"And in regions farre,
Such heroes bring ye forth
As those from whom we came;
And plant our name
Under that star
Not known unto our north.
"And as there plenty grows
Of laurel everywhere,
Apollo's sacred tree,
You it may see,
A poet's brows
To crown, that may sing there.
"Thy voyages attend,
Industrious Hakluyt,
Whose reading shall inflame
Men to seek fame,
And much commend
To after times thy wit."
With rich omen sailed from merry England the men who were to make the beginnings of the United States of America. What they found and how they fared in the paradise of Virginia shall be the theme of our next chapter.
CHAPTER III.
THE LAND OF THE POWHATANS.
Captain John Smith.
While Captain Christopher Newport, with the ships of the London Company, is still in mid-ocean, and the seal of the king's casket containing the names of Virginia's first rulers is still unbroken, we may pause for a moment in our narrative, to bestow a few words upon the early career of the personage that is next to come upon the scene,—a man whose various and wild adventures have invested the homeliest of English names with a romantic interest that can never die. The life of Captain John Smith reads like a chapter from "The Cloister and the Hearth." It abounds in incidents such as we call improbable in novels, although precedents enough for every one of them may be found in real life. The accumulation of romantic adventures in the career of a single individual may sometimes lend an air of exaggeration to the story; yet in the genius for getting into scrapes and coming out of them sound and whole, the differences between people are quite as great as the differences in stature and complexion. John Smith evidently had a genius for adventures, and he lived at a time when one would often meet with things such as nowadays seldom happen in civilized countries. In these days of Pullman cars and organized police we are liable to forget the kind of perils that used to dog men's footsteps through the world. The romance of human life has by no means disappeared, but it has somewhat changed its character since the Elizabethan age, and is apt to consist of different kinds of incidents, so that the present generation has witnessed a tendency to disbelieve many stories of the older time. In the case of John Smith, for whose early life we have little else but his autobiography to go by, much incredulity has been expressed.[36] To set him down as an arrant braggadocio would seem to some critics essential to their reputation for sound sense. Such a judgment, however, may simply show that the critic has failed to realize all the conditions of the case. Queer things could happen in the Tudor times. Lord Campbell tells us that Sir John Popham, when he was a law-student in the Middle Temple, used after nightfall to go out with his pistols and take purses on Hounslow Heath, partly to show that he was a young man of spirit, partly to recruit his meagre finances, impaired by riotous living.[37] This amateur highwayman lived to become Chief Justice of England. The age in which such things could be done was that in which John Smith grew to manhood.