Smith worked hard to obtain food and bartered with the Indians. On one trip he was captured by Indians and taken to their leader, Powhatan. He was finally released, perhaps at the prompting of Pocahontas, Powhatan's daughter. Smith himself did not include the "Pocahontas episode" in the first of his two accounts of his capture, A True Relation … of Virginia The familiar story appears in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles , where it looms less large than people suppose.
In spring Smith sent to England a letter on the colony's adventures, A True Relation, which found its way into print. It is generally recognized as the first American book, though only 44 pages.
He continued to play an important role in the colony, and in September he was elected president of the governing council not governor, as he called himself later. For a time, real progress in establishing the colony was achieved, but then came the discovery that their grain was rotting and had been eaten by rats.
Smith also had difficulty with rebellious colonists. By force of character he led the colonists through a bad winter, but the situation continued to be very difficult. He was badly hurt in a gun-powder explosion and was forced to return to England in October The colonists barely survived the winter, and they would have given up the project had not reinforcements arrived at the last moment. In he visited the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, a trip he described in a propaganda pamphlet, A Description of New England Smith's inclusion of a map of the area resulted in giving many places their present names; Cape Ann, Charles River, and the name New England itself are notable examples.
But to his bitter frustration, two efforts to return to America in and one in were unsuccessful. All that Smith gained was a title: admiral of New England, Gorges called him. John Ratcliffe was assigned to be the new president. Smith conducted expeditions throughout the region.
On one such expedition in December , Smith and his party were ambushed on the Chickahominy River by a large Powhatan hunting party.
What happened next is unclear, as Smith gave varying accounts, and the story has been mythologized in popular culture. However, Smith did not write this version until in his book, "Generall Historie. In a letter written soon after the event and long before "Generall Historie" was published, Smith described feasting and conversing with Chief Powhatan. Most historians believe that the Powhatan people conducted an adoption ceremony, welcoming Smith into their community, but that Smith did not understand this.
Also, anthropologist Helen C. Rountree points out in "Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Lives Changed by Jamestown" that Pocahontas may well have been too young to even attend the ceremony. Girls her age were responsible for preparing food and cleaning up afterward. Chief Powhatan announced that they were friends and that if Smith gave him two cannons and a grindstone, he would give Smith the village of Capahosic and would consider him a son.
It is now understood that Chief Powhatan was trying to expand his empire and neutralize the English threat, but Smith may not have seen this motivation. After four weeks at Werowocomoco, Smith returned to Jamestown on friendly terms with the Powhatan people. They continued contact for some time, and Pocahontas often visited Jamestown with food. Though she and Smith were acquainted, they were never romantically involved. When Smith returned to Jamestown in January, he discovered that he had been replaced on the council.
Luckily for Smith, the night of his sentencing, about new settlers from England arrived with food and other reinforcements. With the arrival of new settlers and the help from the Powhatans, the situation at Jamestown began to slowly improve. The account was understandably unpopular with company officials and investors, whose profits depended on a positive public perception of the colony.
On September 10, , Smith became president of the council at Jamestown. He also said that the number of livestock increased under his watch. But his policies were unpopular, and the colonists still failed to produce an adequate supply of food, leaving them dependent on Indian trade. Smith, perhaps more than most of his contemporaries, recognized that the Indians of Tidewater Virginia were part of a complex, highly organized society with deeply rooted cultural traditions—but he also used violence and intimidation in his dealings with them, often obtaining what he needed by force.
His approach contrasted sharply with the views articulated by Richard Hakluyt the elder , Richard Hakluyt the younger , and certain Virginia Company of London officials, who, while interested in exploiting the colony commercially, wanted to see their efforts in contrast to Spanish cruelties in the West Indies. Rather than war with the Indians, they hoped to convert them to Protestantism. Smith was convinced that Powhatan would misinterpret the ceremony: as an emperor in his own right, he would assume that the English were confirming his leadership, not subordinating him.
The coronation ceremony did not go as planned. It was held at Werowocomoco, not Jamestown, because Powhatan had refused to travel there, and when the time came for him to be crowned, the paramount chief refused to kneel. Only after several Englishmen leaned on his shoulders did he stoop enough to receive the crown.
The paramount chief cut off trade with the English—an order tantamount to a death sentence for the settlers, who had made minimal efforts to produce their own stores of food. In January , Powhatan even tried to have Smith killed. But the ship that carried him, the Sea Venture , was separated from the fleet by a hurricane, its passengers marooned in the Bermudas.
When Gates failed to arrive, Smith refused to step down as president, throwing Jamestown into a political tailspin. He sent the first group , headed by Captain Francis West, to the falls of the James to occupy the Indian village at Powhatan, and the second, led by Percy and Martin, to Nansemond. Of the people at Jamestown in November , only 60 would last through the winter. Smith arrived in England late in November Abandoning any hope he had of returning to the Virginia colony, Smith turned his attention to the northeast coast of America, then known as Norumbega or North Virginia, which the Virginia Company of Plymouth was authorized to colonize.
He sailed there in March under the employ of Marmaduke Rawdon or Roydon , a wealthy merchant, and named the region New England. In Smith reunited with Pocahontas, who had traveled to England that year with her husband, John Rolfe, and their son, Thomas.
Smith visited her at Brentford, in Middlesex, shortly before his projected departure for another voyage to New England.
Smith did not return to New England; though he continued to write and publish, he was not asked to help establish the colony at Plymouth. In May , he asked the Virginia Company of London for a reward in exchange for his service at Jamestown, where, he maintained, he had rebuilt the settlement twice, explored the countryside, and risked his life in service to the colony.
Company officials referred his request to a committee, which apparently ignored it; the company rejected Smith yet again when he offered his services as a military commander in , after Opechancanough led his men in a massive assault on English settlements along the James. In May , the Virginia Company of London was the subject of a year-long investigation that resulted in its charter being revoked by the Crown on May 24, ; Smith scholar Philip L.
Barbour believes that Smith refined the first part of his Generall Historie in that year. In he interviewed some Virginia colonists then visiting England and included their statements about conditions in the colony in The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith , a portion of which is a continuation of The Generall Historie.
In , Smith became mortally ill. He prepared his will on June 21 and died later that day. In his work he often refers to himself in the third person, as if to imply that the praise is coming from a different source. As the historian Alden T.
But in , the historian Philip L. Moreover, his writings shed a considerable amount of light on people and events that otherwise would have escaped notice. His geographically accurate maps of Tidewater Virginia and the New England coast are the first of their kind.
In short, his contributions to our knowledge of the early seventeenth-century history of the Virginia colony and the native people the first colonists encountered are invaluable.
Encyclopedia Virginia Grady Ave. Virginia Humanities acknowledges the Monacan Nation , the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
We invite you to learn more about Indians in Virginia in our Encyclopedia Virginia. Skip to content. Contributor: Martha McCartney. Smith Travels to Virginia Otley Hall. George Percy. Smith had settlers dig the first well inside the fort and Jamestown Rediscovery archaeologists have found that well and the many unique artifacts it held when it became a trash pit.
Smith ordered the repair of many buildings and the expansion of the fort into a five-sided structure, which archaeologists have also traced. Smith also led the first English explorations of the Chesapeake Bay and was almost killed by a ray on the first of the two expeditions.
As he slept in a boat in the river one night, Smith was badly injured by a mysterious gunpowder explosion.
He returned to England for treatment in October and never set foot in Virginia again.
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