The Pocahontas-John Smith StoryEdmunds, Pocahontas Wight
History
The Pocahontas-John Smith Story
Edmunds, Pocahontas Wight
Pocahontas, -1617; Smith, John, 1580-1631
Strange that whatever they subsisted on over there agreed with John and
little Tom, and after a while John decided that nothing else except
Virginia air would revive his ailing wife. She was not acclimated to
this small, neat isle. Only when she rode horseback, as she had longed
to do, reining in beside the trim stable back of the substantial stone
house was there the wild gay vein in her eyes that had ever led him
where she would. Then she had raced away a while from the broken health
and the broken heart.
Soon she was too ill for the rides, and Rolfe arranged passage on
Argall's boat, _The George_, which was embarking from Gravesend. Its
pitiful passenger was immediately on her deathbed, where her resignation
and Christian testimony inspired the beholders: the ministering foreign
women and the men, Argall and Rolfe reading scriptures. She was buried
beneath the chancel at St. George's Church where her dust rests, some
think, out of place.
VII
Argall's ship had put into Gravesend to have Pocahontas buried in St.
George's Church. The vestry-book recorded her name erroneously: "Rebecca
Wrothe, Wyffe of Thomas Wrothe, a Virginia-lady born here was buried in
ye chancell." While the faded writ remains wrong to this day, it was
preciously bound in white leather and kept in a vault, and the church
building therefore became a shrine, although the argument as to where
she lies there, or whether she should be brought here will be
interminable.
Thomas was the name of her son, and the child's illness on the _George_,
as it put to sea again, distracted John Rolfe, who remembered how he had
lost another wife and child almost within grasp of the waves. Again the
ship returned to English shores, this time to Plymouth, where the
frantic father sought out Sir Lewis Stewkley and persuaded him to take
care of the little lad until Henry Rolfe, a London merchant, could take
his nephew in charge. Stewkley who was to betray his own cousin, Sir
Walter Raleigh, still proved worthy of Rolfe's trust.
At that moment John Smith, who was trying to get support for a New
England colony, bustled about Plymouth unsuccessfully, and then tried
London. Pocahontas was lost to her own country, but her ambitious Johns
both coveted it still for themselves.
Rolfe, in spite of the buffetings of disaster and grief, was a man who
got things done as long as he was alive to do them. Without Smith's
brilliant, antagonistic and fascinating temperament he, if not Smith,
got on to America since that was his aim, and there he took his third
wife, Jane, daughter of William Pearce, Captain of James Fort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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