History of American Literature | Page 5

forest where he could hunt and play knight.
In the first part of his young manhood he crossed the Channel, voyaged
in the Mediterranean, fought the Turks, killing three of them in single
combat, was taken prisoner and enslaved by the Tartars, killed his
inhuman master, escaped into Russia, went thence through Europe to
Africa, was in desperate naval battles, returned to England, sailing
thence for Virginia, which he reached at the age of twenty-eight.
He soon became president of the Jamestown colony and labored
strenuously for its preservation. The first product of his pen in America
was A True Relation of Virginia, written in 1608, the year in which
John Milton was born. The last work written by Smith in America is
entitled: _A Map of Virginia, with a Description of the Country, the
Commodities, People, Government, and Religion_. His description of
the Indians shows his capacity for quickly noting their traits:--
"They are inconstant in everything, but what fear constraineth them to
keep. Crafty, timorous, quick of apprehension and very ingenious.

Some are of disposition fearful, some bold, most cautious, all savage.
Generally covetous of copper, beads, and such like trash. They are soon
moved to anger, and so malicious that they seldom forget an injury:
they seldom steal one from another, lest their conjurors should reveal it,
and so they be pursued and punished. That they are thus feared is
certain, but that any can reveal their offences by conjuration I am
doubtful."
Smith has often been accused of boasting, and some have said that he
was guilty of great exaggeration or something worse, but it is certain
that he repeatedly braved hardships, extreme dangers, and captivity
among the Indians to provide food for the colony and to survey
Virginia. After carefully editing _Captain John Smith's Works_ in a
volume of 983 pages, Professor Edwin Arber says: "For [our] own part,
beginning with doubtfulness and wariness we have gradually come to
the unhesitating conviction, not only of Smith's truthfulness, but also
that, in regard to all personal matters, he systematically understates
rather than exaggerates anything he did."
Although by far the greater part of Smith's literary work was done after
he returned to England, yet his two booklets written in America entitle
him to a place in colonial literature. He had the Elizabethan love of
achievement, and he records his admiration for those whose 'pens writ
what their swords did.' He was not an artist with his pen, but our early
colonial literature is the richer for his rough narrative and for the
description of Virginia and the Indians.
In one sense he gave the Indian to literature, and that is his greatest
achievement in literary history. Who has not heard the story of his
capture by the Indians, of his rescue from torture and death, by the
beautiful Indian maiden, Pocahontas, of her risking her life to save him
a second time from Indian treachery, of her bringing corn and
preserving the colony from famine, of her visit to England in 1616, a
few weeks after the death of Shakespeare, of her royal reception as a
princess, the daughter of an Indian king, of Smith's meeting her again
in London, where their romantic story aroused the admiration of the
court and the citizens for the brown-eyed princess? It would be difficult

to say how many tales of Indian adventure this romantic story of
Pocahontas has suggested. It has the honor of being the first of its kind
written in the English tongue.
Did Pocahontas actually rescue Captain Smith? In his account of his
adventures, written in Virginia in 1608, he does not mention this rescue,
but in his later writings he relates it as an actual occurrence. When
Pocahontas visited London, this story was current, and there is no
evidence that she denied it. Professor Arber says, "To deny the truth of
the Pocahontas incident is to create more difficulties than are involved
in its acceptance." But literature does not need to ask whether the story
of Hamlet or of Pocahontas is true. If this unique story of American
adventure is a product of Captain Smith's creative imagination, the
literary critic must admit the captain's superior ability in producing a
tale of such vitality. If the story is true, then our literature does well to
remember whose pen made this truth one of the most persistent of our
early romantic heritages. He is as well known for the story of
Pocahontas as for all of his other achievements. The man who saved the
Virginia colony and who first suggested a new field to the writer of
American romance is rightly considered one of the most striking
figures in our early history, even if he did return to England in less than
three years and end his days there