John Smith
While many people recognize the name of the English soldier, Captain John Smith, they generally associate him solely with the Indian princess, Pocahontas. In reality, John Smith was an amazing man with memorable life experiences. (2001) The son of a commoner, John Smith sought adventure and advancement through military service. (2001) outlined the history of Smith as soldier starting fromhis first battles in the Netherlands and then in France, Smith he asserted fought as a professional soldier. Later, after being robbed and stranded in Europe, Smith became a pirate and made a small fortune. Ultimately, Smith served in the Christian armies that fought against the Turks in Eastern Europe. There he distinguished himself but also was captured and sold into slavery. After escaping, Captain Smith earned a leadership position in the Virginia Company's expedition to North America. ( 2001) When he arrived in what was to become Virginia, Smith met the Native Americans of the area. His experiences in Virginia included the legendary events related to Pocahontas and her father, Chief . Smith served as governor of Jamestown and eventually returned to England. (2001)
John Smith, born in England in 1580, was an adventurer from the time he was a young boy. (1997) (1997) accounted that at the age of sixteen he left home to become a soldier of fortune, serving with Austrian forces and travelling around Southeast Europe for five years. He excelled as a soldier, distinguishing himself in battle and earning a coat of arms. During one of these battles he is said to have been captured and presented as a gift to Tragabigzanda (the Turkish Pasha’s wife). As the story goes she fell in love with him, and for his safety sent him as a slave to her brother. He escaped, returned to London, and soon set sail with the Virginia colonists for Jamestown. There his brave and adventurous nature was a great help to the colonists especially in dealing with hostile Indians. He was taken prisoner again, this time by the Indian Chief Powhatan and rescued by the Indian princess Pocahontas. He continued with a life of accomplishment and adventure, and at one time was head of the Jamestown colony. ( 1997)
John Smith grew up in Elizabethian era. Like other schoolboys in the 1580s, the tales of Spanish Armada, wars in Europe, and the exploits- both chivalrous and piratical- of Sir Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and other English seamen heavily influenced him. Like many of his contemporaries,, too, Smith carried for the rest of his life the era’s taste for adventure and overachievement. (1997)
(1997) illustrated John Smith’s adventures as having been largely independent and courageous. Smith’s father, a yeoman farmer, died in 1596 and his mother remarried shortly after that. Smith then stopped formal schooling and vocational training and although he was legally under the control of a guardian, he gained an early independence. He spent the next five years as an independent youth trying to find one job over the other, following his fancies and opportunities in the hope of finding his niche.
By the time he went to America, John Smith had already witnessed more of the world than most of his contemporaries. Too young in the 1580s to to participate in England’s unsuccessful efforts to plant colonies on the coast of North America, he turned in the next decade toward other lands that captured England’s imagination. Although in the 1606 he was the youngest among the leader’s of England’s first successful colonizing expedition, John Smith was also the most travelled, the most experienced and the most educated- at least in the practical training more relevant to the conquest of a wilderness than a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. (1997)
His bravery is shown in the account of (1994) who illustrated Smith’s adventures. Halfway through the voyage, somewhere in the Canaries, the Jamestown fleet's leaders clapped Captain John Smith into custody and accused him of concealing an intended mutiny. At the next stop, across the Atlantic in the Caribbean, they offered to hang him and got as far as hammering together the gallows. Before his fellow settlers threw him out of Virginia 32 months later, they would again propose to stretch Smith's neck, to banish him, and even to murder him. (1994)
(1999) unabashedly defends the character and accomplishments of John Smith, the frontiersman who helped settle Jamestown. Updating Philip Barbour's biography The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith, he argues that Smith created the American dream of the self-made man by ceaselessly proclaiming and exemplifying the virtues of hard work and self-determination and scorning the hierarchy of aristocracy. The author dismisses charges that Smith was a liar and braggart, confirms the Smith/Pocahontas story, and contends that Smith, though a noted Indian fighter, understood, appreciated, and protected Native American culture. Relying primarily upon Smith's own writings as sources, Lemay provides a straightforward, well-written, and highly opinionated work that directly confronts recent scholarship.
