POCAHONTAS, the legendary" princess Poew]imb-s,"b. about 1505, was the daughter of au Indian chief of Virginia. It is due to the vanity of capt. John Smith, a bustling early settler, that this red Indian woman has been embalmed in his tigmentary story as a heroine of romance, in that she died of love for the said John Smith years after she had prevented her father's braves from beating out his brains at the imminent risk of a simi lar visitation on her own; a fond imagination perpetuated in sculpture by Capellano, as may lie seen any day over one of the doors of the capitol at Washington. But Mr. E. D. Neill, United States consul at Dublin, has recently dispelled the halo from the brow of this •• blessed Pocahontas and great king's daughter of Virginia." According to evidence adduced by this gentleman, Pocahontas first appears in history tumbling wheels in the market-place of the English fort—a prototype of our city Arabs. • Next.sle isliving with a volunteer cap. called Cookham. Subsequently separate from him, she is betrayed by
her uncle Patowomek (Potomak?) to capt. Argall, the unscrupulous deputy-governor of Virginia, and held by him as a hostage for the purpose of extorting from her fathersuch terms as he required. In pursuance of this plan John Rolfe, a married Englishman, marries her. Sir Thonms.Dale, the governor, afterward brings the'' Virginian princess" to England, as a means of extracting money from the government of James I. for the plantation. She created a sensation of curiosity in London and at court, and died at Gravesend in 1616, aged 21. The son she bore to John Rolfe returned to Virginia. Richard Randolph, son of an "esteemed and industrious mechanic," is said to have mar ried Jane Bolling, the great-grand-daughter of Pocahontas, who is accordingly proudly referred to as au ancestress of the Randolphs and other distinguished families of Vir ginia. See English Colonization of America., by E. D. Neill (1871).