Capturing Captivity: Visual Imaginings of the English and Powhatan Encounter Accompanying the Virginia Narratives of John Smith and Ralph Hamor, 1612–1634

Abstract

This chapter concerns what might be called the “early contact” history of coastal Virginia and its visual representation,¹ and consists of an examination of a small group of graphic images created in Britain and Europe between 1612 and 1627. These engravings sought in their separate ways to imagine and visualize what had occurred in the early years of first contact between the Powhatan peoples of coastal Virginia and the English newcomers to their shores. Given the historical accounts they were illustrating, some of them inevitably focused on situations where exchanges, misunderstandings, and even conflicts were in evidence. As surveyed in the editors’ introduction, only a small number of illustrations were made during this period in colonial history and of these only a handful engage with the central topics in this book, the themes of captivity, adoption, and slavery. It has also been observed here that the scope for the study of images of American Indian captivity, adoption, and slavery is still to be fully developed. Over thirty years ago the anthropologist and historian Christian Feest (1967) presented his analysis of these same few illustrations of coastal Algonquian peoples in two essays titled “The Virginia Indian in Pictures, 1612–1624, Parts I and II” (I, pp. 1–30). His account made seminal points about the nature of illustrations of indigenous Americans in this period and he noted that the earlier images created by Theodor de Bry and family from 1590 until 1634, especially those elaborated from the Sir Walter Raleigh funded Roanoke Voyages to the lands the English named “Virginia,” were the major source for the corpus of imagery about “Virginia Indians.” Feest also located in the illustrations elements of knowledge gained from direct contact with indigenous peoples.