Pocahontas, the Powhatan woman later known in England as Rebecca Rolfe, died at Gravesend in 1617 while preparing to return to Virginia. Her journey to England had been used by the Virginia Company as evidence that colonisation and conversion could be presented as successful. Her death exposed the human cost behind diplomatic display, cultural translation, and early English settlement in North America.

Pocahontas became one of the most rewritten figures in Anglo-American literature, often transformed from a historical Powhatan woman into a symbolic bridge between worlds. Poems, plays, histories, and later novels used her story to romanticise colonial encounter, while modern Indigenous writers have challenged those distortions. Her life reveals how oral history, colonial propaganda, and literary myth can compete over the same human story.