Advertisement

Topic: John Rolfe

Jump to
Latest Headlines

John Rolfe News




Wiki

John Rolfe (c. 1585 – 1622) was one of the early English settlers of North America. He is credited with the first successful cultivation of tobacco as an export crop in the Colony of Virginia and is known as the husband of Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy.

No one knows what Rolfe looked like; all portraits of him were made well after his death, and no descriptions of his appearance are extant. In 1961, the Jamestown Foundation of the Commonwealth of Virginia (now the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation) offered a $500 award for "the best historical information" on Rolfe's "appearance and mannerisms".

Rolfe was born in Heacham, Norfolk, England as the son of John Rolfe and Dorothea Mason, and was baptized on May 6, 1585. At the time, Spain held a virtual monopoly on the lucrative tobacco trade. Most Spanish colonies in the New World were located in southern climates more favorable to tobacco growth than the English settlements, notably Jamestown. As the consumption of tobacco had increased, the balance of trade between England and Spain began to be seriously affected. Rolfe was one of a number of businessmen who saw the opportunity to undercut Spanish imports by growing tobacco in England's new colony at Jamestown, in Virginia. Rolfe had somehow obtained seeds to take with him from a special popular strain then being grown in Trinidad and South America, even though Spain had declared a penalty of death to anyone selling such seeds to a non-Spaniard.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Rolfe."