As Thanksgiving approaches, our thoughts naturally turn to a certain New England repast. But no Pilgrim bewitches posterity quite like the princess Pocahontas, best known to schoolchildren (and their dads) as the fetching heroine of the Disney cartoon, in which she is depicted as a tawny supermodel of the 17th century.

Pocahontas and the Englishmen who came "to invade my people, and possess my country," in her father's blunt phrase, are the subjects of David A. Price's well-researched "Love and Hate in Jamestown" (Knopf, 305 pages, $25.95).

Mr. Price notes wryly that "English America was a corporation before it was a country." The Virginia Co., which sponsored the Jamestown settlement, at first desired peaceful coexistence with the natives. It instructed its migrants to settle on uninhabited land in this El Dorado, where, snickered the satirists, even the chamberpots were made of gold.

The 105 male settlers who arrived in Jamestown in 1607 ran through a series of ineffectual toffs as colony presidents until that meritocratic moment when a stocky commoner with the demotic name of John Smith assumed leadership.

Smith was a hard man under whom fools and the indolent suffered. His diplomacy with the natives consisted of equal parts bluff and courage. Mr. Price defends him: "It is clear that he respected the talents and intelligence of the native leaders more than he did the leaders of his own side, but he also meant for the colony to survive. The alternative to intimidation was not love and friendship; it was open war -- which the English, in 1608, would have lost to the last man."

The captain would be forgotten today as just another John Smith were it not for the intercession of an 11-year-old native girl nicknamed Pocahontas. Searching for a Virginia passage to the Pacific, Smith was captured by evidently unpacific Chickahominy warriors. After a puzzling tour of Indian villages, Smith -- whose mates had been tortured and killed by methods primly omitted in contemporary social-studies texts -- found his head on the bashing block.

In Smith's famous account, the princess Pocahontas dashed to his rescue, pleading with her father, the chief Powhatan, to spare his life. "She hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine," Smith would write to Queen Anne. Later, Pocahontas saved Smith's life a second time, warning him of an imminent attack by Powhatan's men. When Smith gracelessly offered her beads in gratitude, she sobbed.

To the eternal dismay of romancers everywhere, John Smith never married the woman who kept saving his life. Instead, Pocahontas, the first Indian convert to Christianity, took the name Rebecca, married the tobacco titan John Rolfe and moved to England, whose palefaces were dazzled by the exotic young lady from beyond the sea. She would die in exile, seeming to prefer the balls and masques of her New World to the corn and venison of the old.

Why did Pocahontas save John Smith? Though Peggy Lee chalked it up to the fever, Smith himself, as Mr. Price writes, saw it as simply "compassion for a man in distress."

Then what's love got to do with it? Nothing, answers Paula Gunn Allen in "Pocahontas" (HarperSanFrancisco, 350 pages, $26.95), wherein she scoffs at the hoary view that her subject "had fallen so helplessly for old blue eyes that she was forever pining after white meat."

Ms. Allen insists that Pocahontas cannot be understood except within an Algonquin Indian context, with its dream-visions and communal acceptance of the supernatural. She rejects the Noble Red Woman clich&eacute; that saddles all natives with the blandly faultless victimhood of a Sidney Poitier character. Yet Ms. Allen can be as tendentious as the deadest whitest malest historian.

Her "hapless" John Smith is so "obtuse" that when he finds his head on the bashing block, he thinks the situation is threatening! In fact, writes Ms. Allen, the Indians were adopting Smith in a "rebirthing" ritual. (Mr. Price, as if in rebuttal, notes that "nothing is known about 17th-century Powhatan adoption ceremonies" -- if such things even existed.)

In a classic case of the wish being mother to the thought, Ms. Allen asserts, adducing scant evidence, that Pocahontas was a "Native espionage agent." She was no "docile and willing convert to Christianity and civilization" but rather an intelligence-gathering "mole." Thus does Ms. Allen parry the charge that Pocahontas was a sell-out "Apple" (red on the outside, white on the inside) who collaborated with English invaders and sealed her people's fate.

Ms. Allen further suggests that secret agent Pocahontas was poisoned by husband John Rolfe. Now, Rolfe may have been an avaricious cad who never even bothered to learn his wife's language, but a uxoricide?

I understand why a proud Indian patriot would wish that Pocahontas had rejected Rolfe and expatriation, but she didn't. The ways of the heart have a way of confounding the best-laid ideologies.

Pocahontas's dying words were a model of equanimity: "All must die. 'Tis enough that the child lives." Her child, Thomas, did live, but the child Pocahontas has lived even longer. She is at four centuries and counting, and despite Ms. Allen's spirited revision, Pocahontas remains the cartwheeling imp who in an impulsively humane moment saved a foreigner's life and made herself immortal.

Mr. Kauffman's most recent book is "Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette" (Henry Holt).