The Lady Rebecka, as she was called in London, died on shipboard at Gravesend after a brief illness, said to be of only three days, probably on the 21st of March, 1617.  I have seen somewhere a statement, which I cannot confirm, that her disease was smallpox.  St. George’s Church, where she was buried, was destroyed by fire in 1727.  The register of that church has this record: 

       “1616, May 21 Rebecca Wrothe
        Wyff of Thomas Wroth gent
     A Virginia lady borne, here was buried
          in ye chaunncle.”

Yet there is no doubt, according to a record in the Calendar of State Papers, dated “1617, 29 March, London,” that her death occurred March 21, 1617.

John Rolfe was made Secretary of Virginia when Captain Argall became Governor, and seems to have been associated in the schemes of that unscrupulous person and to have forfeited the good opinion of the company.  August 23, 1618, the company wrote to Argall:  “We cannot imagine why you should give us warning that Opechankano and the natives have given the country to Mr. Rolfe’s child, and that they reserve it from all others till he comes of years except as we suppose as some do here report it be a device of your own, to some special purpose for yourself.”  It appears also by the minutes of the company in 1621 that Lady Delaware had trouble to recover goods of hers left in Rolfe’s hands in Virginia, and desired a commission directed to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Mr. George Sandys to examine what goods of the late “Lord Deleware had come into Rolfe’s possession and get satisfaction of him.”  This George Sandys is the famous traveler who made a journey through the Turkish Empire in 1610, and who wrote, while living in Virginia, the first book written in the New World, the completion of his translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.”

John Rolfe died in Virginia in 1622, leaving a wife and children.  This is supposed to be his third wife, though there is no note of his marriage to her nor of the death of his first.  October 7, 1622, his brother Henry Rolfe petitioned that the estate of John should be converted to the support of his relict wife and children and to his own indemnity for having brought up John’s child by Powhatan’s daughter.

This child, named Thomas Rolfe, was given after the death of Pocahontas to the keeping of Sir Lewis Stukely of Plymouth, who fell into evil practices, and the boy was transferred to the guardianship of his uncle Henry Rolfe, and educated in London.  When he was grown up he returned to Virginia, and was probably there married.  There is on record his application to the Virginia authorities in 1641 for leave to go into the Indian country and visit Cleopatra, his mother’s sister.  He left an only daughter who was married, says Stith (1753), “to Col.  John Bolling; by whom she left an only son, the late Major John Bolling, who was father to the present Col.  John Bolling, and several daughters, married to Col.  Richard Randolph, Col.  John Fleming, Dr. William Gay, Mr. Thomas Eldridge, and Mr. James Murray.”  Campbell in his “History of Virginia” says that the first Randolph that came to the James River was an esteemed and industrious mechanic, and that one of his sons, Richard, grandfather of the celebrated John Randolph, married Jane Bolling, the great granddaughter of Pocahontas.