Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and The Start of a New Nation

Early on in Love and Hate in Jamestown, David A. Price brings up Pocahontas, the Disney adaptation of the historical figure’s story: “The imaginative 1995 Walt Disney Co. movie, for example, endowed Pocahontas with a Barbie-dill figure, dressed her in a deerskin from Victoria’s Secret, and made her John Smith’s love interest” (4). Price goes to great lengths to puncture these well-trodden myths, while seeking to establish a few new myths of his own.

Pocahontas was 10 years old when she and a captive John Smith met. In Smith’s retelling of the event, Pocahontas’s plea for his life was not that of a love-struck woman, but a curious and precocious girl. Nevertheless, Smith’s enemies speculated that the pair had a sexual relationship at some point in the four years they knew each other, which might have fueled future romantic retellings (which added a few years to Pocahontas’s life and subtracted a few from Smith’s). Though Price suggests that Pocahontas might have harbored an unrequited crush on Smith, he disproves their dynamic being a Disneyfied tale of star-crossed love.

Journalists who retell history often look for an angle of interest to readers, inventing new myths and often calling them “creative theses.