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John Smith Lewis Leary (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Born: 1580? in Willoughby, England Died: June 21, 1631 in London, England Nationality: English Occupation: Colonist American Colonial Writers, 1606-1734. Ed. Emory Elliott. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 24. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1984. From Literature Resource Center. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1984 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

WORKS:

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Books

A True Relation of Such Occurences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia since the First Planting of That Collony ... (London: Printed for John Tappe, 1608). A Map of Virginia. With a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion ... (London: Printed by Joseph Barnes, 1612). A Description of New England; or, The Observations and Discoveries of Captain John Smith ... (London: Printed by Humfrey Lownes for Robert Clerke, 1616). New Englands Trials. Declaring the Successe of 26. Ships Employed Thither within these Six Years ... (London: Printed by W. Jones, 1620; revised and enlarged, 1622). The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles ..., by Smith and others (London: Printed by I.D. & I. H. for Michael Sparkes, 1624). An Accidence or The Path-way to Experience. Necessary for all Young Sea-men ... (London: Printed for Jonas Man & Benjamin Fisher, 1626); enlarged as A Sea Grammar, With the Plaine Exposition of Smiths Accidence ... (London: Printed by John Haviland, 1627). The true Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America, from Anno Domini 1593. to 1629 ... (London: Printed by J.H. for Thomas Slater, 1630). Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New-England, Or any where, Or, The Path- way to experience to erect a Plantation ... (London: Printed by J. Haviland & sold by R. Milbourne, 1631).

Collection

Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, 1590-1631, two volumes, edited by Edward Archer, with an introduction by A. G. Bradler (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1910).

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

John Smith, explorer, colonizer, historian, author, was born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, England, where he was baptized on 9 January 1580, the son of George and Ann Smith, people of modest means. After brief schooling, he was apprenticed in 1595 to Thomas Sendall, a prominent merchant of nearby King's Lynn. Smith's father's death a year later brought him a modest

patrimony, enough apparently to allow him to embark at seventeen on what would become a lifetime of adventuring. After almost four years of soldiering on the Continent, mostly in the Low Countries, which were then part of France, he returned to Lincolnshire by way of Scotland, apparently to recuperate from wounds. But country life seems not to have satisfied him: he spent much of his time in studying Niccolo Machiavelli's The Art of War (1521) and practicing horsemanship. By the end of the summer of 1600, he was off again, at the age of twenty, seeking, he said, further "brave adventures" in battle against the Ottoman Turks. Journeying on foot through Europe to the Mediterranean, he took passage for Italy at Marseilles in a vessel containing pilgrims on their way to Rome. When a storm came up, Smith, a mercenary and, what was worse, an English Protestant, was Noah-like thrown overboard to appease the elements. He swam to a nearby deserted island from which he was rescued by a marauding French merchantman, who, with Smith aboard and with his assistance, so successfully attacked and looted rival vessels that when the young adventurer was set ashore some months later, he had a pocketful of gold to help speed him on his adventuresome way. For months he pushed tortuously eastward toward the Hungarian and Transylvanian frontier, where he joined the polyglot forces gathered by Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, to contain if not overwhelm the Ottoman enemy. Smith's studies in Machiavellian tactics now stood him in good stead as he applied them in setting up signal systems to allow Ferdinand's forces to outmaneuver the Turkish forces. More than that, his strong right arm and invincible courage allowed him on three successive days to slay in single combat, in plain sight of both armies, three lusty Turks, whose heads he presented to his appreciative commander. So impressed was Prince Sigismund Bathori, Prince of Transylvania, that he granted the young Englishman a special coat of arms decorated with three grisly heads and a promised pension of 3000 ducats annually. In a subsequent battle, in November 1603, Smith was taken prisoner and sent to Constantinople as a slave to the Princess Charatza Tragabigzanda, whom Smith described as his captor's "fair Mistresse." She was so attracted to him that to protect him from mistreatment she had him sent northward across the Black Sea to the safekeeping, she thought, of her brother. But the brother turned out to be cruel, so Smith killed him and then beat his way across northern steppes toward England, where after many hardships he arrived at the age of twenty-five with what would seem to be already a lifetime of adventures behind him. Because Smith was to become the sole recorder of these adventures, they have sometimes been suspected to have been inventions of a self-serving person eager for approval. But recent investigation suggests that, barring a stretch of truth here and there, there may be basis in fact for Smith's unashamed recordings of where he adventured and what he did as an adventurer.

After 1605, the record becomes clearer. Restless still and eager for further adventuring, Smith thought of joining the new English plantation in Guiana, where active manpower was badly needed. Instead, however, he took an active part in the promotion and organization of the group of 105 young gentlemen and others who would set sail from Blackwall in three ships on 19 December 1606 to establish a settlement in Virginia. During the voyage, probably for lack of tact in explaining to another seasoned adventurer how this venture should be managed, Smith was placed under arrest. It apparently was not known that in sealed orders, not to be opened until the destination had been reached, he had been appointed one of the council of seven that was to govern the proposed new colony. After a little more than four treacherous months at sea, the ships entered Chesapeake Bay, and a month later the colonists disembarked at what was to be called Jamestown. The long journey was over, but troubles with the Indians, with obtaining food, and with continuing quarrels among the gentlemen settlers had just begun. Denied his place on the council until mid-June 1607, Smith spent much of his time in exploration and in expeditions among the Indians to procure corn and other food for his famished companions, two-thirds of whom are said to have died within the first seven months of settlement. On one of these expeditions he was captured, taken before the Indian chief Powhatan, and sentenced to die, only to be saved, he said, by the intercession of the chief's young daughter, Pocahontas. Returning to Jamestown in January 1608, he was arrested by

