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Desperate Shores — Rebecca Rolfe · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season one of American Political History Desperate Shores Rebecca Rolfe There is a statue of her in the churchyard of Saint George Church in Gravesend, England.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: She faces west towards Virginia, across the Thames estuary, across the Atlantic Ocean, toward a home she was preparing to return to when she died.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: She was twenty one years old.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Her name by the time she died was Rebecca Wolf, but she had been born to two other names, her secret family name, Amonut, and a name the world has remembered her by, the name her father gave her as a nickname when she was small, Pocahontas.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Before we talk about what she did, we have to talk about what she is not.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: She was not the Disney princess.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: She was not the romantic heroine of John Smith's adventure story.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Smith was twenty seven years old when he first encountered her as a child of ten or eleven.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The dramatic rescue he later made famous appears nowhere in his sixteen oh eight accounts of Virginia.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The story only surfaces the first time in sixteen twenty two, fifteen years after the fact, and reaches its full form in his sixteen twenty four General Histori, by which point she had been dead for seven years and could not contradict him.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Most historians today believe he either misunderstood a Powhatan adoption ritual or embellished the story for an audience that wanted adventures in the New World.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: But here is what she actually was.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: She was the daughter of Johanna Sinacha, the paramount chief of the Powatan Confederacy, the most powerful political figure on the Virginia coast.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: She grew up in the household of a king surrounded by the diplomatic calculations of a man who had spent decades maintaining a confederacy of thirty nations.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: She was adaptable and brave in a way that is difficult to fully measure from a distance of four hundred years.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: She crossed every divide her world contained, cultural, religious, linguistic, political, and she did it not as a passive figure moved by the hands of others, but as a person making choices in her time, in her moment, with the understanding she had available to her.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: She was a lone hand on the steering wheel of history, trying to point at somewhere other than war, and she did it all before she turned twenty two.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: She was born around fifteen ninety six by one of the many wives of Wahansi Natcha.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Custom among the Powatan, a child was sent to live with their mother's people after waning, returned to his household only when they were old enough to contribute work.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: She grew up in her mother's community, learning the work of Powatan women, farming, gathering, preparing food, making clothes.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Even the daughter of the Paramount chief worked.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: When she was old enough, she came to her father's great household, and it was there around sixteen oh seven or sixteen oh eight that she began making visits to Jamestown that the English would never forget.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: She brought food, she played with the English boys in the fort, by some accounts she turned cartwheels in the open spaces of the settlement.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: She was curious and bold, and the English found her charming, and her father allowed these visits because they served his purposes.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: She was a young ambassador of good will and a visible signal that the Powhatan were willing to engage.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: By sixteen ten came the first Anglo Powhatan War, four years of raids and burnt villages, both sides exhausted, neither winning.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Into that war stepped his daughter.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: In March of sixteen thirteen, an English captain named Samuel Argyll learned that Pocahontas was visiting the Patawomac people on the Potomac River, a nation not fully loyal to her father.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Argyll invited her aboard a ship under the pretenses of friendship.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Once she was aboard, he refused to let her leave.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: She was taken to Jamestown as a hostage.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: The English demands were straightforward.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Powatan must return English prisoners, stolen weapons and tools, and agree to peace, or the chief's daughter would be held indefinitely.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: While the negotiations dragged on, his daughter was held at the new settlement of Herenko, upriver of Jamestown.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: She was placed in the care of Reverend Alexander Whitaker, a Cambridge educated minister who had come to Virginia in sixteen eleven specifically to convert native peoples.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Whitaker was a man of genuine conviction.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: He believed that the Powatan were souls waiting for salvation, and he believed that Pocahontas was capable of receiving it.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Over the course of a year she learned English, she learned the Bible, she was instructed in the Anglican doctrine and English customs.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Whether she embraced this instruction willingly or accepted it as the only viable path through her captivity is something we cannot know with certainty.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Both things may have been true at once.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was during this year at Herenco that she met John Rolfe.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Rolfe was twenty eight, a widower, the man who had introduced the profitable strain of West Indian tobacco to Virginia, and was in the process of changing the colony's economic future.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was pious, educated, and deeply troubled by his feelings for her.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote a long letter to the deputy governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale, requesting permission to marry her.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: The letter is one of the more remarkable documents of early American history, not for its arguments, but for what it reveals about the man making them.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote that he found himself entangled and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I was even a wearied to unwind myself thereof.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: He convinced himself, and may have been right that he loved her.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: He also argued that the marriage could serve God, the colony, and her immortal soul.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: She was seventeen, she had been held for a year, she had learned a new language, a new faith, and a new name, Rebecca, given at her baptism.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever she had worked out in her mind during the year about who she was, whatever she had worked out in her mind during that year about who she was and what her life would become, it was about to be declared publicly.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the spring of sixteen fourteen, Deputy Governor Dale took Rebecca and one hundred and fifty armed men upriver into the Powhatan territory to demand a ransom.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: There was a skirmish, English soldiers burned a Powhatan village, and then on the shore, Whannesinacha's brother came to negotiate, and Pocahontas spoke.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: She told them that she wished to marry John Rolfe, and so on april fifth, sixteen fourteen, Rebecca married John Rolf in the church at Jamestown.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Both sides saw this union as extraordinary.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The English who witnessed it saw an English gentleman marrying a convert of the royal Powhatan blood.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Powhatan who attended saw a daughter of their most paramount chief entering into a foreign people's household under foreign rights.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But for both sides, four years into a grueling war, it was cause for something neither side had felt in a long time hope.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Wahana Sinacha rescinded his standing orders to attack the English whenever possible, and the war ended.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: The peace that followed bore her name, the Pocahontas Peace, and it held, with only scattered surmishes for eight years.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Eight years.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Those eight years were worth dwelling in, because they were briefly something that had never existed in Virginia's coast and would never exist again.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Native men and women walking freely in and out of English settlements, not as traders under watchful eyes, but as neighbors, sharing meals, learning each other's words.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: English settlers were welcomed into Powhatan villages.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Children on both sides picked up fragments of each other's languages.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: The two worlds which had been tearing each other apart were learning to live alongside each other, and at the center of that piece stood Rebecca Rolfe, the woman who had created the path that neither world had a name for.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: She and John Rolfe had a son.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: They named him Thomas.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Rolfe was both things at once, Powaton by blood through his mother, and the grandson of the paramount chief of the Confederacy, and he was English by baptism and name, the son of a man whose tobacco crop was building Virginia's future.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was living proof that two worlds could produce something new between them.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: The peace was imperfect, but it was a third way that could have been chosen.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: She had brought those eight years with her voice, with her marriage, with her courage.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen sixteen she traveled to England.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: In England, Rebecca Wolfe became a celebrity.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: She was received at the court, presented to King James I and Queen Anne at the twelfth night masquerade at Whitehall Palace.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: She attended the theater.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: She was painted.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: The only surviving portrait of her shows a young woman in English dress, composed and direct, looking at the painter without flinching.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: She was entertained by bishops, lords, and the directors of the Virginia Company, who treated her as living proof that their enterprise was righteous.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: She stayed in England nearly a year.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the spring of sixteen seventeen, the Rolfs prepared to return to Virginia.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was ready to go home.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever she had planned for that return, whatever she had worked out in her mind about what came next for her and her husband and Thomas, for the peace that she had helped build, we will never know.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: She never made it past the Thames.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: As the ship moved downriver in the open sea, she fell gravely ill, pneumonia most likely or tuberculosis.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: London's air in the early seventeenth century was remarkable in its filth, and she had spent nearly a year breathing it in with no immunity to the diseases that circulated through it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: The ship put in at Gravesend, a port town twenty five miles east of London.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: There she died in March of 1617, twenty one years old.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: John Rolfe returned to Virginia without her.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: He remarried, had a daughter, and died in 1622.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: The same year the Pocahontas Peace finally broke.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Their son Thomas stayed in England with his uncle, educated as an English gentleman.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Rolfe returned to Virginia around 1635.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: He came back to a colony transformed.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: The tobacco economy his father had helped build was booming.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Powaton Confederacy, shattered now by two wars, was a fraction of what it had been.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: The world his mother had tried to bridge had chosen sides.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas did not disappear into history, though.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: He planted himself in it.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: He inherited his father's plantation on the James River, the same soil where he had been born.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: He petitioned the colonial governor for permission to visit his palatin uncle and kinsman, which, by colonial law at that time, actually required the request.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: He served as a lieutenant in the Virginia militia.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He acquired land.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: He married Jane Poethras, the daughter of a prosperous Virginia landowner, and they had one daughter, Jane Rolfe.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Jane Rolfe married Robert Bolin.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Their line carried into the first families of Virginia, and eventually, eight generations on to Edith Boleyn Wilson, first lady of the United States, who ran the executive branch of the American government while her husband, Woodrow Wilson, lay incapacitated after a stroke.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: The daughter of the paramount chief of the Powaton Confederacy, dead at twenty one on a ship in the Thames, eight generations later, her descendant, the most powerful woman in America.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: That is the length of the threads that Pocahontas left behind in American history.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Her story tends to get told two ways.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the romance, the Disney version, the legend, the girl who loved an English captain and saved a colony.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: This vision is largely invented and does her a disservice because it makes her a supporting character in someone else's story.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second is the tragedy, the revisionist telling in which she is the victim of colonialism, kidnapped, coerced, used, and discarded by an empire that never saw her as a full human being.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: This version also does her a disservice because it strips her of the choices she actually made.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is harder and more interesting than either of these visions.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: She was the daughter of a king.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: She was held as a hostage.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: She was converted and renamed herself.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: She chose to marry an Englishman.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: She tried to build a third way of peace, a world where a person could be Powatan and English at the same time, where two nations could share the same shore without one destroying the other.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: She embodied that world in her own person.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: She raised a son who carried it forward.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: She brought eight years of peace with her courage and love.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: History did not vindicate her gamble.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: The war came anyways.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: The world she tried to build did not outlast her by long.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: But this is worthy saying plainly, you should not judge people by the eventual outcome of history.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: You should judge them by what they chose to do in their time, in their moment, with the understandings they had available to them.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: She was twenty one years old.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: She crossed every divide her world contained.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: She had made peace between two nations with her voice.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: She had charmed the court of King James, and she bore a son who would carry two worlds forward into Virginia's future.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share the show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.