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Chapter 1 Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic World: Stories of Goods and Power
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Chapter 1 Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic World: Stories of Goods and Power In what might be the only surviving early seventeenth‑century example of the genre, William Strachey, secretary of the Virginia Company of London, did his best to reduce to Roman letters a “scornefull song” that victorious Pow‑ hatan warriors chanted after they killed three or four Englishmen “and tooke one Symon Score a saylor and one Cob a boy prisoners” in 1611: 1. Mattanerew shashashewaw crawango pechecoma Whe Tassantassa inoshashaw yehockan pocosak Whe, whe, yah, ha, ha, ne, he wittowa, wittowa. 2. Mattanerew shashashewaw, erawango pechecoma Captain Newport inoshashaw neir in hoc nantion matassan Whe weh, yah, ha, ha, etc. 3. Mattanerew shashashewaw erowango pechecoma Thomas Newport inoshashaw neir in hoc nantion monocock Whe whe etc. 4. Mattanerew shushashewaw erowango pechecoma Pockin Simon moshasha mingon nantian Tamahuck Whe whe, etc. Strachey explained that the refrain— which almost needs no translation— mocked the “lamentation our people made” for the deaths and captivities. But far more interesting is the gloss he provided for the verses. The Pow‑ hatans sang of “how they killed us for all our Poccasacks, that is our Guns, and for all Captain [Christopher] Newport brought them Copper and could hurt Thomas Newport (a boy whose name indeed is Thomas Savadge, whome 14 Native Power and European Trade Captain Newport leaving with Powhatan to learne the Language, at what tyme he presented the said Powhatan with a copper Crowne and other guifts from his Majestie, sayd he was his soone) for all his Monnacock that is his bright Sword, and how they could take Symon . . . Prysoner for all his Tama‑ hauke, that is his Hatchett.”1 In spite of all their material goods— their guns, their copper, their swords, their hatchets— and in spite of the fact that many of these same vaunted items had been given to the Powhatans by Virginia’s leader Newport in the name of the mighty King James, the Englishmen had, at least on this occasion, been made subject to Native people’s power.2 Like the song, this essay is a story about goods and power. Or, rather, it is three related stories about Chesapeake Algonquian men and what appear to have been their quests for goods and power from the emerging Atlantic world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Paquiquineo (Don Luis), who probably left the Chesapeake in 1561 and returned with a party of Spanish Jesuit missionaries nine years later; Namontack, who traveled to England with Christopher Newport in 1608 and again in 1609 (while the Thomas “Newport” Savage of the song took up residence in Powhatan country); and Uttama‑ tomakkin (also known as Tomocomo or Tomakin), who made the oceanic voyage with Pocahontas in 1616– 1617. We know very little about any of these men, their status, or their motives, and what we do know comes down to us in highly colored tales written by Europeans who were not exactly their friends. Nonetheless, for all the dangers of skimpy sources, of European chroniclers’ distortions, and, possibly, of an overactive historian’s imagination, the stories deserve serious attention. Traveling at particularly crucial moments in their people’s early engagement with Europeans, the three voyagers allow us to glimpse something of what the emerging Atlantic world meant to the elite of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom— if not to the common people who gave their “densely inhabited land” its name, Tsenacomoco. In their travels, Paqui‑ quineo and Namontack apparently attempted to exert control over the access to the goods the 1611 song would mock in order to build up the power of their people, their political superiors, and themselves. Uttamatomakkin’s travels, by contrast, confirmed what the singers by then already knew: that power would have to be asserted in spite of, not by way of, “guifts from his Majestie.” * * * Just as the arrival of Spaniards and English in the Chesapeake cannot be un‑ derstood apart from the political and economic characteristics of competitive 14:51 GMT) Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic World 15 Early Modern nation‑ states, the exploits of these three voyagers from Tse‑ nacomoco— and the significance of material goods in the Powhatan song— cannot be understood apart from the political and economic characteristics of the social forms known as chiefdoms. In the classic definition of anthro‑ pologist Elman R. Service, “chiefdoms are redistributional societies with a permanent central agency of coordination” and a “profoundly inegalitarian” political order in which redistributive functions center on exalted hereditary leaders...