John Smith
letters and returned to England. He seems to have fi rst practiced the art of cultivating a public persona when he returned from England. Smith writes of himself in the third person: “He retired himself into a little woody pasture, a good way from town . . . his study was Machiavelli’s The Art of War, and Marcus Aurelius, his exercise a good horse, with his lance and ring” (36). Although Smith protests that he selected this secluded spot because of “being glutted with too much company,” his careful detailing of the events that made up his daily activities, down to the food he consumed, makes it difficult to take his notions of seclusion as genuine. Instead, this scene works to craft a sense of Smith that will prevail throughout all of his writings: a man who operates under his own principles, who vocally shuns the very notoriety and fame that he most assiduously seeks, and who images himself to be singular, unlike any other. Having acquired equestrian skills and a knowledge of arms, Smith desires “to see more of the world” and decides to “try his fortune against the Turks” (36). Accordingly, he gains passage on a ship but is soon thrown overboard once the Catholics sailing the vessel learn that Smith is a Protestant (38). Luckily, he survives by reaching a small island, where he is soon rescued and placed upon a ship engaged in fighting the Holy Roman Empire against the Ottoman Empire. For four years, as relayed in his autobiographical True Travels, Smith toured France, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Austria, Poland, and Germany. He served in Hungary and Transylvania (41). It was in Transylvania that he earned a coat of arms, gruesomely decorated with the heads of the three Turkish soldiers whom he defeated in individual challenges, a feat he details in True Travels. He also proves himself a worthy gentleman soldier by devising a plan to create “false fi res” that would draw the Turks’ attention, make them believe that they were outnumbered, and thus cause them to retreat. His plan succeeds, and Smith is named captain of 250 horsemen under the command of Colonel Voldo (42). His journey ends with a yearly pension, along with the coat of arms, as just rewards for his services rendered to Sigismundus, king of Hungary.
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In December 1606, Smith paid a nine-pound subscription to the Virginia Company of London and boarded one of three ships along with 105 colonists bound for what would become Jamestown. Although Smith was made prisoner by the leaders, presumably because of some disagreement, he arrived in America in April 1607 as one of seven members of a ruling body. He proved himself by undertaking explorations of the James River, in accordance with strict instructions presented to the colonists by the Virginia Company of London. After Ratcliffe’s brief stint as president, during which Smith served as a supply officer, Smith himself was elected president. It was during his time as president that Jamestown suffered some of its most trying events. The additional colonists who were to have arrived from England, including women and children, were shipwrecked in the Bermudas and therefore arrived in the colony more as a burden and less as a source of assistance. Because the stored grain had been eaten by rats and had rotted, Smith was in charge of overcoming what would surely be a food shortage come winter. As Smith relates in Proceedings, “sleeping in his boat . . . one accidentally fi red his powder bag, which tore his flesh from his body and thighs nine or ten inches square, in a most pitiful manner, but to quench the tormenting fi re, frying him in his clothes, he leaped over board into the deep river, where ere they could rescue him, he was near drowned. In this estate, without either chirurgeon or chirurgery, he was to go one hundred miles to Jamestown.” The gunpowder accident incapacitated him, and he was forced to return to England in October 1609. Not much is known about Smith’s time in England after his return except that he prepared and published A Map of Virginia in 1612 and a narrative of his times in Virginia from 1607 to 1610. He also became extremely frustrated and unlucky in his attempts to return to America. When the Virginia colony suffered, as it did immediately after Smith’s departure, Smith became interested instead in the Maine coast. In 1614, Smith was given command over two ships bound for Maine, a journey that he chronicled in A Description of New England, which