Mad About You

It was the first great American love story. Or was it?

Neither John Smith nor Pocahontas ever claimed to be an item. There’s not a shred of evidence to affirm they were. But the real story of their relationship is more interesting than what the rich canon of American romance literature, or even Hollywood, has made of it. Pocahontas and Smith shared a deep friendship based, at a minimum, on mutual fascination, admiration and respect. Their relationship almost certainly saved Jamestown, opening the way to British empire in America.

And their intimacy–platonic or otherwise–has mirrored for the ages the perilous courtship between the Native Americans and the early European colonists, a forced marriage of competing cultures and conflicting interests that, like so many other impassioned yet ultimately tragic affairs, began with great promise only to end in heartbreak.

Princess Matoaka–she was also called Amonute–was born around 1596. Daughter of Chief Powhatan, she had to be a bit of a spitfire to get Dad’s attention. Powhatan had a hundred “wives” or, more accurately, women who bore him children. This child was special. He nicknamed her Pocahontas, or little capricious one, a tribute to her playful nature. She was also striking. She “much exceedeth any of the rest of his [Powhatan’s] people,” wrote Smith, “not only for feature, countenance and proportion…but for wit and spirit, the only Nonpareil of his country.”

Those lines comprise the most fawning reference to a female in the voluminous collection of Smith’s lifetime of writings. He had good reason to find her extraordinary. For one thing, she saved him from execution by her father. Some historians doubt that–Smith is the only historical source for the tale–but the story has never been credibly disputed. What is less well known is that she saved the Englishman a second time, risking her life to sneak through a darkened forest alone to warn Smith of imminent ambush, and that she continued to find ways to help the Jamestown settlers. When a winter fire ravaged their colony in 1608, Pocahontas paid a series of calls, accompanied by braves bearing beaver meat, venison and other delicacies. And it was Pocahontas who was sent to Jamestown one year to negotiate the release of half a dozen Indian prisoners.

After 2 1/2 years in Virginia, Smith returned to England, and the settlers told Pocahontas he was dead. About 14 at the time, her reaction speaks for itself: she banished all thought of the settlers, staying clear of Jamestown for the next four years. The English, though, weren’t finished with her. In the spring of 1613, when Pocahontas was nearing 18, she was kidnapped by a colonist-sailor. Her father paid most of the ransom–a gaggle of English prisoners, guns and a boatload of corn–but the white men kept the girl just upriver from Jamestown. There the planter John Rolfe, a prosperous widower, soon found himself battling an attraction he deemed alternately sinful and sublime. In what must be the most peculiar betrothal request in American history, Rolfe wrote to Virginia Governor Thomas Dale, first apologizing for being in love with the daughter of the native chief, then begging for permission to marry her. Theirs was the first recorded marriage of an Englishman and a Native American woman, and it ushered in a period of relative peace.

Two years later, the Anglo-American couple and their young son Thomas visited London on a public relations scheme hatched by the Virginia Co. Its heavily indebted investors hoped the exotic New World princess would help them drum up desperately needed capital to keep their flagging American venture afloat.

No one followed her visit with greater interest, it seemed, than the still influential but greatly diminished John Smith. He wrote a letter to King James’ wife, Queen Anne, urging her to receive Pocahontas in a manner befitting her status as Algonquian royalty. Uncomfortable months passed before Smith summoned the courage to call on Pocahontas. What followed was a heated, if not altogether tender, scene. Pocahontas turned her back on Smith, refusing for more than two hours to speak. When at last she did, she gave him a piece of her mind, telling Smith he had betrayed her people and upbraiding him for staying gone for so many years and never sending a word. Weeks later, drifting down the Thames aboard a ship bound for Jamestown, Pocahontas fell ill. She died in Gravesend in March 1617. Smith lived another 14 years, unwed to his dying day. Both were buried in England, separately, and a world away from the one true love they indisputably shared, a place the English called America.