“In the Indian Tongue”: Multilingualism in Tsenacommacah

“Intermediaries” – those rare people such as the Patuxet Tisquantum and the Mohawk Konwatsi'tsiaienni (Molly Brant) who connected Natives and newcomers through their linguistic abilities and other intercultural connections – loom large in scholarship on early America. The best known intermediary is, surely, Pocahontas (or Matoaka, Amonute, or Rebecca), a daughter of the powerful paramount chief Powhatan whose influence spread throughout the Chesapeake Bay region. Although most intermediaries who are well-known today were Native people, in recent scholarship on early Virginia they also include three young English boys who lived amongst Pocahontas’s people: Henry Spelman, Thomas Savage, and Robert Poole.

This paper argues that (1) people such as Tisquantum were part of a far larger cohort of bilingual people who shaped events in early America than scholars have recognized; (2) that in particular, scholars have greatly underestimated English multilingualism; and that (3) we can better understand and explain the course of events in 17^th-century America if we are alert to the full extent of English multilingualism. As a case in point, the second half of this paper focuses on a single episode: the end of the First Anglo-Powhatan War of 1609-1614. According to both scholarly consensus and popular understandings, this peace was brought about by the 1614 marriage between the Jamestown colonist John Rolfe and Pocahontas, which sealed an alliance between the newlyweds’ two peoples. A careful chronological reconstruction of events after her capture in 1613, however, reveals that the end of the war in 1614 and the eight years’ peace that followed had little to do with Pocahontas’s betrothal, and much to do with the activities of a surprisingly large cohort of multilingual English colonists over the course of several years before and after 1614.