Entered in the Ledger at Plymouth, autumn 1621. Told by Mrs. Whiskers III, from her grandmother. Written down by Obedience, who has now been told three times to sit still.
THE RAT
Corn.
Woodsmoke.
Copper, warm from somebody’s pocket.
A girl, upside down.
That’s the first I ever saw of her, and I want it set down first, before the grown-ups get their hands on her. A girl going over in a cartwheel in the dirt inside the fort at Jamestown, hands flat, heels up, braid swinging, and then right side up again and laughing at the face on the gentleman she’d nearly kicked.
Her name was Matoaka.
Everybody called her Pocahontas. It was a nickname. It means the playful one, or the mischief, depending on who’s translating and how much trouble she’d caused them that week. Her father was Wahunsenacah, the paramount chief over some thirty nations along those rivers, the one the English called Powhatan.
She was about eleven.
Hold on to that number. People are going to try to take it from her.
I’d better start where I was, which was in a basket.
I told you the colony was alive that first winter because of the corn coming down the rivers. I didn’t tell you how often I’d been riding it.
It’s not hard. A basket of corn sits on a canoe, the canoe sits on the river, and a rat sits in the corn and eats on the way. When the basket arrives somewhere, so does the rat. By December of 1607 I had been to two towns upriver and one down, and I had learned two things about the people who lived in them.
The first was that they were tidier than the English. Their houses were long and round-roofed and covered in bark and mats, and they had their food stored in pits and racks and baskets where it stayed dry, and nobody left a plate anywhere.
The second was that they all knew exactly how badly things were going inside the fort. They talked about it at the fires in the evening. They had a word for the gentlemen I won’t repeat. Loosely, it meant the men who hold the shovel by the wrong end.
So I was in a corn basket, on the floor of the colony’s little barge, in the middle of December, when John Smith went upriver to trade for more corn and got himself captured.
He’d been asking for it.
That’s not my opinion. That’s his. He told it later, more than once, and every version had the same beginning: he took the barge up the Chickahominy River farther than anybody had, left most of the men with it, went on in a canoe with two Englishmen and two guides, left the canoe, went on foot with one guide, and walked straight into a hunting party of some two hundred men led by Opechancanough, who was the chief’s brother.
The two Englishmen with the canoe were killed. I’m not going to make that funny.
Smith was taken.
And so, as it turned out, was the canoe. I’d crossed into one of its baskets when it left the barge, because the canoe was going farther, and the hunting party took the canoe and everything in it. That is how I came to see Werowocomoco.