Far from being a peace-loving Indian leader, Powhatan hacked and tortured his way to power. Both English and Powhatans murdered each other in periodic skirmishes and reprisals. With remarkable lack of foresight, the colony had far too few workers skilled in the basics of survival, and those not brought low by disease (more than half succumbed by the end of the first summer) lived in fear of random Indian arrows. Virginia's stifling summers and the swampy ground bred disease.

'Pocahontas' is a pet name meaning 'frolicsome.' In 1607, when she was about 12, she first saw the 104 Jamestown colonists struggling to survive on a low-lying peninsula (now an island) in the James River. We do know that Pocahontas was born Matoaka, the favored daughter of Powhatan, the powerful chief of the Powhatan Confederacy of Tidewater Algonquian tribes. Their celebrated love affair probably never happened, either. John Smith from execution, romanticized in eternal stone relief in the U.S. Needless to say, many fabled stories of her life are partly fiction. More lately rocker Neil Young sang, 'I would give a thousand pelts / To.find out how she felt.' And now we have the animated eco-warrior princess from Disney. Poets and writers from Thackeray to Hart Crane celebrated her charm.

During the intervening four centuries others have showered her with virtues. John Smith, whose veracity of detail and recollection is, to put it mildly, questionable. Historians have pieced together her life from the accounts of others, most notably her friend, Capt. Anyone trying to get a reasonable fix on the lady, somewhere between dry history and the Disney version, soon finds out that none of the details of her real life come from her own words.

The hair is European brown not Native American black the intensity in the eyes has softened. Mythmaking has begun to work its subtle magic on her face: the complexion is fairer and anglicized the high cheekbones no longer seem so prominent. The Portrait Gallery also owns a more recent image, an oil painting of Pocahontas done more than a century later by an unknown artist who probably worked from the engraving. 'life portraits,' Reaves continues, 'are our greatest treasures.' The engraving is the oldest item in the NPG's 18,000-piece collection. This engraving of Pocahontas is the only known life portrait. 'Yes,' answers Wendy Wick Reaves, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery. Was this the face that launched a thousand myths? A Jacobean stovepipe hat and lacy ruff can't hide her non-Anglo roots. Though nobility radiates from her resolute eyes, Pocahontas couldn't be more different from the other royals. As I leaf through the 1618 edition, another engraved portrait jumps out at me - a New World princess from Virginia. The corpulent visage of Henry VIII peers at me across the centuries from the pages of Baziliwlogia: A Booke of Kings.

Pictures of pocahontas