Lemay (1992) provided a historical analysis of the validity of the famous Pocahontas story. By the 1860s, scholars began doubting the details. Lemay (1992) contended that the veracity of John Smith's account of his romantic 1607 rescue by Pochahontas was first challenged in the 1860s by essayist Henry Adams and historian Charles Deane. In this meticulous review of the sources of the controversy, (1992) endeavors to show that the incident actually happened. He primarily applied logic to his analysis of the texts by Smith and those of his 19th-century supporters and detractors. Lemay strengthens his argument by showing that none of Smith's contemporaries, Native American or English, was ever quoted as disagreeing with his account of the incident. This analysis concludes that Captain John Smith spoke the truth.
Inspired by John Smith's own Generall Historie of Virginia, the (2002) account of Smith’s life is a vast fresco unfolding the encounter between the Virginia settlers and Powhatan's People. According to him, Smith is "Sweet John," who like a good Elizabethan has taken Machiavelli as his guide to "Politick." His rise to brief eminence as the governor of the colony over the snobbish objections of the council is a tragicomedy of disappointed expectations, yet his policy of bringing war to the "People" has long-range consequences.
Battling the Turks, he was captured and sold into slavery. He escaped and returned to London, where he embarked upon his well-documented life as a Colonial settler. (2001) states that, "There is no real reason to doubt the story of John Smith and Pocahontas," but that a romance between the two seems unlikely. He also reasons that Smith's sometimes harsh and abrupt manner resulted from the fact that he was first and foremost a trained soldier.
That is not the Captain John Smith story familiar to the history buff. Even some academic historians prefer to remember the positive elements of the nowpopular captain's career. With some justification. Montgomery (1994) showed that in Smith’s 51 years he was a compiler and writer of exuberant travelers' tales, an explorer, a mapmaker, a geographer, an ethnographer, a soldier, a governor, a trader, a sailor, an admiral, and the editor of a seaman's handbook. Enormously energetic, his adventures and travels touch Europe, Africa, and America, and match the boldest exploits of fearless knighterrantry. In this hemisphere alone, he was an early explorer not only of the Chesapeake but of New England's coast and, at home in England, an enthusiast in the cause of America's colonization. (1994)
Furthermore, by his admirers, Smith is credited with almost singlehandedly preserving the first English Virginians from the ravages of their own sloth as well as from the hostility of their native neighbors. Except for his pen, chapters of America's earliest history would to us be lost; for much of the story of Jamestown comes from the captain. As an assembler of other men's accounts and a writer of his own, Smith is responsible for five swashbuckling early 17th century descriptions of the colony and its struggles, one richly illustrated. He produced seven other volumes and helped bring to the press a still stunning Virginia map. ( 1994)
Examining Smith's productions, it is difficult to conclude he is due less than a full measure of credit in the founding of the nation. Like many writers of the day, he was not an author to stint on praise of himself, the praise for which his fame is enshrined, once in awhile in bronze. Yet every story has more than one side, and Smith was a manysided man.
Smith ousted another president in July and got himself elevated to that office in September. His enemies, eventually a majority of the settlers, suspected him of aiming to make himself a tyrant king. Smith denied the allegation; yet, by the end of his Jamestown sojourn, he did indeed reign alone, terrorizing Indians, bullying Englishmen, and flogging whoever happened to cross him. He once went so far as to command the assassination of a squad of turncoat colonists--by poison according to one account, by shooting and stabbing according to his own.
While much has been written about Smith, (2001) manages to include some information not usually included in books for children. For instance, Smith had a somewhat checkered career; he was a mercenary for a Spanish cavalry regiment, then fought for the Dutch and also was employed by a Hungarian nobleman. His title of captain was bestowed on him by the Hungarians in a battle against the Turks (who at one point defeated him and sold him into slavery).
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