Reader, if thou hast perused the preceding sketch of the life of Captain Smith, pause one moment, and reflect, that all that is here recorded, he performed, passed through, and suffered, before he came to the wild shores of the new world. And that here he entered upon a new field of enterprise, and of suffering, and of daring, not less remarkable than the scenes which had already given such wonderful interest to his eventful life. Follow him to the wilderness of Virginia, and witness the toils and struggles he went through to plant the first European settlement in these states. Behold him the guardian spirit of the little colony, in repeated instances and in various ways protecting it by his single arm from utter destruction. When the colony was sinking under famine, the energy and activity of Smith always brought them food; when beset by the subtle and ferocious tribes around them, the courage and skill of Smith never failed to prove a safe and sufficient shield for their protection. When traitors among them sought to rob and abandon the colony, they were detected by his penetration and punished by his power. It mattered not what nominal rank he held in the colony, whether vested with office, or filling only the humble post of a private individual, it was to him that all eyes were turned in times of difficulty and danger, and it was his name alone that struck terror to the hearts of the hostile savages.
With a dozen men in an open boat, he performs a voyage of a thousand miles, surveying the shores of the great Chesapeake Bay and exploring its noble tributary streams, with thousands of the wild sons of the forest ready to meet him at every turn. When, in the cabin of the powerful chief Opechancanough, five hundred warriors, armed with bow and club, surrounded him with a determination to seize him and put him to death, who but Captain John Smith would have extricated himself from his perilous situation? Nothing daunted, he seized the giant chieftain by the hair of his head with one hand, held a pistol to his breast with the other, and led him out trembling among his people, and made them throw down their arms.
In short, for romantic adventure, “hair-breadth escapes,” the sublimity of courage, high and honorable feeling, and true worth of character, the history of the world may be challenged to produce a parallel to Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia.
[[NOTE 13—CANTO THIRD, SECT. I.]]
And well might English hearts beat high,
When first they breathed thy virgin air;
For never to them seem’d sky so bright,
Nor ever a land so fair.
“Every object that struck their senses, as they sailed up the Chesapeake, was well calculated to awaken hope in the minds of the adventurers. They were almost enclosed in one of the most spacious bays in the world; whilst the rich verdure, with which a genial and early spring had clad the forest, ascending from the edge of the shore to the summits of the hills, presented a prospect at once regular and magnificent. It was a sort of vast amphitheatre, the limits of which were the horizon; and when to the real beauty of the landscape, be added the ardent spirit of adventure, which delights in the marvellous, and kindles and dilates itself by the enthusiasm of fancy; there is little cause for our surprise at the glowing descriptions of the first settlers, who represented it as a kind of earthly paradise or elisium.”—Burk’s History of Virginia.
There is a simplicity and an occasional richness in the original descriptions of Captain Smith, which cannot fail to be relished by the reader.
“There is but one entrance by sea into this country, and that is at the mouth of a very goodly bay eighteen or twenty miles broad. The cape at the south is Cape Henry, in honor of our most noble prince. The land white hilly sands, like unto the Downes, and all along the shores great plentie of pines and firres.
“The north cape is called Cape Charles, in honor of the worthy Duke of Yorke; the isles before it, Smith’s Isles, by the name of the discoverer. Within is a country that may have the prerogative over the most pleasant places knowne, for large and pleasant navigable rivers; heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation. Here are mountains, hills, plains, valleys, rivers, and brookes, all running most pleasantly into a faire bay, compassed but for the mouth with fruitful and delightsome land.
“The mountains are of divers natures; for at the head of the bay the rockes are of a composition like millstones. Some of marble, &c. And many pieces like christall, we found, as throwne downe by water from those mountains. These waters wash from the rockes such glistering tinctures, that the ground in some places seemeth as guilded, where both the rockes and the earth are so splendent to behold, that better judgements than ours might have beene persuaded they contained more than probabilities. The vesture of the earth in most places doth manifestly prove the nature of the soyle to be lusty and very rich.