After several hard experiences, young Smith engaged in the service of the duke of a little kingdom which was fighting the Turks. In one of his books, John Smith describes his adventures in these desperate battles. He tells of killing three Turks single-handed in mortal combat, and of how his princely master designed for him a coat-of-arms having in it three Turks’ heads. But ill fortune soon befell young Captain John Smith. In a battle with the Turks he was wounded and left for dead, and became the property of a Turkish chief, who, as Smith goes on to tell, “sent him forthwith to Constantinople to his fair mistress for a slave. By twenty and twenty, chained by the necks, they marched in file to this great city where they were delivered to their several masters.” The princess, to whom Captain John Smith was sent, was too young to own any kind of property. Afraid her mother would sell her white slave before she was of age, she sent him to her brother, a distant chief, asking him to be kind to her prize. But the brother treated his sister’s slave so brutally that Smith killed him and escaped in his master’s clothes to Russia. Here he found people who were unfriendly enough to the Turks to file off the iron collar which he still wore. On his way back to England, Smith found himself on the ship of a friendly French pirate, where he had to fight for his life against two Spanish men-of-war. The French ship succeeded in escaping from the Spaniards into a port on the northern coast of Africa. From here Smith took ship for London and entered the service of the Virginia Company, whose business it was to carry on the settling of America, begun by Sir Walter Raleigh. The Virginia Company secured a charter from King James and in December, 1606, sent more than a hundred men to America. It was a strange company for such an enterprise. There were four carpenters, one blacksmith, one bricklayer, one mason, one tailor, one sailor, one drummer, two surgeons, two “boys,” or men-servants, and only twelve laborers. But there were forty-eight “gentlemen,” of whom some were ne’er-do-wells and others downright criminals, who could not work because they did not know how to do anything useful. Even before they reached Virginia, quarrels broke out among members of the party and Captain John Smith was falsely accused of conspiracy and condemned to be hanged. He escaped, however, and afterward forgave the conspirators.