THE three little ships which bore so many hopes, dropping from London down the Thames on the 20th of December,¹ 1606, were vexed by opposing winds and were kept shivering within sight of the English coast for several weeks; then, instead of pursuing the straightforward westerly course to America, they curved southward, meandering foolishly by the Canaries, Dominica, Guadeloupe and elsewhere, to the great loss of time, food, health, and patience; and did not reach their journey’s end until the 26th of April, 1607—a journey’s end to which they were at last blown by the providence of a rough storm, after

“the mariners had three days passed their reckoning and found no land.”¹ No blunder in man’s performance could have been more happily condoned by Heaven’s pity; for these poor little ships, groping along the coast of America in great geographic darkness, and seeking only “to find out a safe port in the entrance of some navigable river,”² were guided by the finger of Him who points out the tracks of the winds and the courses of national destiny, into the noblest bay along the whole coast, and upon a land of balm and verdure. They had come to Virginia at the happy moment when nature in that region wears her sweetest smile and sings her loveliest notes. They were amazed, as one³ of them tells us, at the opulence of life visible all about them; at the oysters “which lay on the ground as thick as stones,” many with pearls in them; at the earth “all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colors and kinds, as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England;” at “the woods full of cedar and cypress trees, with other trees which issue out sweet gums, like to balsam.” “Heaven and earth,” exclaimed another⁴ of that delighted company, “never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.”

     Thus began our American civilization; and among those first Englishmen huddled together behind palisadoes in Jamestown in 1607, were some who laid the foundations of American literature. There were about a hundred of them all. As we look over the ancient list of their names and designations, we alight upon some facts which bode little good to an enterprise in which there is no safe room for persons afflicted with constitutional objections to hard

work. The earliest formal History of Virginia¹ contains testimony that herein lay the worst peril of the enterprise; that besides one carpenter, two blacksmiths, two sailors, and a few others named “laborers,” “all the rest were poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving-men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth than either begin one, or but help to maintain one.” But in this heterogeneous party of forcible Feebles, were a few men of some grip and note, such as brave old Bartholomew Gosnold, Edward Maria Wingfield, John Martin, Gabriel Archer, Robert Hunt their saintly chaplain, and George Percy a brother of the Earl of Northumberland. And there was one other man in that little group of adventurers who still has a considerable name in the world. In that year 1607, when he first set foot in Virginia, Captain John Smith was only twenty-seven years old; but even then he had made himself somewhat famous in England as a daring traveller in Southern Europe, in Turkey and the East. He was perhaps the last professional knight-errant that the world saw; a free lance, who could not hear of a fight going on anywhere in the world without hastening to have a hand in it; a sworn champion of the ladies also, all of whom he loved too ardently to be guilty of the invidious offence of marrying any one of them; a restless, vain, ambitious, overbearing, blustering fellow, who made all men either his hot friends or his hot enemies; a man who down to the present hour has his celebrity in the world chiefly on account of alleged exploits among Turks, Tartars, and Indians, of which exploits he alone has furnished the history-never failing to celebrate himself in them all as the one resplendent and invincible hero.

     This extremely vivid and resolute man comes before us now for particular study, not because he was the most conspicuous person in the first successful American colony, but because he was the writer of the first book in American

literature. It is impossible to doubt that as a storyteller he fell into the traveller’s habit of drawing a long bow. In the narration of incidents that had occurred in his own wild life he had an aptitude for being intensely interesting; and it seemed to be his theory that if the original facts were not in themselves quite so interesting as they should have been, so much the worse for the original facts. Yet in spite of this habit, Captain John Smith had many great and magnanimous qualities; and we surely cannot help being drawn to him with affectionate admiration, when we remember his large services in the work of colonizing both Virginia and New England, his sufferings in that cause, and his unquenchable love for it until death. In his later life, after he had been baffled in many of his plans and hopes, he wrote, in London, of the American colonies these words: “By that acquaintance I have with them, I call them my children; for they have been my wife, my hawks, hounds, my cards, my dice, and in total my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right.”¹

