THE MADE-UP MRS. PENOBSCOT S
Portrait called Mrs. Penobscot (or, Mrs. Pennicott) in the manner of Daniel Mytens,(c.1590-1747) in the Tapestry Room at the Vyne, post conservation. Property name The Vyne County Hampshire England.
quanto wasn’t the only stowaway on Captain George Waymouth’s 1605 voyage. The historian Alden T. Vaughn tells the story of a mythi-
cal “Mrs. Penobscot” that popular histories in the last half century have been presenting as a female adjunct to the Mawooshin Five. It starts with an extra-large portrait of a century Jacobean dress
woman in early 17th
holding a feather fan that has been hanging for centuries in the manor house The Vyne near Basinstoke, Hampshire, in England. Over time, the lady became known as “Mrs. (or Mlle. or Mistress) Penobscot.” But she has no resem- blance in dress or feature to a North American Native. Some elaborate theories have tried to connect her to a family involved in colonization in Maine. But these “were scuttled,” Vaughn writes, when in 2004 an 18th
century inventory
of the house turned up, listing a portrait of a “Mrs. Penniscott.” (Even that might be a mis- identification, taken from the name of the Rev. William Pennicott, an 18th
century collector of
early English portraits.) It wouldn’t be the only time the English have struggled with Indian names. We reported
recently (American Indian magazine, Summer 2013) on a widely circulated portrait presented as Pocahontas and her son Thomas Rolfe. The public historian William Ryan, a student of the Seminole, has demonstrated that it is actually an 1830s painting of Pe-o-ka, wife of the Sem- inole warrior Osceola, and their son. Playing on the similarity in the initial syllables, an enter- prising dealer apparently sold it to the English relatives of Rebekkah Rolfe, nee Pocahontas. But “Mrs. Penobscot” (or Pennicott) has
acquired a legend of her own. In August 1959, American Heritage magazine ran the picture with a caption saying she “was one of the Abenaki Indians whom Sir Ferdinando Gorges saw brought over from Maine, taught English, put into Elizabethan dress, and displayed at court.” As Vaughn observes, this caption was wrong in every point; in fact, it was made up out of whole cloth. Yet it has since passed into popular histories and the pages of The New York Times. Unlike the origin of Squanto’s bo- gus double-kidnapping, in over-interpretation of a 17th
century editorial blunder, the myth of
the abduction of Mrs. Penobscot is simply the invention of a 20th
century caption writer.
“They will eyther Convert them or by
Famine Confounde them for they ar almost Starved already.” As months dragged on, diplomats at the
highest levels debated free access to the Indies and the Richard’s crew complained from the prison in Seville that they had been forgotten. But there were hints of a deeper game behind the delay, with the Abenaki as a prize. Stone- man, the pilot, wrote that after three months he won some freedom for his mates as the Spanish realized the extent of his experience in “North Virginia.” As a veteran of Waymouth’s expedition, he might have been a target of the earlier plot that Rosier had mentioned. As a captive, he was now under intense pressure. “The Spaniards were very desirous to have me serve their state, and proffered me great wages, which I refused to doe.” Seville merchants and officials asked him
to make “descriptions and Maps of the Coast and parts of Virginia,” he wrote, “which I also refused to doe.” In and out of prison as the
pressure increased, Stoneman finally received a warning from a friendly Dutch merchant. The Dutchman had learned from a local judge, said Stoneman, “that the Spaniards had a great hate unto me above all others, because they understood that I had beene a former Discoverer in Virginia, at the bring- ing into England of those Savages.” Because he wouldn’t enter their service or give them any useful information, they now planned to put him to torture. Rather than “stand to their mercie on the Racke,” Stoneman and two of his companions fled from Seville the next morning, leaving Challons, the rest of the crew and the Indians behind. With these stakes in play, it seems unlikely that the Spaniards had simply seized Maniddo and Assacomoit for galley slaves. In fact, they had already indicated to Challons that they planned to convert, or reconvert, the Abenaki. It is very likely the Spanish government also meant to exploit them for intelligence, as the English had done.
What did finally happen to these two of
the Mawooshin Five? Gorges reports that he finally “recovered” Assacomoit, possibly when the Spanish released the rest of the crew. His “old servant” returned to his household and helped him debrief a new captive, the famed Epenow from Martha’s Vineyard. Gorges adds a convincing detail: the two had difficulty un- derstanding each other at first, since they spoke different dialects, albeit of the same language. In 1614, according to Gorges, Assacomoit sailed with the ship that returned Epenow to Martha’s Vinyard, but that is another story. We simply don’t know what happened to
Maniddo. But perhaps some day a debriefing file will emerge from the depths of the Spanish archives with news about his fate.
E SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 39
© NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/IAN BLANTERN
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