Po

the largest river in Italy. It rises in the French Alps and flows in an easterly direction through the wide plains of Lombardy and Venetia. It empties into the Adriatic by several mouths, somewhat south of Venice. It is 360 miles in length and is navigable to Turin. It drains a region of fertility. Turin and Cremona are situated on its banks. Milan, Pavia, Mantua, Parma, and Bologna are situated on tributaries. The Po is subject to overflow in May and June. In 1879, during the rainy season, it rose twenty-one feet. Over $10,000,000 were expended between 1860 and 1880 in constructing levees or dikes to keep the river within its channel and to confine the extra water in reservoirs. These protective works were begun in the day of the Roman Empire, if not indeed earlier. Extensive systems of irrigation are supplied with water from the reservoirs. See Delta; Levee

Pocahontas (1595-1617), an Indian maiden of Virginia. She was the daughter of Powhatan, a dignified and powerful sachem of the Chickahominy tribe. Romance and fact have been so combined that it is difficult to separate the truth from fiction. In his earlier accounts of the colony of Virginia Captain John Smith states that Pocahontas was kindly disposed toward the starving settlers, using her influence in time of scarcity to induce the Indians to bring in supplies of corn and other much needed food. In 1613 she married John Rolfe, a young Englishman of good character, with whom she visited England. There the valiant Captain Smith began to invest her with a fabric of more or less imaginary circumstance. Her father was an emperor; she was a princess. While exploring the vast forests of the Chickahominy he had been taken captive and brought into the presence of Powhatan. A solemn council having decided that he must die he was made ready for execution. He was bound, his head was laid upon a stone. A powerful brave had raised the fatal war club when Pocahontas, a child of ten or twelve, rushed forward, clasped her arms about his neck, and "hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine." This is the story Smith wrote the queen of England in 1616. In 1624 he expounded the tale at greater length in his Generall Historie.

Another anecdote, likewise of doubtful authority, runs to the effect that a Captain Argall induced an Indian by the present of a copper kettle to betray Pocahontas into his hands. He held the girl on his ship as a hostage until Powhatan had concluded peace advantageous to the whites and had ransomed his daughter by the surrender of seven captives and the return of three muskets, a saw, an ax, and the gift of a canoe loaded with corn. Nevertheless Pocahontas did not return to her father, but married Rolfe instead.

Returning now to the known facts, Pocahontas was baptized under the Christian name of Rebecca. She was received with distinction at the English court, where a disposition was shown to treat her as a princess, the Lady Rebecca, she was called. She died in England in 1617, "A wild flower in a city."

An association of the descendants of Pocahontas has been formed with headquarters at New York. The membership includes many wealthy and prominent people. John Randolph of Roanoke, the distinguished Virginian, was a descendant of Pocahontas in the seventh generation. In the 1905 balloting for membership in the New York Hall of Fame, Pocahontas Rolfe received sixteen out of a possible 100 votes.

See John Smith