Rebecca Rolfe, better known as Pocahontas, passed away in March 1617 at the age of 20 or 21 while in Gravesend, Kent, England. She was on a journey back to Virginia with her husband, John Rolfe, when she fell ill and died1. The exact cause of her death remains unknown.
One goal of the London Company was to convert Native Americans to Christianity, and they saw an opportunity to promote further investment with the conversion of Pocahontas and her marriage to Rolfe, all of which also helped end the First Anglo-Powhatan War. The company decided to bring Pocahontas to England as a symbol of the tamed New World “savage” and the success of the Virginia colony,[47] and the Rolfes arrived at the port of Plymouth on June 12, 1616.[48] The family journeyed to London by coach, accompanied by eleven other Powhatans including a holy man named Tomocomo.[49] John Smith was living in London at the time while Pocahontas was in Plymouth, and she learned that he was still alive.[50] Smith did not meet Pocahontas, but he wrote to Queen Anne urging that Pocahontas be treated with respect as a royal visitor. He suggested that, if she were treated badly, her “present love to us and Christianity might turn to… scorn and fury”, and England might lose the chance to “rightly have a Kingdom by her means”.[7]
Pocahontas was entertained at various social gatherings. On January 5, 1617, she and Tomocomo were brought before King James at the old Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall at a performance of Ben Jonson‘s masque The Vision of Delight. According to Smith, the king was so unprepossessing that neither Pocahontas nor Tomocomo realized whom they had met until it was explained to them afterward.[50]
Pocahontas was not a princess in Powhatan culture, but the London Company presented her as one to the English public because she was the daughter of an important chief. The inscription on a 1616 engraving of Pocahontas reads “MATOAKA ALS REBECCA FILIA POTENTISS : PRINC : POWHATANI IMP:VIRGINIÆ”, meaning “Matoaka, alias Rebecca, daughter of the most powerful prince of the Powhatan Empire of Virginia”. Many English at this time recognized Powhatan as the ruler of an empire, and presumably accorded to his daughter what they considered appropriate status. Smith’s letter to Queen Anne refers to “Powhatan their chief King”.[7] Cleric and travel writer Samuel Purchas recalled meeting Pocahontas in London, noting that she impressed those whom she met because she “carried her selfe as the daughter of a king”.[51] When he met her again in London, Smith referred to her deferentially as a “King’s daughter”.[52]
Pocahontas was apparently treated well in London. At the masque, her seats were described as “well placed”[53] and, according to Purchas, London’s Bishop John King “entertained her with festival state and pomp beyond what I have seen in his greate hospitalitie afforded to other ladies”.[54]
Not all the English were so impressed, however. Helen C. Rountree claims that there is no contemporaneous evidence to suggest that Pocahontas was regarded in England “as anything like royalty,” despite the writings of John Smith. Rather, she was considered to be something of a curiosity, according to Rountree, who suggests that she was merely “the Virginian woman” to most Englishmen.[19]
Pocahontas and Rolfe lived in the suburb of Brentford, Middlesex, for some time, as well as at Rolfe’s family home at Heacham, Norfolk. In early 1617, Smith met the couple at a social gathering and wrote that, when Pocahontas saw him, “without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented,” and was left alone for two or three hours. Later, they spoke more; Smith’s record of what she said to him is fragmentary and enigmatic. She reminded him of the “courtesies she had done,” saying, “you did promise Powhatan what was yours would be his, and he the like to you.” She then discomfited him by calling him “father,” explaining that Smith had called Powhatan “father” when he was a stranger in Virginia, “and by the same reason so must I do you”. Smith did not accept this form of address because, he wrote, Pocahontas outranked him as “a King’s daughter”. Pocahontas then said, “with a well-set countenance”:
Were you not afraid to come into my father’s country and caused fear in him and all his people (but me) and fear you here I should call you “father”? I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman.[50]
Finally, Pocahontas told Smith that she and her tribe had thought him dead, but her father had told Tomocomo to seek him “because your countrymen will lie much”.[50]
Death
In March 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but they had sailed only as far as Gravesend on the River Thames when Pocahontas became gravely ill.[55] She was taken ashore, where she died from unknown causes, aged approximately 21 and “much lamented”. According to Rolfe, she declared that “all must die”; for her, it was enough that her child lived.[56] Speculated causes of her death include pneumonia, smallpox, tuberculosis, hemorrhagic dysentery (“the Bloody flux”) and poisoning.[57][58]
Pocahontas’s funeral took place on March 21, 1617, in the parish of St George’s Church, Gravesend.[59] Her grave is thought to be underneath the church’s chancel, though that church was destroyed in a fire in 1727 and its exact site is unknown.[60] Since 1958 she has been commemorated by a life-sized bronze statue in St. George’s churchyard, a replica of the 1907 Jamestown sculpture by the American sculptor William Ordway Partridge.[61]
Legacy
Pocahontas and John Rolfe had a son, Thomas Rolfe, born in January 1615.[62] Thomas and his wife, Jane Poythress, had a daughter, Jane Rolfe,[63] who was born in Varina, in present-day Henrico County, Virginia, on October 10, 1650.[64] Jane married Robert Bolling of present-day Prince George County, Virginia. Their son, John Bolling, was born in 1676.[64] John Bolling married Mary Kennon[64] and had six surviving children, each of whom married and had surviving children.[65]
In 1907, Pocahontas was the first Native American to be honored on a U.S. stamp.[66] She was a member of the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History in 2000.[67] In July 2015, the Pamunkey Native tribe became the first federally recognized tribe in the state of Virginia; they are descendants of the Powhatan chiefdom, of which Pocahontas was a member.[68] Pocahontas is the twelfth great-grandmother of the American actor Edward Norton.[69]
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