"Young children will look again and again at these big pictures, so interesting in detail, so subtle in color."—The New Yorker

First published in 1946 with the d'Aulaires' beautiful lithographic prints, this tale of the first colony at Jamestown is told from the perspective of the princess daughter of the mighty chief Powhatan. When the medicine man judges the white man's magic as evil, John Smith is condemned to death—only the intervention of Pocahontas saves his life and a tentative friendship is established between Pocahontas's tribe and the new colonists. The King of England sends a crown, rich robes and a royal bed to honor Powhatan and he is pleased, but the white man's insistence that the Indians give them corn to sustain them through the long winters threatens their tenuous relationship. Pocahontas's ultimate marriage to John Rolfe, the birth of their son, their voyage to England and presentation to the King and Queen is the stuff of fairy tales except that it is one of the great true stories of America's earliest days.

About the Authors:

Ingri Mortenson and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire met in Munich where both were studying art in the 1920's. Ingri had grown up in Norway; Edgar, the son of a noted portrait painter, was born in Switzerland and had lived in Paris and Florence. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to the United States and began to create the picture books that have established their reputation for unique craftsmanship. Their books were known for their vivid lasting color. This was the result of the painstaking process of stone lithography used for all their American history biographies. This was an old world craft, in which they were both expert, which involved actually tracing their images on large slabs of Bavarian limestone.

Throughout their long careers, Ingri and Edgar worked as a team on both art and text. Their research took them to the actual places of their biographies, including the countries of Italy, Portugal and Spain when they were researching Columbus; to the hills of Virginia while they researched Washington; and to the wilds of Kentucky and Illinois for Abraham Lincoln, winner of the 1940 Caldecott Medal. The fact that they spoke 5 languages fluently served them well in their European travels and in their research of original documents. Since their deaths in the 1980's, Ingri and Edgar's books and works have been kept alive by their two sons Ola and Nils.