The Beginners of a Nation. Eggleston Edward
says George Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland. A pint of worm-eaten barley or wheat was allowed for a day's ration. This was made into pottage and served out at the rate of one small ladleful at each meal. "Our drink was water, our lodgings castles in the air," says Smith. The misery was aggravated by a constant fear of attack from the Indians, who had been repulsed in an energetic assault made soon after the landing of the English. It was necessary for each man to watch every third night "lying on the cold, bare ground," and this exposure in a fever swamp, with the slender allowance of food of bad quality and the brackish river water, brought on swellings, dysenteries, and fevers. Sometimes there were not five men able to bear arms. "If there were any conscience in men," says Percy, "it would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men without relief every day and night for the space of about six weeks." The living were hardly able to bury the dead, whose bodies were "trailed out like dogs." Half of the hundred colonists died, and the survivors were saved by the Indians, who, having got a taste of muskets and cannon in their early attack on Jamestown, now brought in supplies of game, corn, persimmons, and other food, to trade for the novel trinkets of the white men.
VI
Emergence of Captain John Smith. Peril and adversity bring the capable man to the front. The colony proceeded, by means of the technicalities habitually used in those days, to rid itself of its president, Wingfield, a man of good intentions but with no talents suitable to a place of such difficulty. Slowly, by one change and then another, the leadership fell into the hands of Captain John Smith. During the voyage he had drawn upon himself the jealousy of the others, probably by his boastful and self-asserting habit of speech. When the list of councilors, till then kept secret, was opened at Jamestown and his name was found in it, he was promptly excluded by his associates. It was only on the intercession of the clergyman, Hunt, that he was at length admitted to the Council.
His paradoxical character has been much misunderstood. Those who discredit the historical accuracy of Captain Smith's narratives consider his deeds of no value. It is the natural result and retribution of boasting that the real merit of the boaster is cast into the rubbish heap of contempt along with his false pretensions. On the other hand, those who appreciate Smith's services to the colony in its dire extremities believe that the historical authority of such a man must be valid.
His romantic tendencies. His character, double and paradoxical as it is, presents no insoluble enigma if we consider the forces of nature and of habit underlying its manifestations. According to his own highly colored narrative, he had fed his fervid imagination on romances of chivalry. The first natural result in a youth so energetic as he, was that he should set out to emulate the imaginary heroes of whom he had read. It was equally a matter of course that a man of his vanity should exaggerate his own adventures to the size of those that had excited his admiration. The same romantic turn of the imagination that sent him a-wandering after exploits in Flanders and in the wars with the Turks, in Barbary, and in Ireland, made his every adventure seem an exploit of heroic size. Such a man is valuable when boldness and aggressive action are in request; to relate facts where autobiography is involved he is little fitted.
His story of his own life. According to Smith's own narrative, he was robbed and shipwrecked at sea; he slew three infidel champions in single combat and cut off their heads, just for the amusement of the ladies; he was made captive by the Turks and escaped by slaying his master with a flail; he encountered pirates; in the plunder of a ship he secured by the grace of God a box of jewels; and, to round off his story, he was beloved in romance fashion by a fair Turkish lady, one Tragabigzanda; befriended by a Russian lady, the good Calamata; and, later, was snatched from the open jaws of death by the devotion of the lovely Princess Pocahontas, daughter of King Powhatan, of Virginia. What more could one ask? Here are the elements of all the romances. But, to crown all, he emulated the misadventure of the prophet Jonah, and he even out-Jonahed Jonah. He got ashore by mere swimming without the aid of a whale, when cast overboard by Catholic pilgrims to appease a tempest. Never any other wanderer since the safe return of Ulysses passed through such a succession of marvelous escapes as this young John Smith. His accidents and achievements, even without exaggeration, were fairly notable, doubtless, but they are forever obscured by his vices of narration.
Interest in colonization. By the time he was twenty-eight years old this knight-errant had pretty well exhausted Europe as a field for adventure. Soon after his return to his own land he found the navigator Gosnold agitating for a new colony in Virginia, the scene of Ralegh's failures. That being the most difficult and dangerous enterprise then in sight, nothing was more natural than that Smith should embark in it. From this time to the end of his life this really able man gave his best endeavors to the advancement of American colonization. His character. In counsel he was accounted wise, and his advice was listened to with more than common deference in the assemblies of the Virginia Company as long as the company lasted. In labor he was indefatigable, in emergencies he proved himself ready-witted and resourceful. His recorded geographical observations are remarkably accurate considering his circumstances, and his understanding of Indian life shows his intelligence. His writings on practical questions are terse, epigrammatic, and wise beyond the wisdom of his time. But where his own adventures or credit are involved he is hardly more trustworthy than Falstaff. His boasting is one of the many difficulties a historian has to encounter in seeking to discover the truth regarding the events of an age much given to lying.
VII
Smith's exploration and trading. On Smith principally devolved the explorations for a passage to the Pacific and the conduct of the Indian trade. He was captured by the Indians in the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried from village to village in triumph. Contriving to secure his release from the head chief, Powhatan, he returned to Jamestown. Nothing could have suited better his bold genius and roving disposition than the life he thereafter led in Virginia. A. D. 1607, 1608. He sailed up and down the bays and estuaries, discovering and naming unknown islands, ascending great unknown rivers, cajoling or bullying the Indians, and returning to his hungry countrymen at Jamestown laden with maize from the granaries of the savages. Oxford Tract, passim. Smith and his companions coasted in all seasons and all weather in an open boat, exercising themselves in morning psalm-singing and praying, in manœuvring strange Indians by blustering or point-blank lying, and in trying to propagate the Christian religion among the heathen – all in turn as occasion offered, like true Englishmen of the Jacobean time. Gen. Hist passim.
His narrative. Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achievements in Virginia seem to be nearer the truth than his later Generall Historie. As years rolled on his exploits gained in number and magnitude in his memory. The apocryphal story of his expounding the solar system by means of a pocket compass to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity to learn is to be found only in his later writings. He is a prisoner but a month in the narrative of the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was written by his associates and published with his authority, but his captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in the Generall Historie of 1624. His prosaic release by Powhatan had developed into a romantic rescue by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in the earlier account become four or five hundred in the later. Certain Poles assist him in the capture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative of Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our hero performs this feat single-handed. A mere cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure representing the number of his enemies, who by this simple feat of memory become ten times more redoubtable than before.
His service to the colony. But it does not matter greatly whether the "strangely grimmed and disguised" Indians seen by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who, according to the story, were shouting and yelling horribly, though in ambuscade, numbered three or four hundred as in one account, or three or four thousand as in his later story. Oxf. Tract, p. 32. Gen. Hist., bk. iii, ch. v. To Captain Smith remains the credit of having been the one energetic and capable man in those first years – the man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but won from the Indians what was of infinitely greater value – the corn needed to preserve the lives of the colonists. In an open boat, with no instrument but a compass, he explored and mapped Chesapeake Bay so well that his map was not wholly superseded for a hundred and forty years. Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 41. Even Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recognizes the value of his services; and Strachey, who had every means of knowing, says that "there will not return