1607 Other English adventurers had tried to gain a foothold in the New World, but none had succeeded. Now three shiploads of settlers dropped anchor around 40 miles up the James River, Virginia. This time the English had come for good.
With them was a former pirate and mercenary soldier who had arrived with his spoils back in London just in the nick of time to sign up for the Virginia adventure. He was John Smith, whose experience, love of action, and independent means recommended him to the London backers of the Virginia Company. Less fond of him were his social betters on the voyage. They took his strong-minded decisiveness for mutiny, and had him confined below decks for much of the trip.
Imagine their chagrin, then, when they opened their sealed orders on landing to find that the Company had appointed Smith to sit on the council of the plantation. So effective was he as a leader that he was elected its president the following year.
Now he is remembered for how he wrote about the experience. Like Mourt’s Relation (see 15 November), Smith’s True Relation of the settlement (1608) was a booster’s tract, full of the natural plenty of the new country, and the tractability of the natives. Exploring the Chickahominy River, they are greeted by ‘the people in all places kindely intreating us, daunsing and feasting us with strawberries, Mulberries, Bread, Fish, and other their Countrie provisions whereof we had plenty’. It’s like the ending of a Shakespeare comedy.
And Instead of being held captive by Powhatan and his warlike tribe, as in his later, formal history of the settlement, The General History of Virginia (1624), Smith is a guest, feasted with ‘great Platters of sundrie Victuals’, while exchanging information with the chief on the geography of their respective territories.
Without the captivity, of course, there can be no dramatic intervention of Pocahontas (see 5 April). In the True Relation she is ‘a child of tenne yeares old’ of great ‘wit and spirit’, who rather than saving his life, had been sent by her father to plead for the release of some natives held captive at the English fort.