“My daughter,” he said kindly, “you have again saved my life, coming alone, and at risk of your own young life, through the irksome woods and in this gloomy night to admonish me. Take this, I pray you, from me, and let it always tell you of the love of Captain Smith.”
And the grateful pioneer handed her his much-prized pocket compass—an instrument regarded with awe by the Indians, and esteemed as one of the instruments of the white man’s magic.
But Ma-ta-oka, although she longed to possess this wonderful “path-teller,” shook her head.
“Not so, Cau-co-rouse,” she said, “if it should be seen by my tribesmen, or even by my father, the chief, I should but be as dead to them, for they would know that I have warned you whom they have sworn to kill, and so would they kill me also. Stay not to parley, my father, but be gone at once.”
And with that, says the record, “she ran away by herself as she came.”
So the captain hurried back to Jamestown, and Ma-ta-oka returned to her people.
Soon after Smith left the colony, sick and worn out by the continual worries and disputes with his fellow-colonists, and Ma-ta-oka felt that, in the absence of her best friend and the increasing troubles between her tribesmen and the pale-faces, it would be unwise for her to visit Jamestown.
Her fears seem to have been well grounded, for in the spring of 1613, Ma-ta-oka, being then about sixteen, was treacherously and “by stratagem” kidnapped by the bold and unscrupulous Captain Argall—half pirate, half trader,—and was held by the colonists as hostage for the “friendship” of Pow-ha-tan.
Within these three years, however, she had been married to the chief of one of the tributary tribes, Ko-ko-um by name, but, as was the Indian marriage custom, Ko-ko-um had come to live among the kindred of his wife, and had shortly after been killed in one of the numerous Indian fights.
It was during the captivity of the young widow at Jamestown that she became acquainted with Master John Rolfe, an industrious young Englishman, and the man who, first of all the American colonists, attempted the cultivation of tobacco.