CHAPTER II. VIRGINIA: THE FIRST WRITER. I. The arrival in America of the first Americans-A fortunate blunderSatisfaction with their new home. II. The sort of men they were-Their leaders-Captain John Smith-His previous career-His character-His important relation to early American settlements-The first writer in American literature. III. His first book-Its publication in London in 1608-A literary synchronism-American literature and John Milton-Synopsis of the bookNotable passages-The fable of his rescue by Pocahontas-The place of the book at the head of American literature-Summary of its literary traits. IV. His second American writing-A bold letter to his London patrons— His knowledge refusing to be commanded by their ignorance-The kind of men to make good colonists of-Early symptoms of American recalcitrance. V. His third American work-Vivid pictures of Virginia-The climateThe country-The productions-The Indians-His fine statement of the utility of the Virginian enterprise. VI.-Captain John Smith's return to England-His subsequent career—A baffled explorer-His pride in the American colonies-Utilized by the playwrights-Thomas Fuller's sarcastic account of him—His champions -Final estimate. I. 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 'George Percy, in Purchas, IV. 1685. 16 "the mariners had three days passed their reckoning and found no land." 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 one 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 another of that delighted company, "never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." II. 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 'Capt. J. Smith, "Gen. Hist." I. 150. * From their Instructions, given in Neill, “Hist. Va. Co. Lond." 9. 3 George Percy, in Purchas, IV. 1688. 4 Capt. J. Smith, "Gen. Hist." I, 114. 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 Amer 1 Capt. J. Smith, "Gen. Hist." I. 241. ican 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 1 Smith's "Gen. Hist." in Pinkerton, XIII. 245. He adds, in the plain English of the period: "for all their discoveries I have yet heard of are but pigs of my own sow." "1 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.' In another book, 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: “Like Cæsar now thou writ'st what thou hast done, III. Captain John Smith became a somewhat prolific author; but while nearly all of his books have a leading 1 Dedication of " True Travels." 2"General History," I. 57. 2 Capt. J. Smith's "General History," I. 65. For a complete list of his writings, see Charles Deane's ed. of Smith's "True Relation," Preface, xlvi. |