Pocahontas: An American Princess

Born around 1596, Pocahontas was the daughter of the chief Powhatan. Today she is remembered as an ardent supporter of the Jamestown colonists -- but how much of this story is true? Learn more about Pocahontas in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah and
I saw something about the newest Disney princess, the Frog Princess,

(00:20):
the other day, and it got us thinking about our favorites.
Mine is Bell from Beauty and the Beast because she
reads Mine is snow White because I think I kind
of look like her. And we realized there are a
few Disney princesses who rarely make it onto the Disney
Princess branded item, the montage of all the Princesses, right,
and one of them is Pocahontas. Yeah, she is certainly

(00:44):
a princess. She's got a Disney movie, but she never
makes it onto the T shirts and I don't know
the cake plates stuff like that. So you know what,
We're going to give Pocahona some attention today. That's not
her real name, by the way, it's a nickname for
her that means little wanton or mischievous one, so a
bit of a spicy little nickname. Her real name was Matawaca,

(01:07):
and later she went by a Christian name Rebecca. But yeah,
the Pocahonta's nickname was apparently act. She was really bright
and curious and would get into trouble with little pranks
and such. And she was born around fifteen nineties six
near present day Jamestown, which is why she comes up
so much in American history because, as well learn, the

(01:30):
Jamestown settlement is quite a story. Yeah. So Pocahontas was
the daughter of Powhatan, who was the chief of the
Powetan Empire, which is no small matter. It consisted of
twenty eight tribes in the Tidewater region and at the
peak of his power, it's estimated that he ruled between
thirteen thousand and thirty four thousand people. And pocahon Is childhood.

(01:51):
One of the little details you gave that I liked
was that she used to do cartwheels with the boys
of Jamestown, and like all the girls in her tribe,
she went with out clothing until puberty. Yeah. So Palatans,
people who were known by the colonists Palatin Indians, lived
in villages of a few hundred inhabitants, and they would

(02:11):
have cleared lands around this. They didn't have domestic animals
except for dogs. So they didn't really have fences except
for defensive palaceades, which that proves to be an important fact,
the fact that they don't have fences. UM. And the
Jamestown site, the settlers were looking for gold. Uh that's

(02:35):
really which you know, because you can find gold anywhere.
Apparently guess what you can't Um. The Virginia Company sent
them on this gold hunting mission, sort of thinking that
they would have their stores and everything would be great
and they could spend most of their free time looking
for gold. It really doesn't happen. But when they first arrived,

(02:55):
they didn't really want trouble with the local Native of Americans,
and so they positioned Jamestown in an undesirable location. And
part of this is just they didn't quite know what
they were doing. But Jamestown is on a clear an
area of cleared land, something the Native Americans had probably

(03:15):
cleared a generation or two before, but it wasn't really
good land. It's on a part of the James River
that didn't have year round freshwater, and they're really bad mosquito,
So it's an undesirable place to start out. So Jamestown

(03:36):
and John Smith come into Pocahona's life when she's about
ten or eleven. They settled there around sixteen oh seven.
And this is where the history starts to turn into
just stories, because what you probably did learn in your
history client Pokehontas, this lovely Native American girl rescued this
guy John Smith yep. In sixteen twenty four, John Smith

(04:00):
wrote this bizarre third person account of how when he
was exploring the Chickahominy River in a canoe with two
other people and two Indian guides, he was intercepted by
Powhatan's powerful brother, and pocahon Is draped herself over him
and saved him from the Native Americans who were going
to kill him. At least this is the story I learned.

(04:21):
He was going to have his head beaten in by
a stone. And a lot of people have learned that
myth in school or potentially embellished story, but there's not
a whole lot of real basis to it. Now they're
in the two camps. The people who think it was
a bit of misinterpretation and yeah, maybe he didn't quite

(04:44):
understand the ceremony that was going on, and then people
who think he completely made it up and in the
misinterpretation camp Um. There's one theory that's kind of based
on tenuous evidence that Smith was actually in an adoption
Sarah Money. So what he thought was an execution He's
going to have his head hit by rocks was kind

(05:06):
of hazing. Actually a ritualized death and a symbolic rebirth.
And Pocahontas, who's an important person, she's the chief, the
head chief's daughter, uh is in the position of converting him,
making him a brother of the tribe. And for someone
of Smith's stature, it's more likely that execution would have

(05:29):
involved playing, burning and dismemberment, not just a knock on
the head. So I guess Smith's lucky on that account.
The other camp is the John Smith completely entirely made
up this story camp, which is the one that Sarah
and I are and I believe because his accounts in
general are fairly unreliable. He likes to set himself up
as the hero who doesn't and this prototype of the

(05:52):
frontiersman to write, and his story wasn't published until seven
years after her death, after she's already famous, so that
would have, you know, made it bit more sellable. Well,
And he gave an account of the capture only a
few months after it happened in something that wasn't for publication,
and there was no mention of Pocahontas. So you know,
he describes how he's on the search expedition and now

