Tag: Pocahontas

Pocahontas (c. 1595 – March 1617), later known as Rebecca Rolfe, was a Virginia Indian chief’s daughter notable for having assisted colonial settlers at Jamestown. She converted to Christianity and married the English settler John Rolfe. After they traveled to London, she became famous in England in the last year of her life. She was a daughter of Wahunsunacawh, better known as Chief or Emperor Powhatan (to indicate his primacy), who headed a network of tributary tribal nations in the Tidewater region of Virginia (called Tenakomakah by the Powhatan). These tribes made up what is known as the Powhatan Chiefdom and spoke a language of the Algonquian.
Pocahontas’s birth year is unknown, but some historians estimate it to have been around 1595 based on the accounts of Captain John Smith. In A True Relation of Virginia (1608), Smith described the Pocahontas he met in the spring of 1608 as being “a child of tenne years old.” In a letter written in 1616, he again described her as she was in…