Pocahontas biography

Synopsis

Early life

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the leader of an alliance of about 30 Algonquian-speaking groups and petty chiefdoms in Tidewater Virginia known as Tsenacommacah. Her mother’s identity is unknown.

Historians have estimated Pocahontas’ birth year as around 1595, based on the 1608 account of Captain John Smith in A True Relation of Virginia and Smith’s subsequent letters. Even Smith is inconsistent on the question of her age, however. Although English narratives would remember Pocahontas as a princess, her childhood was probably fairly typical for a girl in Tsenacommacah.

Pocahontas was a favorite of her father's -- his "delight and darling,” according to the colonist Captain Ralph Hamor -- but she was not a princess in the sense of inheriting a political station. Like most young females, she learned how to forage for food and firewood, farm and building thatched houses. As one of Powhatan’s many daughters, she would have contributed to the preparation of feasts and other celebrations.

Like many Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians of the period, Pocahontas probably had several names, to be used in various contexts. Early in her life she was called Matoaka, but was later known as Amonute. The name Pocahontas was used in childhood, probably in a casual or family context.

Saving John Smith

Pocahontas was primarily linked to the English colonists through Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with more than 100 other settlers in April 1607. The Englishmen had numerous encounters over the next several months with the Tsenacommacah Indians. While exploring on the Chickahominy River in December of that year, Smith was captured by a hunting party led by Powhatan's close relative Opechancanough, and brought to Powhatan's home at Werowocomoco.

The details of this episode are inconsistent within Smith’s writings. In his 1608 account, Smith described a large feast followed by a talk with Powhatan. In this account, he does not meet Pocahontas for the first time until a few months later. In 1616, however, Smith revised his story in a letter to Queen Anne, who was anticipating the arrival of Pocahontas with her husband, John Rolfe.

Smith’s 1616 account describes the dramatic act of selflessness which would become legendary: "... at the minute of my execution", he wrote, "she [Pocahontas] hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown." Smith further embellished this story in his Generall Historie, written years later.