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 naïve 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.
VIII
AND what now of Smith in England? Neither in Plymouth nor in London did he succeed in getting backers to send him to New England although the Pilgrims studied his maps and books. He wanted to go along with them but he was considered too expensive and too headstrong a companion for such stern settlers. Again he poured out his enthusiasm into another book, for only his pen could keep busy, but that, like his tongue, was no lagger. The man himself remained unemployed and unimportant, for his betters had no idea of letting worth be as recognized as birth. What had he got for exploring and advising for New England?