Half a thousand years ago, a young Indian "princess" named Pocahontas might or might not have rescued an English mercenary named John Smith from being executed at her father's command. She might or might not have been in love with him. Legend has it that thanks to Pocahontas, the colony at Jamestown was saved, and the English and the Indians became friends. Of course, they didn't. Massacres occurred on both sides until the Indians were dispossessed. And Pocahontas never married John Smith; kidnapped, brainwashed, and held hostage by the colonists, she found herself the bride of an ambitious tobacco planter who despised the culture she came from. Shipped off to England as a curiosity, she died young.
In Argall, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend, and the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it, in order to imagine what the lives of John Smith and Pocahontas might really have been like. His array of characters also includes Pocahontas's loving and anxious father, the despot Powhatan, and her uncle Opechancanough, who knows how to hold his rage against the English until just the right moment; Smith's patron, Lord Willoughby, and Lieutenant George Percy, fourth president of the Jamestown colony, whose tainted nobility draws him into genocide. Behind all of them stands the terrifying figure of Captain Samuel Argall, who will kidnap Pocahontas, burn Indian towns, and bring black slavery to North America.