Readers often ask if I have a favorite book of the ones I’ve written. This is one of them. Though this story required more research than other novels, I’ve enjoyed the journey so much and have learned a great deal along the way. I even cried when I wrote “The End,” something I don’t always do.
From childhood I’ve been enthralled with Pocahontas’s life and legend. But the Pocahontas I discovered while researching this novel was not the one taught to me in school. The most helpful sources came from Pocahontas’s own people. Their unique perspective, oral tradition, and written history about her ring true and make her even more remarkable. I’ve attempted in a small way to honor her memory here.
John Rolfe’s romantic letter about Pocahontas prior to their marriage is especially moving, and so I have included it in the novel:
It is she to whom my heart and best thoughts are and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I could not unwind myself thereout.
Alexander Renick’s character was inspired by John Rolfe, just as Mattachanna was inspired by Pocahontas herself.
When I was planning this novel, the NPS Historic Jamestowne website and Encyclopedia Virginia were of particular help to me in creating characters like the Hopewells. They were inspired by Captain William Peirce, his wife Joan, and their daughter, who married John Rolfe, the widower of Pocahontas. Sadly, John Rolfe disappears from the historical record around 1622, which makes me even more thankful to write fiction that offers hope and happily ever afters.
Historical purists will note that tobacco brides came to Virginia’s shores earlier than the date of the novel. For the story’s sake I chose 1634, as the colony was well past the starving time of earlier years and proved solid ground for the story to unfold. But it was still a highly volatile, dangerous period until the more settled eighteenth century. Place names like Mount Malady have been resurrected beyond their time in history to help in the telling of the story.
I had a great deal of fun with Widow Brodie’s Old World insults and was only too happy to return to my love of etymology and discover that the phrase “do or die” originated in the fifteenth century, if not earlier.
The last time I visited Jamestown on a chilly spring day, few were there. It is a moving, beautiful place in any season and feels like hallowed historical ground. We’ll never know all that happened during those early years, but one of the joys of historical fiction is breathing new life into people and events so that history and our American heritage are not forgotten.