THE STORY OF POCAHONTAS

By Charles Dudley Warner



The simple story of the life of Pocahontas is sufficiently romantic
without the embellishments which have been wrought on it either by
the vanity of Captain Smith or the natural pride of the descendants
of this dusky princess who have been ennobled by the smallest rivulet
of her red blood.

That she was a child of remarkable intelligence, and that she early
showed a tender regard for the whites and rendered them willing and
unwilling service, is the concurrent evidence of all contemporary
testimony. That as a child she was well-favored, sprightly, and
prepossessing above all her copper-colored companions, we can
believe, and that as a woman her manners were attractive. If the
portrait taken of her in London--the best engraving of which is by
Simon de Passe--in 1616, when she is said to have been twenty-one
years old, does her justice, she had marked Indian features.

The first mention of her is in "The True Relation," written by
Captain Smith in Virginia in 1608. In this narrative, as our readers
have seen, she is not referred to until after Smith's return from the
captivity in which Powhatan used him "with all the kindness he could
devise." Her name first appears, toward the close of the relation,
in the following sentence:

"Powhatan understanding we detained certain salvages, sent his