his enemies and condemned to be hanged but was saved by the arrival, just in time, of new supplies and new colonists from England and the intercession of less harried, less hungry, and cooler heads. In June he sent back to England an account, published in that year as A True Relation of Such Occurences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia since the First Planting of That Collony ..., setting forth his side of a story of mismanagement and jockeying for power among the gentlemen settlers. Smith spent much of that summer in further exploration of the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers and the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay, and from his surveys he made a map of those territories. Exploration seemed more agreeable to him than administration, but in September 1608, the "sickly season" having taken its toll among the people of Jamestown, Smith was elected their president and bent all efforts toward stabilizing the colony, introducing some order among the settlers, who sought more for gold and gems than for food. He saw to the erection of suitable housing, of a church, and of more efficient fortifications, encouraging gardening and fishing to provide foods to supplement what was bartered from the Indians. But quarrels continued among the colonists, and in 1609 Smith, who had been severely burned when his powder bag caught on fire, sailed for England, where he defended himself and the colony against criticism. In 1612 his A Map of Virginia. With a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion ... was published in London.

Smith's role as an actor, and producer also, in the dramatic founding of Virginia was now at an end but not his lust for further adventuring nor his compulsion to set himself forward as a person, qualified by experience, to establish further transatlantic plantations. In March 1614 he sailed with two sloops on a voyage to northern reaches of the western continent, to explore possibilities for the establishment of colonies and profitable fisheries there. He charted the coast carefully, and he named the lands that lay behind it New England. In 1615, he made two more attempts to explore these promising lands. The first failed because of a storm at sea, the second when his vessel was captured by a French ship of war and he was taken captive. When released, he returned to London where in 1616 he published A Description of New England ..., which included a map of its coastline. But he was thirty-six, and his days of adventuring were over. He was not the kind of person wanted by the colonizers of New England, though he offered them his services and hardheaded counsel. The religious folk who would settle in those northern regions had no place for him, though they seem to have made use of his maps, perhaps even of his advice, freely and with great confidence given. So from that time forward, he became a writer, an adviser, and a self-certified expert on adventuring and the successful settlement of new lands. His New Englands Trials ... in 1620 spoke of possibilities for the planting of colonies there; a second edition two years later spoke with little confidence about what the Pilgrims had accomplished, to what extent they had fallen short of expectations, and how, taking instruction from him, they might succeed there.

In 1624, he published The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles ..., a compendium of his earlier writings and those of other men. An Accidence or The Path-way to Experience. Necessary for all Young Sea-men ..., published in 1626, is a manual of seamanship spiced with incidents and advice based on his own experiences; it was enlarged a year later as A Sea Grammar, With the Plaine Exposition of Smiths Accidence.... Then in 1630 appeared his masterwork, The true Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America, from Anno Domini 1593. to 1629 , which includes his "Accidents and Sea-fights..., his service and Strategems of warre in Hungary, Transilvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, against the Turks and Tartans,... his description of ... their strange manners and customs of Religion, Diets, Buildings, Warres, Feasts, Ceremonies and Living," to which were added previously published accounts of the founders of colonies in Virginia and New England. It was a book of marvels with focus unashamedly on its author. Meant to establish John Smith as a worthy man in his own time, it has made him a storybook hero for all time in an account so filled with braggadocio and derring-do that it has tempted many readers to agree with Thomas Fuller , who

more than 300 years ago in his The History of the Worthies of England (1662) explained that "it soundeth much to the diminution of his [Smith's] deeds that he alone is the herald to proclaim them." But proclaim them he did, and with such vigor that his life has become legend. A year later, in 1631, John Smith was dead and buried in St. Sepulchre's Church in London. Earlier in 1631 he had published a rollickingly instructive book which he called Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New-England, Or any where. Or, The Path-way to experience to erect a Plantation ... and in which he generously shared, sometimes with good-humored raillery, his own adventures and misadventures, expressing forthright notions of how others should have behaved or should behave in similar situations.

Colonist, explorer, professional soldier, and historian--John Smith was all of these. He seems also to have been an opportunist, writing to advance his own interests. He borrowed unashamedly from other writers about the New World, making their stories reflect on his own. But he was also a hardheaded and practical man who wrote clearly, presenting himself and his opinions with force and vigor, setting himself forth plainly, even vaingloriously, as capably at the center of all matters about which he wrote. He, John Smith, a person most anonymously named, was a person to be accounted for and to be held accountable as his story becomes history. What he had to say about his relationship with Pocahontas was expanded, and to his advantage, each time that he told it, so that it has grown, quite beyond the solid angularity of fact, to become America's first great legend. Historians may attack John Smith as a self-serving braggart, and braggart he was. He sang of himself but also of the bounty and beauty of the New World, its rugged shores, its fertile fields, sweet brooks and crystal springs, and of possibilities there for people bound in Europe by persecution or poverty. His may seem indeed to be a barbaric yawp, like the later yawp of Walt Whitman , celebrating himself in testimony to his right to celebrate an ideal of new opportunities for a new people. Self-proclaimed, he stands at the dawn of the literature of the New World, crowing like a chanticleer, and the echo of his voice in song and story has survived for more than 300 years. He has been called America's Odysseus and has been shown to have illustrated in his own life story many of the same traits and marvelous circumstances that have secured immortality for Odysseus, Jason, Robin Hood, and Siegfried, but with this difference--that he was his own Homer, the teller of his own tale. His autobiography as set forth in The true Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith ... may be thought to be finally as representative of the bold colonial adventurer of the seventeenth century as Benjamin Franklin 's autobiography is representative of the self-reliant American of the eighteenth century or as Henry Adams 's autobiography is representative of the self-suspecting retreat of the American in the nineteenth century. Like Franklin, John Smith was a man of letters but a man of much else besides.