The Princess Pocahontas

The Princess Pocahontas, by
Virginia Watson

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Title: The Princess Pocahontas
Author: Virginia Watson
Illustrator: George Wharton Edwards
Release Date: August 6, 2005 [EBook #16458]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: THE WHITE FIGURE MOVED RAPIDLY]

THE PRINCESS POCAHONTAS
BY
VIRGINIA WATSON
Author of "WITH CORTES THE CONQUEROR"
WITH DRAWINGS AND DECORATIONS BY GEORGE
WHARTON EDWARDS

THE HAMPTON PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK

[Illustration: Decorative]
INTRODUCTION
To most of us who have read of the early history of Virginia only in our
school histories, Pocahontas is merely a figure in one dramatic
scene--her rescue of John Smith. We see her in one mental picture only,
kneeling beside the prostrate Englishman, her uplifted hands warding
off the descending tomahawk.
By chance I began to read more about the settlement of the English at
Jamestown and Pocahontas' connection with it, and the more I read the
more interesting and real she grew to me. The old chronicles gave me
the facts, and guided by these, my imagination began to follow the
Indian maiden as she went about the forests or through the villages of
the Powhatans.
We are growing up in this new country of ours. And just as when
children get older they begin to feel curious about the childhood of
their own parents, so we have gained a new curiosity about the early
history of our country. The earlier histories and stories dealing with the
Indians and the wars between them and the colonists made the red man
a devil incarnate, with no redeeming virtue but that of courage. Now,

however, there is a new spirit of understanding. We are finding out how
often it was the Indian who was wronged and the white man who
wronged him. Many records there are of treaties faithfully kept by the
Indians and faithlessly broken by the colonists. Virginia was the first
permanent English settlement on this continent, and if not the most
important, at least equally as important to our future development as
that of New England. From how small a seed, sown on that island of
Jamestown in 1607, has sprung the mighty State, that herself has
scattered seeds of other states and famous men and women to multiply
and enrich America. And amid what dangers did this seed take root!
But for one girl's aid--as far as man may judge--it would have been
uprooted and destroyed.
In truth, when I look over the whole world history, I can find no other
child of thirteen, boy or girl, who wielded such a far-reaching influence
over the future of a nation. But for the protection and aid which
Pocahontas coaxed from Powhatan for her English friends at
Jamestown, the Colony would have perished from starvation or by the
arrows of the hostile Indians. And the importance of this Colony to the
future United States was so great that we owe to Pocahontas somewhat
the same gratitude, though in a lesser degree, that France owes to her
Joan of Arc.
Pocahontas's greatest service to the colonists lay not in the saving of
Captain Smith's life, but in her continued succour to the starving
settlement. Indeed, there are historians who have claimed that the story
of her rescue of Smith is an invention without foundation. But in
opposition to this view let me quote from "The American Nation: A
History." Lyon Gardiner Tyler, author of the volume "England in
America" says:
"The credibility of this story has been attacked.... Smith was often
inaccurate and prejudiced in his statements, but that is far from saying
that he deliberately mistook plain objects of sense or concocted a story
having no foundation."
and from "The New International Encyclopaedia":

"Until Charles Deane attacked it (the story of Pocahontas's rescue of
Smith) in 1859, it was seldom questioned, but, owing largely to his
criticisms, it soon became generally discredited. In recent years,
however, there has been a tendency to retain it."
It is in Smith's own writings, "General Historie of Virginia" and "A
True Relation," that we find the best and fullest accounts of these first
days at Jamestown. He tells us not only what happened, but how the
new country looked; what kinds of game abounded; how the Indians
lived, and what his impressions of their customs were. Smith was
ignorant of certain facts about the