Pocahontas clearly had few illusions about the purity of her hosts’ intentions toward her own people, and subsequent events would validate her scepticism.Ĭ1595: Pocahontas, also known as Amonute and Matoaka, is bornġ606: The Virginia Company – which has been created to colonise the territories to which England had laid claim – receives a new crown patent from James VI and I.ġ607: A group of English colonists makes landfall in Virginia and establishes the settlement of Jamestownġ609–10: Jamestown is decimated in the Starving Time. When John Smith came to visit her, she upbraided him as she believed he had broken the bonds of kinship with her people, adding tartly: “For your countrymen will lie much.” Pocahontas, however, was accompanied by her father’s chief adviser, Uttamatomakin – whose mission was to report back to Powhatan about the strength of the English – and by a retinue of Indian attendants.ĭuring her time in England, Pocahontas attended a masque, and was seated in a place of prominence contemporary observers highlight the dignity and composure of her bearing.

When Pocahontas and John Rolfe visited England in 1616, there were clear propaganda benefits for the Virginia Company (the joint-stock organisation behind the settlement of Jamestown) in presenting an attractive young indigenous woman as the embodiment of the acculturated, Christianised, docile Indian that prospective settlers would encounter in the New World. In reality, indigenous people were either being assimilated or violently erased from American history.ĥ ‘Lady Rebecca’ was sceptical about the colonists’ intentions towards her people Pocahontas, after her marriage to Rolfe and the birth of her son Thomas, was viewed in the 19th century as the Mother of Two Nations – a convenient notion for proponents of the ‘Noble Savage’ stereotype that emerged. It is unlikely that the Jamestown authorities would have allowed the match if Kocoum had still been alive, and it is possible that he had been killed in combat.

Rolfe couched his passion for Pocahontas as an altruistic initiative designed to win her conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sir Thomas Dale, acting governor of the Jamestown colony, in which he asks permission to marry Pocahontas, Rolfe describes her as: “Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are and have been a long time so entangled and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth, that I was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout.” What is clear, however, is that Rolfe was besotted with her. It’s impossible to know what Pocahontas’s feelings were for her first husband, Kocoum, and later for Rolfe.

The real pocahontas