The Pocahontas-John Smith StoryEdmunds, Pocahontas Wight
History
The Pocahontas-John Smith Story
Edmunds, Pocahontas Wight
Pocahontas, -1617; Smith, John, 1580-1631
And what now of Smith in England? Neither in Plymouth nor in London did
he succeed in getting backers to send him to New England although the
Pilgrims studied his maps and books. He wanted to go along with them but
he was considered too expensive and too headstrong a companion for such
stern settlers. Again he poured out his enthusiasm into another book,
for only his pen could keep busy, but that, like his tongue, was no
lagger. The man himself remained unemployed and unimportant, for his
betters had no idea of letting worth be as recognized as birth. What had
he got for exploring and advising for New England?
He began to brood about what Virginia owed him for his risks and
services. Land had been the only wages of the London Company and he was
not in Virginia to stake his claims. In May 1621 he appealed to the
company court and reminded them that he had risked money and peril of
his life for the good of the Plantation. He had built up Jamestown, and
had given five years of his life at great risk to establish Virginia,
and he had spent five hundred pounds of his scant estate in the effort.
Surely now he deserved remuneration either from the local treasury or
from the general Virginia profit in England--but he got none. The London
Company's affairs were not in good shape in either place and the
massacre of 1622 made them worse. Incensed at this latest blow to his
colony, Smith rashly volunteered to rush to their aid with a small army.
In all of his far-flung adventures there was nothing so satisfying to
him as this colony which he had founded. Raleigh had named Virginia,
while he had named New England, but Virginia was his first love, and he
much preferred her sporting planters and adventurers to the pious and
thrifty townsmen of New England. If there was a woman in his life, it
was Virginia--not Pocahontas nor any other. Virginia had never got out
of his blood. He dreamed of cementing the two coasts on one map, but
this, like his every proposition, was turned down.
Rebuffed, he brought out a revised edition of his _New England's
Trials_, and expressed his love of the American outpost eloquently, "I
may call them my children for they have been my wife, hawks, my hounds,
my dice and in total my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my
left hand to my right." As a patroness for his handsome book _The
General Historie_ in 1624, the Duchess of Richmond came to his aid.
Smith had important male backers of his literary works now, if not of
explorations. When he wrote the _Seaman's Grammar_ in 1629, Sir Samuel
Saltonstall was the backer. Among his friends was a collector and
scientist whose house was called "Tradescant's Ark." If he had not been
close to Smith how could his collection include Powhatan's discarded
robe, Indian combs, rattles, bows and arrows, feathered crowns and
tobacco pipes? Smith even willed him a fourth of his library.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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