Unfortunately, however, at this period in England’s history such social climbing, though countenanced and legitimate enough, had not quite come to be “accepted.” It provided fertile ground for the cultivation of jealous enemies.
Still, John Smith had probably packed more thrilling experiences and hairbreadth escapes into his life than anyone else in the realm. He had warred in far-off countries, engaged in sea fights and been forced to ship with Barbary pirates. An award of a coat of arms and the princely sum of fifteen hundred gold ducats had come to him from Transylvania where, like a knight of old, he cut off three Turks’ heads in single combat. He had escaped death from wounds on a middle-eastern battlefield, only to be enslaved by the Turks. This hard fate was mitigated somewhat by the favors of a high-born Turkish lady who acquired him as a slave. But then her brother mercilessly shackled him off to the land of the Tartars. From there, however, Smith succeeded in making a miraculous escape after killing his cruel master.
The fiction-like pattern was to be repeated over and over again in the new world. Captured by the Indians of Virginia, Smith saved himself from a tortured death by an ingenious oration and his flare for the dramatic. Later, in the nick of time, he won the love of the young Indian “princess,” Pocahontas, who rescued him from having his brains beaten out by her father, Powhatan. He escaped from this predicament only to find the living remnant of his distressed comrades in the fort at Jamestown again ready to hang him, this time for allegedly having gone over to the enemy. And so they would have done, if it had not been for the timely arrival of the admiral of the Virginia fleet, Captain Christopher Newport, returning from England with more colonists and stopgap supplies.
Delivered from the gallows once more, Captain Smith was subsequently to be asked to assume the highest office in the colony, that of president, because he was the only man with ingenuity enough to keep his comrades alive while enforcing discipline.
It was a poorly chosen group of colonists—these original Jamestown venturers. Fully half of them were gentlemen of sorts bent only on a quest for riches. A handful of craftsmen, a few boys and a brawling lot of seaport loafers and ex-soldiers who were indisposed to agriculture or any peaceful pursuits completed the ill-balanced company. They came to find gold and they expected to relieve the natives of it quickly, if not to scoop it up by the handful along the banks of Virginia’s rivers. Instead, they met with hostile Indians, killing diseases and famine.
Not more than one out of four who pioneered the settlement at Jamestown survived the first few months in America.
The joint-stock company that sent them out, backed by the patronage of King James I and headed by one of the greatest of England’s merchant adventurers, Sir Thomas Smith, only had the usual primary objectives in view—the discovery of mines and a northwest passage to Cathay. The instructions of the London Company, in fact, dwelt on these things, while saddling the colony with a communalistic form of government that encouraged idleness, bred suspicion and brought about deadly factional disputes. Malarial fevers, dysentery and typhoid laid many of the venturers low. Famine and attacks by the natives completed a grim toll of death.
While others remained behind the palisades of the fort, bemoaning their fate and dying helplessly to prove it, Captain Smith was on the rivers and in the forests laying the foundations of successful trade with the Indians and sizing up the country’s resources. Resolutely, he foraged among the natives for needed corn and other food. With a few men in a barge he explored and mapped the entire Chesapeake Bay and tidewater region, realistically recording Virginia’s natural resources with a view toward making the plantation self-supporting.
And when he assumed the stewardship of the colony in the fall of 1608, following two presidents who had failed miserably, John Smith, the soldier of fortune, truly became John Smith, the colonizer. To do this, under communalism, he had to become a virtual dictator. But his rule was as honest and as ingenious as it was arbitrary. These qualities of leadership coupled with his understanding of the true nature of Virginia’s resources and of the need for a firm foundation of trade relations with the natives saved the plantation from extinction. The colony on the James River became the first permanent English settlement in America.
For that matter, it was the British Empire’s first permanent colonial settlement anywhere in the world.