₦airaland Forum

Myth 2


In 1607, not long after arriving in Jamestown, Smith was captured by Wahunsenaca’s forces and kept prisoner for a few weeks. According to Smith, his captors then held a ceremony at which they were on the verge of clubbing him to death when Pocahontas threw herself across his body and saved his life. This story has since been repeated endlessly and become the main component of the Pocahontas legend. Smith still has his defenders, but most historians doubt the veracity of his claim. “No serious scholar believes that anymore,” Townsend tells HISTORY. “It doesn’t ring true to Algonquian culture.” She and others emphasize, for example, that the Algonquians never would have killed a prisoner of war in that way—they would have burned or tortured him to death instead—and that Wahunsenaca never would have indulged his daughter’s wishes in such a circumstance. “They wouldn’t stop just because a little girl says, ‘Stop, I like him,’” Townsend says. Moreover, as a child of 10 or 11, Pocahontas probably wouldn’t have been allowed to attend such a ceremony in the first place.

Some historians hypothesize that Smith misinterpreted the ceremony, and that Wahunsenaca’s true intent was to adopt him into the community and make him a sub-chief (while establishing authority over him). Others, however, think Smith fabricated the story outright. They point out that he never mentioned the Pocahontas rescue in his first few accounts of Virginia, instead waiting until 1624—after Wahunsenaca, Rolfe and Pocahontas herself were already dead.

The fact that Smith, a notorious braggart, wrote of similarly being saved by other beautiful women has also sown doubts. “There is no way Powhatan was trying to kill him,” says Angela “Silver Star” Daniel, president of the Foundation for American Heritage Voices and co-author of “The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History.” “If anyone was going to kill John Smith, it was his English comrades,” Daniel adds, pointing out that he was arrested for mutiny on the voyage over to Jamestown, that he was sentenced to hang soon after for a separate incident and that he was forced to return to England in 1609 following a mysterious gunpowder accident.

Four centuries after Pocahontas’ death, unlearn everything you thought you knew about this Native American icon.

Myth 1
Born around 1596, Pocahontas was reputedly the favorite daughter of Wahunsenaca (known to the English as Powhatan), paramount chief of a coalition of some 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes in Virginia’s Tidewater region. As is possible even today among the area’s Native Americans, she received multiple names, including Matoaka and Amonute. Pocahontas was merely a childhood nickname, meaning “Little Playful One” or “Little Mischief.” “It would not have been a name she would have kept throughout her life,” says Camilla Townsend, a history professor at Rutgers University and author of “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma.”Yet because John Smith, a founder of the Jamestown colony whose interactions with her would propel them both to lasting celebrity, called her Pocahontas in his writings, that’s how she’s become known to history. After marrying English tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614 and converting to Christianity, Pocahontas picked up yet another name, Rebecca, and was sometimes referred to as “Lady Rebecca.”