(1595-1617)
Graveyard of St George’s Church, Gravesend, Kent, England
Pocahontas was a native American who intervened, at the age of 12, to save the life of colony settler Captain John Smith. She later met Englishman James Rolfe who arrived in the newly formed Jamestown colony in 1610. They married and travelled to England, where she changed her name to Rebecca Rolfe and converted to Christianity.
She died in 1617, around the age of 23, while making a return voyage to Virginia with her husband and son Thomas. The ship would have stopped in Gravesend as the last place for fresh food and water for the journey. She was buried St George’s Church, but the original building was destroyed by fire in 1727 so her exact resting place is unknown.
Folk will no doubt be familiar with the Disney interpretation of Pocahontas’s story. In reality, her act of heroism opened her, and many other native Americans, up to new diseases that their immune systems could not fight – her cause of death in England could have been from any number of ills at the time, from smallpox to flu.
Rolfe, continued his journey back to Virginia to work his tobacco farm, leaving their son Thomas with family, believing that without his mother he was unlikely to survive the arduous journey across the Atlantic. He never saw Thomas again but knew that his son had been brought up safely in England, married, and had children of his own. The actor Edward Norton and Edith Wilson, wife of America’s President Woodrow Wilson, are amongst those who claim to be descended from Thomas and thus from Pocahontas herself.
The Grade II listed statue was gifted by the then governor of Virginia in 1958 and is a cast of the 1907 sculpture by William Ordway Partridge on display in Jamestown, Virginia.
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