Mar 17, 2018 3 min read

Few Native Americans have captured our imagination like Pocahontas, the daughter of Wahunsenaca (Powhatan in English), the chief of several Algonquin tribes in the Virginia Tidewater.

Famously, she saved the life of Captain John Smith, an English explorer who was captured by Wahunsenaca’s men while in Jamestown, Va., and was to be clubbed to death when Pocahontas suddenly threw herself across his body, pleading that he be spared because she loved him, causing her father to relent.

There are, alas, several problems with this story, beginning with the fact that it comes from Smith, who was a notorious braggart and exaggerator, and although he published several accounts of his adventures in Jamestown, he didn’t mention the story of Pocahontas’ brave intervention until 17 years later, in 1624, when Pocahontas, her father and the other alleged witnesses were dead and couldn’t contradict him. Interestingly as well, in another of his published works he wrote of being rescued by another young girl five years prior to the Pocahontas rescue, after being captured by Turks while in Hungary. Two remarkably similar rescues, five years apart, caused some skepticism.

Further, historians familiar with Algonquin tribal customs say they never would have used clubs to kill Smith; they would have tortured him and burned him to death. Finally, in 1607, when this alleged incident took place, Pocahontas was either 10 or 11 years old, meaning it is highly unlikely she would have been allowed to attend Smith’s execution, even more unlikely she would have had a romantic relationship with him – he was 28 – and most unlikely that, at her insistence, her father would have called off the execution.

And if anyone was threatening Smith in Jamestown in the early 1600s it was his fellow English explorers, who had arrested him for mutiny during their voyage to Jamestown and sentenced him to hang for other crimes.

Smith and Pocahontas may have become friends, and the English and Algonquin tribes subsequently coexisted peacefully for two years, but in 1609 war broke out, and Pocahontas was later captured and held hostage by the English. Ironically, her life was spared by her English captors after she converted to Christianity and married an English tobacco planter, John Rolfe, in 1614. She accompanied him to England, where she was feted as “a civilized savage” and even met the king and queen.

She and Rolfe were set to return to Virginia when she died this week (March 21) in 1617, supposedly of tuberculosis, but legend has it – and much of her story is legend – that she was poisoned.

In 1907, 300 years after her famous “rescue” of Smith, Pocahontas became the first American Indian honored on a U.S. stamp.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.