Pocahontas was among this people, (the Potommacks;) the reason of her absence from her father's court, is imperfectly afforded by the early historians. Stith conjectures "it was to withdraw herself from being a witness to the frequent butcheries of the English, whose folly and rashness after Smith's departure put it out of her power to save them." Probably she had been exiled by the displeasure of her father, for her partiality to the English; or he had confided her to the protection of the neighboring king, to secure her from the dangers of the war in which he was involved with the whites.
The temptation of possessing such an hostage as the princess, was too powerful to be restrained, by the few scruples of conscience that arise in the breast of a rude English sailor. Argall seduced Jappassas, by a paltry bribe, and Pocahontas was betrayed by her perfidious host into the hands of the English, to be led into captivity. Power was never yet at a loss for plausible pretexts to palliate its outrage on virtue: policy, expediency, necessity, are the hackneyed themes resorted to, to mitigate the merited reprobation; but the human heart will not be answered so. Insulted, not convinced, by the proffered palliative, it recoils from the false and unnatural subterfuge, and true to its connate susceptibilities, entertains forever the same sentiment of instinctive abhorrence. As long as the memory of the compassionate Pocahontas shall be cherished by a remote and admiring posterity in Virginia, so long will the unhallowed names of Argall and Jappassas be associated with deep and bitter execrations.
DEATH AND MEMORY OF POCAHONTAS.
The Princess died at Gravesend, on the eve of her departure for Virginia. The office of her panegyrist is confined to the merest details. The simplest narrative of her life, is the profoundest eulogy to her memory. Born in an age too rude to afford her the precepts and the instructions of virtue, while the condition of her sex seemingly precluded her from opportunities for the display of shining merit, she has yet left examples so signal, that after-times will best evince their progress to refinement, by their successful emulation of her mercy, redeeming and saving from captivity and death—and of her capacious charity, feeding a famished people from her hand—and that people a stranger and an enemy. The eye and the bosom of beauty suffused, and throbbing under the compassionate influence of pity—the prostrate attitude—the dishevelled hair—and the impassioned gaze of Pocahontas suing for the life of Smith at the feet of Powhatan—the timid and delicate maiden, heedless of the wonted terrors of her sex, rushing to save, through darkness and danger—Pocahontas at Ratcliffe's massacre, sheltering in her bosom the head of the boy Spillman, and warding with her naked hands the glancing tomahawks; these are passages of her eventful life, beyond the efforts of the pencil or the pen; and, without the aid of any coloring in the representation, melt the coldest hearts into acknowledgments of their moral influence and beauty.
JOHN SMITH.
History is replete with examples of the vulgar great who have obtained high consideration in the world, by their lucky association with moving incidents, and who, without any intrinsic impulse, have tamely lent themselves to the current of swelling events; nor are the instances rare, although rarely appreciated, of great virtue and capacity struggling in the tide of adversity, and sinking, not from any defect of their own resources, but by the depression of their fortune, and who have thus forfeited the world's applause, which awaits rather the prosperous than the deserving. But such is not the estimate of men and events which history owes to posterity; and in transmitting worth to fame, she should pay no adulation to fortune. In her discriminating page the character of John Smith will stand conspicuous, unclouded by the obscurity of the times, and the adversity of the events in which he acted and suffered—conspicuous for a constellation of high and shining attributes, such as at once inspire their possessor with the conception of great designs, and qualify him for their consummation. And his claims to reputation will not be tested merely by his achievements, when it is considered that his destinies confined him to a range of action too narrow for his capacity. How unjust to circumscribe his fame to the limits of a colony, whose faculties were capable to remove and extend the confines of empires! His glory dilates itself beyond the sphere to which it had been assigned by circumstances, and lays claim to the merit of any achievement possible to the greatest virtue.
CAPTIVITY OF SMITH.
Captain Smith was not aware of the stealthy approach of the Indians; a slight wound by an arrow was the first intimation he had of their presence.
In this peril, of a nature to quell the greatest courage, because its exercise must be hopeless, his energies did not desert him; seizing his Indian guide, he constrained him to serve as a shield against the missiles of the assailants—and interposing the Indian's person between himself and his enemies, he commenced his retreat in the direction of the canoe; but being obliged to make face to the Indians, his progress was consequently retrograde, and thus not being able to pick his way, he sunk through the ice to the waist in a morass. Here, embarrassed as he was, he slew with his musket three of the Indians, and for several hours kept the others at a distance, until fatigued with his fruitless efforts to extricate himself from the morass, and benumbed by the cold, he desisted from the idle contest. The Indians dared not yet approach him, until he had thrown his arms to a distance from him, when they raised him and carried him to a fire at the canoe, near which lay the dead bodies of his companions.
Smith, with the vague intention of gaining time, and of making a favorable impression upon his captors, endeavored to establish a communication with their chief, whom he propitiated by the offering of his pocket compass. The curiosity of the savage was forcibly roused by the apparent life in the vibrations of the needle, the motions of which were visible through the crystal, although it eluded his touch; but when the prisoner, by signs, and so much of their language as he had acquired, engaged his attention to the description of its properties and uses—how, by its indication alone, the solitary hunter could track his pathless way, in darkness, through the deepest forests, and direct his canoe through the expanse of waters to its destined point, and this by mysterious and inscrutable influence between the heavenly bodies and the little talisman he held in his hands, the Indian's faculties were absorbed in the recital, and he remained fixed in an attitude of mute and vague wonder.