     Then, too, as students of literature we shall be drawn to Captain John Smith as belonging to that noble type of manhood of which the Elizabethan period produced so many examples—the man of action who was also a man of letters, the man of letters who was also a man of action the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little; not a doer who is dumb, not a speech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; the bashfulness and delicacy of the scholar

hovering as a finer presence above the forceful audacity of the man of the world; at once bookman, penman, swordsman, diplomat, sailor, courtier, orator. Of this type of manhood, spacious, strong, refined, and sane, were the best men of the Elizabethan time, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and in a modified sense Hakluyt, Bacon, Sackville, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and nearly all the rest. To this type of manhood Captain John Smith aspired to belong. “Many of the most eminent warriors,” said he, “what their swords did, their pens writ. Though I be never so much their inferior, yet I hold it no great error to follow good examples.”¹ In another book,² he expanded the thought in a way that shows it to have been a pleasant one to him: “This history . . . might and ought to have been clad in better robes than my rude military hand can cut out in paper ornaments; but because of the most things therein I am no compiler by hearsay but have been a real actor, I take myself to have a property in them, and therefore have been bold to challenge them to come under the reach of my own rough pen.” And that he had achieved his ambition for this spherical form of excellence was the belief of many of his contemporaries, one of whom wrote thus of him and of his book on the history of Virginia and New England:

     Captain John Smith became a somewhat prolific author;⁴ but while nearly all of his books have a leading

reference to America, only three of them were written during the period of his residence as a colonist in America. Only these three, therefore, can be claimed by us as belonging to the literature of our country.

     The first of these books, “A True Relation of Virginia,”¹ is of deep interest to us, not only on account of its graphic style and the strong light it throws upon the very beginning of our national history, but as being unquestionably the earliest book in American literature. It was written during the first thirteen months of the life of the first American colony, and gives a simple and picturesque account of the stirring events which took place there during that time, under his own eye. It was probably carried to London by Captain Nelson of the good ship Phœnix, which sailed from Jamestown on the second of June, 1608; and it was published in London and sold “at the Grey-hound in Paul’s Church-Yard,” in the latter part of the same year—not far from the very day when the child John Milton was born, and in a house only three streets distant. Perhaps I may be pardoned for indulging what will seem to some a mere literary caprice, by placing these two events side by side in this history, even as they were placed side by side in the happenings of actual fact. John Milton was born into life, and the first American book was born into print, in the same year, and in the same part of the year, and almost on the same spot. The child born on that ninth of December, 1608, in Bread Street, a few steps from the book-shop where the earliest of American writings was first placed on sale—the child around whose cradle may have been repeated by his father some of the wild and exciting incidents related in that book—was to grow up into a colossal literary figure not only in that century but in all centuries: he was to be in an eminent degree the exponent of the great ideas of

religious and political freedom that were to form the basis of American civilization, which, like himself, was then beginning to live; and the moral peculiarities of his genius, austere earnestness, a devout ethical force, an obstinate habit of judging of life and even of art and letters from the throne of moral laws and of moral tendencies, were to be likewise the most marked spiritual qualities of that remote and unfriended national literature which began its career almost at the very same moment when he began his, and almost on the very same spot.

     The title-pages of the seventeenth century are not the least expressive or amusing portions of the books of that century; and if ever an old title-page shall deserve full quotation at our hands, this does so. It is as follows: “A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of that colony, which is now resident in the South part thereof, till the last return from thence. Written by Captain Smith, Coronel of the said colony, to a worshipful friend of his in England. London: Printed for John Tappe, and are to be sold at the Grey-hound in Paul’s Church-Yard, by W. W. 1608.”

     Barely hinting at the length and tediousness of the sea-voyage, the author plunges with epic promptitude into the midst of the action by describing their arrival in Virginia, their first ungentle passages with the Indians, their selection of a place of settlement, their first civil organization, their first expedition for discovery toward the upper waters of the James River, the first formidable Indian attack upon their village, and the first return for England, two months after their arrival, of the ships that had brought them to Virginia. Upon the departure of these ships, bitter quarrels broke out among the colonists; “things were neither carried with that discretion nor any business effected in such good sort as wisdom would; . . . through which disorder, God being angry with us plagued us with such famine and sickness that the living

