Captain John Smith

Abstract

Soldier of fortune, colonist, colonialist, explorer, cartographer, ethnologist, reporter, and raconteur, Captain John Smith (b. 1580–d. 1631) has always loomed large in the early history of the English colonies in North America. He was the son of a yeoman farmer in Lincolnshire and educated at local grammar schools. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a local merchant, but on the death of his father, when he was just sixteen, Smith quit the apprenticeship in search of adventure. He traveled in Europe and fought on the side of Protestant rebels in the Low Countries against the Spanish crown. After more travel and studies in warcraft, he joined the Imperial Army in Vienna in its struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Named a captain for his efforts and hence something of a gentleman, he was eventually taken captive by Ottoman forces and sold into slavery. Killing one of his minders and escaping, he traveled through eastern and central Europe as well as northern Africa and then returned to England, where he found himself attracted to colonialist circles in London. At the age of twenty-six, he was brought on board with the Virginia Company and sailed with its first expedition, at the end of 1606, to colonize the area of the Chesapeake Bay. He landed with the expedition in 1607 on a bank of what the expedition called the James River, where the town of what was first called James Fort was established. As a member of the ruling council, and eventually president of the colony, Smith led expeditions of exploration, trade, and armed confrontation through the Chesapeake constellation of river settlements, acquiring much-needed food for the settlers, as well as knowledge of the environment and the natives who inhabited it. In 1609 he was injured in a gunpowder explosion and took ship to England to heal. He was never to return to Virginia, but he made something of a career as a writer about Jamestown and the North American Eastern Seaboard. In 1614 and 1615 he went on expeditions to explore the region that he was the first to name New England, the second expedition aborting because of interference by French pirates. In the years that followed, unable to sail again to New England to complete his studies and help colonize it, he published a series of books on colonizing North America and on seamanship, as well as an autobiography. He was not only a central figure in the colonization of North America; he was also a new kind of man, representing in advance a new North American personality and ideology.