(06:15):
he's captured by the men, but Pocahonas doesn't come into
the story. But one of Smith's favorite motise in his
writing too is being rescued by a lady and um
the idea of a princess saving a hero is also
a stable of medieval romance literature, which Smith would have
been familiar with, so he had an idea of how

(06:37):
he would like himself seen by the public. He wrote
on her famous coattails with that story, he wrote a
pretty convincing story if it's made it all the way
to today. Well. And the other story that people try
to say is that there was a relationship between John
Smith and pokeconta is a romantic relationship. This is good
for the movies or something. I even remember when I

(06:58):
was a little kid learning this story, wondering who this
John Rolf guy is who comes in later? I always thought,
you know, how did he Pocahonus and John Smith go together?
Really supposed to end up together. But they don't. As
you'll see, they were really just friendly, cautious allies, and
she was very helpful to him. She was a little girl.
We should say that too. It's only ten or eleven

(07:19):
years old when they meet, um, but yeah, they are allies.
She uh takes the trouble to learn his language and
he learns hers, and she becomes a frequent visitor in
Jamestown over the years. She'll bring food from her father
sometimes and she even if the earlier account is not true,
she does save John Smith's life later in January of

(07:43):
sixteen o nine, when she warns him about an ambush.
And then we've got a sad little interlude where Smith
returns to England in late sixteen o nine and relationships
between the settlers and Powhattan just go down the tubes,
and the English tell Pocahonas that he died, and so
she doesn't come back for four years. She just disappears

(08:06):
from the life of Jamestown. And this is a pretty
dark time in general for Jamestown. Um the at the
beginning of sixteen ten, what's known as the starving time,
when the settlers just ran out of food and they
ate dogs and cats, rats, mice, the starch from their
Elizabethan roughs they could make into this crude porridge, and

(08:30):
the more grizzly details they dug up people who had
died to eat them. And the famous maccab tale of Jamestown,
I'm sure most of us know is the man who
murdered his pregnant wife and eat her, or at least
started to prepare her for eating. But Pocons comes back
into the lives of the settlers in sixteen thirteen when

(08:53):
Sir Samuel Argall takes her prisoner in exchange for English
prisoners and weapons and tools that have been stolen from
the settlers. So that's an awfully nice way to repay
someone who's been to help kidnap her, uh it. Sir
Samuel Argyll had conspired with Japazus, the chief of the
Patawamic tribe, and Palatine releases some of the prisoners, but

(09:17):
he won't negotiate further than that. We probably because they're
not very trustworthy. Yeah, he's probably seeing them as criminals. Um.
And so Pocahonas gets taken from Jamestown to another settlement
which she's treated like a princess, and she's converted to
Christianity and given her new name, baptized as Rebecca. And

(09:38):
then this is where her real love comes in, not
John Smith, John Rawl in April of sixteen fourteen, who
is the man she married with the approval of the
Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Dale, and also her father, Chief Patan.
And I feel like we should give a little background
on John Rolfe because his arrival in Virginia is so miraculous.

(10:00):
He he he tries to come to Jamestown in sixteen and nine.
It's probably good that he didn't make it because as
we all know now sixteen ten we have the starving time.
But instead on his voyage, the ship is damaged by
a hurricane and everyone in the ship is working to
hall water to keep it afloat, but they run aground
in the Bermudez, and he and the survivors recover on

(10:23):
the island, catching fish, wild hogs, and sea turtles better
than the cats, rats, and dogs. Spend nine months on
the island and they build two small ships out of
the wreckage and managed to sail to Jamestown sixteen ten.
I mean, that's better than Robinson Crusoe, isn't it. It
really is impressed Bermuda. At least you're missing a starving time. Yeah.

(10:47):
So they arrive in the spring of sixteen ten. You
can imagine these poor shipwrecked people are probably hoping they're
gonna come to a nice, cozy little jamestown with everything
set up and happy. So welcomes with open arms. But
of course it is right after the starving time, so
instead they find a bunch of skeletal survivors are really

(11:09):
not that many, Only sixty of them have made it
through the winter, and they're all pretty disheartened. So the
shipwreck survivors pack up the starving time survivors and they're
going to wait until the tides are right and sail
for Newfoundland and try to hitch your ride back to England.
And while they're waiting for the for the right conditions,

(11:32):
a convoy of ships comes in this time with a
hundred and fifty new colonists and supplies. I imagine they
thought it was a mirage. Probably at the time. It's
pretty well. And imagine what if they had left too,
What if they had just gotten out and tried to
hitch to New England. I have no idea it would
look like for the new or the new colonists coming,
it would look like another Roanoke or something. So this

