In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

35 2 Bad Blood at Jamestown y July 1609, when the Sea Venture survivors clambered ashore on a Bermuda beach, conditions for the Virginia colonists had gone from bad (as John Smith had reported in his True Relation in 1608) to worse. Smith was still in Virginia, but he would not be there long. For two and a half years in Virginia, some of the English who had come with him and the Indians who were already there had plotted to bring him down. Before he left Jamestown in October 1609, they nearly succeeded. But Smith made it back to England safely, with the terrible news that the Sea Venture was lost. John Smith never returned to Virginia, but he put what he knew of its history and what others told him into a work that ensured his place in the literature of early America. His Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624, is one of the foundation stones of seventeenth-century history. A. L. Rowse, one of the most distinguished scholars of Elizabethan England, called it “the first classic of English America.”1 Without John Smith’s writings, much of the history of early Virginia and Bermuda would remain unknown. He was part of that history from the beginning. On December 10, 1606, the names of seven men were put into a sealed box on a ship bound for Virginia. One of the names was John Smith’s. In that bleak English winter, three small ships carrying the first colonists to Virginia were about to set sail, and aboard the flagship Susan Constant was John Smith, along with the box containing the seven names. Smith, young (he was twenty-six) and adventurous (he had traveled over much of Europe), was eager to see America. He and six other men had been handpicked by the Virginia Company to be the governing council of England’s new colony. No one on the voyage knew who had been chosen , and the box was not to be opened until everyone was put ashore in Virginia. Why the company chose John Smith as a councilor remains a B A Tale of two colonies 36 mystery, and what happened to him on the way to Virginia is even more mysterious. His Generall Historie does not tell the whole story. Of the seven council members who embarked for Virginia in December 1606, all but John Smith had special qualifications or connections. Four were seasoned mariners. Christopher Newport, forty-six, a wealthy privateer who invested in the Virginia Company, was in command of the Susan Constant. He had been sailing the Atlantic since he was nineteen. Bartholomew Gosnold, thirty-four, had explored the New England coast in 1602 (and named an island “Martha’s Vineyard” after his mother-inlaw ). Now he was captain of the Godspeed. John Martin, in his early forties , had sailed with Gosnold to New England and commanded a ship in Francis Drake’s expedition of 1585. Martin was also the son of Sir Richard Martin, a London goldsmith and master of the mint. John Martin’s only son, also named John, was sailing with him.2 John Ratcliffe (whose age is unrecorded) was the captain of the Discovery. Edward Wingfield, fifty-six, was from a prominent family and a patent holder in theVirginia Company. George Kendall, in his thirties, was kin to Sir Edwin Sandys, a member of Parliament and of theVirginia Company Council. (Kendall, who may have been a closet Catholic, was also rumored to be a spy for Spain. He was supposed to feed news about Virginia to Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, one of the Spanish ambassador’s paid informants.)And last,there was John Smith. His biographer, Philip L. Barbour, wrote, “Only Smith’s presence remains to be explained. Somebody must have recommended him, and that somebody must have had a basis to go on, for Smith was a nobody.”3 John Smith, who would mark his twenty-seventh birthday on January 9, 1607, may have been the youngest of the group. The sandy-haired, sturdily built son of a Lincolnshire farmer,Smith had chosen to become a soldier of fortune in 1596 or 1597. Since then he had seen military service with English mercenaries in the Netherlands, fought in France, sailed on a pirate ship in the Mediterranean, served with the Austrian forces against the Turks in Transylvania, and returned from his adventures with the title of captain in the Hungarian...

Share