It was while she was in captivity at Jamestown that Pocahontas converted to Christianity. The English colonists were beginning to get the upper hand on the Algonquians, who had done so much to help them just years earlier. The drug had taken hold, and Europeans were beginning to get a taste for it.Īrgall captured Pocahontas in 1613, and the Jamestown colonists now leveraged her captivity as a means of forcing the Powhatan chief into a peace treaty that would last for nearly a decade. The English had grown in numbers during the early 1610s, as extra expeditions to America were funded, largely on the back of the enormous profits which investors in London had realized could be made from cultivating the tobacco in Virginia. It was presumably during the period of her marriage and wherever she had settled that she was captured by an English military band led by Captain Samuel Argall. Indeed in the early 1610s, she was married, albeit while still a teenager, to a local Native American named Kocoum. Pocahontas’s involvement with the Jamestown colony temporarily abated when Smith headed back to England in 1609 and conflict between the English, and the Native Americans broke out. Later Smith would tell the Queen of England that had it not been for Pocahontas, the colony would never have survived this arduous period. For some reason, colonists opted to spend all their time panning for gold in the James River rather than planting any crops. She seems to have acted as an intermediary to implore her father to provide aid to the English colonists during their first years at Jamestown, during which they were often on the point of starvation. The name she is most commonly known, Pocahontas, translates roughly into ‘playful one’, though later when she married into the English society building up in the Chesapeake Sound, she became known as Rebecca Rolfe.įrom very early on, Pocahontas played a role in the Algonquian’s interactions with the English at Jamestown, principally with the sometimes leader of the fort, Captain John Smith. She was born around 1596 and was thus heading into her teenage years as the Jamestown colony struggled to survive. Pocahontas, who was also variously known as Matoaka or Amonute in local dialects, was a Native American princess, the daughter of the Powhatan chief Wahunsonacock. Had it not been for the help they received from the local Native Americans and their chief, the Powhatan, they might not have survived. Here, surrounded by the powerful confederacy of the Algonquian led by their chief, the Powhatan, the English eked out a depressing existence for several years, with little more than a hundred or so male settlers often being on the brink of starvation. This was in the Chesapeake Sound of Virginia, and the site chosen was named Jamestown after the English king, James I. However, these proved abortive, and it was not until 1607 that the first permanent English settlement was established on the American mainland. English explorers had first made contact with the eastern seaboard of North America in the mid-sixteenth century as they sought to challenge Spain’s primacy in the Americas.Īccordingly, colonial pioneers such as Humphrey Gilbert attempted to establish colonies in the eastern United States during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), notably Sir Walter Raleigh in North Carolina in the mid-1580s.
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