Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Smith subsequently wrote four more books, beginning with An Accidence [Primer], or the Path-Way to Experience, his 1626 guide to oceanic sailing and fighting. He enlarged the Accidence the next year and published the new edition as A Sea Grammar, with the sponsorship of his friend Sir Samuel Saltonstall. His next book, in 1630, was The True Travels and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in which he recounted his experiences prior to his involvement with Virginia, mostly his military adventures in Western and Central Europe. Although his books on Virginia and New England had strong elements of autobiography, given that they often recorded events in which he was involved, the True Travels was his first and only book with an explicitly autobiographical focus. He capped the True Travels with a tag-along “continuation” of his Generall Historie, in which he set out the developments in Virginia, New England, and Bermuda since 1624; the addition was not a particularly logical fit, but it reflected his enduring interest in the latest news from the colonies.

  Lastly, in his 1631 Advertisements [Information] for the UnexperiencedPlanters of New England, or Any Where, Smith returned to his favored subject of urging the English to populate the New World. He was pleased by the prospects for the Massachusetts Bay Company, which had established a large Puritan settlement to the north of Plymouth two years earlier. His conversations with leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company convinced him, he said, that they understood what the Virginia Company never had: the critical importance of selecting people who were suited for the enterprise, rather than simply sending large numbers of recruits and hoping for the best. The Massachusetts Bay Company was taking care, he commented with approval, to send “men of good credit and well-beloved in their country, not such as flye for debt, or any scandall at home . . . men of good meanes, or arts, occupations, and qualities. . . .”

  At the same time, when Smith came to his critics and his former employers, his prose was as combustible as it had ever been. “So doating [was the company] of mines of gold, and the South Sea, that all the world could not have devised better courses to bringe us to ruine then they did themselves, with many more such like strange conceits.” He facetiously claimed to have been won over at long last by those who had censured him during his Jamestown years for mistreating and mistrusting the natives:

  Onely spending my time to revenge my imprisonment upon the harmlesse innocent salvages, who by my cruelty I forced to feed me with their contribution, and to send any [who] offended my idle humour to James towne to punish at mine owne discretion; or keepe their kings and subjects in chaines, and make them worke. Things cleanly contrary to my commission [orders]; whilest I and my company took our needlesse pleasures in discovering the countries about us, building of forts, and such unnecessary fooleries, where an egge-shell (as they writ) had been sufficient against such enemies....4

  Smith’s criticisms in the Advertisements were mainly couched in terms of counsel to the new wave of Massachusetts settlers, and admiration for what they were doing differently from their predecessors. Here are the mistakes the Virginia Company made, Smith was saying, and here is how the Massachusetts Bay Company was avoiding them. “Now they [the Massachusetts Bay Company] take not that course the Virginia Company did for the planters there, their purses and lives were subject to some few here in London who were never there, that consumed all in arguments, projects, and their owne conceits. . . .”

  Indeed, in all of Smith’s later writings about Virginia and New England—the Description, New Englands Trials, the Advertisements, and his magnum opus, the Generall Historie—he was looking to the future of the New World as well as its past and present. In adopting the very title of Generall Historie, he was implicitly staking out a new view of English settlement, one in which the American colonists could be viewed as a distinct nation and a distinct people, much as the French, the Venetians, and the Turks were. The colonies would still be subject to the English crown, to be sure, but they would not be mere outposts, and they would not merely replicate the society of the mother country.

  The English New World would be a different kind of nation, but different how? What should it be in order to succeed? During Smith’s years in Virginia, his answer to that question was half-formed and halfarticulable, no more than a set of utilitarian biases—in favor of the hardworking and the accomplished; against the many around him who harbored a feeling of entitlement by bloodline; in favor of sustaining the colony with activities of proven economic value, such as fishing and farming; against the wishful dictates of leaders with gold fever.

  After his return to England in 1609, it became evident that the opportunity to return to the New World was not awaiting him for the taking. He would have to create his opportunity. Circumstances thus led him to transform himself into a promoter of colonization. One way out of his bind (as he noted in the Advertisements) would have been to make easy promises of gold, a passage to the South Sea, or a base for piracy “to rob some poore merchant or honest fisher men.” Having decided against that course, Smith instead offered a more honest, but still positive, view of America’s economic opportunities, leavened with a striking vision of what America could become as a society.

  Smith’s years in Virginia, combined with his individualistic temperament, led him to see two potential attributes of the New World that could be as enticing as gold. The first, not surprisingly, was social mobility. Smith had escaped yeomanry through service on the battlefield; in America, he suggested, poor men with ambition could likewise make new destinies for themselves. The vestiges of feudal institutions and feudal ideas could be left behind. “Here [in New England] every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land; or the greatest part in a small time,” he proclaimed in the Description. “If hee have nothing but his hands, he may set up this [his?] trade; and by industrie quickly grow rich; spending but halfe that time wel, which in England we abuse in idleness, worse or as ill.”

