Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

A quick note due to a cascading series of technical difficulties Susan has disappeared from the first section.

We'll rejoin her again in section 2, but for the beginning it is only me and now on with the show.

And here's your 30-second summary.

Once there was a story about an 11-year-old girl who saved the life of an explorer from her father's wrath.

She did save the lives of his people, but not the way you've been told.

The End

Let's talk about Pocahontas, but first let's drop her into history.

In 1607, Galileo invented an early version of the thermometer called the thermoscope, and he was deep into his studies of motion.

Shakespeare's new plays, King Lear and Macbeth, were both being performed, except during the months between July and November, when the plague closed all the theaters.

China was in the Ming Dynasty.

Philip III was King of Spain in Portugal. Vesili IV was Zara of Russia.

Queen Elizabeth I had died four years earlier, but her nephew King James I was still trying to fill her shoes.

Former subjects Queen and Zingha and Artemisia Gentileschi were both young women.

And in 1607, three British ships, full of men, arrived to establish the North American Jamestown colony, and in doing so, would propel a young Powatin girl into history.

Hello, and welcome to the show.

Metolica of the Powatin people was born in 1595 or 1596 to the Powatin high-chief, Wahan Senako, who history knows as simply Powatin and an unknown mother, likely in the village of where Wachamako in present-day Gloucester County in Eastern Virginia.

Disclaimer, all these words I've written down phonetically.

So I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

Her family situation is unique among all the subjects we've covered so far and is going to require some serious explanation.

Her father, known to history as Chief Powatin, by the time Pocahontas was born, was the mama natuic or high-chief over 30 tribes in an area that the English called the Powatin Confederation, but the Powatin people called Senakamika.

It's an area about 100 miles square that's right on the James River, Potomac River, and Chesapeake Bay, and it's now known as the Tidewater area of Virginia.

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