The Marriage of Pocahontas and Rolfe
Good morning. It’s April 5, 2013. On this day in 1614, a Powhatan princess called Pocahontas married an English settler in Virginia named John. This was John Rolfe, not John Smith, whom she also knew. Was it a love triangle between the three of them? Was it love at all? We’ll never know for certain, but it’s an enduring story that has fascinated Americans for four centuries.
“Ask any 8-year-old girl in America who Susan B. Anthony was and you'll likely get a blank stare,” Susan K. Lewis once wrote. “But mention Pocahontas and the child's face will light up, no doubt with a vision of Disney's beautiful ‘princess’ dancing in her mind.”
True that, but don’t only blame the Disney movie: Pocahontas was being mythologized in her own time, from the moment she came cartwheeling into the English settlers' fort as a barely clothed free-spirited teenage daughter of Chief Powhatan.
John Smith himself was the first to stoke the legend. He penned the now-famous account of Pocahontas saving him from execution when he was captured in 1607. There are many reasons to doubt this tale. First, Smith never told this story until 1624, when all the other protagonists – Pocahontas, her father, and John Rolfe - were dead. Second, Smith wrote of a similar near-miss while in Turkey in 1602 (with another princess). Finally, Smith was known by his contemporaries as a vainglorious fellow prone to occasional exaggeration.
But Smith was indeed captured by Powhatan’s warriors, and he was later returned safely to his own camp. It’s also true that after Smith left Jamestown for England, war broke out between the Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians - and that in one of these skirmishes, Pocahontas was taken as hostage by settlers seeking to have some of their own people returned.
Chief Powhatan agreed to a prisoner exchange, although he refused to return the weapons his raiders had carried off. This was perhaps the first political debate over “gun control” in the New World. But the chief’s daughter, having been baptized by the settlers, chose to stay among them.
Pocahontas was evidently enthralled by one of the white men, John Rolfe, and he with her. They were married on April 5, 1614. Two years later, the couple set sail for England. There, Pocahontas saw John Smith again, and rebuked him for leaving Virginia and forsaking the promises Smith had made to her people.
As Pocahontas and John Rolfe were returning to America in 1617, she became ill - smallpox or dysentery are likely culprits - and died in Rolfe’s arms.
John Rolfe, killed in an Indian attack in 1622, was not around to counter the innuendo in John Smith’s embroidered accounts, and by 1803, the love triangle notion was exploited by a writer named John Davis in a book titled, “Travels in the United States of America.”
We will never know what Pocahontas felt in her heart about John Smith, although it’s pretty clear John Rolfe loved her dearly. Even that relationship, though, might not pass muster in our more culturally sensitive time: a native girl, taken hostage, converted to a strange religion, and taken away from her people on ships? It doesn’t sound very good.
Then again, Pocahontas, like her father, was no wallflower. And she had a larger-than-life personality when she was alive – and it only got bigger in death.
“Pocahontas is one of those characters, rarely appearing on the theater of life, which no age can claim, no country appropriate,” wrote William Watson Waldron in 1841. “She is the property of mankind, serving as a beacon to light us on our way, instruct us in our duty, and show us what the human mind is capable of performing when abandoned to its own operations.”