  This process of self-advancement, Smith contended, would be more than a route to a fortune; it would be elevating and fulfilling in its own right:

  Who can desire more content, that hath small meanes; or but only his merit to advance his fortune, then to tread, and plant that ground hee hath purchased by hazard of his life? If he have but the taste of virtue, and magnanimitie [ambition], what to such a minde can be more pleasant, then planting and building a foundation for his posteritie, gotte from the rude earth, by Gods blessing and his owne industrie, without prejudice to any?5

  The second attraction that Smith saw in America was liberty. The concept was meaningful to his intended audience, for Englishmen of the early seventeenth century highly prized their “English liberty”; it was, in fact, one of the benefits that the supporters of the Virginia Company imagined the colony would eventually bestow on the Virginia natives. Smith’s insight was to harness the ideal of liberty to earthly practicality: the liberty to pursue one’s own interest was not only mankind’s proper condition, but an engine that could power a society to greatness. (He was writing a century and a half before the Scotsman Adam Smith set out his famous union of self-interest and societal well-being in The Wealth of Nations.) “And who is he hath judgement, courage, and any industrie or qualitie with understanding,” Smith asked in the Description, “[who] will leave his countrie, his hopes at home, his certaine estate, his friends, pleasures, libertie, and the preferment sweete England doth afford to all degrees, were it not to advance his fortunes by injoying his deserts?” He echoed the thought in New Englands Trials, noting that “no man will go from hence, to have lesse freedome there then here.”

  The implication, Smith held, was that the proprietors of a colony should look to the energizing properties of freedom, and rely as little as possible on indentured servitude, martial law, and the like. There was an element of irony in the advice, for his own policies in Virginia had been markedly authoritarian—a by-product of the company policy requiring that the colonists be fed from a common store. Later experience had shown that the combination of a common store and autho
ritarian rule was fundamentally flawed. “The benefit of libertie in the planters,” Smith wrote in the Generall Historie, had been proven by the introduction of private plots of land. When the Virginia Company required that all be fed from the common store, “glad was he [who] could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a weeke, as now for themselves they will do in a day. . . .” For Smith, the lesson was clear: “Therefore let all men have as much freedome in reason as may be, and true dealing, for it is the greatest comfort you can give them, where the very name of servitude will breed much ill bloud, and become odious to God and man....” 6

  Smith made a sharp distinction, however, between self-interest as an instrument of social good and selfishness as a personal creed. He held that the founders of history’s great empires, such as the early Greeks and Romans, were “no silvered idle golden Pharises, but industrious iron-steeled Publicans: They regarded more provisions, and necessaries for their people, then jewels, riches, ease, or delight for themselves. Riches were their servants, not their maisters.” Smith concluded his Description of New England by calling on his countrymen to build an English New World, not only for the sake of present riches, but also to continue the accomplishments of their ancestors and to leave a legacy for their posterity:

  Was it vertue in them [our ancestors], to provide that doth maintaine us? and basenesse for us to doe the like for others? Surely no. Then seeing we are not borne for our selves, but to helpe each other, and our abilities are much alike at the houre of our birth, and the minute of our death: Seeing our good deedes, or our badde, by faith in Christs merits, is all we have to carrie our soules to heaven, or hell: Seeing honour is our lives ambition; and our ambition after death, to have an honorable memorie of our life: and seeing by noe meanes wee would be abated of the dignities and glories of our predecessors; let us imitate their vertues to be worthily their successors.7

  By the time Smith reached the last year of his own life in 1631, he was one of only a half dozen or so of the original colonists of 1607 still left alive. Although he had expressed much optimism for the future of the colonies, his efforts to return to the New World were frustrated to the end. A poem that he wrote as a preface to the Advertisements intimated that he had given in to melancholy. Entitled “The Sea Marke” (in reference to a warning buoy at sea), the verses ended:

  The winters cold, the summers heat,

  alternatively beat

  Upon my bruised sides, that rue

  Because too true

  That no releefe can ever come.

  But why should I despair

  being promised so faire

  That there shall be a day of Dome [Doom].8

  In June, within a few months after the printing of the Advertisements, Smith was stricken ill—the specifics are now unknown—and became weak and bedridden in the home of Sir Samuel Saltonstall, where he had been staying. He was fifty-one.

  Smith dictated his will on June 21. Afterward, he attempted to muster the energy to sign his name at the bottom. He started to write the first letter of his first name, but he could not finish the stroke. He made another attempt, and again ran out of strength, leaving only a blotch of ink. The scribe to whom he had dictated the will then stepped in and inserted the explanatory words “the marke of the sayd John Smithe.” Smith died that day.

