Story of Pocahontas

Before she became a legend, she was a person. This is the historical account of Pocahontas, daughter of the powerful Powhatan chief, whose life intersected with the English colony at Jamestown in ways that would shape American mythology for centuries. Charles Dudley Warner reconstructs her story with careful attention to the cultural chasms that defined her existence: the young woman who may or may not have saved Captain John Smith's life, who bridge-builder between worlds, who traveled across an ocean to a country that both fascinated and failed her. Warner explores her conversion to Christianity, her marriage to John Rolfe, and her brief, ill-fated residence in England where she died far from her homeland at just twenty-two. This is not the Disney version, nor the distorted colonial propaganda. It is an attempt, written in the nineteenth century, to find the real person buried beneath centuries of romanticization and political manipulation. The result is a haunting portrait of translation, displacement, and the prices paid for coexistence.