Page:Pocahontas, and Other Poems.djvu/44

28 the fort, with baskets of corn for the starving garrison. Smith, in his letter to Queen Anne, writes, "She, next under God, was the instrument to preserve this colony from death, famine, and utter confusion, which, if in those times had once been dissolved, Virginia might have lain as it was, at our first arrival, unto this day."

"Notwithstanding, the eternal, all-seeing God did prevent the plot of Powhatan, and by a strange means. For Pocahontas, his dearest jewel and daughter, came through the irksome woods in that dark night, and told us that great cheer might be sent us by and by, but that the king, and all the power he could make, would afterwards come and kill us all. Therefore, if we would live, she wished us presently to be gone. Such things as she delighted in we would have given her, but, with tears running down her cheeks, she said she durst not be seen to have them, for, if Powhatan should know it, she were but dead. And so she ran away by herself, as she came."—Capt. Smith.

The object of the capture and detention of the princess seems to have been to bring her father to such terms as the colonists desired, or to extort from him a large ransom; both of which designs were frustrated.

The marriage of Mr. Rolfe with Pocahontas took place in the church at Jamestown, in the month of April, 1613, and gave great delight to Powhatan and his chieftains, who were present at the ceremony, and also to the English, and proved a bond of peace and amity between them, as lasting as the life of the Indian king.

The rose striped with white and red, sometimes called the rose of Sharon, has been said in some ancient legend to have been first seen in England after the marriage of Henry VII. to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., when the civil war which had so long