  Smith had never married and left no offspring. The only hint that he may have ever had a significant romantic relationship lies in a map of “Ould Virginia” that accompanied his Generall Historie. There, a pair of dot-size islands, each one appearing barely larger than a smudge, bears the name “Abigails Isles.” The identity of “Abigail” remains a nearly four-hundred-year-old enigma, resolved neither by Smith’s writings, nor by his will, nor by any other known surviving records. With equal probability, she could have been a hoped-for patroness or a woman close to Smith’s heart.9

  While he lacked mortal posterity, Smith left a legacy of a different kind. Had he been able to return to see America during the Founding Era, he would have observed a society that had developed along just the lines he had described, and whose virtues he had personified. The heart of the new nation—the values and hopes that were everywhere in the air—shared Smith’s individualism, practicality, disdain for class rank, and esteem for those who worked hard to get ahead. An emigrant of the era, a French aristocrat turned New York farmer named J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, was awestruck by the unique breed of humanity that America was creating: “Here the rewards of his industry follow, with equal steps, the progress of his labour,” de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782. The American was consequently “a new man, who acts upon new principles,” and who had left behind the “involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour” of the Old World.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that the social vision Smith expressed in his writings had directly molded the new society. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Generall Historie, and recommended it as a historical reference, but there are no clear signs that either Jefferson or any of the other Founders drew their views of liberty from Smith’s writings. Smith’s achievement as a social thinker was one of foresight rather than guidance.

  As pure foresight, though, it was remarkable. Smith’s prescience came not from his expert knowledge of the American land, but from his shrewd assessment of human nature—looking at human beings as they were, rather than as projections of what the observer thought they should be. While not everyone was motivated by materialism for its own sake (Smith himself was not), he understood that it was quintessentially human to have one’s own purposes and passions. Smith, like the Founders, imagined America as a place of “libertie” to pursue those things as far as one’s merits and industriousness would allow.

  The founding generation remembered Smith well, as he loomed large in the popular historical writing of the era. Modern Americans look back two centuries and see a small pantheon of heroic figures; Americans of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century looked back to America’s earliest years and saw one standing alone. Nations define themselves in large part through their heroes, and historians found in Smith the opportunity to define the qualities of a distinctively American hero: resourceful, of humble origins and high achievement, inclined toward action rather than reflection, peaceable when possible, warlike when necessary. Jeremy Belknap, in his 1794 American Biography, included a seventy-nine-page entry on Smith that held him up as “an enterprizing spirit,” “an ardent and active genius,” and “the life and soul of the colony.” Typical of the narrative was Belknap’s egalitarian-minded censure of the company leaders who ordered the colony to court the natives with gifts instead of deferring to Smith’s superior knowledge:

  Though savages, they were men and not children. Though destitute of science, they were possessed of reason, and a sufficient degree of art. To know how to manage them, it was necessary to be personally acquainted with them; and it must be obvious, that a person who had resided several years among them, and was a prisoner with them, was a much better judge of the proper methods of treating them, than a company of gentlemen at several thousand miles distance, and who could know them only by report.10

  Chief Justice John Marshall, in his 1804 Life of George Washington, began with a brief history of the nation that emphasized Smith’s importance at Jamestown: “his spirits unbroken, and his judgment unclouded, amidst this general misery and dejection.” His river explorations showed “fortitude, courage and patience” that were exceeded by “few voyages of discovery, undertaken at any time.” His stand against the “fatal delusion” of gold fever showed his common sense. With a nod to his biographical subject, Marshall praised Smith’s presidential administration as “disinterested, judicious, and vigorous.”

  George Bancroft’s highly successful History of the United States in 1834 held Smith to be “the father of Virginia,” contrasting “the selfish Wingfield” and “the imbeci
le Ratcliffe” with Smith’s “deliberate enterprise and cheerful courage.” Smith “united the highest spirit of adventure with the consummate powers of action. . . . He had nothing counterfeit in his nature; but was open, honest, and sincere.” Upon his capture by Opechancanough’s men in late 1607, Bancroft noted approvingly, Smith “did not beg for his life, but preserved it by the calmness of self-possession”—until his relief by Pocahontas at the last possible moment. If Smith represented the proto-American man for Bancroft, Pocahontas in the moment of the rescue seemed to stand for the proto-American woman, possessed of both “gentle feelings of humanity” and “fearlessness.”

  Noah Webster’s pocket-size book for “young beginners in reading,” his Little Reader’s Assistant of 1791, included a biography that held up Smith’s “prudence, fortitude, and resolution” as a worthy model for youth. “How often was he on the brink of death, and how bravely did he encounter every danger!” Webster concluded. “Such a man affords a noble example for all to follow, when they resolve to be good and brave.”

  It is unsurprising that historians and other writers of the founding generation found a resonance in the story of Smith’s trials in Virginia. In their war for independence and their struggle to create a constitution, the Founders themselves had shown the same pragmatic qualities of mind that rendered Smith a hero. The actions of Smith, like the actions of the Founders, also point to a shared outlook on life: one in which a person does not look inward and wait for life to reveal its answers, for life itself is the one carrying out the interrogation. More than most people, Smith and the Founders attempted to answer the questions that life was constantly asking them—or, rather, the single question it asked them, and asks us, over and over. Life presented them with a series of astonishing possibilities and all-engulfing obstacles, all the while whispering to them: