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Chapter 3 John Smith Maps Virginia Knowledge, Rhetoric, and Politics Lisa Blansett Having completed a veritable Odyssean itinerary from Turkey to Virginia, John Smith returned to England and began work publishing his many travels , shaping an oeuvre that in his own mind established him as an epic hero.1 The nightmare of Jamestown was a recent trauma for Smith, who had been effectively stripped of his commission and expelled by Captain Gabriel Archer at the behest of an ill-informed Virginia Company council. He had stood his ground until official documents arrived to remove him from power, but accidentally injuring himself in a gunpowder explosion, he soon departed. Preceding him to England were a number of notes, letters , sketches, and joint-authored missives to his employers, the Virginia Company. Among those documents were materials that became The True Relation, ‘‘sent to a friend’’ in 1608.2 Not authorized for publication by Smith, The True Relation was nevertheless printed and entered into Stationer ’s Register that year. The book’s popularity enhanced Smith’s standing until chatter impugning his reputation began to circulate beyond company members. Four years later, a description and map of the Virginia colony were published as a single book in Oxford, but never entered into the official documentation of works in print. The absence of A Map of Virginia from the Register effectively removed it from official book history. Despite its lack of official sanction, the engraved map’s popularity made it widely circulated as a separate document and as an illustrative companion to several books beyond the 1612 work, from Smith’s Generall Historie to Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimes and into twenty-seven different adaptations and reproductions. In addition to its popularity the map owes its wide dissemination to the printing press and to the work of the image’s engraver, William Hole. The copper plate Hole etched was changed several times for a total of ten different map states. At each acid wash and re-etching, more details were added, including geographic information added after further exploration (states 5, 6, 8, 9), Smith’s arms, crest, and motto (3 and 4), and a coordinate frame showing a grid of latitude and longitude degrees.3 John Smith Maps Virginia 69 Although the first three states are the only versions proper to the 1612 Map of Virginia, later states—usually the tenth—can now be found bound into copies of the book.4 Early bound-in maps, including Smith’s, often fall prey to the knife—sometimes rare book dealers or collectors remove plates from a book to sell separately; other times, they cobble together parts of more than one copy to assemble a ‘‘complete’’ volume. Smith’s apparently close collaboration with the engraver suggests a desire to fashion the image that would represent his work and, perhaps more importantly, to translate his experience directly into a visual representation . He had been incensed and baffled by official criticism and the ostracism he was subjected to, and in response he devoted himself to redacting his unpublished materials and revising some of the details from those already published. This labor ultimately conferred upon him the honor he so desired—most of that praise has been bestowed posthumously and from the American side of the pond. From the time he left Virginia (1609) until his death (1631), he mined the veritable treasure trove of observations and artifacts he had collected, and shaped them into the many texts by which we remember him and his vision of the Virginia colony ’s first years. As a whole, Smith’s oeuvre reveals an energetic, even obsessive, manager who diligently gathered facts and figures, narrated dramatic events and trifling incidents, recorded cultural practices, and enforced a political structure predicated on worth, not birth. While most of the early settlers came with a narrowly established profession or title, Smith demonstrated a broad range of aptitudes and skills, both manual and intellectual. His talent and experience gave him the wherewithal to imagine new ways of collecting and organizing information and of experimenting with political and social organization. His innovations would contribute to the English engagement with cultural difference; his ambitious plans for colonial success and his strategic adaptations to rapidly changing conditions would offer alternative models of order (and the opportunity for a continuously running performance of ‘‘I told you so’’ ex post facto). The combined image and text of his Map of Virginia reveal not only the intentions and agendas of both Smith and his...

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