were scarce able to bury the dead. . . . As yet we had no houses to cover us; our tents were rotten, and our cabins worse than nought. . . . The president and Captain Martin’s sickness compelled me to be cape-merchant,¹ and yet to spare no pains in making houses for the company, who, notwithstanding our misery, little ceased their malice, grudging, and muttering . . . being in such despair as they would rather starve and rot with idleness than be persuaded to do anything for their own relief without constraint.”² But the energetic Captain had an eager passion for making tours of exploration along the coast and up the rivers; and after telling how he procured corn from the Indians and thus supplied the instant necessities of the starving colonists, he proceeds to relate the history of a tour of discovery made by him up the Chickahominy, on which tour happened the famous incident of his falling into captivity among the Indians. The reader will not fail to notice that in this earliest book of his, written before Powhatan’s daughter, the princess Pocahontas, had become celebrated in England, and before Captain Smith had that enticing motive for representing himself as specially favored by her, he speaks of Powhatan as full of friendliness to him; he expressly states that his own life was in no danger at the hands of that Indian potentate; and of course he has no situation on which to hang the romantic incident of his rescue by Pocahontas from impending death.³ Having ascended the Chickahominy about sixty miles, he took with him a single Indian guide and pushed into the woods. Within a quarter of an hour he “heard a loud cry and a hallooing of Indians;” and almost immediately he was assaulted by two hundred of them, led by Opechancanough, an under-king to the emperor Powhatan. The valiant Captain, in a contest so

unequal, certainly was entitled to a shield; and this he rather ungenerously extemporized by seizing his Indian guide and with his garters binding the Indian’s arm to his own hand, thus, as he coolly expresses it, making “my hind” “my barricado.” As the Indians still pressed toward him, Captain Smith discharged his pistol, which wounded some of his assailants and taught them all a wholesome respect by the terror of its sound; then, after much parley, he surrendered to them, and was carried off prisoner to a place about six miles distant. There he expected to be at once put to death, but was agreeably surprised by being treated with the utmost kindness. For supper that night they gave him “a quarter of venison and some ten pound of bread;” and each morning thereafter three women presented him with “three great platters of fine bread,” and “more venison than ten men could devour.” “Though eight ordinarily guarded me, I wanted not what they could devise to content me; and still our larger acquaintance increased our better affection.”¹ After many days spent in travelling hither and yon with his captors, he was at last, by his own request, delivered up to Powhatan, the over-lord of all that region. He gives a picturesque description of the barbaric state in which he was received by this potent chieftain, whom he found “proudly lying upon a bedstead a foot high, upon ten or twelve mats,” the emperor himself being “richly hung with many chains of great pearls about his neck, and covered with a great covering of raccoon skins. At head sat a woman; at his feet, another; on each side, sitting upon a mat upon the ground were ranged his chief men on each side the fire, ten in a rank; and behind them, as many young women, each a great chain of white beads over their shoulders, their heads painted in red; and with such a grave and majestical countenance as drave me into admiration to see such state in a naked salvage. He kindly welcomed

me with good words, and great platters of sundry victuals, assuring me his friendship and my liberty within four days.” Thus day by day passed in pleasant discourse with his imperial host, who asked him about “the manner of our ships, and sailing the seas, the earth and skies, and of our God,” and who feasted him not only with continual “platters of sundry victuals,” but with glowing descriptions of his own vast dominions stretching away beyond the rivers and the mountains to the land of the setting sun. “Seeing what pride he had in his great and spacious dominions, . . . I requited his discourse in describing to him the territories of Europe which was subject to our great king, . . . the innumerable multitude of his ships. I gave him to understand the noise of trumpets and terrible manner of fighting were under Captain Newport my father. . . . Thus having with all the kindness he could devise sought to content me, he sent me home with four men, one that usually carried my gown and knapsack after me, two other loaded with bread, and one to accompany me.”¹ The author then gives a description of his journey back to Jamestown, where “each man with truest signs of joy” welcomed him; of his second visit to Powhatan; of various encounters with hostile and thievish Indians; and of the arrival from England of Captain Nelson in the Pho=enix, April the twentieth, 1608—an event which “did ravish” them “with exceeding joy.” Late in the narrative he makes his first reference to Pocahontas, whom he speaks of as “a child of ten years old, which not only for feature, countenance and proportion much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit and spirit the only nonpareil of. his country.”² After mentioning some further dealings with the Indians, he concludes the book with an account of the preparations for the return to England of Captain Nelson and his ship;

and describes those remaining as “being in good health, all our men well contented, free from mutinies, in love one with another, and as we hope in a continual peace with the Indians, where we doubt not but by God’s gracious assistance and the adventurers’ willing minds and speedy furtherance to so honorable an action in after times, to see our nation to enjoy a country, not only exceeding pleasant for habitation, but also very profitable for commerce in general, no doubt pleasing to Almighty God, honorable to our gracious sovereign, and commodious generally to the whole kingdom.”¹

