Again we digress into the question of privateering and letters of marque, and then take on the stories of the two “sons” whom Christopher Newport and the paramount chief Powhatan exchanged as hostages and emissaries in 1608, the English boy Thomas Savage and the young Powhatan man Namontack. Neither are as famous as Pocahontas or, for that matter, Squanto (Tisquantum), but they were remarkable in their own right. Both would show an impressive facility for utterly alien languages and cultures, and both would be torn between loyalty to their own people and to the side that adopted them. One of them would eventually achieve the honor of giving a name to a vessel of the United States Navy.

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Selected references for this episode

Christopher Clausen, “Between Two Worlds,” The American Scholar, Summer 2007

Alden T. Vaughan, “Namontack’s Itinerant Life and Mysterious Death: Sources and Speculations,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2018.

USS Namontack

The Paris Declaration of 1856 (re privateering)

Jimmy Buffett, “A Pirate Looks At Forty,” with Jerry Jeff Walker

Malintzin (Wikipedia)

Debedeavon (Wikipedia)