This passage is a great puzzle.  Does Strachey intend to say that Pocahontas was married to an Iniaan named Kocoum?  She might have been during the time after Smith’s departure in 1609, and her kidnapping in 1613, when she was of marriageable age.  We shall see hereafter that Powhatan, in 1614, said he had sold another favorite daughter of his, whom Sir Thomas Dale desired, and who was not twelve years of age, to be wife to a great chief.  The term “private Captain” might perhaps be applied to an Indian chief.  Smith, in his “General Historie,” says the Indians have “but few occasions to use any officers more than one commander, which commonly they call Werowance, or Caucorouse, which is Captaine.”  It is probably not possible, with the best intentions, to twist Kocoum into Caucorouse, or to suppose that Strachey intended to say that a private captain was called in Indian a Kocoum.  Werowance and Caucorouse are not synonymous terms.  Werowance means “chief,” and Caucorouse means” talker” or “orator,” and is the original of our word “caucus.”

Either Strachey was uninformed, or Pocahontas was married to an Indian—­a not violent presumption considering her age and the fact that war between Powhatan and the whites for some time had cut off intercourse between them—­or Strachey referred to her marriage with Rolfe, whom he calls by mistake Kocoum.  If this is to be accepted, then this paragraph must have been written in England in 1616, and have referred to the marriage to Rolfe it “some two years since,” in 1614.

That Pocahontas was a gentle-hearted and pleasing girl, and, through her acquaintance with Smith, friendly to the whites, there is no doubt; that she was not different in her habits and mode of life from other Indian girls, before the time of her kidnapping, there is every reason to suppose.  It was the English who magnified the imperialism of her father, and exaggerated her own station as Princess.  She certainly put on no airs of royalty when she was “cart-wheeling” about the fort.  Nor does this detract anything from the native dignity of the mature, and converted, and partially civilized woman.

We should expect there would be the discrepancies which have been noticed in the estimates of her age.  Powhatan is not said to have kept a private secretary to register births in his family.  If Pocahontas gave her age correctly, as it appears upon her London portrait in 1616, aged twenty-one, she must have been eighteen years of age when she was captured in 1613 This would make her about twelve at the time of Smith’s captivity in 1607-8.  There is certainly room for difference of opinion as to whether so precocious a woman, as her intelligent apprehension of affairs shows her to have been, should have remained unmarried till the age of eighteen.  In marrying at least as early as that she would have followed the custom of her tribe.  It is possible that her intercourse with the whites had raised her above such an alliance as would be offered her at the court of Werowocomoco.