John Smith was elected president of Jamestown 400 years ago today.
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.
Smith left Virginia a year later. He explored the coasts off Maine and Massachusetts Bay in 1614 and coined the term “New England.”