1837

Bancroft, George. History of the Colonization of the United States. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Boston, 1837. 117-58. Prominent statesman (as Secretary of the Navy he established the Naval Academy), Bancroft was also probably the pre-eminent historian of the 19th century. This multi-volume history went through many (changing) editions in various forms for forty years. Bancroft embellishes a bit, for instance, indicating that "Smith had [previously?] won the confiding fondness of the Indian maiden," and he describes her successful reception in London thus: "The daughter of the wilderness possessed the mild elements of female loveliness, half concealed, as if in the bud, and rendered the more beautiful by the child-like simplicity with which her education in the savannas of the New World had invested her. How could she fail to be caressed at court, and admired in the city?" Bancroft's description of the rescue footnotes Smith's Generall Historie but contains this curious comment as well: "This account is fully contained in the oldest book printed on Virginia, in our Cambridge library. It is a thin quarto, in black letter, by John Smith, printed in 1608 -- 'A True Relation . . . .'" But the True Relation, of course, does not contain the Pocahontas rescue. In any event, Bancroft is later moved by the debunking efforts of the 1860s to alter his description of Smith's captivity. See Bancroft 1853, 1866, 1876. (No link to an early edition is available at this time, so the link is to the 1853 version so you can see the curious footnote, but note that 1853 is different in some other respects than 1837.)
[U.S. history; debunking]
[Electronic Version]