Historical Summary

FEW REPORTERS can boast the hair-raising adventures of that brash, ebullient, but astonishingly able statesman, historian, explorer, and ex-slave of a Turkish pasha, Captain John Smith. A soldier of fortune, he portrayed himself as a scourge of Turks and Indians, an artful contriver of miraculous escapes, and a favorite of the ladies of many nations. At the time of the romantic incident which he recounted in his General Historie of Virginia, published sixteen years later, the doughty captain was twenty-eight years of age, Powhatan's youngest daughter approximately thirteen. Any romantic attachment between the two seems to have been an embellishment of later biographers. A perennial bachelor, Smith looked upon his colonial career as "my wife, my hawks, my hounds."

Our heroine later married John Rolfe, the pioneer tobacco planter in the New World, and was received by the King and Queen in England. Although some cynics have been inclined to scoff at the episode, it is well known that Pocohontas was the patron saint of the Jamestown colony, brought food to the starving settlers during the early critical period, and was their stalwart friend. In Smith's own words, "she next under God was still the instrument to preserve this Colonie from death, famine, and utter confusion."

Smith, after escaping from a dire fate at the hands of Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, went from the frying pan into the fire, and had to stand trial for murder on returning to the settlement. Condemned to death, he melodramatically escaped hanging by the last-moment intervention of an influential friend who returned in the nick of time. Later, in January, 1609, when Powhatan planned to surprise Smith, his daughter stole out through the woods, Smith testifies, and, "with watered eies" and at the risk of her own life, gave him timely warning. Smith finally quit Virginia in disgust, and spent the remainder of his American career exploring the New England coast.

As a reporter Smith is now considered to have given a generally accurate account of maladministration in Virginia. Although he describes himself as "only a reporter of [men's] actions in Virginia," without aiming "to disgrace any, accuse any, excuse any, nor flatter any," he has sharply censured his opponents and given us a glowing account of his own not inconsiderable achievements. Such partisanship is unavoidable when the reporter is not a mere onlooker, but a principal actor in a tense, dramatic epoch.

His vivid descriptions of the early struggles of the Virginia pioneers remain unsurpassed. At the beginning, he reported, "there was no talke, no hope, nor worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold. Such a brute of gold, as one mad fellow desired to bee buried in the sandes, least they should by their art make gold of his bones." Unfortunately for the prospectors, there was no gold in Virginia. A few years later Pocahontas's husband began to cultivate the sot-weed (tobacco), which placed the settlement on a sustaining basis. But until the get-rich-quick spirit had been dissipated, the colonists had to experience the most desperate starvation in American history. Between October, 1609, and May, 1610, Smith reports, destitution was so terrible that only sixty out of five hundred survived, and these "most miserable and poore creatures." Smith took up his pen to let all pioneers know what had happened when there had been a "want of providence, industrie, and government."

Indian atrocity stories have been abundant in American literature, from the days of colonial captivities down to the time of Fremont. In addition to recounting the cruelties and barbarities of the early Indians, Smith kept a careful record of their customs, arts and crafts, and music. Powhatan, Smith's nemesis and the absolute monarch of Virginia (whose kingdom descended through the female line), is described as "a tall, well-proportioned man, with a sower looke, his head somewhat gray, his beard so thinne that it seemeth none at all. His age near sixty." Awake and asleep, the Indian ruler had "as many women as he" wished, and when he wearied of them, he bestowed "them on those that best deserve them at his hands."