‘Pocahontas’ Tale Likened to Earlier Rescue of Spaniard in Florida : History: Long before Capt. Smith reached the Colonies, the story was told of a chief’s daughter who saved an explorer. Some scholars say Smith borrowed the tale.

When the tribal chief ordered the execution of a European captive, the chief’s daughter persuaded him to spare the white man’s life.

Does that sound like the story of Capt. John Smith, the Jamestown colonist, now being retold in a Walt Disney movie, “Pocahontas”?

Actually, it happened in Florida nearly 80 years before Smith set foot in Virginia. The European was Spaniard Juan Ortiz and the chief’s daughter was known as Ulele.

Many historians doubt that young Pocahontas ever saved Smith’s life, and some contend the Englishman probably made up the story after reading accounts of Ortiz’s ordeal.

Not until after Pocahontas died in 1617 did the story show up in a revised account of Smith’s adventures. Some historians dismiss Smith as a blowhard and self-promoter. One biography is titled “The Great Rogue.”

“It’s something nobody can prove one way or the other,” said historian William Coker. “But on the other hand, the evidence, I think, leans pretty heavily in favor of him borrowing the story.”

In 1528, the Timucua tribe captured Ortiz and three other Spaniards who were searching for missing explorer Panfilio de Narvaez near Tampa Bay.

“The first thing they did was . . . use them for target practice,” said Coker, an emeritus professor of history at the University of West Florida. Three of the Spaniards were killed by arrows, but Ortiz survived, he said.

Hirrihugua, chief of the Ucita village, had a score to settle with the Spanish because Narvaez had cut off Hirrihugua’s nose and killed his mother by throwing her to a pack of dogs.

The chief saved Ortiz for a special torture called barbacoa , a word that survives as barbecue .

Ortiz was strung up over a fire to be roasted alive, but Ulele pleaded with her father to spare his life. The chief’s wife joined in the appeal and he relented, Coker said.

But the chief again threatened to have Ortiz killed. Before his sentence could be carried out, Ulele helped Ortiz escape to the village of a neighboring chief, Mocoso.

Ortiz lived there in relative peace until he encountered Hernando de Soto’s expedition 11 years later. Ortiz, covered with tattoos as was the Timucuan custom, joined the Spaniards as an interpreter. He and De Soto both died during the winter of 1541-42 near the Mississippi River.

A De Soto survivor known as the Gentleman of Elvas included the Ortiz rescue in his account of the expedition published in Lisbon in 1557. An English translation was printed about 1605. A Spanish account by Garcilasco de la Vega appeared in 1601.

“Lisbon and London were on good terms,” Coker said. “There’s no question in my mind that copies of the book in Portuguese, Spanish and English were in London early on, and early enough for Smith to have made a thorough study of them.”

Smith encountered Pocahontas in 1607 and returned to England two years later. Pocahontas married another colonist, John Rolfe, in 1614, and they moved to England in 1616. She died a year later.

Smith’s tale of rescue, never written about by any other colonists, does have supporters. Some say he may have left out the rescue initially to avoid scaring away potential colonists. Others say his first writings were heavily edited, possibly deleting the Pocahontas story.

But Helen Roundtree of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., has another reason for doubting the Pocahontas rescue story.

It claims that Pocahontas’ father, Powhatan, planned to bash out Smith’s brains with stones. The Native Americans of that time and place would have used a slower method of death, she said.