Pocahontas fell in love with the dashing Englishman John Smith, threw herself across his body to save him from execution, and their romance bridged two worlds. Disney made it a musical. It is one of the most retold love stories in American history.
Pocahontas was a child, around ten or eleven, when she met John Smith, who was an adult in his late twenties. There is no credible evidence of a romance, and most historians doubt the dramatic rescue happened the way Smith later told it; he only added the life-saving story years afterward, in a version written when he could no longer be contradicted, and may have misread a ritual if anything happened at all. The real Pocahontas was later kidnapped by English colonists, converted, took the name Rebecca, and married a different colonist, John Rolfe, before dying in England around the age of twenty-one. Her actual life was a tragedy of colonisation, not a romance. The love story is a Hollywood overlay on a young Native woman whose real fate was far grimmer than the film.