A New Edition of the Works of John Smith

Abstract

A LL students of early American history will welcome the news that a modern edition of the works of Capt. John Smith has been planned, with the prospect that it may be published in the near future. The project is sponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture in association with the Newberry Library, the Society for the History of Discoveries, and the Jamestown Foundation. The University of North Carolina Press has agreed to assume the responsibilities of publisher. Philip L. Barbour, first among living authorities on the career of Captain Smith, will be the editor. Although Smith is best remembered as one of the original settlers at Jamestown and as the one whose leadership in time saved the colony from its own tendency toward self-destruction, he also has an important place in the early history of New England. It was as the explorer of the Chesapeake, the discoverer of a wealth of information recorded in part on a famous map of the great bay and its tributaries, that he lent enduring shape to the Virginia adventure, and much the same was the service he later rendered to a developing interest among Englishmen in New England. In i6I4, less than five years after his final departure from Virginia toward the end of i609, Smith explored the coast of New England from Penobscot to Cape Cod. Again, the results of his explorations included a famous map, first published with his Description of New England in i6i6, and upon that map, in addition to the name the region continues to carry, a few of the lesser placenames which still survive in common usage were first fixed. In the larger history of geographical exploration Smith, of course, has not been ranked as one of the major explorers, but among those who filled in the details of particular geographic areas in such a way as to lend direction to significant European adventures in America, he deserves very high ranking indeed. Because of the interest he took in the native inhabitants of the Chesapeake area, his explorations there have proved to be as important for anthropologists and ethnologists as for historians and geographers. Fortunately, Captain Smith was inclined to write about the historic adventures in which he found a prominent place. Fortunately, too, he