Rolfe’s tobacco crop launched a country

(Henrico Citizen) In June 1609, while voyaging from England to the Virginia colony, John Rolfe found himself on an unplanned, fateful layover in an island paradise.
A four-day storm (the same one that is said to have inspired Shakespeare's "The Tempest") scattered and destroyed ships, and Rolfe, his wife Sarah, and several other passengers were stranded in Bermuda. ... Some historians believe that during his Bermuda experience, Rolfe found tobacco seeds. But regardless of whether he obtained seeds there, he soon began experimenting in earnest with the blending and cultivating of various strains of tobacco. Continued

Photo: Pocahontas and John Rolfe by J. W. Glass, early 1850s (Wikipedia).