The Pocahontas Myth -- Real Life Of Princess Has Been Hidden Within An Overgrown Forest Of Legends

The Pocahontas publicity machine is cranking up again, as it has with some regularity for almost 400 years.

With the opening of Disney's new animated movie, "Pocahontas," the country's first heroine and original ethnic female icon is back before her adoring public.

But did the famous Indian princess really die of yellow fever, as National Public Radio reported recently? Did she really save the life of Captain John Smith by flinging her body over his to stop her father, Chief Powhatan, from bashing out his brains?

You won't find the answers in the movie, which tells only a small part of Pocahontas' early life, and not very authentically.

For starters, Pocahontas did not look like a multicultural Barbie doll with long, flowing black hair - although Powhatan females were said to have fine features and shapely bods.

At 11 or 12, the age Pocahontas generally is believed to have been when she met Smith, young Indian girls looked more like punk rockers. The tops and sides of their heads were closely shaved, with a long, braided lock at the back. Pocahontas may even have had a tattoo.

Want to know more? Get yourself to a library - and good luck. The Pocahontas story has been romanticized, eroticized and distorted by countless diarists, playwrights, novelists, poets, historians, biographers and other scholars. And the debate is still raging in academia over whether Pocahontas actually saved Smith's life, as the swashbuckling soldier of fortune claims in a book written in 1624, seven years after his young friend's death.

"From his time to ours, it has been Smith's credibility that is at issue," writes Frances Mossiker in "Pocahontas," a highly praised biography. "It is Smith's story, Smith's alone, with no other eyewitnesses to corroborate or contradict, a story told in one interminably long, rambling, disjointed sentence . . . a compelling story fraught with symbolism, with all the makings of a myth. . . ."

The story begins in the mid-to-late 1590s, when Pocahontas was born in eastern Virginia near the pristine shores of Chesapeake Bay.

Scholars say she must have been a very special child.

Her powerful father, described by the English as "majestic," had more than 100 wives, but only one child with each. Pocahontas was a child of divorce, with 20 half-brothers and 10 half-sisters, all of whom she outshined.

"She grew up in a whole ream of people and managed to get her father's attention," said Helen Rountree, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., and an expert on Powhatan history and culture. "She was witty and a tease."

Rountree favors the Mossiker biography, written in 1976 but out of print. It's lively, moving and suspenseful - and padded with endless, fascinating speculations, which Rountree feels are mostly accurate, such as this one:

"Pocahontas, like other Indian children, would have been taught to cultivate inner stillness - trained to sit quietly beside a mother or a sister who was sitting quietly."

She seems to have liked the sight of John Smith, a natural leader and long-haired blond hunk, just as Disney depicts him. But he was also a braggart, a hard-bitten yeoman of low birth with ambitions to become a gentleman.

Smith is regarded as a pretty reliable historian - except for the rescue story. Many scholars think he lied or at least misinterpreted the incident, and there are plenty of reasons not to believe him:

Smith waited 16 years to write of the rescue, never mentioning it in earlier works. He had fallen on hard times in London and may have spiced up the later book to boost sales.

The tale is suspiciously patterned after an old Scottish ballad about another young English adventurer who is captured by a Turkish sultan and rescued by his beautiful daughter. The tale also resembles an account of the capture of a Spanish soldier in Florida in 1529, and his rescue by another Indian princess.

While Smith may have believed he was facing death, Powhatan may never have intended to kill him, and Pocahontas may have only pretended to save him. The incident could have been part of an adoption/initiation rite into the tribe.

Robert Tilton, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, has yet a new theory.

The mock execution may have been "a test of Smith's courage, not as part of an adoption ritual, but as part of his proving his worthiness to deal on equal terms with Powhatan," Tilton said.

J.A. Leo Lemay, an English professor at the University of Delaware, passionately disagrees.

Hundreds of Indians were present at the rescue, and most were still alive when Smith's last book came out, Lemay said. "If he had lied, they would have known it, and they would have said so."

Some of the Indians had traveled with Pocahontas to London in 1616, and would have met members of the court of King James I, who would have heard the rescue story because of a letter allegedly written by Smith to Queen Anne about Pocahontas, Lemay said.

True or untrue, the rescue story seems destined to continue as the legend's focus. There is nothing in the Disney movie about Pocahontas' capture by the English at about age 17; her year as a prisoner, during which she learned how to read English and fell in love with one of her teachers, John Rolfe, 28, a widower; her baptism into Christianity; her marriage to Rolfe; the birth of their son, Thomas; her trip to England and her London celebrity; her death at about age 21.

Rountree said there is "not a shred of evidence" about the symptoms of her fatal illness, and so no way to know what she died of, though some writers have claimed smallpox or yellow fever.

In the early 1800s, an Englishman named John Davis realized the potential of the rescue story as a great romance. To pull it off, he made Pocahontas slightly older, leading the way for countless other Pocahontas-Smith romances, including Disney's.

In 1830, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington by her first marriage, was the first playwright to solve the main problem of staging the romance: that the rescue comes too early.

Pocahontas became a stereotype, a beautiful Indian girl who saves a white soldier, even spawning a type of frontier fiction.

She was depicted in many paintings showing her allegiance to her newly adopted culture. Today, the paintings are seen largely as propaganda for Manifest Destiny.

Pocahontas' name and face have been used to sell perfume, flour, cigars and other merchandise.

Now, to promote the movie, she's hawking Nestle's chocolate bars, Cheerios, dolls, sandals, athletic shoes and moccasins.

She is everywhere and nowhere.

In 1617, she was buried in a silver coffin in a vault below the Church of St. George at Gravesend, England.

---------------------------- POCAHONTAS: FICTION AND FACT ----------------------------

Disney's "Pocahontas," opening in theaters across the country this weekend, takes some liberties with the real Pocahontas' life.

WHAT THE MOVIE SHOWS:

Situation: Pocahontas meets English Captain John Smith and the two fall in love.

Age: Young woman.

Appearance: Beautiful, with long, thick dark hair.

WHAT HISTORY SAYS:

Situation: Smith said Pocahontas saved his life, but historians think this is a misrepresentation. The two were not lovers.

Age: Young girl of 11 or 12.

Appearance: More aristocratic, short hair with a long braid down her back.