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.
Rolfe was made Secretary and was soon put on the Council. He yearned
over his absent son for the next few years, and wrote Sir Edwin Sandys
that he hoped that he would not be censured for leaving him behind, but
that that seemed the only way the lad could survive. A practical man, he
requested Pocahontas' stipend of the company. Later Henry Rolfe tried to
get more indemnity from the company to repay him for his expenses in
bringing up the lad.
Rolfe's marriage with Pocahontas was credited with bringing about eight
years of peace with the Indians. But Opechancanough had long bided his
time for revenge on the English, grimly sure that the American story
would have been different had he been allowed to deal with John Smith.
He was called "White Hair Man" because of his white fur mantle. Kingly
ermine was never worn more haughtily. He planned the massacre of 1622.
Tragic John Rolfe is supposed to have been among the victims.
Rolfe was a marked man as well as a man of mark. While he could have
handled his own life ably at any time if violent tragedy had not
overcome him, none could have survived his disasters. He achieved the
first colonial business success and the first interracial marriage and
he had mastered personal grief. He had married three women happily
before he was forty years of age, and each bore him a child. He had
survived shipwreck and ship illnesses although his first two wives had
not. He had thought that he had the red man's land in hand, but was
instead in the hands of the red men.
Nevertheless, his son Thomas, then still in England, had inherited lands
from his grandfather, Powhatan, and he would return to the land of his
Indian fathers and now of his English father, who also willed him lands
and carry on in his unique heritage the American tradition. It was
reported that the two old chiefs, Powhatan and Opechancanough had gone
up and down the country asking about the welfare of the motherless boy
in England, and too solicitous for him to return until he was stronger.
After Powhatan's death in 1618 Opechancanough talked grandly of giving
the whole country to the child. Rolfe had been sent to him to be
reassured about the peace between the races ever since the Pocahontas
marriage. To him and others Opechancanough declared that the sun should
sooner fall out of the sky, than his friendliness.
Another colonist had also been deceived by him. This hopeful missionary
believed that he had converted him, and he built him an English house.
The chief was so tickled with lock and key, that he tinkered with both
constantly. Still the naive builder was killed for his kind pains. In
the massacre Indians had sat at table with English at breakfast Good
Friday only to slay them wherever they found them, in field or cottage.