TRAGEDY 💔: The True Story Of Disney's Beloved Fairytale Princess, Pocahontas

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Many tales have been told about Pocahontas, but not all of them are true.

Pocahontas has been romanticized throughout American history, thanks in no small part to the accounts of English settlers John Smith and John Rolfe, and of course, the 1995 Disney animated movie. But who was the real Pocahontas?

To help dispel the many myths surrounding the popular Native American figure, here are some facts that originate from Native American oral history and contemporary historical accounts.

Pocahontas was actually her nickname

Born around 1596, Pocahontas was actually known as Amonute, and to those closest to her, Matoaka. The name Pocahontas, in fact, belonged to her mother, who died while giving birth to her.

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Devastated by his wife's death, Pocahontas' father, Chief Powhatan Wahunseneca of the Pamunkey tribe of Virginia, called his little daughter Pocahontas as a nickname, which meant "playful one" or "ill-behaved child."

A spirited young girl who liked to do cartwheels, Pocahontas grew up to be a brave and intelligent leader and translator on behalf of her people.

There was no romance between Pocahontas and John Smith

By the time 27-year-old Smith and the rest of the English colonists arrived on Native American lands in 1607, Pocahontas was probably around 10 years old. Despite Smith embellishing the idea of a romance between them in order to sell books that he'd later author, they were never involved.

What is true is that Smith spent a few months with Pocahontas' tribe as a captive, and while there, he and Pocahontas taught each other basic aspects of their respective language.

Pocahontas would later marry Indian warrior Kocoum at age 14 and shortly give birth to their son "little Kocoum."

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Pocahontas didn't warn Smith of a planned assassination against him

While Smith was being held prisoner, Chief Powhatan grew to trust him. In 1607 the chief decided to offer Smith a "werowance" role, which was the tribe's way of acknowledging him as an official leader of the colonies, giving him access to coveted resources such as food and better land.

Smith would later allege that while he trained to become a werowance, Pocahontas warned him of a deadly plot against him, and thus, saved his life. However, contemporary accounts show that if a Native American chief was honoring a man, there would be no threat to his life.

Additionally, children were forbidden to attend a werowance ceremony, so Pocahontas wouldn't have been present.

Pocahontas was not traded to the English; she was kidnapped and raped

With tensions rising between the Powhatan and the English, rumors spread that Pocahontas was a prime target for kidnapping. Hoping to prevent future attacks by Native Americans, English Captain Samuel Argall made those rumors a reality and took the Chief's beloved daughter away with him after threatening violence against her village.

Before leaving, Argall offered a copper pot to the tribe and later claimed the two parties had made a trade. Forced to leave her husband and small son, Pocahontas boarded an English ship, not knowing that colonists had murdered her husband Kocoum shortly after.

While captive in Jamestown, Pocahontas was raped by possibly more than one colonist — an act that was incomprehensible to Native Americans. She grew into a deep depression and had a second son out of wedlock. That son would be named Thomas Rolfe, whose biological father may have actually been Sir Thomas Dale.

Pocahontas was not an eager goodwill ambassador of the New World

The story of Pocahontas marrying tobacco planter Rolfe for love is highly unlikely, especially considering Rolfe was under great financial pressure to somehow forge an alliance with the Powhatan to learn their secret tobacco curing techniques.

In the end, he decided the best way to win over the Powhatan was to marry Pocahontas, who all the while was being forced to wear English clothes, convert to Christianity and adopt the name, Rebecca.

Out of fear of being kidnapped himself, Chief Powhatan didn't attend Rolfe and Pocahontas' wedding ceremony and instead, offered a pearl necklace as a gift. He'd never see his daughter again.

To help further fund the tobacco business in the colonies, Rolfe took Pocahontas and son Thomas with him to England to show the court the "goodwill" between the colonists and Native Americans. Thus, Pocahontas was used as a prop, paraded around as an Indian princess who embraced western culture.

Although she was considered in good health right before leaving England, Pocahontas suddenly fell ill and died after dining with Rolfe and Argall, the man who kidnapped her. The tribesmen who accompanied Pocahontas on the trip believed she was poisoned.

At the time of her death, Pocahontas was around 21 years of age. She was buried in Gravesend, England at Saint George’s Church on March 21, 1617. The location of her remains is unknown.