(11:55):
is your history Americans. But going back to Pocohonas, after
their marriage, peace between US settlers and the Indians lasted
for all of Powatan's lifetime. Yeah, it was a non
aggression treaty. It was a real royal marriage in a sense.
So Pocahontas and her husband have a child, Um Thomas,
and in the spring of sixteen sixteen, when their son

(12:16):
is one year old, the family heads back to England
um with a group of other Native Americans and Governor Dale,
and Rolf is selling tobacco. He's done quite well for
himself since Funnally settling in Jamestown was a lucky guy.
He was. He he smoked tobacco. It was a popular

(12:37):
fad at the time. And while the Native Americans also
smoked tobacco, they they had a different strain that wasn't
as popular with the Europeans or the colonists. So Rolf
actually imports a special strain of tobacco from the Caribbean
and Central America and he grows this and cultivates it

(12:57):
in Virginia and becomes a very respectable early Virginia planter
making that money. So so when his family is returning
to England, they're loaded down with tobacco. But it's also
kind of a pr visit. The Virginia Company uses Pocahona's
visit to publicize the colony and say, oh, you know,

(13:19):
look how well Jamestown is doing, and to win support
from investors in James the First because they would like
to send more settlers over there and perhaps developed that
possibly very lucrative tobacco. So she, yeah, she entertains at
royal events, and she's sort of a poster girl for
the quick good Indian um, just to make everyone more

(13:40):
comfortable with the idea of colonization. Not savages, these are
Indians will come and help us in our journey to
colonize America. But Pocahontas falls ill in the English climate
preparing for her return, and she dies in graves and
at about age twenty one, off to burke elysis and pneumonia,

(14:01):
and she's buried there. And her husband had been told
that their son was also too ill to survive the
voyage back to America, so he's left in England. Um
John Rolfe returns to Virginia um continues his his life
as a successful planter. Their son Thomas, stays in England

(14:24):
until about sixteen thirty five, and he too eventually goes
to Virginia and becomes a tobacco planter. But it wasn't
until about a century after John Smith's death that people
started to get really interested in Pokehonus and the Pocontas myth,
because she's become a really important story and how America

(14:44):
came to be. You know, something you learned about when
you're studying the Pilgrims in the First Thanksgiving, and Pocahontas
always falls in there. And even later in the nineteenth century,
Southern writers started focusing on her story as a way
to promote Virginia's earlier origins. That Virginia and Jamestown were
older than New England, so you know, take that Massachusetts.

(15:08):
But one of the questions that historians have thought about
is why did Jamestown prevail over Platon. Peloton was pretty
ambivalent towards the settlers. He it really seemed that he
thought they were too incompetent to make it, and that
eventually they would die off, they would starve. They would

(15:29):
fail for a while there, which looked like was gonna
I mean, that's yeah, you can see why someone would
think that. But I guess what he wasn't reckoning on
is that there was an inexhaustible supply of colonists coming over,
and they gradually started to uh just change the land
so much that the Native Americans couldn't carry out their
old way of living. They were fencing in property to

(15:53):
raise domestic animals, they were growing tobacco, which tobacco is
really hard on the soil. Um, the Native Americans would
would grow crops for a while and then let the
land lie fallow, and even honey bees. The Europeans brought
honey bees with them, um, not really quite understanding the

(16:15):
pollination effects. But no one seems to understand that when
they introduced species to different places, as as you will find.
I remember reading a lot about them with Australia, when
they decided they would like to, you know, bring all
their nice English animals over, didn't really work out. This
is kind of weird. John Rolf actually might have been
responsible for bringing earthworms to America because in his tobacco

(16:36):
Latin's ships they had to throw over ballast which was
mostly soil and rocks from England or Europe, and the
earthworms get in there and changed the landscape of North America.
I like that. I like the detail about the worm
and as a complete sidebar here. Um, the Virginia Algonquin

(16:56):
language is extinct. No one has known to have spoken
it since seventy five, and there wasn't a writing system,
so we've lost the grammar and the vocabulary, but a
few words have made it. There are two contemporary accounts
of Virginia Algonquin words, Captain Smith and the Jamestown Colonies.
Secretary William Starchy gave us words like raccoon, terrapin, tomahawk,

(17:22):
and mox sins, which I'm actually wearing my minnetonkas today
in honor of Pocahontas it was meant to be. But
the language revitalization of Virginia Algonquin is in full swing. Um.
There were fifteen original Algonquin languages. Only two are still
spoken naturally today, but several Algonquin communities in the East

(17:45):
have efforts to return the languages to daily use, which,
as you know, English majors and people who are interested
in language in general, I think it's pretty cool. Well. Plus,
if the words are anything like moccasin and terrapin, I
mean I would like one of the more words like
that please. So, if you'd like to learn about another
early settlement, you can go to our homepage at ww

(18:07):
dot how stuff works dot com and look up Roanoke.
And if you have any more Native American history you'd
like to hear about, please email us at History podcast
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(18:28):
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