Despite popular belief, the young girl was actually 10-years old when the settlers arrived in 1612 and she was mercilessly taken prisoner at Jamestown for over a year.

During her captivity, a widower named John Rolfe took a "special interest" in the young girl and bargaining for her release, she agrees to marry him in exchange for a life outside bars. This was the first recorded marriage between a European and Native American.

In 1614, she was renamed "Rebecca Rolfe" and taken to England two years later against her will, where she was paraded like an animal in the Company's campaign to support colonization. During this time, she gave birth to a son named Thomas Rolfe and was boasted as an example of a "civilized savage."

In 1617, the three of them set off for Virginia but Pocahontas fell gravely ill and was taken off the ship. According to the Powhatan story, she died at Gravesend on March 21, 1617, at the budding age of 21. The exact cause of her death is unknown, but ranges from small pox, pneumonia, to poison or tuberculosis.

Unlike the Disney adaptation, Pocahontas never actually got her happy fairy tale ending.