History Meets Hollywood at Jamestown : Pocahontas: Hit Disney movie focuses spotlight on archeological dig unearthing colony where the Algonquian princess lived. But truth can be jarring.

The trees don’t talk, and there’s not a waterfall in sight. The only John Smith around here is an older fellow with an imposing glare and a full beard. And as for Pocahontas, she’s hardly a long-haired, buxom beauty.

“She looks like a man!” declared 8-year-old Brooke Charlesworth.

This is where history and Hollywood mix and, for this summer at least, it’s an odd concoction indeed. Around these parts, the image of the famous Indian princess is that of a somewhat severe-looking woman with short-cropped hair, a white top hat and masculine-looking English garb. The real Jamestown is found not at the tip of an artist’s pen but in dusty dirt under a white tent.

But if this summer’s hit animated Walt Disney version of Pocahontas deals more in fantasy than reality, that’s OK with the archeologists who consider themselves the guardians of her ancestral homeland. The enthusiasm generated by the film is an opportunity to explain the historic importance of their year-old dig here in southeastern Virginia.

“Disney does entertainment, and they do it very well,” said Timothy S. Kolly, of the Assn. for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which owns the site. “If they get them interested, we’ll straighten them out on the facts.”

In its own way, what’s happening on Jamestown Island these days is every bit as exciting as any of the action Disney dreamed up. For the first time, archeologists think they have found evidence of the original fort that marked the first permanent English settlement in America, a discovery of enormous historical significance, if confirmed.

The signs are visible in the dirt on the banks of the James River. Dark half-moon stains indicate where wooden posts supporting the fort must have been nearly 400 years ago. Coins, pieces of armor and muskets, tobacco pipes and even an intact cabasset helmet have been unearthed.

“We’re finding the supposedly lost city,” said chief archeologist William M. Kelso.

Although often overlooked, the Jamestown settlement played a pivotal role in American history. The colony was formed in 1607, a dozen years before Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock. A group of English entrepreneurs chartered by King James I arrived here aboard three small ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery, and chose this leafy island because the waters were so deep the boats could sail right up to shore and be moored to the trees.

The early years were difficult as disease, starvation and attacks by the native Algonquian Indians took their toll. Of the 104 men who made the trip, only 38 survived the first year.

But John Smith’s perseverance and his negotiations with the Algonquians led to a city that ultimately thrived and produced the first representative assembly in the New World.

Historians long assumed that the site of the original fort was washed out into the river by erosion. Kelso never accepted that theory. In college in 1957, he saw a National Geographic spread on Jamestown and decided that explorers had not excavated enough of the area to support such a conclusion.

So, nearly four decades later, bolstered by public and private funding, he culminated his life’s dream by launching a 10-year, $10-million dig at Jamestown. Already, he and his crew have painstakingly pulled 40,000 artifacts out of the ground. The abundance of copper and glass jewelry suggests that Smith’s craftsmen were more industrious than previously thought, probably making beads and necklaces to trade with the Indians for food and safety.

“There is definitely something left of John Smith’s Jamestown,” said Kelso, a ruddy, 54-year-old ex-teacher who calls himself Jamestown’s last settler because he and his wife live on the site.

For the thousands of visitors now flocking here because of the Disney movie, the discoveries have added an extra dimension to the trip.

Kelso’s project is highly user-friendly. Tourists can walk right up to the ropes around the digging and ask questions while excavators work. The laboratory where objects are cleaned and catalogued has a glass-enclosed observation area so the curious can watch.