Wahunsenacawh (c. 1550–1618) was the Native American king who first met the English settlers at Jamestown in 1607. He was also the father of Pocahontas (c. 1595–1617), the legendary teenage princess who supposedly saved the life of John Smith (c. 1580–1631), the leader of the colonists.
Also known as Powhatan, Wahunsenacawh was the chief of a powerful confederation of Algonquin tribes in coastal Virginia. He was born in roughly 1550 and established his capital at Werowocomoco, a Native American village near where the English landed on May 14, 1607.
Later that year, an Algonquin hunting party captured Smith and brought him before Wahunsenacawh. According to Smith’s account of the meeting, he was threatened with execution, but was saved after Pocahontas took pity on the prisoner and asked her father to spare him.
Wahunsenacawh later agreed to sell food to the colonists during their first difficult year in Jamestown, and he even hoped to build a cooperative relationship with the settlers. However, between 1610 and 1614, the two sides fought a war that resulted in the destruction of several Native American villages and the capture of Pocahontas. The chief was forced to allow his daughter to marry an English planter, John Rolfe (c. 1585–1622), in the peace settlement.
The settlement led to a brief period of peaceful relations. Pocahontas and her husband traveled to England in 1616, where she was received as a royal and met King James I (1566–1625). After Wahunsenacawh’s death in 1618, however, his brother Opechancanough took over the confederacy and renewed the war against the English in 1622.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- In 1977, archaeologists located the site of Werowocomoco—on the York River, only about twelve miles from Jamestown.
- The chief was played by August Schellenberg (1936–) in the 2005 movie The New World. Native American activist Russell Means (1939–) provided Wahunsenacawh’s voice in the 1995 Disney animated movie Pocahontas.
- The Algonquin language spoken by Wahunsenacawh and his tribe began to die out in the late eighteenth century—but not before lending many words to English. Raccoon, terrapin, moccasin, and tomahawk are all derived from Virginia Algonquin.
