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ca. 1595—March 1617

New World Peacemaker

Every kid in America knows the story of Pocahontas, the Indian princess who saved Captain John Smith’s life. Scholars have squabbled over whether Smith’s rescue actually happened or, if it did, what it signified. But there’s little doubt that Pocahontas played an important role in the establishment and preservation of peace between Jamestown settlers and the Native American inhabitants of the New World.

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, chief of a union of Algonquin-speaking tribes in present-day tidewater Virginia. She was probably in her early teens when the English founders of Jamestown arrived in 1607. One of their leaders, Captain John Smith, was captured by Powhatan’s hunters a year later. As Smith related the story to Britain’s Queen Anne, he was forced down on two flat stones and ringed by warriors prepared to beat him to death with clubs when Pocohantas broke through them and threw herself on Smith. She “hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”

Whether or not the story is true, it’s clear that Pocahontas was an important pacifying link between Jamestown settlers and Powhatan’s people. She grew quite close to Smith, calling him her “father,” played with settler children, and prevailed on her father and his hunters to supply the starving colony with stored grain and meat. As Smith put it, “once in every four or five days, Pocahontas with her attendants brought so much provision that saved many of their lives that else for all this had starved with hunger.”

There was a third way in which Pocahontas ensured some degree of peace between settlers and Indians, but the telling of it speaks ill of the settlers. Despite Pocahontas’s efforts, hostilities erupted in 1609, and at one point in the conflict she was taken hostage by the settlers. Held a prisoner for the next five years, she learned English, converted to Christianity, and married an Englishman named John Rolfe. At least on Rolfe’s side, the marriage seems to have been motivated more by a desire to forge a peaceful alliance between the settlers and Powhatan than anything else. He was, he wrote, “motivated not by the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation.”

We don’t know what Pocahontas felt about the marriage. All we do know is that she and Rolfe had a son, and that she died shortly after the child’s birth of an unspecified illness. But the marriage with Rolfe did in fact ease the tension between the English and the Indians. It’s sobering to think that Pocahontas, who did so much on her own to make peace between the two peoples, continued her peace-building even after she was kidnapped and held captive by the men who sailed to her shores on strange boats. In one manner of speaking, Pocahontas may be the New World’s first peace martyr.