The Library of Congress tells us about one of America’s most famous and least understood historical figures.
Explorer, writer, and cartographer John Smith assumed the presidency of the Jamestown settlement on September 10, 1608. The charismatic and controversial Smith was initially excluded from the government of the settlement on grounds he conspired to mutiny en route to Virginia. His comrades’ suspicions notwithstanding, Smith became the de facto leader of the colony during the difficult winter of 1607 and 1608, which visited disease, starvation, and frequent raids upon the settlement by Native Americans.
A brash and boldly self-confident figure, Smith brought years of soldiering experience to the Virginia venture. While fighting the Turks in Transylvania, he was wounded, captured, and sold, he claimed, into slavery in Turkey. Smith reported that he eventually escaped with the assistance of a Turkish woman who had fallen in love with him. All this before his adventures in America!
Whether or not Smith’s reportage was accurate, his version of his role in the survival of the Jamestown colony was accepted as fact by subsequent generations of Americans. In Virginia, Smith led the settlers’ resistance against frequent raids by the Algonquin Indians who made their homes in the Chesapeake region. He also ventured into surrounding territory to forage for food, negotiate with Native Americans, and trade trinkets with them in exchange for corn.
In December 1607, Captain Smith was captured and brought before Algonquin Chief Powhatan. In a book written much later, Smith described how Pocahontas, the chief’s young daughter, saved his life by throwing herself between him and the warriors ordered to execute him.
The tale of Smith’s rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas first appeared in his own Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. The event, now part of our national mythology, was probably romanticized by Smith. However, Pocahontas’s intervention appears to resemble a ritual familiar to many Native American groups.
…By the summer of 1608, the colonists, driven to desperation by poor leadership, personal conflicts, and infighting, elected Smith president of the local council of the colony. Under his firm hand, the colony prospered. In 1609, Smith was injured in a gunpowder accident and forced to return to England.
In 1614, Captain Smith made a successful voyage to Maine and the Massachusetts Bay. With the approval of Prince Charles, he dubbed the region “New England” and mapped the coastline from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. Other colonizing and exploring ventures were hampered by pirates and bad weather. After 1617, Smith wrote extensively about his adventures in North America, but he never returned to Virginia or Massachusetts.