We all think we know Pocahontas, but her real story is very different from the popular image. Pocahontas was an extremely talented and lively 10-year-old girl when Jamestown was founded in 1607. She was the daughter of the Great Powhatan, who ruled over numerous client tribes in the Chesapeake, the region the Powhatans called Tsenacomaca, and he selected her for a special role because of her intelligence and personality. Captain John Smith said her “wit, and spirit” made her stand out.
Smith first met Pocahontas when he was captured a few weeks after the first colonists' arrival in the area. He was brought before the Great Powhatan, where he encountered men with clubs ready, he thought, to beat out his brains. Suddenly Pocahontas intervened and put her head on his. In his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, Smith wrote that she risked her own life to save his, but modern scholars think she was probably playing a scripted role in some kind of adoption ceremony. Afterward, Powhatan called Smith his son.
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