Pocahontas (1613–1617): Captivity, Marriage and Death in England

Pocahontas was a daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief of a confederation of Algonquian-speaking peoples in coastal Virginia. Captured by the English in April 1613, she converted to Christianity, married the colonist John Rolfe in 1614, travelled to England in 1616 and died at Gravesend in March 1617, aged about 21. Her short, well-documented life became one of the most romanticised stories in American history.

Background: the Powhatan world and Jamestown

Pocahontas was born around 1596. Her father, Wahunsenaca, known to the English as Powhatan, ruled Tsenacommacah, a chiefdom of some thirty tribes around the Chesapeake Bay. Her personal names were Amonute and Matoaka; Pocahontas was a nickname often translated as “playful one”.

When English colonists founded Jamestown in May 1607, she was about ten or eleven. Colonists’ accounts describe her visiting the fort, playing with English boys and accompanying Powhatan envoys who brought food to the starving settlers. She was known to John Smith, the colony’s most prominent early leader, who left Virginia in 1609.

Relations soon collapsed into the First Anglo-Powhatan War, which began in 1609 or 1610. Around this time, according to the colonist William Strachey, Pocahontas married a Powhatan man named Kocoum. Nothing more is known of him.

Her early contacts with the colony are recorded mainly by Smith and by William Strachey, the colony’s secretary in 1610–1611. Strachey described her as a lively girl who turned cartwheels with the boys in the fort. Smith also credited her with warning him of an ambush in early 1609, a claim that, like his later rescue story, cannot be checked against any independent source.

The English and the Powhatan at war

The First Anglo-Powhatan War was fought with raids, ambushes and the burning of villages and cornfields on both sides. The English colony nearly collapsed during the “Starving Time” of the winter of 1609–1610, when the population of Jamestown fell from around 500 to about 60. The arrival of new settlers and soldiers under Lord De La Warr in June 1610 saved it.

Under De La Warr and his successors, Thomas Gates and Thomas Dale, the English adopted harsher methods, including attacks on Powhatan towns along the James River. By 1613 both sides were exhausted. Pocahontas’s capture took place against this background, and the English saw her above all as a hostage who might force Powhatan to make peace on their terms.

Capture in 1613

In April 1613 Captain Samuel Argall, sailing up the Potomac River to trade, learned that Pocahontas was staying with the Patawomeck people. With the help of the Patawomeck leader Iopassus, also called Japazaws, the English lured her aboard Argall’s ship and held her.

The colonists demanded that Powhatan return English prisoners, stolen weapons and tools in exchange for his daughter. Powhatan sent back some of them, and negotiations dragged on for months. Pocahontas was kept at the settlement of Henricus, where the minister Alexander Whitaker instructed her in Christianity. She was baptised and given the name Rebecca, probably in 1613 or early 1614.

Historians debate how far her conversion was voluntary. She was a captive, but contemporary English writers, and later Pocahontas herself according to their reports, presented it as sincere. Her own words survive only through English intermediaries.

Marriage to John Rolfe

In March 1614 the English took Pocahontas up the Pamunkey River to confront her father’s people. During this tense meeting she reportedly declared that she would stay with the English. John Rolfe, a widowed colonist who had pioneered the growing of a sweeter variety of tobacco for export, had written to Governor Thomas Dale asking permission to marry her.

Powhatan consented, and the couple married on or about 5 April 1614, probably at Jamestown. Her uncle Opechisco and two of her brothers attended. The marriage helped bring about a truce, often called the Peace of Pocahontas, which lasted until 1622. Their son, Thomas Rolfe, was born in January 1615.

The visit to England

The Virginia Company, which ran the colony and needed investors, saw Pocahontas as living proof that the colony could convert and “civilise” Native people. In 1616 she sailed to England with Rolfe, their son, Governor Dale and a group of about a dozen Powhatan men and women, including the priest and councillor Uttamatomakkin. They landed at Plymouth in June 1616.

In London she was presented as “the Lady Rebecca” and treated as visiting royalty. On Twelfth Night, 6 January 1617, she attended Ben Jonson’s masque The Vision of Delight at Whitehall Palace in the presence of King James I. An engraved portrait by Simon van de Passe, made in 1616, shows her in English court dress; it is the only image made from life.

John Smith later wrote that he met her in Brentford, near London, and that she reproached him for having broken his promises to her father. Smith’s account is the only source for the conversation.

Death at Gravesend

In March 1617 the Rolfes set sail for Virginia. Pocahontas became seriously ill before the ship had left the Thames estuary and was taken ashore at Gravesend in Kent. She died there and was buried in St George’s Church on 21 March 1617.

The cause of death was not recorded. Pneumonia, tuberculosis and dysentery have all been suggested. A Mattaponi oral tradition, published in 2007, holds that she was poisoned, but there is no documentary evidence for this and most historians treat it with caution.

Her son Thomas was left in England with Rolfe’s brother and returned to Virginia as an adult in 1635. John Rolfe died in Virginia in 1622, and Powhatan died in 1618. In March 1622 Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough launched a coordinated attack that killed about 347 colonists, ending the peace for good.

Myths and facts

Myth: Pocahontas saved John Smith from execution. The story first appeared in Smith’s Generall Historie of 1624, published years after her death. His 1608 account of his captivity does not mention it. Some historians think it may have been an adoption ritual that Smith misread, while others suspect embellishment.

Myth: Pocahontas and Smith were lovers. She was a child in 1607, and no source of the time suggests a romance. The love story grew in nineteenth-century novels and plays and was popularised again by the 1995 Disney film.

Fact: Her descendants are well documented. Through Thomas Rolfe, many Virginian families claimed descent from her. When Virginia passed its 1924 Racial Integrity Act, it included a so-called “Pocahontas exception” to protect these families’ legal status as white.

Timeline

• c. 1596: Pocahontas is born, a daughter of the paramount chief Powhatan.
• 1607, May: The English found Jamestown.
• 1613, April: Samuel Argall captures Pocahontas on the Potomac River.
• 1614, April: She marries John Rolfe, beginning a period of peace.
• 1615, January: Her son Thomas Rolfe is born.
• 1616, June: The Rolfes and a Powhatan delegation arrive at Plymouth, England.
• 1617, 6 January: She attends Ben Jonson’s masque before James I at Whitehall.
• 1617, 21 March: She is buried at St George’s Church, Gravesend.

Why it matters

Pocahontas’s life is one of the best documented of any Native American woman of her time, yet it is known almost entirely through English eyes. Her capture, marriage and visit to England show how early colonial diplomacy, religion and propaganda worked. Separating her real history from the later legend also shows how national myths are built.