"What can a man with faith in religion do more agreeable to God than to seek to convert these poor savages to Christ and humanity?"
These are the words of a Christian soldier. Men of his temperament, however, are never regarded with indifference. They are loved devotedly or hated relentlessly. One writer of his day calls him a "dear noble captain and loyal heart"; another, "a wonder of nature, mirror of our clime"; "a soldier of valorous policy and judgment"; another says of him:—
"I never knew a warrior but thee
From wine, tobacco, debts, dice, oaths so free."
On the other hand, his contemporaries brand him as "tyrant and conspirator"; "full of the exaggerations and self-assertions of an adventurer"; "a Gascon and a beggar." The adverse opinions, for some mysterious reason, have crystallized around the Pocahontas incident, and so eager are his critics to disprove the assertion that she saved John Smith's life, they would like to believe she never existed at all! The simple truth is that in the first two of his letters he omitted the fact, in the third he related it. This inconsistency was observed in 1866 by Dr. Charles Deane of Massachusetts. Until then no one had doubted the truth of the story.
Of course the party that had all along questioned the marvellous Transylvanian adventures eagerly welcomed the new ally to their ranks. A warfare of words had been going on for more than two hundred years. It was now given fresh impulse. Boastfulness and arrogance are unpleasant foibles; lying is a sin. He had been disliked for his foibles, he was now despised for his sins. Candid, able historians, like Dr. Doyle of England and Alexander Brown of Virginia, honestly wrote against him; James Grahame, Dr. Edward Arber of England, and all the Virginia historians except Brown defended him. The charges remain on the pages of history "not proven." To those pages (on both sides sincere) I commend the interested reader. Old Thomas Fuller, however, is not much read by latter-day folk, and although his opinion of the prisoner at the bar differs from my own, his ill-concealed sarcasm is expressed in words so delightfully quaint that I venture to quote him. He certainly gave the key-note to all the critics that lived after him, for he wrote only thirty years after our captain's death:—
"John Smith, Captain, was born in Cheshire, as Master Arthur Smith, his kinsman and my schoolmaster, did inform me. He spent most of his life in foreign parts. First in Hungary, under the emperor, fighting against the Turks; three of which he himself killed in single duel; and therefore (so it is writ over his tomb) was authorised by Sigismund King of Hungary to bear three Turk's heads as augmentation to his arms. Here he gave intelligence to a besieged city in the night, by significant fire-works formed in the air, in legible characters, with many strange performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, they are cheaper credited than confuted.
St. Luke's, near Smithfield, built in 1623. The Oldest Protestant Church in America.
Copyright, 1906, by Jamestown Official Photo. Corp'n.
"From the Turks in Europe he passed to the pagans in America where towards the latter end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth (!) such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men above belief, to some beyond truth. Yet have we two witnesses to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.