John Rolfe

John Rolfe made Virginia profitable by introducing a tobacco the English would buy, and married Pocahontas. He sailed for the colony in 1609 and was wrecked in Bermuda on the way, spending ten months there before reaching Jamestown; the wreck is one of the sources usually cited behind The Tempest. His wife and infant daughter died in that first period. The native Virginia tobacco was harsh and unsaleable in London, so Rolfe obtained seeds of a sweeter Caribbean strain, planted it in 1612, and shipped his first crop two years later. Within a decade tobacco was the colony's entire economy, which settled Virginia's future: a plantation society hungry for land and for labour. He married Pocahontas in 1614 after her capture and conversion, and the marriage brought several years of peace with the Powhatan. The couple travelled to England in 1616 to advertise the colony, and she died at Gravesend on the return voyage. Rolfe also wrote the letter that records the arrival at Point Comfort in August 1619 of a ship carrying twenty and odd Africans, sold to the colonists - the first documented Africans in English North America. He died in 1622, probably in the Powhatan attack of that March, and his son Thomas by Pocahontas has descendants in Virginia to this day. His letter describing the 1619 arrivals is the only contemporary account of it, and the ambiguity of its wording - whether those Africans were treated as servants or as property - has been argued over for a century. The tobacco he planted is still grown in Virginia under the name he gave the strain, Orinoco.

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