Argall

Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith is a historical novel by the American writer William T. Vollmann, published in 2001.

The book is a retelling of the founding of the English colony at Jamestown and of the legend that attached itself to Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Vollmann tells it in a deliberately Elizabethan register, through a crowd of voices that includes adventurers, officials and observers, and he gives the story over to the many people involved rather than to a single hero; the Samuel Argall of the title is one figure in that crowd rather than its centre. The novel is the third of Vollmann's Seven Dreams sequence, a set of books about episodes in the history of the North American continent, and it is among the longest and most deliberately difficult of them.

Vollmann's historical novels mix documents, invented speech and long digressions, and this one came out of his own research into the records of early Virginia. Five of the sequence's planned seven books had been published by 2020.