![pocahontas characters pocahontas characters](https://alchetron.com/cdn/pocahontas-character-01220f6a-60e0-4f22-b026-bb7e54d22d3-resize-750.jpeg)
One of the only truths Smith ever really told about Pocahontas, Townsend suggests, is an account of their final meeting in England, when Pocahontas and her second husband, John Rolfe, traveled to London in 1616.
![pocahontas characters pocahontas characters](https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/character_princess_pocahontas_5911060c.jpeg)
Smith exaggerated his own bravery, intrepidness, and attractiveness to women in every tale he ever wrote, Townsend argues-and yet because his words confirmed the racist prejudices of white people and satisfied a cultural curiosity for details about the New World, they were believed and persisted throughout the centuries. Much of what the world has come to know about Pocahontas and the Powhatan people, Townsend shows, comes from Smith’s own books and diaries, which were published to great sensationalism in the years after Pocahontas’s death-when she was not alive to refute Smith’s stories about her. Townsend portrays him as something of a self-absorbed charlatan who has benefited from history in unfair ways. Smith was president of the English colony at Jamestown and as such often tasked with begging for food, help, and mercy from the surrounding Algonkian tribes. A naval captain and explorer who had already lived a well-traveled-and, by his own account, quite sensational-life by the time he sailed to the New World with the fledgling Virginia Company in 1606.