It was while on one of these, in December, 1607, that that incident of
his career occurred which is all that a great many people know of
Captain John Smith. With two companions, he was paddling in a canoe up
the Chickahominy, when the party was attacked by Indians. Smith's two
companions were killed, and he himself saved his life only by exhibiting
his compass and doing other things to astonish and impress the savages.

He was finally taken captive to the Powhatan, the ruler of the tribe,
and, according to Smith's story, a long debate ensued among the Indians
as to his fate. Presently two large stones were laid before the chief,
and Smith was dragged to them and his head forced down upon them, but
even as one of the warriors raised his club to dash out the captive's
brains, the Powhatan's daughter, a child of thirteen named Pocahontas,
threw herself upon him, shielding his head with hers, and claimed him
for her own, after the Indian custom. Smith was thereupon released,
adopted into the tribe, and sent back to Jamestown, where he arrived on
the eighth of January, 1608.

From the Indian standpoint, there was nothing especially unusual about
this procedure, for any member of the tribe was privileged to claim a
captive, if he wished. A century before, Ortiz, a member of De Soto's
expedition, had been captured by the Indians and saved in precisely the
same way, and many instances of the kind occurred in the years which
followed. But to the captive, it partook of the very essence of
romance; he had only the dimmest idea of what was really happening, and
his account of it, written many years later, was of the most sentimental
kind. Many doubts have been cast on the story, and historians seem
hopelessly divided about it, as they are about many other incidents of
Smith's life. Certain it is, however, that Pocahontas afterwards
befriended the colony on more than one occasion; and was finally