Pocahontas Marries Rolfe: A Complex Union in Colonial Virginia

Pocahontas, baptized as Rebecca, married tobacco planter John Rolfe on April 5, 1614, in a ceremony at Jamestown that served as diplomatic treaty as much as wedding. She was approximately 17 years old and had been held captive by the English colonists for over a year. He was a 28-year-old widower whose first wife and child had died in Bermuda during the Sea Venture shipwreck. Their marriage initiated the "Peace of Pocahontas," an eight-year period of relative calm between the Powhatan Confederacy and the English colony that nearly everyone understood was temporary. Pocahontas was the daughter of Wahunsenacah, the paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, which controlled most of tidewater Virginia. The Disney version of her story bears almost no resemblance to the historical record. She was about 10 years old when she first encountered John Smith in 1607, making the romantic narrative impossible. The famous "rescue" of Smith, in which she supposedly threw herself over his body to prevent his execution, may have been a Powhatan adoption ceremony that Smith misunderstood, or it may not have happened at all. Smith did not mention it until 1616, years after the supposed event. English colonists kidnapped Pocahontas in 1613 during a period of conflict with the Powhatan. Captain Samuel Argall lured her aboard his ship using a Patawomeck chief as an intermediary. During her captivity in Henricus, she was converted to Christianity, learned English, and began a relationship with Rolfe. Her father agreed to the marriage and sent a delegation to the wedding but did not attend himself. The union served his strategic interests by creating a family bond with the English leadership. Rolfe took Pocahontas to England in 1616, where she was presented at court and became a celebrity, used by the Virginia Company to promote investment in the colony. She met John Smith again and reportedly rebuked him for his treatment of her father's people. She fell ill while preparing to return to Virginia and died at Gravesend in March 1617 at approximately age 21. The cause of death remains unknown; pneumonia, tuberculosis, and smallpox have all been suggested. The peace her marriage secured ended in 1622 when the Powhatan launched a coordinated attack that killed a quarter of the English settlers.