Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achievements in Virginia seem to be nearer the truth than his later Generall Historie. As years rolled on his exploits gained in number and magnitude in his memory. The apocryphal story of his expounding the solar system by means of a pocket compass to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity to learn is to be found only in his later writings. He is a prisoner but a month in the narrative of the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was written by his associates and published with his authority, but his captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in the Generall Historie of 1624. His prosaic release by Powhatan had developed into a romantic rescue by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in the earlier account become four or five hundred in the later. Certain Poles assist him in the capture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative of Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our hero performs this feat single-handed. A mere cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure representing the number of his enemies, who by this simple feat of memory become ten times more redoubtable than before. [Sidenote: His service to the colony.] [Sidenote: Oxf. Tract, p. 32. Gen. Hist., bk. iii, ch. v.] [Sidenote: Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 41.] But it does not matter greatly whether the "strangely grimmed and disguised" Indians seen by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who, according to the story, were shouting and yelling horribly, though in ambuscade, numbered three or four hundred as in one account, or three or four thousand as in his later story. To Captain Smith remains the credit of having been the one energetic and capable man in those first years--the man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but won from the Indians what was of infinitely greater value--the corn needed to preserve the lives of the colonists. In an open boat, with no instrument but a compass, he explored and mapped Chesapeake Bay so well that his map was not wholly superseded for a hundred and forty years. Even Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recognizes the value of his services; and Strachey, who had every means of knowing, says that "there will not return from" Virginia "in hast any one who hath bene more industrious or who hath had (Captain Geo. Percie excepted) greater experience amongst them, however misconstruction maye traduce here at home." [Sidenote: Smith overthrown.] [Sidenote: A. D. 1609.] [Sidenote: Note 2.]