Dead before 30: Pocahontas

Pocahontas: 1595-1617

Born in the late 1500’s, Pocahontas was the youngest daughter of Powhatan, chief of the tribes whose name he took years earlier, after he had waged a long campaign to unite the southern tribes into a society not unlike the Iroquois confederacy of the northern territories.

The complexities of what Pocahontas did or did not do to spare the life of John Smith have filled volumes I can only begin to recap here. It was 1607, and on an expedition up the Chesapeake bay, Smith – a notorious adventurer, raconteur, blowhard, and general thorn in the side of authority everywhere, was taken prisoner by the Powhatans. He was held captive while the chieftans tried to figure out what to do with him. Powhatan eventually, perhaps, chose to kill him. Or, just as likely, he chose peace. In either case, there was a ceremony, a symbolic (or literal) clubbing of Smith, during which Pocahontas played the role of Smith’s savior, rushing from the crowd, throwing herself on him, and begging her father for mercy. It was granted, and Smith gained a symbolic membership in the tribe. He returned to the Jamestown Colony, and Pocahontas became the emissary and mascot of the settlers.

Whether this was an initiation ceremony welcoming Smith to the tribe, an actual execution she prevented, or even whether any of that happened at all, nobody actually knows. Pocahontas never spoke of it; Smith’s is the only account, and even then he did so ten years later, in his third volume of memoirs, and details of the encounter echo a similar story he recounted from one of his trip to the Orient, years earlier. Such is the record in the pre-blog era.

But what of Powhatan, whose dream was to become father of a great nation? His fate was sealed. By choosing peace he unleashed waves of settlers who eventually spelled the doom of the people he had worked so hard to unite. But I think of this fact: his daughter Pocahontas eventually married John Rolfe, another settler, and emigrated to England. There, she toured the royal houses, converted to Christianity, and bore a son to John. On her return trip to the Americas, she took ill and died in 1617. She was not yet thirty years old.

But Rolfe and the boy returned to America, and their descendants became one of the premier families of Virginia. In this way, Powhatan’s vision of founding a great empire in the south came true, and his bloodline flows through prominent American families to this day. Which makes Pocahontas - who was captured, converted to Christianity, and carried around the globe to wonders beyond her father's imagining, a woman, essentially, without a home or a country except what she forged from circumstances she could not control - this woman who died before 30, a princess of aboriginals who saw more of the world in her short life than the King of England - was one of the founding mothers of America.

Note: This is part of an ongoing series of prominent people who made their contribution to society, then died in their 20's. My fascination with such people has, as yet, gone unexplained.