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EVIL🔞: "Gloomy Sunday" The Song That Caused Suicides

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“Gloomy Sunday,” came to existence during one of history’s bleakest moments. Written in 1933 by Hungarian pianist and composer Reszõ Seress against the backdrop of the Great Depression and an increasing fascist influence in Hungary, and originally recorded in 1935 by Pál Kalmár, the song is something of a plea for mercy as humanity is at its worst. Seress’ original published lyrics were titled “Vége a világnak,” or “The World Is Ending,” and reflected a growing sense of horror and despair at the state of the world. A key sample lyric translates to “Meadows are coloured red with human blood/There are dead people on the streets everywhere,” just to give a frame of reference for the level of darkness that Seress’ composition harbored. No wonder it’s been blamed for anywhere between 17 and over 100 suicides.

To hear “Gloomy Sunday” is to be blanketed in tragic beauty. The song’s minor key melody is at once incredibly catchy and ominously dark, crafted to evoke a sense of despair that transcends language. While Seress’ song became an international hit, eventually being recorded by Billie Holiday in what’s now probably the most famous version of the song, one need only hear the emotion in Kalmár’s gently aching voice to know the pain behind the verses. (Not to mention the vintage crackle of the nearly 90-year-old song gives it a particularly ghostly quality.) Yet its origins stem from something as simple as a breakup, Seress having written the song after the end of a relationship. That the song delved so deep into such harrowing personal feelings initially proved to be an obstacle for the songwriter in his attempt to have it published. One publisher reportedly said, “there is a sort of terrible compelling despair about it” about his reluctance to publish the song.

And yet, in spite of this, “Gloomy Sunday” eventually became a hit. More than that, it became a standard, recorded in many languages by countless artists, including Billie Holiday, Sinead O’Connor, Mel Tormé and Sarah Vaughn. But to hear the lore about the song, it’d seem to have some kind of sinister power over the people who hear it. It’s not even corporeal, but it has a massive body count. Some of the various accounts of its supposed, morbid misdeeds include: a shoemaker whose suicide note quoted the song; a girl in Vienna drowning while holding its sheet music; a man who shot himself after telling loved ones the song wouldn’t leave his head; a woman in London who overdosed while listening to “Gloomy Sunday”; sheet music was found in the apartment of a shopkeeper in Berlin who hanged herself—the list goes on, and those are only the apocryphal accounts that have managed to live on in the near-century since the song came into being. It’s a merciless fiend of a song, almost supernatural, like the video in The Ring you see before you die. Which, perhaps, makes my repeated listens to the song over the past week ill-advised. If it did, in fact, cause the carnage attributed to it.

Because of the epidemic of suicides in the aftermath of the song’s release, and possibly because of it, Hungarian authorities supposedly discouraged broadcast of the song. A more extreme version of the song was that it was banned, and an even more extreme one yet was that it was even banned in the US and UK, where its popularity spread. None of this, at least according to Snopes, can be corroborated, but it’s entirely understandable if broadcasters and the government were a little on edge because of what they were hearing. And to be fair, it is a mournful song. Gloomy, even! It’s not at all surprising to hear that deathrock icons Christian Death later covered it or, for that matter, doom metal band Pallbearer, whose version is actually quite stunning. But it does take a certain frame of mind to hear this song and not feel a sense of dread. “Terrible compelling despair” doesn’t seem at all exaggerated in describing the song, though that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s quite pretty, and its earliest versions, particularly in the original Hungarian, are utterly haunting.

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In some sense, the monstrous stories about “Gloomy Sunday” wreaking havoc seem to be a distraction from the genuine sadness surrounding the song. The landscape in which it was released was one of the darkest of the 20th century, as prosperity declined and iron-fisted hateful authoritarians rose. And we’re in a landscape now, globally, that mirrors the era in too many ways. And Hungary, up through the ’80s, had one of the highest suicide rates of any country in the world, which suggests that “Gloomy Sunday” was merely a reflection of the despair that surrounded it, rather than its cause. Most tragic of all, however, Seress himself dying after jumping off of a building in Budapest in 1968, which makes it the sole concrete connection among all of the stories out there. (There is also a story about the woman who broke up with him, initially inspiring the writing of the song, dying herself after hearing it, though there’s no evidence or documentation of this, just secondhand telephone games with the dead.)

Given all the baggage that “Gloomy Sunday” carries, it’s a song that’s easier to analyze than enjoy. Can one simply listen to a song that’s supposedly such a powerful, overwhelmingly dark presence without context. Can it be enjoyed for what it is? It can, possibly. But with the flood of information that’s already been disseminated, there’s more context than song, at this point. In 2019, it can’t be separated from its reputation as “The Hungarian Suicide Song,” for better or for worse. To hear it, however, it’s impossible to shake the lingering eerie feeling that it leaves with you. Beware of its hitchhiking ghosts.

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