     Thus, with words of happy omen, ends the first book in American literature. It is a book that was written, not in lettered ease, nor in “the still air of delightful studies,” but under a rotten tent in the wilderness, perhaps by the flickering blaze of a pine knot, in the midst of tree-stumps and the filth and clamor of a pioneer’s camp, and within the fragile palisades which alone shielded the little band of colonists from the ever-hovering peril of an Indian massacre. It was not composed as a literary effort. It was meant to be merely a budget of information for the public at home, and especially for the London stockholders of the Virginia Company. Hastily, apparently without revision, it was wrought vehemently by the rough hand of a soldier and an explorer, in the pauses of a toil that was both fatiguing and dangerous, and while the incidents which he records were fresh and clinging in his memory. Probably he thought little of any rules of literary art as he wrote this book: probably he did not think of writing a book at all. Out of the abundance of his materials, glowing with pride over what he had done in the great enterprise, eager to inspire the home-keeping patrons of the colony with his own resolute cheer, and accustomed for years to portray in pithy English the adventures of which his life was fated to be full, the bluff Captain just stabbed

his paper with inken words; he composed not a book but a big letter; he folded it up, and tossed it upon the deck of Captain Nelson’s departing ship. But though he may have had no expectation of doing such a thing, he wrote a book that is not unworthy to be the beginning of the new English literature in America. It has faults enough, with out doubt. Had it not these, it would have been too good for the place it occupies. The composition was extemporaneous; there appears in it some chronic misunderstanding between the nominatives and their verbs; now and then the words and clauses of a sentence are jumbled together in blinding heaps; but in spite of all its crudities, here is racy English, pure English, the sinewy, picturesque and throbbing diction of the navigators and soldiers of the Elizabethan time. And although the materials of this book are not moulded in nice proportion, the story is well told. The man has an eye and a hand for that thing. He sees the essential facts of a situation, and throws the rest away; and the business moves straight forward.

     About three months after the departure for England of the ship which carried to the printing-press the book of which an extended account has just been given, there arrived from England another ship, bringing a new supply of colonists, and bringing likewise a letter of fantastic instructions and of querulous complaints from the London stockholders of the company. It fell to Captain John Smith, as the new president of the colony, to make reply to this document; and he did it in the production which forms the second title in our list of his American writings. This production is brief; but it is a most vigorous, trenchant, and characteristic piece of writing, a transcript of the intense spirit of the man who wrote it, all ablaze with the light it casts into that primal hot-bed of wrangling, indolence, and misery, the village of Jamestown. Let us

reproduce some parts of this letter, the sentences of which seem to fly as straight and hard as bullets:—“I received your letter wherein you write that our minds are so set upon faction and idle conceits in dividing the country without your consents; and that we feed you but with if’s and and’s, hopes, and some few proofs, as if we would keep the mystery of the business to ourselves; and that we must expressly follow your instructions sent by Captain Newport, the charge of whose voyage amounts to near two thousand pounds,—the which if we cannot defray by the ship’s return, we are alike to remain as banished men. To these particulars, I humbly entreat your pardons if I offend you with my rude answer. For our factions, . . . I cannot prevent them. . . . For the idle letter sent to my Lord of Salisbury by the president and his confederates for dividing the country and so forth, what it was I know not; for you saw no hand of mine to it, nor ever dreamt I of any such matter. That we feed you with hopes and so forth, though I be no scholar, I am past a school-boy; and I desire but to know what either you and these here do know, but that I have learned to tell you by the continual hazard of my life. I have not concealed from you anything I know. . . . Expressly to follow your instructions by Captain Newport, though they be performed, I was directly against it; but . . . I was content to be overruled by the major part of the council, I fear to the hazard of us all; which now is generally confessed, when it is too late.

