XXXVA. D. 1608CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
Thesentence just quoted, the most beautiful perhaps in English prose, is copied from theHistory of the World, which Raleigh wrote when a prisoner in the tower, while wee James sat on the throne. It was then that a gentleman and adventurer, Captain John Smith, came home from foreign parts.
At the age of seventeen Mr. Smith was a trooper serving with the Dutch in their war with Spain. As a mariner and gunner he fought in a little Breton ship which captured one of the great galleons of Venice. As an engineer, his inventions of “flying dragons” saved a Hungarian town besieged by the Turks, then captured from the infidel the impregnable city of Stuhlweissenburg. So he became a captain, serving Prince Sigismund at the siege of Reigall. Here the attack was difficult and the assault so long delayed “that the Turks complained they were getting quite fat for want of exercise.” So the Lord Turbishaw, their commander, sent word that the ladies of Reigall longed to see some courtly feat of arms, and asked if any Christian officer would fight him for his head, in single combat. The lot fell to Captain Smith.
In presence of the ladies and both armies, Lord Turbishaw entered the lists on a prancing Arab, inshining armor, and from his shoulders rose great wings of eagle feathers spangled with gold and gems. Perhaps these fine ornaments marred the Turk’s steering, for at the first onset Smith’s lance entered the eye-slit of his visor, piercing between the eyes and through the skull. Smith took the head to his general and kept the charger.
Next morning a challenge came to Smith from the dead man’s greatest friend, by name Grualgo. This time the weapons were lances, and these being shattered, pistols, the fighting being prolonged, and both men wounded, but Smith took Grualgo’s head, his horse and armor.
As soon as his wound was healed, at the request of his officer commanding, Smith sent a letter to the ladies of Reigall, saying he did not wish to keep the heads of their two servants. Would they please send another champion to take the heads and his own? They sent an officer of high rank named Bonni Mulgro. This third fight began with pistols, followed by a prolonged and well-matched duel with battle-axes. Each man in turn reeled senseless in the saddle, but the fight was renewed without gain to either, until the Englishman, letting his weapon slip, made a dive to catch it, and was dragged from his horse by the Turk. Then Smith’s horse, grabbed by the bridle, reared, compelling the Turk to let go, and giving the Christian time to regain his saddle. As Mulgro charged, Smith’s falchion caught him between the plates of his armor, and with a howl of anguish the third champion fell. So it was that Smith won for his coat of arms the three Turks’ heads erased.
After the taking and massacre of Reigall, Smithwith his nine English comrades, and his fine squadron of cavalry, joined an army, which was presently caught in the pass of Rothenthurm between a Turkish force and a big Tartar horde. By Smith’s advice, the Christian cavalry got branches of trees soaked in pitch and ablaze, with which they made a night charge, stampeding the Turkish army. Next day the eleven thousand Christians were enclosed by the Tartars, the pass was heaped with thirty thousand dead and wounded men, and with the remnant only two Englishmen escaped. The pillagers found Smith wounded but still alive, and by his jeweled armor, supposed him to be some very wealthy noble, worth holding for ransom. So he was sold into slavery, and sent as a gift by a Turkish chief to his lady in Constantinople. This lady fell in love with her slave, and sent him to her brother, a pasha in the lands north of the Caucasus, begging for kindness to the prisoner until he should be converted to the Moslem faith. But the pasha, furious at his sister’s kindness to a dog of a Christian, had him stripped, flogged, and with a spiked collar of iron riveted on his neck, made servant to wait upon four hundred slaves.
One day the pasha found Smith threshing corn, in a barn some three miles distant from his castle. For some time he amused himself flogging this starved and naked wretch who had once been the champion of a Christian army; but Smith presently caught him a clip behind the ear with his threshing bat, beat his brains out, put on his clothes, mounted his Arab horse, and fled across the steppes into Christian Russia. Through Russia and Poland he made his way to the court of Prince Sigismund, who gave him a purse offifteen thousand ducats. As a rich man he traveled in Germany, Spain and Morocco, and there made friends with Captain Merstham, whose ship lay at Saffee. He was dining on board one day when a gale drove the ship to sea, and there fell in with two Spanish battle-ships. From noon to dusk they fought, and in the morning Captain Merstham said, “The dons mean to chase us again to-day. They shall have some good sport for their pains.”
“Oh, thou old fox!” cried Smith, slapping him on the shoulders. So after prayers and breakfast the battle began again, Smith in command of the guns, and Merstham pledging the Spaniards in a silver cup of wine, then giving a dram to the men. Once the enemy managed to board the little merchantman, but Merstham and Smith touched off a few bags of powder, blowing away the forecastle with thirty or forty Spaniards. That set the ship on fire, but the English put out the flames and still refused to parley. So afternoon wore into evening and evening into night, when the riddled battle-ships sheered off at last, their scuppers running with blood.
When Captain Smith reached England he was twenty-five years old, of singular strength and beauty, a learned and most rarely accomplished soldier, a man of saintly life with a boy’s heart. I doubt if in the long annals of our people, there is one hero who left so sweet a memory.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement in Virginia had been wiped out by the red Indians, so the second expedition to that country had an adventurous flavor that appealed to Captain Smith. He gave all that he had to the venture, but being somewhat masterful, was put inirons during the voyage to America, and landed in deep disgrace, when every man was needed to work in the founding of the colony. Had all the officers of the expedition been drowned, and most of the members left behind, the enterprise would have had some chance of success, for it was mainly an expedition of wasters led by idiots. The few real workers followed Captain Smith in the digging and the building, the hunting and trading; while the idlers gave advice, and the leaders obstructed the proceedings. The summer was one of varied interest, attacks by the Indians, pestilence, famine and squabbles, so that the colony would have come to a miserable end but that Captain Smith contrived to make friends with the tribes, and induced them to sell him a supply of maize. He was up-country in December when the savages managed to scalp his followers and to take him prisoner. When they tried to kill him he seemed only amused, whereas they were terrified by feats of magic that made him seem a god. He was taken to the king—Powhatan—who received the prisoner in state, gave him a dinner, then ordered his head to be laid on a block and his brains dashed out. But before the first club crashed down a little Indian maid ran forward, pushed the executioners aside, taking his head in her arms, and holding on so tightly that she could not be pulled away. So Pocahontas, the king’s daughter, pleaded for the Englishman and saved him.
King Powhatan, with an eye to business, would now give the prisoner his liberty, provided that he might send two messengers with Smith for a brace of the demi-culverins with which the white men had defended the bastions of their fort. So the captainreturned in triumph to his own people, and gladly presented the demi-culverins. At this the king’s messengers were embarrassed, because the pair of guns weighed four and a half tons. Moreover, when the weapons were fired to show their good condition, the Indians were quite cured of any wish for culverins, and departed with glass toys for the king and his family. In return came Pocahontas with her attendants laden with provisions for the starving garrison.
The English leaders were so grateful for succor that they charged Captain Smith with the first thing that entered their heads, condemned him on general principles, and would have hanged him, but that he asked what they would do for food when he was gone, then cheered the whole community by putting the prominent men in irons and taking sole command. Every five days came the Indian princess and her followers with a load of provisions for Captain Smith. The people called her the Blessed Pocahontas, for she saved them all from dying of starvation.
During the five weeks of his captivity, Smith had told the Indians fairy tales about Captain Newport, whose ship was expected soon with supplies for the colony. Newport was the great Merowames, king of the sea.
Captain John Smith
Captain John Smith
When Newport arrived he was fearfully pleased at being the great Merowames, but shared the disgust of the officials at Captain Smith’s importance. When he went to trade with the tribes he traveled in state, with Smith for interpreter, and began by presenting to Powhatan a red suit, a hat, and a white dog—gifts from the king of England. Then to show his own importance he heaped up all his trading goods, andoffered them for such maize as Powhatan cared to sell, expecting tons and getting exactly four bushels. Smith, seeing that the colony would starve, produced some bright blue beads, “very precious jewels,” he told Powhatan, “composed of a most rare substance, and of the color of the skies, of a sort, indeed, only to be worn by the greatest kings of the world.”
After hard bargaining Powhatan managed to get a very few beads for a hundred bushels of grain.
The Virginia Company sent out more idlers from England, and some industrious Dutchmen who stole most of their weapons from the English to arm the Indian tribes; James I had Powhatan treated as a brother sovereign, and crowned with all solemnity, so that he got a swollen head and tried to starve the settlement. The colonists swaggered, squabbled and loafed, instead of storing granaries; but all parties were united in one ambition—planning unpleasant surprises for Captain Smith.
Once his trading party was trapped for slaughter in a house at Powhatan’s camp, but Pocahontas, at the risk of her life, warned her hero, so that all escaped. Another tribe caught Smith in a house where he had called to buy grain of their chief. Smith led the chief outside, with a pistol at his ear-hole, paraded his fifteen musketeers, and frightened seven hundred warriors into laying down their arms. And then he made them load his ship with corn. This food he served out in daily rations to working colonists only. After the next Indian attempt on his life, Smith laid the whole country waste until the tribes were reduced to submission. So his loafers reported him to the company for being cruel to the Indians, and seven shiploads ofofficials and wasters were sent out from England to suppress the captain.
This was in September of the third year of the colony, and Smith, as it happened, was returning to Jamestown from work up-country. He lay asleep in the boat against a bag of powder, on which one of the sailors was pleased to knock out the ashes of his pipe. The explosion failed to kill, but almost mortally wounded Captain Smith, who was obliged to return to England in search of a doctor’s aid. After his departure, the colony fell into its customary ways, helpless for lack of leadership, butchered by the Indians, starved, until, when relief ships arrived, there were only sixty survivors living on the bodies of the dead. The relieving ships brought Lord Delaware to command, and with him, the beginnings of prosperity.
When the great captain was recovered, his next expedition explored the coast farther north, which he named New England. His third voyage was to have planted a colony, but for Smith’s capture, charged with piracy, by a French squadron. His escape in a dingey seems almost miraculous, for it was on that night that the flagship which had been his prison foundered in a storm, and the squadron was cast away on the coast of France.
Meanwhile, the Princess Pocahontas, had been treacherously captured as a hostage by the Virginian colonists, which led to a sweet love story, and her marriage with Master John Rolfe. With him she presently came on a visit to England, and everywhere the Lady Rebecca Rolfe was received with royal honors as a king’s daughter, winning all hearts by her beauty, her gentleness and dignity. In England sheagain met Captain Smith, whom she had ever reverenced as a god. But then the bitter English winter struck her down, and she died before a ship could take her home, being buried in the churchyard in Gravesend.
The captain never again was able to adventure his life overseas, but for sixteen years, broken with his wounds and disappointment, wrote books commending America to his countrymen. To the New England which he explored and named, went the Pilgrim Fathers, inspired by his works to sail with theMayflower, that they might found the colony which he projected. Virginia and New England were called his children, those English colonies which since have grown into the giant republic. So the old captain finished such a task as “God, after His manner, assigns to His Englishmen.”