Would the Crown have cared about illicit unions with native damsels? William Byrd of Westover (1674-1744) in his account of how they surveyed the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina makes it clear that there were some "illicit unions" taking place between the surveyors and the unmarried Indian girls they encountered, and he could have suppressed that entirely if it would have caused someone to be executed.
The British Crown considered Powhatan to be a foreign king. Fooling around with his daughter was a matter of state.
Rolfe later had to get permission to marry her.
When she went to England, just before her death, she was treated like royalty.
While there, she encountered John Smith, whom she had been told had died in the powder explosion that sent him home, and she acted and spoke very much like an abandoned wife or lover. There’s a pretty clear record of that historic encounter.
Smith admitted in his own writings to being a rather randy fellow, shall we say, in his years soldiering around Europe, before he went to Jamestown.
The first record I’m aware of in Jamestown of Pocahontas is her coming into the fort with a pack of other girls buck naked, dancing wildly.
Smith spent a couple of years out in the wild interacting with her and her tribe. The entire Atlantic Ocean between him and the Crown, and him and a single English woman.
It strains credulity to think that they weren’t intimate, in my opinion.
Add to that the fact that Powhatan treated him like a son in law, and that there were reports of at least one child escaping when she was kidnapped by the English, not long before she converted and married Rolfe.
Anyhow, like I said, I can’t prove it officially, but there is a ring of truth to the whole story, to me.
And the story has come down to us through our Hiatt line. There are even a couple of examples of the middle name Powhatan being used by family members down through the years.
The genealogical consensus is that the descendants of Pocahontas are through her granddaughter Jane Rolfe who married Robert Bolling. From this union, one son was born, John. After Jane Rolfe died, Robert Bolling married Anne Stith.