"Who would live at home idly or think in himself any worth, to live only to eat, drink and sleep, and so die?" "Who can desire more content that hath small means or but merits to advance his fortunes than to tread and plant the ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life? If he have but the taste of virtue and magnanimity, what to such a mind can be more pleasant than planting and building a foundation for his posterity, got from the rude earth by God's blessing and his own industry without prejudice to any?" "What so truly suits with honour and honesty as the discovering things unknown, erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue and gain to our native mother country:--so far from wronging any as to cause posterity to remember thee, and, remembering thee, ever honour that remembrance with praise?" "What can a man with faith in religion do more agreeable to God than to seek to convert these poor savages to Christ and humanity?" These are the words of a Christian soldier. Men of his temperament, however, are never regarded with indifference. They are loved devotedly or hated relentlessly. One writer of his day calls him a "dear noble captain and loyal heart"; another, "a wonder of nature, mirror of our clime"; "a soldier of valorous policy and judgment"; another says of him:-- "I never knew a warrior but thee From wine, tobacco, debts, dice, oaths so free." On the other hand, his contemporaries brand him as "tyrant and conspirator"; "full of the exaggerations and self-assertions of an adventurer"; "a Gascon and a beggar." The adverse opinions, for some mysterious reason, have crystallized around the Pocahontas incident, and so eager are his critics to disprove the assertion that she saved John Smith's life, they would like to believe she never existed at all! The simple truth is that in the first two of his letters he omitted the fact, in the third he related it. This inconsistency was observed in 1866 by Dr. Charles Deane of Massachusetts. Until then no one had doubted the truth of the story.