In her infancy, Pocahontas was given the secret personal name Matoaka later, she was known as Amonute. Her mother’s name and tribal origin were never recorded. Pocahontas was one of dozens of children born to Powhatan, the paramount chief of Tsenacomoco, a political alliance of Algonquian-speaking Indians in Tidewater Virginia. Many elite Virginians, meanwhile, have tenuously claimed her as a relative, even leading to a “Pocahontas clause” in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. In the centuries since, Pocahontas’s life has slipped into myth, serving to represent Virginia’s early claim to be the foundation-place of America. Early in her return voyage to Virginia, she became ill and died at Gravesend in March 1617. At the request of the Virginia Company of London, she met both King James I and the bishop of London, after which she reunited briefly with Smith. The marriage, approved by Powhatan, brought an end to the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614) and set the stage for Pocahontas’s visit to London in 1616. Sometime around 1610, she married an Indian named Kocoum, and in 1613 she was captured by the English and confined at Jamestown, where she converted to Christianity and married the colonist John Rolfe.
She did meet Smith several times, sometimes serving as Powhatan’s silent figurehead and a symbolic liaison between the chief and the English colonists she was not, however, a “princess” or a diplomat in any modern sense. An iconic figure in American history, Pocahontas is largely known for saving the life of the Jamestown colonist John Smith and then romancing him-although both events are unlikely to be true. Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, paramount chief of an alliance of Virginia Indians in Tidewater Virginia.
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