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maiden;’ and, winning the favor of
Pocahontas,
he desired her in marriage.
Quick of comprehension, the youthful princess received instruction with docility; and soon, in the little church of
Jamestown,—which rested on rough pine columns, fresh from the forest, and was in a style of rugged architecture as wild, if not as frail, as an Indian's wigwam,—she stood before the font, that out of the trunk of a tree ‘had been hewn hollow like a canoe,’ ‘openly renounced her country's idolatry, professed the faith of
Jesus Christ, and was baptized.’
‘The gaining of this one soul,’ ‘the first fruits of Virginian conversion,’ was followed by her nuptials with
Rolfe.
In April, 1613, to the joy of
Sir Thomas Dale, with the approbation of her father and friends, Opachisco, her uncle, gave the bride away; and she stammered before the altar her marriage vows, according to the rites of the
English service.
Every historian of
Virginia commemorates the union with approbation; distinguished men trace from it their descent.
In 1616, the
Indian wife, instructed in the
English language, and bearing an English name, ‘the first Christian ever of her nation,’ sailed with her
husband for
England.
The daughter of the wilderness possessed the mild elements of female loveliness, half concealed, as if in the bud, and rendered the more beautiful by the childlike simplicity with which her education in the savannahs of the New World had in vested her. How could she fail to be caressed at court, and admired in the city?
As a wife, and as a young mother, her conduct was exemplary.
She had been able to contrast the magnificence of
European life with the freedom of the western forests; and now, as she was preparing to return to
America, at the age of twenty-two, she fell a victim to the
English climate,—
saved, as if by the hand of mercy, from beholding the
