ABSTRACT
Early modern Europeans often used highly sexualized linguistic and visual images in their efforts to define the Americas.1 John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas is one of several contact narratives focused on exchanges between white men and Native American women. A late sixteenth-century engraving created by Jan van der Straet portrayed America as a woman dressed in feathers waiting for Europe to discover and claim her, an image further substantiated by longstanding European beliefs regarding the male and female genders.2 Medieval and early modern women were often portrayed as naturally lustful, unrestrained, and fecund, and thus in need of male guidance and restraint.3 Such portrayals played easily into the ongoing rhetoric of conquest and colonization, which suggested that the Americas had much to offer in the way of raw goods and open spaces, but needed to be carefully shaped by European style law and order in order to become both prosperous and profitable.
