Memory / Debunk

Pocahontas, Remembered

After 400 years, reality has begun to replace the lies.

by Victoria Sutton via Unintended Consequences on December 24, 2023

...Powhatan Confederacy would be a great stay for his impending execution. A parody was written in 1631 (the year that John Smith died) that parodied John Smith’s tales called, “The Legend of Captain Jones,” which was a capstone to the ridicule he had endured during the remainder of his life.

The kidnapping

Pocahontas or Makotoa (her actual Powhatan name) was only 10-11 years old when she met John Smith, so the tales of romance were just tales. In 1613 Samuel Argyle, kidnapped Pocahontas for ransom. The colonists proceeded to convert her to Christianity with a baptism and then she was “married” to John Rolfe. By 1616, the leaders of Jamestown decided to take their captive to England to promote the Virginia Colony, and it was negotiated that an entourage of other Powhatans would accompany her to England. Argyle was rewarded by being given commissions to work with the Powhatan Confederacy, a further insult to the Native American leadership.

The oral history of the Mattaponi say that one of the women who accompanied Pocahontas to England was told by Pocahontas that she had been raped by John Rolfe.

Suspicions of the Powhatan Confederacy

When Pocahontas was finally leaving to return to Jamestown in 1619, she was taken ill on the way out of the harbor, and suddenly died. Speculation about why she died has included tuberculosis to plague, both respiratory diseases. However, the description of her state of wellness upon leaving for the trip home, and dying before they had left the mouth of the Thames River, is not consistent with the course of plague or tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a chronic disease that lingers for years; plague can kill quickly but it is preceded by days of debilitating sickness. Native American oral history, however has a more likely theory. Pocahontas’s death has been considered highly suspicious by the Powhatan Confederacy and has survived in oral history, among the Mattaponi Nation, one of the Nation’s of the Powhatan Confederacy. The motive for poisoning Pocahontas before returning to Jamestown was out of fear that once she disclosed she had been raped and other aspects of her treatment, they would be attacked by the Powhatan Confederacy.

Her father, Chief Powhatan was stricken with grief upon learning of his daughter’s death, and the Mattaponi believe that he died within the year from this grief.