To follow on from the story itself, here are some arguments I put together to try to pacify the 'but it's not history' faction, although I don't suppose many of them frequent this site.

I'd like to respond to Laur's overall review, but can only do it here because you don't have an account. Thank you very much for reviewing! I was a bit worried by the fact you saw Pocahontas coming over as bitter and downbeat in the early chapters. I meant to convey that she was intensely impatient for love and for a project in life, annoyed with her father for wanting to plan everything out for her, and also to a certain extent in tension with her culture as any passionate, highly individual person is bound to be in any culture. But I still saw her as essentially a happy person. If you could point out specific bits of the story in which she seemed too unhappy, I would be very grateful if you could point them out, as I might need to change something in any future presentation. The main thing I was unhappy about in my characterisation of Pocahontas was that I couldn't believe she would be so dithery about telling her father about John Smith, but I couldn't get past that if the plot was to work.

INTRODUCTION

This is a novelisation of the Disney version of the story of Pocahontas. It should not be confused with fact, or even with imaginative historical fiction. This story is a fantasy romance.

The way I got involved in it was this: in 1998 my daughters, then very small, were given a video of Disney's Pocahontas for a Christmas present. They watched it over and over again at our home in Perth, Western Australia, and as I swished them round in the swimming pool to endless renditions of 'Just Around the River Bend', I began to feel that under the Disney whimsy and cute animals there was a very strong story trying to get out. Some sequences, especially the scene where Pocahontas and John Smith first meet and the scene where she saves his life, were most beautifully animated. The love story was almost unbearably sad, and I stumped around the house with my mop and bucket, thinking, 'Oh, why did he have to leave her?' At last I decided that the only way I could get it out of my head was to get my head further round it: to get involved in the creative process. It worked.

I knew the Disney version was not historically accurate, but the specific criticisms I read tended to centre round relatively superficial points like 'Pocahontas was only 12 when she met John Smith', in other words, things that I supposed artistic licence could cover. Google was in its infancy then. It was only some time later that I started reading about the early colonisation of Virginia and realised with a certain quiet horror just what a hash Disney had made of the facts. There was hardly a single detail, either about the main characters or about the background, that would stand up to scrutiny. By then, however, I was in it up to the neck: it was the Disney story I wanted to write, not the facts. Whatever else you say about the Disney people, they do good narrative. All the main relationships and incidents in my story come from Disney; I've only tried to embed them in a slightly more plausible and serious social setting, especially given that a written story cannot get away with the abrupt veering between comedy and seriousness that a film can. (Animated films can also get away with physical impossibilities, and some of these perforce survive incongruously in my version, for instance the rescue at sea, or the coincidence whereby Indians, English and Pocahontas all get to the same place at the same moment for the climax.) But a genuine historical novel about the 1607 expedition would have to be much darker and stranger; indigenous New World cultures are not very accessible to the modern European mind, and not at all conducive to romance, but it was romance I wanted.

A quick resumé of the things you mustn't believe about this story: the 1607 expedition was not, of course, the first contact between English and native Americans, as it appears here. Attempts at colonisation of the Atlantic coast of North America had already been going on for a generation or more, and the English were getting to be a familiar sight in those parts. The colonists were organised quite differently from the way I show them. Perhaps most embarrassing of all, the geography of the Disney version is nonsense: the cliffs and waterfalls that play such a captivating part in the animated film are not to be found anywhere in the vicinity of the original Jamestown, but I couldn't do without them. Jamestown and Werowocomoco were many miles apart. As for the native Americans, the evidence does not support the picture of Powhatan as a benign, statesmanlike figure, or his people as peace-loving pantheists in harmony with nature. I have tried to avoid the worst excesses of 'noble savage' cliché and at least make the native Americans look like human beings that might at one time have existed; I have also tried to work in some genuine aspects of their culture like matrilineal inheritance. However, basically, reader, I made it up. Rather than being based on in-depth research, my Indians owe much to fictional representations of pre-state societies in Europe, like the archaic Greeks in Mary Renault's novels, or the Stone Age northerners of Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother series, and also to the Nigerians in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I know a good deal more about Jacobean England, and flatter myself that in the case of the English I have achieved an artful blend of authenticity with modern sensibility, but am ready to be corrected.

Not a single one of the events in this story really took place – except that the English did arrive and found Jamestown in 1607, and possibly that Pocahontas saved John Smith's life. But that did not take place in anything like the way it is described here. The only evidence for the episode is John Smith's own account, written in 1624, which goes like this:

[John Smith had been captured by Indians while exploring the head of the James river, and was brought to Powhatan, their 'emperor', at Werowocomoco. Smith describes the seating plan in Powhatan's hall, and what everyone wore, in detail; he was treated ceremoniously at first, but then things turned nasty.] 'Having feasted him [Smith, like Caesar, refers to himself in the third person] after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan; then as many as could laid hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death: whereat the emperor was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves. For the king himself will make his own robes, shoes, bows, arrows, pots; plant, hunt, or do anything so well as the rest.'

And that's it. Oceans of ink have been spilled discussing the truth or otherwise of the episode; it seems likely to be true – a fantasist would surely embroider the fantasy a little beyond this brief and deadpan account – but it will not bear the weight it has been given as a symbolic, mythical origin point in American history. That only came later, with the desire of Pocahontas's descendants, the founding fathers of Virginia, to magnify her importance, and of everyone to emphasise one of the rare episodes that reflects credit on all parties in this mostly sorry tale. And also, admit it, because it's such a good story. The princess who defies her father to help the young hero on his quest and save his life is one of the most basic plots in literature, going back to the ancient Greeks at least, and to object to it in this case because it's dodgy history or colonialist politics is perhaps to put partisanship above common humanity.

Captain John Smith was not captain of a ship, but a professional soldier with exploring as a second string. He was certainly fearless, but far from being handsome and charming, he was an abrasive character who got on the wrong side of almost everybody he met, and in his racial attitudes he was very much a man of his time. His most attractive trait, to us, is his insatiable curiosity. There is no evidence that he and Pocahontas were ever in love, but clearly she meant a lot to him: he mentions her several times in his writings, always with warm regard and gratitude for the various good turns she did to the English settlers.

Pocahontas, above all, still fascinates. Why did this twelve-year-old, the spoilt brat of a violent, unpredictable ruler, suddenly decide on that particular day in 1608 that life was for once not going to be so cheap at her father's court? Why, when 'savages' were regularly massacred or at best treated as cheap labour and casual sexual partners, was John Rolfe later so insistent on making a Christian of Pocahontas, marrying her, and showing her off in London, and their descendants on claiming her as an honoured ancestor? She must have been a remarkable person and I hope that at least to that extent there is something true in Disney's and my picture of her.

Ultimately, my excuse for hanging such a fanciful story on the names of Pocahontas and John Smith is that the real story of the encounter between European and American peoples is so dark that it's off-putting. The moral choices that were made were mostly squalid, and even they paled into insignificance beside the fatal impact of European diseases, which no one then understood: one of the victims was Pocahontas herself. As the poet said:

'Sad it is, too, when a child dies,

But at the immolation of a race, who cries?'

The response to the real story tends to be despair, but despair is not useful. Perhaps the only way in which the average person can be made to want to know more, and do something, about the terrible things that happen is through romance, through an individual story that, though sad, is not without hope and human dignity. If it hadn't been for Disney, I should never have bothered to set about finding any facts about the colonisation of America. I hope that, although untrue, my version may have a similar effect: to make people want to know more, and in the process, explore some ideas about the relative merits of a highly communal, traditional society and one that is more innovatory and individualised.