that he was a winning and fascinating being, and she could not endure that
he should be sacrificed. Accordingly, at this supreme crisis of his career,
she slipped into the dreadful circle, and threw herself upon Smith's
body, so that the blow which was aimed at his life must kill her first.
She clung to him and would not be removed, until her father had promised
that Smith should be spared.

So runs the Captain's narrative, published for the first time in 1624,
after Pocahontas's appearance in London, and her death in 1617. Why he had
not told it before is difficult to explain. Perhaps he had promised
Powhatan to keep it secret, lest the record of his sentimental clemency
should impair his authority over the tribes. Or it may have been an
embellishment of some comparatively trifling incident of Smith's
captivity, suggested to his mind as he was compiling his "General History
of Virginia." It can never be determined; but certainly his relations with
the Indian girl were always cordial, and it seems unlikely that Powhatan
would have permitted him to return to Jamestown except for some unusual
reason.

Pocahontas's life had vicissitudes such as seldom befall an Indian
maiden. Some time between the Smith episode of 1607, and the year 1612,
she married one of her father's tributary chiefs, and went to live with
him on his reservation. There she was in some manner kidnapped by one
Samuel Argall, and held for ransom. The ransom was paid, but Pocahontas
was not sent back; and the following year she was married to John Rolfe, a
Jamestown colonist, and baptized as Rebecca. He took her to London, where
she was a nine days' wonder; and they had a son, whose blood still flows
in not a few American veins to-day. If she was ten years old in 1607, he
must have been no more than twenty at the time of her death in Gravesend,
near London. But her place in American history is secure, as well as in