     For the charge of this voyage of two or three thousand pounds, we have not received the value of an hundred pounds. . . . From your ship we had not provision in victuals worth twenty pound; and we are more than two hundred to live, upon this, the one half sick, the other little better. For the sailors, I confess they daily make good cheer; but our diet is a little meal and water, and not sufficient of that. Though there be fish in the sea, fowls in the air, and beasts in the woods, their bounds are so large, they so wild, and we so weak and ignorant, we

cannot much trouble them. . . . Captain Ratcliffe is now called Sicklemore. . . . I have sent you him home, lest the company should cut his throat. . . . When you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees’ roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have; for except we be able both to lodge them and feed them, the most will consume with want of necessaries, before they can be made good for anything. These are the causes that have kept us in Virginia from laying such a foundation that ere this might have given much better content and satisfaction; but as yet you must not look for any profitable returns. So I humbly rest.”¹

     Such are the principal portions of Captain John Smith’s letter of explanation to the London proprietors of the company whose affairs in Virginia he was just then conducting. Certainly this writing is racy, terse, fearless; a style of sentence carved out by a sword; the incisive speech of a man of action; Hotspur rhetoric, jerking with impatience, truculence, and noble wrath. And it is not without an under-meaning in many ways, that this production, among the very earliest in American literature, should communicate to England a foretaste of what proved to be the incurable American habit of talking back to her. From the beginning, it was hard for England to see the just limits of her interference with her own colonial children in America; and though three thousand miles away from them, she could not stay her motherly tongue from advising and commanding them concerning the details of their life in the wilderness about which they inevitably knew more than she did. One can easily imagine what a shock this epistolary retort of Captain John Smith must have given to the dignified nerves of those kindly and lordly patrons in London; how its saucy sentences must have made them gasp and stare. Almost the earliest note,

then, of American literature is a note of unsubmissiveness. Captain John Smith’s letter, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, is a premonitory symptom of the Declaration of Independence.

     In the same parcel with this remarkable letter of Captain Smith’s was enclosed by him to the adventurers in London another document—a proof of his irrepressible activity and of his versatile talent—a “Map of the Bay and the Rivers, with an annexed Relation of the countries, and nations that inhabit them.”¹ This document did not get into print until 1612, when it was published at Oxford, and constitutes the third work in the list of the author’s American writings. It deals with the climate and topography of Virginia, with its fauna and flora, and particularly with the characteristics of its earlier inhabitants, the Indians. As a whole the work is uncommonly picturesque and even amusing; for though devoted to climatic and topographic descriptions, to matters of natural history, and to the coarse features of savage existence, the genius of the writer quickens and brightens it all, strewing his pages with easy and delightful strokes of imagery, quaint humor, shrewdness, and a sort of rough unconscious grace. His introductory chapter is full of the joy which the first visitors to this country felt in the sweet air, the rich soil, the waters, the mountains, in all the large and majestic framework of nature in the new world: “The temperature of this country doth agree well with English constitutions. . . . The summer is hot as in Spain; the winter cold as in France or England. . . . The winds here are variable; but the like thunder and lightning to purify the air, I have seldom either seen or heard in Europe. . . . There is but one entrance by sea into this country, and

that is at the mouth of a very goodly bay, eighteen or twenty miles broad. . . . Within is a country that may have the prerogative over the most pleasant places known, for large and pleasant navigable rivers. . . . Here are mountains, hills, plains, valleys, rivers and brooks all running most pleasantly into a fair bay, compassed, but for the mouth, with fruitful and delightsome land. In the bay and rivers are many isles, both great and small. . . . The mountains are of divers natures; for at the head of the bay the rocks are of a composition like mill-stones, some of marble and so forth. And many pieces like crystal we found, as thrown down by water from those mountains. . . . These waters wash from the rocks such glistering tinctures that the ground in some places seemeth as gilded; where both the rocks and the earth are so splendent to behold that better judgments than ours might have been persuaded they contained more than probabilities. The vesture of the earth in most places doth manifestly prove the nature of the soil to be lusty and very rich.”¹

