She declined to be discarded.

That is why her story matters.

That is why it endures.

And that is why, in the end, it is her story — not the story of the man who abandoned her, not the story of the failed colony, not the story of the fishing voyage that brought her home — that has lasted.

She survived in a world determined to cast her aside.

And she has kept surviving, in the historical record, ever since.