as she’s on the ship home, when she thinks she’s safe and will be back in Virginia, that’s when death strikes, like an odious, banter-loving British lad in the Scream mask. Pocahontas is returned and buried in the land of her oppressor. She will never get home.
Before she converted to Christianity, Pocahontas had a clear idea of what would happen to her after she died. Her soul would rise, and dash along the path made by the treetops, pausing only to eat hominy and drink milk at the home of a goddess. In good time, she would come to the house of the Hare god, where she would meet her ancestors. They would rest in pleasant fields, doing no labour but to dance and sing to paint themselves with fine oils, and to eat delicious fruits, until their souls grew old, dissolved, and died, coming into a woman’s womb and to be born once again into the world.
The interior of the Three Daws, the pub on the Gravesend pier, is covered ceiling to floor in framed paintings and illustrations of the ships that once dotted the river: clipper ships, flagships, schooners, brigs, colliers and long ferries. But look out on the Thames now and it’s completely still — there’s absolutely nothing — and you can’t get home that way at all.
Special thanks as always to Aisling Conlon.
