Pocahontas was a real Native American woman, born around 1595, the daughter of Chief Powhatan, who led many tribes in the land that English settlers called Virginia. English people later told a famous story: that she saved Captain John Smith in Jamestown when her father was about to kill him, and that she helped keep peace between the English and her people. That is the story many films still tell. Though actually, historians are not sure the rescue happened as Smith described it — he wrote it years later, and she would have been a child then, not a grown woman in love with him. What we do know is harder and smaller: she was taken by the English, given the Christian name Rebecca, married an Englishman called John Rolfe, sailed to England, and died there in 1617, still very young. Students often meet her first through a cartoon. The cartoon borrowed her name; it did not borrow her life.