1822

Davis, John. American Mariners, or, The Atlantic Voyage. London, 1822. Lines 218-20. Probably based on his return voyage to England, the purpose of this book in a post-War of 1812 period was to paint a positive picture of Americans, and it contains the last product of Davis's cottage industry on Pocahontas begun in 1800. "Sunrise in the English Channel" on the first sight of England ("This is the land where love and pity mourn / O'er the soft Indian's monumental urn; / Virginia's jewel, and her sex's pride, / Who on a foreign shore untimely died") triggers an emotional telling of the Pocahontas rescue of Smith: "She flies on seraph's wing, and through the crowd, / With piercing cry, 'mid acclamations loud, / Seeks the pale victim, by compassion led, / And in her arms sustains his languid head / . . . Streams from her eyes -- sobs from her bosom flow -- / And pale that cheek where the rose loves to glow." A footnote indicates that Pocahontas's life exemplified that "Fine Spirits / Are touch'd to fine Issues" and that her descendants are the "patricians of Virginia": the Bowlings, Murrays, Jeffersons, Randolphs, Middletons, and Pierpoints.
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