Item

Description

Eiakintomino, a Powhatan man who was clearly of some status, shows up twice in the historical record. In the first instance, he can be seen alongside his fellow Powhatan Matahan on a Virginia Company lottery circular that was used to raise money for the company’s colonization efforts. The two men appear with a poem attributed to Eiakintomino and Matahan, in which they ask the English to Christianize their people. (This almost certainly an expression of colonial ambition rather than something the two citizens of Tsenacomoco ever said.) Eiakintomino’s second appearance is in the commonplace book of a Dutch soldier, who painted him alongside a small menagerie of exotic animals in St. James’s Park. What happened to Eiakintonimo and Matahan is unknown.

Bibliographic sources

Thrush, Indigenous London, 44, 49-50, 51, 58.