Chapter Five: Captivity and John Rolfe.

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Currently, Pocahontas was 16 years old and very pregnant, and Smith remembered that she was the Chief's favorite daughter. So the Colonizers made a plan to capture her and use her as leverage to get more supplies and create a peace treaty. 

The day that Pocahontas gave birth she was away from her husband, Kocoum, and was in the care of tribal Women.

Later in the night a white man named Captain Samuel Argall snuck into Pocahontas's tent and took her. Pocahontas was physically weak and didn't stand a chance defending herself. In John Smith's book he described Pocahontas being taken to their massive ship screaming in complete horror since she has never seen their kind of technology before. He also lied in his book about the Indigenous peoples stealing all of their supplies and weapons so the reason they took Pocahontas was to broker a peace treaty.

 In record they (not the colonizers) said that Kocoum heard about the news and took a horse in rage and killed anyone he could, he made it all the way to the ship but he was gunned down before he could save her.

After a while of being in captivity Pocahontas eventually fell into depression, we know from their oral history that Pocahontas had stopped eating because she missed her family so much. So the Englishmen decided to let her sister come visit because they needed her alive.

Once her sister arrived, Pocahontas told her that she was being raped by crew members on a regular basis, begging to go home but the Englishmen refused to let her go. Obviously Chief Powhatan would never stop the war until he got his daughter back. According to John Smith, Pocahontas, was only on the ship for three months but if you think about it she must have been prisoner at least a year or longer.

 Eventually, Pocahontas became pregnant by one of the men and they couldn't hide the fact that they were raping her, so there was no negotiating the peace treaty anymore. So they made up a story to hide their lies

This is when John Rolfe came in. He was known to be the first man to bring tobacco farming to the Jamestown colony and was able to build a stable business for the Englishmen to make profit by growing tobacco and shipping it to England. Rolfe was friends with all of them men that kept Pocahontas prisoner and may have been one of the many rapists. He "offered" to marry Pocahontas but the problem was that an "Englishmen can not marry a Native American" because they are "less than human'


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