Mr. Deane first pointed out (1860), in a note to his edition of Wingfield’s Discourse, that the story of Pocahontas’s saving Smith’s life from the infuriated Powhatan, which Smith interpolates in his Generall Historie, was at variance with Smith’s earlier recitals in the tracts of which that book was composed when they had been issued contemporaneous with the events of which he was treating some years earlier, and that the inference was that Smith’s natural propensity for embellishment, as well as a desire to feed the interest which had been incited in Pocahontas when she visited England, was the real source of the story. Mr. Deane still farther enlarged upon this view in a note to his edition (p. 38) of Smith’s Relation in 1866.[312] It has an important bearing on the question that Hamor, who says so much of Pocahontas, makes no allusion to such a striking service. The substantial correctness of Smith’s later story is contended for by W. Robertson in the Hist. Mag., October, 1860; by William Wirt Henry, in Potter’s American Monthly, 1875; and a general protest is vaguely rendered by Stevens in his Historical Collections, p. 102.
The file of the Richmond Dispatch for 1877 contains various contributions on the early governors of the colony of Virginia by E. D. Neill, William Wirt Henry, and R. A. Brock, in which the claims of Smith’s narrative to consideration are discussed. Charles Dudley Warner, in A Study of the Life and Writings of John Smith, 1881, treats the subject humorously and with sceptical levity. Smith finds his latest champion, a second time, in William Wirt Henry, in an address, The Early Settlement at Jamestown, with Particular Reference to the late Attacks upon Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and John Rolfe, delivered before the annual meeting of the Virginia Historical Society, held Feb. 24, 1882, and published with the Proceedings of the Society. Mr. Deane’s views are, however, supported by Henry Adams (North American Review, January, 1867, and Chapter of Erie, and other Essays, p. 192) and by Henry Cabot Lodge (English Colonies in America, p. 6). Mr. Bancroft allowed for a while the original story to stand, with a bare reference to Mr. Deane’s note (History of the United States, 1864, i. 132); but in his Centenary Edition (1879, vol. i. p. 102) he abandoned the former assertion, without expressing judgment. The most recent recitals of the story of Pocahontas under the color of these later investigations have been by Gay, in the Popular History of the United States, i. 283, and by Charles D. Warner in his Captain John Smith, before named,—the latter carefully going over all the evidence.
Alexander Brown has contributed several articles, published in the Richmond Dispatch in April and May, 1882, in which he controverts the views of Mr. Henry, not only as to the truth of the story of the rescue, but as to the general veracity of Smith as a historian, taking a more absolute position in this respect than any previous writer has done.
Pocahontas is thought to have died at Gravesend just as she was about re-embarking for America, March 21, 1617; and the entry on the records of St. George’s Church in that place—which speaks of a “lady Virginia born,” and has been supposed to refer to her—puts her burial March 21. 1617.[313]
For the tracing of Pocahontas’s descendants through the Bollings,—Robert Bolling having married Jane Rolfe, the daughter of Thomas Rolfe, the son of Powhatan’s daughter,—see The Descendants of Pocahontas, by Wyndham Robertson, 1855, and Wynne’s Historical Documents, vol. iv., entitled A Memoir of a Portion of the Bolling Family, Richmond, 1868 (fifty copies printed), which contains photographs of portraits of the Bollings.[314]
There is an engraving of Pocahontas by Simon Pass, which perhaps belongs to, but is seldom found in, Smith’s Generall Historie.[315] The original painting is said to have belonged to Henry Rolfe, of Narford,—a brother of John, the husband of Pocahontas,—and from him passed to Anthony Rolfe, of Tuttington, and from him again, probably by a marriage, to the Elwes of Tuttington, and it is mentioned in a catalogue of a sale of their effects in the last century. It has not since been traced.[316]
Richard Randolph, of Virginia, is said to have procured from England two portraits,—one of Rolfe, and the other of Pocahontas,—and they were hung in his house at Turkey Island. After his death, in 1784, they are said to have been bought by Thomas Bolling, of Cobbs, Va., and the inventory showing them is, or was, in the County Court of Henrico. In 1830 they were in the possession of Dr. Thomas Robinson, of Petersburg, when he wrote of the portrait of Pocahontas that “it is crumbling so rapidly that it may be considered as having already passed out of existence.” A letter of the late H. B. Grigsby to Mr. Charles Deane states that he had heard it was on panel let into the wainscot. In 1843, while still owned by Mr. Robinson, R. M. Sully made a copy of it, which seems to have proved acceptable, as appears from the attestations printed in M’Kinney and Hall’s Indian Tribes of North America, 1844, vol. iii., where at p. 64 is a reproduction in colors of Sully’s painting. Mr. Grigsby says that the original was finally destroyed in a contest which grew out of a dispute when the house was sold, whether the panel went with it or could be reserved.[317]
Of the massacre at Falling Creek, March 22, 1621-22, the Virginia Company printed, in Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia, a contemporary account.[318] Mr. Neill has made the transaction the subject of special consideration in the Magazine of American History, i. 222, and in his Letter to N. G. Taylor in 1868, and has printed a considerable part of Waterhouse’s account in his Virginia Company, p. 317 et seq.
The massacre is also incidentally mentioned by the present writer in a paper, “Early Iron Manufacture in Virginia, 1619-1776,” in the Richmond Standard, Feb. 8, 1879, and by James M. Swank, in “Statistics of the Iron and Steel Production of the United States,” compiled for the Tenth Census, which may also be referred to for information as to that industry in the Colony of Virginia.