     This charming passage, pregnant with adroit hints, must have proved very seductive when it came to be read in England; it must have made many an eye sparkle with the expectation of golden returns from this mysterious new realm of theirs, all bulging and variegated with precious metals and precious stones. And the passage just quoted contains, likewise, not a few of the best traits of the author’s descriptive manner, which is vital with the breath of imagination, and tinted with the very hues of na ture. One has not to go far along the sentences elsewhere in this book without finding all the dull and hard details of his subject made delightful by felicities of phrase that seem to spring up as easily as wild flowers in the woods of his own Virginia. He speaks of “an infinite number of small rundels and pleasant springs that disperse themselves for the best service as do the veins of a man’s body;”²

of “a bay wherein falleth three or four pretty brooks and creeks that half intrench the inhabitants of Warraskoyac;”¹ of the river Pamaunkee that “divideth itself into two gallant branches;”² of the river Patawomeke “fed with many sweet rivers and. springs which fall from the bordering hills.”³ There is often a quaint flavor in his words—that racy and piquant simplicity which so much charms us in the English descriptive prose of the sixteenth century, and the first third of the seventeenth. He speaks of a plum called Putchamins, which when unripe “will draw a man’s mouth awry with much torment;”⁴ of the Indian men of Virginia who “wear half their beards shaven, the other half long; for barbers they use their women, who with two shells will grate away the hair of any fashion they please.”⁵ Referring to the personal ornaments of the Indians, he mentions that “in each ear commonly they have three great holes, whereat they hang chains, bracelets, or copper. Some of their men wear in those holes a small green and yellow colored snake, near half a yard in length, which crawling and lapping herself about his neck oftentimes familiarly would kiss his lips. Others wear a dead rat tied by the tail.”⁶ “The men bestow their times in fishing, hunting, wars, and such manlike exercises, scorning to be seen in any woman-like exercise, which is the cause that the women be very painful, and the men often idle.”⁷ He says that “for their music they use a thick cane, on which they pipe as on a recorder. . . . But their chief instruments are rattles made of small gourds or pumpions’ shells. . . . These mingled with their voices sometimes twenty or thirty together, make such a terrible noise as would rather affright than delight any man.”⁸ He describes their orators as making speeches of welcome to a public guest, “testifying their love . . . with such vehemency, and so great

passions that they sweat till they drop, and are so out of breath that they can scarce speak; so that a man would take them to be exceeding angry or stark mad.”¹ He tells of a certain Indian king who “did believe that our God as much exceeded theirs as our guns did their bows and arrows; and many times did send to me to Jamestown, entreating me to pray to my God for rain, for their gods would not send them any.”² Remembering those tender-fingered drones calling themselves “gentlemen” who constituted so large and so useless a portion of the first colonists in Virginia, one cannot help relishing the frequent sarcasms with which this impetuous and indomitable man spices his references to them; in one place characterizing them as persons who never “did anything but devour the fruits of other men’s labor;” and who, “because they found not English cities, nor such fair houses, nor at their own wishes any of their accustomed dainties, with feather beds and down pillows, taverns and alehouses in every breathing place, neither such plenty of gold and silver and dissolute liberty as they expected, had little or no care of anything but to pamper their bellies, to fly away with our pinnaces, or procure their means to return for England; for the country was to them a misery, a ruin, a death, a hell.”³

     There are in this book some specimens of portrait-painting that show no slight power. Let us take, for example, his description of the appearance and state of the famous Indian king, Powhatan: “He is of personage a tall well-proportioned man, with a sour look, his head somewhat gray, his beard so thin that it seemeth none at all, his age near sixty; of a very able and hardy body to endure any labor. About his person ordinarily attendeth a guard of forty or fifty of the tallest men his country doth afford. Every night upon the four quarters of his house are four sentinels, each from other a slight shoot, and at every half

hour one from the corps de garde doth halloo, shaking his lips with his finger between them; unto whom every sentinel doth answer round from his stand. If any fail, they presently send forth an officer that beateth him extremely.”¹ Here, likewise, is some effective description in his account of the Susquehanna Indians, whom he encountered on one of his tours of discovery, and whose huge shapes and strange costumes appear to have impressed him greatly: “But to proceed, sixty of those Susquehannocks came to us with skins, bows, arrows, targets, beads, swords, and tobacco pipes for presents. Such great and well proportioned men are seldom seen; for they seemed like giants to the English, yea and to the neighbors, yet seemed of an honest and simple disposition, with much ado restrained from adoring us as gods. Those are the strangest people of all those countries, both in language and attire. For their language, it may well beseem their proportions, sounding from them as a voice in a vault. Their attire is the skins of bears and wolves. . . . One had the head of a wolf hanging in a chain for a jewel, his tobacco pipe three quarters of a yard long . . . sufficient to beat out one’s brains; with bows, arrows, and clubs suitable to their greatness. . . . The picture of the greatest of them is signified in the map; the calf of whose leg was three. quarters of a yard about, and all the rest of his limbs so answerable to that proportion that he seemed the goodliest man we ever saw.”²

