She never answered to the name the world knows her by. Her birth name was Amonute, she carried a guarded private name, Matoaka, and Pocahontas was a childhood nickname meaning something close to "little mischief." The English called her a princess because monarchy was the only political structure they knew how to see, but Powhatan society was matrilineal: her father Wahunsenacawh's authority would pass to his brothers, then his sisters, then his sisters' children, never to his own daughter. Early Jamestown colonists describe her turning cartwheels in the marketplace as a girl. Within a few years she would be the hinge on which the survival of an entire English colony turned.

The rescue story does not survive scrutiny. John Smith wrote a detailed account of his capture in 1608, months after it happened, describing a feast and a long conversa ...