Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
There is an engraving of Pocahontas by Simon Pass, which perhaps
belongs to, but is seldom found in, Smith’s _Generall Historie_.[315]
The original painting is said to have belonged to Henry Rolfe, of
Narford,—a brother of John, the husband of Pocahontas,—and from him
passed to Anthony Rolfe, of Tuttington, and from him again, probably
by a marriage, to the Elwes of Tuttington, and it is mentioned in a
catalogue of a sale of their effects in the last century. It has not
since been traced.[316]
Richard Randolph, of Virginia, is said to have procured from England
two portraits,—one of Rolfe, and the other of Pocahontas,—and they
were hung in his house at Turkey Island. After his death, in 1784, they
are said to have been bought by Thomas Bolling, of Cobbs, Va., and the
inventory showing them is, or was, in the County Court of Henrico. In
1830 they were in the possession of Dr. Thomas Robinson, of Petersburg,
when he wrote of the portrait of Pocahontas that “it is crumbling so
rapidly that it may be considered as having already passed out of
existence.” A letter of the late H. B. Grigsby to Mr. Charles Deane
states that he had heard it was on panel let into the wainscot. In
1843, while still owned by Mr. Robinson, R. M. Sully made a copy of it,
which seems to have proved acceptable, as appears from the attestations
printed in M’Kinney and Hall’s _Indian Tribes of North America_, 1844,
vol. iii., where at p. 64 is a reproduction in colors of Sully’s
painting. Mr. Grigsby says that the original was finally destroyed in
a contest which grew out of a dispute when the house was sold, whether
the panel went with it or could be reserved.[317]
Of the massacre at Falling Creek, March 22, 1621-22, the Virginia
Company printed, in Edward Waterhouse’s _Declaration of the State of
the Colony and Affairs in Virginia_, a contemporary account.[318] Mr.
Neill has made the transaction the subject of special consideration in
the _Magazine of American History_, i. 222, and in his _Letter to N. G.
Taylor_ in 1868, and has printed a considerable part of Waterhouse’s
account in his _Virginia Company_, p. 317 _et seq._
The massacre is also incidentally mentioned by the present writer
in a paper, “Early Iron Manufacture in Virginia, 1619-1776,” in
the _Richmond Standard_, Feb. 8, 1879, and by James M. Swank, in
“Statistics of the Iron and Steel Production of the United States,”
compiled for the Tenth Census, which may also be referred to for
information as to that industry in the Colony of Virginia.
An examination of the story of Claiborne’s rebellion is made in the
Maryland chapter in the present volume.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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