Captain John Smith: Historian or Liar?

They’re still taking shots at Captain John Smith, 400 years after that sturdy English yeoman’s son arrived at Chesapeake Bay while facing a death sentence. When Christopher Newport, the commander of the 1607 expedition that would found Jamestown, announced that Smith’s name was on a sealed list of seven council members appointed to govern the colony, Smith escaped the gallows--neither the first nor the last time he would do so.

The latest attack on Smith comes from a young Harvard professor, Jill Lepore. Writing in the April 2 New Yorker,she renews the old (and frequently disproven) charge that Smith’s autobiography--arguably the first ever written in English--is largely composed of boastful lies. Lepore begins by stating that “a discerning reader will learn to expect that when the Captain, wearing full armor, has his stallion shot out from under him he’ll mount a dead man’s horse before his own has hit the ground, and reload his musket while he’s at it.” Oddly enough, such a scene never appears in Smith’s collected works, which we read while researching our book, Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream. It may be a boastful lie, but it is Lepore’s invention, not Smith’s.

Lepore admits she is merely continuing in the tradition begun by 19th-century Harvard professor Henry Adams (the grandson and great-grandson of presidents), who was the first academic to suggest that Smith was a liar. Adams, then only 28, published his attack on Smith in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War. The North’s triumph had provided the impetus for New Englanders to refocus the interpretation of the nation’s earliest years, de-emphasizing the importance of the southern colonies, in particular Virginia, which had been the birthplace of four of the first five presidents, but the most powerful of the rebellious Southern states. Politically, attacking Smith was a way for young Adams to make his name as a historian. Forty years after charging that Smith’s story of  being saved by Pocahontas was made out of whole cloth, Adams admitted that a mentor had “suggested...that an article...on Captain John Smith’s relations with Pocahontas would attract as much attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other stone that could be thrown by a beginner.”

Adams argued that Smith’s failure to publish the tale of his rescue until 1624, eight years after Pocahontas had died, showed that he feared it would be contradicted. Actually, Smith’s earlier accounts of his two years in Virginia were heavily edited by other hands. The Virginia Company, sponsor of the colony, wanted to make the venture as appealing as possible to attract new colonists and new financial backers, so it would not have been surprising for someone to delete the story of Smith’s narrow escape from execution at the hands of the natives.

Today’s ethnologists theorize that the scene described by Smith--in which Pocahontas’ father Powhatan ordered young men to hold Smith’s head down on a rock and then club him to death, an effort interrupted when young Pocahontas pleads for the capive’s life--was a scripted ritual. Its purpose was to initiate Smith into the tribal group. Indeed, immediately afterward, Powhatan told Smith they were now “friends,” in Smith’s translation, and invited him to return to the English fort to find suitable presents for his new father.

Adding to the likelihood Smith is faithfully recording what happened is the existence of a nearly identical scene in an account by a companion of the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, who landed in Florida in 1539. De Soto’s men found a Spanish noble, Juan Ortiz, who had been taken prisoner by a group of natives twelve years earlier. Ortiz reported that he had been taken to a local chief, bound to four stakes, and suspended over the makings of a fire. Before the fire could be lighted, however, “a daughter of the Chief entreated that he might be spared....[for] it would be an honor to have one [Christian] for a captive.” The chief granted her request. To Smith’s supporters, this story indicates that the ritual in which he and Pocahontas took part was common among the natives of the eastern seaboard.

Lepore, like her predecessor Adams, provides no testimony that contradicts Smith. She amuses her readers with stanzas from a bit of doggerel, “The Legend of Captaine Jones,” published two years after Smith’s biography. Written by a Welsh clergyman, it makes fun of “Captaine Jones’ ” accounts of derring-do. Though seventeenth-century readers may have enjoyed the spoof, it’s hardly historical evidence.

Indeed, whenever Smith’s stories can be checked against the accounts of his contemporaries, he is found to be accurate. One of the most striking examples occurs immediately after he returns to Jamestown after Pocahontas has intervened to save him. In Smith’s absence, his enemies had conspired against him and on his return sentenced him to death. (By all accounts, the colony was a hotbed of intrigue during its early years; one council member had already been executed and a second deposed.) Edward Maria Wingfield, the first president of the colony, recorded that Smith was sentenced to be hanged the very next day, “so speedie is our lawe there [in Virginia].” Another day dawned that looked as if it would be Smith’s last, but then a ship flying the English colors appeared at the entrance to the river. It was Newport, already Smith’s savior once before, bringing supplies from England. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the whole extra-legal proceedings against Smith.

Too narrow an escape to be believed? Wingfield, who was no friend to Smith, confirms the story. We can sense his clenched teeth when we read, “it pleased god to send Captayn Newport unto us...whose arryvall saved Master Smyths life.” There are other instances of independent contemporary confirmation of Smith’s exploits; though he endured plenty of criticism, there is no instance of any contemporary witness contradicting Smith.

The most enduring of the lies linked to Smith’s name is his romantic involvement with Pocahontas. Lepore claims that this “distortion of historical fact” was what inspired Adams to pen his assault on Smith. In fact, as Adams well knew, Smith never claimed that such a relationship existed. Smith described Pocahontas as “a child of tenne yeares old,” and in 1612 specifically denied that he had planned to “have made himselfe a king by marrying Pocahontas, Powhatans daughter.” It’s clear that the lies about him had begun to spread even before he published his autobiography. The love affair between Smith and Pocahontas is a tale that has attracted countless purveyors of popular culture--most recently the director Terence Malick--but the story was not of Smith’s making.

The character and the pride of the true Smith shows through in a passage he wrote in his history of the Jamestown colony: “I am no Compiler by hearsay, but have beene a real Actor; I take my selfe to have a propertie in [these events]: and therefore have been bold to challenge them to come under the reach of my owne rough Pen...I have deeply hazarded my selfe in doing and suffering, and why should I sticke [hesitate] to hazard my reputation in Recording?” These are not the words of a man who needs to lie to inflate his reputation.