In 1860 Charles Deane of Massachusetts asked why Smith had concealed the story for sixteen years.[2] Henry Adams, while he bowed to Pocahontas as the most romantic figure in American history, and as the visiting celebrity of 1616 in England, stepped up to Deane's standard,[3] as did William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay,[4] and the Southern scholar, Alexander Brown.[5]
But William Wirt Henry,[6] Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard,[7] and Lyon G. Tyler[8] remained fast friends of the cherished tale. Edward Arber, the most careful editor of Smith's work, accepts it.[9] John Fiske points out that the printed text of the True Relation was incomplete for Smith had written much which his editor in London omitted as "fit to be printed."[10] Allan Nevins, in The Gateway to History, suggests that Smith may have told the story in 1608.[11] Mrs. Stanard[12] and William Wirt Henry[13] also stress this fact. Edward Channing assails the story[14] but Charles M. Andrews accepts it.[15] Many more writers contend that Smith may have deliberately kept the story dark in order that possible new colonists might not be frightened. The tale was not denied when it was told to Smith's contemporaries in 1624.
Many public school teachers have taken the middle ground that the story is almost indispensable and is probably true. Bradford Smith, whose biography of Captain John Smith is notable among a score on the subject, declares that there is not a scrap of evidence to disprove the narrative, and many reasons to establish it.[16] Without the story it would be hard to explain why Powhatan spared Smith since, according to Smith, two Indians had been killed.[17] It was customary for a chief's daughter to be allowed the life of a favorite captive. Juan Ortiz had been saved twice in this manner near Tampa, Florida, nearly a century before.
While Smith is considered a boastful liar by Alexander Brown and others, he still has not only reluctant admirers but fervent defenders among historians. Matthew Page Andrews admitted: "Than Smith there has been no more daring adventurer in English history."[18] Say Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins in The Heritage of America, a source history for Virginia's high schools: "He was a figure worthy of the English race which found in him the first great American representative.... Smith was worth all the others put together."[19]
The public has been inclined to couple the Indian maiden's name with that of John Smith, more than with that of John Rolfe. But this present author's point that Pocahontas did not know that Smith was still alive when she married Rolfe, and that she was still in love with Smith, is unusual. However, it is not original. It has been taken in some plays and short stories. William Wirt Henry's address before the Virginia Historical Society in 1882 and Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimage[20] suggest that Smith could have married her had he so desired. This book is presented as a probable story rather than as documented history.
The Pocahontas-John Smith Story is most stoutly defended not by historians, nor even patriotic societies, but by poets, dramatists, and idealistic youth, who think that it is theirs, and by descendants, who know that it is theirs. The line is utterly Virginian be it in blood or ink from the Pocahontas, who like Will Rogers's ancestors "met the boat" to the Pocahontas who wrote the book. And so I sign here
Pocahontas Wight Edmunds.
Halifax, Virginia,
April, 1956.