     Near the end of this little book occurs one sentence in which the author has admirably compacted a statement of all the nobler utilities of the young colony of Virginia: “So, then, here is a place, a nurse for soldiers, a practice for mariners, a trade for merchants, a reward for the good; and that which is most of all, a business, most acceptable to God, to bring such poor infidels to the knowledge of God and his holy gospel.”³

     We may be well content to let this strong and beautiful sentence linger in our memories as the last one we shall draw from Captain John Smith’s American writings, and as an honorable token of his broad and clear grasp of the meaning of that great national impulse which stirred the heart of England in his time, for the founding of a new English empire in America.

     The book which we have just inspected is the third work written by Captain John Smith in America; and as students of American literature, we must here end our study of his writings. He remained in Virginia about twelve months after the time to which the latest of these writings refers, returning to England in the fall of 1609. It is not improbable that he was recalled to England by the displeasure of the London proprietors of the Virginia company. Dropped from their service, he remained in England until 1614, when with two ships he made a voyage of trade and exploration to New England, and came back the same year with a map, drawn by himself, of the country between the Penobscot and Cape Cod. In the year 1615 he sailed again for New England, taking with him a colony for settlement there; but on the voyage out he was captured by a French pirate and carried prisoner to Rochelle, whence he soon escaped and made his way back to England. From that time until his death in 1631 he probably never left England again. His career of daring adventure was over. Though he continued to take the most passionate interest in American colonization, and to agitate and plot and strive for it, he had to appease his restless spirit with the tame joys of authorship. He appears to have been looked upon henceforward as the veteran explorer, and to have been consulted and quoted as an authority in the practical details of colonization. The marvellous tales of his exploits which he told in his books furnished welcome materials for Ben Jonson and other playwrights; so

that he himself said, half in pride, half in complaint, “they have acted my fatal tragedies upon the stage and racked my relations at their pleasure.”¹ Even then there were not wanting those who suspected the fidelity of his narratives, and who accused him of adorning his heroic anecdotes with exploits which he had wrought only in imagination. “Envy hath taxed me,” he says, “to have writ too much and done too little.”² Thomas Fuller, in his “Worthies of England,”’ first published thirty-one years after Captain Smith’s death, gives perhaps the cool afterthought of many of the Captain’s contemporaries, in these contemptuous and delicately cutting words: “From the Turks in Europe he passed to the pagans in America, where . . . such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men above belief, to some beyond truth. Yet have we two witnesses to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.” Probably it was this base incredulity of his contemporaries, this hard historical Sadduceeism, that Captain Smith and his immediate champions meant to designate by the words “envy,” and “detraction,” which meet us in their allusions to the reception then given to his writings.’ A namesake of the author, one N. Smith, thus bravely steps forward as his defender:

     It is quite plain that while the weak spot in Captain Smith’s character, his love of telling large stories, was suspected

by many of his contemporaries, he nevertheless had among the best of them stanch and admiring friends. Sir Robert Cotton, the Earls of Pembroke, of Lindsay, and of Dover, the Duchess of Lenox, and Lord Hunsdon, were those in the upper spheres of society whom he could publicly name as his patrons and friends. Among the writers of commendatory verses prefixed and affixed to his books, are such eminent persons as Samuel Purchas, George Wither, and John Donne; and nearly all of these writers, whether now famous or obscure, apply to him terms of homage and endearment. Donne calls him “brave Smith;” Richard James calls him “dear noble Captain;” Ed. Jordan exclaims:

while an anonymous writer, after reciting the names of the great explorers, Columbus, Cabot, Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, Drake, Gosnold, and others, says:

     After all the abatements which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity, affluence, sense, and executive force. Over all his personal associates in American adventure he seems to tower, by the natural loftiness and reach of the perception with which he grasped the significance of their vast enterprise,

and the means to its success. As a writer his merits are really great—clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic energy, a diction racy and crisp. He had the faults of an impulsive, irascible, egotistic, and imaginative nature; he sometimes bought human praise at too high a price; but he had great abilities in word and deed; his nature was upon the whole generous and noble; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible.