Smith is sold as a slave,
At the bloody battle of Rothenthurm, November 18, 1602, Smith was taken prisoner and sold into slavery. At Constantinople the lady Charatza Tragabigzanda, into the service of whose family he passed, was able to talk with him in Italian and treated him with kindness. One can read between the lines that she may perhaps have cherished a tender feeling for the young Englishman, or that he may have thought so. It would not have been strange. Smith's portrait, as engraved and published during his lifetime, is that of an attractive and noble-looking man. His brief narrative does not make it clear how he regarded the lady, or what relations they sustained to each other, but she left an abiding impression upon his memory. When in 1614 he explored the coast of New England he gave the name Tragabigzanda to the cape which Prince Charles afterwards named Cape Anne, and the three little neighbouring islands he called the Turks' Heads.
and cruelly treated.
His escape,
and return to England.
The narrative is far from satisfying us as to the reasons why Smith was sent away from Constantinople. To the east of the Sea of Azov, and bordering on the Cossack country, was a territory which Gerard Mercator calls Nalbrits, and Timour, the Pasha of Nalbrits, was brother to the lady Tragabigzanda. Thither she sent him, with a request that he should be well treated; but the rude Pasha paid no heed to his sister's message, and our young hero was treated as badly as the other slaves, of whom this tyrant had many. "Among these slavish fortunes," says Smith, "there was no great choice; for the best was so bad, a dog could hardly have lived to endure [it]." He was dressed in the skin of a wild beast, had an iron collar fastened around his neck, and was cuffed and kicked about until he grew desperate. One day, as he was threshing wheat in a lonely grange more than a league distant from Timour's castle, the Pasha came in and reviled and struck him, whereupon Smith suddenly knocked him down with his threshing-stick and beat his brains out. Then he stripped the body and hid it under the straw, dressed up in the dead man's clothes and mounted his horse, tied a sack of grain to his saddle-bow, and galloped off into the Scythian desert. The one tormenting fear was of meeting some roving party of Turks who might recognize the mark on his iron collar and either send him back to his late master's place or enslave him on their own account. But in sixteen days of misery he saw nobody; then he arrived at a Russian fortress on the Don and got rid of his badge of slavery. He was helped on his way from one Russian town to another, and everywhere treated most kindly. Through the Polish country he went, finding by the wayside much mirth and entertainment, and then through Hungary and Bohemia, until at length he reached Leipsic, where he found Prince Sigismund. It was then, in December, 1603, that he obtained the letter of safe conduct already mentioned. In the course of the next year Smith travelled in Germany, France, Spain, and Morocco, and after some further adventures made his way back to England in the nick of time for taking part in the enterprise projected by the London Company. Meeting with Newport and Gosnold, and other captains who had visited the shores of America, it was natural that his strong geographical curiosity should combine with his love of adventure to urge him to share in the enterprise.
The smoke of controversy.
The brevity of Smith's narrations now and then leaves the story obscure. Like many another charming old writer, he did not always consult the convenience of the historians of a later age. So much only is clear, that during the voyage across the Atlantic the seeds of quarrel were sown which bore fruit in much bitterness and wrangling after the colonists had landed. Indeed, after nearly three centuries some smoke of the conflict still hovers about the field. To this day John Smith is one of the personages about whom writers of history are apt to lose their tempers. In recent days there have been many attempts to belittle him, but the turmoil that has been made is itself a tribute to the potency and incisiveness of his character. Weak men do not call forth such belligerency. Amid all the conflicting statements, too, there comes out quite distinctly the contemporary recognition of his dignity and purity. Never was warrior known, says one old writer, "from debts, wine, dice, and oaths so free;"[44] a staunch Puritan in morals, though not in doctrine.
A tedious voyage.